Is the traffic on your street going too fast? Do what this guy did. Place full-size cardboard cutouts of kids on your lawn (preferably near the road). Motorists see them and slow down (and some of them even shout at the "kids" for playing too close to the street.
You think they have any for "US Out of Iraq" or "Support A Woman’s Right To Choose"? Not on your life….
Two sleepy otters holding hands:
[H/T to Amanda Marcotte, who thought this was so cute that it made her throw up in her mouth a little]Glenn Murphy, Jr. is the recently elected chairman of the Young Republican National Federation (also the RNC Chair for Clark County, Indiana and formerly the YRNF Secretary). When he was elected president of the YRs last month, he told his hometown newspaper, “I will essentially be the mouthpiece and effective leader for the tens of thousands of Young Republicans, 18 to 40, across the country.”
Not sure what he meant by being the "mouthpiece", but maybe it has something to do with performing oral sex on sleeping men.
Allegedly, Murphy and another YR were drunk and crashing at Murphy’s sister’s house. The other man apparently awoke in the morning to find Murphy giving him a non-consensual blow job. The Clark County (Indiana) Sheriff’s Department is charging Murphy with "criminal deviate conduct", a Class B felony.
And guess what? Apparently this isn’t the first time his mouth has ended up on someone’s privates while they were asleep. Glenn Murphy has a prior arrest for sexual battery. Here’s the 1998 Clark County police report.
Immediately following the most recent accusation, Murphy came up with an unrelated reason to resign, and the YRNF cleansed their website of his name. But you can also check out the Google Cache of the Young Republicans site, which reveals the scrubbing of Murphy from their organization included the removal of recently created YouTube videos.
Usual caveats apply: Innocent until proven guilty, yada yada.
UPDATE: Wonkette notes:
It is Mr. Murphy’s position, according to his lawyer, that “what occurred, occurred between two consenting adults,” one of whom just happened to be asleep at the time.
MORE: Tom Tomorrow has the exact same revelation that I had a few years ago:
When I saw Angels in America, I thought the closeted gay Mormon character was a little too heavy handed, but in retrospect I’ve come to realize that Tony Kushner understood something about the world that I did not.
The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., plans to stage protests at funerals of victims of the 35W bridge collapse to state that God made the bridge fall because he hates America, and especially Minnesota, because of its tolerance of homosexuality.
The church and its pastor, the Rev. Fred Phelps, have become notorious over recent years for their claim that the attack of 9/11 was an act of God’s vengeance and their determination to make that case at the funerals of U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq.
In a press release issued the day after the bridge collapse, the church called for protests at the funerals and outlined its feelings about the relationship between God’s plan and the sins of Minneapolis and Minnesota, which it calls the "land of the Sodomite damned."
Reached at the church, Shirley Phelps Roper, who is both the daughter of the pastor and one of the attorneys for the church, said that America, and Minnesota especially, have alienated God by its tolerance for homosexuality, and that the bridge collapse was an act of God’s vengeance. She said:
"The bridge stood in place by the word of God and it fell by the word of God…Each of these little events is just a harbinger of the coming destruction of this American experiment. We are delivering the final call of the doomed nation."
She said, as they have done for years, members of the church would stand "lawfully and peacefully on the public right of way" near the funerals and "put in the air words of praying and instruction and warning."
The signs that the protesters will wave will read:
"God cast down the bridge… Thank God for 9/11… America is doomed… God hates fags… God hates fag enablers… God hates Minnesota."
Here’s the thing that I don’t get. If God hates "fags" so much, and hates American for "enabling" "fags", then why does He take it on on commuters in Minneapolis? Why doesn’t He just take out the "fags"?
I’m real big on the First Amendment, and the right of Fred Phelps & Co to believe and say whatever they want in the name of religion.
But this really really tries my tolerance.
The Bush administration plans to leave oversight of its expanded foreign eavesdropping program to the same government officials who supervise the surveillance activities and to the intelligence personnel who carry them out, senior government officials said yesterday.
The law, which permits intercepting Americans’ calls and e-mails without a warrant if the communications involve overseas transmission, gives Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales responsibility for creating the broad procedures determining whose telephone calls and e-mails are collected. It also gives McConnell and Gonzales the role of assessing compliance with those procedures.
Carpetbagger quips:
It’s a bit like writing the test, and then getting to grade it yourself.
Indeed.
I confess: I don’t get all the hub-bub and titters regarding the fact that Giuliani’s daughter, age 17, has declared herself (in her Facebook profile) to be a "liberal" and a supporter of Barack Obama.
Both Rudy’s kids from his second wife are estranged from him. Are they somehow still obligated to adopt the same political philsophies as him?
The Ninth Circuit has held that vote-swap sites are protected by the First Amendment.
What’s a vote-swap site? The Ninth Circuit explains:
Appellants created two websites, voteswap2000.com and votexchange2000.com, that encouraged people to “swap” their votes and provided email-based mechanisms for doing so. The vote-swap mechanisms enabled third-party supporters in a swing state such as Florida or Ohio to agree to be paired with major-party supporters in a “safe state” such as Massachusetts or Texas, whereby the swing-state users would promise to vote for the major-party candidate and, in exchange, the safe-state users would promise to vote for the third-party candidate. The point of the swaps, at least when agreed to by Nader and Gore supporters, was to improve Gore’s odds of winning the Democratic-pledged electors in the swing state without reducing Nader’s share of the national popular vote (which needed to exceed five percent in order to qualify his party for federal funding in future elections).
The California Secretary of State demanded that the sites be taken down, and the appellants complied, but they sued. Now, the Ninth Circuit has said that the websites are protected under the First Amendment.
Vote-buying is illegal. But the court made a distinction between vote-buying and vote-swapping:
The Supreme Court held in Brown v. Hartlage, 456 U.S. 45, 55 (1982), that vote buying may be banned “without trenching on any right of association protected by the First Amendment.” Vote swapping, however, is more akin to the candidate’s pledge in Brown to take a pay cut if elected, which the Court concluded was constitutionally protected, than to unprotected vote buying. Like the candidate’s pledge, vote swapping involves a “promise to confer some ultimate benefit on the voter, qua … citizen[ ] or member of the general public” -— i.e., another person’s agreement to vote for a particular candidate. And unlike vote buying, vote swapping is not an “illegal exchange for private profit” since the only benefit a vote swapper can receive is a marginally higher probability that his preferred electoral outcome will come to pass….
Now that it is apparently legal, one wonders if we’ll see this phenomenon take root in the ’08 elections.
I’m intentionally avoiding Election ’08 blogging, because it’s all going to change a lot over the next few months, and I don’t want to get burnout.
But this handy chart is pretty cool. You’ll need to click on it to get the full thing. It’s a chart of 18 Democratic and Republican presidential candidates and their positions on 25 issues ranging from Iraq, immigration, universal heathcare, stem cell research, and same-sex marriage.
I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but it’s a good first-step tool.
RELATED: Okay, since I’m doing a little ’08 stuff today, I might as well mention that some new numbers out of North Carolina from Public Policy Polling show Edwards tied with Clinton for first place here (his home state), with Obama behind the two:
Edwards 29%
Clinton 29%
Obama 23%
89% of Americans surveyed think it should be outlawed.
56% of Americans admit that they’ve done it.
Sounds about right. And, by the way… guilty as charged.
UPDATE: Of course, it could be worse:
Police in the Baltic state of Estonia stopped a man who was driving erratically at the weekend, only to find he was blind.
The 20-year-old was driving in the southern city of Tartu early Sunday — helped by instructions from his 16-year-old passenger.
"At first they thought he was just drunk, but the man kept missing the tube for the breath test, then they realized he was blind" and arrested him, Tartu Police spokeswoman Marge Kohtla said Monday.
If it were anyone other than Barry Bonds, and the fact that he — you know — cheated to get this high, I would be all into the hype, just as I was several decades ago when Hank Aaron shattered Ruth’s record.
But Bonds, you know, cheated. I think he should get the record — obviously, he can’t not get the record — but I’m kind of glad that there will be an implicit asterisk (rather than the explicit one that Maris got) next to his final home run number.
Other than that, I really couldn’t give a damn.
A good essay:
And unless you’re extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one’s spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there’s less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there’s more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what’s around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.
Oh, yeah…
Is this coming to an employer near you?
For employees at Clarian Health, feeling the burn of trying to lose weight will take on new meaning.
In late June, the Indianapolis-based hospital system announced that starting in 2009, it will fine employees $10 per paycheck if their body mass index [BMI, a ratio of height to weight that measures body fat] is over 30. If their cholesterol, blood pressure, and glucose levels are too high, they’ll be charged $5 for each standard they don’t meet. Ditto if they smoke: Starting next year, they’ll be charged another $5 in each check.
Clarian has been making headlines for its aggressive and unusual approach to covering escalating health-care costs. Rather than taking the more common step of giving employees incentives for merely participating in its wellness programs, such as joining a smoking cessation group or using a health coach, Clarian is actually measuring outcomes. And unlike most employers, it is penalizing workers for poor health instead of rewarding them for taking healthy steps.
On one level, this makes sense. Workers with unhealthy lifestyles tax the resources of their companies, who are paying skyrocketing insurance premiums, drawing from the benefits of more healthy employees. In addition, it acts as an incentive for employees to actually take care of themselves.
On another level, it’s positively discriminatory. Body mass, cholesterol, and other health issues are often things that can’t be helped because they are hereditary in nature. Why should certain employees be financially penalized if they come from, say, a family with blood pressure problems?
One thing is for sure: this needs fixing.
Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) has always, like a good little Republican, been strongly against raising taxes (especially against the wealthy). In the past two years, he has twice vetoed legislation to raise the state’s gas tax to pay for transportation needs. Needs, like, oh, building better bridges.
Now, with at least five people dead in the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge here, Mr. Pawlenty, a Republican, appears to have had a change of heart.
“He’s open to that,” Brian McClung, a spokesman for the governor, said Monday of a higher gas tax. “He believes we need to do everything we can to address this situation and the extraordinary costs.”
The linked-to New York Times article above is interesting in that it points out a peculiar dilemna when it comes to political spending. You see, politicians love to spend money on new stuff. They get a nice photo-op at the ground-breaking ceremony and so on. But spending money on the upkeep of existing stuff? Well, that’s just not very exciting to them.
That’s got to change.
RELATED: Wingnut Michelle Malkin plays the racist card and plames the Minneapolis bridge collapse on… illegal Mexicans.
Michelle, who INSPECTS those bridges? And is there any indication that those who worked on the bridge did a bad job?
What is Walk Score? Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc:
90 – 100 = Walkers’ Paradise: Most errands can be accomplished on foot and many people get by without owning a car.
70 – 90 = Very Walkable: It’s possible to get by without owning a car.
50 – 70 = Some Walkable Locations: Some stores and amenities are within walking distance, but many everyday trips still require a bike, public transportation, or car.
25 – 50 = Not Walkable: Only a few destinations are within easy walking range. For most errands, driving or public transportation is a must.
0 – 25 = Driving Only: Virtually no neighborhood destinations within walking range. You can walk from your house to your car!
Walking, of course, is not only good for the environment, but it is good for your health.
Go here, type in your home address and find out your home’s "walk score".
For the record, my home’s walk score is zero. Nada. Goose egg. That means to get anywhere — like a store, or restaurant, or whatever — I have to use my car.
Of course, I already knew this.