Ben-isms
“The tooth fairy must have really liked that tooth.”
“The only states I know are Georgia, Florida, Texas, Mexico and Japan.”
“When I’m a man, and you and Daddy are still alive, would you give me some money?”
Military Calls Underage Teen at Home
Army Recruiting Upsets Teen’s Mom
Darla Swift, Cherokee County, said a stranger called her house a few weeks ago asking for her 16-year-old daughter.
“The first thing was, is Robin there? Didn’t even include her last name, it was very casual, and I really thought it was one of the boys who call occasionally,†Swift said. “So I’m like, who’s calling? And the person said it’s the U.S. Army, and I’m thinking this is a joke, alright, who’s calling? He goes, ‘It’s the Army.’”
The local Army recruiter found her daughter’s information on a list provided by her high school.
“I really was taken by surprise because she is so young, and after deliberating on it, I came to the conclusion, I don’t like them cold calling my teenage daughter,†Swift said.
..
“To ultimately put people in the Army, we have to make contacts,†said Maj. Dave Weis of the Atlanta recruiting battalion, and said cold calls were an important part of the recruiting process.
Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, all public schools are required to give the armed forces a list of the names, addresses and phone numbers of high school juniors and seniors every year to avoid losing federal funding. The law allows parents to have their child removed from the list.
A student or parent wishing to protect privacy must actively contact the school to opt out and protect their personal information. In some districts, it can be difficult to withhold information specifically from recruiters, yet still allow this information to be used for other purposes that parents and students may approve of, such as honor rolls or school TV shows.
Write a letter to your child’s principal saying that you don’t want your information released to the armed forces or download a opt-out form here that you can fill out and deliver to the school.
Here is the full US Military School Recruitment Handbook in PDF format.
Intelligent Design a Boondoggle
In a roundtable interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers President Bush said yesterday that he believes schools should discuss “intelligent design” alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life.
No problem. Just don’t ask science teachers to teach it. Teach it in religion classes, not alongside evolutionary theories in biology class. The principle of selection: what lives to reproduce passes on its genes. There are discussions about different theories within the science of evolution – debate about catastrophic events, punctuated and gradual evolution, the big bang. Much of science has latent mysterious content – read up on string theory or strange attractors, for example. However, renaming “creationism” as “intelligent design” doesn’t make it science. What are you going to teach? Bible verses? In any case, there are lots of creation stories – you’d then have to teach them all, not just the Genesis account. Wouldn’t it be better to leave that to families and the worship centers of the different religions? Why would the public school system be teaching Judeo-Christianity?
Intelligent design refers to the theory that “unspecified intelligent causes” (i.e. God the Father) are responsible for the origin of the universe and of life in all its diversity – well anyway, the life we know, which is based on carbon.
Don’t laugh – these pseudochristics are serious! They are already anti-intellectual, anti-science. They want followers, not thinkers.
The House Subcommittee on Basic Education in Pennsylvania heard testimony Monday on a bill that would allow local school boards to mandate that science lessons include intelligent design. The legislation is sponsored by only a dozen lawmakers. A federal judge will consider the issue this fall, when a lawsuit against the Dover Area School District is scheduled to go to trial. The suit alleges that the school board violated the constitutional separation of church and state when it voted in October to require ninth-grade students to hear about intelligent design during biology class.
Of course, here in Georgia, the infamous Cobb Country had big stickers in all the science textbooks proclaiming that evolution is just a theory until a federal judge in Atlanta finally put the nix on it in January saying the disclaimers are an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. The stickers were added after more than 2,000 parents complained that the textbooks presented evolution as fact, without mentioning rival ideas about the beginnings of life, such as the biblical story of creation. Six parents and the American Civil Liberties Union then sued, contending the disclaimers violated the separation of church and state and unfairly singled out evolution from thousands of other scientific theories as suspect. The judge ruled that “While evolution is subject to criticism, particularly with respect to the mechanism by which it occurred, the sticker misleads students regarding the significance and value of evolution in the scientific community.†“By denigrating evolution, the school board appears to be endorsing the well-known prevailing alternative theory, creationism or variations thereof.†Last year, Georgia’s education chief proposed a science curriculum that dropped the word “evolution†in favor of “changes over time.†The idea was dropped amid protests from teachers.
This focus on the new creationism is very clever. If they get religion taught as science they gain more control over the children (get ’em while they’re young). Such children will be unable to distinguish between science and religion, but as Bush himself shows, many of our kids are impervious to the very best education. We may lose out in the science and technology wars of the future, but hey, we’re going down anyway with the gradual destruction of the public school system that helped us rise. If the fight fails, they still motivate their fearful, hateful base -energizing them with that ole God is on our side bull at a time when people are getting less enthused about Iraq, oil/gas prices, and so on. Now that’s strategic politics.
One question, though – if you believe in creationism (and that’s what this is), then you probably also believe that God placed humans in the position of the stewards of the earth. How is it that the same group of people who advocate for creationism are first in line to let corporations pollute? Where are their environmental concerns? Some stewards.
What possible joint interest could a real Christian have with the death and power policies of this administration? Believers are so easily manipulated – don’t you remember that warning about false prophets?
4th of July is Independence Day
Not hearing “Independence Day” much this year, so let me say it loud:
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!!!!!
It’s about a revolution against the tyrannies of old King George.
How could so much of our hard-won independence for our freedom and democracy been so senselessly squandered?
How could Independence Day be represented the way I’m seeing it this year? I want to see more patriots and less nationalists!
Give me liberty or give me death – it’s on the license plates still in New Hampshire, isn’t it? Say it is. I’m from Massachusetts, and the history of that great struggle is a matter of pride there. In Georgia…. well.
We’ll still go see the fireworks – just not at Stone Mountain.
Ralph Reed Lt Gov?
“Political consultant” Ralph Reed, who was in charge of President Bush’s southeast regional campaign last year and who also once ran the Christian Coalition, is seeking Georgia’s second-highest office in the 2006 election – Lt. Governor.
Ok, that’s it. That’s it. I somehow didn’t realize that this was happening. Ralph Reed? Ralph REED?
From The Nation:
When Ralph Reed was the boyish director of the Christian Coalition, he made opposition to gambling a major plank in his “family values” agenda, calling gambling “a cancer on the American body politic” that was “stealing food from the mouths of children.” But now, a broad federal investigation into lobbying abuses connected to gambling on Indian reservations has unearthed evidence that Reed has been surreptitiously working for an Indian tribe with a large casino it sought to protect–and that Reed was paid with funds laundered through two firms to try to keep his lucrative involvement secret.
Reed’s involvement with the casino effort followed his departure from the Christian Coalition in 1997 and his reinvention of himself as a corporate lobbyist and campaign hatchet man. One of his first clients was the Enron Corporation–a deal arranged by Karl Rove when George W. Bush was starting to think about running for President in 2000. Rove wasn’t ready to put Reed directly on a campaign payroll but presumably wanted to cultivate good will from Reed toward the coming Bush candidacy. Enron paid Reed’s Century Strategies more than $300,000 to generate support for energy deregulation. In the 2000 GOP presidential primary, Reed justified his big Enron fee by helping to smear John McCain during the South Carolina primary. Now McCain’s Indian Affairs subcommittee is investigating Indian gambling in the context of lobbying abuses, kickbacks and money laundering, with public hearings scheduled for early September.
Reed is in charge of Bush’s 2004 election campaign in the Southeast, including Florida. In 2000, he was paid almost $3.7 million for helping Bush. In 1995, when he was still exploiting intolerance and fear, Time did a story on him that included the cover line “The right hand of God.” Today God’s right hand seems to be holding dice and a bloody political hatchet.
According to the New York Times, Mr. Reed wrote in his book “Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics” that Mr. Abramoff was “a conservative firebrand.” The men became so close that Mr. Reed sometimes slept on Mr. Abramoff’s couch and later introduced Mr. Abramoff to his future wife.
AmericaBlog also has some serious questions about why he was being paid by Microsoft.
Oh, no… uh-uh. No way. Not gonna happen. Not if I have to scream “wake UP, wake UP, wake UP” in people’s faces.
How can this happen? Don’t give me that trauma-theory about 9/11. People in New York voted for Kerry. don’t give me the scapegoat theory – Republicans have been misdirecting anger for a long time. What is it? The dumbing-down, infotainment, bad education? What is it? How can so many American’s have willed themselves blind? When they finally open their eyes, will it be too late? There is already so much corruption and thuggery.
Will there be a country left to recover?