I feel her pain

A valiant gentle reader writing from the very belly of the capitalist beast sends me this, which makes me very happy indeed, and which she saw at Hot Buttered Death, which is such a great name that if it was a metal album I would consider buying it, although if it was a metal album I probably would end up not buying it but I'd bore the crap out of the coworkers who sit nearest to me by telling everyone who stops by my desk about the great name of the album I decided not to buy.

Parliament bans knitting by government ministers

A New Zealand government minister has needled opposition lawmakers by knitting during a parliamentary debate.

Associate Commerce Minister Judith Tizard enraged legislators by knitting during the discussion of new laws involving her ministry.

Parliamentary opposition leader Bill English said Tizard was showing the "contempt and arrogance" of the Labour-led government toward Parliament.

Speaker Jonathan Hunt, a 33-year veteran of Parliament, eventually ruled that "knitting is permitted in the House but is not permitted from the minister's chair."

Rightist Act Party leader Richard Prebble said that while newspapers and correspondence are allowed in the chamber, computers and other devices are banned.

"Knitting needles are a device," he declared.

Tizard was listening to legislators debate a trade bill when she pulled out her needles and wool. As the minister responsible for the law's passage, she was there to answer questions from lawmakers and take part in the debate.

Tizard retorted that she had knitted in the chamber before and it had not been ruled out.

Retired lawmaker Marilyn Waring, who admitted to knitting 32 garments during her nine years in Parliament, said in her autobiography it had been the only productive thing she had accomplished in the debating chamber.

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I think we can all agree that parliamentary opposition leader Bill English is a bit of a device himself...

the only Bond review you have to read

best line cherrypick:

Halle Berry? Awful. Again, it's hard to pull off the dialogue she was given, but she didn't do a great job with what she had. The fact that she might be given a spin-off movie but Michelle Yeoh was never offered one shows that, given the principle that higher life forms evolve from lower ones, we got the amoeba from the movie mogul.

gee whiz

I'll never talk about the doublesecret plan to destroy our nation and I defy Osama to find me amongst the piles of books and laundry...

...and then we'll have a bunch of rich people send a sizeable donation [deleted to protect the security of my readers] Bush '04 Campaign Committee...

via Eschaton

The difference: take 1,434,534,94...

Well, Ted "my administration had better things to do than keep my wife from dying" Olsen has another of them patriotic causes he's been so well known for since he reluctantly pulled his attention (mostly) away from Clinton's penis.

[A] farm worker here who was shot five times after a brief encounter with police... While the farm worker lay gravely wounded, a police supervisor pressed him to talk, to explain his version of the events. He survived, paralyzed and blinded, and sued the police for, among other things, coercive interrogation.

But Oxnard police assert that the Miranda ruling does not include a "constitutional right to be free of coercive interrogation," but only a right not to have forced confessions used at trial.

Bush administration lawyers have sided with the police in the case. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Dec. 4.

Police can hold people in custody and force them to talk, so long as their incriminating statements are not used to prosecute them, U.S. Solicitor Gen. Theodore B. Olson and Michael Chertoff, the chief of the Justice Department's criminal division, say in their brief to the court.

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So we're all clear on this? They're allowed to torture you as long as you haven't done anything to warrant prosecution.

Or the terrorists win.

via Shadow of the Hegemon, who got a really world-class bizarre comment almost immediately from a "libertarian" who clearly depended extremely heavily on his math scores, if you catch my drift.

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Over at Eschaton, though, we find the lighter side of justice in Bushworld: from Florida, where they have all kinds of family values (when they can find their kids):

A judge who sentenced a former Orlando sex-crimes detective to house arrest for having sexual encounters with a 14-year-old girl compared the officer's conduct to that of President Clinton and his own chief judge.

To the girl, who was upset with the lenient sentence, Orange Circuit Judge John H. Adams said: "You've been dealt a bad hand. But not the worst hand. You're not growing up in Afghanistan. You can rise above this."

Edwin "Ed" Mann, a former leader in Cops for Christ, could have been sentenced to 26 years in prison for having sex with the girl in his police car, hotels and her bedroom while her parents were away.

After the lenient sentence Nov. 14, outraged prosecutors vowed to appeal.

Before passing sentence, Adams told the former Orlando police officer that he had the option of sending him to prison for many years.

But then Adams noted: "I don't know that that would have any effect on the general public, knowing that the president of the United States did things that were not too different and became the butt of late-night jokes."

Clinton, Adams said, "gets no punishment. He gets a walk."

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I know I remember where I was when I found out that there were 14-year-old interns in the White House.

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The victim and her family were upset by the sentence, according to Assistant State Attorney Julia Lynch, who said the ruling "re-victimized" the girl.

In the transcript, the judge calls the girl a "survivor" instead of a victim.

"You really aren't a weak, helpless, broken person," he told her, "and you're not damaged."

...

Prosecutors this week criticized Adams' sentence because it deviated so much from sentencing guidelines. After Mann pleaded guilty to four felony counts, Adams sentenced him to two years of house arrest and 25 years' probation as a sex offender. Prosecutors asked for 13 years in prison.

The three counts of lewd and lascivious battery and one molestation charge stemmed from his six-month relationship with the girl.

Mann, who now works in a greenhouse for $8 an hour, apparently knew the girl from church and because she had dated his teenage son. Their sexual encounters started in July 2000 and ended the following January, according to court records.

...


Addressing the victim during the hearing, Adams said Mann grew "delusional" because of childhood problems he had faced himself.

"In some respects when he became delusional, you weren't dealing with a 39-year-old man. You were dealing with a 13-year-old who deluded himself into thinking he was falling in love with you," Adams said.

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Jeb was apparently not available for comment, but just let either of these guys beat a toll and he'll be right on it, I'm sure.

more little spit drops than usual on the screen

via Stefan

the price of decency

PLA has a thoroughly sensible explanation of the financial cost to society of abandoning children like his (the Merediths' eldest son is autistic). In a perfect world, or even one that sucked a little less, this is not a case that would have to be made - the human costs of what they and parents like them are going through would be reason enough to find a cure, even if it meant spending money. This isn't that world, sadly, but PLA makes a damn good case that this world should pay attention.

This struck a chord for me partially because on the way to school, I heard on news radio that Mayor Bloomberg has gotten much of the property tax increase he's asked for, and it going to restore some of the cuts in his budget, including the cuts in daycare slots.

Explain this to me. This is a ridiculously expensive city. There are literally millions of people working at or below the poverty line. If the city cuts daycare slots, women are going to go on welfare. It's as simple as that. Women who don't have the money to pay for the ridiculously high costs of private daycare are going to stop paying taxes and they're going to go on welfare so that their children won't be left unsupervised (which, by the way, is an offense which could lead to having your parental rights terminated).

But wait! We have "workfare" and "welfare to work" in this city. You get welfare, you work for it. Now not only are these women bringing in far less than the money that you need to live on in this city, and not paying taxes, and very likely joining the swelling ranks of the (expensive) homeless, and seeing their children put at increasing statistical risk of not staying in school and of becoming members of the permanent underclass, in order to do their deadend workfare jobs they're going to need daycare.

Only a single male billionaire and a Republican could have come up with this. I'd like to think so, anyway.

Special props to thimerosol villain Mitch Daniels for withholding the funds we could have used to make some of this pain go away. Astonishing how quickly New York was crowded out of the Bush administration's collective sesame-seedlike attention span.

Even faster than bin Laden.