Archive | Just Plain Crazy
Backyard inflatable pools banned in Pennsylvania
No, not really. This story is about one small borough that doesn’t allow kiddie pools in the front yard. So it’s not about banning “backyard” pools, and it doesn’t mean, as the headline implies, that they’re banned in the entire state of Pennsylvania.
And of course, it’s Fox News!
No comment
Taken from the official Texas GOP party platform for 2012:
We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills, critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education, which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
Mandatory Christianity
To this sort of Christian, anything that neutralizes their religious standards in the public arena is actually persecution. They believe religious “freedom” means the religious majority should dictate the rules, and anyone who tries to say differently is attacking their faith.
Here’s a perfect example, via Slacktivist:
The Voss Lighting Company of Lincoln, Neb., doesn’t hide its religious light under a barrel.
“Our biblical mission,” an online statement reads, “is to ‘sell’ our lighting products so that we may ‘tell’ everyone we can about God’s soul-saving, life transforming gospel message…”
Perfectly legal, says Patrick Holman, an attorney with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “The Commission has no problem with a corporation having religious values,” he says.
But Holman does have a problem with a corporation using religious values to make hiring decisions.
Holman and the EEOC are representing an Oklahoma man, Edward Wolfe, who says he was denied a job at Voss because he wasn’t Christian enough.
“It’s unique,” Holman says. “I haven’t seen anything like it since I’ve been here.”
Wolfe says he applied for a job as Operations Supervisor at Voss’s Tulsa, Oklahoma store.
In the complaint filed against Voss by the EEOC, Wolfe says he saw the position on a church website. His first interview went well, but in a second interview with the branch manager, he told lawyers, he was questioned about his religious practices and beliefs.
According to the complaint, the manager asked Wolfe “to identify every church he has attended over the past several years; where and when [he] was ‘saved’ and the circumstances that led up to it.”
In the interview, Wolfe claims he was told most employees at Voss were Southern Baptist, but employees could go to any church, as long as they were “born again.”
The complaint claims the manager asked Wolfe if he would “have a problem” coming to work early, without pay, to attend Bible study.
Wolfe, a single parent who says he cannot attend church on Sundays, told lawyers the branch manager was
“agitated” at his answers.He didn’t get the job.
Liberal arts vs. the MBAs
There’s a reason the first group is panicking and the second group isn’t – because they’re either too stupid to know what’s coming, or are reasonably sure they can insulate themselves from the rest of the world.
Campaign finance laws? Very funny.
No wonder Karl Rove is always smirking. The GOP’s monster of propaganda and dirty tricks knows that rules governing the use of Super PACs are, if not nonexistent, at least unenforceable:
This weekend, Mitt Romney and his campaign will host a retreat for top $100,000-and-up campaign bundlers and donors at a Park City, Utah resort. The event, dubbed the “First National Romney Victory Leadership Retreat,” will reportedly be an opportunity for “strategizing and fraternizing” between those bankrolling the campaign and those running it.
But one name has raised flags for campaign finance watchdogs. A Saturday panel on “media insight” will feature American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS co-founder Karl Rove. The Crossroads reportedly plan to spend a stunning $300 million to help Romney defeat President Barack Obama this November, but they are legally prohibited from coordinating this effort with Romney’s campaign…
Footnote regarding Nancy Pelosi’s “I could have arrested Karl Rove on any given day” comment to the press: OK, Nancy, maybe you could have arrested the Turd Blossom when he was lying and stonewalling for Dubya in 2007, but you didn’t. That’ll be the day a Congressional Democrat does anything that bold!
Gun-toting felon uses “stand your ground” defense, twice…..
I am pretty sure that this was an unintended outcome of the “stand your ground” law in Florida. Tavarious China Smith is from Manatee County in Florida. He sold drugs to undercover cops and had a pending warrant. He was a convicted felon in possession of a firearm.
He has also been able to use the “stand your ground” defense twice.
On two occasions, more than two years apart, he committed homicides but was not charged thanks to provisions of Florida’s “stand your ground” law. Smith claimed self-defense in both cases and prosecutors agreed. He never faced a judge or jury for fatally shooting Nikita Williams, 18, in February 2008 in a drug-related incident or Breon Mitchell, Williams’ 23-year-old half-brother, in December 2010.
Smith’s only punishment stemmed from using a gun to kill Mitchell. Since he was by then a felon, convicted on drug charges, Smith wasn’t allowed to carry the Ruger .357 Magnum he used to shoot Mitchell outside a Palmetto nightclub in 2010. In January, a federal judge in Tampa sent Smith to prison after he pleaded guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm….
Arthur Brown is the assistant state attorney in Manatee County who reviewed both of Smith’s homicides and declined to prosecute Smith in the Mitchell case. He said both were clear-cut cases of self-defense and that provisions of the “stand your ground” law only strengthened Smith’s claims.
Smith is serving seven years for the gun possession charge.
Marissa Alexander is serving 20 years for a warning shot after a physical altercation with her estranged husband. She had never been arrested before this incident.
Alexander’s case was prosecuted by Angela Corey, the Florida State’s Attorney who is also prosecuting George Zimmerman. Alexander was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and because she discharged a firearm during the incident, the case fell under Florida’s “10-20-life” law, enacted in 1999, which mandates a 20-year sentence for use of a gun during the commission of certain crimes.
Corey initially offered Alexander a three year deal if she pleaded guilty to aggravated assault, but according to CBS affiliate WTEV, Alexander did not believe she had done anything wrong, and rejected the plea. Her bet did not pay off: the jury in the case returned a guilty verdict in less than 15 minutes.
OK. Yes, I do beleive there should be some kind of review of “stand your ground” and “10-20-life” laws.
Something just isn’t right with all this.
Disgusting
Woman on kidney transplant list denied kidney based on her “substance abuse” – medical marijuana use. Doesn’t anyone have any common sense anymore?
In Philly, taxed extra for paying taxes
Just what a struggling major city needs — more property tax hikes for tax-paying property owners in order to make up for the huge amounts owed by deadbeat property owners, many of whom don’t even live in the city. More here.
A nation of losers
Charles Pierce is on to something regarding the casino mentality that has slowly poisoned this country over the years since the first non-Nevada casinos in America opened:
…Consider: Most every state in the Union, including the Commonwealth (God save it!) here, would rather build 20 casinos than risk raising taxes a dime, as though gambling itself were not a brutal tax. (How do I know this? Because once, long ago, on the night Mark McGwire and his pharmacist went past Roger Maris and his bartender for the single-season home run record, I sat in a casino in Tunica, Mississippi, and watched a 300-pound woman with oxygen tubes up her nose feed quarters into a slot machine while wearing a T-shirt that said, “Jesus Is The Answer.” This was the same trip on which I saw a billboard outside Vicksburg that suggested, “Sell Your Car For Cash.”) The entire Republican economic plan is one long gamble on a bunch of economic theories that already have failed twice in my lifetime. Ask even earnest young liberals how you manage to get a middle class without a manufacturing base, an active government, and strong unions, and you get the same kind of shrug you get along the rail when you ask someone why they bet the 5-horse when the creature plainly has hooves the size of a country ham. Ask Willard Romney the same thing, and he makes even less sense…
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