Putting education somewhere in the top 3, or so

"When I was in college, there were certain words you couldn't say in front of a girl. Now you can say them but you can't say 'girl.'"
- Tom Lehrer, in the liner notes to his newly-released 3-CD set

Shrub's new web site lists his top 3 priorities. Number 3 is "Putting education first."

The big issue in the Meg Ryan-Dennis Quaid divorce case: who gets custody of their guru?

Chicago has kicked out of the school districts an abstinence program run by Moonies which preaches something called "absolute sex," which means sex with whoever the Unification Church assigns to you. Yeah, I'd have thought "absolute sex" would mean something more interesting too.

Sheriff Joe of Maricopa County, Arizona is at it again. This time his idea is putting web-cams at the county jail so that guys arrested for soliciting prostitutes can wave to their wives on the Internet.

I'm still waiting to hear whether the guy the Philadelphia police beat up actually had a gun or not. It can't be taking them this long to find a throw-down gun.

I'm also still waiting for Trent Lott to apologize to Hillary Clinton for suggesting that her alleged anti-Semitic statement was recent rather than in 1974, and was made because she's annoyed at not having locked up the Jewish vote in NY. This is the guy who was caught a few months ago lying about his involvement with the CCC, non? He made the statement on Fox
News, owned by Rupert Mudorch, which also owns the newspaper that broke it, and the publisher of the book in which the claim is made. Synergy!

I'm getting a little tired of being woken up at 7 in the morning by EBMUD, which is rebuilding the sewer system around here. I never know what obstacles I'll have to navigate in trying to leave the house. Last week I found they'd dug a huge trench in front of my driveway without knocking on doors to see if somebody might actually want to move their car first. And right now, there is a large truck parked right up to the driveway, just to make getting out of it as hazardous as possible; yup, I like my left turns like I like my women: blind and dangerous.

Probably a longer run-up than that joke required.

The Bermudan Parliament has relaxed the dress-code for MPs. They will now be able to wear Bermuda shorts.

Last week, the Middle East peace talks started with Barak and Arafat each offering to let the other one go through a door first. And then the news drop-out fell. Do you think they've spent the last week arguing about which one would go first?

In Afghanistan, in the middle of a football match, the religious police seized the visiting Pakistani team and shaved their heads for the crime of wearing shorts.

Hope everyone got a chance to read the article in today, Friday's NY Times on a death squad massacre in Colombia. Your tax dollars at work.

According to the US trade ambassador, on McNeil-Lehrer yesterday, the trade agreement with Vietnam will force them to implement the rule of law and democracy. You really have to have heard it to understand why Americans are considered arrogant assholes the world over.

Ok, Philadelphia PD: did he have a gun or didn't he?

Heinz is soon to produce green ketchup. Like the blue M & M's aren't bad enough.

5 years since the massacre at Srebrenica. 4,000 bodies, or parts of bodies, still waiting for someone to get off their ass and run tests to identify them.

Speaking of DNA, does anyone else think that the news that the only person whose execution Dubya ever delayed for DNA testing turned out to be guilty, supporting his ridiculous assertion that everyone executed in Texas is guilty guilty guilty? I smell a rat, and a large rat, since everything is bigger than Texas.

Israel has dropped plans to sell China weapons it can use to threaten the US to keep it from supporting Taiwan. Wasn't that nice? Evidently they were finally pissing off the very Congresscritters they expect to be able to extort a large bribe from in order to underwrite any peace agreement. Such a nice client state. We tell them to jump, they ask how much are you willing to pay.

The president of Montenegro declares that Yugoslavia no longer exists. And not before time, either.

There is a website, which you could look up, devoted to US currency issued by the states before the Civil War, specifically currency issued by Southern states with images of happy slaves.

A Russian rocket will fly parts to the International Space Station tomorrow, with a big ole ad for Pizza Hut on the side. The article didn't say in what language, but one assumes English since the price given was $1 million.

You ain't seen nothing yet

The Star Wars test fails, unfortunately for the wrong reason. Still, any failure is one for the good guys, especially since the Pentagon had already dummied down the test to the point where it was like a Larry King interview with George W. Bush. In this case, though, it was like Bush broke his leg in a freak chewing-gum-and-walking-at-the-same-time accident on the way to the interview.

The NY Times quotes Gore's "pet slogan" as "You ain't seen nothing yet." Two problems with that: 1) Gore can't say it without wincing at the bad grammar (no problem for Dubya, who a couple of days ago in a school said that literacy was the "basics" of education), 2) after 8 years of Clinton, we have in fact seen everything.

The World Bank rejects funding a Chinese project to settle 58,000 Chinese in Tibet.

OK, here's a story that took 50 years to come out: during the Korean War, there were regular aerial dogfights between Russian and American planes. The Russians wore Chinese uniforms and their planes had Chinese markings, and they shot down several hundred American and South Korean planes.

A week after Tony Blair floats an idiotic proposal for the police to be able to fine drunks on the spot and march them to an ATM in order to collect, his own 16-year old son is arrested, found in Leicester Square lying in his own vomit. Euan gave a false name (well, wouldn't you if your name was Euan) and address (11 Downing Street would be a bit of a giveaway).

A report is released on the plane crash of John John Kennedy. It says that he was the victim of "disorientation." He is a Kennedy, so I assume this means he thought he was the center of the universe.

The Yugoslav parliament changes the constitution to allow Milosevic to become president again. Montenegro is threatening not to recognize the change, so look for another war.

Pitcairn Island, settled by the mutineers of the HMS Bounty a couple of hundred years ago, and whose 44 inbred descendants have evidently not figured out that the coast is clear and they can just leave, is threatening to secede to France. Interestingly, the Times says that Tom Fletcher (yes, descended from who you think) speaks with an 18th century accent.

If you've ever been in a phone-box in London, or indeed have ever been looking for a hooker in London, you probably know that the boxes are festooned with cards advertising prostitutes. Well, London elementary school students have started collecting and trading them. Oh great, a Naughty Nellie rookie card! At least it's less pernicious than Pokemon.

Location location location

The NY Times reports that almost all firecrackers blown up today were made in China, as were most of the little American flags waved around. And to top it off, a Japanese man, a little thin Japanese man yet, has again won the hotdog-eating contest on Coney Island, setting a new record.

With no particular sense of irony, the British Parliament spent Independence Day debating the Queen's budget. One Labour MP noted that Buckingham Palace has 58 bedrooms and 78 bathrooms, and asked "How many palaces does the Royal Family need in order to discharge its functions to the state?" No comment.

In the UK, Texaco has a promotion in which people play some sort of game in order to find 5 sportscars which are buried 20 feet underground. Convertibles yet.

In the very same week as California's Insurance Commissioner, Hugo Z. Firefly, resigns from office for extorting money from insurance companies in order to make himself look good on tv, the governor decides that rather than reducing the car tax, the state will first charge the higher rate and then mail out a rebate check. Davis said that this was because otherwise people would not know they were getting a rebate. This little campaign stunt will cost $22 million.

The KGB is back to its old tricks, blackmailing people to make them inform. The latest victim was a student they were trying to get to spy on an opposition party for them. They got him expelled when he refused. They were threatening to have him sent to Chechnya, so presumably that's the next step. If anybody's up for a "Who lost China" witchhunt, I think it's not too early to start.

Clinton said of the human genome project, which let's face it none of you understand, "We have learned the language in which God created life." Pig Latin, I'm guessing.

A Conservative Jewish synagogue was bombed in Jerusalem this week. Congratulations on your understanding of the idiocy of the human species if you immediately guessed that it was done by Orthodox Jews.

Germany is thinking about destroying the bunkers and tank traps that constituted the Siegfried Line, which held off the American invasion of Germany for so long during World War II. Environmentalists want them preserved because badgers and other wildlife have been using them. Proposals to turn the bunkers into laundromats have not gotten off the ground.

Guatemalans tore themselves away from Sabado Gigante long enough to catch two televised executions by lethal injection.

In the last 6 months or so there has been a minor surge of stories about drugs in Africa. Gore was persuaded to u-turn and stop trying to jack up the price of AIDS drugs to Africa, some drug companies have lowered prices on various drugs. I must have mentioned that while there are all these great impotence drugs and whatnot being produced, no one is working on new drugs for tropical diseases, which are becoming increasingly resistant to
drugs. One of the stories is that the cheapest anti-malarial drug, whose name I still remembered a couple of days ago when I first meant to write about this, used to be manufactured rather cheaply on the African continent itself, and that some of the same politicians (more in Britain than here) who have been pointing out that for just a few cents a head you could save all sorts of people from death, made no objection when the plant that used to produce it in Africa was blown off the face of the earth by US missiles (in Sudan, of course).

The New York Times editorial page comes out in support of the two-party system. Evidently there is so much difference between Bush and Gore that Nader is just being a big selfish spoiler by exercising his right to run for president.

The next editorial is on the Mexican elections, and says that they will be an important test of the country's progress is democracy, while admitting that there is no difference between the two main candidates whatsoever. All hail democracy!

Elian is back in Cuba. Ha ha ha, your magic dolphins cannot save you now!

The Russian high school student, although offered a free scholarship at a university, although one specializing in the wrong field, still has not had her grades restore. Someone needs to parachute in some spin doctors. The local education authority report that marked down her grades included in its four pages 33 spelling and 97 punctuation errors, according to one newspaper.

The Supreme Court upholds Miranda not because it thinks Miranda is constitutionally required, but as part of a separation-of-powers pissing
match with Congress. Right decision, wrong reason.

The Supes also strike down Nebraska's partial birth abortion law, while telling it how to write one they will accept. So not the victory it has been portrayed as.

They also allow the Boy Scouts to exclude gays on the grounds that the courts have no right to examine an organization's claim that discrimination is part of its "expressive message."

That said, I have no objection to the Boy Scouts excluding gays, just so long as they get no government funding and their uniforms are banned from schools.

In South Africa, the parties which were bitter enemies under apartheid, the Nationalists and the Democrats, have merged to form a single party, to be the official opposition to the ANC. In other words, they have submerged all their political differences to form a party based solely on ethnicity. South Africa has finally joined the African mainstream.

School prayer got banned by the Supreme Court again. By the way,
wasn't that Texas law great, allowing the students to vote for a student to lead prayers before football games? Who would have thought that a school sponsoring a vote over whose religion was better would had any problem with the Supes?

Oxford University, which has been the target of government attacks as being elitist, will not give Tony Blair an honorary degree. The chancellor says that Blair has only a "second-class mind." Whether pissing off the PM is the action of a first-class mind remains an open question.

Although that Russian girl's grades remain marked down, she did get that camcorder she asked for. She will now have a permanent record of the day her life's dreams went down the toilet.

In chapter 839 of Hollywood's war against culture and sanity, we come to the planned remake of Alec Guiness's Kind Hearts and Coronets, with Will Smith and Robin Williams.

The Daily Show quoted Bill Gates as saying that whenever something gets too popular, the government tries to take it away--like slaves and Thalidomide, they added.

In 1972 Shrub was suspended from flying for having failed to take his medical. Coincidentally, this was the first year in which his medical would have included a drug test. That is one interpretation. The other is that he simply failed to do it like he failed to do any of the other duties he was supposed to perform in his last year in the National Guard, like show up.

When NATO made the ceasefire agreement with Serbia last year, it deleted a clause from the first draft requiring it to release Albanians held in prisons. 1,300 still remain. If I'm reading this right, last month 143 men who had been arrested at random were sentenced to long terms for the murder of a Serb policeman, which occurred after the arrest of some or all of them.

Check out the Chicago Tribune website for an analysis of all 131 (whoops, 132 since they published this morning) of Shrub's executions. Find out how many lawyers have been disbarred, how many jailhouse informants were used, how many lawyers presented no witnesses during the sentencing phase, including one who didn't know he was allowed to. Find out who "Dr. Death" is. And he is not the forensic scientist temporarily released from a psychiatric ward to testify, or the pathologist who made up autopsies. Thrill to the story of a confession coerced by El Paso police, who had Juarez police break into the home of the suspect's Mexican relatives and threaten to hook their genitals up to generators. (A harmless violation of his rights, according to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeal, which is all Republican and one of whose members made up most of his resume and was caught practicing law without a license in Florida, and all of that was known at time of his election and he was elected anyway and he has since been arrested for ticket-scalping). Very entertaining in the sickest possible way. And how about this for a closing argument: "Ladies and gentlemen," Pena began, "yesterday when I was talking to you all the lights went out. I don't know. Maybe that was a message. Today it rained. Maybe that was a message. Maybe the rain drops are the key issues, but that's what you have to decide today." "The system. Justice. I don't know. But that's what y'all are going to do."

Should be available for a while. Long but well worth it. If anyone can't access it, I'll pass on a copy on request.

Tony Blair is being criticized in embarrassing leaked policy memos for being out of touch, and was heckled last week at the Women's Institute. To prove that he is not out of touch, he is finally going to tackle the fox-hunting issue. According to a report released today, "There is a lack of firm scientific evidence about the effect on the welfare of a fox of being closely pursued, caught and killed above ground by hounds. We are satisfied, nevertheless, that this experience seriously compromises the welfare of the fox."

A twin was born in Britain today, 28 days after the other twin.

In order to place bets, I guess, on which inflated internet company is going to go under next, go to www.fuckedcompany.com. I'm telling you, there is a site for everything.

In another example of democracy at its finest, the other son of deceased President Assad of Syria has put in a claim to be his successor. This will last until someone finds a dictionary with a good definition of "president."

The Supreme Court ruled that a person who was told to wait 8 days with appendicitis cannot sue her HMO because her appendix burst, as this was what HMOs were designed to do, and what Congress intended.

Jehovah's Witnesses will no longer be excommunicated ("defellowshipped") for having blood transfusions, but they're still not supposed to.

Some of Barak's coalition partners are pulling out because their rabbis ordered them to.

Beaver College in Philadelphia is giving in after 147 years of tittering (so to speak), and changing its name, although I haven't heard what to. Clitoris University springs to mind. Well maybe springs isn't the best verb. Evidently some prospective students couldn't get to the college's web site (beaver.edu) because of censorship software.

addendum

The state psychologist in Texas who told the jury that Hispanics are dangerous and should be put to death did the same in other trials. See the Sunday NY Times article on the Texas lawyer who represented more people who have been executed than any other lawyer in the US, in between drinks, and how in at least one case he put up no witnesses, including perfectly good alibi witnesses he had been too busy even to interview, and didn't cross-examine the only state witness.

I've been meaning to say this for two weeks, but it seems that Austria's neo-fascist Freedom Party has always been heavily subsidized by Libya.

That idiot judge in Alabama who insists on posting the Ten Commandments in his court, no doubt in the original Hebrew, is going to be the next chief justice of the Supreme Court there.

The Supreme Court vacated another Texas death sentence, in which the jury was told by the prosecutor, with no objection from the defense lawyer, that Hispanics are inherently dangerous, as is shown by their over-representation in the prison system.

If more proof were needed of the utter contempt politicians feel for the intelligence of the electorate, Congress passed a repeal of inheritance taxes, that fall on the richest 2% of the population, in an election year. I don't know what's worse, that or Dubya's sudden conversion to such popular issues as air pollution and insurance, when his record as governor indicates no such prior interest, meaning that even though he planned to run for president, he didn't feel obligated to do anything, as opposed to making speeches during the election year.

Prince William of Great Britain, Northern Island, Gibraltar and the Falklands, is about to turn 18. Let the media feeding frenzy
begin. Charles has shut the queen out of contact with the prince, in a successful effort to get her to cave and meet Camilla. Philip made a totally gratuitous defense of genetically-modified foods, precisely in order to annoy his son. The dysfunction goes on. Rather surprisingly, I read that Charles was actually present at the birth of William. Typically, Diana thought that he was paying too much attention to the baby, and not enough to her. Does anyone else see a parallel between Diana and Marysleysis, or however you spell it?

Chernobyl is finally to close down. At the employees' farewell party, all beer will have two heads.

The Justice Dept. says that there was no conspiracy in the Martin Luther King assassination. So that's all right then.

The UN is censoring "hate speech" in the Kosovan media.

NY Times headline: Democrats Try to Redefine Gore in Ad Blitz. As a mammal?

An Egyptian court says you can't divorce your wife (I divorce you I divorce you I divorce you) by e-mail.

Further raising the question of just how committed to democracy Japan is, after all those Shintoist statements by the prime minister, it seems that 1/4 of the seats in Parliament were inherited, some in their 3rd generation since the war. And this has been going on for a while. Why didn't I hear of this before?

The media in China are not allowed to use the name of the new Taiwanese president.

The Antiques Roadshow (British version) this week evaluated what turned out to be stolen silverware (worth #20,000).

I haven't looked at it yet, but the site charity.artificial.com evidently rates the panhandling techniques of actual homeless people. The mind boggles.

Clinton offers to extend the Star Wars umbrella over civilized countries, defined as "if you have to ask, you're not."

My cat decided I wasn't eating enough and brought me a bird. The first time that's ever happened, but not from want of trying. Any creature stupid enough to get caught by Turquoise does not deserve to be in the gene pool.