My father is a sort of gruff, intimidating man, and when we got married, our spouses were mostly afraid to call him by name - they always referred to him as “your father.”
We thought it was funny, and we all began to call him that, all the time. Then my mother became “your mother” (as [...]

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See how much better off they are than they were under Saddam:
NEW YORK The Washington Post has obtained a cable, marked “sensitive,” that it says show that just before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, “the U.S. Embassy [...]

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Oops:
One day after an official swore under oath that the Department of Homeland Security had no record of a letter from Randy “Duke” Cunningham pushing her agency to do business with the scandal-linked Shirlington Limo company, the department reversed course and released the letter.
(Click here for full size image of the letter.)
Republicans on the House [...]

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NTodd’s mother has died suddenly. Condolences may be left in the comments.

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Live from the Baghdad morgue:
As the doctor talked to his friend, a police pickup truck pulled up with a dozen or more bodies piled in the back. “I could not believe that the dead were brought in such a way,” Siddique said. “They were one on top of the other like animal carcasses.”
When the [...]

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It’s an ADD thing that when I have any constant ache or pain, it’s difficult for me to pay attention to anything else. Every day since Wednesday, I’ve awakened to the sinus-infection throb on the right side of my face, the swelling under my eye that makes it hurt to even wear my glasses. Now [...]

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1. Single - Natasha Bedingfield
2. Goodbye Joe - Laura Nyro
3. Crazy Little Thing Called Love - Cheap Trick
4. Brighter Than Sunshine - Aqualung
5. Harvest Moon - Neil Young
6. On Your Shore - Charlotte Martin
7. Autumn Leaves - Diana Krall
8. How Will I Know - Whitney Houston
9. Democracy - Leonard Cohen
10. Across the Great Divide - [...]

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If Joe Klein loves Bush so much, why doesn’t he marry him?

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Literally.

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Would it help if I mentioned Mayor Ray Nagin was a Republican until he ran for election, and is very friendly with developers? Somehow, we just know how this one will turn out:
NEW ORLEANS, June 17 — Billions of federal dollars are about to start flowing into this city after President Bush on Thursday signed [...]

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From Overheard in Philly:
Guy 1: “Check it out, Aunt Jemima lost the do-rag.”
Guy 2: “Man, she lost that ages ago. Like 1973.”
Guy 1: “No, she had it since then.”
Guy 2: “She’s had like 7 different hairstyles since then.”
Guy 1: “I dunno, this one looks pretty out-of-date.”
Guy 2: “Yeah, they should give her extensions.”
Guy 1: “Or [...]

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From the Friday news dump, via Martini Republic:
WASHINGTON - Murky procedures, lack of oversight and inadequate resources led to mistakes in the way U.S. troops treated Iraq and Afghanistan detainees. But two Pentagon reports, made public Friday, found no widespread mistreatment or illegal actions by the military.
A human rights group called the reports a [...]

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Giblets explains the Guantanamo suicides:
“Oh but Giblets there are dozens of innocent prisoners in Guantanamo” you say because you are a namby-pamby appeasenik who suckles at the teat of terror. Well if these Guantanamo prisoners are so innocent then what are they doing in Guantanamo? Sneaking into our secret military prisons as part of an [...]

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The so-called Zarqawi documents are probably forged.
Which by the way, reminds me of “Mind Games,” a depressingly informative look at Iraq war psy-ops in this month’s Columbia Journalism Review. Read it, and you’ll never look at news the same way again:
Throughout the summer of 2003, Gardiner documented incidents that he saw as information-warfare campaigns directed [...]

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For some reason, toll takers talk to me. The other night, I was driving home from having dinner with a friend in New Jersey. As I entered the toll lane at the foot of the Ben Franklin bridge, the toll taker (a pleasant-looking guy about my age) pointed to the WXPN sticker in my side [...]

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Just ask Genentech:
A major drug company is blocking access to a medicine that is cheaply and effectively saving thousands of people from going blind because it wants to launch a more expensive product on the market.
Ophthalmologists around the world, on their own initiative, are injecting tiny quantities of a colon cancer drug called Avastin into [...]

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Orgasm Amnesty Week. C’mon now, ‘fess up. Stop faking!

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The law is just a minor inconvenience to BushCo:
TRENTON, June 15 — The New Jersey attorney general has issued subpoenas to five telephone companies to determine whether any of them violated the state’s consumer protection laws by providing records to the National Security Agency. Experts say it is the first legal move by a state [...]

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I really, really hate the holier-than-thou bullshit from the members of the corporate media.
I’ve been consistent in telling you my own experience: Reporters are lazy, self-important, economically narcissistic, susceptible to flattery and easily manipulated. The exceptions to that rule are so few in proportion to the majority, they’re hardly worth mentioning. When they are worth [...]

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For those of you old enough to remember, Blue Cheer is at the North Star tonight. Coincidentally enough, it’s going up to the low 90s today.

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I haven’t been able to get onto Talk Left for weeks now. I can get on from some links from search engines, but mostly not. I tried Firefox, and that doesn’t work, either. Oddly enough, I can get onto it from my work computer, but not at home.
WTF?

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Fish gotta fly… right out of the water in my neighborhood, as it happens. Via Tattered Coat
:[Regional Manager of the State Fish and Boat Commission Jeff] Bridi said the fish that were alive along this stretch of the river “were displaying an avoidance type of behavior. Some were literally jumping out of the water, indicating [...]

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Blogger love and the questions it raises. Via Rox.

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Dr. S. marks the milestone.

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Mark Crispin Miller attempts to unravel the riddle of why the media refuses to look at the evidence of 2004 election fraud. Please read it.

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Update on the line of succession in al Qaeda.

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I had to leave work early today to have a cardiogram and a Pap. My test results were back, and the doctor says my bloodwork is great: low bad cholesterol, high good cholesterol, blood sugar normal, nothing at all positive. (He was looking to see if I tested positive for Lyme, because I had a [...]

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From National Journal, via TPM Muckraker:
Your tax dollars at work: Congress attempted to kill the ill-conceived Terrorist Information Awareness program in 2003. But instead, the Rasputin-like program — designed to somehow find terrorists from a sky-high pile of credit card bills, car rental receipts and travel records — came back, bigger and stronger and arguably [...]

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When I was an editor, I used to get all these press releases from the state Department of Welfare announcing all the locals who’d been found guilty of welfare fraud.
I’d look at the releases and almost always, they were people who either thought they were eligible (and got the money through a mistake) or who [...]

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How about that? If Lucinda Williams is getting married, maybe there’s still hope for me. After all, I’m an ornery, opinionated singer-songwriter, too…

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