Schools in Wells and Cape Elizabeth this fall banned “grinding,” a sexually blatant dance in which boys grind their pelvises against girls’ backsides, according to the Associated Press. Wells senior Erica Bouley retorted, “There are so many worse things we could be doing.” Yes, and that’s why school officials stopped the grinding.

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From the New York Times: Slain Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s “final article, a column under the headline ‘We Declare You a Terrorist,’ presented allegations of the use of torture to exact confessions and manufacture good news from the war.” Coerced confessions and paid-for happy war news – how could Russia allow such a corrupt system?

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Some people just don’t get humor. Not long ago, a speaker at an Internet security conference joked about an unfixable flaw in Firefox, a web browser, and even showed a video purportedly exploiting this flaw. But later, Mischa Spiegelmock said he was just kidding. “As part of our talk we mentioned that there was a previously known Firefox vulnerability that could result in a stack overflow ending up in remote code execution. However, the code we presented did not in fact do this …” Hee-hee – stop, you’re killing us.

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The Maine group Citizen’s United, which opposes the tax and spending restrictions under the Taxpayer Bill of Rights or TABOR, has raised more than four times the amount collected by the smaller-government supporters, almost exclusively from out of state. Do you get the sense that one group just likes spending other people’s money more than the other?

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The pro-TABOR side did scrape together enough money to fly Gov. Bill Owens of Colorado, where TABOR was thought up, to Maine to describe the wonderful effects of the restrictions. He joins four or five other lawmakers and policy-types from that state who have visited Maine to campaign either for or against the measure. That means Maine is considering a proposal formed out of state, with opposition supported by out-of-state interests and debated by out-of-state experts. Nothing like being a spectator to your own democracy.