Posted inCurrent affairs Entertainment

PETA now has a XXX web site. It’s animalistic!

Way to go, PETA. You're making good use of the new .xxx domain option with www.peta.xxx Personally, I wasn't turned on by seeing porn star Ron Jeremy featured on the home page, but my male eyes quickly turned leftward (natural for me) to an image of Sasha Grey -- another former porn star who supports the animal side of both humans and animals. PETA enticed my throbbing attention deeper into the site with... PETA is not new to the world of adult entertainment. In fact, we've been collaborating with some of the most legendary XXX stars for years. Thanks to…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Wisconsin recall election disappointing — but everything will be all right

What goes up, comes down. A loss today often presages a win tomorrow. The only certainty in politics is that nothing is certain. I'd hoped Governor Scott Walker would lose today's Wisconsin recall election, but polling showed that the prospects of this happening were low. His win is disappointing to me, not depressing.  I feel for the legions of hard-working progressives in Wisconsin who worked long and hard to recall Walker, collecting more than a million signatures. After subscribing to the Twitter feed of Wisconsin activist Kelly Steele, every day I enjoyed reading his passionate tweets about the ups and downs…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Sustainability

I’m not worried about Southern Oregon land use pilot program

The headline in today's Salem Statesman Journal story said, "Pilot program loosens grip on land use plans." Subhead: "Door opened for southern Oregon counties." Well, yeah. But the door isn't open very far.  As I noted in a blog post last March, Governor Kitzhaber's executive order and the legislature's appropriation of $550,000 to support regional land use planning looks to me a lot more like political expediency than a significant policy shift. So if HB 4095 was unnecessary and didn't even get a hearing in the joint Ways and Means Committee, why was $550,000 in general fund taxpayer money allocated…
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Posted inSalem

Salem “cougar” is almost certainly a cat

Lock the doors! Keep children inside! Armor up your Chihuahuas! A cougar has been spotted in a south Salem residential area! Except... the animal almost certainly is a cat, notwithstanding the uncritical acceptance of the cougar sighting by Statesman Journal reporter Dan Bender. (Note to Bender: "sighting" is when you see something; "siting," the word you used, is when something is positioned somewhere.) This is a real cougar. This is the "cougar" spotted lying on some groundcover during daytime in the backyard of a south Salem home. Comments on the KATU story are decidedly (and appropriately) skeptical about this animal…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Weak jobs report points to Republican failings

Not as many jobs were created in May, 2012 as were expected. This is bad news for the unemployed. But Obama isn't to blame, notwithstanding Republican glee over the misery of Americans without a job. As I noted before, the question to ask is whether the United States is better off after the past several years of Republican obstructionism, where the #1 goal of the G.O.P. has been to stop Obama from winning a second term. So it doesn't make sense to blame Obama for a weak recovery, since after the 2010 election he hasn't been able to get key…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Writing/Weblogs

Reality is respected on this here blog

Reality is a wonderful thing. Actually, the only thing. Show me something that isn't real, and I'll say "You've shown me nothing." And that's what some commenters on this blog want to do: pretend they've got a fact in their hand when all they possess is an empty palm of subjectivity.  Which, I'll admit, is something real. But reality comes in two main varieties, communal/objective and individual/subjective. Both are wonderful, admirable, essential, inescapable. It's when an attempt is made to pass off one as the other that I, as moderator of this blog, rule "No way!" Global warming and Obama's…
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