Cool websites:
Peacefire: Open Access for the Net Generation.
Also: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Also, the Michael Moore book – Stupid White Men: And Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! my brother Todd recommended really rocks. I’m about half-way through. Good stuff.
Ripped down half of the crumbling plaster ceiling in the living room last night. It was remarkably easy. Just have to do some clean-up tonight and finish the ripping down, do some clean up tomorrow night, and I’ll be ready to do drywall. Dunno whether to work on the floor before drywalling or not. Pictures to follow this weekend.
A letter I just wrote to David Horowitz, in response to his rabid article “the America-hating left” on Salon:
Fascinating…. proof that the the Enron scandal was not just caused by greed corporate leaders, but was literally caused by the Republican party:
If it wasn’t for the fact that the Republican Congress was bought off by Enron, most of this wouldn’t have happened. If they’d have passed [former SEC chair Arthur] Levitt’s reforms, separating accounting from consulting, they’d have never gotten away with it; if they’d have passed [Commodity Futures Trading Commission head] Brooksley Born’s proposal to disclose all these derivatives, then people would have known about this. If they’d done Sen. Boxer’s thing to limit the holdings in one company people could have in a 401K, then people wouldn’t have gotten burned like this.
Why aren’t Democrats standing up and saying Republicans caused it? Will the Washington Post write some mealy-mouthed story saying, “Well, you shouldn’t really say that!” Of course, but who cares? Will cocktail parties decry the return of partisanship in Washington? Of course they will, but what difference does it make? None! You’ll get your message out. But Democrats in Washington are completely mortified that somebody’s gonna say something bad about them at a dinner party in Cleveland Park on a Saturday night. You tell them there’s an Op-Ed piece coming out, with somebody saying they’re being divisive, and they’ll fall apart. But that’s what Republicans do. Look at the way they talk about ‘Clinton caused Sept. 11.’ They don’t have any facts — we have facts to prove otherwise — but they just do it anyway.
James Carville, interviewed by Salon magazine.
If you needed more evidence that Fox News isn’t exactly “news” and is more right-wing hysterical polemic: Fox news mistakes a parody site for a right-wing news site, has founder of parody site on show to comment on “real” news.
Parody site founder deliberately doesn’t tell Fox he’s a humorist so that he can savor the irony of making them look dumb: “In a shocking, somewhat frightening example of the glaring research vacuum that plagues television news” and “All anyone at the network would have had to do is actually have read the first paragraph of the piece to discover that it was 100-percent crap.”
From the Washington Post:
Here’s a vignette we’re dying to see on the ABC broadcast of Sunday’s Ford’s Theatre Presidential Gala: When Stevie Wonder sat down at the keyboard center stage, President Bush in the front row got very excited. He smiled and started waving at Wonder, who understandably did not respond. After a moment Bush realized his mistake and slowly dropped the errant hand back to his lap. “I know I shouldn’t have,” a witness told us yesterday, “but I started laughing.”
There was an attempted Republican spin job after this that claimed it wasn’t true, but then a half dozen other witnesses came forward and said that it was.
Maybe Daschle will get crucified for stating the truth, but there’s nothing you can do to me for saying it: If we don’t get Osama bin Laden, there’s no way in hell we should be considering taking action against other countries like Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. All this “axis of evil” is just bull-shit to cover the fact that our “war on terror” is stuck in the mud and not going anywhere.
Noting for future reference:
Here’s a headline for you “Man steals rare monkey to get crack.” What kind of a dumbass trades away a perfectly good monkey for something as stupid as crack?
Turned in the keys to my old house Thursday. Got a quote this morning on installing a washer hookup in my new house. Oh boy. I’m gonna be saving my pennies, because this is going to cost a lot.
