The View from Paris

Ah, so much to blog about...so little time. First things first: the Mona Lisa. I've not seen a reproduction that does her justice. And, yes, I shot this pic clandestinely because now no photos are allowed on the first floors of the Louvre.


As we've walked around Paris the last few weeks it's quite clear that our French cousins don't share our fear of, and distate for seeing, the naked female form. That is, if by "we" I meant John Ashcroft--which I did.


I mean, that whole episode of Ashcroft covering up the statue of Blind Justice at the Justice Department must've given the French, and probably all of Europe, a huge cramp from the belly laugh they experienced for days on end. I would love to have seen Bernard Henri-Levy immediately disavow even thinking "We're all Americans."


If I was bringing back a souvenir for John Ashcroft this would be it.

The Passion of the Peeps

adopt your own virtual pet!

Here's something for your Easter basket.

After waiting outside overnight to be among the first to enter this year's White House Easter Egg Roll, families in line were surprised to learn that the White House had changed the ticketing policy for the annual event, PageOneQ has learned.

The unannounced change means that the families who waited in line the longest, in one case for twenty-four hours, will not be among the visitors at the event's opening ceremonies. The first families in line, who were not part of the LGBT family group, received tickets with an 11:00am entrance time, two hours later than the opening time listed in the White House press release.

Yeah, I don't put too much stock into the idea that this is the beginning of something new for President Bunnypants. Still, it's interesting to note that they're scrambling for all the good press they can get right now.

So Very Wrong

I'm almost afraid to post this, but I can't resist.

A nude Britney Spears on a bearskin rug while giving birth to her firstborn marks a ‘first’ for Pro-Life. Pop-star Britney Spears is the “ideal” model for Pro-Life and the subject of a dedication at Capla Kesting Fine Art in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg gallery district, in what is proclaimed the first Pro-Life monument to birth, in April.

Dedication of the life-sized statue celebrates the recent birth of Spears’ baby boy, Sean, and applauds her decision of placing family before career. “A superstar at Britney’s young age having a child is rare in today’s celebrity culture. This dedication honors Britney for the rarity of her choice and bravery of her decision,” said gallery co-director, Lincoln Capla. The dedication includes materials provided by Manhattan Right To Life Committee.

“Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston,” believed Pro-Life’s first monument to the ‘act of giving birth,’ is purportedly an idealized depiction of Britney in delivery. Natural aspects of Spears’ pregnancy, like lactiferous breasts and protruding naval, compliment a posterior view that depicts widened hips for birthing and reveals the crowning of baby Sean’s head.

Oh. My. God.

Leaving aside the sheer tastelessness of this statue for the moment (and whoa Nelly, it is tasteless), one has to admire the ballsiness of the pro-lifers for taking the poster girl bad trailer park moms and setting her up as an icon for motherhood. Now I have to go rinse my eyes out and forget that I ever saw those pictures.

McGruder Owes Us

Anybody think he reads M&M's?

Short Takes

On the Oscars: Responding to Three 6 Mafia’s winning the Academy Award for best song, Steven Levitt, University of Chicago Economics Professor and author of Freakonomics, announces he’s going to find out if it really is hard out there for a pimp. Responding to critics, Levitt said, “I think we’ve got the right data sets, so back up off me!”

On higher education: John Tierney and David Brooks of the New York Times launch a petition campaign to reinstate Harvard President Larry Summers. The petition also calls for replacing the Harvard Arts and Sciences faculty with Times columnists and for abolishing nationwide all forms of job security for anyone earning less than $500,000 annually.

On Katrina: The Wall Street Journal, after insisting that pre-storm briefings provided to President Bush warned only that the levees would be overtopped and not breached, observed that everyone knows that for Bush “it’s all a matter of details and semantics. He’s always looking for the fine print and nuance.” To prove its point the Journal recalled Bush’s response to the pre-9/11 daily intelligence briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack inside US.” Reportedly Bush told those around him, “This only tells us about Bin Laden’s state of mind. He’s a determined guy. Hell, I’m a determined guy, and I’m not about to do anything. Get back to me when you’ve got something concrete.” Returning to the highlights of Bush’s Katrina response, the Journal wrote, “And finally, it takes a truly unique individual to make Michael Brown look like a capable public servant.”

On books: C-Span books will discuss Michael Eric Dyson’s latest release, Is Mrs. Wimberly Right? Dyson explains that Wimberly was the seventh-grade teacher who told him he’d never amount to anything if he didn’t learn to think before he talked.” The subtitle of Dyson’s book is: “Or is knowledge overrated?”

On the polls: After looking at his 34% approval rating in the wake of his efforts to sell authority for US ports to the highest bidder, to sell high-level government posts to campaign contributors, to sell Social Security up the river, and to sell an illegal and increasingly unpopular war to the American public, President Bush is heard to mutter, “It is hard out here for a pimp.”

Some Vietnam Vets NOT "truly deserving" of benefits?

My brother, Philip, was brilliant. He wrote and created pencil drawings so true to life, you'd weep. And in his paintings he captured an other-wordly quality of light. A sublime glow. He read everything. He told us stories. He was the first and the best storyteller in my life. He was recruited by the Marines, right out of high school. Those recruiters took a lot of boys from our neighborhood in the south valley of Albuquerque. He was sent to Vietnam twice. We didn't see him for three straight years. He came back violent and moody, went to college on the G.I. Bill, briefly coached high school football and taught Biology. He drifted around the country, met a paraplegic woman almost twice his age and married her because she "saved his life." They lived for awhile in her native Alabama and later Hawaii, but finally settled down on a little farm in New Mexico. He worked odd jobs for years, some he kept longer than others, usually manual labor type jobs. He usually broke a rule or two, threatened a co-worker, or just walked off a job if he felt like it. He began collecting animals. Not with any rhyme or reason in mind. He had dogs, cats and goats, in the double digits. When his wife passed away he became more and more reclusive. He didn't have time to read or paint anymore because he was too busy with his animals. He spent hours taking care of them. He lost a good job on a military base because he crossed a military roadblock to drive home to nurse a sick goat. He had periods of deep depression and suicidal thoughts. His health deteriorated. He began feeding the rats on his farm. Over the years we, his sisters and brothers, have pleaded with him to go to the VA Hospital, get a checkup, get some counseling, join a support group. He was stubborn and proud and wouldn't make time to jump through the hoops the VA required.

Well now he's reached the end of his rope. At 60 years of age, broken down and sick, living out of his car, he had to give in and admit he needed help. And now that he's willing to jump through the hoops to get what his country owes him for risking his life, and ultimately deferring whatever dreams a 17-year old had in 1963, idiots like Sally Satel, with the whole weight of the American Enterprise Institute behind her evil ass, are saying how can these guys make any claims after all these years? How the hell can she say that any of these guys are seeking a free ride?

Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote this piece of crap for the NYTimes' op-ed page earlier this week.

ACCORDING to a report from its inspector general, the Department of Veterans Affairs is now paying compensation for post-traumatic stress disorder to nearly twice as many veterans as it did just six years ago, at an annual cost of $4.3 billion. What's more surprising is that the flood of recent applicants does not, for the most part, consist of young soldiers just returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Rather they are Vietnam veterans in their 50's and 60's who claim to be psychologically crippled now by their service of decades ago.

This leads to an obvious question: Can it really take up to 40 years after a trauma before someone realizes he can no longer cope with the demands of civilian life? The answer: possibly, but it is often hard to know which applicants can be helped with short-term psychiatric care, which are seeking a free ride and which are truly deserving of the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and thus long-term care and payments of up to $2,300 a month for life.
...
But it's also very likely that some of the veteran baby boomers who have filed claims in recent years did so not out of medical need but out of a desire for financial security in their retirement years.
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Having worked as a psychiatrist at a Veterans Affairs hospital, I can attest to the good intentions with which the department created its post-traumatic stress disorder programs. But as the bureaucracy has become entrenched — and politicians and veterans' groups have applied pressure — a culture of trauma has blossomed.
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Most important, more rigor in diagnosing will conserve resources for veterans who are truly deserving. With a new generation of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, the Veterans Affairs Department needs to look at post-traumatic stress disorder in a new way: the department must regard it as an acute but treatable condition. Only in rare instances should veterans be eligible for lifetime disability; and perhaps there should be a deadline of years after service by which claims must be submitted.

This is horseshit. I thought I was deeply traumatized when we had to put our 13-year old Husky down after a brief illness. I can't even imagine what horrors my brother Philip experienced in his two tours of duty in Vietnam.

Excuse me if I foam at the mouth. These veterans put their lives on the line. They were willing to go into harm's way when so many ran and hid (how many deferments did Big Dick Cheney get?). The least we can do for them is make sure they finish well. The very least we can do for them is to make sure their next meal isn't coming out of a trash can.

Something else to bring you down...

"I can't imagine anything worse, your loved one is killed in Iraq and you've got to deal with Fred Phelps."

Dick Cheney: A haunted combat vet

Who in their right mind would equate Dick Cheney shooting a 78-year old acquaintance in the face and chest, mistaking him for a quail, with Viet Nam veterans haunted by the devastating experience of battlefield combat? Joe "Primary Colors" Klein that's who.

But then, there he was, with that haunted look in his Fox News interview, saying, "[T]he image of him falling is something I'll never be able to get out of my mind. I fired, and there's Harry falling ..." Hunting had given him "great pleasure" in the past, but he wasn't so sure now. In fact, he sounded a lot like the combat veterans I've spoken with over the years, for whom the living nightmare of firing a weapon under questionable circumstances is a constant theme.

Does anyone seriously entertain the notion that Blind Dick Cheney has an empathetic bone in his squishy body? What passes for hunting prowess to some is really much closer to animal slaughter and all the sociopathology behind it. Think about it. What kind of person takes pleasure from destroying 70 small pen-raised animals in a few hours time? That's just sick.

Watch the Birdies

I admit it’s been hard to get out of my mind the image of Cheney slaughtering 70 pheasants for a single day’s amusement, but then again there are so many other things to keep an eye on, including whether or not Congress is going to let the Bush Administration slither out of its violation of the law against eavesdropping without a warrant. On February 17 Scott McClellan was quoted as saying, “What we have talked about with some Congressional leaders is codifying into law what his authority already is"—in other words, they want Congress to write into law the very authority they claim already exists under the law. This is a load of shit. Even if our weak-kneed legislators ultimately believe that Bush should be given the power to wiretap without a warrant, they should first force Bush to acknowledge that he acted outside of the law. After that they can try to persuade their colleagues to change the law. Taking this course, though, would (should) open the door to impeachment. The Dems have called for a full inquiry before the Senate Intelligence Panel but have put their proposal on hold until March 7 to give the administration time to negotiate. What’s to negotiate? It’s Congress’s job to determine whether the President violated the law. Call your Congressman and demand hearings now.

Cheney Fell to Pieces

Cue Patsy Cline. The Daily Telegraph offers a little peek at Vice President Pantywaist, who according to another guest at the Armstrong Ranch last weekend was "a pitiful sight." Cheney is the worst kind of coward.

"This is a man who has been instrumental in sending thousands of troops to Iraq, but who fell to bits when faced with the reality of shooting someone and seeing them bleeding on the ground."

Five deferments to avoid fighting in Viet Nam, but no deferring the invasion of Iraq, and probably no hesitation or even any thought about sending thousands of young men and women to kill and be killed. The last section of this Newsweek article strongly implies that Dick alone gave the order on September 11, 2001, to shoot down United Flight 93. The entire article is kind of odd in that it also implies history will be kinder to Cheney than the current media view of him. I doubt it. And the fact that Bush didn't offer any kind of consolation to Dick, not even a phone call, doesn't surprise me in the least. I think he enjoyed the whole situation more than David Letterman or Jon Stewart.

Drunks and Skunks

Cheney taking responsibility at this point is cheap. He's let it sit out there for several days that Whittington was at fault for not announcing himself when he approached the hunting party from behind. Every Cheney apologist has blamed Whittington. For Dick to come out now and say, "I pulled the trigger" still suggests that he doesn't truly believe that he was at fault, but that he knows thats the "right" thing to do. But like everything else over the last five years, it smacks of the way this administration has "taken responsibility" for all the damage it has done, from the invasion of Iraq, to it's nonresponse to Hurrican Katrina, to leaking classified information and outing a CIA operative. It amounts to: I'll take responsibility, if you insist, but only other people will feel the consequences.

Elmer Fudd Goes Hunting

Shhhh...wew hunting wabbits! I'm gonna bwast that scwewy wabbit!

"If Cheney was shooting at a bird and he loses sight of it because a hunter was standing between him and the bird, you have to have your head up your ass to pull the trigger."

Thanks to Taylor Marsh for the great insight into where Dick's head was!

Letters to the Editor = Treason

If you had any doubt that our country was hurtling toward fascism ask Laura Berg what she thinks.

The American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico wants the government to apologize to a nurse for seizing her computer and investigating her for "sedition" after she criticized the Bush administration.
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Berg, a clinical nurse specialist, wrote a letter in September to a weekly Albuquerque newspaper criticizing how the administration handled Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War. She urged people to "act forcefully" to remove an administration she said played games of "vicious deceit."
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"From all appearances, the seizure of her work computer was an act of retaliation and a hardball attempt to scare Laura into silence," the ACLU said.

How Did These American Soldiers Die?

Did Katherine P. Singleton and Debra A. Banaszak die from dehydration?

Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark.

Karpinski testified that a surgeon for the coalition's joint task force said in a briefing that "women in fear of getting up in the hours of darkness to go out to the port-a-lets or the latrines were not drinking liquids after 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and in 120 degree heat or warmer, because there was no air-conditioning at most of the facilities, they were dying from dehydration in their sleep."

    "And rather than make everybody aware of that - because that's shocking, and as a leader if that's not shocking to you then you're not much of a leader - what they told the surgeon to do is don't brief those details anymore. And don't say specifically that they're women. You can provide that in a written report but don't brief it in the open anymore."

    For example, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, Sanchez's top deputy in Iraq, saw "dehydration" listed as the cause of death on the death certificate of a female master sergeant in September 2003. Under orders from Sanchez, he directed that the cause of death no longer be listed, Karpinski stated. The official explanation for this was to protect the women's privacy rights.

    Sanchez's attitude was: "The women asked to be here, so now let them take what comes with the territory," Karpinski quoted him as saying. Karpinski told me that Sanchez, who was her boss, was very sensitive to the political ramifications of everything he did. She thinks it likely that when the information about the cause of these women's deaths was passed to the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld ordered that the details not be released. "That's how Rumsfeld works," she said.

    "It was out of control," Karpinski told a group of students at Thomas Jefferson School of Law last October. There was an 800 number women could use to report sexual assaults. But no one had a phone, she added. And no one answered that number, which was based in the United States. Any woman who successfully connected to it would get a recording. Even after more than 83 incidents were reported during a six-month period in Iraq and Kuwait, the 24-hour rape hot line was still answered by a machine that told callers to leave a message.

    "There were countless such situations all over the theater of operations - Iraq and Kuwait - because female soldiers didn't have a voice, individually or collectively," Karpinski told Hackworth. "Even as a general I didn't have a voice with Sanchez, so I know what the soldiers were facing. Sanchez did not want to hear about female soldier requirements and/or issues."

According to icasualties.org Singleton and Banaszak are the only female fatalities without an official cause of death. Karpinski mentions several women dying from dehydration. Who are the others? Karpinski also says more than 83 incidents [of rape by male soldiers] were reported during a six-month period in Iraq and Kuwait. My head is spinning. I'm guessing no one has been brought up on rape charges. Are they at least discharging these sociopaths?

"2245 Dead -- How many more?"

That was the "slogan" on Cindy Sheehan's T-shirt. If that's a slogan then the Democrats should adopt it.

Honor The Troops: Throw the Mothers of the Deceased in Jail

Yup they did it.

Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a fallen soldier in Iraq who reinvigorated the anti-war movement, was arrested and removed from the House gallery Tuesday night just before President Bush's State of the Union address, a police spokeswoman said.

Sheehan, who was invited to attend the speech by Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., was charged with demonstrating in the Capitol building, said Capitol Police Sgt. Kimberly Schneider. The charge was later changed to unlawful conduct, Schneider said. Both charges are misdemeanors.

Sheehan was taken in handcuffs from the Capitol to police headquarters a few blocks away. Her case was processed as Bush spoke.

Schneider said Sheehan had worn a T-shirt with an anti-war slogan to the speech and covered it up until she took her seat. Police warned her that such displays were not allowed, but she did not respond, the spokeswoman said.

SOTU: He just won't say it

And it's over.

And you know that's not water he's drinking.

SOTU: Don't Say "Katrina"

Will he say it? He said "natural disasters."

Yeah Dems! Celebrate rebellion.

Here we go, health savings accounts. He can never say OBGYN ever again. I think my uterus just screamed.

Clean safe NUKULAR energy. Drink again.

There is nothing more ironic than hearing this man talk about rigorous math and science education. Look kiddies, you can be a drug-addled C- student and still be the leader of the free world.

Abstinence my ass. Condoms, birth control, and emergency contraception.

"Natural Disaster," NOT Katrina.

SOTU: The Wanking Continues

Freedom, liberty, democracy, repeat.

He's looking kind of cakey. Bad foundation.

Iran, oh brother, drinking more.

Roomie: "Who are these isolationists you keep talking about?"

I hope these standing ovations are hard on arthritic knees.

PATRIOT ACT. SIT DOWN.

Hillary's look of utter disdain just about killed me.

Oh no, here come the tears

Shameless creep. Using some dead soldier and his family to boost his approval rating.