Kansas Republican Kevin Yoder is running for Congress, attempting to win a seat long held by Democrat Dennis Moore. In Yoder's new campaign advertisement you see him walking around on a farm with his wife and children and chatting at a diner with locals in what appears to be your garden variety ad. The problem is, according to The Pitch - Yoder and his wife have no children.

What a good-looking family. In his new campaign video for Congress, Kevin Yoder appears to have a photogenic, all-American brood: three adorable girls and a boy, who seem to embody the heartland values Yoder espouses in his new campaign video. Except those aren't Yoder's children.

If you just watched the video and didn't know any better, you'd think these were Yoder's kids. They're not. They're likely his nieces and nephew (or models hired for cuteness).

While misleading and creepy, that alone wouldn't be much of a story. But, thanks to a very observant blogger, we find out that Yoder not only hired other people's children to give the impression he was a "family man," he also hired right wing, anti-tax lobbyists and a Delta Dental executive to pose as regular, working folk:

But what Pitch didn't notice, but we at DOTR did, is that while the ad has plenty of other people's children, Yoder also gathered some of his favorite lobbyists to play "real people" for him to "meet" in a "diner."

Why there's Ken Daniel, the conservative anti-tax advocate, in the brown coat next to Yoder at 0:33. And that's Dan Murray at 0:59. You remember him - he's the Kansas director for the right-wing National Federation of Independent Businesses and a frequent Statehouse visitor.

Even former legislator and current Delta Dental insurance executive Dean Newton makes several appearances, bringing his whole family to "meet" Kevin at 1:03 before giving an unconvincing "I'm a Yoder voter" at 1:21. Read on...

Yoder's Democratic opponent is Stephene Moore (Dennis Moore's wife) and here is her website. If you're so inclined, click through and show her some love.

Have a good look at these two women, both wearing the same bathing suit. Which one, in your opinion, would you consider as ‘sexier’?

Now, which one do you suppose was raved over as being 'sensational' by judges of one of those ubiquitous ‘I wanna be a supermodel’ type reality shows, and which one was reduced to tears after being harshly criticized for not taking her diet and exercise regime seriously?

Go on... guess…

Yeah, wasn’t hard, was it? The girl on the left, British yummy mummy Jen Hunter, was 24, and at 5’11” and 11 stone (that’s 154 pounds or just under 70 kilos for the rest of us) was told by a judge who is the managing director of a modeling agency that her legs were ‘stocky’ and scolded by former supermodel Rachel Hunter (no relation) for being ‘fat, lazy and greedy.’

While the judges – professionals from the fashion industry – preferred ‘the walking skeleton,’ tens of thousands of television viewers quite adamantly voted for the more voluptuous Ms Hunter, far and away enough to win over the judge’s favourite…

… just a few hours before model Ana Carolina Reston, a 21-year-old Brazilian model, was reported as having died of starvation, trying to live on a diet of apples and tomatoes to keep her catwalk career. Ms Hunter’s Body Mass Index was a healthy 21.5, while the girl on the right, Swedish Marianne Berglund, had a BMI of 16.1, well below the 18.5 considered by health professionals as the minimum weight of a healthy adult woman, and even below the minimum BMI of 18 for models taking part in Madrid Fashion Week, set after catwalk model Luisel Ramos collapsed three months earlier at a fashion show and died from heart failure, having eaten nothing but salads and Diet Coke for three months in her lethal attempt to slim down to the perfect size zero.

Three months after Hunter’s win and Reston’s death, Luisel Ramos’s sister, Eliana, a model with a major Argentine agency, died after having starved herself. Rather than even consider the issue of the fashion industry’s insane demands on young models desperate enough to risk their lives to be thin ‘enough’, her boss, Pancho Dotto, declared well before any coroner’s post mortem that ‘obvious the sisters’ deaths must be due to a genetic problem.’

Of course, this was back in 2006, and things must have gotten better since then, right?

Continue reading »

...the Rutgers basketball team can go from sports heroes to victims to role models in just a few days, Kudos to Imus...Or something like that....

I can't find any independent verification of this, but if this is true, I have several areas of concern. This just seems like there is way too much potential for severe compromising of your individual privacy. Am I reading too much into this? Would you want all of your personal information collected and sent to a private company? As a victim of identity theft in the past, this makes me very, very nervous.

Wired (h/t OK)

A program to standardize state driver's licenses to create a de facto national I.D. should use a third-party -- most likely a private contractor -- to verify that a person is eligible for a driver's license or state identification card, according to a document provided to 27B by a privacy activist. The document appears to be a portion of the rules that Homeland Security is proposing for the program, which are currently being evaluated by the Office of Management and Budget before they are presented to the public for comment.
According to the document (.txt) that Bill Scannell of UnReal ID says he got from a government official (but which 27B has not yet verified), DHS suggests that there are three models for states to follow to insure that a person has the right documents and does not have a driver's license in another state. One is to let them figure out how to communicate with each other. The second is to create a federated model, where a central service includes pointers to records in all the states' databases which all have a standard lookup interface. This is similar architecture to the one used for trucking licenses, where a state can find information about an applicant by checking a central clearinghouse that doesn't store all the records, but simply knows where to look for records.
The third, and favored option, according to the document, is to have a centralized service, likely a private company, that vets anyone seeking to get a driver's license. The state would collect the necessary information -- including social security numbers, certified birth certificate and possibly fingerprints -- send it along to the service, which would then check all the states, run the name against watchlists, verify the social security number through the immigrant-verification program known as SAVE and verify birth certificate information through EVVE.

Body and Soul

In his biography of Ratzinger, John Allen, National Catholic Reporter's Vatican correspondent, notes that Ratzinger has said that resistance to Nazism was "impossible," a word echoed by his brother in the recent Times of London article that revived the issue of the then cardinal's wartime experiences.

Resistance was impossible. I'm sorry, but that's a blatant falsehood. The Times follows with the comments of a woman from Ratzinger's home town:

John Allen adds that within Ratzinger's "immediate orbit" there were several models of resistance, including Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses and even some Catholics.Body and Soul

In his biography of Ratzinger, John Allen, National Catholic Reporter's Vatican correspondent, notes that Ratzinger has said that resistance to Nazism was "impossible," a word echoed by his brother in the recent Times of London article that revived the issue of the then cardinal's wartime experiences.

Resistance was impossible. I'm sorry, but that's a blatant falsehood. The Times follows with the comments of a woman from Ratzinger's home town:

John Allen adds that within Ratzinger's "immediate orbit" there were several models of resistance, including Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses and even some Catholics.

Clearly, when Ratzinger and his brother (who is also a priest) say that anti-Nazi resistance was "impossible," they're lying. And it's not an insignificant or harmless lie. Denying the option of resistance insults, indeed, denies the existence of, a lot of people who made far braver and more difficult decisions than the Ratzingers. Failing to exhibit extraordinary courage is human and understandable. Denying the extraordinarily courageous their due is shameful. Denying moral agency is surely unworthy of a man who would be pope.

The Ratzingers lie about this because if they admit that moral choices were involved, they'd have to explain their choice. In fact, I would suggest that anyone who cared about moral agency would recognize the need for self-reflection, for either admitting moral failure, or asserting moral principles. I can think of many possible explanations, but none of them fit well into black and white morality.  continue reading The German Shepherd and the Salvadoran Pastor

Choke on that Cinnabon       Unfogged

The only important question that remains in the case of David Brooks is whether he could be

Clearly, when Ratzinger and his brother (who is also a priest) say that anti-Nazi resistance was "impossible," they're lying. And it's not an insignificant or harmless lie. Denying the option of resistance insults, indeed, denies the existence of, a lot of people who made far braver and more difficult decisions than the Ratzingers. Failing to exhibit extraordinary courage is human and understandable. Denying the extraordinarily courageous their due is shameful. Denying moral agency is surely unworthy of a man who would be pope.

The Ratzingers lie about this because if they admit that moral choices were involved, they'd have to explain their choice. In fact, I would suggest that anyone who cared about moral agency would recognize the need for self-reflection, for either admitting moral failure, or asserting moral principles. I can think of many possible explanations, but none of them fit well into black and white morality. continue reading The German Shepherd and the Salvadoran Pastor