Among the many things George W Bush should give thanks for on this holiday, along with the silver spoon lodged in his craw at birth and the many Family-connected saviours who have bailed his butt out of every one of his abject failures except his sorry excuse for a presidency, is the insistently puerile state of arrested adolescence in which American culture is caught like a spy in a honey-trap. Like adolescents, we habitually over-react to threats; like adolescents, we are focused on appearances to the exclusion of everything else; and like adolescents, we are easily distracted by our hormones. The only thing the Bush Invitation-Only Campaign Tour was missing was a string of Vegas dancing girls high-stepping on stage behind him. Maybe next time, assuming he bothers with the fraud of an 'election' at all.

Grownups knew better than to be fooled by his pig-ignorant posturing and propagandistic sloganeering; the adolescents among us took those the way they would take a cheerleader's pump-you-up excesses during the local Turkey-Day matches. Grownups knew that his simple-minded repetition of a few key phrases showed how thinly he grasped the concept--any concept; adolescents took it as Deep Thought, MTV-style. Grownups understood that his refusal to adapt, instead focusing like a laser on making sure he never admitted a mistake, meant that his mind was solidly closed to any new idea that threatened to intrude on its blissfully ignorant serenity; adolescents thought it meant he was 'strong', since being blindingly stubborn is how they measure strength.

George W Bush and an adolescent society were made for each other, let's face it. The only real surprise in retrospect is that there turned out to be as many grownups as there were. But they've all gone back to their books and blogs and are listening to NPR right now, so we can spend some time meditating on what might have been had the culture been more 17-ish than 16-ish.

Purely as an exercise, for instance, we could always amuse ourselves with the spectacle of how 'news' cheerfully debases itself for the 15 and 16 yr-old minds who dominate tube-watching.



Once upon a time, Spencer Tunick's nude group photographs inspired criticism of our adolescent snickering and Puritan outrage over nudity and sexuality, challenging us to look at nude bodies in a more adult way: not as objects of what the SCOTUS might call 'prurient interest' during one of its periodic convulsions of sexual hysteria, but as simple, natural forms--something we all have whether we hide it or not. As Sandra Bernhart put it: 'I'm naked under my clothes.' So aren't we all.

But forget all that intellectual junk. Forget art. And for gawd's-sake forget 'social commentary'. What we want on our tv screens is a good-looking female body strutting all her stuff for the camera--and us. And please let it be a 'news reporter' so we have a sort-of socially-acceptable excuse to feast our eyes all the way through the photo 'installation'.

Local 'news' has been a joke for decades, ever since the small cadre of news 'consultants' got their hooks into station managers, scaring them with how big an audience the competition was going to get by listening to their 'advice', advice that centered around exploiting sensationalism at every conceivable opportunity: 'If it thinks, it stinks. If it bleeds, it leads.' For 20 years, local tv news has descended further and further into the same pit which housed the National Enquirer and the NY Post, avoiding by mere inches the mother-gives-birth-to-cow and aliens-have-abducted-Madonna stories. But they always loomed on the horizon.

Well, after this, there may be no stopping them. Given the whopping success of this 'story' in the ratings, we can no doubt look forward in the future to features like 'Tonight's Nude', the tv equivalent of the Post's famous Page Six centerfold, only there won't be any namby-pamby cheesecake: full-frontal all the way. And hard news, barely more than three minutes of headlines per hour now, will be cut to a whisper that races by your consciousness without a chance to register as we speed along to the 5 minutes devoted to yet another 'human interest' story that involves yet another beautiful young woman yet again shedding her outer garments for the glory of 'reporting' the 'news'.

Let's be clear: lord knows I have nothing against naked bodies. I like them, especially attractive female ones (and in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I find almost any naked female body attractive, especially if I like the woman living in it). I like looking at them. I find them...inspiring. And I don't have anything against showing them on television. I had some bad moments when my daughter was growing up that centered around my fear that she would think she wasn't attractive if she didn't look like Heather Locklear or Pam Anderson, never mind Brooke Burke or Cindy Crawford. But although there were a couple of scary years when she went out of her way to prove how sexy she was, ultimately, by 19, her native good sense and down-to-earth, blunt honesty had asserted themselves. She spared herself the buleimia that way too many of her friends practiced, and escaped the damage to her self-esteem that I had imagined would be her inevitable fate. She emerged from adolescence liking herself and liking the way the man she eventually married responded to the way she looked. He didn't care if she didn't look like Cindy Crawford. He was in love with her (still is, I hasten to add), and to him she was (and always will be, I think, although these things are hard to predict) beautiful because of who she was, not because of what she looked like, nude or not.

So what's my problem if it isn't nudity on tv? I'll put it as simply as I can for the cheap seats:

IT WAS A RATINGS STUNT. IT WASN'T, ISN'T, AND NEVER WILL BE 'NEWS', AND IT DOESN'T BELONG ON A 'NEWS' SHOW UNLESS WE'VE GIVEN UP ALL HOPE OF EVER AGAIN HAVING ANYTHING THAT APPROACHES A RESPONSIBLE PRESS.

There. So? Have we given up? Is the circus all we want? Sure looks that way from here.

After weeks of talking about this, or so it seems to me, the first issue of my first webzine devoted to highlighting a few of the best blog-posts I could find has finally been published.


Blog Tower

Blog Tower will, I hope, serve several purposes. First, it will give people a second chance to read great posts they may have missed the first time around. Second, it will start to call attention to the great writing in blogs that's been going largely unnoticed not just by the general public but by blog readers themselves. And third, it will foster continuing conversations about issues that tend to get picked up and dropped along with the daily news by re-publishing posts on those issues in special sections.

In this first issue, for instance, the Religion page is devoted to posts about the role of faith in public life and includes two posts written by evangelicals--one who still is and opposes an evangelical litmus test, and one who left the movement and talks about why--as well as a centrist's thoughts on the 'Great Awakening' and what it might mean.

But there's lots more: pages on politics, the arts, and humor, as well as a page that will showcase a featured article in every issue. This issue it's a moving, beautifully written piece by a soldier serving in Iraq who finds her father's face in the faces of the Iraqis around her. In a way, it's a meditation on the universality of laugh lines, and how to read them.

I suppose Thanksgiving week wasn't the best time to launch an effort like this. What can I say? I forgot. But I hope when things calm down next week you'll take a few moments to check out the work presented by Blog Tower, and then check out the sites where the pieces come from. A few of them regular readers of the Alley will be familiar with, but quite a few more they may not be, and they're all worth more than one look.

Fresh from their 'victory' installing a theocrat back into power, chief Xtian fundie Jerry Falwell is readying the Band of Angels who will transform American law according to Old Testament Biblical standards by attaching a law school to his Baptist college, Liberty University, which you may take it from me is an oxymoron since it intends to remove 'liberty' from a Godless secular society and replace it with obedience to my-way-or-prison canonical law.

LYNCHBURG, Va. — What Debra Meador read disturbed her. It didn't seem right that schoolchildren were once barred from holding prayer groups after class. Or that the Ten Commandments couldn't be displayed in a government building.

So at 34, the human relations specialist from Lynchburg made good on a longtime interest by enrolling in law school. But unlike most prospective lawyers, she applied to only one place.

"I wanted to take it in a Christian setting," said Meador, a member of the inaugural law class at Liberty University, a Baptist college founded here in 1971 by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. "I don't believe anyone could be neutral. We're willing to tell you what we believe and to follow that."

The school, like Meador, who aspires to argue cases before the Supreme Court, has grand designs. Right now, it has only 60 students and six faculty members. Provisional accreditation by the American Bar Assn. — which certifies that a school has been evaluated on the quality of its legal education and allows students to sit for the bar exam in any state — is at least two years away.

But by teaching law from a Christian perspective, Falwell hopes to train a cadre of Christian lawyers to fight what he sees as the growing secularization of public life across the country.

Imagine that--a secular society daring to be secular. How dreadful! We'll have none of that nonsense if Jerry has anything to say about it. And he does. His little theocratic law school is only the beginning. It will be the precursor of an entire movement, bolstered by lawyers he's trained, which aims to 're-interpret' the Constitution for a while before it despenses with it entirely and uses the Book of Leviticus instead. Think I'm kidding?

The school plans to offer select students hands-on experience with a law firm that takes on constitutional issues. That would occur when Liberty Counsel, a legal organization in Orlando, Fla., that focuses on cases involving religion and traditional values, moves its legislative arm to the campus.

Best known for establishing in 1979 the Moral Majority, one of the first evangelical efforts to affect political discourse, Falwell sees the law school as an extension of his mission.

"We certainly are training Christian activists," Falwell, who this month announced the creation of a 21st century version of the Moral Majority that aims to re-energize religious conservatives, said in an interview last week. "We're turning their attention to understand the Bible is the infallible word of God, that the American Constitution is a sacred document and that the Christian worldview is their matrix of service."

But Jerry, the 'sacred' Constitution and the Bible conflict in some very important ways. Like separating church and state, just as an example I pulled out of a hat. Which gets priority when they clash? Wait, wait, don't tell me....

But not to worry. Jerry isn't actually doing the teaching. Yet...

But for many students, the Christianity at the school's core does not mandate that they promote religion in the courtroom. Nor do faculty members see producing such graduates as their goal. As they point out, lawyers — not Falwell — do the teaching.

For Brad Fraser, a 23-year-old Pennsylvanian who completed his undergraduate degree at Liberty, the law school's purpose is not "to legislate morality. Our goal is to get back to the underlying principles that form the law."

Sure it is. Oddly enough, it's centrist Christians who are most disturbed by this development.

It's a direction that has raised eyebrows among some civil libertarians and constitutional law scholars who fear that schools like Liberty are designed to preach, not teach.

"I don't believe that the understanding of Jerry Falwell about the history of America and of the American Constitution is remotely accurate, nor is it ethically responsible," said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and a longtime critic of Falwell. "It is designed to turn America into his view of a Christian nation…. When you get these insular institutions who believe they are right and fighting the entire world, you get extremists coming out as graduates."

No kidding.

The 9/11 Reforms Bill is going nowhere fast in the House, first because the Pentagon's pet monkey, CA Cong Duncan Hunter, is protecting their interests using the excuse that the bill would somehow prevent their collection of field intelligence, and second because chief House whacko James Sensenbrunner is going to make goddam sure that none o' them goddam 'aliens' gets a goddam driver's licence.And so it goes.

WASHINGTON — Defying their leadership and direct appeals from President Bush and Vice President Cheney, two powerful House Republicans on Saturday blocked intelligence reform legislation that would put a single director in charge of the nation's spy agencies.

Passage of the legislation that would have implemented recommendations from the Sept. 11 commission had appeared likely earlier in the day. Commission members and families of the victims of the terrorist attacks reacted with frustration and outrage at the reversal.

The prospects of reviving the bill appeared uncertain late Saturday.

Hours after House and Senate negotiators said they had a deal, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said he was unable to persuade Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon) and some other Republicans to support the compromise. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), also opposed elements of the bill.

Funny thing is, the pleas of our Junior Emperor, who actually bestirred himself in this crisis long enough to pick up the phone to do a little political arm-twisting, cut no ice with these two AT ALL.

The two chairmen stood firm even after the president called Sensenbrenner from Santiago, Chile, where Bush was attending a summit of Asian and Pacific leaders, to urge him to make a compromise. Vice President Cheney asked Hunter to do the same.

Hunter said the bill would undermine the Pentagon's ability to obtain real-time intelligence during a battle. Sensenbrenner objected to stripping out controversial law enforcement and immigration provisions that had been included in the House's intelligence bill.

"We're just doing our jobs," Hunter said in an interview.

Uh-huh.

What happened to all that 'political capital' Junior was bragging about not so long ago? I guess a polite phone call on metaphoprical bended knee isn't enough. I guess the political dollar is in no better shape than the real one.

Did you note the absence of the House Majority Leader in this fracas? Hmm? Where is The Hammer in all this? Having not just cleared his plate of that pesky 'illegal campaign contribution' nonsense but gotten the whistleblower censured for daring to open his mouth about it, you'd think he'd be riding high, wide and handsome to the rescue.

But he isn't. He's invisible. Personna non here. Why is that, one wonders? Is he going to prove his power by storming in later on to do what the President and the House Speaker were unable to do? Or is he proving his power now? Is he, mayhap, protecting his constituency--defense corporations--from the depredations of odious regulations that will make it harder for them to do business with their terrorist clients?

I'm just asking.

Junior is preparing the ground for war again but is struggling to choose an enemy--we have so many now. After ignoring North Korea and Iran for several years and insulting the leaderships of each country whenever the opportunity presented itself, he spent his holiday in Chile this weekend rattling sabers and making veiled threats against both of them--a twofer.

SANTIAGO, Chile, Nov. 20 - President Bush increased the administration's pressure on Iran on Saturday, saying there were indications that the country was speeding forward in its production of a key ingredient for nuclear weapons fuel, a move he said was "a very serious matter'' that undercut Iran's denials that it was seeking to build weapons.

On the first day here of the annual gathering of Pacific Rim leaders, his first summit meeting since winning re-election, Mr. Bush also tried to re-establish a unified front against the other nuclear challenge facing his second term: North Korea.

In back-to-back meetings with the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea here Saturday morning, Mr. Bush urged each to draw North Korea back into six-nation negotiations. And in a speech later, he issued a direct challenge to North Korea's reclusive leader that echoed President Reagan's demand in 1987 for the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. After the meetings, he said, he was convinced "that the will is strong, that the effort is united and the message is clear to Mr. Kim Jong Il: Get rid of your nuclear weapons programs."
(emphasis added)

The NYT, with its now-standard bit of Emperor-coddling, mentioned in passing that his not-so-benign 4-years of neglect has resulted in the Bush Admin allowing NKorea to produce enough weapons-grade plutonium to build six (6--count 'em [Republicans with one hand busily raiding the Treasury and stuffing their pockets may remove one shoe to facilitate their count]) nuclear weapons already. They also dutifully report that NKorea's weaponizing after he refused to talk to them is in fact the fault of China and Japan (note bolded portion of previous quote), whose laps he dumped this problem in when he couldn't be bothered to spare the time from one of his many vacations, and that Iran's sudden intransigence is the fault of Europe--

[I]n Iran's case, he is clearly skeptical about a European-led effort to suspend the country's manufacture of nuclear material.

--especially those cheese-eating surrender-monkeys in Paris. Cleary war is called for and Junior will no doubt be calling for it as soon as he has an excuse Karl Rove thinks will fly with the kool-aid drinkers, which should be any day now. Let's face it, the KADs don't demand much in the way of proof. Another Chalabi-style forgery should do it, something nice and subtle, like:

Dear Mighty Kim:

Those bastard Americans that we hate because they're so free will get what's coming to them pretty soon now, hee-hee! The 5000-megaton warhead has been loaded onto the oxcart which will be flown into the US on Junkbutt Airlines for only $3.75--one way (hee hee). Boy, will those freedom-loving running dogs hate that! Then it will be parked inconpicuously on the White House lawn where those stupid US of A'ers will think it's a new geranium box for the Rose Garden.

What a surprise for them! Hee hee!

signed,

A North Korean Nuclear Scientist named Lee or Wong. Whatever.

The RWSM will be up in arms, ranting and raving about how this is convincing proof that the NKoreans developed nuclear weapons with the single intention of destroying us, all the cliches from the 'Yellow Peril' days will get drug out of the closet where they've been kept shined and polished and waiting patiently since VJ Day, and the cry of the Blood-Drunk American Right with which we're all now so familiar will ring out strong and proud:

'NUKE THE FUCKING SLOPES!"

Ah yes, I love the sound of American bigots demanding revenge for insults they don't understand. It renews my faith in our kulchah.

One jarring note in the general hilarity was Colin's refusal to play the game.

Following Mr. Bush's assertion on Saturday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment, Mr. Powell appeared at a news conference here with Foreign Minister Ignacio Walker Prieto of Chile and was asked to provide details to back that up but declined to do so.

Aw. come on, Colin. We wanna see another slide show!

I've long suspected that there was more--or rather, less--to the UN's so-called Oil-for-Food 'scandal' than met the eye. For one thing, Ahmad Chalabi was up to his eyeballs in it, and Chalabi's core presence in anything makes me nervous. If he's told the truth once in his entire life, it's unconfirmed by anybody outside his immediate family. In this week's MoJo, Bradford Plumer goes through it step-by-step and it's worse than you thought.

In January of 2004, al-Mada, an independent newspaper, published a list of 270 beneficiaries—a list including multi-national corporations, UN officials, and top French and Russian politicians—who had received oil contracts from Saddam in exchange for either supporting the Iraqi regime, helping Saddam import illegal materials, or simply ignoring the ongoing corruption. These beneficiaries could then turn around and sell the contracts to legitimate oil traders, making a tidy profit.

Now here's where the tale gets complicated. According to AFP, Al-Mada "refused to disclose how [it] procured the documents." The documents had allegedly come from the Iraqi Oil Ministry, which at the time was run by a group of Iraqi exiles, including Fadhil Chalabi—a cousin of Ahmed Chalabi, the con man whose phony intelligence helped lead the Pentagon to war. This same Oil Ministry, note, had already issued other documents in May of 2003 alleging that British MP George Galloway—a prominent critic of the Iraq war—had received bribed from Saddam's regime through oil-for-food. Those documents, in fact, turned out to be forgeries. The Chalabi track record was not exactly airtight.

That's like saying Madonna isn't exactly a virgin. (Are you now beginning to suspect that you know where the Niger 'yellowcake' forgeries came from? Uh-huh....) The Chalabi family's reputation rests on lies, fraud, extortion, forgery, blackmail, and theft. Not a team of horses you'd want to hitch your wagon to when you're hauling your living room sofa to the dump, let alone the family heirlooms on their way to the safety deposit box. But that's who's behind the 'scandal'.

So once the names were published, two--not one, two--investigations started...in Iraq. One was initiated by now-ex-Viceroy Paul Bremer, the other by--wait for it--Ahmad Chalabi. Of course. Ahmad is always most comfortable when he's investigating himself. The investigators are so much easier to get along with than outsiders, and they always find his evidence compelling without checking it--a plus. Chalabi's right-hand-man in this investigation was one Claude Hankes Drielsma, and it's Drielsma-derived 'evidence' that the right-wing scum machine is using to dump on the UN. Drielsma was also at the center of one of the more absurd little dramas in this story--the 'lost' records. Remember the raid on Chalabi's HQ last summer?

It wasn't long before Bremer and Chalabi started clashing over their investigations, with each side trying to lead the charge. The most stunning allegations—of international figures implicated in the scandal—all came from Chalabi's office, though no one else was allowed to verify his documents. In a May raid of Chalabi's offices, Bremer reportedly seized files related to the oil-for-food program, thus complicating the ability of KPMG to complete its audit. (KPMG eventually withdrew from the investigation, citing Chalabi's refusal to pay for its services.) But Bremer couldn't find all of Chalabi's files—as the Daily Telegraph reported, on the day of the raid, Chalabi and Hankes-Drielsma announced that their computer files on the scandal had been "destroyed by hackers," and the backup disks mysteriously "wiped out." It was too bad, Hankes Drielsma said: Had it not been for the bad breaks, "[t]his report would have been even more damning than anticipated."

I remember reading this at the time and wondering if Chalabi and his henchmen couldn't have at least tried to come up with a more believable, less transparent excuse. One likes to feel that one's enemies at least had to work a little to defraud one. It's depressing when they think so little of your brain that they don't figure they have to bother expending the energy.

The investigations are on-going, the names haven't yet--a year later--been verified, and Chalabi is, to put it charitably, in everybody's doghouse except Richard Perle's (who still thinks Ahmad is George Washington re-incarnated; what is it with these doofus neocons, anyway? Laurie Mylroie, Ahmad Chalabi--don't they ever get enthralled with somebody who's at least sane? And not a crook?). This is not to say that a scandal doesn't exist--preliminary evidence is overwhelming that it does--only that it's likely a lot less abnormal and a lot more pedestrian than the hysterical right-wing glee over nailing the evil UN would have you believe. The wilder charges against Kofi Annan that the RWSM is spreading like a do-it-yourself cancer are almost certainly untrue, Bill Safire's giggling notwithstanding, and I wouldn't hold my breath about the rest.

Somewhere between a tempest-in-a-teapot and the Titanic, the truth lies.

This post started as a comment at Fact-esque, trying to answer a question eRobin had asked: It's all well and good to talk about the Democrats finally getting tough ('No surrender, no compromise, no bipartisanship, no civility, no reaching out to Republican officeholders [as opposed to detachable Republican voters]: nothing but scorched earth from here to victory'), but realistically, she asked, 'what are their options?' Here's what I think one of their options is.

They can do what the Pubs did when they were out of power--stonewall. That's why Harry Reid is potentially such a good choice. He's a master parliamentarian and he's brilliant at looking innocent and trustworthy asnd helpful and oh so conciliatory even as he's building a casket that co-incidentally fits you like a glove. He's capable of playing as rough as he has to, and if the Dems stay united, he could make it impossible for the Pubs to do much of anything.

If he does, then they wait out the inevitable backlash when the Xtian fundies and the rabid right start screaming and eating their own, as they've already begun doing with Specter. It isn't going to take much more for the mods to realize their days are numbered with the fanatics leading the party--there's no Dem threat to unite them anymore and the fundie-rads want what they want and they want it NOW. Anybody who gets in their way is going to be mowed down.

I want Specter destroyed, humiliated. That's what it's going to take to make the mods, as in-denial as they are, realize that they have zero chance to survive the extremists unless they cross the aisle occasionally and flex their muscle.

I think in a few months, a year at most, we're going to see the barbarism lurking just under the surface break into the open. We've only had a little taste so far, and it's scaring all the people who were telling themselves Junior was going to back off in his 2nd term. He isn't, and it's becoming obvious he isn't. When the House floor starts to run with blood, all bets are off and a whole new set of alliances will form based on sheer survival.

The mods still don't have any real idea how much danger they're in. They're still telling themselves that compromise is possible, that Junior will finally start acting like a real democratic leader and deal with the opposition. They bought the Rove Show--the 'compassionate conservative who's a uniter, not a divider'--but that illusion is about to get busted into a hundred million pieces. The CIA, State, and the WH are being purged of any and all dissent and turned over to hardliners with no history of or interest in talking let alone listening. Anybody who doesn't get with the program and join the choir is 'the enemy', and that includes the mods, who will soon find themselves under fire from the right-wing Noise Machine, dissed and dismissed as RINO's. They will watch as the TB's from the far, far, whacko right are encouraged by the party leadership to take their jobs. They'll find themselves shut out of Republican committee meetings and their districts ignored when the pork is being handed out.

This will provide an enormous opportunity for the Democrats to forge an alliance with the mods without sacrificing their issues, moving further to the right, or descending into irrelevance shouting at an empty chamber. The mods will get NOTHING from the radical Pubs but contempt. Their only hope is going to be by making common cause with the Dems over issues like the deficit and the most egregiously un-Constitutional aspects of the PATRIOT Act, issues the Dems won't have to bend on at all.

The beauty of the psychology here is that losing the mods in a public way--and losing a vote or two to the mod-R/Dem alliance--will drive the extremists not to compromise but to harder positions, marginalizing them exactly as they've tried to marginalize everybody else. They'll lose it, and the brutality and animosity they have for democracy and anyone who disagrees, even in their own party, will become obvious. With the hardline religious right breathing down their necks, they won't have much choice, but the fact is that every one of them is incredibly arrogant and arrogance doesn't do compromise when it sees itself as 'in charge'. It gets huffy, outraged. It attacks those closest to it as 'betrayers of the cause'.

There are advantages to building a party around fanatics (advantages the Dermocrats never exploited even though they had the chance) but there's also a significant downside: fanatics aren't flexible. Fanatics don't respond to reality checks. Fanatics don't bend when the wind direction changes. And fanatics don't forgive people who do. Fanatics set their heels in even deeper and scrteam even louder and punish anybody who doesn't jump to obey. The radical/fundie right may have provided troops and energy for the win but they can turn on a dime if they're disappointed and provide the same troops and energy for destroying their previous champions.

Then, to stop the blood-letting, Junior starts another war as a distraction, probably with Iran, and all hell breaks loose.

Look, I realize their hubris has lasted far longer than I or anyone else thought it could, but the one thing I know for sure is that it can't last forever. Eventually, their arrogance is going to force them across a line nobody can justify, and when that happens, they're finished. If the Dems are smart and play Harry's game, they can hasten that day. If they fudge and start moving to the right, they're finished, too.

The vulnerability in this argument isn't the potential radcon reaction, which as far as psychology is concerned is a lock, but the hold the surrender-monkeys of the DNC have over the Democratic party. They're convinced that the party has to roll over and show its belly or be eaten alive. If their chokehold isn't broken, yet another opportunity for the Democrats to build strength from weakness will be lost. Then we will have no choice--it will be a third party or nothing.

Greens, anyone?

From the Wilderness Society:

One of our last great wild places, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is under fresh attack from the oil industry and their allies in Congress and the Administration. That's why The Wilderness Society has launched an all-out campaign to protect the Arctic wilderness.

But we need your help.

We need to send Congress and the Administration a strong early message that we're NOT going to stand by and watch as America's wild places are sold off to the highest bidder. Take action today.

We can't lose the critical battle to preserve this precious, threatened landscape which is inhabited by wolves, grizzlies, caribou, and millions of migrating birds.

This looming threat is more serious, and more dangerous, than ever before. Anti-wilderness forces in Congress hope to use a backdoor budget process to sneak this giveaway onto the same federal budget the government needs to function. They know that they don't have the votes necessary to enact this ill-conceived plan through the normal legislative process that requires 60 votes to pass such highly controversial measures in the U.S. Senate. The decision to circumvent the normal rules is being made NOW.

Just last week, Rep. Richard Pombo (R-California), a vocal drilling advocate and chairman of the House Resources Committee, claimed that now is “The best chance we've had” to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (CNN.com, 11/10/2004)

Poll after poll has shown that the American people believe some places are so wild, so special, and so important that they should be off limits to oil drilling. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would ruin one of America 's last unspoiled and irreplaceable wild places for just a few months worth of oil that won't be available to consumers for ten years! There are far better ways to meet America 's future energy needs, like making our vehicles more efficient and investing in renewable forms for energy.

Please take a moment to remind your Senator that the vast majority of Americans want the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to remain just the way it is: wild, unspoiled, and free of oil rigs.

With your help, we will protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as an unspoiled legacy for future generations.

Thank you,

Kathy Kilmer
Director, Electronic Communications
The Wilderness Society

With the deficit reaching astronomic proportions and the dollar falling like a rock against--wait for it--THE EURO, for gawd's-sake, the Republicans are showing their usual brand of intense interest in the country's financial distress by raising the debt ceiling $$$800Bil$$$ worth, then hiding in their offices, not even bothering to show up for the debate on the floor.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 - Faced with the prospect of a government unable to pay its bills, the Senate voted on Wednesday to raise the federal debt limit by $800 billion.

Though an increase in the debt ceiling was never in doubt, Republican leaders in both houses of Congress postponed action on it last month, until after the elections, to deprive Democrats of a chance to accuse them of fiscal irresponsibility.

The bill, if approved by the House in a vote expected on Thursday, would authorize the third big increase in the federal borrowing since President Bush took office in 2001. Federal debt has ballooned by $1.4 trillion over the past four years, to $7.4 trillion, and the new ceiling would allow borrowing to reach $8.2 trillion.

With no end in sight to the huge annual budget deficits, which hit a record of $412 billion this year, lawmakers predicted on Wednesday that the new ceiling would probably have to be raised again in about a year.

Democrats, still stinging from their election defeats, voted against the measure and argued that it should be accompanied by rules that would force Congress to pay for new tax cuts with spending cuts or tax increases elsewhere.

"I don't remember anyone during the elections making a promise to raise the federal debt to $8.1 trillion," Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, said. "What we're doing here is just writing another blank check and saying to this administration, 'Go ahead, continue to run record budget deficits.' "
(emphasis added)

They wanted to be 'fiscally irresponsible', they just didn't want the Democrats to be able to prove it before the election. Now, votes in hand, they're ignoring the debate that's taking place on the floor.

Your [puppet] government at work. The Pubs can't even be bothered to show up and defend their destruction of the US economy and the threat it poses to the world economy. But hey, who cares. The election is over. Move on.

My sister sent this to me. It's making the rounds, apparently. I don't think it's real, but I do think we're not that far from the time when it will be. In any case, I thought you'd get a chuckle out of it.

The following is supposedly an actual question given on a Texas A & M University chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different Religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell.

With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, "it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you", and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct...leaving only Heaven thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting "Oh my God."

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A"

I should think so.