woo hoo!

http://dailycaller.com/2012/03/22/cnn-reporter-uses-word-ngger-on-live-tv-video/

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/03/22/cnn-reporter-uses-word-ngger-on-live-tv-video/#ixzz1pu6mXbZ1 

Here's mine:

Walking to the train this morning, step in sand.  Wait, that's not sand.  It's mutherfucking concrete powder and oh yeah it's raining so actually it's just concrete.  On my shoes.  On the cuff of my pants.  What. The. Fwck.  Who just pours out concrete powder on the fwcking sidewalk?   

second, there is something very wrong with me. Why on this show do hot guys become hotter when they start up with the murdering?  Evil Alaric was smokin!   and kudos to Matt Davis-fine work there.  Fine, fine, fine.  He's just fine.

3rd-I get Sage, but I reallllly don't like her.  The whole "let me teach you how to manipulate and possibly rape your meals, instead of just perfunctorily eating from them, sweet Damon" thing last week, and then the "all girls are weak and can be manipulated" thing this week.  she's conducting her own WOW!

4th-they should burn out the kitchen in the Gilbert house and rebuild it.  I mean, it's a gorgeous room, but could it be more deadly?

5th-Caroline is awesome.  as usual.  poor sad bonnie. 

6th-Jer! i missed you!  come back! i was waiting for the scene to pan back to him gathering murdering tools after he hung up on Elena, and it didn't.  i was sad.  and Elena-communicate important *** to your brother even if you are denying him of his free will.  you are the worst sister ever.

7th-how is stefan all hot when he has bloody mouth?  that is certainly gross. not like smeared all up to his nose bloody mouth, but i just bit my own wrist bloody mouth brings out his eyes or something.

http://community.thenest.com/cs/ks/forums/thread/64457764.aspx

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/business/global/dartmouth-president-is-obamas-pick-for-world-bank.html

WASHINGTON ? The White House on Friday named Jim Yong Kim, the president of Dartmouth College and a global health expert, as its nominee to lead the World Bank.

Sibil - It would have taken everything in me not to throw a rock back.

and the Hunger Games question - I'm so excited for midnight tonight!

I'm Renata, I live in NJ, I got married in October and we have a frenchie named Fifi. I used to teach in Newark but now I'm an educational consultant so I work remotely but travel a LOT (bleh it's NOT fun).

Is there anything else I should include?

Fwiw, I fully blame beginners luck and that fact that we didn't bet any $$. If there was any dough to be won I'd be in last place.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/minnesota-teen-cant-bring-porn-star-prom-221942746--abc-news.html

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Senate wants to grill the NFL about bounties. And the NBA, NHL, NCAA and Major League Baseball are invited, too.

Sen. *** Durbin is setting up a Judiciary Committee hearing about bounties in professional football and other major sports in the wake of news that New Orleans Saints players received extra cash for hits that hurt particular opponents.

The assistant Senate majority leader, an Illinois Democrat, said Thursday he wants to examine whether federal law should make such bounty systems a crime.

"Let's be real basic about it here. If this activity were taking place off of a sporting field, away from a court, nobody would have a second thought (about whether it's wrong). 'You mean, someone paid you to go out and hurt someone?'" Durbin said in a telephone interview before raising the issue on the floor of the Senate.

"It goes way beyond the rules of any sporting contest, at least team contest, to intentionally inflict harm on another person for a financial reward," he said.

His announcement came a day after the NFL took a harsh stand on bounties, suspending Saints head coach Sean Payton for all of next season, and indefinitely banning their former defensive coordinator, Gregg Williams. Saints general manager Mickey Loomis was barred for half of 2012, an assistant coach got a six-game ban, and the team also was docked two second-round draft picks and $500,000.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell still needs to decide what penalties to give players who were involved in the Saints' scheme from 2009-11.

"I am encouraged by what the National Football League did. What they came down with as a penalty on the New Orleans Saints was decisive and historic," Durbin said, adding that he thought the league was "taking this very seriously."

But moving forward, the NFL and other leagues must "come up with standards to make sure this isn't going to happen again," he said. Otherwise, lawmakers will need to "at least explore whether it is necessary to have federal legislation in this area."

One possibility, Durbin explained, would be to extend federal sports bribery laws to cover bounties, so that "if someone offers in a team sports situation some sort of value, money or otherwise, to intentionally hurt another player, that, in fact, would be a crime."

Under the bounty system overseen in New Orleans by Williams ? who was hired in January by the St. Louis Rams ? the targeted players included quarterbacks Aaron Rodgers, Cam Newton, Brett Favre and Kurt Warner. "Knockouts" were worth $1,500 and "cart-offs" $1,000, with payments doubled or tripled for the playoffs.

According to the league, Saints defensive captain Jonathan Vilma offered $10,000 to any player who knocked then-Vikings QB Favre out of the 2010 NFC championship game.

Durbin isn't sure when the hearing will happen, but he said it could be two to three weeks from now.

http://news.yahoo.com/senator-calls-hearing-examine-bounties-nfl-181723430--spt.html 

Words escape me.

(FYI, it's a screen shot taken from toddlers and tiaras, if that helps you realize how young this girl is) 

And then I got an email asking if I knew the name of the first page of my resume was different than the name on the second. I changed the name on my resume back to my married name, but apparently forgot to change it on the header for the second page.

FML.

The Relationship School

Published: March 22, 2012

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/46829903#46829903 

Btw, my iPad wanted to correct your name to "wayward." iPad judges you.  

From a fox news interview. 

RIOS: You are doing very well among evangelicals, not so well among Catholics. I have my own theory about that, but I want to know what yours is this.

SANTORUM: I really wish I could tell you. I think the bottom line is that we do well among people who take their faith seriously, and as you know just like some Protestants, some Protestants are not church going, they are folks who identify with a particular religion but don?t necessarily practice that from the standpoint of going to church and the like, and I think, you know, with folks who do practice their religion more ardently I tend to do well.

Basically, the court (5-4) declared a right to competent counsel in plea bargains, based on the 6th amendment, not just a right to counsel.

See here: http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/missouri-v-frye/

And here: http://www.aclu.org/criminal-law-reform/lafler-v-cooper-and-missouri-v-frye-0

The basis of the case (and lafler v. cooper) is that a criminal forewent a pleabargain due to incompetent counsel. (One attorney told his client that he shouldn't take the plea because in his state, you couldn't be convicted of attempted murder if you shot someone below the waist. The defendant was convicted and sentenced to jail time which was 3 times as long as the amount of the plea offer.)

I like Nina Totenberg's reporting:

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/21/149093334/high-court-throws-out-conviction-in-bad-lawyer-case?ft=1&f=2101289

In both cases, the state conceded that the defense lawyers provided ineffective legal assistance to their clients. But the states contended that didn't matter since there is no constitutional right to a plea bargain. On Wednesday, however, the Supreme Court rejected that argument by a 5-4 vote.

But, I don't really know how this will work in the real world:

The court then went on to fashion a remedy, telling the lower courts that consistent with state law, defendants should get a second chance to accept the original offer if they can show they very likely would have done so originally, that the prosecutor would not have withdrawn the offer, and that the judge would have approved it.

Thoughts?

i'm betting they don't hire someone permanent until the end of april.  in the meantime, guess who gets to do all of her work?  i've actually already addressed it and told them that i will not be doing all of her work and the butt-scratcher in the back can spend some of his "supposed to be working in the warehouse but is instead hiding in his office bidding on star-wars stuff on ebay" time by making a couple of f*cking phone calls. 

we'll see how long that lasts.

That being said, SVU gets more and more ridiculous with each additional viewing. How in the hell can so many people manage to commit suicide or shoot their attackers, shoot other people's attackers, etc in that damned station? Is there really no security in an NYC police station? Do cops not actually serve and protect inside of the building?

Guest Post: A Doctor on Transvaginal Ultrasounds

A friend of mine is a physician who wants to speak about transvaginal ultrasounds but whose position makes it precarious to speak publicly about it. So I?m letting this doctor borrow my site for an entry to speak anonymously on the matter. Obviously, I will vouch for the doctor being a doctor and being qualified to speak on the subject.

?

Where Is The Physician Outrage?

Right. Here.

I?m speaking, of course, about the required-transvaginal-ultrasound thing that seems to be the flavor-of-the-month in politics.

I do not care what your personal politics are. I think we can all agree that my right to swing my fist ends where your face begins.

I do not feel that it is reactionary or even inaccurate to describe an unwanted, non-indicated transvaginal ultrasound as ?rape?. If I insert ANY object into ANY orifice without informed consent, it is rape. And coercion of any kind negates consent, informed or otherwise.

In all of the discussion and all of the outrage and all of the Doonesbury comics, I find it interesting that we physicians are relatively silent.

After all, it?s our hands that will supposedly be used to insert medical equipment (tools of HEALING, for the sake of all that is good and holy) into the vaginas of coerced women.

Fellow physicians, once again we are being used as tools to screw people over. This time, it?s the politicians who want to use us to implement their morally reprehensible legislation. They want to use our ultrasound machines to invade women?s bodies, and they want our hands to be at the controls. Coerced and invaded women, you have a problem with that? Blame us evil doctors. We are such deliciously silent scapegoats.

It is our responsibility, as always, to protect our patients from things that would harm them. Therefore, as physicians, it is our duty to refuse to perform a medical procedure that is not medically indicated. Any medical procedure. Whatever the pseudo-justification.

It?s time for a little old-fashioned civil disobedience.

Here are a few steps we can take as physicians to protect our patients from legislation such as this.

1) Just don?t comply. No matter how much our autonomy as physicians has been eroded, we still have control of what our hands do and do not do with a transvaginal ultrasound wand. If this legislation is completely ignored by the people who are supposed to implement it, it will soon be worth less than the paper it is written on.

2) Reinforce patient autonomy. It does not matter what a politician says. A woman is in charge of determining what does and what does not go into her body. If she WANTS a transvaginal ultrasound, fine. If it?s medically indicated, fine? have that discussion with her. We have informed consent for a reason. If she has to be forced to get a transvaginal ultrasound through coercion or overly impassioned argument or implied threats of withdrawal of care, that is NOT FINE.

Our position is to recommend medically-indicated tests and treatments that have a favorable benefit-to-harm ratio? and it is up to the patient to decide what she will and will not allow. Period. Politicians do not have any role in this process. NO ONE has a role in this process but the patient and her physician. If anyone tries to get in the way of that, it is our duty to run interference.

3) If you are forced to document a non-indicated transvaginal ultrasound because of this legislation, document that the patient refused the procedure or that it was not medically indicated. (Because both of those are true.) Hell, document that you attempted but the patient kicked you in the nose, if you have to.

4) If you are forced to enter an image of the ultrasound itself into the patient chart, ultrasound the bedsheets and enter that picture with a comment of ?poor acoustic window?. If you?re really gutsy, enter a comment of ?poor acoustic window?plus, I?m not a rapist.? (I was going to propose repeatedly entering a single identical image in affected patient?s charts nationwide, as a recognizable visual protest?but I don?t have an ultrasound image that I own to the point that I could offer it for that purpose.)

5) Do anything else you can think of to protect your patients and the integrity of the medical profession. IN THAT ORDER. We already know how vulnerable patients can be; we invisibly protect them on a daily basis from all kinds of dangers inside and outside of the hospital. Their safety is our responsibility, and we practically kill ourselves to ensure it at all costs. But it?s also our responsibility to guard the practice of medicine from people who would hijack our tools of healing for their own political or monetary gain.

In recent years, we have been abject failures in this responsibility, and untold numbers of people have gleefully taken advantage of that. Silently allowing a politician to manipulate our medical decision-making for the purposes of an ideological goal erodes any tiny scrap of trust we might have left.

It comes down to this: When the community has failed a patient by voting an ideologue into office?When the ideologue has failed the patient by writing legislation in his own interest instead of in the patient?s?When the legislative system has failed the patient by allowing the legislation to be considered? When the government has failed the patient by allowing something like this to be signed into law? We as physicians cannot and must not fail our patients by ducking our heads and meekly doing as we?re told.

Because we are their last line of defense.

 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/40088_Fox_News_Commenters_React_to_Trayvon_Martin-_Good_Shot_Zimmy