1. Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or their color.

2. Do not ever even think of using people as private property or as owned or as slaves.

3. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations.

4. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child.

5. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them?

6. Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly.

7. Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.

8. Turn off that fucking cell phone—you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us.

9. Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions and terrible sexual repressions.

10. Be willing to renounce any god or any faith if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above.

In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

I’m sure you have heard of this story by now but since new information has popped up I thought it would be good to go over it again for the class.

Davis Davis is the principle at a high school in Ponce De Leon, Florida. Heather Gillman was a student that went to him for help. Heather was being harassed by other students for being a lesbian and thought Davis could help her. Instead he went on what can only be described as a witch hunt, outing her to her parents, ordering her to stay away from children and suspending any of her friends that showed any support for her.
According to U.S. District Judge Richard Smoak “He went so far as to lift the shirts of female students to insure the letters ‘GP’ or the words ‘Gay Pride’ were not written on their bodies.”
What the fuck?
With the backing of the ACLU Gillman sued the school and won. Davis has since lost his gig as principle at the school but he remains a teacher there. What really caught my attention about this case was the response from the school board’s lawyer when asked if there was a policy against wearing clothing that supported gay rights in the school district.

As has clearly been shown at Ponce de Leon School in September of this year, the types of clothing and symbols your clients seek to wear to school will likely be disruptive and interfere with the educational process. Also, said symbols were used and can further be used by select students to show participation in an illegal organization as defined by the School Board

Again, what the fuck? An illegal organization?

During the trial Davis had to take the stand and some of his quotes will no doubt amuse you:

The principal went on to admit that while censoring rainbows and gay pride messages he allowed students to wear other symbols many find controversial, such as the Confederate flag.

Davis also testified that he believed rainbows were “sexually suggestive” and would make students unable to study because they’d be picturing gay sex acts in their mind.

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with this guy?

Now that the quick review is over let us jump forward to the more recent news.
This is the headline on Yahoo: Fla. town backs ex-principal in gay student case.

“We are a small, rural district in the Bible Belt with strong Christian beliefs and feel like homosexuality is wrong,” said Steve Griffin, Holmes County’s school superintendent, who keeps a Bible on his desk and framed Scriptures on his office walls.

I have no idea how there are still parts of the world that act like this, let alone in my own country.

On Monday Congress decided to ban phthalates from children’s toys and other products. Why? Well, phthalates have been linked to health issues including asthma, allergies, reduced sperm count and genital abnormalities in boys. This legislation would remove three types of phthalates from consumer products permanently and another three types pending further study. On top of that this legislation would ban lead from children’s toys and open up a consumer database of complaints or accident reports for goods.
Toys R Us/Babies R Us and Walmart have stated that they would stop selling toys containing phthalates starting January 2009. I want you to ask yourself something: How bad does a chemical have to be for Walmart to voluntarily ban them? This is Walmart for fucks sake.

As you may have guessed by the title of the post the Bush administration, voiced by spokesman Tony Fratto, responded by saying Bush opposes the ban.
Nice.

Exxon Mobil, who manufactures a large chuck of this shit, responded by claiming that this legislation would put children at even greater risk because manufacturers would have to replace the phthalates with something that could be worse.

Read that last bit again. That right there explains exactly what it wrong with our system. We don’t require chemical additives to be fully tested to see if there are any health concerns before releasing them into the wild. In Europe the safety of a chemical must be proven before it is allowed on the market, here it must be proven unsafe before it is removed.

Part 1: Tour of Duty Changes
Bush made a big fucking deal about changing the tour of duty from 15 months to 12 months. While it was recommended to be 12 months deployed and 24 months home to keep troop moral and mental health high they decided that 12 on and 12 off was good enough. Well, at least it is a step in the right direction, right?
As with everything else with this administration there is small print: This offer only valid to troops starting their tours after August 1st. Now I bet we will see the rapid redefining of the term “tour of duty”.

Part 2: Voting Rights
VA secretary James Peake, in response to a letter from Senators Kerry and Feinstein, say they will not reverse their ban on either allowing injured veterans to register to vote or even helping an injured vet get somewhere where they could register to vote. The reasoning?
They consider registering to vote a “partisan political activity”. So if you are injured fighting for this administration and are laid up in a VA hospital somewhere your right to vote gets essentially revoked.

This administration makes the charge that people who are against the war are not supporting the troops. Here they are, yet again proving that they are truly the ones that are against the troops.
It is easy to get the masses worked into a frenzy powered by fear. Fear of terrorism. Fear of extremists. Fear of people who are different. Fear of who and what they want you to fear. Fear is what got us here and fear is what is keeping us here. I, for one, say fuck you. I will not fear what and when it is convenient for this administration. I will not have a Pavlovian-like fear on command response to the words “Muslim” or “terrorist”. I will not ignore your misdeeds in the name of your redefinition for freedom out of fear.
I will not fear you.
I don’t understand how you could continue to put our soldiers in harms way without the proper armor. Without the proper gear. Without the proper care. How you could continue this and still pretend to have the best interests of the troops in mind. You, Mr. Bush, you and all those working with you are traitors to this country and should be dealt with as such.

Debbie Shank was once a stock person at Wal-Mart. That was almost 8 years ago. That was before her accident. In May 2000 she was in a severe traffic accident that left he in a wheelchair and robbed her of her short term memory.
Two years later she and her husband won a suit against the trucking company that was at fault for the accident. After legal fees they walked away with $417,000 that was put in a trust for Debbie Shank’s care.
Because of some small print on her health plan policy Wal-Mart sued her for $470,000.
Let that sink in a second.

Wal-Mart, who made $90 billion last year, sued her, a disabled former employee, for more then she is worth.

How the fuck is this possible?
Well, the small print I mentioned earlier states that Wal-Mart has the right to recoup medical expenses if an employee collects damages in a lawsuit.
Fuck.

Wal-Mart sued and won. The Shanks lost their appeal. A week later they lost their son in Iraq. Thing is, she has no short term memory and even though she attended the funeral for her son she doesn’t remember that he is dead. Every time she hears about her son dying in Iraq it is the first time.

Her husband, who is 54 and recovering from prostate cancer, works two jobs in order to take care of the family. He had to divorce his wife in order to receive Medicaid. Sometimes I wonder how we are considered a civilized country.

Wal-Mart. Save money. Live better.

I read a few news stories earlier today about a group of Buddhist monks in Thailand who were using the internet social networking site Hi5 to lure women back to the monastery for sex.  Some reports said they were raping these women, other reports say it was consensual so I’m not going to draw any conclusions about that.

I am going to predict, however, that these monks are going to be representative of the whole religion in the eyes of the unforgiving public.  It seems like a trend nowadays that if someone who holds religious office does something immoral, the entire religion is blamed for it.

Take the Catholics, for example.  The whole Catholic priest pedophilia scandal rocked the world when it was brought to light.  Ever since the first allegations of this came out, the entire Catholic faith was put under a microscope and every single Catholic priest was under suspicion.  I was raised Catholic, spent some time as an altar boy, went to a Catholic University and I can tell you first hand that I never witnessed any sort of misbehavior by a priest.  I was never molested, nor did I hear of any other child I knew being molested by a Catholic priest.

In college I spent a lot of time with the Franciscan order of Friars.  These were some of the most decent, moral men I had ever known and have known to this day.   Never did I see one act innapropriately toward anyone else.

This same type of stereotyping is going to happen with the Buddhists now that this incident has come to national attention.  Since the media likes to sensationalize everything, this is going to become a major scandal and the Buddhists are going to be treated as unfairly as the Catholics.

The reason it’s unfair is because members of any religious order who commit acts of immorality are singled out.  There are a lot of sexual predators on this planet, but they’re not stereotyped like Catholic priests are because they come from all walks of life.  There are literally thousands of registered sex offenders in the United States alone, and only a handful of those belong to any religious order.  It can be safe to say that there are more sex offenders that belong to a particular race (whether that be Irish, Black, Hispanic, Polish, or whatever ; I’m not singling out an entire ethnicity because I’m arguing against stereotyping here) than there are Catholic priests who commit these offenses.  There are probably more lay Catholic sex offenders than there are offenders in the clergy.  But that doesn’t make national headlines because it’s not sensational enough.

If you missed it Keith Olbermann has a special comment last night. It may be one of the best things I have ever heard him say. This should be mandatory viewing.

This is the vote I was waiting for. The torture vote. This vote would require the intelligence community to follow the Army Field Manual in regards to torture. This would effectively make waterboarding illegal.
McCain, a former POW who was tortured, has spoken about waterboarding on several occasions saying waterboarding “is not a complicated procedure. It is torture.” and “very exquisite torture.” In fact McCain was one of the few Republicans that spoke out against torture. He even supported the Detainee Treatment Act back in ‘06, which would “bar cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of any detainee.”
So how did he vote? Did he stick to his guns even though they are unpopular with the idiots in his party or did he sell out?
The fucker sold out. Maybe McCain needs a refresher course on what it is like to be tortured.

On top of all this Daisy Cutter over at Daily Kos did a little bit of digging and found that McCain monetarily supported the Nicaraguan Contras.

McCain supporters, you have been fleeced. Now touch the monolith little monkeys and see the truth.

The bigwigs at MySpace have finally decided to cave into the pressure being put on them by idiot parents and try to ‘protect’ its younger users from the threats that sicko pedophiles pose on the website.

 That’s all well and good, but some of the ideas they have, and are going to put into place, really won’t work.  They just aren’t practical.

Although this is my opinion, I’ve been discovering in my travels around the interwebs that this opinion is shared with bloggers from all corners of the globe.   Here’s the gist of what they want to do: 

1.) Set all profiles of 15-and-under users to private, and prevent those profiles from getting any sort of communication from any adult they do now know.

2.) Default all 16 and 17-year-old users’ profiles to private, which they can change to public if they so wish.

3.) Deny any registered sex offenders access to the site.

 While all of those are pretty good ideas, how does MySpace propose to enforce them?  Any 13-year-old can go on there and create a profile with the britdate set to 1982.  It’s not difficult.

Also, suppose Joe Smith the Molester wants a profile on MySpace but he’s a registered sex offender.  How does he get around that?  Easily, by signing up as Bobby Jones, the nice guy from Detroit. 

MySpace should be thanked for the effort, but politely told that none of this is going to work.

 What would work, on the other hand, is better parenting.  I’m so sick of hearing parents declare to the media that their child was raped or put in danger because of MySpace or some other internet bases social network.   I ask you this, parents: Where were you while your child was chatting it up with Chester the Molester online?    Why are you not monitoring your minor’s internet activity, when you hear every day about a child who falls prey to some online predator?  WHy are you not protecting your child?

 It’s sad to say, but I truly believe that a lot of these “parents” are hoping their child will get injured due to a MySpace rendezvous so that they can try to sue.

’nuff said.