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One of the problems of a weekly publishing cycle is that a lot of political stories go cold before you go live. But dangit, I interviewed the Pro-Life Unity woman, I wasn’t going to drop that footage in the archives. So this week’s MTV piece:

(Video source/embed)

For the out-of-Georgia readers, some background:

While the goal of HR536 is ostensibly to end abortion, its definition of life at the earliest possible biological stage — and the attachment of “the inviolable right…to life” to that moment of fertilization — would effectively mean that several forms of birth control, including some hormonal pills or shots and intra-uterine devices (IUDs), which prevent implantation of the early blastocyst into the uterine wall (thus preventing pregnancy), are terminating human life. According to HB1, which also states that a “fetus is a person for all purposes under the laws of this state from the moment of conception,”

‘Abortion’ means the intentional termination of human pregnancy with an intention other than to produce a live birth or remove a dead fetus…. Such term does not include a naturally occurring expulsion of a fetus known medically as a ’spontaneous abortion’ and popularly as a ‘miscarriage’ so long as there is no human involvement whatsoever in the causation of such event.

Thus, intentionally taking or using a form of birth control which by its nature interferes with a fertilized egg, zygote, or blastocyst after “the moment of conception,” could be considered an abortion. HB1 continues,

Any person performing an abortion in this state shall be guilty of a felony and, upon conviction, shall be punished as provided in subsection (d) of Code Section 16-5-1.

Section 16-5-1 (d) applies to felony murder, punishable by death or life in prison.

And the language is open enough to leave one to ponder whether a woman who refuses to give up her morning cup of coffee and then suffers a miscarriage would be guilty of the “human involvement whatsoever in the causation” of an abortion.

Tea and cake or death! Tea and cake or death!

The Pro-Life Unity woman — a 31 year old mother of 6 who clearly enjoys defining “persons” as often as biology will allow — said this was all part of the eugenics movement that started in the 1800s to “exterminate the blacks” and the weeds of the poor classes, and it’s created a big “hole in the work force” which we don’t miss ’cause we have all them illegal aliens coming in.

See, if you’d stop aborting all the black babies, you could put them to work on the farms, I guess. Wait, what?

And of course, the real cure to the eugenics problem is to outlaw abortion so that poor women who don’t have the same access to birth control are forced to have poor babies, and not to do something about poverty so that working class women could afford birth control and afford to raise children.

I feel like the last blogger in Georgia to chime in on the ridiculous SB 59, a bill crafted by Republicans to be exactly the kind of “nanny state” they accuse Democrats of foisting, and to make the internets come to a screeching halt. Okay, not really; the internets would go on unmolested, but Georgia would be made to look even more asinine in the world of science and technology after getting its teeth kicked in by federal courts.

For my out-of-town readers, here’s the crux of the proposed law:

It shall be illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking website to allow a minor using a protected computer to create or maintain a profile web page on a social networking website without the permission of the minor’s parent or guardian and without providing such parent or guardian access to such profile web page at all times.

Right. Implausible enforcement (and Republicans thought undocumented Latinos were hard to catch?), questionable constitutionality, and general lack of a clue, all in one delicious crime.

In poking around for a little more background info to include with my pending Street Team blog post on the subject, I saw, right there on WikiPedia, what the even bigger underlying problem with this whole situation is.

Republican state Senator Cecil Staton, the Chairman of the Senate Science and Technology Committee, is a “publisher” with three advanced degrees.

A Master of Divinity and a Master of Theology (thesis: “A study of the language of theophany in the Old Testament with special reference to the niphal of [raah]”) from the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. And a Ph.D. from Oxford (yay? oh no, wait) with a dissertation titled, “‘And Yahweh appeared … ‘ : a study of the motifs of ’seeing God’ and of ‘God’s appearing’ in Old Testament narratives.”

The Reverend Staton is in charge of our science and technology legislation here in Georgia. Giddyup and pass the leeches.

From the PR Newsire this morning:

MTV Taps 51 State-Based Citizen Journalists for “Choose or Lose ‘08″

AP Online Video Network & Top Mobile Carriers to Distribute Weekly “Street Team ‘08″ Reports

Knight Foundation Grant Helps Power Mobile Media Election Coverage Experiment

NEW YORK, Dec. 20 /PRNewswire/ — MTV, as part of its Emmy-winning “Choose or Lose” campaign (http://www.ChooseorLose.com), today unveiled “Street Team ‘08″: a specially recruited group of 51 citizen journalists — one from every state and Washington, D.C. — who will cover the 2008 elections from a youth perspective and tailor their reports for mobile devices. The members will contribute weekly, multi-media reports (short form videos, blogs, animation, photos, podcasts) that will be distributed via a soon-to-launch WAP site, MTV Mobile, Think.MTV.com and to the more than 1,800 sites in the Associated Press Online Video Network. Carefully selected by MTV after an extensive nationwide search, the one-of-a-kind press corps will be armed with mobile media like laptops, video cameras and cell phones, and charged with uncovering the untold political stories that matter most to young people in their respective states

…

The “Street Team ‘08″ program is made possible by a $700,000 Knight News Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Knight News Challenge, at http://www.newschallenge.org, is an annual worldwide competition awarding $5 million for innovative ideas that use digital media to inform and inspire communities. The Knight Foundation plans to invest at least $25 million over five years in the search for bold community news experiments.

And yes, the punchline is that I am your humble Georgia correspondent citizen journalist. So after 20 hours of online training in Adobe Creative Suite and a two-day orientation in Manhattan next month, I am charged with uncovering the untold stories here in the Peach State.

You know what this means? I mean besides the fact that I’m about to get handed a superfancy new video camera and a (Windows) laptop (please God not Vista) and will be expected to file one story every week (through video, primarily, or text and photos or podcasts or what have you), and that the real shiny stories from the Street Team will get floated up to the MTV cable networks (while the rest remain online), and meanwhile I’ll be getting even less sleep and still have a dissertation to write.

It means I need untold stories. I bet you have stories. You’ve got an issue, a non-profit organization, a candidate, a crusade that you believe in, but you’ve got no platform. Well I’ve got me a very nice platform here, but I’m a little short on causes and crusades. So let’s get your chocolate in my peanut butter, if you know what I mean.

Seriously, who the hell ever thought that was a good advertising campaign for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? And right there is a highlight of one of the first overwhelming challenges this new opportunity presents to me and a handful of other Choose or Lose Street Team members™: Gen X, meet the Millennials. I know the boundaries are pretty hazy, but I’ve seen enough birth year ranges that say I got caught in the last few years of Gen X — and the real point of the matter is that in my frame of reference, getting someone’s peanut butter on your chocolate doesn’t imply the need for prophylactics! Yet now a handful of us CoLSTM’s™, ranging from 29 to 39, are going to have to craft a message a week for an audience that knows “I has a flavor” doesn’t imply the need for prophylactics, either.

I know, that’s a terrible example. See? I can’t even come up with a hip new dirty phrase that is not a sexual euphemism. So while obviously this is all great! and yay! and I’m totally stoked! (see? do kids still say that?) and I’m fired up for this opportunity, that’s also how I’m sure a lot of new Army Rangers feel when they get pinned, and they get their shiny new gun and body armor (sometimes) and night vision goggles and it’s all great! and yay! and then Welcome to Sadr City! and the yay! kinda takes a back seat to adrenaline and trying not to poop.

A representative of the Knight Foundation, which helps fund this project, summarized our call to arms (well, cameras) thusly:

“We hope to find out whether or not our most important political event — the election of a president — matters to young people, and whether or not it matters more when it comes to them through the lens of their issues and the screen of their cell phone,” said Eric Newton, VP/Journalism, Knight Foundation.

And as if to highlight the challenge for the recipients of the Knight News Challenge Grant, MTV issued another press release to the Newswire exactly two hours later:

* The finale of “A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila” delivered a 5.9 P12-34 rating to become the highest rated series telecast on MTV since August 2005.

* For the night (8PM-11PM), “A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila” finale was the most watched telecast across all of television among P12-34, even out-delivering broadcast.

* “The Hangover” Aftershow at 11PM averaged a strong 3.6 P12-34 rating, ranking right behind the “A Shot At Love” finale as the #2 rated cable telecast for the night.

How many people do you think I’ll be able to pull in to watch my live video coverage of the Iowa caucuses? I mean, without putting on the bikini, ’cause you know it’s pretty cold in Iowa this time of year.

But seriously, send your chocolate over to my peanut butter. We’ll talk.

After the Virginia Tech shooting, Georgia Tech, like many other universities, went to work on implementing an emergency broadcast system involving email and text message alerts designed to freak people the hell out and add to the chaos. Today, we tested that system. About half an hour ago, everyone who had opted into the system got a text message:

ATLANTA CAMPUS, EMERGENCY ALERT. Evacuate campus immediately and tune to local media for additional information. To opt out reply STOP.

An email went out campus-wide as well.

In my lab, we all started milling about, making sure we were getting the same info, and gradually came to the conclusion that our work day had ended (and it had just started for some of us! shucks). But what to do next was not exactly clear. A lot of us are basically looking at bicycles and our own two feet to “evacuate,” and if the threat is some crazy emo kid with his grandpa’s guns, evacuating is not a great idea. Our labs have nice, thick doors that lock, and we have plenty of power tools and big steel rods and crap to throw at any nutcases. We can even irradiate the bastard with our mobile X-ray unit if push come to shove. “Ha ha, take that! You will get cancer someday, if you don’t kill yourself first!” So as I weaved in and out of general clusterfuck traffic, I and every other student on the street had an eye out for random commando kids while trying not to get run over by a car.

I only subjected myself to that risk because my building is also next to a giant 40-foot tank of liquid hydrogen that would probably bury us in the rubble next to our X-ray machine if it went pop. Clearly, Georgia Tech is going to have to send out a little bit more detail in future alerts. “Crazy kid with gun” = stay in the damn lab. “Bomb threat” = go the hell home.

They went with the third option in follow-up messages:

Disregard The Previous Message / To opt-out reply STOP

So we all went back to work, or pretend-work as the case may be (hi there).

Except for people in the environmental sciences building. Another message a few minutes later said

ATLANTA CAMPUS, DISREGARD PREVIOUS EMERGENCY MESSAGE TO EVACUATE CAMPUS. EVACUATION NOTICE WAS ONLY FOR THE FORD BUILDING.

Those people must be thoroughly annoyed by now.

I wonder how many people they just got to opt out?

ETA: An undergrad just raised an excellent point. Do on-campus dorms count as that part of campus that has to “evacuate” under such a vague-ass order, and if so, where the hell are they supposed to go? Something for the dorm dwellers to figure out for themselves, for sure, because Georgia Tech sure as hell ain’t gonna tell ya. I would recommend the Vortex.

Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran!

This is some seriously disturbing news from Bush’s last gasp at being relevant: U.S. has “urgent need” to outfit stealth bombers with bunker busters.

Tucked inside the White House’s $196 billion emergency funding request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is an item that has some people wondering whether the administration is preparing for military action against Iran. The item: $88 million to modify B-2 stealth bombers so they can carry a newly developed 30,000-pound bomb called the massive ordnance penetrator…. The one-line explanation for the request said it is in response to “an urgent operational need from theater commanders.”

There doesn’t appear to be any potential targets for a bomb like that in Iraq. It could potentially be used on Taliban or al Qaeda hideouts in the caves along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but there would be no need to use a stealth bomber there. So where would the military use a stealth bomber armed with a 30,000-pound bomb like this? Defense analysts say the most likely target for this bomb would be Iran’s flagship nuclear facility in Natanz, which is both heavily fortified and deeply buried.

Hooray.

My boy Joe got a little ornery on a question or two last night during the 715th Democratic debate on MSNBC, and with good reason. Firstly, the reliable ol’ Dodd clock shows that Biden, the smartest foreign policy guy on the stage, barely edged past Dennis Kucinich (by one second — that’s within measurement scatter) to come in third-to-last on talk time, which is astounding for a guy known widely for wordiness.

That may be an excusable sin in the eyes of those of you concerned primarily with domestic concerns like health care and, um, well, okay health care. But guess what else happened yesterday? In a classic congressional dance of one-step-forward-one-step-back, two amendments were passed in the Senate that opened doors to closing one war down while gearing up for a new one.

With solid bipartisan support, Joe Biden’s long-standing argument — that a political solution in Iraq (which will hopefully allow us to draw down forces without leaving the country in flames, unlike Richardson’s plan to run like hell and hope for the best) will most likely succeed with a loose federal government (as their constitution actually calls for) — finally took legislative form with the passage of his amendment. Co-sponsored by Sam Brownback (R-KS), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Arlen Specter (R-PA), John Kerry (D-MA), Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX), and five others, the amendment passed 75-23, with Barack Obama deciding he was too sick to participate in the first serious policy-based refutation of George Bush’s pipe dream that we can flip this Iraqi house by remodeling it in our own image.

Republican Senator John Warner, instrumental and influential in almost all things related to Iraq, called the vote an “extraordinary moment because it marks the high-water mark of all the many debates and resolutions we’ve had in terms of bipartisanship.”

Sounds like the accomplishment of someone who can move into the White House and actually get things done with support from both parties, doesn’t it? Someone unencumbered by the baggage of the past, perhaps?

It was a touchy moment when Biden brought up the dark side of the Clinton legacy, but time is running out as we round the bend into the home-stretch of campaigning for January, and the second tier candidates have to start making some noise to get any attention from those of you who seem to have failed basic math or just live by the Book of Armaments: “Four shalt thou not count…five is right out.” Yes, Hillary Clinton is smart, she is a fighter, and God knows the Clinton political machine is a juggernaut unlike any in our time. Her primary lead seems unassailable, and I’m sure she will wage a brutal and effective campaign against any Republican they throw at her. And she just may defy the odds, defeating the armies of conservatives driven to the polls just to vote against another Clinton, and take the White House. But then what? What will the second Clinton White House achieve once 48-49% of Congress is too busy poking needles into voodoo dolls of her to show up for a conference committee? Like Biden said, it isn’t fair that Hillary gets stuck with that baggage because of the past, but that’s reality.

“There’s a lot of very good things that come with all the great things that President Clinton did, but there’s also a lot of the old stuff that comes back,” Biden said. “When I say old stuff, I’m referring to policy — policy.”

[It] was Biden’s remark that laid bare a central quandary about Hillary Clinton’s candidacy: whether she can justifiably take credit for her husband’s successes while sidestepping the controversies and lingering questions that make some voters wary of another Clinton presidency.

Joe had to clarify with “policy — policy,” because he’s asking for your vote and no one wants to offend anyone on stage like that; I don’t have such reservations, however, and you should be smarter than that, too. We all know that it ain’t just in Bill’s policies, it’s in his pants, like it or lump it, not to mention eyebrow-raising campaign finance skirmishes and personnel shakeups. And to put it quite simply, for me anyway: why does being First Lady count so damn much as a reason to put someone in the White House? And since when did we become a monarchy, ruled term-in and term-out by members of the same two families?

Well, if she does wind up our next president, yesterday’s step forward on Iraq was met with a step back on Iran in a vote that might give y’all some indication of where the next Clinton White House’s foreign policy priorities will be. As if to balance out the positive stand against the president on Iraq, Clinton and 75 other senators who have no clue how Iran works voted to label part of a foreign sovereign government a terrorist organization, in a move Senator Jim Webb called “Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream.” John Edwards was right to suggest that this shows Clinton learned nothing from the mistake of giving Bush the authority to use military force in Iraq.

Yes, it is true that Iran, through the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, is causing trouble in Iraq by training and arming Shia militia in its own foreign policy whim that, when you really try to be objective about it, isn’t any more deplorable than the things the United States did throughout the Cold War in Central America. Yesterday’s move is therefore about as diplomatically tenable as it would have been had the Soviet Union declared the CIA a terrorist organization. Iran is already on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terror; they are already under the decade-old ham-handed ILSA sanctions. We still have conventional tools of statecraft to confront Iran for objectionable military misadventures without trying to dissect what is a mind-boggling matrix of a government that is almost impossible to treat like it bears any resemblance to our neat-and-tidy Western org charts; trying reading a book, senators.

And more importantly, we still have ways to deal with Iran without laying the first cornerstone for another neocon argument for war in the Middle East. But if you all want to nominate us a president who’s cool with going along with that just because you’re fond of the happy memories of her last name, go right ahead then. I’ll try not to hold it against you when the fit hits the shan.

Like bookends on a week of stupid, MIT tries to one-up UF.

While quite possibly as stupid as Andrew Meyer is nuts, Star Simpson was wise enough to comply with law enforcement.

Shame, ’cause I’m already bored with YouTube again.

In the age of instant news, I still can’t get news fast enough. When I walked the dog before work, there were 5 or 6 police cruisers stationed along Charles Allen Drive at Greenwood, and the cops were out on foot, stopping traffic in both directions to take a peek into back seats, cargo holds, and trunks. They didn’t seem particularly tense or anything, and for much of the time they were actually kind of goofing off until another car approached.

That was almost six hours ago, and I still can’t find any WTF about it on the local news websites. There really ought to be an easier way to find out (apart from, you know, walking up to a bunch of cops enforcing a checkpoint while you have a coffee in one hand and a bag of dog poo in the other) why your neighborhood went into lockdown.

And I really need to get a new cellphone with a better camera, because this is completely unintelligible.

Yet I embed it anyway.

Well it seems that scores of DragonConners are back at home and returning to the daily grind — or at least, showing up near the daily grind, and then procrastinating the return to the work week by Googling for coverage of their weekend adventures. Thus, it should be no surprise that this morning’s traffic spike on the ol’ blog is coming from http://www.google.com/search?q=dragoncon 2007.

Only one fantasy procrastinator today has bothered to refine his Googling beyond “dragoncon 2007 pics” or “dragoncon 2007 video” in order to uh, get to the meat of the matter.

Only one guy showed up looking for “dragoncon 2007 cleavage.”

That guy works at NASA.

May the force be with him.