“You can always tell when the Republicans are getting restless, because the Vice President’s motorcade pulls into the capital, and Darth Vader emerges,”…

…”I’m not invited to their meetings and I don’t know what he says or does,”…

…”But all the brave talk [about ending the war] just dissipates.”—Hillary Clinton

Courtesy of Politico.

Lots of luck enforcing the ruling if it goes in Chambers’ favor.

A long-time employee of a New York school system could lose his job for clocking out at the same place at the same time while carrying a work-issued cell phone with GPS that showed him at home during the hours he claims he was at work.

A 21-year employee of the school system could lose his job after officials accused him of repeatedly leaving early - and stunned the worker with data it got by tracking his movements with a city-issued cellphone, The Post has learned.

In a precedent-setting case, administrative trial judge Tynia Richard recommended the firing of John Halpin, a veteran supervisor of carpenters, for cutting out before the end of his shift on as many as 83 occasions between March 2 and Aug. 9, 2006.

The evidence against Halpin, whose base pay is $300 a day, included time cards that suspiciously appeared stamped on the same machine, even though his duties placed him in different locations each day.

But there was a clincher: data gathered through the GPS system on Halpin’s cellphone, which he accepted in 2005 without being told it might be used to trace his every move.

On March 8, for example, supervisors determined that Halpin was last in Manhattan at 1:31 p.m. and was home in Levittown, L.I., at 2:40 p.m. On March 29, Halpin was found at home at 2:38 p.m.

The earliest he was caught in Levittown was 1:40 p.m. on June 22.

But his shift wasn’t supposed to end until 3:30 p.m.

Some workers refused the free-phone offer, saying they preferred to use their own cells.

Looks like he should have had his own cell phone too.

First of all I don’t understand why a school would have 15 valedictorians in the same class, but I digress.

Erica Corder was one of 15 valedictorians at Lewis-Palmer High School in Colorado in 2006. They each got 30 seconds to speak and when it came her turn her speech was to encourage the audience to get to know Jesus.

Oh, my! The entire faculty must have swooned at the same time! Her principal, Mark Brewer, told her if she didn’t apologize she wouldn’t receive her diploma, though she’d still be able to graduate.

On Monday Erica Corder sued the school district.

The lawsuit said Brewer would not give Corder her diploma until she included a sentence saying, “I realize that, had I asked ahead of time, I would not have been allowed to say what I did.” Corder received her diploma after complying.

The school district released a statement Wednesday saying officials reviewed Corder’s case when it happened in 2006 and also met several times with Corder and her parents.

“While we are disappointed that this matter has resulted in litigation, we are confident that all actions taken by school officials were constitutionally appropriate,” the statement said. “As a result, we intend to vigorously defend the claims. Beyond that, it is the district’s policy not to comment on pending litigation.”

Brewer, who now works for Douglas County schools, declined to comment Wednesday.

Corder is represented by attorneys affiliated with Liberty Counsel, an Orlando, Fla.-based group that says it is dedicated to advancing religious freedom.

Wanna bet if she had mentioned Muhammad and his “peaceful” religion she would have not been penalized?

With millions of people world-wide going hungry and being malnourished, it’s hard to get my arms around the reasoning CARE is using to decline $45 million a year in federal financing.

They say it hurts the people it’s supposed to help because the farmers can’t sell their products when competing with subsidized U.S. farm products. HUH?

CARE’s decision is focused on the practice of selling tons of often heavily subsidized American farm products in African countries that in some cases, it says, compete with the crops of struggling local farmers.

The charity says it will phase out its use of the practice by 2009. But it has already deeply divided the world of food aid and has spurred growing criticism of the practice as Congress considers a new farm bill.

“If someone wants to help you, they shouldn’t do it by destroying the very thing that they’re trying to promote,” said George Odo, a CARE official who grew disillusioned with the practice while supervising the sale of American wheat and vegetable oil in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital.

Under the system, the United States government buys the goods from American agribusinesses, ships them overseas, mostly on American-flagged carriers, and then donates them to the aid groups as an indirect form of financing. The groups sell the products on the market in poor countries and use the money to finance their antipoverty programs. It amounts to about $180 million a year.

But then we read this in the article:

The Christian charity World Vision and 14 other groups, which call themselves the Alliance for Food Aid, say that CARE is mistaken; they say the system works because it keeps hard currency in poor countries, can help prevent food price spikes in those countries and does not hurt their farmers. Not least, they argue, it also pays for their antipoverty programs.

And then this example of how CARE has helped people:

The experiences of Walter Otieno, a grizzled Kenyan farmer in mud-stained pants, illustrate the paradoxes of paying for rural development through sales of American farm goods.

Over the years, he had watched 4 of his 12 children die of measles, which is more often fatal for the malnourished. He has had difficulty growing enough to feed his family. “My children were skinny, and their skin was dull,” he said.

Then last year he began growing a small patch of sunflowers on a hill sloping down to Lake Victoria in the village of Malela, with help from a program that CARE finances through the sale of American farm goods here.

A CARE extension worker, Rosemary Ogala, taught him and dozens of farmers in his group where to buy sunflower seed, when to plant it, how to space the rows and when to harvest.

CARE has also connected them to a ready market: the Kenyan company Bidco Oil Refineries, whose managers say they could more than quintuple the amount of sunflower seed they buy from Kenyan farmers to process into vegetable oil.

The profit Mr. Otieno earned from the crop rescued his family from dire poverty. Now, with his new earnings, he is able to play with his sons and daughters, who are plump on eggs and milk, at the family’s general store, a tiny shack stocked with goods financed by the sunflower sales.

It appears the well-fed and well-nourished people overseeing CARE don’t see the forest for the trees and are hurting the very people they are supposed to be trying to help.

Senator Clinton, are you black enough?

The question usually aimed at her darker opponent from Chicago triggered a burst of laughter from Hillary Rodham Clinton. She recovered from the barb and proceeded by not answering it.

This campaign moment occurred Thursday before the Las Vegas convention crowd of the National Association of Black Journalists. CNN White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux pinned back the former First Lady to explain how she could “sustain black support ” while running against an African-American. Ironically, thanks to Sen. Barack Obama’s mixed white and Kenyan parentage and campaign mischief, it is he who usually gets to field the “black enough” question.

This is what our campaigns have decended into.

Story, if you care to read it.

This has got to be the stupidest things he could have done.
It might please a few out on the far right wing but it wont get him elected.

Not everyone is a fan of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but comparing them to one of the most dastardly pieces of human excrement of all time — that might be bit much. Especially for a presidential candidate.

Clip

From the Senator who was found to be a plagiarizer in his last campaign for president, comes the unforgettable and hateful words that President Bush is “brain dead.”

And we wonder why there is no respect for the president when people in positions of power say stupid things like this.

DES MOINES — Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat running for president, is a man of strong opinions. During a campaign event in a Des Moines backyard today, Mr. Biden had some choice words for President Bush and two of the Republicans running for the White House.

“This guy is brain dead,” Mr. Biden said to surprised applause and laughter from the crowd. “I know I’ll be quoted, I’ll be killed for that.”

“This is a guy who is on the balls of his heels, [In gym class I was always told to run on the balls of my feet, which were near the toes, but balls of his heels? Bush has cajones, but they're not in his heels. Let's say it this way: He clanks when he walks. Admin] here’s a guy who is lower off in the polls than any president in modern history [lower off in the polls? How about lower in the polls, but then remember Jimmy Carter] and he goes ahead and he does something that just flies in the face of the sensibilities of the American people.”

A few minutes later, Mr. Biden turned his sights on Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and a Republican running for president. “I can hardly wait to debate Rudy Giuliani if he is their nominee,” he said. “Because I will eat his lunch. [How about if you just take his lunch money? Or clean his clock? But eat his lunch? Admin] The next time I hear a Republican talk about us being tough on terror – give me a break!” [You have to get the nomination first, Biden. Admin.].

Finally, Mr. Biden’s target was Mitt Romney, the Massachusetts Republican running for president. “I found Romney’s statements yesterday profound – crazy — when he talked about going to war with Iran,” he said. “Why are we talking about going to war with Iran?”

This is from the NY Times, far from a right-leaning Republican newspaper, which calls itself the Newspaper of Record with all the news that’s fit to print.

This jerk (and I do not use this term lightly) got a big har-har from the crowd and is receiving accolades for saying it from most of the commenters on the newspaper story.

Biden is setting the bar low for the next president and nothing will be off limits, whether it be a Republican or a Democrat, so if it’s a Democrat, don’t complain when you hear prominent people question the intelligence of the next Democratic president.

You respect the office if not the person holding it. Period. End. Of. Story.

OUCH!

A fisherman looking to catch a catfish for dinner instead reeled in a fish that flashed its teeth and bit his knife.

Jerry Melton, 46, was fishing in the Catawba River last week when he caught what state wildlife officials later identified as a piranha, a South American carnivorous fish that lives in freshwater.

“When I got it on the bank I didn’t really know what it was; I hadn’t seen anything like it before,” Melton said.

When Melton opened the fish’s mouth with a pocket knife, he said the fish bit down and left an impression on the blade.

Wildlife officials told Melton on Saturday that he caught a 1 pound, 4 ounce piranha that was probably dumped in the river. Officials said the fish was likely put there by someone who kept it as a pet and later dumped it into local waters.

Story

I just read this article at Newsbusters.

It talks about the silly questions asked of the Republican candidates in Thursday night’s debate:

In a debate packed with silly questions and ones matching left-wing attack points on GOP candidates, in the first “Interactive Round” of questions submitted by the public on Politico.com, a co-sponsor of the debate, Mitt Romney got the most bizarre. The Politico Executive Editor Jim VandeHei, a Washington Post political reporter before jumping to The Politico earlier this year, found this one worth posing: “Daniel Dekovnick [sp phonetic] from Walnut Creek, California wants to know, ‘What do you dislike most about America?’” Romney responded: “Gosh, I love America. I’m afraid I’m going to be at a loss for words…”

Does a presidential candidate have to dislike something about America? What are these guys smoking?

How about this one from Chris Matthews:

And finally, near the very end of the 90-minute plus session, moderator Chris Matthews seriously proposed to all ten candidates: “Would it be good for America to have Bill Clinton back living in the White House?”

What kind of question is that to be asking Republcan candidates? Why didn’t they ask the Democrat candidates if it would be better if Reagan were back in the White House? It makes as much sense.

I’m glad I didn’t bother to tune in.

As usual, we welcome the readers of our good friend the Anchoress. Make yourselves at home.

You can’t make these things up if you tried.

From the Detroit News:

We have come to the conclusion that the crisis Michigan faces is not a shortage of revenue, but an excess of idiocy. Facing a budget deficit that has passed the $1 billion mark, House Democrats Thursday offered a spending plan that would buy a MP3 player or iPod for every school child in Michigan.

No cost estimate was attached to their hare-brained idea to “invest” in education. Details, we are promised, will follow.

The Democrats, led by their increasingly erratic speaker Andy Dillon of Redford Township, also pledge $100 million to make better downtowns.

Their plan goes beyond cluelessness. Democrats are either entirely indifferent to the idea that extreme hard times demand extreme belt tightening, or they are bone stupid. We lean toward the latter.

We say that because the House plan also keeps alive, again without specifics, the promise of tax hikes.

The range of options, according to Rep. Steve Tobocman, D-Detroit, includes raising the income tax, levying a 6 percent tax on some services, and taxing junk food and soda.

We wonder how financially strained Michigan residents will feel about paying higher taxes to buy someone else’s kid an iPod.

That they would include such frivolity in a crisis budget plan indicates how tough it will be to bring real spending reform to Michigan.

Senate Republicans issued a plan a week ago that eliminates the deficit with hard spending cuts. Now their leader, Mike Bishop of Rochester Hills, is sounding wobbly, suggesting he might compromise on a tax hike.

A 47 year old Air Force veteran went to the VA hospital in West Los Angeles last year to have a possibly cancerous left testicle removed. Instead, his right testicle was removed.

He never did have the suspect testicle removed but is now suing the VA for damages.

Somehow “I’m sorry” doesn’t take care of the problem.

I came across this opinion piece from the San Francisco Gate last night, and I was so flabbergasted by it I decided to leave it alone until I had a clearer head. Unfortunately, I’m having allergy problems today, but I’m going to try to tackle it anyway.

Actually, I don’t even know where to begin because I don’t know if the writer is putting us on or serious, drunk or sober, crazy or sane.

I think he wants conservativism to die a slow, painful death as evidenced by his first two paragraphs:

Here’s the good news: The Republican party is dying. Slow, painful, twitching, secreting war and intolerance and desperation like a fetid gas, snarling and gagging like Jabba the Hutt being choked by the hard chain of progress and hope and relaxed social mores and an upcoming Generation Next that seems to sense that screaming about gays and women’s rights and Muslims and drugs actually doesn’t do much to move the human experiment forward in the slightest.

Is this not delicious? Is this not cause for rejoicing? According to Pew Research, the percentage of young ‘uns age 18 to 25 (a.k.a. Generation Next) who identify with Republicans has been in steady decline since the early ’90s, and now hovers around a meager 35 percent, down from a high of 55 percent in the Reagan-toxic early-90s, and is still dropping, whereas fully 48 percent of 18-to-25-year-olds now lean Democratic … and rising.

Do any of you conservatives think you are dying as a movement the way he describes it?

Slow, painful, twitching, secreting war and intolerance and desperation like a fetid gas, snarling and gagging like Jabba the Hutt being choked by the hard chain of progress

Do you scream about gays, women’s rights, drugs and Muslims all day? I admit to not being particularly fond of extremist Islamists and I talk about it whenever I get a chance because I see them as a danger to the world and our lifestyle, but women’s rights?

I do think marriage is ordained by God and is between one man and one woman, but I don’t talk about it out of the clear blue sky. It usually happens when it’s being jammed down my throat by the lesbian and gay communities. Otherwise I rarely think about it.

If I don’t run around in public making a spectacle of my husband and myself, declaring I am heterosexual why should I have to watch someone else make a spectacle of themselves telling me about their sexuality, about which I couldn’t care less except I know the act is an abomination to God? I mean, it’s not exactly dinnertime conversation in my house. How about you?

Drugs. Now that’s a topic I talk about to my granddaughter who is nine years old and about to enter middle school. Why? Because it is a problem and she will see it more and more as she progresses in school and in life.

No one wants a loved one to be on drugs and possibly die of an overdose or get some dreaded disease from dirty needles or even from taking drugs that ruin the liver. So, yes, I plead guilty to occasionally talking about drugs to my granddaughter.

Women’s Rights is so 70s. I know they want to get the ERA amendment up and running again, but I honestly don’t even know what they want from it that women don’t already have, so that’s not a hot-button issue with me right now at least.

Is this not delicious? Is this not cause for rejoicing? According to Pew Research, the percentage of young ‘uns age 18 to 25 (a.k.a. Generation Next) who identify with Republicans has been in steady decline since the early ’90s, and now hovers around a meager 35 percent, down from a high of 55 percent in the Reagan-toxic early-90s, and is still dropping, whereas fully 48 percent of 18-to-25-year-olds now lean Democratic … and rising.

Seems Generation Next tend to be more socially liberal and much less worried about the trembling “sanctity” of the failed nuclear family, and are overall less inclined to align with a particular religion. Indeed, it almost makes you want to weep and sigh and go buy a large grass-fed free-range organic hybrid vibrator.

Ah, but there is a flip side. A counterargument. A dark cloud of righteous bleakness and it looms like a giant synthetic cheesecake-scented Glade PlugIn of potential misery.

It is this: According to another set of data, for the past 30 years or so, conservatives — particularly those of the right-wing red-state Christian strain — have been out-breeding liberals by a margin of at least 20 percent, if not far more.

It’s true. The reason? Why, God loves babies, of course. White American babies, most especially. Also: issues of space, religion, sexual orientation and, of course, conscience. Or, you know, lack thereof.

One theory goes like this: Libs are generally more socially conscious and hence tend to actually give a modicum of thought to what it means to pop out a brood of children in this modern overstuffed age. Also, many other liberal bohos are (admittedly) happy selfish suckwads who want all the modern booty for themselves and won’t want to give up the Ducati and the plasma and the biannual trip to Cinque Terre for the sake of a pod of rug rats and 15 grand a year (each) for private kindergarten. Translation: Libs just aren’t procreating like they could/should be.

Conservative Christians, of course, have no such conscience. Among the right-wing God-lovin’ set, there is often little real awareness of planetary health or resource abuse or the notion that birth control is actually a very, very good idea indeed, and therefore it’s completely natural to worship at the altar of minivans and SUVs and megachurches and massive all-American entitlement and have little qualm about popping out six, seven, 19 gloopy tots to populate the world with frat boys and Ford F-150 buyers and food court managers.

I always assumed it might actually be a good thing that conservatives breed so mindlessly, because all those unhappy neocon kids, all those repressed misled tots grow up and eventually begin to (well, sometimes) think for themselves and ultimately do what any good kid does: rebel against their parents’ silly dogma and become a bit more open-minded and hopeful, right?

Not exactly. Apparently, according to the research, four out of five kids actually stick with the political affiliation of their parents, generation after generation, with religious conservatives far more unlikely than their liberal brethren to allow their kids to develop the capacity for independent thought (given how it’s so, you know, dangerous to America). Also, one word: homeschooling. I’m just sayin’.

Actually, research has shown 18-25 year olds are the least likely people to vote and by the time they start to settle down and pay taxes they begin to see a bit more responsibly regardless of how they vote.

He is right about most children voting the way their parents did. Tonto is the exception to that rule.

The rest of the above quote isn’t even worth discussing lest I descend into the depths in which the writer finds himself.

I have two children, my children each have two children, my mother had two children, my sister had two children, and my husband’s parents had two children. Hardly “popping out a brood of children.”

Liberals claim to be the tolerant people. Over the last 30 years or so I have listened to talk radio programs and always wondered why the liberals have been given that moniker. They seem tolerant so long as you agree with them, but very intolerant of your opinion if you disagree.

There’s a lot of hate, stupidity or comedy in this opinion piece. I’m just not quite sure which it is.