Somebody’s Bakin’ Brownies

I gotta say, I love John Edwards' new proposal:

Edwards Proposes "Brownie's Law" — Has Nothing To Do With Girl Scouts
John Edwards announced yesterday that as president he would have a policy dubbed "Brownie's Law," named in "honor" of former FEMA head Michael Brown. "Edwards will enact a new requirement — 'Brownie's Law' — ensuring that senior political appointees actually are qualified to perform the job to which they are appointed," according to a campaign fact sheet. "Brownie's Law will require that heads of executive agencies and other senior officials have demonstrated qualifications in the field related to their job." It sure says something about the current state of governmental affairs that such a pronouncement could be considered newsworthy.

In the coming weeks, Edwards is also expected to announce his Fredo Initiative, which would make it illegal to lie to Congress; the Turd Blossom Doctrine, forbidding the deletion and/or shredding of important documents of public interest; and the G.O.P. Principle, requiring that government officials and candidates for office demonstrate their heterosexuality prior to embarking on a campaign of demonizing and restricting the civil rights of homosexuals.

Beers, Steers, and Queers

Another day, another anti-gay Republican caught in the men’s room soliciting blow jobs. This time it’s U.S. Senator Larry Craig (R - ID). Hey, at least this one didn’t want to cram cock in his mouth because he’s afraid of all the black people. Nope. Senator Craig just likes him some dick.

He just doesn’t like it when other people like dick. Hypocrisy and homosexuality are a way of life in the Gay Old Party…

As Rove Goes So Goes Alberto

Yes, Alberto Gonzales has resigned. You know how I know? Because I've gotten no less than 15 spams from the Democratic party during the course of the day bragging about how they washed that man right out of our hair.

Yeah, right. The Democratic party was as effective at changing Bush's mind about cabinet members as I am at throwing a 98 mile per hour fastball. If they want to boast about how they are actually doing something good since having taken over congress, then let's see what they do when Bush nominates Michael "The Crony In Charge During Katrina" Chertoff to take Gonzales' place. If they manage to force Bush to nominate an independent, honorable, competent candidate for Attorney General, then -- and only then -- will I applaud their accomplishment. It would be their first.

Welcome To The Jungle

Please make note of and click on our latest What We're, Like, Totally Into Right Now&trade resident, "The Faith Between Us" blog.

As background, friend of DoG Scott Korb and his partner (in business, not in life), Peter Bebergal, have a forthcoming new book entitled The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God. It promises to be an interesting book, one which I am looking forward to reading. I am loathe to speak for Mr. Korb (the Catholic referred to in the subtitle), but it is always entertaining and enlightening to have a discussion about God and religion with Scott because of his unusual attitude about religion. I'll leave it to him to explain, but from my limited understanding, his belief in God is quite contrary to the man sitting in a cloud guiding creation and granting home runs to Albert Pujols idea, as described by many in the religious community.

Please enjoy a taste of their handiwork in this column. In the meantime, I apologize to Scott if I've mangled and/or embarrassingly simplified his point of view, and invite him to comment or even guest post if he would care to correct me. In any case, check out their blog and buy the book on October 30. You won't be sorry.

Right Wing Death Porn

To follow up on my Nuke the Others post of the other day, there’s a recent column from a right-wing think tank called Family Security Matters that advocates -- this is real -- that Bush nuke the whole of the Middle East and declare himself Emperor of the World. Democracy (i.e. - you) is what’s wrong with America.

Read for yourself.

As I say, this is a real organization with the likes of James Woolsey, former Director of the CIA, on its Board of Advisors.

White Light Goin' Messin' Up My Mind

"You always have these oddballs in a group and somebody says, 'Ah, we should drop a nuke over Iraq.' The stupid jerk doesn't even know what a nuke is. If he do, he wouldn't say that."
- Theodore Van Kirk, Navigator on the Enola Gay

I just finished watching white light/black rain, an HBO documentary about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Just from hearing the one sentence description I know you already know you don't want to watch it, not because you're incurious or willfully ignorant, but because it's brutal and depressing, and you just don't want to spend an evening feeling suicidal. It's worse than you think, and you should watch it anyway.

Learning exactly how war can destroy an individual person's life is a tried and true method of getting people to understand why we should all be against every war except when absolutely necessary. Bush understands that, and it's why he hasn't allowed photographs of the coffins of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq since day one. I won't go into that aspect. This movie will affect you without question. The issue that strikes me from having viewed the film is the sense of "Other" that we -- all of us -- feel towards other human beings based only on the fact that they were born outside of our artificially drawn national border.

Whether it's the dirty Mexicans who are stealing our jobs and apparently killing us in our sleep or about the ragheads in Iraq, Afghanistan, and all those other countries over there, somehow we tend to ignore whatever trials and hardships these Others might have to endure. "It don't affect me, so piss off, foreigner." Not in those words, of course. We tend to find reasons why we shouldn't concern ourselves with these Others. They're "illegal" immigrants. They're trying to destroy America. They hate us for our freedom.

The same ideas were pervasive back in World War II. In the film, they interviewed the men who dropped the bombs -- the bombs that went on to kill 370,000 innocent people -- and they hadn't lost a night's sleep over it. Nor should they - they didn't set policy; they were just following orders. My point is that most everyone felt that the Japs deserved what they got for what they did at Pearl Harbor, and if you were up on the topic, for their imperialism and destruction they had wrought upon much of eastern Asia. That's fine except the people interviewed in this film, people whose ribs were showing through their skin, whose flesh had been melted away, whose bodies were ravaged with tumors, were mostly children at the time, and I've no doubt that the hundreds of thousands of dead were mostly innocent too.

Which brings us to today. Yes, there are crackpots who think we should just nuke the whole Middle East. And they can go fuck their ignorant selves. Today, I'm bringing to your attention the fact that while we may not have dropped a hydrogen bomb, there may possibly be 600,000 dead civilians in Iraq or more. And can you really tell me there isn't a sense of Other circulating around that number? Do we really care about these woman and children? Do we really care about the people we torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the dozens of secret bases we've established around the world? The U.S. government has admitted that many of those in Gitmo are innocent, but we can't release them because after all the shit we've done to them, they may not have been our enemies then, but they sure as hell are now.

We have to stop and think about why we consider a human life to have less value just because he or she resides outside of our borders, worships a different god than we do, or has different colored skin. As Americans do we not consider it self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness? Are those unalienable Rights endowed by our so-called Creator only endowed to those who live within these fifty states? Do you really believe that? And should our battles in the name of that document rescind those Rights just because they live in the vicinity of a few who would like to see us killed?

3,000 of us were murdered on September 11, 2001. We murdered 370,000 in August of 1945. We've murdered many, many more since. Exactly when does murder -- the murder of innocents -- become something we can so easily brush aside?

Bush's Brain Dead

Rove resigns. Wow.

Well, Bush said that if anyone in his administration was found to be responsible for leaking the name of Valerie Plame that person would no longer work for him. And I'll be damned if he's not a man of his word. Cheney had better watch his back.

My prediction - Cheney will be ousted from office Januaryish, 2009.

Ha Ha!

You support a team that tacitly encourages cheating and overtly celebrates a farce of a broken record. Therefore the Fates will step in and in the one place where people actually support the chemically enhanced robot freak that is Barry Bonds in huge numbers, a Mets fan on a brief layover will go home with the record breaking baseball.

I don’t even give a shit about this record, or any other for that matter. Mostly, I guess because this overblown season-long tempest has stolen the very last drop of nostalgia and innocence from these cynical bones of mine. But also because while Bonds cheated, the pitchers and half the rest of the non-record-breaking players were cheating too. And who’s to say all those old guys weren’t cheating in some way, to say nothing of the fact that many of those records were set when we had barely even heard of the Dominican Republic and you wouldn't have let Barry Bonds watch a game at the ballpark, let alone step on the field. So, whatever, all records are bullshit. But no matter what, a Giants fan didn’t get the big ball.

Suck it, San Francisco. Now maybe that fat fuck can retire and you can get to the task of rebuilding your baseball team. And your integrity.