Deborah Jeane Palfrey, known as the "D.C. Madam,"was found dead in Florida Thursday. Suicide notes were found near the body in a small storage shed next to a mobile home, police said.

This is just awful. This woman was rung through the criminal "justice" system for providing what she consistently maintained was a legal escort service. The problem I have here is that even if she was running a sex-for-hire service, why is she the only one held accountable? She released her complete client list, and how many of the government official and public office holders on that list have been brought up on charges?

None. Not a single one.

If she was convicted of running a prostitution ring, one would expect that somewhere along the line, someone had sex with someone else and money exchanged hands for that purpose, and they were able to prove that transaction took place. Why wasn't the customer held equally as culpable for the transaction?

I'm all in favor of legalized prostitution. Legalize it, regulate it, and UNIONIZE THEM. Stop prosecuting one side of the trade and letting the other side walk.

Tom The Dancing Bug says it best:



-pb

Pretty much, yeah.

Tom the Dancing Bug says it all (msmagenta, I thought you in particular might get a kick out of this.)



-pb

Once again, Chuck Asay makes up his own reality and peddles it as fact. Barry Lynn wouldn't be bursting into classrooms to arrest teachers who hold a 'moment of silence' for a fallen soldier. He might, however, object to teachers who say "let's recite the Lord's prayer and ask Jesus to ease their pain blah blah blah etc". You know what? So would I. Because that makes the Jewish kid in the class feel very pressured to fall in line with his Christian classmates. It makes the Pagan kid the target of ridicule because he doesn't want to talk to Jesus. If anyone thinks that this is just a "well, you don't have the right to not be offended" case, I 'm going to assume that you never dealt with any sort of discrimination in school. You have no idea what it's like to be the kid that everyone thumps on. You have no idea what it's like to be the target of persecution because you're different. It's bad enough that our schools basically encourage bullying, but to allow religiously-motivated harrassment, or even foster an environment where a student is made to suffer for his religion goes against the precepts of the First Amendment.

If kids want to get together on their own and pray on school grounds, go for it. It should be a student activity with no pressure to join and only supervised by staff. Organized prayer should have no place in the classroom. Moments of silence do not count as organized prayer. They count as a moment where everyone shuts up, and if people happen to pray, then that's ok. If people happen to think about last night's rerun of Seinfeld, then that's ok too.

Keep your Jesus out of the school that I pay taxes to support, mmkay?

-js?!

But I had this in my head, and it jumped onto the paper.



-js?!

Andy Singer applies the Bush philosophy to other aspects of American life:



It's kinda like one of those posters with fifteen different animals smoking cigarettes.

-js?!

So, I'm pretty sure Robert Arial is saying that Jacques Chirac has to eat his words on Democracy not working in Iraq or America failing or us being arrogant unilateralist or Bush being a cowboy.

That doesn't make sense to me because:
a) terrorism is rampant in Iraq, and "democracy" was a bunch of people going to the polls to vote for whichever name happened to sound like a relation,
b) we are still arrogant unilateralist,
c) Bush is still a cowboy.

Conversely, all the stuff on Bush's plate is SHIT HE SHOULD APOLOGIZE FOR.

But it's ok, because Chirac is a goddamn Frenchie, and we all know how evil they are!

-js?!

-pb

As an update to my last post, I give you...



Quick and dirty, but funny.

-pb