This is a nice twist on the shooting targets with gravity game. Cool little spirographs are the goal that eventually land the pernguin (whose name is Kevin) onto his spaceship.

The Patriot Act is getting shot up in the courts.

The case before the court involved five groups and two U.S. citizens seeking to provide support for lawful, nonviolent activities on behalf of Kurdish refugees in Turkey.

…

The judge’s ruling said the law, as written, does not differentiate between impermissible advice on violence and encouraging the use of peaceful, nonviolent means to achieve goals.

p.s. Is it wrong to simply straight quote from this article ?

I know this is a particularly difficult subject, even here on the backporch, but this is a sad but powerful story from a woman who had an abortion that would fall into the specifics of the overly-broad, ignorantly-non-medical Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.

“I’m pleased that all of you have joined us as the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 becomes the law of the land,” Bush said. After singling out 11 political supporters of the bill — all of them men — the president whipped the 400-strong, antiabortion crowd into a frenzy. … The signing ceremony staged by the White House was part evangelical tent revival, part good ol’ boy pep rally, ending with the audience muttering “Amen.” …

At the heart of the debate is a term that legislators concocted. They created a nonexistent procedure — partial-birth abortion — and then banned it. … But in the bill, there is no mention of fetal viability (the point at which a fetus could live independently of its mother for a sustained period of time).

Dell’s internet filter service has decided that all things Rollerfeet.com are category: Mature.

No one has ever accused me of being mature before.

It goes without saying that I am the man to talk to about new products. Usually the food engineers and QA managers of Hershey’s and Nestle do a good job and I have nothing to complain about. That is not true today. Here’s three new products that at best are pointless, at worst just disgusting.

Illegal Immigration is up after GWB’s proposal to give legal status to workers already here.

At least he announced the plan in the winter so we don’t have more people frying in the desert while crossing the border.

My!Yahoo is beta testing an RSS feed as part of new content delivery. It’s a little slow in updating, but since I read blogs more than I do My!Yahoo now-a-days, it could convince me to return to their site more often. (Here’s the FAQ on the new feature.)

p.s. For you normal folks, here’s the url for doing BPB sydication into the My!Yahoo RSS feed: http://www.rollerfeet.com/backporchbeer/index.rdf

Joyce McGreevy rips into the president’s SOTU with some clever prose. I especially approve of her attack on the whole “sanctity of marriage” b.s.

This should help the president safeguard the sanctity of marriage from those who, unlike his brother Neil, fail to appreciate that marriage is a union of a man, a woman, and whoever shows up at the man’s hotel room.

The DNC sent me a thoughful note yesterday. I knew both of the stories below, but I didn’t realize the timing between them. They rubbed me the wrong way when I heard them and hearing them presented in this fashion really sticks in my craw:

President Bush bypassed the Senate confirmation process and appointed Charles Pickering to a lifetime seat on the federal bench just hours after laying a wreath at the grave of Martin Luther King, Jr.

That was just their way of stoking the fire, though. This was the real point of their email:

the Boston Globe reported that Republican staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee repeatedly accessed computer files belonging to Democratic members over the course of the year

Since the example was made of Kevin Mitnick before the “Patriot” Act, I can’t wait to see what the government does to the hacker responsible for this crime. Surely the GOP’s partisan spying — tantamount to an electronic Watergate — will lead to a slew of arrests with the criminals being jaled for several years before charges are officialy drawn up, and then the defendants will have to process their case with paper and ink since allowing them access to computers would further their criminal activites.

That’s gonna happen, right?