Year: 2005

Added to the blogroll tonight: « Knottyboy », aka I Bet After Sex He Smokes a Ham. All the way from Etna, Wyoming, ladies and gentlemen. A sample: ‘I saw it. After months of hoopla I saw it…Brokeback Mountain. Now don’t get me wrong, the sexually charged scenes were intense, raw and beautiful. And Ang Lee did...

Apparently, one of the words to make the annual Lake Superior State Banished Words List is “blog” (and, according to the list, all of “its variations, including blogger, blogged, blogging, blogosphere”). The reasoning behind the banishment is unclear — except that, again according to the list, “[m]any who nominated it were unsure of the meaning,”...

« Impeachment. Removal. Treason Trial. Jail. Now. ».

It’s been a long month ….. working on various projects at the library, including a set of pages about the 2005 election cycle, fighting asthma, hibernating with the onset of what was an earlier onslaught of winter weather than usual. Steve has been fighting asthma and bronchitis, and he’s been snowed under with a heavy...

« Meet George W. Bush »; he can’t catch a break, even from « an old comic book character ». Now, « meet Deborah Davis ». And « meet Al-Jazeera ». And finally, « meet Frank Rich », who sums it all up rather nicely.

Joining my rather long blogroll is a fascinating read: « Rational Revolution ». Highly recommended. Check it out.

“How amazing is it that we live in an empire that impeaches presidents over legal consensual sex acts but not over illegal wars which kill hundreds of thousands of people?” Just keep piling up « the evidence » baby, maybe we’ll have an impeachment yet: ‘Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World...

Wow. Winter’s back. And it’s already Thanksgiving! Where did the year go?

“… it’s impeachment time and then let’s replace the dipsticks with a bipartisan McCain and Murtha combination, acknowledging the even division in the electorate.” Everybody needs to take note of this rather extraordinary thing that has happened: the Iraqi government that our Empire installed has called for our legions to be withdrawn and declared that...

I love this! ‘… I thought he sought the privacy of rain, the one time no one was likely to be out and he was left to the intimacy of drops touching every leaf and tree in the woods and the easy muttering of drip and runoff, the shine of pools behind grass dams. He...

Comments are working again, thank goodness. Fire away.

Commenting is broken at the moment. Something in the CSS of the new skin. Will be back later today.

“The fact that government is secretly tracking my life and sharing that information with private corporations in a completely unaccountable way shows me that America has crossed over into a fascist twilight of sorts.” « Here’s » something interesting that needs to be more widely read than it will be: ‘The FBI now issues more than 30,000...

Dear UM Undergraduates, I’ve accepted that it’s part of the social landscape now for you to walk into a wing of a library that is supposed to be used for study and instead use it as an open-air forum for your cell phone conversations, and I’ve accepted that some of you don’t care what you...

From our « Clueless Department »: ‘Delta Air Lines Inc. will likely ask its pilots union to extend an agreement to recall retired pilots to prevent staffing shortages as it ambitiously expands its international service while operating under bankruptcy protection, chief executive Gerald Grinstein said Tuesday. Grinstein made the comments after a news conference set up to...

“These weren’t the works of psychopaths — they were people fighting against something intolerable that many of us know is there, but hasn’t been named yet.” « The Kinder, Gentler American Empire »: ‘… it’s a fairly powerful event to find a decent-sized book that does nothing but articulate a series of truths about the American Life...

“As with most of the Mayberry Machiavellians’ schemes, this is yet another one that is coming unraveled.” Great national hero and former darling of the fascists, Pat Tillman, has, gasp the horror, been « outed as a Noam Chomsky lover » — and boy is Ann Coulter ever pissed: ‘“I don’t believe it,” seethed Ann Coulter. Her...

“I wanna go supersonic before I die and time’s a-wastin’!” Finally, « some visionary thinking », which has been in major short supply here in the 21st century: ‘Barely two years since the last Concordes were retired, Airbus, the European aircraft consortium, is looking at plans for a new generation of supersonic passenger jets. The manufacturer, in...

Dear Fascist Michigan Voters-For-Prop-2: « Screw. You. »: ‘A Michigan judge ruled on Tuesday that a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage does not prevent the state from offering health insurance benefits to the same-sex partners of state workers. Ingham County Circuit Judge Joyce Draganchuk said health care benefits are benefits of employment, not marriage. Twenty-two same-sex couples...

« Jeff Sessions and Jon Kyl = Despicable Low Lifes »: ‘Federal troops aren’t the only ones looking for bodies on the Gulf Coast. On Sept. 9, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions called his old law professor Harold Apolinsky, co-author of Sessions’ legislation repealing the federal estate tax, which was encountering sudden resistance on the Hill. Sessions had...

« Bill Maher has a message for the Failed Boy Emperor »: ‘You’ve performed so poorly I’m surprised that you haven’t given yourself a medal. You’re a catastrophe that walks like a man. Herbert Hoover was a shitty president, but even he never conceded an entire city to rising water and snakes. On your watch, we’ve lost...

‘I’ll send my sons if he sends his daughters. Put those two drunk bitches on a plane and let them go fight. At least I know my sons would be getting some on the way.’ —Comedian Damon Wayans, quoted by the New York Daily News, on the conditions for the Emperor to send Wayans’ sons...

I think Cornel West « perfectly sums up the state of the Empire »: ‘What we saw unfold in the days after the hurricane was the most naked manifestation of conservative social policy towards the poor, where the message for decades has been: ‘You are on your own’. Well, they really were on their own for five...

In among all of the commentary and images over the past few days about Katrina, I’ve noticed a recurring strain along the following lines: the people who remained in New Orleans during and after the hurricane were too stupid, lazy, or both to leave; and nobody who lived in a place like New Orleans (either...

On top of all the shameful and outrageous things we’ve seen this week, comes « this »: ‘House Speaker Dennis Hastert dropped a bombshell on flood-ravaged New Orleans on Thursday by suggesting that it isn’t sensible to rebuild the city. “It doesn’t make sense to me,” Hastert told the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago in editions published...

My friend phoned late last night (Wednesday) — he and his dog got out of New Orleans okay. Here is a list of « FEMA-approved relief organizations » if you are interested in donating to the effort to save the glorious city of New Orleans, which from the looks of things is descending into unimaginable...

I have a dear and old friend who lives in New Orleans. He has lived in the French Quarter for the past few years. He loves New Orleans, and he has always sounded profoundly at home there. I have never had the fortune of visiting, but his stories about being there have always made the...