Humm this issue just keeps getting more interesting.

WASHINGTON (CNN) - Steve Schmidt, a key architect of John McCain's presidential campaign, is making his first public return to Washington a bold one.

Schmidt will use a speech Friday to Log Cabin Republicans, a gay rights group, to urge conservative Republicans to drop their opposition to same-sex marriage, CNN has learned.

"There is a sound conservative argument to be made for same-sex marriage," Schmidt will say, according to speech excerpts obtained by CNN. "I believe conservatives, more than liberals, insist that rights come with responsibilities. No other exercise of one's liberty comes with greater responsibilities than marriage."

Schmidt makes both policy and political arguments for a Republican embrace of same-sex marriage.

On the policy front, Schmidt likens the fight for gay rights to civil rights and women's rights, and he admonishes conservatives who argue for the protection of the unborn as a God-given right, but against protections for same-sex couples.

"It cannot be argued that marriage between people of the same sex is un American or threatens the rights of others," he says in the speech. "On the contrary, it seems to me that denying two consenting adults of the same sex the right to form a lawful union that is protected and respected by the state denies them two of the most basic natural rights affirmed in the preamble of our Declaration of Independence — liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

"That, I believe, gives the argument of same sex marriage proponents its moral force," Schmidt will say.

Politically, he will say that becoming more open and accepting is critical to reversing an alarming trend for Republicans — a shrinking coalition. He will note that Republicans should be especially concerned that McCain got crushed by Barack Obama among voters under 30, who are generally more accepting of gay couples and at odds with the GOP.

"Some Republicans believe the period of self-examination within the party necessitated by the loss of our majority status is mostly a question of whether the party should become more moderate or conservative. I think that's a false choice. We need to grow our coalition, but as I said, that's hard to do if we lose some votes while gaining others," says Schmidt.

Schmidt had previously expressed his personal support for gay marriage. Last month, he told the Washington Blade newspaper that he is in favor of legalizing it and that he voted against California's Proposition 8, which overturned a court ruling that had legalized the unions in that state.

In making the case, Schmidt is putting himself at odds with the position of John McCain, whose 2008 campaign he effectively ran.

McCain rarely talked about same-sex marriage or other social issues, but when he did, he made clear he was in line with social conservatives in opposing same-sex marriage.

"Have no doubt about my commitment to the unique status and sanctity of marriage between man and woman," McCain said on the campaign trail.

McCain's daughter Meghan has become a vocal advocate in recent months for gay marriage, and is slated to participate in the Log Cabin Republican convention this weekend.

In his speech Friday, Schmidt will acknowledge that his is a "minority view" in the GOP, but will also say, "I'm confident American public opinion will continue to move on the question toward majority support, and sooner or later the Republican Party will catch up to it."

I love this!

This lady fought back and won.

Thief to victim: 'You can have your car back'

JOLIET, Ill. (STNG) -- After their 2000 Nissan Pathfinder was stolen Monday afternoon, a Joliet couple reportedly used their cell phone to get it back the next day.

Lindsey Ryan said the theft occurred as her husband, Mike, was returning a table and chairs that had been rented for Easter dinner around 4:30 p.m.

"As he was driving east on Ingalls Avenue...an indicator light said the back gate was ajar," she said.

Crest Hill Police Chief Dwayne Wilkerson said Ryan pulled off into the 1200 block of Rock Run Drive to close the tailgate.

"He leaves the vehicle running and approached the door. He noticed someone near the vehicle out of the corner of his eye and watched someone drive off with the car," Wilkerson said.

Police reports indicate Ryan's cell phone was inside the Pathfinder.

He ran to a nearby relative's house and called Crest Hill police to report the stolen vehicle.

"When he told me, the first thing out of my mouth was 'Oh, my God. It won't be around to bring home the new baby.'"

Lindsey Ryan is six-months pregnant with the couple's third child, a boy. They have 8-year-old and 2-year-old daughters.

"It was the first new car we bought as a couple," Ryan said. "It's a sentimental thing. It's what we brought our new puppy in. That Pathfinder took us to Florida and it's the vehicle we've used to bring each of our children home from the hospital."

"On the way home [Mike] was saying we have to report that cell stolen so he can't use it and run up a big bill," Ryan said. "I said "No way. Let him use it [so] we can track him via phone records.'"

The victims checked their wireless account online and allegedly noticed the phone had been used recently.

"I clicked on call details and there it was! He was calling all his friends and family members," Lindsey Ryan said.

Wilkerson said the victims called police around 8:45 p.m. to report the phone was being used.

Ryan said she began a reverse search of those numbers online, obtaining addresses for landlines and began calling those numbers.

"I called [what turned out to be the suspect's] godmother asking if she had seen a man with a green Nissan Pathfinder today," she said. "I learned the [suspect] was no man but a 14-year-old boy [who] told his godmother his aunt let him borrow her SUV. She gave me his name."

Early Tuesday morning, the Ryans spent several hours going to the addresses they had identified before returning home to get some sleep. After taking their daughter to school, Lindsey Ryan decided to call the cell phone numbers that had been dialed on her husband's phone.

"There was one number that I didn't have an address to that was plaguing me because I knew in my heart that whoever owned that cell knew where that 14-year-old boy was and knew where my Pathfinder was," she said.

Over the next three hours, she allegedly called that cell phone number 38 times until a man answered with an angry "Hello." Ryan identified herself and said she was looking for the boy who had stolen her car.

"I said 'Your number is on my husband's cell records 18 times. I know you know where my Pathfinder is and where the boy who stole it is,'" she told him. "If you don't tell me you will be charged as a accomplice in this auto theft."

The 20-year-old man reportedly said, "Miss, I'll call you back in five minutes."

Instead, the suspect himself called a few minutes later.

"I asked him where my Pathfinder was. He said "You're a crazy [expletive] for calling us 38 times [and] keeping us up all night. You can have your car back,'" Ryan said.

The couple was told the vehicle was parked on Bellarmine Drive and drove there to find it. An investigator with the Tri-County Auto Theft Task Force confirmed the owners called police to inform them they'd found the vehicle. TCAT agents arrived to search the SUV.

"They recovered drugs and a knife along with my husband's cell phone," Ryan said.

The TCAT investigator said a warrant has been issued for a suspect in the theft, but police are not allowed to publicly identify the juvenile.

Lindsey Ryan called the ordeal a "surreal story."

"The car's in the shop right now, but we'll be getting it back first thing [Friday] morning," she said.

You are so right Foliel

Cheney has had his hand in the pot for many years. He wet his whistle in the Nixon white house and has been influential in the party both on the public stage and behind the scenes.

Don't think just because he isn't in the veep's office he has gone.

Jindal criticizing Cheney is a risky move for him. It may gain him some public attention but I don't imagine it endears him to D*ck.

hahah Well, after the disastrous republican response Jindal gave this criticism of D*ck will likely end his presidential hopes.

haha

Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) suggested Thursday that former Vice President **** Cheney should tone down his criticism of President Barack Obama.

Cheney has repeatedly criticized the president’s national security policy, saying recently on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Obama’s decisions “raise the risk to the American people of another attack.”

Asked to respond to Cheney’s remark during an interview ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Jindal said: “I don't think we should question President Obama's patriotism or his intentions.”



“I think Democrat or Republican, we should all agree that our current president, our former president would obviously want to do everything they could to keep us safe,” he said. “Let's give the new administration a chance. Let's not question their intentions. Let's have a real debate on their policies.”

The Republican governor praised Obama for “showing more flexibility when it comes to Iraq than maybe some of the campaign rhetoric suggested.”

“I am, quite honestly, pleasantly surprised,” he said. “That's the kind of pragmatism, listening to the commanders on the ground, I think is very important.”

Jindal did offer some criticism of the president, pointing out that it is “fine to have an honest disagreement on the policies that both administrations would choose to try to keep us safe.”

“At some point, we need to stop going overseas and apologizing, criticizing our predecessors,” he said.

"Ahhh for the 70 All you had to worry about was mom finding the stack of nudie magazines under the bed..Ahh for the 70s"

Humm Temp are you related to Gio? He pines with equal passion for the 50's haha

tngxl65 Grats you for dealing with the school staff. I have seen those sorts of tactics many times over the years. It's great to hear you stepped up.

A lot of this goes to parents who are too stupid, too busy or to selfish to parent. They don't all fit into the same level of blame...if blame is the right word.

Parents expect schools to do what they either cannot or will not do it seems.

No good comes from sheltering children just as no good comes from criminalizing childish adventures.

This is all about shame and the Puritan mentality so many seem to embrace. Thump that Bible!

Then...at the first scent of controversy some hysteric is going to file charges or demand a teacher be fired or a book be pulled because their precious snowflake heard a political view that wasn't embraced at home, learned more about sex than just say no or babies come out of ovens, learned that not all the world shuffles along bound to the myths of their religion....heck...schools teaching children to read banned books, to explore, to challenge conventional thought...OMG to question authority?

Quick...burn the books! Fire the teachers! Fire up the torches!

ARGHH

""Boys will be boys" in reference to sexual stuff is the prerequisite for "men will be men" and they are both reasons men feel being out of control of their own sexual parts and activity is excusable."

I completely disagree with this.

The sexual curiosity of a child isn't ugly or shameful. Healthy sexual desires are not eithernot in boys..not in men either.

Shame Shame...you have desires...oh..it makes you go blind...you are going to hell...it makes me ill...wow...

Issues all over the place

Is the "are you okay with this woman being a registered sex offender" question for me?

If so why are you asking me?

I have never been under the impression that my opinions mattered much to you unless of course you were looking for ammunition to fire at me.

I will leave it to you to make assumptions about why I posted this and what I might think about the situation....after all...why break with tradition haha

For anyone who's seen that disgusting video of the now former Domino's pizza workers who stuck food up their nose and did other disgusting things then bragged they were sending the food for delivery here is a follow up.

What an ignorant disgusting pig this woman and her friend are is obvious in the video. I am only glad that she is as stupid as she is because she posted the video and was caught.

Talk about a waste of space on the planet??? Please note...this isn't a stupid kid...she is 32!!

APRIL 16--The woman who filmed herself and a co-worker as they joked about contaminating food at a Domino's Pizza in North Carolina is a registered sex offender who last year pleaded guilty to engaging in an illicit act with a 14-year-old girl. Kristy Hammonds, 31, and Michael Setzer, 32, were arrested yesterday and charged with delivering prohibited foods after a video surfaced showing Setzer preparing sandwiches while putting cheese up his nose, passing gas on salami slices, and appearing to blow his nose on the food. While this was occurring, Hammonds filmed Setzer and provided commentary such as, "In about five minutes it'll be sent out on delivery where somebody will be eating these, yes, eating them, and little did they know that cheese was in his nose and that there was some lethal gas that ended up on their salami." She added, "Now that's how we roll at Domino's." Court records show that Hammonds, pictured in the mug shot at right, was charged in 2006 with three counts of statutory rape and pleaded guilty last June to a reduced count of misdemeanor sexual battery. According to a Superior Court indictment, a copy of which you'll find below, Hammonds (who was charged under her married name), sexually abused the teenage girl over a four-month period. Investigators with the Alexander County Sheriff's Office, which arrested Hammonds in the sex case, declined to provide further details about their probe, citing the need to protect the minor victim. As part of her plea deal, Hammonds was required to register as a sex offender and ordered "not to be alone with anyone 16 or under, with the exception of her own children." She was also placed on probation for two years, hit with a 60-day suspended jail sentence, and fined $1941. (3 pages)
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0416091dominos1.html

Read the memo's

Torture does not produce reliable intelligence.

For those who believe in torture...come on over and I will torture you into saying you bombed the WTC, that Obama is your personal hero and that unicorns exist.

Humm I better stop...someone might be enjoying the thought.

Funny you didn't title your post, "Obama Releases Interrogation Memos"

haha

I suggest you all read the memos. It's on my list to do.

After a tense internal debate, President Obama officially announced this afternoon that his administration would not prosecute C.I.A. operatives for carrying out controversial interrogations of terrorist suspects, as the Justice Department began releasing a number of detailed memos describing harsh techniques used against Al Qaeda suspects in secret overseas prisons.

“In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carrying out their duties relying in good faith upon the legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution,” Mr. Obama said in a statement issued by the White House.

They are available.

Justice Department Memos on Interrogation Techniques

* Original Document (PDF)


http://documents.nytimes.com/justice-department-memos-on-interrogation-techniques#p=1

Humm interesting...any thoughts?

10 years later, the real story behind Columbine

They weren't goths or loners.

The two teenagers who killed 13 people and themselves at suburban Denver's Columbine High School 10 years ago next week weren't in the "Trenchcoat Mafia," disaffected videogamers who wore cowboy dusters. The killings ignited a national debate over bullying, but the record now shows Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hadn't been bullied — in fact, they had bragged in diaries about picking on freshmen and "fags."

Their rampage put schools on alert for "enemies lists" made by troubled students, but the enemies on their list had graduated from Columbine a year earlier. Contrary to early reports, Harris and Klebold weren't on antidepressant medication and didn't target jocks, blacks or Christians, police now say, citing the killers' journals and witness accounts. That story about a student being shot in the head after she said she believed in God? Never happened, the FBI says now.

A decade after Harris and Klebold made Columbine a synonym for rage, new information — including several books that analyze the tragedy through diaries, e-mails, appointment books, videotape, police affidavits and interviews with witnesses, friends and survivors — indicate that much of what the public has been told about the shootings is wrong.

In fact, the pair's suicidal attack was planned as a grand — if badly implemented — terrorist bombing that quickly devolved into a 49-minute shooting rampage when the bombs Harris built fizzled.

"He was so bad at wiring those bombs, apparently they weren't even close to working," says Dave Cullen, author of Columbine, a new account of the attack.

So whom did they hope to kill?

Everyone — including friends.

What's left, after peeling away a decade of myths, is perhaps more comforting than the "good kids harassed into retaliation" narrative — or perhaps not.

It's a portrait of Harris and Klebold as a sort of In Cold Blood criminal duo — a deeply disturbed, suicidal pair who over more than a year psyched each other up for an Oklahoma City-style terrorist bombing, an apolitical, over-the-top revenge fantasy against years of snubs, slights and cruelties, real and imagined.

Along the way, they saved money from after-school jobs, took Advanced Placement classes, assembled a small arsenal and fooled everyone — friends, parents, teachers, psychologists, cops and judges.

"These are not ordinary kids who were bullied into retaliation," psychologist Peter Langman writes in his new book, Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters. "These are not ordinary kids who played too many video games. These are not ordinary kids who just wanted to be famous. These are simply not ordinary kids. These are kids with serious psychological problems."

Deceiving the adults

Harris, who conceived the attacks, was more than just troubled. He was, psychologists now say, a cold-blooded, predatory psychopath — a smart, charming liar with "a preposterously grand superiority complex, a revulsion for authority and an excruciating need for control," Cullen writes.

Harris, a senior, read voraciously and got good grades when he tried, pleasing his teachers with dazzling prose — then writing in his journal about killing thousands.

"I referred to him — and I'm dating myself — as the Eddie Haskel of Columbine High School," says Principal Frank DeAngelis, referring to the deceptively polite teen on the 1950s and '60s sitcom Leave it to Beaver. "He was the type of kid who, when he was in front of adults, he'd tell you what you wanted to hear."

When he wasn't, he mixed napalm in the kitchen .

According to Cullen, one of Harris' last journal entries read: "I hate you people for leaving me out of so many fun things. And no don't … say, 'Well that's your fault,' because it isn't, you people had my phone #, and I asked and all, but no. No no no don't let the weird-looking Eric KID come along."

As he walked into the school the morning of April 20, Harris' T-shirt read: Natural Selection.

Klebold, on the other hand, was anxious and lovelorn, summing up his life at one point in his journal as "the most miserable existence in the history of time," Langman notes.

Harris drew swastikas in his journal; Klebold drew hearts.

As laid out in their writings, the contrast between the two was stark.

Harris seemed to feel superior to everyone — he once wrote, "I feel like God and I wish I was, having everyone being OFFICIALLY lower than me" — while Klebold was suicidally depressed and getting angrier all the time. "Me is a god, a god of sadness," he wrote in September 1997, around his 16th birthday.

Klebold also was paranoid. "I have always been hated, by everyone and everything," he wrote.

On the day of the attacks, his T-shirt read: Wrath.

Shooter profiles emerge

Columbine wasn't the first K-12 school shooting. But at the time it was by far the worst, and the first to play out largely on live television.

The U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Education Department soon began studying school shooters. In 2002, researchers presented their first findings: School shooters, they said, followed no set profile, but most were depressed and felt persecuted.

Princeton sociologist Katherine Newman, co-author of the 2004 book Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings, says young people such as Harris and Klebold are not loners — they're just not accepted by the kids who count. "Getting attention by becoming notorious is better than being a failure."

The Secret Service found that school shooters usually tell other kids about their plans.

"Other students often even egg them on," says Newman, who led a congressionally mandated study on school shootings. "Then they end up with this escalating commitment. It's not a sudden snapping."

Langman, whose book profiles 10 shooters, including Harris and Klebold, found that nine suffered from depression and suicidal thoughts, a "potentially dangerous" combination, he says. "It is hard to prevent murder when killers do not care if they live or die. It is like trying to stop a suicide bomber."

At the time, Columbine became a kind of giant national Rorschach test. Observers saw its genesis in just about everything: lax parenting, lax gun laws, progressive schooling, repressive school culture, violent video games, antidepressant drugs and rock 'n' roll, for starters.

Many of the Columbine myths emerged before the shooting stopped, as rumors, misunderstandings and wishful thinking swirled in an echo chamber among witnesses, survivors, officials and the news media.

Police contributed to the mess by talking to reporters before they knew facts — a hastily called news conference by the Jefferson County sheriff that afternoon produced the first headline: "Twenty-five dead in Colorado."

A few inaccuracies took hours to clear up, but others took weeks or months — sometimes years — as authorities reluctantly set the record straight.

Former Rocky Mountain News reporter Jeff Kass, author of a new book, Columbine: A True Crime Story, says police played a game of "Open Records charades."

In one case, county officials took five years just to acknowledge that they had met in secret after the attacks to discuss a 1998 affidavit for a search warrant on Harris' home — it was the result of a complaint against him by the mother of a former friend. Harris had threatened her son on his website and bragged that he had been building bombs.

Police already had found a small bomb matching Harris' description near his home — but investigators never presented the affidavit to a judge.

They also apparently didn't know that Harris and Klebold were on probation after having been arrested in January 1998 for breaking into a van and stealing electronics.

The search finally took place, but only after the shootings.

Meticulous planning

What's now beyond dispute — largely from the killers' journals, which have been released over the past few years, is this: Harris and Klebold killed 13 and wounded 24, but they had hoped to kill thousands.

The pair planned the attacks for more than a year, building 100 bombs and persuading friends to buy them guns. Just after 11 a.m. on April 20, they lugged a pair of duffel bags containing propane-tank bombs into Columbine's crowded cafeteria and another into the kitchen, then stepped outside and waited.

Had the bombs exploded, they'd have killed virtually everyone eating lunch and brought the school's second-story library down atop the cafeteria, police say. Armed with a pistol, a rifle and two sawed-off shotguns, the pair planned to pick off survivors fleeing the carnage.

As a last terrorist act, a pair of gasoline bombs planted in Harris' Honda and Klebold's BMW had been rigged apparently to kill police, rescue teams, journalists and parents who rushed to the school — long after the pair expected they would be dead.

The pair had parked the cars about 100 yards apart in the student lot. The bombs didn't go off.

Looking for answers at home

Since 1999, many people have looked to the boys' parents for answers, but a transcript of their 2003 court-ordered deposition to the victims' parents remains sealed until 2027.

The Klebolds spoke to New York Times columnist David Brooks in 2004 and impressed Brooks as "a well-educated, reflective, highly intelligent couple" who spent plenty of time with their son. They said they had no clues about Dylan's mental state and regretted not seeing that he was suicidal.

Could the parents have prevented the massacre? The FBI special agent in charge of the investigation has gone on record as having "the utmost sympathy" for the Harris and Klebold families.

"They have been vilified without information," retired supervisory special agent Dwayne Fuselier tells Cullen.

Cullen, who has spent most of the past decade poring over the record, comes away with a bit of sympathy.

For one thing, he notes, Harris' parents "knew they had a problem — they thought they were dealing with it. What kind of parent is going to think, 'Well, maybe Eric's a mass murderer.' You just don't go there."

He got a good look at the boys' writings only in the past couple of years. Among the revelations: Eric Harris was financing what could well have been the biggest domestic terrorist attack on U.S. soil on wages from a part-time job at a pizza parlor.

"One of the scary things is that money was one of the limiting factors here," Cullen says.

Had Harris, then 18, put off the attacks for a few years and landed a well-paying job, he says, "he could be much more like Tim McVeigh," mixing fertilizer bombs like those used in Oklahoma City in 1995. As it was, he says, the fact that Harris carried out the attack when he did probably saved hundreds of lives.

"His limited salary probably limited the number of people who died."

Contributing: Marilyn Elias, USA TODAY

It's sort of funny that what's fueling the ammo shortage now is people fearing a ban.

So they are buying tons or guns and ammo creating a shortage haha

Then you have the manufacturers of guns and ammo in the mix who are more than happy to make a big fat profit of the fear and paranoia of people.

Here's a clue for you all....follow the money!

I agree creative

Any thoughts on the boys will be boys thing?

Increasingly school yard play is being criminalized. Boys and girls discover each other in those early years in goofy, awkward ways to be sure but is making them child sex offenders the right thing?

Okay folks...did these kids commit a crime?

Is there a difference between a wrong doing and a crime?

Will...boys just be boys? Is that wrong?

5th-graders who viewed porn could face charges
American Fork » Boys searched for sex images on school computer.

By Lisa Schencker

The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated: 04/15/2009 10:50:59 PM MDT

Two American Fork fifth-graders could face criminal charges for looking at pornography on a school computer, but some people are wondering how they were able to access the images in the first place.

Police were called last week after two 11-year-old boys at Forbes Elementary School pulled up images of sexual acts on a school computer and then showed the pictures to nine other students, said American Fork Police Sgt. Gregg Ludlow. The incident came to light when one child told a parent and another told the principal.

Ludlow called the images "pretty explicit" but declined to elaborate. He said the boys made multiple attempts on different days to access inappropriate material. Ultimately, they typed the word "lesbian" into a search engine and were able to pull up pictures not blocked by the school's Internet filter.

The school suspended the boys for two days. They could face charges in juvenile court of dealing in material harmful to a minor or lesser charges for viewing pornography at school, or be referred to the probation department instead of going to court, among other possibilities, said Chris Yannelli, deputy Utah County Attorney. If they are adjudicated in juvenile court, consequences range from community service to serving time in a juvenile detention facility, he said.

Rhonda Bromley, Alpine School District spokeswoman, said district officials decided to involve police based on the seriousness of the case.

"The bottom
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line is, because of the age it's obviously a sensitive thing, but what they did was inappropriate, and it was wrong, so as educators and a society hopefully we need to help them learn that," Bromley said. "It's a little disappointing to hear people say, "Boys will be boys.' ... I don't know what the magic age is when people can stop saying 'Well, boys will be boys.'"

Ludlow said the boys subjected the other children to something they might not otherwise have seen.

"Our main emphasis is not to hammer these kids," Ludlow said. "If we can get them into the juvenile justice system and make sure they're getting some counseling or other services, that's our end goal."

But some say it was the school's responsibility to make sure inappropriate material was blocked from classroom computers, and the students shouldn't face criminal charges. A woman who identified herself as the mother of one of the boys spoke to host Doug Wright during his morning radio show Tuesday on KSL. She said the boys should not have been able to access the images.

"My first reaction was, 'Why did you do something so stupid?' but then I'm like, 'How? How did you do this? How was this able to be accessed when I send you to school and there are supposed to be filtration systems?' " she said on the show. "We are so disturbed at how this could be accessible at school."

Bromley said the district uses a filtration system provided through the Utah Education Network (UEN). All schools must have Internet filters in order to get federal discounts on telecommunication services and Internet access. Jim Stewart, UEN director of technical services, said 38 of the state's 40 school districts use the filter provided through UEN, as do all the state's charter schools. The other two districts, Jordan and Salt Lake City, have their own filtering systems.

The state also requires schools to hand out forms for parents and students to sign each year agreeing to use the Internet appropriately.

Stewart said the filter works by blocking millions of Web sites that contain inappropriate material, everything from pornography to hate speech. Every day, the company that runs the filter adds thousands of new Web sites to the list of sites to be blocked.

Stewart said it can be a challenge to keep up with the constant creation of new pornographic Web sites.

"The pornography sites are constantly changing and adding urls, and filtering providers are constantly out there on a search for those," Stewart said. He said school districts can also block Web sites beyond those on the list. Bromley said Alpine has since taken steps to block the types of sites the boys accessed.

She said the district is also looking into how to handle student Internet access when substitutes are assigned to classrooms. Normally, the boys' teacher would have been able to see all the students' screens on her computer, but a substitute who didn't have access to that system was teaching that day, Bromley said. She said the school has since rearranged the room so that the teacher's desk will face students' computer screens. She said the principal also decided to no longer allow classes to use the computer lab when they have substitute teachers.

"Obviously it's a concern how they were able to get around the filter and how they were able to access it at school," Bromley said. "You want to feel like you can send your kids to school and you want to feel confident something like that isn't going to happen."

This is going on my must read list.

I thought I would pass it along to you all.


By Lynn Harnett
April 12, 2009 6:00 AM

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
Daniel L. Everett
Pantheon


The Pirahã are the "Show me!" tribe of the Brazilian Amazon. They don't bother with fiction or tall tales or even oral history. They have little art. They don't have a creation myth and don't want one. If they can't see it, hear it, touch it or taste it, they don't believe in it.

Missionaries have been preaching to the Pirahãs for 200 years and have converted not one. Everett did not know this when he first visited them in 1977 at age 26. A missionary and a linguist, he was sent to learn their language, translate the Bible for them, and ultimately bring them to Christ.

Instead, they brought him to atheism. "The Pirahãs have shown me that there is dignity and deep satisfaction in facing life and death without the comfort of heaven or the fear of hell and in sailing toward the great abyss with a smile."

Not that they have escaped religion entirely. Spirits live everywhere and may even caution or lecture them at times. But these spirits are visible to the Pirahãs, if not to Everett and his family, who spent 30 years, on and off, living with the tribe.

But they don't have marriage or funeral ceremonies. Cohabitation suffices as the wedding announcement and divorce is accomplished just as simply, though there may be more noise involved. Sexual mores are governed by common sense rather than stricture, which means that single people have sex at will while married people are more circumspect.

People are sometimes buried with their possessions, which are few, and larger people are often buried sitting "because this requires less digging." But there is no ritual for each family to follow.

"Perhaps the activity closest to ritual among the Pirahãs is their dancing. Dances bring the village together. They are often marked by promiscuity, fun, laughing, and merriment by the entire village. There are no musical instruments involved, only singing, clapping, and stomping of feet."

Everett's language studies began without benefit of dictionary or primer. None of the Pirahãs spoke any English or more than the most rudimentary Portuguese. (Among their many eccentricities is their total lack of interest in any facet of any other culture including tools or language — not that they won't use tools, like canoes, they just won't make them or absorb them into their culture.)

Amazingly, "Pirahã is not known to be related to any other living human language."

At first it seems rather deprived. There are only 11 phonemes (speech sounds). There are no numbers, no words for colors. No words for please, thank you or sorry. There are, however, tones, whistles and clicks. And the language comes in three forms — regular plus Humming speech and Yelling speech.

Over the years, Everett comes to the conclusion that the Pirahã language reflects and arises from their culture in its directness, immediacy and simplicity. Ultimately he defies Noam Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar (Pirahã lacks a basic requirement) and starts a firestorm in the linguistics field. Everett alludes mildly to this in the book, but a little Internet browsing will leave readers shocked — shocked! — at the way linguists talk to one another.

There are plenty of anecdotes involving the reader in Everett's adventures, hardships, terrors, epiphanies and the pure strangeness of daily life with a people who live in the immediate present and whose most common "good night" is "Don't sleep, there are snakes." (sound sleep is dangerous and, besides, toughening themselves is a strong cultural value — foodless days are also common).

Fascinating as both anthropological memoir and linguistic study, Everett's book will appeal to those interested in very not-North American cultures and in the ways people shape language and it shapes us.

It's a book that rouses a sense of wonder and gives rise to even more questions than it answers.

Lynn Harnett, of Kittery, Maine, writes book reviews for Seacoast Sunday. She can be reached at lynnharnett@gmail.com.

This article is long but presents some information to ponder as you consider the issue of our war on drugs among other things.

April 16, 2009
even without lies, the damage is already done
When you are sworn into Federal Court, you are exhorted to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Each of these phrases carries a slightly different angle against any possible lie - not only are you swearing to speak the truth, but also to not hold any part of the truth back, and to not mix in lies among the truth you do tell.

By its own standards, the US Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics is openly and unabashedly lying about the racial divisions that remain within the American penal system.

A report by The Sentencing Project uses data provided by the Bureau of Justice Statistics to come to the cheery conclusion that over the six-year period from 1999-2005 there was a 21.6% drop in African-Americans serving state prison time for drug offenses, while the number of white increased by 42.6%. This fact headlines every major newspaper article about the report, including articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Ignoring for a moment the extraordinary racial disparity in the enforcement of drug laws that existed prior to 1996, with blacks accounting for less than 15% of all drug users but over half of those in prison for drug offenses, when you take the time to examine these numbers you'll see they are lies.

Here's the chart quoted in The Sentencing Project's report:

See site for chart:http://www.tremblethedevil.com/my_weblog/2009/04/even-without-lies-the-damage-is-already-done.html

The lie bubbles up to the surface when you do the actual calculations to determine the percentages. The numbers simply do not add up.
In the 1999 group the discrepancy is close to irrelevant: totaling up the number given for each race you get 247,500 instead of the 251,200 given in the chart - a difference of 3,700 or just 1.5%. So, not much of a swing.

Much more troubling is what happens when you do the math on the 2005 numbers. Each race is stated to have a certain percentage of the prison population: 28.5% White, 44.8% Black, and 20.2% Hispanic. And when you take the stated population of each group, and divide it into the stated total, those numbers mesh perfectly.

But there's a problem. One that would cause you to fail a high school math test, bring the IRS knocking at your door, or cause a space shuttle to explode during liftoff.

When you add up the number given for each race, you only get 239,600 total prisoners - instead of the 253,300 the chart tells you. So although 72,300 White prisoners divided into a total prison population of 253,300 does give you 28.5% - the total prison population is actually 236,900, or 16,400 prisoners lower.

That's a 6.5% difference - hardly negligible. And this is not the result of a rounding error or from a margin of error. Nor is it the result of the overall racial composition of the country changing. The 2000 census lists 75.1% of Americans as white and 12.3% as black, while the U.S. Census Bureau's Community Survey for 2005-2007 put the numbers at 74.1% and 12.4% - the one-percent change in whites is by far the largest percentage shift.

Dividing a number out of a whole that's missing a gigantic chunk, an error that results in a 50% swing in the stated outcome, is hard to swallow as simply bad math.

It's safe to assume that the total number of prisoners is correct because, as a footnote explains:

Data analysis procedures adopted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2004 affected the categorization of persons identifying with two or more races... and had the result of a modest reduction in the number of persons identified as non-Hispanic white and black.

So what it seems has happened is that, maybe through simple bureaucratic incompetence but more likely through a concerted attempt to warp the numbers, people who identified themselves as mixed race were simply thrown out and percentages were calculated from a ghost number that was missing prisoners who identified themselves as mixed race.

Because where it really gets ugly, is when you put those 16,400 prisoners back into the system. For the sake of an argument that will be illustrated shortly, those thousands belonged in the Black column.

That would change the the total number of incarcerated blacks in 2005 from 113,500 to 129,900 , so instead of 44.8% of the population they now make up 51% of it. So now instead of a total decrease in the Black population from 1999 to 2005 of 21.6% as the chart erroneously states, the adjusted decrease is instead 10%. That's less than half the stated number, a fairly large mistake.

There are two questions which need immediate answering, the first being why not tack on the missing prisoners onto the initial 1999 black population as well? Well, even if this is done - the adjusted decrease would now be 12% instead of 10%, not much of a difference and now just over half of the number the chart gives us, a number highlighted as the most important statistic by every major media outlet that covered the report.

Additionally, as the above footnote explains, the method of reporting those who identified themselves as mixed-race wasn't changed until 2004, so back in 1999 it's unclear where exactly the 1.5% fit into the system. They may have been a rounding error, they may just have been the Asians.

And to answer the second question, of how can you justify lumping the mixed prisoners missing from the total into the Black column - well, we have our first African-American president, and his mother could pass for June Cleaver. In America if you have one African-American parent, you are considered black by society. This point is no longer open to any sort of sensible argument. (Unless, of course, you want to take it up with Young Jeezy.)

Granted, some of those who identified themselves as "mixed" may have been of Hispanic heritage. Which brings us to the reason these numbers are so warped in the first place.


http://www.tremblethedevil.com/my_weblog/2009/04/even-without-lies-the-damage-is-already-done.html

If you were to break the chart up into "White" and "non-White," using the cooked numbers you'd think that there's been a 23.5% decrease in the total of "non-White" prisoners in State prisons for drug offenses in the six-year span from 1999 to 2005. But use the actual numbers, which actually base the percentages on the real total instead of a completely ****ing imaginary one, you'd find that there's only actually only been a 10% decrease.

Well under half of the cooked number. Drug laws in America, after all, "have originally been based on racism... all of these laws are based on the belief that there is a class in society that can control themselves, and there is a class in society which cannot."19

The popularly cited motivation for the War on Drugs is that it was a response to the growing numbers of military serviceman who were getting hooked on heroin and other narcotics while serving in the Vietnam War.

Although that was a troublesome issue, when you know the history of all past American drugs laws it quickly becomes apparent that there's no way in hell that was the only impetus behind this wave of anti-drug legislation, and that Nixon was using soldiers' addiction as opportunistic displacement.

Following the Civil War the earliest anti-drug laws were passed, banning the consumption of alcohol. But not, of course, for everyone.

Whites could drink as much as they pleased, but if you were a minority in antebellum America you permitted from imbibing at all.
At the time it was a widely held belief in American politics that some races, bless their brown souls, simply couldn't control themselves. Furthering the codification of this perception, in 1901 Henry Cabot Lodge spearheaded a law in the U.S. Senate banning the sale of liquor and now opiates as well to all "uncivilized races."

In this case, "uncivilized" was synonymous with "dark." At this point in American history, whites could get as drunk, high, or smacked as they wanted – while the brown-skinned members of American society were completely banned from consuming any intoxicant.

Throughout the first half of the 20th Century, any violence carried out by a black man against a white could be attributed to the commonly-held caricature of a "cocaine-crazed negro." Newspaper headlines screamed of coked-up black criminals who were SHOT BUT DON'T DIE!, and policemen claiming that WE NEED BIGGER BULLETS! because their current caliber wasn't large enough to stop the crack-crazed negroes they routinely came up against in the line of duty.

However blacks weren't singled out as a racial minority, the first anti-marijuana laws targeted the wave of Mexican immigrants who were spreading across the American South. They were seen, then as now, to be stealing jobs and government resources from resident whites, and so politicians from that region of the country first banned marijuana use by minorities alone, and then eventually altogether.
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Nixon's public claim that the War on Drugs was primarily a response to the growing number of addicted veterans was at best a lie of omission. Taking into account past legal precedent, and the fact that American urban centers were being wracked by a series of seemingly unending race riots, it becomes self-evident that the War on Drugs was simply another page in the story of American anti-drug laws that has always been rooted in racism.

Then in 1973, with Nixon desperately attempting to spin his way out of Watergate, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller passed a set of laws that were soon mimicked by several other states and eventually the entire federal government.

They were minimum sentencing laws for drug crimes that, partially because they included a fifteen-year prison term for possessing even a small amount of narcotics, were the harshest the country had ever seen. The per-capita prison population of the United States remained constant from 1930 to right around 1973, at which point the graph begins an exponential climb that grows steeper and steeper with every passing year.

These counter-narcotics laws that, both by design and in practice, an explosion in our prison population – a population which started disproportionately black, and only grew to become more so as the years passed. Between 1979 and 1990 blacks made up a steady percent of our overall population, but between those same years black went from making up 39% of our prison population to 53% of it.20

Today that number's down to 51.2%. An improvement, but hardly.

Through the 1980s this disparate growth was fueled by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, one of the hundreds of crime bills passed by state and Congressional legislatures in the 1980s and 1990s. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act imposed the first of the mandatory minimum sentencing laws, here five-years in prison without chance of parole for anyone caught selling a substantial-enough amount of heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana, or cocaine. This last drug, cocaine, had a unique provision.

You'd receive the same unparolable five-year sentence for selling either 5 grams of crack cocaine as you would selling one-hundred times that much – 500 grams – of powder cocaine. Crack and powder cocaine are pharmacologically the exact same drug, there're only two important differences. One is that crack cocaine is smoked while powder cocaine is snorted. The other is a bit more telling. Powder cocaine was mainly consumed by whites, whereas crack cocaine was the form of choice for innercity blacks.

Critics, for good reason, blasted the law as shamelessly racist.21

America introduced a solution to civil disorder and social injustice that wasn't novel, it's simply grown to become unmatched in scale. By 2003, the percentage of our population in prison dwarfed England's level, our international neighbor whose culture and mores are closest to ours.

We have, proportionally, six-times our population locked up behind bars as our tea-sipping crumpet-munching cousins across the pond. For France and Germany, the difference approaches ten-times as many.

Our prison population has increased ten-fold in just thirty years. In terms of the global population, we have just 5% of that but fully a quarter of the world's prisoners.22 And these American prisoners have one common and inescapable denominator that you've almost certainly already stereotyped them with – but for good reason. The stereotype of the black male American prisoner is, among other things, an accurate reflection of reality.

Although only 12% of the American population is black, over half of the two-million Americans locked up in prison are black. A black man is eight-times as likely as a white man to be locked up at some point in his life. At any one time in America, almost a third of black American males in their twenties are under some form of "correctional supervision" – if not actually incarcerated, then either on probation or on parole, meaning they've recently passed through the American penal system.23

This means that as of 1996, a sixteen-year-old kid in America would have nearly a one-in-three chance of spending some time behind bars if he was unlucky enough to have been born black. If he happened to be born white, he'd only face a 4% chance of incarceration. In Chicago's home state there're 10,000 more black prisoners than black college students, and for every two black students enrolled in college there are five elsewhere in the state either locked up or on parole.24

In 2001 a government survey revealed that the rate of illicit drug use was only point-two of a percent higher for blacks, and yet three-quarters of those arrested for drug possession were black. Nearly half of all arrests in America are for simple marijuana offenses. These statistical realities should do much more than stagger you.

If you're black – they terrify you.

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And, again, due to the incredibly high concentration of blacks in the American prison population – accounting for about one of ten in the general population but making up half of our two-million prisoners, a discrepancy that can be traced back to the unjust drug laws enacted as the Civil Rights movement was failing up through the War on Drugs - the hope-numbing impact of being held in prison and then being hard-pressed to find employment afterward enforces "the stigma of race [that] remains the unmeltable condition of the black social and economic situation."26

Racism is generally understood in America to have fallen to an all-time low. But this is an illusion, created because our prisons and the hundreds of thousands of black men inside of them are built at sites unseen.

A "subtler and more covert" racism has been enabled as prison populations artificially bend racially specific underemployment rates as "mass incarceration makes it easier for the majority culture to continue to ignore the urban ghettos that live on beneath official rhetoric."27

The Civil Rights movement was marked by dozens and dozens of indelible images of racism that were carried in the media each day – black children being marched past an angry white mob into a newly segregated school, police dogs being sicced on peaceful black protesters, burnt-out remains of bombed black churches, one black man behind a pulpit preaching of Christian love and patience and another black man punctuating with his fist the need for angry black action, crowds full of college students both black and white being sprayed at times by firehoses and other times by bullets.

We've all seen the living, breathing, killing reality of racism in the 1970s. None of us now are able to see its existence now, because racism no longer lives on the front pages of our newspapers and during our evening news – instead it's been suffocated inside poured concrete walls which rise and fall in invisible existence, locked safely out of sight.

Until from the barrel of a terrorist's gun poured a breathe that brought it back to life for all of us.

Here is what really bothers me about this tea party nonsense.

They are full of people who have no idea how government functions.

I watched some interviews with local attendees and have read comments from folks all over the country.

The majority of them haven't the slightest idea how government functions. Heck...I'd buy an intelligent conversation about the legality of our current method of taxation...but these people can't even pony up that argument. Unless you get a mouth piece out there haha

(I am sure someone will post a nifty argument and challenge me to respond...haha)

Do you know what made this country great? Discourse, negotiation, education, exploration...oh never mind...this post is a waste...

Put the hook in your mouth

Cheap political ploys really appeal to a certain crowd don't they?

Funny stuff

Predictable stuff

Sad stuff

Here is an article from Scientific American regarding Portugal's experiment with a new drug strategy.

Their approach? End the war and focus on treatment. The new approach five years in appears to be working.

Any thoughts?

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April 7, 2009 | 46 comments
5 Years After: Portugal's Drug Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results
Street drug–related deaths from overdoses drop and the rate of HIV cases crashes

By Brian Vastag

In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.

Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank.

"Now instead of being put into prison, addicts are going to treatment centers and they're learning how to control their drug usage or getting off drugs entirely," report author Glenn Greenwald, a former New York State constitutional litigator, said during a press briefing at Cato last week.

Under the Portuguese plan, penalties for people caught dealing and trafficking drugs are unchanged; dealers are still jailed and subjected to fines depending on the crime. But people caught using or possessing small amounts—defined as the amount needed for 10 days of personal use—are brought before what's known as a "Dissuasion Commission," an administrative body created by the 2001 law.

Each three-person commission includes at least one lawyer or judge and one health care or social services worker. The panel has the option of recommending treatment, a small fine, or no sanction.

Peter Reuter, a criminologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, says he's skeptical decriminalization was the sole reason drug use slid in Portugal, noting that another factor, especially among teens, was a global decline in marijuana use. By the same token, he notes that critics were wrong in their warnings that decriminalizing drugs would make Lisbon a drug mecca.

"Drug decriminalization did reach its primary goal in Portugal," of reducing the health consequences of drug use, he says, "and did not lead to Lisbon becoming a drug tourist destination."

Walter Kemp, a spokesperson for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, says decriminalization in Portugal "appears to be working." He adds that his office is putting more emphasis on improving health outcomes, such as reducing needle-borne infections, but that it does not explicitly support decriminalization, "because it smacks of legalization."

Drug legalization removes all criminal penalties for producing, selling and using drugs; no country has tried it. In contrast, decriminalization, as practiced in Portugal, eliminates jail time for drug users but maintains criminal penalties for dealers. Spain and Italy have also decriminalized personal use of drugs and Mexico's president has proposed doing the same. .

A spokesperson for the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy declined to comment, citing the pending Senate confirmation of the office's new director, former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs also declined to comment on the report.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-drug-decriminalization