born live love die

There are times when I think that I am the last sane man in America. Now is one of those times.

The Vice President of the United States is asserting that his office is not part of the Executive branch of government because the Vice President can cast tie breaking votes in the Senate. So that makes him, what, the fourth branch of government?

Who is buying this load of shit?

The mainstream media, who are treating this as a legitimate position, instead of pimp slapping it back to where it belongs.  And David Addington, of course. Or perhaps his is the fount of shit from which this load comes.

Vice President Cheney’s office has refused to comply with an executive order governing the handling of classified information for the past four years and recently tried to abolish the office that sought to enforce those rules, according to documents released by a congressional committee yesterday.

The office in question is supposed to make sure that classified information is correctly handled.  This is a routine inspection, but Cheney isn’t going for it.
The Washington Post article, which I cited, doesn’t include this gem, found in the New York Times article.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, disclosed Mr. Cheney’s effort to shut down the oversight office. Mr. Waxman, who has had a leading role in the stepped-up efforts by Democrats to investigate the Bush administration, outlined the matter in an eight-page letter sent Thursday to the vice president and posted, along with other documentation, on the committee’s Web site.

Mr. Waxman asserted in his letter and the interview that Mr. Cheney’s office should take the efforts of the National Archives especially seriously because it has had problems protecting secrets.

He noted that I. Lewis Libby Jr., the vice president’s former chief of staff, was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying to a grand jury and the F.B.I. during an investigation of the leak of classified information — the secret status of Valerie Wilson, the wife of a Bush administration critic, as a Central Intelligence Agency officer.

Mr. Waxman added that in May 2006, a former aide in Mr. Cheney’s office, Leandro Aragoncillo, pleaded guilty to passing classified information to plotters trying to overthrow the president of the Philippines.

“Your office may have the worst record in the executive branch for safeguarding classified information,” Mr. Waxman wrote to Mr. Cheney.

The Washington Post article somehow missed the bit about Leandro Aragoncillo passing classified information to plotters trying to overthrow the president of the Phillipines.

Why is that?

Why is it that neither one of these papers will come right out and say that Cheney has turned Bush into Charlie McCarthy, only this time, the joke is on Charlie?

Why is that?

JMan sits on the sofa playing a video game. He is not supposed to be playing video games because he lost his temper and threw the controller. I put him on restriction when it was clear that he would not have to replace the controller.

Bookzilla has a friend over to play and this friend likes the game that JMan has shown her. Bookzilla was playing, but I asked her to practice her piano and JMan picked up the controller. I am prepping dinner and I don’t know how he will react when I tell him he is not supposed to be playing.

I tell him. He puts the controller down. He tells Bookzilla’s friend that he can’t play anymore because he is on restriction. He tells her about throwing the controller. He recites it in a matter of fact tone. He is not upset.

This boy has my heart.

We’re eating dinner and I tell the kids that I stopped at Costco during lunch. I tell them I bought a new bottle of olive oil to replace the one I broke. The bottle was sitting on the floor in the pantry and I bumped it. It fell over onto the tile floor and broke.

I didn’t put in this tile floor. The previous owners did. Besides it being more impervious to stain than other floor types, it is also hard as stone and will break any glass that touches it. All I did was bump that bottle and I had one liter of Costco’s best extra virgin olive oil spreading into a green puddle on the floor.

I said that I was upset about breaking the bottle. Earlier, in the car, JMan spelled out some words that I have taken great pains not to use in front of them. Words having something to do with copulation. I said that they have heard bad words, but not from me, and I wanted to use a lot of bad words when I broke that bottle.

JMan said, without a hint of guile, “Like what?”, and I cracked up. He tried to hold his innocent face, but I knew that he had thought I would slip up. He soon smiled, knowing that I knew. Bookzilla joined in, trying to get me to slip, using logic to get explain why I should tell them.

It’s like I’m living with a cop and a lawyer.

The Republicans have deified Reagan and don’t really understand why the Communist bloc came apart.

It was the economics, stupid.

It wasn’t some old man pulling street theater in Berlin.

Iran is in bad shape.

Despite promises to use Iran’s oil revenue to aid the poor, Ahmadinejad’s economic policies have backfired, triggering 20 percent inflation over the past year, increased poverty and a 25 percent rise in the price of gas last month. More than 50 of the country’s leading economists wrote an open letter to Ahmadinejad this week warning that he is ignoring basic economics and endangering the country’s future.

How has Ahmadinejad reacted? Just like the Shah.

Iran is in the midst of a sweeping crackdown that both Iranians and U.S. analysts compare to a cultural revolution in its attempt to steer the oil-rich theocracy back to the rigid strictures of the 1979 revolution.

The recent detentions of Iranian American dual nationals are only a small part of a campaign that includes arrests, interrogations, intimidation and harassment of thousands of Iranians as well as purges of academics and new censorship codes for the media. Hundreds of Iranians have been detained and interrogated, including a top Iranian official, according to Iranian and international human rights groups.

The move has quashed or forced underground many independent civil society groups, silenced protests over issues including women’s rights and pay rates, quelled academic debate, and sparked society-wide fear about several aspects of daily life, the sources said.

“The current crackdown is a way to instill fear in the population in order to discourage them from future political agitation as the economic situation begins to deteriorate,” said Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “You’re going to think twice about taking to the streets to protest the hike in gasoline prices if you know the regime’s paramilitary forces have been on a head-cracking spree the last few weeks.”

And what do Cheney and his neo-con pals want to do?

Bomb them.

That would deliver the populace to Ahmadinejad in a way that would cement hard-line rule in Iran for another decade.

The prudent thing is to do nothing aggressive and let Iran’s regime rot from the inside out. We should be prepared with aid in place when the end comes, but they need to go through this.

Cheney and the rest of the Republicans are just bad students of history.

This would be funny, except for this:

Four lesbians convicted of assaulting a man who was stabbed after he made advances toward one of them were sentenced Thursday amid screams and weeping to prison terms ranging from 3 1/2 to 11 years.

The four sentenced Thursday were convicted April 18 after assaulting Dwayne Buckle, who had made advances at one of the seven as they walked past him outside the Independent Film Center in Greenwich Village on Aug. 18, 2006.

and this:

Buckle, 29, testified that he was in a hospital for five days and in bed at home for a month after surgery for a lacerated liver and stomach. He said he also suffered cuts, bruises, scratches and an eye injury in the attack.

What was it about?

Johnson testified at trial that her group told Buckle they were not interested and he became loud and rude, called them names and threw a cigarette at them while saying that having sex with him would make them straight. She said the fight started after Buckle pushed and shoved them.

Dude, seven dykes go by and you start hitting on them? Seven? The probability that one of them is carrying a knife goes over 50% when you get more than four lesbians together.

Mary Winkler could spend a week in jail for shooting her husband in the back with a shotgun while he slept.

A woman who killed her preacher husband with a shotgun blast to the back as he lay in bed was sentenced Friday to three years in prison, but with time served could be released on probation in a little more than two months.

Mary Winkler must serve at least 210 days of her sentence but gets credit for the 143 days she has already spent in jail, Judge Weber McCraw said.

That leaves 67 days, and McCraw said up to 60 days of the sentence could be served in a facility where she could receive mental health treatment. That means Winkler might spend only another week in jail.

Mary Winkler practiced a ‘blame the victim’ defense.

Prosecutors claimed she had become caught up in a swindle known as the “Nigerian scam,” which promises riches to victims who send money to cover the processing expenses.

Winkler, however, testified during her trial that her husband hit and kicked her, forced her to look at pornography and demanded sex she considered unnatural. Jurors were shown a pair of tall, platform shoes and a black wig Winkler said she was pressured to wear during sex.

I’m with Paris. Yeah, the platform shoes is what pushed this over the edge. It was unfair.

Creationism in 10 minutes or less.

I got a new toy, tags for embedding video.

The joke that I didn’t get the first few times I saw this was calling Bush’s continuing support ‘backwash’, that they had been taken in and spit out.

Tucker Carlson: I wouldn’t want to eat  with you.  That’s horrible.

Jon Stewart: I know, and you won’t.

And that was before Stewart called him a dick.

The difference between the current crew at the White House and the former crew.