WTF Is It Now?!?

The fireflies were out last night, and so were the bats. And before you go 'yuck', here: bats eat insects, pollinate flowers, and disperse seeds. Bats are not blind flying mice that that become entangled in women's hair, seldom transmit disease to people or pets, and our concerns should be no different from those we apply to other wild animals. Do not attempt to handle them, and there is little to fear (from friendsofbats.com). As long as they leave the fireflies alone, they're all right by me.

Merlin greeted me yesterday afternoon with "rock and roll!" Oh just great - I had to sing to him after that. I was trying to get through 'You Give Love A Bad Name', and he's yelling 'brawk! brawk! brawk!'...he's the most atonal parrot I've ever heard.

The kittens introduced themselves to Jaffa, my almost-2-year-old cat, by rubbing all over him. He took it very well, the big softie.

A site I've been visiting a lot lately is Scott and Ellen's AMCGLTD.com, 'Where cats, science fiction and anger come together!' Also culture, philosophy, the sciences, silly cat pics, food, space...and without the not-safe-for-work pissings & moanings of a lot of weblogs.

Scott writes, "When Seutonius describes the forum or Pliny talks about defending a case in court yesterday or Herodotus describes the pyramids, it makes you want to get up and go look at these things yourself. You have to stop and remind yourself that these people are dust, and the places they talk about are rubble. It's at that point, when you realize the things they loved, cherished, worried about, or fought for exist now only on the pages of the book you're holding, that history has truly come to life." He really makes me want to go read these guys now!



CNN airs spy-plane footage of the suspected Al-Qaeda terrorist compound, and you spot your kid's Frisbee on the roof. - Topfive.com's Number 1 Sign Your Neighbor Has a Dirty Bomb.




TAPPED has this: "BUSH COMMENCEMENT MYTHS? Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity says that a number of liberal/left wing web outlets -- Buzzflash, Media Whores Online (MWO), and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting -- have been taken in by exaggerated reports of actively suppressed protests at Bush's Ohio State University commencement address. (Granted, protesters were warned in advance not to protest, which may have had a chilling effect -- but the issue here is with the treatment of actual protesters who turned out.)."

Well, hell, maybe their issue is with whether or not any protesters were actually arrested, but the fact that the audience was told in no uncertain terms that they would applaud vigorously or else is quite chilling enough for me. And in this day and age, are we really to believe this spin: "In addition, we now know that the original AP report was incorrect - a later version of the story corrected the description of the announcer asking for 'thunderous' applause, which was actually requested for university President William Kirwan, not Bush"? With all the stories we've been seeing lately regarding the media fudging or 'cleaning up' anything that makes Chimpy McCowpie look even more moronical, I really think NOT.




'Bring out the booster chair for Jr.'

Geez, Alexander, don't hold back - tell us how you really feel! "How aghast that malign political genius [Nixon] would have been at the ignoramus occupying the Oval Office once fragrant with Dick's curses. What a falling off is there! From malediction to malapropism. I'm sure W's speech is less burdened by obscenity than that of the Navy vet and seasoned poker player, but this is the purity of the born-again imbecile. W. has the vocabulary of a 12-year old, though most 12-year olds have an infinitely stronger grasp of world affairs.

"Our spaniel press makes herculean efforts to pass over the fact in silence, but the fact is that George W. Bush is the laughing stock of the world, by dint of the obvious fact that his maximum level of competence was that of greeter at the ball park in Arlington."

I really recommend you read the rest here !





"the most far-fetched spin" used to burnish Bunnypants' image

"This recent trend scraped the nadir of credibility the other day when George W. Bush’s aides provided a press briefing about the sources of his graduation speech on 'volunteerism' at Ohio State University. This quite ordinary address, it seems, had been inspired by a panoply of great literary and political figures: Alexis de Tocqueville and Adam Smith, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and - to advance slightly beyond absolute cliché - Benjamin Rush, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, Pope John Paul II, Aristotle and Cicero.

"No particular quotations were cited, and the President uttered the names of none of these worthies. But testing credulity to the utmost, his aides boldly mentioned Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics, a long disquisition on virtue as dull as any book by William Bennett, though somewhat more challenging than The Very Hungry Caterpillar, that perennial Bush favorite. Somehow, Jesus didn’t make the list this time."

Joe Conason kicks butt here .


Quotes of the Day:
"Maybe the president was expounding upon the Nickelodeon Ethics." - Maureen Dowd, in the NY Times.

"Members of the Bush Administration made the rounds of the morning news programs this past Sunday in the hopes of making its proposed attack on Iraq the best-publicized super-secret attack in history." - Andy Borowitz.





SF attorney: Bush allowed 9/11 attack to happen. SF attorney death watch ensues.

Snipped from The Examiner: Stanley Hilton now figures his case is stronger because of a coalition of attorneys, victims' families and bipartisan legislators who gathered in Washington on Monday to condemn the government's lack of action in preventing the Sept. 11 attacks.

Hilton is the San Francisco attorney who filed a $7 billion lawsuit in U.S. District Court on June 3 against pResident Evil and other government officials for "allowing" the terrorist attacks to occur. Among Hilton's allegations: Bush conspired to create the Sept. 11 attacks for his own political gain and has been using Osama bin Laden as a scapegoat. Hilton said he has information that bin Laden died several years ago of kidney failure.

"I hope it will expose the fact that there are numbers of people in the government, including Bush and his top assistants, who wanted this to happen," Hilton said.

He claims the Bush misadministration ignored intelligence information, refused to round up suspected terrorists beforehand, and during the hijackings refused to disable pilot controls and switch to a ground-based remote system. He also claims the government benefited from installing a puppet Afghan government friendly to U.S. oil interests, and says Bush used bin Laden's antagonist image to create a public frenzy, which allowed the Bush administration to tighten its political grip.




You can't have a peace plan! You're still fighting!

The Unelected Ignoramus put his MidEast peace plan on hold after the 2nd suicide bombing in two days. At the WH, there is real uncertainty about what Cap'n Cowpie should say and when to say it, a senior official told the Associated Press on condition of anonymity

"And we have some concern it won't have any impact," the official said. Some jokes just write themselves.