Not content with riling the Russian bear, Rumsfeld now is talking tough to the next countries on his hit list, Syria and Iran. Scared yet?
Month: March 2003 (Page 2 of 8)
Great article by Geov Parrish on Working for Change about the future of the anti-war movement. (via lies.com) Parrish makes an important point that “preaching to the choir” may make us feel better, but it’s not going to change anything that matters.
Best made-up profession: Nipple wrangler.
-Created out of a discussion with John and Nik over lunch at La Hacienda, mulling over who made J.Lo’s nipples so pointy and prominent through her Oscar-night gown.
Having done camera work in the past for large events where you were focusing on speakers at the podium, I could almost hear the producer yelling into his headphones, “Pull up! Pull up!”
Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton are demonstrating parental internet blocking software on “The Screen Savers” right now. In showing that blocking software does block some legitimate sites, Leo showed how CyberPatrol blocks the official White House site, whitehouse.gov, because it “contains hate speech.”
You can’t make this stuff up.
Yes, I can write about stuff other than the war
Is anyone still watching “American Idol”? I thought the pseudo-country-rock-whatever theme last night sucked. And the performances weren’t all that great either. Truth be told, generally with AI I watch the first 20 seconds or so of each performance, and then switch over to something else while they finish. I’m never all that interested in listening to the whole thing, and sometimes, even with this much better group, it’s downright painful.
The exception is Ruben Studdard, who leaves everyone else in the dust as far as I’m concerned. When he makes even that stupid Aladdin song sound good, you know he’s something special.
My conservative friend Mr. Mosey unwittingly pointed me to a page involving the President and breath mints. It’s mean and silly, but it made me laugh on a crappy day, and it’s my page, so I’ll link to whatever I want. So there. 🙂
What huge chemical weapons factory? We never said anything about that. Move along.
The Bush administration has just awarded the open-ended contract to put out Iraqi oil well fires to a subsidiary of Halliburton, without any bidding. Until 2000, the CEO of Halliburton was Dick Cheney. Does the name ring a bell?
Although the amount of the contract was not disclosed, estimates put it in the neighborhood of $1 billion. Cheney, who divested himself of Halliburton holdings when he became vice president, still gets approximately $1 million a year in compensation from the company that will benefit hugely from Cheney and Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
Defend that, hawks. I dare you.
As if I needed another reason to love Molly Ivins
“When the man says there will be a tax cut ‘for everyone who pays income taxes’ and that the average tax cut will be $1,100, he expects you not to notice that half of all taxpayers will get less than $100, while people making over $1 million will get an average of $92,200. That averages to $1,100 all right. As The New Yorker pointed out recently, if Bill Gates went to a mission where two nuns were feeding soup to sixty bums, the average net worth of everyone in that room would be $1 billion each. But it would still be Bill Gates, sixty bums, and two nuns.”
-Molly Ivins in “The Progressive”
If we want to live in a purely Darwinian society, where each person just grabs what they can, that’s not hard to create. But is that really the society we want to live in?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the power of words. There has been so much eloquent writing about the world situation in the last few months, writing that has sustained me through some tough times. The internet, and weblogs in particular, allow many more people to express their opinions to the world than has ever been possible in human history. With all this discourse, you would think we would be able to see our commonalities, to work together for common goals. And yet, as Arthur pointed out, in this country we’re more polarized than ever before. We’re just shouting past one another. Words seem only to divide and harden, and increasingly, actions seem to be all that matter. I used to think that writing about the war was therapy for me; now it just seems like lancing a boil that won’t stop draining.
The world of Patrick Henry and Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy, a world where words mattered, where words could change the course of human history, seems very far away. Maybe it’s just because the noise level is so high – surfing the internet is like taking a drink from a firehose, and when you add satellite TV, radio, magazines and all the rest, it’s hard not to feel buried. But I don’t think that completely explains it. Do words still matter? I don’t know, but I hope so. I hope so.