Another totally different twist on the Vote or Die theme from News 24 somewhere.

Dead Girl Returns to Vote.

Pildesti - A Romanian family who believed they buried their daughter two years ago were shocked when she came home to vote.

The family from Pildesti, Neamt county, contacted local police when their 22-year-old daughter didn’t return home in July 2003.

After a few days of investigation police found a dead body on a river bank and identified her as the missing girl.

Even her father, brother and some neighbours confirmed it was her.

One of the relatives told Ziarul daily: “The deceased girl looked very much the same like the missing one: Same height, same brown hair, even the haircut was the same and she wore similar clothes. We thought we buried our relative”.

But after almost two years the dead girl came back home by taxi.

She told her family she went to visit a friend in a remote town and found a job there.

She said she decided to return because she wanted to cast her vote in a poll regarding the revision of the Constitution.

Via Logic and Sanity.

President Bush called in to the 32nd annual “March for Life” today. Here is a transcript.

Interesting fact (HT: LaShawn Barber).

Minority women constitute only about 26% of the female population (age 15-44) in the United States, but they underwent approximately 36% of the abortions.
…
According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, black women are more than 3 times as likely as white women to have an abortion.

I’ve noticed a subtle lack of levity in the last few days from conservative bloggers. Seems it hard to mix light banter in with the deaths of so many children.

Michelle Malkin is spreading the word about a baby that needs a heart transplant.

More details here.

This related story from a few months ago from MSNBC indicates that the possibilities may be better than one would first think.

Infants receiving heart transplants from donors with a different blood type can learn to tolerate the foreign tissue, possibly expanding the pool of organs available to babies who might otherwise die on the waiting list, researchers say.

Hang in there baby Jordan, we’re pulling for you.

UPDATE: Another encouraging fact has been brought to my attention.

UPDATE: He has received a heart! See here.

San Francisco may begin charging for grocery bags:

San Francisco may become the first city in the nation to charge shoppers for grocery bags.

The city’s Commission on the Environment is expected to ask the mayor and board of supervisors Tuesday to consider a 17-cent per bag charge on paper and plastic grocery bags. While the goal is reducing plastic bag pollution, paper was added so as not to discriminate.

Some satirical (I hope) analysis from Alan Kesselheim at TidePool.

Slay a tree or add to the wildlife-choking, landfill-glutting, oil-industry-fueling juggernaut? It’s a rock-and-hard-place ethical dilemma on a landscape littered with them.
…
San Francisco officials are considering charging consumers 17 cents every time they check out with a shopping bag supplied by the store. While the rest of the country obsesses over who can go to bed together and whether a woman must bear an unwanted child, folks on the bay are coping with some real issues. Hit us in the pocketbook, they say.

Just so you know.

The group said it’s unsure how many schools will participate in this week’s event, but says 5,100 educators from 36 states have registered, up from 4,000 last year.

Here’s a link to the official site, if you would like to participate. There are actually organizations that study this stuff.

The real question is this… will Congress participate? (Link goes to Annenburg Public Policy report with fun graphs on how many times per session various Congresses insulted and cast aspersions on each other). Here’s an example of some of their data:

Name Calling.

This index consists of 92 insulting nouns, such as “weirdo,” “traitor,” and “crackpot.” The average number of name calling words used per session is 40 per 1,000 pages. In this Congress the Members used 36 name calling words per 1,000 pages in the first session, and 33 in the second session making both sessions just slightly more civil than average by this measure. The name-calling rate has been dropping slightly over the last three sessions (105-H2 = 44, 106-H1 = 36, 106-H2 = 33).

The session with the least name calling since 1985 was the 100 th Congress, second session, with 27 name calling words per 1,000 pages of the Congressional Record; the greatest number occurred in the 104 th Congress, first session with 79 instances.

UPDATE: If you want to buy the book that is the center of this “No Name Calling Week,” you can do so here: The Misfits, by James Howe.

UPDATE 2: If you don’t like it, the organizers will call you names!!

Turns out the story linked to in this post was a hoax and the reporter has been fired.

The University of Oregon has ordered a campus employee to remove the yellow ribbon saying “Support our Troops” from his maintenance vehicle, claiming it was a political statement.

The question then is… what constitutes a political statement.

“I don’t think it’s political i think they’re just trying to support the guys who are putting their lives on the line for this country. be it right or wrong.. be it right or left,” said Lattion.

The trucks are part of a public institution.

Under state law… public employees can not use state resources to spread political messages.

From Kevin McCullough via Michelle Malkin.

And Jordan Golson has done a bit of homework here. He quotes from the University of Oregon Policy Statement on Prohibited Political Activities:
In compliance with ORS 260.432, the following notice required by statute is published:

“The restrictions imposed by the law of the State of Oregon on your political activities are that ‘No public employee shall solicit any money, influence, service or other thing of value or otherwise promote any political committee or promote or oppose the nomination or election of a candidate, the adoption of a measure or the recall of a public office holder while on the job during working hours. However, this section does not restrict the right of a public employee to express personal political views.”

“It is therefore the policy of the state and of your public employer that you may engage in political activity except to the extent prohibited by state law when on the job during working hours.”

And he graciously posts the contact information for the University President Dave Frohnmayer.

Classic quote from the UoO’s Diversity page.

Diversity is not casual liberal tolerance. Not polite accomodation. IT IS ACTION.

Right.

UPDATE: Mike makes an interesting point in his comment to this post, which is basically that it’s university property and they can do what they want in terms of preventing him from putting a ribbon on the vehicle. While that may be true (as long as they don’t selectively permit employees to speak with freedom), I have to take issue with this statement:

placing such objects on a state owned vehicle is implying the state’s endorsement as well which isn’t fair or desired. [Emphasis mine]

I’m not sure how one could possibly say it is not desirable that the state endorse the support of our troops. While I will grant that there is a difference between state and federal governments here, the federal government, theoretically representing the states, has sent these troops into battle, and better be supporting them with every possible resource.

UPDATE 2: Welcome Captain’s Quarters readers. :-)

UPDATE 2: The University responds.

Limiting the number of A’s:

In a move students protested last year, Princeton became the first elite college to cap the number of A’s that can be awarded.

Previously, there was no official limit to the number of A’s handed out, and nearly half the grades in an average Princeton class have been A-pluses, A’s or A-minuses. Now, each department can give A’s to no more than 35 percent of its students each semester.

This is incredible. See if you can stump it.

20Q.net is an experiment in artificial intelligence. The program is very simple but its behavior is complex. Everything that it knows and all questions that it asks were entered by people playing this game. 20Q.net is a learning system; the more it is played, the smarter it gets.

HT: Rex at Fimoculous

Orin Kerr excerpts, on The Volokh Conspiracy blog, from this New York Times article:

When Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, suggested this month that one factor in women’s lagging progress in science and mathematics might be innate differences between the sexes, he slapped a bit of brimstone into a debate that has simmered for decades. And though his comments elicited so many fierce reactions that he quickly apologized, many were left to wonder: Did he have a point?

Has science found compelling evidence of inherent sex disparities in the relevant skills, or perhaps in the drive to succeed at all costs, that could help account for the persistent paucity of women in science generally, and at the upper tiers of the profession in particular?

Researchers who have explored the subject of sex differences from every conceivable angle and organ say that yes, there are a host of discrepancies between men and women - in their average scores on tests of quantitative skills, in their attitudes toward math and science, in the architecture of their brains, in the way they metabolize medications, including those that affect the brain.

// Shocking.

UPDATE: News.com.au has an interesting piece today entitled “Finally - why women can’t read maps.”

From Wired News, Users Confuse Search Results, Ads. Can this possibly be true?

Only one in six users of internet search engines can tell the difference between unbiased search results and paid advertisements, a new survey finds.
…
But only 38 percent of web searchers even know of the distinction, and of those, not even half –47 percent — say they can always tell which are paid. That comes out to only 18 percent of all web searchers knowing when a link is paid.

Update to the VW spoof ad: It looks like Volkswagen is suing the duo Lee and Dan who “accidentally” released the ad on the internet.

Now that’s a lot of snow.