Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Final thought of the day.
Christian homeschoolers receive maximum sentence for death of child.
In Washington state a Christian homeschooling couple received maximum prison sentences allowable under the law after being found guilty of beating and starving their adopted daughter to death in accord with Biblical based parenting techniques.
Superior Court Judge Susan Cook showed no mercy to Larry and Carri Williams, found guilty of causing the tragic death of their adopted daughter, Hana, by using Biblical based parenting techniques found in the controversial child-rearing book, To Train up a Child, by Michael and Debi Pearl.
Cook sentenced Carri Williams to 37 years in prison. Her husband Larry, convicted of lesser charges, was sentenced to just under 28 years. Both terms are well above the standard sentencing range.
Cook said, “I feel the punishment should match the outrage felt by this community. I am at a complete loss. I think at some point in this trial each and every one of us sat stunned and speechless without the slightest hope of making any sense of this whatsoever.”
What these animals did to this child in the name of religion and superstition is repulsive.
Hana’s death was consistent with a corporal punishment style advocated by many Christian extremists, and memorialized in the controversial book, To Train Up A Child. According to reports, Hana was beaten and starved as part of a regimen of corporal punishment subscribed to by many Christian homeschoolers and other Christian fundamentalists.
The New York Times reports that the couple's abusive parenting tactics mimicked instructions from the Christian parenting book. Evidence presented at trial indicated Carri Williams had repeatedly beaten Hana with a plastic tube - a device recommended in the book.
To Train Up A Child advocates using a plumbing tool to beat children with starting at age one. The book also advocates giving children cold water baths, putting children outside in cold weather, and forcing them to miss meals, as well as beating them; all of which exemplifies the abuse investigators said Hana endured.
The book is also linked to the deaths of at least two other children, four-year-old Sean Paddock of North Carolina and seven year-old Lydia Schatz of California. In each case, punishment techniques advocated by the controversial Christian parenting manual were used.
Just in case anybody wants to ask me once again what I find so upsetting about religion and its impact on society, I think you can look at this post and figure that out for yourself.
Prejudice, sexism, child abuse, all if it goes down so much smoother when hidden within the elixir of religion.
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Supreme Court refuses Oklahoma case that looked to limit access to RU-486, the so-called abortion pill.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday left intact a state court decision invalidating an Oklahoma law that effectively banned the so-called abortion pill RU-486, with the justices deciding to sidestep a potentially contentious case.
The high court had been waiting for the Oklahoma Supreme Court to clarify a December 2012 ruling that had voided the law before deciding on whether to rule on the case. Last week, the state court issued a new opinion explaining its reasoning in more detail.
The U.S. high court's latest action means the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling is final. The state court said the effect of the law would have been a ban on all abortions by medications, and as a result "restricts the long-respected medical discretion of physicians" who decide that method is safer for some patients than surgical abortion.
That ruling invalidated a state law it said had the effect of banning abortion-inducing drugs altogether.
This is good news for the pro-choice movement, and kind of makes me feel a little better about the next one headed their direction from Texas.
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Rand Paul's plagiarism-a-palooza also included huge sections of his book. Gonna be awful busy fighting duels if this keeps up.
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| "Okay that's it! My hair is challenging all of ya'll to a duel. Dandruff specks and fifty paces!" |
Rand Paul's plagiarism-a-palooza also included huge sections of his book. Gonna be awful busy fighting duels if this keeps up.
Courtesy of Buzzfeed:An entire section of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s 2013 book Government Bullies was copied wholesale from a 2003 case study by the Heritage Foundation, BuzzFeed has learned. The copied section, 1,318 words, is by far the most significant instance reported so far of Paul borrowing language from other published material.
The new cut-and-paste job follows reports by BuzzFeed, Politico, and MSNBC that Paul had plagiarized speeches either from Wikipedia or news reports. The book was published in August 2013 by Center Street, a division of Hachette Book Group.
In this case, Paul included a link to the Heritage case study in the book’s footnotes, though he made no effort to indicate that not just the source, but the words themselves, had been taken from Heritage.
A Paul aide defended the senator, saying he makes clear in the book’s “notes and sources” that he didn’t individually research each case.
“In the book Government Bullies all the information… was sourced by end notes. In the two cases described, the end notes clearly define the sourcing for the book. In no case has the Senator used information without attribution,” said Doug Stafford, an advisor to Sen. Paul who co-wrote the book. “There were 150 endnotes and cites including The Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute. This is a witch hunt and grasping at straws.”
Yes pointing out that a nationally known politician with aspirations fro the White House has engaged in cutting and pasting huge portions of text from an online site or has taken entire blocks of information, verbatim, from a case study without making it perfectly clear that they have done so is NOT grasping at straws. It is a little thing called reporting the the facts.
Very, very troubling facts.
I have it on good authority that Paul's hair is not original to him as well, and may in fact have been manufactured elsewhere and then passed off as his own. Truly there is nothing about the man that can be believed.
Is anybody else looking forward to watching Rachel tonight as much as I am ?
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Was LAX shooter inspired to kill TSA agents by hate mongers warning of a "New World Order" like Glenn Beck and Alex Jones? Judge for yourself.
The 23-year-old man who allegedly killed a TSA official at Los Angeles International Airport yesterday was carrying a one-page “manifesto” that included references to the “New World Order,” the Federal Reserve and “fiat currency,” according to a knowledgeable source with ranking law enforcement contacts.
Paul Anthony Ciancia, who allegedly wounded three other TSA workers before being shot and critically wounded himself, also expressed antagonism toward the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its chief until she resigned in August, Janet Napolitano, the source said. Ciancia’s note called former Secretary Napolitano a “bull dyke” and contained the phrase “FU Janet Napolitano,” the source said.
Ciancia’s language and references seemed to put him squarely in the conspiracy-minded world of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement. The New World Order refers to a longstanding conspiracy theory that today, in its most popular iteration, claims that global elites are plotting to form a socialistic “one-world government” that would crush American freedoms. Often, the root of the alleged conspiracy is traced to the 1913 creation of the Federal Reserve and the adoption of fiat currency — paper money that is not backed by gold, as it was once was in the U.S.
So-called Patriots also increasingly see the DHS, which produces intelligence assessments of extremists that are distributed to other law enforcement agencies, as an enemy and even a collaborator in the New World Order conspiracy. Many believe DHS has targeted their movement and is somehow connected to the alleged construction of concentration camps by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The purported camps are thought to be meant for those Americans who resist a coming national seizure of all weapons from U.S. citizens.
If you are wondering where you have heard of the "Patriot" movement and references to the "New World Order" before well it just might have been right here among multiple posts about Alex Jones or Glenn Beck, who warn about the encroachment of government into all of our lives with an evangelical fervor, and who believe that we are moving to a one world government that will dictate European laws to American citizens.
However it is not only the fringe who embrace this point of view, the Tea Party itself is very enmeshed with that kind of thinking, as well as both Ron Paul and his son Rand Paul.
You know if you think about it, constantly screaming that America is under attack by communists and socialists, while advocating the ownership of guns while also warning that the government is working to restrict your access, can really only have one result ultimately.
This is domestic terrorism, one of the shooter's notes found in a bag said that he wanted to "instill fear in your traitorous minds." If this were a Muslim who had done this we would know immediately who had inspired him, or who gave him his instructions to kill.
But since this seems to have been inspired by our own Right Wing terror network it, so far, appears that the media is hesitant to make the connections.
That is not only bad journalism, but it also puts Americans at risk.
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"I'd been hiding this for over a decade. I wasn't out." Rebecca Vitsmun talks about the day she came out as an Atheist on national television after surviving the Oklahoma tornado.
I know this is a little long, but at the 8:28 portion Rebecca starts to tell the story of her interview with Wolf Blitzer. However it is around the 9:40 mark that she tells what it is like to be put in a position that every Atheist living in the Bible Belt fears.
Her emotion is so raw, and so honest, that it may serve to explain to those who are religious what it is like for those of us living in America who are not.
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New voting restrictions in Texas so tight they result in former House Speaker's request for voter ID card to be rejected.
Just how tough are new voter identification requirements in Texas? Apparently tough enough that former U.S. House speaker Jim Wright reportedly was denied a voter ID card on Saturday.
"Nobody was ugly to us, but they insisted that they wouldn't give me an ID," Wright, a Democrat who resigned from Congress in 1989, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in a story about his experience at a Texas Department of Public Safety office.
The 90-year-old told the newspaper he realized last week that he didn't have a valid ID to vote in Tuesday's elections. He was refused a voter ID card because his driver's license expired in 2010 and his faculty identification from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, where he teaches, doesn't meet requirements under the state law enacted in 2011.
Well look at that, in their attempt to reduce the number of voters for Wendy Davis they have stopped an elderly white guy as well.
They disenfranchise enough to THEM and it will be the republicans who will find their voter ranks trimmed down to the bone.
And by the way this is, once again, a solution without a legitimate problem.
This from Politifact who looked into voter fraud in Texas:
Abbott spokeswoman Lauren Bean emailed us records showing that from August 2002 through September 2012, the office received 616 allegations of election-code violations and recorded 78 election-code prosecutions.
By our count, 46 of the prosecutions ended with a conviction, guilty plea, no-contest plea or guilty plea as part of deferred adjudication. Of those, 18 cases appeared to involve fraud committed by individual voters: 12 cases with ineligible voters, five cases of voter impersonation and one case of voting more than once.
So, by our reading of the attorney general’s records, 18 instances of voter fraud have been confirmed in Texas since 2002.
18 instances of somebody voting using somebody else's name in ten years.
And THAT was enough of a reason to disenfranchise thousands of potential voters, and one former Speaker of the House?
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