Duckie Rules

I know I've posted this before, but it's a Try a Little Tenderness night, Duckie style!

He's still got the timing, which is why I actually watch his television show.

"Rewriting History," The New Republican Meme

According to Henry, Perino added that McClellan was “rewriting history” on the Iraq war.

So, now telling the truth is "rewriting history." That's the new meme for the Republicans of 2008. Prepare to see this line everywhere, leading up to the elections.

UPDATE:

The cries of betrayal from former aides served as a stern warning to other potential turncoats that, despite some well-publicized cracks, the Bush inner circle remains tight. Their language was so similar that the collective reaction amounted to a big inside-the-Beltway echo chamber.

The wagons are surrounding! Unfortunately for the bubble group, they watched too many Saturday morning westerns.

New Phone

I bought a Sidekick, and now I can post to my blog from my phone. Would have been handy last nigt when I was at Charlie O's for the Pat Longo tribute to my uncle Sid. 17 piece, kickass big band! Yeah, that's the ticket.

Some People's Memorial Day Memories

Drive to the cemetery, look at the little flags on the graves, & think on that, & think on how this day once helped to heal the deepest divisions of this nation, & how it still tells us that there are worthier sacrifices, ultimate sacrifices even.

Read it. Very good.

Funny how the DJ and I have flipped, blog style, politically, lately.

Endangered Species vs. Endangered Development?

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - The state of Alaska will sue the U.S. government to stop the listing of the polar bear as a threatened species, arguing the designation will slow development in the state, Gov. Sarah Palin said on Wednesday.

Palin said the state will file a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington challenging U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne's decision to grant Endangered Species Act protections to the polar bear.

The Republican governor has argued that the ice-dependent polar bear, the first mammal granted Endangered Species Act listing because of global warming, does not need additional protections.

"We believe that the listing was unwarranted and that it's unprecedented to list a currently healthy population based on uncertain climate models," said Alaska Assistant Attorney General Steven Daugherty.

Even though Kempthorne enacted a rule aimed at precluding any new restrictions on oil and gas operations as a result of the listing, the Palin administration believes a wide variety of other development activities in Alaska would be hampered if the listing goes through, Daugherty said. Any development or activity requiring federal permits or using federal funds would have to engage in a "consultation" process to ensure that polar bears are not harmed, he said.

That consultation, mandated by the Endangered Species Act, "is long and time-consuming process," he said. "It's just, basically, a big time-and-money-waster."

The date for filing the lawsuit is unknown, Daugherty said. The state Department of Law on Wednesday was drafting its 60-day notice of intent to sue, he said. (Editing by Vicki Allen)

Of course, God forbid, we endanger development in the sparsely populated Alaska over endangered natural habitat wildlife! Typical Republican agenda -- corporate interests over all else.

I'm so sick of the mantra. I'm ready to put all Republicans on some thin sheet of ice near a polar icecap and wait for them to start yelling "uncle."

It's Gayer South Of The Border

I remember living in Portland, Oregon, and experiencing personally the "distaste" Oregonians have for Californians.

All I can say after today's ruling is "come on over!"

"You know, I'm wishing everyone good luck with their marriages and I hope that California's economy is booming because everyone is going to come here and get married," said Schwarzenegger, prompting laughs and applause, according to a
recording.

You've got that right, Mr. Governator!

Congrats to David Cook

Well, surprise, surprise, David Cook wins American Idol. I was stunned, because I thought the tween vote was going to give Archie the title. I even voted for Cook the last two times, just to x out a few tween votes for Archie!

I totally dug the George Michael finale, and although I was expecting him to rock it, the song was deep and compelling.

Sugarland, My New Fave Group

From Sunday's awards show. Made me a fan forever of this group!

Here's the video of the song. Appears to have been filmed in Hawai'i (since it's Bruddah Iz' birthday, like the symmetry).

Hau`oli Lâ Hânau, Iz

Although he left us much too early on June 26, 1997, he was born on May 20, 1959.

Hau`oli Lâ Hânau!

It's Garth Brooks' Night!

I'm watching the Academy of Country Music Awards tonight because Garth will be doing a medly of his greatest hits, while receiving the Crystal Milestone Award! (Nice tribute from Billy Joel, btw).

I remember when I first heard Garth on the radio, in 1989. I recognized immediately that this guy was going to be a superstar, and I was bugging all of my then hair band rock star friends to listen to him! (Of course, when Shania came along, it wasn't hard to get my rocker friends to come on board the country bandwagon!) Although "Friends In Low Places" won Garth his first award, it was "Unanswered Prayers" that stole my heart as a fan of Garth.

I know he's happy in his retirement and marriage with Trisha, but damn, I miss his voice and his rock and roll country style.

You rock, Garth!

P.S., my new Fave Band is Sugarland!

Hapa Haole Hula Girl

Enjoy. H/T to DJ Rix for inspiring me to find some YouTube of Hapa Haole Hula Girl!

TrackingTransience

Hasan Elahi whips out his Samsung Pocket PC phone and shows me how he's keeping himself out of Guantanamo. He swivels the camera lens around and snaps a picture of the Manhattan Starbucks where we're drinking coffee. Then he squints and pecks at the phone's touchscreen. "OK! It's uploading now," says the cheery, 35-year-old artist and Rutgers professor, whose bleached-blond hair complements his fluorescent-green pants. "It'll go public in a few seconds." Sure enough, a moment later the shot appears on the front page of his Web site, TrackingTransience.net.

There are already tons of pictures there. Elahi will post about a hundred today — the rooms he sat in, the food he ate, the coffeese ordered. Poke around his site and you'll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.

Elahi's site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you're on, it's hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book.

Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he's doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.

This is a must read, not only for its sad poignancy, but for reality of today's minorities, and how one target pokes fun at his tragic situation.

So, Did You Leave Food With The Postman?

Members of the National Association of Letter Carriers collect nonperishable items along their regular delivery routes, and the food is passed along to local food banks and pantries in the communities where it is collected.

"With rising prices for gasoline and food, an unbearable squeeze has been placed on family budgets, forcing many Americans to seek help for the first time from community food banks and pantries to get adequate nutrition," said NALC President William H. Young.

The carriers are asking donors to place food items such as canned meat and fish, soup, cereals, pasta and rice near their mailboxes.

This was last Saturday. I gave, did you?

Another Day, Another Crime By This Administration

WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration is withholding a list of Chinese heparin suppliers requested by congressional investigators looking into problems with tainted supplies of the blood thinner, saying confidentiality agreements prevent release of the companies' names.

As always, the interests of the corporate CEO's are outweighed by the interests of the American people. Ladies and gentlemen, your government in action (well, the Bush controlled government). Wake up, America, and vote Democratic, if you have any hope of surviving in this country as a people.

PART TWO:

WASHINGTON — The general manager and possibly other senior staff members at the Crandall Canyon Mine near Huntington, Utah, where nine miners died last August, withheld information from federal officials that could have prevented the disaster and should face a criminal inquiry, the chairman of a Congressional investigation said Thursday.

The chairman, Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, accused the company of concealing the extent of an earlier collapse in the mine that involved the same high-risk technique, retreat mining, that was being used when the disaster began.

Another Raided Plant Ostensibly To Stem ID Theft (Not)

POSTVILLE, Iowa — At least 300 people were arrested Monday on immigration and identity theft charges at Agriprocessors, one of the USA's largest packing plants for kosher meats.

Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement entered the Agriprocessors complex in this northeast Iowa community of 2,500 during morning work hours, executing warrants for fraudulent use of others' Social Security numbers in connection with their employment at the plant. The packing plant has attracted workers from Mexico, Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere.

It seems that all of the immigration raids that have taken place the past couple of years are at meat and poultry processing and packing plants. I guess their lobbyists are just not as good as oh, say, Myanmar's!

ABC News Jan Simmonds reports: Two of Sen. John McCain' campaign aides resigned this weekend after media reports brought to light their ties to a lobbying group that once represented the military junta of Burma, which the regime calls Myanmar.

When reading these articles about the raids, the key phrase that pops up as the reason for them is the prevention of ID theft. But, interestingly, these raids rarely prove that the immigrants picked up were using stolen ID's or worse yet, using someone else's ID to create wealth for themselves by buying houses, cars, and adult playthings. Mostly the raids end up in rooting out hard working people who are barely making it (and not stealing stuff from ordinary Americans), and with their meager earnings send money home to familys that have almost nothing.

Funny, though, how only the employees of these packing plants are punished. And here, I thought it was illegal, as well, to hire the illegals ...

When A Doctor's Diagnosis Ain't Worth Squat

News and bloggers have been all over this story, but it still boggles my mind that our government can be so callous -- especially when it relates to the very service men and and women that the current administration is always touting in front of us as the reason we must support "the war on terror."

On March 20, 2008 a VA hospital’s PTSD program coordinator sent the e-mail below to a number of VA employees, including psychologists, social workers, and a psychiatrist stating that due to an increased number of “compensation seeking veterans,” the staff should “refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out” and they should “R/O [rule out] PTSD” and consider a diagnosis of “Adjustment Disorder” instead.

That's right. Let's continue to give the big corporate CEO's their "due," but, God forbid, we actually give the soldiers their due.

How Different The Relief Aid Is

MIANYANG, China — With the death toll from this week’s earthquake rising rapidly, China has departed from past diplomatic practice, seeking disaster relief experts and heavy equipment needed for rescue operations from neighbors it has long shunned as rivals or renegades.

Officials on Thursday asked a longtime rival, Japan, to send 60 earthquake rescue experts, the first such team China has accepted from a foreign country during the current crisis and one of the few official relief missions China has ever accepted from abroad. This week it also accepted help from at least three private relief teams from Taiwan, the self-governing island with which China has long had tense relations.

Quite a difference from this:

As the urgency intensifies to get food, water and medicine into the worst-affected areas of Burma 11 days after the country was hit by Cyclone Nargis, the country's military government continues to baffle the world by stonewalling international disaster relief.

The government has taken pains to appear on state television as the sole source of humanitarian relief, even appropriating donations from others so that soldiers can hand out the aid. The United Nations warns of a second catastrophe unless a huge aid effort is begun immediately, and Buddhist monks and other Burmese citizens are quietly tending to the sick and hungry.

The junta's bewildering resistance stems from its fear that outside influence would weaken its control and from a distorted desire to maintain the impression that it is compassionate in the eyes of Burma's Buddhist majority, scholars say.

"The regime is trying to control the aid distribution because they want to be the ones to offer it ceremonially, partly to show they have legitimacy," said University of Wisconsin anthropologist Ingrid Jordt, who has lived in Burma as a practicing Buddhist nun.

"They are the patrons, the distributors of largesse," said Bruce Matthews, a Burma expert and professor emeritus of religion at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. "What anybody gets is what the military wants you to get.

Theoretically, they are Buddhists. They care about their Buddhist image."

Good To Be A Californian!

The California Supreme Court, striking down two state laws that had limited marriages to unions between a man and a woman, ruled on Thursday that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.

I've always been glad to be a resident of California. When my daughter was younger, and she would ask me about things she would hear on the news about restrictions on personal liberties in other states in this country, I would always tell her she was lucky to be living in California, where our state constitution is much more liberal than most states, and very much more liberal than the federal laws and statutes.

Just as I have never been able to understand one's prejudice toward people that are not white, I cannot understand people's equally ridiculous prejudice toward people with different sexual preferences.

It's a good day to be a Californian! And someone once told me this state was going red ... ha ha ha! NOT! This is a blue state that can easily handle having a Republican as governor without losing our liberties and rights guaranteed by our state constitution.

Another Republican Seat Bites The Dust

Congratulations to Travis Childers' win in the Mississippi First District special election, which was open because Roger F. Wicker resigned effective December 31, 2007.

Slowly, but surely, Americans are voting overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates in traditionally Republican strongholds, which is definitely a harbinger of things to come.

2008 will bring us a Democratic president, a more secure Democratic Senate with enough votes to end the stupid "we now have to have 60 votes to pass any legislation," and a stronger Democratic House.

The times, they are a changing!

Survivor, Still Fun To Watch

I am a serious fan of Survivor (although I don't think I'm that much of a fan that I would win any trivia contest -- just fan enough that I enjoy the game, each season, and NEVER miss an episode since the beginning).

This year was absolutely the best since season one, and only because season one was the first and we hardly knew what to expect from this game that first time around.

Totally amazing season. Women rule!

It's Mom's Day!

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY OUT THERE TO ALL YOU MOTHERS, AND YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!

This video is hysterical. Enjoy!

UPDATE: The video has been removed from YouTube, so if you didn't have a chance to view it when it was up, you missed one funny show!

UPDATE II: I found another version of.

Bobby Orr Flies!

This date in history:

The Bruins swept the St. Louis Blues in four games to win their first championship since 1941.

The 1970 Stanley Cup Finals had one of the most dramatic finishes in all of sports, immortalized by the picture of Bobby Orr flying through the air after firing a shot past goaltender Glenn Hall, 40 seconds into overtime to give the Bruins a 4-3 clinching victory.

We Don't Like You, We Just Want To Make Money Off You!

Llewellyn Werner, chairman of C3, a Los Angeles-based holding company for private equity firms, is pouring millions of dollars into developing the “Baghdad Zoo and Entertainment Experience.” In pitching his Disneyland idea to a deputy Baghdad mayor, Werner – displaying little sense for Iraqi culture – said the waterpark is “integral to the sex appeal” of the new amusement center. Speaking in deliberately slow English, Werner told the Iraqis, “One of the fastest growing sports in the world is skate…boarding.” NPR’s Eric Westervelt reported:

After explaining skate…boarding, Werner tells the assembled Iraqi business and government men, “I’m a businessman. I’m not here because I think you’re nice people. I think there’s money to be made here.”

I really do not have anything to add to this except my disgust.

H/T to Think Progress.

Stanley Cup Playoffs

Is there anything more exciting than overtime in hockey Stanley Cup playoffs? HELL NO!

I've been watching the Stars and Sharks game 6, as the Sharks try to stave off elimination. First overtime in the books, writing this as I wait for second overtime.

I became a Shark fan after I was a Kings fan, based on Wayne Gretzky's move to Los Angeles, and the expansion allowed in California. I went to a few games at the Cow Palace before the Sharks moved to their "tank." I was even wearing my Shark T-shirt!

Hopefully, I can end this post with a yeehaw cuz the Sharks won, bringing the series even and a game 7 coming up.

I love hockey!

PS - Did I say I am NOT a Dallas fan?

Part II - Waiting for Third Overtime ...

Part II - Waiting for Fourth Overtime ...

Part III - 69 minutes and some seconds ... did I say I am NOT a Dallas fan? Sharks lost. I need more booze.

Part IV: Update 5/5/08

This from the San Jose Mercury News:

The game lasted so long, you half expected Jeremy Roenick to become a great-grandfather before it was done. One of sport's bromides is that there is nothing like an overtime NHL playoff game. And this one held to that standard.

It is true. Overtime in hockey is the most exciting thing to watch in all of sports, as far as I am concerned, and last night's game was what hockey is all about.

28 Years Later - Kent State Shootings

"You know, you see these bums, you know, blowin' up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are, burnin' up the books, I mean, stormin' around about this issue, I mean, you name it - get rid of the war, there'll be another one." -- Richard M. Nixon, New York Times, May 2, 1970

Two days later, we had the Kent State shootings, where National Guardsmen shot and killed students and bystanders on campus. 28 years later, this still stands out in my mind as one of the most pivotal moments in my life.

"Four Dead In Ohio" - RIP 5/4/70

Wikipedia Blocks DOJ IP Address!

Wikinews has learned that a United States Department of Justice (DOJ) IP Address has been blocked on Wikipedia after making edits to an article which were considered "vandalism". In two separate instances, the IP address from the DOJ removed information from the Wikipedia article about the organization Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America(CAMERA), regarding an attempt by the organization to secretly gain influence on the site. The IP address has been confirmed by Wikinews to be registered and used by the DOJ located in Washington, D.C.

Now, why does this not surprise me? Sheesh.