Extremely Lame

For the past week, the Attorney General has been berated up and down Pennsylvania Avenue for uttering the following with regard to the current scandal of the Bush Administration’s politicization of judicial hirings and appointments. Basically, Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson spent time under then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales passing over candidates for positions for “not being Republican enough” and determining this through questions that sound more like those that Stephen Colbert would utter.

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Homeowner’s association thugs strike again, this time over air drying laundry in the back yard. You know, the part of the yard that no one sees so there’s no way in hell it can cause property values to fall. You would think that having laundry to dry in the backyard would seem to hark back to the ’50s and a sensibility of housewives with phony smiles and husbands who like to smoke a pipe and read the newspaper after his wife cooks him dinner. Isn’t that the kind of ideal neighborhood these people are dreaming of?

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I just finished reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, so maybe I’m a bit paranoid of the government right now, but even if I hadn’t, I think this has BAD IDEA written all over it.
Buried deep in a Senate bill for housing financing reform created because of the subprime adjustable rate mortgage crisis, there’s a [...]

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Grapevine High School in Texas is the latest school around here to engage in paper pushing, rules lawyering moronity. Anjali Datta is graduating high school this year with an impressive 5.898 GPA in a scant three years. She’s also got the best GPA of anyone in her graduating class, so she’s the valedictorian.
Nay, nay, moosebreath. [...]

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Less than a week after I post an entry about the jackbooted thugs in Arizona regarding arresting people for being drunk when they aren’t, we have another case of an Arizona cop abusing his authority and falsely imprisoning someone for DUI when said person was not just below the legal limit, but had a Blood Alcohol content of .00.

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There are a number of crimes nowadays where you are automatically assumed to be guilty de facto if not actually assumed guilty du jure. Of these are sexual harrassment (if the victim is female and the accused is male), rape (same situation), anything related to terrorism, hate crimes, and drunk driving.

Actually, with regards to things like terrorism and drunk diving, you can be proven to not having broken the law and still be whisked away to jail or a detention center.

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Oh great, what has Florida done now?
Well, for starters, they’ve impounded fined a 78 year old man and impounded his car for running an illegal taxi operation. The problem? He was being a nice old man and gave someone a ride from the grocery store. Turns out that the person that approached him and begged [...]

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Is there anything more ridiculously dishonest than performance reviews? The inanity behind them is just staggering. The ones at my workplace have seven different ratings, running the gamut from “You Suck” to “We’re Not Worthy.” Seven different ratings, so naturally, everyone got the one right in the middle. EVERY LAST ONE OF US. The guy that steals stuff from work? Yep. The guy who is more concerned with recycling than with paying attention to the plant? Yep. The guy who goes way above and beyond what’s required of him? Yep. They’re all the same. Why even bother with the charade if everyone’s going to get the same review?

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I work in the public sector in North Texas. I’ve recently been awarded a $4.00 per hour raise. So, why am I upset about that? That’s a long story. Please, have a seat.
I took my test to get licensed back in January.  It’s now the middle of April and I won’t see the fruits of [...]

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Ah yes. The blessing and curse of bureaucracy. The good thing about it is that it’s a way to treat people relatively equally. The bad thing is that it’s a way to treat people equally badly, i.e., often it completely ignores extenuating circumstances in individual cases. This is one of those.
Steve Steinberg was issued a [...]

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