Normally, Oprah makes my stomach turn. Add to that the fact that her name was in the subject of the forwarded meail my mother sent and my eyes were rolling before I could click delete. But, owing to the fact that we all only have one mother, I read the email and was incensed with what I found. It was the story of Amina Lawal, a 30 year-old Muslim woman, who was sentenced to be stoned to death by a Shari’ah court at Bakori in Katsina State in northern Nigeria. She was being executed because she had a baby out of wedlock which apparently indicates, according to Shari’ah law, that she has committed adultery. The father of the child, who denies his involvement, has so far suffered no repercussions.

If the sentence is put into place, she will be buried up to her neck and stoned to death by the men of the town.

You can help by signing this petition that Amnesty International will use to leverage the sane position of commuting her sentence with the Ambassador of Nigeria.

The greater injustice of this is that the sentence will wait until Amina has finished nursing the child, meaning that she has already been relegated to nothing but a breeder body and soon will be disposed of.

National Geographic confirms, Generation Y is lacking in the area of smarts. Hell, they stole their name from us Generation Xers. They couldn’t even come up with a unique name! National Geographic is reporting that only 13% of American’s between the age of 18 and 24 could find Iraq or Iran on a map of the middle east. And this with Bush saying he’s ready to go to war with Iraq. It’s on the news every damn night.

And while 58 percent of that same age group knew that the Taliban and al Qaeda were based in Afghanistan, only 17 percent could find that country on a world map.

What’s this war for? Don’t ask 18-24 years olds. If they can’t find it on a map, then they surely don’t care or know what’s going on. I’m not sure if this is sad day for the political issues, or a sad day for our public school system.

“If our young people can’t find places on a map and lack awareness of current events, how can they understand the world’s cultural, economic and natural resource issues that confront us?” John Fahey, president of the National Geographic Society, said in a statement.

Among 18- to 24-year-old Americans given maps:
87 percent cannot find Iraq
83 percent cannot find Afghanistan
76 percent cannot find Saudi Arabia
70 percent cannot find New Jersey
49 percent cannot find New York
11 percent cannot find the United States

34% knew that the island used on last season’s “Survivor” show was located in the South Pacific, but only 30% could locate New Jersey on a map.

When show a map of the United States, only California and Texas could be located by a large majority (89%) of those surveyed. In this post September 11th world, only 51 percent could find New York.

29% of Americans couldn’t find the Pacific Ocean, the world’s largest body of water. Pssst… here’s a hint. If you’re looking at a globe, the Pacific is on the left. That is if you know which hand is your left, and assuming you know where the US is to begin with.

The Homeland Security Bill. Strangely, I don’t feel any safer. Honestly, I’ve been pretty much against this from the beginning. I feel that civil liberties are being violated, too much money is being spent, and no one is actually any safer.

As Jetteva pointed out in his post, there is a lot of pork in this bill. That’s not the major thing that bothers me. What really gets me is that no one in this country is any safer than before 9/11, or ever will be safer. The issue is that suicide terrorists simply cannot be stopped. If 20 people want to die in the course of committing a terrorist act, that force of will is too great to be squelched.

The reason that any crime is solved or deterred is because the criminal doesn’t want to be caught or killed in the committing of that crime. That matters not to these suicide terrorists. They fear nothing, so stopping them before the fact becomes impossible because they don’t have to salvage any sort of life for after the crime.

I see the Homeland Security Bill as a band-aid to pacify the American people. It’s a also a crutch for the Bush people to hang their hats on come election time. It is a political ploy and nothing more.

It goes against every Republican fiber of my being to create new departments in government. It increases the bureaucracy around making me more secur. It does nothing to address the nature of suicide terrorists. It will be all but forgotten until election time.

In short, they’re going to spend my money while providing me no protection violating the primary tenet of a government’s raison d’etre.

Let’s take another tack. Let’s like at this as if we were running a business. Not only do we have the monetary cost of actually integrating all these departments into one, but we also must include the monetary cost of all the politicians time, their assistants time, and the opportunity cost of the passage of other bills. So, we add all that together, plus the future cost of running this bureaucratic behemoth that is beholden only to the President, and the American people are faced with something like what the Social Security System has become.

We end up with an overwrought, overburdened, and unsuccessful enterprise whose noble beginnings have now become a crutch that no politician dare remove. We should not be locking ourselves into this permanent state of alert of terrorist acts. This level of security and alert existed before 9/11. Long before. Remember the Cold War?

So, for all the political reasons, monetary reasons, and social reasons, this Bill/Act seems nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction to a nonissue.

I’ll close with a quote I just read on another forum:
“hey united states, the 40’s called. they want their fascism back”

The Homeland Security Bill passed the Senate yesterday, it’s last hurdle to becoming law. Terrorism is the new mantra of a Republican Congress, but it’s politics as usual with the hidden benefits to Republican friends. The pharmaceutical industry, which donated $35 million to the last two political campaigns, will gain lawsuit protection over adverse side effects of vaccines. Conveniently, the protection is retroactive, ending all injury cases that are now in the courts.

Makers of faulty bomb detectors, gas masks or other anti-terrorism devices would be granted immunity from liability, even in cases of intentional wrongdoing.

Companies can cover up violations of the law by hiding behind new restrictions on access to government information.

A provision inserted by incoming House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R- Texas, would hand Texas A&M University the first department grant: a homeland-security research center. Hummm… I wonder why all that grant money is going to Texas A&M? Papa Bush’s Presidential Library is also located there.

Congress is now off for the rest of the year without delivering promised billions more for such programs as truck and nuclear-plant security, bioterrorism research and Customs operations.

Now before I get accused of Democratic propoganda, the bill passed 90-9. Thought the nine Senators who voted against the bill were all democrats: Ted Kennedy, D- Massachusetts; Paul Sarbanes, D- Maryland; Jim Jeffords, I-Vermont; Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii; Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii; Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia; Carl Levin, D-Michigan; Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, D-South Carolina; and Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin.