Rove investigated?

This bears some watching. Hopefully the investigation will turn up the kind of things we all know have been going on, ie WH involvement in the NH phone jamming scandal, and all of the "lost" emails in the US Attorney scandal. We'll see.

Guns on campus...yeah, that's a good idea.

I'm no freaky gun control nut. I grew up in NH and have a number of hunters on my mother's side. In fact we had a couple of rifles in the house as a kid, no big deal. I support bans on automatic weapons and assault rifles as well as certain types of ammunition. I also support as rigorous a waiting period/background check as we could come up with. Would any of this have stopped a horribly disturbed young man from killing 32 on the campus of Virgina Tech in Blacksburg, VA? Not likely. What would have stopped him? I can't pretend to know, but one thing is for sure, the thought of our young people going to school armed is not one that inspires a great deal of confidence in me. I was listening to D&C again this morning and Callahan was proposing the idea that if one of these kids in the building Cho was shooting up had been armed it might have all ended differently. That may be so, but one thing I know is that if students were allowed to posses firearms on college campuses they would be a far different place. I've been a college professor before, I can imagine the possibility of an upset student griping with me over his grade and potentially brandishing a gun in an effort to get me to change my mind. I can also imagine groups of drunken young men getting into altercations with each other (as happens every weekend on every campus in the country) and these instances ending in gun violence. Is that what we need? Do we need to turn the quads of our college campuses into the streets of the Old West? I feel horrible about what happened to the community of VT, I can't pretend to understand what they are going through but how on earth is allowing students to have guns on campus going to make this better? Maybe what we should be focusing on is how was it that this wildly disturbed young man was still on campus? He'd been reported for stalking a couple of times, had teachers request his removal from their classes because they were scared of his writings and, let's face it regardless of what you think about what he wrote, he had no apparent skill as a writer. How was it that he was in decent academic standing as a senior English Major when he wrote like a jr. high schooler? As a society we have shown less and less respect for the judgement of our teachers over the years, it shows in this case. If a students removal is requested by one of his prof's should the administration take that VERY seriously and consider removing the student from school? I realize the rights of the individual are important, but aren't they outweighed by the rights of the majority? We have a right to be safe on our campuses, that doesn't mean you expel every kid who wears black or writes dark poetry but isn't it clear that the case of this young man went well beyond that?

Fox News High School Fair and Balanced: We Censor We Decide

Ok so this story is starting to get a little play nationally. I must say I do find it interesting for a host of reasons not the least of which is the inconsistency of the administration. Wouldn't it have been wise for the principal to deal with this at the front end as opposed to waiting until he received some pressure for what his students were doing? I mean we all know that's what happened right? He figured no one was going to care what a bunch of theater geeks were doing until people got wind of it and the right wing thought police figured it needed to be stopped. I love how he claims he stopped it because it wasn't politically balanced and lacked context... ok wait... instead of stopping the production you take a chance and use it as a teaching opportunity. Had he thought it through maybe he could have worked with the students and the director and set up panel discussions and debates surrounding the event? Clearly he chose the easy way out. I hope his students will remember this about him as they make choices in their lives.

I also found a certain amount of humor in the fact that he was concerned about political balance but the last production they did in the fall was Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Does anyone else smell a whiff of irony? Maybe this guy needs a vocab quiz on the word "Allegory"

Oh Newt...

Figures doesn't it? Years after leading a witch hunt that cost the American tax payer 60 million dollars Newt Gingrich (the GOP's moral compass) has admitted that he had an affair while the investigation into Clinton's extra-curriculars were going on. I find it hilarious that the guy leading the right wing charge in the 90's has been married 3 times. Once to his high school geometry teacher (who he later started divorce proceedings on while she was recovering from cancer in the hospital) and later to a congressional aide 20 years younger than he. While we're at it, look at the leading candidate for the GOP, Rudy Guiliani...how many times has this guy been married? The last divorce was very public and very messy (having his mistress live in the mayor's residence? yuk.) and in part led to the estrangement of his son.

Listen, I don't really care that much about what you do in your life from a relationship standpoint. Relationships are hard. But don't come to me from the moral high ground. Life is a struggle for us all. Marriage is a challenge to everyone, but shouldn't everyone have the right to accept that challenge? How can Newt say gay marriage is wrong? It's not like his straight marriages have a great track record. Guiliani used to be pro-gay rights, now that he's running for the GOP nomination it appears that he is changing his tune? Why? is it to protect the children Rudy? Maybe you should have thought of that before you publicly humiliated your spouse by having your girlfriend live in your home at the same time.

Does anyone really care about this?

And if they do, why? Check out this story from the Baltimore Sun
So his Great-great-great-great-grandfather and his great-great-great-great-great-grandmother on his mother's side owned slaves...is there any relevane to life in 2007 to any of this? Just so you know I feel the same way about stories about Mitt Romney's grandfather being a polygamist. I mean we're talking about people long dead relatives. Here's the thing, do you think of we elect Romney he's going to legalize Polygamy? Is Obama going to legalize slavery? At least if they're going to waste their time digging into the past can they do it relative to the candidate and not some relative who's pushing up daisies?

Rebuke Bush NOLA

I saw this posted at Spocko's Brain and other bloggers are being asked to post it so here it is:

Mr. President: Katrina Survivors Do Not Welcome You, We Rebuke You!

We live in a devastated city and you are a big part of the reason why it sill sits in ruins. Your administration has abandoned our children by savaging their public schools. Your administration has tortured our working class people by refusing to reopen the city’s public housing developments. And your administration is fully complicit in placing our uninsured in harms way by ruthlessly pursuing the privatization of local public healthcare in the aftermath of Katrina. And, finally your administration is guilty of sending our sons and daughters of to war for oil and empire just when we need them most to help us rebuild our community.

Mr. President, we, Katrina Survivors all, do not welcome you to our city, we rebuke you!

Sponsored by Survivors Village, United Front For Affordable Housing.

(504) 587-0080

If you have a blog please consider posting this today.

Al Gore Energy Whore?

Well maybe, maybe not. In a story conveniently released immediately following Gore's oscar win for An Inconvenient Truth the Tennessee Center For Policy Research
has come forth with the assertion that Gore's 10,000 sq/ft home in Nashville, TN consumes nearly 20x the national average and significantly more than the average Nashville home. Gore's consumption last year was something like 191,000 KW/Hrs to 15,600 KW/Hrs for the average Nashville home, that is at least according to the TCPR which claims to be an independant think tank though it has strong ties to the right wing. It's founder/President Drew Johnson cut his teeth at The American Enterprise Institute and notorious conservative think tank out of Washington, DC. He has also worked for right wing media outlets like The Wall Street Journal and The National Review in addition to being seen often on Fox News.

Here's the thing, even if we accept those numbers as fact (the Nashville utility claims no request for information was ever submitted)
, what do they really mean? Gore's 10,000 sq/ft. home used more energy than the avg. Nashville household...ok, here's a question; just how big is the average Nashville how? Well according to this story the average single family home sold in Middle Tennessee is about 2,000 sq/ft. about 1/5th the size of Gore's home. Of course that's only single family homes, this does not include the 33% of Nashville residents who rent apartments, condos, trailers, etc which we all no are generally smaller than single family homes. Now even taking this into account Gore's home uses considerably more energy than the average Nashville home per sq/ft so why not say this in their attack on Gore? Well maybe it has to do with the nature of what Gore's home is used for? Gore and his wife both run their home offices out of the home, that in and of itself could account for a sizeable increase in energy usage.

Regardless, Gore puchases Carbon Offsets and invests in renewable energy research so while he may not live the perfect green life, he is doing a lot to try to improve the world around him.