Jesus never said it. In fact, it doesn't come from anywhere in the Bible. The closest quote is from King Solomon, who said "He who spares the rod hates his son." And who knows what he meant by that. The "rod" a shepherd carried was to protect his sheep from wolves, not to beat the crap out of them.

And if you assume that Solomon really was advocating beating your kids because that's what some crackpot preacher told you, then I believe you should consider that dear old Shlomo (doesn't sound so great in Hebrew, does it?) came from one of the most dysfunctional families in history.

Tragic to say, it's not an exception in America's own little police state. Before you read further, please get the whole story, courtesy of Huffington Post, by opening this link in a new window: http://huff.to/jbCiW0.

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Privatization sounds like a good idea, if you believe that a for-profit corporation can provide any service more efficiently than a government agency. In some instances it may be true, but across the board? It's a false and dangerous premise.

In Iraq we hired soldiers of fortune, aka Blackwater and others, to run POW prisons and perform other functions that historically fall to our own military. We actually paid them more than we pay our own warriors, and exempted them from the rules our own men and women in uniform must operate under.

The result? When prisoners, many of whom turned out to be guilty of nothing, were tortured and humiliated, our military personnel were punished but not the highly paid private operators who gave the orders. Continue...

For many years, Jon Burge, may his name be cursed, and other Chicago detectives under his command, tortured suspects to obtain false confessions. Some of their victims went to death row. One that I know of was only 16. One was forced to falsely confess that he had set a fire that killed his own wife and son.

After ruining the lives of hundreds of innocent people, destroying families, creating a pervasive fear of police in Chicago's black community, staining the reputation of a beautiful and remarkably livable city, Burge retired to Florida to enjoy his pension and his booze. Apparently one of the few things this psychopathic scumbag really cared about was his alcohol. Finally, after decades of dodges and delays, he came to trial, in a federal court.

Why did it take so long, and why wasn't he prosecuted under Illinois law, which he was sworn to uphold but trampled? Continue...

It's good new that state governments are beginning to see that we can't continue to build more and bigger prisons. The average American household already spends around $500 per year to keep people behind bars.

For the short term, the alternative most often considered is directing juvenile offenders into rehabilitation-oriented programs for shorter periods of time, while keeping punishment as the primatry objective for older offenders. It's a step in the right direction, but let's hope it's only the beginning of a trend.

Rehabilitation has gotten a bad rap for decades now. Continue...

Is America really the best nation on earth? Our politicians get applause by telling us that it is. When some of our leaders spoke of mending fences with our allies, promising more cooperation and less of the arrogance we came to be known for recently, the mouthiest critics of the current administration screamed that they were "apologizing for America!" Nations, like individuals, should know that there's no shame in saying they're sorry.

Don't get me wrong; the U S of A is not perfect, and it's not God, but I think it's pretty great.

Sorry to say, there are a lot of Americans in 2010 who are not acting like they belong to a great nation. Continue...

When I was a kid there was speculation in some quarters that Father Charles Coughlin, the notorious anti-Semitic priest, was "The Antichrist." Then some thought it could be Hitler. Then Stalin. One evangelical revivalist insisted it was FDR, who wasn't really dead; his funeral was staged so he could make a new appearance and claim to be resurrected. Meanwhile, a Baptist preacher I knew was certain that the same evangelical revivalist was, himself, The Antichrist.

More recently, a "Christian militia" in Michigan (remember Timothy McVeigh?) seems to believe that President Obama is Satan's Anointed One. A member claimed that they were stockpiling assault rifles because Jesus Continue...

One of the worst kept secrets in diplomatic circles is the Cuban government's plan, beginning April First, to offer free healthcare to any American citizen who obtains permission to travel there and cannot afford treatment under what their health and welfare minister, Francisco Villa, called "the bloodsucking capitalist medical monopoly."

According to my anonymous sources, leading Democrats and Republicans have taken what appear to be totally paradoxical positions on the matter. Vice President Biden is reported to have said privately that he opposes the idea: "It's just grandstanding on their part, implying that we can't fix our own healthcare system. We're fixing it, and we don't need penny ante dictatorships telling us how to do it." Continue...

You can come out from under the bed now.

Who would want to live under Soviet-style communism? I certainly wouldn't. Supposedly that was "socialism": USSR = Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It would be more accurate, however, to describe the Soviet system as one of state-governed feudalism. The brutality and deprivation suffered by citizens of the USSR is one of the main reasons that "socialism" has become such an effective scare-word for many. Continue...