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January 31, 2005

Thou Shalt Breed!

Heteros, go forth and multiply ... or else! Guess what group the Baptists are going after now? Childless couples, the scourge of our times (that is, after the homos). In this article from The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (there's a mouthful) we see the agenda spelled out clearly.

The sexual revolution has had many manifestations, but we can now see that modern Americans are determined not only to liberate sex for marriage [and even from gender], but also from procreation.

The Scripture does not even envision married couples who choose not to have children. The shocking reality is that some Christians have bought into this lifestyle and claim childlessness as a legitimate option. The rise of modern contraceptives has made this technologically possible. But the fact remains that though childlessness may be made possible by the contraceptive revolution, it remains a form of rebellion against God's design and order.

Couples are not given the option of chosen childlessness in the biblical revelation. To the contrary, we are commanded to receive children with joy as God's gifts, and to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We are to find many of our deepest joys and satisfactions in the raising of children within the context of the family. Those who reject children want to have the joys of sex and marital companionship without the responsibilities of parenthood. They rely on others to produce and sustain the generations to come.

This epidemic of chosen childlessness will not be corrected by secular rethinking. In an effort to separate the pleasure of sex from the power of procreation, modern Americans think that sex totally free from constraint or conception is their right. Children, of course, do represent a serious constraint on the life of parents. Parenthood is not a hobby, but represents one of the most crucial opportunities for the making of saints found in this life.

The culture is clearly buying into this concept. Legal fights over apartment complexes and other accommodations come down to the claim that adults ought to be able to live in a child-free environment. Others claim that too much tax money and public attention is given to children, and that this is an unfair imposition upon those who choose not to "breed." Of course, the very use of this terminology betrays the rebellion in this argument. Animals breed. Human beings procreate and raise children to the glory of God.

I can almost envision a scene from "Birth Wars" where the Birth Star is encroaching upon the planet Alduran (a contraceptive, no less!) to fire it's devistating "Birth Beam" at the planet's childless population. We see the leader talking about the "Rebel childless alliance falling" to the power of the "Force to Have Kids". The Sex Lord, who packs a mean Light dildo, will personally inpregnate the childless women of Alduran, despite their rather good birth control (rebel) technology.

Hey, that's about as absurd as what these crackers are saying about God and babies, but since they think that SUVs, oil, water and food are in infinite supply, then why not over breed? I fear for Gaia.

Posted by Steven at 02:23 PM | Comments (2)

January 30, 2005

Just A Thought

Would you apply a bumper sticker like this?

© 2005 Deltos Fleet Computing and Thomas White

Posted by at 10:13 PM | Comments (1)

Cheezbrghhr, Lrjj Frzz, N A LJJ ARNJJ ZDA!!!

I like technology. However, this is an appallingly petty, and overkill, application of some pretty basic level stuff.

What's next, routing to Bangalore? Why stop at Grand Forks?

Posted by at 10:02 PM | Comments (0)

Need A Ride?

The Navy, which has responsibility for shuttling around the president in the official Marine One helicopter, has placed an contract for new helicopters. Specifically, $6.1 billion for 23 helicopters. Do the math and that averages out to $265.2 million each, though the list cost would probably be less after sinking the non-recoverable engineering costs in the first one or two.

But wait a minute; twenty-three helicopters? What the hell does any president, not just the current sitting doofus, need with that many? Let's think: one in DC, of course, plus a spare. Air Force One can haul one around the world. Probably one on standby in Waco for whenever Yosemite George takes his bi-weekly vacation to Crawford. That's four; double that for the Veep and throw in a couple extra and I still don't see the need for more than ten, which would save about three billion.

I do not see the need for 23 new helicopters. Party of fiscal responsibility, my tuchus.

Posted by at 09:55 PM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2005

Nutbags Leading the Loonies

While Bush Fiddles Over Social Security, "Values Voters" Demand Marriage Amendment. This is classic stuff. The Bush Administration has begun their now well-worn approach to "selling" an unsellable product (in this case, coring out Social Security in the name of saving it) when along comes another group even more insane and evil: the Thumpers who are claiming that Bush himself is their mandate and as such, owes them a "defense of marriage" amendment.

Now Bush is fighting a real two-front war, trying to keep the fundamentalists at bay while pursuing their own nutty cause. The hilarity is plain: one group of crazies is saying that homosexuals are dooming this country while another claims that the Social Security system is doing the same. In both cases, they're dead wrong and in both cases, we're ignoring real problems like Iraq, the collapsing dollar, and of course, our endless energy dependence on the third world.

With the 109th Congress in full swing and the president about to deliver his State of the Union address, hard-line conservatives are howling a unified message at the door of the White House: It's payback time, Mr. President. Insisting they were the key to Bush's reelection, they're now demanding results on red-meat issues -- foremost a ban against same-sex marriage.

They've been baring their teeth at the president ever since Bush, in a mid-January interview with the Washington Post, backpedaled over the prospect for a constitutional amendment to "protect" marriage as a heterosexual institution. A number of senators, Bush told the Post, "have made it clear that so long as [the Defense of Marriage Act] is deemed constitutional, nothing will happen" to change the status quo. On Monday, Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., announced that a Marriage Protection Amendment is tops on his list. But while applauding the Senate majority leader, the hard-line faithful are threatening to desert the president on other key domestic issues if he doesn't get with the program.

"It's fine for the White House to champion overhauling Social Security and the tax code, said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, "but voters really want a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage." Perkins added that voters also desire confirmation of conservative judges, who will create the impetus to overturn the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision that established abortion rights more than 30 years ago. "These value issues, which have gotten very little play from the White House since the election, need to be kept front and center," Perkins said. "After traveling the nation for a year campaigning for re-election, the president heard a resounding message from the American people: They want marriage protected."

Salon has more in their Right Hook editorials, but the gist of this is that the most influential people in the United States are pursuing agendas that are of no practical concern to the nation at this time. And this is how Bush is "spending his political capital".

Posted by Steven at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)

Joe Conason: Totalitarian Scribblers

What part of "totalitarian regime" don't you understand? Conason's column today in Salon really tears the Bush-backed right wing pudits on payola a new asshole.

Despite all the opprobrium heaped upon Armstrong Williams and now Maggie Gallagher in the punditry payola scandal -- and despite their hesitant public apologies -- neither of those right-wing worthies appears to understand quite where they went wrong.

Although the rule they violated is perfectly plain, they don't seem to get it: No journalist, not even an opinion columnist, is permitted to take money from a politician, not even the president. There are no exceptions, not even for part-time pundits who maintain their own public relations shops or think tanks. Having a handy conduit to launder the money doesn't make dirty cash clean.

Columnist and broadcaster Williams, who was secretly paid more than $240,000 by the Department of Education to promote the "No Child Left Behind" program, has suggested that he is innocent of serious wrongdoing because "it's something I believe in." Evidently he thinks that if he had disclosed the federal funding when he talked about that program, he would have had his journalistic ethics in order. He excuses himself by noting that he is really a paid publicity flack, not a reporter, although he likes to play a journalist on TV and radio and in newspapers.

Longtime syndicated columnist Gallagher, who was paid about $21,000 by the Department of Health and Human Services to promote marriage, says she would have revealed the contract if only she had remembered it when she wrote about the Bush administration's marriage-promotion policy (which, of course, is something she believes in, too). But Gallagher isn't so sure she needed to disclose anything because, after all, she does scholarly research on the subject of marriage and also heads the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy.

"Until today," she wrote in response to Howard Kurtz's Washington Post article on her contract, "researchers and scholars have not generally been expected to disclose a government-funded research project … when they later wrote about their field of expertise in the popular press or in scholarly journals. For these reasons, it simply never occurred to me there was a need to disclose this information." She concedes, however, that as a journalist she made a "mistake" in failing to reveal her government deal. "It will not happen again," she promised.

What exactly is Gallagher promising won't happen again? Is she vowing not to accept another government contract while posing as a journalist, or is she saying that she will remember to mention the next golden handshake from the Bush administration?

As a ubiquitous presence on cable channels from CNN to Fox to CNBC, Williams flacked for Bush whenever he could get in front of a camera. (He could and did blather about anything, whether he knew what he was talking about or not.) Most of his commentary had nothing to do with education but that doesn't mean the Republicans didn't get their money's worth. After funds started flowing from the U.S. Treasury to the Williams bank account, his column topics included the president's outstanding appointments of blacks to his Cabinet, the flip-flopping perfidy of John Kerry (more than once), Bush's superior morality, Bush's innovative domestic policies, and Bush's unwavering war against terror.

Williams summed up his appreciation for the president last September: "Some critics accuse the president of having too much cowboy swagger. Perhaps a better label would be political courage. Whatever you want to call it, one thing is clear: While the Democrats exude weakness and indecisiveness on the issue of national security, Bush remains unwavering."

As for Gallagher, she was less visible than Williams (which probably has nothing to do with her much lower compensation) but no less ardent. He didn't have to write about education to polish up the president, and she didn't have to write about marriage to do likewise.

In January 2002, when her deal with HHS apparently began, Gallagher testified at length to the greatness of the commander in chief. He is the nation's "Daddy," she gushed, and every bit as clever as those liberal elitists who used to look down on him. Her encomium concluded with praise for "Bush's genius" and she wasn't kidding.

It is remarkable that Williams and Gallagher, who claim to understand why democracy and freedom are superior to tyranny, don't fully understand why pundit payola is so repugnant. American journalists don't take money from the politicians they cover because we don't live in a totalitarian regime where state-subsidized scribblers are expected to glorify the Beloved Leader.

Yet that's essentially what Williams and Gallagher did. While quietly taking money from the Bush administration, they promoted the president and his party, as well as his policies, while denigrating the opposition. Their misconduct gives off a nauseating whiff of totalitarianism that should outrage any honest conservative.

That about covers it.

Posted by Steven at 12:11 PM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2005

Newest Game Show: Guess The Conservative Pundit on Payola

Show me yours, I'll show you mine. Salon has an article talking about the latest craze in right wing punditry is denying that you're on the White House payola.

Goldberg notes that because of pending Freedom of Information Act requests, submitted to government agencies in the wake of the Williams revelation, "It's going to come out anyway and [the White House] may as well get it out first and clear the air of lingering suspicions."

"I hope whoever does [have a contract] will come forward promptly, as there's a cloud over conservatives and all commentators and pundits," says Tony Blankley, editorial page editor of the right-wing Washington Times. "My suspicion is it will be a very few people. But maybe I'm being naive."

"I don't know anybody who writes columns who's on the take from the federal government and not disclosing it," says Goldberg.

Still, the suspicion remains, fueled by comments from Williams himself that additional commentators have quietly signed contracts with the administration in exchange for behind-the-scenes or on-camera support, a brash move that breaks several obvious conflict-of-interest rules. "There's no gray zone. It's a strong march across a bright line," says Blankley.

Condemnation of the practice appears to be uniform within conservative circles. "I've never taken any money and I'm appalled," says Debra Saunders, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. "You just don't do that."

Apparently, these assholes are more afraid of being labeled Bush patsies than the Senate Democrats. And with good cause ... how many of them have taken the Bush dole payments to say shit they were going to say anyway?

Posted by Steven at 06:44 PM | Comments (0)

January 25, 2005

Classic Bushit

Bush's word is not worth spit. A commentary by Mark A. R. Kleiman.

Well, that was quick, wasn't it?

Thursday, GWB gave a mighty pretty speech, all about freedom and how we were going to be for it from now on. A day later, that speech officially became a dead letter courtesy of one of the dreaded "senior officials" who makes official leaks, not for attribution: Bush Freedom Speech Not Sign of Policy Shift: Aides (Reuters); Bush Speech Not a Signal of New Policy, Aides Say (NYT).

Since I kinda like freedom, and think we mostly ought to be for it, I decided not to say at the time any of the snarky things that came to mind: about GWB's coziness with the Saudi ruling family, with the nuke-peddling Pakistani military theocracy, with Putin and his KGB cronies, with the Indonesian generals who have decided to prevent tsunami relief from reaching the people of Aceh, or with the Chinese government that runs the largest, and perhaps most successful (or second-most-sucessful after Singapore) tyranny in the world.

Naturally, I was skeptical that the President who has raised bullshit to an art form and erected it into a governing principle actually meant what he said. He addressed "all those who live in tyranny and hopelessness" and promised that "when you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you."

Really? All? Forget for the moment about those who are standing for their liberty against Putin and the Chinese politboro and other rulers it would be expensive for us to alienate. There are people in Zimbabwe right now standing for their liberty, and people in Burma (I'm damned if I'll call it Myanmar just because the SLORC prefers it that way), and people in Iran, and people in Kazakhstan.

Are we "standing with them," or are we just standing on the sidelines lackadaisically cheering them on? Are we sending money? Communications equipment? Weapons, if that's what they want? Will we allow this country to be used as a base for revolutionary fundraising or a source of small arms purchased privately?

I think the right anwer to give to those questions is sometimes, but not always, "Yes." But it seemed to me that for the President of the United States, on a solemn occasion, to publicly offer a blank check that he knows is going to bounce, was pretty offensive.

Still, it would have been nice to think that, on the margin, the speech represented a genuine decision to give a little less support to the people FDR called "our sonsofbitches."

The war against Islamofascism is being played for lower stakes than the Cold War or World War II, so we can afford to be a little bit less cynical in our choice of means. Moreover, re-establishing ourselves as the global beacon of democracy might actually be a strategically sound move. Not only is it helpful to actually stand for something when you're trying to get other people to help you, but cynicism exacts its own price. It's easy to forget how many "realistic" policies, from backing the Shah in Iran and losing to backing the mujaheddin against the Russians in Afghanistan and winning, turned out sour.

[There is still much wisdom in the Norse myth JFK liked to tell: how Odin knew, by his magic, that the victory of the Aesir at the Gotterdammerung depended on his learning a secret known only to a certain witch. When the witch demanded his right eye as the price of the secret, he plucked it out and laid it on the table: only to be told that the secret of victory was "Watch with both eyes."]

Anyway, that's all obsolete now. The ink was barely dry on Friday's newspapers before Bush sent one of those dreaded "senior officials" to tell the New York Times, "Never mind." None of our tyrannical buddies need worry. The plan to hold (men-only) elections for local councils in Saudi Arabia means that Saudi Arabia is making progress toward democracy. The same goes for Pakistan, where a promise by Musharraf, who has already broken more promises than he can count, to hold elections two years from now, is plenty good enough. Freedom is coming, as an "end state," said the official, though it might take "generations to achieve."

Now I don't pretend to know what to do about Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, where democracy could have disastrous consequences; as Wesley Clark remarked during the campaign, if Saudi Arabia held free elections, its new President would be Osama bin Laden.

But I'm heartily tired of being ruled by a man whose word isn't worth the spit behind it.

Well, four years isn't forever.

From The 18½ Minute Gap.

Posted by Steven at 08:41 AM | Comments (1)

January 24, 2005

Canadian Liberals Tell Bush To Shove Missile Defense Plan

So now Canada is its own country? According to the Globe and Mail, Canada's Liberal Party is pretty pissed off at the Bush Administration for telling them to sign up (and pronto) with the North American missile defense system.

One Liberal opposed to the plan summed up the feelings of like-minded MPs in the Liberal caucus, which is gathering this week for its annual winter retreat amid reports U.S. President George W. Bush scolded Prime Minister Paul Martin for his slowness in signing on.

"They should mind their own damned business," said an Ontario MP, who asked not to be identified.

The MP said he was especially irked by Bush's intervention in a domestic debate because most observers feel Canadian backing is already a fait accompli.

"We're going to be moving in that direction anyway," he said.

"Besides, if they (Americans) ever need to use our airspace to defend themselves — whether we join or not — do you think they will hesitate?"

A Liberal proponent of missile defence agreed it doesn't make much of a difference whether Canada gives its blessing to the project, which will install missile interceptors in Alaska and California.

I'm sure that top diplomat Condi Rice will smooth things over with the Great White North, say, with a missile strike of her own.

Posted by Steven at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)

Foreigners Fear Dollar's Demise

The dollar is down 35%. Treasury Secretary Snow is pissing off the Europeans, and scaring the shit out of the Chinese. The New York Times has a story about our staggering decline.

After a first term in which terrorism and war dominated President Bush's foreign policy agenda, his allies in Europe and Asia suspect that his next confrontation with the world could take on a very different cast: a potential currency crisis, in which a steep plunge in the value of the dollar touches off economic waves around the world.

Already, the tensions over the dollar are becoming a recurring source of friction, a conflict that does not reverberate as loudly as the differences over Iraq but may be as deeply felt. At a meeting in Paris on Monday, the finance ministers of Germany and France complained that Europe had unjustly borne the brunt of the dollar's decline, and called for coordinated action to stop it.

"Europe has until now paid too big a share in this readjustment," Hervé Gaymard, the French finance minister, said. His German counterpart, Hans Eichel, said the United States needed to reduce its deficits, adding "each one has to play its role."

Two months ago, similar sentiments came from China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, whose nation is at the center of a struggle with Washington over currency policy. He complained about the fall of the dollar, asking, "Shouldn't the relevant authorities be doing something about this?"

In an interview just before President Bush's inauguration, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow played down the tensions. "We understand that deficits matter," he said, insisting that the tight budget Mr. Bush is expected to send to Congress next month should give foreigners and the financial markets the solace they seek.

But should the dollar continue to fall - if, for example, global investors determined that Mr. Bush did not have the will to hold spending down - it would not only add to tensions, analysts said. It might also force up interest rates at home to keep foreigners interested in financing America's need to borrow more than $600 billion a year to cover its gap in the current account. The current account is the broadest measure of the trade and financial flows into and out of the country.

To be sure, the dollar's fall may never reach crisis levels, and in the last few weeks, after a more or less steady fall of almost 35 percent against the euro and 24 percent against the Japanese yen over the last three years, the dollar has stabilized a bit. Many experts argue that a further decline, if relatively modest and gradual, is entirely manageable.

Administration officials, along with a number of like-minded economists, contend that the nation's record trade and current account deficits are not particularly worrisome, a reflection more of strong foreign interest in investing in the American economy than any sign of global weakness.

But across Asia and Europe, a wide range of officials and analysts worry that Mr. Bush's economic team may not be up to the challenge of grappling with the issue. They contend that Washington has retreated from efforts to marshal the biggest economies of the world into a mutual effort at more robust and balanced growth.

Let's sum this up: the foreigners know that Bush's team is a bunch of incompetent boobs, otherwise known as CEOs. They know that they are trying to deep six the dollar to drive foreign investment into the drink in some weird suicide pact on the dollar.

Posted by Steven at 10:25 PM | Comments (0)

ID Joins Evolution in PA School

Bible thumping morons on the march. Congratulations, Harrisburg, PA. You're schools are now officially laughingstocks of the nation (or at least, of the Blue States).

High school students heard about "intelligent design" for the first time Tuesday in the Pennsylvania school district that attracted national attention by requiring students to be made aware of it as an alternative to the theory of evolution.

Administrators in the Dover Area School District read a statement to three biology classes Tuesday and were expected to read it to other classes on Wednesday, according to a statement from the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which was speaking on the district's behalf.

The district is believed to be the only one in the nation to require students to hear about intelligent design -- a concept that holds that the universe is so complex, it had to be created by an unspecified guiding force.

"The revolution in evolution has begun," said Richard Thompson, the law center's president and chief counsel. "This is the first step in which students will be given an honest scientific evaluation of the theory of evolution and its problems."

With any luck, they'll strike that pesky "mathematics" from the cirriculum as it only fosters an irrational (is that a word, now that we've banned Math and Science?) world view.

Posted by Steven at 03:02 PM | Comments (1)

January 21, 2005

Blame the Last Guy II: Cheney Boogaloo

Saddam did it. Again. It seems that the Bush/Cheney kleptocracy is willing to let a few bucks slip through their white-knuckled grasp, but only those bucks that are metaphors for responsibility. No, those get passed like Olestra at the Bush White House.

Case in point, were remarks by our twisted, evil Vice-Criminal, "Dick" Cheney, who blamed all the problems in current-day Iraq on — everyone together now &mdash Saddam Hussein. Apparently, Saddam Hussein invaded his own country with US troops, blew up any building larger than a ... well, anything they could get close to with a daisycutter, and then proceeded to impose no civic order whatsoever.

Oh, wait, no, that was Dick Cheney.

No, despite the fact that Bush's Iraq is in much worse condition than Hussein's Iraq, it was Saddam's fault for the failed recovery because he left the country in such terrible shape. Cheney remarked on the situation before his rubber-stamping ceremony yesterday:

I think the hundreds of thousands of people who were slaughtered at the time, including anybody who had the gumption to stand up and challenge him, made the situation tougher than I would have thought.

Believe it or not, Cheney was referring to Hussein, not Bush.

Posted by at 01:32 PM | Comments (0)

Bush's sound-proof asbestos suit

A recent Washington Post article provides us with climatologist James E. Hansen's perspective on life as a climate scientist under the Bush administration. It's hard to be a scientist these days, and that's sad. The reaction of an administration to the views and opinions of specialists who advise it, especially when those views and opinions don't mesh comfortably with other administration policies and goals, says a lot about an administration -- just like when the current administration ignored what certaqin specialists were telling it about Iraqi WMDs, the difficulties of war, troop strengths and how difficult the aftermath might be.

But, evidently Hansen hasn't figured out that this administration isn't likely to learn from its mistakes.

"You can't just give up," he said. "I remain optimistic, even in this administration, that the evidence is going to become strong enough so there's a chance there will be a change in policy."

Ah, it's refreshing -- if sad -- to see such optimism in today's political climate.

Posted by at 10:18 AM | Comments (2)

January 20, 2005

Oh, The Irony

Oh, the irony. This Sunday, Ukraine will inaugurate a man to the office of President who fought a corrupt election campaign, complete with poisoning, to become the people's true choice for a leader. Sadly, today the U.S. is coronating a false President who stole his office not once, but twice.

Independent election observers said the re-run elections on 26 December had been much fairer than the earlier rounds.

The re-run was held after Mr Yushchenko's supporters staged massive protests over the outcome of a November poll, alleging vote-rigging by Mr Yanukovych.

Deliberations at the Supreme Court continued until 0230 (0030 GMT) on Thursday, when chief presiding justice Anatoly Yarema announced that the court was to uphold Mr Yushchenko's election victory.

"The decision is final and cannot be appealed," Mr Yarema said.
The announcement came after Ukraine's newspapers printed early editions carrying official results of the election, in which Mr Yushchenko beat his rival by eight percentage points.

Mr Yushchenko's victory celebrations had been put on hold by dogged appeals from his rival, who alleged widespread vote-rigging and electoral fraud.

Supporters who remained in the city awaiting the court's decision were jubilant at the judgement.

For those who say we cannot rerun an election, I say, "Bullshit!" If counting every vote isn't the goal (and the GOP clearly thinks not) then why call it democracy? Oh, the irony.

Posted by Steven at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)

Why Today Didn't Turn Out Differently

Posted by Steven at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)

A Terrible Day

Once again, this nation must suffer the shame of elevating to President a man who has neither the gravitas nor the intellect, much less the compassion to lead our diverse nation. He has squandered what we do best, taking us down in the world in the eyes of the billions who would love to be here, but who also now despise us.

Bush will make another speech that he has no intention of acting upon, laced with lies, half-truths and obvious sales pitch. He and his handlers are famously good at spinning advertising-quality spiels, but who's real agenda is to line the pockets of the top 1% of the nation's wealthy (the new royalty, the CEO caste).

He will claim a mandate that doesn't exist. He will call himself a "uniter" in a nation that is divided on the very question (and thus too stupid to realize that that itself proves he's a divider). If you pay FICA and support Bush, you are beyond hope, supporting a facist regime that has no intention of taking care of you as a citizen. They will loot the Social Security system to line their pockets with government money, the gold standard of the wealthy class (almost all super rich made their fortune courtesy of government contracts).

I fear that the United States will be brought to ruins in merely four more years of this monster and his handlers. They will suck the greatness out of this nation, and then leave it for safe havens. But along the way, the world will burn, the Earth will suffer, and her people will be in agony. We could have done so very much better, if we were lead by a true Christian, who loved people instead of money.

Posted by Steven at 08:30 AM | Comments (2)

Bush's Constituency

Big egos and big hair love their big fake President. Just in case you forgot, here's a snapshot of Bush's constituents.

Posted by Steven at 08:20 AM | Comments (1)

January 19, 2005

Allawi Is Saddam Lite

Our man in Bagdad is Yet Another Saddam. Reporters have confirmed that CIA-picked Iraqi leader Allawi shot seven Iraqi "terrorists" in cold blood last year.

The American official's confirmation of the killings by Allawi, according to Anderson, came via a "well-known former government minister" from Jordan; if it's reliable information it's pretty damn ugly for what it says about our man for democracy in Baghdad. From the New Yorker:

"There have been persistent rumors that, a week or so before he took office, Allawi shot and killed several terrorist suspects being held prisoner at a Baghdad police station. When reporters asked him about the rumors, Allawi denied that he had shot anyone, but added that he would do 'everything necessary' to protect Iraqis. I was in Baghdad at the time; although most Iraqis I spoke to believed the rumors, journalists and diplomats speculated that Allawi had spread them himself, in order to bolster his stern reputation.

"In late June, however, I sat in on an interview, conducted by Paul McGeough, a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, of a man who claimed to have witnessed the executions. He described how Allawi had been taken to seven suspects, who were made to stand against a wall in a courtyard of the police station, their faces covered. After being told of their alleged crimes by a police official, Allawi had asked for a pistol, and then shot each prisoner in the head. Afterward, the witness said, Allawi had declared to those present, 'This is how we must deal with the terrorists.' The witness said that he approved of Allawi’s act, adding that, in any case, the terrorists were better off dead, for they had been tortured for days.

We fought a bogus war to replace Saddam with Saddam-lite? What ... the ... fuck! Would the approval rating for the war go up or down if the American public knew this?

Posted by Steven at 11:28 PM | Comments (0)

It's Official: Americans Really Are That Stupid

Like Barnum said, "There's one born every second." In a perfunctory pre-election poll, CNN has decided to highlight the fact that half of the people in America will believe pretty much anything they see on the news. Read about the jaw-dropping optimism that allows full-grown adults to express opinions such as:

Fifty-two percent said he will be an outstanding or above average President in his second term.

I'd be stunned by anyone expecting "above average," but outstanding?

Even when stupidity is in the minority, it still manages to be a bloated minority:

Only forty-six percent said that Bush cut their taxes — the signature domestic achievement of his first term.

Of course, forty-six percent of Americans had nothing resembling an actual tax cut.

Read the CNN article and see for yourself.

Posted by at 02:58 PM | Comments (1)

January 16, 2005

Social Security Agency Ordered to Slit Own Throat

Can the Bushistas do anything on the up and up? The Bush Administration is covertly compelling the Social Security Administration to publicize the financial problems it allegedly faces down the road, and to actively push for privatization of accounts.

Over the objections of many of its own employees, the Social Security Administration is gearing up for a major effort to publicize the financial problems of Social Security and to convince the public that private accounts are needed as part of any solution.

The agency's plans are set forth in internal documents, including a "tactical plan" for communications and marketing of the idea that Social Security faces dire financial problems requiring immediate action.

Social Security officials say the agency is carrying out its mission to educate the public, including more than 47 million beneficiaries, and to support President Bush's agenda.

"The system is broken, and promises are being made that Social Security cannot keep," Mr. Bush said in his Saturday radio address. He is expected to address the issue in his Inaugural Address.

But agency employees have complained to Social Security officials that they are being conscripted into a political battle over the future of the program. They question the accuracy of recent statements by the agency, and they say that money from the Social Security trust fund should not be used for such advocacy.

"Trust fund dollars should not be used to promote a political agenda," said Dana C. Duggins, a vice president of the Social Security Council of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 50,000 of the agency's 64,000 workers and has opposed private accounts.

Deborah C. Fredericksen of Minneapolis, who has worked for the Social Security Administration for 31 years, said, "Many employees believe that the president and this agency are using scare tactics to promote private accounts."

Social Security trustees say the program's financial problems will grow as baby boomers retire. The program will pay out more in benefits than it collects in revenue in 2018, they say. By 2042, they say, the trust fund will be exhausted, and tax income will be sufficient to pay only 73 percent of scheduled benefits.

In campaign-style speeches, Mr. Bush and other officials have said that Social Security is headed for bankruptcy, and that workers should be allowed to divert some of their payroll taxes into private accounts, as a way to build wealth for themselves and their heirs.

This is probably the final test of democracy in this nation. If Bush pushes this madness through Congress, he will have demonstrated that he can lie on camera to the people and get away with it. What's that you say? Weapons of Mass Distruction? Oh ...

On a more serious note ... if the Bush Administration continues to succeed in taking non-partisan government agencies and turning them into his propoganda machines, it won't be too much longer before any semblence of representative democracy will be in the shitter. And that is clearly a highly favored strategy.

The fact that they refer to this activity as "marketing" tells you a lot about the necessity and value of the effort. This is a wholesale effort to destroy the Social Security net, and to play one generation against another. If Americans buy into this, then they have doomed themselves to be a third world nation where the 1% at the top literally will own everything.

Posted by Steven at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2005

Getting Astroturfed

I got a call from the "Progress for America" group advocating Bush's Social Security "reform" plan. Before they could finish their spiel, I laid into the call about not wanting to support Bush's efforts to gut the system and hand over the cash to Wall Street. He hung up before I could finish.

If you get a call from them, lay into them. This is "astroturfing" at it's worst.

Posted by Steven at 04:54 PM | Comments (0)

January 13, 2005

Arthur Holds Food Court At Camelot

Except that, no, it's not a joke. It's real. The cycle of history is complete.

Limited area of availability, but no doubt eBay will solve that right away.

Posted by at 10:21 PM | Comments (0)

What's That? NO WMDs?

In what no Progressive will find in the least bit surprising, the White House has officially ended the search for WMD but refuses to admit they were wrong.

The U.S. investigators searching for Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction have given up the hunt and left Iraq with an appeal to the Pentagon for the release of several Iraqi scientists still being questioned, it was reported Wednesday. Charles Duelfer, who led the Iraq Survey Group, has returned to the United States and will deliver a final report in the spring that will be almost identical to the interim assessment he delivered to Congress last October. That assessment found that Saddam had destroyed his last weapons of mass destruction more than 10 years ago, and his capacity to build new ones had been dwindling for years by the time of the second Gulf war.

"Charlie has left Iraq," an intelligence official said yesterday. "In terms of the weapons hunt in a proactive sense, it has concluded, and the report is being tweaked a bit but it will be largely unchanged." But he added: "There is a considerable amount of document exploitation to be done that will continue to occur, and leads that come out of the exploitation will be followed up."

U.S. officials said the operation was being wrapped up because there was little expectation of finding any substantial new evidence and the hunt could no longer be justified in view of the rising danger to the investigators. Despite the end of the search, President Bush Wednesday night said he remained convinced that he was right to go to war on Saddam. In an interview with ABC television's Barbara Walters, Bush admitted: "I felt like we'd find weapons of mass destruction, or like many many here in the United States, many around the world, the United Nations, thought he had weapons of mass destruction." When asked directly whether the invasion of Iraq was worth the cost of an increasingly violent war, Bush said: "Oh, absolutely."

Bush's "resolve" and "gut instinct" are clearly signs of a mental illness and a stark inability to face reality ... at the cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives.

Posted by Steven at 10:27 AM | Comments (3)

January 11, 2005

Wolfwood's Cross Banned From Inauguration Parade

James Dobson's rabid Focus on the Family group has announced that the Secret Service is banning crosses during the inauguration parade.

The Rev. Patrick Mahoney and the Christian Defense Coalition were granted a permit to hold a prayer vigil and demonstration during the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day. In that permit the list of prohibited "structures" includes crosses—along with bicycles, crates, coffins, cages and statues.

Mahoney is outraged.

"Why were crosses singled out over any other religious symbol—the Star of David, Islamic symbols?" Mahoney asked. "This is offensive. It's, in my view, religious bigotry."

Apparently there would be no prohibition against a picture of a cross. A Secret Service spokeswoman, who would not consent to a formal interview, nevertheless said the ban is only against "structures" of a cross.

Erik Stanley of Liberty Counsel said he doesn't think the intent of the Secret Service is to ban a religious symbol.

"It was to ban a structure that could conceal a weapon," Stanley said." You know, in these days of terrorist threats after 9/11, the Secret Service is already on high alert, particularly where the inauguration of the president is concerned."

Now where would the Secret Service get the ridiculous idea of storing weapons in a Christian cross?

How about from anime?

The character "Nicholas Wolfwood" from Trigun is the SS's worst nightmare:

Nicholas is one of the few people who can be a potential match for Vash with a handgun. He always travels with his "burden": his huge Cross Punisher. It's as tall as him and takes three ordinary guys to lift, but he hefts it around like it's nothing at all. He normally keeps it wrapped, but underneath it's a literal arsenal which is revealed bit by bit. One arm of the cross hides six handguns, the other stores the ammunition for the built in machine gun revealed in the long stem side, and the short stem is houses a fairly powerful rocket launcher.

So, we have the SS protecting the pretend President from pretend villians and this is pissing off the pretend Xtians. Can this get any better?

Posted by Steven at 04:42 PM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2005

University of Toronto Hearlds Solar Cell Breakthrough

U of T has announced a breakthrough in solar cell technology.

Researchers at the University of Toronto have invented an infrared-sensitive material that's five times more efficient at turning the sun's power into electrical energy than current methods.

The discovery could lead to shirts and sweaters capable of recharging our cellphones and other wireless devices, said Ted Sargent, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the university.

Sargent and other researchers combined specially-designed minute particles called quantum dots, three to four nanometres across, with a polymer to make a plastic that can detect energy in the infrared.

Infrared light is not visible to the naked eye but it is what most remote controls emit, in small amounts, to control devices such as TVs and DVD players.

It also contains a huge untapped resource -- despite the surge in popularity of solar cells in the 1990s, we still miss half of the sun's power, Sargent said.

"In fact, there's enough power from the sun hitting the Earth every day to supply all the world's needs for energy 10,000 times over,'' Sargent said in a phone interview Sunday from Boston. He is currently a visiting professor of nanotechnology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sargent said the new plastic composite is, in layman's terms, a layer of film that "catches'' solar energy. He said the film can be applied to any device, much like paint is coated on a wall.

"We've done the same thing, but not with something that just sit there on the wall the way paint does,'' said the Ottawa native.

"We've done it to make a device which actually harnesses the power in the room in the infrared.''

The film can convert up to 30 per cent of the sun's power into usable, electrical energy. Today's best plastic solar cells capture only about six per cent.

In the Seventies, efficiency of this magnitude was considered the rate that was required to make this technology competitive with oil, which was still priced lower than today. Maybe there is hope for the energy future afterall.

Posted by Steven at 03:31 PM | Comments (0)

2005 Bidness Predictions from The Street

Check out The Street's Ten Business Predictions for 2005:

1. Wal-Mart will fall down and go boom.
2. Texas will become an oil production state, again.
3. Water will be the new Oil.
4. the Housing Bubble will not pop -- this year.
5. Major drug companies will drown in lawsuits.
6. National IDs will become the law.
7. High fuel costs will kill all airlines except JetBlue and Southwest.
8. Bush will get SS reform passed thanks to millions in contributions from Wall St. employees.
9. Google will lead a (yet another) new Internet revolution.
10. The Chicago MERC will buy the NYSE aned NASDAQ to create one mega-market.

Not a single one of these predictions fills my heart with hope. I lick my lips with anticipation thinking about Wal-Mart's demise, but it will further erode retail in urban areas when it collapses. Expect the "Wal-Mart Riots" to start shortly afterwards. Someone has to take that product off the shelves.

Water and Oil will dominate this century, and likely will be the cause of the first half's worst wars. West Texas will blow the cash from this windfall just like the early eighties one. 'Nuff said there.

I think the housing bubble will pop and soon. It may precipitate the debt crisis in the U.S. or instead, may trigger it, but either way, we've spent our kids' futures already.

It's hard to come down firmly on either side of Big Drug. I feel terrible about the loss of those harmed by bad drugs, but I blame the Feds. (FDA) as much for letting bad drugs get through a system the Rethuglians have completely politicized. OTOH, the Big Drug firms have taken doctors so completely out of the picture (with self-diagnosis TV ads) that it's hard to hold them blameless for the mess they made. And isn't it ultimately more profitable to sell a product that doesn't kill customers than one that does?

Under Gonzales, anything can and will happen. From manditory ID to manditory DNA samples, we're going to slide far, far from the 1st, 4th and 5th Amendments in the next four years. Get your passport now, while you can.

All airlines gone except JetBlue and Southwest? What kind of crazy talk is that? Who knows is all I can say. With billions of air miles sitting out there, a huge blow back is inevitable.

Bush's SS "reform" has always been about enriching the rich. Bankrupting SS and handing billions in fees to Wall Street is the modus operandi of the CEO President. I hope against hope that some in the sparse, fiscally sane GOP camp will stand with the Dems. against this, but with all that Wall Street influence, I mean, lobbying, what hope does poor old Social Security stand?

Not another Internet boom.

One market to rule them, and one market to take their profits away. Didn't Middle Earth fight to end the rule of the One Market? Who thinks this is a good idea, besides the Masters of the MERC?

Posted by Steven at 03:01 PM | Comments (0)

Cape Gattaca, Mass.

In order to solve a three year-old murder, the Truro, MA Police Dept. is asking all male residents of Truro, MA for a sample of their DNA. How long before this is required to get a driver's license, or vote?

In an unusual last-ditch move to find clues to the three-year-old killing of a freelance fashion writer, police investigators are trying to get DNA samples from every man in this Cape Cod hamlet, all 790 or so, or as many as will agree.

Raising concerns among civil libertarians and prompting both resistance and support from men in Truro, the state and local police began collecting the genetic samples last week, visiting delicatessens, the post office and even the town dump to politely ask men to cooperate. Legal experts said the sweeping approach had been used only in limited instances before in the United States - although it is more widely used in Europe - and in at least one of those cases it prompted a lawsuit.

Sgt. David Perry of the Truro Police Department and other law enforcement authorities here say that the program is voluntary but that they will pay close attention to those who refuse to provide DNA.

"We're trying to find that person who has something to hide," Sergeant Perry said.

And in strict violation of the Fifth Amendment, the police have stated (quoted above) that not participating is equivalent to confessing. So much for a right not to incriminate one's self.

PS. In case this all sounds strangely familiar, check out this entry in the Internet Movie Database.

Posted by Steven at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)

January 08, 2005

Mozart is a Teenager Repellant?

This is a new low for my culture -- using Mozart as teenager repellant. Go read it for yourself.

Posted by Steven at 12:47 PM | Comments (0)

January 06, 2005

Where Are We After Turning The Fourth Corner?

The closing graf has the blackest, funniest metaphor I've read in a long time -- I was in tears -- but the whole piece is worth reading. Go. It's a thing of beauty.

Posted by at 01:44 AM | Comments (0)

January 05, 2005

Tucker "Dick" Carlson Out of Work

Guess who got canned today? That's right ... Tucker "Dick" Carlson.

CNN said goodbye to pundit Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, and with him likely the "Crossfire" program that has been the granddaddy of high-volume political debate shows on cable television.

CNN will probably fold "Crossfire" into its other programming, perhaps as an occasional segment on the daytime show "Inside Politics," said Jonathan Klein, who was appointed in late November as chief executive of CNN's U.S. network.

Klein on Wednesday told Carlson, one of the four "Crossfire" hosts, that CNN would not be offering him a new contract. Carlson has been talking with MSNBC about a prime-time opening replacing Deborah Norville.

"I would host any kind of show for (MSNBC chief executive) Rick Kaplan," said Carlson, whose Friday night PBS show "Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered" resumes this week.

Suck on this, Carlson.

Posted by Steven at 10:27 PM | Comments (0)

Kunstler's 2005 predictions

Jim Kunstler's blog, Clusterfuck Nation, is a good read if you haven't seen it before. Check out some of his most recent entries.

Posted by at 01:52 PM | Comments (0)

January 04, 2005

2005 Off To A Rotten Start

Just a day after losing Kelly Freas, we learn that Will Eisner has also passed away. Best known for his character The Spirit, Eisner was an enormously influential comics artist for well over half a century.

This is probably the worst start to a year in regards to popular art in memory. And if such things really do come in threes... nah, I'd rather not think about it.

Posted by at 05:31 PM | Comments (0)

Fake Solution to a Fake Crisis

Paul Krugman has some good insights on the Social Security non-crisis:

By law, Social Security has a budget independent of the rest of the U.S. government. That budget is currently running a surplus, thanks to an increase in the payroll tax two decades ago. As a result, Social Security has a large and growing trust fund.

When benefit payments start to exceed payroll tax revenues, Social Security will be able to draw on that trust fund. And the trust fund will last for a long time: until 2042, says the Social Security Administration; until 2052, says the Congressional Budget Office; quite possibly forever, say many economists, who point out that these projections assume that the economy will grow much more slowly in the future than it has in the past...

The bonds in the Social Security trust fund are obligations of the federal government's general fund, the budget outside Social Security. They have the same status as U.S. bonds owned by Japanese pension funds and the government of China. The general fund is legally obliged to pay the interest and principal on those bonds, and Social Security is legally obliged to pay full benefits as long as there is money in the trust fund.

There are only two things that could endanger Social Security's ability to pay benefits before the trust fund runs out. One would be a fiscal crisis that led the U.S. to default on all its debts. The other would be legislation specifically repudiating the general fund's debts to retirees.

That is, we can't have a Social Security crisis without a general fiscal crisis - unless Congress declares that debts to foreign bondholders must be honored, but that promises to older Americans, who have spent most of their working lives paying extra payroll taxes to build up the trust fund, don't count...

There are two serious threats to the federal government's solvency over the next couple of decades. One is the fact that the general fund has already plunged deeply into deficit, largely because of President Bush's unprecedented insistence on cutting taxes in the face of a war. The other is the rising cost of Medicare and Medicaid.

As a budget concern, Social Security isn't remotely in the same league. The long-term cost of the Bush tax cuts is five times the budget office's estimate of Social Security's deficit over the next 75 years. The botched prescription drug bill passed in 2003 does more, all by itself, to increase the long-run budget deficit than the projected rise in Social Security expenses.

That doesn't mean nothing should be done to improve Social Security's finances. But privatization is a fake solution to a fake crisis.

Posted by at 09:43 AM | Comments (0)

Sign Of The Times

Parking spaces are getting bigger.

When the Bernardsville, N.J., borough council voted last month to widen parking spaces, it may have put itself at the vanguard of communities that are trying to accommodate sport-utility vehicles, minivans and other larger vehicles.

"I had anticipated this would start to happen because you could see the SUVs occupied more space than an ordinary sedan," says Martin Robins, director of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at New Jersey's Rutgers University. Robins expects other towns to follow Bernardsville's lead. "I think they're responding to a real issue."

Already, Honolulu has eliminated parking slots designated for compact cars. Concord, Calif., population 122,000, will consider a similar move this year, along with increasing the minimum width of parking spaces.

...

Mary Smith of Walker Parking Consultants in Kalamazoo, Mich., says, "With the increasing use of SUVs and those other vehicles, as well as the fact there just aren't as many small cars being sold, it's become ineffective to have those (compact) stalls."

As a small-car driver, I don't find compact spaces to be at all ineffective. Make the SUV drivers hike a little further to get to the mall entrance. The size of their vehicle was a real factor they should have considered before acquiring it.

sigh... this is more a reaction than a response, because it's years late and probably not enough even now, but that's government. Since same or greater quantities of parking spaces will be needed in the future, urban sprawl will either be increased, or areas of natural reserves will be decreased. This will be a small but real factor.

Know what's a real waste of parking spaces? The handicapped access slots. There's too damn many of them, and those people never show up. (joke! joke!)

(Nice to see the Voorhees bequests have been spread around.)

Posted by at 12:14 AM | Comments (0)

January 03, 2005

Miracle On Constitution Ave.

The GOP has decided not only to not push for a thorough gutting of the House ethics guidelines, but also to reverse an earlier change that allows committee leaders to retain their chairs even if under indictment -- a change originally made to guard top Rethuglican Tom DeLay (R - Sugarland, TX, home address available through Harris County website). DeLay himself grabs credit:

House Republicans suddenly reversed course Monday, deciding to retain a tough standard for lawmaker discipline and reinstate a rule that would force Majority Leader Tom DeLay to step aside if indicted by a Texas grand jury.

The surprise dual decisions were made by Speaker Dennis Hastert and by DeLay — who asked GOP colleagues to undo the extreme act of loyalty they handed him in November. Then, Republicans changed a party rule so DeLay could retain his leadership post if indicted by the grand jury in Austin that charged three of the Texas Republican's associates.

...

Jonathan Grella, a DeLay spokesman, said DeLay still believed it was legitimate to allow a leader to retain his post while under indictment. But Grella said that by reinstating the rule that he step aside, DeLay was "denying the Democrats their lone issue. Anything that could undermine our agenda needs to be nipped in the bud."

Wow. This almost approaches strategic thinking, but it retains the ethics guidelines, which is very much a good thing, and keeps DeLay on the ropes, which probably doesn't hurt him any but must be keeping a lot of top attorneys tied up rather than moving on to other dirty work, so there's a pewter lining. It's also interesting to see that the Agenda is considered more important than Tom DeLay, though I'm not sure what to make of that in toto.

It'd have been more satisfying seeing the Dems grab a victory on this matter through debate and vote, but this works for me. And Ronnie Earle is still working on matters in Austin.

Posted by at 11:13 PM | Comments (1)

Frank Kelly Freas, RIP

Renowned sci-fi illustrator Frank Kelly Freas passed away this past Sunday. He produced countless beautiful works, not just illustrating SF books, but in many fields, including the 1973 Skylab I mission patch (second from left). Once again we lose one of the good ones. Thanks for gracing our world, Kelly.

Here is an interesting article by Freas about designing the patch. Artwork is work!

Posted by at 07:16 PM | Comments (0)

January 02, 2005

France un, Etats Unis zero

I read comic books. I don't read nearly as many as I did in my misguided youth, partly due to time constraints, more due to the dual filtration mechanism of me being a more discriminating reader today and the available material being sorely misaligned with my interests. I won't say comics suck today, because a lot of them don't (some do, of course), but in general (and particularly in the superhero genre) comic books are aimed at younger readers. Which is fine.

Marvel Comics has been around for a long time, going back to the late 1930s if we count predecessor publishers like Timely. Marvel has a lot of stuff in the company archive, but now it's a bit less. They've donated tons of comics to the National Center for Comic Books and Images -- which is in France. (The website is in French, apparently without translations, so I couldn't get a lot out of it; I can stumble through a tiny bit of French and I'm familiar with a lot of the American-produced material so I was able to enjoy reviewing some small parts of the collection index. The entire collection, I expect, must be amazing.)

Marvel's donation -- which was, by request, reduced from the original bequest due to it being simply overwhelming (nearly one million books) -- will total about 300,000 books. Most of these books were published from the early 1950s to the late 1970s -- which was a seminal period for Marvel. The early 1960s alone saw the creation of Spider-man, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, Daredevil, the X-Men, and more. These are some of the most enduring and significant characters in the history of comics. Archival copies of origin and other early issues can be valued in the tens of thousands of dollars. Marvel will, no doubt, reap a huge tax benefit for this largesse (which is fine). And it is all to the good that these materials will be made available for public access. It does make me sad, however, that apparently there is no similar institution in the States that would have made a worthy accession site. Here, comics are still looked upon as second-rate, juvenile entertainment; trash, basically. And that's grossly unfair to the medium. C'est la vie.

The donation agreement "allows the museum to destroy duplicate copies, but it cannot barter, trade, sell or give any away". This amazes me. It's pretty difficult for any museum in America to disperse any of its collection -- I don't know about France -- and this is a fair exchange for some of the special statuses that museums enjoy. But allowing for destruction (which I would hope would not come about) instead of other potential dispersal methods -- some of which could be used for exchange-driven collection expansion or even fund raising -- strikes me as very odd. And given the historical value of many of the books (some issues are duplicated into the hundreds of copies), many collectors are up in arms. Which, right now, is for nothing. The Museum is planning on creating five identical collections from the entire donation, keeping two for itself and lending the other three collections. But if the Museum decides at some point to destroy surplus copies, well, let's hope justice prevails. As it should.

If I ever get to France, I gotta visit this place.

Posted by at 01:44 AM | Comments (0)

The Ranger's Not Gonna Like This, Yogi

The Cromwellians haven't taken over completely just yet. This, in little blue Connecticut:

Banning lap dances and other simulated sex acts at strip clubs illegally censors erotic expression, a federal court judge has ruled.

Senior U.S. District Judge Warren W. Eginton, who is based in Bridgeport, said that sections of a Berlin ordinance regulating adult businesses violate the Constitution because they prohibit movements and gestures that a dancer might need in transmitting an erotic message.

"A government cannot constitutionally regulate erotic expression with such stringent restriction that the expression no longer conveys eroticism," Eginton wrote in his Dec. 20 ruling.

I suspect that Judge Eginton is going to get an extremely nasty reprimand from Lord High Inquisitor-nominee Gonzalez soon after his ascension to office. Nothing official, of course. But perhaps reassignment to the 1st Provisional Circuit Court of Fallujah.

Posted by at 01:10 AM | Comments (0)

The Only Annual Review You Ever Need

2004 is done and gone, as is the custom. While I will look back on it as The Red Sox Championship Year Of My Lifetime (even if there is another one), there's a large measure I'd rather forget as well, though in some certain and specifically revolting ways we'll be braving the next four years as a result. Well, onward. I agree with Steve that for the most part we need not rehash 2004, but one chronicler's take is always worth checking out, the inestimable Dave Barry.

Some choice bits:

• We somehow managed to hold a presidential election campaign that for several months was devoted almost entirely to the burning issue of: Vietnam.
  
• Osama bin Laden remained at large for yet another year (although we did manage, at long last, to put Martha Stewart behind bars).
  
• ...the Bush administration, increasingly disturbed by the bad news from Iraq, cancels the White House's lone remaining newspaper subscription (Baseball Digest).
  
• In other political news, Russian president Vladimir Putin easily wins re-election, despite exit polls indicating the winner was Howard Dean.
  
• ...U.S. gasoline prices reach record levels when, in what economists describe as a freak coincidence, two drivers attempt to refuel their Humvees on the same day.
  
• ...the Department of Making Everybody in the Homeland Nervous raises the Official National Terror Index Level to "Yikes!" based on having received credible information indicating that al-Qaida terrorist cells are, quote, "up to something" and "could be in your attic right now."
  
• ...former President Ronald Reagan dies and embarks on a weeklong national tour.
  
• ...President Bush, reacting to news of a projected sharp increase in the federal budget deficit, vows to find out if this is a good thing or a bad thing, or what.
  
• ...experts say (hurricane damage) would have been much worse if not for a dense protective barrier of TV news people standing on the beaches and excitedly informing the viewing audience that the wind was blowing.
  
• ...Bush states that being president is really, really hard, for him, anyway.
  
• ...US Airways files for bankruptcy for a second time, only to have a federal judge rule that the airline can't possibly get any more bankrupt than it already is.
  
• The Red Sox get into the (World) Series thanks to the fact that the New York Yankees — who were leading the American League championships three games to none, and have all-stars at every position, not to mention a payroll larger than the gross national product of Sweden — chose that particular time to execute the most spectacular choke in all of sports history, an unbelievable Gag-o-Rama, a noxious nosedive, a pathetic gut-check failure of such epic dimensions that every thinking human outside of the New York Metropolitan area experienced a near-orgasmic level of happiness. But there is no need to rub it in.
  
• John Kerry easily sweeps to a 53-state landslide victory in the exit polls and has pretty much picked out his new Cabinet when word begins to leak out that the actual, physical voters have elected George W. Bush. Democrats struggle to understand how this could have happened, and, after undergoing a harsh and unsparing self-examination, conclude that red-state residents are morons.
  
• On the military front, the president, in a move that sparks international outrage, announces that he is sending Ron Artest to Iraq.
  
• ...Iran continues to heatedly deny that it is developing nuclear weapons, but is unable to offer a plausible explanation as to why it purchased 200 pounds of enriched uranium on eBay.
  

There's lots more; I didn't spoil it for you. Barry is taking a year-long sabbatical soon, and will be missed (and welcomed back warmly), so this may be one of his last new pieces for some time. Check it out.

Posted by at 12:23 AM | Comments (0)