Cheney: [The War] was the right thing to do and if we had it to do over again, we’d do exactly the same thing.
Web Log Archives, 9/3/06 through 9/16/06
Saturday, September 16th, 2006 Happy Birthday, June!
"...one of the most far-reaching and depressing developments of our time, disfiguring conversation wherever you go."
Friday, September 15th, 2006
Martha, the protagonist of "A Dangerous Woman", a 1991 novel by Mary McGarry Morris is a young woman with a peculiar social disorder: she is unable to lie...in matters large or small. In fact, she is unable to understand how anyone can or why anyone does lie! Needless to say, this causes lots of trouble for her and for everyone around her. It was no lesser a sage than Jack Kevorkian who liked to point out the necessity to lie to get by. He asked, only somewhat rhetorically, "how long would you keep your job if you never lied to your boss? ...or how long would your marriage last if you never lied to your spouse?"
Dunno about you, but I say that the Bushies' frantic (and, so
far, futile) over-the-last-few-days push to get Congress to change the 1978 law
against warrant-less wiretapping has the odor of people who fear
exposure...especially if their Republican majority is overthrown in the upcoming
elections. It's like they're asking (the now-still-friendly) lawmakers to retroactively
make legal things that they've (already) done! Think about it! Why is it
(was it) so burdensome to get the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
Court approval for any spying that they wish(ed) to perform? After all, they can
(and always could) immediately install a wiretap and then apply
for Court approval within seventy-two hours! No one in the Administration has
ever explained what's so restrictive about this procedure! So...that leaves us thinking
folks to assume that the Bushies, not unlike the Nixonians, must
have been spying on their domestic political opponents and didn't want to create
a paper trail!
Similarly, the just-in-the-past-few-weeks push to 'redefine' the Geneva
Conventions policy on treatment of detainees smells like a plan to absolve Bush
of a war crimes charge, should the details of our CIA's 'alternate'
interrogation methods ever come to light in a military trial of the fourteen
people we now admit that we have held in secret detention for nearly five
years! Here's just one
of the many columns circulating this week on this subject.
Is it possible that Bush's seeming desperation of the last few days is a
pull-out-the-stops attempt to save himself from criminal charges in one or both
of the two aforementioned matters? Perhaps, just like there was no planning for
post-war Iraq, there was no discussion of what might happen if Congress ever actually exercised some oversight of the Executive branch!
Thursday, September 14th, 2006
Shrub was “born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.” Ann Richards
Asked if ignorance is a greater danger than apathy, he answered, "I don't know and I don't care!"
Wednesday, September 13th, 2006
'Now that President Bush has publicly declared that we are fighting the
decisive ideological struggle of a century, to “determine
the destiny of millions across the world”, [he should require] that we
do what was done in our previous major conflicts:
Send more troops to the crucial areas, increase our armed forces to make this
possible and still keep major reserves for fighting elsewhere; re-institute a
draft if there are not enough volunteers for this program; and increase taxes to
pay for the expenses involved.' David
Hudson
Tuesday, September 12th, 2006
Happy Birthday Tootie!
Been working on a mix
of Gold Watch & Chain, featuring some gorgeous background vocals by RJ!
Been studying Pro Tools for twenty-two months and just lately I'm
beginning to think I know something! In this mix, I've spent a lot of
time 'setting up' the vocals...using sub-mixes and some gated ('keyed')
compression. The problem I'm left with at the moment is how to make the
breathing not so audible. It's too much of an iron lung effect!
:-)
News Flash: the next time somebody tells you that no one in the MSM is tellin' it like it is, send them this URL to the video that Keith Olbermann ran last night! It's called "This Hole In The Ground". Do we dare to hope? Or will Olbermann be poopcanned?
Chris Matthews interviewed Tom Brokaw last night and, for a welcome change, Matthews did not keep interrupting. But Brokaw was slurring his words...he seemed inebriated and maybe that's why he unabashedly bashed Bush! Brokaw's sixty-six this year and I guess now that he's at the foothills of old age, he figures he might as well just say what he thinks. The worms do seem, at last, to be turning. The rodents are leaving the sinking ship.
Monday, September 11th, 2006
Cheney: [The War] was the right thing to do and if we had it to do
over again, we’d do exactly the same thing.
Russert: Exactly the same thing?
Cheney: Yes, sir.
Sunday, September 10th, 2006
Happy Birthday, Pam & Patty!
Have you seen that TV ad with the fifty-something short-haired blonde woman riding a crowded elevator who is revealed, as the elevator empties, to be wearing a sandwich board with the words "I have a bladder control problem" in red letters on white?
Saturday, September 9th, 2006
"Consider your deepest and most secret yearnings as if they were merely facts, so you can see how insubstantial and hysterical they are. There is no shame in pursuing worldly success: It's normal. Your trouble lies not in the pursuit itself, but how you pursue it. You allow your frenzied, misguided desires and fears to color your judgment. So you over-evaluate the intrinsic worth of your pursuits. You bank on your pursuits to give you happiness, thus confusing means with ends. Understand that while the pursuit of such indifferent objectives is natural, neither failure nor success in attaining them has the slightest bearing on your happiness." Epictetus (55-135)
Friday, September 8th, 2006
This this time of year, I often get sucked
into watching singles' tennis matches televised from the US Open in New York.
There's something mesmerizing about them (but I won't say it's time well-spent).
Tennis is wonderful---thoroughly invigorating to play, but it's often depressing
to watch the people who do it for a living because most of them, any more, don't
appear to be having much fun at their craft and, almost to a one, they're
insufferably boring...at least in post-game interviews. Ah, but what's new with
pro athletes? In order to compete at the big-money level of any sport,
one has got to have done little else with one's life other than
practice one's game. Personality, insight and humor are distractions and,
therefore, detractions.
There's lotsa buzz this year about the Men's #1. Roger Federer even
merited a New York Times piece entitled "Federer
As Religious Experience"! Now...dunno how much you have to be into
tennis to think about it that way, but one could argue that he is
simply the best player the game has ever seen and, what's more (to my
eyes, at least), he seldom seems even to try very hard! While his
opponents perspire and drip as if freshly baptized, Roger stays about as excited
as someone waiting for a bus that's on schedule.
The Women's #1 is now Amelie Mauresmo, an 'out' French Lesbian who plays
a tidy game. The Women's #1 attention grabber is the #3 ranked, 19
year-old, 6' 2" Russian beauty Maria Sharapova. She's sort of like Anna
Kournikova...except that Maria wins matches!
Thursday, September 7th, 2006
"Nature
seems made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very
spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not
ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions of men. The white streak
in our own fortunes is brightened by making all around it as dark as possible;
so the rainbow paints its form on the cloud. Is it pride? Is it envy? Is it the
force of contrast? Is it weakness or malice? But so it is, that there is a
secret affinity, a hankering after evil in the human mind, and that it
takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never
failing source of satisfaction. Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and
spirit. Pain is a bittersweet which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little
indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal."
William
Hazlitt (1778-1830)
Wednesday, September 6th, 2006
Half of what you see is a Doberman and the other half is a Chihuahua.
Believe none of what you hear.
The mutt's name is 'Chemo'
and is the lost-and-now-found property of Kyle.
"When President Bush cited the fight against
Communism as a predecessor to the war on terrorism, he got it right. Then, too,
our government overstated the danger from a supposedly monolithic global enemy,
thereby causing more disruption and distortion of American society than the
Communists themselves ever did or could." James
Zall
Tuesday, September 5th,
2006
Primary Day in Florida
"
...a repeatable joke. Ten Kurds locked up in a
mental hospital spend six months fighting one another to look through the tiny
hole in the wall of their cell. A doctor, curious, enters the cell and asks to
have a look. He puts his eye to the hole for ten minutes: nothing. 'There's
nothing there! ', he says. One of the patients
answers, 'We haven't seen anything in six
months---you expect to see something in ten minutes?'
"
From The
Assassins' Gate, by George Packer
Monday, September 4th, 2006
Yet another illustration of why, though there may be old divers and bold divers, there are no old, bold divers!
Sunday, September 3rd, 2006
"When there is peace, the warlike man attacks himself." Fred