Yesterday was a long day

But it was a good one. I bargained (well, I think) last night, and then Mrs. Drinallmyyears and I went to see The Inside Man.

What a movie. This is a new crime classic. Every moment it was truly a Spike Lee movie, and I was hooked. Great story, amazing script. Amazing shots, and beautifully made.

Plus, Captain von Trapp was in it! Yeah, he's still kickin' around.

And God love him, he actually plays a, well, I wouldn't want to give it away.

Holy crap.

500,000 marched yesterday in DC. It's like a Benneton ad on steroids, and hyped to the umpteenth power.

I wonder if James Sensenbrenner noticed?

Two news hits:

On the one the hand we have a "A staggering collection of misfortunes and failures," according to a longtime Washington hand.

On the other...

Is it too much to suggest impeachment?

Gracious, I'm tired.

Last summer , we got rid of an above-ground pool that came with the house when we bought. There was a nice brown sandy pit about 20' in diameter where once the proud pool stood. No grass, but some sand and lots of gravel. Lots. Lots. Of. Gravel.

7,000 pounds of gravel later (an approximate estimation), plus dinner (macaroni and cheese casarole), plus a trip to the winery for the monthly wine tasting = one tired Mr. Inallmyyears.

The Washington Post confirms it!

Onward Christian soldiers, onward to Tehran. Well, no one can say they didn't know it was coming. You know how they say the sequel is rarely as good as the original? Think about that more a minute. Then weep.

And for extra shits and grins, check out this link to see if the blowhards in question are talking about invading Iraq, or Iran.

Anything's possible, I guess.

A woman who's smarter than I am makes the case that Congressional Democrats are actually pretty well organized and effective, given their current constraints.

Democrats are famously impossible to pin down on certain issues. Just recently, my junior Senator quipped that "People say that Democrats don't stand for anything, but that's not true. We do stand for anything."

I was mighty glad to see the Democratic opposition to Social Security grind the President dead in his privatization tracks. I was happy to see them call out the current leadership on the NSA business (to the small extent that they did). And it's true that when Democrats do put forth their ideas, that the mainstream press ignores them for the most part (when they collide with the convenient media narrative).

I was also glad to see Sullivan point out the following:

When in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Bush quietly suspended the Davis-Bacon Act in order to allow federal contractors to avoid paying the prevailing wage to workers involved in clean-up efforts, Miller led Democrats in handing the president a rare defeat. Appalled that “the President has exploited a national tragedy to cut workers' wages,” Miller unearthed a little-used provision of a 1976 law that allows Congress to countermand the president's authority to suspend laws after a national emergency. While it is usually nearly impossible for Democrats to get bills through the all-powerful House Rules Committee, Miller's maneuver would have bypassed that step and guaranteed an automatic vote by the full House. Bush, faced with a vote he was sure to lose, reversed his earlier action and reinstated Davis-Bacon.

This was a particularly shameful episode in the wake of the Hurricane That Ate Bush's Presidency, and it was quite nice to see Bush eat a nice shit sandwich (served up hot)from a California Democrat over his erstwhile attempt to rob government workers out of a prevailing wage.

The following passage certainly gave me food for thought:

So it is that Democrats can be “hopelessly divided” while voting together 88 percent of the time, according to Congressional Quarterly; just one percentage point lower than the vaunted lock-step Republican caucus. They can be “pathetically ineffective” while dealing a humiliating defeat to the president's biggest domestic policy effort. They can be deemed “weak” and “timid” while setting the terms of the debate for pulling troops out of Iraq.

Huh.

I think I've seen this movie before.

Don't you?

And as I recall, it sucked.

You're kidding me.

My wife has this song as her default ring on her cell phone. I hope she never gets a cab ride from this guy.

Denver Transit Workers on Strike

Here's a good on the ground look at another 'illegal' strike.

More here. Apparently top managers got raises of $40K and $50K. Must be nice.

I'm off to go bargain myself. Then tonight, bargaining preparations until 7 p.m. or so.

Exciting!

Of course!

He's Piggy from Lord of the flies. Why didn't I see it before?

My favorite piece:

The media's defense has been that it can function only within the prescribed information structure. How can we know when the White House is prevaricating, dissembling, not being straight with us, even outright lying to us?

McClellan destroys this line of defense. His inability to finesse the administration line, to tickle its logic, to prettify it, to seem smart about it in the least—and with virtually every one of his prevaricating and dissembling and truth-avoiding utterances becoming the morsels of the daily blog diet—means the media has to struggle even more to justify how it ever believed these num--skulls.

Indeed. How in the world these people ever got taken seriously in the first place should be chapters of 'how not to...' in journalism texts across this great land. Of course, that won't happen.

The case for a just God

Unbeknownst to all of you, I've recently started the process of being confirmed in the Episcopal church. It's the church Dr. Mrsinallmyyears grew up in, and I like their social message. Recently, I've been feeling the need to go in this direction. I've been searching for the proof a just and loving God that actually cares about the affairs of a species (s)he by all rights should long ago have given up on. And myself, I had believed that this is exactly what had happened.

Proof positive for the love of the Lord.

Gimme five Jesus!

And as for little Tom, remember that not too long ago, it was a conspiracy among Nancy Pelosi and Ronnie Earle, the prosecutor who'd been on his ass.

Tom, tonight I drink to your (dis)honor.

I'm becoming a Human Resources Director!

Late April Fool's Day. In other news, I found this link to a PETA website focused on worker rights in the slaughter industry. Now, I normally abhor PETA. Their publicity strategy seems to go something like this: "Is it offensive? If yes, how offensive?"

I honestly cannot understand their strategy at all. So I give the props where the props is due.

Does anyone in this administration ever get fired? Ever? What do you have to do? Seriously.

I give you the following:

Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration.
...
The White House was largely successful in defusing the Niger controversy because there was no evidence that Bush was aware that his claims about the uranium were based on faulty intelligence. Then-CIA Director George Tenet swiftly and publicly took the blame for the entire episode, saying that he and the CIA were at fault for not warning Bush and his aides that the information might be untrue.
...
"Presidential knowledge was the ball game," says a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort. "The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn't in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn't do that with the tubes." A Republican political appointee involved in the process, who thought the Bush administration had a constitutional obligation to be more open with Congress, said: "This was about getting past the election."
...
Only two months before Wilson went public with his allegations, the Iraq war was being viewed as one of the greatest achievements of Bush's presidency. Rove, whom Bush would later call the "architect" of his re-election campaign, was determined to exploit the war for the president's electoral success. On May 1, 2003, Bush made a dramatic landing on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to announce to the nation the cessation of major combat operations in Iraq. Dressed in a military flight suit, the president emerged from a four-seat Navy S-3B Viking with the words "George W. Bush Commander-in-Chief" painted just below the cockpit window.
...

Because the Bush administration was able to control what information would remain classified, however, reporters did not know that Bush had received the President's Summary that informed him that both State's INR and the Energy Department doubted that the aluminum tubes were to be used for a nuclear-related purpose.

(Ironically, at one point, before he had reviewed the one-page summary, Hadley considered declassifying it because it said nothing about the Niger intelligence information being untrue. However, after reviewing the summary and realizing that it would have disclosed presidential knowledge that INR and DOE had doubts about the tubes, senior Bush administration officials became preoccupied with ensuring that the text of the document remained classified, according to an account provided by an administration official.)

I'm going to fix a strong drink. That's what modern life is doing to me.

The lights are on again.

I know it seems like I only deliver bad news, and hey, that's pretty much true. But I still feel obligated to pass on to you this most recent documentation of the fact that not only are we all headed to hell, but that the skids are apparently getting greased with the blood of innocents. As usual.

Read more here.

Also, Christine lost. Tammy Duckworth won. Congratulations, Rahm.

Fucker.

I'll still vote for Tammy, but my ability to get and bust my hump for her will depend quite largely on how she comes across in person to her own volunteers. I hope she inspires more confidence than she has thus far.

Archpundit has his rundown.

The light of reason and hope that is In All My Years will go dim this week.

See below for more details.



(I'm going on a cruise.)

See ya Sunday.

Donna's kids

Donna's kids.

You know, the ones who clean up dorm rooms, classes, facilities. Can you imagine cleaning up after the students at UM? Would you want to? I wouldn't.

Here's the latest on their walkout.

From one of their own.

It's hard to believe people this incompetent keep their jobs. Or: That Darn Librul Media Vol. XXXVIII

It must be their union, galldarn unions keep dead weight from gettin' fired, that's all they do.

Some choicest quotes from the wayback machine:

Now that the combat phase of the war in Iraq is officially over, what begins is a debate throughout the entire U.S. government over America's unrivaled power and how best to use it."
(CBS reporter Joie Chen, 5/4/03)

"Tommy Franks and the coalition forces have demonstrated the old axiom that boldness on the battlefield produces swift and relatively bloodless victory. The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly shattered skeptics' complaints."
(Fox News Channel's Tony Snow, 4/27/03)

We're all neo-cons now."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)

"The war winds down, politics heats up.... Picture perfect. Part Spider-Man, part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan. The president seizes the moment on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific."
(PBS's Gwen Ifill, 5/2/03, on George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech)

We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 5/1/03)


"He looked like an alternatively commander in chief, rock star, movie star, and one of the guys."
(CNN's Lou Dobbs, on Bush's 'Mission Accomplished' speech, 5/1/03)

"Well, the hot story of the week is victory.... The Tommy Franks-Don Rumsfeld battle plan, war plan, worked brilliantly, a three-week war with mercifully few American deaths or Iraqi civilian deaths.... There is a lot of work yet to do, but all the naysayers have been humiliated so far.... The final word on this is, hooray."
(Fox News Channel's Morton Kondracke, 4/12/03)

The final word is what again?

More here. Someone can surely easily explain to me why we keep these boobs on the air.

Jesus Christ. Please take me home, Lord.

I bring you the following. Read it and weep. Weep aloud if you voted for this clod because you were put off by John Kerry's effete frenchness, your dislike of his wife, or some other such piece of trivia that has nothing to do with anyone's ability to actually run a government. Read this, for it's your legacy as much as his.

President Bush has decided to stay out of the lion's share of decisions made by his administration.

Sources close to the administration said that over the last year, Mr. Bush has chosen to focus on two issues, leaving the rest to be decided by Cabinet members and senior aides. They said the issues are Iraq and the Republican congressional campaign in the 2006 elections.

"Lots of important issues that deal with national security are never brought to the president because he doesn't want to deal with them," a source familiar with the White House said. "In some cases, this has resulted in chaos."

Read the rest here.

Eric Boehlert is smarter than me

And he proves it here. I thought the port deal was a such a shitstorm because the karmic rubber band that is the collective sin and wrongdoing of these fucking people finally snapped.

Oopsie.

I'm pro-censureship

Finally, someone in the Senate is doing something, anything about the President's warrantless spy program. You know, the one he admitted to, and said he'd keep up doing? Well, I called my Senators today, and urged both of them to sign on the articles of censure, and neither one of them has an official position.

Typical.

Meanwhile, the White House is tired. I'm tired too.