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Given the right context, and everyone's permission, spanking can be a lot of fun. But that's probably not true for public school students in the 19 states where corporal punishment is still allowed. Thankfully, though, the Satanic Temple has stepped in to help.

After crusading for various free speech issues in schools, the Temple is now campaigning to end corporal punishment in public schools by launching the Protect Children Project. Children can register with the project—regardless of religious affiliation—and it will notify that child's school board that any harm toward them is a violation of their civil rights.

"The Protect Children Project utilizes the First Amendment to protect public school students from being subjected to corporal punishment, solitary confinement, physical restraints, and the deprivation of bathroom access as these abusive practices violate our religious belief of bodily inviolability," according to the press release.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-satanic-temple-wants-to-save-kids-from-abusive-teachers

A major new study of social-media sharing patterns shows that political polarization is more common among conservatives than liberals — and that the exaggerations and falsehoods emanating from right-wing media outlets such as Breitbart News have infected mainstream discourse.

Though the report, published by the Columbia Journalism Review, does an excellent job of laying out the challenge posed by Breitbart and its ilk, it is less than clear on how to counter it. Successfully standing up for truthful reporting in this environment “could usher in a new golden age for the Fourth Estate,” the authors write. But members of the public who care about such journalism are already flocking to news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and, locally, The Boston Globe, all of which have experienced a surge in paid subscriptions since the election of President Trump. That’s heartening, but there are no signs that it’s had any effect on the popularity or influence of the right-wing partisan media.

The CJR study, by scholars at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, at Harvard Law School, and the MIT Center for Civic Media, examined more than 1.25 million articles between April 1, 2015, and Election Day. What they found was that Hillary Clinton supporters shared stories from across a relatively broad political spectrum, including center-right sources such as The Wall Street Journal, mainstream news organizations like the Times and the Post, and partisan liberal sites like The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast.

By contrast, Donald Trump supporters clustered around Breitbart — headed until recently by Stephen Bannon, the hard-right nationalist now ensconced in the White House — and a few like-minded websites such as The Daily Caller, Alex Jones' Infowars, and The Gateway Pundit. Even Fox News was dropped from the favored circle back when it was attacking Trump during the primaries, and only re-entered the fold once it had made its peace with the future president.

http://news.wgbh.org/2017/03/15/politics-government/major-new-study-shows-political-polarization-mainly-right-wing

http://www.hellcat.org/attachments/green-beer-jpg.7046/



aon easpa measa atá beartaithe, cheers!

As one of the original authors of Florida’s 2005 "stand your ground" law, Sen. Dennis Baxley, has a long history of touting its success.

Since the 2012 shooting death of Miami Gardens teen Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, opponents have pointed to an increase in justifiable homicides to argue against the law, which protects individuals who use deadly force in self-defense instead of retreating.

Baxley, a Republican from Ocala, has repeatedly countered that argument and others by connecting the law’s passage 12 years ago with decreasing crime rates.

He did it again in a March 15 debate on legislation that would shift the burden of proof from the defendant to the prosecutor in "stand your ground" cases. (The Senate approved SB 128 by a 23-15 vote; the House version has received the backing of one committee so far.)

http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2017/mar/16/dennis-baxley/did-floridas-stand-your-ground-law-reduce-violent-/

The culture war over religious morality has faded; in its place is something much worse.

Over the past decade, pollsters charted something remarkable: Americans—long known for their piety—were fleeing organized religion in increasing numbers. The vast majority still believed in God. But the share that rejected any religious affiliation was growing fast, rising from 6 percent in 1992 to 22 percent in 2014. Among Millennials, the figure was 35 percent.

Some observers predicted that this new secularism would ease cultural conflict, as the country settled into a near-consensus on issues such as gay marriage. After Barack Obama took office, a Center for American Progress report declared that “demographic change,” led by secular, tolerant young people, was “undermining the culture wars.” In 2015, the conservative writer David Brooks, noting Americans’ growing detachment from religious institutions, urged social conservatives to “put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations.”

That was naive. Secularism is indeed correlated with greater tolerance of gay marriage and pot legalization. But it’s also making America’s partisan clashes more brutal. And it has contributed to the rise of both Donald Trump and the so-called alt-right movement, whose members see themselves as proponents of white nationalism. As Americans have left organized religion, they haven’t stopped viewing politics as a struggle between “us” and “them.” Many have come to define us and them in even more primal and irreconcilable ways.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/breaking-faith/517785/

racists were once pushed to the fringes. In the Trump era, they're in charge.

In 1990, former President Ronald Reagan gave a moving speech to mark the end of the Cold War. “I received a letter just before I left office from a man. I don’t know why he chose to write it, but I’m glad he did,” Reagan said. “He wrote that you can go to live in France, but you can’t become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Italy, but you can’t become a German, an Italian. He went through Turkey, Greece, Japan, and other countries. But he said anyone, from any corner of the world, can come to live in the United States and become an American.”

Reagan endorsed that view and went on to point out: “If we take this crowd and if we could go through and ask the heritage, the background of every family represented here, we would probably come up with the names of every country on Earth, every corner of the world, and every race. Here is the one spot on Earth where we have the brotherhood of man. And maybe as we continue with this proudly, this brotherhood of man made up from people representative of every corner of the Earth, maybe one day boundaries all over the Earth will disappear as people cross boundaries and find out that, yes, there is a brotherhood of man in every corner.”

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/14/the-gop-is-americas-party-of-white-nationalism/

Welcome to hell on earth

This may come as a surprise, but President Donald Trump isn't a typical Republican.

This week, two pages from a single Trump tax return from 2005 was leaked by mail to a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, possibly by the president himself. For over a year, the media have been asking Trump for his tax returns, which candidates typically turn over prior to an election.

The document held few surprises. Trump made more than $150 million in 2005 and paid about 25 percent in taxes largely due to the alternative minimum tax. But one minor detail is interesting: On this return, Trump supported public financing of elections by checking the often-overlooked box on his 1040 form.

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/15/trump-tax-returns-he-supported-public-campaign-finance.html

Source: The Washington Post

The Justice Department is set to announce Wednesday the indictments of two Russian spies and two criminal hackers for the heist of 500 million Yahoo user accounts in 2014, marking the first U.S. criminal cyber charges ever against Russian government officials.

The indictments target two members of the Russian intelligence agency FSB, and two hackers hired by the Russians.

The charges include hacking, wire fraud, trade secret theft and economic espionage, according to officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the charges have not yet been announced. The indictments are part of the largest ever hacking case brought by the United States.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/justice-department-charging-russian-spies-and-criminal-hackers-for-yahoo-intrusion/2017/03/15/64b98e32-0911-11e7-93dc-00f9bdd74ed1_story.html?pushid=breaking-news_1489587007&tid=notifi_push_breaking-news&utm_term=.2f2f1f679a83

Americans Are Getting More Secular

A new poll finds white evangelicals are out of step with the rest of the country.

Despite all the conservative posturing about how their movement represents “real” America and liberal political attitudes are restricted mainly to the “coastal elite,” new research from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) suggests that, at least in political terms, most Americans are secular in their orientation. While many Americans may still hold conservative personal beliefs, when it comes to the issue of church-state separation, large majorities reject efforts by the religious right to use the power of the state to impose conservative Christian values on others.

In fact, the polling data shows that there’s really only one group of Americans that rejects a secular society: White evangelical Christians. And this study is just further evidence that a lot of the political polarization in our country is the direct result of white evangelical Christians realizing that they are no longer dominant majority, and lashing out angrily in an effort to regain the levels of dominance they used to enjoy.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/americans-are-more-secular