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The
Vidiot's
weekly blog:
What
pissed me off this week? 1/17/2005
(updated
every Monday at some point during the day)
...'cause
I'm angry and my friends are sick of listening to me...
Cost
of the War in Iraq
Remember
these faces.
Media
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What's pissing me off this week? Hmm, what could it be I wonder...oh,
let me think. Wait a minute, I know! It's the CORONATION of King George!
Do you you have
any idea how much money it's going to cost? They're saying like $40
million! $40
million!! Meanwhile, tsunami victims are starving, fallujah
is FUBAR, Iraqi civilians are dying, our troops
are suffering, our military is stretched
too thin, medicaid is being cut all over the friggin' place, and this
idiot is going to let his
cronies buy him a $40 million coronation?? Can anyone say "unabashed
greed"?? Why are there no
limits on these guys? I'm ashamed, embarrassed, and saddened. This
inauguration is inexcusable.
During FDR's second
inaugural, the one during WWII, the committee said "Hey. We've got
$20,000 for your inauguration." and do you know what FDR said? He
said "I can do it for $2,000." $2,000!! Now, granted, that's
1940s dollars, but what would that be now? Like $40,000? FDR understood
that it would be unseemly to have a big festive party when so many of
the nation's boys were dying in a foreign land. But our boy George? Fuck
unseemly! LET'S PARTY!
{sigh}
It's
sucks to be an American right now.
Cool Sports
Site of the Week: The
Oracle of Baseball
Weird Dieting
Site of the Week: My
Pet Fat
Best Pictures
of the Week: I
Look Like My Dog Contest
Weird Craft
Site of the Week: Miniature
Clay Fruit
Cool Food
Site of the Week: Chocolate
Sushi
Cute Movie
of the Week: Clean
Your Screen
Besides
the new Apples,
Cool Tech of the Week: Virtual
Keyboard Unit
Must-Read
of the Week: Neoliberalism
vs. Distributionism
Poetic Justice
of the Week: Limbaugh
dumped for Air America
Comparison
of the Week: Rathergate
vs. Saddam's WMD
Coolest
Animal Cam EVER: Eagle
Cam
Space Pictures
of the Week: Titan
Good Question
of the Week: Why
are there no fundraisers for the Iraqi dead?
Story Updates:
Last week, I mentioned that a Virginia state senator was going to propose
a bill making it a felony to not report a miscarriage.Seems
the blogs forced his hand and he's withdrawn the bill. Heh heh heh.
The Frist Political
Paranoia bill has
still not been proven to be real or disinfo. Stay tuned.
Evil
Asses of the Week
Honestly, anybody who could
fire
someone for taking too many sick days because they have cancer really
should reincarnate as a crippled rat or something.
Excerpt:
But top Loudoun County Public Schools officials, Yowell said, have had
a less compassionate response to her Hodgkin's disease: They forced
her from her job.
Or anybody who professes
to be a Christian and then refuses
to give aid to someone on the basis of religion should DEFINATELY
reincarnate as a crippled rat.
Excerpt:
Rage and fury has gripped this tsunami-hit tiny Hindu village in India's
southern Tamil Nadu after a group of Christian missionaries allegedly
refused them aid for not agreeing to follow their religion.
Underreported
of the Week
Rumsfeld is being sued
for Aspartame.
Excerpt:
Details on a newly-filed lawsuit that accuses food and soft drinks companies
of poisoning the public with aspartame (and the real reason why the
FDA won't ban this neurotoxic chemical).
War Watch
Will it be Syria?
Excerpt:The
fact is, Syria is harboring terrorists who are training insurgents to
kill innocents in a country where we are trying to set up a model democracy.
It is also an entry and exit point for insurgents, terrorists, weapons
and money into and out of Iraq — and beyond.
Excerpt:The
United States has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside
Iran to help identify potential nuclear, chemical and missile targets,
The New Yorker magazine reported Sunday.
Excerpt:
According to the Selective Service System, approximately 2,000 military
draft boards are geared-up throughout the nation, ready to decide which
young men in each community will be sent to die for Israel.
Be prepared to defy
the draft.
Excerpt:
Being willing (and eager) to fight for one's country when it is truly
in danger is one thing. Having the courage to refuse to fight in immoral
and/or unconstitutional "wars" is quite another matter, I
believe. ICE No need to "dodge" the ball if they're not allowed
to hit you with it, if you merely 'take your stand' and refuse to VOLUNTEER!
Stupid
Law of the Week
This
is where some real critical thought needs to be applied.
Excerpt:
Introduced by Sen. Paull Shin on January 13, 2005, to authorize the
department of ecology to require any person using rain barrels and cisterns
to collect rainwater to receive a permit from the department prior to
collection of rainwater. Rainwater must be intended for beneficial use
on the same property from where it was collected.
Of course, whatever the law is
that says you're only
allowed to use single-season seeds from Monsanto is also quite dumb.
Excerpt:Monsanto
Co.'s "seed police" snared soy farmer Homan McFarling in 1999,
and the company is demanding he pay it hundreds of thousands of dollars
for alleged technology piracy.McFarling's sin? He saved seed from one
harvest and replanted it the following season, a revered and ancient
agricultural practice.
Who's
your Daddy?
What's the real
reason for Bush's push to privatize social security? I'll give you one
guess. (If you need more than that, stay away from the knife drawer. You're
not too bright.)
Excerpt:
The prospect of 100 million Americans each having $1,000 of their Social
Security contributions to invest every year has investment professionals
salivating at the potential financial bonanza.
Check Josh Marshall's Talking
Points Memo blog for the latest updates on the battle for Social
Security and read this
article from the New York Times Sunday Magazine.
Excerpt:
The campaign is potentially self-fulfilling: persuade enough people
that Social Security is going bankrupt, and it will lose public support.
Then Congress will be forced to act. And thanks to such unceasing alarums,
many, and perhaps most, people today think the program is in serious
financial trouble.
The
Impossible
There's no
way the Boy Wonderless will forego his coronation and give the money
raised to the tsunami victims. That's about as likely to happen as me
forgoing flipping the bird to a taxi that cut me off.
Excerpt:
Dallas billionaire Mark Cuban has a suggestion for President Bush: Cancel
the inauguration parties and donate the money saved -- some $40 million
-- to the tsunami victims.
Anyway, does this
sound like a president who feels like the people are really supporting
him?
Excerpt:
An "unprecedented" level of security will help ensure that
the 55th U.S. inauguration ceremony and activities later this month
proceed without disruption, Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge
said here today.
And read this
interesting parsing of his recent interview with the Washington Post.
Excerpt:
Incredible media moment here, folks. W and team are looking to change
SS. The main strategy is to first convince Americans that there is a
"problem" with the way things are now. That is the core of
the early marketing campaign. In this question, Post reporters ask a
question about the overall SS problem. They think they are being probing
and tough. The truth is that they've bought into W's framing of the
issue. Social Security and Problem go together. Game over. That's how
framing works. And it works incredibly well.
Thatcher
in the News
Apparently,
if you're well connected, you can plead guilty to a heinous crime, like,
for instance, trying to overthrow a sovereign government, and
the punishment you get is "Pay this fine, here's your ticket,
now go home."
Excerpt:
MARK Thatcher left South Africa today after pleading guilty in a Cape
Town court to charges linked to an alleged coup plot in oil-rich Equatorial
Guinea, a move which ended travel restrictions imposed on him.
So, maybe Harry's little
Nazi
stunt was little more than a little media distraction?
Excerpt:
The British royals seem to have a knack for making it into the headlines.
But Prince Harry dressed up as a Nazi? That went too far even for the
English sense of humor. The young prince showed up at a party wearing
a Nazi armband complete with swastika. What was he thinking?
Read
between the lines.
The lap-dog press reported
on Bush's op ed piece on Social Security. My favorite part of the article
is this
bit at the very beginning:
Excerpt:
In a newspaper opinion piece signed by President Bush and offered to
newspapers around the globe, a White House eager to lessen anti-American
sentiment in the Muslim world is trumpeting U.S. efforts to help tsunami
victims in the Indian Ocean region.
Of course, everyone knows
that guy can't string 5 words together. Clinton "wrote" and
Gore "penned". Bush, however, "signs". Precious.
Follow
the Money
I don't mind if the media
reports differing views on global warming, as long as they report who
funds the research. But unfortunately, that never
seems to happen.
Excerpt:
Cutting down on fossil fuel pollution could accelerate global warming
and help turn parts of Europe into desert by 2100, according to research
to be aired on British television on Thursday. "Global Dimming,"
a BBC Horizon documentary, will describe research suggesting fossil
fuel by-products like sulfur dioxide particles reflect the sun's rays,
"dimming" temperatures and almost canceling out the greenhouse
effect.
Who funds these guys? Inquiring
minds want to know.
No
surprises there.
If you put John Negroponte
any where near a region, a death
squad will pop up. It's like he's the death squad pollinator or
something.
Excerpt:
What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon's latest
approach is being called "the Salvador option"-and the fact
that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald
Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can't just
go on as we are," one senior military officer told Newsweek. "We
have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right
now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November's
operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking
"the back" of the insurgency-as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically
declared at the time-than in spreading it out.
Dumb
Blogger
Here's
why I never mention my office or who I work for.
Excerpt:
A bookseller has become the first blogger in Britain to be sacked from
his job because he kept an online diary in which he occasionally mentioned
bad days at work and satirised his "sandal-wearing" boss.
Trust me, there's PLENTY
I could say about where I work, but I'm smarter than that. (There's
so much to say, you have NO idea.)
"The
Stand"
The conspiracy net is abuzz
with the death of another microbiologist.
Excerpt:
Im was primarily a protein chemist. Mark McIntosh, chairman of the MU
department of molecular microbiology and immunology, said he doubted
the crime could have been the act of an angry student.
Excerpt:
The Centers for Disease Control says it will deliberately combine the
deadly bird flu virus that's circulating in Asia with human influenza
viruses to understand whether and how it might cause a pandemic. This
ScienCentral News video has more.
It certainly seems that anyone
who could deal with a pandemic is being offed for some reason.
I sure wish someone would
do a statistical analysis of mysterious deaths vs. profession.
Religiocrazies
OK. I'm confused. If the
President swears to uphold the constitution, and the constitution calls
for the separation of church and state, how can Bush protect the constitution
if he believes the religion MUST
be a part of being president?
Excerpt:
"I think people attack me because they are fearful that I will
then say that you're not equally as patriotic if you're not a religious
person," Mr. Bush said. "I've never said that. I've never
acted like that. I think that's just the way it is.
Aiayaaaaaaah!
But why stop there. Our judges
should believe in God as well. I mean, did Clarence really say this?
Excerpt:
Justice Thomas expressly believes that "a judge should be evaluated
by whether he faithfully upholds his oath to God, not to the people,
to the state or to the Constitution"?
Would someone who calls
themselves a journalist please investigate? Oh, hell, who am I kidding.
That'll never happen. The bloggers
will figure it out.
Excerpt:
...let me just add that while I think Thomas is off the hook in some
sense, it's precisely this kind of thing which bothers me about the
"ceremonial deism" defense of seemingless "harmless"
mixing of religion and government (God in pledge, on money, etc...)
While a reasonable person will probably conclude that all Thomas meant
was that the oath of office was to God, and therefore of paramount
importance to keep, there's still the implication that for these judges,
even in the context of serving the state they still consider God to
be the higher power, and that view has been enshrined by various forays
into ceremonial deism. Now, thinking God is a higher power is not
especially surprising -- He is God, after all, and if you believe
in Him of course his Almightyness will trump the puny power of the
state. But, in the context of being a judge, a strong intertwining
of your job and your religion raises legitimate questions about what
you do, as a judge, when God's law and man's law collide.
Rubbernecking
Let Newt
give the presidency a run.
Excerpt:
Newt Gingrich is taking steps toward a potential presidential bid in
2008 with a book criticizing President Bush's policies on Iraq and a
tour of early campaign states.
I'd love to watch him explain
his tortured marital past.
Excerpt:
Please ignore that man who divorced his wife and swapped her for a 33
year old staffer he was having an adulterous affair with. Oh, and this
would be Newt's second divorce. During the first divorce, he served
his wife the papers while she was in the hospital with cancer.
Apparently, to be a good
republican means having a high level of delusional thinking.
Second
verse, same as the worst.
So who is this Chertoff guy.
Obviously, the Bushies wouldn't appoint anyone to a major position that
a) wasn't a crony and b) hadn't served the BFEE loyally. Chertoff fits
the bill to a tee. He was one of the authors of the P.AT.R.I.O.T.
Act .
Excerpt;
Mr. Chertoff headed the Justice Department’s criminal division
from 2001 to 2003, where he played a central role in the nation’s
legal response to the Sept. 11 attacks, before the president named him
to appeals court position in New Jersey.
Excerpt:
“Chertoff was a political attack dog in that job, indicting and
convicting a raft of Democratic officeholders,” Ireland pens.
“But one who Chertoff deliberately let get away was his big buddy,
Bob ‘The Torch’ Torricelli, forced to resign his U.S. Senate
seat from Sopranoland in a major corruption scandal.”
Excerpt:
I have the answer, and it lies in Chertoff. Chertoff's goal, I believe,
and the goal of Ashcroft and Bush in supporting this prosecution in
federal court, is to subject federal trials, as they see fit, to ad
hoc exemptions of whatever laws (be they constitutional, criminal code,
or rules of procedure) that will suit their purposes. Their grand scheme
is to ultimately cripple and dismantle the federal courts as we know
them, one brick at a time.
Fingerprints
are hot!
Everyone wants fingerprints
now. A ticket in Green Bay gets you fingerprinted.
Excerpt:
If you're caught speeding or playing your music too loud, or other crimes
for which you might receive a citation, Green Bay police officers will
ask for your drivers license and your finger. You'll be fingerprinted
right there on the spot. The fingerprint appears right next to the amount
of the fine.
Excerpt:
Americans' fingerprints should be added to their passports, outgoing
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said Wednesday, hoping to include
the United States in a growing global security standard but risking
a privacy fight at home.
So never mind that digital
fingerprints can be hugely
misleading.
Excerpt:
Across the country, police departments and crime labs are submitting
fingerprints for comparisons and for entry into databases, using digital
images that may be missing crucial details or may have been manipulated
without the FBI knowing it.
Excerpt:
A new FBI computer program designed to help agents share information
to ward off terrorist attacks may have to be scrapped, the agency has
concluded, forcing a further delay in a four-year, half-billion-dollar
overhaul of its antiquated computer system.
And we have a disaster waiting
to happen. Listen, it's not the concept of a national ID card that bothers
me, it's the ineptitude of the people handling that information that
bothers me. They don't have a prayer in hell's chance of keeping all
that info out of the hackers' hands or making sure that some authoritarian
figure with the penis of a humming bird doesn't abuse the information.
Slow-speed
collision.
Hey, did you know their was
going to be a major
iceberg collision in Antarctica?
Excerpt;
It is an event so large that the best seat in the house is in space:
a massive iceberg is on a collision course with a floating glacier near
the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica. NASA satellites have witnessed
the 100-mile-long B-15A iceberg moving steadily towards the Drygalski
Ice Tongue. Though the iceberg's pace has slowed in recent days, NASA
scientists expect a collision to occur no later than January 15, 2005.
They had to evacuate
McMurdo and the Russians needed to help us do it.
Excerpt:
According to inside Aussie news reports, the US has decided to evacuate
its base at McMurdo in the Antartic and has requested the Russians to
also send its icebreaker the 'Krasin' to assist evacuation. The Krasin,
which I believe is one of their biggest, is reported to be presently
south of the equator under full steam to meet a US icebreaker. The story
goes that 2 large icebergs are grounded in McMurdo Bay preventing supplies
reaching the Base.
Earth's undergoing
some changes it
seems. The Indonesian earthquake may be (pardon the pun) just the
tip of the iceberg.
Excerpt:
In July, 2003, Yellowstone Park rangers closed the entire Norris Geyser
Basin because of deformation of the land and excessive high ground temperatures.
There is an area that is 28 miles long by 7 miles wide that has bulged
upward over five inches since 1996, and this year (2003) the ground
temperature on that bulge has reached over 200 degrees (measured one
inch below ground level).
Did
you hear the one about...
Of all the lawyer jokes that
are out there, the
one they told was so innocuous.
Excerpt:
While waiting on a long line to get through into court, they began telling
each other lawyer jokes such as, "How do you tell if a lawyer is
lying? Answer: his lips are moving."
Why they got slapped with
a desk appearance is beyond me. (Other than the fact the Hempstead police
are assholes, not as bad as Rockville Center police, mind you, but assholes
nonetheless.) Good thing they didn't tell the one about what you call
50 lawyers at the bottom of a pit?A good start.
Propaganda
101
Much has been bandied about
the blogosphere this week regarding the payola
scam that involves No Child Left Behind and the Bush White House.
Excerpt:In
an attempt to defend his decision to accept $240,000 from the Bush administration
in return for promoting the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education law,
Armstrong Williams has claimed that he always supported the policy.
But in 2001, he strongly criticized the administration's decision to
drop private school vouchers from NCLB, even touting this criticism
on television and going so far as to write in his nationally syndicated
column that by dropping the voucher provision, Bush had "scooped
out" the legislation's "soul." And Williams's January
10 column, purporting to explain his arrangement with the Bush administration,
focused much more on his support for vouchers than his support for NCLB.
In an effort to find a scapegoat,
the Rovians are trying
to convince people that liberal bloggers are nothing more than propagandists.
So here's the truth from the bloggers they accuse.
Excerpt;
And while it's true that his role as a Dean consultant was disclosed
and reported in the press on multiple occasions, it came as a surprise
this week to a whole lot of people, including a lot of prominent bloggers.
(Here
it is in easy-to-digest table form)
Excerpt:
The electoral group headed by Iyad Allawi, the interim Iraqi prime minister,
on Monday handed out cash to journalists to ensure coverage of its press
conferences in a throwback to Ba'athist-era patronage ahead of parliamentary
elections on January 30.
But who really disparaged
the liberal bloggers? Why, a paid
hack of the Bush administration, that's who.
Excerpt:
The chief editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal, the paper which
disparaged two progressive blogs over accepting money from Howard Dean’s
campaign, serves on President Bush’s fellowship board with Armstrong
Williams, RAW STORY has learned. He is also being hired as chief speechwriterfor
the Bush Administration.
But while the media is whipping
itself into a mocha over the blogosphere and Rathergate, they've failed
to mention the fact that a report has officially
found that there are no WMDS in Iraq.
Excerpt:
Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004,
submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every
prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials,
a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG's
final conclusions and will be published this spring.
Because that would mean the
Bush and Cheney lied
to the world and what are you supposed to do to an administration that
lies to the world? You're supposed to grab them by their proverbial
nutsacks and hang 'em high, that's what.
Excerpt:
I remember when that was enough for Cokie, Sam, George, and George to
unanimously declare that immediate presidential resignation was the
only possible consequence for such a thing. And, now, we have a president
whose almost every word about Social Security is a Big Fat Fucking Lie.
Not a mistake. Not spin. Not hyperbole, exaggeration, etc... But, a
Big Fat Fucking Lie.
News
of the Weird
When I read this,
I tried to go through every instance where I was on hold and I might've
been on the toilet. Did they hear me, I wonder.
Excerpt:
Monitoring is intended to track the performance of call center operators,
but the professional snoops are inadvertently monitoring callers, too.
Most callers do not realize that they may be taped even while they are
on hold.
Well, the least the Venetians
can do is use this
time of low water to clean out the canals. Honestly, it's beautiful
and all, but pictures can't convey what the canals smell like.
Excerpt:
Gondolas are running aground and hotel docks hang in midair as Italy's
lagoon city Venice, more commonly awash at high tide, dries out because
of good weather and an unusual combination of planetary influences.
Cool. Spray-on
solar cells.
Excerpt:Like
paint, the composite can be sprayed onto other materials and used
as portable electricity. A sweater coated in the material could
power a cell phone or other wireless devices. A hydrogen-powered
car painted with the film could potentially convert enough energy
into electricity to continually recharge the car's battery.
Does The Bible Predict
President Bush Will Start
WW3?
Excerpt:According
to Michael Drosnin's best selling book, The Bible Code, the Bible
contains a hidden text that was first discovered by an Israeli mathematician,
Dr. Eliyahu Rips, who presented his findings in a major science journal.
The code foretold the Kennedy assassinations, World War II, the Holocaust,
the Hiroshima bomb, the Moon landing, and one more thing: That in
the "END OF DAYS" the "WAR OF BUSH" would involve
"THE NATIONS UNDER ALL OF HEAVEN."
Previous
rants
What do we
do about all of this crap? I have no idea. Part of me wants to start teach-ins
at my local pub. Just go to the bar, rant and rave and inform the idiots
who still think Dan Rather is telling them the truth. Another part of me
wants to organize a voter observation program to insure that this moron
isn't in the White House all the way to 2008. I sincerely believe that if
we protected the voting rights of the underprivileged that any Democrat
could SWEEP any election. And we'd have to start with the Florida Election
for Governor THIS FALL (like these
guys!.) I don't think Democrats are the answer. But they are at least a
start.
At the very least,
point your CNN-loving friends to my links
page. Just getting started in reading alternate news sites gets people
thinking. I have one friend who was very happy-go-lucky, thinking ol'
Greta was telling the whole truth until I opened up his eyes a bit. Now,
he's all depressed. He'll get over it. You gotta' get depressed before
you get angry and you gotta' get angry before you can accomplish anything.
We're all in mourning. We have to move through the steps. But we gotta'
hurry it up.
Read. Inform.
Spread the word. Even if it means your friends avoid you for awhile. If
they really love you, they'll start to listen.
"POSSE
COMITATUS ACT" (18 USC 1385): A Reconstruction Era criminal law proscribing
use of Army (later, Air Force) to "execute the laws" except where expressly
authorized by Constitution or Congress. Limit on use of military for civilian
law enforcement also applies to Navy by regulation. Dec '81 additional
laws were enacted (codified 10 USC 371-78) clarifying permissible military
assistance to civilian law enforcement agencies--including the Coast Guard--especially
in combating drug smuggling into the United States. Posse Comitatus clarifications
emphasize supportive and technical assistance (e.g., use of facilities,
vessels, aircraft, intelligence, tech aid, surveillance, etc.) while generally
prohibiting direct participation of DoD personnel in law enforcement (e.g.,
search, seizure, and arrests). For example, Coast Guard Law Enforcement
Detachments (LEDETS) serve aboard Navy vessels and perform the actual
boardings of interdicted suspect drug smuggling vessels and, if needed,
arrest their crews). Positive results have been realized especially from
Navy ship/aircraft involvement.
(Tom
Ridge has practically said he'd do away with this act.)
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