“Spanking”: This is what’s wrong with it

. . .even when it’s legal and sanctioned by School, Church and/or State.

It ruins relationships and trust. It distorts and destroys love, lives, mental health, reputations and careers. It creates monsters more often than curbing or curing them. Indeed it’s pretty much the opposite of “discipline” considering that the justified, disciplined and accountable person in any physical bullying drama tends to be the suffering, subjugated victim, not the calculated inflicter of pain and humiliation.

Teen daughter beaten by Texas-Judge Dad

See also:

Jessica Alba’s Idea of Award-worthy Parent Performance

Can you go all day without hitting a child?:

Can anyone really deny that we are perpetuating and endorsing the lesson of “might makes right” when we rule over our children using physical punishment?

Stop every kid-hitter you can — teach ’em a lesson!

Thinking about hitting and children

Child abuse is not home education:

Spankings were a minor part of the allegations. Hitting with objects and. . . in anger, yes, but there is much more to this story than that. . .

Beep Won’t Like This: Iraq War Vet Critical After Police Violence at Oakland Occupy Protest

The Oakland Police Department fired tear gas on Occupy Oakland demonstrators Tuesday night as they marched through downtown, determined to reclaim the camp that officers destroyed that morning. As the marchers zigged and zagged in search of safe ground, authorities bombarded and barricaded the activists into a drawn-out stalemate that resulted in further arrests.

The local police’s use of force seriously injured an Occupy activist and Iraq War veteran.

Scott Olsen, 24, remains sedated on a respirator, in stable but critical condition at Oakland’s Highland Hospital after being hit in the head with a police projectile.

. . .New video posted to YouTube suggests that Olsen was hit [in the face] at close range with a tear-gas canister. After demonstrators rush to Olsen’s aid, an Oakland cop waits a few beats before lobbing a second tear-gas canister at the crowd. They are attending to Olsen when the canister explodes, sending smoke everywhere.

No, Beep won’t like it.
I don’t like it.
No one should like it.
WTF America . . .

What’s in the Word “Cult” Used By “Christians”?

UPDATE – is the whole Christian Right itself, behaving like “an apocalyptic cult” dragging America toward civil war and if so, wouldn’t that make the Romney-Huntsman cult troublesome not because it’s radical but because it’s not radical enough?

******************
Prominent Pastor Calls Romney’s Church a Cult:

“I’m going to instruct, I’m going to advise people that it is much better to vote for a non-Christian [Mormon Willard “Mitt” Romney] who embraces biblical values than to vote for a professing Christian like Barack Obama who embraces un-biblical values.”

OTOH, Jeff Sharlet’s work to expose a more secretive and cultish “prayer” cell in the nation’s capital, known only as The Family, calling themselves Christians and using that bible to justify their personal and global dominionist politics, isn’t something this man calls a cult or calls out politicians for practicing? Hmmm . . .

It’s time to take political faith seriously. And if doing so strikes you as invasive, unseemly, and irrelevant to the job the candidates are seeking -– well, then, it’s really time to take faith seriously, including its uses and abuses in a democracy where piety and cynicism have long been comfortable companions.

See also:

More on C Street: Is It a Shadowy Multi-National Government?

Asking Candidates About Their Faith and Extraterrestrial Beliefs

Look Lynn! Bobby Jindal Has a Brother in Exorcism!

Asking Candidates About Their Faith (and Extraterrestrial) Beliefs

“God chose me for that moment!” she thrills . . .

Following up after the GOP debate controversy around asking Rep. Bachmann about the implications of her bible-based wifely submission beliefs should she become President:

This year’s Republican primary season offers us an important opportunity to confront our scruples about the privacy of faith in public life — and to get over them. We have an unusually large number of candidates, including putative front-runners, who belong to churches that are mysterious or suspect to many Americans.

Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons, a faith that many conservative Christians have been taught is a “cult” and that many others think is just weird. (Huntsman says he is not “overly religious.”) Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann are both affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity — and Rick Santorum comes out of the most conservative wing of Catholicism — which has raised concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact and fiction.

And let’s not skip too quickly over

Florida Gets New Ed Head But As Conservative Con Jobs Go, Not So New

JJ’s note: this was drafted last month when I was pretty hot about it, so I set it aside to cool off. Well, I did cool off about THIS but only because everything else has me even hotter now! (At least it kept me from blogging the Casey Anthony debacle as yet another Florida shame.)

So I just reread it and it’s not wrong or incomplete, just pissy. To get it out of the draft file and make room for new and bigger outrage, here it is:

**********************
What a discouraging “choice” . . .

After bullying his way into our state’s governorship with $70 million he bilked from taxpayers, corporate fraudster Rick Scott quickly forced out Florida’s education commissioner (who himself was no prize — he’d come to what used to be called public service from a for-profit testing company, to put even more misplaced emphasis on said testing to dominate the lives of teachers and kids.)

Yesterday Scott got what he wanted, yet another weapon in his grand scheme to destroy our common wealth, an even more direct dismantler of public education, a career-long panderer to corporate interests in education sold with soothing sounds of concern for kids and schools:

Truth of Economy Even Your Kids Can Grasp, in Two Minutes

Three Power of Story Stories . . .

to help JJ celebrate this National Day of Reason:

1) You’ve seen this picture.
“It is an image unimaginable 30 years ago. . .”

Now see three reasons it’s worth not only a thousand words but worth more than every history textbook in Texas, and then some.

(If you saw the evangelical Christianist self-styled as an authentic history expert on Jon Stewart last night, you’ll know what I mean. If not, watch this.)

Update – the Jon Stewart interview moved one author to action, reports the Friendly Atheist. She decided to give away for free download her book, Liars for Jesus:

The whole thing is just infuriating. Barton goes on and on (and on), talking over Stewart, saying that Christianity is under attack. Stewart calls him out on it. Barton changes the subject, cherrypicks court cases to prove some obscure point, and acts like he’s victorious. . . .

She’s going to give away her book for free in the hope that the truth can spread.
. . .So download it, read it, spread it, and help put a dent into Barton’s influence. Better yet, buy it if you can so future volumes can be published.

2) THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE! Only reason will beat it back into the Dark Ages. (Do we need a presidentially commanded special ops strike force of REASON?)

3) Edge dot org has an intriguing new conversation up on “The Argumentative Theory.”

Edge is the perfect place for some Day of Reason reading:

EDGE
To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

Read first, feel the sudden warmth of human cognition exciting your synapses, then talk later.
I’ll be here. 🙂

Serious T-Shirts, Hats and Saggy Pants All Trumped By My UTERUS!

Uterus.

Uterus, uterus, uterus!

Uteri aren’t just for Floridians anymore. Did you know half of all Americans carry concealed uteri with us everywhere we go, even [gasp!] in public policy debate?

“Uterus” has a Facebook page, Twitter hashtags and — because it’s politics — pink buttons.

But most important, Democrats looking for a unifying theme amid dour legislative prospects have found it in a single, unlikely word. House Democrats have started wearing pink buttons that say uterus in capital letters.

Saunders, the minority leader, warned members at a Wednesday caucus meeting not to wear the buttons on the House floor.

If I hear one more professional political operative of any

Psy-ops of “Strategic Communications” Busted Wide Open by Rolling Stone

Read first.
Then discuss.

“My job in psy-ops is to play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave,” says Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes.

Power of story. This exposes and then explains everything we’ve ever talked about here imo.

According to Holmes, the general wanted the IO team to provide a “deeper analysis of pressure points we could use to leverage the delegation for more funds.” The general’s chief of staff also asked Holmes how Caldwell could secretly manipulate the U.S. lawmakers without their knowledge. “How do we get these guys to give us more people?” he demanded. “What do I have to plant inside their heads?”

Forget China’s Tiger Mom, Import Swedish Pay-to-Plays Instead??

I was pondering the hot new documentary blaming teachers for charter school lotteries with a fellow Thinking Parent (Lynne) the other day. Not necessarily for-profits, just all charters and the desperate lifeline they represent in a rigged system and why that should be so, and who the real villains are, what the real solutions might be.

Then today I’ve been talking with another fellow Thinking Parent (Daryl) about the odd results of GOP mayors and governors seeming to be against the public in fact but all in the name of public service! See Chris Christie, Rick Scott, Rudy Giuliani, for example. See also how universities and even community colleges are being forced into more private funding as for-profits get more and more from the “public.”

Then along comes a story that both fits right in and warps the narrative further out of whack:

New and Improved Obama! Brought to You By Corporate America

as epitomized at rise-worldwide dot com

“[G]overnment is now said to be the problem. . .
The favor shown to charter schools by the president and his secretary of education Arne Duncan, in their endorsement of the testing regime of Race to the Top, draws on that ideology without much skepticism; and as Diane Ravitch has shown, it has encouraged a broad disdain for the supposed lack of ‘results’ in public education that is not supported by facts.”

I’ve been wanting to write about “venture philanthropy” too, but it’s so big, so important in how it pulls together the impact of what’s really been going on in the corporatization of education — for my parentthood if not my lifetime — that so far I have been daunted:

A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels.

Another Big Week for Cable Word Wars

Can it be America’s political newstalk isn’t new, so much as reruns or at least remakes from the 1940s and 50s?

(Demagogue?) Glenn Beck is inspiring actual death threats against yet another of his favorite flogging targets while FOX execs insist they hear nothing, nothing and anyway, Beck *denounces* violence rather than selling it for personal fun and profit.

“We are vigorous defenders of the First Amendment,” the center said in its letter to Fox. “However, there comes a point when constant intentional repetition of provocative, incendiary, emotional misinformation and falsehoods about a person can put that person in actual physical danger of a violent response.”
Mr. Beck is at that point, they said.

Meanwhile Keith Olbermann abruptly signed off MSNBC last night and ended his show by ending his show, permanently and without announcing any future.

Olbermann, before leaving the show with a final signature toss of his script toward the camera on Friday,