The news thread

[Missy]

edit: the sex-bot is a prossie Catherine Tate.

Oh dear god, it is. I am bothered.

That's Post of the Day right there!

[Guest]

His customer base? Shy, awkward or older men who "have trouble meeting girls," he says.

[Dan]

You rang?

[MaxPower]

Yet if the guy put half as much effort in to meeting a woman as he did this "invention" he wouldn't need it. People are fucked up.

[JackFetch]

Self-described "way fat" director Kevin Smith was booted from a Southwest Airlines flight because of his size, according to his own breathless minute-by-minute tweets.

Smith, the millionare director and writer of "Clerks" and "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" was thrown off the U.S. budget airline's Boeing 737 late last night night in Oakland, Calif., because the captain deemed him a "flight risk," Smith tweeted. The incident was first reported by TMZ today.

He was eventually flown out on a later flight to Burbank, Calif., but not before making his displeasure known to the 1.6 million people following him on Twitter.

"Hey @SouthwestAir? F--k making it right for me just 'cause I have a platform. I sat next to a big girl who was chastised for not buying an extra ticket because "all passengers deserve their space." F--king flight wasn't even full! F--k your size-ist policy. Rude...," he tweeted in quick succession.

Southwest gave him a $100 voucher for his troubles, he Tweeted.

The airline requires "customers of size" to purchase an additional ticket if they cannot be comfortably accomodated in a single seat. According to Smith a PR rep for teh company has tried to make amends, but the filmmaker isn't likely to let it go.

"Wanna tell me I'm too wide for the sky? Totally cool. But fair warning, folks: IF YOU LOOK LIKE ME, YOU MAY BE EJECTED FROM [southwest]," he tweeted.

He added Southwest had messed "with the wrong sedentary processed-foods eater!"

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/clerks_director_kevin_smith_plane_X5tPnewEM1z4WWzxJnu4GL#ixzz0fXvNZu4U

[Molly]

I think my favorite one of his tweets on the matter was this:

Hey @SouthwestAir! Look how fat I am on your plane! Quick! Throw me off! http://twitpic.com/1340gw

[Dread]

This just in!

Man kicked off airplane for being too fat, sits on ass and complains about it on the internet! News at 11.

[SuaveStar]

This just in!

Man kicked off airplane for being too fat, sits on ass and complains about it on the internet! News at 11.

Will you be playing the lotto numbers and the weather after this breaking news?

[MaxPower]

I still think airlines should have a massive set of scales that you stand on with your luggage when you check in, and everyone gets the same about, say 120-150kg, including person, luggages, laptops, etc, whatever. And if your over that, you pay more, if you're under that, you're good to go. I'm only 70kg yet I get the same luggages allowance as someone who is 100kg, that's the bit that pisses me off, especially when I'm over (which happens on business trips with catalogues, samples, etc.

If Smith thinks that is bad, an airline here in Oz took a guys wheelchair away from him and he had to drag himself up the concourse to the plane. Well actually they offered to have someone carry him, but he was one of those stubborn 'I can do anything an able body person can do' people so he decided to make a scene instead.

[dc20willsave]

This is why I take the train. On Amtrak, no one cares about your size and half the time, you get two seats to yourself anyway. If you're uncomfortable sitting next to a person of size, you get up and sit in the lounge with a novel until they get off or another seat opens up you can jump to.

[JackFetch]

The Canadian women's hockey team is in hot water for their celebration after beating the U.S. in Thursday's gold-medal game. After the game, players openly drank and smoked on the court -- and now the International Olympic Committee is investigating.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/26/canadian-hockey-celebrati_n_477665.html#s71092

So the Canadians are in trouble for acting like Canadians?

[Venneh]

So, two things today, one rage inducing, but both quite ironic.

Choir leader pimped out the boys in his choir. He's also a papal aide.

Also, anti-gay Republican caught with a DUI after leaving local gay club.

[Dread]

So the Canadians are in trouble for acting like Canadians?

To be fair, they're only in "trouble" because one member was under the legal drinking age in BC. She was from Alberta, where she was legal (18) but BC is 19 because we're a bunch of killjoys. And "under investigation" means a letter was sent to the team saying "That wasn't the best thing in the world you could have done." and the thing is over.

[dc20willsave]

Also, anti-gay Republican caught with a DUI after leaving local gay club.

He was there to get directions to get away from there.

But seriously, closet case Republicans, it's called the internet. There are plenty of sites where you can make anonymous hook-ups with guys and you won't get caught for being a dumb-ass. Actually, on second thought, it gives those of us that aren't scared of being ourselves something to laugh at. It also help ruin their lives and make the wives that stick by them realize how much better they can do.

[SuaveStar]

He was there to get directions to get away from there.

But yeah, serves that ass right.

[Venneh]

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

Published: March 12, 2010

AUSTIN, Tex. After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.

The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.

In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwins theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.

Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a panel of teachers.

We are adding balance, said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.

Battles over what to put in science and history books have taken place for years in the 20 states where state boards must adopt textbooks, most notably in California and Texas. But rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum.

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the states large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics dont exist.

They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians, she said. They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.

The curriculum standards will now be published in a state register, opening them up for 30 days of public comment. A final vote will be taken in May, but given the Republican dominance of the board, it is unlikely that many changes will be made.

The standards, reviewed every decade, serve as a template for textbook publishers, who must come before the board next year with drafts of their books. The boards makeup will have changed by then because Dr. McLeroy lost in a primary this month to a more moderate Republican, and two others one Democrat and one conservative Republican announced they were not seeking re-election.

There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.

I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state, said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.

They also included a plank to ensure that students learn about the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.

Dr. McLeroy, a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported.

Republicans need a little credit for that, he said. I think its going to surprise some students.

Mr. Bradley won approval for an amendment saying students should study the unintended consequences of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. He also won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the United States during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.

Other changes seem aimed at tamping down criticism of the right. Conservatives passed one amendment, for instance, requiring that the history of McCarthyism include how the later release of the Venona papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government. The Venona papers were transcripts of some 3,000 communications between the Soviet Union and its agents in the United States.

Mavis B. Knight, a Democrat from Dallas, introduced an amendment requiring that students study the reasons the founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others.

It was defeated on a party-line vote.

After the vote, Ms. Knight said, The social conservatives have perverted accurate history to fulfill their own agenda.

In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word capitalism throughout their texts with the free-enterprise system.

Lets face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation, said one conservative member, Terri Leo. You know, capitalist pig!

In the field of sociology, another conservative member, Barbara Cargill, won passage of an amendment requiring the teaching of the importance of personal responsibility for life choices in a section on teenage suicide, dating violence, sexuality, drug use and eating disorders.

The topic of sociology tends to blame society for everything, Ms. Cargill said.

Even the course on world history did not escape the boards scalpel.

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term separation between church and state.)

The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based, Ms. Dunbar said.

Source

...I just... I don't even...

I'm gonna be over here screaming in a corner for a bit, don't mind me.

[Koete]

Forget an excerpt, imagine the whole thing here.

Oh fuck off.

[Venneh]

Insider: Republican Dirty Tricks Machine Targeting Grass Roots Constitutionalists

Exclusive: Establishment neo-cons have resolved to attack Debra Medina, Alex Jones and Ron Paul because they are terrified of losing control of the Tea Party movement

Paul Joseph Watson

Prison Planet.com

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

A prominent insider has told Infowars that Texas Governor Rick Perry and other establishment neo-cons have decided to deliberately target grass roots constitutionalists with dirty tricks campaigns in an effort to derail and hijack the growing liberty movement whose influence is threatening to blow the Texas gubernatorial race wide open.

Our office was contacted by a national personality, a household name, who told us that they were in a green room at a national public event a few weeks ago with Rick Perry. The individual was shocked when Perry said directly that there were three people who ‘got under his skin’ and who ‘had to be dealt with’ immediately.

One – Debra Medina, two – Alex Jones, and three – Ron Paul.

Perry told the individual that these three people had to be targeted and stopped in order for the Republican establishment to shut down any real voices of opposition that were threatening to have an influence on the Tea Party movement, which has been blatantly hijacked by the neo-cons in recent months.

Perry made it clear that these individuals and their supporters were the number one target of the neo-con hierarchy because the grass roots was threatening to regain control of the Tea Party movement that was first created by Ron Paul supporters back in 2007, but has since been hijacked by the Republicans.

The insider expressed their shock that Perry would be so open with his comments, suspecting that Perry must have considered the individual to be a fellow neo-con. The insider’s deep concern about what was said prompted them to contact our office.

Perry made the comments just a couple of weeks before gubernatorial challenger Debra Medina, the only true constitutionalist running for Governorship in Texas, was set-up by Fox News’ Glenn Beck, after the duplicitous talk show host smeared Medina and generated a fake controversy merely for saying that people should be free to question the official 9/11 story, a view shared by the vast majority of Americans.

Perry, who was subsequently celebrated by Beck as the only remaining credible candidate after the smear attack on Medina, must have been in on the ploy. Within an hour of her appearance on the Glenn Beck radio show, Texas residents told the Austin-American Statesmen that they had received robo-calls on behalf of the Perry campaign demonizing Medina as an unstable “9/11 truther,” echoing Beck’s manufactured talking point aired just an hour earlier.

There can no longer be any doubt that the RNC establishment is running a targeted smear campaign against real grass roots conservatives and libertarians because they are terrified that such individuals will be able to steer the Tea Party movement in a genuine national revolt against big government, thereby massively diminishing the power of establishment Republicans.

This dirty tricks campaign is most likely being steered by Karl Rove, master Republican political strategist and former Rick Perry campaign manager. Rove cut his teeth in Texas, using his “uncanny ability to manipulate federal prosecutors into going after the officeholder his client was trying to unseat,” reports Harper’s Magazine writer Scott Horton.

Horton reveals how Rove, in his capacity as Perry’s campaign manager for the powerful Texas office of Commissioner of Agriculture, eliminated Perry’s political opposition by using his influence to launch aggressive criminal investigations into their past and then hyping allegations of misconduct in the media.

Rove is a kingpin of smear and dirty tricks campaigns, and his fingerprints are all over this latest assault.

We now have confirmation of everything we have been witnessing from the likes of Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and even establishment leftists like Chris Matthews, who have all been echoing the same talking points about grass roots constitutionalists and “9/11 truthers” being terrorists and a threat to the President – this is all part of an orchestrated campaign to target real patriot leaders for character assassination and it is being directed from the highest levels of the Republican power structure.

While Medina and Ron Paul are being attacked from above by the establishment, since this would be too obvious – Alex Jones is constantly being attacked from below by phony patriot groups in a ploy to make the smears look more organic and genuine in their nature.

Ron Paul is setting the example of how the liberty movement can have an impact at the national level, which is why the Republicans are running three fake Tea Party candidates against him. Medina is showing people that it’s possible to take back control at state level. Alex Jones is setting the example of how Constitutionalists can take back control of the fourth estate, the media.

The burgeoning success of this combination has the establishment running scared, which is why they have resolved to sick attack dog media whores like Glenn Beck on any individual who poses a threat to the controlled left-right paradigm that Beck upholds while marginalizing any real voices of opposition to big government. As we have exhaustively documented, Beck poses as a grass roots libertarian and yet he is a virulent neo-con, constantly hyping an attack on Iran, supporting the bailout and calling for more new taxes.

Beck is following the precise methods laid out by Obama White House regulation czar Cass Sunstein in his 2008 white paper. “Conspiracy theorists,” ie real Constitutionalists and grass roots activists, have been targeted as the number one threat to the power structure and Beck’s job is to neutralize their influence by using a mixture of infiltration, in claiming he is a libertarian yet leading his followers astray on key issues, as well as demonization, by claiming people who question 9/11 are an extremist fringe on both left and right, when in fact they make up no less than 84 per cent of the population.

The revelation that the Republican dirty tricks machine is targeting Constitutionalists as the real threat to their power structure, and the fact that they are using the fake neo-con, the Benedict Arnold of our times, Glenn Beck, as their primary mouthpiece for this assault, speaks volumes about the level of influence the real liberty movement is now having on the body politic in America.

Internally, while the likes of Perry and Beck dismiss the real grass roots as “fringe extremists,” with Beck claiming earlier this week on his show that they make up no more than 10 per cent of the country, their constant attacks illustrate just how worried the neo-cons are about the growing liberty movement, which comprises far more than 10 per cent of politically active Americans.

The phrase “As goes Texas, so goes the U.S.” has never been more appropriate. If Medina were to win the Governorship, Texas would become the bellwether trend setting state and provide massive impetus for the liberty movement to run candidates and win in other states across America. A Medina victory would send a big message to the country and grease the skids for true Constitutionalists to take over state houses, governorships and legislatures nationwide.

A Medina victory would also legitimize the Tea Parties as a true organic movement of the people, and not as an astroturf offshoot of the Republican party, as the neo-con hijacking of the movement has allowed it to be characterized by the establishment media.

A victory for the liberty movement in Texas would also completely derail funding for the North American Union, the Nafta Superhighway, cap and trade measures being enforced at state level, and a whole host of other unconstitutional initiatives that are being pushed by globalist and Bilderberg attendee Rick Perry.

Watch the video below in which Alex Jones explains how Rick Perry, Glenn Beck and the neo-con establishment have resolved to target the true liberty movement as the number one threat to their power structure, as well as how Sarah Palin’s comments on 9/11 expose how the Debra Medina “9/11 truther” controversy was a manufactured hoax.

Source

Texas and the GOP in general: Finding new and interesting ways to break my brain daily.

[KnightWing]

Oh noes! Politicians doing political things?! The horror!

And to be fair, those articles are very tilted. It's all "the Republicans are dooming the world." Pssh. When we've got a Democratic majority in congress, I don't see how the goings-on of one little state are so significant. for every state that wants slightly more conservative curriculum, there's someone else in another state that tells 14-year-olds to have sex and do drugs.

[Koete]

I really don't care which side of the political fence dumbassery falls on. Dumbassery is dumbassery.

[Venneh]

It just happens to be falling on the conservative side more often than not lately.

[KnightWing]

It just happens to be falling on the conservative side more often than not lately.

Everyone on every side says that about their opponents. Political argument is all about finger-pointing. Down here in Texas, people make a pastime out of having extremely deep and well-thought-out political conversations that ultimately boil down to "Obama's being stupid." Personally, I like to distance myself from that sort of thing.

[Professor]

The nation’s public school curriculum may be in for a Texas-sized overhaul, if the Lone Star state’s influential recommendations for changes to social studies, economics and history textbooks are fully ratified later this spring. Last Friday, in a 10-to-5 vote split right down party lines, the Texas State Board of Education approved some controversial right-leaning alterations to what most students in the state—and by extension, in much of the rest of the country—will be studying as received historical and social-scientific wisdom. After a public comment period, the board will vote on final recommendations in May.

Don McElroy, who leads the board’s powerful seven-member social conservative bloc, explained that the measure is a way of "adding balance" in the classroom, since "academia is skewed too far to the left." And the board's critics have labeled the move an attempt by political "extremists" to "promote their ideology."

The revised standards have far-reaching implications because Texas is a huge market leader in the school-textbook industry. The enormous print run for Texas textbooks leaves most districts in other states adopting the same course materials, so that the Texas School Board effectively spells out requirements for 80 percent of the nation’s textbook market. That means, for instance, that schools in left-leaning states like Oregon and Vermont could soon be teaching from textbooks that are short on references to Ted Kennedy but long on references to conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly.

Here are some of the other signal shifts that the Texas Board endorsed last Friday:

- A greater emphasis on “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s.” This means not only increased favorable mentions of Schlafly, the founder of the antifeminist Eagle Forum, but also more discussion of the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association and Newt Gingrich's Contract With America.

- A reduced scope for Latino history and culture. A proposal to expand such material in recognition of Texas’ rapidly growing Hispanic population was defeated in last week’s meetings—provoking one board member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out in protest. "They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist," she said of her conservative colleagues on the board. "They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world."

- Changes in specific terminology. Terms that the board’s conservative majority felt were ideologically loaded are being retired. Hence, “imperialism” as a characterization of America’s modern rise to world power is giving way to “expansionism,” and “capitalism” is being dropped in economic material, in favor of the more positive expression “free market.” (The new recommendations stress the need for favorable depictions of America’s economic superiority across the board.)

- A more positive portrayal of Cold War anticommunism. Disgraced anticommunist crusader Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator censured by the Senate for his aggressive targeting of individual citizens and their civil liberties on the basis of their purported ties to the Communist Party, comes in for partial rehabilitation. The board recommends that textbooks refer to documents published since McCarthy’s death and the fall of the Soviet bloc that appear to show expansive Soviet designs to undermine the U.S. government.

- Language that qualifies the legacy of 1960s liberalism. Great Society programs such as Title IX—which provides for equal gender access to educational resources—and affirmative action, intended to remedy historic workplace discrimination against African-Americans, are said to have created adverse “unintended consequences” in the curriculum’s preferred language.

- Thomas Jefferson no longer included among writers influencing the nation’s intellectual origins. Jefferson, a deist who helped pioneer the legal theory of the separation of church and state, is not a model founder in the board’s judgment. Among the intellectual forerunners to be highlighted in Jefferson’s place: medieval Catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, Puritan theologian John Calvin and conservative British law scholar William Blackstone. Heavy emphasis is also to be placed on the founding fathers having been guided by strict Christian beliefs.

- Excision of recent third-party presidential candidates Ralph Nader (from the left) and Ross Perot (from the centrist Reform Party). Meanwhile, the recommendations include an entry listing Confederate General Stonewall Jackson as a role model for effective leadership, and a statement from Confederate President Jefferson Davis accompanying a speech by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.

- A recommendation to include country and western music among the nation’s important cultural movements. The popular black genre of hip-hop is being dropped from the same list.

None of these proposals has met with final ratification from the board—that vote will come in May, after a prolonged period of public comment on the recommendations. Still, the conservatives clearly feel like the bulk of their work is done; after the 120-page draft was finalized last Friday, Republican board member Terri Leo declared that it was "world class" and "exceptional."

—Brett Michael Dykes is a national affairs writer for Yahoo! News

Source

[Dread]

I mean this in all due respect, but sometimes I think that America is a lost cause.

Might as well call you People's Republic of America...

[Venneh]

Hon, you're not the only one.

Remind me to put up the link to the Utah law that just got passed where a woman can get charged for murder for miscarriage; all a prosecutor would have to do was prove that she was "reckless". All because a seventeen-year-old girl who got pregnant and whose boyfriend threatened to leave her hired a guy to beat her till she miscarried (the baby was later born w/o complications and adopted out), and a prosecutor in Utah was unhappy that he couldn't charge her for murder and put her in jail for life.

(Part of what pisses me off is that my mother could have been prosecuted under this law for smoking while she was pregnant, and ended up having a miscarriage for unrelated reasons.)