I turned to my Indian co-worker today and said, I don’t know how your food doesn’t kill you.

I got Indian food for lunch today, and I have no idea why. No, wait, I do—it was cheap. But I know I don’t like it and it just hurts me, but I got it anyway. Ugh. I just don’t even like the palette—it’s all brown and yellow. And blazing, firey red, two hours later. My experience with Indian food is like holding a hammer over my fingers and saying, hm, I wonder if this’ll hurt this time.

Dallas Morning News: Friends say “Wild-eyed” Bush “thumps chest,” declares “I am the President!” | CorrenteWire

Replace “thumps chest” with “stamps little foot” for added dark hilarity.

The original article fails at setting the scene, though; it gives no context why he’d be doing this. If you’re going to show our President as wild-eyed and thumping his chest while insisting on an actual fact, you really should tell your reader why.

Turns out that Presidential order I linked a few entries ago isn’t actually that big a deal.

Ech. Well, it was wrong of me to jump to a conclusion on that, but I think I get some slack, considering the things we know this administration has done already.

I have myself a blog-reading rotation, now, and I think my current favorite is Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall. He takes a much more news-oriented approach than other blogs I read, which means it’s heavy on information and light on snark. I also like it because the posts tend to be quick, paragraph-length entries, with links to other parts of the TPM media empire if you want more info.

Over the weekend, he wrote an unusually long post about our country’s current experiment in training terrorists. In the middle of it was a paragraph that put into words a conflict that’s been in the back of my head for some time:

We’re so far deep into this mess that sometimes I believe we’re past the point of argument. You look at the evidence and you either see it or you don’t. Or perhaps more agnostically, you look at the evidence and one of two completely contradictory narratives makes sense. Whichever is right, the assumptions brought to the issue are so divergent as almost to defy argument or debate.

I occasionally lament that I don’t have a large enough forum to get important ideas out to people who really should be grasping them, but behind that is the quiet, diffuse despair Marshall is describing. For someone who prides himself on seeing other people’s points of view, and being able to construct a discussion that shows them mine, it’s disheartening to suspect that no amount of debate would change the minds that really need changing.

New Dem Rule Hits Old Dem Dealer

Republicans abuse process for some time, Dems get elected and try to cut that shit out…and Murtha’s too old school to get the memo.

My political interest is pretty much through the lens of the Iraq War, so this is an unfortunate revelation about Murtha for me. I gotta remember that the Democrats aren’t the Good Guys, but the Not-Necessarily-As-Bad Guys.

My blog-reading recently suggests that blogs frequently get these sorts of stories out before newspapers do. I hope you see this reported in the major newspapers soon.

Bush Anoints Himself as the Insurer of Constitutional Government in Emergency

President Bush has ordered up a plan for responding to a catastrophic attack. In a new National Security Presidential Directive, Bush lays out his plans for dealing with a “catastrophic emergency.”

Under that plan, he entrusts himself with leading the entire federal government, not just the Executive Branch. And he gives himself the responsibility “for ensuring constitutional government.”

Of course, I figured Giuliani telling farmers they’re not rich enough for him would also be picked up by the newspapers after it was in the blogs, but that didn’t happen. But really, I only wanted that to get picked up for the vindictive “if a Democrat did this, it’d be everywhere” reason. This King George thing is actual news.

I was listening to talk radio the other day, and heard just a piece of a story from a woman who was attending an anti-war protest. She got talked over by the host before she could finish, which is a real shame, because the scene she was describing was quite powerful.

I wish I had a transcript, but…it went something like this: she was at a protest, and an ex-soldier came at one of the protesters and punched him. There was a scuffle, but shortly after that, the soldier broke down in tears, saying, “don’t tell me I killed little girls for no reason.”

I’m…okay I am highly insulated and privileged and I have absolutely no grasp of what it’s like to actually offer my life for the sake of my country. And yet I am literally getting choked up picturing all that. I suppose I don’t really have to understand what it’s like to be a soldier, I can just understand despair. But I’m just typing about it, what’s it like to live it?

Couple that despair with the sort of post-combat treatment we’ve heard that the soldiers are getting—inadequate services, VA runarounds, etc.—and I am sure we’re creating another round of disillusioned, disabled veterans in the mold of the Vietnam vet stereotype.

This is not my original observation–Daily Show got it, TPM got it, whoever saw Gonzales’s testimony got it–but man I just gotta highlight this quote from Gonzales:

“It would be pretty darn difficult, if not impossible, to make a decision for political reasons [at the DOJ] and expect to get away with it…if a career investigator, prosecutor, felt that uh, we were making decisions for political reasons to interfere with a case, you’d probably hear about it, we’d probably read about it in the papers.”

<spinn> man
<spinn> the white house has no freakin shame
<tieboy> technically, they can neither confirm nor deny the amount of shame they may or may not have
<spinn> comey was testifying today, he was talking about gonzales (when he was white house council) trying to get ashcroft to sign a white house order when ashcroft was in the hospital and doped up on drugs
<spinn> astonishing
<spinn> ashcroft was seriously ill, in intensive care for six days
<spinn> comey, acting AG when ashcroft was in the hospital, wouldn’t sign off on the order
<spinn> so the day before the deadline, comey gets a call from ashcroft’s wife saying that gonzales was going to the hospital to get (the not currently attorney general) ashcroft to sign it
<spinn> comey rushes to the hospital, beats him by minutes
<tieboy> classy
<spinn> and ashcroft says, what are you asking me for? I’m not AG right now, ask him (comey)
<spinn> gonzales just walks out without talking to either of them
<spinn> comey, by the way, says that he was actually surprised ashcroft was lucid enough to make this point, because he was pretty ill and doped up
<spinn> so basically gonzales was planning on showing up and taking advantage of a sick man so the white house could go on with wiretapping whoever they feel like
<spinn> and. my whole point here is that tony snow was asked about this today
<spinn> Tony Snow on Comey testimony describing nighttime Gonzales/Card visit to hospital to get sign off on illegal wiretap program from half-conscious John Ashcroft: Comey’s got “splashy testimony. Good for him.”
<tieboy> Tony Snow is a fucking lizard
<spinn> yeah it’s amazing
<spinn> I already grind some of my soul to keep doing this job
<spinn> but I could not imagine the death of self that job would require
<tieboy> he was being interviewed on NPR and I thought “Why bother?”
<tieboy> you know what he is going to say at all times
<tieboy> but man, what a piece of work. you can’t even really get mad at him because he’s so transparently evil

Update: Saw a transcript of that press briefing, here’s another great one: when a reporter asked about the White House trying to “take advantage of a very sick man,” Snow replies: “Trying to take advantage of a sick man — because he had an appendectomy, his brain didn’t work?” This from a guy who was just in the hospital for cancer treatments. I swear these people have no sense of irony.

11 Republican congressmen go up to the Capitol and tell the President to shut his gob.

Like every other thing I record, this one feels like it’s about 90% of what it really should be. But, eh, I’m just gonna let it go.

dont_listen_to_arcanta.mp3

Several years ago, Debb and I went to a Faith and the Muse concert, and the opening act was this guy, Arcanta. He was all chanty and reverby and kinda world-musicky, which was kinda neat but kinda tiresome, but the main problem was that he went on forever. The little venue had strict show end times, so FatM had to cut their concert short. This really kinda ticked us off, because they only rarely tour.

So, I wrote the lyrics for this song that night, and been kicking em around in my brain ever since. Finally recorded the damn thing.

Oh yeah! Forgot, Debb wanted me to point out that The Ninja-Zombie Show, that I did for Scribs (remember Scribs?), is now in the discography.

I’ve been having an experience this week with polls and 30%. You know how, you get a number stuck in your head, you keep noticing it? Well, it’s not exactly 30%, but let’s call it three-tenthsish. Watching different polls this week, it caught my eye in a few places, listed here in increasing order of my personal astonishment:

Bush’s approval rating: 28%

How much our electric usage has gone down since we replaced most of our incadescent light bulbs with fluorescents: 30%

Americans who think Iraq is going well: 30%

Americans who don’t know who our Vice President is: 31%

Current Republican presidential contenders who don’t believe in evolution: 30%

You know that last one must’ve amazed me the most, because I had to break out the italics for it. Freakin’ astonishing.

Read Maus’s blog. It makes me long for the days when I had interesting things to say. (Or, at least, interesting ways to describe uninteresting things.)

Our electric bills have suddenly gone sharply down in the last three months. Like, 30% or so. Debb and I have been trying to figure out why this could be–we haven’t really changed much, and in fact, rates have increased in our area. And rates wouldn’t matter, anyway, our bill have a little bar chart of electric usage, and we can see the amount of energy we’ve been using has significantly dropped.

The best we can figure is that we changed nearly all our lightbulbs to fluorescents. That’s the only difference we can pinpoint. And if that’s true, buying them on sale at Home Depot–8 bucks for four of em–is really paying off. Screw the “will give savings over two years” bit, they’re already saving us money.