Israeli scientists said on Wednesday they had discovered a prehistoric ecosystem dating back millions of years. The discovery was made in a cave near the central Israeli city of Ramle during rock drilling at a quarry. Scientists were called in and soon found eight previously unknown species of crustaceans and invertebrates similar to scorpions. …

The cave was completely sealed off from the world, including from water and nutrients seeping through rock crevices above. Scientists who discovered the cave believe it has been intact for millions of years. “Every species we examined had no eyes which means they lost their sight due to evolution,” said Dimantman.

Scientists are fighting one more battle against efforts of the Bush administration to prevent studies which seem to confirm the theory of evolution. In an excavation during refurbishing the foundation of a building in Washington, D.C., diggers found a self-contained cavern containing several previously unknown species. The cave had been bricked over many years ago beneath an office building whose current address is 310 First Street, SE, apparently to entomb a skeleton found chained to the wall within. There were also a variety of strange creatures which seemed to be ancestors of current residents of that location. That claim has become a source of heated controversy.

All of the new species were completely blind, due to countless years of not venturing into the light of day. Their lack of vision does not seem to have prevented their ability to detect metals, perhaps by smell. One colony had acted similarly to dung beetles, in gathering a huge pile of gold and silver. There seemed to be no functional purpose to this activity, leading to the suggestion that it was a form of conspicuous collection, perhaps intended to win mates by display.

Biologist Paul Myers, called in to study the discoveries, said that these organisms were also very primitive, so much so that they actually managed to live without any form of modern forebrains or hearts. “They seem to operate on a base reptilian level, without any emotional empathy even for each other”, he said. “It’s a classic example of Hobbesian war of all against all.”

Many fundamentalist religious groups have called the discovery a hoax, and called for the cave to be sealed again or even exterminated. They have been angered by DNA tests which seem to demonstrate that current occupants of the site overhead have a closer ancestral link to these species than to primates. “They are claiming that these blind, brainless, heartless mockeries changed over time to become some kind of monsters walking among us”, said Sam Wilberforce of the Prediscovery Institute. “We reject this as one more bit of monkeyshines by the godless left.”

Meanwhile, noted blogger Extraneopundit charged that the whole project was dishonest and motivated by partisan considerations of trying to attack the administration, noting that the building overhead currently serves as the headquarters of a certain current political party. “Heh”, he noted, “indeed.”

This is the birthday of Alida Valli.

Make a movie that Alberto Gonzales will try to ban.

I wish they’d say more.

It’s understandable that they’d fear imprisonment in a country that condones torture, but would Gonzalez really dare to put them in jail? I suspect we’re at the point where the public would riot if they did.

If you’ve dreamed of a way to capitalize on your compulsive lying, here’s your chance to take those skills and make the bigtime.

Submit your padded resume, with a $50,000 campaign contribution to the Committee to Re-Exonerate the Empirical Poobah, and the world can be your shuck-proof oyster.

Let’s study this sequence of events.

November 20, 2005 — U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq, report that on Nov. 19, fifteen civilians and one Marine were killed by a roadside explosion and eight insurgents were killed in subsequent combat. According to Time magazine (Tim McGirk, “One Morning in Haditha,” March 27 issue),

A day after the incident, a Haditha journalism student videotaped the scene at the local morgue and at the homes where the killings had occurred. The video was obtained by the Hammurabi Human Rights Group, which cooperates with the internationally respected Human Rights Watch, and has been shared with TIME. …

… Soon after the killings, the mayor of Haditha, Emad Jawad Hamza, led an angry delegation of elders up to the Marine camp beside a dam on the Euphrates River. Hamza says, “The captain admitted that his men had made a mistake. He said that his men thought there were terrorists near the houses, and he didn’t give any other reason.”

But the military stood by its initial contention —that the Iraqis had been killed by an insurgent bomb— until January when TIME gave a copy of the video and witnesses’ testimony to Colonel Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad.

January 2006 — Time magazine told military officials in Baghdad — that Iraqis said the fifteen civilians were not killed by a bomb but were deliberately killed by Marines. According to Time, military officials began to investigate what happened in Haditha in January. Read the rest of this entry »

So is Bryan when he say’s this is So Wrong.

I’ve never seen her infamous videos, never saw her TV show. All I’ve ever seen is her picture plastered everywhere like she’s somebody. But she’s only somebody I’d approach with a healthy dose … of penicillin.

Why does the story of new SecTreasury, Henry Paulson’s interest in environmental issues bug the hell out of me? I think it’s because my husband came home yesterday and said, “Hey, did you hear that the new guy at Treasury is an environmentalist? They’re saying he might have some influence with Bush.” Yeah, now that I think about it, that’s when my head started to hurt. My husband is my canary in the information coalmine. He’s more informed than the average American about nearly everything that’s important but he gets his information from the corporate media, including NPR, so I can tell which stories are probably soaking into the public consciousness.

The corporate media punching Paulson’s environmental credentials is just more hoop-jumping at the behest of the White House. So the guy is the chairman of the board of the Nature Conservancy and his company Goldman Sachs has spoken out about global warming - an economically smart position for an investment firm to take, by the way. In what Universe are we supposed to believe that any of that matters? BushCo gets reports from an entire agency devoted to the environment, which he routinly ignores - that is, when he isn’t ordering that same agency to lie about public safety in the aftermath of disastrous attacks on the homeland.

Add to that the fact that Paulson is stepping into a position that has been getting trashed by this White House since Paul O’Neill (another smart guy who was supposed to be able to influence BushCo) was mistreated and ignored until he was finally fired over the phone by Cheney and we start getting a clearer picture of what good Paulson the Green will be able to do.

The bottom line is that Paulson is a good soldier. His enviro cred is a fig leaf, a distraction to feed the press and watch them regurgitate faithfully. As usual, whenever BushCo has to rely on that happening, the mission has been accomplished.

Wisconsin Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner is PISSED.

House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner said on Tuesday he plans to draft legislation that would protect congressional material during searches by government investigators.

Sensenbrenner also said he wanted to call Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller to testify about their justification for the unprecedented raid on the office of Rep. William Jefferson, the target of a bribery investigation.

Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, said at a hearing on the raid that his bill could avoid a repeat of last week’s standoff between congressional leaders and the Bush administration after the search of Jefferson’s Capitol Hill office.

“We want to make sure that when the next congressman is investigated for illegal activity that the procedure done by the Justice Department is right,” Sensenbrenner said.

The FBI obtained a court warrant before searching the office of Jefferson, a Louisiana Democratic, but lawmakers from both parties said the raid violated constitutional protections designed to shield lawmakers from executive-branch harassment.

Gee…we’re not happy that the Justice Dept. and Executive branch are trampling over Constitutional rights, Jim? I wouldn’t have guessed that, based on your pissy attitude when Democrats tried to point out those exact dangers during the Patriot Act debate a year ago:

Saturday, June 11, 2005

After repeated criticism of the Bush administration, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee yesterday gaveled a hearing to a close and walked out while Democrats continued to testify — but with their microphones shut off.

The hearing’s announced topic was the USA Patriot Act, which granted broad new powers to federal law enforcement after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The Republicans had presented several witnesses at earlier hearings who supported the administration’s call for reauthorizing the legislation. But yesterday, when four witnesses handpicked by the Democrats launched into a broad denunciations of President Bush’s war on terrorism and the condition of detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) showed his pique.

He urged witnesses to “wrap it up” and repeatedly told committee members that their time for questioning had expired.

“We ought to stick to the subject,” the chairman scolded at the end. “The Patriot Act has nothing to do with Guantanamo Bay. The Patriot Act has nothing to do with enemy combatants. The Patriot Act has nothing to do with indefinite detentions.”

“Will the gentleman yield?” Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) asked.

“No, I will not yield,” replied Sensenbrenner, 61, the heir to a paper fortune who is known for a brusque insistence on decorum. He completed his reproof of the witnesses and left the Rayburn House Office Building hearing room amid a cacophony of protests from Democrats seeking to be recognized.

Democrats charged that the episode was another example of Republicans abusing their control of Congress and trying to stifle dissent over Bush’s approach to counterterrorism.
Read the rest of this entry »

I sat down to write a quick post about Robert Newman’s History of Oil, which is a short comedy video you must all watch immediately. It was going to be a two-sentence, go-watch-this-now-you’ll-be-glad-you-did affair but then I started googling around about Mr. Newman and found out so much interesting information about him that the post grew to an unwieldly length and started to take on a fangirl tone which I don’t trust because a) I only found out about the guy twelve hours ago and b) I may have fallen in love.

So see for yourself.

Watch the video. (via SteinL’s dKos diary) Here’s a short excerpt:

I’ll say many things in the course of tonight’s show that you will not agree with. I will say, for example, that people who fly short-haul should be ASBO’d (see comments), climate criminals that you are. I shall call for a hundred hours community service for eating fruit out of season. I’ll be calling for a mandatory carbon rationing of ten kilos per person per anum. Arguing that the dissolution of corporations is the sine qua non of Democracy. And that the First World War should be taught in our schools as the invasion of Iraq that it was.

It’s 45 minutes of remembering that you aren’t the crazy one after all and that you’ve got proof because look, look here, he’s saying the same things you’ve been thinking all along. Only he’s funny.

Visit his site.

Read what reliable source Avedon Carol had to say about him.

Want to bring democracy to the Middle East? Okay, let’s start with the country that’s the second largest recipient of US aid.

It doesn’t require a single soldier to achieve. It can be done by wielding our purse.

That is, if democracy really is our goal. So far, the evidence is thin.

Update: Democracy is winning! Democracy is winning!

As long as we keep building such stable countries, like we have in Afghanistan and Iraq, someday, we may even be able to rebuild that hotbed of extremism, New Orleans!

The Associated Press is apparently associated with everything but the truth.

It’s long been apparent that some journalists support nominees for national office based on who they’d like to get drunk with. But in the process of ruining their entire profession, it’s becoming clear they also have a penchant to guzzle a complete bar selection, from Sterno to cheap pisswater beer.

Another predictable byproduct of the immigration debate, per David Neiwert, is a renewal of traditional Americanist values wackjobs.

“Mama, run an’ git my cross and flag; there’s a bean roast social comin’ on.”

It’s inevitable: Ex-Kansas GOP Chair Switches Affiliation.

At the rate the Bush administration is driving the best of its base away, I expect by November that Utah and Idaho residents will soon announce they’re going to become French and gay.

So Hastert’s ire was not really about separation of powers. It was about being dismissed by the guys he thought were his allies.

WASHINGTON — The saga of Rep. William Jefferson, the New Orleans Democrat at the center of a FBI bribery investigation, is a case study in the treacherous politics of corruption, investigation and privilege in the nation’s capital.

Though Republicans said the allegation that Jefferson accepted $100,000 in bribe money would help them overcome the Democrats’ “culture of corruption” attacks in this year’s congressional campaigns, the dramatic developments in the case could pose problems for the GOP as well.

In a political sense, this could be a case where the fallout favors neither side and perhaps deepens the public’s negative feelings about their leaders in Congress, analysts say.

Ya think?

It’s amazing to me how few lawmakers ‘get’ this. So the next thing I expect them to do is give themselves a raise.

I’d relish the response if a major polltaker asked “If you could vote today for your Congressional representative, and the ballot offered the choices of the incumbent, an opponent or none of the above, which of the three would you choose?”

Way back when…..

Michelle Malkin about Haditha:

Our Marines do not deserve to be hung in the court of public opinion before an investigation is complete, before hearings are convened, or before any military court proceedings are launched. But there are knees jerking on both sides. I just can’t agree with sentiments like this one:

Jerry Alexander, the owner of G.I. Joe’s and a Navy man who served with the Marines for a dozen years, had much the same perspective, saying, “If I saw my buddy laying there dead, there is no such thing as too much retaliation.”

What? That is not the way to “win the hearts and minds” of Iraq. Or anywhere else. This is not the attitude we celebrate on Memorial Day.

As I was saying, way back when it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that Bush was not going to be dissuaded from going to war, no matter what Saddam did, I not only argued publicly against it, but I said then, that innocents would die, torture would happen and massacres would occur, when we went to war.

That took no psychic powers, nor a cynic’s bent. I knew it because I’ve studied war plenty, spoken with its participants and I know these are ALWAYS part of every war.

Ms. Malkin is shocked, SHOCKED, that these Marines aren’t thinking about winning hearts and minds. She has no concept of the stress, of the snapping point, nor of the twisted logic that can turn once ordinary people into rampaging lunatics. While I abhor such reactions, I’m far more concerned with the military brass that tried to cover it up than the guys who ran amok.

Malkin and her kind of hawks want their wars all dressed up in ribbon and bows, with pauses so they can pee during commercials. They want war with all the glory and a minimum of gory, though actual war is just the opposite. And even if you don’t lose it and do something truly awful, almost everyone in combat has something awful happen to them. They get to see how ugly and gut wrenching death and serious wounds can be. How they look, sound, and smell. And how that haunts.

Sometimes it seems the dead are luckier for avoiding those horror flashbacks. And that’s a part of the bond between generations of war veterans who rarely discuss any of the details beyond times and places. They understand the burden so many silently endure.

Whenever wars start, hawks are quick to condemn anyone opposed as cowards, traitors or idealistic naive people who don’t understand the realities of life. But there are many anti-war people who understand there’s times when there’s a compelling need for war. They just understand as well, that there’s more compelling reasons to avoid war till every other option’s been exhausted. Chief among them is the damage and pain even victorious troops have to endure.

Memorial Day Michelle is the naive one, believing that any Memorial Day is cause for celebration. It’s a time for honor and respect and compassion, but not for celebration. Any real war hero doesn’t want that. They just want a little more peace.

That’s why I didn’t want to go to war. And when inevitable events occur that bring horror and dismay, I certainly don’t think ‘what monsters they be!’ Because most people don’t grasp that that ‘monster’ could be them. Most of us are capable of worse than we believe, and only if we are tested in actual combat can we really know how we’d react. Condemnation of troops under such duress is too easy for the inexperienced.

But condemnation for those political leaders who do not wring the last option out before charging into war, is conversely too mild. For it’s in their haste, that pain is delivered to the undeserving on both sides. And then they loftily praise their own bad choices as justified, despite all the horrors they’ve unleashed.

That is who decent people should reserve their harshest judgments and hatred for. It’s that misuse of power that’s despicable. That’s the greatest war crime of all and if anyone deserves the dankest darkest dungeons of life isolation, it’s them.

Violence aside, Baghdad is broken
Water runs only an hour a day, power is on for 4 hours, and sewage runs in the streets
–San Francisco Chronicle, May 24, 2006

Ironically, to the tune of “Morning Has Broken”, once a hit for the semi-fatwa fan formerly famed as “Cat Stevens”:

Baghdad’s not broken — like an oil pipeline
Iraq’s a token — democracy
Cover the good news — follow our talk line
We flexed our sinews — from air and sea

Swiftly our bombs fell — smashing the bridges
Now no streetlights tell — where our tanks roam
Now no one needs to — defrost their fridges
Power just leads to — broadcasts from home

Supplies are short but — water is private
We slammed the door shut — to leftist cant
Better no output — than a Marxist state
Pinned down by our foot — Saddam won’t rant

Iain Murray is a lying shill. There is simply no other way to put it.

Murray, a “fellow” at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, earlier today carried CEI’s big-oil-financed smear campaign against Al Gore over to The Corner where he burped up this preposterous bit of nonsense:

Al Gore justifies his enjoyment of a carbon-intensive lifestyle in a speech in the UK:

He said he was “carbon neutral” himself and he tried to offset any plane flight or car journey by “purchasing verifiable reductions in CO2 elsewhere”.

Translation: I am rich enough to benefit from executive jets and Lincolns because I pay my indulgences. All you proles have to give up your cars, flights and air conditioning.

The new aristocracy; there’s no other way to describe it.

Murray knows full well that the other kids at the Corner, as well as that site’s readers, have no clue as to what it costs to purchase carbon offsets, and so he figures that he can get away with claiming that carbon offsets cost ginormous amounts of money.

Well, what are the facts? Carbon offsets for driving a 30 mpg car 12,000 miles can be purchased for $19.50. And what about those jet plane rides? A cross-country flight produces less than a metric ton of CO2 per passenger (slightly more for Messrs. Murray and Goldberg); offset credits for a metric ton of CO2 can be purchased for $5.50, slightly more than a Big Mac, fries and a coke.

The only carbon offset that might be truly expensive to purchase is one that would offset the emissions that spew out of the gasbags over at CEI.

political, political cartoons, cartoons, satire, Bush, Mission Accomplished, Iraq

Zencomix

I’ve been looking ahead to the 2008 elections, mostly because everyone else in the blogosphere seems to be. I gotta tell you, the view…well, it resembles a 1860s Glasgow tenement.

We have Hillary Clinton. Now, I have serious issues with Hillary, not the least of which is her sudden friendship with the Murdoch empire and her embrace of every so-called “centrist” bad idea to float down the Potomac. Molly Ivins says it best. It’s like this: If I am going to be stabbed in the back, I’d rather an enemy do it.

Then there’s John Kerry. No, sorry. Too much of a gentleman the last time around. We need someone willing to get down and dirty. Kerry is still in the grip of the consultant class, and those morons all seem bent on emasculating every Democrat in Washington. I’m not sure John can grow a new pair in time.

And there’s Al. Jesus, does anybody else feel the apocalyptic level of regret I feel when I see Albert Gore speaking and think that man should have been president? Do you feel the same amount of rage at the press? This thoughtful, intelligent, informed man was bludgeoned into the ground by a bunch of cowards hiding behind their wordprocessors. It’s enough to make a grown woman cry.

And yet, I’m not sure that I want Al to run in 2008. You see, I think we are going to lose the election of 2008. The scripts all seem written already: St. John McCain versus either (1) cold, calculating bitch or (2) lying leftist war protestor. It doesn’t matter. The press has already chosen a winner, and I don’t think we have any Dems currently in Washington or elsewhere with the gonads to slap the press back in line. I think Al Gore can do more good outside of that blasted hothouse than in; I don’t want him to be co-opted and cowed back into presenting the face that the apparatchiks seem to be enforcing. Al is full of fire these days; let him burn without restrictions.

So who would be a good candidate? I have no idea yet. The problem is that I see nothing but middle-of-the-roaders and, to quote Jim Hightower, ain’t nothing down the middle of the road but yellow lines and dead armadillos. The only hopeful sign lately has been Howard Dean’s reconstruction of the state-level party structure…and we all know how well this has been received by the mandarins.

Who’s your guy…or gal?

The writers at the Economist don’t get it yet. When it comes to the new Network of Spiritual Progressives, that is. Mainstream journalists, in general, are not widely deserving of being credited for being professionals of vision. They tend to cling to lazy misnomers - to what they know.

They’re wrong about the Network of Spiritual Progressives. This isn’t some newfound unity of “the Suddenly Left and Religious” vs. the Religious Right.

This is not a partisan game we’re playing. This is about hope and vision; not about playing “gotcha” with the Religious Right. God is not a Republican. God is not a Democrat. The media needs to come to terms with the fact that millions upon millions of American citizens are people of faith, yet their core common values are not being represented in the public.

This cartoon betrays the real work of the Spiritual Progressives because,
unlike the Religious Right and their decidedly non-spiritual co-opting of Republicans,
no one in the Network of Spiritual Progressives is claiming to have triumphal political
ownership of the Democratic party. Unfortunately, the Economist
and the New York Times have not yet learned a thing about what this Network is set upon accomplishing.

The Economist’s gross misunderstanding of the Network’s platform contributes to their grim political predictions for Progressives based upon what I suspect are unintentionally-reached false conclusions.

Don’t swallow it.

Journalists continue to paint “moral values” inside some imaginary box that consistently assures, with perpetual falsities, that the Religious Right will retain possession of the political keys to “moral authority.” Democrats partake willingly in this game, virtually handing the keys to the “moral authority vehicle” over to the GOP like secular drunks silenced by the fear of running off the road while offending. Meanwhile, the only ones offfended are people with common sense and a wide array of common spiritual values.

When I speak of common spiritual values, I am not talking about a stiff obligatory morality with a prescribed set of specific moral behaviors based in one certain religion. That’s totally incompatible with today’s American society, which is made up of such a culturally, politically, and spiritually diverse population. There will always be a moral order of which any society’s law will be a reflection. A society with no moral order would probably not survive for very long. In a Democratic society with such a diverse population, our legal institutions must remain the social-structural basis of a practical moral order. Not the church.

The notions of right and wrong, good and bad are always going to be inescaple and integral parts of the spiritual, religious, and legal facets of our society. There will be no end to ensuring that church and state are kept separate. Someone will always be overstepping the boundary and someone else will always have to remind them of the line between chruch and state. In a rational and diverse democracy, we must always remain guards at the crossroads…where religion and law will inevitably intersect. Americans are, in overwhelming numbers, people of faith. Religion involves both group activities and private activities. Americans develop personal value-structure, in large part, through faith and through the human spirit.

We cannot have a holistic society or a government that really works for the best interests of the most oppressed in our society unless we learn to talk about what is best about our common values and, together, create a practical moral order which can be transcribed to the kind of law we want to see and the kind of government in which we can continue to participate with pride. If our society doesn’t have laws and public policies that work for the least of us, I do not see it as a society with an acceptable moral order. Do you?

In time, if this new movement has any success, all journalists who have misunderstood and bungled the coverage of this Spiritual Progressive network will understand that Green, Democratic, and moderate Republican voters have been gagged for too long by the super-secular special interests that would love (just as much as the Religious Right would love) to have political leaders (especially Democratic leaders) continue to deliver lame, unconvincing, and meaningless platitudes to millions of spiritual voters. The trouble is, citizens can spot a phony and a panderer from a rhetorical shout away. *Read Politics: A New Bottom Line, which I wrote for the One America Committee last week.

The Network is here to change the way we speak about the issues and to drive the creation of policy that will reflect a democracy that is made up of people who actually care about something other than only the economic “bottom line.” Some of the ideas may seem idealistic, but where there is no vision, there is no progress. Consider how you may have felt about your “idealism” if you’d been a slave longing for freeedom that you thought could never be possible - or a woman at the turn of the 20th century, still without a vote.

If successful, the Network will have the tremendous power of the Spirit behind it - the human spirit as well as the voice of mystery that most of us human beings have been hearing for thousands of years. Let’s see the two-issued-wonders - the falsely pious Bush-hugging Jerry Falwellians and the “I’ve got to make the Supreme Court change the overwhelming majority’s values because they’re not mine” Michael Newdowians try to beat the voice of love and caring that comes straight from the human heart.

I was at the conference in Washington, D.C. last week, and so was Peter Rothenberg. By reading his brief article at the Nation this week, I can see that he has a much better handle on the topic.

Today the only President we’ve got signed a bill outlawing protests at military funerals, then drove past competing demonstrators from Fred Phelps (”God hates fags”) and FreeRepublic (”only traitors question Bush”) to Arlington. There he spoke and laid flowers.

One of my close relatives is buried there. At the funeral they handed me the flag from the coffin. I am sure he would not want me to disrespect the Commandante of Grief for this token effect in tribute to many who didn’t pull strings or have other priorities. Very well, I’m glad el jefe paid the lip service.

I’ll say instead: that bill violates the Constitution all those underground died to uphold. Those protesters should kill each other off and make this a better world. The most recent additions to those hillsides never should have been placed in harm’s way at all, much less with insufficient armor and support from the great brothel just across the river from their resting place. I’m not ashamed of the flag that flies over them. I am sickened by its abuse by puny politicians unworthy of its traditions.

Just turn away and pretend the man in the limousine isn’t unfit to set foot there.

Kevin, I’m not sure if I’m allowed to do this, so you all can flog me with a wet cable cord (hmm, would that electrocute me first?) if it’s a no no - but each of these three posts from my blog yesterday are just as relevant to the AmStreet audience as they are to the five relatives and three friends who read my blog.

Happy Memorial Day!

The First Amendment Applies to Online Reporters

I love Helen Thomas

Letter to Matt Bai re: Can Bloggers Get Real?

I’ve been dealing with some bouts of hopelessness lately, mostly on a personal level, and, as I’ve been ruminating, I’ve analogized the circuitous nature of my hopelessness (about a specific situation, not life in general, no fears necessary) to how having the current administration in charge, especially for so long, makes me feel.

And then, I imagined what I would feel like if I’d been a Democrat in the Ohio state legislature for the last sixteen years. I mean, if it didn’t drive me to mimic either Michael Douglas in Falling Down, or the suicidal character in Harold and Maude, then I’d have to accept that humans are indeed tougher than I’d ever imagined.

Hyperbole aside, why do those politicians keep going back for more of the same? Would you? Are they delusional or can they really accept, as people who are feeling hopelessness are implored to remember, that nothing lasts forever? Nothing is permanent, this too shall pass, life will go on, and it will improve?

That’s how I’m trying to conquer my demons. And I’m no career Democratic politician.

But if you were - how would you cope? Would you have been outta there and bought a Dairy Queen franchise instead? Or do you think you could keep running for re-election, every. other. year. ad. nauseum. until the Democrats regained a majority?

Or something else?

Beneath the grass leaves, sodden earth and whitewashed crosses
there you lie, decomposed, for incomprehensible causes.
The prophets of war spoke of necessity, and of monsters looming.
Their resurrected lies respected nothing we’re entombing.

Surpassing their measure in loyalty to your sister and brother,
your sweetest brilliance can ne’er be matched in the wick of any other.
And why this is can not be told by any fact or guess.
We’re only certain this universe weighs one supernova less.

We’ll carry on your luminence and emulate your deeds
in pursuit of the fulfillment of every child’s needs
to live and grow and laugh and dream unscathed by cruel men.
Certain only in the knowledge that the cruel will bring us here, again.

The NY Times:

Representative William J. Jefferson has always liked to talk about growing up in an impoverished farm community, picking cotton for $3 a day and hitting the books hard enough to win his ticket out — a scholarship to Harvard Law School.

But even as Mr. Jefferson built a reputation as one of Louisiana’s brightest, most effective leaders, a less flattering view began to emerge, one signified by his nickname in political circles, “Dollar Bill.”

Early in his career, as a state legislator, he was criticized for enriching his law firm with contracts from state and local agencies. He also ran stores that rented appliances by the month to poor residents, owned dilapidated apartment buildings and was sued by federal regulators over a defaulted loan.

Okay, stop right there. What’s that last sentence? Took advantage of the poor? Slumlord? Sued for a loan default? I’m sorry, but none of those make him a criminal. They make him more of a ….. Republican. And that’s not illegal.

If he took bribes or offerred value-added Congressional services for a price, then that would be illegal. Let’s have a judge and jury determine that. Which doesn’t make me partisan. It makes me more … in favor of a fair trial.

If he dug his way out of poverty, that’s an admirable achievement. If convicted, it will certainly reflect favorably in the pre-sentencing investigation. But admirable backgrounds, or childhood poverty, do not justify the actions the FBI alleges, if they’re true.

His background or his past business practices might make him a good or bad guy, but that’s entirely irrelevant to any evidence of a crime. If he’s a crook, throw the book. His party matters not, nor does his color.

Once the separation of powers issue gets resolved, that’s my only interest here. The standard of guilt is the same. And if his guilt is proven, then it’s a shame to see him squander a positive life before and take up the practices of crooks. But I’d not be sympathetic to a crook.

Which makes me … normal.

Some bombs are actually fairly harmless unless you come in direct contact with them. Our government knows this and that is why they were going to drop a 700-ton “non-nuclear” bomb in the Nevada desert. Now, the mission to blow up the desert with 700 tons of explosives has been ground to a screeching halt because Senator Orrin Hatch and some other yahoo read reports from the ’50’s and ’60’s that claimed that radiation disperses into the atomosphere.
And due to their paranoia over outdated information, the 700-ton bomb, the Divine Strake, has lost its holy mission.

What kind of God-hatin’ heathen would derail such a glorious experiment? Hatch and his partner-in-derailment, Jim Matheson Rep. D-Utah, are demanding that science back up the claim that radiation is harmless when dispered in the atmosphere. I can understand a wacky Democrat using the “science” scam, but since when did Republicans fall for this kind of nonsense? Our future is at stake here my friends, and now Republicans are falling under the unholy lure of the “scientific-
evidence demanders.” Good God, next thing you know Orrin Hatch will be urging his constituents to see that new Al Gore flick. This truly is becoming a one-party system.

On a warm and lazy holiday afternoon, determined to avoid any exertion and relax in my easy chair, I was contemplating something easy on the brain: beauty. I have no idea what makes something beautiful, but I could at least approach the subject empirically and catalog those things and experiences the I have found beautiful…so I put together a list. It’s nothing definitive, it’s merely personal, a set of memories of moments where I have been awestruck with beauty.

10. The zebrafish embryo. These tiny little embryos encapsulate everything that’s lovely about development and biology. They are transparent^* animals wrapped in a transparent shell, and you can pop them straight from their mother’s oviduct onto the stage of a microscope and see everything. There’s cytoplasm streaming through strands of yolk to establish a cellular domain; there are nuclei cycling through mitosis, breaking down and reappearing as the cell divides; there are cells creeping through an intricate slow-motion dance to build new tissues; there’s a neuron reaching out with its growth cone, laying down the first nerves; there’s a blood cell tumbling through the epithelia of partially formed blood vessels; there’s a single striated muscle fiber, twitching delicately. The egg is only a millimeter across, but there’s a whole complex world in there. And it changes so fast! It is a spectacular affirmation of the power of natural processes to watch a single cell divide and divide and divide, and then knit itself into a swimming and eating machine, all in the space of a day.
9. An alpine lake in the Oregon Cascades. We hiked up a mountain trail on a hot June day, carrying a canoe, up and over a rocky rim into a natural bowl with a large lake at its center. We were hot and sweaty when we launched the canoe, but the lake was frigid—it was like sliding out onto a sheet of ice, it was so cool and pleasant. We drifted out to the middle, and stopped paddling; it was a windless day, and the ripples faded away, and we looked down. This lake was deep and so astonishingly clear, you could look down to the bottom 50 or 60 feet below as if our canoe were hovering in the air, with only the thinnest boundary between us and the tangle of logs and rocks below. I seriously felt a moment of vertigo, there in our flying canoe. I reached down and broke the interface with my hand, and felt intense, stinging cold, then numbness…I was suspended in a warm and airy, tree-lined world above, with part in a crystalline world of dead cold and empty, lifeless loveliness.
8. Me. I already wrote all about my inner beauty; read that article for an explanation.
7. Crossing the Columbia Bar. Everything was gray: gray skies and a gray sea, and the wind was blowing strongly. It was one of those marginal days for fishing, when the weather could go bad at any time and the water was going to be rough. The charter boat captains decided to go for it anyway, although they’d be spending the whole day fretting over their radios and standing ready to skitter for harbor at the first word of warning. Crossing the bar of the Columbia River was always a bit choppy, but that day it was particularly tough. Twenty and thirty foot swells heaved us up and down; one moment we look straight up and see one of our companion boats hanging above us, the next it would be plummeting down and we’d by rising upwards, and we’d timorously look over the side to see it deep in a trough below us. We were like nothing to the sea. The big boats and the weight of all the people in them were miniscule compared to the masses of water around us, and our passage had no effect on the rhythmic surges of titanic volumes of the Pacific Ocean. There are no human machines that can compare to the power and majesty of the indifferent consequences of the combination of wind and water.
6. Pregnancy and birth.How do women bear it? I’m male and can only be a witness, not a real participant, and it’s overwhelming from even my limited perspective. Seeing a belly grow taut and full, seeing physiology rearranged in such a focused way, and watching a new organism grow is awesome enough…but the violent (it can’t be described any other way—there’s blood and strain and action and screaming) culmination is also beautiful in its intense ferocity. I admire and respect that effort, but I’m too cowardly to envy it.
5. Thunderstorms over the Great Salt Lake. From a vantage point on the hills to the west of the city, you can watch the storms roll in towards you over the lake. These are fierce desert storms where the lightning is a near continuous barrage, and the rain pours out of thick dark clouds in black corrugated sheets, and they move fast. The storm roars towards you, flashing and booming, and of course you run for shelter before it arrives. Cowering in a basement is acceptable behavior. Afterwards (it usually doesn’t last long), you can drive out to the desert and find vast stretches of earth glazed with thin sheets of water, made mirror-like and impassable, and watch as the desert sucks them down. They’re gone in an afternoon.
4. The valley of the Hoh, in the rain. There are many kinds of rain, and you can experience them all at once in the forests of the Olympic Peninsula. We were walking up a thin trail of red earth, paralleling the tea-colored stream of the Hoh, and it was raining, as it usually was. We were surrounded by the moss-covered cedars and firs and spruce of the forest, though, which arched overhead so densely that we never really saw the sky. Sometimes the rain would come down in a damp haze; at other times little droplets pattering down; sometimes those fat drops that splat hard against my hat and poncho and make themselves physically felt through all the raingear; and sometimes when the wind stirred the boughs just right they’d release their burden of water all at once, and there’d be a deluge to leave me gasping. Through it all was the hushed moan of the wind through the deep forest, the water rilling through the stream, the constant splash and spatter of the falling rain, the damp musty cedar smell of the rain forest. It was good.
3. Brains.The first time I sawed through a cranium and peeled the bone back, or tore through the thin membrane shrouding a chain of ganglia, or reflected a layer of muscle to expose a chain of nerves, I was unimpressed. Hearts throb and intestines writhe and muscles twitch, but brains just lie there gelid and pale pink, with all the consistency of a firm pudding. Boring! The beauty lies in hidden complexity. Lower an electrode through it, and the audio monitors hum and squeal and click as they pick up all the electrical activity crackling through it, unseen. Take a slice, stain it, put it on the microscope, and everywhere there are delicate branching fibers a tenth of a micron in diameter, reaching out and connecting cells in a web of contacts. Brains have the beauty of intricacy, an extravagantly baroque filigree of connections…all built by genes and proteins and lipids and cellular interactions.
2. The west coast of the Olympic Peninsula. All of it. I want to die there on a rocky beach, with sea stacks towering on the horizon and anemones tickling my toes. Drape me with kelp for a caul and push me off with the tide—I’ll feed the crabs and the fish. It’s raw and wild and often hostile, but it also preserves the diversity of marine and shore life, and there is a small glimpse of the richness of a world that isn’t overwhelmed by a monoculture of a single species.
1. My wife, undressed. You’ll get no description: that’s for my eyes only. But I will say that human eyes and human minds respond best to the human form, and my personal bias is that the female human form is the most splendid representative of the species. When that form is coupled to deep emotional resonance, too, well, nothing can be more lovely. It’s also a major biological miracle.

I started this little exercise by just trying to think of the first things to come to mind when considering the idea of beauty, and I guess after the fact that I can see a few themes emerged. There’s an awful lot of water up there. That’s always been an attraction to me, but honestly, if I’d expanded my list to a hundred entries many more dry places would have come up. There are places in the Palouse and along wild stretches of the southwestern badlands and in some of the other rocky wastelands of the west that come to mind: splitting 500 million year old shales near Delta, Utah and seeing vestiges of a lost world in my hand was also a beautiful moment.

Another bias favors the beauty of the non-human world. I don’t think anything in the Louvre is quite so beautiful as a gnarly tree on a hilltop, I’m afraid. The fact that we humans keep trying to match the spectacular splendor of the natural world is to be admired, but no hand has made anything as lovely as what evolution has wrought.

OK, somebody else’s turn. What are the most beautiful things you can think of?

^*I’m often asked, “if they’re so transparent, how can you see anything?” The answer is complicated. We use Nomarski phase contrast optics. When light passes through a transparent object, its intensity and wavelength are unaffected; however, the phase (and polarity, too, but that’s a different issue) of the light may be shifted. This does our eyes no good, since we’re unable to see phase changes—however, a phase contrast microscope merges the phase-shifted image with an unshifted reference, generating patterns of constructive and destructive interference and variations in intensity that we can see. So, we can focus freely through the specimen, and the microscope optics generates contrast in the focal plane only.
Phase contrast optics are also beautiful.
So are the mathematics of light.

Let’s look at the bigs on their big day edition:

Washington Post: Immigration Deal a Risk for Some Republicans

Washington Times: Earthquake kills more than 3,700 in Indonesia

USA Today: Java deals with destruction

New York Times: Death Toll Climbs to 3,500 in Indonesian Quake

Google News: Update 21: Grieving Quake Survivors Scavenge for Food

Christian Science Monitor: Americans have troops in mind

Los Angeles Times: Angelides Draws Even With Westly in Governor’s Race

Chicago Tribune: Quake survivors search for food

Miami Herald: Heat takes 2-1 series lead

Dallas Morning News: Drivers fill up on conspiracy theories

Cleveland Plain Dealer: Meet the new Americans: Clevelanders take the path to citizenship

Philadelphia Inquirer: Perzel rousing ire in party faithful

Detroit Free Press: DOUBLE TROUBLE: Heat take 2-1 lead over Pistons

Houston Chronicle: Border fence

St Louis Post Dispatch: Godfrey man kills sons, self

Atlanta Journal Constitution: Indonesia quake toll tops 4,300

Charlotte Observer: N.C. gets ready to play Powerball

Minneapolis Star Tribune: House Republican: Citizenship path for illegals unacceptable

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee County parks sinking fast

San Francisco Chronicle: Hard Lessons: a fierce commitment to SF public schools

Arizona Republic: Reverberations felt 30 years after Don Bolles’ death

Denver Post: Roads to riches

Kansas City Star: Indonesia earthquake kills thousands

Boston Globe: Sunni leader assassinated; PM yet to name security head

New Jersey Star Ledger: Cable bill reveals North vs. South tension

Indianapolis Star: Hornish, Wheldon Duel

Baltimore Sun: Trouble follows schools official

Times Picayune: Is New Orleans ready for another hurricane?

Las Vegas Review Journal: A heart, smile for immigrants

In summary, the biggest city and national US papers think the Indonesia quake is the top story, with seven leading with that, out of 29 choosing it. Second is immigration, with five leads. Nothing else got more than one, as the others mostly led with local or state stories. Miami, Detroit and Indianapolis put sports first. Charlotte put Powerball at the top.

The war on terror? Iraq? Only the Boston Globe led with that. The CS Monitor was close with a troop support article. And Iraq oughta be the lead, since we’ve now officially lost the war.

Murtha said high-level reports he received indicated that no one fired upon the Marines or that there was any military action against the U.S. forces after the initial explosion. Yet the deaths were not seriously investigated until March because an early probe was stifled within days of the incident, he said.

“I will not excuse murder, and this is what happened,” Murtha said. “This investigation should have been over two or three weeks afterward and it should have been made public and people should have been held responsible for it.”

Elsewhere:

Reuters: Search for survivors

BBC News: Search for Java quake survivors

International Herald Tribune: Quake damage in Indonesia delays relief aid

OhMyNews International: ‘Stop World Cup Prostitution’: Groups

Haaretz: Lebanon slams ‘warlike’ Israel over border clash

The National Security Archives continues to, through Freedom of Information Act requests, get at the fetid underbelly of Henry Kissinger’s thinking, a process that no doubt, must be as unappealing as it sounds.

There is much interesting and revealing comments here, but I find these two to be mong the most compelling:

During secret talks with Zhou Enlai in June 1972, Kissinger explained U.S. Vietnam strategy. Following his "decent interval" approach, Kissinger argued that the White House could not accept Hanoi’s proposals to eject South Vietnamese leaders from power, but would accept the political changes that could occur after the United States withdrew forces from Vietnam: "if, as a result of historical evolution it should happen over a period of time, if we can live with a Communist government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina"

This certainly gives the impression that Kissinger knew what would inevitably happen. In any event, it’s a strong historical corrective to the reactionary right who tend to blame the Vietnam debacle on the media, the left, or any number of other reasons that ignore history and the nature of the conflict.

This comment is also noteworthy and also sadly indicative of Kissnger’s embrace of brutal regimes:

Discussing Cambodia with Thailand’s Foreign Minister, Kissinger acknowledged that the Khmer Rouge were "murderous thugs" but he wanted the Thais to tell the Cambodians "that we will be friends with them": Cambodia aligned with China could be a "counterweight" to the real adversary, North Vietnam.

Unfortunately, no one in mainstream media seems to have anything but a reverential, elder statesman view towards Kissinger, but I would certainly love to see someone pose questions about these comments to him the next time someone feels a need to drag his tired ass into a studio.

Okay, I’m surly. I get that way after too many hours in an emergency room with my kid (she’s okay, just a flare-up of her geneticly flawed kidney system, that has provided her excruciating pain a couple times a year, for the past decade). But I come back thinking about all the crap I read earlier in the day, beginning with the Southern Appeasement Strategy from some of my favorite lefties.

Here’s a prime example.

I support the fifty state strategy of Howard Dean. I’m as supportive of blue collar workers and the working poor as anyone. I’d even be trailer trash if I ever could afford a freaking trailer. But I’m not into Frenchkissing the bungholes of the entire South because they’re up to 40% or so of enlightened people in their population mix.

People denigrate the South for perfectly valid reasons, even though the broad brush of generalization unfairly tarnishes millions. I’ve stated before that I was born an American and considered myself an American till I first visited the South in 1973 and discovered I was just a despised Yankee. Upon my return in 1979, not a thing had changed. In 1992, on my third move there, I travelled off the interstates, passing through numerous towns and cities, and though I was treated better, I still saw an enormous amount of overt racism, overt regionalism and wounded pride about the Civil War that ended 127 years earlier.

And in my view, their conservative religion addiction has a very good reason for existing. If I needed saving as much as many of them do, I doubt I could leave my knees ever, too.

Some say the national Democratic Party left them, not vice-versa. But based on many of the Democratic politicians elected to Congress and the Senate from their over many decades, I see no reason to be apologetic for leaving some of the worst behind. (Zell Miller, anyone?)

There’s many places in the South that seemed fairly progressive and welcoming, especially larger metro areas, but there’s a ton of rural places as welcoming as tribal Pakistan. Why should I kiss up to them? Why should national leaders do outreach to bigots that’d be be perfectly happy to lynch most Northern Dems?

Screw that weak and vacillating, anything-for-a-win appeasement dialogue.

Oh, boo-hoo-hoo, they can’t stand affirmative action. Oh, whine-whine-whine, they yammer about Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton for being sharp enough to rub racism back in the noses of them whut brung it to the dance. One of their more enlightened politicians, President Clinton, had the good grace to apologize for slavery. But where is the rest of the South’s consideration on that, or for lynchings or for seceding from the country in the first place? The rest of us are being uncivil to YOU????

I know all the excuses. Most didn’t own slaves. And almost all who participated in any of those events is dead. Fine, so what’s their grudge against most of the country? Against the Democratic party? All I’ve seen them budge is to say they might vote for a Dem president, but only if he’s a Southerner. Between FDR and now, for any Dem nominee north of Missouri, they only barely elected Kennedy. And he wasn’t allowed to live through his first term. What’s that, less than 3 years out of the past 61?

The national Dems, from the time of LBJ, have shifted ever more conservative, and have always been for the little guy throughout. And the South still won’t shift in their presidential votes. Oh, the percentages of Southerners has shifted favorably in some states. But I’m talking the majority that remains steadfast in their rejectionism. It’s up to them to change, now. If they keep voting for perpetual marginalization, let ‘em have it. Because if the Dems shift more rightward to appease the South, they’ll start losing the North and West to third parties and the non-voting bloc.

Only through the attrition of older generations do I expect to see that change sufficiently. There’s much more promise among the under 45 crowd of our Southern peers.

I have Southern friends. I know many intelligent and educated and ethical Southernors. Yet I make fun of the ignorant ones, stereotypiing them, just as I do to San Franciscans, New Yorkers and others for their own examples of stupidity. I don’t hate Southerners, nor make assumptions about those I meet for the first time. I just have no sympathy for the crybabies who can’t handle being criticized.Tribal identity? That’s one sorry-ass tribe.

You go visit Mississippi Delta country. Go visit snake-handler country in the mountains near Hazard, Kentucky. Take a traipse through the theocratic state of Alabama. Or rural Georgia. I did, so don’t tell me black Americans have recovered too much or that these ‘value voters’ have a full slate of values we should emulate. Many Southerners have marginalized themselves. Don’t tell me that’s the fault of any political party.

If Dean can get through by helping Southern Dems organize and presenting an honest case about what Dems stad for, I fully support that approach. But he should make no concessions or appeasements to persuade.

I don’t speak for Dems on this, I only speak for me. The South’s cybabies need o grow up and get over their persecution complexes. Or they can stay in their self-built holes and keep on digging.

In a close decision between contestants Continental Op and Dave Beckwith, the award goes to Dave for simply having the more extensive Dick Cheney iPod playlist:

D.O.A. - Bloodrock
Hail to the Thief - Radiohead
Cheney’s got a Gun - Arrowsmith
Zombie - Cranberries
Tie a Yellow Ribbon - Tony Orlando & Dawn
The Bitch is Back - Elton John
Life During Wartime - Talking Heads
Helter Skelter - Beatles
Happiness is a Warm Gun - Beatles
Gates of Delirium - Yes
21st Century Schizoid Man - King Crimson
1984 - Anais Mitchell
Diamonds and Rust - Joan Baez
My Dick is a Monster - Frank Zappa
Well-Respected Man - Kinks
Pleasant Valley Sunday - Monkees
Bomb Iran - (takeoff on Barbera Ann)
Nowhere Man - Beatles
Fresh Garbage - Spirit
The Queen & the Soldier - Suzanne Vega
The Sound of Fear - Eels
Every Breath You Take - Sting
We Work The Black Seam - Police

I can only presume the Monkees and Kinks songs got included due to a poor translation from their original French and Mexican versions, which we don’t have room in this country for.

Dave wins the paltry sum of $10, which allows him to fulfill his lifelong dream of owning his very own thimbleful of gasoline.

Have a great three day weekend!

(Date altered from its original post date of two days ago)