[Quote]:

”I don’t think it’s appropriate they feel discriminated against, and I’m very upset they feel that,” [principal Heather Schnagl] said.

You don’t think it’s appropriate that your students have the ability to form independent thoughts? You don’t think it’s appropriate that your students feel that way about a policy which bars them from attending an event with their peers because their partners don’t have a penis?

How dare they embarrass you for being a fucking bigot.

[Quote]:

A funny thing happened on the way to tighter public disclosure rules for fracking fluids in Pennsylvania.

Halliburton sent a letter of objection and bingo, the rules suddenly got less stringent.

[Quote]:

Christine O’Donnell, the surprise Tea Party-backed Senate candidate in Delaware, threatened to sue a local radio station if it did not turn over a videotape of an interview it conducted with her.

O’Donnell’s campaign later apologized to the station for the threat, WDEL reports.

O’Donnell appeared on WDEL’s "The Rick Jensen Show" Tuesday, during which she fielded several questions from listeners and the host. Upon the conclusion of the interview, an O’Donnell aide demanded video of the interview be turned over to the campaign and destroyed because such videotaping had not been previously approved.

It was then, according to WDEL, that O’Donnell herself threatened to sue the station if it did not comply with the request. WDEL also says it later fielded a phone call from O’Donnell campaign manager Matt Moran, who threatened to "crush" the station with a lawsuit if it did not agree to turn over the tape.

WDEL’s attorney was soon involved and told the campaign there was nothing illegal about videotaping the interview for later use on the station’s website and added that such action is protected by the First Amendment.

Upon further investigation, WDEL says O’Donnell’s attorney called the station to apologize for the uproar and threat of litigation.

[Quote]:

Tim Profitt — the former Rand Paul volunteer who stomped on the head of a MoveOn activist — told told local CBS station WKYT that he wants an apology from the woman he stomped and that she started the whole thing.

"I don’t think it’s that big of a deal," Profitt said. "I would like for her to apologize to me to be honest with you."

[Quote]:

As the progressive Blue Virgina blog reported Monday — and I independently confirmed from one of the recipients Tuesday — Virginia Beach Republican Party chair Dave Bartholomew forwarded a racist email comparing African Americans to dogs. The email, subject line "my, dog," consists of a racist parable about African Americans and welfare. In the first 24 hours since the email came to light, Democrats condemned Bartholomew and he resigned his position with the Republican Party.

[..]

The e-mail was dated March 15 and sent from the address that Bartholomew uses as party chairman. Bartholomew forwarded it without reading the contents when “he was first getting familiar with the Internet,” Byler said.

Well, I guess you’re pretty familiar with the Internet now!

He says he’s not a racist. He not only has black friends, he calls them man’s best friend!

[Quote]:

In the winter of 2009, Georgia state legislator Rep. Calvin Hill (R-Canton) led a high-profile campaign against the teaching of public university courses that dealt with sexual health and related topics. Hill was joined by a small cadre of other conservatives who sought to end the teaching of courses dealing with topics such as male prostitution and gay history, and some of his acolytes even called for firing professors who taught these courses. Hill even appeared on CNN and boasted about an award he received for leading the battle to shut down courses dealing with sexuality. “Our public colleges are not the place for our young adults and future leaders to experiment and experience these types of sexually explicit behavior,” Hill said at the time.

Now, the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Jim Galloway reports that, while Hill may think that sex is too hot of a topic for the young adult students at public colleges in the state to handle, he’s perfectly fine making a buck off it. Galloway writes that Hill’s Democratic opponent, Stephanie Webb, has discovered that the company Hill serves as CFO of, Gila Distributing, sells numerous sex gadgets and gay pride paraphernalia through the company. These products include “stress relievers” in the shape of male sex organs and Gay Pride flag lapel pins.

Honestly, CVS?

[Quote]:

Outgoing BP CEO Tony Hayward defended his company’s safety record Wednesday in the face of questions from British lawmakers, and said the Gulf of Mexico oil spill should not lead to a universal ban on deepwater drilling.

[..]

Hayward insisted that BP’s safety record is “better than the industry average” and said no corners had been cut in the interest of saving money.

And those hundreds of violations in their gulf rigs over the past few years don’t mean anything. Industry standard. Everyone does it. Right?

[Quote]:

A Washington-based research group says two BP refineries in the U.S. account for 97 percent of "egregious willful" violations given by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

[Quote]:

Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret "kill team" that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians.

And they wonder why nobody greets them as liberators any more…

[Quote]:

The problems thrust Brown in the spotlight two weeks ago when, first, he was charged with felony assault and accused of twisting his fourth wife’s arm behind her back and then, three days later, he forfeited in court any rights to see his children from his third wife. Throughout, he wore an electronic monitoring bracelet.

Those are just the latest of Brown’s skirmishes. In 2002, he was charged with and later convicted of beating his pregnant third wife with a broken bedpost and pulling her down the stairs by her hair. In 2006, the Texas Medical Board revoked his license after he tested positive for cocaine. He’s been treated for narcissistic personality disorder, bipolar disorder and depression and spent time at an addiction rehab center and court-ordered anger management counseling, according to the medical board and other public records.

In court, public documents and earlier news articles, Darlina Barone, Brown’s since-remarried third wife, told how he had an obsession with sex and firearms. He threatened to kill her if she ever tried to divorce him, she said.

[..]

In 2008, he was awarded a Republican Congressional Medal of Distinction, which included a lunch with Vice President Dick Cheney and a dinner with President George W. Bush.

[Quote]:

Thomas Bodström, chair of the Parliamentary Justice Committee and former justice minister, has come out in favour of voluntary drug testing, but when Sveriges Radio asked him to submit to a test, he refused.

[Quote]:

A three-year investigation by the United Nations will almost entirely exonerate Royal Dutch Shell for 40 years of oil pollution in the Niger delta, causing outrage among communities who have long campaigned to force the multinational to clean up its spills and pay compensation.

Before you click through – take a guess who funded the investigation.

[Quote]:

Greg Taylor was wrongfully convicted of killing a prostitute in 1991 in North Carolina. Taylor proclaimed his innocence, but the evidence against him seemed insurmountable: blood from the victim found on his SUV.

The catch is that there was never any blood in the car. Taylor was convicted after crime lab technicians reported traces of blood on his SUV near the crime scene. Those same technicians buried the results of additional testing that showed there was never any blood.

Taylor wrongly served 17 years in prison until being released in February.

[..]

Cooper said that the investigators pored through 15,000 lab files from the period between 1986 and 2003. Of those, they identified 230 instances where a lab report did not clearly reflect the totality of information in the lab notes.

[..]

Of the 190 cases that will now be reviewed, four people are sitting on death row, three have already been executed and five died in prison.

What happens if you expose the fact that voting machines can be tampered with?

You are arrested.

[Quote]:

Erik Prince, the founder of the notorious security company Blackwater/Xe, has left the United States and is settling with his family in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

There is no extradition treaty between the USA and the UAE.

What a proud patriot….

[Quote]:

In a statement to The Daily Telegraph on Thursday, BP admitted that it edited images it posted on its official “Gulf of Mexico Response” website.

“BP’s photographic department uses Photoshop to edit images we post on the bp.com Gulf of Mexico Response web site,” a spokesman said.

“Typical purposes include colour correction, reducing glare and cropping. In a few cases, cut-and-paste was also used in the photo-editing process. These cut-and-pasted images have been removed.

“We’ve instructed our post-production team to refrain from doing (sic) cutting-and-pasting in the future.”

They’re still a bunch of fucking liars – they posted the images on their official Flickr page and the one labeled as “Original Image from Inside Helicopter” still shows the thing as being airborne.

[Quote]:

Now, they’ve gone and done it again with this image of their aerial monitoring from helicopters over the gulf.

[Quote]:

The first thing you might notice out of place is the looming air traffic control tower in the upper left hand side of the photo

Then, direct your attention to where the water abruptly changes shades of blue in a frenzy of pixelation, blurring, and a disappearing vessel

[..]

BP Photoshops Another Official Image TerriblyAnd last, while the helicopter clearly appears to be situated at some height above the boats ahead, the readouts on the dash appear to indicate that that door and ramp are open and the parking brake engaged, not to mention that the pilot appears to be holding a pre-flight checklist

[Quote]:

In the hours before the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, BP pumped into the well an extraordinarily large quantity of an unusual chemical mixture, a contractor on the rig testified Monday.

The injection of the dense, gray fluid was meant to flush drilling mud from the hole, according to the testimony before a government panel investigating the April 20 accident. But the more than 400 barrels used were roughly double the usual quantity, said Leo Lindner, a drilling fluid specialist for contractor MI-Swaco.

BP had hundreds of barrels of the two chemicals on hand and needed to dispose of the material, Lindner testified. By first flushing it into the well, the company could take advantage of an exemption in an environmental law that otherwise would have prohibited it from discharging the hazardous waste into the Gulf of Mexico, Lindner said.

The procedure mixed two substances. "It’s not something we’ve ever done before," Lindner said.

[Quote]:

Apparently BP is no more adept at doctoring photos than it is at plugging deep-sea oil leaks.

A blogger has noticed that the oil giant altered a photograph of its Houston crisis room, cutting and pasting three underwater images into a wall of video feeds from remotely operated undersea vehicles. The altered photo is displayed prominently on the company’s Web site.

An enlarged version of the photograph reveals flaws in the editing job. One of the 10 images sticks down into the head of one of the people sitting in front of the wall, while another piece of the image is separated from the other side of the head by jagged white space. The right side of the same image also hangs down below the area on which the video feeds were projected.

[Quote]:

BP has now posted the "original" photo, they claim. Except – surprise – they are refusing to post the high-resolution version of the new "original" photo. They posted the high-res version of the altered photo earlier, and in fact, that version is still live via a link below the new photo. Why not post the high-res version of the new "original" photo? Afraid someone is going to enlarge it and find out it’s fake too?

[Quote]:

Total UK, the refining and marketing subsidiary of Total SA (TOT), Friday said it was fined GBP3.6 million for failing to prevent a huge fire its Buncefield oil storage depot in Dec. 2005.

The fire at the Buncefield depot–the largest in peacetime Europe, and situated in Hemel Hempstead, to the north of London–injured 43 people and caused major damage to nearby property.

Total had about $19 billion of profit in 2009, so this fine is a bit like getting fined a penny when you get caught doing 200 Mph in a 30 Mph zone.

[Quote]:

In the largest fine ever levied under a U.S. pesticides law, Monsanto agreed to pay the Environmental Protection Agency $2.5 million.

The agricultural giant was found to have been selling genetically modified cotton seeds without labeling them as such. Between 2002 and 2007, Monsanto’s seeds were illegally sold in several Texas counties where the seeds are explicitly banned.

The seeds — known as Bollgard and Bollgard II — were genetically engineered to produce the insecticide Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), and Texas officials were concerned that using the seeds would lead to pest resistance.

But that didn’t stop Monsanto from bamboozling buyers into purchasing the illegal seeds.

[Quote]:

Gov. Bobby Jindal rejected a bill Friday that would have required him to make public and to preserve all his office’s documents involving the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

[Quote:]

State senators voted Monday to force schools to ask parents whether their children are in this country legally.

Sen. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, said Arizona taxpayers are entitled to know how many children are being educated who have no legal right to be here. He said asking for documentation when a child is enrolled is no different from asking for proof of vaccinations or that a youngster actually lives in the school district.

[..]

But Pearce did not dispute a contention by foes that simply asking about legal status might keep some parents from enrolling their children, even if the youngsters were born in this country. And he said that doesn’t bother him one bit.

“The laws are intended to make people fearful,” Pearce said.

So first they disadvantage these kids, then when the kids grow up, they can complain about how the minorities are so undereducated and “dumb”, which obliges them to take the worst jobs at the worst pay, and then everybody can complain how the “minorities don’t want to better themselves” and on and on and on in an endless circle. The circle of hate.

[Quote:]

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has long been a vocal critic of the Democrat’s health reform efforts, but today he started taking credit for some provisions of the bill, and talking up his own role in crafting the legislation.

[Quote:]

“David, I read your posts about how the cell carriers are eating up our airtime with those 15-second ‘To page this person, press 5′ instructions, but I think Verizon has a bigger scam going on: charging for bogus data downloads.

“Virtually every bill I get has a couple of erroneous data charges at $1.99 each—yet we download no data.

“Here’s how it works. They configure the phones to have multiple easily hit keystrokes to launch ‘Get it now’ or ‘Mobile Web’—usually a single key like an arrow key. Often we have no idea what key we hit, but up pops one of these screens. The instant you call the function, they charge you the data fee. We cancel these unintended requests as fast as we can hit the End key, but it doesn’t matter; they’ve told me that ANY data–even one kilobyte–is billed as 1MB. The damage is done.

“Imagine: if my one account has 1 to 3 bogus $1.99 charges per month for data that I don’t download, how much are they making from their 87 million other customers? Not a bad scheme. All by simply writing your billing algorithm to bill a full MB when even a few bits have moved.”

[Quote:]

When the history of the Second Circuit is written, the Arar decision will have a prominent place. It offers all the historical foresight of Dred Scott, in which the Court rallied to the cause of slavery, and all the commitment to constitutional principle of the Slaughter-House Cases, in which the Fourteenth Amendment was eviscerated. The Court that once affirmed that those who torture are the “enemies of all mankind” now tells us that U.S. government officials can torture without worry, because the security of our state might some day depend upon it.

[Quote:]

WOMAN: It meant everything to me that I was able to put the person who attacked me [behind bars]. And what allowed me to do that was our judicial process. I showed up in court every day to make sure that happened.

VITTER: And I’m absolutely supportive of any case like that being prosecuted criminally to the full extent of the law.

WOMAN: But there are rape victims who are being kept silent.

WOMAN: But how can you support a company that tells a rape victim that she does not have the right to defend herself?

VITTER: Ma’am The language in question did not say that in any way shape or form.

WOMAN: But it is unconstitutional to have a law that says a woman does not have a right to defend herself.

VITTER: You realize Mr. Obama was against that amendment and his administration was against that amendment

WOMAN: But I’m not asking Obama. I’m asking you.

VITTER: Do you think he’s in favor in rape?

WOMAN: I’m asking you Senator. What if it was your daughter who was raped? Would you tell her to be quiet and take it? Would you tell your daughter to be silent?

Of course the woman never received an answer to her question, because after totally mischaracterizing the President’s view, Vitter ran like a baby looking for his next diaper change.

[Quote:]

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) voted against a bill in June which contained special funding to combat H1N1 both domestically and internationally.

[Quote:]

The EU’s new foreign minister will have sweeping powers to conduct foreign policy, propose his own budget and name his own staff independently of other EU institutions, according to the latest EU presidency blueprint.

The 10-page Swedish report – obtained by EUobserver – was submitted to EU ambassadors on Thursday (22 October) and represents a synthesis of Stockholm’s consultations with the other 26 EU capitals in recent weeks.

The post of EU foreign minister or “high representative” for foreign affairs and a new EU diplomatic corps or “European External Action Service” (EEAS) are to be created following the entry into life of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty.

The Swedish paper envisages a minister in charge of a unique “sui generis” institution with its own section in the EU budget alongside the European Commission, the EU parliament and the Council, the Brussels-based secretariat which prepares regular meetings of EU ministers.

The foreign minister is to propose how much money he needs each year, authorise spending, appoint his own staff and take charge of the European Commission’s existing delegations across the world.

I’m so glad to see how well the European Union is doing with transparency, nepotism, accountability, tight spending policies and corruption.

[US:]

A Dallas police officer who fatally struck a child last October received a one-day suspension during a disciplinary hearing this afternoon.

Senior Cpl. Michael Vaughn appeared before Assistant Chief Floyd Simpson, who oversees the city’s seven patrol stations.

The punishment was for “for violating the emergency vehicle operations policy when he drove over the speed limit without activating the lights and sirens,” police officials said.

[UK:]

A traffic policeman who killed a schoolgirl after reaching speeds of 94mph in a 30mph zone was jailed for three years yesterday.

PC John Dougal was not using the blue lights and siren on his patrol car when he hit Hayley Adamson, 16, as she crossed a road at night last May.