Obama: White House blind to poverty in U.S. WASHINGTON — Sen. Barack Obama on Wednesday night again criticized the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina and urged a black policymaking conference to make sure the poor are not left behind again. “The incompetence was colorblind,” said Obama (D-Ill.). “What wasn’t colorblind was the indifference. Human efforts will always pale in comparison to nature’s forces. But [the Bush administration] is a set of folks who simply don’t recognize what’s happening in large parts of the country.” MSNBC: The Other America “I hope we realize that the people of New Orleans weren’t…
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Chicago Tribune | School Expels Girl for Having Gay Parents ONTARIO, Calif. — A 14-year-old student was expelled from a Christian school because her parents are lesbians, the school’s superintendent said in a letter. Shay Clark was expelled from Ontario Christian School on Thursday. “Your family does not meet the policies of admission,” Superintendent Leonard Stob wrote to Tina Clark, the girl’s biological mother. Stob wrote that school policy requires that at least one parent may not engage in practices “immoral or inconsistent with a positive Christian life style, such as cohabitating without marriage or in a homosexual relationship,” The…
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Salt Lake Tribune – Salt Lake Tribune Home Page On Wednesday, Rocky Anderson will make history. At noon in City Hall, the Salt Lake City mayor will quietly sign an executive order to offer a handful of health benefits to gay and unmarried heterosexual partners of city employees. This won’t last long – probabably not through the end of the next legislative session – but it’s nice to see these two categories together for the first (and probably last) time.
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This weekend is going to be pretty busy. I’m not looking forward to all of the meetings and running around, plus it gives David and me very little time to take care of an essential item on my agenda. I’ve got an all-day meeting Saturday that’s a kind of retreat for Holy Moly, and to be ready for that I’ve got some formatting to do for fliers and things that we’ll be handing out in bulletins. The meeting goes from 9am to 3pm and is supposed to be a planning event. We had better get some actual planning done, rather…
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Scandal Visits the White House: The Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal reached into the White House yesterday, picking off President Bush’s top procurement official — who just barely had time to resign before being arrested. The federal charges against David Safavian stem from his tenure as chief of staff of the General Services Administration, predating his arrival at the White House a year ago. But his arrest nonetheless draws renewed attention to the ongoing corruption and influence-peddling inquiry swirling around Abramoff, a lobbyist well known for his connections to conservative Republicans in the White House and Congress. And for a White…
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See the pretty lady about to adopt a cat? Not me, the lady on the poster behind me. I’m just holding a kitten and wondering if I can get David to hold it and go all skwoogie for it. As it turns out, David managed to avoid entanglement, but it was a nice cuddly kitten and not all wiggly and ‘put-me-down’ like kittens often are. This was Sunday at the local Petsmart – they generally have cat adoption events by various groups on the weekend. We took stock of things tonight – we still have a litter box and a…
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Under the Banner of Heaven : A Story of Violent Faith This book, like a lot of others in the “expose'” genre, attempts to explain the background of a small, intense, and very insular subset of the dominant faith of Utah. Actually, it attempts to explain the connections and rivalries between several similar but different subsets of same, and how they all disavow each other and the “mainline” faith. Oh, and how certain kinds of unethical, criminal, and horrific acts of violence and mayhem can somehow be justified by said faith(s). I grew up in Utah, so some of the…
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Jill, you were right about the lights in New Orleans being turned on just for the Presidential speech the other night: Daily Nightly: Friday Morning (Power) Line I am duty-bound to report the talk of the New Orleans warehouse district last night: there was rejoicing (well, there would have been without the curfew, but the few people I saw on the streets were excited) when the power came back on for blocks on end. Kevin Tibbles was positively jubilant on the live update edition of Nightly News that we fed to the West Coast. The mini-mart, long ago cleaned out…
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Hey, Kevin!! If you’re still lurking about, I uploaded pictures of many anemones (and other things) to Flickr just now. It’s weird that I didn’t take any photos of you all when we were at the house earlier that week, though. I think I was in “decompress” mode that day. This image was sent from Flickr as a blog entry, email or cameraphone image. Via: Flickr Title: Many More Anemones! By: GinnyRED57 Originally uploaded: 18 Sep ’05, 1.09am PST
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This image was sent from Flickr as a blog entry, email or cameraphone image. Via: Flickr Title: photo_0033.jpg By: GinnyRED57 Originally uploaded: 17 Sep ’05, 7.47pm PST