From Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility via YubaNet and our valuable contributor Ron Avitzur:

Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER)....

"As one park geologist said, this is equivalent of Yellowstone National Park selling a book entitled Geysers of Old Faithful: Nostrils of Satan," [PEER Executive Director Jeff] Ruch added, pointing to the fact that previous NPS leadership ignored strong protests from both its own scientists and leading geological societies against the agency approval of the creationist book.

This reminds me of the controversy about Bush's NASA appointee.

From satirical blog Opinions You Should Have:

In what some called a desperate gambit to retain Republican control of the Senate, Majority Leader Bill Frist announced today that he had examined a videotape and pronounced recovering Senator Tim Johnson dead.

"I will remain Majority Leader and the Republicans will continue to hold the Senate," he said in a press conference this morning....

No, I'm not hosting ads on my site. I just found the above amusing.

I was amused and appalled by George Vaccaro's blog entry Verizon doesn't know Dollars from Cents, in which he describes the inability of Verizon workers to understand that there is a difference between ".002 dollars" and ".002 cents". Keith and I listened to the audio of his customer service phone calls. Here's an excerpt from the transcript:

George: [big sigh] Okay, I think I have to do this again. Do you recognize that there's a difference between one dollar and one cent?

Andrea (customer support representative): Definitely.

G: Do you recognize there's a difference between half a dollar and half a cent?

A: Definitely

G: Then, do you therefore recognize there's a difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents

A: No.

G: No?

A: I mean there's... there's no .002 dollars.

My favorite comment was from a Slashdotter who wished that Verizon off-shored their call center to India.

Verizon eventually agreed to refund the overcharge, but there's no word yet on whether they'll do so for the uncounted other people who received a misquote.

With the school year over, I'm working at Google almost every day, which I enjoy for many reasons, including spending more time with my husband Keith, who also works at Google. While Keith and I usually have dinner together, I lunch with my co-workers. Here is an excerpt of today's lunchtime conversation:

Co-worker1: Did you hear? Co-worker2 bought a car for his girlfriend!

Ellen: That's nothing. The guy I'm sleeping with gives me half his salary and stock.

For some reason, they weren't impressed.

• Satire: Prominent Male Hooker Forced To Step Down Amid Accusations Of Sex With Sleazy Evangelical Leader
• Not satire: Parent wants to ban book on book banning (during Banned Book Week)

Ron Avitzur pointed me to Majikthise's commentary on a recent Washington Post article:

The Bush administration told a federal court last month that the 14 high value detainees transferred to Guantanamo must not be allowed to talk to lawyers because they've been tortured in CIA prisons. [WaPo]

According to the government, these detainees have been subjected to ordeals so exquisite and ingenious that they count as state secrets.

The state's chilling logic is as follows: If you were tortured in a CIA prison, then you can't have a lawyer because you might tell your lawyer how they tortured you.

If the judge accepts this reasoning, getting tortured by the USA will carry an automatic life sentence. After all, if these techniques are too secret for a client to share with an attorney in preparation for a secret trial, then it follows that torture victims must never be released for security reasons. They know too much.

It's a clever way to neutralize military tribunals, isn't it? It will cease to matter whether the detainee is guilty of the charges against him. If he's already been tortured, he'll never go free.

From the original article:

Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern University law professor who has represented several detainees at Guantanamo, said the prisoners "can't even say what our government did to these guys to elicit the statements that are the basis for them being held. Kafka-esque doesn't do it justice. This is 'Alice in Wonderland.'"

Readers who would like to do something should:

1. Vote Tuesday.
2. Give to the Center for Constitutional Rights Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative or Human Rights Watch.

From CNN:

If presidential elections were held today, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton would likely have a comfortable edge over Sen. John McCain, but take away her maiden name and McCain has a better shot of landing in the Oval Office.

So say the results of a CNN poll released Friday by Opinion Research Corp., which asked 506 adult Americans whom they preferred among potential 2008 presidential candidates. The margin of error for the survey is plus or minus 4.5 percent.

Asked if they preferred Hillary Rodham Clinton to McCain, respondents gave the Democratic New York senator and former first lady a 51 percent to 44 percent advantage over the Republican Senator from Arizona. Remove "Rodham" and McCain had a 1 percentage point advantage, 48 percent to 47 percent...

Women have become the majority of college students, but this hasn't resulted in a more female-friendly environment, at least socially. Via Chronicle of Higher Education, I found the Commonweal column "Role Reversals" by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead:

In the wake of last spring’s sex scandal involving the Duke University men’s lacrosse team, a Rolling Stone reporter named Janet Reitman went to Durham to interview current students. She returned with a revealing portrait of social life at Duke, and particularly of what it is like to be a female student at the school that ranks eighth on the latest U.S. News and World Report list of the nation’s top universities.

The women she met were hard-working superachievers. They had impressive GPAs, letters in sports, double majors, and high career ambitions. Almost to a one, they were fit, attractive, and stylish. They stood out as the very model of the independent-minded young woman of the twenty-first century. Yet in their social lives, Reitman discovered, they were abjectly dependent on winning the approval of the male students at Duke. This required going to bashes organized by men, matching them drink for drink, hooking up for sex and acting out men’s pornographic fantasies at theme parties like “Dress to Get Lei’d” and “Sex and Execs.” Moreover, these elite women couldn’t think of anything that might be wrong with this kind of behavior. To them, it was just the normal way that men and women socialized....

As recently as the early 1960s, there was a familiar gender divide on coed college campuses. Men dominated the classroom. They outnumbered women, were taught by male professors, and enjoyed the privileges of male sponsorship in their academic pursuits and future careers. Women dominated campus social life. They set and enforced the rules for dating and parties. They organized the rites and rituals of coed socializing-including such now-arcane courtship rituals as pinning ceremonies, formal dances, and male serenades-where men were obliged to defer to women’s fantasies and desires....

The Duke coeds don’t see their social condition as a form of servility, but they do experience it as a source of perplexity. On the one hand, they believe that their generation of women has achieved sexual equality. To them, that means that girls can get hammered and have sex with as much freedom and abandon as the guys. They’ve been taught that this represents progress from the old double standard and from the burden of female modesty. On the other hand, they don’t always feel good about themselves. Their participation in the booze-drenched party culture, they admit, is at odds with their own sense of dignity and self-worth. One Duke woman, who confessed to having sex with a popular guy in order not to lose him, said wistfully: “I have done things that are completely inconsistent with the type of person I am, and what I value.”

(Reading the full column requires free registration.)

I've been sheltered from these environments. I was a student at MIT, where the focus was on studying and there were few enough women (especially in computer science) that we didn't have to go out of our way to attract men. I'm a professor at Mills, a women's college, which has different social problems.

• The Stephen Colbert-Ann Coulter Challenge
• Republicans blame Democrats for Foley scandal