“A woman can take care of the family. It takes a man to provide structure, to provide stability.”
Sugar Land Congressman Tom DeLay, Time Magazine, February 23, 2004
“Tom DeLay wouldn’t be stable even if they mounted him on a tripod.”
Juanita Jean Herownself, Richmond woman
From Juanita’s, Barefoot, Pregnant, and Royally Hacked-Off
Two more from Susan DuQuesnay, these from an essay essentially about Bob Novak.
As a general rule, I don’t like reporters. They go to meetings. I go to meetings. I come home and think about the meeting. They go home and write about the meeting. The next day when I read about the meeting in the newspaper, I wonder where I was yesterday when I thought I was at the meeting. This can be disconcerting.
*****I marched myownself over to the sheriff’s department right then and there, slammed that public record on the sheriff’s desk, and hollered in that voice of mine that sounds like a teaspoon in the garbage disposal, “You are too damn dumb to be sheriff.”
Susan DuQuesnay at Juanita’s tells us about Bud Lite, the county attorney.
You know all this outsourcing stuff you’ve been hearing about? Well, Bud invented that. No, I’m serious. He did. He got elected and then realized that he didn’t know diddle squat about law – including, but not limited to, that you stand up when addressing the judge – so he started outsourcing all his work to private lawyers. And, Commissioners let him because even they realized that he’s dumber than bean dip. And, Darlin’, you gotta be Olympic dumb for county commissioners to take notice of it.
From Tom DeLay’s Congressional district, some thoughtful words from Susan DuQuesnay at Juanita’s, The World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc.:
Thanks to our local Republican Party Chairman, the entire world now knows that a resolution calling on Fort Bend Republicans to “welcome people of all faiths into the Republican Party” failed. Couldn’t get a simple majority vote on that sucker. Thought it was Communistic or something.
To add heat to the humidity, another resolution stating that the Republican Party “welcomes into its membership thoughtful and conscientious individuals of diverse opinions, convictions, colors and creeds…” also failed.
I, personally, think it was the word “thoughtful” that got ‘em.
GOP.com has a web page devoted to Nancy Pelosi, Totally San Fran.
PELOSI IS WRONG ON NATIONAL SECURITY
PELOSI FAVORS HIGHER TAXES AND BIG GOVERNMENT SPENDING
SAN FRANCISCO LIBERAL, OUT OF TOUCH WITH MAINSTREAM VALUES
Link via uggabugga.
“In any case, the disclosure that a federal official may have lied in a trial in which defendants were convicted of lying was a stinging blow to the authorities.”
From Los Angeles Times story on Stewart trial perjury
Well, I guess.
Bob Somerby sums up why McCain can’t be Kerry’s running mate — McCain is publicly supporting Bush. D’oh!
Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival, Sunday, June 6, at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas:
From AP via the Santa Fe New Mexican, California town that created online bidding frenzy finally sold. For $700,000. 82 acres.
“There’s a mile and a half of river frontage. It’s very green and beautiful. Great weather,” said Krall, of Laguna Hills. “In San Francisco, $700,000 doesn’t buy you a one-car garage.”
Bridgeville, which dates to the early 1900s, includes a post office, a cemetery and more than a dozen cabins and houses. It needs a new well and several buildings need to be renovated.
In December 2002, Bridgeville became the first town “sold” on eBay. Almost 250 bids were cast during the town’s month on the electronic auction block. Bidding started at $5,000 and went well beyond the asking price of $775,000 to close at $1,777,877.
But no buyer ever appeared, no check arrived and the deal fell through.
Gary Wills is 70 today; Peter Matthiessen is 77. The Writer’s Almanac tells us about them both. Or, as always, you can hear the stories as told by Garrison Keillor [RealAudio].
It was 77 years ago today that Lindbergh landed in Paris. The Writer’s Almanac tells the story well.
At briantology they don’t much like Oklahoma tornadoes. (Some of the commenters say they do.)
Thanks to dooce for the link.
From American Heritage, a modern tour of America’s oldest highway.
In 1598 Oñate blazed the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, a trail that became the most used and most significant route of commerce and culture for 300 years. At its peak the Camino Real ran 1,800 miles from Mexico City north to Santa Fe. Spaniards used the trail to settle towns and villages all along the way, Franciscans used it to spread their gospel, troops from the United States and Mexico used it for waging battles and building forts, Indians used it to fight the swelling tide of foreigners, and traders used it for commerce.
Have you noticed Venus in the western evening sky these past several weeks? The Astronomy Picture of the Day shows her phases.
From Wired News, Los Alamos Lab Loses More Data
The Los Alamos National Laboratory, the nation’s most important nuclear weapons lab, lost another hard disk drive filled with classified information, once again throwing a spotlight on lab officials who have been trying to re-emerge from years of scandals and mismangement.
The latest episode came to light Thursday, after Los Alamos admitted that, since a Monday inventory check, its custodians hadn’t been able to find a “classified removable electronic media,” or CREM — disks and drives inscribed with the country’s secrets.
Matt Feeney appreciates Deadwood:
If you gutted out that first exhausting night and tuned in to subsequent episodes, you’ve witnessed a show both politically insightful and aesthetically rousing. As the season has progressed, the characters’ motivations have become more transparent, their relationships more stable and human, and public crisis has spurred them to form a loose political order. Plot lines have become not just discernable but elegant and bracing. And the saturated setting has become—thanks to an aching mandolins-and-fiddles score and the stunning natural-light cinematography—sometimes overwhelmingly beautiful.
He particularly likes the language, profanity notwithstanding. Read more.
And what followed was one of those moments in life that reaches into your heart and squeezes it so tightly that you momentarily black out from the cuteness.
I didn’t think that the Teletubbies were going to open fire on each other with machine guns, although I would definitely pay money to see that episode.
Swirling Swirling Swirling. Watch out, it can make you dizzy.
Thanks to Kottke for the link.
Frank Rich tells us about “Fahrenheit 9/11” Michael Moore’s film.
Whatever you think of Moore, there’s no question he’s detonating dynamite here. From a variety of sources – foreign journalists and broadcasters (like Britain’s Channel Four), freelancers and sympathetic American TV workers who slipped him illicit video – he supplies war-time pictures that have been largely shielded from our view. Instead of recycling images of the planes hitting the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, once again, Moore can revel in extended new close-ups of the president continuing to read “My Pet Goat” to elementary school students in Florida for seven long minutes after learning of the attack.
*****Wasn’t it just weeks ago that we were debating whether we should see the coffins of the American dead and whether Ted Koppel should read their names on “Nightline”? In “Fahrenheit 9/11,” we see the actual dying, of American troops and Iraqi civilians alike, with all the ripped flesh and spilled guts that the violence of war entails. We also see some of the 4,000-plus American casualties: those troops hidden away in clinics at Walter Reed and at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where they try to cope with nerve damage and multiple severed limbs. They are not silent. They talk about their pain and their morphine, and they talk about betrayal. “I was a Republican for quite a few years,” one soldier says with an almost innocent air of bafflement, “and for some reason they conduct business in a very dishonest way.”
*****Speaking of America’s volunteer army, Moore concludes: “They serve so that we don’t have to. They offer to give up their lives so that we can be free. It is, remarkably, their gift to us. And all they ask for in return is that we never send them into harm’s way unless it is absolutely necessary. Will they ever trust us again?”
Thanks to The Sideshow for the link.
“Dick Cheney gave a speech at the Coast Guard Academy in which he vowed that Americans would fight on in Iraq. Actually he said, ‘not me, but a lot of other Americans.’ Maybe we should have a new law in this country: Anybody vowing to fight on should actually have to do some of the fighting.”
Jay Leno
“According to some reports, U.S. forces bombed a wedding party in Iraq. Apparently President Bush thought it might have been a gay wedding.”
Jay Leno
“The White House is now saying that they still do not have a timetable for when the U.S. will be out of Iraq. Although they hinted that it would be early in the Kerry administration.”
David Letterman
“John Kerry and Ralph Nader met face-to-face, it was a historic meeting. Astronomers said today their meeting actually created what is called a ‘charisma black hole.'”
Jay Leno
“You ever take a good look at Ralph Nader? Don’t you think he looks like Kerry if you left him in the dryer for couple of days?”
Jay Leno
“John Kerry met with Ralph Nader. Wouldn’t you have liked to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation? And if you had, you would have been the most charismatic thing in the room.”
David Letterman
Wonkette has a take on Kerry’s campaign slogan:
How many rough drafts do you think the Kerry team went through to come with the campaign slogan, “Let America be America again”? It takes a lot of work to boil down an entire political platform into a single phrase of such astonishing meaninglessness. We’ll give them this: It does capture the essence of Kerry’s rhetorical style — stilted, yet empty. Maybe Kerry himself provided an early version, something like, “To be sure, I would like it to be known, that who among us does not want this great country, America, to return to a state of being that country which it was and shall be again.”
NewMexiKen scored only six correct out of ten.
Talking Points Memo by Joshua Micah Marshall
Politics is certainly a rough business. And it’s common, and understandable, that candidates will often send staffers to videotape or record their opponents’ speeches.
But we seem to have an embarrassing new low in the Illinois senate race — one that might even amount to stalking.