truesee's Blog

NU president 'troubled' by sex toy demonstration on campus

Jodi S. Cohen and Lisa Black

Tribune reporter

12:13 PM CST, March 3, 2011

http://dai.ly/hJGUKY

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/environment/2011-03-03-1Apurewater03_CV_N.htm

Patrik Jonsson 

Staff writer
March 2, 2011 at 5:49 pm EST

What if NFL labor talks break down Thursday and football owners lock out their players?

On one hand, lack of agreement by the Thursday midnight deadline wouldn't preclude more negotiations between rich players and even richer owners over the $9 billion chunk of change that is the league's annual honey pot.

But a lockout puts the 2011 NFL season into question. And that prospect is one that the NFL deeply wants to avoid, worried that any lost games – or an entirely lost season – could cost the league its status as the unrivaled king of the American sports landscape.

But would it?

In a press conference before the Super Bowl last month, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said pro football was not immune to the kind of fan backlash that struck Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League in the years after they lost seasons to labor disputes.

“I have said repeatedly that the fans want football and if we are not successful in reaching an agreement that [backlash] will be toward the commissioner, toward the clubs, toward the players, toward everyone involved,” Mr. Goodell said Feb. 4.

Baseball needed a steroid-induced home run chase to recover from canceling the last two months of its regular season and the World Series in 1994. Hockey has only now begun to recover from its 2004-2005 lockout year, boosted by rule changes to make the game higher scoring and the emergence of stars Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin.

Yet the NFL's connection to modern America might be so deep that it can weather labor troubles better than baseball and hockey did. The once-a-week Sunday ritual, the devotion to fantasy football leagues, and the fascination with the gladiatorial nature of pro football makes it a sport that is difficult to replace.

“It will bounce back, because it meets a function in society, even though it goes through readjustments from time to time," says Bowling Green University sociologist Eldon Snyder, author of an article in the Journal of American Culture called "Football and American Identity."

The 1987 players strike, where owners used replacement players, irritated fans and led to less-than-full stadiums but did not irrevocably damage the game. Since that time, the popularity of the game has risen year by year.

The two sides in the current dispute are split about how to divvy up $9 billion in gate and TV revenues. Included in that equation are issues including a rookie wage scale and a proposal to add two more games to the current 16-game season.

If an agreement isn't met by Thursday, players have vowed to decertify the National Football League Players Association ahead of the deadline. While the stated reason is so players can take the NFL to court for antitrust violations, dismantling the union would also give players the ability to sign personal contracts directly with teams.

Given what happened in 1987, when striking players stepped over the picket line after only five weeks of replacement play, owners are confident that a work stoppage would cause today's players to buckle to owners' demands in late spring or early summer rather than August, at the start of training camp, says University of Illinois labor expert Michael LeRoy.

At least publicly, however, the NFL's players and owners aren't taking fans for granted.

"We want the fans to know that we're trying. We're trying," NFL general counsel Jeff Pash told the AP. "We understand our responsibility, and if we don't get it done, we know that we'll have let them down. And we take that very seriously. So do our owners."

Charlotte Observer 

Wednesday, Mar. 02, 2011

Police say school employees tried to poison coworker

By Glenn Kahl
Reporter
Manteca Bulletin
March 1, 2011 1:52 a.m. 

 

Christopher Carroll. (Courtesy San Joaquin County Jail)  

Well, That Was Fast: Health Officials Stop Sales of Breast Milk Ice Cream

Elizabeth Tyler 

Time

March 2, 2011 

They'll be no more milk from mommy for customers of The Icecreamists, after local government officials confiscated ice cream made from human breast milk.  

The action came on Monday, when representatives of Westminster City Council removed the offending dairy products from the central London store. The infamous "Baby Gaga" ice cream was launched last week amid a flurry of press attention.

But it seems not everyone was enraptured by the discovery. A number of complaints arrived at the City Council's door questioning the sale of edibles made from bodily fluids, and the myriad health hazards this could entail. It was these complaints that prompted the confiscation of the ice cream.

Officials from the Council said that the product is now being thoroughly tested with full cooperation from the producers, The Icecreamists. Although the company insists that the milk was screened in line with blood donor requirements before it was processed,  this further testing and guidance from the UK's Food Standards Agency will be needed before it can be put back on the market.

The daring dessert is lightly flavored with lemon zest and vanilla pods and is served in a martini glass, to whichever brave customer is willing, and eager to fork out £14 ($22.50) for their taste of the trend. The ice cream sold out as soon as it launched on Friday, but further production is in the pipeline, with more women coming forward offering to donate milk. The first batch was sourced from women, paid by the company, who had responded to an online ad calling for their breast milk.

Matt O'Connor, founder of The Icecreamists said that "As far as we are aware there is no law prohibiting a business from selling breast milk ice cream," and that the company had had a "huge response" to the new product line. The company's website proclaims them to be "Agents of Cool" who are "liberating the world one lick at a time." But it looks like the world might need a bit more time to come round to the idea of 'breast milk' ice cream. (Via Yahoo News)

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/01/well-that-was-fast-health-officials-stop-sales-of-breast-milk-ice-cream/#ixzz1FVYMyanX

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a grieving father's pain over mocking protests at his Marine son's funeral must yield to First Amendment protections for free speech. All but one justice sided with a fundamentalist church that has stirred outrage with raucous demonstrations contending God is punishing the military for the nation's tolerance of homosexuality.

The 8-1 decision in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., was the latest in a line of court rulings that, as Chief Justice John Roberts said in his opinion for the court, protects "even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate."

The decision ended a lawsuit by Albert Snyder, who sued church members for the emotional pain they caused by showing up at his son Matthew's funeral. As they have at hundreds of other funerals, the Westboro members held signs with provocative messages, including "Thank God for dead soldiers," `'You're Going to Hell," `'God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11," and one that combined the U.S. Marine Corps motto, Semper Fi, with a slur against gay men.

Justice Samuel Alito, the lone dissenter, said Snyder wanted only to "bury his son in peace." Instead, Alito said, the protesters "brutally attacked" Matthew Snyder to attract public attention. "Our profound national commitment to free and open debate is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case," he said.

The ruling, though, was in line with many earlier court decisions that said the First Amendment exists to protect robust debate on public issues and free expression, no matter how distasteful. A year ago, the justices struck down a federal ban on videos that show graphic violence against animals. In 1988, the court unanimously overturned a verdict for the Rev. Jerry Falwell in his libel lawsuit against Hustler magazine founder Larry Flynt over a raunchy parody ad.

What might have made this case different was that the Snyders are not celebrities or public officials but private citizens. Both Roberts and Alito agreed that the Snyders were the innocent victims of the long-running campaign by the church's pastor, the Rev. Fred Phelps, and his family members who make up most of the Westboro Baptist Church. Roberts said there was no doubt the protesters added to Albert Snyder's "already incalculable grief."

But Roberts said the frequency of the protests – and the church's practice of demonstrating against Catholics, Jews and many other groups – is an indication that Phelps and his flock were not mounting a personal attack against Snyder but expressing deeply held views on public topics.

Indeed, Matthew Snyder was not gay. But "Westboro believes that God is killing American soldiers as punishment for the nation's sinful policies," Roberts said.

"Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and – as it did here – inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker," Roberts said.

Snyder's reaction, at a news conference in York, Pa.: "My first thought was, eight justices don't have the common sense God gave a goat." He added, "We found out today we can no longer bury our dead in this country with dignity."

He said it was possible he would have to pay the Phelpses around $100,000, which they are seeking in legal fees, since he lost the lawsuit. The money would, in effect, finance more of the same activity he fought against, Snyder said.

Margie Phelps, a daughter of the minister and a lawyer who argued the case at the Supreme Court, said she expected the outcome. "The only surprise is that Justice Alito did not feel compelled to follow his oath," Phelps said. "We read the law. We follow the law. The only way for a different ruling is to shred the First Amendment."

She also offered her church's view of the decision. "I think it's pretty self-explanatory, but here's the core point: the wrath of God is pouring onto this land. Rather than trying to shut us up, use your platforms to tell this nation to mourn for your sins."

Veterans groups reacted to the ruling with dismay. Veterans of Foreign Wars national commander Richard L. Eubank said, "The Westboro Baptist Church may think they have won, but the VFW will continue to support community efforts to ensure no one hears their voice, because the right to free speech does not trump a family's right to mourn in private."

The picketers obeyed police instructions and stood about 1,000 feet from the Catholic church in Westminster, Md., where the funeral took place in March of 2006.

The protesters drew counter-demonstrators, as well as media coverage and a heavy police presence to maintain order. The result was a spectacle that led to altering the route of the funeral procession.

Several weeks later, Albert Snyder was surfing the Internet for tributes to his son from other soldiers and strangers when he came upon a poem on the church's website that assailed Matthew's parents for the way they brought up their son.

Soon after, Snyder filed a lawsuit accusing the Phelpses of intentionally inflicting emotional distress. He won $11 million at trial, later reduced by a judge to $5 million.

The federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., threw out the verdict and said the Constitution shielded the church members from liability. The Supreme Court agreed.

Forty-eight states, 42 U.S. senators and veterans groups had sided with Snyder, asking the court to shield funerals from the Phelps family's "psychological terrorism."

While distancing themselves from the church's message, media organizations, including The Associated Press, urged the court to side with the Phelps family because of concerns that a victory for Snyder could erode speech rights.

Roberts described the court's holding as narrow, and in a separate opinion Justice Stephen Breyer suggested that in other circumstances governments would not be "powerless to provide private individuals with necessary protection."

But in this case, Breyer said, it would be wrong to "punish Westboro for seeking to communicate its views on matters of public concern."

___

Associated Press writer Maria Sudekum Fisher in Kansas City, Mo., contributed to this report.

Billboards Claim To Know When Christ Will Return

Memphis

Candace McCowan 2:22 p.m. CST, March 2, 2011

Obama's 'Where's Waldo?' presidency

Ruth Marcus

Washington Post
Wednesday, March 2, 2011; 12:00 AM

For a man who won office talking about change we can believe in, Barack Obama can be a strangely passive president. There are a startling number of occasions in which the president has been missing in action - unwilling, reluctant or late to weigh in on the issue of the moment. He is, too often, more reactive than inspirational, more cautious than forceful.

Each of these instances can be explained on its own terms, as matters of legislative strategy, geopolitical calculation or political prudence.

He didn't want to get mired in legislative details during the health-care debate for fear of repeating the Clinton administration's prescriptive, take-ours-or-leave-it approach. He doesn't want to go first on proposing entitlement reform because history teaches that this is not the best route to a deal. He didn't want to say anything too tough about Libya for fear of endangering Americans trapped there. He didn't want to weigh in on the labor battle in Wisconsin because, well, it's a swing state.

Yet the dots connect to form an unsettling portrait of a "Where's Waldo?" presidency: You frequently have to squint to find the White House amid the larger landscape.

This tough assessment from someone who generally shares the president's ideological perspective may be hard to square with the conservative portrait of Obama as the rapacious perpetrator of a big-government agenda. If the president is being simultaneously accused of overreaching ambition and gutless fight-ducking, maybe he's doing something right.

Maybe, or else Obama has at times managed to do both simultaneously. On health care, for instance, he took on a big fight without being able to articulate a clear message or being willing to set out any but the broadest policy prescriptions. Lawmakers, not to mention the public, were left guessing about what, exactly, the administration wanted to see in the measure and where it would draw red lines.

That was not an isolated case. Where, for example, is the president on the verge of a potential government shutdown - if not this week, then a few weeks from now?

Aside from a short statement from the Office of Management and Budget threatening a presidential veto of the House version of the funding measure, the White House - much to the frustration of some congressional Democrats - has been unclear in public and private about what cuts would and would not be acceptable.

By contrast, a few weeks before the shutdown in 1995, Clinton administration aides had dispatched Cabinet members and other high-ranking officials to spread the message that cuts in education, health care and housing would harm families and children. Obama seems more the passive bystander to negotiations between the House and Senate than the chief executive leading his party.

He performs best on a stage that permits the grandest sweep. He rises to the big occasion, from his inspiring introduction to the public in his 2004 Demoncratic convention speed to his healing words in the aftermath of the Tucson shootings.  The president has faltered, though, when called on to translate that rhetoric to more granular levels of specificity: What change, exactly, does he want people to believe in? How, even more exactly, does he propose to get there? "Winning the future" doesn't quite do it.

My biggest beef is with the president's slipperiness on fiscal matters. Obama has said he agrees with some of his fiscal commission's recommendations and disagrees with others. Which ones does he disagree with? I asked this question the other day of Austan Goolsbee, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Here's what I got: "The view espoused by some of the . . . commission that we ought to do Social Security 100 percent off of benefit cuts for sure he doesn't agree with." But of course, the plan that 11 of the commission members endorsed did nothing of the sort.

I was unfair to Goolsbee because I asked him a question he didn't have the leeway to answer. You can't blame the aide for ducking when the boss fudges.

Where's Obama? No matter how hard you look, sometimes he's impossible to find.

Boulder Weekly

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Last Updated  Monday, Mar 01, 2011 10:09am

Is Sarah Palin smart enough to be president?

Paul Danish

Good question. Are you? Come on now — no false modesty.  No quips about being smart enough not to run for president, or any other dodges.  The question is do you think you are smart enough to be CEO of the United States of America, and to, as the presidential oath puts it, “faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and … to the best of [your] ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States?”  That’s a pretty simple and straight- forward job description — think you’re smart enough to handle it?  Or put the question another way:  Do you think you’re too dumb to be president?  Again, no false modesty.  Fess up.  If it’s any comfort, I think it’s a good bet that you are smart enough to be president.  This isn’t because you’re so <snip>ed smart;  it’s because being president of the United States,  although it requires some extraordinary personal attributes, doesn’t demand extraordinary intelligence and erudition.

The truth is that when it comes to running the United States, you don’t have to be much above average in terms of smarts. The genius of the Constitution is that it created a government that doesn’t require a genius to run it. Academic credentialing, which supposedly says something about a person’s smarts, hasn’t been much of a predictor of success when it comes to the presidency.

While it is true that most American presidents have had university degrees, the two greatest — Washington and Lincoln — did not.

Washington was home-schooled; his hopes for a formal education in England ended with his father’s death in 1743 when he was 11.  (He eventually earned a Surveyor’s Certificate from the College of William and Mary.)

Lincoln had about 18 months of formal schooling.  His legal education consisted of reading law books after he was elected to the Illinois legislature.

You would have to be pretty dumb to argue that the lack of formal education, never mind college degrees, rendered either Washington or Lincoln unfit for the presidency.

Between 1789 and 1869, seven of the first 17 U.S. presidents didn’t have college degrees. (Washington, Jackson, Van Buren, Taylor, Fillmore, Lincoln and Andrew Johnson.)

From 1869 to the present, only two presidents lacked college degrees — Grover Cleveland and Harry Truman. History’s judgment of both has been “better than average.”

If you are going to run the United States, it certainly helps to be intelligent and reasonably well educated, but there are more important qualities to have.

What might those be?  Well, that’s a question that a senior colloquium in American government could argue about all semester.  However, my personal answer comes not from political science, but from poetry.  It’s the list of character traits in Rudyard Kipling’s poem  “If.” Here are some of them, cast as questions to a potential candidate and semi-delyriced (if that’s a word) to keep the poetry from distracting from the content:

Can you keep your head in a crisis when all your advisers and political allies are panicking and blaming you?  (It’s something that can be a big plus when your finger is on the nuclear trigger.)

Can you trust yourself when everyone doubts you, but make allowance for their doubting, too? (Like Bush, ordering the surge in Iraq.)

Can you dream — and not make dreams your master? Can you think — and not make thoughts your aim? ( JFK and Theodore Roosevelt could.)

Can you talk with crowds and keep your virtue? (Obama may have a problem here.)

Can you walk with kings and not lose the common touch? (Reagan could and did.)

Can you wait and not be tired by waiting? (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Carter, and Reagan could. That’s why we won the Cold War.)

Do you have the inner strength and tenacity to keep going after you have nothing left in the tank physically, intellectually or emotionally except the will that says to you, “Hold on.”  (Think Lincoln in 1864. Think Ulysses S. Grant’s entire life.)

Do all men count with you, but none too much?  (The prime directive for any democratically elected political leader is to do the greatest good for the greatest number.  In order to do that, all men must count with you, but none too much.)

And so on. These “presidential” qualities are expressions of morality, integrity, character, even wisdom, but not necessarily of smarts.

So to return to the original question: Is Sarah Palin smart enough to be President? Yes, she is, and so are you.

But the real question is does Sarah Palin have what it takes to be president?  It’s too soon to say, but I think if measured against the Kipling standard, she would stack up pretty well — probably better than a lot of those who have occupied the Oval Office.

Would you?

http://cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2011/03/01/pkg.gas.price.gouging.wcbs

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41857938/ns/technology_and_science-science/

 

The South's small-government, pro-business, boot-strap ideals are drawing jobs to states in the region. That economic model may hold appeal for Wisconsin's Scott Walker and other Northern GOP governors. But it also has a dark side.

Patrik Jonsson

Staff writer
March 1, 2011 at 3:51 pm EST Atlanta

If Gov. Scott Walker (R) has his way in the labor dispute that has rocked Wisconsin for two weeks, will his state in effect look a lot more like those in the South?

Their economies marked by weak unions, a business-friendly climate, a thin social safety net, and lower taxes, Southern states may be an inspiration to some Northern politicians looking to grow jobs and dig out of budgetary holes.

Governors around the United States are "really under tremendous pressure ... to transform their economies," said Bruce Katz, director of metropolitan policy at the Brookings Institution, at a recent symposium. Collectively, states' deficits for the next fiscal year add up to $125 billion, forcing at least 41 states to propose cuts in education. Help from the federal government is probably not on the way, either, with Congress having no appetite for another stimulus bill or a bailout.

That leaves financially strapped states looking around for other solutions, and their gaze may be fastening on what some economists call the South's "moonlight and magnolias" strategy. Under that economic construct, the focus is on creating a competitive place to locate businesses, so the premium is on investments in benefits for corporations and on keeping wages relatively low. Worker rights, social services, even education take a back seat to "job creators" under this model – which critics denounce as a race to the bottom.

"Members of the modern Republican Party, and the 'Tea Party movement' in particular, gravitate naturally toward models of growth that treat public programs and investments as mere obstacles in the path of dynamic corporate 'job creators,' '' writes Ed Kilgore, a fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, in The New Republic this week. "Many look South in admiration." But "if Wisconsin and other states – not to mention the country as a whole – end up adopting these atavistic economic ideals," warns Mr. Kilgore, "they will simply begin to resemble the dysfunctional Old South societies that spawned them in the first place."

Others note, though, that people are voting with their feet. Northerners – including African-Americans – have decamped in a massive migration to the South during the past two decades, evidently perceiving that's where the jobs are going.

"When you talk about folks in New Jersey, Ohio, and Wisconsin, there's not a lot of optimism about the future right now," says David Woodard, a political scientist at Clemson University, in South Carolina. "They're not as optimistic as someone living in Atlanta."

Of the top 10 states with the smallest share of public employees eligible for collective bargaining, nine are in the South. In Wisconsin, Governor Walker is trying to curtail unions' collective bargaining rights; other states seek steep concessions in pay and benefits from public employee unions to close budget gaps and make their states more competitive.

The top 10 entrepreneurial states, moreover, are all in the South and the West – and all in so-called right-to-work states that ban closed union shops, according to the Kaufmann Index of Entrepreneurial Activity.

For many Southerners, the strategy is hardly a race to the bottom. Blacks on average now make more money in the South than they do in the North. Professor Woodard relates the story of a former South Carolina landscaper who used to drive a beat-up Chevy pickup truck but now works at the nonunion BMW plant in Greenville, S.C. He drives a new BMW, and "you couldn't convince him that he's worse off," says Woodard.

Wisconsin's Walker has said that stronger taxpayer representation in state governments will pave the way for economic recovery – and eventually more opportunity for all. But getting there means breaking a social compact that has been in place since the 1950s and that was strengthened in the 1990s boom years, when many public employee unions secured generous health and pension benefits in exchange for slightly lower pay scales.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R), who has without much opposition cut pay and benefits for state workers in order to offer incentive packages for corporations, supports Walker's moves in Wisconsin. (A new Toyota plant is opening in Mississippi this year.)

"When they have collective bargaining in Wisconsin, on one side of the table there's state employee unions or the local employee unions. On the other side of the table are politicians that they paid for the election of those politicians," the potential presidential aspirant tells the Washington Post. "Now, who represents the taxpayers in that negotiation? Well, actually, nobody."

There is a darker side to the Southern model. Former slave states and territories have greater income disparities, receive more in federal subsidies than the tax dollars they send to Washington, and lag behind in educational achievement, especially for the poorest residents. Critics say that's what happens when economic policies put the "job creators" ahead of consumers of state services and benefits, including education.

Southern states receive more than their fair share of federal dollars per resident largely because they get a lot of farm and military subsidies, have fewer high-wage earners, and in effect outsource much of their indigent care to Washington. Obviously, the federal government could not long afford a situation in which a greater number of states get more federal dollars than they give. The US would need to cut entitlements and social programs much more than lawmakers in Congress – including GOP conservatives – are currently contemplating.

"Texas, for example, has a huge debt problem, and it's a state with no social safety net to begin with and they're now planning to cut services for the needy more deeply," says Norm Ornstein, a fellow with the nonpartisan American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "The great irony here is that people who are now most agitated about deficits and debt are the ones who not only want to keep $4 trillion in tax cuts, but want to have even more tax cuts."

That core idea – that tax-cut opportunity trumps tax-paid benefits – is built into the South's Jeffersonian society, which backs limits on federal power and promotes the state's role in safeguarding individual property and rights. It comes at a price. "By design, life is tougher in the South," concedes Clemson's Woodard.

Diagnosing Charlie Sheen, from afar