WHILE YOU WERE AWAY ...

Right. The conferences are done, the deadlines met and my schedule is back to what passes for normal.

So ... what have I missed?

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ITEM: Top executives at United Airlines, US Airways, Polaroid and Reliance Insurance – all of which jettisoned their employee pension plans – received $49.5 million in retirement and severance benefits in the years before the companies filed for bankruptcy, while retirees saw their benefits cut by as much as two thirds, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The report says executives at those four companies and six others that abandoned their pension plans took in a total of $350 million in pay and perks in the years leading up to the bankruptcies.

"If the pension is getting deeper into trouble and the executives are getting richer, there's something wrong with that picture," said House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif.

ITEM: Two Lexington, KY librarians library workers are fired after getting caught deliberately withholding a copy of Alan Moore’s THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: BLACK DOSSIER from an 11-year-old girl.

One of the library workers describes her own mortal danger when reading the book:

“People prayed over me while I was reading it because I did not want those images in my head,” she says.

ITEM: An Ozark police officer uses a Taser on a 10-year-old girl who was combative when the officer tried to get the girl into a patrol car to be taken to a youth shelter.

According to a report filed by Bradshaw on Thursday, the officer found the girl on the floor of the house screaming and crying. She refused to follow her mother's instructions and the mother told Bradshaw to use his Taser.

The officer is suspended – not for tasing a kid but for not having a video camera attached when he did it.

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Jesus. I can’t leave you people alone for five minutes.

Back to action,

This is dF

ALAN MOORE IS THE NEW PORNOGRAPHY

Or, “Fear and Loathing In Lexington KY, Part 2”.

Remember that story about the two library workers in Lexington, KY who lost their jobs for deliberately blocking an 11-year-old from checking out a copy of Alan Moore’s The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier from an 11-year-old girl, which they did because one of them felt the images were so shocking she required prayer to cope with the trauma?

Apparently the incident came up at a library board meeting, where supporters of the library workers offered a petition demanding that not only LOEG: BD be removed permanently for obscenity, but also the following:

• Snuff, by Chuck Palahniuk
• Choke (based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk), DVD
• Ron White: You Can’t Fix Stupid, DVD

Why? Because they encourage sexual predators. Obviously.

Meanwhile, televangelist Earl Lee Watts weighs in, waving a copy of LOEG: BD:

“If this is not pornography, what is?”

Luckily, it wasn’t all fear and pitchforks:

DeWayne Brewer, Brookside Baptist's pastor, asking for a little common sense, warned that if the Bible ever went into graphic novel form, the banning committee would have something to really fret about.

Which I guess means that Robert Crumb's Book Of Genesis and the Manga Bible won't be available on Kentucky's library shelves anytime soon.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m generally a fan of Alan Moore, but while I have read the first volume of LOEG and liked it, I haven’t read Black Dossier (due chiefly to international licensing issues). But I fully intend to get me a copy now.

Thanks for the recommendation, Fraidycat Christian Librarians!

Church of the poisoned mind,

This is dF