No Love in Tulsa, but the Chicken is damn good!

Seems that Tulsa is running short of money to pay its police officers so rather than take a pay cut and keep all the officers, Tulsa was force to lay officers off, reducing the force by 89 officers. The citizentry is not helping, for example:

One fear: a repeat of the Chicken Hut incident.
At 3 a.m. on Feb. 28, a young man was shot multiple times outside Chicken Hut, a fast-food joint in north Tulsa. Three officers arrived in minutes but were outnumbered by a hostile crowd of perhaps 150 people. Some were so intent on getting their chicken, they stepped over the wounded man, who eventually died, to reach the take-out window.

This is a quote from the WSJ.

SharkyandSharky suggest that you go to Tulsa for chicken, but not for love.

©Sharky&Sharky

Advice to Benedict XVI: WWJD

Open Letter to: Sharky&Sharky's Friend Benedict XVI, aka Benny D,

Although everyone knows and respects you as the knowledgeable Benedict XVI, however to Sharky&Sharky, you are Benny D, a good old boy, a little stodgy but still our 'bro Benny'.
Sharky&Sharky's morals may not be of the highest, correction are not the highest well let it be said that Sharky&Sharky are the friends in low places that people sing and speak of. But our wisdom is pretty good. Benny D in your current (yes your) situation, you must reflect on those paraphrased words of St. Redneck, "A man has got to ask himself, what would Jesus do?" To assist in determining that answer let us review the priest child sexual abuse problem. Let's lay bare the nonfeasance, misfeasance, and malfeasance performed by Church officials.

Starting in America, there is the case of the late Father Murphy in Milwaukee, who is alleged to have molested 200 deaf boys from 1950 to 1974. There also appears to be a police whitewash of his crime. Later while you were the head man (Prefect) of the CDF (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) it is said the CDF advised Bishop Weakland of Milwaukee to not hold a canonical trial 20 years later due to the impending death of Fr. Murphy. Fox paints a bleaker picture of Bishop Weakland's attempt to get the CDF to hold the canonical trial. However if you note the last line of the FOX article, it maybe come apparent why Weakland may not have pushed the cause for a canonical trial to hard.

Weakland admits he is gay
The BBC produced the documentary Sex Crimes and the Vatican. Readers can view the entire film at the hyperlink. From Wikipedia: Canon lawyer Thomas Patrick Doyle , who was included in the documentary as supporting the picture that it presented, later wrote with regard to the 1962 Crimen sollicitations and the 2001 De delictis gravioribus, and the Church's formal investigation into charges of abuse: "There is no basis to assume that the Holy See envisioned this process to be a substitute for any secular legal process, criminal or civil. It is also incorrect to assume, as some have unfortunately done, that these two Vatican documents are proof of a conspiracy to hide sexually abusive priests or to prevent the disclosure of sexual crimes committed by clerics to secular authorities."^[22] However, two years later in 2008 Doyle said of attempts to reform the Catholic Church that it was like "trudging through what can best be described as a swamp of toxic waste".^[23] The Church was reluctant to hand over to the civil authorities' information about the Church's own investigations into charges. In the BBC documentary, Rick Romley, a district attorney who initiated an investigation of the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix, stated that "the secrecy, the obstruction I saw during my investigation was unparalleled in my entire career as a DA...it was so difficult to obtain any information from the Church at all." He reported archives of documents and incriminating evidence pertaining to sex abuse that were kept from the authorities, which under the law could not be subpoenaed. "The Church fails to acknowledge such a serious problem but more than that, it is not a passiveness but an openly obstructive way of not allowing authorities to try to stop the abuse within the Church. They fought us every step of the way."
Without naming names and just identifying locations: Boston, New Hampshire, Arizona, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Canada, Ireland, and your own Munich. This is only a partial list of child abuse by priest. Nonfeasance, the non performance of a duty by a bishop to drop a dime on the criminal priest and defend the children, the ignoring of this duty is manifest and exacerbated in allowing the police to shove the victimization under the rug. The priests were not tried by canon law, by state law or defrocked. In many cases nothing was done to the criminal priest. Next, misfeasance was done. The criminal priests were transferred by church authorities to another location where he was positioned to do more harm. This was an organizational crime, the transferring thereby using the power of an office to hide a crime or criminal, a cover up. Finally malfeasance occurred that is the hiding of the evidence and sometimes the criminal priest.
These sexual assaults are all around you. What about the Philippines? Are you not suspicious of South America or the rest of Europe? Leaders often find themselves in situations that are deplorable and not of their choosing. Sharky&Sharky aver that your apologies are not enough to change organizational or clergical behavior as well as enact papal authority and behavior for the future ages:

• Pope to Australia
• Pope to Irish Bishops
• Pope to US Bishops
• Pope to America

Sharky&Sharky urge you to consider the South African approach of truth and reconciliation with the outcomes of amnesty or rejection for the tried priest. Truth is the goal and that will cleanse the Church and its believers. In the truth and reconciliation you would be calling all the harmed faithful to come forth to tell their story and face their victimizers. Both the accused and the victim should express their situations and feeling. However all testimonies should be made available to the authorities such that crimes maybe prosecuted. Organizational and ecclesiastical nonfeasance, misfeasance and malfeasance should be exposed, tried and corrected. Guilty priests are obligated to come forward and accept their life of penance.

This my dear Benny D is what Sharky&Sharky believe Jesus would do.

Sharky&Sharky©

Making Happiness Durante and Fitzgerald

Notice everything as smooth a butter, Introduction, Ella's jazz rifts, and the cakewalk. This is make you so happy you will start to cry.

Nursing Mothers Get Their Civil Rights

LA Restaurant Fined $46,645 for Firing Breastfeeding Mom
Jesus Acosta, the owner LA Taqueria Acosta Tacos, was ordered on Tuesday to pay $46,645 to a former employee for unfair termination after learning that the employee had breastfed her infant in her car during her break time at the restaurant. This abhorrent violation of the employee's rights, along with the recent ruling, set a precedent that bodes well for breastfeeding moms in California. The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH), the agency that ruled on the case, found Acosta liable for sex discrimination, retaliation, and failure to prevent discrimination. Acosta was ordered to pay his former employee $21,645.00 in lost wages plus $20,000.00 as compensation for her emotional suffering. An additional $5,000 fine is to be paid to the state's General Fund as an administrative fine. Phyllis Cheng, Director of the DFEH, said that "[The employee] suffered an egregious violation of her civil rights that is not tolerated in California...It is unconscionable that a working mother should be penalized for needing to feed her newborn baby, and the law ensures that her rights are protected." This ruling sends the message to all employers and employees in California that the state's laws regarding workplace lactation must be followed. However this is all changed by the new health care bill which comes in to play immediately.

Breast Feeding Mandate part of Health Care Bill

Tracy Overstreet, The Grand Island Independent (this is a newspaper in Central Nebraska)  

The federal Health Care Reform Reconciliation Bill mandates that employers with more than 50 workers provide a private place, other than a rest room, and time for a mother to express breast milk for a nursing child up to 1 year old.
"It's time to celebrate," said Jane Miller, a nurse with the Women, Infants and Children program at the Central District Health Department in Grand Island. "It's past time for Nebraska to address this issue."

Only Nebraska and Idaho lacked breast-feeding protections in state law, Miller said. Nebraska's only provision was to excuse nursing mothers from jury duty if they presented a doctor's note, she said. But now all states will have protections in the workplace for nursing mothers, Miller said. That means employees working in the JBS Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Grand Island will have breast-feeding accommodations like those their colleagues at Swift's Greeley, Colo., plant already had courtesy of a Colorado breast-feeding law.

Miller said numerous mothers in her WIC program have reported being ridiculed by co-workers at the Swift plant for trying to pump during breaks or having difficulty getting time or accommodations to do so. They have had to use the plant's rest rooms or locker rooms, she said. "I'm going to look into this personally," JBS spokesman Chandler Keys said. "We're all about nursing moms and their babies." Keys said he's been told that mothers requesting time to nurse have been provided exam rooms in the plant's health station. Pumped milk can be kept in the nurse's station refrigerator, he said. But not all mothers may feel they can ask for accommodations, he acknowledged.

Miller said she was working with one mother who asked her employer, Skagway, to accommodate her. The employee was surprised when she was not only accommodated but given the bosses' office to do so. The result of being accommodated is employees who are more dedicated to their employers, Miller said.

But there are other reasons to support breast-feeding. Those reasons are as clear as the "Affordable Health Care Begins With Breast-Feeding" pin that Miller wears on her lapel. "It's for a healthier, happier America," she said.
Research shows that breast-fed babies are 40 percent less likely to have diabetes, 60 percent less likely to have recurring ear infections and 25 percent less likely to become overweight.
 It took Sharky&Sharky awhile to find this mandate. You see it was not in the reconciliation bill of HR. The nursing mandate is in the original Senate bill that passed in only the Senate on Christmas Eve. Here is the "precise" wording:
Page 1217
HR 3590 EAS/PP

1. SEC. 4207. REASONABLE BREAK TIME FOR NURSING
2. MOTHERS.
3. Section 7 of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938
4. (29 U.S.C. 207) is amended by adding at the end the fol-
5. lowing:
6. ''(r)(1) An employer shall provide—
7. ''(A) a reasonable break time for an employee to
8. express breast milk for her nursing child for 1 year
9. after the child's birth each time such employee has
10. need to express the milk; and
11. ''(B) a place, other than a bathroom, that is
12. shielded from view and free from intrusion from co-
13. workers and the public, which may be used by an em-
14. ployee to express breast milk.
15. ''(2) An employer shall not be required to compensate
16. an employee receiving reasonable break time under para-
17. graph (1) for any work time spent for such purpose.
18. ''(3) An employer that employs less than 50 employees
19. shall not be subject to the requirements of this subsection,
20. if such requirements would impose an undue hardship by
21. causing the employer significant difficulty or expense when
22. considered in relation to the size, financial resources, na-
23. ture, or structure of the employer's business.
24. ''(4) Nothing in this subsection shall preempt a State
25. law that provides greater protections to employees than the
26. protections provided for under this subsection.''. /

How did this mandate become part of the health bill on Christmas Eve; where did it come from?
First Rep. Carolyn Maloney presented a breastfeeding promotion bill in the house in 2007. The bill died. Moving on if we look to June 11, 2009 we see that Oregon Senator Merkley with Representative Maloney proposed the Breastfeeding Promotion Act (BPA) in their respective chambers. This was a derivative of an Oregon Law. Senator Merkley presents another horrible situation. This act did not seem to get anywhere. However when the Christmas Eve Senate health bill passed, the nursing mandate was present.
With a few changes the best way to analyze the Mandate for Nursing Mothers is to use Kingdon's problem, policy and politics streams approach. This helps somewhat but may not get us all the way to completion. Kingdon asserts that the policy process is not rational. Policy is not generated by determining the net bet benefits from a select group of well thought out alternatives. Let us follow an imagined path of creating the Nursing Mother's Mandate (NMM).
First the Stream theory says that there has to be a problem. A major organization that lobbies for Nursing Mothers is United States Breast Feeding Committee. Obviously Rep Maloney and Senator Merkley responded to the problem; they introduced bills in their respective chambers. Although these bills did not pass, they did not disappear. They sit around as policy proposals (like garbage that never gets hauled away, ref Cohen, March, Olsen). A policy entrepreneur awaits an opportunity to wedge his proposal or garbage on to policy. In the NMM situation the policy entrepreneur may have been a Hill staffer in Senator Merkley's office. The policy does not have to address his problem or he might have to change his proposal to make it fit the category of the problem being addressed by the policy. For example the original BPA looked like this:

1. Protecting Breastfeeding Under Civil Rights Law.  This will ensure that women cannot be fired or discriminated against in the workplace for expressing milk or breastfeeding during lunch or breaks.
2. Providing Tax Incentives for Employers.  The bill encourages employers to set up a safe, private, and sanitary environment for women to express (or pump) breast milk by providing a tax credit for employers who set up a lactation location, purchase or rent lactation-related equipment, hire a lactation consultant or otherwise promote a lactation-friendly work environment.  Many companies would be able to receive a tax credit of up to fifty percent of their related expenses.
3. Setting Safety Standards for Breast Pumps.  The bill requires the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to develop minimum quality standards for breast pumps to ensure that products on the market are safe and effective.
4. Allowing Breastfeeding Equipment to Be Tax Deductible.
5. Protecting the Privacy of Breastfeeding Mothers.  The bill ensures moms break time to express milk, and reasonable efforts to provide a private place for them to pump.

If you throw out 2, 3, and 4 because they would cause friction at the last minute, Sharky&Sharky think you have the Nursing Mother's Mandate, couple it to the Christmas Eve Health Bill, and it becomes law. There was no analysis of cost, employer impact, nor negative externalities further there was no decision, just a coupling.
Sharky&Sharky is not against working, nursing mothers. But the sharkbite is how many other mandates are in the 1994 page Health Bill that had no analysis of costs, employer impact, nor negative externalities and what will the unintended consequences be? How many policy entrepreneurs added their favored proposals to the Health Bill? Finally Citizen now that you know that this is the way government develops how will you manage the ensuing chaos?

©Sharky&Sharky

Kartika is a choice woman

Often Sharky&Sharky witness befuddlement in mankind. When given  a choice people cannot choose. We see it everyday in the media. For example

But he does chose without saying so he choses the beer.

Sometimes we have to choose what we truly love.


Then there is a beautiful Malaysian Model by the name of Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarmo. Here are two model shots of her from around the web.

Here is her penitent picture after being busted; the dude looking on is her dad.

picture not credited in yahoo news

Kartika is 33 years old. Not only has she been grounded, but she must do community service in a children's home for three weeks. This is a commuted sentence. Her crime was drinking beer in a hotel bar. Oh, Muslim women in Malaysia cannot do that. (Muslim women in other countries like Australia can drink beer) Her original sentence of caning was commuted by the Sultan of Pahang, Sultan Ahmad Shah. The caning under sharia law is meant to be educational. The local lawyers association voice complaints that the Sultan was out of line, and they expressed that Kartika should feel a little of the cane, say six strokes to teach her how to behave. However it appears no one wants to challenge the sultan:



Well Sharky&Sharky like the Sultan of Pahang; he seems to be able to humanely balance touchy and politically difficult situations. Sharky&Sharky want to thank the Sultan for stopping the caning of Kartika. Further we want to encourage him to stop the caning of everyone, men and women, in Pahang. Therefore we give him the interesting guy in world salute.
. We can only say to Kartika and the Sultan and everyone else in Pahang "stay thirsty our friends"

©Sharky&Sharky