the bitter shack of resentment

So Obvious

Bush chooses someone who is not a judge to the highest court. This isn't even funny anymore. There is no irony when everything fits a pattern, no mater how ridiculous. He also appointed a man who doesn't believe in the U.N. to be ambassador to that organization. He appointed as head of the intelligence community a man who participated in the illegal selling of arms to fund terrorism in Latin America.

You can't even laugh anymore.

Squishy, Happy News

Eight trained bottlenose dolphins who were washed out of their tank at a Gukfport aqarium by a storm surge from Katrina three weeks ago, have all been rescued. "They have survived various injuries and predators and have stayed together since the storm." They all seem to be relatively OK.

The Greatest Novel of All Time?

Fifty of one hundred writers worldwide said the greatest novel ever written is "Don Quixote of La Mancha." I say "To Kill a Mockingbird." What's yours?

Know Thy Neighbor If You Dare

Interesting, if slightly spooky, idea to combat people who don't agree with you at the ballot box: publish the names and addresses of everybody who signed a petition to put a measure you don't like on the ballot. That's what gay rights advocates are doing in Massachussetts, where a measure to amend the state constitution to "define marriage" as between a man and a woman has made the ballot thanks to a petition drive.

KnowThyNeighbor.org makes the lesbian in me cheer and the privacy advocate in me cringe. In a way, though, you shouldn't sign your name to something if you don't have the cojones to stand up for what it stands for. On the other hand, what's to stop someone from torching someone's house or harassing their kids simply because they hold a perfectly legal political opinion? It could just as easily be us - targeted for harassment or bashing for signing a petition in favor of gay rights.

There is a precedent of course. Remember when anti-abortion activists published the home addresses of doctors who performed abortions, and how that resulted in one being shot to death through his kitchen window? That practice was found to be illegal. So how is this different?

R.I.P, Racist

Of Rehnquist, David Corn says In recent years, there has been no other Supreme Court justice who had a personal history so loaded with racism.

The Price of Devolution

I see the federal government shifting into blame mode, deciding to deflect the blame they rightly earned to state and local government officials. This is what the movement for state's rights by feds means. The opportunity to divest themselves of responsibility for anything that happens within the nation. It's shameful in the extreme. This should, but of course won't, shift the tide back to a movement for our national government to be the ultimate caregiver to the nation that puts them in power. New Orleans is part of America, not part of the nation of Louisiana. These are thousands of Americans - not African-Americans, not poor Americans, not southern Americans, not red state or blue state Americans, but Americans. Truman, the bastard, even had the class to say The Buck Stops Here. That's the Oval Office. Not the Mississippi Bridge out of New Orleans.

It's states right, not state's responsibilities. If New Haven Connecticut were underwater, or Williamsburg, VA, or Galveston, TX, you better believe this would look different. Is Connecticut or Virginia, or Texas any less a state worthy of rights? Or less responsible for catastrophe? Then explain to me the difference.

I honestly don't believe that the federal government targeted New Orleans for criminal neglect. But I do think it chose to take a calculated risk to underfund emergency planning there, in favor or a war, tax cuts, and comforting the comfortable. This is but a peek at what that really costs.

Ray Nagin for President

Let me be probably the 3,000th to say it.

Disasters Pile On

Rehnquist is dead. You know we're in deep shit when a liberal is SAD that he's dead. Now we get an impeachably incompetent president in a position to fuck up our country for decades, perhaps centuries to come. This, the hurricane ... I am seriously regretting not moving to Canada in 2000.

I'm going to hold a funeral mass for civil rights.

Looting and Race

Brilliant:

"Let me say a few things here. The first is that the city of New Orleans is, according to the last census, 67.3 percent black. Given that looting is predictable under any significant breakdown of social order, who would you expect to find out there smashing windows when the lights go out? Ethnic Hawaiians?"

Where's Dick?

What, no press conferences? Is he dead?