Friday Fodder

Lots of weird news out there.

Afghan girl named Gulnaz gets raped by her cousin's husband and is imprisoned for adultery. Her initial sentence was two years, when she appealed it became twelve years. She has a daughter during her two years in jail and was recently released after an international outcry, with the condition that she marry her attacker. Karzai has now commuted this part of the sentence, in his most benevolent wisdom. The European Union blocked a documentary about Gulnaz and many other Afghan women facing similar straits, expressing concern about the subject's safety. Half of Afghanistan's women prisoners are inmates for "zina" or moral crimes.

In another story from our dear friends in Afghanistan this week, a gang has beaten a father and sprayed his wife and three daughters in the face with disfiguring acid for refusing to marry a much older suitor.

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Florida carjacking thwarted because would be heisters couldn't drive a stick shift. If I've said it once I've said it ten times, kids these days are just not being properly trained how to drive.

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Check out what the asshats at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce did to the picture of Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown.

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Herman Cain is about to have his first sit down with his wife Gloria after a two week interlude where news of his thirteen year affair with a georgia woman named Ginger White has come to light, a tryst that included regular financial payments. Cain still maintains his innocence, he only gave her money to help her pay her bills as she struggled financially. Cain says their relationship was merely a "friendship."

Her story is a little different; White said the affair was purely sexual and not about love and neither ever said "I love you" to the other. "It wasn't a love affair. It was a sexual affair, as hard as that is for me to say and as hard as it is for people to hear it. You know, it pretty much is what it is. And that's what it was."

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This seventeen year old girl got kicked off a flight to Jacksonville because her purse had a picture of a gun appliquéd to the surface. No pictures of guns, don't even think of a gun...


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Renée sends over an interesting article by Todd S. Purdum in this month's Vanity Fair discussing the private papers of cold war architect George Kennan and his apparent anguish over the Soviet conflict and its role in turning America into a national security driven "Police State."

"In his letter to Moynihan, Kennan acknowledged a legitimate, if comparatively rare, need to keep some things secret. But he went on to observe, “We easily become ourselves the sufferers from these methods of deception. For they inculcate in their authors, as well as their intended victims, unlimited cynicism.” In his famous “Long Telegram” from Moscow, in February 1946, in which he set official Washington afire with the assessment that the Soviet Union was “committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi,” Kennan had also issued another powerful warning, though it got little attention. “We must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society,” he wrote. “After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet Communism is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.”"

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Kudos to President Obama for his threatened veto of S.1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill.

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While interracial marriages have been soaring in most parts of America, don't try telling it to the good folks in Pike County, Kentucky. Stella Harville, the 24 year old daughter of the church's secretary and clerk, and her 29-year-old fiance, Ticha Chikuni, a native of Zimbabwe, paid the Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church a visit last month. They were told in no uncertain terms that they and other mixed couples were not welcome at the house of worship.


Following the visit, former pastor Melvin Thompson told Harville that his daughter and her fiance, who works at Georgetown College,  could not sing at the all white church again. Thompson later proposed that the church go on record saying that while all people were welcome to attend public worship services there, the church did not condone interracial marriage. His proposal, which was accepted by a 9-6 vote last week, also suggested that married interracial couples be prohibited from becoming members and used in worship activities, except for funerals.


Harville said the resolution was motivated by racism and has given the church, the community, the county and even God a black eye."It sure ain't Christian. It ain't nothing but the old devil working," Harville said.

Another reason to skip the red states.

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Imagine having a harridan like this for a mayor?

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Anyone think that there is more to the Carrier IQ data logging story than meets the eye? Little NSA trapdoor, perhaps? RIM, a Canadian company, doesn't include it but most American smartphones do. Am I being paranoid here?

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Newt Gingrich has doubled down on his comments on getting rid of child labor laws. "They (poor kids) have no habit of 'I do this and you give me cash' - unless it's illegal,"said the Newtster at an Iowa event.
Teach the little bastard criminals the way things are done in this country...

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WildBill sent along this picture. Not quite sure what it depicts.