Texas uses "Merry Christmas Bill" to push theocratic agenda

By Michael J.W. Stickings

What the hell's the matter with Texas? It's not just that it's batshit crazy, or at least in the hands of batshit crazy Republicans, it's that the craziness is deeply anti-American:

Christmas may be seven months away, but Texas is ready for it.

State lawmakers there waged their own battle against the so-called War on Christmas on Friday, passing legislation, House Bill 308, that allows public school teachers to say "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Hanukkah" and display Christmas trees, nativity scenes or menorahs. Winter displays must represent more than one religion or include secular symbols.

But while the legislation specifies that schools may not constitutionally favor one religion over another, the bill is named for only one religion -- Christmas.

And that tells you all you need to know.

They've given themselves some cover by attaching Judaism to Christianity, which fundamentalists do these days, and by requiring that at least one other religion be represented, but come on, we all know what's going on here. (And it's not the war on Christmas, which doesn't exist. That "war" is made up by conservatives using fake victimhood to push their agenda.)

It's right-wing Christians pushing theocracy -- the Constitution, the very idea of America, be damned.

Do the math

By Mustang Bobby 

NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre said on Friday that there should be an armed police officer at every school in the country. Aside from the fact that there have been incidents where there were already people with guns protecting a facility and still a shooter got in and did his carnage — Fort Hood, for example — let's indulge Mr. LaPierre in his masturbatory Rambo fantasy and put one well-trained armed guard at every school in the country. How will he pay for it? The cost would be out of the reach of most school districts, and even if Congress decided to pay for every one of them via a federal grant, it would be a budget buster.

Let's just take a look at one school district. How about one I know pretty well, such as Miami-Dade County Public Schools? It is the fourth-largest district in the country, with over 347,000 students. It has 354 schools or facilities with students, so we'll need one guard per school. Let's say that the base average salary of a guard is $75,000. I know that seems a little high for a cop, but we're talking average salary, not starting.

But you just don't pay for the base salary and you're done. There are other costs, such as paying into their retirement account, Social Security and Medicare contributions which the district has to pick up a portion of, contribution to health insurance, and the required payment of workers compensation, liability, and unemployment insurance, all required under contract or state or federal law.


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No, this is the stupidest thing you’ll read

By Mustang Bobby 

(Ed. note: For more on this stupidity, see Dave Weigel, who did the research Allen didn't do and notes that there were in fact men at the school, not that it would have mattered. -- MJWS) 

Earlier this week I shared the wit and wisdom of Megan McArdle, who said the solution to school shootings was teaching the kids to gang-tackle the attacker, thus making it easier for the coroner to find the bodies. I called it "probably the stupidest thing you'll read today."

My apologies to Ms. McArdle. Or at least I should tell her to get out of the way; she's been overtaken by Charlotte Allen at National Review, who says that the reason all those kids died was that there weren't enough men and well-built 12-year-old boys at Sandy Hook Elementary:

In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the "reading specialist" — were female. There didn't even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza's knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school's public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.

Seriously, where does she get this shit?


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Conservative answers for shootings

By Frank Moraes 

On Friday, I reported on the obsession of Wall Street Journal reporters Tamer El-Ghobashy and Devlin Barrett regarding how the shooter got through the security system at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It was otherwise a good and informative article, but really: how did he get in? As I wrote, "This is a typically American approach to a problem: look everywhere but not at what is right in front of you."

Now we have the answer: he forced his way into the school. Before I heard that, I was pretty sure that was going to be the answer and I thought that would settle the issue. What an idiot I am! Of course it doesn't settle the issue. It puts the issue into sharp focus for conservatives: the answer is to put armed cops in every school. Check out the Fox News clip at the end of this segment on Up with Chris Hayes:

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Oh shit

By Capt. Fogg

Not again.

Two students were shot at a Los Angeles high school today because some idiot put a cocked and locked pistol in his backpack and it went off when he dropped his pack on a table. One could call it an accident, but you'd at least have to put the word in italics.

There's no resemblance to the Tucson shooting, although the student obviously illegally possessed the gun, illegally concealed it, and illegally brought it into a school, even if he wasn't out to shoot anyone at that particular moment. I'll bet there will be more calls to make it even more illegal, but more than likely he was a gang member, so illegality isn't a deterrent any more than it is to a psychotic. It may have earned him some status, in fact.

It may surprise some people, but we have a maze of gun control laws and they aren't doing a good enough job with this kind of crime and these kinds of criminals: gang members, psychotics, and sociopaths -- a tiny but deadly element.

But without knowing just how the kid got the gun, I can only speculate about what went wrong and can't talk about what to do, other than to do a better job with the metal detectors. There's a gun-show loophole. There are hard-to-control private transfers, some legal, some not, and some guns are stolen. Even though nothing short of a 24-hour curfew and a police state with no civil rights will stop such crimes, it's time we stopped being comfortable with more and more "gun control" bills based on twisted descriptions, laden with straw arguments, and riddled with loopholes. It's time for -- no, please don't laugh -- some bipartisan and rational reconsideration.

It's also time to remember that in a huge country, with a growing population, crime can be on the decline and still appear to be on the rise.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

There's craziness on the loose in North Carolina

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This is what happens when the culture of fear takes over: 

Sanford, N.C. — An athletic and academic standout in Lee County said a lunchbox mix-up has cut short her senior year of high school and might hurt her college opportunities.

Ashley Smithwick, 17, of Sanford, was suspended from Southern Lee High School in October after school personnel found a small paring knife in her lunchbox.

Smithwick said personnel found the knife while searching the belongings of several students, possibly looking for drugs.

"She got pulled into it. She doesn't have to be a bad person to be searched," Smithwick's father, Joe Smithwick, said.

The lunchbox really belonged to Joe Smithwick, who packs a paring knife to slice his apple. He and his daughter have matching lunchboxes.

"It's just an honest mistake. That was supposed to be my lunch because it was a whole apple," he said.

Ashley Smithwick said she had never gotten in trouble before and was surprised when the principal opened her lunchbox and found the knife.

The teen was initially given a 10-day suspension, then received notice that she was suspended the rest of the school year.

"I don't understand why they would even begin to point the finger at me and use me as an example," she said.

This month, Ashley Smithwick, a soccer player who takes college-level courses, was charged with misdemeanor possession of a weapon on school grounds. She is no longer allowed to set foot on campus.

There are many nefarious forces behind this ever-growing culture of fear: news media sensationalism (hyping threats beyong all reasonable perspective), the cult of law and order, post-9/11 security obsession, a general disregard for young people and youth culture, etc.

In this case, it's school security run amok (as schools have been hyped up into cesspools of violence), with no apparent consideration for the specifics -- which clearly exonerate this young woman.

Those responsible for suspending Ms. Smithwick and potentially ruining her life, or at least her academic career, should themselves be suspended, if not fired, for abuse of power.

And, if need be, the governor should step in and make sure that these absurd charges are dropped, that Ms. Smithwick receives not just a formal apology but whatever reparations she may be owed, and that policies are put in place to prevent this sort of madness from recurring in future.

The children are the future... so let them eat shit

By Michael J.W. Stickings

A troubling story from the USA Today:

In the past three years, the government has provided the nation's schools with millions of pounds of beef and chicken that wouldn't meet the quality or safety standards of many fast-food restaurants, from Jack in the Box and other burger places to chicken chains such as KFC, a USA TODAY investigation found.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the meat it buys for the National School Lunch Program "meets or exceeds standards in commercial products."

That isn't always the case. McDonald's, Burger King and Costco, for instance, are far more rigorous in checking for bacteria and dangerous pathogens. They test the ground beef they buy five to 10 times more often than the USDA tests beef made for schools during a typical production day.

And the limits Jack in the Box and other big retailers set for certain bacteria in their burgers are up to 10 times more stringent than what the USDA sets for school beef.

For chicken, the USDA has supplied schools with thousands of tons of meat from old birds that might otherwise go to compost or pet food. Called "spent hens" because they're past their egg-laying prime, the chickens don't pass muster with Colonel Sanders -- KFC won't buy them -- and they don't pass the soup test, either. The Campbell Soup Company says it stopped using them a decade ago based on "quality considerations."

Awesome.

(By the way, I don't eat KFC, and most other fast food, not just out of concern for my health but out of regard for both "quality considerations," to put it mildly, and humaneness -- just read Fast Food Nation. It's a good thing I'm no longer in school -- though I only went to high school in the U.S. and I don't think I ever ate whatever crap they were serving in the cafeteria.)

Toronto-area high school takes To Kill a Mockingbird off Grade 10 reading list over language complaint

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It's not just in the U.S. that this sort of thing happens:

The classic literary novel To Kill a Mockingbird is being pulled from the Grade 10 English course at a Brampton high school after a parent complained about the use of a racial epithet in the book.

Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which challenges racial injustice in America's Deep South, will be removed from curriculum at St. Edmund Campion Secondary School following a lone complaint from a parent whose child will be in Grade 10 this September.

"The parent was concerned about some of the language in the book," said Bruce Campbell, spokesman for the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board.

Principal Kevin McGuire made the decision at the end of the school year to resolve the complaint quickly. The book, a fixture on high-school reading lists across the country, will still be available in the library, said Campbell.

"The school administration was aware of the parent's concern and made the decision to use another board-approved resource that teaches the same concept for the coming year," said Campbell.

"It's not a requirement that the novel be used," he said. "It's an option on our list of board-approved resources, and the school can make a decision to use whatever resource (it) would feel best suits them."

"In this case, the principal believed an alternate resource might be better suited for that community," said Campbell.

This is a Catholic school board, not a regular public one -- both are publicly funded in Ontario -- which may partly explain the decision. Still, it seems to me that the community would be better served by having what is widely regarded as one of the great novels of the last century, "bad" language and all, read by its students (in Grade 10 -- it's not like the book was assigned to young kids, after all -- presumably advanced high school students can handle, and appreciate the context of, a broad range of language).

What is the point of shielding students from a great book that just happens to contain language that some find objectionable (in this case, one parent)? Should students -- again, Grade 10 students, not children -- also not read, say, Huck Finn? Or how about Shakespeare, whose work was hardly free of language that at least one person might find objectionable (and that was, for the time, extremely objectionable). Forget that the language used in the book is appropriate to what the book is about, that the language is actually essential to the book. This obviously hyper-sensitive principal is denying his students the education they deserve and require. You'd think he had removed not a great novel like To Kill a Mockingbird from the classroom but, oh, say, Hustler.

Is censorship -- and this, indeed, is a form of it (the book hasn't been banned, but it won't be taught) -- more important to the community than literature? It would seem so.

Is the value of a book determined more by its objectionable language (even as objected to by just one parent) than by its content? Again, it would seem so.

Apparently, what the book teaches about racial injustice is outweighed by the presence of a few "bad" words. Apparently, reading those words would corrupt those oh-so-impressionable students. Apparently, the book is otherwise disposable.

This is truly outrageous, a shameful decision, a cowardly act for which there is no excuse.

Columbination

By Carl

No doubt you have heard by now that this is the tenth anniversary of the day when two self-indulgent, twisted, infantile right-wing psychopaths shot up a high school in Colorado.

Much has been written over the weekend with respect to the lessons learned from the Columbine massacre. How can American culture produce this kind of behavior on a regular basis?

Much of it, from both the left (guns!) and right (culture!) has been both simplistic and flat out wrong.

It goes far deeper than that, I fear. It goes all the way to our national psyche.

For example, Canada has a comparable number of guns per household to the USA. It also has as its national sport one of the most physical, violent games played, ice hockey. Guns. Culture. Yet...

You don't hear about Canadians shooting up busloads of people as regularly as you hear about Americans doing it. Why?

The words of the former premier of the province of Alberta will speak volumes to you:

A few years ago, former Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed astonished us by denouncing what he called “the decline of collectivity” in Canada. “We are becoming increasingly Americanized,” he warned, “and this imposes an un-Canadian individualism on our ethic.”

Individualism.

It says so much about this nation.

People only mature when they are exposed to other people on a regular basis, when they can learn to empathize with the plight of others, when the culture around them demands that attention be paid.

If this isn't learned from an early age, immaturity sets in, and you have the fertile grounds for the self-indulgence that sees everything from mass killings to subprime mortgage markets, all in the pursuit of the Material Me.

We used to teach Civics in school, but budget cuts imposed by the Republicans, the very fount of self-indulgence and immaturity, have forced schools to decide whether to raise citizens or drones.

We used to teach ethics & compassion in society, but the greedy bastards who decided that the Fairness Doctrine was unprofitable saw to it that we raised a culture where your opinion doesn't count because you can't raise the money for it to be heard, to ennumerate just one of many hits to ethics we've witnessed in my lifetime.

We used to teach community in our cities and towns, but that was before the word was modified with the adjective "gated".

We used to have neighbors, and now we have co-tenants.

We used to invite the world to our doors, now we make them stand behind fences, gazing in on us, and when we do allow them to enter, we make them jump through so many hoops while dangling the dream of prosperity in their faces, so is it any wonder that after all that effort and time, folks get a little upset when they aren't lottery winners?

We encourage individuality, unless you want to have sex or be married, which is the very essence of individuality. And heaven forbid you need to have an abortion! There, you have to conform!

What the hell do we expect when we insist on conformity in others' behaviors but demand individuality when it comes to our own useless peccadilloes?

Freedom isn't free. It comes with its own long list of demands in exchange for releasing you from captivity. Among these are the responsibilities inherent in any free society best summed up by the saying, "If one man is not free, then I am not free."

Collectivism, in this area, is individuality. If you take care of others, you will be free to be whom you want, whom you need to be, because the responsibility is on them to help you when you need it.

Won't work, you say. True. This is America, and no one trusts anyone else. THe Colonial motto should have been, "I got mine, Jack, now you go get yours," instead of "Don't tread on me."

Which means we have to change America, or we will not survive. No man is an island, and that goes double for a nation of wannabe islands. We have to learn to give a damn about everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, else.

We fake it. We pay attention when Madonna falls off a horse. We geet into a tizzy when some woman in Arizona has fourteen children. We throw a fit when our President tries to fix the problems of this nation.

And we spend trillions on a war in a land where people hate us, where most of us will never visit, and will soon be useless to us for any potential natural resources, but to spend a few thousand here to bail out a neighbor who is losing his house?

And there's the rub.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Sign of the Apocalypse #61: Seclusion rooms for special-needs children

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I can only hope that the people behind this barbarity get what they deserve.

And, all across the country, there need to be laws, with clear guidelines, restricting -- and perhaps banning, if a suitable alternative can be found, as surely one can -- the use of these so-called "seclusion rooms," or "time-out rooms."

Is this seriously how special-needs children ought to be treated? By being thrown into isolation?

It makes you wonder how civilized our civilization really is.