Fairport Tragedy

Five Fairport high school students died in a horrible car crash on Tuesday night. Four of them were members of the Fairport cheerleading squad.

I didn’t know these young ladies, but by all accounts they were highly respected by their peers. I did have the chance to watch them perform at regional cheerleading competitions, and I came away very impressed with the Fairport cheerleading program.

Fairport was the standard of cheerleading excellence in the Rochester Area for schools in its class. People came to see Fairport — they had the largest and loudest cheering section (that’s right, the Cheerleaders had a cheering section). People stayed after their own school’s cheerleaders had finished to see Fairport. And at Geneseo on January 20, their junior varsity and varsity teams were absolutely flawless. They displayed tumbling skills that no other squad showed; they were the only team on which every cheerleader did a backwards flip from a standing start. They displayed athleticism and co-ordination that was far above the other squads, and both the junior varsity and varsity finished first in their class. In fact, the highest score of any team that day belonged to the Fairport junior varsity.

Two weeks later, at the Section V Championship, Fairport again went through their high difficulty routine. They showed more tumbling skills and more athletic skills than any other squad, but one of their flyers wobbled when she was lifted. Webster Schroeder went through a flawless, but less difficult routine. The judges’ highly anticipated decision went to the Webster team.

Thanks for the memories, Fairport. And rest in peace Hannah Congdon, Bailey Goodman, Meredith McClure, Sara Monnat and Katie Shirley.

Conservative Activist Judges

Adam B tells us how far these judges have taken us in just one term:

In one full term, this Court has severely curbed local efforts to promote racial diversity in schools, upheld a right-wing ban on a necessary medical procedure for women, curbed students' free speech rights, crippled Congress' ability to keep corporate money out of political advertising, prevented taxpayers from challenging the constitutionality of Bush's faith-based initiatives, made it almost impossible for women to prevail on claims of longterm sex discrimination . . . and they're just getting started.

Under this Court, people have no rights at all. Only corporations will find success taking cases to the Supreme Court.

This Makes My Blood Boil

American software companies are required by law to attempt to hire American workers first, and if none can be found, then they are allowed to hire from overseas and that new hire will be eligible for a “green card”.

But here, we see “immigration attorneys from Cohen & Grigsby explain how they assist employers in running classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified applicants, and the steps they go through to disqualify even the most qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1b workers.”

Some of the steps in the process:

1. Run classified ads (required by law) far away from the place where the jobs are. Example: this classified ad was run in a Sacramento, California newspaper for jobs in New Hampshire.
2. Once applicants send in resumes, the hiring company is required to review them. They disqualify any candidate that does not have all of the requirements listed for the job, even if some of the requirements are shams. If the applicant is expecting more money or better benefits, this also means the applicant is disqualified for the job. Companies will often make the salary so low or the benefits so low that few Americans will be “qualified” under this meaning of the word.
   
3. If an applicant seems to have met all of the requirements, a manager is brought in to see if he can find grounds for disqualifying the applicant.
4. Interviews are held with applicants that make it this far, and in an interview setting, it’s easy to find many reasons why you decide the applicant isn’t a good fit.

Don’t believe me? Click the link and watch the video.

These people are certainly not complying with the good faith requirement of the law to find United States citizens who are capable of doing the job. Then they can turn around and say, with a smirk, that they have complied with the law, they have tried to find American candidates for the job, and none are available.

Lawyers like these ought to burn in hell. I hope someday they are trying to find a job and they run into a similar type of obstruction. And companies that adopt these policies also ought to burn in hell.

Another Reason Not To Vote Republican (Follow-Up)

As described in this post, you vote Republican at your own risk. The risk seems to be growing larger and larger, as we now see:

Good God. Is [Republican Minnesota Governor] Tim Pawlenty determined to make it impossible to admit to being a Minnesotan?

Let’s see:

There’s his determination to buff up his paleocon credentials (and insure his place as McCain’s VP pick) by shutting down state government by refusing to sign a budget.

There’s his insistence on placating David Strom of the Minnesota (Rich) Taxpayer’s League by keeping his disastrously destructive 2003 tax cuts in place and continuing to shift more of the tax burden from rich people and onto poor people in the form of clever tricks like his infamous “fees”.

Then we find out that his precious tax cuts, which were touted as a way to promote job growth in Minnesota, haven’t done diddly for it: Minnesota’s unemployment average, which under Democratic governors and legislatures was the lowest in the nation, is now, for the first time since records started being kept three decades ago, HIGHER than the national average — a fact that shocks and saddens those of us Minnesotans who remember the prosperity we enjoyed during Wendy Anderson’s time as governor over thirty years ago.

Click the link, there’s a lot more.

Weird Things People Eat Around The World

Yuk! (via)

Is This The Reason...?

… that the University of Connecticut / Tennessee women’s basketball rivalry has ended? Because of lies and pettyness? I hope not. (via She’s Got Game)

Health Care You Need vs. Health Care You Can Afford

The Los Angeles Times today runs down the different positions on health care of all of the presidential candidates. Most of the Democrats favor universal health care, while most of the Republicans, if they have a position at all, favor some sort of market based health care.

The moral of the story: Democrats want to give you the health care you need. Republicans want to give you the health care you can afford.

When Will We Get Secure Voting Machines?

Sayhar at Rochester Turning points out that New York State has done a very good thing — it has refused to trade in its extremely secure mechanical voting machines for extremely insecure electronic voting machines. He also points out something that I pointed out years ago, that Las Vegas gaming machines have more (obvious) security built in to them than any electronic voting machine ever has had.

Now, Microsoft is trying to sneak its operating system (you know, the one that constantly needs patches to fix security leaks) into New York State voting machines via legislation. Let’s hope that our legislators are smart enough to stop this — but since those same legislators have never seemed to catch on to the Las Vegas security model (as far as I know), I am not too optimistic. We’ll see.

By the way, check out the great graphic provided by Sayhar.

Supreme Court Protects The Powerful

Christy Hardin Smith:

Overturning precedent is not always bad for the nation — look at the differences between the Dred Scott decision (wherein the Court held that a slave of African descent could never become a citizen) and the Plessy decision (wherein the Court upheld the repugnant ”separate but equal” doctrine) versus the later opinion of Brown v. Board of Education (wherein the Court declared the Plessy decision to be overruled by a doctrine of racial equality in public education).

Sometimes the sentiment of the country naturally moves forward from a place where discrimination or some other egregious conduct is no longer considered tolerable by a majority of the nation’s citizens. We have seen that happen with civil rights laws, with equal rights for women, with questions of labor treatment and numerous other examples through the years of changes for the better — which lift up a segment of society or a particular issue which had previously been shoved to the side or derided as unworthy of decent treatment only a few short years beforehand.

It is the decisions where we turn away from lifting up the powerless, to further dividing the nation into camps of those connected to power and those who are not — where we turn away from the principles inherent in our founding and the possibilities of who we could be as a nation, and instead settle for who we are at the moment because it happens to suit the people in power, where we lose our way.

Amanda Beard

Amanda Beard (owner of seven Olympic swimming medals) has posed for Playboy Magazine.

Is this bad for women’s sports? I hardly think so, any more than Tank Johnson being sent to jail is bad for the NFL. Nor was if bad for the NFL that Dexter Manley played in the NFL while being functionally illiterate. You see, any sport is made up of a collection of individuals, and the fact that sometimes these individuals do things that are, well, individual, does not reflect on the sport. It reflects on the individual. Furthermore, Amanda Beard is not trying to sell her sport by posing for Playboy, she is trying to sell herself.

What about Amanda Beard being a role model for young athletes? Yes, of course she is. And is her posing for Playboy somehow unacceptable behavior for an athlete? That depends on your point of view about nudity (and my view is that it doesn’t bother me a bit), but let’s for the sake of argument say that posing for Playboy is unacceptable for a role model. This gives parents all over the country a “teaching moment”, where they can explain their views to their impressionable young children. What would be even more unacceptable to me is if extremely influential role models (parents) did not use this as a teaching moment to guide their children. Presumably, parents are for more influential in their children’s growth and development than Amanda Beard is. In other words, don’t blame Amanda Beard (or Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan or Tank Johnson or Dexter Manley) for the way your child turns out.

A Meaningless Statistic

In the past, I have complained about useless camera angles that actually interfere with a viewer’s ability to follow sporting events. I am glad to see that these useless camera angles have been abandoned by the networks, for the most part.

Now, ESPN has unveiled a completely useless and waste-of-time statistic: the probability of winning! Today, we find out that in the College World Series, in the top of the fifth inning with one out and Oregon State winning 2–1, that they have a 58% chance of winning! I never would have guessed that (not)!

My problem with this statistic is that everyone knows that the team that’s ahead in the top of the fifth by one run has a slightly higher chance of winning. We don’t need to be told that. And it simply doesn’t enhance my viewing experience to know that the probability is exactly 58%. Whether the exact number is 58% or 61% doesn’t change my thinking in the slightest, and furthermore, this number is meaningless anyway.

ESPN analyst Orel Hershiser admitted that the statistic isn’t based upon earned run averages, batting averages or other relevant statistics. It’s simply based upon history — how many times have teams in similar situations won in the past. You see, if the team that is behind has a very high batting average, and the team that is ahead has the worst bullpen ever, you get the same probability as if the team that is behind has a very low batting average and the team that is ahead has the best bullpen ever. Of course, batting averages and bullpen capabilities ought to influence the probabilities, but they don’t influence the probabilities that ESPN shows us.

Meaningless!

Understanding The Intelligent Design Creationist Movement: Its True Nature and Goals

Center for Inquiry has released an important new paper by Barbara Forrest, entitled Understanding The Intelligent Design Creationist Movement: Its True Nature and Goals. Forrest says:

This paper will examine the intelligent design (ID) movement (which, for the reasons set forth below, will be referred to as the intelligent design creationist movement). In particular, this paper will examine the ID movement’s organization, its historical and legal background, its strategy and aims, and its public policy implications.

As this paper demonstrates, the ID movement is the most recent version of American creationism. In promoting “intelligent design theory”—a term that is essentially code for the religious belief in a supernatural creator—as a purported scientific alternative to evolutionary theory, the ID movement continues the decades-long attempt by creationists either to minimize the teaching of evolution or to gain equal time for yet another form of creationism in American public schools. Accordingly, the ID creationist movement threatens both the education of the nation’s children and the constitutional separation of church and state, which protects the religious freedom of every American (Forrest and Gross, 2005). Despite political and legal setbacks (Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District, 2005), ID creationists continue their campaign to de-secularize public education and, ultimately, American culture and government, thereby undermining foundational elements of secular, constitutional democracy.

As a recent example of the Intelligent Design Creationists attempts to “to gain equal time for yet another form of creationism in American public schools”, consider this post by Timothy Sandefur at Panda’s Thumb. Creationists lately have been donating Creationist books to school libraries, and when the books are rejected by the librarian as inappropriate, the creationists scream censorship and imply this is unconstitutional, in an attempt to bully the librarian and/or school board into accepting the books. They rely upon misleading and mistaken references to Supreme Court decisions. No one knows how often this attempt to bully librarians and school boards is successful, however it is clear that this is not censorship, and does not run afoul of the referenced Supreme Court decision.

Another Reason Not To Vote Republican

Republicans show their true stripes again (from Firedoglake):

Funny doings here in Minnesota lately. Our Republican governor, Smilin’ Tim Pawlenty, responded to narrowly winning re-election by being an arrogant prick. He’s been copiously using his veto knowing that he has just enough Republicans to blindly back him up and overcome the will, not just of the newly-elected Democratic majority in the state legislature but of the majority of Minnesotans.

Because of his refusal to undo the Reverse Robin Hood he pulled as a state legislator with the infamous 2003 Rich Man’s Tax Cut (which caused a $4.2 billion deficit that he “fixed” by cutting back on those state services that didn’t benefit the wealthy), the once-excellent quality of life in the state has been on a steady decline, to the point where Minnesota — which under Democratic governors and legislatures had what were among the lowest unemployment figures in the nation — has now for the first time a higher jobless rate than does the nation as a whole. And thanks to his veto, the residents of Saint Paul are now stuck with the $450-per-household bill for the Republican National Convention next year. But he protected his tax breaks for the rich, and that’s what matters to him.

Pyramid? MLM? Legit? You Decide

Water Buffalo Press has been doing a fantastic job of following a local company whose business practices strike me as a pyramid scheme. I say that because about two years ago, I attended a seminar put on by 5Linx, and I came away with the conclusion that this was a variation of the traditional pyramid scheme. Now, I’m not a lawyer, and I have no idea whether the legal definition of pyramid scheme applies to 5Linx, but the Paige-definition of pyramid clearly applies.

Read through the comments at this thread to see some of the logically suspect justifications for the business practices at 5Linx, and the rebuttals. Decide for yourself whether or not 5Linx is or is not a pyramid.

Now, Water Buffalo Press has provided us with the earnings of 5Linx “investors”. Here is a table of the data provided by Water Buffalo Press:

Job Title	Percent of Employees	Annual Income
Customer Representative	45%	$55
Independent Marketing Representative	48%	$261
Executive Trainer	6%	$2,536
Executive Director	1%	$10,816
National Director	0.4%	$67,147
Senior Vice President	0.1%	$236,904

As WBP says: “93% at the bottom, 7% on top, I wouldn’t call it a square, what is the word I’m looking for here…”

Kudos to the Town of South Bristol

Check out the view from this beautiful scenic overlook near the south end of Canandaigua Lake on County Road 12 at newly dedicated Carolabarb Park on land donated by Mr. Odell Scott.

The Town of South Bristol and the South Bristol Historical Society has also recently re-dedicated a pioneer cemetery known as Wilder Cemetery, where South Bristol’s founder Gamaliel Wilder is buried. This cemetery had become overgrown with weeds and abandoned, but now that the Historical Society has re-dedicated the cemetery, there will be some maintenance and rehabilitation of the cemetery, plus a road has been built that leads up to the cemetery, which is on a bluff overlooking a creek. Notice the brand new American Flags (almost obscured by the weeds) placed at the graves of soldiers from the French and Indian Wars through the Civil War (click for larger picture).

Start Wearing Purple: Update2

A week ago, I wrote about how my weekend would be filled with cheering for my purple-clad sports teams. Here is the end result.

The Northwestern University softball team finished third in the nation, but failed to advance to the Women’s College World Series championship round for the second straight year. Tennessee star Monica Abbott threw a two hitter to knock Northwestern out of the tournament. Still, Northwestern set a school record with 52 wins and shortstop Tammy Williams was named to the all-tournament team. Farewell to entertaining Northwestern senior stars Garland Cooper and Eileen Canney.

Congratulations to the Northwestern University Women’s Lacrosse team, which won the National Championship in a thriller over Virginia, 15-13, their third straight National Championship. Rochester’s own Hillary Bowen was tournament MVP.

The Greece (N.Y.) Odyssey girls softball team had their best season ever, finishing 10–7 and advanced to the second round of the Section V Playoffs.

The Greece Odyssey baseball team, led by Jordy Smola, captured the Section V Class B championship on Friday night against Leroy. In that game, Leroy scored first, taking a 3–0 lead, but Odyssey refused to panic and put up three runs in the third inning and another three in the fifth inning to win the championship. It was Odyssey’s third straight championship.

The next day, in the State Tournament Qualifying game, Odyssey faced Livonia. This was a back and forth game, but with the score tied 4–4 in the top of the seventh, Odyssey catch J.P. Papaleo led off with a double, advanced to third, and then scored on a bizarre play in which a pitch trickled about 10 feet away from the catcher. Papaleo saw that the catcher was in no rush to retrieve the ball and the pitcher had not moved to cover home. He took off and scored barely ahead of the catcher’s tag.

With Odyssey leading 5–4 in the bottom of the seventh, Livonia had runners on second and third with two outs. With two strikes on the batter, Livonia runner Chip Northrup tried to steal home (photo).

This was not only startling, but extremely dangerous, as the batter swung at the pitch (fortunately Northrup wasn’t hit by the bat) and the batter fouled off the pitch. (It was reminiscent of St. Louis Cardinal’s third string catcher Glenn Brummer’s steal of home in 1982.) That Livonia batter would eventually walk to load the bases, bringing up Livonia’s Mike Feldman, their ninth place hitter. Odyssey pitcher Mike Maier’s second pitch to Feldman was hit up the middle to score two runs, winning the game.

Republicans Are Responsible For Bush’s Failures

Sometimes a column is so good, I repeat it in its entirety. Today’s column by Avedon Carol at The Sideshow is exceptional:

Glenn Greenwald has more on the fact that The Republican Party is the party of Bush, even though most of them are trying to distance themselves from him now because nobody likes him and even some conservatives have noticed that he hasn't exactly upheld the alleged principles of conservatism.

The problem of course, is that Bush has upheld the principles of the conservative movement, and all of these so-called conservatives who are suddenly so disappointed in him had been cheering him on all along while he did all these things they supposedly didn't like. And the thing is, they still haven't repudiated the actual policies - just the outcome.

For example, none of these people are complaining about the fact that he lowered taxes in wartime, an unprecedented policy in all of history. They can complain all they like that he hasn't been "fiscally conservative", but they not only supported his war and his tax cuts, but they refused to so much as question the fact that he ran it in the most expensive way imaginable - not just pseudo-privatizing the functions of the armed services, but actually giving the private companies they outsourced to incentives to overspend and generally waste resources. (And they let him force them to pass the drug-benefit bill with a clause forbidding negotiations to keep prices down.)

I say "pseudo-privatizing" because outsourcing government functions but still paying for them from the tax base isn't real privatization, it's socializing it at a higher price. Actually privatizing the invasion and occupation of Iraq would mean that you told all the people who wanted to invade Iraq to go do it themselves. They could club together and raise an army on their own dime and leave the taxpayer out of it. But they didn't do that - they raided the US treasury instead.

It's all very well to say in hindsight that Bush didn't run the war and occupation competently, that there should have been more troops at the outset, that we somehow should have warred harder or whatever it is they think would have been "competent", but what none of them are saying is that (a) you would have needed a draft to have enough troops to do it up right, (b) this would have been even more expensive, and (c) outsourcing to private firms was still too expensive. They aren't complaining about the lack of a draft, and they have never complained about the Bush-Cheney program of giving Halliburton et al. far more money than it would have cost just to let the army do the same things.

And then they did things like spend amazing amounts of money to have schools tell kids not to have sex. Now, you can cancel all sex education, or you can have real sex education, but why on earth would you need to pay strangers to tell kids not to have sex when they can hear it for free from their own parents, just as we always have? Can you say, "Waste of money"? I thought you could. Did you hear conservatives say it? Rarely, if it all.

Bush has not been spending all that money alone - he had the help of the entire Republican leadership and almost every Republican in Congress, as well as the rest of the conservative base, who never raised a whisper against this behavior.

And then there's national security, something they pretend to be the masters of, but they've actually put our national security - from the guardianship of our ports to the actual handling of our troop supports - into the hands of private companies which know no allegiance to the United States of America. One of those companies recently announced it was ceasing to be an American company at all, and moving its headquarters to Dubai, one of the countries that is moving its headquarters to Dubai, one of the countries that is connected to the 9/11 attacks. Conservatives did complain about the Dubai port deal, but they never seemed to get that the port deal was part and parcel of the conservative economic policies they supported, nor wonder whether it was safe to allow organizations that were not run by those sworn to the United States Constitution to handle our military operations.

Even now, as we look at the main contenders for the Republican nomination, we may see them trying to distance themselves from the individual named George Walker Bush, but they are not distancing themselves from his policies - and in some cases, they are even tying themselves more tightly to his policies. (Some of them even appear to think that we aren't torturing people enough, for example. None of them are talking about rescinding the tax cuts or reinstating the draft, but they still want to keep spending money and lives on war.)

George Bush has expanded government and burned our money and even more that we don't even have, and the Republicans still don't want to raise taxes.

And something else: When you ask Republicans how they can trust a president to hold the kind of power they have continued to allow Bush to take, they seem to think it's perfectly all right to put such power in his hands. If you suggest that Hillary Clinton might become president and she would have such power, well, that's different, because you can't trust her. But think about that: If they really felt that much distance from Bush, why aren't they horrified that he is wielding such power? How can they claim to see him as such a bad president if they are still comfortable giving him the power of life and death without due process?

If they really want to repudiate George Bush, I can think of a lot more convincing ways to do it. They're not doing it.

G-Dub Disses Dubya (While Wearing a Frilly Cravat)

From The Onion:

WASHINGTON, DC—Breaking a 211-year media silence, retired Army Gen. George Washington appeared on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday to speak out against many aspects of the way the Iraq war has been waged.

Washington likens Vice President Cheney to controversial British Chancellor of the Exchequer and Stamp Act architect George Greenville.

Washington, whose appearance marked the first time the military leader and statesman had spoken publicly since his 1796 farewell address in Philadelphia, is the latest in a string of retired generals stepping forward to criticize the Iraq war.

"This entire military venture has been foolhardy and of ill design," said Washington, dressed in his customary breeches and frilly cravat. "The manifold mistakes committed by this president in Iraq carry grave consequences, and he who holds the position of commander in chief has the responsibility to right those wrongs."

Things That Scare Me, Part 4

Meteor Blades points out several writers have compiled evidence that there will likely be an uptick in right-wing violence if Democrats control government after the 2008 elections. The trends that lead to this violence exist in our society now and is mostly ignored by the media. Historically, whenever Democrats control government, right-wing violence increases.

Also: Govexec.com reports that former officials and national security experts are warning of a crisis in national security come the 2009 transition in administrations. The concern is because the Bush administration has so heavily stacked DHS with political appointees that they “run the first-and second-tier layers across almost all of the Department of Homeland Security’s units.”

Global warming is accelerating three times more quickly than feared. (via Americablog)

Our Long National Nightmare Is Over

Hilary Duff and Lindsay Lohan end their feud:

Duff says she ended all the strangeness between them.

“Lindsay and I were out at the same place and we were like, ‘Let’s get this out of the way.’ And she was really nice, and I was really nice,” newsweek.com quoted Duff as saying.

The Lizzie McGuire star added that the whole thing reminded her of her high school years when she was shooting the television series and all her friends would share their stories.

“They’d say, ‘Oh my god, you’ll never believe what this guy did,’ and I’d be like, ‘Hmm, we just shot an episode about that last week.’ But it's nice to be able to see Lindsay out and say hi, and not have this weird weirdness,” she added.

What a relief! No more weird weirdness. No we can get back to the normal weirdness and get some sleep at night.