Reason Morning Links: Texas Textbooks and Nevada Chickens

- Death rates for children five and under are dropping rapidly around the world.

- A U.S. appeals court rules that prisoners at the Bagram air base do not have a constitutional right to habeas corpus.

- President Obama asks for greater power to excise projects from spending bills.

- Texas adopts those controversial new curriculum standards.

- Drug war fallout: a state of emergency in Jamaica.

- "Voters dressed in chicken costumes won't be allowed inside Nevada polling places this year."

Comments

[Johnny Longtorso]

Alongside Night Author to Sue United States for Copyright Infringement

The feral vanguard
...When these politicians insist they bear no responsibility for the disasters they have engineered, or the failure of their policies, their loyal supporters believe them. The hunt for the "true" villains predictably follows. The authors of the deficit time bomb will never admit they made impossible promises, or knowingly sold out future generations to acquire immediate power. ...

[Johnny Longtorso]

D.C. Metro Police Escorted SEIU Protesters to Bank Of America Executive's Home

Turns out the 2008 meltdown that 'forced' us to expand govt may not have been so bad after all. "We may not have an economy by Monday" is going to join "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" in the annals of Big Govt Lies.
Credit crunch? What credit crunch?

[Captain Renault]

It is startling that many of (Federal Reserve) Chairman (Ben) Bernanke and (Treasury) Secretary (Henry) Paulson's remarks are not supported or are flatly contradicted by the data provided by the very organizations they lead

I'm shocked, shocked ...!

[MicroNomics]

Don't worry. Naomi Kline will run to the front of the protests and explain everything. "It's all Milton Friedman's fault!!!"

[The Libertarian Guy]

Police escort for union thugs on their way to a protest at a private residence.

Let's see MNG defend that.

[Tulpa]

Maybe they thought that the protesters might be incited by not getting an escort.

[SugarFree]

Decided to watch King Idiot Bill Mahar because Ayaan Hirsi Ali was on. Big mistake. All the sophisticated analysis you'd expect from a Salon comments section. The hooting from the Brooklyn Community College section of the crowd was so erudite. And, of course, Michael Eric Dyson was on to spout the same leftist talking points over and over again--amazingly the exact same drivel we hear here every day oozing from the same orifices (even if they call themselves something different on every thread.)

Ugh.

[Marc]

amazingly the exact same drivel we hear here every day oozing from the same orifices (even if they call themselves something different on every thread.)

He invited people to fellate Ron Paul?

[SugarFree]

No, at least that would have been entertaining.

[LibertyBill]

Does Dyson still have that 70s haircut?

[John]

I don't get the hating on Ali. She is an atheist social liberal. Imagine if a woman escaped from some fundamentalist moron compound out in Utah or some similar group of separatists Christians and said the exact same things Ali says. Maher would be proposing to her on air.

[SugarFree]

Maher didn't even hate on her. She was just marginalized out the debate by her ESL status. Maher was sweet and nice, the way you might be to a puppy. If it was a Democrat woman that he condescended to in that manner, the feminist blogs would be screaming for his balls in a jar.

[John]

At heart liberals like Maher are paternal white supremacists. They are not malevolent. But they clearly consider white westerners to be worthy of holding to a higher standard than non-westerners. If a group of white westerners started treating women the way Somalis treat women, a dissident from the group would be a hero. That is because Maher has no problem holding white people to moral standards and seeing oppression where it exists. But someone like Maher just can't hold non-Westerners to the same moral standards, which is really just another way of saying they are not fully equal human beings in his eyes.

[West Texas Boy]

+1

[TrickyVic]

The moral standard concept is mostly bullshit anyway. It's something people want to impose on others but are offend when others want to impose it on them.

[Kolohe]

some fundamentalist moron compound out in Utah

It's become stale keeping track of these, but I liked this one.

[dbcooper]

Mormon/moron is one of the best John-isms to date. 🙂

[Death Panelist]

Decided to watch King Idiot Bill Mahar...

And for that, you deserved to lose an hour of your life.

[AZ Frog]

Reading is really super swell.

[heller]

It's good the governor is paying for these important propaganda videos, I mean educational videos.

[Kingston Grio]

It's better in the Bahamas.

[Johnny Longtorso]

Joe Sestak: Um, yeah, Obama tried to buy me off by offering me a job

[John]

The other entertaining part of that interview was Sestak claiming that despite the fact that he supported the stimulus, Obamacare and every other part of Obama's agenda, he is not an "Obama Democrat".

It is going to be really entertaining and pathetic this summer and fall watching Democrats who supported every major policy initiative of the last two years claim to be for "change" and be "outside of the establishment".

[Slim Charles]

Please impeach

[Wesley]

I can't help but think that Joe Biden would be even worse.

[Mike M.]

I disagree. Biden may be kind of a doofus, but I don't believe that he has remotely the amount of virulent animus towards America in his heart that Obama and most of the cronies around him do.

[Skid Marx]

^THIS^

[Nick]

Irrelevant. They're both heinous, so impeachment of the top guy now would render them both void of any political capital whatsoever.

[R C Dean]

The lay-down on the whole job offer thing by the media is just astonishing. No follow-up, no questions about who, what, when, nothing. Even though it may well be illegal.

[Tulpa]

Where have you been for the last 16 months?

Of course, the GOP Congress did quite the laydown for Bush administration indiscretions.

[R C Dean]

Who said anything about Congress? Of course Congress lies down when one of their guys is in the White House.

I'm talking about the resounding lack of curiousity by the media concerngin repeated allegations, by a Democratic Senate nominee, of illegal conduct by the White House.

[bigbigslacker]

It's time to either drop charges against Blagojevich or press some on Obama. If this is not investigated by the FBI, they have no credibility as a law enforcement agency.

[mad libertarian guy]

I'm not sure they've had much credibility as a LE agency in quite some time.

[Rich]

But dove/turkey/eagle/etc. costumes are still OK, right?

[CoyoteBlue]

Monkey/Gorilla suits always have a special place in political discourse.

[mr simple]

Chicken suits have been shown to confuse people and make them vote for Buchanan.

[robc]

I would assume Lizard People costumes are right out in Minnesota.

[Louis Farakhan]

Why would any of you Aryans need a lizard costume or any kind of costume, for that matter, you shape shifting lizard devil worshipers!

If you divide the nine knights of the round table into three parts you clearly see how the Council of Foreign Relations, the Tri(!)Lateral Commission and Bilderburgs formed issuance equal to seven . . . .

[Margaret Sanger]

Death rates for children five and under are dropping rapidly around the world.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

[P Brooks]

But dove/turkey/eagle/etc. costumes are still OK, right?

Fuck that; I'm working on a giant papier mache rat costume.

[Ragin Cajun]

Is that your Waxman disguise?

[James Ard]

Sonny Perdue was outspent ten to one by Roy Barnes, but won the governorship with the help of one cheap rat commercial.

[TP]

Something like this?

I didn't know that you were a union guy.

[Henry Waxman]

HEY!!

[P Brooks]

Mark Zandi was on CNBC this morning. I hate that guy.

"Well, we really oughta kick this heroin habit, but I think we need to do another kilo or so before we try."

STFU, Zandi, you Obamanomicon!

[John]

I was thinking about "third way" socialism this weekend. The first way is just to let the market work. The second way is state control communism. And the third way, if you think about it, is allowing the market to regulate supply but then subsidize demand to make it more equitable.

The problem is that when you subsidize demand you end up with bubbles and over inflated prices. Think about it. The first way in housing is just to have everyone buy their own housing on the market. The second way is for the government to own all of the housing and allocate it as it sees fit. The third way is to let the market build the housing but then give away money for people to buy houses. That is what gave us the housing bubble. Free money for housing in the form of the mortgage interest deduction, federally subsidize loans and artificially low mortgage interest rates. So what happens? The price of housing goes up artificially and everyone is left paying up to 50% of the disposable income on housing. The same thing happened in education. Education used to be cheap. Then third way socialism started handing our free money to students and now everyone who wants to go to college is stuck with huge costs and debts.

It is sad that people look at last two years as a failure of the market. It is the failure of the vaunted "third way" that the industrialized west has pursued for the last seventy years.

[kinnath]

In a 3-0 decision, the U.S. appeals court in Washington ruled for the administration Friday and said the Constitution and its right to habeas corpus does not extend to foreign prisoners held by the U.S. military in Afghanistan because it is a war zone. The judges dismissed claims from three prisoners who were taken to Bagram from Pakistan and Thailand and have been held for as long as seven years.

"It is undisputed that Bagram, indeed the entire nation of Afghanistan, remains a theater of war," said Chief Judge David Sentelle, a conservative who was appointed by President Reagan. Joining him were two Democratic appointees, Judges David Tatel and Harry Edwards.

Nice to know that the US can capture criminals anywhere in the world, transport them to a war zone, and then deny they habeas corpus because they're in a war zone.

Fuck Obama, and double fuck every freedom-loving individual that voted for Obama to punish the Republican party.

[Tulpa]

Yeah, while extending habeas corpus to prisoners held in battlefield prisons would be ridiculous, there should be exceptions for cases of obvious legal runarounds like this. If anything, wartime necessities should dictate that you don't bring outside prisoners into the war zone!

Of course, it was the Bush administration that engineered this legal runaround, so add him to the fuck list.

[mad libertarian guy]

Of course, it was the Bush administration that engineered this legal runaround, so add him to the fuck list.

This presupposes that he isn't already on the fuck list.

[Coeus]

This isn't the fuck/wed/kill game is it? Cause if so, you guys are either way too lenient, or just have really weird tastes.

[Nick]

Why do you think they call it the Global War on Terror? The warzone is everywhere.

[Rich]

The legislation would award Obama ... ability ... to scrutinize spending bills that have already been signed into law .... He could then send Congress a package of spending cuts for a mandatory up-or-down perfunctory down vote

FTFY. Also, if bills were not monolithic monsters perhaps such procedural shenanigans would not be "needed".

[Tulpa]

Obama's going to send them a list of spending cuts centered heavily on districts currently Republican representatives. Then the GOP is going to either filibuster or kill the bill.

Then Obama and his stooges in the media will complain about how the Republicans aren't serious about cutting spending.

[Nick]

Republicans, if they were smart (I know, I know), would accept the reductions in their districts. Then they can tell their districts that all the taxes they are paying, are going solely to Democratic districts at their expense as net tax payers.

"While we work day in and day out to support this great country, the Obama Administration and their Democrats in Congress, throw your money into a giant hole instead of using it for Defense!"

(tiny American flags for everyone in attendance)

[Max]

Re fewer kids dying, the key sentence for market fundamentalists:

Murray said death rates were falling surprisingly fast in countries including Liberia and Niger, but that progress had stalled in rich countries like Britain and the United States.

[John]

Yes because it is a lot easier to reduce the death rate for children when you start at the bottom and a few obvious improvements like basic medical care and clean water are needed than it is to improve the rates in a country that all of the basic public health improvements have already been made.

I really am starting to think that all liberals are stupid and incapable of understanding basic logic.

[Rich]

John, I know you know that painting "all liberals" with that brush is illogical. But your point is well-taken. People should probably be given a *simple* test of logic before being allowed to vote. Something like: "If all liberals are stupid and some stupid people vote, it follows that some liberals vote. True or false?"

[John]

I didn't say I thought that. I said I am starting to think. There is a difference. I never seem to see these kinds of basic logic errors made by conservatives or libertarians. The mistakes always seem to be made by liberals.

Conservatives and libertarians may be misinformed but their arguments always seem to make sense, even if their assumptions and facts can be wrong. But liberals seem to be just batshit insane. It is terrible the quality of thinking that it put up on the liberal side.

[Rich]

I have similar perceptions. Many liberals, if pressed a bit, admit to the "don't confuse me with the facts; my mind is made up" mentality. I don't know if that's "batshit insane", but I suspect the repercussions of that mindset are similar.

[Byron]

Rich - what would *your* answer to your simple logic test be? The logically correct answer is false, although I wish you'd modified it slightly to be true. =)

[Ragin Cajun]

United Kingdom 4.85
United States 6.26
Niger 116.66
Liberia 138.24

Just for those who are interested. The problem of different measurements used for different countries still holds.

[Max, simplified]

Get rid of wealthy people, and children will become bulletproof and immortal.

[sage]

Give it up, dude.
Grow some balls and find a handle you want to keep.
If you can't find a reason to disagree, then either leave, or join us. First posted 5/21/10

[Skid Marx]

CHICAGO - For decades, black men across Chicago described torture at the hands of former police Lt. Jon Burge and his officers, and for decades no one listened. Suspects landed in jail and even on death row for crimes they say they didn't commit after Burge and his men coerced confessions using terrifying methods including suffocation, a form of waterboarding and electric shocks.

Finally those complaints from the 1970s and 80s are being taken seriously ? and it could be Burge's own words that send him to prison.

http://www.startribune.com/nat.....:UiacyKUUr

[John]

"The police department fired Burge in 1993, and he now lives in retirement in Florida. He's been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and his trial was delayed for months while he recovered from treatment.

The 62-year-old Army veteran wasn't prosecuted for torture even after police officials agreed that he'd participated in it, and some in the legal community say he wouldn't be facing charges at all if it wasn't for U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald."

The big blue wall strikes again.

[Pip]

But that pig shit cop who posts here tells us that the cops are our friends.

[wayne]

Actually, I like the cop's posts. He seems like a reasonable guy, and we need reasonable guys on the police force.

When I read the Balko Horror Log, I need to remind myself that many cops are decent guys and object to the same things that we object to. I don't think it helps the Libertarian philosophy to "hate cops, no matter what".

[Nick]

Good cops need to stand up to bad cops. Unless they do, they are bad cops by default.

[TrickyVic]

""Good cops need to stand up to bad cops. Unless they do, they are bad cops by default.""

They need to get rid of the us vs. them attitude too. They are civilians just like everyone else. I'll give reservists a pass even though the regular duty side of me resists.

[J sub D]

Texas adopts those controversial new curriculum standards.

? When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It's a wonder
I can think at all
And though my lack of edu---cation
Hasn't hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall ?

Here's hoping that Texas kids are as cynical and curious as I was.

[John]

Doubtful. They have been fed leftist propaganda from grade school. And they exist in a system where telling people what they want to hear is the surest way to success.

[J sub D]

And I wasn't fed propoganda from grades 1-12? You weren't?

[John]

True. And we were the exceptions even back then.

[Tulpa]

Luckily, I went to Catholic school so I wasn't subjected to propaganda. No wonder I turned out so well.

[Nick]

This explains so much.

[mad libertarian guy]

You were subjected to a whole different kind of propaganda.

[Wesley]

My guess is that the issues are completely overblown. Last time Texas had a "textbook controversy", the Democrats on the State Board of Education said that the Republicans were trying to "set math education back 30 years", when they started requiring rugrats to learn their multiplication tables again. Whatever comes out of this will be good enough to teach from, if they had good enough teachers who weren't hamstrung by incompetent administrators.

[AlmightyJB]

Yeah, but it's overblown because the left hates for anyone to interfere with their indoctronation efforts. That's why you're seeing this story on the network news every night. It's a huge deal to them. If they can't teach the children that socialist and progressives are heros and that capitalist are robber barrons it makes it harder to suck them in later on. Not that I agree with turning the books into bible school lessons but I think that part of it is probably being overblown to get people to care.

[mad libertarian guy]

Hence the push for a national curriculum.

[P Brooks]

We're serious, this time: no more WASTE FRAUD AND ABUSE.

This obviously means the Department of Education will go the way of the Dodo.

[John]

And the Departments of Energy, Labor, Health and Human Services, TSA, FEMA, Commerce, and HUD. that would be a good start.

[BakedPenguin]

Why does everyone forget the DEA and BATFE when they make these lists?

[Wesley]

They make revenue for the Feds. We can't get rid of that in a budget crisis.

[Yig Roo]

Wow, looks like that is going to be a lot of fun!

Lou
http://www.complete-anonymity.at.tc

[John]

More Thomas Friedman idiocy this weekend.

"... and I do think there is a sense of that, on, on everything from the economy to environment. I don't want to be China for a second, OK, I want my democracy to work with the same authority, focus and stick-to-itiveness. But right now we have a system that can only produce suboptimal solutions."

http://althouse.blogspot.com/

I don't want us to be China, I just want our government to act with the impunity that the Chinese one does.

[Mike M.]

Charles Djou becomes first republican from Hawaii elected to Congress in 20 years.

[Slut Bunwalla]

I'll tell you what, if I lived in Hawaii, I wouldn't want to take a job that required me to be in Washington DC most of the time.

[P Brooks]

Burge and his men coerced confessions using terrifying methods including suffocation, a form of waterboarding and electric shocks.

People like this are why I am not completely opposed to the death penalty. This fucker's execution should be piped into every fucking police station in America, with the "officers" forced to watch.

[BakedPenguin]

Except the death penalty is a lot more likely to be applied to Burge's (and other Burge-esque cops) victims than Burge himself.

But I agree with the sentiment that the fucker needs to die. Personally, I'd like to see them withhold cancer treatment.

[Average American]

"Drug war fallout: a state of emergency in Jamaica."

Who cares?

[Dr Duck]

But is it OK for chickens to dress up as voters? I'm asking for... a friend.

[Ragin Cajun]

"He wears a disguise to look like human guys..."

[Jim]

I think as long as the chicken is a landowner, the Constitution allows it.

[Dr Duck]

Oh. In that case I'll have to settle for 3/5 of a chicken. Maybe two breasts and a leg? So many combos...

[caption contest]

I am sure ACORN can get your "friend" registered to vote under the name "Foghorn Leghorn".

[Rhywun]

"Decided to watch King Idiot Bill Mahar because Ayaan Hirsi Ali was on."

Me too, though I vowed to bail after the first "Teabaggers! zOMG arglebargle!".

Made it about five minutes.

[Silentz]

Paging Mr. Balko...

http://wjz.com/local/preakness.fight.internet.2.1708562.html

Several Marylanders face felony charges for recording their arrests on camera, and others have been intimidated to shut their cameras off. That's touched off a legal controversy.

[Skid Marx]

Sestak may face ethics probe over claims of White House job offer

http://www.washingtonexaminer......z0orO7Jg2d

[BakedPenguin]

Drug war fallout: a state of emergency in Jamaica.

Victory is just around the corner. There is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Fucking idiots...

[P Brooks]

Except the death penalty is a lot more likely to be applied to Burge's (and other Burge-esque cops) victims than Burge himself.

Baked-

My position, at this point, is that the death penalty should be restricted solely to "public servants" guilty of corruption, malfeasance, or other abuse of their "sacred" power.

I, personally, would like to see Mister Burge stoned to death by his victims.

[R C Dean]

Seeing as Mister Burge has prostate cancer, I think it likely that cosmic justice is being administered as we type.

Very painful? Check.

Crap into a bag the rest of his life? Check.

Its a start, at least.

[SugarFree]

Only if he was forced into the same restrictions on painkillers like lowly civilians.

"Here's some Tylenol, fuckhead. Walk it off."

[P Brooks]

Good cops need to stand up to bad cops. Unless they do, they are bad cops by default.

Exactly.

"Protect and Serve" my ass.

[BeesInTheBrain]

In UK:Rape accused to be given anonymity
To recap,
those accused of rape will be given anonymity as will teachers who physically assault their students. The most interesting note however, is they are looking to " toscrap jail sentences of six months or less".