Shakesville

New Faith-Based Initiative: Slavery

This is totally WJWD:

A rehabilitation program at a church is facing allegations it forced people to work as telemarketers for 28 cents an hour under the threat they could go back to jail…

The men were sent to the program by judges or state agencies for substance abuse rehabilitation. A department report said they were paid about 28 cents an hour, but even those wages were withheld and donated to the church.

So they were forced to work for no money with threat of punishment if they tried to leave. Yes, I do believe that’s called slavery. So why, exactly, is the Utah state Department of Human Services giving the House of Refuge “10 days to explain itself” before they revoke its license and shut the program down? And why, pray tell, is the door of the House of Refuge, who “wouldn’t let in” investigators, not being kicked down, even though the DHS doesn’t know if more of the men in the program are still left? And why, Martha-Ann, is the House of Refuge being given the opportunity to register its criminal telemarketing company as a business with the state before it’s shut down, instead of cuffing and hauling away its proprietors? Is it because they’re “good Christians?”

Whatever. I’m sure Planned Parenthood, or the Gay and Lesbian Task Force, or the NAACP would receive the same gracious treatment in the colossally unlikely event that they were ever disgusting enough to enslave their workers.

Abortion Extremists Anonymous

My name is Melissa, and I’m an extremist*, too.

----------------

* Coherent and principled.

Faust Made Me Do It!

Won’t somebody please think of the children?

Some parents in this prairie town [Bennett, Colorado] are angry with an elementary school music teacher for showing pupils a video about the opera "Faust," whose title character sells his soul to the devil in exchange for being young again.

"Any adult with common sense would not think that video was appropriate for a young person to see. I'm not sure it's appropriate for a high school student," Robby Warner said after two of her children saw the video.

Another parent, Casey Goodwin, said, "I think it glorifies Satan in some way."

This zany, Satan-glorifying video, “Who’s Afraid of Opera,” consisted of operatic soprano Dame Joan Sutherland and “three puppet friends” discussing Gounod's "Faust."

Her critics questioned the decision to show children a portrayal of the devil, Mephistopheles, along with a scene showing a man being killed by a sword and a reference to suicide.

While this sounds nice and inflammatory, is it possible that perhaps her critics are braindead reactionaries? I mean, it’s puppets. The video is clearly for kids. Something tells me “a scene showing a man being killed by a sword” is a slight exaggeration. Of course, I have no idea, since the article doesn’t see fit to explain what’s actually on the video; just how the teacher’s “critics” categorized it.

The teacher was required to send a letter of apology to all elementary school parents.

"I was definitely not sensitive to the conservative nature of the community, and I've learned that," Waggoner said in Sunday's editions of The Denver Post. "However, from what has been said about me, that I'm a Satan worshipper, my character, I can't believe all of this. My intention was just to expose the kids to opera."

Waggoner, who is in her first year teaching vocal music in Bennett, said she doesn't expect to stay in town.

"I know I'm not accepted here, that I'm not welcome here by the parents," she said. "It's a very uncomfortable position."

How pathetic is this? A children’s introduction to opera video has provoked parents to go on some sort of obnoxious rampage. And for what reason? Because they didn’t think the video was appropriate for children. Apparently, however, it is appropriate for children to be exposed to their parents calling their teacher a Satan worshipper.

The sad part about this to me is that these kids are doomed. Aside from running a good teacher out of town, Faust has been an important part of our culture for a very long time. Unless a family is one which can guarantee even the most ignorant bastard a shot at the presidency, people need to be fluent in a wide spectrum of cultural reference to achieve professional successes in a lot of fields. Not that one’s success in life is predicated on knowing about Faust specifically, but there are lots and lots of things that could be deemed immoral by similarly narrow-minded reasoning, and shielding children from all of it is condemning them to a life of ignorance and cultural illiteracy.

People Who Live in Glass Houses...

Are stupid.

Here's Rumsfeld, commenting on the deteriorating relationship between the U.S. and certain parts of Latin America:

“We saw dictatorships there. And then we saw most of those countries, with the exception of Cuba, for the most part move towards democracies,” he said. “We also saw corruption in that part of the world. And corruption is something that is corrosive of democracy.”

Corruption is bad for democracy, eh? You're just lucky that building you were speaking in was equipped with a lightning rod, Donald.

He continues:

“I mean, we’ve got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money,” Rumsfeld added. "He’s a person who was elected legally — just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally — and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales and others.”

And then there are other, more old-school dictators, that just go ahead and rig the elections.

Horrific

I don't know why it seems as if every time I turn around, there's another massive accident or disaster taking thousands of lives, but I'd really like it to stop.

Crews Search for Survivors in Red Sea

SAFAGA, Egypt - An Egyptian ferry carrying about 1,300 people sank in the Red Sea early Friday during bad weather, and rescue ships and helicopters pulled dozens of survivors and bodies from the water. Some 180 escaped on lifeboats, an official said.

Most of the passengers were Egyptian workers returning from their jobs in Saudi Arabia. At least four Saudi and four Egyptian ships were involved in the search effort, arriving about 10 hours after the 35-year-old ferry was believed to have sank.

1300 people. That's getting close to the numbers of the Titanic. (It's unknown exactly how many died in the Titanic, but most seem to agree that it's above 1500.)

Egyptian regulations require life jackets on the boat, but implementation of safety procedures are often lax. It was not known if the ship had enough life jackets and whether the passengers put them on when the ship sank.

Rescue efforts appeared confused. Egyptian officials initially turned down a British offer to divert a warship to the scene to help out and a U.S. offer to send a P3-Orion maritime naval patrol aircraft to the area. The British craft, HMS Bulwark, headed toward from the southern Red Sea where it was operating, then turned around when the offer was rejected.

But then Egypt reversed itself and asked for both the Orion and the Bulwark to be sent, said Cdr. Jeff Breslau, a spokesman for the U.S. 5th Fleet, based in Bahrain. The Bulwark is part of a Dutch-controlled multinational task force, which includes assets from the 5th Fleet and British navy.

Bravo to these ships for attempting to help. There's more to the article; you may wish to read the whole thing.

You know, if Pat Robertson makes any sort of statement about this being "God's wrath against the people of Egypt" or something else equally as asinine, can we please just shoot him out of a cannon into the sun already?

Submitted Without Comment

Political Wire:

"Forty-five percent (45%) of voters say they will vote for a Democratic candidate in their Congressional race this year while 37% plan to vote for a Republican," a new Rasmussen Reports poll finds.

"Democrats have a 12-point advantage among women and a 3-point edge among men."

Key finding: "34% believe the country is heading in the right direction. Sixty percent (60%) believe we have gotten off on the wrong track."

Okay, one comment. I don’t know how much this means with so few Congressional seats really facing a significant challenge.

Homobigotry is what’s up, doc.

To be filed under Keep Your Opinions to Yourself, and cross-filed under Shove It Up Your Ass:

A 36-year-old lesbian has filed a state complaint against a doctor and physician's assistant alleging she was given literature condemning homosexuality as "sinful and sexually impure" after a routine appointment.

Jamie Beiler, formerly of Kissimmee, saw physician's assistant Dawn Pope-Wright on March 11, 2005, for a bronchitis checkup because her normal doctor was on vacation, according to a Jan. 27 complaint filed with the Division of Medical Quality Assurance.

Beiler's sexuality was noted in her medical file, but unmentioned during the appointment, her lawyers said.

When she opened up an envelope Pope-Wright left at the checkout counter, she was shocked to find photocopied pages including Bible verses that denounced homosexuality and asserted God can help her change.

You can see the materials given to Beiler here, courtesy of the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Pam, who gets the hat tip for this one, says, “Some licenses need to be revoked in this case. There's nothing else to it.” Absolutely.

Pharmacists who refuse to dispense certain drugs to women, teachers who refuse to hang up LGBT tolerance posters in their classrooms, doctors who want to right to refuse to treat gay patients, a physician’s assistant who hands out condemning literature to a lesbian patient…all in the name of Christianity. They use their religion as a weapon and a shield, and worse yet as a trump card to jusitfy any and all manner of exclusion, judgment, and oppression, and the rest of us are expected to respect it.

Fuck that.

I don't give a good goddamn why someone believes in inequality, or what their rationale is. Telling me "I’m a Christian and my god says so" will evoke precisely the same amount of respect for such a position as "A flying bear told me gays are bad during a gnarly peyote trip." In other words, NONE.

And that's not because I hate Christians; it's because I'm literate. I've read the Bible; Jesus Christ (you know, the guy after which the religion is named) doesn't say anything that makes that position tenable. It’s pretty evident that acting as God’s earthly dispensers of judgment and reprimand is not explicitly endorsed; in fact, the opposite is quite plainly true. And you don’t have to be a Christian to suss that out from the Bible.

I know that it’s frowned upon to evaluate one strand of Christianity as “wrong,” because there are almost as many Biblical interpretations as there are Bible-readers, but where, exactly, are we allowed to draw the line at what we will acknowledge as acceptable behavior with religious validation? At some point, it’s going to have to be fair game in America to tell people who say they’re Christians but don’t follow a remotely Christian doctrine that they’re full of shit, because accommodating ignorance and the misappropriation of religion to justify being an asshole doesn’t do anything but encourage assholism.

I’m well and bloody tired of being expected to extend logically-incoherent exceptions to people because they call themselves Christians that I wouldn’t extend to anyone else.

Question of the Day

Submitted by Shaker Constant Comment:

"Where do you fit in with your family’s birth order and how, if at all, does that position affect people you are attracted to as partners/significant others?"

I'm the oldest of two girls, and I've not really thought about how my birth order has affected to whom I'm attracted. But I have noticed that every major relationship I've had has been with an only child. In fact, many of my closest friends are male only children, too. Don't know what that means, or if it's a coincidence, but there you go.

Food for Thought

Apropos of a discussion going on in another thread regarding economics and healthy eating, I want to take a moment to make a very important point that ought to be of concern to progressives: Health is a class issue. We’re all very understanding about the disparity in healthcare between the upper/middle and lower classes, but we seem not to be quite so keyed in to some fundamental challenges facing low income families when it comes to a disparity in nutrition and the availability of healthy foods.

First of all, it’s important to recognize that many inner city communities have no grocery stores. Period. We’ve likely all heard the term “white flight” that is associated with whites moving out of cities and into the suburbs, and during that time, most cities experienced a “supermarket flight,” too—a phenomenon that has been studied and/pr noted by sociologists, urban planners, politicians, and community leaders concerned about the lack of access to affordable, high-quality and healthy food for inner city residents. The problem is so pervasive that some states have proposed state-run grocery stores for inner city areas.

This special report from the Detroit News highlights some of the problems with the lack of grocery stores in the inner city.

Lack of Choice:

Underserved by supermarket chains that began divesting in sections of the Detroit area in the 1970s, poor people often find their bills inflated at small neighborhood stores. The high cost of groceries is one factor that keeps the poor impoverished.

Only eight supermarkets affiliated with major chains serve more than 900,000 people in the city of Detroit. The contrast with the suburbs is stark. At just one intersection, at Hall and Hayes roads in Macomb County, two Farmer Jack stores and a Meijer store occupy three of the four corners. Another grocery, a Kroger store, is less than a mile and a half away.

Transportation a Problem:

Like many of the urban poor, Morris’ ability to shop for food is limited by the long distances between supermarkets and her lack of an automobile. The 60-year-old mostly walks from her home in the Col. Hamtramck Housing development to buy her groceries at small neighborhood stores where prices are often comparatively high…

Walking to the closest supermarket, a Farmer Jack at Joseph Campau and Holbrook, is a three-mile round trip. Morris says she makes it there when she can.

“We do have a SMART bus that comes to the housing project once a week,” she said. “They’ll pick people up and take them up Joseph Campau to Farmer Jack. Once in a while, my son’s girlfriend takes me up there.

Higher Prices, Lower Quality:

But even at Farmer Jack, she encounters many products with higher prices than at the big, suburban stores. The News survey found that both ground beef and potatoes were 25 percent more expensive than at Meijer in Shelby Township, while the cheapest chicken drumsticks and thighs at Farmer Jack were more than 100 percent more expensive than the cheapest brand offered at Meijer…

A frequent complaint of grocery shoppers in poorer areas is that produce is of poor quality. There also was some evidence of that at the Farmer Jack on Joseph Campau, where much of the corn and all of the watermelon was far browner than the same produce at the two Farmer Jacks in Macomb County, on previous days…

The smaller stores closer to Morris’ home that stock groceries are generally even more expensive, and the inventory does not offer many good choices for someone on a limited food budget.

“It is difficult to shop around here,” Morris said. “And it’s even better here than in some other neighborhoods I know of.”

Availability and Access:

Kami Pothukuchi, a professor of urban planning at Wayne State, surveyed retail food establishments in Detroit last year. In 55 percent of all neighborhood stores in the Detroit area, Pothukuchi says, “alcohol, cigarettes and junk foods are widely available, while ingredients with which to prepare balanced, wholesome meals are very rarely available in any one store, let alone in sufficient variety.”

And even where there are supermarkets in predominantly minority communities, they are vastly different from their counterparts in white neighborhoods:

[T]rained community volunteers and academic researchers in the Los Angeles area studied 261 stores in specific areas of South Los Angeles, Inglewood and North Long Beach, whose populations are 47% black, with a median household income of $29,237.

They compared foods found in those stores with products in 69 stores in areas in West Los Angeles (between Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, but not including those communities) that are mostly white and have a median income of $45,917…

~ 38% of the stores in the black communities carried skim milk, compared with 80% of white neighborhoods.

~ 70% of the stores in the black neighborhoods had fresh fruits and vegetables, compared with 94% of the stores in the white communities.

~ There was less variety of produce, and it was of a poorer quality, in the black neighborhoods: 13 fruits and 21 vegetables in a typical store in those areas, compared with 26 fruits and 38 vegetables in the stores in the mostly white communities.

Community members reported "finding unappealing vegetables and fruits such as brown bananas" in the lower-income neighborhoods, says lead author David Sloane, an associate professor of policy, planning and development at USC.

There were marked differences in the types of stores in the communities.

"In West Los Angeles, they tend to be larger chain stores," Sloane says. "In South Los Angeles, they tend to be more mom-and-pop stores. ... They don't have a strong a relationship with distributors to get as great a variety of goods, and so the result is people have a fewer choices of healthy items."

Healthfulness shouldn’t be a class issue, but it is. It manifests in myriad ways—access to the doctors and other health services, the kinds of jobs that extend health benefits to their employees, the cost of preventative care and drugs, etc. But almost never in any health discussion, even those which address class disparities, do you see the very basic issue of healthy food addressed, and it’s a very serious problem.

Combine a dearth of local supermarkets with low car ownership in poor communities (something that became all too clear after Katrina), add in independent corner shops that have low purchasing power, and what you’ll find is a whole hell of a lot of people who are left with frozen dinners, boxed meals, and processed snacks as the staples of their diets.

For most of us, I imagine the very thought of a neighborhood without a place to buy fresh fruits and vegetables is almost incomprehensible, but it’s a reality for far too many Americans. The question we need to be asking is not why everyone doesn’t make whatever we feel are the best food choices, but why they don’t even have the same choices we do.

Bayh Gets Frisky

My Democratic Senator (and presumed 2008 presidential candidate) Evan Bayh gave a speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in D.C. today, the main focus of which was the Dems’ need to take back their history of being strong on defense and take the GOP head-on re: national security and defense issues. I didn’t agree with everything he had to say in the speech, but it’s worth a read. Here are a couple of excerpts:

As a lifelong Democrat I welcome this debate, because it is one we can win. George W. Bush’s saying he wants the 2006 election to be about national security is like Herbert Hoover proudly claiming that the 1930 election should be a referendum on the economy. And if the Democratic Party can get its national security act together, the result should be the same.

Karl Rove has claimed that Democrats were too weak to defend the nation, that President Bush is simply tougher. Tough is good, but six years into the Bush Presidency it is clear that tough is not enough.

We need a foreign policy that is both tough … and smart. The good news? That it is the historic legacy of the Democratic Party. It is a legacy we must now reclaim…

To be blunt, Karl Rove and George W. Bush have been much better at national security politics than national security policy…

When I was in Baghdad last year, our top intelligence official told me things would be 100 percent better in Iraq if we’d only not sent the Iraqi army home. Another U.S. official in Iraq recently told me that the Administration’s policy of complete De-Baathification was “insane.” The author of that policy was given our nation’s highest civilian medal.

Plenty tough. Not very smart.

…Our troops have also not been given the equipment they need to do their jobs as effectively and safely as possible. Hillbilly armor? That’s a disgrace.

…Mr. Rove, I say we are ready. Ready to have this debate any time, any place, you’d like to have it. Ready to expose the severe failings of this Administration’s stewardship of America’s security. Ready to show the nation that there is a better way, that we can be tough AND smart.

Bah

Stat of the Day from PSoTD:

It's estimated that at least 800,000 Americans have tried group sex at least once. Some estimates go as high as 3 million Americans.

Of course, you still have to be in a crowded store to bump into such an American, after all, there were an estimated 295,734,134 people living in America in July of 2005.

Three million? Come on, someone’s not fessin’ up. I’ve seen at least three million people engage in group sex between Real Sex and Taxicab Confessions alone.

Oh My

How does someone this dumb function?

A Utah teenager called the police when a burglar stole a big bag of marijuana from his home.

And, after police pulled in a suspect, the 18-year-old agreed to go to the station to 'identify' the drugs.

The 'victim' was then arrested and charged with possession of drugs with intent to supply, reports the Desert Morning News.

"He actually came and identified it as his," said Orem Police Lt. Doug Edwards. "Even the dumb criminals are generally smarter than this."

Possession is 9/10 of the law—and a felony.

The GOP Gets a Boehner

Rep. John Boehner of Ohio has been elected House majority leader to replace the indicted (and embattled—don’t forget embattled!) Tom DeLay.

So what’s Boehner’s story? Rated 0% by NARAL, 7% by the ACLU, 17% by the NEA, 5% by the LCV, 0% by APHA, 7% by the AFL-CIO, 0% by the ARA, and 91% by the Christian Coalition. So anti-choice, anti-civil rights, anti-education, anti-environmental protection, anti-public health, anti-labor, and anti-seniors, but he loves the baby Jesus.

Sounds great.

Lordy Begordy

House Republicans are taking a mulligan on the first ballot for Majority Leader. The first count showed more votes cast than Republicans present at the Conference meeting.

Passed on by Shaker Angelos, who notes, “Republicans even cheat on their OWN voting!”

Either that, or it’s just really hard to count when your head is up your ass.

Well, whaddaya know?

Toast passes on an article in Slate which suggests that “the gender lens may not shed light on the latest educational crisis.” Gee, that sounds familiar. Where have I heard that before…?

Writer Ann Hulbert does a great job of debunking the “boys are in trouble” business with both data and a little common sense, and I’d do it no justice by excerpting, so I really recommend reading the whole thing.

One thing I’ll note, however, is this:

What's truly at stake for American children may not be the intricacies of neural wiring, but the rudimentary habits of working. Citing a recent study by two psychologists (one of them Martin E. P. Seligman, author of Learned Optimism), Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews called attention to evidence that self-discipline—in particular, a capacity for deferred gratification—may be the best predictor of academic success, better than IQ: Do your homework, and plenty of practicing, before you watch television or sit down to play Xbox. That sounds, I know, like irresistible grist for an argument about whether and why girls might have an innate gift for just that kind of goody-goody, grindlike behavior, but let's not start it. It's a disservice to girls to portray them as destined for diligence, as though conscientious effort were a second-rate recourse for slower or steadier minds, rather than what is really is: a crucial choice that helps ensure long-term success. And it's an even bigger disservice to boys and their college prospects to reinforce the idea that discipline and self-denial are sissy stuff.

That’s a perfect example of why I’ve been arguing against viewing this through the prism of gender. It does a grave disservice to both boys and girls on a lot of levels, and has the added ill effect of ignoring the very real societal issues that must be addressed if this problem is going to be met with suitable solutions.

Random Thoughts on the Telly

So last night, I’m watching an episode of CSI: NY (so not as good as the original in Vegas, but wev), and during the show, I see commercials for all these other CBS shows, none of which I’ve seen, but all seem to be in the same vein—law enforcement and/or mystery solving. This morning, I started looking at the other network schedules, and, although detective and crime shows have always been a TV staple (hello, Perry Mason), it seems like there’s just an absolute glut of them at the moment.

CBS offers CSI, CSI: NY, CSI: Miami, Cold Case, Criminal Minds, NCIS, Numb3rs, and Without a Trace. NBC offers Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Crossing Jordan, and Medium. ABC’s got Alias and is adding a new show to their schedule called The Evidence, in which all of the clues to the case will be revealed in a videotaped evidence log and viewers are invited to “play along with our heroes as they find each clue, determine its meaning, put the pieces of the puzzle together and figure out who done it.” Fox has 24 and a new show, Bones, which features a forensic anthropologist. USA’s got Monk and endless Law & Order re-runs. And TNT has its own production, The Closer, coupled with re-runs of Law & Order, Without a Trace, and Cold Case. And this doesn’t even begin to touch on the myriad of investigation and forensics programs on A&E, various incarnations of The Discovery Channel, HBO’s long-running documentary series like Autopsy and America Undercover, and all the other shows of the same ilk across the cable spectrum.

What struck me as curious about the prevalence of these shows is that it’s completely counterintuitive based on the hostility toward science and contempt for facts that so deeply plagues the public discourse. CSI is the top-rated non-reality TV show, topped only by American Idol, and its entire premise is that logic, reason, and science are the path to truth. I don’t think only members of the reality-based community are watching these shows; I’m curious how a person who disdains intellectualism as elite or, you know, not that necessary, appreciate a show that is predicated on precisely the opposite view.

In looking at the current crop of shows, I couldn’t recall ever having seen such a dearth of sitcoms. They’re there, but the rest of the network schedules are dominated by “news” shows, like 60 Minutes and Dateline, and reality shows, which seems to signal at minimum a curiosity about the world and the people in it. Why are so many people interested in watching a show like The Amazing Race, but not exploring beyond their own borders? Why watch Trading Spouses, but refuse to challenge one’s own biases by exploring new or unfamiliar territory?

I imagine television gives some people the justification for not broadening their own horizons, as it were. I saw it on the teevee; I don’t need to do it myself. But what about the people who spend their days championing the watering down of science classes by infusing them with lectures on intelligent design, and by night, snuggle up with the remote to spend some time with Grissom and his CSI team, whose work is dependent on sound science? They must exist; the numbers of people who support teaching ID and who watch CSI make it unlikely there’s no crossover. What is the disconnect here? It feels like the opposite of escapism.

No conclusions from this blogger, who remains a bit mystified by the whole thing. Just thought it might make an interesting discussion.

Ha

Shaker Merciless passed this along via email:

Love it. (And, btw, I did check to confirm it’s a genuine quote. It is.)
Side Note: A couple of people have mentioned that they weren't familiar with Congressman Rangel before this post. For more Rangel-goodness, check out this video at Crooks & Liars, to which Paul the Spud originally linked back in June. Rangel's a good guy; check it out.

Trouble in Freeperland

See Alito not deliver a knee-jerk response to execute a black murderer.

See the Freepers go apeshit.

What I love about this is that conservatives spent Alito’s entire nomination process trying to convince liberals that he wasn’t a knee-jerk conservative, that he was reasonable and prudent. Now that he actually acts that way, conservatives feel betrayed. And let’s be realistic about this decision—he stayed an execution so a condemned man’s argument about the death penalty could be considered. That’s not exactly a radical leftist position. But the bloodthirsty wingnuts are disappointed that their man has granted a few more days to a guy whose petition will likely fail anyway, simply to ensure his legal options are well and truly exhausted before his life is taken. Nice.

More Headline Juxtaposing Fun

Lobbying Changes Divide House GOP

Just two weeks after House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) pledged to pass far-reaching changes to the rules of lobbying on Capitol Hill, House Republican members pushed back hard against those proposals yesterday, charging that their leaders are overreacting to a growing corruption scandal.

In a tense, 3 1/2 -hour closed-door session, many Republicans challenged virtually every element of the leadership's proposal, from a blanket ban on privately funded travel to stricter limits on gifts to an end to gym privileges for lawmakers-turned-lobbyists. Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.), a veteran conservative who is seeking a top leadership post, scoffed that Congress knows how to do just two things well -- nothing and overreact, according to witnesses.

Shorter GOP: We wants to keeps our goodies!

Budget Cuts Pass By a Slim Margin

The House yesterday narrowly approved a contentious budget-cutting package that would save nearly $40 billion over five years by imposing substantial changes on programs including Medicaid, welfare, child support and student lending.

With its presidential signature all but assured, the bill represents the first effort in nearly a decade to try to slow the growth of entitlement programs, one that will be felt by millions of Americans. Women on welfare are likely to face longer hours of work, education or community service to qualify for their checks. Recipients of Medicaid can expect to face higher co-payments and deductibles, especially on expensive prescription drugs and emergency room visits for non-emergency care. More affluent seniors will find it far more difficult to qualify for Medicaid-covered nursing care.

College students could face higher interest rates when their banks get squeezed by the federal government. And some cotton farmers will find support payments nicked. State-led efforts to force deadbeat parents to pay their child support may also have to be curtailed.

…Thirteen Republicans joined 200 Democrats and one independent in voting against the measure.

Shorter GOP: Fuck the poor, the sick, the elderly, children, single parents, and fuck them but good. Lazy jerks. If they weren’t so lazy, they’d be rich. Now gives us our goodies! Gimme gimme gimme gimme gimee!!!

Question of the Day

As a follow-up to Tart’s Monday night question about what traits in a partner you find irresistible, let’s go the opposite route tonight.

If glasses, a great ass, humor, bookishness, etc. rev your engine, what stalls it? What are the deal-breakers?

Aside from the obvious (abusiveness, cheating, lawbreaking, etc.), the ultimate deal-breaker for me, way more than any physical attribute or bad habit, is being either deliberately ignorant or dull. I can’t stand deliberate ignorance—whether it manifests as stupidity or hatefulness—and I can’t hack being bored all the time. If you can’t hold a lively, engaging conversation, it’s over before it even began. Zzzzzzz...goodbye.