Hey, I'm willing to let it slide that the Rick Noriega is too scared to answer a simple email from me about attempts by his supporters to turn his National Guard change of command into a political event.

I'm willing to excuse his staff adding my email address to their spam-ad list because they harvested it from the email Noriega is dodging.

I'm even willing to concede Noriega has no culpability when one of his supporters potentially violates the Hatch Act by operating a political blog supporting him (note that 2:37 PM time stamp on a Monday) on government time (and soliciting funds for him and other candidates) .

However, this is all we need to see to determine that Rick Noriega is unfit for any office -- Rick Noriega has kow-towed to the KOSsacks.

UPDATE: He also blogged on DailyKos -- meaning he is willing to associate himself with all the hate-mongers and conspiracy theorists there.

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Why this jihadi pig is angry.

Nuradin Abdi smiled and laughed with his attorney before admitting in a federal court yesterday that he had worked with terrorists to help plot against the United States.

Abdi, who wanted to blow up a mall in the Columbus area, is expected to serve 10 years in prison and be deported to his native Somalia.

His conviction, though, could be a sign that there are others still to be named as members of the same terrorist cell.

Details brought to light yesterday show that the terror cell was bigger than a trio of local men possibly involved in it -- Abdi, convicted terrorist Iyman Faris and Worthington native Christopher Paul -- previously reported.

Great! We got three who won't be killing Americans -- though I regret that they are not being disposed of with a single bullet to the back of the head (shot through a piece of bacon, of course).

But you have to love the comments from this Islamist dog's lawyer.

"It's better to minimize his losses," defense attorney Mahir Sherif said. A fair trial here would not be possible because Americans "have no or limited understanding" of why Muslims are angry, Sherif said.

Frankly, I don't give a rat's ass why this would-be killer is angry -- personally I think it is because of a particularly small... -- well be that as it may, I find it irrelevant. I don't care about his political gripes, his intolerant religious faith, or the fact that his mama didn't put mint on his pillow before bed each night. He was conspiring to kill Americans because of that anger, and there is no legitimate justification under American law (which is not sharia, for which I praise Jesus), so it does not matter why he or any other Muslim is angry.

And his lawyer sounds like a terrorist sympathizer, too.

After the plea, Sherif said the case should prompt people to ask: Why do Muslims hate Americans?

"I'm angry. If 1 million Americans were being slaughtered, that would be a different issue," Sherif said, of Iraqis killed in the war.

Yeah, I bet you would be out dancing in the streets, just like many Muslims around the world did on 9/11.

H/T Purple Wombats

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No, I'm not making it up or being disrespectful of victims of terrorism -- and screw the jihadis (may pigs piss upon them).

That is the name of a new production going on this year at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland.

Here's a sample.

This is surely a five fatwa production!

Hopefully I'll be able to see it when a touring company comes to Houston.

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Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin doesn't care how successful the Surge is, nor how much political progress is made in Iraq. He's demanding that the war end now, no matter how well things are going in Iraq.

Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan)

Even if Iraqi leaders return from a recess this month and make political progress before a report to Congress in September, it won't be enough to change Sen. Carl Levin's feelings about withdrawing U.S. troops.

Levin told reporters Wednesday that it is possible that President George W. Bush would use any political progress the Iraqis might make -- not to mention reports that violence was down in the month of July -- as cover for continuing a policy that saw him order tens of thousands more troops to Iraq.

For Levin, the Detroit Democrat who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, it would be too little, too late, even if the Iraqis returned from their August recess with "a different attitude" and began working toward benchmarks including regional elections, disbanding militias and other actions.

"That's not enough for me," he said.

It must suck to have your political future depend upon American defeat, Carl. Why don't you resign now, and let someone who loves America take your place?

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I love the Harry Potter books since I picked up the first one several years ago, just to understand what had my students so excited. I certainly noted some Christian symbolism -- but not anywhere near as much as this column explains.

Next I tried the more recognizable Christian material. In Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets, Harry confronts Voldemort (whose name means “will to death”) by traveling down into a great cavern where he slays a serpent to win an (eventual) bride. He fatally wounds the serpent in the head. He’s rescued by a bird who descends upon him and the bride, a kind of bird whose “tears have healing powers, and who are able to bear immense loads.” The bird bears them up out of the cavern. “There, how’s that?” I thought. The problem is that very few Christians seem to be aware of descendit ad infernum, the descent into hell. Don’t the schools teach Dante? Don’t the Churches teach the Apostle’s Creed? Well, as a matter of fact, no, they generally do not. The Proto Evangelium, the first gospel in which God told Adam and Eve that He would send Someone who would rescue their descendents by crushing the head of the serpent doesn’t seem to get a lot of play either.

I could go on for page after page: snippets from ancient hymns and creeds for instance. The most powerful spell in Harry’s world is the Patronus, in which the wizard forcefully says “Expecto Patronum”. That’s Christian Latin for “I look for the Savior”. Expecto is used in the Nicene Creed, and Patronum is used in the medieval Dies Irae as the Savior that we look for in the day of judgment. Harry uses the spell when ghastly evil spiritual beings called DEMENtors (caps mine) attack him and another innocent man near a lake. A stag (which just happens to function as a common Christ figure in medieval art) walks across the water dispelling the vile soul-destroying creatures. What’s it take, a 2 by 4 across the forehead? This is Christian stuff!

I have only one word for this column -- FASCINATING!

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In 1992, one of the things that Bill Clinton had going for him was a wife who, by all accounts, was a competent professional woman. Democrats seemed intent on creating a virtual co-presidency, with Hillary presumably to have a leading role in the administration.

Why is it that today there are those so frightened by Jeri Kehn Thompson, and who seek to minimize her accomplishments with epithets like "trophy wife" and "child bride" or other insults? Could it be a bit of misogyny? A concern that a grassroots candidate like Thompson appears able to upset the best laid plans of GOP contenders for the nomination? Or is it a left-wing fear that this young, intelligent, competent woman who also happens to be quite attractive might be an asset to a candidate who can beat anyone the Democrats nominate?

Bob Novak takes on this subtle (and not-so-subtle) misogyny in his current column.

Murmuring about Jeri Thompson hit a peak July 22 on "Fox News Sunday," when the program's roundtable engaged in whimsical contemplation of debate between spouses of Democratic presidential candidates. "Well, first," said Juan Williams of National Public Radio, ". . . I think you should get Jeri Thompson in here, the trophy wife, right?" William Kristol of the Weekly Standard interjected: "That's unfair." Williams: "Unfair, unfair, I know, but --" Kristol: "It is unfair."

That ended the discussion. I asked Williams, a respected journalist, whether he regretted the comment. He did not, but he explained that he got the idea from a July 8 New York Times article by Susan Saulny. "Is America ready for a president with a trophy wife?" she asked in the paper's Style section. "Subsequent to that," Williams told me, "I heard the same thing in conversation with people in other campaigns -- about her being so young, so attractive and so powerful."

The archetypal "trophy wife" (a phrase coined by Fortune magazine 18 years ago) conjures up the image of a rich corporate executive who tires of the woman he married when they both were young, whom he has grown old with, and turns to a young, chic new wife, usually seen as a home wrecker. Mrs. Thompson does not fit that mold. Thompson had been divorced for 17 years and was on friendly terms with his first wife when he married Jeri Kehn in 2002. They also have two small children -- not the trophy wife caricature either.

Nor does Jeri Thompson's background fit the caricature. After working for the Senate Republican Conference and the Republican National Committee, she became a big-time political media consultant in Washington. She has been intimately involved in the planning of her husband's campaign, including last week's staff shakeup. When Tom Collamore left as Thompson's campaign manager, he told CNN that he was "very respectful of the desire of Fred and Jeri to make some changes as they move to the next level." Those comments generated whispers in the political community that whoever ran this campaign would have to answer to the candidate's wife.

Competent, experienced, and beautiful -- that certainly puts her ahead of a certain Democrat seeking the presidency. And what's more, it leaves open the possibility that, following a successful Thompson presidency, we might see another Thompson seeking elected office -- and being a powerful figure in the GOP for decades to come.

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I'll be the first to concede that stealing from another is wrong. But when someone is engaged in illegal activity for money, it is pretty hard for me to get overly outraged when they get ripped off by the other party to the illegal transaction.

Now an ongoing epidemic of wage theft from immigrant laborers reflects the many ways that a dysfunctional immigration system robs us all.

According to a recent Chronicle story, reports of Houston-area employers refusing to pay immigrants for their work doubled from 2006 to 2007. The U.S. Department of Labor's office here received 842 complaints of businesses stealing back pay in 2006, compared to 371 in 2005. There were 172 in 2004. The department does not investigate complaints against individual employers. Nationally, almost half of all day labors reported being robbed by employers in a two-month period, according to a 2006 survey.

Reports of stolen wages probably account for only a small portion of wage thefts. As about 75 percent of day laborers are undocumented, many shy from complaining to authorities. Because they are low-income workers supporting impoverished families, they often cannot afford to lose precious work hours trying to file charges.

Even so, for those immigrant laborers who came forward last year, the Labor Department recovered $475,000 owed to 453 workers.

I have mixed emotions here. I think employers who rip off workers are scum -- especially having been in such a situation early in my working career. But at the same time, we are talking about folks who are in the country illegally and not working legally -- the transactions they are involved in are illegal from start to finish. Isn't getting ripped off just a part of the price you pay for being a part of a criminal enterprise?

Are those who file such complaints also turned over to immigration authorities for deportation? I think we all know the answer there. Any change in immigration law needs to require that they are.

Or are the feds going to now help folks recover stolen drugs and drug money, and not prosecute the underlying crime?

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Incredible!

Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb expressed support for Michael Vick during an interview here Tuesday.

"I'm a supporter of Vick," McNabb said. "That's because I'm a good friend of his and also we're guys that obviously compete to win the Super Bowl. We push each other. Now, I don't know exactly what happened in that situation, and I think for all of us that have read over the stuff that was over the Internet, the report, you look at it as kind of like, 'Wow, you've got your so-called friends and family members turning their back on you now to make their situation better.' They're throwing you under the bus so that they can clean their name. That's unfortunate. That goes to show, I always have a saying that I've always lived by: If you can't trust family, who can you trust? It's an unfortunate situation, and I just hope everything works out well for him where he can get back out on the field."

Actually, trusting family is a big part of why Vick is in trouble in the first place.

McNabb also advocates lighter punishments for NFL criminals

"As a football fraternity member, you just want those guys to have that opportunity to get back out there and maybe put that stuff behind them and change their life," McNabb said. "I think for some of the guys that have made the mistake and now that their season is taken away from them, the question goes out of what happens next? Because when some people get things like that taken away from them, they just continue to go down. You hope nothing but the best, that they've learned from their mistakes to move on where they can get back out on the field and play. Being suspended for a year? That's tough. That's tough.... You just want everything to kind of work out well for everybody, work out well for us as well as work out well for those guys."

Never thought he had any class, and this pretty well confirms it.

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I'll be honest -- this sort of massive failure of a major bridge on an interstate highway left me assuming that we had seen a successful terrorist attack. However, the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis appears to be something else -- though exactly what is still not clear, even as the casualty report stands at 9 dead, 60 injured, and 20 missing.

The entire span of an interstate bridge broke into sections and collapsed into the Mississippi River during evening bumper-to-bumper traffic Wednesday, sending vehicles, concrete and twisted metal crashing into the water.

Hometown newspaper The Star-Tribune reported that nine people had been confirmed dead, 60 had been taken to hospitals and at least 20 remained missing early Thursday. The Associated Press put the number dead at seven so far.

Authorities said the death toll was expected to climb.

Asked about the possibility of finding more survivors, Fire Chief Jim Clack said, “The likelihood is fairly slim.”

"This will be a very tragic night when this is over," Mayor R.T. Rybak said.

Perhaps the most chilling part of the report for me is the statement that, after searching 50 cars, authorities assume that there are still more under water. I am quite thankful that the school bus that was on the bridge made it across in relative safety.

As one who used to regularly cross the Mississippi at St. Louis and who daily crosses the Houston Ship Channel, such a situation is among my worst nightmares.

To the people of the Minneapolis area, I send my prayers and best wishes. And to Stewart, Eric, and Michelle, old friends from grad school, I send my hopes that you and those you love are all right.

UPDATE: The death toll has been revised down to 4.

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I love flowers, and always have. Indeed, back during my high school and college dating days I used to regularly show up with flowers because I worked at the base PX and was friends with the women who ran the flower shop there -- they'd always fix me up with something nice.

I don't buy flowers as often anymore -- at least partly because of a request from my wife -- but I do from time to time. And I've been looking at some flowers for my wife, since her birthday and our anniversary are very close. I particularly like this arrangement of eighteen fresh-cut assorted roses in a beautiful oversize vase. They would certainly add a beautiful splash of color to any room, and they positively shout love for the one you adore.

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Well, thanks to some Longhorns with too much time on their hands (no jokes, please), we now know there are at least 237 reasons.

Scholars in antiquity began counting the ways that humans have sex, but they weren’t so diligent in cataloging the reasons humans wanted to get into all those positions. Darwin and his successors offered a few explanations of mating strategies — to find better genes, to gain status and resources — but they neglected to produce a Kama Sutra of sexual motivations.

Perhaps you didnÂ’t lament this omission. Perhaps you thought that the motivations for sex were pretty obvious. Or maybe you never really wanted to know what was going on inside other peopleÂ’s minds, in which case you should stop reading immediately.

For now, thanks to psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin, we can at last count the whys. After asking nearly 2,000 people why they’d had sex, the researchers have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons — everything from “I wanted to feel closer to God” to “I was drunk.” They even found a few people who claimed to have been motivated by the desire to have a child.

The researchers, Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, believe their list, published in the August issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, is the most thorough taxonomy of sexual motivation ever compiled. This seems entirely plausible.

But seriously, folks, is every bit or research really necessary? And how much taxpayer money went into this study?

I hear that the Aggies are going to get in the act next, doing a similar study that involves sheep....

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For a variety of reasons that do not need to be discussed, the Founders included in the Constitution the Electoral College. Usually unimportant, the Electoral College system does create the possibility (and has in more than one election) of the nation being governed by a president with fewer popular votes (but geographically wider support) than hid opponent. This is because of the custom of states awarding all electoral votes to the candidate with the most popular votes within their borders.

Two states, Maine and Nebraska, currently do not follow this practice, but instead award some of their electoral votes based upon the results of presidential voting within congressional districts. Such a proposal is now being considered in California.

A Republican-backed ballot proposal could split left-leaning California between the Democratic and GOP nominees, tilting the 2008 presidential election in favor of the Republicans.

California awards its cache of 55 electoral votes to the statewide winner in presidential elections — the largest single prize in the nation. But a prominent Republican lawyer wants to put a proposal on the ballot that would award the statewide winner only two electoral votes.

The rest would be distributed to the winning candidate in each of the state's congressional districts. In effect, that would create 53 races, each with one electoral vote up for grabs.

California has voted Democratic in the last four presidential elections. But the change — if it qualifies for one of two primary ballots next year and is approved by voters — would mean that a Republican would be positioned the following November to snatch 20 or more electoral votes in GOP-leaning districts.

That's a number equal to winning Ohio.

Frankly, I'm opposed to the idea, based upon a reality of American politics -- the gerrymander.

Let's be honest here, both parties seek to maximize their political power in legislative bodies by drawing congressional district lines to partisan advantage. This could, in fact, make the likelihood of an Electoral College victory for the popular vote loser even greater than it is now -- because a majority of a state's electoral votes could go to the candidate with fewer popular votes.

For example, not too many years ago the congressional map here in Texas was drawn so that the Democrats needed only 44% of the votes cast to win 57% of the Congressional seats. Presuming that the presidential vote had mirrored the that outcome, the Republican candidate for president in that year would have received only 16 of 34 electoral votes. Multiply this effect across the 50 states and you can see the potential havoc this could cause -- and the incentive for even greater redistricting shenanigans.

Now I'm not one of those who supports the abolition of the Electoral College. In the past, it has served to legitimize candidates with a minority of the popular vote (Abraham Lincoln once and Bill Clinton twice) by giving them a clear mandate for office. It is, on balance, a good thing as it currently operates -- and tampering with it in this manner strikes me as unwise.

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Well, I guess the notion of Islam as a religion of peace can pretty well be laid to rest with this quote from the head of CAIR.

Schanzer also argued that while "radical Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution."

The problem, however, is that "radical Islam has the podium," he added.

"There are extremists in all religions," countered Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). "But the way you don't go about dealing with that is making sweeping generalizations about such large groups of people."

Hooper told Cybercast News Service that Schanzer's definition of "moderate" -- like that used by other conservatives -- is skewed.

"They label those few who are outside the mainstream 'moderates' and then ask why the mainstream doesn't listen to moderates," he said.

Yeah -- those "outside the mainstream" folks we call moderate urge an end to terrorism, equality for women, and respect for human rights. Hooper reveals a great deal about mainstream Islam with his statement.

No wonder Hooper's group has so fervently operated as a fifth column during the Crusade against Jihadism.

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We've struggled with issues of how the nation casts its votes since the 2000 presidential election, during which a few anomalies and a particularly close vote count allowed the election's loser (and yes, I do mean Al Gore -- read your Constitution for details) to cast doubts upon the integrity of the punch card systems that had been standard for decades in many regions of the country.

Optical scanners and computerized systems were presented as "the answer" to election integrity -- but over the last six years there have been concerns raised over the "black box" systems. Now, even the optical scanner systems have been cast into doubt.

Florida's optical scan voting machines are still flawed, despite efforts to fix them, and they could allow poll workers to tamper with the election results, according to a government-ordered study obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

At the request of Secretary of State Kurt Browning, a Florida State University information technology laboratory went over a list of previously discovered flaws to see whether the machines were still vulnerable to attack.

"While the vendor has fixed many of these flaws, many important vulnerabilities remain unaddressed," the report said.

The lab found, for example, that someone with only brief access to a machine could replace a memory card with one preprogramed to read one candidate's votes as counting for another, essentially switching the candidates and showing the loser winning in that precinct.

"The attack can be carried out with a reasonably low probability of detection assuming that audits with paper ballots are infrequent," the report said.

So, what is the solution? Do we rely on these new technologies, despite the flaws? Do we return to the punch cards, which had a relatively low error rate and are relatively easy to use? Or do we go back to hand-counted paper ballots, eschewing the technological fixes but introducing the element of human error?

No system is perfect, no system is fraud-proof, and no system will satisfy everyone. The question therefore becomes "which one will be seen as conferring the greatest legitimacy on the results?"

Posted by: Greg at 12:13 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Here's a story I can sure identify with. And sadly, it exposes the sort of thing that happens all too often in education today -- minimum grades even for students who do no work at all.

Several weeks into his first year of teaching math at the High School of Arts and Technology in Manhattan, Austin Lampros received a copy of the schoolÂ’s grading policy. He took particular note of the stipulation that a student who attended class even once during a semester, who did absolutely nothing else, was to be given 45 points on the 100-point scale, just 20 short of a passing mark.

Now I can identify with this -- my district decrees no grade lower than a 50 with a state-mandated 70 as teh minimum passing grade. Of course, we are not permitted to assign a grade of 68 or 69, so we then have to decide which way to manipulate a student's average to determine whether or not the kid passes or fails -- and I've listened to more than one principal offer the not-so-subtle guidance that "if a kid is that close, I don't know how you can really argue he deserves to fail."

Now what this means, of course, is that under our grading system (we have three terms per semester) a student can get an 80 for each of the first two marking periods and then do nothing during the final one and end with a 70 before taking the final. Then if the kid hits even a 60 on the final, there is that subtle pressure to pass the student on the theory that "one test shouldn't be the difference between passing and failing."

This leads me to the case of a student some years ago who did well during the first two marking periods of her final semester of senior year, and then "checked out" because she figured that she had a 73 average going into the final once she averaged in that gift of a 50. She literally did nothing for six weeks -- and then scored a 38 on her final exam, earning her a 67 for the semester. Despite all the pressure brought to bear on me by the administration and the athletic department, I stuck to my guns -- and the girl had to take summer school to graduate so that she could take her volleyball scholarship. Fortunately, state law forbids anyone other than me to change teh grade, so it did stick.

I don't know what I would have done if something like this happened.

Mr. LamprosÂ’s introduction to the high schoolÂ’s academic standards proved a fitting preamble to a disastrous year. It reached its low point in late June, when Arts and TechnologyÂ’s principal, Anne Geiger, overruled Mr. Lampros and passed a senior whom he had failed in a required math course.

That student, Indira Fernandez, had missed dozens of class sessions and failed to turn in numerous homework assignments, according to Mr. LamprosÂ’s meticulous records, which he provided to The New York Times. She had not even shown up to take the final exam. She did, however, attend the senior prom.

Through the intercession of Ms. Geiger, Miss Fernandez was permitted to retake the final after receiving two days of personal tutoring from another math teacher. Even though her score of 66 still left her with a failing grade for the course as a whole by Mr. LamprosÂ’s calculations, Ms. Geiger gave the student a passing mark, which allowed her to graduate.

Ms. Geiger declined to be interviewed for this column and said that federal law forbade her to speak about a specific student’s performance. But in a written reply to questions, she characterized her actions as part of a “standard procedure” of “encouraging teachers to support students’ efforts to achieve academic success.”

Frankly, such a decision by a principal is outrageous -- and any policy that allows for it is immoral and unethical. I won't even get into this frightening response by the parent in this case.

Samantha Fernandez, Indira’s mother, spoke on her behalf. “My daughter earned everything she got,” she said. Of Mr. Lampros, she said, “He needs to grow up and be a man.”

Three thoughts.

1) No, she didn't.

2) He is the only one acting like an adult and a professional in this situation.

3) It's a pity you didn't see fit to act like a parent during either of your daughter's two senior years.

Indeed, this sort of situation is precisely why every state should have a law making the classroom teacher the final arbiter of grades, unless there is substantiated proof of a calculation error or a violation of district grading policy. Allowing administrative grade changes under any other circumstances constitutes academic fraud.

I am, however, troubled by one aspect of this story. There is information disclosed here, connected with the name of a student, that I don't believe should ordinarily ever be released to the public. Where, exactly, did the new York Times get the grade and attendance information? Was permission granted for the paper to obtain that information? Depending on where this information came from, I believe that there may be grounds for both legal action and sanctions against the professional licenses of those involved.

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