Embattled Woodlan Junior-Senior High School journalism teacher Amy Sorrell will continue teaching under an agreement reached Thursday with East Allen County Schools.Well, it's not a perfect solution, and I'm sure that the closed-minded bastards behind this whole thing aren't going to learn jack, but this gives me some level of hope. I guess maybe I don't live in that much of a backwards, hateful, bigot-filled, conservative, Bible-thumping shithole.
The agreement places Sorrell on paid administrative leave for the rest of the school year and requires her to serve a five-day unpaid suspension, said her attorney, Patrick Proctor of Eilbacher Fletcher Attorneys.
The settlement also relocates her to Heritage Junior-Senior High School in the fall. Sorrell’s exact position hasn’t been determined, but it will not be teaching journalism, he said.
On the April 25 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, host Rush Limbaugh again claimed that the "Media Matters people fell for it, and the drive-by media fell for it, and this is a perfect illustration of what I was talking about on that day," referring to his recent statement that Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech gunman, "had to be a liberal." Media Matters documented both Limbaugh's April 19 statement that Cho "had to be a liberal" and his subsequent observation that "[n]ow the drive-bys will read on a website that I'm attacking liberalism by comparing this guy to them" (Limbaugh regularly refers to mainstream media outlets as "the drive-by media"). On April 23, Limbaugh similarly claimed that "Media Matters fell for it hook, line, and sinker. They had it up all over the place," adding: "I was making a joke. ... Although I do believe that it was liberalism that got a hold of this guy and made him hate things, professors and this sort of thing."First, he's flip-flopping so fast I swear he's going to wear a groove in his floor. Does he believe his bullshit statement about Cho "ha[ving] to be a liberal", or is it a joke? To make things worse, he's claiming it's a joke and saying he only said it to make Media Matters report on it. So he's admitting to be a meatspace troll, no better than folks like Fred Phelps. But this also means he doesn't believe the offensive garbage he spews, so why should his loyal wingnuts follow him?
The “In God We Trust” license plates that have quickly become a fixture on Indiana roads came under a legal attack today claiming the law authorizing them is unconstitutional for favoring that message over those on other plates.Naturally, the bitching has begun. The Christofascists don't want to have to pay for the right to advertise their kising of the Magic Sky Man's ass, so they're carping and whining everywhere they can.
The lawsuit filed in Marion Superior Court claims the state Bureau of Motor Vehicles gives preferential treatment to motorists wanting the plates, which also feature the American flag, because they don’t have to pay the $15 administrative fee that the agency collects on sales of most other Indiana specialty plates.
Isn't it comforting to know we're the most hated group in the western world? Wow, that's going to help me sleep tonight...You hear that fluttering noise? That's my perception that the world was moving forward flying right out the damn window.
According to a new study out of Australia, gays and lesbians are the most hated minority group in the world. The researchers posed the question, "Would you like to have a person from this group as your neighbor?" The survey then asked about muslims, gays, Jews, immigrants, or someone of a different race. Whudda thunk it that the primary group other folks don't want to live next to would be the queers?
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Where did the good old United States rank? We are the 9th most homophobic out of the 23 countries surveyed with 22.9% of respondents not wanting to live nextdoor to gays or lesbians. (The Muslim community came second in the US too - with 10.9% of Americans bigoted against them.) The average for all countries was 19.6% bigoted against the LGBT community world wide. Ah, you can always count on the United States to be ahead of the pack.
Justice Ginsburg penned a moving dissent from today's Supreme Court opinion upholding the Federal Abortion Ban. Some highlights:This scares me. That the court can make a ruling on such wrongheaded information casts a disturbing light on the future to me.Today's decision is alarming. It refuses to take Casey and Stenberg seriously. It tolerates, indeed applauds federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). It blurs the line, firmly drawn in Casey, between previability and postviability abortions. And, for the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman's health.
Vice President Dick Cheney repeated his assertions of al-Qaida links to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq on Thursday as the Defense Department released a report citing more evidence that the prewar government did not cooperate with the terrorist group.You know, he must be desperate to sell this war to the 30% if he's going to go against the facts that blatantly. Worse yet, he doesn't assert these lies in the real media, where there's even the slightest chance he might be told how much of a lying sack he is, just on right-wing shitholes like Flush Limpballs' show. The sad part? His "boss", Dubya, has already said that the Saddam-AQ link was bullshit.
Cheney contended that al-Qaida was operating in Iraq before the March 2003 invasion led by U.S. forces and that terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was leading the Iraqi branch of al-Qaida. Others in al-Qaida planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the al-Qaida operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June,” Cheney told radio host Rush Limbaugh during an interview. “As I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq.”
History has been made, folks! SJR-7, the proposed amendment to outlaw same-sex marriage and civil unions, has been defeated in committee. The amendment is dead.You probably have no idea how happy this makes me. This is one step closer to the goal of making this state into being seen as something other than a backwards, hateful, bigot-filled, conservative, Bible-thumping shithole. And yes, this does set a good business precedent - believe it or not, gay people need jobs, too, and they're not going to want to live in a state that tells them they're second-class citizens.
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None of this would have been possible without the courageous stand taken by Indiana companies like Cummins Engine, Wellpoint, Dow AgroSciences, Eli Lilly, and Emmis Communications. These corporations correctly pointed out that SJR-7 would negatively affect their ability to recruit quality employees by painting Indiana as an intolerant state to live and work in.
U.S. Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., traveling Sunday in Iraq's capital with three other GOP members of Congress, compared a shopping area there to a "normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime."Yeah, because when I go down the street, I need a detachment of military guards to escort me:
Pence, speaking after a heavily guarded hourlong walk through the newly fortified market, echoed comments made by U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona and others that the capital was getting safer.First, you gotta be amazed at the kind of denialism these people cling to. "It's safer! It's just like back home!" This dementia persists despite stories like these coming out of Iraq every damn day. (Of course, that's only because the "liberal media" "only reports the bad news".) Second you also gotta marvel at the condescension in that statement: "freedom might just work for these people". "These people", like they're barely even human, like they're some concept rather than human beings. And this man is supposed to represent us?
"I, too, find myself leaving my day at the market in Baghdad with a new sense of cautious optimism that freedom might just work for these people," Pence said during a news conference inside the fortified Green Zone.
