Transportation Security Administration officials said passengers aboard U.S. Airways Flight 192 from Orlando, Fla., on Saturday night reported that two men, described as Middle Eastern, were acting strangely and talking loudly to each other in a foreign language.

A nearby passenger also observed one of men watching what appeared to be footage of a suicide bombing, but was actually a scene from the 2007 movie “The Kingdom.” The man also got up from his seat while the seat belt warning sign was still lit, FBI spokesman Manuel Johnson said.

“The totality of those three occurrences led this passenger to believe this was suspicious,” he said.

(via The Associated Press)

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Idiot.

The federal government may think it’s doing people a favor by providing them with access to food, but it’s doing them a disservice if it also robs them of the motivation necessary to break free from dependency.

(via National Review Online)

What are you going to do with the poor! First they single-handedly crash the economy, then they immediately start asking for bailouts. Says Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, “Food stamps is quasi money.” They is indeed. Not to mention the fact that every penny leeched by the needy takes away from another executive’s bonus money, meaning that this country may soon be at risk of suffering an executive incentive deficit.

(via NYT)

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“Ask the men and women who stood on top of the Trade Center,” said Rep. Randy (Duke) Cunningham, R-Calif. “Ask them and they will tell you: pass this amendment.”

…because the attacks on the Trade Center were just some big flag burning stunt? Please – you don’t need to hijack four airplanes and fly them into buildings to burn a flag. There are an infinite number of simpler methods – a barrel of stolen Iraqi oil and a match should do it.

“If the flag needs protection at all, it needs protection from members of Congress who value the symbol more than the freedoms that the flag represents.” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., whose district includes the site of the former World Trade Center.

thank you.

and for the record, our own Barbara Lee voted: NO

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Historians, philosophers, political scientists and sociologists cite many reasons for the decline of an ethic of responsibility in America over recent decades, including:

• A culture of narcissism or self-absorption;
• The rise of celebrity worship and entitlement;
• The distractions of the war on terrorism.

Examples are appallingly abundant, from the fundamentalist’s sense of divine righteousness (e.g., nature is a resource to be exploited (see resourcism)), to the happy consumer’s oblivious ignorance of the hidden cost of cumulative indulgence.

In the article, Rev. John Staudenmaier, a historian at the University of Detroit Mercy, says, “You take your eye off the ball and you get bad behavior.” Sounds more like the consequences of rule by the lowest common denominator.

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Let’s dig a little deeper. According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor, two Texan pharmacists “refused to fill a prescription for an emergency contraceptive for a woman said to be a rape victim.” While the employees were fired, we also have Colorado Gov. Bill Owens vetoing a bill requiring hospitals to inform rape victims about the availability of emergency contraceptives. Now I think we’re getting to the meat of the situation.

Conservatives consistently vote to cut funding for family-planning clinics, to limit access to contraception, and censor contraception information. Instead, they promote abstinence programs, even while extensive research shows that these policies consistently lead to negative consequences. Conservatives argue that easy access to these materials would simply cause promiscuity and irresponsibility (which is why, for example, Wal-Mart’s health insurance policy doesn’t cover contraception).

In a report by the Rockridge Institute, the real debate is about differing approaches to unintended pregnancy.

Policies that increase barriers to contraceptive and condom use don’t alter rates of sexual activity. However, individuals who are sexually active and do not use contraception or condoms have much higher rates of pregnancies, abortions, and STIs compared to those who use contraception and condoms. [Sources]

So we’re safe in concluding that the right wing extremists’ stance isn’t concerned so much about womens’ health as it is maintaining the usual authoritarian “punishment over prevention” model of discrimination. Hey, no one said it’s a crime to have morals, but if your business card says “Pharmacist,” and you’re not performing the duties laid out in your job description, then, technically, you are not a pharmacist. You’re a person standing behind a counter–a deeply-misguided person–and you should probably be tossed out by drugstore security for trespassing.

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Why should this unfortunate state of events matter to fancy blue state folk? The crux of the issue–so to speak–is that if these conservative school districts should boycott a textbook due to its having too much information, the publishing company will lose money regardless of whether it had won statewide adoption. Since textbook companies generally publish only one national edition, and Texas’ community of religious conservatives have the power make or break textbook adoption, thus is the fate of a given textbook nationwide determined by the religious right in Texas.

Here’s the rundown: As the Texas Board of Education mulls over the latest textbooks each Fall, publishers compete to win the influential $400 million market. If the 15 elected board members vote that a book conforms to Texas state law, the state may pay for local school districts to use the textbook. Otherwise the books are rejected. Texas uses a statewide textbook adoption process, thereby wielding the power to rewrite textbooks to meet their priorities. William Bennetta, president of the The Textbook League, says, “The books that kids in Albany, [New York], read have been diddled to conform to the tastes of people in Texas.”

Metroland Online reports that health-education teachers who purchase new textbooks will have their choice of three nationally distributed textbooks, each of which adheres to the “abstinence-only” curriculum.

There are four national textbook companies, and only three publish health-education textbooks. All three wrote new editions for Texas adoption in 2004, and all three textbooks are fervently abstinence-only.

But wait, there’s more! Texas’ conservative influence has broadened to dilute the content of other subjects as well:

In Our World Today: People, Places and Issues (Glencoe/McGraw-Hill), a passage noting that “glaciers formed the Great Lakes millions of years ago” was altered to read “in the distant past” after a conservative reviewer attacked the phrase as merely “the opinion of some scientist who support [sic] the theory of evolution.”

A passage in World Explorer: People, Places and Cultures (Prentice Hall) noting that the Quran teaches “the importance of honesty, honor, giving to others and having love and respect for… families” was deleted after a conservative reviewer branded it “more propaganda” for Islam.

Prentice Hall dropped an entire section on global warming from World Explorer after a reviewer charged that it would “prepare students to look to the government for solutions to problems.”

Learn more about Texas’s textbook adoption system at the following sites: Texas Freedom Network, Texans For Science.

(via Boing Boing)

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While Baxley’s so-called “leftists” are “indoctrinating” their students, are the latter sitting in silent submission? To the contrary, the Academic Freedom Abuse Center, housed on the Students for Academic Freedom website, has been collecting student-submitted reports of “rights abuse.” Among them is a report by a student who complained because her professor suggested men and women might see colors differently. And, submitted last month, another complaint reads as follows:

This complaint applies to the discriminating nature of grading of my English teacher. She knows I’m an advancer of conservative ideas b/c I where a “W” t-shirt to class on sometimes. Ever since the 1st day of class when I wore my “W” shirt she has treated me cold and been discriminating in grading my essays. On the last one, I wrote about how family values in the books weve read aren’t good. I know the paper was pretty much great because I spell checked it and proofred it twice. I got an D- just because the professor hates families and thinks its okay to be gay.

While most colleges already have rules ensuring free expression, ACLU-Ohio says that such bills “would shift the responsibility … from highly trained faculty to the state government or the courts,” thus discouraging teachers “from teaching anything controversial.” A variation of the bill, introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2003, has made inroads in other states.

(via MetaFilter)

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“Galápagos” (1999) takes viewers to depths of 3000 feet with scientists studying “the processes of evolution as part of an ongoing effort to understand the forces which may ultimately affect the survival of our own species.” But said Carol Murray, director of marketing for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, “some people said it was blasphemous.”

Another film meeting resistance is “Volcanoes of the Deep Sea” (2003), in which viewers join scientists as they witness strange communities of organisms, bioluminescent creatures and giant predators, and explore the implications these discoveries may have “for our understanding of the emergence of life and our search for its traces elsewhere in the Cosmos.” Officials refused to show the documentary citing its “evolutionary overtones” which “would not go well with the Christian community” because “the evolution stuff is a problem.”

The irony is that these controversies have been more likely to arise at science centers, which, so labeled, ought to be deterrent enough for fundamentalists, who are more interested in literalist interpretations of mythology and fanciful folkloric fables. Imax bills itself as a movie experience that “takes you to places you only imagined.” For the lowest common denominator, who don’t want to venture too far beyond “imaginary,” that may be too far.

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The blog Stay Free! Daily is encouraging all good citizens to link to the O’Reilly column so that they may more fully enjoy the benefits of right action.

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