More of the same, please

This photo makes me so hopeful, I think if the recent spate of truces and optimism in Israel and Palestine doesn't pan out, I will probably start bawling.

As if kitty killing wasn't bad enough.

The person who replaced racist Trent Lott is also a raging homophobe!

Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tennessee, said the Supreme Court's decision last week on gay sex threatens to make the American home a place where criminality is condoned.

The court on Thursday threw out a Texas law that prohibited acts of sodomy between homosexuals in a private home, saying that such a prohibition violates the defendants' privacy rights under the Constitution. The ruling invalidated the Texas law and similar statutes in 12 other states.

...Asked whether he supported an amendment that would ban any marriage in the United States except a union of a man and a woman, Frist said: "I absolutely do, of course I do.

"I very much feel that marriage is a sacrament, and that sacrament should extend and can extend to that legal entity of a union between -- what is traditionally in our Western values has been defined -- as between a man and a woman. So I would support the amendment."

Serial Killer Richard Ramirez married someone, legally, after being convicted of raping and mutilating people. So, what Bill Frist is saying is that in his opinion men who rape and murder people have done less damage to the "institution of marriage", which entails them certian legal rights that men who happen to prefer love other men or women who happen to love other women do not deserve. Does this make Frist objectively pro-Night Stalking?

Missing the point, as usual

Unsurprisingly, George Will conpletely misses the point about being multi-racial in this online commentary.

To what race do they belong — besides the human race?

The racial privacy initiative rests on the premise that it is factually false — and morally obtuse — to force Americans to pick a racial identity.

Connerly is not black or white.

He is American. Period.

Actually, he is both black and white. The morally obtuse premise here is the one that if you can't pick either black or white, or whatever you happen to be a combination of, then you don't get to be either of them. You have to be an "American", some sort of bland future person living in a world where people like George Will don't have to worry about insulting what race you are, because you're not any race at all.

I have my Italian mother's resolve (some people call it a "firey temper", but what do they know,) and the bronze skin of my Black-Cuban father. I have the almond-shaped eyes of my Chinese great-grandfather and the thick curly hair of my Spaniard great-grandmother. I have all of these things, not because I'm an American, but because I'm Italian, Black, Cuban, Chinese, and Spanish.

My husband has his Irish mother's pale creamy skin and his German father's dark hair. He has those things not because he is an American, but because he is Irish and German. If we ever have children, they will share all of these attributes not because they were born in America, but because of who their parents are.

You know, I'm quite proud of being an American. Despite all the crap that entails, I don't do stupid things like pronounce the names of foriegn cities with foriegn accents. (Come on, you don't think the newscasters in other countries talk about Noo Yoik or Bahston, do you?) We gave the world Jazz and the Blues and Punk Rock. (Don't give me that Sex Pistols did it first crap. The Ramones beat them by a year and The Stooges beat them by neary a decade.) However, I don't think being an American has to also entail that I give up my racial heritage.

I am the decendant of poor immigrants who came to this country with just about nothing. I have no family heirlooms and know next to nothing about my family tree. I started watching Antiques Roadshow out of jealousy, longing to be the person who found a valuable masterpiece in their Grandmother's attic. Being able to say that I am Italian, Black, Cuban, Chinese, and Spanish is really all I have. How dare George Will presume to take that away from me!

Oh, no

In a sad, sad loss to plucky punk girls worldwide, one of our own, Katherine Hepburn, has died.

Two best movies? The Philadelphia Story and Adam's Rib, without a doubt. Watch for the scene in Adam's Rib where Spencer Tracy walks in with a handgun made of licorice, and the entire sequence in The Philadelphia Story where Katherine romps drunkenly around her backyard with a saucy young Jimmy Stewart the night before her wedding to the astoundingly dull John Howard. Wonderful!

*UPDATE* Ain't No Bad Dude has a cool picture of Katherine that captures her true haughtiness.

George Bush is the son of a Motherless Goat. So there.

A friend of mine emailed this to me.

An Iraqi youth is arrested and handcuffed after calling out insults to a US military patrol in Baghdad as he was making his way to school.

That boy has the slumped shoulders and hanging head of someone who was expecting "Democracy, Whisky, Sexy" and didn't get any. Well, at least they didn't strip him naked, or blow off his arms, or refuse to help him with his burns, or kill him or anything.

Oops...

Okay, so I was tired of the Enetation comments constantly going down, so I decided to switch to Haloscan...except I seem to have done something funny to my template, where each preceding post is indented a little bit...

Help?

*UPDATE* Sigh...also, it seems that when you put a check in the "open in new window" box, the comments window can't open. I'm a java script retard, not to mention sleep deprived at the moment. I'm going to bed, and maybe when I wake up the blog fairy will have fixed everything nice and pretty.

*Update to Update* Thanks to the nice people at Haloscan for helping me fix the weird indent problem! May the forces of evil become lost and confused on the way to their houses!

Housekeeping

Silvan, formerly of The Dog House, has made the big move to Movable Type and is now at http://www.archetypical.org/. Go read!

Yuck

Okay, here's an article about an actual racist liberal.

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- A state senator suggested in a flier that terrorist attacks could be deterred if convicted Muslim extremists were buried with pig entrails -- a proposal that angered some Muslims.

...It said that before World War I, Gen. John Joseph "Black Jack" Pershing ordered troops to execute terrorists in the Phillipines with bullets dipped in pig's blood, then bury them with the blood and entrails.

..."Maybe it is time for this segment of history to repeat itself, maybe in Iraq," the flier concluded.

Replace the word "Muslim" with "Jewish" in this paragraph and the cries of "Anti-Semite" would be deafening, not to mention the accusations towards the rest of us of failing to condemn this racist liberal.

Well, I condemn him anyway.

*ADDENDUM* Let me clarify that with this post what I wanted to do was illustrate the type of person bloggers should be taking to task instead of each other, not to drag out a flame war. The End.

Okay, so it's belated.

But the Blogger move and a day trip to Taos made me miss it. But I just want to wish all my readers (both of you)...



Celebrate responsibly.

And may his ultra-conservative politics die with him...

Far be it from me to rejoice in someone's death, at that's not really what I'm doing here, but maybe we can hope this means an end to an era, so to speak.

Oh, neat...

Well, I'm on the new Blogger now. The interface is a little prettier. Not sure how much I like it yet...

You're too isolated from society when...

When there's a huge wildfire in the middle of your city that causes a power outage and evacuations and the first you hear about is when you're idly browsing the internet fighting insomnia at 5 a.m.

I really should get out more. Or at least watch the local news.

On the plus side, whenever New Mexico makes the national news, less of the people I talk to on the phone at work ask me astoundingly stupid questions like, "Oh, New Mexico, what part of Mexico is that?" or, "Oh, is the tech support center in New Mexico because of NAFTA?" Or compliment me on my excellent English. Yeah, I've been practicing for 25 years, I'd like to think I'd be good at it by now.

Embarassingly Revealing Internet Quiz Result of the Week

This one is in honor of Christopher.


You are the drawing.


Saint Exupery's 'The Little Prince' Quiz.
brought to you by Quizilla

Hrm. See, I thought it was a picture of a hat...

This is gross.

If surgeries like this were popular in a Muslim country, we would use it as evidence of their backwards-ness.

Now, a new surgical technique is giving girls with a past a new future.

"The hymen's a delicate membrane that separates girls from women," said Dr. Robert Stubbs, who runs the Cosmetic Surgicentre in Toronto, where, in a simple, half-hour operation, he turns sexually experienced women into surgical virgins.

The surgery is called hymen restoration — a relatively simple procedure that stitches back together what a moment of passion might have shattered.

Well, I guess girl power is now officially out of style. That is icky on many subtle levels...physical, emotional, and social. If I had a teenage daughter, I would absolutely forbid her from getting an operation like this!

Interesting...

Okay, so maybe we're not all thickly apathetic after all. It seems that some discomfiture over Iraq is penetrating through the haze of mass media.

June 23— The number of Americans who say the United States is sustaining an "unacceptable" level of military casualties in Iraq has grown sharply, a trend that could signal limited patience for a long and violent occupation.

Hmmm...I think this could be a key issue for all those Democratic presidential candidates to exploit.

Happy Birthday Dad!

Don't worry, I won't tell the whole internet how old you are.

Bush Lied, People Died...I want my MTV

I've been too busy to post about this article for a few days, but now that I'm on vacation (yay) here it is. Everybody go read this Salon article about the really, truly pathetic apathy of the American public regarding our current president.

To simply say that the public has been duped by the White House and Fox News is far too reductive, though. While some Americans are deluded about Iraq's WMD, others simply don't care. After all, if a third of Americans surveyed believe weapons of mass destruction have been found, two-thirds realize they haven't been. Meanwhile, there's been an important shift in public opinion suggesting that Americans aren't much more attached to the president's initial justification for war with Iraq than Bush himself is. Before the war, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll showed that only 38 percent of Americans felt the war would be justified even if weapons of mass destruction were not found. When the same pollsters asked that question two weeks ago, 56 percent of Americans felt the war was justified even if the weapons are never uncovered.

-snip-

..."In a way, it's Americans' insularity, their isolationism, that may be showing its ugly head," says Susan Tifft, a Duke University professor and former Time magazine writer who's written several books about American journalism. "Saddam, Osama, they all sound the same, they're all rag-heads, so who cares? I don't think a lot of Americans have taken the time or considerable trouble to find the difference between Shiite and Sunni or Saddam and Osama."

As recently I have spent all day listening to my co-workers spout the jingoism they learned watching Fox News, this sounds right to me. How can American Democracy survive if the people are fine with being lied to as long as the propaganda they're being exposed to makes them feel better about their position in the world? It's interesting psychologically, but also depressing when you think about it realistically.

Fellow Cineaste Joseph provides a link to a Moveon.org petition calling for Congress to form an investigatory commission. Let's try to shake our apathy long enough to sign it!

Bush Lied, Shepherd Boys Got Shot in the Stomach Four Times.

This might seem like an unusual source, but I found myself riveted by this article, written by an embedded reporter from Rolling Stone magazine, of all places. The article was surprisingly honest to me, especially since this issue had Justin Timberlake and Christina Augilera on the cover. I was glad to find it on their website. This last section was the most disturbing.

A couple of hours later, two Bedouin women arrive at the edge of Bravo's perimeter...the younger woman seems highly distraught, gesturing and moving her mouth, but no words come out. Her breasts are exposed, her robes having fallen open while she was dragging her bundle across the fields. As Bryan approaches, she frantically unrolls its contents, revealing what appears to be a youth's bloody corpse. The boy looks about fourteen. Then he opens his eyes. Bryan kneels down. There are four small holes, two on each side of his stomach.

Bryan begins treating him immediately. In the field, several men appear walking a seventeen-year-old with blood streaming down his right leg. The two Bedouin boys were shot with rounds from a Marine SAW. Trombley is the only Marine who fired his SAW that morning. There were no other Marines in the area for twenty kilometers.

So, even though it's old news to us, the nation with the shortest collective attention span in the history of human civilization, let's just remember that when Bush lied...

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," he said in the January 28 speech.

The allegation was wrong. It was based on documents later exposed by U.N. weapons inspectors as sloppy forgeries -- with the wrong letterhead and wrong names -- designed to falsely implicate Niger in selling raw uranium, known as yellow cake, to Iraq.

...people actually did die. It's not just a fun catchphrase, or a marketing opportunity. (That last link via Red Letter Day, who I like even though he uses the word idiotarian.)

I maintain that someone should pay Monica Lewinsky to have an affair with Dubya. That way, we can impeach the jag-off and be done with him.

Two more R.I.P.'s

For Hume Cronyn and William Marshall, who is best known as Blacula, but better known to me from one of the better episodes of the original Star Trek.

Housekeeping

Welcome to ...a certian shade of [green], Wallybrane's Martian Adventures, and Progressive Gold. Go Read!

*UPDATE* Also, The Mad Prophet Blog!

Life in liberated Iraq

Via Bob Harris at This Modern World I read that Iraqis in Baghdad are going so hungry that they are stealing zoo animals for food.

Looters stole zoo animals to eat, sell: animal rights group
June 17 2003
The number of animals at the Baghdad zoo has shrunk from 400 before the war to only 50, largely because looters stole them to eat or sell, a US-based animal rights group said today.

Holy stinking crap. Let's put aside the fact that this is incredibly sad for those poor wild animals. These people must be in a very desparate situation. Getting these people food and water should have been our first priority. Now, Iraq could begin exporting oil again any day now, but the people are so desperate all they have to eat is zoo tiger?

Am I the only one that thinks that's a little out-of-order? Will stories like the baby-eating in North Korea start to come out of Iraq, too?

God has better grammar than that

There's a billboard I see on my way home from work everyday that's starting to annoy me. It's one of those stupid, black-with-white-text billboards that presumes to have quotes from God on it. "If you don't stop using my name in vain, I'll make rush hour longer," is one example.

That's annoying enough, but this particular one says "What part of 'Thou Shall Not' didn't you understand?" Oh, I dunno, perhaps the improper conjugation? Perhaps if it said 'Thou Shalt Not' like it was supposed to, then I wouldn't have been coveting my neighbor's wife this whole time.

Oh my

Good This Modern World this week. Definitely made me chuckle.

I've always liked Tom Tomorrow's cutely befuddled George W. Bush. It definitely takes the edge off all the crappy things the president actually does when he looks like that.

Humble thanks

Thanks to the Rittenhouse Review for including me in this list. Go read those blogs, not my drivel!

On Innocent Bystanders

Read this about the real victims of Palestinian/Israeli violence...not the prospective governments, or even the "Road Map", but the normal people who, by accident of birth, happen to be of a particular nationality. Average Palestinians and Israelis are being killed and injured because of the actions of groups who presume to represent them.

The Israelis are suffering...

"I haven't heard all the names yet. I'm afraid of what I'll hear tonight," said Web page designer Rahel Sharon, 38. "I've already lost a few friends to terrorism."

Her friend Sara Duker, 22, a student from Teaneck, N.J., was killed in a bus bombing in Jerusalem in February 1996 along with her fiancee. Another friend, from the Netherlands, was killed in a shooting attack in 1994.

"It's very sad, very frightening," she said, as she stood at the bus stop where city bus No. 14 was destroyed in Wednesday's attack. She thanks God out loud each time she arrives home safely.

And the Palestinians are suffering...

The panic is equally unnerving for Palestinians after Israeli military strikes, which target militants but often kill and injure civilians. Four Israeli missile attacks in the last three days have hit crowded areas of Gaza.

The chop-chop of helicopter blades or first sight of a vapor trail from an Israeli F-16 fighter jet, is enough to set off panic in Gaza's streets after four airborne attacks in two days.

"Everyone now is a target, not only the fighters," said Radwan Aneen, 22, a falafel vendor.

His friend and fellow shopkeeper, Hammed, suffered two broken legs when Israeli helicopters fired missiles at a car carrying two militants in a crowded market area Wednesday.

That attack killed the two Hamas operatives, but seven bystanders also died.

As an American, I cannot even imagine what living with that kind of constant fear would be like. The attacks from both sides of the conflict are doing nothing except for breeding more terrorism and causing more opression. Hamas isn't sufferring. Ariel Sharon and his hawks aren't sufferring. The people who are doing nothing but trying to ride the bus to work or harvest their olive groves, or live in their houses, or sell their wares on the street, they are the ones that are being hurt by this intifada.

If I were Empress of the Universe, the first thing I would do is set up Hamas and the IDF on a tiny desert island, where they could kill eachother to their heart's content and leave the rest of humanity out of their blood fest.

R.I.P....

...Gregory Peck.

Go rent Spellbound and Roman Holiday, and imagine yourself swooning over his stoicness. I'll be fun.

And David Brinkley, too. Who will say goonight to Chet now?

Playing Nice

Jim at Rittenhouse has wisely told us all to play nice with eachother. Point well taken.

Thursday, June 26 is Appropriate Michael Savage's Name For Your Own Purposes Day!

Via Blah3 I learn that in response to Michael Savage's astoundingly stupid lawsuit, Neal Pollack is proposing a special parody day.

That's right. On Thursday, June 26, any of you with a website should appropriate Michael Savage's name for your own purposes. Flood The Zone, as the Republicans like to say. Savage won't be able to sue all of us. If he tries, he'll look like a bigger idiot than he already does.

Everyone warm up your Photoshop and get crackin'.

No crow for me, thanks.

Sorry, Red Letter Day, you know I love ya, but Tom Tomorrow illustrates nicely why I will not be eating crow any time soon.

But, as someone who used to work tech support, thank you so much for this huge laugh.

Embarrassingly Revealing Internet Quiz Result of the Week

It's been awhile since the last one.


You're Ripley. Believe it or not.


Which Drive-in Damsel Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Via Sisyphus.

Housekeeping.

Recently added Take Back the Media, Ruminate This, Centerpoint, and Whiskey Bar to the blogroll. Go read!

Also, in an unfortunate incident, Wampum will no longer be positng. I'm leaving her on the blogroll, though, in the hopes she maybe changes her mind.

**UPDATE*** Oh, also added Blah3. Go read now!

The French are Cheese-Eating cowards...

...that just rescued a bunch of Americans trapped in Liberia.

June 9, 2003 | MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) -- French military helicopters evacuated Americans and other foreigners from the besieged capital of Liberia at dawn Monday, ferrying them from embassy compounds to a French navy ship in the Atlantic.

...By midafternoon, France had evacuated 350 people -- including Americans, Europeans, Lebanese, Indians, and others -- to the French ship Orage, which planned to sail to neighboring Ivory Coast, French Defense Ministry spokesman Col. Christian Baptiste said in Paris.

You'd think a country that has it's capital city named after an American president would garner more interest. You'd think we'd care enough to save our own civilians.

To be fair, the French probably had the advantage of being able to find Liberia on a map.

Jeeze, I really am in a bitter mood today.

Michael Savage is a big fat weenie

Many bloggers have linked to this story already, (Pandagon, skippy, and Tom Tomorrow among them) but I thought I'd throw my two bits in.

Take Back the Media, who I really should have been linking to all alongfor their flash movies alone, is being sued by raging bigot Michael Savage, an extreme right-wing loon that makes Ann Coulter look like Karl Marx. Here are some examples of what a total racist, sexist, touchingly homophobic (it's okay, Mike, we know you only kiss girls, you don't have to keep reminding us) pig Savage is, taken from this Buzzflash interview.

- The United States "is being taken over by the freaks, the cripples, the perverts and the mental defectives"

- Gays and lesbians are "perverts" and that "the gay and lesbian mafia wants our children"

- America is a "'she-ocracy' where a minority of feminist zealots rule the culture...together, they have both feminized and homosexualized much of America to point where the nation has become passive, receptive and masochistic"

- MSNBC's Ashleigh Banfield is "the mind-slut with a big pair of glasses"

- When speaking of immigrants, "You open the door to them, and the next thing you know, they are defecating on your country and breeding out of control."

In the biggest irony since Ann Coulter released a book titled Slander, and then followed it up with a book in which she accuses all liberals of treason, this man is now suing Take Back the Media, among several other web sites, for making fun of him.

Let me repeat that, because it's really quite astounding.

This "man" makes a living by shouting insults at people who aren't even in the room with him all day long, and he is now upset that people on the internet are insulting him back.

Michael Savage is the worst kind of coward. He is a greedy, spoiled, C-level celebrity. He has a show with very poor ratings on a basic cable channel that has very poor ratings. He is clearly illustrating what is wrong with the American legal system. Michael Savage deserves to have Hustler magazine make fun of him like they did to Jerry Falwell. Since I don't have Larry Flynt on my speed dial anymore (hah! Just kidding!) let's see what I can do.

Michael Savage needs to get laid.

Michael Savage is so ugly, he has to hang steaks around his neck to get his dog to play with him.

Michael Savage is so stupid, he brought lipstick to a makeup quiz.

Michael Savage's momma is so fat, we're inside her right now.

One more,

Q: What's the difference between a mosquito and Michael Savage?
A: When you slap a mosquito, it will stop sucking.

Oo, oo, do I get a lawsuit now, too?

This is just sick

Camp X-Ray is just disturbing to me. It's bad enough that these prisoners are being withheld from international view, so that we can do whatever we want to them. It's bad enough that some of the people there are juveniles. But now we're thinking about executing them, too?

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico June 10 —
Guantanamo officials are ready to provide a courtroom, a prison and an execution chamber if the order comes to try terror suspects at the base in Cuba, the mission commander said.

...Some 680 detainees from 42 countries are in Guantanamo, categorized as unlawful combatants by the U.S. government. It has refused demands from human rights organizations to recognize them as prisoners of war. They have no constitutional rights as non-U.S. citizens being held outside U.S. territory, and none have been formally charged or allowed access to attorneys.

Let me remind you, some of these "unlawful combatants" are children. Do I think the U.S. government might play judge, jury, and executioner with children (not to mention the grown men, who are all probably extremely low-level Taliban foot soldiers) while on their own private little island, free from the jursdiction of U.S. law, outside of the tenets of the Geneva Convention, and hidden from the international community? I sure hope not.

I've never quite understood how we can get away with not classifying these detainees as prisoners of war. Is it because we didn't officially declare war on the Taliban? I'll bet if you asked an Afghan, they would disagree.

Operation North Korean Freedom

Via Hesiod I see there is more evidence that the current White House is "objectively pro-cannibal".

Cannibalism is increasing in North Korea following another poor harvest and a big cut in international food aid, according to refugees who have fled the stricken country.

Aid agencies are alarmed by refugees' reports that children have been killed and corpses cut up by people desperate for food. Requests by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to be allowed access to "farmers' markets", where human meat is said to be traded, have been turned down by Pyongyang, citing "security reasons".

It really makes me angry that the horrors of Iraqi regime (which were horrific, don't think that I am denying that) are being used as an excuse to bomb that country and plunge it into chaos, when people are suffering the horrors of a thousand Iraqs in places like North Korea and the Congo. When is Operation North Korean Freedom or Operation Congolese Freedom scheduled to occur? Why don't we care about the freedom of those people? Could it be that we didn't really care about the freedom of the Iraqi people either? Could it be?

What does Iraq have that these other places don't? I almost don't want to write it, it's so cliche by now, but it's so obvious to anyone whose eyes have yet to completely get the wool pulled 100% over them.

Please, someone convince me it's not all about the oil!

Relief

Reading this, I breathe a sigh of relief.

The world-famous treasures of Nimrud, unaccounted for since Baghdad fell two months ago, have been located in good condition in the country's Central Bank in a secret vault-inside-a-vault submerged in sewage water, U.S. occupation authorities announced Saturday.

...One of the 20th century's most significant archaeological finds, the objects have not been exhibited since the early 1990s. Their discovery will help assuage the worries of archaeologists fretting for the country's ancient heritage.

This is really good news I will unabashedly rejoice at, but it still doesn't let the "U.S. occupation authorities" off my short list. I priase the Iraqis who seemed to have the foresight to hide and protect these items from looters (I seem to remember something coming to light about something similar happening at the Iraqi National Library) but that had to happen because "U.S. occupation authorities" did not help them. Still shameful. Besides, there are still important pieces missing.

"It is a great relief that so much of the museum's main collection is safe and in good condition," said Pietro Cordone, the provisional authority's senior adviser on cultural affairs.

But, he added: "There is no room for complacency. There are still important items that are missing from the museum's collection."

All of a sudden they are so important, when before the looting started they were an unimportant distraction. Humph. I hope those important items are eventually found, but they are probably in private collections by now.

I have crocheted Everest....

It's done. Finally. In all it's 17 foot glory, complete with 4 inch tassels at each end, it's the scarf to end all scarves. Long enough to wrap arpund your neck three times and still dangle attractively to the floor, it's definitely my crochet piece de resistance.

Look here for some pictures of that which I have replicated.

I've gone blind, I have repetitive stress disorder in my wrists, and my right hand has deformed into a hideous, crochet-hook shaped claw, but I'm done with the bloody thing once and for all!

Okay, so my next post will be about serious Current Event type issues, I promise.

Bye-Bye Beetle

I've always wanted a Beetle as companion to Brian's Bus (although now I have a Celebrity-thanks Joe!). But I guess now I have to buy one used.

BERLIN June 6 —
Volkswagen said Friday it will stop making the original rear-engine Beetle later this year, bringing the curtain down on the nearly 70-year history of the classic "bug."

Production of the last old Beetles at the VW plant in Puebla, Mexico, will "end this summer," spokesman Fred Baerbock said, adding that an exact date was not set.

I didn't even know they were making old Beetles anymore. Are they expensive?

Police Brutality

Hesiod, in a post worth reading because it relates my exact opinon about many recent protests, brings this story, and particularly, this photo to my attention.

What, if anything, could this cameraman have been doing or saying to the bike cop to deserve a face full of pepper spray? Please? Anyone have an answer? Or are you all objectively pro-pepper spray?

Maybe I'm biased, especially since I've recently heard from Ginny second-hand accounts of a local protest (it ended in tear gassing crowds that included small children) that radically differred from account on the news, but it really seems from these photos that the police over-reacted.

But a flag was burned, so I guess that's okay.

Osama? No. Saddam? No. Martha? Yes!

They way everyone is getting excited about the whole Martha Stewart situation, you'd think she was Ken Lay or something.

Hours after her arraignment, Stewart resigned her positions as chairman and chief executive of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc., a multi-million dollar lifestyle empire she had built out of a small catering business.

Yet the media-savvy Stewart, 61, had been prepared to fight back.

...Byron wrote in the New York Post on Thursday that Stewart's aura of success, capped with good taste, "has teed her up as Wall Street's perfect victim in a world of jealous, threatened men," including several corporate officers under investigation for crimes of a far larger scope.

I've never really like Martha Stewart, and honestly have found her a little creepy and robotic, but I really wouldn't be surprised if the furor over her medium-sized insider trading, as opposed to corporate crime of the degree that, say, Vice President Dick Cheney has yet to really clear himself of, was tainted by the faintest whiff of sexism.

Too bad there's no oil in the Congo.

To anyone who still thinks we "liberated" the Iraqi people for purely humanitarian reasons, I offer this horrific story.

Ritual Cannibalism Stalks Congo's Remote East

BUNIA, Congo (Reuters) - High on drugs and war, the militiamen took the Rwandan woman to a public place. There, before a large crowd, they mutilated her, cooked parts of her body and ate them.

It gets worse, and kind of graphic. How can we totally ignore things like these happening in the world? Not that I'm saying that we should rush in there with our bombs and tanks or anything, but I do think that if Iraq was enough of a human rights disaster to warrant it's own "Operation", when is "Operation Congo Freedom" going to happen? Is the White House objectively pro-Cannibalism?

Just so you know, I haven't gone anywhere

It's just that I've got friends in from out of town that I haven't seen in years, so there's more important stuff on my mind than ye olde blog over here.

I would like to mention tow things, though. Last night we went to go see a band play at a bar called The Launchpad. The band was called The Datsuns, from New Zealand, and they were awesome. Kind of AC/DC by way of The Ramones. Highly recommended. I ordered a CD.

However, the bar had the worst, most horribly rude and disrespectful bartender I have ever experienced. And believe me, I am the last person to expect my ass to be kissed because I'm a customer, but her rudeness went way beyond what a human being should act like to another human being.

So if you're ever in Albuquerque and feel like going to The Launchpad, save yourself the trouble. Or, at least, if the bartender that night is a woman named Michelle, don't tip her.

At least not very well.