Living deja vu

I'm living my life in reverse. When did someone hit the rewind switch?
Battles I had in my 20s an 30s, which I thought were settled, done-with, bought-the-tshirt OVER, I find myself fighting again.
Yesterday, it was abortion. Today, it's women's rights -- ie, this column about how society would be better off if women stayed home with their kids instead of running off to be lawyers or engineers or, I suppose, columnists. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
Tomorrow, I suppose I'll be reading something about how women shouldn't complain about doing all the housework because, after all, its just so important that the family laundry be done really well.
Well, I was going to write some sort of brilliant reply to Cohen but then I ran out of energy -- have to wax the kitchen taps this afternoon, as well as crocheting my spring wardrobe, so I just don't have time...

Weekend open thread

And I just couldn't resist this photo.
By the way, I haven't done an accident update lately so here it is: slowly healing. It is taking a lot longer than I ever thought, but the ribs are healing now and the swelling in my legs is going down and the bruises are fading. The knee is still sore when I move it, particularly when I stand up, but the doctor says we'll see in a couple of months if that has improved because if not then I would need arthroscopic surgery for which there is a nine month waiting list anyway.

Oh, darn, isn't that just too bad...

This story on the Libby request for intelligence briefing materials notes that

the judge . . . is concerned that Libby's request could 'sabotage' the case because President Bush probably will invoke executive privilege and refuse to turn over the classified reports. 'If the executive branch says, 'This is too important to the welfare of the nation and we're not going to comply,' the criminal prosecution goes away.'

Well, duhhh -- that's exactly the point.
Libby and the White House are engaged in a complicated little dance here -- trying to get the judge to agree that Libby needs some particular classifed document for his defense, which then the White House can refuse to turn over, so that the prosecution falls apart.
And then everybody says, Oh, darn, isn't that just too bad...

Thank you so, so much

Women will be so thankful.
The Associated Press story about the South Dakota abortion ban quotes a woman named Leslee Unruh, president of a Sioux Falls pregnancy counseling agency, who said that most of the 800 abortions which are presently being performed annually in South Dakota were simply "conveniences", that most South Dakota women wanted the state to ban abortion, and many who have had abortions "wish someone would have stopped them."
You see, we women just don't know what's best for us -- it will be so wonderful when women in the United States show the way to the rest of us by losing the right to make their own decision on abortion. And we'll be ever so grateful -- yes, we will -- when we are stopped from making our own decisions and instead we have to go crawling into some hospital committee for permission to have an abortion if we can convince them that continuing the pregnancy will kill us -- before it actually does. And we'll all be so thankful that someone will control our bodies for us since obviously we cannot control ourselves and we have sex and all that evil stuff...

Great line of the day

From Hullabaloo, Tristero writes a letter:

Dear God,
Please deliver us from the hideous locust plague of conservative pseudo-intellectuals. Sinners we may be in Thine eyes, and unworthy of thy Divine Love, but Jesus Kee-rist! Cut us some friggin' slack, already! Fire and brimstone, eternal damnation, I ain't gonna argue with you. But, seriously, God, we really don't deserve any more Fukuyamas, y'know? So ease up.
Please.
Love,
Tristero

And that's what its all about

So I'm flipping through websites thinking about blogging about something, but its all just so damned depressing - civil war in Iraq and the Bush administration screwing up and the hockey team melting down and on and on, when I find this posted by susanhu at Booman:

. . . Larry LaPrise, the man who wrote 'The Hokey Pokey,' died peacefully at the age of 93. The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin.
They put his left leg in. And then the trouble started . . .

Men just don't understand

Of course the BC finance minister spent $600 on a pair of shoes. If you want an economy, you have to pay for it.

What Canada is all about

This is what Canada is all about:

Canadian soldiers sent an Afghan boy with a massive tumour on his face to a cancer hospital in Pakistan early Thursday morning, where he will likely live out his final days in a little less pain . . Touched by the boy's cries of pain and knowing a modern cancer hospital exists in Pakistan, Cpl. Brian Sanders, an ambulance driver at the camp, contacted his church in Edmonton to see if it could help. The North Edmonton Christian Fellowship church raised $10,000 Sunday morning, with money still flowing in after news reports publicized Namatullah's case . . .

We can't save them all, but we still do what we can to save some.

Great line of the day

Here is Dibgy on The Trifecta: "If there are three hallmarks of this failed Bush administration, it is hubris, incompetence and cronyism. This port deal features all three."

"When solder #3,000 dies, I get a free juicer!"

Seeing this story about people getting arrested for selling guerrilla t-shirts reminded me that my son said I should check out this website -- T-Shirt Hell, which sells shirts with slogans like "When solder #3,000 dies, I get a free juicer!" and "Dumbledore dies on page 596. I just saved you 4 hours and $30" and "I'm not getting jiggy, I have Parkinson's" and "You'll regret reading this shirt when the sketch artist asks you to describe my face", and a baby's t-shirt that reads "Now that I'm safe, I'm pro-choice" .

Grotesque Guantanamo nonsense

Here are some nonsesical quotes from a New York Times article describing the grotesque force-feeding at Guantnamo of hunger strikers:

Military spokesmen have generally discounted the complaints, saying the prisoners are for the most part terrorists, trained by Al Qaeda to use false stories as propaganda . . . Capt. John S. Edmondson of the Navy, wrote that his staff was not force-feeding any detainees but "providing nutritional supplementation on a voluntary basis to detainees who wish to protest their confinement by not taking oral nourishment." . . . General Craddock suggested that the medical staff had indulged the hunger strikers to the point that they had been allowed to choose the color of their feeding tubes . . . Two other Defense Department officials said a decision had been made to try to break the hunger strikes because they were having a disruptive effect and causing stress for the medical staff.

So its just a little bit stressful for the poor staff, is it, who have to strap prisoners into restraint chairs and repeatedly force those colour-coordinated feeding tubes down their throats while the prisoners are bleeding and vomiting and urinating and defecating all over the place? But of course, all those terrorists prisoners are just lying about how awful it all is, except for the hundreds who are innocent, I guess. But they don't think they're really force-feeding anyone, just "providing nutritional supplementation" and its all so "voluntary" that people are choosing the colour of their feeding tube -- which sort of begs the question of why the staff are finding it all so stressful.
Just how stupid does the American military think people are, that they would believe all this tripe?
Or how delusional are these military people themselves?

"Anti-gay adoption" will get out the Republican vote

Well, here it is -- USA Today is reporting that banning gay adoption will be voted on in 16 states in November, 2006.
I've been watching for this -- I knew there would be SOMETHING that would be used to get the Republican vote out.
In 2004, the ballot initiatives against gay marriage gave Karl Rove enough of the Christian wingnut vote that Bush was reelected. Now, while the Democrats are howling after the UAE port deal and Abramoff and illegal wiretaps and Kartina and Iraq and all the other Bush administration foul-ups, the Republicans are terrified about trying to save enough Senate and the House seats to maintain control of the US government committees.
They must prevent committee investigations of the Bush administration at all costs. The word they DO NOT want to hear is "subpoena". And state votes against gay adoption will be their ticket.
Republicans are trying to keep this under the radar. The USA Today article says:

Republican pollster Whit Ayres [says] adoption . . . "doesn't have the emotional power of the gay marriage issue because there is no such thing as the phrase 'the sanctity of adoption.'

That's just BS -- gay adoption has even more power than the gay marriage argument to bring out the wingnut vote.
If there is anything Karl Rove loves, it is whisper campaigns. We all saw how easy it was to create public hysteria about the day-care-centre-as-Satanic-cult prosecutions of the 1990s. With gay adoption, its going to be really easy to develop an under-the-radar whisper campaign about a gay-recruitment and pedophila-agenda subtext.
Gay adoption doesn't have a prayer. And neither do the Democrats if they don't get cracking.

What was the cut?

"Former [Malaysian] Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said Monday that disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff was paid $1.2 million to organize his 2002 meeting with President Bush . . . " Yeah, and George Bush, Karl Rove and the Republican Party never saw a penny of that money? Hmmmm...

Great line of the day

Tim at POGGE writes about the short shrift given to the Arar lawsuit by US courts: "Remember when we used to live next door to America? I miss that country."

A damn good thrashing

"Right! That's it! You've tried it on just once too often! Right! Well, don't say I haven't warned you! I've laid it on the line to you time and time again! Right! Well...this is it! I'm going to give you a damn good thrashing!" -- Basil thrashing his car with a tree branch when it won't start.
Now comes the news that many of us talk to our cars. Reuters reports on a British survey:

Nearly half of motorists regularly talk to their cars, giving words of encouragement ahead of a long trip and lavishing praise for a job well done at journey's end, according to research on Monday. A survey of 2,000 owners also found 40 percent thought their car had a personality and was capable of being upset whilst 19 percent worried about how their car was feeling.
The poll, conducted by organisers of July's British International Motor Show found women rather than men tended to have a close relationship with their car. Giving a pet name to their car but not their human partners was admitted to by 20 percent of women...

What they didn't survey was how many of us talk to other drivers -- I'll bet its just about everybody, and thank heavens those idiots cannot hear us insult them.
There is one thing that we all share, and that is the inner conviction that each of us has -- "I am an above-average driver".
My kids learned to swear by listening to me behind the wheel, though of course I always blamed it on their friends.