
reviews for bad (and i do mean BAD) movies
if you can, please watch 'the girl in the gold boots'. it is one of my personal favorites. you won't be sorry (but wear your dancin' shoes)
.....AUSTIN, Texas - A religious watchdog group complained Monday that a Bible
study course taught in hundreds of public schools in Texas and across the
country promotes a fundamentalist Christian view and violates religious
freedom.
The Texas Freedom Network, which includes clergy of several faiths,
also said the course offered by the Greensboro, N.C.-based National Council on
Bible Curriculum in Public Schools is full of errors and dubious research.
“No public school student should have to have a particular religious belief
forced upon them,” the Rev. Ragan Courtney, pastor of The Sanctuary, a Baptist
congregation in Austin, said at a news conference held by Texas Freedom
Network.
.....One of the most puzzling aspects of the C.I.A. leak case has had to do with
the name of the exposed officer. Why did the syndicated columnist Robert D.
Novak identify her as Valerie Plame in exposing her link to the C.I.A. in July
2003 when she had been known for years both at the agency and in her personal
life by her married name, Valerie Wilson?

Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, is supposed to be our valued ally in the
war on terrorism. But terror takes many forms, not all of them hijacked
airplanes or bombed subways...........
.......Now, for the first time,
Dr. Shazia has agreed to tell her full story, even though this will put herself
and her loved ones at risk. Her tale is simultaneously an indictment of General
Musharraf's duplicity, a window into the debasement that is the lot of
women in much of the world - and a modern love story......
....."They told me to be quiet and not to tell anybody because it would
ruin my reputation," Dr. Shazia remembers. One official warned that if she
reported the crime, she could be arrested.
That was a genuine risk. Under
Pakistan's hudood laws, a woman who reports that she has been raped is
liable to be arrested for adultery or fornication - since she admits to
sex outside of marriage - unless she can provide four male eyewitnesses to the
rape.......
.........Rapes occur in Pakistan at an estimated rate of one every two hours,
and the rape itself is only the beginning of the horror. As in much of the
world, the victim is frequently expected to atone for her "sin" by killing
herself, while her attacker goes unscathed.

TOLEDO, Ohio - Police helped the Catholic Diocese of Toledo cover up sex
abuse allegations for several decades, refusing to investigate or arrest priests
suspected of molesting children, a newspaper reported Sunday..........
........‘Wasn’t part of our policy’“It doesn’t look good today, but it
wasn’t part of our policy that this was considered to be a crime against youth
and it had to be handled by police,” Lamantia said.

"I mean, really, who are we hurting here?" McKinley asked. "We don't bother
anyone, we mind our own business . . . stick to ourselves. How would our
marriage hurt anyone?"......Battle
Over Gay Marriage Plays Out in Indian Country

HOUSTON, July 31 - When the school board in Odessa, the West Texas oil town,
voted unanimously in April to add an elective Bible study course to the 2006
high school curriculum, some parents dropped to their knees in prayerful thanks
that God would be returned to the classroom, while others assailed it as an
effort to instill religious training in the public schools.
But a
growing chorus of critics says the course, taught by local teachers trained by
the council, conceals a religious agenda. The critics say it ignores evolution
in favor of creationism and gives credence to dubious assertions that the
Constitution is based on the Scriptures, and that "documented research through
NASA" backs the biblical account of the sun standing still........

.............Meeting filmmaker Jim Jarmusch recently in the back room ofi love his films! my favorite, so far, has been Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai featuring the GREAT forest whitaker. i love the offbeat characters. i love the dialogs. i love the humor and the poignancy. i love the NO car chases. i love that he doesn't bend to hollywood. i love that you sit there and think (while watching his work), i would actually like to MEET some of these characters.
Emilio's Ballato, an off-the-beaten-track Italian joint on New York's Houston
Street, feels like walking into a Jarmusch film. The 52-year-old director has,
throughout his career, developed his own indelible universe of hipster cool -- a
universe replete with neighborhood hangouts such as Ballato's, where you pass
through the hot kitchen, with its caldron of bubbling meat sauce, to get to the
white-walled back room............


Former
Polygamous Sect Member Confronts Past
July 28, 2005 -- As a member of an
isolated polygamous sect in Arizona, Laurene Jessop says she was sexually abused
by her father, who had four wives and 56 children, and mistreated by her
husband, who was already married to Laurene's sister............
........Young girls are destined to be married off in their teen years
to older men, who keep several wives. The girls are expected to bear many
children and obey the sect's strict patriarchal rules. The FLDS split from the
mainstream Mormon church in 1890 when it disavowed polygamy.....
Quiñones spoke to Jack Cooke about his daughter's pain. At the time, the
76-year-old had not seen his daughter for 22 years, but talked to Quiñones
knowing she was in a nearby room, listening in.
He said at the time he
didn't view his fondling of his daughters as abuse. It wasn't sexual, he said,
claiming it was "on the same premise as our religion." ......
"I had the
idea that I was the big boss," he said. "I believed those children were mine."
He compared his position to a farmer with his animals. But he also said
"every intimacy which I had with them, they understood perfectly that if I did
anything they didn't like, to tell me and I would not do it."
Laurene denies
this. She says he told his daughters they "weren't normal if we didn't like it.
And, that all men do that to their daughters.".......

(keillor)

John G. Roberts, a young lawyer in the Justice Department in 1981 and 1982 andpsssssssstttttttttt, hey baby, there IS a separation between church and state.
on the White House counsel's staff from 1982 to 1986, held positions too junior
for him to set policy in those days...............
But his internal
memorandums, some of which have become public in recent days, reveal a
philosophy every bit as conservative as that of the policy makers on the front
lines of the Reagan revolution and give more definition to his image than was
apparent in the first days after President Bush picked him to be an associate
justice of the Supreme Court.
On almost every issue .............
He
favored less government enforcement of civil rights laws rather
than more. He criticized court decisions that required a thick wall
between church and state. He took the side of prosecutors over criminal
defendants. He maintained that the role of the courts should be limited and the
president's powers enhanced..........
In 1981, he urged Attorney General William French Smith to reject Mr. Reynolds's
position that the department should intervene on behalf of female prisoners who
were discriminated against in a job-training program. If male and female
prisoners had to be treated equally, Mr. Roberts argued, "the end
result in this time of state prison budgets may be no programs for
anyone." read the whole
article here, it's too depressing for me to go on any further
........When the wildly popular video game was released in October, it was
rated "M" — which meant it was for mature players 17 and older.
A city granny who bought her grandson a video game that promises murder and
mayhem in a city of "gang trouble, drugs and corruption" says she was shocked to
hear it contains sex, too..................... SEX-SHOCKED GRANNY SUES
'GRAND THEFT'
The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a wider range
of administration officials than was previously known, part of an effort to
determine whether anyone broke laws during a White House effort two years ago to
discredit allegations that President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify
the Iraq war, according to several officials familiar with the case
Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy
director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department
officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the
street...................
AUGUSTA, Me. - After saying no twice before, voters in Maine may be going
to the polls again to decide whether to add sexual orientation to the
state's
human rights act, which prohibits discrimination based on age,
sex,
race, color,
marital status, religion, ancestry or national
origin.
...............
"We just felt
like we
had to stop it," said Paul Madore, head of the
Grassroots
Coalition, a
conservative group that, with the Christian Civic League
of
Maine, organized
the petition drive. "This is a bad law. It uses the weight
of the legal
system to force an acceptance of a lifestyle that the
majority of
people
have a strong objection to..........Maine May Consider, for a Third Time, a Gay Bias Question
stop it????????????? paul, i'll bet you a cup of coffee you cannot
prove a gay or lesbian person has caused you or your family any harm based on
their GAYNESS alone. i'll carry the bet over into the future too, i'll bet they
will NOT cause you any harm either. even if they marry among themselves and
adopt children and join the pta and go to their chosen place of worship or
grocery shop or watch a school recital or have their car detailed or have their
teeth cleaned or on and on and on. oh wait, that makes 'them' sound normal!
duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 'they' ARE normal

N'DJAMENA, Chad - The U.S. military is embarking on a long-term push into
Africa to counter what it considers growing inroads of al Qaeda and other
terrorist networks in poor, lawless and predominantly Muslim expanses of the
continent............The Pentagon plans to train thousands of African troops in battalions equipped for extended desert and border operations, and to link the militaries of different countries with secure satellite communications. The initiative, with proposed funding of $500 million over seven years, covers Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Nigeria, Morocco and Tunisia -- with the U.S. military eager to add Libya if relations improve...............http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8705654/
500 million???????????? why the hell don't we use that money to help those nations farm. turn those swords into plowshares, huh? why why why why why. it will hurt us less (or even themselves) if they turn on us (inevitable) and attack us with guavas instead of guns


(ny parade above)NEW BRITAIN -- Kielbasa is about to get its 15 minutes....
"I called a friend out in Connecticut and asked her if she had any ideas for
food unique to Connecticut. She said, `Well, I'm cooking kielbasa tonight,'"
said Correll, who grew up in Middlebury and remembered eating kielbasa from New
Britain regularly as a youth. "That's when it hit me, that kielbasa is a staple
in many Connecticut households, Polish or not. I haven't had kielbasa in the
years since I moved out to L.A. You can find it outside of Connecticut but not
unless you seek it out."....(worlds largest you know what)
http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc-nebkielbasa0725.artjul25,0,6020338.story?track=mostemailedlink
i am vegan BUT my mother was polish (father italian). they met at the polish home one weekend. that was THE place to meet and dance and eat (or so i'm told). they married at sts cyril and methodius (the polish church next door) and had their reception at, you guessed it, the polish home! they were married 52 years. my father was a saint himself for sticking it out. when i was a child i was made to attend the pulaski day parade. i don't believe they have it here any longer. i'm certain they do in chicago though. i even think school lets out for the day.
wow, i just checked and they have an annual parade in ny too. http://www.pulaskiparade.com/english.html
