Weds-Does the QOP Love Outhouses?

Sasse Rhymes With Ass

Nebraska U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse won approval Tuesday from the University of Florida Board of Trustees to be the school’s next president despite vocal opposition from some faculty and students.

Sasse, a Republican, was recommended for the top post by a unanimous vote of the trustees. A final vote to elevate Sasse as the school’s 13th president is set for Nov. 10 by the state university system Board of Governors.

The recommended compensation package for Sasse comes to about $1.6 million, university officials said. That will also be finalized at the governors meeting.

During a four-hour meeting Tuesday on the Gainesville campus, Sasse sought to allay concerns that he’s more a creature of politics than academia by saying he will take a “pledge of political celibacy” with regard to partisan issues.

“I would have no activity in partisan politics in any way as I arrive at the University of Florida,” Sasse said, adding that his candidacy was not pushed by GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis or other Florida elected officials. “There is just tons and tons of learning and listening that I need to do.”

Opposition to Sasse, who was first elected to the Senate in 2014, has focused on his stance against same-sex marriage and positions on other LGBTQ issues. Some faculty and students question his qualifications to run such a sprawling school with more than 50,000 students. leading to a recent no-confidence vote by the university’s faculty Senate.

Sasse, a historian by training with a doctorate from Yale University, was previously president of Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska, which has just over 1,600 students. He also taught at the University of Texas.

Does the QOP Love Outhouses?  Many of their Candidates Are Full of Sheet.

The Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey provides insight into the beliefs of White evangelical Christians, who make up the core of the GOP. It reveals a lot about what they think and why they vote the way they do.

A striking 71 percent of these voters think the country has gone downhill since the 1950s (when women were excluded from most professions, Black Americans faced barriers to voting, 50 million Americans still used outhouses and only about 5 percent of Americans were college-educated). Because White Protestant evangelicals make up such a large share of the GOP, that means 66 percent of Republicans want to go back to the time of “Leave It to Beaver.”

Half of White evangelical Protestants also think God intended America to be the promised land. Nearly two-thirds say immigrants are a threat, and 61 percent say “society has become too soft and feminine.” And they are the only discrete religious group polled to support overturning Roe v. Wade.

Life in Prison for Stealing $14

David Coulson, 55, did not see his family for the two decades he spent behind bars. But they were ready to welcome him home last month, starting with a surprise reunion.

On his fourth day of freedom, his adult son invited him to his grandson’s football game in Norwalk, California. He thought it would just be the two of them, but halfway through the game, Coulson turned around and saw his daughter, three grandkids he’d never met and several other relatives.

“I was just bawling and torn up, and my daughter runs up and hugs me and is like, ‘You big ole crybaby!’” he said. “The grandkids accepted me with open arms. It was like I never left.”

For the last 20 years, Coulson was serving a life sentence, with little hope of ever coming home.

His crime was stealing $14.

At the time of the 2002 offense, in which he took loose change from an unlocked garage, Coulson, then 35, was living on the streets of Long Beach and deep in the throes of drug addiction. He was also struggling with mental illnesses after surviving significant childhood abuse. Despite his documented health crises, and having no violent crimes on his record, a judge ordered him to be locked up for life, saying he could only be considered for release after 35 years.

He was incarcerated under one of the most extreme “tough on crime” laws in the US, which aimed to indefinitely imprison “habitual offenders”. He only came home last month because a judge reviewed his case and declared that his punishment “shocks the conscience and offends fundamental notions of human dignity” and that he never should have been imprisoned at all.

Coulson’s release was unusual, but the extraordinarily harsh punishment he received was not. Experts say thousands like him remain behind bars in California, sentenced to life due to 1990s legislation, some who may never be freed.

It costs an average of about $106,000 per year to incarcerate an inmate in prison in California.  So 20 Years Cost Us Over $2 Million to Keep Him In Prison.