Christian workbook gives instruction for how to explain to homeschool students why God would allow a child to be molested.

Courtesy of the Friendly Atheist:  

The folks at Homeschoolers Anonymous recently got their hands on some old workbook pages used at the Institute of Basic Life Principles. That would be the Christian ministry founded by Bill Gothard, a man who resigned as President a couple of years ago after 34 women accused him of sexual harassment. 

In these workbook pages, which are approximately 20 years old but still aligned with the ministry’s current teachings, students are presented with a question: “Why did God let a four year old boy be molested by a fifteen year old neighbor?” 

Besides the odd phrasing that suggests the four-year-old did something to get molested instead of focusing on the teenager who committed the crime, it’s also a really weird way to talk about why God allows bad things to happen…

Well just threw up in my mouth a little. 

As somebody who has dealt with kids who have been sexually abuses and molested I am horrified that ANYBODY would use this to "educate" an impressionable child.

In fact it reads like a manual for how to prepare children to be victimized.

Home schooling lobby "Make the anti-vaxxers seem rational."

“I’ve never seen a lobby more powerful and scary,” said Ellen Heinitz, the legislative director for Michigan state Rep. Stephanie Chang, who ran up against HSLDA backlash when she tried to pass home-schooling regulations a few months ago. “They make the anti-vaxxers seem rational.”

The above quote was taken from a Slate article that reports on the struggle that one New Jersey State Senator faced when trying to pass legislation to require parents to notify the state that they were homeschooling their children, submit proof of annual physicals, and to complete the same yearly tests that other New Jersey students had to take.

The response to this bill was quick and incredibly aggressive:

Soon afterward, a small group of home-schooling parents began following Weinberg around the capitol. The barrage of phone calls from home-schooling advocates so jammed her office phone lines that staffers had to use their private cellphones to conduct business. “You would have thought I’d recommended the end of the world as we know it,” said Weinberg. “Our office was besieged.”

Ultimately the state senator, Loretta Weinberg, dropped the bill and has little success with modified versions of it, removing the testing requirements, since.

Slate also reports similar obstacles which halted legislation in other states. Including Michigan which is where we get that quote at the top.

Now for those who simply do not trust the government, and do not want them educating their children, this might seem like no big deal, but there are some very troubling statistics:

• Forty-eight states have no background check process for parents who choose to home-school. Two have some restrictions. Arkansas prevents home schooling when a registered sex offender lives in the home, while Pennsylvania bans parents previously convicted of a wide array of crimes from home schooling. 
• Fewer than half of states require any kind of evaluation. In some of these, including Washington, New Hampshire, and Georgia, home-schooled students are tested, but these tests are not submitted to the school district, and there are no ramifications for failure. Others, like Oregon, require parents to submit the test scores only if the local districts request them. A third category of states, including Maine, requires that test scores be submitted but set no minimum score. 
• Seventeen states have no required subjects for home-schooled students. Of the 33 states that do, 22 have no means of checking whether a parent is actually teaching those subjects. 
• In 40 states, home-schooling parents are not required to have a high school diploma, even if they intend to home-school through 12th grade. 
• Twenty-five states do not require home-schoolers to be vaccinated. Another 12 mandate vaccinations but do not require records. Only five states require home-schoolers to submit proof of vaccinations at any time.

Now I recognize that whenever I introduce the topic of home schooling on this blog that emotions run high, and that several of my regulars have home schooled their children and are advocates of home schooling in general.

However as many of you know I have very strong reservations concerning home schooling, ESPECIALLY religious homeschooling, based on my own experiences and interactions with home schooled children over the years.

So I will simply suggest that you read the article over at Slate and perhaps come back here afterwards to share your thoughts, whether they be pro or con.

Hey remember that racist alternative school principal? Yeah she's been fired. Sorta.

Courtesy of WXIA:  

The private school principal who gained national attention for a racially charged comment she made during a graduation ceremony has been fired, but still owns the school and will likely reap any financial benefit from it. 

Dr. Heidi Anderson, chair of the board of directors at TNT Academy, wrote in a letter sent to the Gwinnett County NAACP that the board voted to dismiss school director Nancy Gordeuk: 

"In light of recent events, the board of directors of TNT Academy has moved to dismiss Nancy Gordeuk as principal. During the coming transition, we will continue to prioritize support for our most recent graduates. Moreover, we will continue our commitment to providing students with the best educational classes, transcription services, and academic credit recovery possible."

So this woman is "fired" and yet will still get paid?  #justwhitepeoplethings.

Remember this is not only a woman who started berating people as being rude for talking through a valedictorian speech that SHE totally forgot about and insulted black people for walking out, but she is also the person who claimed that the devil made her do it.

The devil.

Sounds to me like this is just a cosmetic change to protect from losing its accreditation, and that the school will function as always, with this Gordeuk woman making decisions as before and reaping the financial benefits as if nothing ever happened.

You know for awhile I was kind of confused as to what kind of "alternative" school this was. But not anymore.

TNT Academy is a non-traditional school for home-schooled students hoping to obtain accredited degrees.

Ahh, homeschool. That explains a lot.

You know my daughter attended another one of these "alternative" schools while SHE was homeschooled in Georgia. 

It was also a crappy educational program that failed to help my daughter get the accreditation she needed to graduate, even though she completed ALL of the course work.

Eventually I had to help her get her GED here in Alaska, which she managed to do in record time.

One of the parents said that they paid $3,000 to attend this school for a year, and that there was an additional $300 fee for the graduation ceremony. Sounds like a huge rip off to me.

Home schooled daughter of fundamentalist Christian parents cannot prove she is an American citizen.

Courtesy of The Friendly Atheist:  

Alecia Faith Pennington grew up in a homeschooling Christian household. As you might expect, her parents don’t like government regulations. We know that freedom can be abused, but I’ve never seen it go this far. 

Alecia’s mother Lisa, who runs a website called The Pennington Point, never obtained a birth certificate for her daughter. (She was born at home.) Furthermore, there’s no social security number for Alecia… or school records (since she never attended public school).

Because of that the young woman cannot attend school, get a driver's license, or even prove she is an American citizen. 

But hey, at least God knows she exists. Right?

Frank Schaeffer writes about the conspiracy of religious home schooling, and how it was shaped to overthrow secular America. (Schaeffer also suggests that all of this helped a certain nobody from Alaska briefly rise to the heights of power.)

Courtesy of Salon:

As someone who participated in the rise of the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s, I can tell you that you can’t understand the modern Republican Party and its hatred of government unless you understand the evangelical home-school movement. Nor can the Democrats hope to defeat the GOP in 2016 unless they grasp what I’ll be explaining here: religious war carried on by other means. 

The Christian home-school movement drove the Evangelical school movement to the ever-harsher world-rejecting far right. The movement saw itself as separating from evil “secular” America. Therein lies the heart of the Tea Party, GOP and religious right’s paranoid view of the rest of us. And since my late father and evangelist Francis Schaeffer and I were instrumental in starting the religious right — I have since left the movement and recently wrote a book titled “Why I Am an Atheist who Believes in God: How to Give Love, Create Beauty and Find Peace“ – believe me when I tell you that the evangelical schools and home school movement were, by design, founded to undermine a secular and free vision of America and replace it by stealth with a form of theocracy. 

This happened because Evangelical home-schoolers were demanding ever-greater levels of “separation” from what they regarded as the Evil Secular World. It wasn’t enough just to reject the public schools. How could the Christian parent be sure that even the Evangelical schools were sufficiently pure? And so the Christian schools radicalized in order to not appear to be “compromising” with the world in the eyes of increasingly frightened and angry parents. (My account here of the rise of the home school movement is not aimed at home-schooling, per se, but at parents who want to indoctrinate, rather than educate.)

Schaeffer then goes into incredible detail as to how the religious home school  movement came to be, and how it has shaped policy in this country, as well as inspiring a new wave of evangelism, attacks against public schools, and helped create religious and conservative heroes.

And guess who one of those heroes happened to be?

Yep you guessed it. 

In the first decade of the 21st century the Evangelical and conservative Roman Catholic (and Mormon) outsider victim “approach” to public policy was perfected on a heretofore-undreamed-of scale by Sarah Palin. She was the ultimate holier-than-thou Evangelical. What my mother had represented (in her unreconstructed fundamentalist heyday) to a chalet full of young gullible women and later to tens of thousands of readers, Palin became for tens of millions of alienated, angry, white lower-middle-class men and women convinced that an educated “elite” was out to get them. 

Palin was first inflicted on the American public by Sen. John McCain, who chose her as his running mate in the 2008 presidential election for at least one big reason: He needed to shore up flagging support from the Evangelical Republican antiabortion base. McCain wanted to prove that he was fully in line with the “social issues” agenda that Dad, Koop and I had foisted on our country more than 30 years before. Palin lost the election for McCain but “won” her war for fame and fortune. 

She presented herself as called by God and thus cast in the Old Testament mold of Queen Esther, one chosen by God to save her people. Palin perfected the Jesus Victim “art” of Evangelical self-banishment and then took victimhood to new levels of “success” by cashing in on white lower-middle-class resentment of America’s elites. 

Palin made a fortune by simultaneously proclaiming her Evangelical faith, denouncing liberals and claiming that she would help the good God-fearing folks out there “take back” their country. This “Esther” lacked seriousness. But born-again insiders knew that the “wisdom of men” wasn’t the point. Why should the new Queen Esther bother to actually finish her work governing Alaska? God had chosen her to confound the wise! 

So she became a media star and quit as governor of Alaska. Then she battled “Them”—the “lamestream media” (as she labeled any media outlets outside of the Far Right subculture)—in the name of standing up for “Real Americans.” Palin used the alternative communication network that had its roots deeply embedded in those pioneering 1970s and 1980s Evangelical TV shows and radio shows that I used to be on just about every other day. She did this to avoid being questioned by people who didn’t agree with her. By not actually governing or doing the job she’d been elected by Alaskans to do, and by using the alternative media networks as an “outsider”—all the while reacting to and demanding attention from the actual (theoretically hated) media—Palin also made buckets of money.

So in a nutshell these religious zealots used homeschooling to disenfranchise and under educate a segment of Americans to such an extent that they began to see themselves as detached from the rest of society in such a way that it made them the perfect targets for unsavory politicians, con-men, and grifters to take advantage.

Cue Sarah Louis Palin.

God they never had a chance.

P.S. Doesn't this put an interesting spin on that Jon Stewart interview with Mike Huckabee that I posted yesterday?

Hey would you like to feel smart today? Well watching this homeschooling mother demonstrating stunning ignorance while visiting the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago should do the trick.

Now the above is just a sample from the original 30 minute video which I will embed below, but it gives you some idea of that vast which emanates from this Megan Fox woman. 

As you may have guessed she is a Fundamentalist Christian, who home schools her children to protect them from anything which might threaten their faith in what Mommy and Daddy believe.

Here is how Raw Story reported on this: 

In the description of the 30 minute video she uploaded to YouTube to document the visit, Fox wrote, “In November 2014, Megan Fox toured the Field Museum’s ‘Evolving Earth’ exhibit to audit it for bias. She found many examples of inconsistencies and the Field Museum’s insistence that people support opinion as fact without proof. The Field Museum pushes certain theories as if they are absolute proven law when that is not how the scientific method works.” 

In the video’s opening moments, Fox is reading a display regarding the evolution of eukaryotes — which she has to ask her camera operator how to pronounce — simple, microscopic animals that first evolved as single-cell life forms, but which became multicellular, beginning the diversification that would lead to complex life forms. 

“‘At first, many eukaryotes were single-celled, and many still are today,’” Fox reads from the display before scoffing. “What? If many still are today, then that would support the theory that they have never changed, that they have always been as they are today, not that they started someplace else and then are here, but they were always this and still are today.” 

Regarding what paleontologists have said about the first animals to make the transition from life in the water to life on land, Fox says this is impossible. God made the creatures of the water to live in the water and the creatures of the land to live in the land, which is why fish have fins and people have feet. 

“It’s not like their fins fell off and they grew feet,” she says. “That’s what they want you to believe, that their fins fell off and then they grew some feet and started walking on the land. This is the dumbest theory I’ve ever heard in my whole life. It’s not good, it’s really not good. It’s bad. It’s very bad. Do you know how complex feet are?”

Holy crap! This woman almost makes Sarah Palin seem like a Rhodes Scholar. 

What is even more troubling is that this lunatic has a YouTube channel where she reviews, and recommends, books for children.

Now as promised embedded below is the entire 30 plus minute video.

My advice is to watch in small segments however as the stupidity is actually overwhelming.

Home school advocate and associate of the Duggar family and Sarah Palin, charged with sexually harassing female employees and failing to report child abuse.

Courtesy of Religion News:  

Bill Gothard, an Illinois-based advocate for home-schooling and conservative dress and who warned against rock music and debt, has been placed on administrative leave after allegations of sexually harassing women who worked at his ministry and failing to report child abuse cases. 

Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles was once a popular gathering spot for thousands of Christian families, including the Duggar family from TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting.” Gothard’s Advanced Training Institute conferences were also popular among devotees of the Quiverfull movement, who promote large families and eschew birth control. 

He’s also rubbed shoulders with Republican luminaries. He and former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee were photographed at a campaign lunch together; former Georgia Gov. Sunny Perdue spoke at one of Gothard’s conferences; and Sarah Palin, when she was a small town mayor in Alaska, attended his International Association of Character Cities conferences and declared Wasilla among Gothard’s “Cities of Character.” 

In a statement posted Thursday, board chairman Billy Boring told World magazine: “After completion of the review, the board will respond at an appropriate time, and in a biblical manner.” Until then, the statement said, Gothard “will not be involved in the operations of the ministry. The board of directors will be prayerfully appointing interim leadership.” 

Gothard is 79 and single.

Wow, an associate of the Duggar family and Sarah Palin, and advocate for the Quiverfull movement, engaging in sexual harassment, who could have possibly imagined such a thing?
 

President of Britain's Association for Science Education says that Creationism is indoctrination and should not be taught in public nor private schools. Oh, can we get one of her in this country?

Courtesy of the Guardian:  

Teaching pupils about creationism in science lessons is "indoctrination", according to Professor Alice Roberts. The TV presenter and new president of the Association for Science Education called for new laws banning all schools, including those in the private sector, from teaching the topic alongside evolution. 

The new national curriculum for primary schools, due to be introduced this September, contains a clear requirement for pupils to be taught about evolution. But the curriculum only applies to state schools, not private schools. Academies and free schools can choose not to follow it. 

In an interview with the Times Educational Supplement (TES), Prof Roberts, who has presented a number of BBC programmes including The Incredible Human Journey and Origins of Us, said: "There should be regulation that prevents all schools, not just state schools, from teaching creationism because it is indoctrination, it is planting ideas into children's heads. We should be teaching children to be much more open-minded. 

"People who believe in creationism say that by teaching evolution you are indoctrinating them with science, but I just don't agree with that. Science is about questioning things. It's about teaching people to say, 'I don't believe it until we have very strong evidence'."

Okay I may be in love here. 

America desperately needs somebody just like Professor Roberts to take on the religious indoctrination that is taking place in charter schools, home schools, and private schools all over this country.

Sadly for us we do not yet have anybody in an official capacity willing to take on the Creationists in such a courageous manner, for fear of appearing anti-Christian.

That's too bad, because in the interim it is our children and our standing among the world's scientific community that suffers.

Why Christian home school kids should avoid pop quizzes.

"I'm so far right I don't even believe in birth control." 

I think that just about sums up the problem.

Not smart enough to trust public education, not smart enough to practice family planning, and certainly not smart enough to teach your children good math skills.

"We've studied Genesis to Joshua that's as far as we've...Not so  hard on the math class. We're on..uh..we're on Bible."


Seriously how is that NOT considered child abuse in the 21st Century?

Four more school employees indicted in Steubenville rape case.

Courtesy of CNN:  

A grand jury investigating the 2012 rape of a 16-year-old girl in Steubenville, Ohio, has indicted four school employees, including the school superintendent, who faces felony charges, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine announced Monday. 

Steubenville City Schools Superintendent Michael McVey faces three felony counts: one charge of tampering with evidence and two counts of obstructing justice. He also is charged with making a false statement and obstructing official business, both misdemeanors, DeWine said. 

Also indicted was elementary school principal Lynnett Gorman and wrestling coach Seth Fluharty, both of whom are charged with misdemeanor failure to report child abuse. Volunteer assistant Steubenville football coach Matt Bellardine was charged with four misdemeanors: allowing underage drinking, obstructing official business, making a false statement and contributing to the unruliness or delinquency of a child. 

This brings to six the number of people the grand jury has indicted after two students were convicted of rape, DeWine said. A school technology director and his daughter were indicted in October. 

In March, Steubenville High School football players Ma'lik Richmond and Trenton Mays were convicted of the rape, which authorities said took place at a party in August 2012. Photos and videos of the incident made their way onto social media and attracted national attention, rocking the small eastern Ohio community. 

Richmond was sentenced to a minimum of one year in a juvenile correctional facility. Mays got two years. 

A grand jury then began investigating whether others should be charged. In October, it indicted William Rhinaman, 53, the director of technology for Steubenville City Schools, on charges of tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice, obstructing official business and perjury. 

His daughter, Hannah Rhinaman, 20, of Mingo Junction, Ohio, was also indicted that month on two counts of receiving stolen property and one count of grand theft, according to a news release from DeWine's office.

This is very good news, in a case that demonstrated just how far a town will go to protect their athletes. Even at the expense of a 16 year old girl's reputation and personal safety.

These school employees were supposed to protect this child, and instead did everything they could to protect her attackers and to prevent justice from being carried out.

For those who are not up to speed on the Steubenville rape case just click here.

Nobody can explain electricity. Well nobody who is educated by this book at least.

Damn I wish this were a parody. But sadly it is not.

Here is how Science 4 for Christian schools is advertised on Amazon:

Explain God's ordered world to students through the study of the moon, light, area and volume, simple machines, digestion, animal defenses, trees, erosion, and simple classification of insects.

Somehow the fact that they do not recognize that electricity CAN be observed, and definitely be felt, does not fill me with confidence that they can explain a damn thing to children.

Fortunately for the children of the 21st Century there is a thing called Google.

Virginia home school student speaks out against the practice and says it severely limited his options.

Courtesy of The Washington Post:

 Josh Powell wanted to go to school so badly that he pleaded with local officials to let him enroll. He didn’t know exactly what students were learning at Buckingham County High School, in rural central Virginia, but he had the sense that he was missing something fundamental. 

By the time he was 16, he had never written an essay. He didn’t know South Africa was a country. He couldn’t solve basic algebra problems. 

“There were all these things that are part of this common collective of knowledge that 99 percent of people have that I didn’t have,” Powell said. 

Powell was taught at home, his parents using a religious exemption that allows families to entirely opt out of public education, a Virginia law that is unlike any other in the country. That means that not only are their children excused from attending school — as those educated under the state’s home-school statute are — but they also are exempt from all government oversight. 

School officials don’t ever ask them for transcripts, test scores or proof of education of any kind: Parents have total control. 

Powell’s family encapsulates the debate over the long-standing law, with his parents earnestly trying to provide an education that reflects their beliefs and their eldest son objecting that without any structure or official guidance, children are getting shortchanged. Their disagreement, at its core, is about what they think is most essential that children learn — and whether government, or families, should define that.

Josh was able to catch up by taking remedial courses in community college but he still feels cheated and worries a great deal about his siblings. 

Josh Powell, now 21, wonders how much more he could have accomplished if he hadn’t spent so much time and effort catching up. 

“I think people should definitely have the freedom to home-school as long as it’s being done well and observed,” he said. “I don’t see any reason for there not to be accountability.” 

Most of all, he worries about his siblings: There are 11. One, old enough to be well into middle school, can’t read, Josh Powell said. 

Now he’s trying to get his brothers and sisters into school, to ensure that they don’t have to work as hard as he did to catch up — or get left behind. 

“I almost have survivor’s guilt,” he said. He loves his family and stays in close touch with it, but he said he is frustrated. “I feel like I made it out alive and I’m doing okay, but I’m not sure everyone else can because there’s so much that’s gotten so much worse.”

Okay I know what a volatile issue this is, and you already know that I suffer from some serious prejudices against religious homeschooling due to the experiences of my daughter, but what do all you think about this young man's situation?

Is there really a way to provide families the choice of teaching their children at home while maintaining academic standards? And if that decision is based mainly on religious considerations is that an adequate reason to deny their children access to the kind of education and social opportunities enjoyed by the rest of their peers?

You know what I think but I will leave the floor open for discussion.

Christian homeschooling essentially "a massive, well-oiled machine of ideology that is churning out soldiers for the culture war."

Courtesy of Raw Story:  

Several decades ago, political activists on the religious right began to put together an “ideology machine”. Home schooling was a big part of the plan. The idea was to breed and “train up” an army of culture warriors. We now are faced with the consequences of their actions, some of which are quite disturbing. 

According to the Department of Education, the home schooling student population doubled in between 1999 and 2007, to 1.5 million students, and there is reason to think the growth has continued. Though families opt to home school for many different reasons, a large part of the growth has come from Christian fundamentalist sects. Children in that first wave are now old enough to talk about their experiences. In many cases, what they have to say is quite alarming. 

“The Christian home school subculture isn’t a children-first movement. It is, for all intents and purposes, an ideology-first movement. There is a massive, well-oiled machine of ideology that is churning out soldiers for the culture war. Home schooling is both the breeding ground – literally, when you consider the Quiverfull concept – and the training ground for this machinery. I say this as someone who was raised in that world.” 

Too frequently, Stollar says, the consequences of putting ideology over children include anxiety, depression, distrust of authority, and issues around sexuality. This is evident from the testimonials that appear on Home schoolers Anonymous, the website that Stollar established, along with several partners. 

Stollar’s own home schooling experience started off well. But over time, as his family became immersed in the world of Christian home schooling, his “education” became less straightforward and more ideological. “I particularly remember my science curriculum,” he says. “We used It Couldn’t Just Happen, which wasn’t really a science textbook. It was really just an apologetics textbook which taught students cliché refutations of evolutionism.” 

Many parents start off home schooling with the intention of inculcating their children in a mainstream form of Christianity. However, as many HA bloggers report, it is easy to get sucked into the vortex of fundamentalist home schooling because extremists have cornered the market – running the conventions, publishing the curricula, setting up the blogs. 

As HA blogger Julie Ann Smith, a Washington state mother of seven, says: 

“If you are the average Christian home schooler with no agenda, and you have the choice between attending a secular home schooling convention and a Christian one, chances are you’ll choose the Christian convention. But they only allow certain speakers who follow their agenda. So you have no clue. What you don’t realize is that they are being run by Christian Reconstructionists.”

I know that whenever I touch on this subject I irritate a rather vocal part of my audience who are homeschooling their own children and feel immediately on the defensive whenever I bring up how homeschooling is being used by Fundamentalists to bypass more secular lessons plans in favor of those that help to indoctrinate their children more fully into their faith.

So I will apologize ahead of time for those who I might offend. However it is important to face the reality, that despite your experiences, there is definitely a vast subculture that is completely not interested in getting the best education available for their child but instead with controlling the information available to them for as long as possible.

And remember I speak from experience as my ex-wife used homeschooling and Christian textbooks to drive a wedge between my daughter and I. Fortunately for me my kid is a genius, and all it took was for her to read "Origin of Species" and she was deprogrammed virtually overnight. (Though I must say her animosity toward Catholics, who were vilified by members of her church, took a little longer to overcome.)

So I am interested in hearing about the experiences of some of you who home school. My experience with my daughter was horrible, and my interactions with home schooled children while I was coaching gymnastics left me less than impressed, so I would be interested to learn of the positive side as well as if there appears to be more of a focus on religion now than when some of you first started.

Fox News attempts to explain the gap between Germany's highly successful solar energy industry, as opposed to America's lackluster one, on the fact that Germany is sunnier than the US. I kid you not.

Courtesy of Slate:

Thanks to Fox News and its expert commentators, millions of Americans now understand the real, hidden reason why Germany's solar-energy industry is so much further along than ours. Turns out it has nothing to do with the fact that Germany's government has long supported the industry far more generously, with policies like feed-in tariffs that stimulate investment in green technologies. No, the real reason is much simpler, explained a trio of journalists on Fox & Friends: It's always sunny in Germany! 

"The industry's future looks dim," intoned host Gretchen Carlson at the beginning of the segment, which was preserved for posterity by the liberal blog Media Matters for America. She and her co-host went on to ridicule Obama's "failed" solar subsidies, adding, "The United States simply hasn't figured out how to do solar cheaply and effectively. You look at the country of Germany, it's working out great for them." Near the end of the segment, it occurred to Carlson to ask her expert guest, Fox Business reporter Shibani Joshi, why it might be that Germany's solar-power sector is doing so much better. "What was Germany doing correct? Are they just a smaller country, and that made it more feasible?" Carlson asked. 

Joshi's jaw-dropping response: "They're a smaller country, and they've got lots of sun. Right? They've got a lot more sun than we do." In case that wasn't clear enough for some viewers, Joshi went on: "The problem is it's a cloudy day and it's raining, you're not gonna have it." Sure, California might get sun now and then, Joshi conceded, "but here on the East Coast, it's just not going to work." 

Wouldn't you think that some scientist, somewhere, would have noticed that the East Coast is far less sunny than Central Europe and therefore incapable of producing solar power on the same scale? 

You would—if it were true. As Media Matters' Max Greenberg notes, it isn't. Not even remotely. According to maps put out by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, virtually the entirety of the continental United States gets more sun than even the sunniest part of Germany. In fact, NREL senior scientist Sarah Kurtz said via email, "Germany's solar resource is akin to Alaska's," the U.S. state with by far the lowest annual average of direct solar energy.

As we have reported earlier this week, there are fewer and fewer people who trust Fox News these days, but that is not the only place that puts out this kind of anti-green energy propaganda.

There are also many Republican members of Congress and the Senate whose campaigns were largely funded by energy companies, and their supporters, for the sole purpose of fighting the inevitable move toward solar energy and renewable energy sources which is really what's at the heart of our sluggishness in moving that direction.

Of course the energy companies have far more insidious methods for fighting the move away from fossil fuels as well.

If you happened to watch the documentary Jesus Camp you probably saw this scene where the mom was homeschooling her son and teaching him that global warming was a fraud and only used as a political tactic. You KNOW that is something that the oil companies paid to have put in those books in order to indoctrinate children into believing that green energy is an unnecessary waste of money, just like those folks in the Fox and Friends clip above would also have you believe.

By the way. my daughter is a HUGE proponent of green energy, and would like all of you to know that many people in Alaska DO have solar panels in their homes that work quite well.

Michele Bachmann still owes money to campaign workers, but refuses to pay them unless they sign a nondisclosure form. Hmmm, interesting!

Courtesy of Salon:  

Over a year after she dropped out, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann has refused to pay five staffers from her failed presidential bid, according to a former top campaign official. Peter Waldron, her controversial former national field coordinator, told Salon the dispute started when former Iowa straw poll staffers refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would bar them from discussing any “unethical, immoral, or criminal activity” they witnessed on the campaign with police or reporters. 

Waldron said the staffers are owed a mere $5,000, and that Bachmann has more than $2 million in her campaign account, but has refused to pay unless the staffers sign the agreement. Negotiations over payment with Bachmann Finance Chairman James Pollack eventually broke down and Waldron decided to go public with the news, posting a press release on Christian Newswire this evening. 

“I feel a moral obligation to see that my Christian brothers and sisters are paid for worked performed in good faith. I’ve continually communicated by telephone and email with Mr. Pollack for 1 year but he broke every promise made to me to pay the staff. I appealed to Dr. [Marcus] Bachmann for help. I appealed to Representative Bachmann’s Chief of Staff Robert Boland to intercede with Mrs. Bachmann on behalf of her loyal Iowa staff — all of whom are married, all have children,” Waldron said in the press release. 

“It is sobering to think that a Christian member of Congress would betray her testimony to the Lord and the public by withholding earned wages from deserving staff,” Waldron added. 

Reached my phone, Waldron confirmed the details and said the nondisclosure agreement stems from the campaign’s alleged misuse of an email list. A home-schooling group accused the Bachmann campaign of stealing the list, which was contained on a volunteer’s laptop, and then using it to fundraise for the campaign. The home-schooling group has sued the campaign and Waldron said there is also a criminal investigation pending, explaining that he spoke with police about the incident “several times.” 

“They wanted us to have no further conversation [with police] without first notifying Michelle’s attorneys, and we just refused,” he told Salon. “We’ve been lied to at every turn.”

Okay so the "super religious" Michele Bachmann refuses to pay people who worked for her in good faith because she does not want them to tattle on her for breaking the law. Does that about sum it up?

You know I think these five ought to spill their guts to the police and then later on collaborate on a book. Should pay a hell of a lot more than $5000 a piece don't you think?

Is this really too much to ask?

Christopher Hitchens liked to point out that there were NO Christian, or Muslim, or Buddhist children, there were just children. It was their parents who tried to cram their kids into a tiny, limiting religious box to suit their vision of who they should be.

And personally I could not agree more.

Just the other day my daughter and I had a discussion along the same lines.

Right after our divorce my ex-wife suddenly became very religious and joined this weird Fundamentalist church.  When the church uprooted and moved to Georgia, she quit her high paying job, sold our house, and followed them.

I could have stopped her from taking my child out of state, but I was afraid that my daughter would grow up resenting me for not allowing her to see her mom. So instead she spent half of her time in Georgia, and the other half up here with me.

For the first three years I had her during the school year, and she attended public school.  But when it switched, around the time she was entering the sixth grade, and her mother had her during the school year, her mother suddenly found the schools in Georgia unacceptable, and started to home school my daughter. Of course the materials provided for these classes were supplied by religious publishers.

My daughter, who is brilliant by the way, was inundated with lessons from the Bible and told to view EVERYTHING through the prism of Christianity.

She learned to call the Catholic church a non-Christian cult, that evolution was based on lies, that the world was only 6,000 years old, and that her father was being deceived by the devil.

My daughter has now made a full recovery, but she has often expressed anger that I did NOT save her from being subjected to that indoctrination. In my defense I never had any idea how bad it was, and her mother made sure to keep what was in those text books a secret from me.

When my daughter smuggled one up to Alaska in her luggage, and I read the kind of garbage she was being taught instead of science, and social studies, and history, I quickly took her to the library to get her books with facts in them. Then I started to educate her to see the world around her through the prism of critical thinking.

Later when she realized that getting a certificate of completion from this home school company would never help her in the real world we decided to take her to get her GED while she was up visiting. I am happy to report that she breezed right through it with flying colors in less than a month.

Even though she often asked, I always refused to tell my daughter of my stance on religion. I simply wanted her to find her own way.

I thought I was doing the right thing, but my silence created a void that her mother was quick to capitalize on.  And in the absence of any contradictory information my daughter was defenseless.

Right now I am not exactly sure WHAT my daughter's religious beliefs are for sure, though I know they no longer reflect what her mother wanted them to be. But that is okay with me, just as long as her beliefs make her happy and do NOT keep her from maintaining an open mind about the wonders of the world around her.