Pam Sepmoree was the first family member to testify that she noticed even the slightest changes in Deanna Laney before the 39-year-old stay-at-home mother admitted to bludgeoning her sons with rocks last Mother's Day weekend.
Well, she was a mother, and she did stay at home with her children, so it's fair to describe her this way. I think the stay-at-home part could have been excluded, and the point conveyed through the use of the word "mother" sans adjectives, but that's just my opinion and I'm no writer. So only a right-wing nut would read this and think bias.
Laney, who home-schooled her children in the tiny town of New Chapel Hill, 100 miles southeast of Dallas, has pleaded innocent by reason of insanity to capital murder and serious injury to a child.
Still no reason to think the author's biased, but let's try rewriting the story just little bit:
Pam Sepmoree was the first family member to testify that she noticed even the slightest changes in Deanna Laney before the 39-year-old lawyer admitted to bludgeoning her sons with rocks last Mother's Day weekend. ......
Laney, who sent her children to NEA Public School and to Minimum-Wage Illiterate Day Care, Inc.'s after-school program in metropolitan Dallas, has pleaded innocent by reason of insanity to capital murder and serious injury to a child.
One can't help but think that the author wouldn't have included the murderous mother's profession in this manner if she were in fact a big-city lawyer mother instead of a stay-at-home mother in a small town. And God forbid that someone faced with a choice between rotten public school and homeschooling would choose the latter. There would probably be fawning sympathy for this nut if she was a stressed-out working mother. Her choices would be above reproach, even though they are anything but. Children get sick and injured in daycare all the time. Working mothers have been known to leave their children strapped into hot cars because they forgot they were in there on the way to work. For that matter, working mothers have gone nuts and deliberately killed their children. Nobody seems to see a pattern; probably because there isn't a pattern, it's a statistically insignificant bunch of unrelated occurrences having nothing to do with career choice and everything to do with deficiencies on the parts of the individual perpetrators. But two home-schooling stay-at-home moms kill their children in the course of two years? Cause for concern.
12:47 PM
Legislation will be unveiled today in Sacramento barring any California bank from charging employees of business-account holders fees to cash their paychecks.
The legislation precedes a state Senate Banking Committee hearing Wednesday, when representatives of Bank of America and Wells Fargo will be grilled on the rationale for such fees, which officials estimate affect tens of thousands of workers throughout California.
Umm, thousands of workers, why don't y'all just open bank accounts?
"We want to know how much money they're making off the backs of workers," said Sen. Dean Florez, a Central Valley Democrat and chairman of the banking committee. He's also the sponsor of the new legislation.
For the past two years, Bank of America has charged $5 for people who don't hold accounts at the bank to cash paychecks issued by BofA business payroll clients. Wells Fargo plans to introduce an identical charge Thursday.
Responding to my columns on the issue earlier this month, the state Department of Industrial Relations concluded that the fees violate Section 212 of the California Labor Code, which requires that paychecks "be negotiable and payable in cash, on demand, without discount."
The "backs of workers." And it begins. These venerable workers choose freely to pay $5 every time they cash their paychecks rather than open a free account. You'll get no argument from me if you say that's probably the wrong choice. Cashing one's paycheck is generally something not done by those of even mediocre intelligence. Paying $5 each time is even dumber. But that doesn't change the fact that this is what these people choose. It's natural to want to help people, the FACT that some people are simply too stupid to be helped is rarely considered. Even if all the evil banks are forced to provide services free of charge to non-customers, there is no doubt whatsoever that these idiots will find some other way to squander that $5. And I don' just mean on booze or crack. They will voluntarily give up that money in exchange for either very very little value or none at all. This is just how these people operate. It is an inviolable law. Like gravity.
But is this even the bank's problem? The law quoted above (Section 212 of the California Labor Code, which requires that paychecks "be negotiable and payable in cash, on demand, without discount." ) seems to make it pretty clear that the dirtbag's employer is responsible for paying the dirtbag. An employee demanding to be paid in cash should be paid in cash, according to this law. Why the vultures are even going after the banks remains unclear. It's probably because the workers' advocates hate banks and want to punish them. But even this slanted article, which makes it abundantly clear that the author is on the workers' side, offers no legal basis for going after the banks instead of the employers. Perhaps the author didn't feel it necessary to make his case. Or perhaps he simply doesn't have one.
The Tennessee Department of Health pulled a radio public-service announcement yesterday after some people complained that it played to racial stereotypes about African-Americans.
The PSA encouraged listeners to ''try baking your chicken, eating a fresh tossed salad on the side and scrumptious watermelon for dessert.''
I think this ad is wrong, but not for the reasons cited by its critics. Sure, it plays to racial stereotypes, but I'm not going to address that right now. My problem with it is that it's basic premise is that black people (or people in general, for that matter) do not know that, for health/obesity purposes, baked chicken is preferable to fried chicken. To have a commercial which suggests, as this one does, that people are ignorant of that fact is insulting. People who choose fried chicken over baked do so because fried chicken is delicious, not because of misconceptions about its nutritional content. They eschew baked chicken, not because they believe it to be nutritionally worthless, but rather because it tastes like crap, at least by comparison. In other words, people would rather choose something that tastes good than something that may possibly result in a slimmer figure and more freely-flowing arteries. It can be argued that this is the wrong choice, but that doesn't change the fact that it is the chicken-eater's choice to make, and nobody else's. But what if the state is paying higher health care costs as a result of high fried chicken consumption? Then the state should stop paying these costs. Perhaps more people would lay off the fried chicken a bit if they had to pay for their own coronary bypasses. Now this commercial isn't forcing people to bake their chicken, so it isn't infringing on anyone's freedoms, but it is using taxpayer money, and it is most certainly pointless. If people aren't listening to their doctors, families, or bodies, is there any reason to think they'd listen to an idiotic radio commercial, particularly when many members of the target audience of said commercial perceive it as racist?
But enough of that. This commercial is so dumb that it even gets the stereotype wrong. The stereotype is: black people like fried chicken and watermelon. Everybody knows this to be the stereotype, except for the Tennessee Department of Health. The commercial gets the fried chicken part "right." It refers to "your chicken" revealing the assumption that people are already partaking in the fried stuff. But then it suggests "a fresh tossed salad on the side and scrumptious watermelon for dessert," as if this is an unheard-of idea. The salad might very well be a novel suggestion, but the watermelon's already part of the stereotype. This thing is too pointless and idiotic to really be offensive from a racial standpoint. I can hardly wait to see the Tennessee Department of Health's take on da chitlins.
10:49 AM
