If you could spend one day as any (non-human) animal, which would you choose?
Did He Get a Lollipop?
So, Bush is in good health.
WASHINGTON - President Bush says his annual physical shows him in fine shape — though he's a little upset about those extra five pounds he's packed on.
After a nearly four-hour physical exam, Bush's doctors on Tuesday pronounced him in good health and "fit for duty," the White House said.
[...]
The exam was at the National Naval Medical Center. A fuller report from Bush's doctors was to be released by the White House late Tuesday.
Snow said the president's resting heart rate was 46, similar to the 47 at his exam last July and in the range of a well-trained athlete, and that his total cholesterol of 174 was his best ever. Below 200 is a desirable cholesterol level, and Bush's was 178 last year.
"I'll direct you toward the test results, but he's still healthier than we are," Snow said.
Bush remarked that the Bethesda, Md., hospital, where he usually undergoes his annual exam, is an "amazing operation."
Meanwhile, more than 41 Million Americans wish they could afford a physical.
OMFSM, the Image Warz are so ON
Poutine? Poutine?! Bob King is obviously some kind of French traitor. Not to mention a Punkass. (At least the Head Nurse has some sense.)
Take this, Mr. Roi (not WS)…
WTF? I hear you asking. Why would you make us look at this, Shakespeare’s Sister? you implore. War is never pretty, my pets.
All ye who would challenge Shakes and Spudsy to a battle of weird and disturbing images underestimate both the depth of our depravity and the egregious amounts of time we already spend on the phone giggling about weird nonsense! You are facing an impressive enemy, Image Warriors—and we will not back down.
Caption This Photo
Fill-in-the-Blank Edition. We’re certainly not “United,” so what States of America are we these days?
REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
Your Moment of Zen
Look—it’s Matthew McConaghy being destroyed by Darth Vader! I find this oddly satisfying. (Via Monkeys for Helping.)
Fanboy American authors plead for Harry's life
Tell the truth, now: You wouldn't really mind all that much if Harry Potter bought the big howler in the upcoming seventh and final novel in the series, would you? I mean, what's to miss? In the novels, if not (yet) in the film adaptations, the boy's turned out to be a right foul git. A moody, whiny teenager - no, worse, a moody, whiny teenager with supernatural powers. And poor study habits. Tell me the world needs that. And don't excuse him by saying he's had problems. We've all had problems.
Well, two American authors - grown men of some accomplishment but diminished to the status of fanboy geeks - demeaned themselves by pleading for the boy wizard's life. Feh. Avada Kedavra, I say.
(It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to cross-post...)A Week of Nightmares and Disturbing Smells
By the way... this week is National Clown Week.
As if that wasn't disturbing enough, check this out:
And who do we have to thank for this? Wait for it...National Clown Week
By the President of the United States of America
A Proclamation
Whoever has heard the laughter of a child or seen sudden delight on the face of a lonely old man has understood in those brief moments mysteries deeper than love.
All men are indebted to those who bring such moments of quiet splendor-who redeem sickness and pain with joy. All across America good men in putty noses and baggy trousers following a tradition as old as man's need to touch gently the lives of his fellowman, go into orphanages and children's hospitals, homes for the elderly and for the retarded, and give a part of themselves. Today, as always, clowns and the spirit they represent are as vital to the maintenance of our humanity as the builders and the growers and the governors.
In the folklore of the world is the persistent claim that the heart of a clown is sad, and that all the gladness he provokes is simply a facade for the pain he cannot reveal to the world. In the myth is the kernel of reason: the clown leaves happiness where he goes, and takes misery away with him.
Yet we cannot suppose there is real truth in the myth. For surely the laugh-makers are blessed: they heal the heart of the world.
To call public attention to the charitable activities of clowns and the wholesome entertainment they provide for all our citizens, the Congress by a joint resolution approved October 8, 1970 (Public Law 91-433), has requested the President to designate the week of August 1 through August 7, 1971, as National Clown Week.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, RICHARD NIXON, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim the week of August 1 through August 7, 1971, as National Clown Week. I invite the Governors of the States and the appropriate officials of other areas under the United States flag to issue similar proclamations.
I urge the people of the United States recognize the contributions made by clowns in their entertainment at children's hospitals, charitable institutions, for the mentally retarded, and generally helping to lift the spirits and boost the morale of our people.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this second day of August, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred seventy-one, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred ninety-sixth.
Good heavens... the man was evil!
(Send in... the cross-posts...)
Mel Wants Help from the Jews
I believe this is called chutzpah:
There is no excuse, nor should there be any tolerance, for anyone who thinks or expresses any kind of anti-Semitic remark. I want to apologize specifically to everyone in the Jewish community for the vitriolic and harmful words that I said to a law enforcement officer the night I was arrested on a DUI charge.Aside from maybe, “Wow, I never realized what a total asshole I am until now,” that was all he should have said. But no.
I am a public person, and when I say something, either articulated and thought out, or blurted out in a moment of insanity, my words carry weight in the public arena.A moment of insanity? Nice try. Normally when people get drunk, their honest thoughts come out, not some crazy shit they’ve never thought before. I’ve never said, “Man, George Bush is a great president!” after a couple of martinis.
The tenets of what I profess to believe necessitate that I exercise charity and tolerance as a way of life. Every human being is God's child, and if I wish to honor my God I have to honor his children. But please know from my heart that I am not an anti-Semite. I am not a bigot. Hatred of any kind goes against my faith.The problem isn’t so much what’s in his heart, but what’s in his head—and that seems to be some pretty nasty stuff. And that’s the problem with the kind of “faith” to which conservatives subscribe; it’s not meant to be of the mind. One’s “heart” may have embraced a faith that forbids hatred, but unless the mind follows, unless the mind constructs and embraces a framework of genuine equality, that faith is impotent. An uncontemplated faith is irrational, and has no capacity to contain irrational hatred.
I'm not just asking for forgiveness. I would like to take it one step further, and meet with leaders in the Jewish community, with whom I can have a one on one discussion to discern the appropriate path for healing.See? See? I’m not an anti-Semite! I’ll spend time with Jews!
I have begun an ongoing program of recovery and what I am now realizing is that I cannot do it alone. I am in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken displayDear Apple: Check the tree. Love, Shakespeare’s Sister
and I am asking the Jewish community, whom I have personally offended, to help me on my journey through recovery. Again, I am reaching out to the Jewish community for its help. I know there will be many in that community who will want nothing to do with me, and that would be understandable. But I pray that that door is not forever closed.Prediction: In six months, Mel Gibson will be wearing a red Kabbalah bracelet.
In all seriousness, Gibson clearly realizes he’s fucked up. Fucked up as in “has made a mistake,” and fucked up as in “has serious issues.” And, okay, I admit, it strikes me as a little stupid on its face that he’s begging the Jewish community to help him overcome his anti-Semitism, but, on the other hand, he could learn a bloody thing or two, and if there’s an extremely forgiving and patient rabbi willing to teach him, asking for his help isn’t the worst thing Gibson could do.
But in addition, maybe Mad Max could move beyond the Thunderdome of religion and consider taking on some advice that isn’t faith-based. Even devoutly religious people aren’t required to exclusively trust to faith; if they were, their Almighty wouldn’t have given them free will and the faculties for rational thought. It’s not meant to be an either-or proposition, in spite of what the faith-based community would have us believe.
Can you feel the gilding of America?
Legalized extortion:
They use an old address for someone, so they don't actually get the documents, don't know they are being sued, and therefore don't show up. The debt collectors then get the go-ahead to take their property. Oddly enough, they are able to scrounge up a correct address for that part of the project, thanks to the constables, tow lot operators, and deputy sheriffs working for them.Go read the whole thing.
The people [they] target are working- and lower-middle-class, or are among the ranks of the working poor. They are the elderly, the disabled, and the economically disenfranchised. Some of these people cannot get to work with no car. Some of these people paid off their debts years ago, but collection agencies are not often questioned about the veracity of their information. It's all about gouging poor people.
Oh, the Humanity!
Won't someone please think of the guards?
WASHINGTON (AFP) - "War on terror" detainees are hurling spit, urine, feces and the occasional flip-flop at guards in a cat-and-mouse struggle at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, documents released by the Pentagon show.Good lord! What savages! I simply cannot comprehend why they might behave this way!
The skirmishes between prisoners and guards are succinctly recorded in incident reports made public by the Pentagon following a Freedom of Information Act request made by a conservative legal group, the Landmark Legal Foundation.
About 11,000 documents were posted with no notice in mid-June on a Pentagon website, each one giving a brief description of an incident and the time and day they occurred.
Numerous incident reports recount prisoners waiting for the bean hole to open and then hurl cups of urine or feces at the guards.I'm sure the Landmark Legal Foundation will immediately recommend legislation to protect Guantanamo guards from poo.
Toothpaste tubes, meal trays, plastic utensils, and an apple were among the objects thrown at guards, according to the reports.
On July 6, 2005, a detainee "threw a flip flop out of the bean hole striking the guard, then threw his other flip flop at the block guard missing her," a report said.
Other attacks made use of the element of surprise.
A report on July 23, 2005 tells of a block guard "walking the tier" at 9:50 pm and noticing that all the detainees were praying except one.
"The guard momentarily paused as he walked past at which time the detainee spit on the guard's face and into his left eye," the report said.
(The cross-post dance is your chance to do the hump...)
Fidel Castro secretly cedes power to Elian Gonzalez
Though most news outlets are reporting that Cuban President Fidel Castro has ceded power to his brother Raul due to medical concerns, this weblog has confirmed that the official succession account is a mere cover story. The truth is far more incredible: Castro has actually ceded his political authority to Elián Gonzalez, the Cuban child rescued from the sea following an ill-fated attempt to enter the United States, and who subsequently became the center of a bitter immigration and custody battle.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, Cuban officials disclosed that Castro has been increasingly consumed by thoughts of mortality accompanying health complications, and has confided to his brother that the Gonzalez child has appeared to him in recent dreams, floating upon ocean waters and borne by dolphins. These dreams may have been influenced by accounts that Elián is considered by some to be a personification of an Afro-Cuban deity named Eleggua, and that the child is viewed by some as a conflation of Moses and the Messiah. Convinced that young Elián was destined to succeed him, Castro sought out the "El Nino de los Delfines" - currently an ordinary schoolchild - and offered him the seat of power in Havana. According to this account, Raul will serve as a figurehead until the Gonzalez child comes of age.
This news was met with mixed reactions by the Cuban exile community in Miami. Though many here have viewed the news of Castro's recent ill health as a hopeful sign of change, others worry that the Cuban government is using Elián to further its own cynical political ends. Enrique Ferrer, an exile who made regular appearances at the Miami home in which Elián stayed, said that the ascension of the Gonzalez child represents a pivotal moment in history:
"If Elián were just a child, Fidel would not have bothered with him," said Ferrar. "Fidel knows he is divine, and wants to destroy him...Elián's life is not his own; its God's. He will either become the future leader of the Cuban exile community, the one whose salvation ensured the death of Castro, or he will be...reprogrammed and ensure the survival of Cuban communism."
The Bush administration has declined to comment on the future of American relations with a Cuba governed by a President Elián.
(Satire drawn on "The Elián Gonzalez 'Religious Movement'" at ReligiousTolerance.org. Cross-posted.)
Hot enough for ya?
President Bush went in this morning for his annual physical exam, checking in to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., for a long morning of tests which should yield at least a scintilla of good news on this troubling first day of August. The president is in great shape – physically, if not politically. But more on that later.There’s something perfect about the symbolism. As large swaths of the country sweat it out in the heat, and those of us with air conditioning sweat out spiraling energy costs, and those of us without—also most likely not to have health coverage—sweat out their very survival, and our soldiers sweat it out in Iraq and Afghanistan, and warriors and civilians sweat it out in Israel and Lebanon, President Bush coolly passes a stress test in an air conditioned medical center.
There's a glacier melting somewhere. And so am I. They are predicting highs of 100 degrees Farenheit today, tomorrow and Thursday here in the nation's capital. But temperatures already have pushed past 100 degrees from Los Angeles to Bismarck, N.D., and word arrived this morning of an electrical power outage in Chicago, which should make for more woe. Around here, they tell us to not even wander outside, if we don't have to, on days like these. They warn us about a Code Red. And that's not Homeland Security talking. That's the Health Department. Maybe I'll call in Red.
For Bush, the political good news is that his job-approval rating has held about steady through perhaps the roughest weekend of the summer…
But for Bush, the political bad news is that job-approval rating: 40 percent approval, according to the results of a weekend Gallup Poll released today.
…Some contend that the U.S. is unable to play its traditional role of "honest broker'' in the Middle East in the current crisis, partly because of the three years of costly warfare that the U.S. has waged in Iraq and partly because of the solid support that the Bush administration has provided for Israel, with the U.S. laying the blame for the conflict on Hezbollah.
But Michele Dunne, an expert in Arab affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, suggests that the Bush administration is not doing more because it is simply unwilling to engage in "the nitty-gritty'' of the diplomacy needed to bring an end to hostilities.
…It's a lot to think about, as they crank up the treadmill under the 60-year-old president this morning. It'll be air-conditioned in Bethesda. And if the past is prologue, the president ought to pass his stress test with flying colors. But it's hot here in Washington these days, it's hot in the Middle East, and November is beginning to look a little hotter every day.
Which, by the way, reminds me of this month last summer: “As his limo passes by protesters holding pictures of Casey Sheehan, is he really thinking about how fortunate he is not to be Cindy, or instead about the bitter irony of escaping a fate like Casey’s only to condemn another generation? Or does he just see the trickles of sweat running down their brows from standing in the hot Texas sun, and ask his driver to turn up the air conditioning, as he turns away and closes his eyes?”
The World’s Greatest Untapped Resource
“There’s a natural resource that exists everywhere on the planet that could improve conditions and help end poverty…yet it’s been largely ignored.”
Find out what it is here…then continue below the fold.
I saw this commercial last night and found it incredibly moving (not to mention effective), so perfectly encapsulating in such a small space the notion that, more pointedly than perhaps any other, separates progressives from conservatives—equality enriches us all.
A woman who is not free to choose her destiny—who has no control over her health, her reproduction, her education—suffers as an individual, which we all understand, but it is the larger picture of millions and millions of women denied those freedoms—hence culminating in an almost incomprehensible level of unrealized potential—that is rarely addressed.
Oppression is a useful tool to those who themselves are oppressed; a man who is detained in his dire conditions by the stranglehold of poverty may find some solace in exacting dominion over women, or minorities, or gays. Like a bullied child who turns into a bully, he masks his feelings of despair and helplessness by exacting brute authority over anyone weaker, anyone he can find to submit to his diminished but determined will.
As long as I am stronger than someone, it means I am not weak.
Likewise, it a useful tool to those who fear losing their status, who know they have come by their prosperity and opportunities through no endeavor of their own, but a fortunate twist of fate. Such enviable circumstances being nothing more than a happy accident can burden their benefactors with wracking anxiety, driving them in desperation to fashion a means of control—and, finding they cannot will guarantees against loss into existence, they instead create barriers against gain for others, as if life is a zero-sum game.
If another man becomes rich, someone will have to become poor, and it isn’t going to me, by god.
The desire to oppress is too useful to too many people for it to magically disappear out of the goodness of hearts. There will always be bad hearts with bad intentions. Eradicating oppression of the magnitude it now exists around the globe is contingent upon empowering the oppressed communities—giving them the chances they are denied and telling them they have the right to take them. And that depends on our collective willingness to, well, CARE. What would it mean for us all if every person who wanted to get an education…could? What would it mean for us all if every person who wanted to work on ending poverty, negotiating peace, curing diseases…did? What would this world look like if everyone had the ability to live up to her or his potential?
Equality enriches us all.
(Crossposted at AlterNet PEEK.)
Quiet, Borny
Essentially the most brilliant phrase I've heard to describe the Republican attitude towards needy children.
The cartoon's pretty damn funny, too.
Unintentional Hilarity
Because everything that the Lefty blogosphere does is traitorous and stupid—especially netroots organizing, which leads to traitorous shenanigans like trying to oust good Republicans like Joe Lieberman from your party—the conservative blogosphere spends lots and lots of time denouncing it. And then, you know, copying it.
Witness the emergence of Rightroots, complete with its own logo, "which turns the already less-than-nimble GOP elephant into an even less dextrous, root-footed creature."
Says Paul: "I get the intended metaphor, but it's even easier to see an alternative one: If you thought the party that led us into unending war and a record-breaking deficit can't change... you're right."
And if you're part of that party...you may be Rightroots!
(Crossposted at AlterNet PEEK.)
Don't call it a comeback; he's been here for years, rockin' his peers...
Creature reports that Darwin is staging a comeback in Kansas:
God and Charles Darwin are not on the primary ballot in Kansas on Tuesday, but once again a contentious schools election has religion and science at odds in a state that has restaged a three-quarter-century battle over the teaching of evolution.Sniffing a conservative backlash, Creature muses, "Crazy can only hold on for so long." Let it be as you say, sir.
Less than a year after a conservative Republican majority on the State Board of Education adopted rules for teaching science containing one of the broadest challenges in the nation to Darwin’s theory of evolution, moderate Republicans and Democrats are mounting a fierce counterattack. They want to retake power and switch the standards back to what they call conventional science.
(Crossposted at AlterNet PEEK.)
Question of the Day
Do you still own a favorite toy you had as a kid? If so, what it is? If not, is there one you really miss?
