PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — A sheriff apologized Thursday to a pair of female lawyers who were told they needed to take off their underwire bras at jail to avoid setting off the metal detector if they wanted to talk to their incarcerated clients.
It’s a rare and precious moment when a politician does something which perfectly demonstrates what he or she really thinks about democracy and power. This is one of those times.
The Supreme Court, in its Citizens United decision, ruled that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts in elections. Now politicians in Kentucky are claiming they have a Constitutional right to receive gifts from lobbyists.
In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, Republican Kentucky state Sen. John Schickel, along with two Libertarian political candidates, are suing to overturn state ethics laws, claiming that the campaign contribution limit of $1,000 and a ban on gifts from lobbyists and their employers are a violation of their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
The lawsuit notes that lobbyists and the employers of lobbyists are prohibited by Kentucky law from inviting legislators to parties, offering gifts, or paying for food for legislators. “This infringes on the legislator’s, lobbyist’s, and employer of lobbyist’s right to freedom of association, and freedom of speech,” Schickel claims in the suit.
Kentucky’s ethics laws were passed in 1992 after an FBI investigation exposed a number of local politicians selling their votes.
Corporations have increasingly turned to new interpretations of the First Amendment as a legal strategy.
Bond-rating agencies that gave high grades to toxic mortgage-backed securities claimed in court that doing so was their First Amendment right. Lobbyists have argued that food-labeling laws undermine the meat industry’s right to free speech. And similarly, AT&T recentlyargued that net neutrality violates the ISP industry’s First Amendment rights.
The mayor of Lewiston, Maine, has called on the the state legislature to create a public online registry with the names and addresses of those on welfare in the state, as well as how long those individuals have been receiving benefits.
In a Thursday column in the Twin City Times, Mayor Robert Macdonald wrote that "the public has a right to know how its money is being spent." He said that he would submit a bill to the legislature that would create the registry.
The combination of another debt limit fight, the defunding of Planned Parenthood, and prospect of another government shutdown tearing his party apart, the GOP just suffered its latest major blow, when news hit that House speaker John Boehner, just 24 hours after getting a visit by none other than the Pope, is folding one last time:
BOEHNER TO RESIGN FROM CONGRESS, GIVE UP HOUSE SEAT IN OCT: NYT
This not only makes a government shutdown more likely as a result of loss in leadership at this crucial stage but more importantly, with Yellen blaming Congress for not hiking, just raised the general uncertainty and lowered odds of a December (or any subsequent) rate hike.
Speaker John A. Boehner will resign from Congress and give up his House seat at the end of October, according to aides in his office.
Mr. Boehner was under extreme pressure from the right wing of his conference over whether or not to defund Planned Parenthood in a bill to keep the government open.
Boehner Statement:
Boehner aide's full statement on impending resignation. Comes amid rumblings of conservative coup. pic.twitter.com/ZB3IY8xdbC
A middle-aged woman wheels an enormous cheese trolley into her opulent living room for her sadistic husband to enjoy, but when she lifts the dome she finds it is full of grass.
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A lanky priest is mistaken for a fishmonger and is harangued by a crone over the cost of some diseased chub. The priest cries eventually.
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A local bearded mayor is sexually aroused by the thought of a washer woman playing a piano sonata in a pig sty. In his excitement he falls off a ledge.
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St. Sebastian catches all the arrows fired at him while laughing uproariously, showing the remains of a lamb shank caught in his teeth. The Mauritanian archer is so enraged he immediately flees and starts shucking corn.
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A sly ghost tries to purchase a used Winnebago using a small bag of old teeth, but is unnerved by the sounds of wailing emitting from the assistant manager’s office. A horse cries eventually.
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The Swiss Ambassador rails against the tyranny of gravity and attempts to live the rest of his life gently floating above the carpet until a defrocked doctor grounds him with talk of his bowel routine.
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An enormous graduating class of veterinarian students slowly dwindles as each is called away to comfort a struggling ox. Once alone, the professor is frustrated by his young lover who wears a bodice made of lava.
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A monk gets lost in a pear orchard, where he is continually tempted by a nun dressed as a frigid cloud. As he approaches her, he is spirited away by ants.
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A gaggle of exhausted orgiasts emerge from a cave and try to board a dingy, but are thwarted by the Catholic church.
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A distended street musician is tricked by a spider into giving his beloved hurdy-gurdy to a group of millionaires hiding in a nearby tree. His monkey cries eventually.
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The greedy church organist accidentally soils his priest’s favorite cassock when he uses it to lure a stray goat into his rickshaw. Then his mother laughs at him.
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Fernando is pursued by a jealous lake who he has been cheating on with a nearby fjord. He tries to hide within an advertising poster for off-brand hair conditioner but soon realizes this is unreasonable. The lake cries eventually.
In the United States, there is more interest in heaven than in hell, at least based on searches. There are 1.5 times more searches for “heaven” than “hell,” 2.8 times as many searches asking what heaven looks like than what hell looks like, and 2.75 times as many searches asking whether heaven is real than whether hell is real.
…Relative to the rest of the country, for every search I looked at, retirement communities search more about hell. In retirement communities, there are a similar number of searches asking to see visuals of hell as visuals of heaven.
And:
There are 4.7 million searches every year for Jesus Christ. The pope gets 2.95 million. There are 49 million for Kim Kardashian.
one time my boyfriend and I were cuddling and he was like “I know how to read palms” and I got really excited and he looked really intensely at my hand and then gasped and looked up at me and just went “it says that you’re a nerd”
‘Parklife’: A contextual examination of the cultural connotations of St. James’s, The Green and Victoria Park, London relative to their intended purposes, 1800-1900.
MA Nineteenth Century Studies, King’s College London.
A new electronic, erotic fiction novella hit virtual bookshelves Sept. 15 — and its subject is "Kim," who has a lesbian sexual encounter while serving time in jail.
"Kim Goes To Jail: An Erotic Story" is a "timely tale of faith, prejudice, incarceration, danger and sexual discovery," according to a description of the book on Amazon.
Variety has announced some news that should be mighty tantalizing to fans of the darker expressions of post-punk: Peter Murphy of Bauhaus and Nivek Ogre of Skinny Puppy will star in the forthcoming horror film BlackGloveKiller, by the Canadian composer/Fangoria editor/film director...
They're not precisely sure when their business was founded. But RJ Balson and Son has on file a business license granted in 1515. And for that entire 500-year period, this butcher shop in Bridport, Dorset, UK, has been owned and operated by the same family.
It's survived wars, both foreign and civil, plagues, and economic depressions. RJ Balson and Son has been in its current location only recently--just since the 19th Century. But it's always been serving meat to customers in Bridport. The Daily Telegraph reports:
On sale now is a mixture of novelty and old-fashioned fare. Packs of beef dripping share space with sliced chorizo. There is a freezer of game: some traditional, like venison and rabbit, some exotic, like bison, zebra, crocodile, ostrich and kangaroo.
When the business opened, the kangaroo hadn’t even been discovered. […]
From the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, butcher numbers tumbled from 15,000 to around 6,000, a drop of 60 per cent, according to Meat Trades Journal, though in the last couple of years figures have stabilised.
Balson is clear that he can fight against the supermarkets. “The main thing is personal service. When you come in, you get a nice welcome, you say, 'how’s your mum?’, 'how’s your daughter?’ Most of the people who come in, we’ve served their parents before them, and their grandparents before that and they like to be asked.
"You’re not going to get that personal experience in a supermarket. Who wants to queue up for 20 minutes before you even get to the checkout?”
In any case, if a shop has outlived 23 monarchs and 52 prime ministers, it probably stands a fighting chance of surviving the rise and Tesco and Aldi.
Many qualitative researchers have been there. Your research participant was in the middle of what you thought was a serious topic of conversation when he suddenly burst out laughing. You smile politely and guide the interview back on course, thinking, Maybe I’ll figure out what was so funny during transcription.
In a recent Social Forces article Mike Reay revisits past data to try to do just that. With data from interviews he conducted with economists in 2000, Reay applies philosophical and sociological theories of laughter to try to understand how his research participants got the giggles.
These seemingly random outbursts actually revealed a social pattern. During interviews, researchers asked their participants to talk about topics in unusual settings—in this case, to talk economics with a sociologist. Participants, then, were in a scenario that philosophers and sociologists have long found to have an especially high potential for humor: a moment of incongruity that mirrors how our minds have long understood jokes. Sometimes the absurdity of talking about a particularly specialized or private subject with an outsider makes the participant laugh. Other times, Reay thinks a participant might “laugh off” a statement that doesn’t match the way she wants the researcher to see her. In either case, spontaneous laughter is likely connected to self-presentation.
Reay’s research has the potential to help qualitative researchers peer further into the minds of their participants. Instead of hurrying to the next question on an interview protocol, it may be well worth the time to question those spontaneous bouts of laughter.
