I think the universe has decided to taunt me.

First I thought the paranoia caused by the failed (let me repeat, FAILED) Christmas day terrorist attack was extreme. I was annoyed by that. I dislike the overreactions.

Then the Jewish kid gets the plane diverted because he's praying and we have no cultural sensitivity in this country. I thought this was even sillier.

Then my mom's cousin tries to come down to Florida for a visit but they can't board the plane for two hours because there was a battery in the luggage hold (oh noes, the battery of DOOOOM!). This was just stupid. WTF was a battery going to do?

These are getting more and more ridiculous, right? So the universe decided to test my tolerance for absurdity.

This new story takes the cake. A guy is running late so he's sweating profusely when he gets on the plane. He gets upset when he has to sit in a window seat. So the plane returns to the gate, everyone gets off, and the guy is "intensely" questioned by the FBI. Expert agents determine...that the guy is running late and didn't want to sit in a window seat. Two hours later, everyone is re-screened and allowed to board the plane.

I can only conclude that Western civilization is doomed.

We face death every time we get in a car -- death that is a lot more real and immediate than loose batteries, sweaty guys, and tefillin. You also court death when you eat beef or go outside in a thunder storm. Why all the obsession with random events on planes?

Obama admits health care overhaul may die on Hill.

The president's newly conflicting signals could frustrate Democratic lawmakers who are hungry for guidance from the White House as they try to salvage the effort to extend coverage to millions of uninsured Americans and hold down spiraling medical costs.

Lawmakers aren't the only ones who could be frustrated by this.

The article goes on to say that there is no clear way forward without 60 Senate seats, but I didn't see us getting anything done when we had 60 seats, so that's a freakin' stupid excuse.

What's he going to run on in 2012? "Yes, we can...but we won't."

This article, on how more kids are able to opt out of PE due to new legislation that was meant to enforce PE participation, is terrible. According to the article, as many as half of the kids in some middle schools are opting out of PE because of two reasons: the kids want to take fine arts classes, and the parents don't care if the kids are fat.

This is bull.

I'd like to share with you some of the reasons to opt out of PE:

1. It's boring. This is not a workout in the adult sense of a workout. Adults get to decide how to exercise to best fit their own needs and interests. Adult workouts are usually solo or in small groups, but gym classes aren't, which makes personal interest even less relevant. In a workout, you have to be mentally engaged or at least be satisfied with your choices, because that's what makes exercise a lifelong habit.

2. We live in Florida. Dear G-d, do you realize how hot it is here? Kids start school in August and it's like 100 degrees outside without factoring in the humidity, and on a day when you can fry an egg on the sidewalk, a student is given a waiver form to get out of PE. What kid in their right mind wouldn't beg for it to be signed?

3. Can you even tell me it works? There's a lot of yammering about "health" and the "obesity epidemic," but how many really decent studies can show that PE can effectively combat obesity? I've never yet read one. Sometimes, like in the PE class the bf took in high school, you just sit around answering worksheet questions about team sports. Sometimes, like in the PE class I took in the sixth grade, you're just waiting around in lines of 75 other kids.

4. PE is unfair. I remember clearly being asked to do "the standing long jump" once a year. I was graded on it and we moved on. No one ever taught me how to do it, and it's not a pre-test, because there's no post-test. There's no practice. It's not aerobically efficient. It's not strength training. And no one ever explained to me why the fuck we were doing it.

5. PE teachers suck. I'm going to be accused of painting with too broad a brush here, but I stand by it because it's basically true. PE teachers usually think that they know best, even though they don't care to factor in body type, experience, and what is reasonable for each individual kid. Not all of us can climb a rope. Most of us grew up into adults who don't have to climb ropes. We're okay with it. PE teachers, as adults who can and do climb ropes, are not a positive influence on kids who can't. Also, habits are learned from people you respect. If the PE teacher is tormenting you, you won't respect him or her, and you won't get anything out of the class.

6. Locker rooms are homophobic. I'm not sure that I have to elaborate on this one, but I will say that when you're changing for gym class and you're the only eleven-year-old girl with adult sized breasts, the reaction can range from mere personal tension to outright group abuse. The fact that PE classes themselves are sexist is actually secondary to this problem, imo.

7. PE isn't a workout. I've touched on this in previous items, but it can stand to be repeated as its own. We aren't talking about going to the gym and running on the treadmill for thirty minutes before doing fifteen minutes of weight training. We're talking about a huge group of kids being herded along in a totally dehumanizing, inefficient way that adults would never put up with.

8. The state legislators being quoted in the article are all fatasses. Well, they are. So why don't we make our legislators take 50 minutes out of their day to run around and be screamed at under the broiling Florida sun? But they don't. So why should you? Opt out.

9. Aren't these lawmakers all Republicans who are against a nanny state? That's how the Florida legislature describes itself. This isn't ideologically consistent. They must just like picking on fat kids.

10. Even when someone miraculously organizes a team sport during a PE class, almost no one gets to play. There will be a couple of kids on each team who actually know how to play the sport or game, and they will run roughshod over everyone else in pursuit of the all-important win.

Epic fail:

Culpeper County [Virginia] public school officials have decided to stop assigning a version of Anne Frank's diary, one of the most enduring symbols of the atrocities of the Nazi regime, after a parent complained that the book includes sexually explicit material and homosexual themes.

Methinks they are missing the point of the book.

Excellent article on why you can't say "I forgot he was Black."

I'm confused.

Media coverage of the Edwards' impending divorce and the former aide's about-to-be-published tell-all seems to be focusing, to a large extent, on painting Elizabeth Edwards as this difficult woman John needed to find refuge from.

Without sullying my mind with too many details, I'm reasonably sure that this is pure sexism. We want her to be this patient, enduring, stand-by-your-man character, and we don't want to acknowledge that a woman who is terminally ill and survived the death of her son probably has a few issues she's entitled to. Then put her in a high-profile environment and have her husband go impregnate another women...

Well, I just think she's entitled to more than a few freak-outs. In fact, pretty much anything up to but excluding physical violence shouldn't be judged by anyone.

Foods I've prepared since my last food-centered update: Blueberry muffins; cupcakes; apple pie; vegetarian potpie; another lasagna; cheesy tofu and broccoli; fresh green beans; chocolate oatmeal cookies again.

Homemade food is the best.

Nightly news might want to take the hint and consider a new format:

Glenn Greenwald on Alito's terrible SotU behavior:

By contrast, the behavior of Justice Alito at last night's State of the Union address -- visibly shaking his head and mouthing the words "not true" when Obama warned of the dangers of the Court's Citizens United ruling -- was a serious and substantive breach of protocol that reflects very poorly on Alito and only further undermines the credibility of the Court. It has nothing to do with etiquette and everything to do with the Court's ability to adhere to its intended function.

There's a reason that Supreme Court Justices -- along with the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- never applaud or otherwise express any reaction at a State of the Union address. It's vital -- both as a matter of perception and reality -- that those institutions remain apolitical, separate and detached from partisan wars. The Court's pronouncements on (and resolutions of) the most inflammatory and passionate political disputes retain legitimacy only if they possess a credible claim to being objectively grounded in law and the Constitution, not political considerations...

On a night when both tradition and the Court's role dictate that he sit silent and inexpressive, he instead turned himself into a partisan sideshow -- a conservative Republican judge departing from protocol to openly criticize a Democratic President -- with Republicans predictably defending him and Democrats doing the opposite. Alito is now a political (rather than judicial) hero to Republicans and a political enemy of Democrats, which is exactly the role a Supreme Court Justice should not occupy.

The Justices are seated at the very front of the chamber, and it was predictable in the extreme that the cameras would focus on them as Obama condemned their ruling. Seriously: what kind of an adult is incapable of restraining himself from visible gestures and verbal outbursts in the middle of someone's speech, no matter how strongly one disagrees -- let alone a robe-wearing Supreme Court Justice sitting in the U.S. Congress in the middle of a President's State of the Union address?

I teared up last night when I saw that Howard Zinn had passed away. His death is, at a minimum, a huge loss to American intellectualism.

I keep thinking of the title of his autobiography: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. There's a bitter irony to Dr. Zinn dying on the same day as President Obama's first SotU; Obama is trying his hardest to be neutral on so many things, and it just makes me sad.

G-d forbid you be educated about an unpopular idea.

Via Pharyungula, this story about how a children's book author was cut from the Texas curriculum because he has the same name as a philosophy professor who wrote...a book on philosophy. The article leans towards presenting the story as being about the confusion between the two authors; you can't just go banning everyone named Bill Martin, after all. The real issue, however, is the one PZ zeroes in on:

Stupid mothers are a problem. Craven administrators are a bigger problem. But when you've got a curriculum set by odious ideologues like Terri Leo [and Pat Hardy], who would ban an author's name wholesale because she read a title like Ethical Marxism[: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation] (no, she hasn't actually read the book, of course), you're in a whole wide new world of pain, in which your local school has become a temple to ignorance.

This is apparently the standard in Texas: Don't read a book before you dismiss it, and don't be open to the notion that philosophers might have something to say about a concept you've been taught from childhood to hate.

They banned a book because the title was Ethical Marxism and they hate the realization that such an idea exists out in the world. They want to shut down and live in the safety of knowing nothing.

I despise these people.

So why am I blogging in the middle of the night?

Bill Nelson jumped on the Evan Bayh bus, and I just had to hammer out this email, which I'm sure will be read for a full tenth of a second before some irritated, underpaid staffer clicks "Delete."

Come on, Senator Nelson. Give us just one example of an issue on which the action President Obama has taken is further to the left than whatever promises he made during the campaign -- a campaign he won with a resounding mandate, if you don't remember clearly.

Are you like Joe Lieberman, whose idea of political center means endorsing the other party? Because if so, you should defect right now, and stop trying to undermine the Democratic Party from within.

And by the way, I am a political leftist, and I am proud of it. Don't talk about me as if I'm some toxic waste on the American political landscape. I don't expect the president to uphold my ideals all or even some of the time, but you have some nerve to imply that he never should.

Other than Nelson's idiotic fabrication that the liberal base of the party has too much sway over the president's agenda, the second stupidest line in the article was one I was unable to address in the email. Fortunately, I have a blog, and I can address it here:

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said that Obama would need to ramp down some of his plans in the months ahead if some of the most vulnerable Democrats are to go on to win this fall.

Yeah. That worked so well for Coakley. Pussyfooting around when you feel vulnerable is political hemlock for Dems. Why are the Democratic Senators and the Obama administration some of the only people in the country who can't see this?

Wonderful post: we aren't "pro-choice," we're "pro-justice."

Don't mimic Republicans, Obama; one of them wants to starve poor people so they won't breed.

That should be your first clue that Republican ideas about spending aren't totally sound.

I need to look closer at the details of Obama's absolutely insane plan to freeze discretionary spending before I decide to spew hot molten rage across the interwebs, but my instincts -- which are nearly always dead-on whenever I get a chance to play Cassandra -- are screaming their objections already.

Oh joy.

I've been a little more cynical than Krugman has this past month, but it looks like he's giving my side some credit. In response to an Obama quote discussing what to "legitimately" dislike in the health care bill, Krugman writes:

In short, "Run away, run away"!

Maybe House Democrats can pull this out, even with a gaping hole in White House leadership. Barney Frank seems to have thought better of his initial defeatism. But I have to say, I'm pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in.

Krugman's title is spot on, even if it is hard to swallow: "He Wasn't The One We've Been Waiting For."

A curious article about how the most common web password is "123456."

I'm confused by this trend, not because it's an easy password to guess but because it's absolutely meaningless and therefore would seem difficult to remember, whereas, for example, the name of a childhood pet or a significant relationship is rooted in one's mind.

Quick hits:

1. Firm will remove Bible references from gun sights.

The company's practice of putting Bible references on the sites [sic?] began nearly 30 years ago by Trijicon's founder, Glyn Bindon, who was killed in a plane crash in 2003. His son Stephen, Trijicon's president, has continued the practice.

No comment on how disturbed I find this practice; I imagine you can guess.

2. Former Sen. John Edwards admits the child is his.

This hurts -- not because I had Edwards on some moral pedestal, but because his campaign contributed a lot of positive things to American politics, including several ideas I still support, am still proud of, and are still not getting the recognition they deserve.

And suddenly, it just doesn't matter at all that he was a leading voice on net neutrality, health care, rural broadband access, and finding green energy without increasing reliance on nuclear power plants. He's just the schmuck who cheated on his dying wife, fathered a child with his mistress, and denied the child was his before finally coming clean.

He's a douche and he can't be a leader any more, but that doesn't mean that he was wrong on any of those issues.

3. Pilot diverts jet over teenager's in-flight prayer.

Mixed feelings on this one. Part of me wants to put it in the same category as gun sights story, which would be the "get religion out of the public sphere" file. But a much larger part of my brain -- hovering near 97% at the moment -- is pissed about the paranoia and ignorance.

A Jewish teen trying to pray on a New York-to-Kentucky flight caused a scare when he pulled out a set of small black boxes containing holy scrolls, leading the captain to divert the flight to Philadelphia, where the commuter plane was greeted by police, bomb-sniffing dogs and federal agents.

...Another rabbi, however, said tefillin have been used for thousands of years and he found it hard to believe no one recognized it. Benjamin Blech, an assistant professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University in New York, said he found the incident "both humorous and outlandish" and called it a "wake-up call" for religious sensitivity.

It's hard for me to be impartial on the question of whether or not the tefillin should have been recognized, since I know exactly what they are and wouldn't look twice at someone with them on a plane. That aside, I do think that diverting planes because of small black boxes is extremely paranoid, and, in addition, that cultural sensitivity would benefit us all. I mean, seriously: You see a tradition you don't recognize, and you bring in the bomb-sniffing dogs? Wouldn't it just be easier to foster some understanding?

Mental note: Bring pink lunch box next time I use air travel. Wouldn't want anyone freaking out over the black one.

Great; now we're going to have to listen to another two weeks of pundits carping about how the Massachusetts special election means that the Democratic agenda is a failure -- totally oblivious to the fact that the real failure lies in deserting the base and failing to fight for Democratic principles. Let's talk about how Senator Bayh is just a suit (walks, talks, has by chance a man in it), shall we? Conceivably that behavior was making the Senate ineffective anyway, regardless of what happened in Massachusetts.

How did we revert to the Democratic Party circa 2002, anyway? Where's Howard Dean when you need him?

In better news, I made an apple pie from scratch tonight and it was totally delicious. We ate half of it. The bf was surprised by how much cinnamon I used, and how good it was. :)

"Former boyfriend used Craigslist to arrange woman's rape, police say."

This is one of those stories to which I have a thousand little responses to and no cohesive narrative for (obviously, since the case has yet to be resolved). The little responses range from "I don't know how the fuck I can stand to live in this world" to "yeah, big surprise, what with every other episode of that triggering Law and Order: SVU shit covering stuff like this." (I hate SVU on a cellular level, but that's a different post.)

The biggest response I have right now is to this paragraph:

Documents related to Stipe's arrest have been sealed. But as for the alleged rapist, Blonigen said his state of mind would be central to the case. Though jurors must weigh what McDowell believed to be true, they also must consider how a reasonable, objective person would view the situation, he said.

I'm not sure who the law has in mind when it denotes "a reasonable, objective person," but I'm completely sure that the definition does not come from women and therefore does not benefit women. That is the simplest summary of laws pertaining to rape that I know of.

I think it takes a fundamental hatred for the personhood of women to blithely assume that the type of requests made of McDowell could possibly have been made by the victim herself*, but perhaps someone who doesn't live under the constant threat of rape will think it reasonable for McDowell to have believed a woman wanted to have him break into her house and rape her at knifepoint.

*(And no, this is in no way a slight against anyone who has indulged in any level of rape fantasy; read just a couple of weeks of Savage Love and you'll immediately begin to understand just how careful the practitioners of consensual sexual violence are and need to be.)

KO takes a minute tonight to address the hatred and filth spewing from Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh:



In one small oversight of Limbaugh's comments, KO does not mention how Limbaugh actually said, "[W]e've already donated to Haiti. It's called the U.S. income tax."

KO ends his short rant by saying that he would wish Robertson and Limbaugh to Hell but that to have such empty souls must be Hell enough already. I disagree. Hell is too good for them. Wish them to Haiti.

"And you know Kristi, something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, uh you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so the Devil said 'OK, it's a deal.' And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other."

Yes, Pat Robertson actually said this in response to the 7.0 earthquake that killed perhaps as many as 100,000 people in the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

What a proud day it must be for conservative Christians.

PZ Myers, with uncharacteristic restraint, suggests that trying to confront the sickness that is Pat Robertson should be put off until after the crisis has resolved in Haiti. That is absolutely what should be done. I've already donated what I can afford ($30, and I can barely afford that) to Partners in Health, an organization I can't speak highly enough of.

And while I'll currently take a pass on detailing the exact degree of hellfire and torment Pat Robertson is entitled to, I will say that the Devil is a fictional character and fictional characters don't usually cause earthquakes, and let us please remember that before reality takes a total holiday.

I really can't stand the Republican hypocrisy of going after Reid by equating him to Lott. Making that comparison is in itself racist. It implies that Republicans really think that an insensitive statement -- not only that, but an accurate insensitive statement, as President Obama is biracial and therefore "light-skinned" (there's no point in denying that, is there?) -- is somehow the exact same thing as an endorsement of segregation. I can't imagine which would be the worse offense: to not see the difference therein, or to just pretend to not see the difference therein. Is it more of a sin to be an idiot or to play an idiot?

I'm also less than thrilled about the Dem defense of Reid. He shouldn't have to resign over this (he should resign because he's an inept leader and has been in the Senate too long, but that's neither here nor there), but the caucus shouldn't have to waste its time coming to his defense.

There is virtually no one in congress qualified to lead a discussion on race. This is a failure both of the institution and of the voters, but no matter who is the most responsible in this case, the end result is a disingenuous sideshow that embarrasses both political parties.

I've been laid up, so I had to take the weekend off from culinary adventures. Or at least, I thought I did, until the simple pasta and salad dinner we were having tonight took a dire turn: the corkscrew snapped off inside the cork.

We had no wine!

The bf, bless his heart, made a valiant attempt to yank the cork out like a tooth, but that didn't work. Two hours later, I returned to the scene of the accident with my dainty hammer (even though the hammer's balance is designed for women's hands and arms, I use the word "dainty" with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek; it's a bad-ass, effective hammer) and a determination to turn the small protruding metal into something resembling a nail closely enough that it could be levered out, and the cork with it.

There was hammering. Pulling. Bending. Squeezing. And out came the cork. I feel brilliant.

McCain aide: Palin believed candidacy 'God's plan'.

See, I told you: if G-d exists, She's a Democrat. Why else would G-d's plan have involved putting the Palin anchor around McCain's neck?

Harry Reid has been taking a lot of heat, and deservedly so, for his use of the word "negro." But the different points of view I've seen have thus far overlooked a critical point. This may not be about Reid's age or position of power. This may not be about a white man failing to respect a Black man (but this Blagojevich story certainly is).

Harry Reid is a Mormon.

Now, I know it's not really justified to go blaming all Mormons for one little thing, but if you don't think that the Mormon faith is overtly racist, you've gotta wake up and do some reading. Official positions, such as the LDS church's current one claiming to oppose all racism, don't mean a thing when you line them up against the church's history of claiming that the darkness of non-white skin is in proportion to evilness and sin (ie, Lamanites) and that the "negro men" can't hold priesthood ("negro women" don't rate; at least, until 1978, when the Lord mysteriously rescinded His previous commandments on race -- and don't ask for details because IT DOES NOT DO TO QUESTION THE LORD!).

Not to mention, how about all those posthumously baptized Holocaust victims? That's a racial issue, too.

So no, I don't know if Harry Reid is really a secret bigot. I do know that he's a public Mormon, and taking a look at the white supremacy of that church, I've gotta say, that seems just as bad.