Another reason not to vote for Giuliani, as if anyone with any sense needed one.
Gore Rocks
Constant Comment would like me to remind Shakesville that Al Gore is on 30 Rock tonight at 8:30pm EST on NBC.
In totally unrelated news, I may be making out with my television tonight at 8:30pm EST.
Christian Preacher Harassing Woman on USF Campus
by Michael Hussey
The University of South Florida newspaper The Oracle has a disturbing story of a 22 year-old female student harassed by evangelist John M. Kranert. The young woman was sitting outside of Cooper Hall. She told reporter Victoria Bekiempis she was waiting for her next class and not interacting with Kranert. What happened next is bizarre.
The student said she was waiting for class, sitting on a bench near the Subway outside of Cooper Hall, when evangelist John M. Kranert charged at her with his fist up, running until he stopped inches from her face, before he stuck his finger out and called her a whore.How Kranert was able to form an opinion on the woman's character based on her wardrobe is a task best left to shrinks, not that a wardrobe is an indicator of one's sexual history in any event.
"I remember this, when he was telling me, that I was fully covered," she said.
That day, she was wearing a gray sweater, long pants, a button-down shirt - not a tank top - and flip-flops.
I'm glad that the young lady told Kranert that he's "sick" and "domineering." Women should stand up to this kind of bullying. Cowering only empowers bullies. I'm not encourage women to put themselves in dangerous situations, just that they don't need to take shit.
Kranert should be aware that college campuses take harassment very seriously.
"He is just a baby step away from sexual harassment," said the student. "I don't understand how he isn't sexually harassing students on campus." The student has filed charges and is remaining anonymous.
He has harassed the woman on other occasions. He told her, "I can tell you've been with every man on campus by the way you stand." Kranert also mocked her skin complexion and called her a "prostitute." Apparently, being sexist wasn't enough. He had to make racist remarks. One more phobic form of behavior and he can win the Jerry Falwell Triple Crown.
Kranert's wife Evangelina may face possible assault charges.
The student, who has not filed a complaint against Kranert's wife, Evangelina, said that the preacher's wife also approached her and pointed her fingers close to the student's face, so closely that Evangelina even touched her at several junctures.The student has filed charges and is remaining anonymous. She has witnesses to back up her account of the events.
Campus police have received other complaints about Kranert.
University Police initially confronted Kranert and other evangelists Wednesday, Oct. 31, about possible disorderly conduct, responding to callers who complained that their preaching could be heard in Cooper Hall classrooms and offices and was disrupting lessons and work. There was also a question of whether the evangelists were improperly and illegally blocking sidewalks outside of Cooper. No arrests were made.The question is why hasn't USF trespassed Kranert and his followers. I'm familiar with Cooper Hall. If his preaching is load enough to disturb classes then the noise level must be deafening outside. Interfering with classes is enough to cite Kranert for trespassing. There is no reason to let Kranert back on campus. USF must be scared of a potential lawsuit. The college already is being accused of not having enough security. They need to prove they will protect students by getting rid of Kranert.
(Cross-posted from Pushing Rope.)
Where are all the women (of color) bloggers?
[The title is not intended to marginalize the issue of color, but to be a riff on the semi-annual "Where are all the women bloggers?" thing.]
Created by Sudy, who notes it's a first draft. Via Donna Darko.
Sometimes Dead Is Better
Presidential contender and all around asshat Mitt Romney wants you to know he's really against this whole gay marriage thing. He's hates the gays way more than that drag queen Rudy Giuliani, or Hollywood Fred Thompson. No surprise, he backs amending the Constitution so gays can't get married.
In Iowa last week he even let loose with this pearl:
"…I believe that the development of children is enhanced by having a male and a female as part of their upbringing in their home. Even when there's a divorce, you still have a mom and a dad. And even where one member of the partnership may pass away, the memory and the characteristics of that gender, of that partner influence the development of a child."
So, yeah, according to Mitt, a dead parent is preferable to a gay parent.
Nice.
FBI: Regularly Scheduled Announcement
The Ministry of Homeland Defense would like to remind you that terror could be lurking around every corner while you go shopping for yourselves and your loved ones during this Holiday season.
Comfort breeds apathy.In what one FBI spokesman described as "almost an annual ritual," the bureau has obtained
uncorroboratedWhite House intelligence indicating al Qaeda would like to strike shopping malls during the holiday shopping season, two law enforcement sources said Thursday.
Those sources confirmed there is intelligence dating back to August that al Qaeda would like to attack malls in Los Angeles, California, and Chicago, Illinois. [...]
A spokesman for the FBI's Chicago field office, Ross Rice, stressed the intelligence came "froman uncorroborated sourceThe White House and it's non-specific."
Consume and be vigilant.
OMFG
Eddie Izzard + Legos = Unadulterated Brilliance
Via Tigtog, who's going mad for Cake or Death (classic), but I've got to go with Death Star Canteen, which is just one of my favorite comedy bits of all time.
[Transcript here.]
Part of the reason that I love Death Star Canteen so much is because Eddie did the Circle material in Britain first, so my Londoner Andy saw it live before I did, and he tried to recreate it for me after the show. I can still remember that conversation to this day; I was laughing so hard that my whole body went weak and I could barely maintain my grip on the phone.
Then, when I saw the show live, I was waiting and waiting for this bit—and when he launched into it, I could hear Andy saying it, too, which just made it even funnier. And later, when I recounted to him how I was in stitches remembering his version while listening to Eddie, it sent us both into fits of laughter, so now when I see it, I recall that, too. It just keeps getting funnier and funnier for me, with every new layer.
And now—Legos! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
A Tale of Two Stories
GO train assault haunts victim:
It was 16 years ago when Debbie, then 17, was … on her way from her Oakville home to a George Michael concert in Toronto. She was sitting by herself in the upper level of an otherwise empty car between Oakville and Port Credit when a man came up behind her, choked her and dragged her into a washroom. He sexually assaulted her and knocked her unconscious. She needed dental work and suffered permanent partial paralysis in her right eye.Says Shaker Megan, who forwarded me this story: "If these asshats are serious about this, it means that either they let her stay on the train knowing that she didn't have a ticket (unlikely), or they checked to see if she had a ticket after she was assaulted. WTF? Seriously? Sorry about the sexual assault and beating, sweetheart, but can we just check your ticket to make sure you're all paid up, just before we call 911? Gah!"
…But Debbie is not without blame in this tortured journey through a legal maze.
As part of its defence, GO Transit said Debbie was a non-paying customer and that she was caught without a ticket that day. In effect, she was a trespasser and GO Transit and CN said they don't knowingly permit non-paying passengers to remain on board their trains [and] they aren't liable for the attack on Debbie.
Meanwhile, as I briefly mentioned yesterday in the round-up, eight young men who filmed themselves orally raping a 17-year-old young woman, setting her hair on fire, and spitting and urinating on her, then disseminated the tape as a porn film called "Cunt the Movie," were given probation and ordered to "participate in a rehabilitation program for male adolescents about positive sexuality."
I'm routinely called (variations on) a crazed, evil, delusional feminazi for not obediently genuflecting to the Totally True Story about how legions of women just falsely cry rape willy-nilly to ruin men's lives and oh you don't even KNOW how the courts are just stacked against legions of poor, unfairly accused men, but the reason I fail in perpetuity to bow at that particular altar is because I'm a member of the reality-based community, and reality just doesn't bear that shit out.
In fact, it pretty much bears out the exact bloody opposite. KTHXBYE.
Caption This Photo
"Heh heh. I just gave him the French tickler!"
[Thanks to Petulant for the photo, which he found here.]
The Return of Mark Klein
Remember Mark Klein, the former AT&T tech who emerged as a whistleblower in April of last year, alleging that AT&T was diverting internet traffic to the NSA via secret rooms in their switching centers?
Well, if you don't remember him, I won't blame you, given that the mainstream media didn't seem to think that what he had to say was all that important at the time.
But in the intervening year and a half, of course, we've learned that both the administration and the telecoms were getting up to a lot of secretive and flatly criminal shenanigans, the extent of which we've yet to determine—even as Congress is poised to nonetheless grant them retroactive immunity for whatever it was they might have done in a blatant infringement of the privacy rights of American citizens.
Now, Klein is in D.C. to lobby against that legislation, explaining that if the immunity provision passes, Americans may never know how extensive the surveillance program actually was nor how profoundly their rights had been breached."The president has not presented this truthfully," said Klein, a 62-year old retiree. "He said it was about a few people making calls to the Mideast. But I know this physical equipment. It copies everything. There's no selection of anything, at all -- the splitter copies entire data streams from the internet, phone conversations, e-mail, web-browsing. Everything."
Yesterday, Matt Browner-Hamlin from Chris Dodd's campaign interviewed Klein. This video is a short clip (transcript at the link), but the full 18-minute interview can be viewed here.
What Klein unearthed -- you can read it here -- points to a nearly unbounded surveillance program. Its very location in San Francisco suggests that the program was "massively domestic" in its focus, he said. "If they really meant what they say about only wanting international stuff, you wouldn't want it in San Francisco or Atlanta. You'd want to be closer to the border where the lines come in from the ocean so you pick up international calls. You only do it in San Francisco if you want domestic stuff. The location of this stuff contradicts their story."
That's what's at stake in the telecom immunity provision, Klein believes. If the surveillance-related lawsuits are invalidated by a provision in the intelligence-committee-passed FISA bill, then the extent of the program -- at least between 2001 and 2006 -- will remain the exclusive purview of the Bush administration, the communications firms and the handful of Senators selected to review legal justifications for the program. "These are not babes in woods. They knew what they were doing," Klein said. "The violation of the Constitution is where they split off -- where the splitter splits off full copies of a datastream, and connects to other companies' internet stuff, like Sprint or GlobalCrossing. They don’t want people to understand that. They want to portray it like the president does, that it's a handful of international phone calls. That's the soundbite, and that’s not true. It affects millions of people domestically."
I'd like to point out that Mr. Klein is blew this whistle in real time, unlike a seemingly never-ending parade of Bush administration tattle-tales who waited to reveal the truth until they had books to promote.
UPDATE: Petulant also has video of Klein with Olbermann and on Washington Journal.
Maybe even asshole of the month…
A bitch read this shit about Damon Wayons over at Slant Truth 2.0 and…well, it made my Afro hurt.
Damon was on The View defending Don Imus and his comments about “nappy headed ho’s”, which he has the right to do. He’s a complete dumb ass, but a bitch will defend his right to be verbally ig’nant in this great country of ours.
Color me patriotic (wink).
But then Damon took it a step further…“Black people at home are laughing right now,” he said. “White people are going, ‘That’s not right!’ It’s all cultural.”
Blink.
Hold on and wait one damn minute, you single because your mother never raised your ignorant ass to respect a sister instead of expect a sister to stay quiet and fix you dinner dumb ass motherfucker!
Speak for thyself...if you must, oh foolish throwback to a less enlightened time.
But this bitch is with Kevin aka The Thin Black Duke on this…leave the whole of blackness out of that stupid ass shit.
And once more with feeling...Damon, m'dear YOU JUST SAID SOME STUPID SHIT!
Vote for Science!
Right now, a global warming denier is leading in the Weblog Awards in the Best Science Blog category.
Currently leading the field in the "Best Science Blog" category is a website whose work has gone a long way in furthering anti-scientific interests, the global warming denialist blog Climate Audit.Kevin Grandia just emailed me with a heads-up, and he says vote for Bad Astronomy Blog, who's currently in second place.
Climate Audit is run by Stephen McIntyre, a Canadian and "former mining executive" who has become the darling of climate skeptics by challenging the conclusions of Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann and NASA’s James Hansen.
…[T]he right blogosphere has made Climate Audit’s shot at the Weblog Award a cause celebre and are using postings and “endorsements” to rally their support to push for a skeptic to be named "Best Science Blog."
Voting ends in like two hours, so off you go!
ZOMG
Congress hands Bush first veto override:
President Bush suffered the first veto override of his seven-year-old presidency Thursday as the Senate enacted a $23 billion water resources bill despite his protest that it was filled with unnecessary projects.Actually, Bush getting his first smackdown would be more impressive if he hadn't only had to issue his first veto in July of 2006, thanks to the useless, rubber-stamping bastards of the GOP-majority Congress who gave him everything he wanted for nearly six uninterrupted years.
...The bill funds hundreds of Army Corps of Engineers projects, such as dams, sewage plants and beach restoration, that are important to local communities and their representatives. It also includes money for the hurricane-hit Gulf Coast and for Florida Everglades restoration efforts.
tune in next Tuesday
Once long ago on a blog far, far away, I wrote about the challenging of evolution in schools and the "intelligent design" movement. The start of it all, for me, was when a Kansas state school board member was leading hearings into the science teaching standards (on evolution and didn't agree with evolution) but never actually read the standards because they were "too technical" for her to understand (note: the decision the KS board came to was "Science teachers will now be required to instruct their students that evolutionary theory is not proven, and will have to add that life is in fact so complex, it could not have arisen without the involvement of some external agent, or higher power."). Next came the case in Dover, PA, which caught national attention. And, poof!, a blog series called Inherit the Dumbassery was born.
PBS & NOVA are airing a show next Tuesday, November 13th, called: Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial focusing on the Dover case.
In this program, NOVA captures the turmoil that tore apart the community of Dover, Pennsylvania in one of the latest battles over teaching evolution in public schools. Featuring trial reenactments based on court transcripts and interviews with key participants, including expert scientists and Dover parents, teachers, and town officials, "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" follows the celebrated federal case of Kitzmiller v. Dover School District.Check your local PBS station listings for times in your area. In case you don't remember much about the Dover case, here's a refresher:
From my original post on it (sorry I can't link, not even through the WayBackMachine who didn't archive the month is was written, the site is no longer up):
In Harrisburg, PA the next production of Inherit the Dumbassery is set to run. It seems the Dover Area school district decided to put a blurb on the so-called “intelligent design” in their biology class. The case has gone to court.More from Buckingham from PBS' site about the show:
Most ID’ers ballyhoo the notion that “intelligent design” is some sort of creationism-in-pseudo science clothing. It’s not creationism, they chortle, it is a theory just like evolution is. It’s not trying to insert any one religion into public schools. Bullshit, I say. On both counts.
First, if it’s not promoting religion or “any particular religion” then why is it that the people who defend these court cases come from single-religion groups that tend to have a persecution complex? Interesting that you don’t see multi-religion defense groups trying to fight for this. Look at the Dover schools—their lawyer, Patrick Gillen, is from the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor. The Center, who is defending the school district, lobbies for (what it sees as) the religious freedom of Christians. If this isn’t about christian creationism, then what’s up with these people? Or check out a Dover school board member, William Buckingham, who said this:
“Nearly 2,000 years ago, someone died on a cross for us. Shouldn’t we have the courage to stand up for him?”
Public school, people. Public. School.
[...]
"There was a blow-up like you couldn't believe," Bill Buckingham, head of the school board's curriculum committee, tells NOVA. Buckingham helped formulate the intelligent-design policy when he noticed that the biology textbook chosen by teachers for classroom use was, in his words, "laced with Darwinism."A more objective overview of the situation (also from the site):
In 2004, the Dover school board ordered science teachers to read a statement to high school biology students suggesting that there is an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution called intelligent design—the idea that life is too complex to have evolved naturally and therefore must have been designed by an intelligent agent. The teachers refused to comply. (For more on this, see Board vs. Teachers.) Later, parents opposed to intelligent design filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the school board of violating the constitutional separation of church and state.By the way, not two months after this made the news, there was a new school board election in Dover. All of the members who were up for re-election were ousted.
Programming Note
Hey Guess What?
Larry King (who still hates your stinking guts) will have Dr. Phil on tonight to discuss Dog the Bounty Hunter. It doesn't get better than that.
Gah!
Last season's American Idol runner-up, Blake Lewis (who was the favorite of nearly every last Idolater around here, so don't give me any shit for posting this!), is just about to release his album, and this is the cover (via Andy and Michael K):
Okay, first of all, that reminds me of my crush-poster to gay lion and rebel billionaire Richard Branson.
Secondly, where is this album being released—a Solarbabies Enthusiasts Convention on Planet Unicorn?!
Fuck.
Rudy and Pat
The only thing I can figure out from the endorsement of Rudy Giuliani's candidacy by televangelist Pat Robertson is that desperation has set in amongst the Religious Reich to the point that one of their more prominent voices would support a man who is pro-choice, pro-gay rights, and views his marriage vows the same way he does a rental-car agreement. If this was true fifteen years ago, Mr. Robertson would have endorsed Bill Clinton...except that Mr. Clinton was then and is still married to the same woman and she is the only woman he's ever married.
Either that or Mr. Robertson has had one too many of the miraculous protein shakes that enable him to leg-press over 2,000 pounds.Many former Christian conservative allies dismissed the endorsement as an inexplicable stunt. They noted that Mr. Robertson, 77, had lost much of his influence since the heady days of his second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses 20 years ago when he ran for the Republican presidential nomination.
What also springs to mind is that the Christian conservative movement is just incapable of learning their lesson. They thought that with the election of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the long years in the wilderness would be over. No more abortions, no more queers promoting the radical homosexual agenda, nothing but pure Christian white bread wonderfulness now and forever. But it didn't happen that way; Roe v. Wade survived intact through the 1980's, those damned queers were still everywhere, and the country elected Bill Clinton. Not to worry; all the Clintons did was rally the troops, and when George W. Bush came into office, they were sure that now really was their time, bitchez! Except the Bushies played them like a one-night stand -- "of course I'll respect you in the morning." Oh, sure, they talked a good game about "faith-based" this and that, but all they wanted was their money and their support at the voting booth.
“What support he has left,” said Connie Mackey, a vice president of the public policy arm of the evangelical Family Research Council, “is obviously going to be eroded by this very strange endorsement.”
Others close to Mr. Robertson said, however, that he had decided to speak out to rebut a threat from other Christian conservative leaders to bolt the Republican Party if it nominated Mr. Giuliani or any other candidate who supports abortion rights.
Mr. Robertson must think that Mr. Giuliani is a very straightforward and pragmatic candidate who has been very upfront about his views on abortion and gay rights; he's not going to offer them nostrums and then screw them over later (although perhaps he should have checked with the former Mrs. Giulianis first). At least they know from the git-go, and since he's the best chance the GOP seems to have at the moment, you go with what you've got. Desperation and the fear of oblivion are a great motivator.
So this endorsement by Mr. Robertson is either a calculated move on the part of a very crafty and insightful political genius, or the random act of weirdness from a has-been lunatic who thinks political assassinations are cheaper than war and that meteors over Orlando are divine retribution for Lance Bass. You make the call.
Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.
Quit Doggin' Dog the Bounty Hunter
Can't a man use an offensive racial epithet in the privacy of his own home anymore without jeopardizing his lucrative reality television program? Duane "Dog" Chapman, star of A&E's Dog the Bounty Hunter has had his show suspended after he was taped saying the N-word repeatedly and he is devastated. Now reporters are hounding the poor bounty hunter, walking around his neighborhood, showing his picture to friends and neighbors, saying, "Have you seen this man? Do you know where we can find him? We just want to talk to him."
The irony of this whole thing is that anyone who knows Dog -- and who doesn't feel they know him from his well-edited television program -- knows that he isn't a racist. This whole misunderstanding started when he was actually trying to protect his son's black girlfriend from having to hear all the racial epithets he and the members of his crew and family say in a typical day. He was afraid they just wouldn't be able to stop themselves from using the N-word around her and she might take offense. We all know how touchy black people can be about these things, which is why Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck have been forced to stop socializing with all their black friends. So Dog told his son, Tucker, that he would either have to dump his girlfriend or quit the show. It was really for her own good, to spare her feelings.
"I don't care if she's a Mexican, a whore or whatever," Dog patiently explained to Tucker. "It's not because she's black, it's because we use the word n----r sometimes here. I'm not gonna take a chance ever in life of losing everything I've worked for for 30 years because some fucking n----r heard us say n----r and turned us in to the Enquirer magazine. Our career is over! I'm not taking that chance at all! Never in life! Never! Never! If Lyssa [Dog's daughter] was dating a n----r, we would all say 'f--k you!' And you know that. If Lyssa brought a black guy home ya da da... it's not that they're black, it's none of that. It's that we use the word n----r. We don't mean you f--king scum n----r without a soul. We don't mean that s--t. But America would think we mean that. And we're not taking a chance on losing everything we got over a racial slur because our son goes with a girl like that. I can't do that Tucker. You can't expect Gary, Bonnie, Cecily, all them young kids to [garbled] because 'I'm in love for 7 months' - f--k that! So, I'll help you get another job but you can not work here unless you break up with her and she's out of your life. I got 'em in the parking lot trying to record us. I got that girl saying she's gonna wear a recorder."
"I don't even know what to say," Tucker replied.
It turned out that Dog was right to be worried about someone recording his words and people misconstruing them. Unbeknownst to him, Tucker taped their telephone conversation and sold it to the National Enquirer. If this incident shows anything, it shows what a good father Dog was in the way he instilled his values into his son. After all, Dog's work often depends on family members turning in their relatives.
Now America has the wrong idea about Dog even though it's hard to see how anyone could interpret his words as racist. As he explained to his son, when he uses the word n----r, he means it in the good way. In fact, Dog always thought of himself as practically an honorary black person: "There’s a special connection that I thought I had between me and black America," he explained. "And I used to say, 'I’m black, too.' In other words, I — my whole life I’ve been called a half-breed, a convict, king of the trailer trash, this and that. I take that and stand. So when I stood there and said, 'I kind of know what you feel like, because I’ve been there, too, I felt that I could embrace and like, as brothers or, even as a black woman, say the word."
And he didn't want his son to break up with his girlfriend just because she was black. If Tucker brought a Jew home, Dog would have been worried that his girlfriend would hear them making anti-Semitic remarks. Or if Tucker had a homosexual lover, think how difficult it would have been for the family not to let the word "faggot" slip out. Yet people insist on making it a racial thing.
It's hard not to feel sympathy for Dog, who still has a lot of fans. Even Whoopi Goldberg defended Dog on The View (she's not the one who thinks the world is flat, she's the other one), claiming that she uses racial slurs around her house all the time. Who doesn't? And Dog is really trying hard to make amends. Like Michael Richards, Mel Gibson and Don Imus, Dog has gone on CNN's Larry King and made a tearful apology. He went on Sean Hannity on Fox and cried there, too, saying "If I could kill myself and people would forgive me, I would do that," an offer some people are considering. He has asked to meet with the Rev. Al Sharpton. He has promised to seek counseling for anger management and to do something about his inability to stop saying the word n----r, which could take years of work. But that's not all. To show just how sorry he is Dog is making arrangements to spend eternity surrounded by black people. He wants to be buried at a slave burial ground near George Washington's home, Mount Vernon in Virginia. "I want to be buried right where they're at because I will never be forgiven as (long as) I'm alive," Chapman said. After he is dead, Dog should have no problem at all being around black people and not saying the word n----r. I think we all can be pretty sure of that.
Crossposted at Jon Swift
Duh of the Day
Abstinence-only programs still don’t work. Anyone who's shocked, raise your pristine hymen.
(Not so fast, bionic women…)
