spooky_nine

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS 5) ― A federal judge has ruled that California's voter-approved same-sex marriage ban, known as Propostion 8, doesn't pass scrutiny under the U.S. Constitution because it violates the 14th Amendment.

Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that the measure banning same-sex marriage is "unconstitutional under both the due process and equal protection clauses."

Gay rights advocates were quick to hail the decision.

"This ruling is an historic milestone for millions of loving families, for all who have fought to realize the dream of equality under the law, and for our nation as a whole," said Rick Jacobs, spokesman for the Courage Campaign, a gay and lesbian rights organization.

But Walker 's decision issued Wednesday afternoon is only the first word in the landmark case.

Attorneys on both sides had said an appeal was certain if Walker did not rule in their favor. The case would go first to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals then the U.S. Supreme Court if the high court justices agree to review it

Walker's ruling comes in response to a lawsuit brought by two same-sex couples and the city of San Francisco that seeks to invalidate the law as an unlawful infringement on the civil rights of gay men and lesbians.

Proposition 8 outlawed gay marriages in California five months after the state Supreme Court legalized them. It passed with 52 percent of the vote in November 2008, following the most expensive campaign on a social issue in U.S. history.

Anticipating Walker's decision, lawyers for the coalition of religious and conservative groups that sponsored Proposition 8 in 2008 filed a legal brief asking Walker to stay his ruling overturning the ban so same-sex couples can not marry while an appeal is pending.

"Same-sex marriages would be licensed under a cloud of uncertainty, and should proponents succeed on appeal, any such marriages would be invalid," they wrote.

Walker presided over a 13-day trial earlier this year that was the first in federal court to examine if states can prohibit gays from getting married without violating the federal constitutional guarantee of equality.

Supporters argued the ban was necessary to safeguard the traditional understanding of marriage and to encourage responsible childbearing.

Opponents said that tradition or fears of harm to heterosexual unions were legally insufficient grounds to discriminate against gay couples.

renegade_mime

Blizzard has indicated that it does not care to hear women's feedback on the game. I suppose that makes sense, as its target demographic is young adult males.

I didn't cancel my account because without posting on the forums, I wouldn't enjoy WoW. Of course I'd still enjoy the game. I cancelled my account because Blizzard's new "if you're afraid for your security, just don't speak up" policy. The forums are our only voice, our only place to make suggestions and have conversations and get clarifications and be heard by Blizzard. Telling people that if they're worried about their safety, they shouldn't participate, shouldn't make their voices heard, should sit down, shut up, and leave the public space to those who don't have to worry about it, well, that makes me rage.

It's like telling black men living in fear of the Ku Klux Klan that they should just not go to the voting booth today.

It's like telling a battered wife that she should just shut up so that her husband is less likely to hit her.

It's like telling Islamic women that if it's dangerous for them to go outside alone, they should sit inside, rather than trying to change anything.

And ultimately, it will lead to victim blaming.

When this system is implemented, and some poor woman is !!@%d or killed, and her !%@%##/killer was able to track her down based upon her name posted on a Blizzard forum - Blizzard is going to release a press release. It's going to say, that what happened to this woman is unfortunate, but it is up to the user to safeguard their internet privay. The internet community at large is going to agree. She should have known better than to be a woman on Blizzard forums. %@#!* had it coming.

And then something in me will snap. RAGE. I play a warrior for a reason.

And that is why I have cancelled my account.

Just six more weeks of paid time left.

An ad campaign for pro-assisted suicide group DignityInDeath.com features a series of park bench plaques telling stories of now-deceased people whose lives, it suggests, may not have been worth prolonging. One plaque is dedicated "to the glory of Kathleen (Kay) Mandell, who at age 32 was stricken by Lou Gehrig's disease that caused her muscles to waste away, one by one, until her throat paralysed and she choked to death while fully conscious."

The Texas Board of Education will vote this week on a new science curriculum designed to challenge the guiding principle of evolution, a step that could influence what is taught in biology classes across the nation.

The proposed curriculum change would prompt teachers to raise doubts that all life on Earth is descended from common ancestry. Texas is such a huge textbook market that many publishers write to the state's standards, then market those books nationwide.

"This is the most specific assault I've seen against evolution and modern science," said Steven Newton, a project director at the National Center for Science Education, which promotes teaching of evolution.

Texas school board chairman Don McLeroy also sees the curriculum as a landmark -- but a positive one.
Dr. McLeroy believes that God created the earth less than 10,000 years ago. If the new curriculum passes, he says he will insist that high-school biology textbooks point out specific aspects of the fossil record that, in his view, undermine the theory that all life on Earth is descended from primitive scraps of genetic material that first emerged in the primordial muck about 3.9 billion years ago.

He also wants the texts to make the case that individual cells are far too complex to have evolved by chance mutation and natural selection, an argument popular with those who believe an intelligent designer created the universe.

The textbooks will "have to say that there's a problem with evolution -- because there is," said Dr. McLeroy, a dentist. "We need to be honest with the kids."

The vast majority of scientists accept evolution as the best explanation for the diversity of life on earth.

Yes, they say, there are unanswered questions -- transitional fossils yet to be unearthed, biological processes still to be discovered. There is lively scientific debate about some aspects of evolution's winding, four-billion-year path. But when critics talk about exposing students to the "weaknesses" or "insufficiencies" in evolutionary theory, many mainstream scientists cringe.

The fossil record clearly supports evolution, they say, and students shouldn't be exposed to creationist critiques in the name of "critical thinking."

"We will be teaching nonsense in the science classroom," said David Hillis, a biology professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Polls show many Americans are skeptical of or confused by evolution; in a recent survey by Gallup, 39% said they believe the theory, 25% said they didn't, and 36% had no opinion.

The Discovery Institute, a Seattle think tank that challenges evolution, cites a recent Zogby poll that found a strong majority of Americans supports letting teachers explore both "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution. Otherwise, students see only "cherry-picked evidence that really amounts to propaganda," said John West, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.

The Texas school board will vote after taking public testimony in a three-day meeting that starts Wednesday. Dr. McLeroy leads a group of seven social conservatives on the 15-member board. They are opposed by a bipartisan group of seven, often joined by an eighth board member considered a swing vote, that support teaching evolution without caveats.

Neither side is confident of victory. All members of the board have come under enormous pressure in recent months, especially three Republicans who support teaching evolution without references to "weaknesses." The state Republican Party passed a resolution urging the three to back Dr. McLeroy's preferred curriculum. A conservative activist group put out a news release suggesting all three were in the pocket of "militant Darwinists."

One of the three, former social-studies teacher Pat Hardy, said she has received thousands of impassioned calls and emails.

Ms. Hardy says she intends to stand firm for evolution, but she has learned not to predict what her colleagues might do. Curriculum standards critical of evolution won preliminary approval in January, but several board members said later that they hadn't understood the issues.

"Anything can happen," Ms. Hardy said.

(CNN) -- The British soldiers who were killed in Northern Ireland over the weekend had already packed their bags for Afghanistan and changed into desert uniforms when they were shot, a top British military officer said Monday.

"Some of them decided to order a final takeaway pizza before they departed," Brigadier George Norton said from the base where they were killed.

"It was then that the brutal attack took place. They were off duty, they were unarmed and they were dressed in desert combats to deploy overseas."

Two men with automatic rifles shot the soldiers as the pizzas arrived, authorities said. Two other soldiers and the two pizza deliverymen were seriously wounded.

The Ministry of Defence identified them Monday as Cengiz Azimkar, 21, and Mark Quinsey, 23.

The two soldiers are the first British troops to be killed in the province in more than 12 years, the Ministry of Defense confirmed, and the shooting has sparked fears of a return to the sectarian violence that Northern Ireland suffered for two decades before that.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A top congressional Republican on Sunday criticized President Barack Obama's expected decision to reverse the Bush administration's limits on embryonic stem-cell research, calling it a distraction from the country's economic slump.

"Why are we going and distracting ourselves from the economy? This is job No. 1. Let's focus on what needs to be done," Rep. Eric Cantor, the Republican whip in the House of Representatives, told CNN's "State of the Union."

Obama's move, scheduled for Monday morning, is part of a broader effort to separate science and politics and "restore scientific integrity in governmental decision-making," White House domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes said Sunday. The Bush administration's 2001 policy bars federal funding for research on embryonic stem cells beyond the cell lines that existed at the time.

Cantor, R-Virginia, has been among the leaders of GOP opposition to Obama's economic policies.

In a conference call with reporters, Barnes said funding research is also part of the administration's plan to boost the plunging U.S. economy.

"Advances with regard to science and technology help advance our overall national goals around economic growth and job creation," she said, adding, "I think anytime you make an effort to try and separate these pieces of the puzzle, you're missing the entire picture."

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- NASA's launch of the Mars Science Laboratory -- hampered by technical difficulties and cost overruns -- has been delayed until the fall of 2011, NASA officials said at a news conference Thursday in Washington.

The mission had been scheduled for launch in the fall of 2009.

The Mars Science Lab is a large, nuclear-powered rover designed to traverse long distances with a suite of onboard scientific instruments aboard.

It is, according to NASA's Web site, part of a "long-term effort of robotic exploration" established to "study the early environmental history of Mars" and assess whether Mars has ever been -- or still is -- able to sustain life.

The delay of the launch, according to NASA, is due to a number of "testing and hardware challenges that must (still) be addressed to ensure mission success."

"The progress in recent weeks has not come fast enough on solving technical challenges and pulling hardware together," said Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Changing to a 2011 launch "will allow for careful resolution of any remaining technical problems, proper and thorough testing, and avoid a mad dash to launch," argued NASA Associate Administrator Ed Weiler.
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The overall cost of the Mars Science Lab is now projected to be roughly $2.1 billion, according to NASA spokesman Dwayne Browne. The project originally carried a price tag of $1.6 billion.

REYKJAVIK, Iceland (AP) — Iceland is set to appoint the world's first openly gay woman as interim prime minister — a former flight attendant who rose through the political ranks to become a cabinet minister.

Johanna Sigurdardottir, the island nation's 66-year-old social affairs minister, is the pick of the Social Democratic Alliance Party to lead an interm government.

Iceland's conservative-led government failed Monday, after the country's banks collapsed in the fall under the weight of huge debts amassed during years of rapid economic growth. The country's currency has plummeted, while inflation and unemployment are soaring.

Sigurdardottir's appointment is expected to be confirmed within days by the new ruling coalition of the Alliance party and the Left-Green movement. She would lead Iceland until general elections, expected in May.

"She is a senior parliamentarian, she is respected and loved by all of Iceland," said Environment Minister Thorunn Sveinbjarnardottir, a fellow Alliance party member.

But conservative critics say her leftist political leanings are not going to help fix the economy. "Johanna is a very good woman — but she likes public spending, she is a tax raiser," said Geir Haarde, who quit as prime minister Monday, partly for health reasons.

Sigurdardottir faces the difficult task of repairing the nation's shattered economy and rebuilding public trust in government. Icelanders are deeply angry at their government for not reining in the country's banks and leading the once-prosperous nation into an economic nightmare.

Iceland has negotiated about $10 billion in bailout loans from the International Monetary Fund and individual countries to keep itself afloat but long-term solutions for re-building the economy have been unclear.

The IMF predicts Iceland's economy is facing its biggest slump since the country won full independence from Denmark in 1944. Millions are also owed to depositors around the world.

Sigurdardottir entered politics through the labor movement, serving as a labor organizer when she worked as a flight attendant with Loftleidir Airlines — now Icelandair — in the 1960s and 1970s.

She was first elected to Iceland's parliament in 1978. She became a minister in 1987 and has held her current post since 1999. Despite her veteran status, many Icelanders regard her as a maverick and respect her work promoting the welfare of minority groups.

She is perhaps best known for her reaction to a failed bid to become chairman of the Social Democratic Party — a forerunner of the current Social Democratic Alliance Party — in 1994. Despite a heavy loss, Sigurdardottir predicted: "My time will come."

In 1995, she quit the Social Democrats and formed her own party, Tjodvaki — translated as "Waking The Nation" — which won four parliamentary seats. Sigurdardottir later rejoined her old party when it merged with three other center-left groups in 1999 and 2000.

While a woman has served in the largely symbolic role of president, Sigurdardottir would become the country's first woman prime minister.

She lives with journalist Jonina Leosdottir, who became her civil partner in a ceremony in 2002. Sigurdardottir was previously married to a man and has two sons.

"I'm angry at having presided over the first genocide of the 21st century," said Mukesh Kapila, a British doctor and former U.N. official.

He was referring to what he considers the world's ineffective response to mass atrocities in Darfur, Sudan's western region.

"What happened in Darfur would be classified as obscene," he told CNN's Christiane Amanpour. "It's a combination of a horror movie and a snuff movie."

Kapila was the United Nations' top official in Sudan. He took up his post as resident and humanitarian coordinator in 2003, just a few months after rebels from Darfur's African tribes attacked outposts of Sudan's government, which is led by Arabs.

The government's retaliation was so harsh that a U.N. human rights monitor issued a prophetic warning. His March 2003 report said that in the "escalating conflict," Sudan's government may be "engaged in ... ethnic cleansing aimed at eliminating African tribes from Darfur."

Unfortunately, Kapila says, the report "disappeared into a big hole" because the world's attention was on Iraq, where a U.S.-led coalition had gone to war to topple Saddam Hussein's regime.

Since 2003, according to U.N. estimates, 300,000 Darfuris have been killed in the violence or died in the ensuing disease and starvation. Another 2.5 million have been uprooted from their homes.

Kapila says it didn't have to be, and the man who was his boss at the time agrees.

"The most bitter lesson of Darfur," said Jan Egeland, former U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, "is that the world let a small conflict slowly but surely degenerate into a full-blown catastrophe."

As reports of atrocities mounted in late 2003 and into 2004, Kapila and Egeland saw a pattern: Sudanese forces and government-armed Arab militia members known as janjaweed ("devils on horseback") were using scorched-earth tactics against civilians from Darfur's African tribes. They burned villages, poisoned wells and raped women and girls, according to reports from U.N. workers and aid groups.

Sudan claims that its forces were only putting down an armed insurrection.

"I think the problems which have been happening in Darfur are problems which can be happening in any place of the world where there is a war," Sudanese Interior Minister Ibrahim Hamid said. "There are crimes, but it's not like what has been reflected in the international media."

But that's not what Kapila was hearing. He kept getting reports of more Darfuris killed or driven from their land and Arabs talking about making Darfur "zurka-free" -- "zurka" being a derogatory term for blacks.

Unlike cyclones and earthquakes, the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Darfur was man-made, so Kapila and Egeland began a crusade to get Darfur onto the U.N. Security Council's agenda. They knew from experience that getting an issue in front of the Security Council brings, as Egeland says, three things: "attention, attention, attention."

Both Egeland and Kapila approached Western governments but came away disappointed because most diplomats were focused on resolving another conflict, in southern Sudan, which had claimed 2 million lives over 20 years.

The international community did respond with an emergency relief operation for the growing number of refugees who were running for their lives. But Kapila and Egeland wanted more. They believed that Darfur was not only a humanitarian crisis but also a human rights crisis that required action from the U.N. Security Council.

Out of frustration, Kapila went outside proper channels and screamed to the media. In a March 2004 interview with BBC Radio, Kapila compared the situation in Darfur to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

His comments, which Sudan called a "heap of lies," were picked up by newspapers around the world. Kapila so angered the host government in Khartoum that he had to resign his post.

Even after the Security Council put Darfur on the agenda, it would take three more years of resolutions and debate to authorize a large U.N. peacekeeping force. China, which has veto power on the Security Council and extensive commercial and military ties to the government of Sudan, was one of the major obstacles to taking decisive action.

But as conditions in Darfur became more widely known, a grass-roots movement began to grow, putting pressure on the White House and a spotlight on the U.N. Security Council. According to Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, "no other tragedy since 1945 has caught the imagination of so many people as Darfur has."

Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and President Bush characterized the killing in Darfur as "genocide." Human rights groups documented China's strong ties to Sudan. And activists, including actress Mia Farrow and other celebrities, campaigned to tag the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics as the "genocide Olympics."

Over time and under pressure, Chinese diplomats helped persuade Sudan to accept a U.N.-led peacekeeping force with the understanding that many of the troops would come from African countries.

Would earlier action by the Security Council have made a difference? "Yes," Egeland said. "We would have kept it to a medium-sized African disaster. Not this mega-disaster. It could have been stopped when it was a small emergency."

In July, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court applied for a warrant to arrest Sudan's president, Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Sudan denies the charges and has promised to punish anyone who has attacked innocent civilians.

In recent days, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK), has begun referring to Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) as “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” referring to his proposed tax plan that would provide greater tax relief for lower income individuals than those with higher incomes. Obama recently explained his support for progressive taxation, saying, “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

Palin contends that Obama’s characterization of his tax plan revealed him to be a “socialist” who wants to “redistribute” American wealth. Palin argues that the Obama tax plan “discourages productivity,” will “punish hardwork,” and will “stifle the entrepreneurial spirit.”

Watch a compilation of Palin’s recent comments about the Obama tax plan:

Conservatives in the media have echoed Palin’s sentiments, insinuating that Obama is a “Marxist” and referring to his tax plan as “welfare.”

But Palin’s criticisms of Obama’s “spread the wealth” remarks are ironic, as she recently characterized Alaska’s tax code in a very similar way. Just last month, in an interview with Philip Gourevitch of the New Yorker, Palin explained the windfall profits tax that she imposed on the oil industry in Alaska as a mechanism for ensuring that Alaskans “share in the wealth” generated by oil companies:

"And Alaska—we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs. … It’s to maximize benefits for Alaskans, not an individual company, not some multinational somewhere, but for Alaskans."

In fact, Alaska’s Clear and Equitable Share (ACES) program, which manages the redistribution of oil wealth in Alaska, brings in so much money that the state needs no income or sales tax. In addition, this year ACES will provide every Alaskan with a check for an estimated $3,200.

As Hendrick Hertzberg notes, “Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it…but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.”

ANCHORAGE -- Soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska, she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago -- about 65 million years after scientists say most dinosaurs became extinct -- the teacher said.

After conducting a college band and watching Palin deliver a commencement address to a small group of home-schooled students in June 1997, Wasilla resident Philip Munger said, he asked the young mayor about her religious beliefs.

Palin told him that "dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time," Munger said. When he asked her about prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin said "she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks," recalled Munger, who teaches music at the University of Alaska in Anchorage and has regularly criticized Palin in recent years on his liberal political blog, called Progressive Alaska.

The idea of a "young Earth" -- that God created the Earth about 6,000 years ago, and dinosaurs and humans coexisted early on -- is a popular strain of creationism.

The era of tax-free e-mail, Internet shopping and broadband connections could end this fall, if recent proposals in the U.S. Congress prove successful.

State and local governments this week resumed a push to lobby Congress for far-reaching changes on two different fronts: gaining the ability to impose sales taxes on Net shopping, and being able to levy new monthly taxes on DSL and other connections. One senator is even predicting taxes on e-mail.

At the moment, states and municipalities are frequently barred by federal law from collecting both access and sales taxes. But they're hoping that their new lobbying effort, coordinated by groups including the National Governors Association, will pay off by permitting them to collect billions of dollars in new revenue by next year.

If that doesn't happen, other taxes may zoom upward instead, warned Sen. Michael Enzi, a Wyoming Republican, at a Senate hearing on Wednesday. "Are we implicitly blessing a situation where states are forced to raise other taxes, such as income or property taxes, to offset the growing loss of sales tax revenue?" Enzi said. "I want to avoid that."

A flurry of proposals that pro-tax advocates advanced this week push in that direction. On Tuesday, Enzi introduced a bill that would usher in mandatory sales tax collection for Internet purchases. Second, during a House of Representatives hearing the same day, politicians weighed whether to let a temporary ban on Net access taxes lapse when it expires on November 1. A House backer of another pro-sales tax bill said this week to expect a final version by July.

"The independent and sovereign authority of states to develop their own revenue systems is a basic tenet of self government and our federal system," said David Quam, director of federal relations at the National Governors Association, during a Senate Commerce committee hearing on Wednesday.

Internet sales taxes
At the moment, for instance, Seattle-based Amazon.com is not required to collect sales taxes on shipments to millions of its customers in states like California, where Amazon has no offices. (Californians are supposed to voluntarily pay the tax owed when filing annual state tax returns, but few do.)

Ideas to alter this situation hardly represent a new debate: officials from the governors' association have been pressing Congress to enact such a law for at least six years. They invoke arguments--unsuccessful so far--like saying that reduced sales tax revenue threatens budgets for schools and police.

But with Democrats now in control of both chambers of Congress, the political dynamic appears to have shifted in favor of the pro-tax advocates and their allies on Capitol Hill. The NetChoice coalition, which counts as members eBay, Yahoo and the Electronic Retailing Association and opposes the sales tax plan, fears that the partisan shift will spell trouble.
One long-standing objection to mandatory sales tax collection, which the Supreme Court in a 1992 case left up to Congress to decide, is the complexity of more than 7,500 different tax agencies that each have their own (and frequently bizarre) rules. Some legal definitions (PDF) tax Milky Way Midnight candy bars as candy and treat the original Milky Way bar as food. Peanut butter Girl Scout cookies are candy, but Thin Mints or Caramel deLites are classified as food.

The pro-tax forces say that a concept called the Streamlined Sales Tax Agreement will straighten out some of the notorious convolutions of state tax laws. Enzi's bill, introduced this week, relies on the agreement when providing "federal authorization" to require out-of-state retailers "to collect and remit the sales and use taxes" due on the purchase. (Small businesses with less than $5 million in out-of-state sales are exempted.)

It's "important to level the playing field for all retailers," Enzi said during Wednesday's hearing.