Headline of the day: Another GOP alternative to gun control?

We’ve finally found an idea even dumber than giving teachers guns:

Source: WNEP.com

(via @KrangTNelson)

Daily Links #118: US bishops praise LGBTQ discrimination bill

• US Conference of Catholic Bishops praises a Senate bill that would legalize anti-LGBTQ discrimination nationwide, because of course they do.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• A Buffalo, NY bishop names 42 priests accused of child sexual abuse, many of whom were previously unidentified, because … wait, that’s actually surprising.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Meanwhile, Michigan police raided the Saginaw Catholic Diocese and a bishop’s home, citing their lack of cooperation in a sexual abuse investigation.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• ICE contractor says it doesn’t use solitary confinement, and also, please ignore the testimony and photos of its isolation cells that prove they use solitary confinement.

• The sun continues to set on the northern white rhinoceros as Sudan, the species’ last living male, dies. Two females survive, which conservationists hope to impregnate using IVF.

• Security theater: The Parkland, Florida high school where the February shooting occurred now requires that students wear clear backpacks, which I’m sure will make it impossible to bring guns into schools and would totally have prevented those shootings carried out with rifles that don’t fit in backpacks anyway.
  (via @adamconover)

• Finally, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature passes a bill, sure to be signed by Gov. Bill Haslam (R), requiring public schools to display “In God We Trust” in a “prominent location”, which is guaranteed to fix every problem forever.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #116: Officials misbehavin’ edition

• It may interest you to know that the NYPD lies in court so often they have a name for it – “testilying”.
  (via @Snowden)

• Seattle, WA district attorney’s office ratchets up their prostitution-related caseload to meet quotas set by a privately run anti-sex-worker organization that pays them yearly grants. This is amazingly messed up. (Of the over 100 clients arrested last September, roughly half had their charges dismissed because police had illegally wiretapped them.)
  (via @davidminpdx; retweet by @radleybalko)

• Alabama sheriff legally rerouted $750K meant to feed inmates to pay for his beach house. Reporter breaks the story. Days later, the source who blew the whistle is arrested on drug charges and held in one of the sheriff’s prisons.
  (via @G_Padraic; retweet by @radleybalko)

• Wisconsin school district limits discussions of racism after an MLK Day exercise on social privilege made the majoritarily White community uncomfortable.
  (via @jeffelrod; retweet by @Popehat)

• In several death-penalty cases in the 1970s, prosecutors in Muscogee County, Georgia systematically excluded Black jurors in handwritten notes where they marked their names with ‘N’ (White jurors were marked with ‘W’). Of 44 potential Black jurors, two were allowed to serve.
  (via @davidminpdx; retweet by @Popehat)

• Finally: Look, I understand that guns in schools is a sensitive topic. But can we still agree that “hand gestures” by a six-year-old cannot possibly warrant a police investigation for “terroristic threats”?
  (via @TimCushing; retweet by @radleybalko)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #107: Texas school district threatens to suspend students who protest gun violence

• Thanks to this Texas school district, colleges may soon see “I got suspended for protesting against kids being shot in school” on applications they receive.
  (via @sarahemclaugh; retweet by @Popehat)

• The Pennsylvania district map saga continues: As predicted, Republicans are suing over the new, non-gerrymandered map released by the State Supreme Court, likely hoping to keep their advantage until after the midterms.

• Aurora, Illinois cop secretly installed surveillance cameras in his ex-wife’s home so that he could spy on her during and after their divorce. The city and police chief both want him fired. The arbitrator and police union argue a suspension is good enough. The only reason he’s not going to jail is because the ex-wife refused to press charges.
  (via @TimCushing; retweet by @Popehat)

• More than half of US states are taking it upon themselves to protect net neutrality.
  (via Techdirt)

• Germany’s speech laws continue to be a raging dumpster fire of censorial stupidity.

• Speaking of terrible laws, Swedish politicians want to set the prison penalty for copyright infringement on par with manslaughter.
  (via Privacy News Online)

• Finally, what’s more predictable: That Twitter would ban thousands of bot accounts, that this would impact the follower counts of far-Right tweeps in particular, or that they’d scream “censorship!” over it?

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Idaho lawmakers vote to kill climate change education

Anyone who’s been following Creationists’ decades-long efforts to remove facts they don’t like from public schools will find something familiar in this report out of Idaho:

Students at Leadore School—or any Idaho public school, for that matter—might not be learning much about climate change in the future, though. The Idaho House Education Committee voted Wednesday to remove most mentions of climate change from these proposed K-12 science standards teachers have been trying to implement since 2015, reports The Boise Weekly. The big piece the state removed is where human use of fossil fuels is connected to global warming.

The committee voted 12-4 on the measure, which also removed all “supporting content” from the standards. That means this 70-page document for science standards is likely to lose nearly half of its content, said Glenn Branch, the deputy director for the National Center for Science Education, which has been advocating for updated standards.

Now and again it strikes me just how hard and persistently science deniers are fighting to keep kids dumb and ignorant in order to deprive them of the capacity not only to fight against the greatest long-term existential threat our society has ever faced, but also to recognize the lust for power and money that’s behind it all, and I start getting visions of the greedy little bastards being led to a hangman’s noose. Yet saner heads must prevail – they may be trying to pillage whatever future we have for their own short-term gain, but perseverance and an inflexible dedication to the truth empowers us to fight back just as hard.

Well, that, or we can just wait for the Republican old guard to finally die off. It’s somewhat astounding how many problems that may end up solving on its own.

(via @adamconover)

Daily Links #102: San Diego County harasses reporter who exposed jailhouse deaths

Kelly Davis

• Reporter ^[pictured] helps expose how incompetence and negligence led to 60 deaths in San Diego County jails. So naturally, county attorneys are now harassing her.
  (via @radleybalko)

• Popehat presents: Don’t talk to the feds, Donald Trump edition.

• Fox News frequently touts its willingness to publish things no other outlet will. That’s probably because no other outlet would accuse the US Winter Olympics team of going “darker, gayer, different” by choosing athletes based on race rather than ability.

• US college student flunks an assignment because her professor says Australia is a continent, not a country. (It’s both.)
  (via @davidmackau; retweet by @Popehat)

• Finally, I’d joke that The Onion is no longer doing satire, but to be fair, it’s impossible to tell reality and satire apart anymore.
  (via retweet by @Popehat)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #101: Constitutional crisis brewing in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania’s gerrymandered 7^th District

• US Supreme Court refuses to block a lower court’s order that Pennsylvania’s heavily gerrymandered, Republican-favoring district maps be tossed out and redrawn.

• … So now Pennsylvania Republicans want to impeach the Democratic state supreme court justices who ruled against them.
  (via @radleybalko)

• New Jersey is the latest state to protect net neutrality with an executive order.

• British appeals court refuses to extradite accused hacker Lauri Love because of US prisons’ inability to humanely handle mental health issues.

• Father whose teen is threatened with child porn charges over sexting does exactly as he should: lawyer up and don’t believe any promises made by school administrators or police.
  (via @JohnSMill_enial; retweet by @Popehat)

• More on the Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s terrible idea to import a European-style “right to be forgotten” that’s invariably abused.

• Trump may finally get his military parade. I guess he thinks showing off the men and women doing a job he weaseled his way out of several times will demonstrate his strength.

• Finally, flat-Earthers’ best “proof” really just proves how incredibly silly they are.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Mississippi bill to put Ten Commandments in schools dies

Last week we learned that Mississippi State Representative Credell Calhoun, a Bible-thumping Democrat, had presented a bill that would’ve installed a Ten Commandments display in every classroom and made teachers read them aloud every day. That such legislation was self-evidently unconstitutional and didn’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell of making it to a vote, much less becoming law, apparently never crossed his mind.

Well, the inevitable wasted no time in coming to pass, and HB 1100 is now dead in subcommittee only 15 days after its introduction. As is HB 783, another bill Calhoun had introduced days earlier that would’ve made moments of silence mandatory in schools – something also covered by the later bill. So not only didn’t he realize the earlier bill was stillborn, he then doubled down on it with the Ten Commandments bill.

It’s a low bar, but it’s good to see that his fellow legislators have more sense – and knowledge of the law – than he does.

(via Friendly Atheist)

Mississippi lawmaker wants teachers to recite the Ten Commandments every day

There’s something disturbing happening in Mississippi. A legislator, Rep. Credell Calhoun, apparently thinks there isn’t quite enough Christianity in public schools, and has introduced a bill that would push the following requirements:

• Every school board must require a 60-second moment of reflection at the beginning of each school day.
• In every classroom, school, auditorium, and cafeteria, there must be posted an 11×14 (minimum) display featuring the Ten Commandments and the U.S. motto, “IN GOD WE TRUST.”
• Every morning, teachers must recite the Ten Commandments aloud at the beginning of the first hour of class, though any student or teacher who objects must be excused without penalty.

The moment of silence is allowed. Indeed, 36 states have legislation related to school moments of silence, 23 of which permit the moments while 13 require the moments. The Supreme Court has ruled that such moments are allowed, so long as they serve a secular purpose. If, for example, Calhoun had written in his bill that the moment was intended to be used for prayer, then that would run afoul of what the Court has allowed.

But it’s unquestionable that the Court would reject the other aspects of his bill as unconstitutional.

Not only is it unquestionable, it’s so obviously inevitable that it begs the question why anyone, much less someone whose job revolves around understanding the law, would think it’s a good idea. This bill is good for one thing only, and that’s to brighten a judge’s day by giving them something to laugh about as they presumably fold it into a paper airplane and toss it out the window.

Now, I mentioned there was something off about this. You’ve probably never heard of Rep. Calhoun until now, but you’d probably reckon, given this bill, that he’s just another Republican who thinks religion and government should go hand in hand. Well, you’d be half-right – this blatant violation of the Establishment Clause is brought to you by a Democrat. Because whilst the GOP has the market cornered on Christian-fascism, religion is a rot that crosses the aisle.

(via Friendly Atheist)

Daily Links: 12/29/17 – Birthday links

Twenty-six. Twenty-six. Dunno, that number sounds mighty odd to me.

• Roy Moore’s last-ditch voter fraud complaint is ignored as Alabama officials certify Doug Jones’ Senate election victory.

• A Nashville, TN man spends 20 of a 30-year sentence behind bars; then sentencing guidelines are revised and he’s released to begin his rehabilitation, forging connections with his family and community. Now the government decides the new guidelines don’t apply and are set to throw him back in prison.
  (via @radleybalko)

• Botched drug raids, wrongful police shootings and criminalizing poverty: Another round of criminal justice news in the US.

• Speaking of, Radley Balko has a bunch of terrifying, totally unrealistic “predictions” about civil liberties violations we may see in 2018.

• Illinois becomes second state (after California) to ban the “that person was gay/trans so I panicked and murdered them” defense.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Despite Trump’s rhetoric and his unshackling of ICE, he still deported far fewer Mexican immigrants in 2017 than Obama did in 2016. (Not that Obama gets applause for that.)
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• College presidents still say, and are still completely wrong to say, that “hate speech is not free speech”.
  (via @Popehat)

• Here’s an idea: Make all counselors either obtain a license or stop practicing, regardless of whether or not they base their practice on religious doctrine. (It’ll never pass.)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Mass. middle school administrator busted for trying to pay for consensual sex

In an ideal world, the headline to this article would read “Parents outraged: Police waste time & taxpayer money arresting adult who tried to pay for consensual sex; also, his job is utterly irrelevant”.

This is not an ideal world. (And I am not a headline writer, which is perhaps a good thing.)

Parents are expressing concern after police busted a school employee in a prostitution sting.

Court documents note that Aaron Viera agreed to pay an undercover police officer $60 in exchange for sex in October.

Viera is the assistant principal at Beckwith Middle School.

Some parents said they learned the news through a newspaper article listing arrests in New Bedford in October. Other parents said they learned from their own children and through other parents on community Facebook groups.

Viera is currently on leave and has taken a “sexual education course”, which I presume consists of sitting him down and explaining to him that whilst having sex with another willing person is okay and exchanging money for services is okay, combining the two somehow makes you a Bad Person who deserves to be shunned by society and saddled with a criminal record like a common rapist.

I still cannot fathom the sort of busybody attitude that thinks what a school employee does in their private life is anyone else’s concern or has any bearing on that person’s ability to do their job.

(via @fark)

Daily Links: 12/19/17 – Chicago police blames teen they killed for a bystander they also killed

Quintonio LeGrier (l) & Robert Rialmo
[source]

• First a Chicago cop kills a teenager ^{[both pictured]} suffering a mental breakdown and a bystander. Now the city is suing the teen’s estate, blaming him for the bystander’s death.
  (via @alan_uplc; RT: @radleybalko)

• Following a three-year civil liberties lawsuit, a Canadian court strikes down the country’s solitary confinement regime, albeit with a one-year delay to let Parliament fix issues with the law. It’s unclear where things go from here.

• It’s bad enough that some slimebag restaurant owners illegally pocket their servers’ tips. Now Trump’s Department of Labor is asking: “What if we made it legal?”
  (via @donttrythis)

• Conservative college students get an English instructor fired over her peaceful protests, demonstrate yet again who the real snowflakes are.
  (via @radleybalko)

• Trump hates the NFL for allowing players to protest, but he loves letting taxpayers subsidize new football stadiums.
  (via @radleybalko)

• Finally: We’re witnessing the wholesale looting of America.
  (via @radleybalko)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.