CNN’s Anderson Cooper interviews the parishioner of a North Carolina church whose pastor recently preached a sermon advocating death camps for gay men and lesbian women.
Marion Brady in TruthOut (republished from The Washington Post:
What’s an alternative to today’s mandated, standardized curriculum? An elective curriculum.
By “elective,” I don’t mean offering kids a couple of options if they pass all their math, science, language arts and social studies courses, or are willing to stick around after hours. I mean that, starting no later than middle school, kids set their own schedules, going in whatever directions their interests, abilities, and respect for parental and teacher opinion lead.
Of course, that’s not going to happen. Bureaucrats, pointing to statutes, would quickly shut down any school that gave kids real freedom of choice. Politicians would resurrect the accusation they once used to sell No Child Left Behind, that teachers were guilty of “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Policymakers would argue that workforce needs trump individual needs. Corporations making billions selling “solutions” to the educational problems they’re helping create would threaten to cut off political campaign contributions. Many (maybe most) educators, comfortable in their niches, would defend those niches by pointing to personal successes.
Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian: “When Halden opened, it attracted attention globally for its design and its relative splendour. Set in a forest, the prison blocks are a model of minimalist chic. Høidal lifts down from his office wall a framed award for best interior design, a prize given in recognition of the stylishness of the white laminated tables, tangerine leather sofas and elegant, skinny chairs dotted all over the place. At times, the environment feels more Scandinavian boutique hotel than class A prison.”
President Obama takes a seat on the historic “Rosa Parks bus” at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan on April 18, 2012.
Official White House photograph by Pete Souza.
James Lipton’s advice to Mitt Romney: “How to Act Human.” From New York Magazine.
Abstruse Goose on the role of credit default swaps in the European debt crisis.
Mikw Konczal in Jacobin: “It’s taken decades and millions of lives, but elite opinion is starting to move against mass incarceration. The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books ran detailed exposés on the scale and violence of the penal state. Conservative leaders like Grover Norquist have said that mass incarceration violates the principles of “fiscal responsibility, accountability, and limited government,” while GOP darlings like Mitch Daniels have tried to take the lead in state reform. Soon the common wisdom will shift from “we need to get tough on crime” to “we jail too many people for too long for the wrong reasons.”
Chang Park. Death of American Capitalism
Shane Bitney’s moving call to action in loving memory of Tom Bridegroom.
CLICK TO TWEET
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LINKS
http://www.Facebook.com/EqualLoveEqualRights
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MUSIC
“Beautiful Boy” Coleen McMahon
http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/beautiful-boy-single/id524418205
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CONTACT
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President Obama has a genuine sense of humor, and seems to have no fear in using it. It is refreshing to see someone in his position actually have a little fun.
Paul Krugman in the New York Times:
“Bernanke was and is a fine economist. More than that, before joining the Fed, he wrote extensively, in academic studies of both the Great Depression and modern Japan, about the exact problems he would confront at the end of 2008. He argued forcefully for an aggressive response, castigating the Bank of Japan, the Fed’s counterpart, for its passivity. Presumably, the Fed under his leadership would be different.
“Instead, while the Fed went to great lengths to rescue the financial system, it has done far less to rescue workers. The U.S. economy remains deeply depressed, with long-term unemployment in particular still disastrously high, a point Bernanke himself has recently emphasized. Yet the Fed isn’t taking strong action to rectify the situation.”
Eugene Debs was a labor leader and union organizer who ran for president in 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920 on the Social Democrat Party ticket. In the 1912 election, he won nearly a million votes, the largest vote ever for a socialist candidate in the United States. A speech denouncing U.S. participation in the world war led to a conviction for treason, and he conducted his final presidential race from his prison cell.
(via kriszensufi)
Columnist Rex Huppke of the Chicago Tribune offered an moving obituary recently. He wasn’t writing about the death of a person, however—he was writing about the death of facts:
“To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of theU.S. House of Representatives are communists.”
