Friday, October 16, 2009

Anger at US mixed marriage 'ban'

I keep saying that though U.S. voters elected Obama as President, absolutely nothing else changed in America in the last twelve months...

A white US justice of the peace has been criticised for refusing to issue marriage licences to mixed-race couples.

Keith Bardwell, of Tangipahoa Parish in Louisiana, denied racism but said mixed-race children were not readily accepted by their parents' communities.

A couple he refused to marry is considering filing a complaint about him to the US Justice Department.

Mr Bardwell said he had many black friends and frequently married them.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Possible Religious Link Seen in Mystery of Runaway Goats

Are you kidding me?? This headline (above) is from the New York Times! And wait until you read paragraph one!
Another goat, the fourth in the past four months, was found wandering in the vicinity of the Hutchinson River Parkway in the Bronx over the weekend.
Another goat!? And it seems that:

The goats had baffled animal rescuers, because they were not marked in a way that indicated they were from live markets. They did not have metal tags in their ears and were not marked by spray paint.

This is because:

While the goats could have been dumped sick animals or live-market escapees, a number of neighbors have called animal-care officials to speculate that the goats might be part of the sacrificial rituals of Santeria, a religion created several centuries ago by West Africans enslaved in colonial Cuba and imported to the New York area in the 1940s.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

She's in the News...

... but she doesn't look quite like this anymore. She is United States Senator from Maine, Olympia Snowe. She is also -- alone -- the only Republican senator to vote for a crucial piece of legislation in the current Obama-inspired attempt to reform health care in America.

(NYTimes:) The Senate Finance Committee voted on Tuesday to approve legislation that would reshape the American health care system and provide subsidies to help millions of people buy insurance, as Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, joined all 13 Democrats on the panel in support of the landmark bill. The vote was 14 to 9, with all of the other Republicans opposed.
On that particular issue, Republicans are freakwently screaming about the cost of health care reform, and that Obama's plan would include artificially fixing the market to accept certain prices for prescription drugs, but no one seems to ask the same people about the cost of the Iraq war: I accept that it does not amount to much of an 'argument', but when did you last hear any sense out of a Republican?

And note this as well: the Obama-inspired reforms are a timid, weak-as-water version of the normal health care systems such as exists in the U.K. or Ireland, and so the Republicans are not even opposing universal health care or anything like it; not even one free check-up with a doctor per year -- they are opposed to making health care insurance more affordable to ordinary Americans. Republicans, of course, are extraordinary Americans.