I thought it would get me off the couch but it has confined me to it.

I remember reading that Steve Martin said when working on the movie Pennies from Heaven that learning to tap dance at 35 was like being hit by a truck every day.

Yesterday I saw Sanders bashing Hillary for her deafening silence on the topic.  Ryan seemed to be channeling Pelosi with his comment that we would know what was in Obamatrade once it was passed.

Karen Fitzgibbons, an elementary school teacher in the Frenship Independent School District, wrote on Facebook that she did not think Casebolt needed to resign after a video showed him slamming a black 15-year-old girl to the ground and pointing a gun at teenagers at a community pool in McKinney, Texas, according to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.

She wrote that "the blacks are the ones causing the problems and this `racial tension.' I guess that's what happens when you flunk out of school and have no education," according to the Avalanche-Journal.

"I'm almost to the point of wanting them all segregated on one side of town so they can hurt each other and leave the innocent people alone," she continued. "Maybe the 50s and 60s were really on to something. Now, let the bashing of my true and honest opinion begin....GO! #imnotracist #imsickofthemcausingtrouble #itwasatagedcommunity."

Frenship ISD announced in a Thursday statement that the district began the process of firing Fitzgibbons over the Facebook post, according to Everything Lubbock.

"Frenship ISD is deeply disappointed in the thoughtlessness conveyed by this employee's post. We find these statements to be extremely offensive, insensitive, and disrespectful to our Frenship community and citizens everywhere. These comments in no way represent the educational environment we have created for our students," the statement reads. "The employee whose account is responsible for the post will be relieved of her teaching duties at Frenship ISD."

Fitzgibbons apologized on Wednesday and deleted the post from her Facebook page.

"I apologized to the appropriate people," she told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, adding that the post "was not directed at any one person or group."

This in turn spurred an amazing period of ferment and re-thinking what a bike is and how it is used.  Now bicycle design has exploded into dozens of micro-niches.  Anybody can design and build a bike, but not every new design changes anything.  

Which brings me to one of my colleagues in the great bicycle adventure, Joe Breeze.  Joe's bicycle designs changed everything, beginning when he built the first working example of this new kind of bike, not yet called a "mountain bike" in 1978.

My friend of 45 years, a world renowned bicycle designer, Joe wrote the foreword for my book, Fat Tire Flyer: Repack and the Birth of Mountain Biking.  Joe put almost as much work into the book as I did.

- Steven W Thrasher, The Guardian

And yet Rachel Dolezal, the president of the Spokane branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had been passing herself off as mixed race with an African-American father for years, until she was outed as white by her parents this week.

As the theologian Broderick Greer tweeted, "only a white person could get this much attention for being black."

Acting under a rarely used provision of Ohio state law, a judge found probable cause Thursday to charge Cleveland police Officer Timothy Loehmann with murder in the fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice last year.

Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Ronald Adrine also found cause to support negligent homicide charges against Officer Frank Garmback, Loehmann's partner, who is accused of standing by after Loehmann shot Tamir in November at a recreation center, where Tamir was playing with a pellet gun.

Adrine agreed with local activists known as the "Cleveland 8" who took the unusual step of independently seeking charges because, they said, they'd lost confidence in the grand jury investigation.

The ruling is only advisory and doesn't affect the separate grand jury investigation.

Link

The other teams qualifying for this year's CWS, which is held annually at TD Ameritrade Park in Omaha, NE, are Arkansas, LSU, Florida, Virginia, Miami and TCU.

Daneshia Heller, 19, called 911 seeking police help to complete a drug transaction.

"He got my money and I want my drugs. Can you send an officer?" Heller asked the 911 operator.

Heller was found with a small bag of the artificial street drug flakka in her pocket

Florida's "Scarlet Letter" law, allowed to go into effect  in 200l, by then Governor Jeb required unwed mothers who wished to put their babies up for adoption to buy and post details about their recent sexual encounters in the newspaper.  An attempt to inform the estranged fathers that their child was up for adoption so as to give a chance to intervene. The law applied in instances of incest and rape.

The newspaper buy required the mother's full-name, age, weight, height, hair/eye color, race, child's name, birthplace and description of the possible father.

Jeb did not veto the bill, but let it go into effect--although, in Jeb's book published way back in 1995 advocated for the public shaming of women who had babies "out of wedlock."

Marco Rubio, then a Florida state legislator voted for this bill.  Jeb signed a repeal of this law two years later, in 2003, after successfully being challenged in Court as being unconstitutional.  

Thought y'all might apprecate this quote:

Mr. Arzberger said that he had been dismayed by how he has been portrayed in the media coverage his case has received. "I could be a rock musician or something like that -- destroying hotel rooms, or taking drugs or excessive alcohol," he said. "No, it's different."

During instructional sessions in 2012 and 2013 for military personnel, Hagmann gave trainees drugs and liquor, and directed them to perform macabre medical procedures on one another, according to a report issued by the Virginia Board of Medicine, the state agency that oversees the conduct of doctors.

Hagmann, 59, is accused of inappropriately providing at least 10 students with the hypnotic drug ketamine. The report alleges Hagmann told students to insert catheters into the genitals of other trainees and that two intoxicated student were subjected to penile nerve block procedures. Hagmann also is accused of conducting "shock labs," a process in which he withdrew blood from the students, monitored them for shock, and then transfused the blood back into their systems.

It comes a little late - the awakening of Democrats who are actually Democrats - but still it is a sign of health.

I also wonder whether this is a reflection of the power of Elizabeth Warren.

Obama took her on - and was rather insulting and condescending in doing so in my opinion.

And he lost out.

When I mentioned the power of Elizabeth Warren, I am speaking of the power of her intellect - and her ability to communicate in a forthright manner. Apparently it impresses a lot of people.

I know it has impressed me.

My hope is that people in government and in the media can be inspired by her.

Of course, there may be some way around this defeat for Obama's trade bill. The machinations of government coupled with corporate avarice is a powerful force.