I cannot -- yet -- confirm if this is real -- the name of the alleged lawyer is rather suspicious and the rest of the content here looks rather tongue-in-cheek, but....

(PP)- Friday a teacher working at an Oklahoma school hit hard by a devastating tornado this week was fired after admitting she had prayed out loud during the horrific event, and that a complaint was filed by an atheist family of a kindergarten student who was offended by the Christian prayer.

Offended?

The teacher saved your kid's life you jackasses.

Never mind that you do not have the right to be free from offense.  And when there is a tornado bearing down on you, offense due to someone asking that God spare their lives is the last thing that ought to be on your mind.

The family, who’s name is being kept anonymous for their own protection, filed the complaint with the school through an ACLU attorney even though the teacher was responsible for saving the life of their six year old child.

That needs to be rectified and the responsible parties identified -- assuming it's real, of course.

You (of course) have the right to free speech.

And others have the right to judge your speech and your character, which may include outcomes like refusing to associate with you.

Ever.

At all.

“Saving the life of my client’s child was Ms. Trumble’s responsibility and is to be expected,” said ACLU attorney Donald Ambulachasky. “Unfortunately, it is also a teacher’s responsibility to keep God out of the classroom and on that count Ms. Trumble failed miserably. It doesn’t matter the circumstances…. the law is the law, and someone must pay.”

Assuming this is actually a real story and not someone's sick joke, my response is simple: "Go **** yourself."

The site in question has a rather "odd" slant on its writing, and some of it is clearly utter crap, but if so exploting this particular tragedy for this sort of purpose is outrageous as anything I've seen on the 'net of late.  My spidey sense says this is probably crap -- perhaps someone can do some digging around, as there are multiple reports of the praying itself.

From Fox News:

State officials approved the trucking company to carry a load as high as 15 feet, 9 inches, according to the permit released by the state. However, the southbound vertical clearance on the Skagit River bridge is as little as 14 feet, 5 inches, state records show. That lowest clearance is outside of the bridge's vehicle traveling lanes, Transportation Department communications director Lars Erickson said Friday. The bridge's curved overhead girders are higher in the center of the bridge.

...

There are no signs leading up to the Skagit River bridge to warn about its clearance height. State Transportation Secretary Lynn Peterson said that under federal and state standards, the clearance is tall enough to not require signage.

That is correct; provided travel lane clearance is 15' or higher no signage is required.

A permit for over-height loads specifically requires a "feeler" truck in front of the vehicle with a non-destructive pole (typically fiberglass) that is sufficiently tall that it will strike overheads insufficient to clear, and far enough in advance of the vehicle that the loaded vehicle can stop before it hits the obstruction.

Obviously this particular system of checks and balances failed in this instance but if the overhead clearance met or exceeded 15 feet then the standards for highways were met.

I can't get excited about this folks, other than the obvious problem here that exists with the state granting a permit to a load described as being 15' 9" if in fact the overhead clearance on that route, for which it was explicitly granted, was insufficient for it to pass.

The other possibility, of course, is that there was 15' 9" of clearance and the load was higher, despite the permit.  

Which, if this was the case, will have to await the results of the investigation.

From the Census (we can't count with all 12 of our fingers) bureau:

New orders for manufactured durable goods in April increased $7.2 billion or 3.3 percent to $222.6 billion, the U.S. Census Bureau announced today. This increase, up two of the last three months, followed a 5.9 percent March decrease. Excluding transportation, new orders increased 1.3 percent. Excluding defense, new orders increased 2.1 percent.

Shipments of manufactured durable goods in April, down following two consecutive monthly increases, decreased $1.3 billion or 0.6 percent to $227.1 billion. This followed a 0.9 percent March increase. Computers and electronic products, down three of the last four months, led the decrease, $0.8 billion or 2.9 percent to $27.6 billion. This followed a 3.3 percent March increase.

Eh, that's not terrible, at least at first blush.  Let's have a look inside.

The internals look reasonable, especially for primary metals and fabbricated products, but on a three-month basis it's less-clear, as last month both were soft.  We need more evidence to know if this is a one-month wonder or something real.

Computers were terrible, but comms equipment was up on new orders -- again, a mixed bag.  

This report usually has something in it that makes my head turn, but not this time.  While there's nothing terrible to be found in here I also don't see much in the way of inspiration.

I'll call it neutral and move on.

The stupid, it burns:

A section of a major interstate highway bridge in Washington state collapsed yesterday, sending two vehicles into the rushing waters of the Skagit River north of Seattle. Three people were rescued and no one is believed to have died, authorities said.

The bridge carried both north- and south-bound lanes of Interstate 5, which runs the length of the U.S. West Coast from Mexico to Canada. Investigators said a truck carrying an oversized load may have struck the span before it fell.

Actually, eye witnesses say that an over-height load did strike the bridge, taking out some of the overhead (load-bearing) structure and causing the collapse.

What does Bloomberg focus on in their "reporting"?

The bridge’s collapse put a new focus on the nation’s failing infrastructure, an issue that President Barack Obama has highlighted in his second-term agenda.

The bridge (unlike the one in Minnesota) did not fail.  It was hit.

Washington Governor Jay Inslee (A Lying Democrat) wasted no time trying to claim that "we have some work to do on our bridges", implying that there was some maintenance issue responsible for the collapse.

Horsecrap.

The bridge was hit by an oversize load and suffered structural damage.  It didn't collapse due to being in poor condition, it collapsed because it was damaged.

Is this a bridge of older design and subject to being hit by such loads (compared to, say, a suspension bridge or similar that doesn't have anything overhead to strike)?  Sure.  But the fact remains that there's nothing unservicable about these older designs provided you don't strike them with heavy, moving loads!

The exploitation of this sort of incident by those who simply want to spend spend spend disgusts me, and the dishonest slant on reporting of these incidents, even when the underlying truth is in the actual article is an outrage.

BTW, one cheap solution to this sort of problem for bridges with overhead structures is illustrated in the below video.  You simply erect a strong "sacrificial" barrier at a height a few inches below the lowest clearance in front of the bridge and thus you "trap" those loads that otherwise would not clear and do not stop.

When the clearance sign says 11' 8" it means it.  Note that there is a nice fat I-beam in front of the bridge structure itself and slightly lower.  If you try to run the bridge with an over-height load the bridge survives just fine as the cheap-to-replace I-beam takes the impact and stops you from damaging the span.

Why am I not surprised with this coming from the lefty media?

The scary truth is that letting these 9.4 million founder is our -- we, the people’s -- active national higher-education plan. We know it leads to fewer jobs for the 9.4 million, many without health insurance or a living wage, and we know we will pay later in Medicaid and food stamps.

Wick is part of the system, as a teacher, that has driven the cost of education well beyond where someone can pay for it in cash by flipping pizzas.  He now demands that we use "public funds" to meet the price he helped jack up to the moon and as a bludgeon to get people to go for it he threatens us with "having" to hand out food stamps and Medicaid to so-called "underserved" people if we don't.

Go sit on a running chainsaw Wick.  Repeat until your cranium has been cleared of human excrement and there is room to insert a brain.

The take-away in discussions of this study is that we should do a better job of getting them into wealthier colleges that will pay their way. Why not say that they are worth the public investment, no matter what school they go to.

First create, out of whole cloth, a nation of dependent children irrespective of age.

Then demand that those dependent children be given pacifiers in the form of food stamps and Medicaid so they don't rape, rob and shoot us.

I'm tired of this crap.  The only person responsible for your success is you.  Wick teaches "writing" in a community college, a job that shouldn't exist and wouldn't if anyone gave a damn up front.  

By the time you get out of High School you damn well ought to be able to read, write and calculate.  If you can't then the problem doesn't lie in a college, it lies in the outrageous level of dependence that we foster by making possible people sitting on their asses while draining our nation's resources.

Funding abounds for research papers, conferences and ideas. What’s missing is anyone willing to be responsible for seeing that more of these 9.4 million people complete their education, degree or certificate, or just obtain a skill. Is the world too messy for such big plans? U.S. President Lyndon Johnson would have disagreed. He enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Higher Education Act of 1965 -- the backbone of today’s federal higher-education policies -- all with the Vietnam War under way.

Uh huh.  And that "Great Society" program destroyed the two-parent family, skyrocketed crime and led directly to ridiculous levels of teen pregnancy and dependence.  It was an abject failure at doing anything other than trashing our nation and creating generations of adult children who lost the feedback mechanism (that is, privation and even death) that comes from a decision to sit on one's ass rather than become industrious and take responsibility for one's own future.

Remember, Johnson promised the end of poverty and dependence.  What we got instead was ramping handouts to people who refuse to help themselves and exploitation of that dependence by people just like Wick.

Expanding that which has utterly failed in the hope of success is either the mark of insanity or that of an evil bastard who intends to screw over the productive, enhance the cycle of dependency and poverty, and hope to skim off part of the largesse for themselves in the process.

I am left with only one question: Which is it?