Why They Call 'Em Sheep

450 Sheep Jump to Their Deaths

Making The World a Safer Place (sort of)

I think this can only be placed under the category of WTF??

Iraq Signs Military Pact With Iran

Responding to the suggestion that the thaw in ties with Iran would anger Washington, [Iraqi Defense Minister] Dulaimi said: "Nobody can dictate to Iraq its relations with other countries."

I suppose I should be heartened that some independence, if not democracy, is taking hold in Iraq.

(But I'm not.)

R.I.P.

Governor Jeb Bush today ended the farcical investigation into the circumstances of Michael Schiavo's 911 call after the Florida state attorney found no cause to suspect that criminal activity was involved in Terri Schiavo's collapse.

About time. Rest in peace, wackjobs. Not that you will be deterred by anything so straighforward as a complete lack of evidence.

Only Sorrow

There are lots of things that can be said or speculated about--about the conduct of the "war on terror", about what the response of the British and American public will be, etc. We'll know more in the days to come. I don't have the heart for politics or the assigning of blame today...only sorrow.

We're All Londoners Today

The law of unintended consequences?

The Left Coaster has some interesting commentary on how the outing of a double agent by the Bush administration may have caused the collapse of a British investigation into a network of Al-Qaeda cells last fall.

What Goes Around...

Are you kidding me?

Says Judith Miller:

"A promise of confidentiality once made must be respected, or the journalist will lose all credibility and the public will, in the end, suffer."

Excuse me?? Credibility? I think you lost that, Judy, when you allowed yourself to be used as a government shill to hype non-existent WMD. Now the public is suffering on account of the con job you facilitated. So excuse my total lack of empathy.

It's not that I think the principle of confidentiality isn't important or that it should only apply to journalists whose work I respect. And I can't claim to understand the fine points of all the speculation about what Miller knows and who she told, or what someone might have told her. But as someone pointed out earlier today, it's one thing to protect a source who comes forward to reveal a crime. It's another when coming forward is the crime.

And Judith Miller's martyr act doesn't change the fact that she's a hack. She and Robert Novak are two of a kind: except that she has pretensions to journalistic integrity, and he doesn't even have that.

It Just Makes You So Proud

Bush Falls Off Bike in Scotland

What I want to know is, was he eating a pretzel at the time?

I mean, I know I shouldn't laugh--being somewhat of a klutz myself--but jeez, the guy is a menace to humankind and he can't ride a bike down the sidewalk without running into someone?

Ah, the banana-lity of evil.

(insert sound effect here)

like I said...

My Brain is Compromised!

...baked and bludgeoned by summer heat into an inert mass, incapable of formulating even basic sentences about Supreme Court nominees, the price of gas, or the Atlantic hurricane season. It's been too long, I know. Forgive me. Better yet, put some cracked ice in a large plastic bag and apply it to my head. Please.

No Really....

John Nichols writes in The Nation about a resurgence of progressive politics at the local level. For those of us sometimes inclined to despair when we observe the national scene, it's good to be reminded that 1). people who are not wingnuts are still getting elected, and 2). there is reason to believe--well, hope--that there is a stirring at the grassroots that will ultimately challenge the corporate/fundamentalist deathgrip.

And not a moment too soon. In reading Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, I am reminded that many so-called "failed" societies actually lasted quite a bit longer than we have managed to do so far. Will this nation still exist in its present form 100 years from now? Or will we become the Easter Islanders of our time? Stay tuned....

Or more to the point: Stay hopeful. Stay active. Stay mad.

Things Heat Up

From the NY Times--is there finally going to be some attention paid to this administration's head-up-their-ass approach to global warming?

A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

What a surprise.

Risky Business

The Washington Post reports that porn star (and former California gubernatorial candidate) Mary Carey and her boss, porn producer Mark Kulkis, will be among those attending a fundraising dinner for George Bush in June. According to Kulkis:

"...you won't find a group of people more pro-business than pornographers."

Contemplating a run for California lieutenant governor next year, the voluptuous actress says she hopes to network with GOP officials here. "I'm especially looking forward to meeting Karl Rove," she cooed in a statement. "Smart men like him are so sexy."

Define "network", please.

Wait a minute, Karl Rove is sexy?? Are we sure this isn't Jeff Gannon in drag?

First there was "military, male, discreet" Gannon/Guckert, and now this. Who knew Republicans were so kinky?

Uh, Why?

...is John Kerry now authorizing the release of his military records? They show, among other things, commendations from some of the same veterans whose criticisms of him did so much damage in the Swift Boat Vets' negative ad campaign. Said Kerry:

"...I felt strongly that we shouldn't kowtow to them and their attempts to drag their lies out."

There are lots of reasons why John Kerry was a lousy candidate. Running away from his VVAW experience and its applicability to the Iraq debacle was only one of many. Taking the goddamn high road in response to the Swift Boat campaign (and everything else) was another.

So John, why take the trouble now to remind us of why you lost? It's not as if anyone is going to take you seriously as a candidate in 2008.

Elephants in the Room

And yes, I would love to write about something other than Iraq and the religious right. Something witty and inconsequential. Unfortunately that would require something like the opposite of blinders, to see everything except what's right in front of me.

Let George Bush start to pull the troops out, or do anything else right in Iraq. Let the fundy ayatollahs and their stooges stop trying to take over. Let me complain about ordinary things again.

Please...make my day.

Things get Worse...

...by the day, as Dahr Jamail writes in his Iraq Dispatches. With civil war looming and the onset of another brutal summer with temps as high as 125 degrees and next-to-no electricity, Iraqis ask yet again:

“Two years of occupation…for God sake where is the rebuilding, where the hell are these billions donated to Iraq? Even not 1% improvement in services and electricity! They say again and again the terrorists are to blame and I would accept this, but why they do not protect these facilities? Do the American camps have cuts of electricity? No, no, and nobody will allow this to happen...but poor Iraqis, nobody would be sorry for them if they burn with the hell of summer, small kids and old men they get dehydrated because no electricity, no cold water, etc."

The billions are going to build massive permanent military bases in Iraq (14 at last count) and to fortify the so-called "Green Zone" so that American officials and their contractor buddies and their private armies can have the illusion of normal; going into the pockets of corrupt officials; going to pay for mercenaries to do what the US military is stretched too thin to do. Reconstruction for Iraqis?? You must be kidding. That would require some outside-the-box thinking, some shift in priorities that is obviously beyond the capability of our present civilian leadership, entrenched as they are in their fool's vision of empire.

Oh, and the Army has declined to release their recruitment numbers for last month until they figure out how to put a spin on their failing efforts. Not enough troops; no stomach for a draft that would be a political disaster. This ought to get interesting real fast.

We Remember...

...those who have served their country in its wars today. Wars for honor, for property, for liberty, wars to end all wars.

They wanted what most of us want: respect, self-respect, a family, a home. Some of them got to have that. Some lost it all. It's only right that we should honor them--not just today, not just by slapping a plastic ribbon on the back of an automobile, but by paying attention to how we spend the lives they sacrifice in our names.

No more blood for oil. No more blood for global corporate empire. Let it finally end.

No more holidays for the dead. No war, to end all wars.

Mega-mania?

An article in Harper's magazine offers a disturbing look at what it calls "America's Most Powerful Megachurch". It suggests a true alternative universe in which demons roam, looking for bodies to inhabit:

The demons are cold, they need bodies, they long to come inside. People let them in in two different ways. One is to be sinned against..... The other is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You could walk by sin—a murder, a homosexual act—and a demon will leap onto your bones. Cities, therefore, are especially dangerous.

So apparently are ethnic restuarants, women who work outside the home and anybody who doesn't look like you, think like you, and own a fake-white-picket-fence suburban cookie-cutter house like you. It's conformity as the ultimate expression of religious conviction.

These people don't need a logical argument in favor of universal health care; they need therapy. Is religious fundamentalism nothing more than a mega-construct for denial and the avoidance of reality on a mass scale? Is it, in effect, a form of mental illness?

There is an interesting, though passing, mention of this question in Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven. What is the difference between faith (that is "faith", as in "faith-based") and madness? I suspect there is one, but reading articles like this one (above) makes me wonder if some true believers haven't crossed over the line.

Thanks J

You've persuaded me to pick up the pen...cudgel...uh, keyboard once again.

And Furthermore...

Things are getting hot for the world's remaining superpower as well. Tom Englehardt writes at Tomdispatch.com about "Moving Out of the Superpower Orbit" in which, having shown the limits of our global reach in Iraq, and having no attention, money or military left to exert any influence over events elsewhere, we are now seeing our global neighbors go their own way in ways that may have been inevitable, but wouldn't have been possible, even five years ago--that is, before the present Bush administration.

Maybe I should be grateful to the squinty-eyed bastard. He's been an agent of change all right, but not in the way he imagined. The rest of the world will no doubt be better off. As for ourselves, I have mixed feelings. I would have preferred a more gentle decline, not this steep dive down a rat hole that we seem to be doing. The unscrupulous, even brutal projection of American power has always offended me, but I am not naive enough not to know that I have benefitted from it in some ways. American clout has sucked money out of the pockets of poorer nations for half a century, and given me the middle-class lifestyle I now fear to lose.

Maybe impending memory loss will keep me from remembering too clearly how it used to be. That and a well-tended garden (oh wait...I live in a desert!) may be my only hope.

Missing brain cells and overabundant zuchini. What a sorry-ass end to empire.

I'm In Hot Flash Hell!!

I mean, I am officially in hot flash hell! It's 100 degrees outside, and either the swamp cooler doesn't work right or I'm having hot flashes. Probably both. All I know is, if I could fit myself into the refrigerator, I would--where I would probably immediately cause the entire freezer compartment to melt, and do god-knows-what to the cottage cheese.

Ah hormones! Ah fermentation! (Speaking of which, is that a beer I see in here??)