As part of the I Believe series, I propose the following:

With proceeds to go to providing frogs for biology classes.

Unless ET objects to the frogs, in which case I suggest home chemistry sets for every kid.

Regarding the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (S. 1843), which the House passed last year and upon which the Senate is set to vote today, I had to ask yesterday what reasonable person could possibly oppose it.  The New York Times was kind enough to give me an answer today:

 Wait for it...

Wait for it...

Senate Republicans, of course!  The esteemed Senator from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell is on record with the Times as saying "We think that this bill is primarily designed to create a massive amount of new litigation in our country."  He is not on record as complaining about uppity women trying to screw the white menz out of their rightful place in the hierarchy and take away their jobs and emasculate them with pixie sticks, but that's probably not far off.

Meanwhile, the right-on Senator from Maine, Olympia Snowe, a co-sponsor of the bill, resorted to very strong language against the Republicans who wish to deny the bill the floor: "unfortunate," she said.  McConnell had better be careful, from Ms. Snowe that's tantamount to pulling out the pixie stick.

Majority Leader Reid has delayed the Senate's convening today until 5:00 PM so that all of the presidential campaigners can be on hand for this critical vote.  Maverick McCain is not expected to attend.  He's too busy with his It's Hip to Be Poor Tour of the Downtrodden to be bothered with actually doing anything to, you know, help them or crazy stuff like that.

If you believe, as I do, that the ability to do the same job as well as or better than one's counterparts merits a salary at the very least commensurate with theirs, then get on the horn and call your Congress Critter (by phone at 866-338-1015 or email) - 'specially if he's a weasel who runs at the sight of pixie sticks.  Wankers.

UPDATED, From WaPo, the Senators aren't the only ones askeered of letting the great unwashed have their day(s) in court, our wonderful Weasel-in-Chief has threatened to veto the bill should it somehow make it out of the Senate.  To put this in perspective, it's not just a women's issue.  The original court decision has already had an impact on other kinds of discrimination suits:

the bill is a needed remedy for a ruling that is already having far-reaching and unexpected effects, limiting access to the courts by female athletes seeking to compete in a male-dominated sport, disabled people seeking to enforce fair housing laws and workers pressing claims of age discrimination, as well as women who are paid less than their male co-workers, according to a survey of federal court cases.

So now it's not just the uppity women who need to be quashed, but also the disabled and the old.  Of course, the disabled have always been a thorn in our national sides, demanding ridiculous things like wheelchair access or braille in elevators.  And don't get me started on people over 25 - completely useless, senile quacks, all of 'em.

"The impact of this decision was enormous," said Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, a national association of civil rights, women's and consumer organizations, which conducted the survey. "It's not just American workers who are affected, but those seeking redress to remedy all kinds of discriminatory actions."

Say it with me, class:  Wankers.

UPDATE 2: Shame on you, Johnny Isakson (R-GA) for suggesting this bill will unfairly "allow people to file discrimination suits against employers for deeds decades old." (AP)  The bill will do no such thing - unless that discrimination is still ongoing, decades later, and at least one instance occured within the last six months.  Your obfuscation borders on a lie, sir, and shoves a knife in the back of every working person who ever voted for you. 

Saxby Chambliss, the other R-GA - not to be confused, however temptingly, with Zaxby's the Chicken Place (Zaxby's at least peddles something tasty, unlike the Senator who got himself elected by calling Max Cleland a coward) - also voted against.

Weasels.

UPDATE 3:  It's over for today.  42 Senators voted to block the debate.  57 voted in favor of debate, falling short of the magic number 60.

 

For more on this, see Happy Equal Pay Day.

The Bush White House doesn't believe ordinary Americans are entitled to much, if any, privacy: they flag library books for government inquiry into those who read them, they tap wires without warrants, they reserve the right to read our mail and pruriently wonder at what goes on in our bedrooms.  And none of this even comes close to touching the ongoing outrage of suspending habeas corpus and actively promoting torture.

The pattern has become such that one wonders what, if anything, this White House would hold as off-limits.

In terms of off-limits to their own insatiable hunger for absolute power, the answer is obviously "nothing."  Yet the AP reports that, while average citizens are entitled to exceedingly little personal space free from unreasonable search, seizure and subjugation, the White House does believe something sacrosanct - the Secret Service White House visitor logs.   The American people, it seems, are not entitled to know who sees our president, on company-time, in the building which we have generously provided.  Apparently such knowledge would grossly impair the president's ability to "gather advice."  Evidently, public knowledge of the President's visitors would be so damaging to the President that he could no longer have the kinds of visitors he likes to have without people getting all nosy and up-in-his-business and snotty about having stupid things like "rights."

Meh.  Stupid people, wanting to know things like who has direct, personal access to the leader of our country.  Don't they know that's not important?  Not really.  Not as important as anything really important - like muppets.  Or pop-tarts.

I would very much like to claim shock and and incredulity over the New York Times article exposing the links between network military "analysts," the government, and the military-industrial complex.  Really, I would.  I would like to think my government above such things as trading lucrative access for favorable press, and cutting those who offer even the mildest of criticism out of the loop.  I would like to think our corporate news media at least aspired to pretend to hold to the tradition of Murrow and Woodward and those others who risked everything to tell us the truth, instead of those who risk nothing to pander to an increasingly stultified audience.

I would like to believe our news isn't pre-packaged, Americanized for American tastes, freeze-dried crap vomited up on cue by an army of willing slaves, eagerly lining up to thank this administration on behalf of the deluded population and requesting if we might, pretty please, have another.

I'd like that very much.  But then, I'd also like world peace.  So now, as Mom suggested, I shall spit in one hand and wish in the other, and see which one fills up first.

I think most of us even reasonably aware of the world around us know by now that the Chinese government isn’t terribly enamored of protests, much less those protestors who have the gall to show up, live and in color, and suggest that perhaps the government has made a bad decision. More than simple annoyance, the Chinese Powers That Be tend to react with violence, and captured protestors have a nasty habit of disappearing for some time.

So it is no little surprise that Chinese officials got a little miffed over French protests during the Olympic torch relay in Paris yesterday. From all reports I’ve read, the icing on the cake was the banner hung outside Paris’ City Hall – a banner claiming support of human rights, hung there by French officials.

While many regret that the athletes’ bus had to suffer the slings and arrows (or at least eggs and soda cans) of outrageous fortune, I have to wonder what the International Olympic Committee thought they were doing when they awarded the games to Beijing. If an ill wind bodes no good, and the human rights wind out of China is almost universally acknowledged to be ill, then what good could come of it? Do the members of the Committee lack thumbs to prick when something wicked approaches? Do they also lack all common sense?   

More after the jump... »

From Colorful Colorado, home of tourism, shiny metals and the team that used to be led by John Elway, an object lesson in zero-tolerance:

Eight-year-old Eathan Harris was originally suspended from Harris Park Elementary School for three days. Principal Chris Benisch reduced the suspension to one day after complaints from Harris' parents.

Harris used a black Sharpie marker to color a small area on the sleeve of his sweatshirt. A teacher sent him to the principal when she noticed him smelling the marker and his clothing.

"It smelled good," Harris said. "They told me that's wrong."

I think at this point we're going to have to suspend every kid in America.  I don't know of a one, from my childhood to present day, who hasn't whiffed one of those fruity magic markers, or played with glue, or observed that some art supplies smell better than others, or cut their own bangs in class (okay; the last one might've been just me).  Really.  He's eight and it's a sharpie.  I think suspension is a tad extreme here.  But wait, there's more:

In his letter suspending the child, Benisch wrote that smelling the marker fumes could cause the boy to "become intoxicated."

A toxicologist with the Rocky Mountain Poison Control Center says that claim is nearly impossible.

Dr. Eric Lavonas says non-toxic markers like Sharpies, while pungent-smelling, cannot be used to get high.

The toxicologist goes on to say that maybe, if the kid had 50 bags of sharpies, maybe he could "get creative" and figure something out.  The school was completely nonplussed by the whole science-speak thing, though:

"Principals make hundreds of decisions everyday based on our best judgment. And in that time, smelling that marker, I felt like, 'Wow, that's a very serious marker,'" Benisch said.

Despite the medical evidence, Benisch promised to draw an even clearer line on markers.

"We've purged every permanent marker there is in this building," he said.

Time well spent, I say.  Can't be too careful with those sharpies.

There remains so much wrong with the No Child Left Behind act that I hesitate to even begin to address it. One of the most deplorable chasms, and, coincidentally, most easily addressed by the federal Department of Education, has, however, been the law’s allowance that individual states may calculate graduation rates in any way they desire. Many states initially took advantage of this disconnect between the law-as-written- and the law-as-applied and have, since 2002 at the law’s inception, relied upon a variety of inaccurate formulas producing misleading data, thus artificially inflating their graduation rates.

Georgia is one of these states.

In September of 2007, State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox released a statement on the Georgia Department of Education website publicizing an overall graduation rate of “an all-time high of 72.3 percent.” Were our education system in even adequate shape, this figure, and its attendant crowing, would be woeful enough. Our education system is in a shambles, however, and deeply, possibly systemically, flawed, and Georgia takes advantage of the law’s ambiguity in the state’s favor in order to preen its own ragged feathers. By this I mean, of course, that the figure on the website is inflated, vis-à-vis the meaning that the average parent would expect that figure to reference, anyway.

   

More after the jump... »

I have long held that the problem with letting Christians erect religious monuments on public land is not necessarily that I will have to look at those monuments, but that if we allow Christians the privilege of memorializing their religion in stone on public property we must, as a free and fair people in premise if not always in practice, allow other adherents of other religions to erect their own monuments to their own gods, demigods, sacred books, and pasta.

I mean, really, that's why people have previously told Christians to erect their monuments on private land.  It's not because they're not allowed to have monuments, but because if they put a monument on public land, pretty soon Jews or Muslims will want a monument, and then the Buddhists start feeling left out, and once you let them in, well, you have to let everybody in.

Imagine, a ten commandments monuments goes up.  Okay.  Then a golden seagull perches nearby, then we add a Buddha and a Shiva and maybe a statue of L. Ron Hubbard.  Next someone erects a crescent, and some of the Pagans get in with a statue of Gaia.  And then there's the modern art with the plate of actual spaghetti and meatballs with a nice lighting effect indicating a heavenly glow.  That one has to be changed daily.

Not only would it be a mishmash of competing ideologies, such a hodgepodge would have little aesthetic value.  Quite frankly, I think it would make for a very crowded park.  What might make for an interesting example of roadside object d'art, a la Route 66 circa 1960, would, I think, be terribly out of place in a city park - or courthouse, for that matter.

Having gone through the preamble of what should be the ridiculous, the LA Times reports that the Supreme Court has agreed to consider a case along this vein:

But last year, the U.S. appeals court in Denver extended this free-speech rule to cover the monuments, statues and displays in a public park. It ruled in favor of a religious group called Summum, which says it wants to erect its "Seven Aphorisms of Summum" next to the Ten Commandments in Pioneer Park in Pleasant Grove, Utah.

Its ruling left the city with an all-or-nothing choice: Allow Summum and others to erect their own displays in the park, or remove the other monuments.

The city is apparently upset that it will have to either allow everybody to put up religious monuments, or remove the Christian-only material which it currently allows.  Some of these monuments are old, you see.  I get that.  We often place historical value on certain items that the newfangled contraptions just can't claim yet.  It's tradition.  Just because a thing is traditional, however, doesn't make it right.  Take slavery, for example, or female genital mutilation, or torturing a confession out of an enemy.  Or haggis, for that matter.  Tradition, for all it is often beloved, can be wrong, and being forced to choose otherwise can be tough.

Myself, I think if the city believes in the value of ancient Christian monuments so much that they are willing to spend precious tax dollars to defend them, they should keep them.  They just have to desegregate and let the other kids in, too.

The city could always plant lots of trees and other flora to obscure all of the monuments, make a sort of wild ramble out of it.  Then they could print up maps and charge a dollar a person to enter the park and hunt for the monuments.  It'd be like a modern day treasure hunt, only with civics and history and tolerance and stuff.

Contrary to what Senator McCain seems to think, the problem with private health insurance is not that healthy people cannot get it.

 

According to an LA Times story covering Elizabeth Edwards’ reaction to the McCain plan, McCain’s plan proposal would exempt health insurers from having to cover those with pre-existing conditions like melanoma or breast cancer.  Senator McCain, as someone who suffers from melanoma, would therefore likely be ineligible for private coverage.  Whatever coverage he could manage, were he Joe Blow instead of The Straight Talk Express, would certainly exclude melanoma and any related illnesses or conditions from covered treatment.

 

Further, Senator McCain wants to “encourage competition” by allowing insurance companies to sell across state lines.  The Edwardses are concerned, and rightfully so, I say, that this would allow health insurers to move their headquarters into states with relatively loose consumer protections, much as credit card companies have done.  Combine this with McCain’s intention to block “frivolous lawsuits” (since by GOP standards, most lawsuits against big business are “frivolous,” regardless of actual basis), and we have recipe for consumer disaster. 

 

Additionally, McCain’s plan calls for making employer-sponsored healthcare taxable income.  So, if you are able to get health coverage through your employer (which is how most of middle class America manages it), and you’re already paying through the nose for coverage that shrinks every year, McCain wants to make the cost prohibitive even to you.   According to saukvalley.com, “…a worker whose employer-offered family plan now costs an average $12,000 a year, that would mean a tax increase of $3,360, if in the 28 percent bracket.” 

 

Lee Burman at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center also suggests that some employers might drop workers’ healthcare coverage altogether should the government offer that tax credits for private insurance, as proposed by McCain.

 

Healthcare in this country is in a poor enough state.  It’s bad enough I can’t get reimbursed for my son’s speech therapy – even when it’s covered in my contract documents – but now Senator McCain want to see to it not only that certain folks are never covered, but that those who are pay more for fewer privileges and cannot seek redress should the insurance company fail to live up to its end of the severely constricted bargain.

 

We certainly don’t need McCain’s “help” with making it more expensive for the average consumer to receive less coverage.  We get enough help from the insurance companies as it is.

At the request of the battery industry (and other producers of lead pollutants), the EPA is considering removing lead from a list of regulated air toxins.  Their reasoning, according to Scientific American, is that lead levels in the air have fallen 90% since lead was first added to the list in the 70s, so they can now consider that mission accomplished and allow lead pollution to ramp back up.

Rep. Harry Waxman (D-CA) wrote EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, urging him to:

"Misdirected" is a tad more charitable than I felt upon first reading the news.  "Asinine" and "idiotic" sprang more immediately to mind.

Hey, EPA, while you're at it, why don't you just go ahead and okay asbestos and chlordane for use in human habitations?  I mean, now that use is way down from a few years ago, it seems safe enough to poison an entirely new generation with lackadaisical standards benefiting corporate pocketbooks at the expense of public health, right?

Like most people, I have this internal barometer that slides up or down as I read news stories.  This particular item set that indicator a-fluttering, bouncing up and down like a cake-high 5 year old at an all-out birthday bash:

Whenever one of the arms of this particular administration begin reaching for things, my hackles rise.  Call it Pavlovian, but historic repetition of complete and utter disregard for what "the people" think or need in favor of what the political apex momentarily hankers for has taught me that when this government begins to ask about a program which benefits working families more than it benefits corporations or the wealthy, then that program is not long for this world.

Brian Reid, the author of the WaPo article, also wondered what this meant, and found an AP story (quoted from the WaPo text):

"This is meant to be a very objective review," Victoria Lipnic, assistant secretary for the Labor Department's Employment Standards Administration, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

"We're genuinely in search of information and having looked at the issues now for a number of years ... it became apparent we really needed some fresh thinking on this. I am hoping that is what all of this will yield," she said.

Hmm, "fresh thinking," eh?  Like Mr. Reid, I would love to see some "fresh thinking" which included paid leave under FMLA (which is currently unpaid), extended the leave, expanded protections (both in people covered and in specific job-protection).  I'd also like to see some creative solutions to the problems inherent in being both a medical caregiver and a wage-earner, such as mandating that companies which offer telecommuting options to employees should also offer that option, on a trial basis (say, 30 days to begin, with the option to reevaluate and continue in 30 day increments) to employees in good standing applying for FMLA-covered leave.

However, the Pavlovian response rises again, and I cannot help but wonder if the fears of a couple of years ago, that the Bush administration would attempt to gut FMLA in its continuing war against working families, were prescient and that, politically wounded as the cur is, he lashes out now to grab his petty revenge against a nation which repudiated him.  After all, the hard right, which still supports the guy, usually "encourages" women to stay at home, rendering largely FMLA moot for their own families (when taken with the fundamentalist view that women should stay at home and be caregivers, while men should work and be heads of the house, and never the twain shall meet) and, as anything that benefits women who work outside the home over women who do not must come from Satan and cannot, therefore, be used, targeting the law would do real, painful damage to those uppity folks who had the nerve to oppose the Supreme Will of the self-styled demigod that is George Bush.

Or maybe not.  I really don't know.  The "chilling little note" reads as follows:

The deadline for comments is 5:00PM EST, February 2, 2007.  If you've some experience with FMLA, please send a note to the Labor Department at whdcomments@dol.gov.  Fresh thinking doesn't have to equal a net negative, and I'll be happy to provide my input if it means protecting and/or expanding protections for working families.

The House voted yesterday to fund the preservation of 10 internment camp used to house Japanese-Americans during WWII.   The National Park Service seems to be grumbling about the expense of it all, but I believe that in the last 6 years we've spent $38MM on plenty of things worse than preserving the history of our civil rights.

Except that we have already allowed it to happen again.

Oh, we haven't pulled up stakes on entire ethnicities and forced them into middle-of-nowhere barracks.  Yet.  But we have abdicated our right to even a pretense of privacy, we have abandoned habeas corpus, and a portion of our citizens would, given the opportunity, gladly alienate anyone not professing at least a surface-deep and temporarily-abiding belief in Christian theology - particularly those nasty Muslims threatening to take oaths on their own stupid book instead of the holiest of holies Bible (though I've yet to determine which translation) (USA Today comment section).

We have Jose Padilla, an American citizen, who was held without charge for three years.  Held in a modern day internment camp, which surpassed the shocking abomination of those 50 years ago by including physical and psychological torture as part of the daily fare, Mr. Padilla was systematically morphed into more than a citizen with the wrong sort of pedigree, or perhaps a more accurate characterization would be "less than," he was turned into little more than "a piece of furniture."

Congress may well recognize the 50 year old gross error of treating a swath of citizens as through the slant of their eyes or the cadence of their accents somehow unfailingly points to a treasonous tendency, but they are blinded to a worse atrocity perpetuated today - that citizens are not only being held in modern camps without charge, but are there being systematically dehumanized in the name of the very rights upon which such actions gleefully trample.

This is not to say that the US government should ignore threats where it finds them.  In finding them, however, the government should be obliged to provide some proof, and formally charge the individual(s), and try them in open courts of law.  With few exceptions, this has been our history for the last 250 years.  More than just a symbol of our national values, it is confirmation of them and testimony to the lives lost in securing them.

Yesterday, the Congress voted to preserve the internment camps used against Japanese-Americans in WWII as a reminder of our national hubris, that we might never allow such a thing again.  Too late, I think, for some.