From AlterNet: Today's digest

What Republicans and ISIS Have in Common Kali Holloway, AlterNet Recent developments in Syria prove American conservatives and Islamic extremists share a few ideas. READ MORE» Modern Science Says Homeopathy Is Total Bunk — So Why Is It More Popular Than Ever? Reynard Loki, AlterNet Homeopathy is not only here to stay, it's growing by leaps and bounds. READ MORE» The GOP is a Neo-Confederate Party Now: The South and the Religious Right Have Devoured the Republicans Whole Lou Dubose, The Washington Spectator To understand the insane 2016 campaign, you must understand the Southern, religious, anti-immigrant GOP base. READ MORE»

Michael Moore’s Gutsy New Film: Our Military Has Not Won a War Since World War II By Sophia A. McClennen, Salon Look out: Moore's new film opens with assertion sure to inflame the right, then suggests we "invade" for good ideas. READ MORE» Should Your Political Beliefs Be Protected by College Discrimination Policies? By Jesse Benn, AlterNet The inclusions of political and intellectual diversity are both tactics straight from the playbook of conservative polemicist David Horowitz. READ MORE» Young People Are Shifting the U.S. Towards Becoming a Less Religious Nation By Harriet Sherwood, The Guardian Growing numbers of millennials who are atheists or unaffiliated are causing vast changes in America's religious landscape. READ MORE» Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan: Hiding Cruel Policies Behind the Smiley Faces By Bill Boyarsky, Truthdig In the weeks ahead, this conservative duo will be portrayed in the political press as the reasonable, thoughtful new face of the Republican Party. READ MORE» State Law Makes It a Felony to Touch a Police Officer Even Off-Duty and Out of Uniform By William N. Grigg, The Free Thought Project In effect, the Oklahoma measure extends the cloak of 'qualified immunity' to cover every aspect of a law enforcement officer’s life. READ MORE» Smoking Pot Could Relieve Severe Morning Sickness, Some Doctors Say By Stephanie Castillo, Medical Daily Morning sickness is the leading cause of hospitalization in early pregnancy. Marijuana appears to help. READ MORE» Why Climate Change Could Make People a Lot Less Likely to Have Sex By Tom Bawden, The Independent As the report from the National Bureau of Economic Research delicately puts it, 'coital frequency' could diminish. READ MORE» Minnesota Woman Smashes Muslim in Face With Beer Mug for Speaking Swahili at Applebee’s By Travis Gettys, Raw Story The 43-year-old Burchard-Risch yelled at the woman and threw a drink at her, and she brushed off managers’ attempts to calm her down. READ MORE» 19 Ways You Can Eat Healthy Without Having to Be Wealthy By Adda Bjarnadóttir, Authority Nutrition Healthy food can be expensive. But there are many ways to save money and still eat whole, single-ingredient foods. READ MORE»

From DKos: Cuckoo! Cuckoo! It's Ben Carson again.

Fri Nov 06, 2015 at 03:00 AM PST

Chris Matthews excoriates Presidential Candidate Ben Carson for good reason

by Egberto Willies

Chris Matthews excoriated Ben Carson for much of the nonsense he says on the campaign trail. Here's a sampling so far.

 

From DailyKOS's Laura Clawson:

Ben Carson still believes that the Egyptian pyramids are ancient granaries, and not just any ancient granaries. No, according to Carson, they were built by the Biblical Joseph to store grain to prepare for a famine. Asked by CBS News about his 1998 comments claiming that, Carson said "It's still my belief, yes."

Carson reiterated to CBS News that "the pyramids were made in a way that they had hermetically sealed compartments....You would need that if you were trying to preserve grain for a long period of time."

From Vox's Timothy B. Lee:

Leading Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson has never held elected office and isn't known for his in-depth understanding of public policy issues. Critics have questioned whether it makes sense to elect him president. But Carson tweeted a response to this criticism: 

"It is important to remember that amateurs built the Ark and it was the professionals that built the Titanic."  

From Politifact:

Ben Carson’s tithe-based tax plan became the subject of a computational tussle between him and a CNBC moderator during the third GOP debate.  

Carson said "it’s not true" that his plan would leave us with a $1.1 trillion hole, as moderator Becky Quick said. 

But Quick’s math is sound, based on what's publicly known about Carson's plan. Carson’s 15 percent flat tax would generate a $1.1 trillion hole. By his own math, his plan would create a $1 trillion hole. 

We rate Carson’s claim False.

From the Wall Street Journal:

In a Facebook post late Wednesday, Mr. Carson, a retired neurosurgeon seeking the GOP presidential nomination, asked if the American people really want officials with political experience. He added, “Every signer of the Declaration of Independence had no elected office experience.”  

“That’s just patently false,” said Benjamin L. Carp, an associate professor of history at Brooklyn College and author of books on the American Revolution.

Ben Carson is the current GOP front runner. Voodoo economics is bad enough. What's next? Imaginary economics?

From DKos: Carly Fiorina skrooed the pooch on quantum computing

Mon Oct 05, 2015 at 01:02 PM PDT

Forget HP ... What Carly did to Lucent was Unforgivable

by Im a frayed knot

There has been a great deal of talk about Carly's disastrous reign at HP. Her acquisition of multiple companies to boost her numbers and large numbers of layoffs while she got millions in perks and benefits is well documented.  But her tenure at Lucent was a bigger disaster.

In 1996, Bell Laboratories, the research arm at AT&T, was spun off and became Lucent.  At the time, Bell Labs was, along with Lawrence Livermore, the top rated research laboratory in the United States and arguably the world.  But Lawrence Livermore was doing primarily research for the defense industry.  Bell Laboratories' research was more general - and more cutting edge.  One of the most promising areas of their research was the quantum computer.  I did my masters thesis on quantum computing in 2000.

I posit that Carly Fiorina is a big reason we don't have a quantum computer to this day.

In 1996, Carly Fiorina was appointed president of Lucent's Consumer Products sector.  She
opted to focus on the telecommunications arena, with a joint venture with Royal Philips Electronics. Her goal was to bring the joint venture to the top of the telecommunications industry in technology, distribution and brand recognition.  To do this, she did two things.  She redirected funding from hard research to telecommunications and began "patent churning."

Patent churning happens when a company focuses on the number of new patents, not the quality or depth of research.  When researchers request funding for new projects, they provide the company with an analysis that includes a timeline, needed funding, risk assessment and estimates of the benefits realized with success. When a company begins patent churning, most projects with timelines longer than 3-6 months, high funding and a measurable risk of failure are turned down.  Thus, real research into the unknown gets choked out and replaced with lightweight projects that are pretty well known.  There is no money allocated toward higher risk ventures that could lead to technological breakthroughs.  The many patents Lucent registered under Carly were slight variations on known technology.

In 1980, Yuri Mann had proposed the idea of a quantum computer.  In 1981, Richard Feynman proposed a model of what could become a quantum computer.  In 1994, Peter Shor, of Bell Labs, discovered an algorithm, known as Shor's algorithm, that allowed a quantum computer to factor large integers quickly.  This algorithm solved the heart of the quantum computing problem.  His algorithm was simulated in C.  The simulation was performed to prove the concept and show the direction a new language would need to take to successfully run a quantum computer.  To this day, one of the impediments to having a quantum computer is the lack of a language that can handle ambiguity.

In 1996, Lov Grover, at Bell Labs, invented the quantum database search algorithm. David P. DiVincenzo, from IBM, proposed a list of minimal requirements for creating a quantum computer.

The realization of the quantum computer was in sight.

But in 1998, Fiorina began her policy of patent churning.  The budget for quantum computing was eliminated, and those working on it had to find other work.  In 1999, Fiorina left Lucent to HP, but the damage was done.  While work on the quantum computer has continued, the team at Bell Labs, with their collaboration and their collective momentum, was gone.  We will probably get a quantum computer eventually.  But it will have been extensively delayed, and it may not be as elegant a solution as Bell Labs would have yielded.

Some people would prefer we not get a quantum computer.  I won't go into the benefits and non-benefits of a quantum computer here.  But I do lament the destruction of good research at the expense of Carly's obsession with padding the annual report.  Her tenure at HP proves that she didn't learn from her management.

If she becomes president, you have to wonder what games she will play with our government to make thinks look good under her tenure while being destroyed long term.

From DKos: Even Poppy realized Junior's presidency had ... issues

Thu Nov 05, 2015 at 10:30 AM PST

George H.W. Bush goes off script. Sorry, Jeb?

by Hunter

 

Daaaaaad!

 

Former President George H.W. Bush, aka Poppy Bush, has released a book. You have probably heard by now that it is distinctly unflattering to two members of the George W. Bush presidency; he thinks Dick Cheney became "very hard line" after 9/11, and for once a Republican doesn't mean "hard line" in a good way, but he reserves most of his fatherly spite for George's Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who "served the president badly."

"I don't like what he did, an I think it hurt the President, having his iron-ass view of everything, Bush told Meacham. "There's a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He's more kick ass and take names, take numbers. I think he paid a price for that."

President Bush the Elder has not been in the best of health these past few years, and so if he's going to be releasing a biography he probably is keen on getting it out there sooner rather than later. Writing a book in which you publicly distance yourself from your own son's administration, though, is pretty damn harsh. Granted, Bush the Elder feels that the things that went wrong (he still supports his son's inexplicable invasion of Iraq, or at least is still willing to stick to that script) went wrong because of the people surrounding George W. Bush, and not because his son mini-George was in fact the person screwing all those things up hisownself. The message, though, is still clear: Yes, even I, the boy's father, admit that my son's administration was chock-full of screwuptitude.

 

This has got to be causing heartburn for Jeb!. Jeb has staked his campaign on the notion that everyone is misremembering the George W. Bush years, which were actually full of peace and security and "he kept us safe" while standing on rubble-piles; Jeb Bush is his own man, he says, but you couldn't tell it from the Bush family advisers he surrounds himself with or his steadfast insistence that all those old Bush policies, both economic and military, would work out great the next time around. Now even Pa Bush is piping up with memories of the bad times and of a White House filled with "hard line," "iron-ass" eff-ups, and that does not do Jeb! much good. No, Jeb says, the Iraq War went fine—stop saying it didn't! We just needed to keep trying!

 

So Jeb! Bush is no doubt going to be asked about this, and now we all get to sit back and watch to see how Jeb is going to screw up on this question too. Because he's going to screw it up, he just is. As for Rumsfeld, he has already responded by not-too-subtly implying that Bush the Elder is just going senile.

 

So there you go.

"No woman who is seven months pregnant ever waddles past an abortion clinic and says, 'Darn, I knew there was something I've been meaning to get around to.'"

 

-- The late, great Molly Ivins

 

Thu Nov 05, 2015 at 07:28 AM PST

Ohio woman forced to drive 300 miles for abortion—or have a stillborn baby

  by Leslie Salzillo

Every day, we hear of Republican lawmakers introducing and pushing forward misogynistic bills that are not only an embarrassment to government and a huge waste of taxpayer money, they are also physically, emotionally and financially damaging to the women they attack. Jessie Balmert with USA Today reports:

An Ohio woman whose baby would have been stillborn was forced to travel 300 miles to Chicago because no Ohio abortion clinic would do the procedure. Sheva Guy, 23, a doctoral student from Cincinnati, said her daughter was diagnosed with a fatal spinal abnormality when she went to a hospital for her second-trimester ultrasound at about 22 weeks. She and her husband were expecting to find out the gender of their child.

Guy spoke at last week's news conference hosted by NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio and ProgressOhio. She said when she and her husband went to the hospital for a second-trimester ultrasound, hoping to find out the gender of their baby, the news they received was crushing. After two tests, the hospital providers told her the baby has a spinal abnormality and would not survive.

"I just completely broke down. I mean, I was so vulnerable," Guy said. "Pantsless on the table, I was finding out this news. I was just sobbing. Both my contacts fell out. I couldn't see anything."

She was given two options: deliver a stillborn daughter or have an abortion. The first option, she says "was more than she could bear," but she was 22 weeks pregnant and couldn't find a medical facility in Ohio to perform the procedure. She ended up being rerouted to a clinic in Chicago. Due to the restrictive GOP laws passed by Republican Governor/GOP Presidential Candidate John Kasich, abortion clinics in the state of Ohio have dropped from 14 to nine, and too many doctors are afraid of getting too close to the 24-week ban, said Jaime Miracle, deputy director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio.

 

As if the burden of hearing the devastating news, then having to travel hundreds of miles while in incurring a trip cost of approximately $3,000 wasn't tough enough, the emotional trauma that followed was even more devastating. On her way back home, it hit Sheva Guy.

"I had to leave my baby in Chicago," she said.

Pro-choice advocates fight for the rights of all women to make their own reproductive choices without interference. Yet we have Republican lawmakers who are relentless in their pursuit to remove the constitutional rights of women to choose what's best for their future, their bodies, their families and their lives.

 

The fight is hardly new.

In 1996, the late great journalist, author, and commentator Molly Ivins said:

"There's something very wrong in our discussion of this. If there's anything that late-term abortion is, it is not an easy call. And I just want to say, that perhaps, I almost get the impression that somebody thinks women don't have no moral sense at all. No woman who is seven months pregnant ever waddles past an abortion clinic and says, 'Darn, I knew there was something I've been meaning to get around to.' This is ridiculous. 

You have those late-term abortions, because either the mother is going to die, the child is going to die, or both are going to die.  

These procedures are incredibly rare.  

I only know of two in the state of Texas since Roe v. Wade was passed. They were both what they call cases of babies with no brain. The brain, the child's brain stem had developed, but then something went horribly wrong and these children literally had no brains. Now, is that an easy call? Is that simple to you? 

I am really, I'm… let me try and calm down - it's not going to do any good for me to get excited. If the choice… These are women who want their babies, they want the babies, terribly. What would you do, and I'm talking to the women in the audience. If a doctor said to you, 'Either your baby has to die, or you will die, or your health will be wrecked for the rest of your life, and you'll never be able to have another child.' I don't know what you'd do. I think you'd want a second opinion. But if I were you, I sure as hell wouldn't ask Bob Dole, because I don't think that's an easy call.

(See the original article for Molly's impassioned delivery of these truths that Republicans, in their blindness to anything not clear-cut black or white, just can't admit exist.)

 

Thank you, Molly Ivins. You are dearly missed.

If you are pregnant and feel your rights as a woman are being violated, contact: NAPW/National Advocates For Pregnant Women

To Sheva Guy and the many millions of women who have suffered miscarriages and still born deliveries, our hearts go out to you. No one should have to go through that kind of loss. And no one should be treated less than—because of it. Thank you for your strength.

 

---

 

An editor's note from Dot Calm's shadow: Republicans, by which I mostly mean evangelical fundamentalists, suffer not only from inability to understand or tolerate nuance but also magical thinking. 

 

Molly Ivins's statement that late term abortions are incredibly rare flips a switch in these right-wingers' brains: what they hear is that it's perfectly ok to sacrifice the women who need those procedures, either to save their own lives or to be able to have live children at a later date, because there are so few of them. It's ok to write those women off and let them become sterile, suffer lifelong health consequences, or die. It's ok to write off women because even dead fetuses matter more.

 

The magical thinking comes in when the holy rollers pretend that fetuses shown not to have brains will somehow develop those missing brains if only those selfish, evil, fornicating, baby-killing women would just let them be born. They believe in miracles because God. You may call it noble, faithful, or Godly, but I call it not understanding how the universe works.

 

"Let them die in childbirth--
that is why they are here."

 

--Martin Luther

Christian Apologetics: Hitler Can't Help You

A Youtuber named NonStampCollector posted a video about Christian apologetics basing their ethics on the Bible, using Hitler as an example.

The argument he presents from the apologists is framed as a series of questions, which I will paraphrase. Does our moral revulsion at Hitler's concentration camps come from objective morality--is it always true that treating people that way is wrong? If Hitler had won, would people today admire him as a hero who did the right thing in gassing millions of Jews--is morality simply a matter of what society thinks? Or would Hitler's genocide against the Jews still be wrong even if no one thought it was wrong? Could we be wrong about moral facts, and would that imply a "moral dimension" that transcends our natural world that is in effect evidence of God?

As NonStamp points out, the argument effectively refutes itself. Watch the video to see why:

From AlterNet: People who want to control lady parts actually grossed out by them

Woman Drives Planned Parenthood Protesters Away With 'Yeast Infection' Chant

The people who want to control women's bodies are grossed out by actual lady parts issues.

By Kali Holloway / AlterNet

October 27, 2015

Photo Credit: Twitter @MaryNumair

Mary Numair is an American hero. All because she was willing to shout about how Planned Parenthood helped cure her yeast infection at a bunch of clinic protesters, effectively driving them away in horror. Someone should really give this woman a medal.

Speaking to Slate, Numair said her interest was piqued when she noticed protesters in front of a Planned Parenthood just up the block from her job in Portland, Oregon. “I said, ‘Fuck this shit,’ went back inside, and started making my sign.”

What happened next was nothing short of inspiring: Numair made a sign that read, “Dear P.P. Thanks for helping with my yeast infections!” The sign included a floating vagina with a smiley face for a clitoris and a stick-figure woman with boobs. (Check out the photo, below.) Then, Numair made her way to where the protesters were standing and improvised a chant.

“I don’t know why I started chanting ‘Yeast infections!’ but it just came out,” Numair told Slate. “I have this cold, so it was just this obnoxious squeak, cheerleader-like. And I started doing high kicks, which I don’t normally do, in my skinny jeans.”

Numair says one protester called her a whore (because that’s Christian-like behavior, somehow?) and others began to pray for her until they finally couldn’t deal with the repeated “yeast infection” refrain. From start to finish, Numair says it took about half an hour to get them to leave.

Numair, who says Planned Parenthood really did help her with a yeast infection, along with birth control and other health care services, urges others to try her method, especially seeing how effective it was. And she’s considering showing up to the next protest better prepared.

“If someone wants to help me make a giant wooden labia,” she told Slate, “that would be great.”

From AlterNet: Bill Gates says private sector is inept

Bill Gates: The Private Sector Is Inept

The world's richest man doubts that the private sector is up to the most important job.

By Janet Allon / AlterNet

October 27, 2015

         

             

Photo Credit: JStone/Shutterstock.com

 

Bill Gates, still the world's richest man after all these years, does not have a lot of faith in his fellow billionaires or even capitalism when it comes to doing the right thing. It turns out he thinks the private sector is too selfish and inept to tackle the dire climate change situation, and relying on it would be courting disaster. Better to take a quasi socialist approach and remove the profit motive altogether from this important work.

 

In a wide-ranging interview with The Atlantic recently, Gates tacked pretty hard to the left. "There's no fortune to be made," he said, when it comes to developing clean energy sources and mitigating climate change. Besides, he pointed out, "the private sector is in general inept. How many companies do venture capitalists invest in that go poorly? By far most of them.” 

 

The tech magnate, who has pledged $2 billion of his own money for R&D (which seems like a lot until you consider that he is worth $79.2 billion, according to Forbes), said he was pleasantly surprised when he dug into the history of government research into big scientific questions.

 

“Since World War II, U.S.-government R&D has defined the state of the art in almost every area,” Gates told the Atlantic. “When I first got into this I thought, ‘How well does the Department of Energy spend its R&D budget?’ And I was worried: ‘Gosh, if I’m going to be saying it should double its budget, if it turns out it’s not very well spent, how am I going to feel about that? But as I’ve really dug into it, the DARPA money is very well spent, and the basic-science money is very well spent. The government has these ‘Centers of Excellence.’ They should have twice as many of those things, and those things should get about four times as much money as they do.”

 

Gates is doing a solo world tour to convince the world's richest nations to commit to innovating their way out of catastrophic climate change, a tall order. Germany and China are already pointing the way to green energy with some of their socialist policies. Germany has generated as much as 78 percent of its electricity through renewable sources, and regularly generates about 30 percent, twice what the U.S. does. China’s $80 billion green energy investment dwarfs that of both the U.S. and Europe.

 

“I would love to see a tripling, to $18 billion a year from the U.S. government to fund basic research alone,” Gates said. “Now, as a percentage of the government budget, that’s not gigantic… This is not an unachievable amount of money.”

 

Still, given the current make-up of the U.S. Congress, and its funding from the climate-change denying Koch brothers, Gates will likely face his hardest fight right here at home. 

From DKos: 47 Gun FAILS

Thu Oct 29, 2015 at 08:49 PM PDT

Good guy with a gun takes out a theater shooter! GunFAIL CLXIII

by David Waldman

Ten of the 64 guns discovered by TSA agents at airports across the country, during the week of 10/09 through 10/15/15.

Sorry I'm late. The gun crowd has been keeping me busier than usual, lately. But I'd like to catch up a little, and I've got my fingers crossed that I can knock out two of these installments and get back up to speed.

The self-inflicted shootings are really racking up the numbers toward the end of the year. It's hunting season now, and I think that magnifies the problem. In fact, five of our GunFAILs were hunting accidents, two of which were fatal. During the week of this installment, it was still early in the season, but we still found 20+ people who accidentally shot themselves. Seems like 23 or so for sure, with another two incidents that are highly suggestive of self-inflicted injury, but where the language of the report is less than 100 percent clear on the question of who pulled the trigger. Or rather, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, when the gun "suddenly went off," as the saying goes.

In a countdown of other familiar categories, six people were accidentally shot by family members, five people accidentally discharged guns while cleaning them, four people were accidentally shot while sitting in cars (well, one was in a golf cart), three each were accidentally shot while target shooting or had accidental discharges while at work, two were accidentally shot in bars, and just one left a loaded gun behind in a public bathroom.

The week also included two GunFAILs by cops and/or security guards, two movie theater GunFAILs, two GunFAIL shootings by toddlers, and two Salina, Kansas GunFAILs.

One of the hunting accidents this week actually prompted the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department to move to ban hunting for the period during which its personnel are restocking the forests with game birds. Yes, this is a thing which had not yet been done, because Live Free or Die. But apparently, the risk that someone would Die got to be too great when people actually began shooting at pheasants still in the process of being released by Fish and Game biologists, which is in fact something of a risk to the Fish and Game biologists, who are not even in season.

Our title story is that of Cody Denault, the good guy who brought his gun with him into the "gun-free zone" of the Starplex Cinema at the Central Mall in Salina, Kansas, because reasons. Cody is ex-military, you see, so he's trained, and you can trust him ... to make his own tourniquet. At least he was prepared with a sturdy belt, which is amazing in hindsight, given that he didn't bother preparing so much when it came to buying a holster for his pocketed Smith & Wesson M&P Shield 9mm. (The same gun Veronica Rutledge was carrying in her purse when her 2-year-old found it there and killed her with it in a Hayden, Indiana Idaho Walmart last December, by the way.) Anyway, it was a foolish mistake, but Cody wants you to know that it's not an indicator of his skill with guns. He's totally awesome normally. So awesome, in fact, that he felt safe in ignoring the private property owner's posted firearms restrictions, not bothering with a holster, keeping a round chambered, and blindly fidgeting with his gun in his pocket. It's just one of those unavoidable accidents that in so doing he accidentally both disengaged the safety and somehow activated the trigger. There was no real way—other than obeying the law with respect to the weapons prohibition, buying a holster that would have shielded the trigger, or just resisting the urge to finger his weapon in the theater—to have prevented this. But at least he lived the dream and proved the theory: a good guy with a gun finally took out a theater shooter.

(See the original article for the details of 47 recent, nasty gun fails.)

From DKos: Ben Carson's new rap song

Thu Nov 05, 2015 at 12:38 PM PST

Ben Carson approved a rap song for his campaign, and it is astonishing

"I approve this dope rhyme." (That's what the kids say, right?)

Support Ben Carson
for President it would be awesome.

So goes the opening rhyme scheme on the newest Ben Carson radio ad. It is one minute of rap music you will never forget. If you don't see the rhyme, he rhymes Carson with awesome. Yeah. He did that.

Like most politicians, Democrat or Republican, you can expect some pandering here and there. You can expect some pandering to the black community, and the black community already knows this well—which is why the Black Lives Matter protests are bipartisan. But you need a Republican candidate to get the beauty of completely tone-deaf pandering like this Ben Carson advertisement. It's only a minute of your life but, it's a real thing, and you should probably listen to it just to tell your grandchildren you did.

If we want to get America back on track
We gotta vote Ben Carson, matter-o-fact
Twitter has a hashtag for today's festivities. #TweetYourReactionToTheBenCarsonRap:

(See the original article for the tweets. Some are rather cute. Some are quite insightful.)

Rapper Talib Kweli was a bit more blunt when asked by the Washington Post, what he thought about this foray into his world:

Does this strike you as an effective way of reaching out to young, black voters?  

The most effective way for Ben Carson to reach out to young black voters is to actually care about other black people, which Ben Carson has proven to be incapable of. When you say things like "Obamacare is the worst thing that's happened to America since slavery" and describe the youth-driven Black Lives Matter as "sickening" and accuse them of "bullying" people, who cares about your rap ad? 

Even if it was good, which it isn't, no one would care.

Do you think you'd look at this differently if Carson weren't black? If Jeb Bush released this, for example, how would that change things? 

I almost feel like Jeb Bush has more respect for the black vote than Carson. I couldn't imagine him being this pandering to black people. And I'm no fan of Jeb Bush. Jeb could have probably found a better rapper too.

You can see a lot more "fan" reactions to Ben Carson's attempt at ingratiating himself into hip hop culture following the #TweetYourReactionToTheBenCarsonRap on Twitter.

Those evil teachers ...

No wonder Republicans hate them and decry them for being overpaid!

An Open Letter from a Newly Resigned Teacher

Today, I resigned from the school district. I would like to share with you what I gave them. Feel free to share it if it strikes you as important.

To: The School Board of Polk County, Florida

I love teaching. I love seeing my students’ eyes light up when they grasp a new concept and their bodies straighten with pride and satisfaction when they persevere and accomplish a personal goal. I love watching them practice being good citizens by working with their peers to puzzle out problems, negotiate roles, and share their experiences and understandings of the world. I wanted nothing more than to serve the students of this county, my home, by teaching students and preparing new teachers to teach students well. To this end, I obtained my undergraduate, masters, and doctoral degrees in the field of education. I spent countless hours after school and on weekends poring over research so that I would know and be able to implement the most appropriate and effective methods with my students and encourage their learning and positive attitudes towards learning. I spent countless hours in my classroom conferencing with families and other teachers, reviewing data I collected, and reflecting on my practice so that I could design and differentiate instruction that would best meet the needs of my students each year. I not only love teaching, but I am excellent at it, even by the flawed metrics used up until this point. Every evaluation I received rated me as highly effective.

Like many other teachers across the nation, I have become more and more disturbed by the misguided reforms taking place which are robbing my students of a developmentally appropriate education. Developmentally appropriate practice is the bedrock upon which early childhood education best practices are based, and has decades of empirical support behind it. However, the new reforms not only disregard this research, but they are actively forcing teachers to engage in practices which are not only ineffective but actively harmful to child development and the learning process. I am absolutely willing to back up these statements with literature from the research base, but I doubt it will be asked for. However, I must be honest. This letter is also deeply personal. I just cannot justify making students cry anymore. They cry with frustration as they are asked to attempt tasks well out of their zone of proximal development. They cry as their hands shake trying to use an antiquated computer mouse on a ten year old desktop computer which they have little experience with, as the computer lab is always closed for testing. Their shoulders slump with defeat as they are put in front of poorly written tests that they cannot read, but must attempt. Their eyes fill with tears as they hunt for letters they have only recently learned so that they can type in responses with little hands which are too small to span the keyboard.

The children don’t only cry. Some misbehave so that they will be the ‘bad kid’ not the ‘stupid kid’, or because their little bodies just can’t sit quietly anymore, or because they don’t know the social rules of school and there is no time to teach them. My master’s degree work focused on behavior disorders, so I can say with confidence that it is not the children who are disordered. The disorder is in the system which requires them to attempt curriculum and demonstrate behaviors far beyond what is appropriate for their age. The disorder is in the system which bars teachers from differentiating instruction meaningfully, which threatens disciplinary action if they decide their students need a five minute break from a difficult concept, or to extend a lesson which is exceptionally engaging. The disorder is in a system which has decided that students and teachers must be regimented to the minute and punished if they deviate. The disorder is in the system which values the scores on wildly inappropriate assessments more than teaching students in a meaningful and research based manner.

On June 8, 2015 my life changed when I gave birth to my daughter. I remember cradling her in the hospital bed on our first night together and thinking, “In five years you will be in kindergarten and will go to school with me.” That thought should have brought me joy, but instead it brought dread. I will not subject my child to this disordered system, and I can no longer in good conscience be a part of it myself. Please accept my resignation from Polk County Public Schools.

Best,
Wendy Bradshaw, Ph.D.