CNN is reporting that the body of Julian King, the seven year old nephew of Jennifer Hudson who’s been missing since Friday, has been found in a SUV in Chicago.
I’d held out hope that he’d be found alive and now… I dunno. I feel kind of empty.
I can’t begin to imagine what his family is going through.
Remember those words spoken by VP Dick Cheney? Keep them in mind as you watch the following video about the growing epidemic of Iraqi girls and women setting themselves on fire to avoid abuse.
Remember when Lehman Brothers was begging the government to rescue them? Guess what they were doing for their executives at the same time. If you guessed “making sure Lehman executives walked away with millions” you win.
And he said a compensation system that he estimated paid him hundreds of millions of dollars between 2000 and 2007 even as the company headed for disaster was appropriate.
“We had a compensation committee that spent a tremendous amount of time making sure that the interests of the executives and the employees were aligned with shareholders,” Fuld said.
That wasn’t good enough for some lawmakers who decried what they called a culture of entitlement at Lehman even as the company’s performance nosedived.
The panel unearthed internal documents showing that on Sept. 11, Lehman planned to approve “special payments” worth $18.2 million for two executives who were terminated involuntarily, and another $5 million for one who was leaving on his own.
Ya gotta love rich people, eh?
Six chaplains in Virginia have resigned, dozens more have signed a protest letter and there’s talk of having a rally outside the governor’s pad on November 1, just a few days before the election. All allege that they’re the victims of religious persecution.
In this case it’s persecution because the state enacted a policy forbidding sectarian prayers at publicly sponsored events and is thus “expunging our Judeo-Christian heritage from the public square” because “in the name of tolerance, public faith is frowned upon”.
Of course, that’s a lie. Not being able to force your religious views on others especially at a public event is not persecution. It’s a realistic expectation of neutrality and plain old good manners.
It’s also a lie that that prayer cannot be stripped of its sectarian nature, but that’s another subject. Today’s subject is the state getting exactly what it asked for which is grief from the religious set.
The real answer is not to strip prayer of “God”, “Jesus”, “Allah” and the like, but to stop inserting prayers of any sort into public events.
No one can complain about not being able to say “In Jesus name we pray, amen” if no one is up in front of the attendees praying to begin with. Yes, the religious set will cry about it, but so what? It seems to me that every time we give them an inch, they insist that anything less than a mile is “persecution”.
For example, they’ve gotten their inch here in Texas by managing to get the Bible into the schools as an elective course. Now certain supporters are attempting to get an extremely biased curriculum that got one school here in Texas sued and is peddled by right wing Protestant Christians such as Chuck Norris as the course material.
An inch is never enough for the religious right and the sooner we learn this the better off we’ll be.
He has introduced 35 impeachment articles against George Bush.
This is his second attempt to start impeachment procedures against George Bush (he abandoned another attempt earlier this year). I have no doubt that there will be no impeachment of George Bush, but it feels good to know that there’s at least one of our person in Washington DC who wants to do the right thing by Americans.
Jim Piculas of Florida has been fired as a substitute teacher for practicing wizardry for a toothpick disappear, then reappear.
Substitute teacher Jim Piculas does a 30-second magic trick where a toothpick disappears then reappears.
But after performing it in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land ‘O Lakes, Piculas said his job did a disappearing act of its own.
“I get a call the middle of the day from the supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, ‘Jim, we have a huge issue. You can’t take any more assignments. You need to come in right away,’” he said.
When Piculas went in, he learned his little magic trick cast a spell that went much farther than he’d hoped.
“I said, ‘Well Pat, can you explain this to me?’ ‘You’ve been accused of wizardry,’ [he said]. Wizardry?” he asked.
Tampa Bay’s 10 talked to the assistant superintendent with the Pasco County School District who said it wasn’t just the wizardry and that Picular had other performance issues, including “not following lesson plans” and allowing students to play on unapproved computers.
Florida’s been a source of amusement for quite some time now as it seems to always be doing something that’s a bit on the nutty side of things, but this does take the cake doesn’t it?
Keith Olbermann’s worst person last night was none other than Rep. Monique Davis of Illinois for her anti-atheist tirade in which she stated that it was “dangerous for children” to even know of the existence of atheism and ended with ordering the target of her tirade, an atheist, out of the witness chair he was sitting in because he (and by extension all atheists) had no right to be there.
Here’s something to perk you up this morning. According to Ted Turner, 30 to 40 years from now most of humanity will be dead because the planet will be eight degrees hotter causing a near total crop failure. The survivors will be living in a failed state such as Sudan or Somalia and will have to draw sticks I suppose to see who gets to be dinner.
If steps aren’t taken to stem global warming, “We’ll be eight degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow,” Turner said during a wide-ranging, hour-long interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose that aired Tuesday.
“Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals,” said Turner, 69. “Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state — like Somalia or Sudan — and living conditions will be intolerable.”
If that isn’t enough to tick people off (ask yourself this: when’s the last time you heard a white man talk about cannibalism becoming a part of survival for white people), his comments on the Iraqi resistance are sure to. In the same interview he stated that the Iraqi resistance members are ‘patriots’ who don’t like us because we invaded their country. He went on to say that we (American civilians) if they’d taken over Washington, DC.
I think that they’re patriots and that they don’t like us because we’ve invaded their country and occupied it. I think if the Iraqis were in Washington, D.C., we’d be doing the same thing: we’d be bombing them too. Nobody wants to be invaded.
I have to say I agree with that statement. I don’t know how it was in Iraq before our invasion, but America is stuffed to the gills with patriots/nationalists and I have no doubt that any invasive force would find out that there were far worse things than dying.
Pardon the expression, but this just takes the cake. A Mississippi representative has written a bill that, if passed, will forbid restaurants from serving people who are obese according to the state.
Any food establishment to which this section applies shall not be allowed to serve food to any person who is obese, based on criteria prescribed by the State Department of Health after consultation with the Mississippi Council on Obesity Prevention and Management established under Section 41-101-1 or its successor. The State Department of Health shall prepare written materials that describe and explain the criteria for determining whether a person is obese, and shall provide those materials to all food establishments to which this section applies. (H.B. 282)
This is not a joke nor an attempt to raise concerns – it’s serious. Need we any more proof that the obesity “crisis” is plain f’ing insane and has more to do with shaming people that don’t fit a particular body shape than anything else?
The scandal involving District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal here in Houston has brought to light a new way to be a racist without actually saying anything “racist”. The word is “Canadian” as in “a couple of Canadians on the jury felt sorry for the defendent and convicted him of a lesser charge”. The Canadians in question? Those would be black Americans serving on a jury here in Harris county.
It was a routine e-mail from the boss sent to congratulate a junior prosecutor in Houston, Tex., who had won manslaughter convictions against an intoxicated driver.
“He convicted Mr. Sosa of a double intoxication manslaughter, got a weak jury to give him 12 years in each, and then convinced Judge Wallace to stack the sentences,” Harris County assistant district attorney Mike Trent wrote in an office-wide memo. Then came the odd part: “He overcame a subversively good defence by Matt Hennessey that had some Canadians on the jury feeling sorry for the defendant and forced them to do the right thing.”
The e-mail was sent in 2003 but came to light only this month as part of an unrelated controversy with his office, forcing Mr. Trent to defend himself against accusations of bigotry — not because he offended the people of Canada, but because “Canadian” has apparently become a code word for blacks among American racists.
I haven’t heard it myself. The racists I run across around here are pretty open about it. I guess it’s racism for the upper class.
