The House voted yesterday to take away the teacher incentive they agreed to last year and instead propose an $800 pay raise. Whoop dee shit. That's a whopping 38 cent per hour increase. Eight hundred dollars is one night's stay at the Four Seasons with dinner, drinks and breakfast. Excluding the obligatory hooker!

Texas, dead last in book smarts and commitment to education. When you've got people that barely have a sixth grade education in the legislature what do you expect? They do not value public education, school teachers, or students.

Speechless.

In most dramatic office building fire of the day. Chicago's Version here.

The TV is showing clips of British soldiers hitting the clubs and making asses of themselves while being held hostage in Iran. Oh wait, I've got my shows mixed up. Iran? Soldiers? Hostages? Oh just fuck me running. We seriously cannot catch a break can we?

Is Liz Richardson, John Kerry's Press Secretary, sending me press releases? Does anyone really care about John Kerry anymore?

Namely John McCain's MySpace page. Apparently the staffer who set up his MySpace page used a template and didn't give the creator credit for it. Not only that, they stole his bandwidth by not hosting their own images. Redonkulous.

To get back at McCain's campaign, the creator changed one of the images that he was hosting (and they were using) to say that McCain was now supporting gay marriage. It has since been taken down off the official MySpace page, but we present it here for posterity's sake.

Here's the full story.

This seems to follow the continuous pattern we've been seeing of campaigns using a tool (the internets) that is over their heads. What we did here was save the image to our computer and upload it to our server. See how easy that is, staffers?

[Eat the Press]
You may remember that we've had this problem with MySpace before. We were much more brutal. (NSFW)

The cost of birth control pills for college students has doubled and at some colleges will triple. Why?

The change is the result of a chain reaction started by a 2005 deficit-reduction bill that focused on Medicaid, the main federal health insurance program for the poor. College health officials say they had little idea the bill would affect them.

Man, being in college totally sucks these days.

*This is my new favorite fake word.

Does it embarrass you when friends from other parts of the country call you asking what kind of idiots you elect to your state legislature? It's sad because it takes a lot of explaining to someone in NYC that this guy is a fluke, but still...somebody voted for him and that is humiliating.

Unlike Alberto Gonzeles and his cadre of lawyers, we have been burned enough on business emails to know that they are what's called 'discoverable.' Our attorneys tell us that when we're discussing business strategies, the competition and anything sensitive we should keep in mind that our emails could become part of the record. We've learned that pontificating on email is bad news.

Here are few of things you should never do in an email:
1.) Never hit reply-all. This is non-negotiable and never acceptable. Best case scenario? You start a chain reaction of reply-alls that fill your inbox with every idiot on the list putting in their two cents.
2.) Use complete sentences, punctuation and spell-check. Ur shorthand mkes u look like an idiut.
3.) When pissed off by an email. Delete it. Do not reply. It never works out for you.
4.) If at all possible, pick up the phone and respond...or better yet lean your head over the cube and shout out an answer.
5.) Never send an email to a co-worker discussing how big of an ass your boss is. Your boss 'owns' your emails from work and has access to read them any time they want to.

Add your own lessons learned in the comments. Maybe Alberto will read them!

We have not had one single email tip about someone getting drunk and feeling up a staffer all Session!!

"Any president who says, I don't care, or I will not respond to what the people of this country are saying about Iraq or anything else, or I don't care what the Congress does, I am going to proceed — if a president really believes that, then there are — what I was pointing out, there are ways to deal with that," said Hagel, who is considering a 2008 presidential run.

It's just getting tiresome and quite frankly, it's time somebody somewhere do something. This whole Iraq thing is a disaster. People are being killed every day and the U.S. looks like a bunch of doofuses with absolutely no strategy. Either pull out or give them everything we've got and just get it over with.

Marie Antoinette Mrs. Craddick gave the press a tour of the refurbished Speaker's Apartment inside the pink dome. It's really fancy, y'all. A bit too fancy for anybody that's lived in Midland if you ask me. It's nice to see what a million dollars of donations from the public can do for a private place they'll never get to see except in the photo tour she allowed of the press.

If you're looking for a place to drop some cash, we have a few suggestions. Add your own in the comments section.
Alzheimer's Association of Texas
Meals on Wheels
SafePlace: Battered Women's Shelter

That took me about three seconds to come up with just those few ideas of where I'd rather spend my disposable income than giving it to the state to put in a private apartment I'll never get invited to see and one in which (no matter the person holding the office of Speaker) usually is the home of an asshole.

Daniel's comment:
Bloggers should use better grammar. Someone might read your work. Therefore, try using the correct relative pronoun to describe a person. For example, write "People WHO have worked..." or "For those of WHO have changed jobs..."

Pinkdome's Reply:
You're an asshole. Those of you whom become mired down in grammar lessons tend not to excel in reading comprehension. Exhibiting your lack of social skills by pointing out grammar errors will never win friends and influence people. Go suck it.

Update: Daniel's in San Antonio. San Antonio has consistently provided the most humorless commenters on this site and during our rare visit to the area it has also provided us with the most unattractive people. Plus, it smells like a fart there.

Well, not God..but Goodyear. Goodyear is planning to close it's Tyler plant and with it over 1,400 jobs will come to an end. The impact on the town is undeniable. People that have worked at the tire plant for 20 years will surely have a hard time finding jobs in a town that is not exactly an economic boom-town.

For those of us that have changed jobs every 3 years, been laid-off several times, and moved from city to city with a new job this type of impact is hard to believe. Politically, there is only so much you can do to protect 20th century jobs in a 21st century economy.