lesbians, tractors and AIDS

I've spent the first day of 2008 ~ a year I know is going to be a good one ~ at home cooking chicken mole enchiladas and tomato florentine soup. And I've read from start to finish a marvelous book by this woman, Catherine Friend, a writer who fell in love with Melissa and turned into a farmer.

The book ~ Hit By a Farm ~ was a delicious treat. I laughed out loud and cried just enough. I love the way Catherine writes about her relationship with Melissa, with honesty and frankness and love. It's a book I randomly picked up off the library shelf because a glance at the cover reminded me of my old dream of living in the country.

I sometimes think I've missed my calling and really belong out in the hinterlands raising chickens and milking goats. When I bought this city house, I fully intended to keep a couple of goats and chickens in the back yard, with the plan of making cheese and building a chicken tractor to keep the bugs out of the garden beds.

After reading Catherine's account of life and death on the farm, I'm rethinking that for the 100th time, but the book was a delight and it was an extra treat to find that the farmers are a couple of gay girls with a bigass tractor. In my dream, the tractor's a spiffy little Kubota, but these women have got a honkin' big red monster and I've now got a bad case of tractor envy.

And then there's this Post of the Year thing for which I was unknowingly nominated and, surprisingly, won along with another blogger called Little Red Boat. It was quite a surprise to drop by Joe's and see my name practically in lights. Sweet. The post was an old one from April called piano music. I mention it again only because it honors my friend Wayne, who loved and lost his Ronnie to that fucking disease. So now I've confessed and that is that and a big thank you to the Post of the Week folks. Thank you.

And the last good thing is this: I know we are going to prevail against these thugs who have seized control of our government. It is not hopeless, it will be frustrating and frightening but I am certain that this will be the year things change for the better and we will rid ourselves of the likes of George Bush and his band of zealots.

the GOP's culture of corruption

As Larry Craig says, "Nasty, bad, naughty" boys. It's really something to see this year's parade of thugs and thieves all in one place. The list, courtesy Oklahoma's Doc Hoc. I'm getting that delicious sense of schadenfreude again.

i want vengeance

Vengeance isn't what I was brought up with. I was taught a turn-the-other-cheek ethic at First Lutheran Elementary School. But my heart is filled with a white hot hate I fear will not abate until Alberto Gonzalez is disbarred and arrested.

I want Karl Rove to get his comeuppance too, and a hard kick in the ass to go with it. The good citizen in me cannot accept that these thugs and criminals will escape unscathed. It is intolerable. Unbearable.

I am sickened by the sound of George Bush's voice chastising the American people and the Democratic congress, small and persistent voices demanding accountability from these thugs. These unprincipled men have chipped away at our Constitution and the Bill of Rights; they have turned this country into something unrecognizable.

I want vengeance, but it's not personal. This nation should avenge these misdeeds to send a message to the world that these people are not us. They are of a tyrant and dictator class arising out of, but separate from, the rest of us.

I don't recognize my country anymore and I want these bastards punished. We have become mean, petty and alienated, isolated from one another as we point fingers of accusation, Republican to Democrat and the other way around. While we fight among ourselves, these criminals destroy the fabric of our democracy. I hate them and I want revenge.

soldiers speak out

Since the Whitehouse will be whitewashing Petraeus's report in September, we'll need to look elsewhere for an honest assessment of what's happening in Iraq. And lookie! Fresh from the pages of the NYT, soldiers speak. And the consensus is, of course, get the hell out. Think the Bush cretin will listen?

republican predicts police state

Unbearable. I may stay in Jamaica.

"Americans think their danger is terrorists," said Roberts. "They don't understand the terrorists cannot take away habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution. ... The terrorists are not anything like the threat that we face to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution from our own government in the name of fighting terrorism. Americans just aren't able to perceive that."

senates moves to defund cheney's 4th branch of government

AP has the story, but Wonkette has the funny on the insanity of it all:

Now the Democrats are one step closer to making good on their threat to stop funding the Vice President’s rogue, free-floating office of no fixed branch. A Senate approps panel refused to grant Cheney’s office the $4.8 million it takes to maintain the thousands of industrial cooling units that keep the Vice President’s radioactive exoskeleton from overheating, cooking his decrepit innards like a slab of roadkill in the desert sun. Should his body temperature rise above 90 degrees, all of Northwest DC would be incinerated in the resulting firestorm. Ye gods, let the man say he’s in whatever branch of government he wants, Durbin, can’t you see there are thousands of lives on the line???

sing it, everybody

In the midst of my recovery from the cyber-attack and trying to get caught up at work, I have checked HuffingtonPost a few times to keep up with the headlines now that Congress is back in session. The news is good this morning ~ New York Times editorial calling for bringing the troops home, Justice Department lawyer telling all, Rethuglican senators defecting. The news is great.

But in the middle of all of that, when I clicked on UNDER SIEGE!, joyfully emblazoned over a photo of the chimp-in-chief, I somehow found this. It was a God thing. Sing it, pumpkins!! "The idiot son of an aaaasshole!" Sweet! And funny and right on target. Now I'll be singing this all day, but what better thing on a Monday afternoon when the tides may be turning at last?

google is spying on me (and you)

I don't know how this works, suspect it has something to do with cookies and other seemingly tasty things that are actually bits of confusing techni-code-whatever.

But Google is on the job, busily reading every email I send. Just to test it, I sent an innocuous note to myself from one Gmail account to the another . . .

Dear Belle ~
My dear, I am so disturbed about what is happening. It seems dickheads abound and there's nothing we can do to change course. Please share with me your thoughts on these matters.
Most lovingly,
Lynette

My sidebar links in the email I received from myself, each of which Google believes will be of interest given the text of my email, were more limited than usual, but included an outfit selling Labradoodle puppies and another selling wilderness homesites in Montana. Google hears my pain and responds with solutions. Despairing about the state of the nation? Get a dog and move to Montana.

This offends me on many levels, but one annoying example is that every conversation I have via email with my customers, all buyers of my antique furniture, results in a vast amount of linkage to others selling antique furniture. In these difficult times, I feel a bit proprietary about my longterm relationship with these people and the money I put into marketing my product. What right has Google to attempt to interfere with my business? (Yes, I could switch email accounts, but it is an enormous undertaking with an online business and, having done it once, I am most reluctant to do it again.)

Does this bug you? Am I hypersensitive in this era of Big Brother Bush and his band of wiretapping thugs? Do you think BushCo receives copies of this stuff in the same way AT&T assisted the National Security Agency in data-mining our telephone conversations?

impeach dick cheney now

Vice Thug Cheney says he's not a part of the Executive Branch of our federal government and thus is exempt from public scrutiny. It is late, and it's possible I'm confused, but I'm fairly certain the Constitution places the offices of President and Vice President squarely in the Executive Branch. I think I learned that in 3d grade.

But hey, since Thuggish Dick says he's not a part of it, let's boot the arrogant bastard out! Put him on the street, do it now. I suspect the vast majority of the blame for the disaster in Iraq, for the rampant thieving of the war profiteers, for the plan to attack Iran and so many more disastrous decisions and foreign policy debacles lies squarely at the feet of Dick Cheney, master puppeteer of George W. Bush.

Congressman Henry Waxman's office has put together a document detailing this man's refusal to comply with the laws of this nation, with the policies of the federal government of which he is a part. He insists, though, that that the rules don't apply to him and after repeated efforts to gain his cooperation in safeguarding classified national security information, the National Archives referred the matter to the Justice Department. You know, the one headed by Alberto Gonzalez, criminal-in-chief, and staffed by idiots and fools from a right wing 4th rate law school. Not surprisingly, Gonzalez did nothing.

It's ironic, really, because one thing I've noticed generally about the far right Rethugs is that they tend to be very rule oriented, very stringent about requiring adherance to standards, guidelines and the like. (That's one of the screeching points on immigration: They are here illegally!!!!) But when it comes to Dick Cheney, the rules simply don't apply. That is outrageous, infuriating and wrong. Impeachment seems the only option for one so dismissive of law, of the Constitution, of the American people.

liar. murderer. fool.

bloomberg abandons rethugs, runs as independent

He hasn't been my kind of candidate, affiliating himself with the rethuglicans, but what if he's actually viable as an Independent? What if he, as The Agonist suggests, were to team up with a Democrat. Does that give anyone else a freshening of hope? I'm desperate for anyone who might be able to wrest control of our country back from the bought-and-paid-for corporate operatives masquerading as elected representatives. It's probably not him. And he's likely still a rethug at heart, just hastening now, like a long-tailed wharf rat, to abandon the sinking ship that is George Bush. I know little about him, just that NYC-living JMGers don't screech in outrage at the mention of his name; that's somewhat encouraging but clearly not enough.

president pottymouth

And I said I should stop cussing. Maybe he should too. From Time. I love the bit about disappointing his family values base. It will be a fine day when we can all see that the emperor has no fucking clothes.

the truth about george bush

From The Assault on Reason:

I’m convinced, however, that most of the president’s frequent departures from fact-based analysis have much more to do with his right-wing political and economic ideology than with the Bible…. Now, with the radical Right, we have a political faction disguised as a religious sect, and the president of the United States is heading it. The obvious irony is that Bush uses a religious blind faith to hide what is actually an extremist political philosophy with a disdain for social justice that is anything but pious by the standards of any respected faith tradition I know.

The truth about this particular brand of faith-based politics is that President Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in American history to take what belongs to the American people and give as much of it as possible to the already wealthy and privileged…

Make no mistake: It is the president’s reactionary ideology, not his religious faith, that is the source of his troubling inflexibility. Whatever his religious views, President Bush has such an absolute certainty in the validity of his rigid right-wing ideology that he does not feel the same desire that many of us would in gathering facts relevant to the questions at hand.

By way of DU.

14 points of fascism

Scary.

criminal elements

The elements Sneerium and Moron are particularly deadly.

Very amusing (if it were not so tragically true) and highly creative periodic table of criminals, sociopaths and thieves from And the Horse You Rode In On.