Apparently many mortgage companies are turning pregnant women down for mortgages because they equate maternity leave with unemployment. Even if their maternity leave is really short. I wonder if they're doing the same with men who take a couple weeks of sick leave? For some reason I doubt it.
It has now become clear that massive amounts of chemical dispersants were used on the oil spill (out of sight, out of mind, y'all) in spite of the EPA's request to limit the use of them. In order to pretend to take the EPA's concerns into account, there was a paperwork system in place by which BP would have to request permission to use the dispersants from the Coast Guard. The thing is, no matter how much they were proposing to spray, the Coast Guard never denied the requests, so the paperwork was just a deceptive formality. And gallons and gallons of chemical dispersants are in the water as we speak, doing damage that we won't be able to fully understand for years to come. It's a science experiment, y'all. Because we don't do R&D on this kind of stuff in between disasters, reserving the R&D funds instead for improving our drilling and extraction techniques.
Oh yeah, and concerning the claim that the dispersants (Corexit and its siblings) are as mild as dish soap... would you squirt large quantities of Dawn into the aquarium containing your expensive and beloved pet fish? I didn't think so.
And finally, the ACLU is rightfully protesting the fact that Boy Scout troops often use school facilities at a discounted rate given the fact that their discriminatory policies conflict with public policy. A recent court ruling involving a christian student group that had been denied official recognition by the law school it was affiliated with because of its discriminatory policies seems to have implications concerning the relationship between public schools and groups like the Boy Scouts. The court ruled that "it's within the legal parameters of the school to deny official recognition to organizations that don't follow school policies." If discounted access to school facilities counts as official recognition, then this seems pretty clear cut.
What have I missed?
Yeah, I have a big issue with the Boy Scouts holding their meetings and events in my kids' school. It just seems to indicate a stamp of approval from the school district, and I don't want my kids associating school with some hate group.
ReplyDeleteum...the boy scouts are hardly a hate group. that's pretty extreme.
ReplyDeleteOMG, yeah. I thought it was really bizarre when they said in a news segment about corexit that it's "as mild as dish soap." If we were dumping gallons and gallons of dish soap in the ocean, I bet people would be raising hell.
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