Link Banana

An interesting bit of cocktail chatter, if nothing else:

Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party’s nominee for president, has filed a lawsuit in Texas demanding Senators John McCain and Barack Obama be removed from the ballot after they missed the official filing deadline.

“The seriousness of this issue is self-evident,” the lawsuit states. “The hubris of the major parties has risen to such a level that they do not believe that the election laws of the State of Texas apply to them.”

(via Slashdot)

Both awe and sadness seem like proper responses to this post from The Big Picture. These two really got me.

Katy Vine wrote a rather good piece about the history of sex and abstinence education in America, and explores why Texas still prefers to teach abstinence even when the method’s been repeatedly proven ineffective:

The Texas State Board of of Education adopts new health textbooks every eight to ten years. Since the content of these books pretty well dictates what happens in the classroom, the process of textbook adoption has historically been contentious. To better understand why, in 2008, the vast majority of Texas teens will not see the word “condom” in their textbooks, we need to go back to the 1994 health textbook debates. Back then the state board still had a great deal of power in the process and could edit textbooks at will (in 1995 the Legislature took this power away). Items some of the members deemed objectionable for the eyes of children included an image of a woman with a briefcase in her hand and a toddler looking up at her. Line drawings illustrating breast and testicular self-exams were considered too explicit. The board asked at least one publisher to erase the clitoris from a drawing of the female anatomy and reduce the size of the penis in a drawing of the male anatomy, prompting Lorena Bobbitt jokes.

Those who did not vote with the small but vocal ultraconservative faction faced swift and extreme retaliation. Patsy Johnson, a Democratic board member from 1992 to 1994, remembers that a few days before meetings, her husband’s office, where she worked, would be paralyzed by a flood of angry letters. “We’d have boxloads of mail and faxes saying, ‘Mrs. Johnson is for condoms, vaginal, anal, oral’—awful stuff,” she said. “I’m a traditional Methodist lady!”

I didn’t follow “Waco” when it happened (in my defense, I was seven) and haven’t learned much about it since. Thus I was rather fascinated by Pamela Colloff’s excellent — though sometimes hard to follow — compilation of accounts of the events by those who were there, both Branch Davidians and law enforcement. 

(via brijit)

The answer is no. Poll taxes were abolished by the 24th Amendment. Pole taxes remain legal. And Texas now has one.

THERE is a new price to be paid for looking at naked women in Texas. On January 1st the state’s strip clubs began imposing a $5 surcharge for each visitor. The “pole tax,” as it is commonly called, is expected to bring the state an additional $40m in revenue each year. Most of the proceeds will go to programmes that support victims of sexual assault.

So I want to know, is this good government or and insane idea from the Texas’s legislature?