I don't know how the metal gets rusty
when it never rains here


american pride, by dronepop.

* Top Ten conservative idiots. excerpt:

"3. The Bush Administration

"The most bizarre excuse to come from Bush & Co. over the past week was that - hey, they didn't even know about the ports deal until it was done! As if that should make everyone feel better.

"Not only was Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff unaware of the deal, he wasn't even aware 'that his agency was leading the review until after the deal's approval,' according to the Washington Times.

"Treasury Secretary John Snow said he didn't know about the deal either, despite the fact that he was supposedly head of the panel that cleared it.

"Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said 'I wasn't aware of this until this weekend.'

"And the White House claimed that Bush didn't know about the deal until he read about it in the newspapers. Unfortunately that claim was debunked by Scott McClellan, who announced last week that Bush has known about the deal since February 16. (Video courtesy of CanOFun.com.)

"But hey, it's nothing to worry about. After terrorizing us for years with color-coded threat levels, dire tales of WMDs, and suggestions that people stock up on duct tape and plastic sheeting, George W. Bush now says that 'people don't need to worry about security.'

"See? All we have to do is trust him, and everything will be fine. After all, the Bush administration has shown itself to be really trustworthy in the past, right?"

* From Harper's:

-- Minimum number of times that Frederick Douglas was beaten in what is now Donald Rumsfeld's vacation home: 25

-- Miles from Berlin's World Cup stadium that a four-story brothel has recently opened: 2

-- Chances that a Japanese person will make eye contact during conversation with another Japanese person: 2 in 5

-- Chance that he or she will make eye contact during conversation with a robot: 3 in 5

-- Amount paid in January for one of William Shatner's kidney stones: $25,000

-- Number of U.S. states whose constitutions require that public officials believe in a supreme being: 4

* Essay on (the book) A Clockwork Orange concludes:

"A Clockwork Orange is not completely coherent. If youth is violent because the young are like “malenky machines” who cannot help themselves, what becomes of the free will that Burgess otherwise saw as the precondition of morality? Do people grow into free will from a state of automatism, and, if so, how and when? And if violence is only a passing phase, why should the youth of one age be much more violent than the youth of another? How do we achieve goodness, both on an individual and social level, without resort to the crude behaviorism of the Ludovico Method or any other form of cruelty? Can we bypass consciousness and reflection in our struggle to behave well?

"There are no schematic answers in the book. One cannot condemn a novel of 150 pages for failing to answer some of the most difficult and puzzling questions of human existence, but one can praise it for raising them in a peculiarly profound manner and forcing us to think about them. To have combined this with acute social prophecy (to say nothing of entertainment) is genius."

* "It is a Dick Cheney world out there - a world where politicians and lobbyists hunt together, dine together, drink together, play together, pray together and prey together, all the while carving up the world according to their own interests." -- Bill Moyers (from this recent speech)