Corrente

A Sentry in Kanab Purses His Lips For Reasons Unknown

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A day late, but here's some more of the photo essay...

Chauncy & Signage

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Frist:

"The answer is yes," Frist said when asked if he would act to change Senate procedures to restrict a Democratic filibuster. "Supreme Court justice nominees deserve an up-or-down vote, and it would be absolutely wrong to deny him that."

Um, I must have missed the up-or-down vote on Harriet Miers. Read below the fold...

"bush meets st. peter" is a top ten technorati search--but, remarkably, there are no posts on that topic.

Readers, can you help? Read below the fold...

Newsweek reporters Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe have a profile on Bush this week; Boy in a Bubble. We've noted before the minor Beltway genre of not speaking for attribution; and this article contains many outstanding examples of that art: Read below the fold...

Turns out the Republicans really are the Piranha Brothers. [Isn't it funny how, under Republican rule, the most outré, over-the-top parody quickly becomes reality? Ha ha only serious.] You remember the Piranha Brothers:

INTERVIEWER: Stig, I've been told Dinsdale Piranha nailed your head to the floor.

STIG: (Eric) No, no. Never, never. He was a smashing bloke. He used to give his mother flowers and that. He was like a brother to me.

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Why? Because the Republicans--as so often--pissed in the well that everybody should be able to drink from. Get a load of this little attempt at Republican full spectrum dominance:

A Republican operative has admitted collecting identity data from a political Web log - a practice the state Republican Party earlier had blamed on Democrats.

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Harold Pinter

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Neil Shakespeare (artist, human) takes a few moments to observe Harold Pinter's speech to the Swedish Academy (a recording sent in by the ill Pinter as part of his acceptance of his Nobel prize). In his post Shakespeare links to By Neddie Jingo! who also then links to a posting of Pinter's speech posted on the Nobel Prize website here. Read below the fold...

I'm serious. So far, we can't do anything as well as he could...except perhaps torture:

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - Despite President Bush's optimism on Iraq's reconstruction, the country appears set to pump less crude in 2005 than last year's disappointing showing and far less than under Saddam Hussein.

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If you're a regular reader of the lefty blogosphere, news like this won't surprise you one bit. Hell, my parents had files during the civil rights era, and I sincerely hope I'm living up to that fine family tradition and have one myself.

The names and licenseplate numbers of about 30 people who protested three years ago in Colorado Springs were put into FBI domestic-terrorism files, the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Colorado said Thursday.

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Twenty-three (23), count 'em, twenty-three (23) paragraphs down in Wapo's coverage of the Montreal climate change conference we get this:

At one point Bush's deputies threatened to boycott the [Montreal Climate Change] meetings if Clinton, who was invited by Montreal's mayor and the Canadian Sierra Club, spoke. Clinton offered not to come, said sources close to the former president, but the Canadians stood by the invitation.

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Ian Frazier's latest, Hogs Wild ("They're feral, destructive, and spreading"), didn't make it into the New Yorker's online edition. I wonder why?

The presence of feral hogs in a state is a strong indicator of its support for Bush. Twenty-three of the twenty-eight states with feral hogs voted for Bush. That's more than four-fifths; states that went for Kerry, by contrast, were feral-hog states less than a fifth of the time.

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Say it isn't so! The Inky:

[Knight-Ridder, which owns the Inky] does not plan to identify would-be bidders, spokesman Polk Laffoon IV said yesterday. Officials of other newspaper chains, such as Gannett Co. Inc., as well as private investment firms, including Blackstone Group of New York and Carlyle Group of Washington, have said they might be interested in some or all of Knight Ridder's papers, but none of those three has said it was making an offer.

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I'm putting this one under the "heroes" file because the researchers who made this happen are cool for being able to figure it out. So much good sci-fi discusses the idea that organic technology will replace silicon, and there are plenty of wild, wonderous and scary directions it could go. Hat tip to the totally overlooked and worthwhile Xenophon for the catch: Read below the fold...

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WARNING: This posting does not mention a lot of things going on in the world.

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