Friday, February 20th, 2015
Olivia Nuzzi, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: The thing about being in power is you can make the laws designing them wherever they touch your life so that your preferred behavior is not illegal. North Carolina is a state facing many challenges. This is what the Theocratic Rightist legislature of North Carolina has chosen to focus on. The corruption has reached a point of satire. This reads like something from an Evelyn Waugh novel, or a skit on SNL.
Notice particularly how they have word this thing.
The North Carolina Liegislature in session
Credit: www.carolinapublicpress.org
A clandestine sexual relationship between a lobbyist and a government official they lobby may sound unethical, but the North Carolina Ethics Commission says it’s perfectly legal.
North Carolina government officials who are having secret sex with lobbyists need fear no more: The state’s ethics commission has decided such illicit relationships are completely fine.Yes, what could go wrong?Joal H. Broun, the secretary of state’s lobbying compliance director, sent a letter to the commission on December 15 inquiring whether, um, intimacy between lobbyists and the people they are lobbying violates ethics laws. On Friday, the commission released its answer: The passionate and unwise may carry on!
The opinion, which is almost romantic if you can get past the legal jargon, essentially says that your body is a temple and sharing it with anyone else is a priceless gift—emphasis on priceless: Sex has no value, according to the commission, and so it doesn’t need to be disclosed.
“Consensual sexual relationships […]
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Thursday, February 19th, 2015
Alice Ollstein, - Think Progress
Stephan: There is something very strange going on with the Theocratic Right and education. Using ALEC and other agencies of the right, there is a coordinated effort on behalf of willful ignorance. A program to create a compliant, poorly educated, mass that could be easily manipulated by deliberate disinformation operations. Does that sound too Orwellian, or is that just a description of the truth?
Nowhere is this clearer than in how Republican state governors are devastating their state university systems. Brownback in Kanasas. Scott in Florida. Walker in Wisconsin. And on and on. This report details Walker's depredations.
Credit: AP
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) will unveil a budget Tuesday night that aims to slash hundreds of millions of dollars from the state’s public universities over the next two years. Students, professors and state lawmakers are already blasting the plan — the deepest cut in state history — and tell ThinkProgress they’re organizing to block its passage.
Ahead of his presentation of the budget to the state legislature, Governor Walker told local right-wing radio host Charlie Sykes that his budget cuts over the past few years have created positive “efficiencies” at the university, and offered: “Maybe it’s time for faculty and staff to start thinking about teaching more classes and doing more work.”
At the same time, Walker is calling for a nearly $500 million new basketball stadium in Milwaukee for the Bucks. Under his plan, the state would take out $200 million in bonds to pay for the arena, and the county and city of Milwaukee would have to chip in as well. The team’s owner has promised […]
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Thursday, February 19th, 2015
Judd Legum, - Think Progress
Stephan: I consider this assault on secondary education, to be a very important trend, and I am going to publish two perspectives on what is going on in Oklahoma.
Students protest proposed changes to U.S. history curriculum in Colorado. Credit: AP
An Oklahoma legislative committee overwhelmingly voted to ban Advanced Placement U.S. History class, persuaded by the argument that it only teaches students “what is bad about America.” Other lawmakers are seeking a court ruling that would effectively prohibit the teaching of all AP courses in public schools.
Oklahoma Rep. Dan Fisher (R) has introduced “emergency” legislation “prohibiting the expenditure of funds on the Advanced Placement United States History course.” Fisher is part of a group called the “Black Robe Regiment” which argues “the church and God himself has been under assault, marginalized, and diminished by the progressives and secularists.” The group attacks the “false wall of separation of church and state.” The Black Robe Regiment claims that a “growing tide of special interest groups indoctrinating our youth at the exclusion of the Christian perspective.”
Fisher said the Advanced Placement history class fails to teach “American exceptionalism.” The bill passed the Oklahoma House Education committee on Monday on […]
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Thursday, February 19th, 2015
Scott Kaufman, - The Raw Story
Stephan: For the Theocratic Right truth and facts are very difficult. The illusion of perfection is far more desirable, than the flawed but human reality of imperfection. Nowhere is this more easily seen than in the Right's attempt to inculcate children with a fantasy of the past, rather than the facts.
Oklahoma state legislature Credit: blog.ansirh.org
An Oklahoma lawmaker filed a bill that would ban the current Advanced Placement United States History curriculum and replace it with one that taught “foundational documents” that include the Ten Commandments, numerous sermons, and three speeches by Reagan — but none by any Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson.
The bill’s sponsor, state representative Dan Fisher (R), told CNN that the problem with the current course is that, “in essence, we have a new emphasis on what is bad about America.”
The revised course, however, would replace a “robust analyses of gender and racial oppression and class ethnicity and the lives of marginalized people, where the emphasis on instruction is of America as a nation of oppressors and exploiters” with “an emphasis on America’s founding principles of Constitutional government.”
That emphasis would include teaching students Jonathan Edwards’ sermon “Sinners in the Hands of a Angry God,” the purpose of which is to remind the people that God may cast a sinner into Hell at any moment, so the best course of action is to accept Christ immediately. It […]
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Thursday, February 19th, 2015
Larry Elliott, Economics Editor - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Here in one report you can get what I think is an accurate assessment by carbon energy concerning their view of our energy future. It is a recipe for civilization ending wrong choices. We have got to make getting off carbon energy a national security priority. Nothing less than a national commitment to achieve this is going to get us there.
BP’s annual energy outlook says renewables sources will not be able to cope with its forecast 40% growth in energy demand.
Credit: Tim Ireland/PA
Rising global demand for energy over the next two decades is at odds with the fight against climate change, the head of BP said on Tuesday, as he outlined the oil giant’s forecasts showing unsustainable increases in carbon emissions.
BP’s annual energy outlook predicted that the world economy would double in size in the next 20 years, resulting in demand for energy rising by almost 40%. The company said two-thirds of this demand would be met from fossil fuels – oil, gas and coal – and that this would lead to a 25% increase in carbon emissions.
BP said slower growth in China and India coupled with greater energy efficiency would mean that demand would rise by 1.5% […]
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