i planted liberty.

VOTE
* heres a bit more on the tyre-slashing incident - its not particularly interesting - and i havent even been following the story apart from my roveradar pricking on electionday. the only interesting thing is that i may have been premature the other day when i discounted my previous 'rove did it' assumption http://nashuaadvocate.blogspot.com/2005/01/news-advocate-continues-its-tiregate.html

* blinky: " If we'd been having this discussion a couple of years ago and I had stood up in front of you and said the Iraqi people would be voting, you would look at me like some of you still look at me, with a kind of blank expression. " http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/26/politics/26TEXT-BUSH.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=

* "Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance says he now has found far more than enough evidence to persuade a judge to nullify the election and call for a rematch between Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi... Republicans also argue that they don't need to show which candidate got the illegal votes, only that there were enough to cloud the results." http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002161949_vance27m.html

* "The Republicans contend in the lawsuit that the court should order a revote because it is impossible to determine who truly won the election. " indeed. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/209591_revote27.html

WAR
* "Perhaps the one freedom most fundamental to Bush and his many admiring columnists is the freedom from reality." http://consortiumnews.com/2005/012605.html


* THIRTY SEVEN AMGRUNTS DIE IN IRAQ (300 iraqis die every week)

* in case u missed it - everyone is (appropriately) atwitter at rumsfelds new SSB. evil cometh this way.

* oz gitmo resident is on his way home. free at last. free at last. thank dog alm... wait a minute, actually he isnt quite free. or his freedom of speech isnt free. or rather, the ozgovt wants to make his freedom of speech so free that they'd confiscate any profits from a book deal or media appearances et al. ya see, in oz, you arent allowed to make any profits from crimes - even indirectly - which is all good & fine. except that he didnt commit any crimes, which is why he is being freed - but the govt thinks that he might have comitted crimes. somehow. go read. how the fuck did we get here? seriously.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/War-on-Terror/Canberra-to-seize-Habib-story-fees/2005/01/25/1106415595525.html

* how long till the turks get involved in iraq?


AMDOM
* the gay cartoon thingy is going crazy. i think we should ban non-white cartoon characters too. and unmarried ones.

* peggynoonan actually *reiterates* her take on the coronation speech. she must have some sort of disorder where she didnt feel the tap on her shoulder. "Refrain from breast beating, and don't clobber the world over the head with your moral fabulousness... we should remember as we do it that history is also a long tale of woe. And human vanity only complicates our endeavors."
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110006211

* socsec update - there's a brouhaha going on about the use of words - privatization, personal accounts, individual accounts - and how the journos are being forced (implicitly one assumes) to adopt the shitehouse description du jour. it'd be funny, except that its spooky. and of course, its nothing new, but the pace is fun - its almost as though there simply isnt a word that is sufficiently effective. maybe, just maybe, the idea is a bad one. nah...

* feiths family must be horrified.

* " all eight Democrats on the panel voted against Mr. Gonzales." but alas. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/politics/27gonzales.html

* i hate all this talk abuot drrice's intellect. the same charge is levelled at the neocons. it drives me mad. seriously - have any of these people ever come across as 'smart'? the only thing we ever see from *any* of them that looks like intellect is a splash of talkingpoint jujitsu. i understand that we only see them in public, and their mass audience isnt necessarily brilliant - but still - i dont think ive ever thought 'yeah - that was actually clever'. even evil geniuses are at least sposed to be geniuses - that just makes sense. cheney is probably clever - but again we never see it. at least no direct evidence. krauthammer? kristol? puhlease! we do see propaganda genius around, but that is simply fear and repitition and a tight message. rove? again - the best we are allowed to glimpse is tactical genius. which is a genius to be sure - but its not compelling evidence of towering intellect... rumsfled probably comes the closest - he is obviously smart - but the well seems to be pretty dry elsewhere. or maybe they all really are geniuses, so clever that the only evidence of it is the occassional wobble of a distant star.
it'd somehow be more comforting if we were getting slaughtered by masterminds... instead, we've got 'stupidest fucking guy on the planet' out in front. and that quote as we know is from tommyfranks - and even the stupidpresident made fun of tommy cos all his classmates at school thought he was dumb... what a bizarroworld. (actually, gonzales also seems smart. fwiw)

OTHER
* xymph does a piece on some murders - incl another dead microbiologists - http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2005/01/few-murders.htmlhttp://xymphora.blogspot.com/2005/01/few-murders.html

* mmmmmm. sharapova.

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war makes me mad, sad, bad. tsunamis makes me sad.
wotisitgood4.blogspot.com