Ay Dios Mio!

Mexico is going to legalize drugs, apparently as a step towards more efficient pursuit of larger-scale narcotics traffickers. A new law, that is expected to be signed by President Fox, will make personal possession of only a few grams of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and opium legal.

Fuckin' crazy, man. I gotta git down to Acapulco, man.

***

If you haven't heard, Karl Rove is closer to the chopping block than ever. The fucker's had to testify in front of a grand jury for the fifth time now, and a perjury indictment is closer than ever. Heady times, these are.

***

This is just amusing: apparently Rumsfeld, perhaps suffering from jetlag, was a complete asshole to various reporters during his recent trip to Iraq. He snapped at various reporters, refused to answer questions, and exhibited extreme irritation when reminded of how badly the war in Iraq is going. I think he's also a little pissed at Condi for actually doing a halfway decent job. Say what you want about her, at least she's not fucking incompetent. Like Ronald Dumsfeld.

Burger and a beer. Extra cheddar. Mmmmmmmmmm.

Closed eyes on a sinking ship

Despite a new low in his poll numbers (an incredible 32% approval rating), Bush remains as brilliantly optimistic as a lemming with a smile on his face, right before he jumps off the cliff.

He was recently quoted as saying "I base a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true. One, I believe there's an Almighty. And, secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody's soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free. I believe liberty is universal. I believe people want to be free. And I know that democracies do not war with each other."

To be clear, our commander-in-chief just said that he bases almost all of his foreign policy decisions on his belief in God.

I don't know or care about anyone else, but I'm really goddamn sick of shrub ignoring the Constitution. This country is supposed to be founded on a handful of principles, and one of the most basic is the SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE. If shrub wants to make this country into something else, I wish he'd come right out and SAY that he wants to rewrite the Constitution according to the fucking Bible.

Turkey dinner, extra stuffing. Mmmmmmmm.

Sexual privacy under fire?

A new South Carolina bill, if passed, would make the sale of sex toys illegal in the state, and punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

What shocks me, though, is that apparently this very simple and unbelievable violation of personal privacy rights is nothing new. According to the AP story, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, and Mississippi already have various sex toy bans in place.

Excuse my disgust, but how the fuck is this NOT legislating morality? I can't IMAGINE a justifiable argument to support the ban of sex toys. I haven't done the necessary research, but I'm guessing the bill's author, a REPUBLICAN state legislator by the name of Ralph Davenport, is one of those crazy fucks who also thinks public schools should be punished for distributing condoms to underage high schoolers.

The article does make reference to the last Supreme Court case which dealt with obscenity, Miller v. California, in which the court finally defined "obscene" as that which is completely without any "literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" or is completely "prurient" in nature.

As various critics have noted, there are two serious problems with this premise. First, there is no clear standard by which peddlers or citizens could determine beforehand whether or not any given material is actually obscene. The standard given is absolutely subjective, and so then the danger becomes the ability of the law to punish citizens for breaking a law that they didn't know they were breaking.

The second problem is that the court never established anything WRONG with PRURIENCE. To say that something is obscene only because it is expressly and only sexual is the equivalent of a condemnation of ALL SEX. What would the courts have us do, reject sexual pleasure in all its forms? That seems to be the implication here, and it certainly seems to be the spirit of the legislation offered by Mr. Davenport. And that is a method of legislating morality, and that, many would contend (including myself) is unconstitutional.

Why the hell can't the Christians just be happy with their own prudish natures? Why is it that they can't stand to see ANYONE having a good time? I think the pro-choice maxim of "keep your laws off my body" is quite appropriate here.

The petulant-child-in-chief

Most of you, I'm sure, are familiar with shrub's immature explosion the other day when, under repeated questions concerning half a dozen retired generals' calls for Rumsfeld's resignation, W came out with, "I'm the decider, and I decide what's best!"

What a hoot.

As a tribute to that wonderful momeent, check this out.

***

Another thing I've found interesting while Chinese President Hu Jintao's been bouncing around the country is that representatives of major manufacturers keep complaining that China's not doing anything to address the enormous trade deficit between our two countries.

There's one story about that here.

The question I'd pose to these reps who keep whining that China won't do what we want is very simple: why should they?

The only thing they stand to gain, perhaps, is the temporary goodwill of a nation that's viewed on the international scene these days as a musclebound bully who yells and yells until everyone on the playground finally just gives up and lets him have his way. Their economy is on the upswing for the first time since the early twentieth century, so why the hell should they stop now? Just because we want them to?

To think that China would dance to our tune is not only asinine, it's dangerously ignorant. It means that our officials and lawmakers refuse (the yahoo story refers to a number of congressmen who are pushing legislation to level out the trade deficit via embargos and tariffs and whatnot) to consider the point of view of our soon-to-be-more-powerful brethren to the East. And if our leaders continue to act in this fashion, it will only be to our detriment.

That having been said, I could really go for some egg rolls. Extra sweet and sour.

Stewart v. O'Reilly

I didn't know this, but two years ago, apparently Jon Stewart actually appeared on the O'Reilly Factor, and Comedy Central got pissed off at O'Reilly because he referred to Stewart's audience as "stoned slackers."

MSNBC had a story about it here, and there are some fun stats about the Daily Show's audience here.

This one's for you, mandabear. Eat your heart out.

A Red Stripe perhaps, but no other colors

Jamaica is perhaps one the most homophobic places on Earth, says Time.

This comes as a shock to me, but it looks like the tiny Carribean country is more intolerant than Wyoming. The Time article goes on and on, referring to a number of little-publicized hate crimes against gays.

"In the past two years, two of the island's most prominent gay activists, Brian Williamson and Steve Harvey, have been murdered — and a crowd even celebrated over Williamson's mutilated body. Perhaps most disturbing, many anti-gay assaults have been acts of mob violence. In 2004, a teen was almost killed when his father learned his son was gay and invited a group to lynch the boy at his school. Months later, witnesses say, police egged on another mob that stabbed and stoned a gay man to death in Montego Bay. And this year a Kingston man, Nokia Cowan, drowned after a crowd shouting 'batty boy' (a Jamaican epithet for homosexual) chased him off a pier. 'Jamaica is the worst any of us has ever seen,' says Rebecca Schleifer of the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch and author of a scathing report on the island's anti-gay hostility."

As a kind of social buttress for the sentiment, the article cites a number of major Rastafarian reggae artists who advocate violence against gays and lesbians with their lyrics. Some examples:

"One of [Buju Banton's] first hits, 1992's Boom Bye-Bye, boasts of shooting gays with Uzis and burning their skin with acid 'like an old tire wheel.'

Banton's lyrics are hardly unique among reggae artists today. Another popular artist, Elephant Man (O'Neil Bryant, 29) declares in one song, 'When you hear a lesbian getting raped/ It's not our fault ... Two women in bed/ That's two Sodomites who should be dead.' Another, Bounty Killer (Rodney Price, 33), urges listeners to burn 'Mister Fagoty' and make him 'wince in agony.'"

I know I can't speak for the rest of you, but this makes me fucking ill. Jamaica, like Texas, is now officially on my list of places I have no desire to visit.

Talk about a quickie

I feel so vindicated by this.

A new study, from Scotland of all places, has found that women, are quicker to judge than men are. The study covered 500 speed dates, and of those,

"About a third of the speed dates were actually over within the first 30 seconds, but there was a marked difference between the sexes with 45 per cent of women coming to a decision within 30 seconds, compared with only 22 per cent of men.

Professor Richard Wiseman, of Hertfordshire University, said: "Men are often accused of being shallow and judging women very quickly.

"However, this evidence suggests that women may make up their minds much quicker than men. It suggests men have only a few seconds to impress a woman, thus emphasising the importance of their opening comments."

The study also found that women were twice as picky as the men."

ha HA! TWICE AS PICKY! Never again shall the fairer sex have the right to call us Y-chromosomed breadwinners shallow and judgmental! Ye narrow minded sexist pigs!

Maybe this is tied to American Idol's popularity... Hmmmm...

Actually, I think there's probably an interesting historical/evolutionary argument to be made here within the context of social structure and men's physical impetus to breed contrasted with women's physical impetus to choose mates carefully. Could be a thesis there, you think?

Cross your fingers

The Washington Post says that the GOP might be in some serious trouble for this year's midterm elections, and all because people are pissed off at shrub.

"Polls have reflected voter discontent with Bush for many months, but as the election nears, operatives are paying special attention to one subset of the numbers. It is the wide disparity between the number of people who are passionate in their dislike of Bush vs. those who support him with equal fervor.

Lately, there have been a lot more of the former -- and even Republicans acknowledge that could spell trouble in closely contested congressional races.

...The intense opposition to Bush is larger than any faced by Clinton. For all the polarization the 42nd president inspired, Clinton's strong disapproval never got above 37 percent in Post-ABC polls during his presidency."

I'm not one to count my eggs before they've hatched, but I can't get over how many good signs I've seen. Cross your fingers, baby. Perhaps the sane ones will somehow be able to retake Congress.

Roll over, little doggy

NEW DISCLAIMER: The following post is not completely accurate. I claimed below that the grand jury testimony Libby gave was that he was ordered by Cheney to leak Plame's name to journalists. In fact, Cheney authorized Libby to leak classified intel in order to discredit Joseph Wilson, but not specifically Plame's name. My bad. But I haven't edited the orginal post, which starts below.

***

This is where you'll find the latest development in the Scooter Libby Plamegate case, and I must say, it's fantastic.

Libby has given up Cheney. That's right. According to documents filed by Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who's been investigating the leak of Valerie Plame's name to reporters for over two years now, Libby testified before a grand jury that he was instructed to leak Plame's name in order to undermine the credibility of her husband, Joseph Wilson, one of the most dangerous critics the administration has ever faced.

An excerpt:

"Both Libby and Cheney have repeatedly insisted that the vice president never encouraged, directed, or authorized Libby to disclose Plame's identity. In a court filing on April 12, Libby's attorneys reiterated: 'Consistent with his grand jury testimony, Mr. Libby does not contend that he was instructed to make any disclosures concerning Ms. Wilson [Plame] by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, or anyone else.'

But the disclosure that Cheney instructed Libby to leak portions of a classified CIA report on Joseph Wilson adds to a growing body of information showing that at the time Plame was outed as a covert CIA officer the vice president was deeply involved in the White House effort to undermine her husband."

As of this moment, the online versions of CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the BBC are not carrying this story. It's only found in the National Journal, and there are links to the story from several liberal blogs, like Huffington Post and Raw Story. The guy who came up with the story first, an intrepid journalist by the name of Murray Waas, was also the first one to break the news last week that shrub authorized the leak of classified intelligence in order to support the rationale for the Iraq war.

I think this is big, guys. This is the first time that there's been direct evidence, in the form of Libby's testimony, that Cheney himself was involved in the leaking of an undercover CIA agent's name. I'm not sure what Fitzgerald thinks he can do with this, but the way I see it, Libby's testimony could be enough to at least indict Cheney for treason.

Hope, hope.

But what will actually happen is, of course, another question. If nothing else, this will be damn interesting.

At least he's gotten rid of the bow tie

Tucker Carlson is being fucking crazy again. Now it looks like he hates strippers. Or is it women in general? Could somebody tell me why conservatives are so afraid of sex?

Never mind the fact that one of Duke's lacrosse players sent around an email to his teammates in which he said he wanted to have a bunch of strippers over so he could kill them and skin them.

So whose word would you take? A stripper or a psycho? I don't know about the rest of you, but I support working mothers.

It's amore!

I wonder what bin Laden will say to this offer.

She looks like a man, man!

Oh say can you si

The funny thing about public school officials is that they usually try and head off fistfights and riots before they start. Isn't that a strange habit?

Recently, in the wake of an outpouring of nationalistic anger and strife sparked by the immigration bills making their way through Congress, a couple of schools here in our beautifully red state of Colorado banned the wearing of any and all flags, including the American flag.

Why? Because a lot of students were taking sides over the immigration issue, mainly Mexicans and Americans (I only use the word American to refer to citizens of the United States for lack of a better term; actually I think that's a really fucking arrogant word because it implies that America is only the United States- what about the rest of these two continents? but I digress). The ban was aimed at lessening tensions between the two groups, because there had already been instances of violence at both the schools that enacted the ban.

But, of course, there was an outcry from the "patriots" who were upset that they couldn't wear the American flag. The stupid nationalistic bastards lost sight of the fact that the school administrators were just trying to keep a potential powder keg from exploding. Suddenly, however, the right wing in the US is all about the first amendment and civil liberties.

Strange, weren't most of those conservatives eager to hand the bill of rights over to the chopping block when the PATRIOT Act was first proposed? Or up for renewal? Or when it was revealed that Bush authorized illegal wiretaps of U.S. citizens? Shucks, I guess those violations of our constitutional rights were okay, but when it involves the safety of our students, it's just too much to ask.

Not only that, but even CNN fucked up the story, and told it as though only American flags were being banned. Real responsible, Lou Dobbs. Way to be.

Now I want a burrito.

Three way

From the New York Times:

"President Bush's spokesman insisted that the president had the authority to declassify and release information "in the public interest" and had never done so for political reasons."

This was in reference to the recent news that Scooter Libby has served up Bush and Cheney on a silver platter to Patrick Fitzgerald.

The suggestion that Bush didn't authorize the leak of classified information for political reasons makes me so fucking livid that I can't even compose a good solid critique. Instead, I'll just rant and storm. Here goes.

BULLSHIT! Absolute and total fucking HORSESHIT! First of all, when the fuck is it LEGAL to leak classified information? Second, why in the fuck WOULD he "declassify" information in "the public interest" unless it was for some particular AGENDA? Because by doing so, with any AGENDA in mind, makes the act, by definition, POLITICAL! And does he REALLY expect ANYONE in their RIGHT GODDAMN MIND to expect that Scooter shitass Libby actually acted alone and without any kind of permission when he "accidentally" dropped Valerie Plame's name to half a dozen reporters? Hmmmm? That kind of position in life is not attained through lapses in memory! It's RETARDED! THE WHOLE STORY IS ASININE! AND even if they can prove it WASN'T illegal to leak that information, even if Fitzgerald can't directly connect Bush and Cheney to the leak of Plame's name, Libby's authorization to release information connected to the justification for invading Iraq is STILL POLITICAL. Shrub and his fucking team of storytellers came up with all KINDS of reasons to convince the country, the UN, and the world that we NEEDED to invade Iraq! Unbelievable. Take some goddamn responsibility for your actions, asshole.

Okay, I think I have that out of my system.

One other note, for right now. Shrub also wants to start making more nuclear weapons. He's just so smart, I can barely stand it.

"The administration... wants the capability to turn out 125 new nuclear bombs per year by 2022, as the Pentagon retires older bombs that it says will no longer be reliable or safe."

The weapons will no longer be safe, eh? Isn't the point of nuclear weapons that they're supposed to be dangerous as all fucking hell?

No munchies today. Just tequila. Extra salt. Leave the bottle.

Sex and the Capitol

The name Jessica Cutler might ring a bell if you read the D.C. tabloids, but if you don't, she was a Republican senator's staffer who got fired for publishing various accounts of sexual escapades she had online. The key here is that her escapades involved at least one married man and a number of D.C. insiders. Bad move, Jess. She's now being sued by one of the men she wrote about, for invasion of privacy (it's a bullshit claim, though- she never used his name, only his initials).

The thing is, that while reading about this retardedly lurid story (I felt like I was downing a gallon of ice cream, it was such a guilty pleasure), I came across an extensive Washington Post article that used Cutler's story as a segue into a really intelligent look at American mores and sexuality. One excerpt, which quotes pollster and analyst Daniel Yankelovich:

"The country is taken aback by moral relativism in all of its forms," Yankelovich says. "To me, the best way of thinking about it is that people are now free to say: 'I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't break the law.' An earlier generation, my own generation growing up in the United States, would say, 'What has the law got to do with it?' The usual model for societies is that they have a very thin layer of law and a very thick layer of social morality. What this expressive individualism has done, as an unintended consequence, is weaken that layer of social morality to the point where it's almost disappeared."

This is me again: I've argued this in the past, and those of you who know me best have probably heard this at one point or another, but this is a symptom of the very foundation of our Constitution. The United States of America was the first country in history to posit that the individual is more important than the collective good. That's why we have the bill of rights. That's why the Nazi Party is allowed to demonstrate in public. It's why our legal system allows death row inmates to appeal their sentences for decades instead of simply executing them immediately after trial. It's why questions as to where we draw the line on things like censorship and obscenity are so impossible to answer clearly.

But where does that leave us? Ah, there's the rub. What to do about our moral relativism? How to decide what IS right and wrong? And then, how to govern, how to enforce these "truths"?

What a quandary we have. Ain't it fun?