Freed

Shaquanda Cotton, the Texas teen who was sentenced to excessive time in jail for a misdemeanor, has been freed.

She became the first juvenile inmate ordered freed by Jay Kimbrough, whom Gov. Rick Perry tapped Thursday to lead the troubled Texas Youth Commission out of an abuse and mismanagement scandal. Kimbrough told lawmakers Friday that the order had been given.

"He made a determination that she served her time and it was time to let that child out," said Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas.

Stunning

Google? Corrupt?

Google Maps has replaced satellite photos of New Orleans with pre-Katrina maps. Yes, if you wish to look at New Orleans through Google Maps, you get to see a time warp instead of the real New Orleans.

Who gave the orders. And why?

[crosspost to the Medley]

Barbarians

A young girl in Texas is serving a seven year sentence for shoving a hall monitor? That is barely a misdemeanor!

Visit Shaquanda's web site and let the governor of Texas know that people are paying attention to injustice.

MadTV - iRack

Someone sent me the link to this, and y'all should get to share.

****************

Note -- the copy I had installed was pulled. Click link for another.

Grasping at Straws

Oh, Bush is such a fatuous lout. Today's headline has him claiming that the vote to fund the war, define a pullout, and give aid to New Orleans was "wasting taxpayer money".

Sorry, but the only waste of taxpayer money going on right now is the part that pays for an administration that is raping the Constitution and playing at politics with the lives of both active duty and wounded members of the armed forces.

It's Their Own Fault

Good ol' McDonald's -- always bent out of shape because the truth pinches. Our arch corporation is going to try to get the definition of "McJob" changed so it does not have negative connotations.

The word first cropped up two decades ago in the Washington Post, according to the dictionary. But executives at Oak Brook, Ill.-based McDonald's say the definition is demeaning to its workers and say they'll ask dictionary editors to amend the definition.

Last time they tried to get it changed, Merriam-Webster gave them a thumbs-down:

In 2003, editors at the Merriam-Webster dictionary declined to remove or change their definition of "McJob" after McDonald's balked at its inclusion in the book's 11th edition. Instead, the Springfield, Mass. publisher said the word was accurate and appropriate.

I am pretty sure the Oxford English Dictionary will be able to resist whatever campaign McDonald's mounts.

A representative from the New York office of Oxford University Press, which publishes the Oxford dictionary, said nobody was immediately available to comment.

They were probably all in the back room rolling on the floor and laughing.

Gonzales

On the day that Gonzales declared that there was no guarantee of habeas corpus in the Constitution, he may as well have resigned.

He is ignorant. He is unfit to be Attorney General. He doesn't know the Constitution well enough to graduate from high school. He should be removed from office for that, if for nothing else.

Have You Noticed

that CNN is trying to ignore anti-war protests out of existence?

CNN is touting stranded airline passengers and recalled dog and cat food. Their coverage has become so blatantly twisted that I deleted them from my toolbar and replaced them with competitors. It is pretty obvious that they are no longer a news organization.

Guinea Pigs

ABC News has a story today whose teaser reads "Should we experiment on kids?"

Of course the story reports a storm of criticism. It is not just the suggestion of such experimentation that is "showboating", but the sensationalism of "experimenting" on children.

Let's face it -- either children try things under experimental conditions, or they are the victims of uncontrolled experiments once a drug or technique reaches the marketplace. Any drug that has a limited test population is a time bomb for other groups once it reaches the general population. Remember thalidomide? Pregnant women are usually kept far away from being part of an experimental population, and so there was no hint that Thalidomide would cause widespread, consistent fetal damage. Some painkillers work better on men than on women. Drugs behave in ways that a limited test population fails to reveal.

So either there will be experiments that include children, or there will be later disasters that include children. The ethics of this choice are a bit more complicated than the debaters suggest.

Yeah, Right

The Rude One has posted a typical Bush picture -- Bush is hugging a Guatemalan woman in that paternalistic kabuki he performs all over the world.

What cracked me up was that the women in the background look thoroughly disgusted.

Yessss!

Chain of Collapse

As house prices collapse, one of the things that will go down with the prices and the value is the amount of tax that can be assessed. Cities get a lot more taxes from a house valued at 250K than they do from one valued at 100K, and cities are going to be awfully reluctant to lower their assessments as the fair market price on properties shrinks.

I once sold a house for 41.5 K. The city had just assessed it for 45K, but very frankly it would not have sold with that high a price (listen to me laugh uproariously in retrospect -- it is likely over 100K by now!). I recommended that the people who bought it should go to the city and point out that they had paid a fair price, and that the assessment should go down.

I wonder if they did that. Moreover, I wonder if house buyers will have the guts to do that as prices start falling drastically.

A Fox Among the Fowl

... or is that Foul?

The woman who was running an escort and sex service has shared her client list with a news outlet.

"I have decided to hand over all phone records, logs and invoices (including those presently unknown to the government) to what I believe to be one of the most reputable and respected investigative news organizations in the country, to assist me with my needs," Deborah Jeane Palfrey, 50, wrote in an e-mail to WTOP Radio.

She did not identify the news organization or give details of the arrangement. Palfrey's civil attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, would not say whether his client was getting paid, or if she was simply getting investigative assistance with uncovering the names associated with the phone numbers.

Palfrey ran an upscale escort service in the Washington area from her Vallejo, California home for 13 years, until August 2006. Her assets were frozen in October after an Internal Revenue Service investigation, and she pleaded not guilty Friday to federal racketeering charges in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia.

That is a wonderful response to seeing her assets frozen. Just goes to show that not all her assets were in a nice bank somewhere. Personally, I don't care what parties her clients belong to as long as they are not hypocritically trying to make laws for the rest of us to follow while they do whatever they are forbidding to others. If her client list has notes on preferences, the fallout could be amazing.

Can We Stop Now?

Can we stop providing Halliburton with a perpetually filling trough of no-bid fodder when it moves to Dubai?

Can we cease to give those swine tax breaks? Tax dollars? Military contracts?

Pseudo Problem

Oh dear me! One might have to perform a *manual* operation! This story about your computer having a problem with time is the dumbest thing I have read in a long time.

Click on the time display and correct it. Ohmygod! How outrageous!

Even larger computers can have their times reset manually. It is not as if any machine keeps perfect time -- power outages, voltage surges, and drift make electronic clocks inaccurate over the long haul anyway. Talk about your fake problems.

War With Iran a Bad Idea

Cast your mind back to the day when the Berlin Wall came down. For quite awhile after that it seemed we had jumped tracks to an alternate universe, one where the threat of war, both nuclear and conventional, had backed off drastically. It was an interesting feeling after the Cold War years. And then -- and then came the Bushes. The current Bush has us back to the brink of catastrophe with his lust to meddle in the Middle East. He creates enemies out of people who do not have the ability to actually invade the US. He really *has* done his best to take Iraq's oil. He is making the citizens of this country into Good Germans because it is difficult to shout loudly enough. Still, we need to try.

Via Avedon Carol at The Sideshow, I went to Arthur Silber's Building an Effective Resistance.

Arthur outlines a plan for trying to prevent the Bush buildup to an attack on Iran. It will be interesting to see if any members of Congress start to state out loud and up front that an attack would be unwarranted and criminal. I am not sure any of them are that courageous.

My own Senators sold their souls so long ago that calling them would be as useful as petitioning Satan for an act of mercy. If your Senators are better than mine, you can implement Arthur's plan of reminding them daily at no cost. The Senate switchboard number is 1-866-808-0065 -- just ask for your senator when they answer. Oh, and give an extra call each day to Clinton, Obama, Reid and Steney Hoyer. Extra responsibility falls on those who want national office or leadership positions -- these people should be right up front in trying to repeal both Authorization for the Use of Military Force resolutions, the one passed immediately after 9/11 and the one on Iraq.

They should be reminded every day that resisting war with Iran is the right way to start opposing the Bush administration's criminal acts.

Frankenfoods

In response to a post by Cookie Jill at skippy's blog, I commented as follows:

A sane person would have reservations about eating plants modified to kill pests.

People who do plant modification research are such sloppy crappers about isolating their experimental stocks. Wonder if modified plants are killing the bees?

That question is not as idle as it looks at first. A large percentage of the corn crop in the US has been contaminated by strains modified to repel borer worms. Meddlesome Agra has let many experiments out, and the corn crop is not the first to become tainted by modified strains. Sure -- take a crop that is pollinated by the wind and put the modified plants outdoors. What happens? Instant transmission of pollen by the wind. Sometimes you have to wonder about the intelligence of the people who are working with plants. They sometimes act as if the plants are their colleagues and intellectual equals.

Pollen from modified corn has been implicated in damaging populations of Monarch butterflies. Monarchs feed on milkweed plants, but pollen blown from corn may be clinging to milkweed plants and killing the butterflies. And what do bees thrive on? Pollen. And do you suppose that other blossoms are not being contaminated by modified pollen?

Right.

All My Grinching

Oh, I am indeed being a Grinch today. I posted my economic maunderings over at the Medley.

Yes, it's titled "Good Fortune", but only because my personal 401(k) did not suffer in the latest market slide. For awhile, I had investments that slid with the market, and a couple of years ago it wiped out several thousand dollars of perfectly good money. I started to refine my choices, and after I moved money out to an IRA after the layoff, I finally closed down the last of the marginal choices.

All the big boys are moving a chunk of the principal to foreign investments. Gates moved a billion to China so he will continue to be a billionaire no matter what.

Unless the Congress starts to put taxes back to pay for what we owe, things are going to get worse. Lots worse.

Oh

Today is Blogaversary number three. I can hardly believe I have been doing this that long. I started before the 2004 election. There has rarely been a shortage of infuriating or amazing things going on.

It Looked Odd

Yesterday I took someone to a WalMart in the suburbs. It was a very odd place. Almost all the people working there were over 70, and some looked as if they were over 80.

It looked like WalMart had gone into the senior day-care business and then put their charges to work as an occupational activity. Really.

Shame on Associated Press

Associated Press has just corrupted a label that had a very specific meaning.

A "dirty bomb" has always been one that spread radioactive materials.

Today, Associated Press has used the phrase to refer to conventional explosives set under trucks of chlorine. Attempting to associate nuclear materials spread with bombing chemical storage is a degradation of terminology. This happened earlier when almost anything that blew up was conflated with "weapons of mass destruction", when the actual weapons were often "weapons of middlin' harmfulness" instead.

Next thing you know, Iran will be accused of using "dirty bombs", and George will think that is a reason to attack them. The minds of people are being corrupted by slithery terminology and gross exaggeration. Thanks, Associated Press, thanks a lot. With reporters like yours, who needs additional administration propaganda?

The Great Circle

Follow the logic:

Bush invaded Iraq on intelligence cooked to his taste to justify invading Iraq. And according to No More Mr. Nice Blog, the New York Post published a push poll validating the stand of "We are at war so we should stand behind the president."

Um. If he invades Iran on cooked grounds -- nay, on any grounds but a direct attack on the US with armed forces -- will those same nitwits declare that we should stand behind him? I suppose on that ground they would have stood behind the leader who invaded Poland, too. Those who did so were ultimately tried as war criminals, and shunned as monsters.

Someday, our own monsters must be held accountable. Vive la Resistance!

____
edited for clarity

I Tell Ya ...

It must be real fun to be a CNN web editor. It's the weekend, and their breaking news included the story that Britney Spears shaved her head. The only thing missing was the important fact that the lack of curtains now matches the lack of a rug[*].

And actually, she looks pretty good without that trashy hair. Makes her eyes look a lot bigger.

And that story about her being in rehab for all of a day -- hey, her rehab stint was almost as long as her first marriage! Doesn't she get a break for that? How can you expect someone to commit more time for rehab than for that most holy of unions, so holy and privileged that denying the status to gay people is the most important thing in some people's lives. Sheesh!

Watching Their Own Tails

Did you know that Bush's ranch is off the electrical grid entirely, and self-contained?

For what it's worth, Bush's Crawford ranch is completely off-the-grid and equipped with the latest in energy saving and renewable power systems. It has been described as an "environmentalist's dream home." The fact a man as steeped in the petroleum industry as Bush would own such a home should tell you something.

On a similar note, Dick Cheney's personal investments indicate he (or more accurately, whoever handles his money) is expecting economic collapse.

Neither Bush or Cheney (or really, any administration) can be honest with the American people about the severity of what we're facing. If they were honest with the country, half the nation would refuse to believe them while the other half would likely panic.

So if he starts a war with Iran and does critical damage to them, he can just go hide in Crawford, snug and power-fat while everyone else can just go ....

Do you like this picture? Whether or not you like this picture, do you get this picture?

I Am Spartacus

Yes. Make it known that standing up for your own is one of the most important things you can do.

[via]

Today

Today, honest, I started looking at three-wheeled adult tricycles. If Bush attacks Iraq, I am going to buy one immediately -- because if he does that it will be the beginning of the end. This web post at Pygalgia says that the administration would be attacking to steal Iran's oil, but I don't think that would be a likely outcome. It is not easy to steal oil -- pipelines are way too amenable to sabotage. The supply line is way too long. We don't even *buy* oil from Iran -- and I doubt their customers would sit quietly by and permit such a theft.

Of course, if Bush does attack them, he should definitely be removed from office forthwith -- but I think he should have been removed for crimes quite awhile back. And if he does attack, it is not going to be with a ground incursion designed to maintain the infrastructure -- it's going to be with bombs.

Oh crap. Those of you who voted for these warmongers have much to answer for.

Bringing Polygamy Back

The new Defense of Marriage proposal has some interesting wrinkles that aren't discussed. One provision is that having a child is equal to getting married.

If a man gets two women pregnant, would he be legally married to both under this proposal? And someone like Anna Nicole Smith, who has three men fighting over the paternity of her child -- if she had three children by three men, would she be married to all of them?

Yes, it is a measure intended to take discrimination in marriage to absurd lengths -- one to make people understand that procreation is not the only basis for marriage no matter what some religions like to preach. But it has far more entertaining implications than its authors intended.

Reasonable Complaint

On a Live Journal I read, a woman complained that headline news this last week has been all about drawing women as crazy and as bimbos, but it is very hard to find any news about how the Scooter Libby trial is going.

Actually, unless you read web logs, finding Scooter's trial is almost impossible. More and more it looks like the major news outlets are leaving the real reporting to the web logs they so despise, and putting on a freak show for ratings goodness. Mothers giving guns to children. Men putting children out to freeze. Ambulances dumping hospital patients on skid row. Reading the news is like wading in sewage.

And the politics of pretend scandals! Someone listed Obama/madrassa, Pelosi/large jets, Hillary/evil men and Edwards/mouthy blogers as all the recent attempts to show Democrats in a bad light, with nary a Republican smear. Of course, when Republicans do fall, the scandals are likely to be real and ugly -- accosting young boys or child pornography -- so maybe it is just as well we haven't heard about any recent activity.

Health Care for Veterans

The one thing John Edwards would make sure of is that veterans got the health care they need. A current tragedy is that of the young man, Jonathan Schultze, who pleaded with the VA for help, and who reported he was feeling suicidal, and who was dismissed without receiving an evaluation and at least temporary meds ... and who then killed himself.

It's a tragedy, and not even as *isolated* tragedy. With universal health care, this young man would not have had to go begging to the VA -- he could have sought care almost anywhere.

John Edwards proposes that the US institute universal health care. At least part of the money could come from the funds that Defense uses to fund dependent health care for service members whose families stay in the US when they are overseas. People married to service members would just have -- health care, like all other citizens. And think of it -- if a good chunk we spend is not paying insurance companies to tell us what we can't do, I suspect that money for the care itself will be more available than some opponents think.

Another post

up at Mockingbird's Medley.

Short, sung in five sharps.

Unwarranted Hysteria

Boston officials are not quite sane. Their response to the advertising stunt showing a lighted figure on a piece of board was nothing short of hysterical -- and they have the temerity to claim that the TV network is responsible for their reactions, and to claim that an apology is insufficient. They claim the people who set out these ads caused "harm" -- when the actual harm was caused by Boston officials. Not only is an apology sufficient, to me it's actually excessive. The people who should be apologizing are all these cowering city stuffed shirts.

Look, in Seattle city workers tossed the same ads in the trash when they found them. In Boston the police actually blew up one of the offending things before deciding that they were not harmful.

It's a really sad day when Seattle street crews are more sensible and intelligent than the law enforcement and security officials of Boston.