Dirty Laundry

Umm…seriously? These people are making such a joke out of themselves. (I actually checked a few other news outlets hoping this was made up, but it appears to be true.)

Tags:   MiscNo Comments.

Via The New York Times:

Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, gave a two-year reprieve on Tuesday to immigrants whose applications for permanent residency have been denied because their American spouses died during the application process.

Under United States law, a foreign spouse of an American citizen is eligible for residency, but the couple is required to be married for at least two years first, in part as a safeguard against fraudulent marriages.

The government has argued that if the American spouse dies before the two-year mark, the foreign spouse becomes a widow or widower, effectively annulling the right to be considered for residency, and thereby opening the door to deportation.

While Ms. Napolitano’s order does not change or abolish the law, as its opponents have sought, it suspends action, including deportation proceedings, in cases involving widows and widowers who reside in the United States and were married for fewer than two years before their spouses died.

This is not a perfect solution, but as a temporary fix it is the best that can be asked for. Deporting a vulnerable person grieving the loss of a partner is a despicable abuse of a law designed to prevent simple fraud, and the attitude which allows lawmakers to justify this policy is clearly borne out of racism and kneejerk xenophobia. Good on Napolitano for taking a look into this.

Of course, this does nothing to help gay couples in which one partner is not a citizen, such as in the high profile case of J. W. Lown, the former Mayor of San Angelo, Texas, who resigned from his position and moved to Mexico to be with his partner. Until gay marriage is legal and recognized on the federal level, GLBT Americans will not be able to help their partners become citizens and will be faced with the difficult choice of leaving the US or harboring their partner illegally. Hopefully Mr. Lown’s story will help bring attention to this often-overlooked area of the gay marriage debate.

Tags:   gay rights · immigration · politics · raceNo Comments.

10-year-old Kennedy Corpus got a surprise the other day at a town hall meeting when President Obama wrote her a note excusing her from class. (”To Kennedy’s teacher - Please excuse Kennedy’s absence from class…she’s with me. Barack Obama”) No matter how you feel about his policies, it seems impossible not to love the guy on a personal level. Video below:

For more Obama-themed fluff, check out The Terrorist Fist Jab: A Retrospective at gawker.com.

Tags:   Misc · politicsNo Comments.

Hamas, the militant Islamic group out of the Gaza strip, has a little-known soft side. When they aren’t firing missiles into Israel, they also provide matchmaking services for lonely, single Palestinians. The Associated Press reports.

Tags:   islam · middle eastNo Comments.

It appears Dick Cheney may be human after all. I’d always wondered how a man with an openly gay daughter could support the party position that she doesn’t deserve the same rights as 90% of the population. He does qualify with “it’s a matter that should be decided on a state-by-state basis”, which I personally think is a lazy, safe position to take which ignores the very real impact on same-sex couples like Mary Cheney and Heather Poe and does nothing to ensure them access to a host of benefits conferred upon straight couples who marry. I’m not sure if this does anything to further the cause, but I do think it’s pretty significant to have a major member of the Republican Party make a statement like this.

Transcript at The Huffington Post.

Tags:   gay rights · politicsNo Comments.

From Alternet, the Somali-Canadian author K’Naan explains Why We Don’t Condemn Our Pirates in Somalia:

In 2004, after Tsunami washed ashore several leaking containers, thousand of locals in the Puntland region of Somalia started to complain of severe and previously unreported ailments, such as abdominal bleeding, skin melting off and a lot of immediate cancer-like symptoms. Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the United Nations Environmental Program, says that the containers had many different kinds of waste, including “Uranium, radioactive waste, lead, cadmium, mercury and chemical waste.” But this wasn’t just a passing evil from one or two groups taking advantage of our unprotected waters, the UN Convoy for Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, says that the practice still continues to this day. It was months after those initial reports that local fishermen mobilized themselves, along with street militias, to go into the waters and deter the Westerners from having a free pass at completely destroying Somalia’s aquatic life. Now years later, that deterance has become less noble, and the ex-fishermen with their militias have begun to develop a taste for ransom at sea. This form of piracy is now a major contributor to the Somali economy, especially in the very region that private toxic waste companies first began to bury our nation’s death trap.

This is not the first time a media outlet has argued that the political situation in Somalia is far more complex than Western media coverage claims.

Tags:   politicsNo Comments.

The Burlington Free Press reports on a new bill being considered in the Vermont legislature legalizing the consensual sharing of nude digital photos between teenagers. Currently, teenagers who take photos of themselves naked can be prosecuted for possession of child pornography and risk being labeled sex offenders for life. An excerpt:

Time has come, advocates said, to align law, technology and teenagers’ use of it as they begin exploring their sexuality.

“They’re doing it,” Chittenden County State’s Attorney T.J. Donovan said. “We don’t want to condone it. We need to educate. But there’s no public interest in labeling them as sex offenders for engaging in a perverted, albeit new, form of courtship.”

The prosecutor offered an example: If a 14-year-old girl “flashes” her 18-year-old boyfriend while the two are in the same room, but the couple refrain from sexual contact, no crime has occurred. Why, then, Donovan wondered, should either partner face child-porn charges if the girl snaps a nude picture of herself and sends it via cell phone to her boyfriend?

“The technology makes it the crime,” Donovan said. “The act here is sending the photo. There’s no sexual act performed.”

Tags:   MiscNo Comments.

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that American food safety is no longer improving and may, in fact, be getting worse.

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There’s a sinister side to all the attention that the first family has received over the new canine addition to the White House. On the campaign trail, Joe Biden adopted a German shepherd puppy from a breeder — who now reports that she has been the victim of harrassment from animal rights groups based on the high-profile sale.

Tags:   politicsNo Comments.

Inspired by the American revolution and the Boston Tea Party, conservatives unhappy with Obama’s economic policies are protesting by sending tea bags to the White House. Media Matters criticizes Fox News for its role in organizing protests against the President while maintaining an image as a balanced and impartial media outlet.

And Rachel Maddow has a few words to say on the subject of the so-called “teabagging“:

Tags:   humor · politicsNo Comments.