As I understand it, Obama and I have a lot in common: we both spent twenty years of our lives sleeping through church.

This is amusing (from Reason Magazine):

Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrig­erator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry and he had suf­ficient funds in the past year to meet his family's essential needs. While this individual's life is not opulent, it is equally far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, liberal activists, and politicians.

Of course, the living conditions of the average poor American should not be taken as representing all the poor. There is actually a wide range in living conditions among the poor. For example, a third of poor households have both cellular and landline telephones. A third also have telephone answering machines. At the other extreme, however, approxi­mately one-tenth have no phone at all [i.e. about 1% of the population - dpj]. Similarly, while the majority of poor households do not expe­rience significant material problems, roughly 30 percent [i.e. about 4% - dpj] do experience at least one problem such as overcrowding, temporary hunger, or difficulty get­ting medical care.

And from the original source:

The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)

... most poor children today are, in fact, supernour­ished and grow up to be, on average, one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II.

This would be a phenomenal time for the US to withdraw it's 37,000 troops from Korea, save a few bucks and incidentally let South Korea grow the fuck up a little. Yahoo News:

Taliban militants agreed Tuesday to release 19 South Korean church volunteers held hostage for six weeks after Seoul reaffirmed a pledge to withdraw its troops by year's end and prevent Christian missionaries from working in Afghanistan.

CBC:

A vegan couple in Atlanta have been sentenced to life in prison for the death of their malnourished six-week-old boy, who was fed a diet largely consisting of soy milk and apple juice.

Superior Court Judge L.A. McConnell imposed the automatic life sentences Tuesday on 27-year-old Jade Sanders and 31-year-old Lamont Thomas.

Their son, Crown Shakur, weighed only 3½ pounds when he died of starvation on April 25, 2004.

Sanders and Thomas were convicted on May 2 of charges of murder and cruelty to children.

Defence lawyers said the first-time parents did the best they could while adhering to the lifestyle of vegans, who typically don't consume or use any animal products.

Savage retards.

Barack Obama (via Kathy and a cast of thousands):

In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died—an entire town destroyed," the Democratic presidential candidate said in a speech to 500 people packed into a sweltering Richmond art studio for a fundraiser.

But Boosh is still #1 Hitler!

FIRE's Torch reports:

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Stacy Snyder, a 27-year-old student at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, was denied her education degree (and the accompanying teaching certificate) after student-teacher advisors and university officials discovered an “unprofessional” picture of the degree candidate on her MySpace page. The picture, which portrays Snyder drinking from a plastic “Mr. Goodbar” cup and wearing a pirate hat at a 2005 Halloween party, is accompanied by the caption “Drunken Pirate.” Despite the fact that (a) Snyder was of legal drinking age at the time of the picture; (b) the picture was posted on an outside, non-university website; and (c) the drinking captured in the picture happened in a private, non-university setting, Millersville officials decided that the picture alone was enough to cost Snyder her degree and teaching certificate, despite the fact that Snyder was on the dean’s list and received positive evaluations for her final student/teacher evaluation in every area except for “professionalism.” The school instead awarded Snyder a degree in English.

In response, Snyder has sued, requesting relief in the form of her education degree and $75,000 dollars in compensatory damages.

The Lancaster Intelligencer Journal’s coverage of the incident sheds yet more light on the disturbing denial. According to her lawsuit, Snyder's student-teacher advisors at Conestoga Valley High School (where Snyder was fulfilling her student-teaching requirements) were the first to discover the photo, and confronted Snyder about it, accusing her of “incompetence” and telling her that “she should have been removed from her student-teaching position months ago.” In turn, the dean of Millersville’s School of Education, Jane S. Bray, had a meeting with Snyder, accusing her of “promoting underage drinking” and stripping Snyder of her education degree. Instead of pursuing a career in teaching, Snyder, a mother of two, now works as a nanny.

Barring any as-of-yet unknown revelations about her student-teaching conduct and her coursework, the conduct of Snyder’s student-teacher advisors and the Millersville administrators is outrageous. Snyder should be awarded her degree immediately. Online glimpses of her private life, insofar as they did not portray any illegal activity whatsoever, should in no way bar her from receiving her duly-earned degree. Since when are teachers required to forego any semblance of an adult social life? Since when did a student’s normal, non-criminal private life outside of the classroom become suitable grounds for evaluation, and even the denial of a degree?

Noami Wolf gives her 10 easy steps to a Fascist America, currently being implemented by the Bush Junta. This is even too stupid for Boing Boing's Mark Frauenfelder. One could pointlessly "fisk" the article, but let me argue from a meta point of view: if America was actually becoming fascist, Wolf and her pals would either shut up and cower or, more likely, enthusiastically join up, start sig-heiling and kicking the shit out of people who looked at them sidewise, just like large numbers of "socialists" and "communists" did once they saw which way the wind was blowing in Nazi Germany. And to further belabor the point, if you turned on the TV and saw a mob of masked thugs kicking the shit out of someone, would you take a bet that they're right-wing Bush partisans?

Updates:

• Right Wing News does the point by point
• Kathy asks "why aren't you a lampshade?"

Durham-in-Wonderland:

Who does [New York Time's public editor Byron] Calame think he’s fooling? Imagine the following scenario: three African-American college students are charged with a crime for which almost no evidence exists. One has an air-tight, public, unimpeachable alibi. Their accuser is a white woman with a criminal record and major psychological problems. They are prosecuted by a race-baiting district attorney who violates myriad procedures while seizing upon the case amidst an election campaign in a racially divided county.

Does anyone believe that the Times would have covered the story outlined above with articles that bent over backwards to give the district attorney the benefit of the doubt, played down questions about his motivations, and regularly concluded with “shout-outs” regarding the accuser’s willingness to hang tough—coupled with sports columnists who compared the accused students to gangsters and drug dealers?

How will they differentiate between the loners and the dangerous crazies. Poorly, ignorantly and stupidly it looks like. Because there's a hell of a lot more of the first, and sorry they don't fit in the way you like but they are entitled to a life outside of popularity.

Mark Steyn notes:

Perhaps the best sign is the shifting media narrative. A few weeks back, yours truly and a couple of other skeptics were dismissed by The Toronto Star’s David Olive as “Black retainers”. But, as Chris Selley noted the other day, it’s not just Steyn and Peter Worthington “calling this thing for the defence any more”. Fleet Street seems to be so stunned by the prospect of a Black acquittal that they’ve more or less abandoned all coverage of the trial. But, across the water in Dublin, The Irish Independent’s Ruth Dudley Edwards says: “I can’t be the only one beginning to wonder if there’s anything more to this case than spite and envy.”

As a Canadian, I don't have a congressional representative but maybe you do. Here's a message from Pandora's founder Tim Westergren that showed up in my e-mail today:

I'm writing today to ask for your help.  The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy because of a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora.  The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays, and broadcast radio doesn't pay these at all.  Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

In response to these new and unfair fees, we have formed the SaveNetRadio Coalition, a group that includes listeners, artists, labels and webcasters.  I hope that you will consider joining us.

Please sign our petition urging your Congressional representative to act to save Internet radio: http://capwiz.com/saveinternetradio/issues/alert/?alertid=9631541

Please feel free to forward this link/email to your friends - the more petitioners we can get, the better.

Understand that we are fully supportive of paying royalties to the artists whose music we play, and have done so since our inception.  As a former touring musician myself, I'm no stranger to the challenges facing working musicians.  The issue we have with the recent ruling is that it puts the cost of streaming far out of the range of ANY webcaster's business potential.

I hope you'll take just a few minutes to sign our petition - it WILL make a difference. As a young industry, we do not have the lobbying power of the RIAA. You, our listeners, are by far our biggest and most influential allies.

As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.

Jim Treacher (via it comes in pints?):

According to MSNBC: "South Korea's Foreign Ministry expressed its condolences, saying that there was no known motive for the shootings and that South Korea hoped the tragedy would not 'stir up racial prejudice or confrontation.'" You know what? How about just expressing your condolences? If a white American guy shot a bunch of people in South Korea, would we tell the grieving families that we hoped it wouldn't stir up racial prejudice?

Nice rant about freedom and a cautionary tail for Canada. Read it all, as they say:

When did we decide to allow the police to smash into private homes without knocking and identifying themselves? Recently, in the suburb I live in, a special police force dressed in black Nazi style uniforms busted into a suburban home without warning and dragged a school teacher out of her house with an automatic weapon at the back of her head. They forced her to the ground, handcuffed her, and hauled her away while her neighbors watched. They did it without a warrant and without consequence. Why? A misunderstanding. That is precisely why we need checks in place, to avoid misunderstandings and abuses. The police chief said, “When we realized it was a mistake, we all had a good laugh.” If a group of unidentified men dragged his wife away at gunpoint, I wonder if he would still think it was funny.

When did we decide it was okay to strip search an old lady at the airport because the pin in her hip set off the metal detector? When did we decide it was too risky to take a cup of coffee on an airplane? When did we decide it was reasonable to make a nursing mother drink her own breast milk to prove she wasn’t a terrorist? When we impose such extreme levels of security, haven’t the terrorists already won? Haven’t we willingly given our freedom to the government and the terrorists in the name of security?

[...] I believe there was day when most Americans accepted that life was risky. They accepted that bad things can happen to good people. They accepted that risk was an inherent part being free. They didn’t need a new law or government program every time something bad happened.

Just for a laugh, I thought I'd give the Green Party a visit and see what's making news for them.

Green Parties of Canada and United States warn of disastrous consequences of an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities

Canadian and U.S. Green Parties are jointly calling for a comprehensive and open dialogue to stop the escalation of tension in the Persian Gulf OTTAWA – At the initiative of the Leader of the Green Party of Canada, Elizabeth May, the Canadian and U.S. Green Parties are jointly calling for a comprehensive and open dialogue to stop the escalation of tension in the Persian Gulf. The escalating tension, combined with suggestions the U.S. may have a war plan that includes targeting Iran's nuclear facilities, led the Green Parties of the U.S. and Canada to state today that nuclear facilities should never be targeted for deliberate attack.

Does the Conservative Party issue joint press releases with the Republicans? The Liberals with the Democrats? Yet Canadian Green Party leader, the American Elizabeth May, somehow thinks us colonials need a little transnational help from our betters, south of the border.

“There can be no justification for attacking nuclear facilities," said Janina Komaroff, Green Party of Canada critic for International Cooperation. “The consequences of such an attack would be disastrous.”

Nuclear facilities? It's not like Iran has plants up and running. And the consequences for Iran's nuclear program would certainly be disastrous, but I doubt it be much worse than any other "normal" attack. And it certainly sorted out Iraq's program, all those years ago without "disastrous" "consequences".

Citing the potentially catastrophic environmental and health consequences of such attacks, the Greens jointly called upon all parties in the current stand off to refrain from war and to enter into meaningful negotiations. The Canadian and U.S. Green Parties are collaborating with Green Parties in Europe on this issue.

OK, our final offer: you can kill half the Joos in a rain of fire, enslave one-quarter and deport the rest to Germany.

“Western governments know the dangers of attacks on nuclear facilities. The vulnerability of their own nuclear facilities to terrorist attacks has been an ongoing concern since 9/11,” said Julia Willebrand, Co-Chair of the International Committee of the Green Party of the U.S. “The idea that any western country would engage in or support such attacks on the facilities of another nation should be unthinkable.”

We, the sane, don't really see the symmetry between a terrorist attack designed to kill Canadian and American civilians and a military attack design to stop a dictatorship from killing civilians and threatening neighboring nations. Sorry, we didn't go to cuckoo school let you folks.

Global double standards are the crux of the current crisis over Iran's uranium reprocessing. While the nuclear weapons states have failed to live up to their commitment made under the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970 to dismantle their own nuclear weapons, they have selectively allowed some states like Israel, India and Pakistan to develop nuclear weapons, while threatening and/or bombing countries like Iraq and Iran. Clearly, as this crisis demonstrates, the status quo is not working and is not providing security and stability in the Middle East or the world.

This paragraph is so bizarre, it's hard to know where to start. We didn't "allow" Israel, India and Pakistan to do anything; they just went and did it. How can any sane person -- yes, I know -- talk about nuclear proliferation in the 21st century and not work in a mention of North Korea? That doesn't really fit into the negotiations, not bombs paradigm, does it? Iraq hasn't managed to attack any of its neighbors in the last 16 years, so that's a plus. Beyond that, it's hard to see what this has to do with peace and security in the rest of the Middle East.

While the situation in the Middle East is complex and involves many issues beyond the current nuclear crisis, a de-escalation of the current nuclear crisis is essential to addressing these complex problems. It is time to end the threats and the war games and to enter into a meaningful dialogue that addresses the issues and concerns of all parties involved.

e.g. see our final offer re: the Joos above.

Cute 4 minute-ish video here (via Kottke).

Juxtaposition of the day:

• Maher Arar, stuck by the man
• Nancy Pelosi, stickin' it to the man

Work it out with yourself.

Pro Liberate (via The Agitator):

Delaware was the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. It may be the first state to be afflicted with a fully operational death squad – unless a civil lawsuit filed on Friday against the murders of Derek J. Hale results in criminal charges and a complete lustration (in the Eastern European sense of the term) of Delaware's law enforcement establishment. 

This is truly insane stuff. Apropos of nothing, our RCMP are super #1 cops.

The US should encourage the UN to state its cash demands in Euros.

"Where's Steve Guttenberg?"