gregladen | April 20, 2009A joint project by Democrats has flipped traditional fund-raising on its head, by starting a campaign aimed at collecting $1 a day from supporters "to make Norm Coleman go away."
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a new group working to get like-minded candidates elected, has teamed up with Howard Dean's Democracy for America to tap the wallets of Democrats who are disgruntled by the five-month-old ballot contest in Minnesota between Mr. Coleman, the former Republican senator, and Al Franken, the Democrat.
source
gregladen | April 19, 2009From a University of Chicago Press Release.
The genetic toolkit that animals use to build fins and limbs is the same genetic toolkit that controls the development of part of the gill skeleton in sharks, according to research to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on March 23, 2009, by Andrew Gillis and Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago, and Randall Dahn of Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory.
"In fact, the skeleton of any appendage off the body of an animal is probably patterned by the developmental genetic program that we have traced back to…
gregladen | April 19, 2009During the election campaign, the Palin/Whatshisname ticket made hay over Obama's statements that he would engage in international conversations with unsavory knee-jerks such as the president of Iran. I call these people knee-jerks because they invoke a knee-jerk response in right wing and even moderate circles. Obama is of course right in that it is counter productive to write off any possibility of communication with another nation or a globally significant faction of any kind a priori. Sure, writing them off a priori makes a point, and does so in a powerful way. But then what do you do…
gregladen | April 18, 2009As expected, New York Gov. David Paterson (D) unveiled legislation Thursday morning to allow same-sex couples to marry in the Empire State.
Standing beside New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R), openly gay Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D) and state leaders and union leaders, Paterson said "Marriage equality is about basic civil rights and freedom. That is why we stand together today to embrace civil rights for every New Yorker."
Paterson's bill would amend the domestic relations law allowing civil marriages between same-sex couples, and he called on the Legislature to approve the bill.…
gregladen | April 18, 2009Or, more exactly, where are they all going to go during the next two or three months?
I'm sitting here between a large frozen lake and a small "pond" (connected to the lake with a channel) that has patches of open water on it. (The melting on the pond is probably because the bioactivity at the bottom of the pond increases water temperature.) There is a pair of mallards on the pond, and I expect that in a few weeks there will be two or three mallards and three or for mergansers, all females, and each with between six and 12 or so ducklings. These 60 ducklings will initially hang out only…
gregladen | April 18, 2009Eric Black of MinnPost Dot Com has made an interesting observation. Last week the three judge panel charged with hearing Norm Coleman's "Election Contest" (that's a thing ... an election contest is a kind of suit claiming that an election did not go properly) finished their job. They ruled against some of Coleman's claims, but they did count extra ballots as Colman had insisted. That addition of new ballots -- all absentee ballots -- resulted in Franken's lead growing.
From that ruling, the plaintiff has ten days to file an appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court. The appeal itself is a…
gregladen | April 18, 2009As many as 107 Tennessee public school districts could be illegally preventing students from accessing online information about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues, according to a letter to sent to school officials by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The letter demands that Knox County Schools, Metro Nashville Public Schools, and the Tennessee Schools Cooperative unblock the Internet filtering category designated "LGBT" so that students can access political and educational information about LGBT issues on school computers.
read about it here
gregladen | April 17, 2009An agreement stating that girls under 18 will not undergo female genital mutilation (FGM) in Sierra Leone was recently signed by village chiefs and other community leaders, including women who perform FGM. The agreement affects the Kambia district, which is in the northernwestern part of the country.
At puberty, the majority of girls in Sierra Leone are initiated into the Bondo Society, a secret society of women that uses circumcision to initiate new members abducted the women. Gloria Bella, of Sierra Leone's Human Rights Commission, told IRIN, "community leaders feel that [initiation] is…
gregladen | April 17, 2009Update: See this: CIA exemption is the wrong thing to do
I do not disagree with Obama's decision to pre-pardon CIA agents who tortured people at Gitmo and elsewhere. (See this.) The only reason to not pardon them is to use them to get to higher-ups who should actually be prosecuted. These on the ground operatives are the ones who, like it or not, need to do what they are told even when they may well "know" it is wrong. As long as they were not acting as rogue agents, they should be immune, and they should certainly not take the fall for what Bush, Cheney and their cronies did.
gregladen | April 17, 2009"The commies have infiltrated our country as part of their fifty year plan! I know what I'm talking about, I'm in the marketing business! Only the FOX network knows the truth!" ... and so on and so forth.
These are real people. Be afraid. Trust no on. I am not joking even a little. You must listen to the end, or at least, focus on the last 90 seconds or so.
gregladen | April 17, 2009... there is no way to turn way from it, but we are often poorly prepared to deal with it, especially when it involves teenagers. Face it: adults like it when teenagers finally learn to hide some of their emotions. Maturity = knowing how to leave other people out of your bad shit. We reward this behavior and we model it by building and maintaining a Barbified and Kenified culture. But every now and then a kid goes too far for their own good and, not to shock you or anything, but the morgue is not the appropriate place to have "that conversation" about life.
I've been lucky. I was never…
gregladen | April 17, 2009"Building a permenant home in the political wilderness" ... brilliant, Rachel.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
This is totally unbelievable. The Imams were polite yet annoyed. Reasonably annoyed.
Here's the Imam story from way back when:
MINNEAPOLIS - The Council on American-Islamic Relations called Tuesday for an investigation into the behavior of airline staff and airport security in the removal of six Muslim scholars from a US Airways flight a day earlier.
A passenger raised concerns about the imams -- three of whom said their normal…
gregladen | April 17, 2009A young couple wished to get married (19 and 21 years of age)against their parent's wishes, so they tried to elope. They were tracked down by their parents, who had them arrested. Monday, they were shot to death by a firing squad.
The couple had violated the religious beliefs of their families.
Details here.
gregladen | April 17, 2009One of the nice things about Linux -- but by no means the most important -- is the enhanced security that comes along with running it. That doesn't mean Linux never runs into security issues, though, and this week, the vulnerability in question centers around a nifty little service called udev.
According to advisories from several distributions, including Fedora, Ubuntu, and SUSE, a bug has been discovered that allows a local or remote user to exploit the udev service in order to gain root access to the system....
You can read the rest here, but mainly, just update your system frequently…