Don't do this!
I went through this so hopefully you won't have to: if you clean the cat litter and get all the ammonia and cat pee on your hand, remember to wash your hands before putting a finger in your nose.

You can thank me later.

Honoring the dream

Gee, I wonder why GW Bush isn't doing too great with black voters? This, which comes off www.mediawhoresonline.com, might have something to do with it.

"A day after facing humiliating protests while visiting Martin Luther King's grave for a photo op on the way to a $2000-a-plate fundraiser, the Unelected Fraud has installed a cross-burning advocate to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In the case, two men and a juvenile had burned an eight-foot cross on the lawn of an interracial couple with a young child...

Specifically, questioning by Senator Edwards revealed that Pickering had threatened to order a new trial in the case (even though the time for such an order had expired and Pickering had no authority to order it on his own motion), ordered Justice Department lawyers to take his complaints about the proposed sentence personally to the Attorney General, and initiated an ex parte communication with a high-ranking Justice Department official to complain about the case. A Justice Department letter released after the hearing revealed a series of "off-the-record" efforts by Pickering to pursue his complaints, including a direct phone call by him to the home of one prosecutor the day after New Years' Day, 1995. Senator Edwards expressed serious concern that Judge Pickering had violated Rule 3.A.4 of the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges, which specifically forbids ex parte contacts between a judge and attorneys for one side of a case about that case...

Senator Durbin was concerned about the extreme lengths to which Pickering went to assist the defendant to obtain reduced punishment for conduct - the cross-burning -- that Pickering at one point called a "drunken prank."

OK, folks, I've pulled a few drunken pranks in my time, but I missed the one where I burned a cross on the lawn of an interracial couple with a child. To any of my Republican friends who are reading this: this is your President and I hope your proud of the judges he's appointing.

ACLU rushes to the defense
I love the irony of the ACLU defending Rush Limbaugh, saying the government has no right to look at his medical records. Rush must have thought he was still high when he heard that one. And please, all you ditto-heads, stop saying he was using prescription painkillers like he obtained them legally. When you're in a parking lot exchanging a box of money for a box of drugs, it's illegal. And by the way, if Rush's back was so bad, how did he continue playing golf, sometimes 36 holes a day? I'm not a golfer or a junkie and I get tired after 10 holes.

Rush is coming on as a strong contender for my 2003 conservative hypocrite of the year. Other contenders: Bill Bennett, moralist and gambling addict; Rep. Bill Janklow, who killed a man while speeding through a stop sign, then blamed it on his diabetes; and CT Gov. Rowland, who lied about having free work done on his house by people who do work for the state.

These are just a few. Tune in later in the month for more nominees and the winner.

Just a bit off
There's a strange phenomenon where most of us want to believe Colin Powell, even if it's obvious he's lying his ass off.

Since Powell said this almost a year ago (2/3/03 to be exact), I thought it would be worth revisiting.

"Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan."

"Iraq declared 8,500 litres of anthrax, but Unscom estimates that Saddam Hussein could have produced 25,000 litres. He has not verifiably accounted for even one teaspoon-full of this deadly material. Iraq has successfully weaponised not only anthrax, but also other biological agents, including botulinum toxin, aflatoxin and ricin. Saddam Hussein has investigated dozens of biological agents causing diseases such as gas gangrene, plague, typhus, tetanus, cholera, camelpox and hemorrhagic fever, and he also has the wherewithal to develop smallpox."

"Iraq has also developed ways to disperse lethal biological agents into the water supply, into the air. Iraq had a programme to modify aerial fuel tanks for Mirage jets. This video of an Iraqi test flight obtained by Unscom some years ago shows an Iraqi F-1 Mirage jet aircraft. Note the spray coming from beneath the Mirage; that is 2,000 litres of simulated anthrax that a jet is spraying."

A side note: David Kay, the head of the team looking for such weapons in Iraq, is looking to quietly resign without ever compiling a report. Where's that "Mission Accomplished" banner when we really need it?

Delay of game
A few people have pointed out that it took the Bush Administration only 1 day to start investigating Paul O'Neill because a document marked "Secret" could be seen during the "60 Minutes" interview, while it took them 74 days to instigate an investigation after Robert Novak's column outing agent Valerie Plame.

Shocker, huh?

"I was born a poor black child..."
I was flipping around last night and stopped on Fox News when I saw Sean Hannity's luggage-sized head. (It's literally the size of the heads sculpted into Mt. Rushmore, but with slightly more granite.) He was talking to a black minister from NH, who was criticizing Howard Dean. The minister said Dean stopped by the church to address his congregation but didn't bother to hang around to talk to them after service. Hannity dismissed Dean as a phony who was just using the church as a photo-op. He neglected to mention President Bush, who uses black kids as a prop at every school he visits.

Then, Hannity told the minister he'd like to visit the church during a service. I would pay big bucks to see that. I saw Hannity once on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He was with his Fox punching bag Alan Colmes, but unlike on the "Fair and Balanced" network, Colmes did most of the talking. Hannity looked really uncomfortable to be out of the safe environs of Fox or his radio studio. He just looked tiny, even with his big head. (It really is huge.)

It made me long even more for the sight of him clapping and singing in a black church. The image that comes to mind for me is Steve Martin as Navin Johnson in "The Jerk."

Wall Street Journal's track record
The Wall Street Journal came out strong against Wesley Clark's new tax plan, opining that they hope he knows more about war than he does about tax reform. Of course, the WSJ is in a tizzy because anyone making over $1 million a year would have to pay an extra five percent in taxes for all the money they earn over a million. Everyone reading this who makes more than $1 million a year please raise your hand.

Eric Alterman, quoting his book "What Liberal Media", had an interesting take on this today:

"When, after twelve years of supply-side-inspired deficits threatened to cripple the economy, Bill Clinton was forced to clean up the economic mess, Journal editors had no doubt about what would happen. Clinton's proposals, they predicted, would 'cripple' the economy. When the plan passed, the paper promised, "[W]e are seeing the early signs of the stagflation that we knew so well during the Carter presidency."

"Hysteria" would not be too strong a term to describe the Journal's reaction to the Clinton plan. The headline, "The Class Warfare Economy" was attended by a cartoon of a guillotine. The tiny rise in the nation's top marginal tax rates to a level where they remained the second lowest in the industrialized world did not turn out well for the editors. The Clinton years resulted in an unbroken expansion of the economy in which the vast majority of its benefits were tilted towards the very wealthy--in other words, the people on whom "class war" had allegedly been declared."

And then Alterman wrote this about the WSJ attack on Clark:

"So I guess it's a good sign that similarly misplaced knives are out for Wesley Clark's excellent new tax program. They term it a "Clintonian tax hike." The Clark campaign should trumpet that endorsement to the heavens."

Scam artists
I love the story of the woman who claims she had the winning lottery ticket but lost it in a convenience store parking lot. She was on Keith Olberman's show last night on MSNBC with her lawyer. She didn't make any sense and neither did her lawyer, who rambled on about how the state should have a system where you put your drivers license in some mechanism when you buy a lottery ticket to confirm it was you who bought it.

Uuuhhhh, and they also should have a time machine so you can go and buy the winning ticket after you know what numbers will be selected.

Anyway, near the end of the interview, Olberman sprung this on the lady: thesmokinggun.com was reporting that Elecia Battle wasn't her real name and she had been convicted of various types of fraud through the years.

The look on her face was classic. When asked for a response, her lawyer said, "This is the first I'm hearing of it." Must have been a good time to find that out.

WMD's: Texas vs. Iraq
FBI officials recently busted a ring that was connected with some white supremicists and anti-government types in Texas. Here's part of the news story:

"Investigators found nearly 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 65 pipe bombs and briefcases that could be detonated by remote control. Most distressing, they said, was the discovery of 800 grams of almost pure sodium cyanide -- material that can only be acquired legally for specific agricultural or military projects.

The sodium cyanide was found inside an ammunition canister, next to hydrochloric, nitric and acetic acids and formulas for making bombs. If acid were mixed with the sodium cyanide, an analysis showed, it would create a bomb powerful enough to kill everyone inside a 30,000-square-foot facility, investigators said."

Surprised you haven't heard more about this story? Don't be. It doesn't fit into the media's neat foreign terrorist storyline. Did you know that David Kay, the chief weapons inspector for the Bush Administration, has quietly resigned?

For those of you keeping score, this means that we've found more weapons of mass destruction in Texas than Iraq.

World Idol, doo doo, and Shawshank
A little television sampler:

I watched some of the World Idol thing last night. It was basically a showdown between all the pop idol competitions winners. Kelly Clarkson represented the US. Some dude from Belgium or Norway or something won. I keep calling him Hans Blix since I can't remember his real name. Anyway, Hans looked like a combination of Philip Seymour Hoffman, the lead singer from the movie "The Commitments", and the kid Corky from "Life Goes On." He got the most votes from around the world doing a karaoke-style cover of "Beautiful Day" by U2. Go Corky!

My favorite part of the Michael Jackson interview with Ed Bradley was when Michael said he was locked for 45 minutes in a dirty bathroom with walls covered with "doo-doo feces." Michael said that the guards kept asking how he liked the smell. "It's alright," said the King of Doo Doo Feces, maintaining his tougher than leather exterior.

I know some people love "Shawshank Redemption" although I rate it slightly better than tolerable. Why the hell is this movie on 40 times a week on TNT? Don't they have any other movies? I made two independent movies that are marginally interesting. Put one of those on for Christ's sake. If I have to see Tim Robbins pained expression as the innocent man or Morgan Freeman as the noble inmate one more time, I'm going to smear my bathroom with doo-doo feces. Is that alright?