But what of the mute, unseen people off-screen who cannot wield the conventions of knowledge and language needed to participate in the American public sphere? Brecht described them memorably: "But you see only those in the light/Those in the darkness you don't see."
Too many Americans are in the linguistic shadows now—possibly close to a majority. Despite intense efforts driven by the No Child Left Behind Act, the language abilities of our 17-year-olds have remained stuck at the steeply declined levels of the 1970s, while the language gap between white students on one side and black and Hispanic students on the other remains distressingly and immovably large.
This language gap represents more than a civic disability that prevents full participation in a democracy. It also represents a bar to general prosperity and social justice. According to studies by the University of Virginia economist William R. Johnson and others, the large wage gaps among demographic groups narrow significantly when scores on a language-comprehension test are factored in. I use the word "language gap" because the usual term, "reading gap," is far too narrow. Our schools have made progress in imparting technical decoding skills in the early grades, but that improvement in early technical facility has not been followed by improvement in language comprehension in the later grades.
A principal cause of this catastrophic educational failure has been the dominance within the school world of a faulty how-to theory of language mastery. Full membership in any speech community and in any democracy involves mastery not just of grammar and pronunciation, but also of commonly shared knowledge—often unspoken and unwritten—that is equally essential to communication. All effective writers and speakers have learned the convention of tacit knowledge. They know that a baseball metaphor like "he struck out" can be confidently used, but a cricket metaphor like "he was leg before" cannot. Their audience will know the name Franklin D. Roosevelt, but not necessarily Harold L. Ickes.
http://chronicle.com/article/How-Schools-Fail-Democracy/48574/
Here's what you need to know:
Right now, candy sales are off the charts. There are simply not enough bullets to go around. Far too many people believe Wal-Mart is the one corporation that best symbolizes America. Upwards of 75 percent of students in Oklahoma cannot name the very first president of the United States. Then again, 25 percent can. Maybe we should be impressed.
How many snippets of ugly do you want? How do you sift and sort the various specious spitwads of untoward reality? The machine keeps churning, the news wires keep pumping and it's an endless cavalcade of hope and woe, pain and stupid, divine and beautiful, same as it ever was, except completely different. Shall we dance?
Cancer rates are way down, overall. Did you know? Also, the murder rate in New York City is as low as it's been in nearly 50 years and no one can really understand why, considering how desperate and depressed and murderous everyone is supposed to be these days. Who wants candy?
Somehow, we are living longer than ever. Average lifespans are still increasing, thanks to wonder drugs and artificial pumps and valves and stimulators and the sheer force of will that millions of Americans apparently have to live long enough to watch the finale of "Dancing with the Stars."
Then again, the raw data proves we are also fatter, dumber, generally more miserable than ever. It's a bizarre paradox: prescription meds are more popular than Jesus, self-help is the biggest section of the bookstore, the U.S. ranks near the bottom in public education quality in the world, and the woeful American diet, after all these years of organic this and low-fat that and overall enthusiastic health-food awareness-raising, is just as fatty and sugary and toxic as ever. We have not learned a thing. Or if we have, we forgot it already, due to all the high-fructose corn syrup rotting our brains.
Is there a correlation? Is there some bizarre juncture where those same two opposing ideas -- longer lifespan and worse overall health -- meet and slap each other in the face and move on, pretending the other doesn't really exist? Would it not be simply terrific to someday read the exact same headline, in reverse? "Life spans shortening, everyone healthier, happier than any time in past 100 years."
This is my question: Is anyone keeping score? Is there any way to know for sure if we are, on the whole, making some sort of vague yet palpable progress, advancing the human experiment even a little? Or are we merely regressing into a sticky black puddle of prelapsarian goo? Can it be both? Do you get to choose? I think you get to choose.
Some of my favorite studies to blip across the news wires are always the ones that talk about adding years to your life, about how modifying this or that aspect of your diet or health regimen will either add or subtract a year, two years, a decade to/from your time on this pale blue dot.
I don't quite get it. Are we really enthralled by such information? Is anyone thrilled at the rather obvious idea that if you stop snarfing a family-sized bag of neon-orange nuclear Doritos every damn day, you will die at a ripe old age of 92 instead of a sickly and pallid 89? Should we not be discussing the only thing that really matters: how you live and feel in this very moment, the one right here and now?
Here's the new study: Quit smoking, quit eating garbage, quit drinking HFCS-laden swill, get more exercise, laugh louder, screw longer and, hey, guess what? You get to live better today. You get to climb stairs and keep up with your 22-year-old boy-toy in bed and dance past 9:30 p.m. without your knees giving out. You make these changes not because they add precious years to your life at the end, but because they add breaths and grins, loves and orgasms to your life, right the hell now. Go figure.
Speaking of which: Remember the chorus of whines against the various smoking bans enacted across America not all that long ago? Get this: turns out they actually work. Turns out, insofar as actually reducing the rate of heart attacks, smoking bans are a big, stinking success. It's pretty much straight-out, shut-up, seatbelt-law irrefutable: In towns with the bans, fewer people died. Damn you evil big gummint, stay away from my freedoms! Oh wait.
A shadowy private security company that has no known clients but claims to have helped foreign governments combat terrorism and will protect anything from cruise ships to Pakistani convoys has taken over a jail in a small Montana town, with plans to build a law enforcement training facility on the property. The state legislature is looking into the matter and residents of Hardin, MT, were alarmed last week when executives from the firm, American Police Force, showed up in the town, which does not have its own police department, with Mercedes SUVs bearing "City Of Hardin Police Department" decals.
And the town has had to tamp down reports on conspiracy Web sites that APF plans to impose experimental H1N1 vaccines on residents under threat of quarantine in the jail.
Under a lease signed with Hardin, APF, based in Santa Ana, California, and incorporated just six months ago, is now in control of a 400-bed detention facility the town built a few years ago but never used, a town official confirmed to TPMmuckraker today. The town reportedly stands to make over $2 million per year.
Just what American Police Force plans to do with the detention facility, which comes with 50 acres of land in the small south-central Montana town, is unclear. Also not clear is who, if anyone, APF plans to put in the jail. (Watch a video tour of the jail here.)
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/09/american_police_force_hardin_montana.php?ref=fpb
National Geographic photographer Michael Nichols is one of the world's foremost wildlife photographers. But he recently said that he'd happily spend the rest of his life photographing trees. Of course, the folks over at National Geographic would almost certainly never hear of it. Nichols' newfound love developed after a serious, yearlong relationship with redwoods.
National Geographic sent Nichols to spend an entire year in California's redwood forest. His mission was to capture the majesty of some of the tallest trees on Earth, some of which date back before Christ. And if you've ever photographed in a forest, you'll understand the challenge this presented. There's no capturing the awe one feels before these monoliths that measure, in some cases, upward of 300 feet.
In a recent lecture at National Geographic in Washington, D.C., Nichols described his frustrations. Eventually, though, he devised a way to do redwoods justice. It involved three cameras, a team of scientists, a robotic dolly, a gyroscope, an 83-photo composite and a lot of patience. (And, OK, maybe it's not the Biggest, Tallest Tree Photo Ever -- but it's the biggest one I've ever seen.) Here's how they did it:
The photograph appears as a huge foldout in the the October issue of National Geographic magazine, which hits newsstands today and is definitely worth reading.
Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a bar complaint with the Louisiana Office of Disciplinary Counsel against Senator David Vitter (R-LA) for violating Louisiana's rules of professional conduct for lawyers.
In 2007, it was revealed that Sen. Vitter's telephone number was included in the so-called "D.C. Madam," Deborah Jeane Palfrey's, list of client telephone numbers. The senator confirmed he had sought Ms. Palfrey's services, saying in a statement, "this was a very serious sin in my past for which I am, of course, completely responsible." Two other women also alleged Sen. Vitter had engaged the services of prostitutes. Jeanette Maier, the "Canal Street Madam," claimed Sen. Vitter visited the New Orleans brothel several times in the mid-1990s. In addition, a woman who worked as a prostitute under the name of Wendy Cortez said Sen. Vitter was a regular client of hers between July and November 1999.
Under D.C. and Louisiana law, it is a crime to solicit for prostitution. CREW filed a complaint against Sen. Vitter with the Senate Ethics Committee, which dismissed the matter without action in September 2008.
Louisiana Rule of Professional Conduct 8.4(b) provides it is professional misconduct for a lawyer to "commit a criminal act especially one that reflects adversely on the lawyer's honesty, trustworthiness or fitness as a lawyer in other respects." By repeatedly committing the crime of soliciting for prostitution, Sen. Vitter violated the rules of professional conduct for lawyers and should be investigated and disciplined for his misconduct.
CREW executive director Melanie Sloan stated, "Sen. Vitter's zeal to see ACORN criminally investigated for offering advice in setting up a prostitution ring reminded me he has yet to be held accountable for his own role in a prostitution ring. While ACORN's conduct is indefensible, so is Sen. Vitter's and what is good for the goose is good for the gander."
Ignatius is an unforgettable literary creation, much like Holden Caulfield, right down to the deer cap, you come away from the book not with the plot but with the indelible memory of a character so uncompromising and irritating that you don't know what to make of the fact you identify with them.
In October 2003 employees at more than 800 chain supermarkets in California walked out of their jobs after management demanded pay cuts and a reduction in health insurance benefits. The ensuing strike and lockout were notable for the number of workers involved (59,000), the duration of the conflict (more than four months) and the defeat eventually suffered by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which represented the workers. Just as notable was what had ostensibly provoked the showdown. In 2002, the discount chain Wal-Mart announced that it would place at least forty new Supercenters, the largest of its big-box stores, in California. A nonunion company famous for expanding its market share by undercutting its competitors' prices, Wal-Mart had proven hard to beat in the past. And in addition to offering a massive selection of housewares, toys and clothes, its Supercenters were outfitted with a full-service grocery. The mere prospect of losing customers to these new stores convinced Safeway, Albertsons and other large grocery chains that they could seek concessions from their workers on the pretext that wage cuts were a necessary measure for remaining competitive. Wal-Mart, it appeared, had changed the way the grocery business operated in California before it even entered the market.
In The Retail Revolution, Nelson Lichtenstein explains how Wal-Mart could shape, if not dictate, the agendas of so many third parties. And he suggests that the California grocery strike was just one particularly visible example of the profound impact of the Bentonville, Arkansas, chain on the broader economy. A labor historian best known for his biography of autoworkers leader Walter Reuther, Lichtenstein has become something of an authority on the discount Goliath. In 2006 he edited a collection of essays, published by the New Press, on the economics and historical circumstances of the Wal-Mart phenomenon. With The Retail Revolution, he provides a comprehensive story of the corporation's awesome growth and expansion. Drawing on sociological scholarship and reporting about the experiences of Wal-Mart workers in the United States and around the world, as well as information made public by lawsuits involving the company, Lichtenstein describes Wal-Mart's origins, expansion and current business practices, from its relationship with subcontracting manufacturers to its protocol for scheduling night shifts. He respects the company's argument for its own social utility -- that it brings an abundance of goods to consumers at the lowest possible price -- and admires its ability to solve complex logistical problems that have long bedeviled discount retailers. But he is horrified by the dispiriting low-wage, part-time economy that Wal-Mart has helped create.
http://www.powells.com/review/2009_09_29.html
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The novelist and children's writer Philip Pullman has been showered with awards that include a CBE, a Carnegie Medal and several honorary professorships. This week he notched up a new distinction: he is ranked second in the top 10 books that people have tried to ban across America.
Pullman's fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, has leapt to the top of the target list of would-be censors in the new rankings issued this week by the American Library Association. It tracks cases where individuals or groups have attempted to have books stripped from bookshelves in schools and libraries across the US.
Its newly released rankings for 2008 recorded 513 cases where books were targeted for censorship, of which 74 were successfully banned or restricted. Pullman's trilogy was the second most commonly attacked, a result, the ALA believes, of an organised campaign that the anti-defamation group the Catholic League launched against the film version of The Golden Compass.
Several schools across America faced requests from parents to remove the book. One challenge at a school in Winchester, Kentucky was made on the grounds that the book's main character drinks wine and eats poppy with her meals. Another school in Oshkosh, Wisconsin pulled the trilogy because of its "anti-Christian message".
Reached by the Guardian, Pullman quipped that he was "very glad to be back in the top 10 banned books". But he added: "Of course it's a worry when anybody takes it upon themselves to dictate what people should or should not read. The power of organised religion is very strong in the US, and getting stronger because of the internet."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/30/american-library-association-banned-books
There are three basic ways to talk to complete idiots.
The first is to assail them with facts, truths, scientific data, the commonsensical obviousness of it all. You do this in the very reasonable expectation that it will nudge them away from the ledge of their more ridiculous and paranoid misconceptions because, well, they're facts, after all, and who can dispute those?
Examples? Endless. You may, for instance, attempt to explain evolution to an extreme fundamentalist Christian. You may offer up carbon dating, the fossil record, glaciers, any one of 10,000 irrefutable proofs. You may even dare to talk about the Bible as the clever, completely manufactured, man-made piece of heavily politicized, massively edited, literary myth-making it so very much is, using all sorts of sound academic evidence and historical record.
You are, of course, insane beyond belief to try this, but sometimes you just can't help it. To the educated mind, it seems inconceivable that millions of people will choose rabid ignorance and childish fantasy over, say, a polar bear. Permafrost. Rocks. Nag Hammadi. But they will, and they do. Faced with this mountain of factual obviousness, the bewildered fundamentalist will merely leap back as if you just jabbed him with a flaming homosexual cattle prod, and then fall into a swoon about how neat it is that angels can fly.
But it's not just the fundamentalists. This Rule of Idiocy also explains why, when you show certain jumpy, conservative Americans the irrefutable facts about, say, skyrocketing health care costs that are draining their bank accounts, and then show how Obama's rather modest overhaul is meant to save members of all ages and genders and party affiliations a significant amount of money while providing basic insurance for their family, they, too, will scream and kick like a child made to eat a single bite of broccoli.
Remember, facts do not matter. The actual Obama plan itself does not matter. Fear of change, fear of the "Other," fear of the scary black socialist president, fear that yet another important shift is taking place that they cannot understand and which therefore makes them thrash around like a trapped animal? This is all that matters.
Four out of five major committees have delivered in one form or another what 65 percent of the American public wants: a government-run public health insurance option. President Obama supports a public option, the majority of medical profession does, and without it there is no way healthcare costs can be brought down in any significant way.
And yet our Democrat-controlled Congress can't get its act together. Today, five Democratic senators rejected the most progressive version of the public option to emerge from the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller's amendment. Remember their names, because they should go down as traitors to what the Democratic party should stand for: Blanche Lincoln, Bill Nelson, Max Baucus, Kent Conrad and Tom Carper.
by William Rivers Pitt
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Sooner or later, heaving buckets of blame onto George W. Bush for what we as a nation are being forced to endure will become a facile excuse; at some point, the whole kit and caboodle will be the sole property of President Barack Obama, whether he likes it or not and be damned to excuses. Already, his administration has taken enough dramatic measures to ensure that, should something go wrong, a fair share of censure will and rightly should be placed on the present and not the past.
This has been one of those weeks, however, when everything happening bears the scars and stains of the despicable, cowardly and criminally insane actions of the Bush administration. This has been one of those weeks where it seems for all the world as if Bush left a flaming bag of dog poop on the White House porch before fleeing into the night, and President Obama had no choice but to stomp on it and get covered in crud. This has just been one of those weeks.
President Obama spoke before the UN General Assembly on Wednesday after making significant progress in two key areas of foreign policy: he secured concessions from Russia regarding sanctions on Iran and won support from both Moscow and Beijing for a resolution to curb nuclear proliferation. In his address, however, one could not help but notice how forcefully the president emphasized the demonstrable fact that he is not George W. Bush, and that the country he leads is not the same one that had run roughshod over the international community over the last eight years.
"During his address to the General Assembly," reported The New York Times on Thursday, "Mr. Obama sought to present a kinder, gentler America willing to make nice with the world. He suggested that the United States would no longer follow the go-it-alone policies that many United Nations members complained isolated the Bush administration from the organization. 'We have re-engaged the United Nations,' Mr. Obama said, to cheers from world leaders and delegates in the cavernous hall. 'We have paid our bills' - a direct reference to the former administration's practice of withholding some payment due the world body while it pressed for changes there."
The simple fact that an American president had to stand before that world body and apologize, to all intents and purposes, for the last American president is a stinging humiliation for this country, but the sad fact is that it had to be done.
Think today's filmmakers are stuck behind the camera? Or the edit room?
Think again.
Many filmmakers are harnessing the power of the web to tell another side of the story– their story.
Readers enjoyed my earlier post, "7 Interesting Storytellers to Follow on Twitter," so let's continue this series with some interesting filmmakers.
Keeping in the spirit of Twitter, the following "tweets" are 140 characters or less.
7 Fascinating Filmmakers to Follow on Twitter
1. Errol Morris @errolmorris
The Oscar-winning director of 'Fog of War" often tweets zen-like koans. Witty and always thought-provoking.
2. Michael Moore @MMFlint
Yes- the Academy-Award winning filmmaker is on Twitter. Currently promoting his new documentary, "Capitalism: A Love Story."
3. David Lynch @David_Lynch
Mixes "transcendental" tweets with updates about his new storytelling project, @InterviewProj. Pioneering personal stories for the web.
4. Bluedot Productions @bluedot_
Game changers. Really. These "quantum activist" filmmakers are creating "quantum leaps" in documentary films.
5. PBS Point of View @povdocs
Beyond promoting POV documentaries, watch for tweets on interviews and educational resources.
6. Frank Kelly @frankwkelly
The filmmaker behind the "140 Project." 140 filmmakers from 140 countries captured 140 seconds of unedited footage. Truly fascinating.
7. Peter Marshall @bcfilmmaker
Veteran filmmaker/workshop teacher/social media proponent. Tweets often & covers the intersection of traditional filmmaking with new media.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi3mwfrNakM
What if I told you that there was a piece of legislation that would:
(1) Defund all of the Mexican, Islamic and other drug cartels.
(2) Defund all of the local drug gangs
(3) Cripple the movement toward a centralized Globalist Government
(4) Reclaim the liberties lost in the wake of 911
And what if I told you that this legislation would minimally add 26.6 Billion dollars in revenue to the US economy: without the imposition of any further taxation on the American people? And furthermore what if I told you that this legislation could be implemented world wide, yielding similar benefits throughout the planet?
Wouldn't you be interested in learning more about it? Well then, please take a seat and watch this entire video, because I'm going to describe what that legislation would look like. And I will also begin to map out a strategy that could implement this legislation before the end of 2009.
Let me be absolutely clear why I am producing this series of videos. The primary purpose of this series of videos is to provide a global strategy to Re-Legalize Marijuana Worldwide in 2009. In this second video I will be giving a thorough overview of the only true solution to ending the War on Marijuana: the MERP Model.
Since the first part of this series premiered on February 2nd, 2009 it has been viewed by over 2,000 people in over 20 different countries. For those that can't read English I provide transcripts of each video, which can be viewed in any of 40 languages.
I encourage you to distribute this link throughout the planet so that we can win our first battle against the Globalists, by implementing the MERP Model of Marijuana Re-Legalization Worldwide before 2009 ends. It already appears that this is going viral across the internet and the support for the MERP Model has been overwhelming.
In the first video I made it clear that neither Obama nor Congress have any intention to Re-Legalize Marijuana without concerted pressure from the American public. I then recommended 5 steps that groups and individuals could take to begin pressuring our representatives to specifically implement the MERP Model of Re-Legalization.
In this video I will give an overview of the MERP Model
What is the MERP Model?
MERP is really a one syllable contraction of the acronym MRPP which is short for the "Marijuana Re-Legalization Policy Project." For brevity I will be using MERP from this point forward.
The MERP Model for Marijuana Re-Legalization is elegant in its simplicity and can be succinctly described as follows:
"The MERP model of Marijuana Re-Legalization would minimally allow non-commercial cultivation of unlimited numbers of plants, by adults above the age of 18, without any form of government taxation, regulation or other interference."
Under the MERP Model both Marijuana Cultivation and Consumption are to be held as inalienable, sacred rights. MERP does not preclude the issuance of commercial licensing and taxation as long as such laws do not interfere with the aforementioned protections for personal cultivation and consumption. The structure of the MERP Model assures (1) the destruction of the Drug Cartels, (2) free access to Medical Marijuana and (3) a counterbalance to the loss of personal liberties following the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001.
The MERP Model is really not significantly different than the way we allow US citizens to produce beer and wine within our homes. Home beer and wine production is neither taxed nor is it regulated. And many activists need to be weaned from this false notion that the government should get to tax everything. If they don't tax your tomatoes or your beer, why should they be allowed to tax your Cannabis?
The US Secret Service is trying to identify the people who launched an online poll at Facebook asking whether US President Barack Obama should be assassinated.
Facebook on Monday shot down the user-generated poll, which was titled "Should Obama be killed?" and offered answer choices of yes, no, maybe, and "If he cuts my health care."
"Once we found out about it, we worked with Facebook to have it removed," Secret Service spokesman Malcolm Wiley told AFP.
"We are certainly investigating; just like we would with any threat case."
More than 750 Facebook users had reportedly cast votes by the time the poll was yanked from the wildly popular online social networking community.
"This is sick and sad," a Facebook user with the screen name Cocoa Fly said in a posting as the poll fuelled passionate online exchanges at the website.
"All of this anti-Obama rage is pure racism."
That's Sarah Palin's achievement for Jonathan Burnham, who runs the marketing company, Harper Collins. Several questions naturally arise. Did she actually write those 400 pages? Please. Her peregrinations in the couple of months since she quit her "day-job" do not exactly reflect a period of personal reflection and diligence. She wrote that book as thoroughly as she wrote her speech in Hong Kong. The book was written by a hardcore Christianist; the speech by a hardcore neocon. She remains the hood ornament for a marketing campaign that now passes for the conservative movement.
The title itself lets us know that if anyone harbored any doubts about her own view of that disastrous campaign, she is immensely proud of it.
And by "it", I mean her refusal to cooperate with the McCain campaign, hijacking it for her own delusions of grandeur, generating immense drama and refusing to answer salient questions. Someone in her position with a decent sense of perspective and self-knowledge might have said no to John McCain in August of 2008. Or taken the pick as an opportunity to get boned up on policy. But we see now that she came to see her nomination as an entrepreneurial opportunity - for wealth, fame and irresponsibility. The notion of public service, divorced from reality show culture, clearly bored her and bores her still. She has now found her niche.
But why the rush? It couldn't be that she's trying to beat any other account of her bizarre career and surreal private life, could it?
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/09/400-pages-in-four-months.html
The translator broke down during Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's speech at the UN, shouting into his live microphone "I just can't take it any more" in Arabic.
Ironically, the translator was one supplied by Gaddafi, who refused to use the regular UN interpreters. Those who have translated for Gaddafi in the past empathized with the frustration of his interpreter:
He's not exactly the most lucid speaker. "It's not just that what he's saying is illogical, but the way he's saying it is bizarre.
UN rules normally limit the time a translator does live translation to 40 minutes, but Gaddafi's translator broke down after 75 minutes. Another translator immediately took over, translating the final 20 minutes, but even he was given the following day off to recuperate.
Obviously, this conclusion has been thrown into question by the botched Polanski pick-up, proving that the Swiss are not really the best stewards of swift order and that the French have some very odd ideas about the art of love, or whatever you want to call it. The joke does not make mention of the United States, but I have a suggestion: In heaven, the Americans are the keepers of justice, and in hell, the Americans are ... the keepers of justice. Because if you are hauled into court in this country, as the Polanski brouhaha displays, it is both the best of times and the worst of times. Right now I cannot even imagine how it will all turn out, but since justice is meted out so unevenly anyway, I wonder if inherent in Scorsese et al.'s defense of Polanski isn't the suggestion that there ought to be a genius exception to the rule of law—that is, if you are a great artist, what's a little rape on the side?
Notwithstanding the due process concerns that the Polanski case raises—which are for legal scholars, not Hollywood directors, to quibble with—if we excuse Polanski from punishment, aren't we really saying that his life is more valuable than the life of a 13-year-old girl's just because he happened to direct Rosemary's Baby? Taking that to its logical extreme, we have to assume that Bob Dylan can never go to jail, even if he rapes a teenager or two, and that Picasso could not have served time for whatever felonies he might have committed in his brazen lifetime, and—well, I could go on. Where would we draw the line? Does Leonard Cohen qualify? Neil Diamond?
You may have seen Ben Stein hawking Freescore.com on your TV in recent months. (It's why he was fired from the New York Times in August, in fact, because of a perceived conflict of interest.) It's no different from any other "free" credit report nonsense out there in that after a short trial period—7 days in this case—you have to pay for what you can get for free once a year from annualcreditreport.com. The company exists to lure in people who don't mind paying unnecessary fees, as well as people who don't read fine print, as well as those who do read fine print but forget to cancel within that 7 day window. Freescore.com is even more obnoxious in that it will charge you $1 to access your "free" initial results; the fine print says that if you choose to cancel within 7 days, "remember to ask for a refund of your $1 processing fee."
For those reasons, Reuters blogger Felix Salmon called Stein a "predatory bait-and-switch merchant" in July, and someone called "Flâneur de fraude" added to the claim in a blog post, where he showed that Freescore is ultimately owned by Vertrue Inc., a company that has a BBB rating of "F", mostly due to complaints that Vertrue's various membership companies enrolled customers without their knowledge or permission.
Somehow, that spurred Freescore to retaliate with legal action. But what's weird is although they're making a lot of noise about defamation and trade libel, and they've filed a suit with Yahoo to get Flâneur's real name revealed, they haven't actually argued that anything Flâneur posted was false. They haven't even gone after Felix Salmon, the original blogger at Reuters.
So is Freescore.com planning on suing Flâneur if they can find out her real name? If so, for what? As you can see from her blog post, the original content she added to the story was all about tracing ownership and pointing out the history of complaints against Freescore's parent company.
http://consumerist.com/5369356/freescorecom-sues-yahoo-to-reveal-bloggers-identity
 The jail break occurred Wednesday night when seventeen prisoners, five of them on death row, climbed out of a small bathroom window to freedom. Eight of the prisoners, including three on death row, have since been caught. Search parties, planes, and dogs are combing the area surrounding Tikrit, which is about 100 miles (170 kilometers) north of the capital Baghdad for the remainder of the escapees. U.S. military officials say they are providing aerial surveillance and search dogs for the manhunt. Road-blocks have been set up for all roads going to and from Tikrit. The border crossing with Syria is also under close surveillance. |
In compliance with a International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) requirement, Iran revealed the existence of the new plant this month and has agreed to allow U.N. inspectors access to it. While the British report states that "diplomatic sources said it could hold 3,000 centrifuges, capable of making enough enriched uranium to build a nuclear bomb each year," the IAEA reports that nuclear material has not yet been added. The IAEA says that the data they have been given suggests that as with the existing Nanatz facility, the new site is only designed to enrich uranium to 5%, useful for energy production at the nation's Bushehr power plant but not for military purposes. See: http://news.antiwar.com/2009/09/25/as-required-iran-informs-iaea-about-new-enrichment-site/.
The most direct route for the Israeli air force to attack Iran would be over Iraq, but Israeli F-15I and F-16I jets would still be well-within range of Iran after flying over Saudi air space. Such a move may also circumvent some political pressure from the U.S.
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Now we found someone who was made to believe he could kill people with an asshole bomb, and so it follows that the TSA will have to ban -- or at least inspect -- our assholes. They're like opinions, you know, everybody's got one. Except, of course, most of us got to keep our assholes to ourselves. Not anymore.
Let's just be thankful that no one has yet convinced a suicidal murderer that he could blow up a plane with his mind, because once that happens, we're all in for mandatory airport trepannations. Because, you know, you can't be too safe. Every little bit helps. If an unhinged suicide bomber believes it's possible, we must take it seriously. To do less would be irresponsible.
For years, I have made the joke about Richard Reid: "Just be glad that he wasn't the underwear bomber." Now, sadly, we have an example of one.Ass BomberLewis Page, an "improvised-device disposal operator tasked in support of the UK mainland police from 2001-2004," pointed out that this isn't much of a threat for three reasons: 1) you can't stuff a lot of explosives into a body cavity, 2) detonation is, um, problematic, and 3) the human body can stifle an explosion pretty effectively (think of someone throwing himself on a grenade to save his friends).
But who ever accused the TSA of being rational?
In rememberance of political columnist William Safire, who died yesterday at the age of 79, we present his favorite New Yorker cartoon. Even though this cartoon by Chon Day was published in April 1945, the recent financial meltdown for which nobody seems responsible makes it timely today.
http://politicalirony.com/2009/09/28/william-safires-favorite-new-yorker-cartoon/
Dropped down the memory hole is the fact that ACORN was at the center of the so-called "prosecutor-gate" scandal, when the Bush administration pressured U.S. Attorneys to bring indictments over the grassroots group's voter-registration drives and then fired some prosecutors who resisted what they viewed as a partisan strategy not supported by solid evidence.
The latest furor over ACORN was touched off by conservative filmmaker James E. O'Keefe III and a right-wing columnist who posed as a couple planning to buy a house for use as a brothel and getting advice from a few ACORN employees, rather than being turned away.
The pair filmed their meetings at ACORN offices with a hidden-camera, producing a video that brought to a fever pitch the long-simmering Republican war against ACORN. The video was trumpeted by Fox News and other right-wing news outlets, starting a stampede in the mainstream press and in Congress, where a majority of panicked Democrats joined the herd in approving legislation to strip ACORN of federal funds.
The stampede, which trampled ACORN and its mostly black and Hispanic organizing staff, soon pulled in President Barack Obama, who often has touted his work as a community organizer in his youth. In an interview last Sunday on ABC's "This Week," Obama told host George Stephanopoulos that ACORN "deserves to be investigated."
Yet, while bending to Republican demands to speak out against a poor people's group, Obama continued to resist the notion that powerful Republicans from the Bush administration deserved to be investigated for authorizing the use of torture against prisoners in the "war on terror."
http://pubrecord.org/nation/5510/republican-against-acorn-starring/
Last March, Sally Harpold, an Indiana grandmother of triplets, bought two boxes of cold medication in less than a week. Together, the two boxes contained 3.6 grams of pseudoephedrine, putting her in violation of the state's methamphetamine-fighting law, which forbids the purchase of more than three grams by one person in a seven-day period.
Police came to Harpold's home, arrested and handcuffed her, and booked her in a Vermillion County jail. No one believes Harpold was making meth or aiding anyone who was. But local authorities aren't apologizing for her arrest.
"I don't want to go there again," [Vermillion County Prosecutor Nina] Alexander told the Tribune-Star, recalling how the manufacture and abuse of methamphetamine ravaged the tiny county and its families.
While the law was written with the intent of stopping people from purchasing large quantities of drugs to make methamphetamine, the law does not say the purchase must be made with the intent to make meth.
"The law does not make this distinction," Alexander said…
Just as with any law, the public has the responsibility to know what is legal and what is not, and ignorance of the law is no excuse, the prosecutor said.
"I'm simply enforcing the law as it was written," Alexander said…
It is up to customers to pay attention to their purchase amounts, and to check medication labels, Alexander said.
"If you take these products, you ought to know what's in them," she said.
Harpold's photo was put on the front page of the local paper as part of an article about the arrest of 17 people in a "drug sweep." Alexander has generously allowed Harpold to enter a deferral program. If she commits no crimes in the next 30 days, her arrest will be wiped from her record. She'll still have to pay court costs and attorney fees.
I'll leave it to Vigo County Sheriff Jon Marvel to (unintentionally) put an exclamation point on the absurdity.
"Sometimes mistakes happen," Marvel said. "It's unfortunate. But for the good of everyone, the law was put into effect.
"I feel for her, but if she could go to one of the area hospitals and see a baby born to a meth-addicted mother …"
Because clearly the best way to prevent meth-addicted babies is to arrest women who buy cold medication for their grandchildren.
http://www.theagitator.com/2009/09/28/hoosier-grandmother-arrested-for-purchasing-cold-medication/
