Here's a video people should watch about ACORN. The video is basically a response to the outcry John McCain has been trying to raise about ACORN's attempt to perpetrate the greatest fraud on democracy. Those darn left-wing activists and their fradulent attempts to register masses of people the right-wing doesn't want to vote!

Sorry for not embedding it, but I'm feeling a tad too lazy to deal with that right now. Just click the link and watch it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdNgMKPV9xQ

I have to toot my college's horn here as the bearded man interviewed throughout the video graduated from my fine undergraduate institution. I did not know him personally as he was a few years ahead of me, but this will not stop me from

Unbelievable

This is just an appalling story that needs to be shared.

Customer finds racial slur on store receipt. The link includes a photo of the actual receipt. The man returned a pair of shoes after finding a cheaper pair at another store. When I worked retail, we had to fill out a little paperwork when we did a return, so I'm assuming that's what happened here. Evidently, the cashier had to input that information into the register. One of the pieces of information that showed up on the printed receipt was "Cust:". According to the receipt, the customer was "Dumb N******." Here's where it gets even worse: the store's explanation suggests that the cashier wouldn't have typed that in, s/he would have just selected one of 6 options. Surely one of the options is a manual entry, right? Otherwise the register was already programmed to spew out this possible option.

I have shopped at this mall a lot. I grew up just a few blocks and walked to that mall every weekend. I don't believe I have ever entered this particular shoe store before and I can guarantee I will not ever enter it now.

Every time I am confronted by something like this, I'm still shocked. How are we still producing people who think this crap is funny or acceptable? And who still really feel this way?

My new favorite true crime story

The headline says it all: 89 year-old charged with keeping kids' ball.

According to this news report, the woman was arrested for petty theft for refusing to return a football to the neighborhood kids after the ball landed in her yard.

We all had that yard in the neighborhood, the one that we wanted to keep away from, not cut through, and definitely not knock our balls into because the old man or woman was just too mean and would hassle us. Of course that would also then be the yard most likely to be TP'd or to have yard gnomes go missing.

Calling the cops on the lady is taking the neighborhood dispute to a whole new level.

Prison isn't a pleasant place to be. It's cement and metal, which means there's a lot of echo. There are always lights on. Where you can be is controlled 24 hours a day. When you have to get up, when you have to eat, when you can shower, all these things are decided for you. There's no real privacy. You are subject to strip searches, you have to shower in front of other people, you can't even shut out all other eyes when you go to the bathroom. No matter what sort of nice programs your prison has, no matter what lax rules it has towards what clothes you can wear or what things (like televisions or radios) you can have in your cell, no matter how good the recreation facilities and food may be, you're still locked up 24/7.

So prison sucks. We don't really need to make it as absolutely awful, dehumanizing, undignified, and wretched as we can. Yet I find an awful lot of prisons seem to go out of their way to take away as many little things as they can from inmates. I can think of no reason for this other than spite. Surely we can let individual prisoners have their own, personal underwear rather than making them wear underwear from a collective pile. I don't care how good the washing machine is; I don't want to wear underwear after it's been worn by someone else. Surely we can let them wear a real pair of shoes, not just flip flops. Surely we can let them have adequate time and tools for basic personal hygiene. Surely we can let them have some basic human contact, decent reading and education materials, maybe even a little counseling or anger management classes. Most of them will get out one day, so why not let them gain some useful tools and skills so they can have decent lives when they do get out?

Yes, most people in prison have done some bad things and deserve punishment. But being locked up inside prison is already punishment enough. Really, it is. We don't have to make it as harsh and unbearable as we possibly can. We can show inmates a little compassion and decency without being "soft on crime" and without insulting the memory of their victims or forgetting the horror of their crimes.

Once they're sentenced and incarcerated, how we choose to treat prison inmates says a lot more about us than it does about them.

John McCain and the RNC are frustrated with the way Barack Obama has funded his campaign. They fear it is the death knell for publicly-funded campaigns. They distrust his donor list because of the extraordinary number of unidentified donors (those who have given under $200). I agree this campaign may mark a turning point in the way we fund presidential campaigns in the future, but I just can't see how Obama's fundraising is a bad thing at all.

I believe the majority of my friends have donated to Obama, but in small amounts. I myself have given several times but only this weekend passed the $200 mark. They have made it easy and appealing to donate in small amounts, a little bit at a time. They have found ways to connect with students via Facebook and other similar sites. They have convinced those small donors that even $25 would help. I know when I was a broke college student, I didn't have any idea that such a small donation to a presidential campaign would do any good. But the Obama campaign has managed to convince hundreds of thousands of broke college students that all of their itty bitty donations add up to a big stockpile of cash.

Maybe it is time to revisit how tax money adds to campaign funds, but I don't think this will be the end of publicly financed campaigns. I mean, if millions of people donating small dollar amounts to a campaign isn't public financing, what is?

The worst member of Congress

Hey Michelle Bachmann: You want an investigation into the possible "Anti-American" views of any members of Congress? How about we start with you? Because suggesting that there is some set of views that are acceptable for Congress members to hold (the "pro-American" set) and another set of views that would be unacceptable (the "Anti-American" set) might be considered "Anti-American" by some.

And by suggesting that there may be "Anti-American" members of Congress, what exactly are you suggesting? Are you suggesting that those members are pursuing policies and initiatives that are detrimental to the well-being, even national security, of our country? That they are somehow actively working against our nation's best interests? Because, well, that sounds an awful lot like treason. Treason is punishable by death, so that seems like a pretty serious crime. Maybe you should think a little bit more before you start down a path of suggesting that your fellow members of Congress might be Anti-American.

And when someone asks you if you're really saying 30% of the country is "Anti-American," the only correct answer is "No." But you couldn't bring yourself to utter that simple word. Am I being "Anti-American" if I call you an extremist wackjob?

To all my Minnesota friends: could you please move to her district in the next day or two so you can vote against this nutbag?

Hey, state: When you know that the truth is one thing, but you do your absolute damndest to lead the jury to believe it is really something else, you're doing a bad thing. I don't really care how much of a "good faith basis" you can claim you have for clinging to your believe that the truth could be something else. You and I both know it isn't. I know you have personally confronted the real truth.

You were probably going to win, anyway. Was it really necessary to risk an ethics complaint and possibly run afoul of an appellate court mandate? Were you just so pissed at me for winning the first round that you had to do something to make sure I was as pissed no matter the outcome of round two?