As part of the current pattern of actions, this is quite alarming — it demonstrates that SUP/LJ now actively and openly disapproves of and targets specific groups.
Wow, the ABC News website has entered a whole new world of suck: loud autoplay video ads. Suck horridness is what AdBlock was made for. Blocking http://a.abcnews.com/assets/* does the trick. Actually, blocking http://a.abcnews.com/ass* would do the trick as well, which seems appropriate.
What do European robins, garden warblers, and zebra finches have in common?
They're all beautiful birds who love the freedom of flight and their natural surroundings. They all have glorious voices and instincts to match. And many of these beautiful birds have been decapitated in cruel experiments sponsored by Volkswagen.
IDA was sickened to learn that the Volkswagen Foundation is paying experimenters at German and U.S. universities to capture and use these beautiful songbirds in worthless experiments that terrify the birds before they are ruthlessly killed for curiosity's sake. Although the use of any animal for experimentation is objectionable, the thought of birds-who are universal symbols of joy and freedom-captured, caged, terrorized, and vivisected, is particularly heinous. Birds are indeed so fragile that they often die of fright from the capture or transportation process.
These atrocious acts are taking place at the University of Oldenburg in Germany and Duke University in North Carolina. Songbirds captured from the wild and captive canaries and finches are exposed to different light cycles or are fitted with eye caps glued tightly to their heads to block out all light. Researchers then cut the birds' heads off to slice their retinas out of their eyes, and dissect and study their brains for clues to the secret of migration.
Congratulations on getting ENDA through the House of Representatives. I forgave you the last time you betrayed the transgender community. Many of us did. We believed that your organization had changed. We gave you the benefit of the doubt. We were wrong and we won't make that mistake again.
If by some chance you manage to get the trans-excluded ENDA through the senate, President Bush is almost guaranteed to veto it. You sold out the transgender community for nothing. Nothing. You are not going to get ENDA &mdash all your going to get is a split and angry queer community, a queer community in which many do not and cannot support you, a queer community in which many actively despise and oppose you. That is what you've won, enjoy your spoils.
By the way, I fixed your logo for you. You should really consider changing it:
A German citizen who said he was kidnapped by the Central Intelligence Agency and tortured in a prison in Afghanistan lost his last chance to seek redress in court today when the Supreme Court declined to consider his case.
The justices’ refusal to take the case of Khaled el-Masri let stand a March 2 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va. That court upheld a 2006 decision by a federal district judge, who dismissed Mr. Masri’s lawsuit on grounds that trying the case could expose state secrets.
...
Mr. Masri contended in his suit that he was seized by local law enforcement officials while vacationing in Macedonia on New Year’s Eve 2003. At the time, he was 41 years old and an unemployed car salesman.
“They asked a lot of questions — if I have relations with Al Qaeda, Al Haramain, the Islamic Brotherhood,” Mr. Masri said in a 2005 interview with The New York Times. “I kept saying no, but they did not believe me.”
After 23 days, he said, he was turned over to C.I.A. operatives, who flew him to a secret C.I.A. prison in Kabul. There, Mr. Masri said, he was kept in a small, filthy cell and shackled, drugged and beaten while being interrogated about his supposed ties to terrorist organizations. At the end of May 2004, Mr. Masri said, he was released in a remote part of Albania without ever having been charged with a crime.
This is outrageous. The blocking of a trial with spurious claims of "state secrets" is, in my opinion, tantamount to an admission of guilt. This crime is even more blatant by the fact that this German citizen was flown to Kabul — an occupied territory of the United States. Does anyone really doubt who's in charge in Afghanistan or Iraq? The crimes of puppet governments are crimes of the puppeteer. It is a further crime that Khaled el-Masri cannot peruse justice in an American court and it is likely that neither those who kidnapped and tortured him nor those that ordered the kidnapping and torture will ever be extradited to stand trial in Germany.
Sometimes it is necessary to link to an offensive or hateful website in order to discuss it. However, by linking to the site, you inadvertently increase its search engine rankings. Adding rel="nofollow" to the link tag solves this problem. Google (and many other search engines) will not count such links towards the ranking of the site linked to.
“I talked to my landlord. She's upset about the hacking of the tree, too. There's nothing really anyone can do about it at this point, but she has given me authority to oversee any future work around the house or the yard by anyone to make sure something like this doesn't happen again, which is really good, that no work will go on unless there's someone there, in other words generally me, to supervise. Since she lives in California, she can't really come over and watch to assure things go smoothly. So, at least this won't happen again.”
Last week, purpleglitter and I found that the landlord at her old place had murdered a nest of starlings, ripping apart the nest and throwing the babies down to the ground like they were worthless. Just getting their down in, eyes never opened. They never saw the sun. We buried them in the back.
Today, the tree cutters came to the back yard here. Supposedly just to cut the branches overhanging the neighbor's, they instead cut main branches which may have had one or two subbranches overhanging the neighbor's yard, but most of which were not over the fence at all. Renting, I have no real control over any of this.
I don't understand the reason people need heavily nitrogenated death-yards. "Kill everything but grass. A dandelion! Kill it! Kill it! No flowers here! Nature is just weeds. Throw on more chemicals on... pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer... everything! It surely won't run off anywhere. Must have that perfect patch of stale green nothing, because lord knows if anything wild and free grows it'll be anarchy! Nature is ugly and must be controlled, but oh yeah, save the rain forests — nature is only ugly if it's where I can see it."
Gun ownership is akin to being sex offender? That's the assertion of Christian Trejbal and is the attempted justification for the printing of the names and home addresses of concealed carry permit holders, including police officers and VICTIMS of domestic violence, in the Roanoke Times . The CNN piece exposing the fallout from the Roanoke Times article features a domestic violence victim now has her name and address listed publicly while her ex-husband who almost killed her won't have his information listed publicly when he gets out of prison. Who's lives are being put in danger here?
As to the assertions that public records should be public information, following that logic wouldn't the databases of holders of driver's licences need to be made public? Cars are potentially dangerous weapons, and I would like to know which of my neighbors might be driving one. That actually may not be too far off, for better or worse we are rapidly heading to a state of near-total information awareness.
I support concealed carry. People who don't have the physical prowess to put up a sufficient fight should be allowed a means of protecting themselves. Several states at this point have laws allowing concealed carry by ordinary citizens and none of them have turned into the wild west. It just makes sense to even the odds a bit. I think this would have a profound effect reducing the number of completely random committed for "coolness" or an adrenalin rush. Let a few of those assholes get their heads blown off and see how long the trend continues.
Yesterday, in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton proclaimed, "We liberated you. We got rid of Saddam Hussein for you. We are not going to babysit a civil war."
Gotta love that attitude: The Iraqis owe us for invading their country, dismantling their stable government, destroying their infrastructure, raiding their treasury, firebombing their cities, and stealing their oil. If their country is a mess, it's their own damn fault. Why can't they just grow up?
Neighbors noted that the house was unkempt and the parents were seldom seen. Teachers told investigators that Rebecca Riley came to school in clothes that were too big or not warm enough. The 4-year-old was so lethargic, they said, they sometimes had to help her up the steps in school.
Pharmacists questioned the refills of clonidine, one of three psychotropic drugs the little girl was taking, two of which contributed to her death, according to the state medical examiner.
...
The affidavit submitted by State Trooper Anna C. Brookes, one of three lead investigators of Rebecca’s death, paints a picture of a family in extreme crisis despite having access to social services and medical treatment. Rebecca, her 11-year-old brother, her 6-year-old sister and mother were all on medication for mental illness, and their father told investigators he had intermittent rage disorder but was not on medication.
Denise Monteiro, a spokes-woman for the Department of Social Services, confirmed that the agency has had an open case on the family since 2005, when Michael Riley, Rebecca’s father, was accused of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl. He had been ordered to leave the family’s house, then in Weymouth, and was allowed to have only supervised visits with his children.
...
An unidentified social worker from South Bay Mental Health in Weymouth began visiting the family in May. Her concerns about the amount of medication the children were receiving prompted her to contact their psychiatrist, Dr. Kayoko Kifuji of Tufts-New England Medical Center.
The social worker told Kifuji that the amount of medication Rebecca was receiving was unusual and that she saw no evidence of the diagnosis of hyperactivity for which the girl was being treated. Rebecca was also diagnosed as bipolar when she was 28 months old.
I'd really like to know how you diagnose a 2 year old with bipolar disorder. No child should be on these drugs. None, zero, zip, zilch. There is absolutely no excuse for drugging a child. The psychiatrist should be criminally charged as well.
It's amazing that the only one in the whole family who wasn't drugged was the sexually abusive father.
Bush's $2.9 trillion dollar budget proposal seeks to cut FEMA funding by 14%. Does he somehow believe that FEMA has been too well funded to handle disasters? Does he WANT another Katrina-style disaster? Perhaps he simply needs to scrape more money up for his failed wars and hopes that the public view this as punishing FEMA rather than further crippling an agency that was already decimated by his post-9/11 homeland security reforms.
Berdovsky sent an e-mail to friends at 1:25 p.m. telling them not to talk about the marketing scheme to promote the animated television show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" on the Cartoon Network.
"My boss from the Cartoon Network’s ad agency just called -- she is asking that we pretty please keep everything on the DL," or down low, wrote Berdovsky, according to a copy of the e-mail provided to the Globe.
...
Moments after facing the felony charges, Berdovsky and Stevens mocked reporters at press conference outside court, deflecting questions about their culpability with non sequiter quips about haircuts in the 1970s.
President Bush likes to say that his health-care proposal would "level the playing field" between people who get health coverage through their job and those who buy it on their own.
But experts said yesterday that it would tilt that field toward a kind of health insurance that Bush has long favored -- a high-deductible plan paired with a special tax-exempt health savings account, or HSA.
...
Bush's proposal seeks to eliminate the long-standing tax break for job-based medical insurance, requiring that a worker's taxable income include any money his employer contributes to help pay the premiums. A new tax deduction -- $15,000 a year for families and $7,500 for individuals -- would help people pay the premiums, either through their job or on their own. The plan faces opposition from Democrats in Congress.
...
Len Burman, director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, said that, in leveling the field, the White House should also seek to scrap the HSA tax break, whose purpose is to counter the tax code's current bias toward comprehensive and expensive employer-provided coverage. Under Bush's plan, it would be the only extra tax break for health insurance -- one that would most benefit wealthy people, who can best afford the financial risk of a high-deductible plan and to sock away a lot of money in an HSA. ...
Burman said eliminating the HSA tax break would bring in billions of dollars that Bush could put toward the other initiative he proposed this week -- giving states special grants to fund innovative ways of covering the nation's 47 million uninsured.
"This is not just free money just sitting there," he said. "There really is a big opportunity cost."
This is not a tax cut. Bush is proposing taxing employees where they were not taxed before. Adding new taxes is a tax increase.
Of course his new taxes will barely (if at all) touch the wealthy. Of course employers don't have to pay the new tax. And to offset the hardship the wealthy will experience at not having to pay this tax, he proposes a new tax break for the wealthy. Everyone else, go suck an egg.
I propose "Mr. Tax Cut" Bush be spanked spanked repeatedly with this proposal. I propose that "Bush is proposing a tax increase" be a talking point. He is repeating the lies of his father. Read my lips: "Trumpet it!"
gryffyn gave goldmourn and me a ride up to London, where I caught the bus back to Boston. In short order I screwed up boarding the bus and spilt my entire cup of coffee (a lot of it going on my skirt).
However, things seemed to go a bit better until we reached the border. Compared to the security personal at the Canadian border, the Americans are fascist assholes. Someone in front of me put his hands in his pocket while waiting for the border guard to confirm his identification, for which he received the threat: "WE'RE NOT PLAYING GAMES! DO YOU WANT TO GO TO JAIL RIGHT NOW?". His was hardly atypical treatment. Greyhound had scheduled 15 minutes to cross the border. However it took us over an hour to get through security, and there was no one ahead of us. The imagery reminded me more of the check points in the old Soviet Bloc rather than something I'd hope to expect from the United States. How times change.
Luckily the hold up at the border didn't cause me to miss my connection at Syracuse. Other than losing an inexpensive article of clothing, the rest of the trip went smoothly — I walked out of the bus station the exact moment purpleglitter was pulling into the parking lot.
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I didn't do my normal voice post updates during this trip, because the entire LiveJournal voice post system was down the entire trip.
Looking through the book section, I came across Rush Limbaugh's book from the early '90s entitle "The Way Things Ought to Be".
It has a Time Magazine review on it, which reads, "Outrageous and impudent. Rush Limbaugh is the loudest noise in the crucial conversations America is now having with itself."
I can't help but think by "loudest noise" they mean "big fart".”
pissed off
awake
chipper
mellow
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
purpleglitter and I found that the landlord at her old place had murdered a nest of starlings, ripping apart the nest and throwing the babies down to the ground like they were worthless. Just getting their down in, eyes never opened. They never saw the sun. We buried them in the back.
discontent
predatory
exhausted