Apparently I need to get Riley a Day-Runner so he can keep up with his exhausting Daily Schedule. It’s a hell of a thing when your cat has a busier social life than you do.
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BBC NEWS | Americas | US evangelicals warn Republicans Prominent leaders from the Christian right have warned Republicans they must do more to advance conservative values ahead of the US mid-term elections. I want to know why prominent progressive Christians and secular, non-religious political progressives aren’t contacting their Congresspersons to warn them they “must do better” in the struggle for the separation of church and state in this country. The story claims that about one-quarter of Americans self-identify as evangelical Christians. Of that number, how many are actually progressives, rather than conservatives? The way they run things in Washington, you’d…
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So I went back to work yesterday – wasn’t too sure about the weather, but I was feeling well enough to give it a shot and since I’m now on the antibiotics, I’m probably not too pestilential. It was a typically busy and frustrating first day back; it seems that my least favorite tasks were the ones that were stacked up in a holding pattern. I do wish that I’d had a little better “back-up” on one deal, which had been parked in my email rather than given to one of my backups. I have an issue with one cow-orker…
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Salon has posted an archive of Abu Ghraib photos. Boing Boing notes that no officer or CIA operative has ever been prosecuted or convicted – it’s just been the small fry in the photos. Also BB notes that Smartfilter would prevent viewing the archive due to “nudity.” This amounts to a worse kind of censorship than mere anti-prurient Puritanism.
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MILE HIGH COMICS presents THE BEAT at COMICON.com: A FOR ALAN, Pt. 1: The Alan Moore interview We’ll probably see V for Vendetta, the movie. Which is apparently fast-and-loosely based on Moore’s original premise, but the American comics-and-movies industry have screwed up Moore’s original vision. Keep in mind that the original has anarchists vs. fascists in the near-future tale, not Redstate vs. Bluestate. Moore has demanded that DC take his name off books and movies and stop sending him money, but they keep paying him. Also, they send him advance copies of books with poorly edited back copy: I have…
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Ha! What a great HALF a leg so far. I love how the producers figure out ways to change the rules, play with expectations, and keep this show fresh. In a normal 2-person team, international itinerary season, of course. This week I started smelling a rat at the beginning, when Phil said “Who will be eliminated… next?” In the past, this always used to herald a non-elimination leg. Fans got wise to this. Producers got wise to fans getting wise, and sometimes a team was eliminated on a “…next?” type episode. Tonight, it wasn’t a non-elim, and I should have…
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Bush’s Refrain on Iraq Joined by a Smaller and Smaller Chorus To illustrate the progress in Iraq, Bush ticked off statistics on the Iraqi security forces (200 operations in two weeks), the number of Iraqi battalions (more than 130, covering 30,000 square miles), the number of tips (4,000 in December), the number of weapons caches and bomb plants found (1,800), and the amount spent to defeat improvised explosives ($3.3 billion). He declared that the Iraqi police academy “will include many, many more Sunnis.” Wait a minute. This is The Shotgun Approach. The strategery by which poorly prepared college or post-collegiate…
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BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin gets around, finally, to making this observation: “We are being lied to.” Yep, we sure are. Finally, several days after I first heard part but not all of it, here is the link to This American Life’s Guantanamo report, “Habeas Schmabeas.” This is the one where part of it, in explanation of the origin of the legal concept of habeas corpus, entails a visit to Westminster Abbey. I was wrong about the guide, his name is Tony, and thus is not the same one we had when we visited the Abbey year before last. And remember, the…
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Huffington Post, that haven for lefty slebs, has a new blogger, and I say “Right on, right on, see you at the barricades.” The Blog | George Clooney: I Am a Liberal. There, I Said It! | The Huffington Post The fear of (being) criticized can be paralyzing. Just look at the way so many Democrats caved in the run up to the war. In 2003, a lot of us were saying, where is the link between Saddam and bin Laden? What does Iraq have to do with 9/11? We knew it was bullshit. Which is why it drives me…
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