Teachable Moments

Well, that and one other thing:

A Mississippi county school board announced Wednesday it would cancel its upcoming prom after a gay student petitioned to bring a same-sex date to the event.

“Due to the distractions to the educational process caused by recent events, the Itawamba County School District has decided to not host a prom at Itawamba Agricultural High School this year,” school board members said in a statement…

School officials told [Constance] McMillen last month that she could not bring her sophomore girlfriend to the prom and also told her she could not wear a tuxedo.

As much as we want to mock Mississippi over this, the fact is they somehow managed to raise a young woman who’s not afraid of standing up for her rights. By name. In a national newspaper. That’s the real news.

Miss. prom canceled after lesbian’s date request [USA Today]

Nevada has a “Tea Party” candidate challenging Harry Reid. Teabaggers say the Tea Party candidate is a decoy run by Harry Reid’s minions. Harry Reid may be smarter than we thought. [CNN, via Political Wire]

The actress who played Ellen in the Family Guy episode that Sarah Palin has cynically criticized for personal gain not only talked to the New York Times last week — she also spoke on camera for “The Insider”.

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We think this clears things up, but somehow we remain confused:

The Culpeper County school superintendent said Monday that the school system had never formally removed a version of Anne Frank’s diary from classrooms following a parental complaint that some passages were objectionable.

Of course, that was how the local rag originally reported it: “school officials immediately chose to pull this version and use an alternative copy.” No formality required!

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Generations ago, a doomed young girl hiding from Nazis wrote a diary about her experience. Since she was 13 when her self-imprisonment began, she was interested in more than just her surroundings:

“There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!”

While Anne Frank’s father omitted that and similar passages when the diary was first published in 1947, the Anne Frank Foundation published a complete edition in 1995, allowing other 13-year-olds around the world to understand the full breadth of her experience.

Well, except in Culpeper County, Virginia:

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American banks are kinda like Santa Claus - if Santa was a psychopathic home jacking extortionist. "Hey, you got my fucking fee? You didn't know about it? Hey, you know the fuck about it now! Where the fuck is it? Where the fuck is the money?"

Unless you’ve made your way to a credit union or thrift, likely your bank is planning to beat you unconscious and ream your ass into a bloody pulp with savage new fees to make up for the revenue these gangland operations will lose due to changes in the credit card regulations taking effect next month. If you have a credit card, call your bank immediately and find out what changes are in store. Likely they’re monstrous horrors that the poor telemarketer schlubs will try to explain away as unlikely to effect you.

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In the Navy.

Today in 1773, rebel colonists performed the first recorded mass sexual act in American history:

Colonists objected to the Tea Act for a variety of reasons, especially because they believed that it violated their right to be taxed only by their own elected representatives… Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson … apparently did not expect that the protestors would choose to destroy the tea rather than concede the authority of a legislature in which they were not directly represented.

Wikipedia also corrects the legend that Boston teabaggers were disguised as Indians. Modern-day teabaggers, as we know, frequently disguise themselves as idiots.

Boston Tea Party [Wikipedia]