Hacket saying someone in class molested pig, forcing me to consider classmate committing beastiality. Disturbing!

That’s what I wrote for my Senior Year High School year book for “most memorable moment”. To an extent, I was trying to outdo my brother, whose “Drank Jolt Cola, and was wired for the rest of the day” garnered a comment to me a year from a student looking through old yearbooks. My comment stood out, and there appears to have been a bit of “iffyness” on the part of the Yearbook staff. For his part, my conversation with the teacher went like this. “That’s a pretty interesting ‘memorable moment’.” “Indeed.” (A few people post-graduate have read it, and commented “They let you write that?“)

The editing job on the passage confused me. They inserted a “to be” between “classmate” and “committing”. What that clarifies is beyond me, and further it seems to confuse matters: is the classmate a future classmate of mine? And, if they’re going to move the word-count past the 15 words that was imposed on me, why not stick a “Mr.” before “Hacket”?

There really isn’t much of a story beyond those 15 words. I was taking an Auto Shop class (mostly a scheduling accident). I wasn’t paying attention to the teacher as he was talking about some prankery someone apparently had on FFA students (that’s “Future Farmers of America”). A student (his nakename wasn’t “Squirt”, though it might as well have been) made a wise-crack that I didn’t catch — and the teacher responded tersly with words that popped me to attention: “Molested a pig.”

After a classroom of kids popped up to attention, and gave a “Wooah” reaction, we went to the shop, and that was the last I ever heard of anything. I regret not popping in by saying, “Define ‘molest’.”

Horsley did not stress the “deliverance” from his poking Elsie, as much as he emphasised that everyone who lives on a Georgia farm engages in bestiality. I am sure the farmers of Georgia are none to pleased. He even went so far as to try and get Colmes to enjoin his behavior.

I… guess… bestiality happens. (I note a comment spam I deleted today full of links to bestiality-related porn.) But to suggest that everyone on the farm is doing it offers up the basic problem with Horsley: he has a perverted view of what normal sinners are doing… and, mind you, I believe he loves the photos of bloody fetuses that he’s likely to wave around in a strangely sexual way.

It’s easy to destroy the tired argument chimed in from the religious right (Neal Horsley on down to Senator Rick Santorum) that goes First Homosexuality, next Bestiality. As children can’t consent, animals can’t either. I’m more head-strong on protecting the innocence of children than animals, I may as well admit, and I can envision a hyper-libertarian argument that… oh, never mind.

As for Horsley’s further kvetching on the matter of “doing anything that moves” to include “a warm watermelon in the pasture” (or a location of creepy specificity)– it reminds me that there was a popular movie made a few years ago with a teenager having sex with a pie, which means … I guess masturbation into food happens somewhat regularly. But please don’t tell me about it. (I happen to hate Joe Matt’s comics.)

I just realized that the blog entry entitled “Frog. Boiling. Slowly. Pot.” gets bombarded with comment spam from cooking and recipie sites.

Now that’s target marketing!

(I might also mention that the entry about “Media Whores Online Watch Watch Watch Watch” has gotten comment spam from something akin to “Bus Stop Whores”.)

“”If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy.”

So goes a line from the latest Star Wars movie, Revenge of the Sith, giving the public reason to suspect parallels between modern politics and the the movie. Lucas… rejects them. Kind of.

“In ancient Rome, “why did the senate after killing Caesar turn around and give the government to his nephew?” Lucas said. “Why did France after they got rid of the king and that whole system turn around and give it to Napoleon? It’s the same thing with Germany and Hitler.”

“You sort of see these recurring themes where a democracy turns itself into a dictatorship, and it always seems to happen kind of in the same way, with the same kinds of issues, and threats from the outside, needing more control. A democratic body, a senate, not being able to function properly because everybody’s squabbling, there’s corruption.”

But the Bush supporters protesteth too much. I don’t know. Imagine a nation where the Senate votes its deliberative powers away, opting instead to become a rubber-stamp for the presidency. Hard to imagine.

My first thought on hearing the news about Newsweek today was, “Oftentimes, the first draft is the most true, because this comes before the powers that be clamp down on it.”

More than likely, the detail from Newsweek — that the Quran has been flushed into the toilet before before the souls locked up in Guantanamo Bay — is true. Not the part that they were reporting — that the government was about to admit it in an official report — a story that strikes me as incredulous — but the part that had been reported and reverberated through the past few years from detainees and (I think, though I may be wrong) interrogators. (Some google searching brings me to this list.

That being said, and maybe this is just a sort of anti-religious bias on my part, but the idea that Interrogators trashed the Quaran into the toilet doesn’t terribly disturb me. Yes, I know we need to avoid the General Boykin worldview, and perceptions of how it plays in what too many want to be a True Religious War. But, you don’t have to get very far to find more disturbing acts Just go to the Newsweek article in question.

But what impresses me about this case is what is coming out of the Bush Administration. We have a flip-flop here!

The Bush Administration had earlier said that this article (more specifically, sentence) had nothing to do with fanning the flames for riots that occurred in Afghanistan and Pakistan, downplaying it in favour of — what, I was never exactly sure, though there is a measure to which they were probably correct. No fuel to the fire, despite the signs that were being waved, such as these signs. It went like this:

“It is the judgment of our commander in Afghanistan, General Eichenberry, that in fact the violence that we saw in Jalalabad was not necessarily the result of the allegations about disrespect for the Koran, but more tied up in the political process and the reconciliation process that President Karzai and his cabinet are conducting in Afghanistan. He thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine.” — General Myers

Now they’re all over Newsweek, saying they incited the violence with such a false story… Donald Rumsfeld even chiming in with a “People need to watch what they say and watch what they do.”

Make of it what you must.

In consideration of the Downing Street Memo:

We already have Jack Straw on public record in his “I’m quitting” speech before the House of Commons saying that “it’s amazing how thin the evidence really is.”

I’m tempted to say that everyone knows this already, but really… seemingly only I do. And everyone like I. Perhaps it tore into Blair a bit; the American media ignores it and meanders onward.

It’s sort of like the open secret with the John Bolton nomination. What other purpose could John Bolton serve at the UN besides to demean the institution and provoke a crisis?

Fox News has aired a special called something to the effect of “The Threat from Iran”. I’m thinking that somebody needs to create a whole series of these programs, one for each nation state on Earth. “The Threat from New Zealand” would be a pretty spiffy program, methinks.

21 Red States: Alaska, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wyoming.

16 Blue States: Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachussetts, Maryland, Michigan, North Dakota, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, West Virginia.

13 Purple States: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Lousiana, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Rode Island, South Dakota.

As per the most recent electoral map: 30 Red states. 20 Blue states.

Boldened are the states thate voted for one candidate or the other but have a delegation of two Senators from the other party.

On Neal Horsley’s Triumphant Return to the Air Waves.

……………….

Howard Dean: It’s hard to know what to make. None of us outside the administration have access to the intelligence, which led to this determination.

I am concerned that every time something happens that’s not good for President Bush he plays this trump card, which is terrorism. His whole campaign is based on the notion that “I can keep you safe, therefore at times of difficulty for America stick with me,” and then out comes Tom Ridge.

It’s just impossible to know how much of this is real and how much of this is politics, and I suspect there’s some of both in it.

Joseph Lieberman: I don’t think anybody who has any fairness or is in their right mind would think that the president or the secretary of Homeland Security would raise an alert level and scare people for political reasons.

(Note: If I wanted to, I could throw up John Kerry largely concurring with Lieberman, though not as forthrightly.)

The recent statements by Tom Ridge pretty well prove Dean correct in this old war of words. Lieberman’s a douche-bag, but we already knew that.

With that, we can look back into some feel-good rhetoric from Matthew Yglesias, along the lines of (I can’t find the quote immediately), “The ‘moveon.org’ crowd and the DLC crowd disagree vehemently on the War in Iraq and… that’s about it.”

For his part, Yglesias’s mea culpa with the War in Iraq went like this: I was bamboozled because I didn’t want to think of myself as reflexively anti-Bush; I wanted to be smarter and more thoughtful than the anti-war crowd. It was a telling commentary to be sur… politisc as self-image.

I will point out that Howard Dean was a DLC poster child at one time — a fact that maybe doesn’t matter anymore since the DLC clearly distanced itself from him in 2004. The point beyond that being that the difference between Dean and Lieberman in the matter of the color codes — and that weird doo-hingle with Iraq that ensnared Kerry — is pretty stark and more telling than any supposed similarity with respect to — say — Social Security. One opinion shows a deference to power and a key role-making in narrowing acceptable discourse to suit said ambiguosly floating power. The other is willing to go out on a limb and — I might add — not afraid to be correct for the sake of being correct against a backdrop of Universal Deceit.

This works its way into other matters. Take Lieberman’s duplicity on the Bankruptcy Reform Bill. Dare I say: he voted for the bill before he voted against it.

The word on the street these days is that the DLC is a dead institution. Nakedly exposed, a point of reference to which Centrist Democrats are running away from to find their way to a different banner (say, for instance, the “New Democratic Network”)– one not propped up by the same Charles Koch money that props up various right-wing, libertarian, and generally corporatist Political Institutions.

The latest issue of the New Republic includes an article defending “Clintonism”. I skimmed through it, and have not read it. I assume it has some good points to make — few New Republic articles of the last half dozen years are completely devoid of value. Something needed to defeat the Democratic Party of the 1970s and something needed to win in the early 1990s. BUT…

I started jotting down items for a blog entry… a rambling and list of supposed proposed “Democratic Party Platform” Initiatives. Something beyond a A Party of No or the more egregious “Party of Me Too”, addressing the great problem of the Democratic Party: a lack of definition. Items inspired by various actions and initiatives of various Democratic politicos, others by the excesses of the RNC at the moment. Nothing strikes me as radical in the least, or utopian, or sectarian / special interesty in its grasp, or outside the mainstream of average American opinion. Odd props to Jay Inslee, Peter DeFazio, Warren Buffett, Eliot Spitzer, and Brian Schweitzer.

But then I squint my eye. It needles various corporate coffers just enough to keep them honest. Which is why they tend to float around the ether, bounced around by Democratic officials and never framed into a cohesive storyline. The National Democratic Party platforms from 1988 onward shall remain as bland and blurry as can be.

What are you going to do about it?