Obama poster in LA

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Christian Girls' Guide to Spring Break Abstinence

During Spring Break, the number one priority for unsaved boys (especially lustful colored and avaricious Jewish ones) is to take home the trophy prized by pagans the world over: the sweet, warm blood of a virgin. Every March in Daytona Beach, that prize is attained by spilling the sacred hymen blood of a lily-white Christian girl. Here at Landover Baptist, as our college students make their way toward the godless, gibberish-mumbling shores of Mexico and Florida this Spring, they understand that whether they are a boy slipping on a pair of enormous crotch concealing surfer shorts or a girl covered from knee to chin in a modest one-piece swimsuit, their conservative swimwear is going on the body of the Lord Jesus Christ. And He doesn't like to flop about, displaying His enormous dangling holy parts in public. Yes, Christian youngsters know that the most important thing to remember when they are at the ocean (after the importance of using a 120 SPF so they don't wind up so dark folks think you're about to knock over a Cancun liquor store) is that mixed-faith beaches are mission fields to share the Good News. 

As members of the inferior sex, Christian girls are more easily swayed toward the lures of Satan and anything drunk out of a pineapple. A young lady might have made a commitment to save herself for Jesus and abstain from the filthy, repulsive act from which the beauty of life springs, but it is often times more difficult for them to understand which parts of their body are off limits to the superior sex. 

In general, Christian boys are more successful in resisting demonic influences. Indeed, we've heard countless tales of Spring Break sacrifice from our Godly gentlemen, who've sacrificed their pride by resorting to mouth, hiney, and even boy-on-boy canoodling in order to protect their virginity. These are lessons many Baptists boys picked up from Mormon missionaries and can provide a reputation-saving technique for Christian girls hoping to save their precious lady business until after an expensive, catered wedding. 

Of course, Christian females have a hard time understanding the different parts of the slimy abyss between their legs -- in part, because they have been forbidden to look. Most Christian ladies don't even realize they have six holes (the number of the beast) through which the devil tries to enter. There is only one however, that upon entry, will destroy an angelic little girlie's virginity and turn her into a debauched, fornicating Devil's slut who must be drop-kicked out the back door of our church and sent to the Landover Baptist Home for Wayward Girls and Pastors' Comfort Retreat.

As any Roman Catholic priest who has spent countless hours eying the crotches of buff, young men in swim trunks can tell you, the Lord Jesus isn't the only thing that rises in the Spring. Danger of vaginal penetration lurks on every beach blanket. In preparation for the lurid temptations of Spring Break, our team of Creation Scientists has been kind enough to prepare the chart below. All female church members are required to carry a laminated copy it in their purses at all times as a "map" to guide them safely across the treacherous minefield of teen almost-sex, which is pitted with many a dark and sticky sinkhole intent on sucking young souls into their fetid vortex of sin. Choose the wrong hole and you will have chosen a whole lot of damnation, my teenage friend!

 

http://www.landoverbaptist.org/

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Deepak Chopra on Slumdog Millionaire:

The Dilemma of the New India

by Deepak Chopra

After its sweeping win at the Oscars last Sunday, Slumdog Millionaire seems like the movie everyone wants, and perhaps needs. It has all the ingredients of escapist fare from the Great Depression -- a populist hero who overcomes all odds to get the girl and the money. There's an added element of self-congratulation for the West: by seeing this movie you can see India without getting your hands dirty or offending your nose, and cheer it on. Cinderella didn't walk through tenements and sectarian violence to reach her prince. But in this fairy tale, a concession must be made to modern realities. Dev Patel is symbolic of India here and now, fulfilling its wildest economic aspirations while being conscious of the darkest aspects of social decay and despair.

 

If we follow the metaphor to its logical conclusion, India will get the money and the girl by rising above its slums. Perhaps that's why Slumdog has created an uneasy reaction in Mumbai and the rest of India. Rising above isn't the same as solving. Many well-born educated Indians have looked westward for a long time, which is easier than looking inward. They know more about the streets of London and New York than the teeming lanes of the ghettos in their own city. This is true, of course, among rich elites everywhere, not just in south Asia. Watching Dev triumphantly cross the social line is triumphant, but it reminds you that there is a line. (Barack Obama crossed the racial line in triumph, also, but notice how much heat his Attorney General, Eric Holder, took when he suggested in less than polite terms that America needs to be more honest and courageous about the whole problem of race.)

 

Like fairy tales, symbols can pacify deep anxieties. India dreams of being a millionaire, but it lives with the anxiety that it's really a slumdog. Or that the slumdogs will one day rise up against the millionaires. You can read the tea leaves any way you like. Another uncertainty attends the film. Having been made on a shoestring, Slumdog managed to outgross any number of big-budget Hollywood films. Last week it ranked fifth in U.S. box office while its nearest Oscar rival, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, was no longer in the top ten. Brad Pitt, being a megastar, has pulled his film to $122 million, compared to Slumdog's $98 million, but is that really competitive? Ten movies on the scale of Slumdog can be made for the cost of one blockbuster that has yet to pay back its cost.

 

The whole movie industry is watching closely, and the developing world is watching back even more closely. After two decades of action flicks with move-your-lips scripts that were primitive enough to appeal to immature male psyches, here is Asia -- via the UK, admittedly -- sending back something sophisticated, poignant, and universal. It's like the ultimate retort to colonialism: the coolie and the wallah have more smarts than the sahib. Indians feel uneasy about that, too. Will the sahib turn his back and shut them out? Do south Asians have enough self-respect and stature in the world to at last forget that the sahib ever existed?

 

http://www.newrealities.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=292&Itemid=914

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We found the chip inside the new iPod headphones...but is it DRM?

 

Posted by Joel Johnson and Rob Beschizza

 

You'd never guess it was there—a tiny chip, barely a millimeter square, hidden inside the headphone module on the third-gen iPod shuffle. If you dismantle the module itself, you still won't see it: it's underneath a board containing a few simple copper traces, itself minuscule, and glued to the plastic. Even the traditional iFixit teardown gallery missed it.

We decided to take a closer look after iLounge reported that the third-generation iPod Shuffle's headphones had an "authentication chip" that Apple could use to turn something as basic as headphones into a proprietary licensing scheme.

By adding such a chip to headphones, Apple could force third-party manufacturers to pay fees to make headphones for its iPod Shuffle—after all, the device has no controls, so normal headphones are useless.

"This is, in short, a nightmare scenario for long-time iPod fans," wrote iLounge's Jeremy Horwitz. "Are we entering a world in which Apple controls and taxes literally every piece of the iPod purchase from headphones to chargers, jacking up their prices, forcing customers to re-purchase things they already own, while making only marginal improvements in their functionality?"

Even if someone invented headphones that worked without a licensed chip, that could amount to circumvention of a digital lock: Apple could shut them down using the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, provided the signal sent from the headphone buttons to the iPod itself is encrypted.

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/03/14/we-found-the-chip-in.html

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Liberty City Six Judge Refuses to Pay Private Investigator After He Speaks Out

By Bob Norman

How much does freedom of speech cost when applied to the now-infamous Liberty City terror trial?

P.I. Rory McMahon got screwed by a federal judge for speaking out against her.

For one private investigator who worked long and hard on the case, Rory McMahon, the bill came to $9,000. For making the mistake of speaking his mind, the veteran P.I. was also banned from the case.

That's the punishment levied against McMahon by U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard, who handled the two previous Liberty City terrorism trials and is presiding over the third that's playing out now at the federal courthouse in Miami. Lenard refused to authorize payment to McMahon for work he'd done while leading the investigation for the Liberty City defense and forbade him from working on the case ever again.

McMahon's crime: He had the nerve to criticize the judge during the first trial in a story of mine in New Times ("Have Terror, Will Travel," November 22, 2007).

Because federal judges have near-dictatorial power in their courtrooms, there's not a thing McMahon, a former federal probation officer, can do about it, the First Amendment be damned.

"Initially I was totally shocked," McMahon said of his reaction to Lenard's withholding him pay for 180 hours of work over the course of several weeks. "But I know that federal judges can act with impunity and there is no accountability, so I guess I shouldn't have been."

McMahon's story is a cautionary tale for anyone involved in the justice system. The disheartening lesson: Keep your mouth shut.

http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/2009-03-12/news/liberty-city-six-judge-refuses-to-pay-private-investigator-after-he-speaks-out/

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"Where Have All the Political Songs Gone?" (with apologies to Pete Seeger)

I'm spending some time this month rehearsing for an annual charity show (playing keyboards in the pit band), so my thoughts have turned back to music. Here's my question: where have all the political songs gone, and especially songs about war and peace? I'm not saying there aren't any (see below), but this genre doesn't seem to cast the same shadow it once did.

Back in the folk era (for younger readers, that means the late 50s/early-to-mid 60s), songs about war and injustice were staples of popular culture here in the United States. Think of Pete Seeger's "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" or Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," or Phil Ochs' "I Ain't Marching Anymore." At about the same time, the all-time genius of political musical satire, Tom Lehrer, was writing scathingly funny songs about a range of foreign policy topics, including nuclear proliferation ("Who's Next?"), NATO's multilateral force ("The MLF Lullaby"), liberal interventionism ("Send the Marines!") and even nuclear Armageddon ("So Long, Mom!"). And don't forget Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" (written by P.F. Sloan), an apocalyptic jeremiad that hit #1 on the Billboard charts in 1965 and contains references to nuclear war, Red China, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and congressional fecklessness.

By the late 1960s, fueled by Vietnam, songs about war were legion. Off the top of my head, there's Donovan's "Universal Soldier," the Animals' "Sky Pilot," CSNY's "Ohio," and "Wooden Ships," John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance," and "Imagine," Edwin Starr's "War," and Kenny Rogers' "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town." Even Glenn Campbell's pop hit "Galveston" (written by Jimmy Webb) has a Vietnam theme. There were a few songs on the other side too, most famously Sgt. Barry Sadler's "Ballad of the Green Berets."

My main point is that some of these songs were big hits, selling lots of copies and getting lots of airplay. And satire wasn't entirely gone either, with Country Joe and the Fish's "Feelin' Like I'm Fixin to Die Rag," and Randy Newman's brilliant "Political Science," which dates from the early 1970s but could have been written for George W. Bush.

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/03/06/where_have_all_the_political_songs_gone_with_apologies_to_pete_seeger

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Pete Seeger's 90th Birthday

Clearwater: Creating the Next Generation of Environmental Leaders
hosts a benefit concert in celebration of

Pete Seeger's 90th Birthday

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009, 7:00 p.m.
Madison Square Garden, New York, NY

American Express Pre-Sale Monday, March 23 at 9:00 a.m. EDT at americanexpress.com/entertainment
Tickets On Sale Monday, March 30 at 9:00 a.m. EDT at ticketmaster.com

Pete Seeger	Richie Havens
Bruce Springsteen	Steve Earle
Dave Matthews	Taj Mahal
Eddie Vedder	Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine)
John Mellencamp	Warren Haynes
Juanes	Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet
Ani DiFranco	Bernice Johnson Reagon
Arlo Guthrie	Dar Williams
Bela Fleck	Guy Davis
Ben Bridwell (Band of Horses)	Jay Ungar & Molly Mason
Ben Harper	Kate & Anna McGarrigle
Billy Bragg	Larry Long
Billy Nershi (String Cheese Incident)	Mike & Ruthy Merenda
Bruce Cockburn	Native American Indian Cultural Alliance
Emmylou Harris	NYC Labor Chorus
Joan Baez	Scarlett Lee Moore
Keller Williams	Silvio Rodriguez
Kris Kristofferson	Tao Rodriguez-Seeger
Ladysmith Black Mambazo	Tom Chapin
Michael Franti	Tom Paxton
Patterson Hood (Drive-By Truckers)	Tommy Sands
Preservation Hall Jazz Band with Del McCoury	Tony Trischka
Ramblin' Jack Elliott	Toshi Reagon

All proceeds to benefit the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater (www.clearwater.org),
a non-profit organization created to defend and restore the Hudson River.

Artists subject to change. Ticket purchase is not tax-deductible.

http://www.seeger90.com/

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DOJ to end raids on medical marijuana facilities not violating state law: Holder

by Matt Glenn

[JURIST] The US Department of Justice (DOJ) [official website] will no longer prosecute owners of medical marijuana facilities that do not violate state law, Attorney General Eric Holder [official profile] said Wednesday. Although the use of medical marijuana violates federal law, thirteen states have legalized its use. Holder warned, however, that the federal government would continue to prosecute dispensers that violate state law [AP report], including dispensers that are fronts for drug dealers. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) [official website] opposed Holder's decision [AP report], arguing that marijuana leads to harder drugs. Holder did not comment on whether the DOJ would continue to prosecute medical marijuana cases already underway. Also Wednesday, a bill legalizing medical marijuana in New Hampshire survived a committee vote [Union Leader report] in the state House of Representatives [official website]. The house will vote on the bill next week.

Under the Bush administration, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) [official website] routinely raided medical marijuana distributors because they violate federal law. The DEA raided medical marijuana facilities as recently as February [Washington Times report] to the disappointment of President Barack Obama, who, during his campaign, pledged to end raids [Boston Globe report].

 

http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2009/03/doj-to-end-raids-on-medical-marijuana.php

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Portraits of US Presidents' mistresses

             

             

             

             

http://www.anniekevans.com/All%20the%20Presidents%27%20Girls%20main.htm

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Victims of class warfare

by Garrison Keillor

As a member of the board of directors of the American International Group, I am pained by the hailstorm of fecal matter raining on our company for the $450 million in bonuses we are paying out to the traders in credit derivatives after receiving billions from the U.S. Treasury to rescue us from going over the cliff that the derivative traders were driving us toward.

I was in Greece when the storm hit and got a call from Marie, my assistant, saying, "We're sending the jet," and came home to find a stack of anonymous letters in the solarium, saying, "Bonuses? To the jerks who totaled a corporation? Where did this idea of rewarding failure come from? Are you living in a fairy tale in which wealth is generated by following owls into underground caverns?"

Many of these missives were written with black felt-tip pens in big block letters and words snipped out of magazines, words such as "fraud" and "skunks," "San Quentin," "die in hell" and "eat glass shards," and a picture of a naked man chained to a rock and a bird pecking out his liver.

To cancel bonuses because of a bad year is like refusing to water the greens just because a golfer has hit into the rough. It would be counterproductive.

And in the end, AIG is not about credit default swaps or derivatives. It is about people.

People like Megan, who suffered a painful case of shingles after a $4 billion default swap dropped to $234.15 and whose mission is to save the endangered grommet. That's where her bonus is going, to create a grommet habitat in Vermont.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped0318keillormar18,0,5921581.column

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The Case Against Indexing

(I Don't Buy It) by Andrew Tobias

SMALL BUSINESS BOOST

The way to help small businesses is NOT to give them tax cuts – what good's a tax cut when you're making no profit to be taxed ON?  I refer you back to my five questions on tax cuts. 

 

But yesterday the Obama Administration did three things concrete things that WILL help small business: 

 

It waived the fees small businesses have to pay to take out SBA loans.

 

It raised the Federal guarantee on such loans from 75% and 85% to 90%, which will encourage more lending (yet still leave the lender on the hook for significant scratch).

 

It set aside $15 billion of TARP money to buy securitized SBA loans, until private investors regain their appetite, so that the banks can sell them and, with the proceeds, make new small business loans.

 

That money will be ready to start buying 7A loan securitizations by the end of this month – any minute now – and 504 loan securitizations by mid-May.

 

To take just one concrete example of how constructive this is:  I have an investment in a private company that has profitable orders it can't fill.  It lacks the working capital to pay suppliers, shippers, and so on.  It may have to close and lay everyone off.  But with an SBA loan, it would be able to keep people employed filling the orders, remain in business, and continue to grow.

 

Now, because of the Administration's swift action, it has a better chance of getting an SBA loan.

 

Compare that with telling the owners of this company that they will get a tax break on their nonexistent profits.  I think the Obama approach makes more sense.

http://www.andrewtobias.com/newcolumns/090317.html

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Stimulus/recovery

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A Mom Lets Her Son Walk to Soccer…And The Police Come Calling

 

Dear Readers: The following is an exchange I had earlier this week with a mom who wrote to this blog. It shows how those of us who trust our own eyes, and guts, and neighborhood, and children can get beaten down…and rise up again.

A WOMAN NAMED LORI WROTE: I went searching for your story after an experience last night. My 10-year-old son wanted the chance to walk from our house to soccer practice behind an elementary school about 1/3 mile from our house. He had walked in our neighborhood a number of times with the family and we have driven the route to practice who knows how many times. It was broad daylight - 5:00 pm. I had to be at the field myself 15 minutes after practice started, so I gave him my cell phone and told him I would be there to check that he made it and sent him off. He got 3 blocks and a police car intercepted him. The police came to my house — after I had left — and spoke with my younger children (who were home with Grandma). They then found me at the soccer field and proceeded to tell me how I could be charged with child endangerment. They said they had gotten "hundreds" of calls to 911 about him walking. Now, I know bad things can happen and I wasn't flippant about letting him go and not checking up, but come on. I live in a small town in Mississippi. To be perfectly honest, I'm much more concerned about letting him attend a birthday party sleepover next Friday, but I'm guessing the police wouldn't be at my house if I chose to let him go (which I probably won't). 

I WROTE BACK: Incredible! It's like the Salem Witch trial era, when people were hallucinating witchcraft. Today we hallucinate horrific danger in the safest of settings. I am so sorry you – and he – went through this!

LORI WROTE: I appreciate you responding. I was more than a little upset yesterday and second-guessing my actions. I tend to actually be more of a hovering parent, so even though I was nervous about my son going on his own yesterday I really didn't think it was a bad decision. I really resented the police officer trying to lecture me about how the streets aren't safe. Rather than give in to the hysteria or naively ignore the danger, I think I'm going to go down to the police office and ask to see detailed statistics about what happens on our streets in the afternoon hours. I'd like to base my decision on facts rather than hysteria. 'Course, I don't quite know what to do about the "hundreds" of people who called 911 when they saw him on the street. I can't imagine that many people even saw him in 3 blocks in a mostly residential neighborhood. But, if they were watching out for him, that just makes me feel like he was that much safer.

I WROTE encouraging  her to go get those statistics and keep me posted. She did!

LORI WROTE: Guess what. I just got an apology from the Chief of Police. I emailed him this afternoon to ask for stats and explain what happened. He called me almost immediately, assured me that I lived in a safe neighborhood, and apologized for the officer's conduct. He asked if I really wanted the stats, or if I just wanted to know that I was right. I told him that knowing that I was right was enough for me. I still don't know what I can do about the people who call 911 because they see my son on the street alone, but at least I don't feel like a naïve mother anymore. And, I like our chief of police even more J. He promised to handle this himself with the officer.

http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/a-mom-lets-her-son-walk-to-soccerand-the-police-come-calling/

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New word of the day: testilying

Testilying

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Testilying is U. S. police slang for the practice of giving false testimony against a defendant in a criminal trial, typically for the purpose of "making a stronger case" against someone they believe to be guilty, although it may also be for the purpose of framing an innocent defendant.

The word and its meaning have been publicized by defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, notably in a 1994 New York Times article, "Accomplices to Perjury," in which he said:

As I read about the disbelief expressed by some prosecutors... I thought of Claude Rains's classic response, in Casablanca on being told there was gambling in Rick's place: "I'm shocked—shocked." For anyone who has practiced criminal law in the state or Federal courts, the disclosures about rampant police perjury cannot possibly come as a surprise. "Testilying"—as the police call it—has long been an open secret among prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges.^[1]

There seems to be little doubt that the practice occurs, is not limited to any region of the country, and that "testilying" is a common name for it. A 2003 Boston Globe editorial noted:

In the early 1990s, the Mollen Commission peeled away layers of falsehood in the New York City Police Department, including false statements on warrant applications, creation of confidential informants out of whole cloth, and lies told to establish probable cause for stopping and searching vehicles. So-called "testilying," however, is not limited to any one area or police department. The problem has become so acute that juries nationwide routinely express skepticism about law enforcement testimony, such as drugs found "in plain view."

The LAPD is said to call the practice "joining the liars' club." In a 1996 article in the Los Angeles Times, "Has the Drug War Created an Officer Liars' Club?," Joseph D. McNamara, then chief of police of San Jose, said "Not many people took defense attorney Alan M. Dershowitz seriously when he charged that Los Angeles cops are taught to lie at the birth of their careers at the Police Academy. But as someone who spent 35 years wearing a police uniform, I've come to believe that hundreds of thousands of law-enforcement officers commit felony perjury every year testifying about drug arrests." He noted that "Within the last few years, police departments in Los Angeles, Boston, New Orleans, San Francisco, Denver, New York and in other large cities have suffered scandals involving police personnel lying under oath about drug evidence."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testilying

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The SkinFlints

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Get excited and make things

http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackbeltjones/3365682994/

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Final goodbye from the Seattle P-I

Thank you for making us who we were

By DAVID MCCUMBER
P-I MANAGING EDITOR

Goodbye, Seattle.

Thanks for everything.

We probably didn't tell you enough how proud we were to be part of you.

We love your saw-toothed Klondiked Boeing-proud past. It's our past, too.

We even love your nervous overcaffeinated undercapitalized Sonics-free present.

And we're sure you'll still be pretty fetching in the future as a bored-tunnel light-railed one-paper joint (or paper-free zone, as the regrettable case may be).

We love your Koolhaas library and your defiant little Edith Macefield house. We love your ratty Pike Place Market and rattier Pioneer Square, complete with the ersatz totem pole standing in for the real one the P-I-backed drunken expedition stole from the Tlingits in 1899 (not our finest move).

Down here on Elliott, we love it when Rainier rolls into view on mystical ball bearings, and we love the way our old globe looks when the winter sun sets behind it about 4 p.m. and lights up the bay with more fire than Hempfest.

We love the Blue Angels and the hydros and the Duwamish and Northwest Harvest and Dave Niehaus and Elliott Bay Books and Tom Douglas' coconut cream pie. We love guys named Warren (Moon and Magnuson), and Jimi Hendrix, and walking around Green Lake and along Alki and Golden Gardens and through the arboretum. We love the Suzzallo and Salumi and the Burke-Gilman and the Fremont Troll and the best women's crew in the world. We love Benaroya Hall, and also the Croc and the Showbox and the Tractor. We love Norwegians, but most of us fear lutefisk. We love taking ferries, and not using umbrellas, and eating lunch at Bakeman's and the Pecos Pit and the Shanty.

All of which is to say, we love you.

We're overwhelmingly grateful to you for supporting us for 146 years -- for buying us on the street, for inviting us into your homes, for placing ads with us, for telling us what you think and helping us be better. And, over the last two months, for telling us how much you'll miss us.

And we're damned sorry we won't be here in print to cover you. When our kids and your kids make this place even better than it is now. When the Mariners win the World Series. When the city and the county and the state step up to their responsibilities to give our youths better schools and alternatives to shooting each other in the streets, to clean up both traffic and Puget Sound, to actually plow snow, to hold cops accountable, to make this a better place to do business and buy a home.

We won't be here to nudge you along in that old traditional newspaper way, so you're going to have to figure all that out, and more, without us.

It's been a hell of a ride, from Skid Road to the SLUT, from the Great Fire to the Kindle, the first edition to the last deadline in a gut-punched newsroom, and we never wanted to see it end.

Remember: We'll continue the P-I bloodline online with seattlepi.com.

Come see us in the pixels.

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/403835_mccumberxx.html

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Obama's Critical Early Test: Corporate Arrogance

by Dan Gillmor

 

This is Obama's air-traffic controllers opportunity.

In 1981, not long after taking office, President Reagan faced a strike by the nation's air-traffic controllers. He fired them, broke the union and set in motion a generation of anti-labor policies that were a tenet of Republican orthodoxy. Whether those policies were ultimately more positive or negative is still a topic of political and economic debate, (I think the aggregate outcome was damaging) but Reagan's decisive action made a huge difference that reverberated through his presidency and several more.

Today, we face corporate arrogance that is almost transcendent and vastly more damaging than any of organized labor's excesses. Wall Street's barons, and the people who have been running and allegedly governing many of the nation's biggest companies, have raised a collective middle finger to America even as they've forced us to bail out the enterprises they've run into the ground. When commentators fret about corporate leaders' tone-deafness, they are implying that the executives simply don't get it. Oh yes they do.

In coming to Washington for bailouts, they said: "This is a stick-up. Give us the money or we'll kill the economy."

In creating their disgusting compensation schemes, they said: "Pay us as usual, not for performance but because this is our just due as masters of the universe. And because we deserve anything we can loot from whoever has the money, whether it's shareholders, customers, taxpayers or anyone else."

The puzzle of the past week is not that Americans are furious. Only an idiot (or a Wall Street banker) wouldn't be angry upon learning of the unconscionable "bonuses" renegade ward-of-the-taxpayers AIG wants to pay to its employees -- including well over $100 million to people in the same unit that completely screwed the company and then threatened to take down the entire global economy if we refused to subsidize (so far) to the tune of $170 billiion.

No, the mystery is why this outrage hasn't come to the surface sooner. And why it's not more dangerous.

Why, for example, didn't Americans take to the streets earlier this year when we found out that Merrill Lynch and its conniving buyer, Bank of America, had paid almost $5 billion in bonuses -- a number that makes the AIG bonus money seem small -- after taking tens of billions from taxpayers? Why didn't we scream bloody murder when the Bush administration flatly refused to disclose where the hundreds of billions in bailout money was going in any kind of detail?

One reason, perhaps, is that we are a soft and lazy and uncurious people. We are quick to being pissed off at relatively small things -- typically minor but sensationalized stuff that tabloid TV news programs (i.e. CNN, MSNBC and Fox and local stations) decide to make into issues -- but slow to grasp the significance of the really big and crucial stuff until it's so powerfully in our faces that we can't avoid it any longer.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/03/18/obamas-critical-earl.html

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U.S. Government celebrates one millionth member of terrorist watch list

Posted by Sisyphus

WASHINGTON – The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center celebrated a major milestone last week when the nation's terrorist watch list reached one million members.

To mark the event, the FBI and the ODNI are planning celebrations and media events throughout the remainder of the year, including commemorative memorabilia, such as stationery, coffee cups and apparel, and highly visible signage at airports and border crossings that will center around the program's new tagline: The U.S. Terrorist Watch List: One Million Strong … and Growing.

Featured heavily in the promotion will be Saif Abu Abd al-Shibh al-Masry bin al-Ouda, who has been honored by the agencies with official recognition as the watch list's one millionth member.

The nation's terrorist watch list boasts a healthy CAGR of 38.4% since May 2005

"Some of the best and brightest brands in the world have recently commemorated their millionth customer – from Singapore Airlines to Verizon," noted Throaty Midge, a non-managing director of information for ODNI's civil liberties and customer retention unit. "We thought, 'Why not us?' It's a great way to personalize the government's anti-terrorist efforts – to put a warmer, human face on them."

Abu Abd al-Shibh al-Masry bin al-Ouda, a tuk tuk cabbie in Peshawar, Pakistan, said through an interpreter that he was unaware of how he gained admission to the list, but was happy to accept the agencies' invitation to participate in the marketing blitz. As part of the agreement, he will undergo cosmetic beautification and a photo shoot and receive a transferrable "Get out of Gitmo Free" card, which he says he plans to auction on EBay.

http://wineandexcrement.com/us-government-celebrates-one-millionth-member-of-terrorist-watch-list/981/

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Gay Marriage Ban Introduced in Minnesota to Prevent 'End of the World'

By Julie Bolcer

The Minnesota Family Council said on Tuesday that it would introduce a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, civil unions and domestic partnerships in Minnesota within the next few days. The group made the announcement at a press conference, accompanied by religious leaders from all major faiths who said that gay marriage would trigger the end of the world.

"If everyone is a gay, this world will cease to exist in 10 years," said Ikram ul-Huq, the imam and religious director of the Muslim Community Center of Bloomington, according to the The Minnesota Independent.

http://www.advocate.com/news_detail_ektid75605.asp

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