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.