January, 2013 archive
Driving while Brown 0
Among other details, she is an American citizen, daughter of American citizens. But, apparently, she didn’t look like one to the cops.
“I had never been in trouble,” Ms. Davila said in an interview. Her thoughts, as she tried to sleep on a holding cell floor: “Am I going to be taken back to Mexico? Is my car going to be taken away from me?”
(snip)
Reggie Shuford, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which is providing the legal muscle for the lawsuit, called her case “a blatant example of ethnic profiling. … The police questioned her status only because of her ethnicity and that of her passenger.”
Details at the link.
Facebook Frolics 0
The ACLU offers some hints for making sure that Facebook’s new “graph search” has not zucked your privacy settings.
News, Ripped from the Ticker 0
Warning: Language.
Write Right 0
Daniel Ruth is taken aback by the fuss over Jack Lew’s signature. (In the spirit of empirical investigation, I just fished a few bills out of my wallet and was mildly surprised to see reasonably legible signatures, but, really, who looks at the darned signature anyway, other than persons trying to spot counterfeits? Lighten up, already.)
I have a certain sympathy for Lew’s penmanship plight.
I was born left-handed. In grade school during the 1950s, the Sisters of the Blessed Waterboarding would come around with a ruler and whack anyone consumed enough by Satan to attempt to use their southpaw to write.
Consequently, after being forced to use my right hand by the Sisters of the Holy Vigilantes, my handwriting is a mystery even to me. About an hour before I started to type this, I was in an editorial board meeting with Hillsborough school superintendant MaryEllen Elia. My notes from that meeting would stump even a CIA code-breaker.
My parents told me that my grandfather was similarly forced to write right-handed, though this would have been in public schools over a century ago.
He resented it until the day he died.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Visit, politely. (Link fixed.)
A 17-year-old boy shot himself in the chest this morning while handling a gun at an East Side home.
(snip)
“The victim was visiting a 19-year-old friend and they were handling a handgun when the weapon discharged, hitting the victim in the chest,” Sgt. Sammy Morris said.
The Galt and the Lamers 3
Steven M. thinks that the lamers have won.
Girl Scouts’ Mangled Mangos 0
Mango Cremes, a new addition to one of the world’s most expensive brands of cookies,* is not what its name implies.
Aren’t mushroom cookies your fave?
Comparing Mango Crèmes with a comparable portion of Peanut Butter Sandwich cookies shows Mango Crèmes have more calories, more fat, more sugar, and less protein. Healthy indeed.
_________________
*Just for giggles, figure out the “per cookie” price sometime.
Droning On 0
Coming soon to a lawful public assembly near you.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Die it with the NRA’s miracle malarkey diet:
(snip)
When the subject is gun violence, though, the National Rifle Association has been feeding the country a similarly poisonous line for decades: that if mass murder is the inevitable price of the Second Amendment, then so be it; that the only permissible answer to gun killings is more guns; that any effective clamp-down on firearms would undermine freedom — including limits on assault-style weapons that can mow down multiple victims in one clip — and that anyone who advocates such a thing in the wake of the latest massacre is “politicizing” tragedy.
Read the rest.
Inquiring Minds Want To Know 0
PoliticalProf asks a question.
A Promise Betrayed Is a Dollar Saved 0
As borrow a phrase from Atrios, there’s nothing better than taking it out on the poors and the olds:
Notice the framing: It’s no longer an “earned retirement benefit,” even though that’s what it is.
It’s now “taxpayer-subsidized.”
Of course, if I dropped coverage of my credit card bills “to help erase a financial shortfall”–oh, never mind.
We need single-payer.
Spacey Needles 0
You Say You Want a Revolution . . . 0
. . . well, you know, we won’t get fooled again.
Fortress Idaho 2
And here I thought the Citadel was a college in South Carolina.
Reince Cycle 0
If you can’t win elections the way they have been conducted for two centuries, under no circumstances consider whether maybe, just maybe, you may be on the wrong side of history.
Just change the rules.
“It’s not my decision that can come from the RNC, that’s for sure,” said Reince Priebus, the RNC’s chairman.
Gov. Scott Walker recently said he was intrigued by the notion of Wisconsin divvying up its electoral votes by congressional district, but that he had not made up his mind on whether to back the idea. If such a system had been in place in November, President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney would have evenly split Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes, rather than having all of them go to Obama.
“Not a Deadbeat Nation” 0
Just a nation with one deadbeat political party.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 5
Steven M. spotlights the WATB in gunnuttery (emphasis in the original):
Do please read the rest.
Light Bloggery 0
Home improvements.