Some positive developments this week in two ongoing Mississippi stories I’ve been covering. First, the Mississippi Court of Appeals has rejected the state’s motion for a rehearing in the Cory Maye case. Maye was convicted of capital murder for killing a police officer who broke into his home during a 2001 drug raid.
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Good News From Mississippi
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Appearing on Real Time With Bill Maher , amateur Latin America scholar Sean Penn details his recent humanitarian trip to Haiti, reveals that he has started an NGO, and praises the United States military’s reconstruction efforts in Port-au-Prince, calling it the “most noble [military] mission since World War II.” (Penn has apparently forgotten the 2004 operation to provide relief to parts of tsunami-ravaged South Asia.) But as is his wont, Penn couldn’t get through the interview without reference to the beneficent Venezuelan and Cuban governments (who supplied “narcotics” in Haiti, despite their own drug shortages) and how Hugo Chavez is unfairly maligned in the United States media. How should one combat this misinformation campaign?

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Sean Penn Wants Me Thrown In Jail
Now run my health care! Aren’t there a coupla wars going on? A financial crisis? Health-care debates

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Thank God The FCC is Finally Looking Into Dr. Phil’s 2006 Show About Masturbation!
Yesterday, I blogged about the president of the U.K.’s National Federation of Fish Fryers, who found new bureaucratic guidelines about the width of chips “totally unfair,” and thus demanded that their competitors get screwed , too: ‘We will be opposing this as much as we can until they make it a level playing field and start asking McDonald’s, KFC and Burger King to change their chip sizes too.’ Today brings a new installment of the convince-government-punish-your-competitors sweepstakes, this one in the U.S. of A.

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DVD Rental Kiosks Are Corrupting the Children Hurting My Business
By now the observation that Saturday Night Live has made the full switcheroo from anti-establishment bomb-thrower to establishment chin-tickler is nearly as old (and unfunny!) as the show itself. But this week’s ” Funny or Die ” Internet sensation, in which multiple generations of Not Ready for Prime Time presidential impersonators all gather around a conscience-plagued Fred Armistead-as-Barack-Obama to give him a pep talk about (I’m not making this up) creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, is probably the perfect piece of audio-visual evidence. See for yourself: Oh, you could quibble about the laughable notion that there are “almost no regulations” on banks and credit card companies , or that George W.
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Michael O’Donoghue Is Plunging Steel Needles into His Eyes From the Grave
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinski,” declared [youtube alert] President Bill Clinton back in the prelapsarian 1990s. It turns out that the former chief executive may have been something of a semiotician since a new survey by Indiana University researchers find Americans disagree over the meaning of “had sex.” The press release from the Kinsey Institute researchers reports: The study involved responses from 486 Indiana residents who took part in a telephone survey conducted by the Center for Survey Research at IU. Participants, mostly heterosexual, were asked, “Would you say you ‘had sex’ with someone if the most intimate behavior you engaged in was …,” followed by 14 behaviorally specific items.

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Have You “Had Sex”? Are You Sure?
Over at When Falls the Coliseum , Scott Stein notes a New York Post report that Suffolk County, New York, legislator Tom Cilmi “hopes to curb underage drinking by banning the sale of booze-themed board games, like beer pong, to minors.” Stein observes that the underage drinkers Cilmi has in mind, whom he calls “our children,” are largely 18-to-20-year-olds, “minors” who are treated as adults in virtually every other context. Even if we do not question the wisdom of the current drinking age, says Stein, Cilmi’s reasoning is hard to follow: Drinking is already against the law for people under the age of 21.

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When I Was a Boy, We Didn’t Buy Drinking Games. We Made Our Own Fun.
If you’ve been wondering where former vice president and Nobel laureate Al Gore has been hiding out during the recent Climate Crackup (or as I prefer, Klimate Krackup!!! ), wonder no more. Gore broke his silence yesterday in an op-ed of 1,896 words’ duration in Los Tiempos de Nueva York . And it turns out that even if you don’t have global warming to kick around anymore, you’ll still have to worry about shady oil sheikhs: It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it

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Al Gore Breaks Silence on Global Warming Fiascos (Fiasci?)
Al Gore says that legislation ensuring “net neutrality” is “needed for the revitalization of American democracy.” Techno-vegan Moby says without it, the “egalitarian” Internet would disappear. Even Mallory from Family Ties , Justine Bateman, thinks “the freedom to access the site of any organization from Planned Parenthood to the Christian Coalition is going to end. ” But just what the hell is net neutrality—and is all that is good and holy about the Internet really imperiled if legislation guaranteeing it isn’t passed
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Recently at Reason.tv: Net Neutrality For Dummies
I am reliably informed by consumers of old-school softcore pornography that Playboy was once, in point of fact, worth reading for the articles. Norman Mailer, P.G. Wodehouse, William F

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“Libertarian” Playboy Mag Hates Choice, Loves Authentic Communism