there are two things i have to say: MORE PLUMBING LESS LAUGHING and jerry falwell and i together say: blow 'em all away in the name of the lord!!! -lady rose of hartfordshire
On September 10, 2009, a SWAT-team of Atlanta police officers detained and searched over 60 people without a warrant, probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion of any criminal activity, just because they were patrons at a gay bar called the Atlanta Eagle.
Here’s what happened…
On the evening of on September 10, 2009, Atlanta police officers stormed into the Atlanta Eagle to investigate reports of lewd conduct and to make arrests for unlicensed adult entertainment, because the bar had four dancers in boxer-brief-style costumes.
Excerpt from Police Report. .............
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A Fox News host is scheduled to make several appearances next week at events and forums where he will "discuss the dangers of government-forced health care," alongside the head of the anti-tax and anti-health care reform group Americans for Prosperity.
John Stossel, a former co-anchor of ABC's 20/20, is hosting a new show on the Fox Business Network called "Stossel," which is described as featuring "in-depth reports on domestic and international libertarian issues" like civil liberties, the business of health care and Social Security.
The network refers to Stossel as a journalist on its website---in fact, "one of the most talented and thought-provoking journalists in the field."......
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THE DUST STORM
…the editor, in order to make the point more effective, had changed my words from a conditional subjunctive mood to an indicative past tense…
— Arthur RothsteinMaddow made a point to mention that she reached out to all thirty senators who voted no on the bill amendment for comment - and none of them responded. Maddow also asks Jones and Kelly directly about their thoughts on the senators that voted no, and Session's accusation that this was "a political move."........
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A retired General who served more than 30 years in the U.S. Army and helped train Iraq's military between 2003 and 2004 called former Vice President Dick Cheney an "incompetent war fighter."
National Security Network Senior Adviser and Retired General Paul Eaton made the comments after Cheney criticized Obama in a Wednesday night speech for "dithering" about whether to substantially increase the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.......Technorati Tags:retired general paul eaton, dick cheney, barack obama, afghanistan
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Peoria, Arizona, police said Wednesday that Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 48, struck his 20-year-old daughter, Noor Faleh Almaleki, and her friend Amal Edan Khalaf with a vehicle he was driving in a parking lot Tuesday afternoon.
Faleh Hassan Almaleki was angry with his daughter "as she had become too 'Westernized' and was not living according to [the family's] traditional Iraq[i] values," Peoria police said in a statement released Wednesday............
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The Washington Times' Amanda Carpenter reports, "Maintaining his stature as one of the most forceful defenders of the Bush Administration's defense policies former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Obama of committing 'libel' against CIA interrogators on Wednesday" during a speech at the Center for Security Policy.
"In the speech, Mr. Cheney charged that President Obama has 'filled the air with vague and useless platitude' when talking about torture and by calling enhanced interrogation techniques 'torture" he has committed 'libel' against CIA interrogators whom Mr. Cheney described as 'dedicated professionals who acted honorably and well, in our country’s name and in our country’s cause,'" Carpenter adds........
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…that there can be be more beauty and more deep wonder in the standings and spacings of mute furnishings on a bare floor between the squaring bourns of walls than in any music ever made: that this square home, as it stands in unshadowed earth between the winding years of heaven, is, not to me but of itself, one among the serene and final, uncapturable beauties of existence.
— James Agee, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”
William Stott’s “Documentary Expression and Thirties America” is a scholarly attempt to fit F.S.A. photography within a broader context. Hilton Kramer in The Times Book Review called it “…a comprehensive inquiry into the attitudes and ambitions that characterized the documentary impulse of the thirties.” Stott was a graduate student and a teacher at Yale, and it was there that he first met Evans. We started our phone conversation with a discussion of James Curtis and Walker Evans.
ERROL MORRIS: In your review of “Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth” you write, “Curtis thinks all manipulation is the same.” That he wants to lump all the F.S.A. photographers into one big pile and, in particular, he wants to prove that Walker Evans is guilty of manipulation........Technorati Tags:errol morris, ny times, the case of the inappropriate alarm clock
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By Susan Elan
WeNews correspondent
Enforcement of an Oklahoma law that will publicize an unprecedented amount of personal information about women who undergo abortions has been delayed by at least one month, to Dec. 4, as part of a legal challenge.
(WOMENSENEWS)--An Oklahoma law mandating that detailed information about patients who have abortions be published on a state Web site was blocked by legal action on Monday.
The law was scheduled to take effect Nov. 1.
To challenge the state constitutionality of the law, the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights filed a lawsuit on behalf of two Oklahoma women.
The center's spokeswoman Dionne Scott said a temporary restraining order that stops enforcement was granted late Monday by Oklahoma County District Court Judge Twyla Mason Gray so that she could "look further into the case."
The law, House Bill 1595, requires physicians to ask patients, described as "mothers," up to 37 personal questions, including their age, marital status, race, years of education, number of prior pregnancies, reason for the abortion, method of abortion and payment and whether an ultrasound was performed.
Former state Rep. Wanda Jo Stapleton, an Oklahoma City Democrat who brought the lawsuit with Lora Joyce Davis, a resident of Shawnee, Okla., applauded the court granted reprieve.
"This is one of dozens of bills piled on year after year by the Oklahoma legislature to place obstacles in the path of women," Stapleton said on Tuesday. "The bill points a public finger at women and is intended to scare them to death."..........
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Rep. Gregg Harper (R-MS) was interviewed by Politico this week and responded mainly with a stream of wisecracks. When asked, "Have you broken your streak of not introducing any bills yet?" he answered, "Bill who?" And a question about the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus brought the reply, "We hunt liberal, tree-hugging Democrats, although it does seem like a waste of good ammunition."..........
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“There were people throwing up everywhere,” said Dr. Beverley Bunn, 43, an orthodontist from Texas, who said she struggled to remain conscious in the sweat lodge, a makeshift structure covered with blankets and plastic and heated with fiery rocks.
Dr. Bunn said Mr. Ray told the more than 50 people jammed into the small structure — people who had just completed a 36-hour “vision quest” in which they fasted alone in the desert — that vomiting “was good for you, that you are purging what your body doesn’t want, what it doesn’t need.” But by the end of the ordeal on Oct. 8, emergency crews had taken 21 people to hospitals. Three have since died. ............She also described a game — enacted again at the retreat this month — in which Mr. Ray wears white robes and plays God, ordering some participants to commit mock suicide.
For the “vision quest,” the exercise that required spending 36 hours in the desert without food or water, participants had sleeping bags, but Mr. Ray also offered to sell Peruvian ponchos for $250, Dr. Bunn said. .......Technorati Tags:new age guru, james arthur ray, lemmings, sedona, sweat lodge,
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ERROL MORRIS: Rothstein was made the fall guy for this whole concept of posing and manipulation, but you suspected that Walker Evans was moving things, as well.
JAMES CURTIS: My favorite example is Walker Evans moving furniture around inside the sharecroppers’ cabins in Hale County, Alabama. I was talking to Alan Trachtenberg [a professor of American history at Yale]. And Alan said, “Well, when your article on Evans came out, I was mad as hell.” And I said, “Well, what were you mad about?” And he said, “Well, what difference does it make if he moved furniture around inside the sharecroppers’ cabins?” And I said, “Because Evans has been regarded as the high apostle of documentary honesty, and he said he never did things like that.” And afterwards, Trachtenberg replied, “Oh hell, we all know he was a liar.”
ERROL MORRIS: When did you first suspect that Evans was rearranging the furniture?...........THE SORGHUM CANS
Many of the sorghum cans, by the way, were almost the only bright and new-looking things on the farm. Gudger may have bought them. If so, they are notable, for tenants seldom buy anything new.
— James Agee, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”
As in most cases, the mantel mystery includes other sources of evidence that must be weighed against the evidence in a photograph — but should they be given equal weight at the outset of the investigation? How do we weigh the value of some evidence against another? Curtis surveys the evidence from Agee’s written descriptions. He writes in “Mind’s Eye”:
“Agee’s extremely detailed descriptions provide both the floor plans of the tenant homes and inventories of furniture and personal belongings. A close comparison reveals serious discrepancies between Agee’s word pictures and Evans’s photographs…”[23]
Agee may be “very precise” in his descriptions. But is he accurate? Why should we trust Agee and cast suspicion on Evans? Isn’t there something perverse about giving the written word primacy over the photographic image. Don’t we (habitually) do the exact opposite when considering evidence?.............Technorati Tags:the case of the inappropriate alarm clock, errol morris
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from wapo's eye on the world
Clowns attend the Latin American Clown Convention in Mexico City, Mexico.
Eduardo Verdugo-AP
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You know you have bad parents when they fool the the entire world into thinking that their six-year-old son is stuck in a balloon floating in the Colorado air. You know you have even worse parents when those same people allow their children to record a homophobic rap video, complete with lines like "I hate gay faggots, I hit 'em with a bat," and (possibly) "Faggot tried to pee on me."
Yup, it's official. The Balloon Boy saga has taken another turn for the absolute weird.
For those who have managed to escape the absurdity of this story, it all revolves around the Heene family in Colorado, and a set of parents, Richard and Mayumi, who have three children -- Falcon, Bradford and Ryo. The parents duped the world into believing that Falcon was caught in a balloon last week, while he was off either hanging in the rafters of the family's attic or down the street playing basketball (nobody knows where the hell he was -- it's just clear he wasn't in the balloon).......
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Three years after Mel Gibson was arrested during a drunken, anti-Semitic tirade, Los Angeles authorities filed a search warrant seeking bank records attempting to trace cash from the Web site that broke the story: TMZ.
News of that warrant, and a second one issued earlier, provides a chilling postscript to the Gibson saga as investigators tried to uncover who leaked incriminating information to the gossip Web site. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office used the earlier warrant to obtain the cellphone records of TMZ's founder, Harvey Levin.........
.......
The search warrants violate the federal Privacy Protection Act of 1980, Dalglish said. That law, she said, "makes it illegal to execute a search warrant of newsgathering material unless you are investigating the reporter himself or herself for breaking the law, not in a leak investigation."
The Los Angeles district attorney decided earlier this month not to bring charges against Mee, who was suspected of leaking the Gibson documents to TMZ, on grounds that the charge could not be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. According to the memo, based on information obtained from AT&T California, two calls were made from Mee's home to Levin hours after Gibson was arrested in Malibu. Levin called Mee's home eight more times in the two days after Gibson's arrest. The Los Angeles Times was the first to report the memo and the phone records warrant...........
the video i chose to accompany this is disabled (embedding), you'll have to watch it here
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He added that he "meant absolutely nothing derogatory by the reference to a great and honorable people."
Merwin's statement said he wished "to deeply apologize for any material included in that letter that would be considered anti-Semitic in any way.” He said he has "always abhorred in the past, and shall continue to do so in the future, anti-Semitism in any form what so ever."
One of South Carolina's two Jewish lawmakers called on state GOP Chairwoman Karen Floyd to denounce the comments and remove both men from their positions.
The Associated Press and the South Carolina newspaper The State reported Tuesday that Floyd had denounced the comments made by Ulmer and Merwin in their letter but would not ask them to step down over the incident.
"It was an offensive and inappropriate comment that Jim and Edwin have rightly apologized for. These kinds of stereotypes are absolutely unacceptable” Floyd said in a statement Tuesday morning. “It goes without saying that some people will continue trying to exploit this mistake for political gain, but as far as we're concerned, their apology ends the matter."..........
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In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day....
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The letter, published by South Carolina newspaper The Times and Democrat, was authored by James S. Ulmer Jr., who chairs the Orangeburg County GOP, and Edwin O. Merwin Jr., who chairs the Bamberg County GOP.
"There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves," the wrote. "By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.".........
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The first of a seven-part series.
Republican editors throughout the land were soon rubbing their hands over a dispatch which, on quick reading, seemed to convict the New Deal’s cherished resettlement Administration of photographic fakery and bad faith.
— Time Magazine
Summer of 1936. One of the worst droughts in American history. On June 7, North Dakota’s Republican governor, Walter Welford, proclaimed a day of prayer. The citizens of North Dakota would kneel en masse to pray for rain. “Only Providence,” the governor declared, could avert “another tragedy of tremendous proportions.” Devil’s Lake, N.D., recorded .16 of an inch.
The drought continued.
On June 21, Gov. Welford flew to Washington to ask President Roosevelt for aid. On June 23, Roosevelt ordered Dr. Tugwell, head of the Resettlement Administration, to make a survey of the needs in Dakotas and Montana. A million dollars in aid had been requested.
Within a week, a heat wave spread across the Western plains. Newspapers reported it was 111 degrees in North Dakota. By July 7, it was a record 119 degrees in parts of the state. Fields were scorched brown and black. The range country seemed to be covered with a tan moss so close to the ground that the hungry cattle could not reach it; so dry was the covering that it was useless for sheep..........Last week, when White House Communications Director Anita Dunn charged the Fox News Channel with right-wing bias, Fox responded the way it always does. It denied the accusation with a straight face while proceeding to confirm it with its coverage.
Consider Fox's Web story on the episode. It quotes five people. Two of them work for Fox. All of them assert that administration officials are either wrong in substance or politically foolish to criticize the network. No one is cited supporting Dunn's criticisms or saying that it could make sense for Obama to challenge the network's power. It's a textbook example of a biased journalism. (Click here to follow Jacob Weisberg.)......
Everywhere you look (even here at Ars), there are articles about people making poor decisions about what kinds of info and how much to share on sites like Facebook. The Internet is no longer a place where you can hide out easily—friends, family, and employers are all lurking, reading your embarrassing status updates and checking up on those drunken pictures from last week. And that's just the beginning—the world of social networking is a feeding ground for identity thieves and stalkers, too.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Many users are aware that Facebook has numerous privacy controls, for example, but even the most experienced Facebook users often don't know just how much they can control who sees what. For instance, did you know that you can specify exactly who can see your status updates, down to different groups of friends (not just "friends" versus "everyone")? What about controlling which groups of people can even find you in a Facebook search to begin with?
If you don't want to be socially available at all, then the solution is right in front of you and you can stop reading! However, if you have been wondering how you can be socially available on Facebook while still keeping your privacy under control, this guide is for you...........
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As of November 1, doctors in Oklahoma will be compelled -- under penalty of criminal prosecution -- to post the details of each abortion they perform online. Among the details to be posted for every abortion is the patient's age, marital status and race; her financial condition; her education; and the total number of her previous pregnancies.
In all, 37 personal questions will have to be asked and answered, and posted publicly for the world to see, under the new law.
"A friend said it best: It's like undressing women in public, exposing their most personal issues on the Internet," Lora Joyce Davis, one of the plaintiffs suing to prevent the law from coming into effect, told ABC News.........
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