Monthly Archives: March 2012
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Advanced Sex Education Legislation in Utah…
A new Abstinence Only sex education bill brought a description from Fox 13 Salt Lake City:
A bill that would require Utah educators to refrain from the discussion of contraceptives in sex ed passed the Utah Senate Tuesday afternoon.
House Bill 363 passed with a vote of 19-10.
After the new bill goes into effect, the teaching of sex education in Utah classrooms has to be about not having sex before marriage and fidelity within marriage. Teachers cannot advocate the use of contraceptives anymore and they cannot talk about homosexuality, even if asked by a student.
HB 363 would also allow any Utah school to opt out of sex education and would ban students from talking to their teachers about pre-marital sex.
I always thought students learned things by asking questions. So if they have a question about gay marriage, or why do contraceptives exist anyway, their teachers will not be allowed to answer them.
This means at least one of two things:
1. by not learning answers to common questions, students will learn from other, not always accurate sources.
2. by being young and prone to experiment, students will try out experiences to see why they are being banned from education.
Utah… that’s Mormon country,no? Does Romney support this unfortunate bill? I guess he must, given his most recent campaign statements on birth control.
Related articles
- Utah passes Abstinence-only sex ed bill, Bans talking about homosexuality and contraceptives in schools (queerlandia.com)
- Utah Passes Abstinence-Only Sex Education Bill; Bans Discussion of Homosexuality and Contraceptives: VIDEO (towleroad.com)
- Utah Ditches Sex Education (lezgetreal.com)
- Utahns say lawmakers went too far, call for veto of sex ed bill ()
- Utah Goes Back To The Victorian Era (ken_ashford.typepad.com)
- Utah Senate Passes Abstinence Only Bill (haleybehre.wordpress.com)
- Utah passes bill banning sex education – how long till teen pregnancies skyrocket? (bazaardaily.com)
- Why Utah’s Anti-Sex-Ed Bill May Backfire (livescience.com)
Cartoon(s) of the Week – You Can’t Always Get What You Want… Thank Goodness!
Drew Sheneman in the Newark Star-Ledger:
So, if you get elected we’ll drop the big boy on Iran?
-and
Tony Auth in The Philadelphia Inquirer
So, if you get elected we’ll eliminate education?
-and
Tom Toles in The Washington Post:
So, if you get elected we’ll reduce population by increasing the death rate?
-and
a
So, if you get elected you’ll be able to mandate gas prices?
-and
David Horsey in the L. A. Times:
So, if you get elected you won’t get eaten up by your own deficit policy?
Related articles
- Inquirer cartoonist Tony Auth leaving after 40 years (philly.com)
- The Meme of the Year is ‘Meltdown’ (thinkprogress.org)
- Cartoonist Tony Auth Leaving Philadelphia Inquirer (philadelphia.cbslocal.com)
Spring Ahead!
We lose an hour of sleep tonight, so remember to set your clocks and watches (and computers and cell phones if they don’t do it automatically) ahead one hour.
Don’t let it get you down, though. It means there’s one more hour of sunshine in the early evening when we start doing the after work gardening or pet exercising or just casual coffee drinking on the front porch. Ahhh, Daylight Savings Time.
It gives Santorum and Romney an extra hour of campaigning in daylight, when people can really see them. Too bad for Newt, though… vampires come out an hour later.
I guess we’ll just consider it springtime and hope there is no return to the cold.
Related articles
- Get Ready To Spring Forward (kymx.radio.com)
- In defense of springing ahead (steveprestegard.com)
- Spring forward, but don’t expect your technology to do all the work (theglobeandmail.com)
- Remember: Spring Ahead! (proud2save.com)
- The Cat’s in the Cradle and Daylight Savings Times (ichoosehappynow.com)
- Change Your Clocks, Change Your Passwords (community.websense.com)
- REMINDER: SPRING AHEAD, iMaGiNe ThAt! (akissofbliss.wordpress.com)
Were starting our second week of major moving…
The truck and the Shepherd University boys are out again today to do two more runs 
from the townhouse to the farmette…and even then we won’t be done. I did 2.5 carloads yesterday with the help of my buddy John Case (thanks so much, John) and another carload the day before and will probably be doing them all week.
Meanwhile the new house is a pile of boxes and other unpacked items waiting for racks and shelves to show up… hopefully we’ll put lots of these things away this week. I especially would like to see the kitchen more workable.
Right now I’m over at WSHC waiting for my show to start (an hour earlier and an hour shorter today due to baseball season)… then I’ll be going over to the townhouse to fill my car while the boys fill the truck.
Onward and upward.
Andrew Breitbart had a tape, EE Eye EE Eye Oh…
…and on that tape he had some crap, EE Eye EE Eye Oh…
With Obama here, and students there
Here a speech, there a speech
everywhere a speech speech…
Andrew Breitbart had a tape, EE Eye EE Eye Oh…
According to the Telegraph in the UK:
(A) video, pitted as Mr Obama’s coup de grace and the end of his 2012 re-election bid, promised to expose the president as a “racist radical” who had plotted to seize control of the White House with other “totalitarian freaks” for more than 20 years.
In reality the tape showed a college student campaigning for racial diversity at Harvard law School – not quite the fiery revelations right wing blogger Andrew Breitbart had pledged prior to his death.
Sean Hannity, though, tried to push the tape on Fox News as some kind of real revelation that would end Obama’s campaign. But his efforts were more or less silly with a lot of respondents outside of the Fox/Tea Party crowd having greater respect for the President and his support of a dedicated professor while he was Editor of the Harvard Law Review (I don’t think Hannity ever had that kind of status).
As to Breitbart, he died before he could create another phony attack on good people. Perhaps he is watching all this from Hell. 🙂
Related articles
- Breitbart’s Video of Obama at Harvard on Hannity Tonight! (fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com)
- Breitbart Video Shows Barack Obama Protesting at Harvard in 1991 (VIDEO) (blippitt.com)
- Breitbart Editors Preview Obama College Video With Hannity (mediaite.com)
- Andrew Breitbart Tapes To Be Released (webpronews.com)
- BREAKING: Years Old, Publicly Available Photo of Andrew Breitbart Hugging A Black Guy Found (thesuperficial.com)
- Why We’re Talking About Barack Obama and Derrick Bell Now [Andrew Breitbart] (gawker.com)
- ‘Mancow’ Muller: Breitbart Was Murdered (mountainrepublic.net)
Passing on a Disgusting Practice…
Here it goes again… My cousin turned me on to this piece:
Seven Million Pounds of “Pink Slime” Beef Destined for National School Lunch Program
By Sarah B. Weir, Yahoo! blogger | Healthy Living – 6 hours ago
“Pink slime” burger? McDonald’s and Taco Bell have banned it, but now the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is buying 7 million pounds of beef containing ammonium hydroxide-treated ground connective tissue and meat scraps and serving it up to America’s school kids. If you thought cafeteria food was gross before….
Related: What You Need to Know About the New Meat and Poultry Labels
According to TheDaily.com, the term “pink slime” was coined by microbiologist Gerald Zirnstein, formerly of the USDA Food Safety Inspection Service. He first saw it being mixed into burger meat when he was touring a Beef Products Inc (BPI) facility in 2002 after an outbreak of salmonella. “Scientists in D.C. were pressured to approve this stuff with minimal safety approval,” Zirnstein told The Daily.
“Pink slime,” which is officially called “Lean Beef Trimmings,” is banned for human consumption in the United Kingdom. It is commonly used in dog and chicken food. Celebrity chef and safe food advocate Jamie Oliver featured the substance and called for its ban on the April 12, 2011 episode of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, which may have influenced McDonald’s to stop using beef patties containing the filler.
Reportedly, Zirnstein and his colleague Carl Custer studied the substance and classified it as a “high risk product.” Custer, who worked at the Food Safety Inspection service for 35 years, says, “We looked at the product and we objected to it because it used connective tissues instead of muscle. It was simply not nutritionally equivalent [to ground beef]. My main objection was that it was not meat.”
Another issue is the ammonium hydroxide, a chemical that is used to kill pathogens such as E. coli. The FDA considers it safe for human consumption but a 2009 expose by the New York Times questioned its safety and efficacy. Some food advocates are asking for meat containing “pink slime” to be labeled. It’s used in about 70% of ground beef in the US. “We don’t know which districts are receiving what meat, and this meat isn’t labeled to show pink slime. They don’t have to under federal law,” Bettina Siegal, a writer and mother of two who created TheLunchTray.com told NBC. Siegel has started a petition to demand the USDA stop using the product in the National School Lunch Program.
Virginia Governor signs Ultrasound law…
This from the L. A. Times:
Maybe this will get him the VP nomination.
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has signed into law a controversial bill requiring women to have an ultrasound before undergoing an abortion.
The bill sparked a national furor among abortion rights activists who argued that the intent was to make it more costly and more difficult for women to receive abortions.
So here we have a medically unnecessary procedure being forced on women (and their doctors) in a not-so-secret effort to discourage women’s choice. There’s another problem here with serious legal complications:
Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said the law might place an undue burden on women, making it vulnerable to legal challenge. Enforcement could also be problematic, he said, because it could violate doctor-patient confidentiality.
“How is the state going to verify that there’s been compliance by a doctor unless they see records?” Tobias said in an interview last week. “I don’t know how you can prevent the state from seeing the names” of patients, he said.
As I have said before, free women should stay out of Virginia.
BTW – Happy International Women’s Day.
Related articles
- Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell Signs Virginia Ultrasound Bill (kayceeweezy.wordpress.com)
- Va governor signs pre-abortion ultrasound bill (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
- Planned Parenthood Condemns Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell Signing Mandatory Ultrasound Law (yubanet.com)
- Va Governor Signs Pre-Abortion Ultrasound Into Law (abcnews.go.com)
- Gov. Bob McDonnell Signs Abortion Ultrasound Bill Into Law (washington.cbslocal.com)
- Va governor signs pre-abortion ultrasound bill (sfgate.com)
- Va. Governor Signs Ultrasound Bill (myfoxphoenix.com)
- Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell signs Virginia ultrasound bill – CBS News (cbsnews.com)
- Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell signs controversial abortion bill (calgaryherald.com)
- Va. gov. signs bill requiring ultrasounds for abortion (foxnews.com)
- You: Va. Gov. Signs Ultrasound Law (thedailybeast.com)
- McDonnell Signs Ultrasound Abortion Mandate (lezgetreal.com)
- Why Virginia’s New Mandatory Ultrasound Law Still Sucks (alternet.org)
- If I were a woman, I wouldn’t live in Virginia… (underthelobsterscope.wordpress.com)
Conservative politics takes another downward step…
I am constantly amazed by the incredibly unsettling nature of tea-party politics. I would hope that politicians running for office (or even non-politicians for that matter) would have some kind of informed knowledge about national needs and issues.
Then something like this happens (according to the AP):
Samuel Wurzelbacher gained the nickname “Joe the Plumber” for expressing working-class concerns about taxes to then-candidate Barack Obama during a stop to the region.
The Toledo-area plumber defeated Steve Kraus, a Sandusky real estate agent, early Wednesday to grab the GOP nomination in Ohio’s 9th Congressional District.
I remember his discussion with Obama on the 2008 campaign trail and I am not impressed with the man. Actually, I think he is somewhat of a joke (and great fodder for both the Daily Show and Stephen Colbert.)
I’m beginning to think the national elections this year are going to be the most entertaining and amusing in years. Hopefully, we will survive as a nation.
Related articles
- Good News For Joe The Plumber (huffingtonpost.com)
- Joe The Plumber Wins GOP Congressional Nod In Ohio As Dennis Kucinich Crashes And Burns (thedaleygator.wordpress.com)
- Ohio’s ‘Joe the Plumber’ Gets GOP Nod for Congress – ABC News (abcnews.go.com)
- Joe the Plumber Is Back (theroot.com)
- ‘Joe the Plumber’ explains qualification for run (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)
- OHIO NEWLY FORMED 9TH DISTRICT – DON’T VOTE FOR ‘JOE THE PLUMBER” OR HIS ALTER-EGO Samuel Wurzelbacher (bonjupatten.com)
- Joe the Plumber Wins Congressional Nomination In Ohio (inquisitr.com)
World’s Best Graffiti VI – As you can see, I’m being lazy…
… while I’m in the process of moving houses, I’m not doing my usual political ramble (of course, I’ve had no television to pick up the political stuff, but, wonder of wonders, Comcast showed up this morning.)
Anyway, here are a few more wall art masterpieces;
I love the tiger!
To answer a question received by e-mail…
…yes, I change the background pattern on the blog every day (or two) and try my hardest never to repeat a pattern.
Paisley
I spend a lot of time searching for new patters that will make the blog stand out. Following users comments I stopped using moving images a while ago since they
detract from the posts. I do, however look for color that makes the pages stand out and patterns that make me relatively happy (like the “Paisley” I have up today.)
If you have a pattern you haven’t seen here that you’d like me to use, click on the mailbox and attach it to the e-mail.
Thanks, Bill.
Related articles
- Five Effective Marketing Ideas to Increase Repeat and Referral Sales (printrunner.com)
- Q&A: MacFixIt Answers (reviews.cnet.com)
- Use open-ended questions to get the right answer set (blogs.constantcontact.com)
Ongoing chapter of the Comcast battle…
Well… here I am after the Comcast installation didn’t show up this morning (although the man they call the site survey came yesterday and said our connection to the cable was there on the outside of the house and we were ready to go.)
Installation was supposed to show up between 8 and 10. At 11, after there was no sign of a Comcast installer, I called the delightful folks and, guess what? They had no record of an installation appointment, nor any record of our address.
So I asked the rep – Devin – (and this was the fourth guy I spoke with after 45 minutes of being on hold with three other people), how did your site survey guy know which address to come to yesterday? Devin said he didn’t know how to explain it… he tried four different ways and our address didn’t come up.
While I was holding on the phone as he checked, I got on line to Comcast.com and found on my billing account that they were billing my old home’s service to my new address… I had him look up my bill and he saw it was so. But he said the address still didn’t come up with any request to reinstall my service.
Finally, after an hour and a half on the phone, he gave me a new work order number, told me he was putting it on an emergency alert and would call me back as soon as it was set up. That was almost 2 hours ago.
I’m still waiting.
With this quote, I thee wed…
Who is joining hands with all the truly religious in America by following the last three or four decades of political history?
Guess..
Look at every race that’s been run over the past forty, thirty years, and you will see a divide between George Bush and Al Gore, between George Bush and John Kerry, between John McCain and Barack Obama, between people who go to church and people who don’t … We are the party that believe in values.
Got it?
Yeah, it’s Rick Santorum from a WLW radio show last Friday.
Deborah Brancheau over at RestoringTruthiness.org has an article: Rick Santorum to Abraham Lincoln: Oh You Infidel! that sums up the situation of the values party nicely.
Related articles
- Rick Santorum’s Republican math (dailykos.com)
- Rick Santorum: All For Me, Not For Thee Or Charity (crooksandliars.com)
- Rick Santorum Makes the Bizarre Promise to Never Speak the Name of Any Former President [Rick Santorum] (jezebel.com)
- Look At Rick Santorum’s Inbox (huffingtonpost.com)
- 31 Rick Santorum Quotes That Prove He Would Be A Destructive President | Addicting Info (tribuneofthepeople.com)
So Rush Apologized (apparently for displaying what he thought was his sense of humor), but he’s still losing advertisers.
Even though he made this lackluster apology, he is still losing his advertising base. Here’s today’s announcement in the press:
NEW YORK (AP) — A flower company is the seventh advertiser to pull its ads from conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh‘s radio program in reaction to his derogatory comments about a law student who testified about birth control policy.
ProFlowers said Sunday on its Facebook page that it has suspended advertising on Limbaugh’s program because his comments about Georgetown University student Sandra Fluke “went beyond political discourse to a personal attack and do not reflect our values as a company.”
The six other advertisers that say they have pulled ads from his show are mortgage lender Quicken Loans, mattress retailers Sleep Train and Sleep Number, software maker Citrix Systems Inc., online data backup service provider Carbonite and online legal document services company LegalZoom.
Here’s a bit from my sense of humor: how many more advertisers leaving would it take to get this foul-mouthed asshole off the air?
Comcast! Comcast! Comcast! :(
For the second time in 10 days I spent more than 2 hours on the phone with Comcast (and seven different people) trying to get my Cable Television, Internet and Phone installed in the new house.
The first hour or so was just trying to make them realize that I was a regular customer (although account numbers, the last four digits of my Social Security number and the job ticket number they gave me three weeks ago went completely unrecognized.)
Now we are scheduled (AGAIN!) for Wednesday morning at 8 AM.
Good luck!
I should have gone back to DISH.
First night in the new house…
No TV… Comcast hasn’t shown up yet.
Dogs are going crazy…they have a long way to go getting used to a new 
existence.
Unopened boxes, big black plastic bags stuffed with clothes, misplaced furniture everywhere. Organization starts tomorrow (we’re lucky we have a bed ready to sleep in.)
Hope everyone out there has a great night.
Cartoon(s) of the Week – Eve of Destruction
Jim Morin in the Miami Herald:
Education destroys Santorum’s world…
-and –
Tom Toles in the Washington Post:
…and unchangeable opposition is destroying the Congress…
-and –
Ted Rall from UClick:
…and the Right wants to destroy social benefits…
-and –
Mike Luckovich in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
… and, while we’re at it, let’s destroy America’s sex life…
-and –
Lee Judge in the Kansas City Star:
Of course, we’ve already destroyed the influence of average citizens on our government.
We hear so much about Google invading our lives…
Here’s one you weren’t expecting:
A view from much further away.
(Reuters) – A Frenchman took Google to court on Thursday over a photo published online by its Street View application showing him urinating in his front yard which he believes has made him the laughing stock of his village in rural northwest France.
The man, who is aged around 50 and lives in a village of some 3,000 people in the Maine-et-Loire region, is demanding the removal of the photo, in which locals have recognised him despite his face being blurred out.
He also wants 10,000 euros in damages.
“Everyone has the right to a degree of secrecy,” his lawyer, Jean-Noel Bouillard, told Reuters. “In this particular case, it’s more amusing than serious. But if he’d been caught kissing a woman other than his wife, he would have had the same issue.”
The Judge is ruling on March 15th. This will be one to wait for.
Meanwhile, watch what you do in your own yard.
World’s Best Graffiti V – Wonders on Walls
Here’s some more… thanks for all the email comments.
Have a good evening… Bill
It’s hard to know what to say… Andrew Breitbart, enemy of most of us who support Obama and the Rational Left, is dead at 43.
From the LA Times:
The conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart, the polarizing website publisher who once helped edit the Drudge Report and found his way to tea-party stardom in recent years and exposed the story of the sexually explicit tweets of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), suddenly collapsed near his Westwood home early Thursday morning and died. He was 43.
Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center suspected his death was due to natural causes, Breitbart’s father-in-law, actor Orson Bean, told The Times.
“He was walking near the house somewhere…. He was taken by paramedics to UCLA and they couldn’t revive him,” said Bean, who spoke with his daughter, Susannah Bean Breitbart, about what happened.
The Los Angeles County coroner’s office confirmed it will investigate the case, given how young Breitbart was.
Breitbart was a Hollywood-hating, mainstream-media-loathing conservative, and shot to stardom with two stories in recent years: breaking the story over the sexually charged tweets by Weiner, a scandal that led to his resignation; and posting a video of Shirley Sherrod, a black employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in which she appeared to make racially charged comments, leading to her firing and then a subsequent apology by the Obama administration when it was later revealed her comments were taken out of context.
This will certainly ease an element of the election situation this year.
It puts the thought in my head that maybe there IS a God. Or maybe Rush Limbaugh could go out and walk around his house, too.
Breitbart was no respecter of the maxim that one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead: After the death of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in 2009, he spewed venom all over the liberal lion’s grave via Twitter, calling him a “special pile of human excrement,” a “villain” and other things we can’t reprint on a family website. So I don’t have any qualms about remembering Breitbart, who died suddenly Thursday at 43, as a closed-minded bully and blowhard who seemed to think he could win debates by shouting louder than his opponent rather than having a better argument, a casual liar who shamelessly destroyed reputations and an unfortunate new species of Internet parasite.
–Dan Turner, LA Times Staff
I guess agree. I just don’t feel bad.
Quote of the Day – Repub’s View of Romney Strategy
“It seems like Republican primary voters will not vote for Mitt Romney unless they are forced into it. And the way they’re forced into it is when he beats the other guy senseless.”
– Nelson Warfield, Republican strategist
Of course, when there are none of them left, he’ll have to actually come up with a real policy plan.
What will be left after the Repubs finish eating each other?
Thinking of politics as leftovers, it looks like we’ll have a couple of Santorum wings and a Romney drumstick or two left over after Super Tuesday. That doesn’t leave much to serve at the great election 2012 dinner. (Did I say they are both Turkeys?)
George Will is releasing a column later today in the WaPo that pretty much says the Presidency will be out of reach for Romney or Santorum after they have destroyed each other… and that Repubs should focus on preserving their lead in Congress in order to compete against Obama for the next couple of years.
George Will!
If I were to counsel the Democratic Party I’d say Obama is doing a great job right now in sticking up for the worker, defending his record, and pushing for reelection. That should continue.
There has to be focus put now on recovering the House and maintaining the Senate… and as long as the Repubs keep their focus on Birth Control, ultrasound for pregnant women seeking abortion and all the other non-jobs, non-economic crap they are playing with, we have a real chance of booting them out of office.
Frankly, I’d like to see more jobs, less unemployment, a single-payer health plan and so many of the things we NEED to deal with the 21st Century. And we have the candidates to do it.
Summary: It’s better to be the Diner than the Dinner.
The Memorials the Oscars Left Out…
My pal Joe Bratcher turned me on to this in Facebook. As I looked at the list, I realized that there were some great… and important to our cultural history… actors and actresses left out of the Academy Award‘s “In Memoriam” segment.
Nicole Williamson? How could they?
Under The LobsterScope 