Saturday, March 22nd, 2014
KANYA D'ALMEIDA, - Nation of Change
Stephan: The American Gulag, the largest prison system in human history is now facing transformation into the largest geriatric ward in the world. As this report makes clear we pay dearly for the stupidity of our social policies -- you pay dearly that is, since it is all being done with tax monies. Most of these people are in jail for Marijuana. We spend more on warehousing aging prisoners than we do for elementary and secondary schools. How stupid is that?
Click through to see the accompanying chart.
A nurse helps an old man up from his chair. Holding onto her arms, he steps blindly forward, trusting her to lead him to his spot at the lunch table.
One man breathes through a respirator. Another gropes on the nightstand for his dentures. Yet another calls out to a passing doctor that he cannot remember his own name.
This may sound like a typical day at a home for the elderly but several independent investigations describe such scenes being played out in a much more unlikely place: in prisons across the United States that are now home to thousands of senior citizens.
Due to unhealthy conditions prior to and during prison terms, the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) considers inmates over the age of 50 to be ‘aging”. By this calculation, there are some 246,600 elderly inmates in state and federal joints, a number that is expected to jump to nearly 400,000 by the year 2030, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
A Human Rights Watch report entitled “Old Behind Bars’ says the number of prisoners aged 55 and older nearly quadrupled between 1995 and 2010, marking a 218 percent increase in just 15 years.
With over 16 percent of the national […]
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Saturday, March 22nd, 2014
MICHAEL ANTHONY PEROUTKA, - Institute on the Constitution
Stephan: Did you know that evolution is anti-American? Neither did I until I read this moronic essay from the Institute on the Constitution, a Theocratic Right operation masquerading as a scholarly website. And I'll bet you didn't know that, "American political philosophy is based on the belief that the world was created by God in six days and that this creation event occurred about six thousand years ago."
Click through to see the actual video
Evolutions is Anti-American. Please, let me explain why.
The American View of Law and Government, as set forth in our founding documents, can be described as the political philosophy of America.
Briefly, the American View can be summarized thusly:
There exists a Creator God. He is the God of the Bible. He is not Allah, nor any of the million Hindu deities; nor is he the god that is in the wind nor any other impersonal force. He created us. We did not evolve from apes or slimy swampy things.
Our rights come from Him. Our rights are a part of His Creation. They are not privileges of government. Law is nothing more than His will as expressed in Nature and understood by our reason and conscience and as specifically set forth in His divine Word. That is to say, the Bible.
The one and only purpose of government is to secure and protect the rights that God has given to the people. Government is not authorized to go beyond this limited purpose.
American political philosophy is based on the belief that the world was created by God in six days and […]
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Saturday, March 22nd, 2014
REBECCA RIFFKIN, - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: Mississippi is a state quickly reverting to second world status. If it weren't a state and was, instead, a separate country it would be on the order of Guatemala, or any one of several African states. It is interesting to note that the Congress persons from these failed states recently voted to cut food stamps (SNAP) and would have cut their budget even more had it not been for Blue value state legislators. To make matters even worse the Blue value states through tax dollars underwrite the dysfunctionality of Red value states like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama.
Click through to see the several graphs and charts
WASHINGTON, D.C. — For the sixth consecutive year, Mississippians were the most likely in the U.S. to report struggling to afford food. In 2013, 25.1% report there was at least one time in the last 12 months when they did not have enough money to buy the food they or their families needed. Residents in West Virginia, Louisiana, and Alabama were also among the most likely to struggle to afford food. Residents of Alaska, New Hampshire, and Minnesota were among the least likely to have this problem.
Struggle Most to Afford Food Least Likely to Struggle to Afford Food
These findings are from surveys conducted with more than 178,000 U.S. adults in 2013 as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. Gallup asks 500 Americans each day if there have been times in the past 12 months when they did not have enough money to buy food that they or their families needed.
Explore complete state data >
In 16 states, at least one in five residents said they struggled to afford the food that they or their families needed at least once in the past 12 months. In seven states, less than 15% of residents reported the same struggles in 2013.
Alabama has been […]
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Saturday, March 22nd, 2014
MATT LEE-ASHLEY, Senior Fellow with the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress - Think Progress
Stephan: The National Parks of the United States are one of the really good social decisions we have made as a culture and, as anyone who has ever visited them knows, they are treasures that each generation passes on to the next. Now -- its a Republican effort of course -- the park system is under threat. Write your representative, let them know how you feel.
Responding to President Obama’s decision last week to protect a stretch of California’s Coast near Point Arena as a new national monument, the House of Representatives is planning to vote next week to overturn a 108 year-old law that presidents of both parties have used to protect iconic American places, including the Grand Canyon, the Statue of Liberty, and Arches National Park.
The bill, H.R. 1459, aims to block presidents from using the Antiquities Act of 1906 to establish new national monuments by putting caps on how many times it can be used, requiring congressional review of proposed monuments, and forcing local communities to engage in an ironic exercise of reviewing the environmental impacts of protecting lands for future generations.
The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), criticized President Obama’s use of the Antiquities Act to expand the California Coastal Monument last week as an end-run around Congress. ‘In other words, the House was punked by the President,” said Bishop.
However, despite arguments from Bishop and Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA) that Congress should hold exclusive power to decide whether or not to protect public lands, the House has effectively shut down all legislative efforts to protect wilderness, parks and monuments since the Tea […]
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NINA MARTIN, - Pro Publica/AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: This excellent interview with Professor Katherine Franke, Director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School articulates very well what the strategy of the Theocratic Right is about. What they are trying to achieve.
There is a reason the Founders put up a firewall between the church and the state, and would not support any particular religion -- Ben Franklin paid for pews in a church of every major denomination in Philadelphia, and very infrequently attended any of them. The Founders understood that what is trying to happen today is exactly what they feared would happen if they did not build the firewall. In many cases they, their parents, or grandparents, or all three, had suffered because Anglicanism was the state religion of the United Kingdom, and the monarch was the head of both church and state.
As conservatives grapple with the reality of gay marriage and the Supreme Court weighs whether companies should be forced to offer birth control to employees, it’s very clear: The conflict between religious freedom and gender/sexual equality has become ‘the most important civil rights issue of this time.”
So says Professor Katherine Franke [3], director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School [4] and one of the driving forces behind the school’s Public Rights/Private Conscience Project, a new initiative that seeks to shift the way people look at religious and secular values – and to bridge a divide that has come to seem insurmountable. Here, Franke talks with ProPublica’s Sex and Gender reporter, Nina Martin.
NM: Let’s start with why these two things – religious belief and civil rights – have come to seem so at odds.
KF: Part of the problem is the way we’re currently framing the issue. On the one hand, we have the free exercise of religion, which is largely based in an appeal to revelation, to the truths of religious texts and religious doctrine. And on the other hand we have rights of equality and liberty, which are based in rational arguments – […]
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