commotiocordis

Democratic lawmakers opposed to federal funding for abortions said Tuesday the House leadership's health care bill contains a "hidden mandate" that would allow taxpayer dollars to be used to end pregnancies.

God, that's a hard question. (Though first of all, I'd call it a loophole rather than a mandate--the bill just doesn't say anything about abortion, which means that insurers that already cover it will continue to do so, possibly funded by the public subsidies of low-income subscribers.)

I've hashed this out before--I'm pro-birth control and sex education and extremely anti-abortion, but I'm more or less reluctantly pro-choice because data says that if it's illegal, it'll still be done, just criminally and unregulated and people will die. (Like pot.) I take a more practical aproach to the whole issue--reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, and soon abortion won't be an issue. (Kay, that's really optimistic, but we can reduce the need for it drastically.)

If we change something, that's government interference with private companies, which people scream about. (Mostly the Republicans, which is probably why the article I read talked about how it's Senate Democrats making a fuss about closing the hole, LOL.) 90% of private insurers cover abortions (which flabbergasted me until I realized that they probably just cover it some minimal percentage that they cover any gynecological surgical procedure by an approved provider), so the government just steps in and is all "Umm, sorry. Change your practice. You don't get to cover that anymore, even if you have no publicly-subsidized clients, because, you know, how can we tell that you have no subsidized folk?"

And on the other hand, I'm way not comfortable with my tax money (that I pay way goddamn too much of for a kid who's only income is a freaking scholarship--I'll bitch about this again; I've got a full ride, room/board monies included, and all of that went straight back to the school, but because they didn't, idk, waive my tuition or something, they actually deposited money into my account, I had to pull some > $600 out of my savings to pay the taxes on it) going to abortions. And since the money goes to people who can then use it for whatever insurance provider they want, the only way to ensure that I'm not contributing to this is to stop all of them from covering it.

Huh. Legally, infringing the right to an abortion is a no-no, so they're just going to end up having to not do anything and leave the loophole or whatever in, but it might be yet another interesting fight to derail the healthcare bill (that I'm not paying nearly enough attention to considering I'll prolly have to buy into it when I age out of my parents' plans and still have mounting education debt).


Also interesting, a study from the Department of Transportation that was blocked from release in 2003 and just gotten under the Freedom of Information Act says that your driving sucks just as bad whether you're talking on a regular cell phone or a bluetoooth, handsfree thing. Makes sense--I mean, most of the distraction is cognitive. More so if you're a business type person or taking important calls, it says, because you've got to pay a lot more attention to that. At first, I was like "Okay, so places with cellphone bans move to banning even hands free stuff, but then isn't having a conversation with somebody in the car going to be just as bad? How about listening to NPR or other high-brow talk radio? Ban that too?" But you really can see how

It's funny, because most of the time when they talk about cellphone driving laws, it seems directed towards the stupid teenagers, when according to this, it's businessfolk that are the problem. Except for texting, natch. But it's not like you can really get caught texting like you can get pulled over when they see you with a phone in your ear, so that's rather impossible to enforce.


Moar news.

Prometheus Laboratories v. Mayo Collaborative Services et al. is heading for the federal circuit in early August. Hells yes. I've long been of the opinion that medical patenting has gone WAY too far. For instance, what this case is about: testing for metabolites of a drug to see how well the drug is working in somebody's system. Sure, patent your little kit for doing so, whatever, but if a lay person can walk up and say "Oh, because if there's lots, it means there's lots of drug being metabolized!" and get it just like that, it's way too common sense to patent the process.

If Prometheus wins, I kinda want Obama to step in there and be all "Dude. Judge-types. We're over here trying to make healthcare less expensive and you're on the other side of the beltway screwing us over by making sure that every one of this whole category of tests has to be run through your company. WTF. See if I put any of you on the Supreme Court now." I can see it coming out as sort of a compromise decision--the company gets the patent on testing for this drug because Mayo's simply changing the threshold numbers the test looks for is too derivative, but. . . I don't know. Mayo's kinda been a sneaky little bitch by trying to avoid the patent like that, but in my world, that kind of a patent is invalid anyway. I mean, what, can only one company in the word do a CBC too? Counting eosinophils, we did that in microbiology, should we have to have licensed that process first? No way.


And finally? Interesting food fact. I tried this out when we had a fire in the backyard a couple of times this week (it's been unseasonably cool and wonderful lately) and didn't feel like pigging out on s'mores but also didn't want to lose the opportunity to make them for later, so I made a bunch, wrapped them up (some in foil, some in wax paper--the latter first just because I couldn't find the foil at first, but then switched when I did because I had to tape the wax paper to get it to stay, and the tape didn't stick well) and froze them. I made the mistake of trying to eat the first two when they were still frozen, and then the graham cracker just turns to powder in your first bite, though the innards are good, but the other two I'm eating right now, and I let them thaw first and it's marvelous. So. Has discovered that that works. I mean, you lose out on the warm and gooey, but I can still taste that campfirey-marshmallow flavor. Win.

Reading through Memory Alpha. Started to look up a distinction about Klingon hearts for my RPG (they're referred to in canon both as having two hearts and having an 8-chambered one, the latter tending to be by characters who would be expected to be knowledgeable, but I wanted to make sure), went to fixing the article about the DS9 episode "Babel" (they had the kind of aphasia they experienced totally wrong; it's Wernicke's, not global), and somehow managed upon the article on Sexuality. It's a good article, actually, talking a lot about the issue of homosexuality in Star Trek (at first I was all "Erm, I'm probably the wrong person to point this out considering how every ST character who's ever been in a room with another of the same sex is sleeping with that person in my universe, but there's such a thing as heterosexuality too," but that's really all covered via canon examples of different species' courtships and mating and such in more specified articles). My initial dislike for it, I realized while beginning to write this up to get to the quote I'll present in a minute, was really because of what they were reporting and the fact that there are no gay people in Star Trek unless they're Mirror Universe and thus somewhat evil. Which is how they're perceived, as well, as shown by my having to edit up the Wikipedia article on MU characters because somebody decided that MU!Ezri and MU!Leeta were bisexual (it's suggested that Ezri is a lesbian and Leeta we only see for a few seconds and have no way of knowing) and thereby "promiscuous" (we see Ezri with Kira whom she decides is morally corrupt and dumps for Leeta, and Leeta just with Ezri. Not promiscuous in my book, especially if you consider that in the novels, the pair got married).

This is another example of what I thought was my dislike for the article and have decided upon further reading is just my dislike for the situation/producers.

"The production team over the years has stated that they do not want to create a "token" homosexual character for the express purpose of the issue, anymore than they want to create a black character purely to address racial issues."

Was his acting really that bad that no one remembers, idk, SISKO? That was entirely his point. And even if it wasn't his initial point of being there, Avery Brooks turned it into the point with his requisite, twice a season episodes talking about how bad racism is. I mean, it's bad, but I'm watching Star Trek, kthx, and though social commentary is important, I think not only did we get it the first time, society as a whole has pretty much moved past the whole separate drinking fountains thing, I'd hope. Instead of talking about how the past sucked, talk about how we can move forward and love each other, etc. etc.

"If the taxpayers are helping you, then you've got certain responsibilities to not be living high on the hog,"

Obama to detail further compensation limits

Damn straight. But then again, how many of the bailed-out CEOs really need a salary anyway? They'll cash in their stock options, maybe sell off one of their 4 Lamborghinis (which I'm surprised as hell I spelled right on the first try), and just keep on trekking. Still. Step in the right direction, considering what the Forbes list comes out with as salaries for the top CEOs every year. (Shift it to the teachers. The teachers!)

Microbiology test this morning? Quick. Should have been easy, had I been studying the easy stuff and not the hard shit that I didn't understand because he didn't really teach it. Lots of memorization of the history, which I've learned to expect to be the barely-skimmed-over part of these classes where it's not really relevant and have been unpleasantly surprised when this is not the case in two science classes here now.

And one question that just killed me--they wanted the name of the apparatus that lets you grow a continuous culture by feeding in and draining out a limiting nutrient that you then use to determine growth rate of a species. I looked at that last night and went "Oh, that's easy; I'll recognize it." Sure, I would have recognized it were it multiple choice. I remembered that it started with "chemo-". I could have danced around the word, bloody diagrammed it were it a short answer question. Nope. Fill in the blank, the stupidest test question type in existence. Seriously. Multiple choice gives you some context and lets you rely on recognition memory. Something with more room to answer lets you show that you know what you're talking about even if you forget the word. Can't come up with the exact term on fill in the blank and you're screwed. That's the one that I absolutely know I got wrong (I made up some "chemotron" thing that sounds more like a big technical piece of equipment than the "chemostat" it actually was).

And then a bunch more where I had spent too long working on trying to figure out what a south seeking magnetotactic bacterium in Flathead Lake would tend to do (questions from the book's online tests, which I mistakenly both prioritized higher since I don't have the actual book and spent much more time on since we covered the topics but not much of the actually questioned-on content, which should have been a clue in retrospect). So it was more "yeah, it's one of these. And this one sounds right. But not quite sure." The history stuff, mainly; the names I'd never heard before lecture and then didn't spend time reviewing because who really gives a damn about who did this first and when, so long as they did it?

*sigh.* Psychology next, which I'm hoping should be as easy as I'm expecting it to be, but as usual, I'm vaguely fearful that I'm entirely wrong. The bio test was all of 10 minutes max; I was out of the building by 8:20 when you add in my taking it and then going through it 2x more because I didn't want to turn it in first (the kid next to me looked like he finished it--turns out he just paused for a really long time whilst thinking--and just sat there, so I wondered if maybe we'd be grading it in class or something), so I got to my spot in the psych building (actually a different spot, because I brought my laptop cord today just in case and the spot with the tables that I usually use has no outlet) and had enough time to do this before I go through my notes again, as the class isn't until 10.

I started the third journal for my Hero and Quest class last night before realizing that she said "before Thursday" we must turn it in, which means that I can probably slide it under her door before my 9am on Thursday (hopefully she's not in before that), so I switched to the biology. That test is tomorrow as well, so maybe I can work the answers I'm going to write out for the study guide--this class appears to be very free response rather than the multiple choice/matching/"describe what myth's happening in this picture" of her class last semester, so I figured actually composing answers to all of the prompts is a good idea as she's mentioned pulling test stuff from there (though you never know to what extent teachers mean when they say that; could be anything from pulling questions word for word to their being related in topic and style)--into the reflective part of the journal. It's only got to be 2/3 as long as the others as there's no "talk about what happened in class" bit, as we had no class last week. The summary of the reading is going to require that I actually do some of the reading, though. The translation on the Internet Classics Archive of the Iliad isn't as good as the one I've been using by this Canadian professor that's also available online (he's translated a whole bunch of stuff and put it all out there for free, which is really awesome. I think I might email the guy and thank him at some point); I realized that I should have pointed it out to Dr. Johnson and asked what she thought of it in terms of, idk, accuracy and such, but it's a bit late now.

Should probably psych now. This is another one where I'm afraid there's going to be a whole load of names and dates I didn't memorize. There is a lot more history (more detailed, I guess) in the book than in the notes that I didn't really look at, which I'm hoping will be okay. I'm not planning on getting the book for this one at all, since I can pretty much get anything I need from his notes and the DSM (and, you know, AP Psych) and if really necessary, Chelsea (the cohab) is taking it as well and has the text sitting out on her desk that I can nab and quickly look things up in.

Evangelical pastor Rick Warren, whose participation drew criticism from liberals and gay rights groups, directly invoked Jesus as expected in his invocation, but did so personally.

"I humbly ask this in the name of the one who changed my life," he prayed.

He also quoted from the most important prayer in Judaism, the Sh'ma, when he said, "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God. The Lord is One," and he called God "the compassionate and merciful one," a phrase from Muslim devotion.
Inaugural prayers aim for a more diverse America - Yahoo! News

Color me surprised. And impressed. The whole "who changed my life" bit felt pretty much like a late-night televangelism testimony session, but the rest (as well as Obama's shoutout to the secularists in his speech) was neat.

And then we get to Roberts. Way to fail, sir. Now we don't actually have a president, as according to Article II of the Constitution and all, he's got to say those 35 words (that are in there in quotation marks, so I think even though he got them all in but out of order, it doesn't count) before taking office. Which he didn't.

Plus, "So help you God?" Not in there. What if he didn't want to say that part? I mean, no reason that he wouldn't, really, but putting that in there as a requirement in the oath sets precedent. Especially since Roberts will probably be doing the next, idk, 8 inaugurations since he's all of 53--now we've just injected a religion requirement into a Constitutionally required element of taking the Presidential office.


Back here in podunkville, fail that after finally finishing the 8 page review exercise for chemistry that every other lab section gets to turn in next week, but my teacher's an ass, I not only have psychology homework to finish (1 page on Dorothea Dix; totally easy but I keep trying to make it harder somehow because idk, using the first hit on Google just seems wrong) and chem lab prep still to do (that's going to be during lunch, because I'm already falling asleep), during the open hour that I thought I'd be able to use to throw the psych paper together I've got a meeting with the guy running the lab I'm supposed to be researching in this semester to go over what's going to be my project for the semester. And I have no ideas. None. I pulled up a couple of pages to read some about what work's already being done in those fields (that's the problem--all of my ideas don't have to do with this DNA repair stuff; I dig much more macro things than that).

And in microbiology news (my 8am class tomorrow), I think I've already "missed" that twice. I swear the guy takes attendance at 7:55 or something, because I was late twice already (of the three class periods we've had so far, major fail; it's almost exactly the opposite corner of the campus from me and it's been so damn cold and windy that riding my bike and walking take the same length of slow) but only maybe 7 minutes the first time and no more than 3 the second, but I don't remember having attendance taken either time. But it happened on the first day, and it's mentioned in the syllabus that though it's not for points, if you've got <4 misses he takes that into account when putting together final grades, so to have lost half of that grace period of 4 in the first week is really pissing me off.

I really, really need another Dr. Pepper as I'm thirsty as hell, but Chelsea moved her bed over near the door more, so I'm reluctant to get up and open it and trek out and back, etc. And I've only got one cold can left, and only 6 I think overall (and I bought the cans rather than my normal 2-liters in the first place because I could just grab one in the mornings, not to drink them while in bed). Plus, I'm thinking about going to sleep now and getting up at 6 or something to finish this Dix thing and try to read over some lab stuff because I'll just be able to take my Ritalin early and let that help keep me up, as opposed to how I'm obviously not able to take it now or risk never going to sleep tonight (and crashing 6-8 hours from now, putting it smack in the middle of my classes).

Another note, because procrastination is my thing. Michelle Obama's dress at the balls? Not a fan. The skirt was white and sparkly and pretty, but the bodice frankly looked like somebody had taken a roll of toilet paper and wrapped it around her chest and over one shoulder a bunch of times.

Many "reply all" fiascos result in mere embarrassment, but American diplomats have been told they may be punished for sending mass responses after an e-mail storm nearly knocked out one of the State Department's main electronic communications systems.

A cable sent last week to all employees at the department's Washington headquarters and overseas missions warns of unspecified "disciplinary actions" for using the "reply to all" function on e-mail with large distribution lists.

The cable, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, was prompted by a major interruption in departmental e-mail caused by numerous diplomats hitting "reply all" to an errant message inadvertently addressed and copied to several thousand recipients.
Reply-all e-mail storm hits State - Yahoo! News

O. M. G.

People keep drawing comparisons between the Obama administration and Matt Santos' on the West Wing? Well, evidently the administration before on both sides CONTAINS MARGARET ("You lost me at raisin muffin")!

This excited me. That is all.

Edit: "Anyone who disregards these instructions will be subject to disciplinary actions," Kennedy wrote in the cable, which begins: "Please ensure widest distribution of this message.

So evidently forwarding is okay, then? LOLOLOLOL.

Happened to notice a newspaper article about the movement of Pakistani troops to the Indian border in the Saturday paper a few hours ago. I haven't watched the news lately, but I read the headlines on the internet and spent more than an hour watching CSPAN this evening and I had no idea this was happening until just a while ago, which is surprising. Is it just not getting a lot of coverage? Because I'm fairly sure that now that they both have nukes, a Pakistan/India rematch would be pretty much a really bad thing.

Did some more research, and NDTV (an Indian news source) is calling it a bluff to blackmail the west (read: America) into placating them with stuff. Like we can give them anything, our economy the way it is, LOL. They also claim that the Pakistani movements aren't nearly as serious as the media is presenting, and declare that Whatever movement of Indian tanks and troops are noticed in Rajasthan is part of the annual firing exercises that various units conduct in Rajasthan's Lathi, Mahajan and Pokhran ranges in the winter months.

It's like they're saying "yeah, all the media is saying that the Pakistanis are moving troops. But we found out that they're not. So believe us, not. . . you know, everybody else. And while you're doing that, if anybody tells you that we're moving guys around in response, they're wrong. Rather than hold off on our annual firing exercises right next to Pakistan, we're just doing them right on our normal, everyday schedule even though it's liable to escalate this into bringing all manner of shit down on our collective global heads."

This article seriously makes no sense. It doesn't feel like a bad translation in terms of the normal syntactical errors that you'd expect, but the sentences just don't line up:
There are reports all over the media about heavy redeployment of forces along the Line of Control and International Border.
But NDTV has learnt that there is no significant movement of forces towards the Indian border.
Meanwhile, newspaper reports say that thousands of troops have been moved towards the Indian border.

Okay, guys? Let's just stop with the posturing. Neither of you is going to attack the other, because nuclear war is not a fun thing to play with. So why waste your resources like this? Wouldn't it be so much better to just make the other guy look stupid by not showing up? Or just go play a soccer match or something, a la Christmas Day in WWI.


To move on to a totally different topic. I realized I meant to mention: the cover of the Oregon Catholic Press reading book things ("Today's Missal") that we (and tons of Catholic churches around the US) use? They have religious art on the covers, both of the reading book and the music issue that come in pairs but always have different covers. Sometimes you can't really tell it's religious art (last month on the music one, it was this blue and purple cover cut into stained glass-esque rectangular pieces that if you squinted, you could make into a sort of 3d outline of a cross if you were looking for it), but on the reading one this quarter/season/however they divide them is a really nice piece of a Korean Madonna with Child. I was pleased, both because it was kind of pretty and because it's something different. I've always been a fan of multicultural representations of these images that are so often white-breadified. We had this Santa decoration that I think was a set of window clings of Santas in all different ethnicities, and all of them also had little tweaks to the outfit that just subtly reinforced the differentness. It was really cool. Because seriously, if you think about it? Where was Jesus from? Not America, I'll tell you that much, so I find it very highly unlikely that he's as pasty and blue-eyed as often presented.

Edit: Ooh, found ( the picture. )

Re: Rick Warren. What's next, James Dobson to preform next year's Red Mass? Seriously. Sure, he's not going to be doing anything official in the administration (as far as we know), but this indicates that Warren's got more than a little influence over Obama, which is not a good thing when you consider that according to Wikipedia, this guy has stated that homosexuality is an intolerable, unnatural way of life and thus not a human right, denounced evolution, and compared atheists to Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot.

Got home after exercising and spending hours between Big Lots (where I just took a while), Wal-Mart (where I stood in the express line for 20 minutes, because the cashier kept letting this guy try his denied credit card over and over and fiddling with the computer and such), and then Shop N Save. Got fat free hot dogs at the last, which I didn't realize I'd been missing until I was in bleakone's room last week and her roommate made a veggie dog and my stomach practically did backflips with the longing (as the fat free ones taste similar, prolly because their meat content has been cut down to "has been on the same refrigerated grocery shelf as meat" levels). Reason I went to the other two, though, was looking for an electric warming throw blanket thing for my mom for Christmas. Turns out that Dad had just checked for in-store availability and didn't see that it said that they weren't in stock at our local Wal-Mart, and so assumed that they were, when really it was just that the local one wasn't listed at all because they never carry it.

Grades come out Monday, as they're all due from the teachers before 5pm, I think, Saturday. Which is why a lot of them were pushing up the finals to the week before, as that's earlier than usual for them and they didn't think they could get them all graded that quickly, I suppose. I see it with some of the more populous classes (some kind of psych 101, or my gym class, even though that was all done electronically so there was no physical grading for the final), but my mythology teacher has what, 60 students total? 19 in my class, though that's an honors section, and her other two are more specialized, upper-division (I think one's graduate) courses, so I presume that it'd be the same or less. She only pushed one of hers up, but maybe that one required a more grading-intensive final than ours (which was in the second-to-last time slot of all the finals, I'm fairly sure) did; essays or something.

Anyway, that mythology final was bad. I'm fairly pissed about that. I'd thought (and others had agreed to the point of overtly encouraging me to stop working on the older Ovid stuff during breakfast right before and study Odysseus--LOL, all of a sudden I wonder if that was purposeful) that most of the final would be over the parts of The Odyssey we hadn't been tested over yet, with 50% at most of comprehensive material. Nope. This was the third test that contained Odyssey material (1 & 2 were all Ovid, 3 was half and half, and 4 was all Odyssey and Oresteia), and yet Ovid was easily 80, maybe 90% of it. The only bits of the Trojan War stories (Odyssey, Oresteia) were in a 10 or so question matching section at the bottom of the 4th page of the test, matching names to identities and one "identify the myth in this picture" thing. And Wednesday night, what did I do but finish the Odyssey instead of studying the Ovid myths. So I used to be able to say that I was getting an A in everything but gym. Fairly sure that's no longer the case, as this was a good 25% of my grade that I'd be surprised if I pulled a C on. It's hard, because I know I know most of the stories so if you just prompted me a bit, I would be all "Oh, and then [blah]". It's tough to do the matching then, too, because you can't tell if you recognize these two items as a pair because they go together, or because you just know both stories, or because one's a family member of the name that really fits with the story and that's why you're connecting the two (because everything's intertwined somehow in Ovid--the man's king of "Oh, and speaking of" transitions), etc., if that makes any sense.

Slight oddness tonight. More in my reaction of a perception of weirdness than the actual thing. Was hanging out in the kitchen, fixing one of my newly purchased hot dogs, when I heard my dad talking to Mom's rabbit. Okay. I'm not really a fan of that animal, but whatever. I look around the little island bit that separates the kitchen from the dining room (which is in turn connected to the living room, where the rabbit's cage is), and he's down there next to the cage petting it. It's not that my dad's an unnafectionate fellow, or dislikes animals or whatnot (he championed the original adoption of Rascal as well as probably every other animal we've had in the house save the rabbit), so I'm not sure if I was just projecting my dislike for the rabbit (I'm not sure where that comes from, whether it bit me a few too many times or what, but I'm just not a fan) onto him, but it surprised me. In a very pleasant-surprise sort of way, as it was quite. . . idk, touching. He was uber gentle (I spelled that "gentile" at first, and then went "LOL, Christmas"), and yet I suppose because of his size or whatnot, the rabbit was still scared (I feel like I've written about this situation almost exactly before because I felt the same way then--shall have to peruse my tags and see if I'm not just deja vu-ing). I don't know. It was touching, okay? Something about it being a rabbit, too; I'd see him petting Rascal with no such out-of-place feeling. Maybe it was the combination of rabbit + him having to squat way down to be anywhere near where he could reach the cage on the floor + talking to it (in not a crazy way) that sort of created this dichotomy of rabbit/giant human (saving my mild, occasional feelings of paternal intimidation for future exploration, LOL) that was cool to see.

Too much analysis, way too late at night. Without classes, I've evidently shifted back to my up-all-night cycle within all of two days. CIRCADIAN RHYTHM, WHY ARE YOU BATSHITCRAZY?

I was totally planning on watching the football game this evening. Instead? CSPAN and Laura Bush giving a tour of the White House. As research for my never-to-be-finished West Wing fic.

Laura says that she and George sleep in the traditional Presidents' bedroom, the same that her in-laws slept in when HW was president. I have no problem with the prospect of my parents having sex. But could you imagine having sex in not only the same bedroom, but the same bed that your husband's parents did? Idk. That's what jumped into my head, LOL.

Oh my god.

I wrote a sort of current event review paper thing for polisci about this study published that says that not only is there a strong correlation between winners of elections and physical attributes, but consistently in head-to-head fictional matchups, women were rated less competent.

( Said quickiepaper with more info on the study )

This goes on the message board thingie for the class, and somebody actually wrote a response piece (as we're required to do). I say again, oh my god. You've just got to read it.

( ' I think the biggest factor is that women, for the most part, have things to do that are more important to them.' )

Thank you for an excellent essay? No, sir. You do not get the privledge of thanking me for writing an excellent essay because you know what? Not only do your arguments make no sense, as they're organized in some kind of crazyland kind of way, they're wrong. And I could appreciate your arguments if they were at least, you know, decent, but they're not. I see where you're trying to go with the societal stigma against the working woman, but you didn't get there.

And the worst part is that this is one of the best essays I've seen posted on there. (Admittedly, I've not nearly read them all, and a moment ago I just flipped open to one that's actually good, but still.) Such is the caliber of my honors college political science class. Le sigh.

Hooray, Pauley Perrette! I knew I could count on her.

Her blog post re: Prop 8 from before the election. (Evidently she's getting married again, so congrats there.)