Thursday, Feb. 17, 2005
Poly Ticks, posted at 10:39 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com Entry #2 of the night1. I'm so embarrassed of my hometown congressman. He was always a moderate, I thought. Here he is, introducing legislation to increase fines to broadcasters from $11,000 to $500,000. I can't wait for it to go to court for the first time. The government, deciding what is indecent, but without giving standards for that indecency, and leavening a fine that nobody can pay if you do violate their tacit rules? how can anyone not think that's a First Amendment violation? Well, apparently only 39 congressmen did. Stupid weak Democrats who won't stand up to the Republicans who apparently believe that the government, not parents, should decide what is acceptable for kids. What I don't understand, though, is why this website says the vote was 220-198, while the media is reporting 398-38. I wanted to see if my current Congressman voted for the bill, but apparently the House website isn't updated? Anyone know? All I know is that it sucks, and, Fred Upton, you suck, even if you did come to the Blueberry Festival parade every year.
2. I am glad, however, that The Baltimore Sun did not win the right to sue Bob Ehrlich for Ehrlich's refusal to allow his staff to talk to Olesker and the other Sun reporter. There's no law, nothing in the Constitution, that requires a politician to speak to the press. That's ridiculous. Sure, it makes Ehrlich look sort of stupid, but he's done that plenty of times in this, his lone term as governor of the state of Maryland.
3. I met Michael Olesker last year. Many colleagues wrote to him about problems at our school this year, and he never responded. But he was a nice guy when I met him. I also met Gregory Kane the same day. He was cool. I like cranky Gregory Kane even though I agree with his columns only about a quarter of the time. He wrote a doozy of an article about Jesse Jackson on the day after Martin Luther King's Day that I really liked, though.
4. One of my favorite students of all time disappointed me greatly as her junior year teacher showed me an essay she wrote on gay marriage. The assignment was to take one issue, and write a speech to a hostile audience and one to a friendly audience. There are obviously very different rhetorical strategies for each, and that was the assignment. Her topic was gay marriage, and her speech to the hostile audience (which she labelled "athiests and homosexuals") was not only something that disappointed me coming from a liberal girl who wants to be a lawyer and once said to a reporter, "I think compassion is the most important thing for a person to have" in an article about her being a leader in the school community, but it was also a poorly constructed argument, one that makes leaps of logic without follow-through. The speech to the friendly audience was filled with cliches. Her writing seems to have regressed since she was a ninth grader, and her ideas just make me sad. I did not envy being in the teacher's position of grading that, because, while the essays were poorly written, a teacher cannot let his/her own thoughts about an issue sway their judgment.