Archive for March, 2007

If Republicans are said to be suffering from “scandal fatigue” all I can say to them is imagine how awful we Dems feel. The fact that Libby was found guilty was not a collective cry of victory from the liberal camp, I assure you. If there’s any analogy that can be used to describe the way Dems are trying to get at the heart of the overly-secretive White House it’s like trying to remove the clog in a gutter. When the Republicans controlled congress all the Dems were armed with to remove this clog was a tweezer; out came Libby but the clog remained.

Now the Dems have the power of the people behind them on everything from the facts of global warming to the need to subpeona White House officials over the firings of US Attorneys for what appears to be purely political motivation. It’s not a tweezer anymore. The fact that Gonzo ran like Forrest Gump out of a press conference yesterday speaks to that.

Gonzo, as the man who tried to redefine torture and the man who is both denying having anything to do with the firings of 9 US Attorneys while simultaneously stating that he knows all that goes on in his DoJ, represents a great deal of the current miseries facing the American people. That’s not an exaggeration. Next to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and his predecessor, John Ashcroft, Gonzales is one of the chief figureheads of an administration gone Machiavellian.

What I have to remind myself is that while he is, without question, one of the most corrupt administration officials since Nixon’s AG, Elliot Richardson, Gonzo actually has displayed that he has the remnants of a conscience – we could have it much worse. I’m reminded of a Gonzo anecdote from the Great Molly Ivins:

Right-wing Republicans fight to make the world safe from “judicial activists” by appointing Priscilla Owen — the biggest, baddest, worstest judicial activist Texas ever produced — to the federal bench.

Owen is so notorious for reading her own opinions into the law, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, then her colleague on the Texas Supreme Court, described her opinion in a parental consent case as “an unconscionable act of judicial activism.” (For further irony, see Gonzales’ subsequent attempts to deny that he was describing Owen.)

With his World’s Fastest Mouse impersonation (pardon the reference — the man is a pop culture reference gold mine), Gonzo is signaling a White House falter and a possible unclogging of one of the most stopped-up drains of corruption and secrecy in United States history. You many want to put on your grubby clothes for this one folks — a HazMat suit may not hurt either.

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this before, but I do own a dog and a cat. Officially, they are the property of my wife — but they know who to bug when it’s time to go outside or if the food bowl is empty. (Not that my wife doesn’t take care of animal necessities; they just tend to nag me about it more than anyone else.) My cat is especially attached to me because of the hair on my chinny-chin-chin, which he loves to use as a sort of pseudo-hair brush.

It’s time for the annual trip the vet so I arranged for the appointment today and everything seemed to go off without a hitch. Tucker Ray,the dog, gains more and more weight each year – thereby mirroring his ‘dad’ – and this year was no exception. I’m continually chided for not taking the dog on more walks and can expect this line of nagging to continue for some time. I know what it is: McDoonalds cheeseburgers. I get them for him from time to time along with a variable cornucopia of crap that I shouldn’t put into my own mouth, let alone the dog whose eyes just scream “I know I am a good dog….don’t beat me”. So yes he’s overweight. I am too. We’ll get through this together.

(William) Wallace the cat is a true freak of cat nature. Although he is not above making himself into the very ideal of cute and cuddly when his food bowl is empty, he’s also a genuinely affectionate cat — more so than any cat I’ve ever known. When it came time to have him declawed (yes, we’re those evil people who insist on having nice, nonclawed furniture) I was fully expecting him to turn into a little ball of hate towards anything that went upon two legs. To my utter disbelief he was actually more affectionate, at times giving my wife pause as to who loved me more, her or the cat.

He’s also not put off by car rides the way a lot of other cats tend to be. He can get a bit squirmy but we’ve now found that he has absolutely no issues with a cat carrier. (I’ll wait so you can read that again – I know it’s hard to believe.) But at the tender age of two and half years, we’ve only had to bring him in for shots one other time. So while today’s trip to the vet was fairly quiet, the ride home was quite different. He sat in his kennel and meowed most of the way home leading me to speak for him to my wife (I’m very fluent in meowlese): “Back in the kennel and driving around again dad? Where are we going now, dad? Are they going to stick me in the ass with more needles at our next stop, dad?”

But it was the parting from the vet’s clinic that stood as a stark reminder why I don’t have more than two animals – a $364 tab. It doesn’t matter how goddamned cute that doggy in the window is; those cheeseburgers don’t pay for themselves.

It never ceases to amaze me how much Christians are willing to denigrate their own religion and then blame others for it. Case in point: A recent trip to the grocery store landed me with one of my favorite candy purchases of all time.

A symbol of Christianity that sits atop church steeples, dangles from necks and hangs on walls is being worshipped in a new way — in the mouths of the faithful.

A mass-produced chocolate cross is being sold this Easter by Russell Stover Candies Inc. in about 5,000 stores nationwide.

Chocolate crosses have long been available. But chocolate expert Clay Gordon said Russell Stover’s chocolate cross under its Pangburn’s brand appears to be the first by a major American company.

I’ve actually had the cross for a while, and was meaning to write about it but wanted to wait until Easter. As for eating it, well, let’s just say I was waiting for another visit where I could cheerily munch on the chocolate whilst wishing my visitors a Happy Crucifixion.

A note to my Christian faithful: You don’t have to worry about other religions or secular progressives (as labeled by O’Lielly)…you’re doing a fine enough job of destroying your religion on your own.

With the entire political realm arguing about whether it’ll be Hillary or Barack representing the Democratic Party in 2008, it’s easy to forget that there are other people in the race. After all, we’re 20 months out of the 2008 election and to declare anyone a winner or even a frontrunner at this point is meaningless. It’s anyone’s ballgame despite the rumored insurmountable fund-raising abilities of Hillary. And nothing outlined this more distinctly than Edwards’ showing at a presidential forum on health care.

At a Democratic presidential forum focused on health care, Edwards pressed his rivals to provide a detailed plan to cover the nation’s uninsured — estimated at about 47 million — and describe how they will pay for it.

His chief competitors, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, did not rule out the possibility that they would follow his lead with a plan requiring a tax increase, but they provided no specifics.

*snip*

“One of the reasons that I want to be president of the United States is to make sure that every woman and every person in America gets the same things that we have,” Edwards said. His plan would require employers to provide insurance and individuals to have it at a cost of $90 billion to $120 billion.

Edwards said any politicians who say they can provide universal health care and other promises while ending the federal deficit are not being honest.

“They’ve probably got a bridge in Brooklyn they want to sell you, too,” Edwards said to laughter and applause. “I just don’t think it can be done.”

The hilarious part of that article is the very next bold line: “Richardson: Universal care in first year”. I swear CNN had to do that on purpose because the sheer comedic timing of it is nothing short of Onion worthy.

But what the article also detailed is the sad news of Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer returning. First and foremost, there is no woman in the public eye more sweet than Elizabeth. If you’ve not seen an interview with her you’re missing out for she is directly representative of most of the women I know. She tough, smart, demure (when it’s needed), spunky (when she can get away with it) and above all full of spirit. During the 2004 primaries, I think it was Elizabeth’s words in an interview that truly swayed my wife to the Edwards camp when her man Dean dropped out and she was forced to pick from who was left. So to hear that her cancer has return is devastating — and the way that John and Elizabeth are dealing with it is truly admirable.

She said she could not live with denying him the chance to be president.

“That would be my legacy, wouldn’t it, Katie?” according to a transcript of the interview with Katie Couric, which was taped Saturday in Las Vegas; the transcript was released Sunday before broadcast.

“That I’d taken out this fine man from — from the possibility of — of giving a great service. I mean, I don’t want that to be my legacy,” Elizabeth Edwards said.

John Edwards, a lawyer and former U.S. senator from North Carolina, said this was a chance to give public service to “a country that I love — both of us love, as much as we love our lives.”

They announced Thursday that she was once again facing cancer, only this time it was incurable and had spread to the bone. Despite the prognosis, John Edwards said he would forge ahead with his second bid for the presidency.

Anticipating the demands of the campaign trail, Elizabeth Edwards said her options were clear.

“Either you push forward with the things that you were doing yesterday or you start dying. That seems to be your only two choices,” she said. “If I had given up everything that my life was about — first of all, I’d let cancer win before it needed to.”

John — you are a very lucky man to have a woman that tough by your side.

…before you label the person telling it a liar? This is a question I have for Joe Scarborough and the of the TV journalists who insist on televising people like Terry Holt.
Whilst over at C&L, I came across this little nugget and I just couldn’t let it pass.

Last night on Scarborough Country, Republican strategist Terry Holt advanced for the umpteenth time the right’s favorite Al Gore smear — that he claimed to have invented the internet.

This picture remains one of my favorite internet pics of all time:

Why? Because Al Gore is one of the major reasons I’m able to write and the reason you’re able to read this post. That’s not reaching or embellishing his efforts at all. The bill called the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 was called “The Gore Bill”. That was not due to its high content of Clive Barker references; it was because Al Gore drafted it.

Terry Holt is a either a typical Republican idiot or he is deliberately attempting to denigrate the authority and prestige of someone whose accomplishments he is obscenely jealous of. Take your pick, Terry. It’s one or the other when someone in this day and age can step in front of a national audience and make a statement so untrue that it kills small children with its mere utterance.

This also goes for the lot of you who insist on hanging on to this lie. You are so irrecoverably misguided that you really need to go live in the mountains somewhere — a place that you can’t hurt anyone but yourself.

From the people who actually fathered the internet:

Leonard Kleinrock – considered the father of packet-switching theory:

A second development occurred around this time, namely, then-Senator Al Gore, a strong and knowledgeable proponent of the Internet, promoted legislation that resulted in President George Bush signing the High Performance Computing and Communication act of 1991. This Act allocated $600 million for high performance computing and for the creation of the National Research and Education Network [13-14]. The NREN brought together industry, academia and government in a joint effort to accelerate the development and deployment of gigabit/sec networking.

Vinton G. Cerf and Dave Farber – “Founding Fathers” of the internet:

Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.
…Gore’s initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening.

So here’s a call to end all of this bullshit. If another person goes on Hannity’s show or Scarborough Country and let’s this lie fly and the host lets it go, I swear to God and Sunny Jesus that I will have Al Gore call you personally and tell you to get off his fucking internet.

Oh, and Terry Holt is not to be believed about anything until he publicly apologizes for being that fucking ignorant, whether it was intentional or not.