Ministry of Intrigue

If you’ve been following the news carefully you have already heard that the South Dakota senate has passed a bill to ban abortion except in cases where the life of the mother is in danger. The bill is now currently awaiting the signature of Governor Mike Rounds, who in a recent press conference indicated that he would sign the bill provided that after review he feels that it would succeed in its intent. The intent in question being a successful and effective “assault on Roe vs. Wade”. My friend Dan of The Creepy Sleepy Show attended the press conference via cell phone and you can read some of his impressions here and you can listen to the audio of the conference here courtesy of SDPB.

Obviously, this concerns a lot of people, including myself, that Roe vs. Wade is being challenged so directly during the current administration. Pete Williams, a justice correspondent for MSNBC, however seems to believe that this bill will not succeed in its eventual goal of overturning Roe vs. Wade and he illustrates his reasoning in this recent column.

Personally, I am not so sure and I worry what will come in the following months if the governor determines that the bill will be the effective weapon against Roe vs. Wade that the Republicans of South Dakota intend it to be.

Those of us outside of South Dakota offer our support for the people of that state in the quest to defend women’s reproductive rights.

In the light of a potentially long legal battle ahead, this would be a great time to donate to NOW, Planned Parenthood, and the ACLU.

Keep watch for other opportunities for you to help fight this outrageous attack on women’s rights.

I just read an article that the governor of my adopted state has just signed into law a bill that will require future touch screen voting systems to be open-source software. The code will be provided to any citizen who requests it. Also these machines will be required to produce a verifiable printed ballot in case a recount is required.

Wow, it is nice to see open source equated with accountability to the people.

Read about it here.

I just found an entry on Boing Boing that informs us that Patricia Santangelo, the mother who refused to settle out of court when the RIAA’s goons came to her door. Unfortunately she has run out of money to pay her legal fees during the court battle. Please take a moment to donate to her cause.

You can read the Boing Boing article here and you can about the initial court hearing (with a judge who tells off the RIAA lawyer) here.

Please donate and help fight Goliath!

Scientists have finally captured footage of a living giant squid! I’ve been waiting for this for years. For those of you not familiar with the significance of this discovery, while we have known of giant squids as well as seeing the wounds from their attacks on whales and have occasionally discovered dead ones that have drifted to shore, up until this point no one had succeeded in seeing one live.

I remember once doing a little bit of temp work helping out an archaeological contractor that my friend Quentin was working for, and after a long day he and I were sitting in our motel room watching a Discovery channel special on the search for the giant squid. We watched it with the fascination that only physical exhaustion can give you and were very disappointed that at the end of an hour there was still no success.

I found this link through Boing Boing and you can read all about it here.

I am amused.

The Isthmus Daily Page, which is the digital version of one of Madison’s free weekly newpapers cited my entry where I wrote about my short trip to the Taste of Madison. (Although they didn’t get the link to my blog correct.) The funny thing is that in collecting blog entries they were obviously looking for positive reviews, but my entry was intended to be more of a “meh” reaction to the event. The reason this is particularly funny is that instead of posting a brief snippet of a sentence they included my entire paragraph about the experience including my comments about small portions and general overpricing of the products, and mine is probably (while maybe not an out and out negative review) certainly the least positive of the tiny bits and pieces they pulled from other sites.

Of course, in all fairness, I was pretty grumpy when I went to ToM, and my sandal disaster didn’t endear the experience to me.

I am on Google IM as we speak. Google is just using the Jabber protocol and you use your gmail account username. For detailed info on how to get on go here.

See you online!