When is all hell going to break loose, anyway?

Hawaii became the first state in the union today to cap wholesale gas prices at $2.16/gallon. Sounds good right about now, but that's before taxes and retail markup, making the minimum practical price in Honolulu next week $2.87/gallon.

Is Pat Robertson our own version of Mullah Omar?

He's just not the stereotypical version. You know, he's not brown. Or Muslim. So most of the American public will shake their weary litlle heads when I say "Pat Robertson is a terrorist".

I don't know how it managed to slip by me, but it turns out that military recruiters have a right to ask public schools for a list of their students--names, addresses, telephone numbers.  This provision got tacked onto the end of the "No Child Left Behind Act" which certainly puts a whole other light on the "left behind" title.  What exactly does the government not want your child to be left behind FROM?

Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) has introduced a "Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act" designated H.R. 550. If you are one of the people who think that paper trails are essential checks on the evil potentials of electronic voting, check out the legislation here:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:H.R.550:

If it seems like a good idea to you, let your federal representatives know.

After several ill-fated ventures into the oil industry, our illustrious president made a sizable chunk of money by investing in the Texas Rangers baseball team.  In fact, his original $605,000 investment, using almost all borrowed money, produced $10 to $14 million when he sold his interest some 9 years later.

This story was kicked around the dark fringes of the media during the 2000 campaign, briefly raised its head in public after Bush was sworn in, and seemed to have completely disappeared by the 2004 campaign.  How did our president get so lucky as to come up with $10 million or more from a modest investment over a fairly short time?  Well, it's big time business, and big time power, so it isn't exactly pretty.  But it seems worth bringing back into the light.

So George W understands the pain that some feel, but he absolutely needs to be able to get on with his life.  There are bikes to be ridden, brush to be cleared (if only that r wasn't in there!), cameras to be located, dollars to be counted, millionaires to be met, billionaires to be wedded, trillionaires to be....nah, I'll keep it clean and sexless.

There is a famous quote, which appears in the documentary "28 Up":  "give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man."  Is that true?  Well....

"But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that? And watch him suffer."
-- Barbara Bush on "Good Morning America," March 18, 2003, as quoted by Frank Rich, "Michael Moore's Candid Camera," May 23, 2004, NYT [The date is just before the commencement of the Iraq invasion]

That Bush family really knows how to give themselves the love and affection that they're due, gosh darn it, cause after all--they're Bushes.

Here we go again, eh? Creationists clowning around?

The Bush administration to date refuses to recognize that it has a military problem beyond the immediate problems in Iraq & Afghanistan: how to get enough "volunteer" soldiers to conduct these and future wars.  The well publicized failure of most military branches to meet recent recruitment goals both: (1) reflects the failure of mainstream Americans to support the war in the most personal way possible, by actually fighting it; and (2) appears to be resulting in a military that is now accepting substandard recruits.

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