Risking It

After a double dose of horrid movie picks (A Prairie Home Companion and some movie about a kid's Bar Mitzvah called 'Keeping Up With the Steins' or some shit) I am risking a third disaster that I hope will turn out okay.
Saturday night, I'm going to go see "The Devil Wears Prada."
The idea that Meryl Streep stars as the movie version of Vogue's bitch-in-chief Anna Wintour is tempting, but then again she played the hayseed singer trying to woo Garrison Keillor in the aforementioned piece o' crap, so there's no telling.
Anne Hathaway plays her assistant. Her, I love. She played the wife of Jack in Brokeback Mountain, and she has that pouty lipped sassiness that has gotten me into lots of trouble in my spotty history of real life woman chasing.
So, wish me luck. I'll report back soon.

P.S. Bush and that Japanese lame duck at Graceland. What a couple of dorks. Elvis would have loved Bush- two dope addicts disguised as law abiding citizens. Yeecch.

Lame Duck with Lemons?

Supreme Court Rejects Guantanamo Trials
Decision Marks Setback for Bush Administration

WASHINGTON (June 29) - The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees, saying in a strong rebuke that the trials were illegal under U.S. and international law..."

Good. I love a strong rebuke to Bush from the Supremes.
And as far as recent decisions go, it seems the Supremes are taking some strong measures to restore their credibility, while they reign in the naked little emperor and his sycophants.

Could this be the beginning of the last phase of Bush's petty tyranny?
Maybe something as common as enforcing the laws of the land might do to him what the media has failed to do: expose him and declaw him.

All This Partisan Bitching

Everyone knows by now that Bush, Cheney and a handful of their goofy GOP legislative co-conspirators are up in arms over recent stories published in the NY and LA Times about BushCo's spying into bank records.
"Treason!" they claim. "The stories harm our national security," they continued.
Trouble is, while the BushCo crybabies whine about the liberal, left-wing mainstream media harpooning their so-called security measures, they totally left out their pet right-wing rag, The Wall Street Journal.
Yep, the WSJ printed basically the same story, yet they escaped the wrath of the swiftboating right-wing. Why? You know why.

Listen here, friends.
You can tell when the NY Times and other major print media are finally doing their jobs:
BushCo starts to bitch.

A Prairie Home Companion

You'd think with Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Lindsey Lohan, Garrison Keillor and more, the movie would have been sensational.
Well, I picked it out last night and my most frequent movie viewing companion has stripped me of my movie choosing rights.
It was a pointless snore. The music was corny, the plot was thin, the cinematography was dark and the comedy was nonexistent.
Save your money.
No, really.

Sweet n' Sour

Sweet:
Rush Limbaugh, the OxyContin gulping male version of Ann Coulter, was detained for three hours Monday at the Palm Beach airport because he possessed a bottle of Viagra that was not prescribed to him.
What's wrong, Rush? Are you so gross that even your own dick is turned off?

Sour:
Just because Bush's Keystone Kops FEMA screwed up their initial reaction to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, does that mean they forever get a pass on the whole thing?
You'd think Bush and HLS "director" Chertoff would want to correct their initial misdeeds with a superior follow-up effort, but news report say more than $2 billion in taxpayer money has been wasted on fraudulent claims, bogus reconstruction contractors and so on.
They can't get it right at any stage, but I guess they figured once they were branded as incompetents at the start, what the hell, may as well screw up the whole thing to the finish.

I Read the News Today, Hoo Boy

I used to love to read the weekly, sometimes daily news accounts of Bushian malfeasance.
Now it's just a chore.
I read about the latest scandal: the Bush government snooping into ordinary citizens' banking records, and I realized nothing will be done about it.
The tepid, left-wing NY Times mentioned it, then of course some right-wing Senator called for a treason charge against them.
There's no real news being reported anymore, unless you count the Daily Show. It's a pretty abysmal outlook when the only news outlet that even hints at the truth comes from Comedy Central.
Now I hear a college radio station somewhere in Texas has sold out to a Christian broadcasting network. Brahms will be replaced by 'Jesus is awesome' music.
From what little I know about Jesus, my guess is he wouldn't approve of the majority of hate mongers and judgmental fanatics who claim to represent his point of view.
Everything is upside down in the world today.
Peace is perceived as cowardice and war is perceived as a religious quest.
The news today makes me question the reality of karma.
If karma is real, why haven't Bush and his evil friends been struck between the eyes with bolts of lightning?

From Tim Grieve at Salon.com

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Lawsuits are coming over 2004

In an interview with PRWeek, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he'll follow up on his Rolling Stone story about the 2004 presidential election by bringing lawsuits against as-yet undisclosed defendants.

In his Rolling Stone piece, Kennedy said that he has "become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004." Now he says he's meeting with lawyers to devise a "litigation strategy" to address the problems raised in his article. "And I would say very soon we'll be announcing lawsuits against some of the individuals and companies involved," Kennedy tells PRWeek.

Kennedy declined to identify possible defendants, but he notes that many of the "same people" involved in suspicious activities in 2004 are "up to the same shenanigans" with respect to upcoming elections.

If Kennedy files suit over the 2004 election, he won't be the first: The Democratic Party of Ohio, among many others, has engaged in litigation over the voting in that state. But a lawsuit from Kennedy -- even if it didn't reverse the results of the last presidential election, which seems beyond unlikely at this point -- would bring renewed public attention to what happened in 2004 and could make it harder for Republicans like Kenneth Blackwell to continue with the voter-suppression tactics they're already employing for 2006 and 2008.

Back in Black

Last night, my best friend Anna took me to see "The Daily Show" Commentator Lewis Black in concert at the Majestic Theater here in San Antonio.
He really was magnificent in his comedic timing and righteous indignation.
My favorite line of the show was when he said how the next president should be chosen.
He said, "The next winner of American Idol should be blindfolded and face a map of the United States. Then they should throw a dart and wherever it lands, we should send a plane carrying a monkey with a parachute, drop him over the site and the first person who touches his hand is it."
Made sense to me.
Chances are, whomever it is would be smarter than this dumb son of a bitch we have now.
He also mentioned Bush was born in Connecticut and educated at Yale. He said we Texans got suckered in by voting for a Yankee to begin with.

Well, not ALL of us...

Friedman Makes November Governor Ballot in Texas

Yahoo!Texas voters have made history by placing independent gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman on the November ballot, the state announced today.

Friedman, the author-singer-humorist making his first try for state office, had submitted 169,574 signatures. His campaign said today that more than 137,000 signatures were certified.

Voters will see their widest field of hopefuls for governor since Democratic Gov. Dolph Briscoe won a second term by trouncing GOP nominee Jim Granberry. La Raza Unida, American and Socialist Party candidates trailed.

The Texas record for candidates on the gubernatorial ballot is six, last reached in 1932 when Miriam "Ma" Ferguson won her second term as the state's first female governor..

Robert Marbut, a lecturer in political science at Texas State University and the University of Texas-San Antonio, said he could not recall previous instances in American politics of two major-party candidates for governor facing high-profile independent or third-party opponents.

"This is going to be a very weird election," Marbut said. "This is going to be probably the most interesting election in Texas history and maybe the most interesting governor's race in the history of the United States."

GO KINKY!

Check out http://www.kinkyfriedman.com/index.html and send the guy five bucks.
You may not be from Texas, but you know damn good and well you'd vote for him if you were.
Help a Texas Jewboy out.
It's our way of telling the world we're sorry about sending you George W. Bush.

Ugh.

I am starting to really hate politics and politicians.
I wish we could just turn back time to the year 2000, install Al Gore in his rightful place as President, then move forward.

In other news, the Massachusetts legislature is debating the wisdom of school cafeterias serving fluffernutter sandwiches to students. That's a peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich to you.
Why don't they just deep fry the damn things, then roll them in confectioner's sugar? Then they could coat them in butter and syrup and serve them up like French toast.

Intolerance: Stop Tolerating It.
A Zipdrive Blogatorial

I just watched the Lifetime network's made for TV movie called, "A Girl Like Me," about a boy who realizes he's a girl trapped in a boy's body, almost from toddlerhood.
Naturally, he grows into a beautiful, cross-dressing "girl" who ends up getting beaten to death by a group of angry young male homophobes.
How much longer will it take for the trannies, the queers, the anti-war, the pro-choice, the immigrants and the rest of us who routinely get smacked around by the self righteous, so-called patriotic radical fundamentalists to get fed up and start smacking back?
The other night, I was playing online Mah Jong with a built-in chat feature. Two stupid idiots started bitching about immigrants who refuse to learn or speak English. Predictably, neither could spell or create grammatically correct sentences.
I mentioned casually that their English skills needed to improve before they could credibly debate the topic.
They both started to come at me, at which point I took great pains to ridicule and poke fun at them, humiliating them until they left the game in a huff. By the time I got through with them, most of the room was helping me out.
It takes two fools to argue, to be sure, but it seems to me civil discourse is wasted on these cretins. Maybe we should all start to react to intolerant bullies in the only way they can understand--by shoving it right back in their faces.
Can you imagine a crowd of angry Unitarians showing up at some redneck's funeral with posters denouncing his life of being an intolerant turd?
Can you imagine a little old lady smacking some brute in the face with her purse if he said the N word?
Can you picture a transvestite kicking some young thug in the nuts because he couldn't resist making lewd, rude comments?
Can you envision a young pregnant woman entering an abortion clinic and pausing to beat a protester with the stick from his own protest sign?
The other day I was having lunch with two older ladies from my Al-Anon group, one of whom is a Republican. She made some casual statements about gas prices not being "all that high," and I just couldn't help myself. I said she was so woefully uninformed, it was hardly worth the effort to discuss it.
She pressed on, so I started hitting her with some facts about Exxon/Mobil and kept at it until she relented.
Neither of us got unpleasant about it, but I wasn't willing to remain a civil little liberal and allow her to state her ridiculous GOP talking points as if they were facts.
Subsidizing Exxon/Mobil with billions of taxpayer dollars for "oil exploration" is simply a blatant slap to every face in our nation. We should no longer allow people to pretend it's okay.
People who aim to be tolerant and morally decent should no longer let intolerant, immoral people skate through statements and conversations without challenge.
The Ann Coulters and Bill O'Reillys of the world need to be put into check.
By any means necessary?
Maybe so.

The Mistaken Name Game

My big sister offered this gem in an e-mail.
If you remove all the middle names and just call Brangelina's new baby by her first and last name--then say it real fast, Shiloh Pitt sounds like "shallow pit."
Poor kid.

Bush Spikes in the Polls

Bush's "incredibly good week" has resulted in a whopping, one-point increase in his poll numbers.
According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Bush has zoomed from an abysmal 36 point approval rating to a hefty 37 point rating.
Analogous to this would be a turd circling the drain to one floating near the surface of a toilet bowl.
Though the media has been swooning over the hit on another one of the Number Two men in Iraq and christening Bush with a second chance, the public's not buying it.
File this under "too little, too late."
Now, rumors about the Bush administration endorsing an amnesty for terrorists program in Iraq are bound to drag BushCo back to the bottom of the toilet bowl.
It seems the 2,500 American lives lost in Bush's unwinnable quagmire still count for something in the American consciousness.
Bush may not care, but we do.

A Real Fork Job

Quizzno's is advertising their new line of chopped salads that are so darn special, they are served with "real forks."
1. Why the hell do they call it a 'chopped salad'? Is that opposed to a hand-torn salad? Who cares?
2. If you order one to-go, do you still get a real fork, or are you relegated to a plastic fork, or even worse, a spork?
If their ad agency made more than $100 on these crappy ad concepts, Quizzno's got hosed.
You want to eat a chopped salad with a real fork, go buy a bag of the stuff, take it home and eat it, like all normal people do.
I am not putting on shoes and a bra and burning $8 worth of gas in 100 degree weather to go to Quizzno's so I can sit down and eat chopped lettuce off a Styrofoam plate with a 'genuine' metal fork.
I wish I was a Quizzno's customer so I could boycott them based on this ad campaign.
It's crazy hot outside, I'm just over food poisoning and my sinuses are draining.
Don't fork with me, Quizzno's.

Mary Cheney's book sells fewer than 6,000 copies since release

Despite saturation media coverage when it was published a month ago, Mary Cheney's book Now It's My Turn has tanked at bookstores. Published by a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster, the memoir has sold fewer than 6,000 copies to date, according to Nielsen Bookscan.

The book's sales have declined in each of the four weeks since its release, to only 574 copies sold for the week ending June 3. That's 77% fewer than its first-week sales of 2,445.

At this rate, it will be virtually impossible for Simon & Schuster to recoup the reported $1 million advance it paid Cheney for the book, which describes her life as the gay daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney. (The Advocate)


(from The Advocate.com)

Mary better save that money. Methinks her second booklet won't be such a great seller.

This is my first try at posting a photo.
The puppy in question is Polly, my friend's retarded pit bull.
Isn't she cute...in a retarded kinda way?

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Okay, there's been no actual blood, but I have a stomach virus that hit yesterday like Hurricane Katrina.
Thank God for friends who squirrel away their RX drugs. Compazine and Lomotil are my friends.
I lost 5 pounds yesterday.
'Nuff said.

The Dog Whisperer

I am hooked on this National Geographic Channel show about a guy who tames unruly dogs.
I don't even have a dog, yet I can't wait to watch host Cesar Millan settle down the roughest Rottweiler to the most petulant Pomeranian.
In fact, a friend of mine's son is between houses and I am seriously considering letting him board his dog Pug, a Labrador/German Shepherd mix, in my back yard so I can go out there and say, "Chhhh" while I am nipping his side with my fingertips.
My niece Dixi, a large Boston terrier, had a little problem with authority when she was a tiny puppy. My big sister was horrified when Dixi was kicked out of puppy Pre-K for trying to bust moves on baby Labs and Shepherds who towered over her.
Through sheer will and a doctoral degree in arguing (lawyer) my big sister has managed to tame Dixi pretty much, but she still tries to dominate by jumping up on visitors as they enter the front door. And she petulantly stares at my sister for hours after being sent to her little bed.
My friend Katie has a retarded (I'm being literal here) Pit Bull named Polly Wolly Doodle.
Polly is sweet, but she'll eat a rock, chew up a TV cable, destroy a potted plant or dig a pit whenever the urge strikes her.
After weeks of obedience school, all Polly managed to learn was,"Look at me."
If I had the money, I'd fly Cesar Millan to San Antonio and set him loose on the little retard to see just how good he is.
Now all I need is for National Geographic Channel to launch a new show called, "The Cat Whisperer."
I have two boy cats who could benefit from a little obedience training.
Lesson one would be, James, stop licking my face to wake me up.
Lesson two would be, Nick, get down. Nick, get outta there. Nick, put that down. Nick, stop it. Nick, be quiet.

Big Fucking Deal

The GOP and Bush are trumpeting victory because Abu Musag al-Zarqawi was killed when his safehouse was destroyed by a couple of 500-pound bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes.
Did you notice I spelled his middle name "Musag" instead of "Musab"?
Nah, I didn't think you would. I had to look up the spelling of his entire name. He's no Osama bin Laden, after all.

Bush will become energized and start publicly bragging about bagging the number two man in Iraq. His cockiness will only fan the flames, and we all know that by now.
Seems to me there have been several number two men in Iraq who've been killed.
Al Qaida is like a roach colony, though.
If you kill a large cockroach in your kitchen, do you feel like the rest of them will see his remains and run for their lives to the house next door?
Clyde, who needs no introduction, sent me a smug e-mail this morning, saying, "it was a mighty fine day." He didn't mention why, presumably because he thought the news was so big it needed no specific mention.
I wonder if the tens of thousands of American people who've lost their loved ones in Iraq are rejoicing because a major cockroach has been killed? Are they singing, "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead?"
I doubt it.
You can take people named Abu, Mohammed, Osama, bin- this or al- this and kill all of them and it won't matter.
Iraq is a festering, infected wound that smears its pus and blood and germs all over everyone who gets close to it.
The only way to avoid exposure is to get the fuck away from it.

P.S. Where's bin Laden?

Senate Rejects Ban on Gay Marriage

Yesterday the Senate rejected a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, dealing a defeat to Bush and Republicans who hoped to use the measure to energize conservative voters on Election Day.
Up yours, Bush.
Your one hot button issue has gone cold.
Heh. I guess the conservative voters won't have to be be wasting gas in their Impalas to get to the polls come November.

Is He at it Again?

Hrummph.
Bush's poll ratings are swirling around the toilet and he's become a liability to the GOP during an election year, so what does he do?

He trots out his secret weapon again: the anti-gay marriage amendment.

Doesn't the Senate have better things to do than toying with the Constitution with an issue that most of the red states have already banned?
Bush already has referred to the Constitution as, "a goddamned piece of paper," so why should he care what's in it when he's never shown any interest in it before?
"Sadly, President Bush is playing election-year politics with this divisive issue," the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said Friday. "He is shamelessly using this ploy to energize his right-wing base. We should never rewrite the Constitution to enshrine intolerance."
Amen, brother.

Make It Stop!!

I find lately when I'm doing yardwork, a playlist of really bad songs pops into my head and one will etch a groove into my brain, repeating itself again and again.
It might not even be the whole song- it might just be the intro.
Yesterday, it was the beginning notes of the Partridge Family's "I Think I Love You."
Over and over, my mind played, "Bah, bah BAH bah, bumpa, pa pa..."
Which brings me to my favorite game.
If you could duct tape anyone to a chair and force them to listen to one song over and over, who would it be, and what song would it be?

I've Had It

As a writer, my clients usually like it when I spell everything correctly.
As an Internet addict, I run across frequent instances of bad spelling, and it drives me to distraction.
I too make common mistakes on some of the words below, and rely on spell check to keep me sounding semi-literate.
Here's a handy list of common words we Internetistas frequently spell wrong.
Let's clean things up, shall we?



a lot
absence
acceptable
accidentally
accommodate
acquire
acquit
all right
amateur
analyze
apparent
argument
believe
business
calendar
camouflage
category
cemetery
changeable
chief
collectible
colonel
column
committed
conscience
conscious
definite(ly)
description
dilemma
disappear
discipline
eighth
embarrass(ment)
encouragement
equipment
especially
existence
experience
February
foreign
forfeit
forty
fourth
fulfill
gauge
government
grateful
guarantee
happily
height
heroes
hierarchy
humorous
hygiene
ignorance
immediate
independent
intelligence
island
its/it's (Where is its dog bowl? It's in the yard.)
jewelry
judgment
knowledge
leisure
liaison
library
license
lightning
maintain
manageable
maneuver
mathematics
medieval
memento
miniature
millennium
miscellaneous
mischievous
misspell
muscle
necessary
neighbor
noticeable
obedience
occasion/ally
occur/occurrence
opinion
parallel
permanent
perseverance
personal
personnel
possession
potato/potatoes
precede
preferred
principal/principle (pal is the elementary school boss)
privilege (no d)
pronunciation
questionnaire
receive
receipt
recognize
recommend
referred
reference
relevant
religious
restaurant
rhyme
rhythm
schedule
scissors
separate
special
subtle
supersede
technique
temperature
their/they're/there
thorough
to/too/two
truly
twelfth
until
vacuum
weather
Wednesday
weird
you're/your (you're= you are, your = is that your house?)

Which one(s) do you often misspell?
I am bad with words that end in 'ence' versus 'ance.'

Class dismissed!