I thought maybe you and I could go dancing or something.

Happy birthday to Elvis Presley. Every time I put a bullet in my television or head off to DC to convince the president to make me a DEA Agent I think of you.

Well I've got a gal, she's as cute as she can be. She's a distant cousin but she's not too distant with me.

Oh noes! I missed noting Elvis's birthday yesterday. Happy birthday big guy. Here's a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich for you.

Also noteworthy is that today marks only eleven more days of having to endure the monkey juggling the hand grenade. Yay!

I see the Florida Tebows won the BcS "championship" last night. Thanks AP voters for supporting that bullshit. I am rooting big time that the Utah AG's potential lawsuit breaks up that joke of a system once and for all. Playoffs!

Lockwood has a link up to a great nerd test. I scored nerd god. Bow down before me my fellow geeks.

I'm with randal graves. I thought it was kind of cool that bands began releasing music on vinyl again but my daughter got me an old style album for Christmas and I'm still still scratching my head as to how I'm going to get it to play. I have a turntable somewhere but will it even work with my super modern stero equipment.

Swinebread wrote a nice little post about the classic film "The Warriors."

Ubermilf picked on rich people who don't know how to put cream cheese on a bagel. Like it's so damned simple to spread that stuff.

Don snabulus wins the "Simultaneous Hope and Bile" award for his post that contained this: "With that said, I think the passing of Dubya, like a painful kidney stone, is worth celebrating, so the inauguration will be time for joy at Rancho Snabulus."

Dguzman uses that mathy thingy to prove Bush was a failure. I don't need math to tell me that. Any man that chokes on a pretzel is not a man to be trusted with nuclear secrets.

Distributorcap NY is still taking nominations for Douchebags of the Year. Harry Reid rightly leads the pack.

Monkey von Monkerstein has his own plan to revive the economy. His best idea: "Keep all the proposed stimulus money out of the hands of banks, financial professionals, and anyone connected with any Wall Street institution."

Enigma asks a question I've been wondering myself: "Dear Mr. Bush, did you give your blessing for the violence in Gaza that's killing women, children and refugees?" Israel doesn't make a move without consulting the United States. Besides being an enormously immoral act, this comes across as the Bush administration's version of removing the letter"w" from keyboards on the way out the door. Only in their version people die.

Pissed Off Patricia has spent most of the week sipping martinis. I'm so jealous.

Thoughtcriminal makes the clever observation that, if you predict something has a roughly 40% chance of happening, you will never have it held against you if it never happens.

I wrote similar responses to this post by Liberality apologizing to the people of Gaza and this post by franiam asking about the definition of "peace." Here's why I sigh and shake my head when I watch the violence like that which has recently erupted in Gaza--

I believe that there are two types of people in the world.

In the first category falls the majority of the world's population. Whether they live in Senegal or Syracuse these people can be defined as having no other goal than wanting to live their lives safe and unmolested.

These people (and I count myself in this category) simply want to spend their days going to work, whether it's a factory or a farm, come home to watch a football (or soccer) game, make love to their husband or wife (or SO) and go to sleep with a satisfied smile on their face.

They have no larger goals in life other than celebrate the addition of children to their families, share the joy as those children beat life's challenges and dance at the weddings or graduations of those same children.

The other type of people are unfortunately a little more driven (type A?) which often puts them leadership positions within whatever society they inhabit. They tend want to believe something so strongly that they're willing to start wars over that belief. Sadly, these wars are ultimately fought by the rest of us who just want to live our lives in peace.

If we could just get this second group of people out of power the world would be a much better place.

(In case anyone is wondering- Elvis falls into that second category but he was the rare form of benevolent dictator.)

No, you ain't gonna hate me. I ain't gonna let you hate me.

In memory of the King of Rock and Roll





I'm fairly certain I'm going to "go" the same way.

(See what I did there? :-) )

Oh I wasn't thinking of you, I was thinking of me.

The pattern is depressingly similar whether it's Oregon or national politics: Republicans are the true obstructionist party when it comes to carrying out the will of the voters.

Yesterday, Republicans in the state House killed an effort to create a rainy day fund with a one-time suspension of the corporate kicker.

In Tuesday's floor debate, Democrats said most of the state's business lobbying groups had backed their plan to protect schools and other services from cuts in future economic downturns.

Hunt said the next step will be to ask voters in a May election to approve a constitutional amendment to permanently divert corporate kicker money to a rainy day fund.

"Based on polling it's clear that the vast majority of Oregonians want a rainy day fund, they want to redirect the corporate kicker," he said.

Republicans were able to take advantage of a law requiring the approval of a 2/3 majority or 40 members of the 60 member House to pass a bill raising revenue. So even though a majority of the legislature supported the measure it didn't have the votes to pass.

If this sounds a bit like the machinations Republican Senators are using on the national level to kill debate on the war in Iraq that's because the two examples do bare striking similarities. In both cases the Democrats won the election based in part on promises to address issues previously ignored by Republicans. In both cases Democrats immediately moved to address those issues. In both cases Republicans decided that elections suddenly DON'T matter and that the will of the people is, at the very best, only a secondary concern to that of the special interests and wingnuts that increasingly make up the party core.

Republicans were shown the door because they couldn't or wouldn't lead. At this point it would behoove them to get out of the way when someone does.

Will you tell me where you think the accident will take place and I'll make sure I'm there.

Just a little reminder as we find ourselves knee-deep in conservative 911 revisionism over the next couple of days. It may come as a shock to the Rush Limbaughs of the world but the country actually formed a commission and held *gasp* hearings in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks. The commission's final report was itself a summary of much of the testimony and investigative work that it implemented.

Some highlights from just that one day of public testimony covered in the March, 2004 Washington Post article I cite above:

President Bush's top counterterrorism adviser warned seven days before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks that hundreds of people could die in a strike by the al Qaeda network and that the administration was not doing enough to combat the threat, the commission investigating the attacks disclosed yesterday.

Richard A. Clarke, who served as a senior White House counterterrorism official under three successive presidents, wrote to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Sept. 4, 2001, urging "policymakers to imagine a day after a terrorist attack, with hundreds of Americans dead at home and abroad, and ask themselves what they could have done earlier," according to a summary of the letter included in a commission staff report. Clarke also cites the same plea in his new book.

----

The CIA now says that a controversial August 2001 briefing summarizing potential attacks on the United States by al Qaeda was not requested by President Bush, as Rice and others had long claimed.

(In fact Rice held a news conference JUST to claim that the PDB was requested by Bush. Liar, liar...)

---

Commission investigators disclosed that during the Clinton administration, the president and other White House officials signed a series of secret orders for covert action that, according to the top Clinton aides, authorized the killing of bin Laden by CIA proxies.

---

In the summer of 2001, veteran counterterrorism officers privy to reports on al Qaeda threats "were so worried about an impending disaster that one of them told us that they considered resigning and going public with their concerns," according to one of two staff reports issued by the commission yesterday. Senior CIA officials were also frustrated by some Bush appointees who were not familiar with surges in terrorist threat information and questioned their veracity, the report said.

And it goes on and on. Point is the producers of the ABC movie seem to want to pretend there was no 911 Commission while claiming, at the same time, that the work of the Commission supports the "truthiness" of their film.