With effort and fun

The Tom Ridge color of the day is blank, ‘cause I’m out of ideas.

Remember those stories about all the farm subsidies going to really rich people like Ted Turner? Well Congress decided to do something to stop it: the new farm bill requires that information to be kept secret. Problem solved.

The US claims to have captured a top Al Qaida leader, or possibly a waiter. And by captured, I mean sent along forces, presumably armed, in a foreign country, and simply removed people from that country. People say that Sharon is trying to prove that his forces can go anywhere they want and do anything they want, but the US really can.

Of that man, Donald Rumsfeld, in a euphemism excessively folksy even for him, said that we were “visiting” with him. Since this visiting is going on in a location the government refuses to disclose, I assume this visiting involves electrodes attached to genitals rather than lemon meringue pie, unless the CIA has uses for a lemon meringue pie which I’d rather not know about.

Speaking of torture, a) Amnesty International refuses to condemn the forcible feeding of POWs in Guantanamo, which is stupid of them, b) if you haven’t seen the picture of Johnny Taliban naked, blindfolded and trussed up like a Christmas goose, make sure you do. Prosecutors told the court yesterday how they intend to indict him for conspiracy to do things he didn’t actually do, including kill that CIA officer Johnny Spann who had just threatened to kill him. I would just note that Spann was not wearing a uniform, which according to Rumsfeld would make him an “unlawful combatant.” The judge kept interjecting gratuitously, asking what Lindh was doing there in the first place, and asking his lawyers if they’d ever been in a war. American justice at its most impartial.

The fuss about whether BBC reporters should wear black ties when reporting on the Queen Mother’s death goes on, and on. See The Times for how much ink can get spilled on this subject.

The fucking Michigan law against fucking saying fucking obscenities in fucking public has been fucking struck down in fucking open court, live on Court TV in what I understand was a fucking hilariously obscenity-laden trial. So you can shout “f...” in a crowded theater.

zdnet.co.uk for corporate anthems, which I’ve mentioned before but have since then really taken off as an internet past-time. KPMG’s song, with the refrain “We will be number one, with effort and fun,” is this week at number, um, two. “Together each of us will run for gold that shines like the sun in our eyes.”