What do you mean "they" cut the power? They're animals.

I worked late last night and turned on the radio on the way home. Big mistake. That old guy droning on about stuff with his nasally voice almost put me to sleep behind the wheel. That guy is the John Tesh of politicians.

So here's the final series of pics from Animal Blogging Week featuring photos we've taken of critters. Today it's animals we've either seen or eaten. Actually those aren't exclusive.

Deer that wandered into our campsite a couple of weeks ago.

Had a cool moment at about five in the morning. We camped close to town because I couldn't get out of work and one morning I'd just gotten back from the shower and dressed for work and was sitting by the campsite drinking coffee when this same deer walked right up to me and checked me out. I just kept thinking "I'm going to be in a shiny, high tech office in a couple of hours and right now I'm hanging with a deer."

Took this picture at the zoo obviously. I loved how Doctor Zaius, ahem, this Orangutan came right up to us to chat. I think he was thinking "someday you're going to be on the other side of this glass and I'm going to watch YOU throw your poop at your friends."

Shark from the Oregon Aquarium. We needed a bigger boat.

Giant Dungeoness crab. I've crabbed for fun for most of my life and most of the time we get crabs that are barely keepers according to regulations. Wouldn't you know the first time I take the kids out on a boat we catch this giant. It's pretty rare to see a crab this size in the bay as the commercial fishermen get them first. He was delicious.

D'oh. He was also delicious. (jk)

A seal watching us crab. No crabz 4 U.

Zoo again. I think it's fair to say this zebra rarely misses a meal. He's not exactly in sleek, jungle form.

For some reason I hate elephants after the last week.

Hungry like Duran Duran.

You started it. Show me everything. I can handle myself.

Just an observation on something that's been bothering me on my own blog for some time now- not enough quotes from female characters in movies as post titles.

First a quick note on the quotes themselves. I really don't have any methodology to how I pick quotes to go along with whatever I'm blathering about that day. Sometimes I'll read about something in the news and a quote immediately springs to mind. On rare occasions I'll build the post around a quote from a movie I've recently watched.

As you probably suspected I grab the majority of my quotes off of the IMDB. Again, there's little methodology. If I've written something about FISA for instance then I might immediately go look for a quote from "The Manchurian Candidate." If I can't find a good quote from that film then I may follow the link to Frank Sinatra's book of work and pick another movie he's been in to find a quote. It's a bit of a zen thing.

I have some rules for myself that I try to follow when I pick a quote and picture to head my post. It has to be a movie or television I've actually seen. The quote has to have subtext. Finally the picture has to be on or near to the point when the line used in the quote was actually spoken. (That last one is the toughest to hit and I often have to "cheat" with the picture.)

Recently I realized that the vast majority of the quotes I've used these past years were from male characters. Part of this isn't that surprising in that, as liberal and non-sexist as I try to be, I'm still a guy. I like action movies. It follows that the characters I identify with on a conscious/ subconscious would be strong male leads.

With this in mind I recently set out to deliberately find and use more quotes from women characters. I decided to use a Sophia Loren quote last week. I had a devil of a time finding a good quote from a movie with Loren to use. It didn't help that 2/3rds of the movies on her resume were Italian.

But the exercise tickled my curiosity so I spent a couple of hours thinking up the names of famous actresses, checking their filmology and then the memorable quotes from their individual films. What I found from that little admittedly non-scientific exercise is that, with the exception of women like Elizabeth Taylor or Katherine Hepburn, actresses don't have as many great lines as actors in movies. Here's some of the stuff that I think contributes to that conclusion--

• Nerds -- Quotes on the IMDB are compiled by fans of the individual movies and not some group of movie scholars who dig through the movies looking for great lines. Point is this could be a group of guys who live in their parent's basement.


• Who has the conch? --Most writers, especially in the golden age of Hollywood, were men. As such they wrote FOR men.


• By men, for men -- There aren't that many strong characters who are women written for movies. Strong characters, regardless of gender, get the best lines.


• And your little dog too -- Along those same lines characters that are strong that happen to be women are usually villains.


• It blowed up real good -- Hollywood makes action movies and most action heroes, with the exception of films like Thelma and Louise and Aliens, traditionally are men.

While I readily admit my little study was nowhere near empirical, I don't doubt for a second that any actress who has spent any amount of time around Hollywood would back up what I found.

As for myself-- I'm going to continue to try and utilize more quotes from women here. I can't promise that it will ever be perfectly distributed just because of my Schwarzenegger fixation.

At least I'm admitting I have a problem. That's a start.

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Off topic but in the course of doing the above mentioned research I did come across this long, beautiful anti-war quote from Elizabeth Taylor Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor in The Lion in Winter. It's too long to use in it's entirety as a post title and too great to break up.

Prince John: A knife! He's got a knife!

Eleanor: Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians! How clear we make it. Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war: not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, nor any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars. We carry it like syphilis inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten. For the love of God, can't we love one another just a little - that's how peace begins. We have so much to love each other for. We have such possibilities, my children. We could change the world.

Hey, maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events, but we just got our asses kicked, pal!

One of my favorite lines the last couple of months as the issue of gender has entered the presidential primary is to say we'd have a woman as president right now if congress did their damn jobs. I firmly believe this to be true. If congress was following their own constitutionally mandated role of oversight of the Executive Branch then I have no doubt that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would currently be working in the Oval Office.

The immediate reaction of realists when they consider that statement is to dismiss it outright. Simple math makes the idea that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney could be impeached and removed from office absurd. In the first place- the numbers aren't there for a conviction in the Senate. The whole thing would be an exercise in futility from the start.

It seems to me that this unfortunate reaction to my oft-repeated quip that if congress was doing their job Pelosi would be the president is based on the idea that I am attacking our Democratic leadership in congress in making that statement. In fact - I'm only partly attacking our Democratic leadership. I'm also attacking every other warm body in a suit on capitol hill, Democrats and Republicans, who refuse to accept their constitutionally mandated role in our federal government. Those that put the needs of their party or, more often, their own political careers ahead of the need of their country.

It also seems to me that the assertion of powerlessness of congressional Democrats in the face of a slim majority in the Senate as an excuse (and let's be honest an excuse is exactly what it is) towards inaction is also a tacit admission of the of the real problem facing us. Think about the above calculation on conviction and see if you can determine anything other than our leaders will not push for impeachment because, regardless of evidence, facts or public sentiment, Senate Republicans (and Lieberman) will vote in a block against conviction. Recognition of this reality may be rational, but acceptance of it is as a simple fact of life is beyond absurd.

This collective acquiescence to the true partisans in our government is what drives progressives like myself absolutely nuts. For over thirty years now we've watched as Democrats have continued to meet vicious attacks from Republicans by effectively rolling over and tucking their tail between their legs. We've watched as our constitution was subverted through Iran Contra or abused as it was through the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton. Probably the worst thing we've had to endure is to watch that constitution be simply ignored as this President used a horrible tragedy as an excuse to consolidate power in the Executive not granted to it under our constitutional framework. Again and again our elected representatives in congress refused to acknowledge what they're we're up against.

I would ask the realists to consider this mathematical formulation: 61-39. That is the absolute minimum margin the next Democratic president will have to have in the Senate in order to get anything done. It doesn't matter if it's president Clinton II or Obama. NOTHING of any consequence will make it through the Senate without a Democratic majority of at least 61 Senators. Not health care reform. Not tax reform. Certainly not any progressive Supreme Court Judges. Republican Senators will block it all. They'll do it because they can.

God forbid the Democrats don't lose the House and/ or Senate while a Democratic president is in office, because that day in January that they swear that new congress in will be the day impeachment proceedings begin against that man or woman. They'll do it because they can.

Because they can. Because Democrats don't fight. Because Democrats continue to try and get along with these people or meet them half-way when all they'd rather do to the Democrats in return is put 'em in a bus and drive 'em off a cliff.

I understand the question of what impeachment would accomplish (and it it's really a moot question this late in Bush's term.) My honest answer is that I just don't know.

But I also know what NOT impeaching Bush has gotten us. Not to mention NOT forcing Senators to filibuster or NOT using the congressional powers of Inherent Contempt to really bring the hammer down on John Bolton and Harriet Meiers and a whole list of powers inherent to, but unused by, congressional Democrats which are too numerous to list here. It hasn't led to victory, legislative success or even compromise. It's led to one big GOP middle-finger in our direction.

If we're truly serious about the kind of country we want this to be then we need to bend that finger back until in breaks.

Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?

Most of you know I'm a huge fan of the new incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, finding it a huge leap forward in every way over it's predecessor from the 70's. Glen Larson's original series was an amalgamation of a bunch of different religious views and sci-fi stories all coddled together around the central theme of the necessity of a benevolent military dictator to save us from ourselves and our silly democratic ways. Indeed - if there was any message that show felt necessary to repeat over and over it was that democratically elected leaders will always make the wrong choices and put our society in mortal danger.

The new show is just and blatant in it's politics but it's joyfully difficult to pigeonhole just exactly where those politics lie. The producers and writers of the new BG seem to delight in challenging our preconceptions and forcing us to ask questions about our beliefs in the best tradition of science fiction.

So it's more than a little surprising to me that this new incarnation has a good proportion of conservative fans who've recently been turned off by events in the third season which have centered around an insurgency by the human protagonists.

I find it difficult to get my head around the idea that conservatives could be fans of this show. BSG thrives on the biggest conservative bugaboo of all: moral ambiguity. There isn't a single one of it's many characters, including the show's cylon villains, that's drawn one dimensionally. There are no easy answers to the situations that face the characters on the show. Problems which often times mirror those we face in our own society such as terrorism, the origins of conflict, genocide, abortion, religon and guerilla war are all fair game for the Battlestar scribes. It's not a simple show to watch intellectually and conservatives are nothing if not intellectually simple.

I can't imagine that conservatives would come away from an episode in which a cylon prisoner is tortured or another female cylon prisoner nearly raped by her military interogator captors without challenging their own beliefs on the treatment of prisoners issue as intended by the show's creators. I can't help but wonder if they cheered those scenes rather than were revulsed.

In fact the only way I can imagine that a conservative would be a fan of Battlestar Galactica would be that they simply didn't "get" the show. It's funny that now that the third season has started and the message of moral ambiguity has become even more pronounced that the coins are finally starting to come off. But they've never been the sharpest dagget in the frakkin' pack to begin with.

I admire its purity. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.

I hate it when I have to cross things off this list.

Things that Seperate the United States from Nazi Germany.

1. Fair and free Elections.

2. A free press.

3. Free speech.

4. Strong, constitutionally protected group of individual rights.

5. A belief in a fallible executive.

6. A seperation of branches of the government.

7. A strong set of rights under the law including a right to trial and a right to not be held without charge.

8. No secret prisons.

9. No torture.

10. No genocide.

Looks like we're just getting down to the 'nubbins.

Game over, man!

Iraqi Government warns of 'endless civil war'

We. Told. You. So.