Don’t worry, I haven’t crossed the border into deeply conservative Christian thinking.  

No, "Do Not Marry A Muslim" was the title of a pamphlet handed out recently by a guest speaker at a Raleigh, North Carolina School.

Officials said Robert Escamilla invited Kamil Solomon to talk with students on Feb. 16. Students said Solomon handed out two pamphlets to students, entitled, "Jesus Not Muhammad Part 1," and "Do Not Marry a Muslim Part 1."
Teacher suspended with pay

Your regular hosts are attending to other pressing duties, and have very responsibly called the hotline for a substitute tonight.  I promise I’ll try to follow the usual lesson plan, but be warned!  Attendance will be taken!  The passive voice will be used!  And yes, this will be on the test.

A student in one of my classes wrote a sentence today.

In another class, kids got into a fight.

Those may not seem like great examples for starting a "Happy Story" diary.  But once you know that the sentence was the first step in a major assignment for a kid who has been struggling all year, and that the "fight" was in my honors British Lit class over a critical interpretation of Beowulf, you’ll start to smile with me.

CNN.com is carrying a story today about a lawsuit from back in 2004 that may soon come to trial, involving Robert Steinbuch, a former Senate aid whose girlfriend, also a Senate aide at the time, posted details about their sex life on her personal blog--including tidbits about his preferences for spanking but not for condoms.

There are many lessons in this little newsbyte, but this is the one that may prove most relevant to us here:

If the case goes to trial, its outcome will be important both to bloggers and to people who chronicle their lives on social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said he may teach the Washingtonienne case this spring during his class at Georgetown Law School.

"Anybody who wants to reveal their own private life has a right to do that. It's a different question when you reveal someone else's private life," he said, adding that simply calling something a diary doesn't make it one. "It's not sitting in a nice, leather-bound book under a pillow. It's online where a million people can find it."

More below the fold

UPDATE

First, we're fine, and gloriously, everyone else in the area seems to be fine in the immediate aftermath, too.  For all the explosions and fires and deadly chemicals and poison gas clouds, there have been no deaths, no injuries, and only some minor respiratory complaints from a dozen or so of the first responders, who were already treated & released at a local hospital.

*UPDATE* As of 12:40 am, half the town of Apex (pop. about 32,000) is being evacuated. A state of emergency has been declared.

UPDATE 3:30 AM We're heading out of town, to a Greensboro/High Point hotel until day breaks and we have more of an idea what we're looking at. As y'all have said in the diary, better to have a funny story to tell about how foolish we were to be spooked than a tragic story to tell about how idiotic we were to risk lives and health. We've picked a hotel w/ internet access, of course, so we'll be in touch. Many, many thanks for all the company and advice through this long night.

For me, one of the great things about John Edwards getting tapped for the VP ticket was getting to see Elizabeth take a national stage, too.  

I can claim some local pride as a North Carolinian, but with the release today of her book, Saving Graces, y'all can get in on the fun, too.  

more info below the fold!

You see, my new job is not in the lovely suburban high school where I formerly taught English literature.  Instead, when I decided to return to teaching after a two-year hiatus of doing the whole stay-at-home-mom routine, I deliberately--for many reasons-- chose an inner city magnet school.

And in North Carolina, as in many places around the country, "inner city," while accurate, is also a euphemism for "poor and black."  

Of course I'm not prejudiced.

For my husband, it was also a repeat visit, but for our children, it was their first trip.  It's cliché but true that one of the joys of parenthood is getting the chance to experience things for the first time all over again  as you watch your children take it all in--the marble, the museums, the monuments--- all those  icons of America and Americana.  

This was the first time I had visited Washington DC, though, during the Bush administration's tenure.

more below the fold.

Every forkful of food you put into your mouth has political as well as nutritional content.

We've all heard it: America is in an obesity crisis; weight is going to be America's next plague.  

We are certainly right to worry about Bird Flu, but cans of Coke, Big Macs, and a "supersize everything" mentality is already racking up a body count.

The truth is that weight issues in our country are a complex problem, despite this diary's tongue-in-cheek title, with equal tension in a triangle between personal choices & responsibilities, cultural & societal pressures, and governmental polices, regulations, & programs that help or harm.

I can speak here from personal experience, as someone who has tilted at the windmill of weight since childhood. I saw cute and chubby turn into just plain fat.  I fought back with diets, pills, programs and plans, wrestling the scale back down from time to time for special occasions and then giving up again and watching the numbers--and dress sizes--climb, and climb high.

It was a cool night in North Carolina with a full moon rising.  Markos and Jerome arrived early at Quail Ridge Booksfor the event, with lots of great local Dems and representatives from assorted progressive causes there for the meet & greet.  

The crowd seemed a good match for the book's basic message of "people powered politics."  The theme of starting locally to build and support good progressive candidates so that our next generation is in place and strong when the party dinosaurs start to drop back was well illustrated by the whole atmosphere   The chairs were rickety white plastic and the microphone squealed with feedback all too frequently, but the energy and optimism in the room was refreshing.

I  stand shoulder to shoulder in support of the policies and values  that OrangeClouds and most of you would support, but watch out, O'Reilly & Rush & Company, I am far, far from someone you can dismiss as the dangly bits of fringe on the left.

In fact, by so many categories, if you were to look up "mainstream America" I wouldn't be surprised to see a picture of me and my family waving back at you.

The Raleigh based group Called2Action is challenging three books in the school district's secondary English curriculum, feeling that the books contain "vulgar and sexually explicit language."

Under fire this week are The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, Beloved, by Toni Morrison, and The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier.

What I would like to know is why every woman who decides, with her doctor, to undergo this procedure doesn't have the same ease, availability, and standard of care that I was fortunate enough to experience when I needed this surgery?  

Cross Posted at Street Prophets

more below the fold

Yikes.  A friend just sent me a link to this article:  Their Own Version of a Big Bang

My friend's advice was to avoid reading the end of the article without a good glass of bourbon in hand.  I'll let y'all choose your own coping devices, but it is a hard-to-swallow story, so be forewarned, but learn and prepare.

WAYNE, N.J. -- Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.

"Boys and girls," Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, "you put your hand up and you say, 'Excuse me, were you there?' Can you remember that?"

from L.A. Times article by Stephanie Simon

Follow the link to read the rest of the article.

more below the fold.

Mail Call

What are you doing today?   How about taking the time to write a Valentine--and send it to one of our soldiers?

It's not surprising that mail call is one of the brightest spots in a soldier's life, when they're so far from home and in harm's way.  I know we are all unhappy with the person & policies that sent our service men & women abroad, but the soldiers themselves are doing the job they were sent to do in the best way they can.

Valentine cards for service members overseas need to be mailed by today to be sure of getting them delivered by Feb. 14, the Postal Service said.

"Cupid may have wings, but we have to rely on more conventional methods," said postal consumer advocate Delores Killette.

Tips for Military Valentines

If you don't have any personal contacts, AnySoldier.com helps connect you to service men and women.  Surf over to their Where to Send page to read personal messages and requests from individual soldiers.

"How hard is it to say, `It's against the law' and `He's lying.'"

Elizabeth Edwards, in a speech in North Carolina, Jan. 24, 2006

Last night, in the charming setting of North Carolina's Fearrington Village known as "The Barn," I heard Elizabeth Edwards give a barn-burner of a speech.

She was scathingly critical of the current administration and its policies, as you might expect in front of this friendly crowd of local Dems.  But she also pulled no punches in being critical of Democrats whiffing the ball, over & over again, in our responses.  She was relaxed, warm & witty, and offered some wonderful insights and anecdotes on the state of politics today.  

My heart goes out to those grieving families in West Virginia this morning.  Knowing a loved one is in danger, waiting through agonizing hours to hear news, and then getting a miscommunication is surely a taste of hell on earth.

I am struck, however, at one message that seems to be coming out from the small army of news reporters camped outside that little white country church:  Inside that church, when the news was good, there was much praising of God and singing of hymns and clapping of hands.  When the news turned bad, there was blame and shoving and cursing, directed both at God and at fellow man.

Comedian Jeff Stilson, noticing the propensity of sports stars to pray before games and cross themselves and point to the sky to give all credit for victory to God, adds in his stand-up routine that just once, he  would like to see one say: "Yeah, we were in the game until Jesus made me fumble. He hates our team."

Claiming positive divine intervention, often based on one's own moral superiority or abundant prayer life, seems common.

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Dickens was such a progressive.

Dickens's religious beliefs were those of most 19th century British Unitarians. In his will he urged his children to adopt a liberal, tolerant, and non-sectarian interpretation of Christianity, "the teaching of the New Testament in its broad spirit." He recommended they "put no faith in any man's narrow construction" of isolated passages. In The Life of Our Lord, written for his children and not published until 1934, Dickens summarized his faith as "to do good always." He believed humanity, created in the image of the divine, retained a seed of good. He preached the gospel of the second chance. The world would be a better place if, with a change of heart, people were to treat others with kindness and generosity.

Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography