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Dr. Zaius

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  1. Posted · Report reply

    Beginning in early 1998, the news was bristling with stories about a children's cartoon PBS was importing from Britain that featured a gay cartoon character, Tinky Winky, the purple Teletubbie with a male voice and a red handbag.

     

    I don't know what's weirder. The fact that she thinks Falwell's comments about the Teletubbies was rational, or that she apparently can't grasp a concept like the definition of the word "cartoon."

  3. Posted · Report reply

    Three dead in Ward Parkway Center shooting spree

     

     

    A gunman on an apparently random shooting rampage killed two people in the parking lot of the Ward Parkway Center this afternoon before walking into the crowded mall and shooting at least one other person

     

    Kansas City police then shot the man to death outside the mall entrance to the Target store.

     

    The person shot inside the mall was taken to a local hospital in critical condition, but is expected to live, police said. Another person in the mall suffered a shoulder injury, apparently when he dived to avoid the shooting.

     

    The shootings occurred about 3:45 p.m.

     

    Police said the two dead were on either side of the shooter’s car in the mall parking lot. After shooting them to death, the gunman, who was carrying some sort of long weapon that may have been an assault rifle, walked into the mall firing randomly

     

    Police did not release a detailed description of the shooter but witnesses said he appeared to be a white man in his 50s.

     

    Police have no answers for why the gunman headed for the shopping center.

     

    “It appears he came to the mall to shoot people,†police spokesman Tony Sanders said. “It was mass chaos on a Sunday afternoon, but it could have been a much worse situation. It’s a mall in Middle America on Sunday afternoon…it’s crowded.â€

     

    The mall wasn’t the shooter’s first stop, Sanders said.

     

    The crime spree actually unfolded over three crime scenes this afternoon beginning with a death investigation at a home in the 3700 block of E. 93rd St. in Kansas City.

    http://www.kansascity.com/115/story/88339.html

     

    At least 4 dead in K.C. shootings

    Others wounded at one of city’s busiest shopping centers

    The Associated Press

    Updated: 8:17 p.m. CT April 29, 2007

    KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A shooting at a Kansas City shopping center has left at least three dead, including the gunman, police said. A fourth person was found dead at a home in the area and the death appears to be linked to the gunman, police said.

     

    Two of the victims were killed around 3:45 p.m. in the parking lot of the Ward Parkway Center in south Kansas City. The victims were found in their vehicles, which were parked on either side of the gunman's car.

     

    The gunman, whose name wasn't released, fired more shots in the parking lot, wounding at least two others before he went inside the mall, police spokesman Tony Sanders said.

     

    Police shot the man to death outside a Target store inside the mall, Sanders said. The gunman's body remained inside the mall early Sunday evening.

     

    "It sounded like firecrackers at first," said Cassie Bradshaw, 19, of Kansas City, who was at her first day of work at the Target.

     

    She said she was in a break room with two other people when they heard shots. She said co-workers saw a white man in his 50s with a rifle.

     

    "They said he was shooting everywhere," she said.

     

    The shooting spree appeared to be linked to the discovery of an elderly women's body at a home around 2 p.m. The women's car was missing, Sanders said.

     

    Around 3:15 p.m., an officer pulled over a car that matched the description of the victim's vehicle. The gunman fired a handgun, shooting the officer in the arm. The officer, whose wound was not life-threatening, returned fire, shooting out the window of the gunman's car. The car took off and was seen at the mall.

     

    Police received several calls from people who saw a man with a "long gun" at the mall, Sanders said.

     

    The mall, one of the city's busiest shopping centers, was shut down and officers were going through each store to see if anyone else might have been involved and still be around, Sanders said.

     

    Aaron Washington, 34, a worker at Target, said the shooting appeared to happen near store's entrance into the mall. He said he was coming back from lunch when he heard gunshots.

     

    "The only person we saw was a black gentleman holding his eye. The man had apparently been shot," Washington said.

  5. Posted · Report reply

    I just don't get how all these Republicans can still be in favor of staying in Iraq. I guess they don't value their jobs too highly.

     

    Either they actually think they're right, or they think they can win the voters back by November 08 if they make the Democrats sound like they don't SUPPORT THE TROOPS™. (This is how this is being framed after all, not as a debate about the war, but whether or not Congress will SUPPORT THE TROOPS™.)

  8. Posted · Report reply

    Your last word explains why they're not different. I don't see how offering any kind of incentive to an individual race, any segregated housing or educating, should continue or why anyone who really cared about blacks would want that. Keeping the black victim mentality is what keeps the whole race behind. The things mentioned do so, they're saying blacks are owed.

    Poor education? Poverty? Racial stereotyping? 400 years of oppression? No, the real thing that holds black people down is giving them extra help.

  10. Posted · Report reply

    While he may have helped introduce Democratic reforms, his complete failure to control the economy has allowed Russia to slowly slip back toward Authoritarianism. If he had resigned in '96 he may have had a somewhat better legacy, but I can't help but think he will be judged as a failure in later years.

     

    Can't say i'm shocked by his death though, he probably drank more Vodka in a year than we will our entire lives.

    Maybe "control" wasn't the best choice of words, friend.

  12. Posted · Report reply

    Students attend school's first integrated prom

    Story Highlights

    • Students of Turner County High School voted to have school-sponsored prom

    • In the past, parents have organized private, segregated dances

    • Principal Chad Stone says the official prom will become a yearly event

    • Senior Class President James Hall led the movement for the integrated prom

     

    By Kristi Keck

    CNN

    ASHBURN, Georgia (CNN) -- Students of Turner County High School started what they hope will become a new tradition: Black and white students attended the prom together for the first time on Saturday.

     

    In previous years, parents had organized private, segregated dances for students of the school in rural Ashburn, Georgia, 160 miles south of Atlanta.

     

    "Whites always come to this one and blacks always go to this one," said Lacey Adkinson, a 14-year-old freshman at the school of 455 students -- 55 percent black, 43 percent white.

     

    "It's always been a tradition since my daddy was in school to have the segregated ones, and this year we're finally getting to try something new," she said.

     

    Adkinson's sister, Mindy Bryan, attended a segregated prom in 2001.

     

    "There was not anybody that I can remember that was black," she said. "The white people have theirs, and the black people have theirs. It's nothing racial at all."

     

    Breaking away from traditions

    But this year's upperclassmen -- 213 students total --voted to have just one official prom.

     

    "It's been a dream of all of ours," Senior Class President James Hall said.

     

    "We didn't want to put emphasis on integrated blacks and whites coming together. We just wanted to put emphasis on this was our first school prom," Principal Chad Stone said.

     

    The theme of the first official prom: Breakaway.

     

    "It was fitting already because we are breaking away from the past traditions here in Turner County School," Hall said.

     

    Another tradition that ended this year -- having two separate homecoming queens.

     

    "You pick the homecoming queen for their personalities and being a role model," explained Roshunda Pierce, 16, as she waited to get her nails done for prom.

     

    In the past, two queens were chosen -- one white, one black.

     

    But not everyone in the town of 4,400, famous for its peanuts and Fire Ant Festival, was breaking with the past.

     

    The "white prom" still went on last week.

     

    "We did everything like a regular prom just because we had already booked it," said, Cheryl Nichols, 18, who attended the dance.

     

    Nichole Royal, 18, said black students could have gone to the prom, but didn't.

     

    "I guess they feel like they're not welcome," she said.

     

    Nichols said while her parents were in support of the integrated prom, some of her friends weren't allowed to go.

     

    "If they're not coming tonight it's because either they had to work and they couldn't get out of it or because their parents are still having an issue because they grew up in south Georgia," she said.

     

    "I've asked, 'Why can't you come?' and they're like, 'My mommy and daddy -- they don't agree with being with the colored people,' which I think is crazy," she said.

     

    Stone said he doesn't plan to stop the private proms.

     

    "That's going to be up to the parents. That's part of being in America. If they want to do that for the kids, then that's fine," he said.

     

    Looking toward the future

    Outside the prom on Saturday, parents and relatives of students talked as the students filed into the Turner Civic Center.

     

    "If they are picking so much for it to be united, why was there a prom last week for the white, when they are supposed to be united for tonight?" asked Lisa Hall.

     

    Valerie McKellar echoed that sentiment as she watched white and black students pose together.

     

    "That is so fake. There is nothing real about that," she said.

     

    "That's just like you're cooking a half-baked cake, putting the icing on it, and when you cut the cake, the cake ain't no good. That's how this prom is," she said.

     

    McKellar said the prom was a good step, but more needs to be done.

     

    "There is a time and season for all things, and right now it's time for Turner County to make a change."

     

    A success in the students' eyes

    Inside the auditorium, students put the controversy aside and danced for hours. Stone said he was pleased with the outcome. About 150 students, including some dates from other schools, attended.

     

    Students leaving the prom praised the evening.

     

    "We been separated for a while. I sure appreciate how the school got all of us together, and we had a blast" said John Holmes, 16.

     

    Aneisha Gipson, who was crowned prom queen, said the night could not have been better.

     

    "Amazing. It was absolutely amazing. It was perfect."

     

    Superintendent Ray Jordan said he couldn't be more proud of Stone and his students.

     

    "If I could write this story it would be a story of celebration of students making a difference for themselves and for future students. I believe they wanted to leave their mark, and I certainly believe they've done that."

    http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/23/turner.prom/index.html

     

    Now, if they could just take care of that "Colored only" restroom, they'd be all set.

  13. Posted · Report reply

    Former Russian leader Yeltsin dead at 76

    Story Highlights

    • He became the first democratically elected president of Russia in 1991

    • In final years, Yeltsin was dogged by health problems, seemed out of touch

    • He created a private sector and allowed foreign investment

    • He preferred chess game of politics to work of solving economic, social problems.

     

    MOSCOW, Russia (AP) -- Former President Boris Yeltsin, who engineered the final collapse of the Soviet Union and pushed Russia to embrace democracy and a market economy, has died, a Kremlin official said Monday. He was 76.

     

    Kremlin spokesman Alexander Smirnov confirmed Yeltsin's death, but gave no cause or further information. The Interfax news agency cited an unidentified medical source as saying he had died of heart failure.

     

    Although Yeltsin pushed Russia to embrace democracy and a market economy, many of its citizens will remember him mostly for presiding over the country's steep decline.

     

    He was a contradictory figure, rocketing to popularity in the Communist era on pledges to fight corruption -- but proving unable, or unwilling, to prevent the looting of state industry as it moved into private hands during his nine years as Russia's first freely elected president.

     

    He steadfastly defended freedom of the press, but was a master at manipulating the media.

     

    He amassed as much power as possible in his office -- then gave it all up in a dramatic New Year's address at the end of 1999.

     

    Yeltsin's greatest moments came in bursts. He stood atop a tank to resist an attempted coup in August 1991, and spearheaded the peaceful end of the Soviet state on December 25 of that year. Ill with heart problems, and facing possible defeat by a Communist challenger in his 1996 re-election bid, he marshaled his energy and sprinted through the final weeks of the campaign. The challenge transformed the shaky convalescent into the spry, dancing candidate.

     

    But Yeltsin was an inconsistent reformer who never took much interest in the mundane tasks of day-to-day government and nearly always blamed Russia's myriad problems on subordinates.

     

    Yeltsin damaged his democratic credentials by using force to solve political disputes, though he claimed his actions were necessary to keep the country together.

     

    He sent tanks and troops in October 1993 to flush armed, hard-line supporters out of a hostile Russian parliament after they had sparked violence in the streets of Moscow. And in December 1994, Yeltsin launched a war against separatists in the southern republic of Chechnya.

     

    Tens of thousands of people were killed in the Chechnya conflict, and a defeated and humiliated Russian army withdrew at the end of 1996. The war solved nothing -- and Russian troops resumed fighting in the breakaway region in fall 1999.

     

    In the final years of his leadership, Yeltsin was dogged by health problems and often seemed out of touch. He retreated regularly to his country residence outside Moscow and stayed away from the Kremlin for days, even weeks at a time. As the country lurched from crisis to crisis, its leader appeared increasingly absent.

     

    Yet Yeltsin had made a stunning debut as Russian president. He introduced many basics of democracy, guaranteeing the rights to free speech, private property and multiparty elections, and opening the borders to trade and travel. Though full of bluster, he revealed more of his personal life and private doubts than any previous Russian leader had.

     

    "The debilitating bouts of depression, the grave second thoughts, the insomnia and headaches in the middle of the night, the tears and despair ... the hurt from people close to me who did not support me at the last minute, who didn't hold up, who deceived me -- I have had to bear all of this," he wrote in his 1994 memoir, "The Struggle for Russia."

     

    Yeltsin pushed through free-market reforms, creating a private sector and allowing foreign investment. In foreign policy, he assured independence for Russia's Soviet-era satellites, oversaw troop and arms reductions, and developed warm relations with Western leaders.

     

    That was the democratic Yeltsin, who in August 1991 rallied tens of thousands of Russians to face down a hard-line Soviet coup attempt. Throughout his nearly decade-long leadership, he remained Russia's strongest bulwark against Communism.

     

    But there was another Yeltsin.

     

    He was hesitant to act against crime and corruption -- beginning in his own administration -- while they sapped public faith and stunted democracy. His government's wrenching economic reforms impoverished millions of Russians -- poor people whose wages and pensions Yeltsin's government often went months without paying.

     

    In the course of the Yeltsin era, per capita income fell about 75 percent, and the nation's population fell by more than 2 million, due largely to the steep decline in public health.

     

    Yeltsin was a master of Kremlin intrigues, and preferred the chess game of politics to the detail work of solving economic and social problems. He played top advisers off against each other, and never let any of them accumulate much power, lest they challenge him.

     

    He fired the entire government four times in 1998 and 1999. The economy sank into a deep recession in summer 1998, but Yeltsin rarely commented on the troubles and never offered a plan to combat them.

     

    He was quick to act if anyone threatened his hold on power, standing fast even when his traditional allies called on him to step down. He easily faced down an impeachment attempt by the Communist-dominated lower chamber of parliament in May 1999.

     

    In foreign affairs, he struggled to preserve a role for his former superpower. He called for a "multipolar world" as a way to counterbalance what Russia perceived as excessive U.S. global clout, and in spring 1999 he sent Russian troops rushing to Kosovo -- ahead of NATO peacekeepers -- to underline that Moscow would not be elbowed out of European affairs.

     

    He wrangled with the West in disputes over NATO expansion and Russia's relatively warm relations with Iran and Iraq. But as Russia's political and economic might withered, Yeltsin had little to offer other nations.

     

    Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was born February 1, 1931, into a peasant family in the Ural Mountains' Sverdlovsk region. When he was 3, his father was imprisoned in dictator Josef Stalin's purges. His alleged crime was owning property before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

     

    Yeltsin was, by his own account, a garrulous, scrappy boy who loved pranks and was quick to fight. And from the start, he bucked authority.

     

    He was expelled from elementary school for criticizing a teacher at a school assembly. Early in his career as a construction engineer, he was given written reprimands 17 times in one year -- "a new record," he would later recall proudly. And his long career as a Communist Party official was rife with battles with higher party officials.

     

    He was educated as an engineer and married a fellow student, Naina Girina. They had two daughters.

     

    At age 30, Yeltsin joined the Communist Party after a brief career in construction in Sverdlovsk city, now Yekaterinburg. He became a full-time party official in construction in 1969, and seven years later was named the region's party boss.

     

    In 1985, the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, intent on his own reforms, brought Yeltsin to Moscow, where he shook up the city's party hierarchy. The strapping, silver-haired Yeltsin cut a popular figure in the capital, making a point of riding city buses instead of a limousine, standing in long lines in grocery stores and loudly demanding why managers were stashing away food for favored customers instead of selling it to ordinary consumers.

     

    A bitter rivalry soon grew between him and the more cautious Gorbachev. When Yeltsin criticized Gorbachev at a party meeting in November 1987, accusing him of a sluggish approach to reform, Gorbachev fired him.

     

    In the old days, that would have ended Yeltsin's career. But he stormed back to power in 1989, winning a Soviet parliament seat in the first real election in 70 years. The following year, Yeltsin dramatically quit the Communist Party, walking out of its final convention.

     

    His popularity grew. Yeltsin was a natural with crowds, shaking hands and bantering in a booming voice. For many Russians, he had the unpolished charm of a "muzhik" -- a tough peasant with common sense and a fondness for vodka.

     

    Even then, Yeltsin's career was punctuated by bouts of bizarre behavior that the public chalked up to alcohol. Red-faced pranks, missed appointments, inarticulate and contradictory public statements continued into his presidency, blamed by aides on jet lag, medication or illness.

     

    Yeltsin won Russia's first popular presidential election in a landslide in June 1991. Russia still was part of the Soviet Union, but the central government had started ceding power to the 15 republics.

     

    Kremlin hard-liners trying to stop that process launched the failed coup in August, putting Gorbachev under house arrest. But Yeltsin took control of mass protests in Moscow, leading the democratic opposition to victory.

     

    Yeltsin banned the Communist Party and confiscated its vast property. The ban was lifted in court about a year later, but by then Yeltsin had dealt the death blow to the tottering Soviet state. He and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus formed the Commonwealth of Independent States in December 1991, declaring the Soviet Union extinct. Gorbachev resigned within the month.

     

    Impatient to lead Russia into a new, prosperous era, Yeltsin quickly launched an economic-reform program that freed prices but sent them soaring, wiping out many people's savings. Inflation skyrocketed and production plummeted.

     

    Years later, he expressed regret over the rush, and said he'd been "naive."

     

    "I ask forgiveness for not justifying some hopes of those people who believed that at one stroke, in one spurt, we could leap from the gray, stagnant, totalitarian past into the light, rich civilized future," he told the nation in a televised speech to announce his resignation on December 31, 1999.

     

    "I myself believed in this, that we could overcome everything in one spurt."

     

    Tension grew between him and the Soviet-era parliament, climaxing in fall 1993 when Yeltsin disbanded the legislature. An armed standoff and street riots followed, and Yeltsin finally turned tanks against the parliament building. Scores of people were killed in the fighting.

     

    Afterward, Yeltsin pushed through a constitution that guaranteed a strong presidency and allowed him to brush off any serious parliamentary challenges.

     

    But growing hard-line influence led him to dump key reformers from his Cabinet, which alienated democratic forces. Their disillusionment grew after the start of the first Chechnya war and more hard-line gains in parliamentary elections in December 1995.

     

    By early 1996, Yeltsin was deeply unpopular and presidential elections loomed in June. But true to form, Yeltsin rallied when things looked bleakest, manipulating the media, enlisting the aid of the so-called oligarchs who had enriched themselves on the spoils of the Soviet economy in a grueling campaign.

     

    The campaign trips to Russian regions and exertion took a heavy physical toll, and by election day Yeltsin could not even make it to his scheduled polling station. Doctors later said he had suffered another mild heart attack during the campaign.

     

    He underwent quintuple heart bypass surgery in November 1996, but continued to suffer from a series of other ailments. He also had long-running back trouble, and seemed increasingly shaky, both physically and mentally.

     

    Russians questioned who was running the country -- the doddering Yeltsin, or the aides and tycoons whom critics accused of exercising undue influence over Kremlin policy.

     

    Yeltsin's increasing frailty seemed to reflect the declining fortunes of the country he led. During public appearances, he would often stumble, and his speeches were punctuated by long, inexplicable pauses -- even when he had the text in front of him.

     

    Russians expected another halting speech on New Year's Eve 1999, but he stunned the nation and the world with his resignation -- having given no hint that he would ever give in to calls that he step down before his second term was up in spring 2000. He named his last prime minister, former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, acting president -- giving him a huge incumbent's advantage over any would-be challengers.

     

    "Russia must enter the new millennium with new politicians, with new faces, with new, smart, strong, energetic people," Yeltsin said.

     

    "And we who have been in power for many years already, we must go."

     

    After his dramatic exit, Yeltsin appeared rarely in public -- popping up now and again at an official ceremony, holiday reception or tennis tournament. He traveled several times to China for what were described as health-boosting trips, and he looked fitter in retirement than he had in years.

     

    Yeltsin met about once a month with Putin, usually at his dacha in Barvikha outside Moscow, he told an interviewer with Russian state television on the second anniversary of his resignation. He said he felt stronger than during the presidency, less weighed down by stress, and never regretted his abrupt departure. He felt certain that the reforms he championed would continue under Putin, he said.

     

    "If I had doubts that the reforms might be reversed, I would not have resigned," Yeltsin said.

    http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/04/23...n.ap/index.html

  14. Posted · Report reply

    According to Newt Gingrich & Rush Limbaugh, this is all liberals' fault.

     

    I was going to make a facetious comment about how either of those 2 could basically politicize anything, even the most trivial inconvenience, but every example I thought of was followed by a theory of how it could actually be done.

  15. Posted · Report reply

    In retrospect, given what happened this week, don't we all feel stupid for paying any attention at all to something this trivial? Its pretty sad that it took something as horrible as a campus massacre to remind us that Don Imus and Anna Nicole Smith really don't mean shit in the big scheme of things.

  16. Posted · Report reply

    Turkey's army chief said Thursday the military had launched several ''large scale'' offensives against rebels in the predominantly Kurdish southeast, and he asked the government for approval to launch an incursion into neighboring northern Iraq...

     

    On Monday, the Turkish government demanded again that U.S. and Iraqi officials crack down on guerrillas from the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.

     

    ''An operation into Iraq is necessary,'' said Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, the head of Turkey's powerful military. ''The PKK has huge freedom of movement in Iraq ... It has spread its roots in Iraq.''

    New York Times

     

     

    Shit.

    Jesus Christ.

    Son of a bitch.

  21. Posted · Report reply

    I'm pretty irrated with all of the coverage its been getting. MSNBC is treating this story like Watergate or something, by giving it the big banner at the top of their their website and devoting huge portions of their evening programming to covering his suspension.

     

    "OH MY GOD A MIDDLE-AGED WHITE MAN SAID SOMETHING RACIST!!!!!"

  24. Posted · Report reply

    There's a very practical reason why sex is supressed. My assumption is that consenting adults should be allowed to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own homes, but that assumption is based on the idea that adults are responsible for their own actions and would have to face the consequences if they behaved in a dangerous way. Parents are legally responsible for children's well-being, and because of their emotional development, are usually too immature to deal responsibly with sex until they are adults.

  25. Posted · Report reply

    We usually don't treat criminal like they treated their victims. It'd be hypocritical for us to say it was okay to do to them what they did to others. Even in death penalty cases, we still have a trial to prove their guilt and then multiple chances for appeals. The law treats people how they should be treated, not how they actually treated others. I cannot answer as to whether or not murderers can be rehabilitated, but I disagree with the idea that criminals should be treated a certain way because that's how their victims were treated.

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