The Electron Pencil
"The blog has made Glab into a hip town crier, commenting on everything from local politics and cultural happenings to national and international events, all rendered in a colorful, intelligent, working-class vernacular that owes some of its style to Glab's Chicago-hometown heroes Studs Terkel and Mike Royko." — David Brent Johnson in Bloom Magazine
By glabwrites	AIPAC, Bryan Fischer, Charlie Pierce, Chuck Berry, Concealed Carry Law, Cornerstone Church, Fox News, John Hagee, Mark of the Beast, Matt Taibbi, Mother Jones, Northside Independent School District, NPR, Rich Abdill, San Antonio, Sandy Hook Massacre, Temple Grandin, The Great Derangement, William Bennett, Wonkette
The Pencil Today:
THE QUOTE
"People are always looking for the single magic bullet that will totally change everything. There is no single magic bullet." — Temple Grandin
FIRE WITH FIRE
From Rich Abdill in Wonkette:
"Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Sure, and Apache helicopters don't kill people but we cannot have those either."
He also points out the fallacy of the argument that good people with guns can defend themselves against crazies with guns:
"It sounds like a great argument, until you realize that the good people with guns are awful at defending society from bad people with guns. Mother Jones put together a big, terrible list of all the mass-murders of the last 30 years, and not a single one ends with, 'And then a person with a concealed weapon killed the shooter before the shooter could inflict anymore damage.' None. Zero."
I Got Somethin' For Ya Right Here, Psycho!
Charlie Pierce in Esquire magazine's politics blog quotes a Tweet from X-tian loon, the Rev. Bryan Fischer: "Shooters attack an elementary school in CT — another 'gun-free zone.' Makes children sitting ducks."
Pierce answers in the only possible rational way: "Go fuck yourself, pal. Sometimes I dearly wish I believed more strongly in a hell."
Rev. Bryan Fischer, Security & Education Expert
Naturally, the babbling idiot of the US Congress, Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), has plenty to say. He referred to the Sandy Hook principal on — what else? — Fox News Sunday: "I wish to god she had an M-4 in her office locked up so when she heard gunfire she pulls it out and she didn't have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands but she takes him out, takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids."
To borrow a quote from a very articulate man, Go fuck yourself, pal.
A-a-a-nd, former Reagan Secretary of Education, GHW Bush Drug Czar, self-appointed plaster saint, and degenerate gambler Bill Bennett wants an armed person patrolling the halls of every school.
Bennett: "Do You Have Any Idea How Good I Am?"
Cool idea, huh? So, next time a psycho barges into a school, he pops the armed guy and then goes ahead and wipes out a few dozen kids and teachers.
You know what to do with yourself, Bill.
I'm gonna stop now. I'm getting depressed.
GOD THE EDUCATOR
Oh, by the way, the god who's so enraged because we don't allow public school kids to sing hosannas to him in the classroom that he sent an armed psychotic in to wipe a few dozen of them out? He's hot for another reason these days, again having to do with public schools.
NPR reports that some Texas kid and her old man are suing a local San Antonio school district for forcing her to wear a radio frequency ID badge. See, these badges help school administrators keep track of students to make sure they're not wandering off campus to do what teenagers like to do other than study mitosis.
The kid, who's 15, told her daddy-0 that she was going to refuse to wear the ID tag when it was given her at the start of the school year because the Bible has something to say about it. "Daddy, I'm not going to do this," she said. "Dad, That's exactly what it talks about about in the Book of Revelation that you were teaching us about taking the mark of the beast. This is the exact same thing."
Not Only In Our Schools
The mark of the beast, in case you didn't know (and I wish I didn't), is mentioned in Revelation 13:15-18. It has to do with some evil being who comes down and pretends to be the Christ but is really the Anti-Christ and will somehow mark all people for some fercockter reason and then all hell will break loose. Or something. Look, I tried to figure it all out but it's in the Bible, see, and if you want to get your head screwed completely around, try reading half a page of that thing.
Anyway, loads of folks believe in this stuff and are constantly on the lookout for the beast-mark. And this Texas kid, apparently, has put her finger on it and now she and daddy-o are making a federal case about it.
The local San Antonio school district told her she has to wear the ID badge and she responded by saying Whoa, Nilly, you're violating my freedom of religion.
Now the whole affair is being played out this morning before the Federal district court in S.A.
Funny thing is, the school district has told the kid she can wear a badge without the radio frequency chip in it but she told them where they could stick that idea. She says she'll only wear her old school ID from last year, which the Bible apparently approves of, although I was unable to find a reference therein for it.
The kicker is the kid and her old man are members of John Hagee's Cornerstone Church, headquartered in San Ant.
Hagee
Hagee, you may recall, got presidential candidate John McCain in hot water back in 2008, after JM accepted the preacher's endorsement. Hagee, it was learned, had written that the Catholic church is "a godless theology of hate" and a "great whore." He'd also stated that the goal of Islam was to "kill Christians and Jews." He has stated that it was the Jews who were responsible for the Holocaust — and believe me, his "reasoning" behind this makes the Bible read like a kindergarten primer. He has stated that Hitler himself was an apostate Jew and that the Jews run the Federal Reserve System.
A-a-and the good Rev. Hagee is four-square in favor of a US preemptive strike on Iran using nuclear weapons. A real sweetheart, no?
Now Who's The Boss, Iran?
All that said, Hagee calls himself a "Christian Zionist" and works tirelessly with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to support radical pro-Israel legislation.
Weird, huh?
You wanna know how weird? Pick up Matt Taibbi's book, "The Great Derangement." He goes undercover in Hagee's church to find out who peoples his flock. Trust me, you'll be torn between laughing out loud and wanting to slash your wrists.
In any case, this fellow, god, seems fixated on the goings on in our schools. Funny, no? You'd think he'd fix it so students would learn more and teachers wouldn't burn out so quickly and legislators wouldn't be so eager to cut education funding. Seems as though god's priorities in education are about as screwed up as ours.
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