This is foolery. Wingnuts aren’t going anywhere. They aren’t an ideology that is malleable; that anyone could learn a lesson about. The cult of republicanism is a personality type – a type of person that has been among us since the dawn of humanity. Their disease is fear and insecurity, which is why they are always governed by the lizard brain no matter what airs of intellectualism masquerade and sophistry they try to project. The cure is generational – it will take eons to work its way out of the system of parent-child hand-me-down traits. In the interim, the only thing to do is be vigilant in keeping their disgusting grubby hands off of the levers of power where they can maximize their infliction of damage. This fight has miles to go before anyone can sleep.

Haven’t read the comment thread yet, but it strikes me that part of the major problem to be faced, post-Bush, will be the extirpation of all the Bushies planted behind throughout the Executive Branch, each one a potential landmine.

How can this necessary extirpation be accomplished, legally?

Still working through the thread myself, but this says it for me. I suppose their process has to be addressed first, no?

We found out with Watergate and Iran-Contra that if you let them escape justice, they will come back even worse than before, having learned nothing in the interim;

Justifications for imprisonment:
1. prevention of more crimes
2. deter others from crime
3. rehabilitation
4. protect society
5. punishment

Incarceration doesn’t work all that well for these goals with the exception of one kind of crime: white collar crime. Those guys really hate prison, the shame, losing money, work, status, friends, marriage, and power and living with crass poor people. White collar criminals will do anything to avoid prison – even dying like Kenny boy. It’s going to be fun watching Scooter squirm trying to stay out of pokey. Delay is in total denial. Orange jumpsuit in his future.

There should be a deterance tipping point with all these crooks. They won’t return to crime if they spend enough time in there – or their friends. Should Nixon have gone to trial?

Maybe not as a movement but it’s been around longer than that. My Mom’s (RIP-2003) second husband, an Episcopal Reverend (RIP-2005), was home schooled in Oregon. Taught to read by reading the Bible, never saw TV or a movie until his 20’s, etc. A very smart guy but a sheltered, parallel universe

Home schooling always been around but generally out of necessity, not as an alternative where public schools are available. When public schooling came in so did truancy laws. Here in Canada most provinces have correspondence programs up to high school. Books and syllabi provided, send in assignments which are marked and returned, phone convs and on-line. School-as-we-know-it is good for some kids, not the right thing for others.

Urban Pirate -

Medical epidemiology demonstrates GLBT kids subject to peer abuse have rates of suicide/ suicide attempt/ educational failure greatly exceeding those of GLBT kids with peer support.

GLBT kids are already at far higher risk of suicide than other kids – adjusting for all other socioeconomic variables.

Children in compulsory schooling are subject to the state’s in loco parentis power. The state is obliged to provide safe accomodations for those compelled to endure the states confines in the public schools.

IANAL, and I pulled that ‘graph out of my ass to give me time to calm down.

Kinda.

As a physican and a human being and a person who learned fundamental values in a tolerant Protestant household, I am far more interested in objective meaasures of survival and health than in any other perspective.

Those who place the safety and survival of our young people as their first priority would do well to step away from teh ideology and any idiosyncratic opinions and towards the hard cold dead epidemiology on LGBT youth.

Those who fail to do so – out of fear, prejudice, or (self)hatred – choose to increase the number of hard cold dead LGBT youth.

Amateurs’ failed public health policy doesn’t spin well.

Too much dead weight.

With names and birthdates.

Urban Pirate @ 219

I hear you Kirk Murphy, and that must be tough, as are a million other things, but I believe kids from 5-16 years old should be in school with other kids that dont all sleep in the same house.

After 16, they can make other arrangements if need be. Just my feeling, and I’m amazed it’s been allowed to deviate from that.

Also, with the Internet and PC’s, home schooling is going to change radically and in mainstream ways. My stepdaughter is a teacher in Jefferson County, colorado (big county around Denver Metro) and due to budget cuts she is doing the work of two teachers; she conspired with her sister-in-law (a PC programmer) to create a web application that did a lot of the heavy lifting on spanish and french grammar so kids could pass that NCLB test thing (don’t remember the name) and now language teachers everywhere are copying it and using it. Given the funding issues of modern education, partial home schooling using mandated internet curricula via web sites with verified ID online tests (Web cams?) may become the norm a lot faster than some expect. Just look at how a few blogs have driven the wingnuts into pure terror over the purgegate thing. The power of the Internet is just STARTING to show up. (I remember when AOL dumped a million customers onto the academic internet as a value add to compete against CompuServe. Yup, that’s how the modern Internet was born. I were there, with my little 486 running windows 3.1 and delphi 1.0.)

Hot Flash: Thanks for that ink to Little Thom. Nice blog.

Ditto. Sent it around for a look see, maybe more blogs will pick up on it. TPM especially.

Bluetoe @ 176

Would it be considered poetic justice if Grover Norquist slipped on a bar of soap in the bathtub and drowned?

Definitely. A limerick is a poem, isn’t it?

Norquist’s politics make liberals mope;
They vanquish the USA’s hope.
But one frabjus day
He departed, they say;
He slipped on a wet cake of soap.

:) it’s a JOKE, wingnuts. No pundits were injured in the making of this Limerick.

HotFlash @ 227

Urban Pirate @ 170

As for things we need to change, what the hell is home schooling? To my understanding, that’s truency, and child abuse.

Keeping a kid home because you’re afraid of the big bad world is the worst sin imaginable. When did this become legal?

WTF.

A major aim of the ‘modern’ ie, 20th C and later, educational system is to provide good, docile worker-bees. Home-schooling as a movement was started in the 60’s by people who were very concerned about the education their children got. Like most everything else, though, humans have managed to abuse this initially progressive idea. As a species we are geniuses at abusing things.

Maybe not as a movement but it’s been around longer than that. My Mom’s (RIP-2003) second husband, an Episcopal Reverend (RIP-2005), was home schooled in Oregon. Taught to read by reading the Bible, never saw TV or a movie until his 20’s, etc. A very smart guy but a sheltered, parallel universe

Forgot to add the context, he was 80 years old when he died