I just heard my mother-in-law ask our kids if they were going to wear red today, in honor of Valentine’s Day. Now, there’s no school today due to freezing rain, and because of that no Valentine’s Party, and although they will get a very small Valentine’s Day candy this evening, that’s about the extent [...]

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(A Valentine’s Day rerun. Enjoy!)
Salon takes a look at the ones who got away:
Sometimes we let good people go out of our lives. Often, it’s because we don’t see the good until it’s too late and they’re long gone. Just as often, perhaps, it’s because we do see the good, and it’s just not [...]

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It really seems to me that the press is trying to make the Democratic Presidential Primary a two-candidate race.

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Will never be the same.

(And, if you haven’t guessed, I doubt this link is particularly “work-safe”)

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I was 11 years old, hanging up my wet bathing suit after getting a blistering sunburn on the beach at Wildwood Crest. Suddenly I heard this song crackling from my dad’s transistor radio, and Dusty Springfield’s plaintive voice connected with something deep in me:

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There’s this poll by Salary.com, asking the all important question: What Is the Sexiest Job, that Yahoo! has devoted valuable front page space to promote. Congratulations to United Parcel Service, who apparently has such sexy drivers that they are a specific choice, rather than delivery drivers or package delivery drivers or such.
When you look at [...]

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Somegirl explains why the grossly underreported Big Bee Die-Off of Ought Seven is going to be a bad, bad thing.
A mysterious illness is killing tens of thousands of honeybee colonies across the country, threatening honey production, the livelihood of beekeepers and possibly crops that need bees for pollination.
Which is, like, most of them. [...]

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Punk. Advertising. Two words that should NEVER have gone together. That it’s for the AARP is kind of cute and weird. Not as bad as the Wendy’s ad featuring “Blister In The Sun”, though. Yeah, I’ll have one without the special sauce, please.

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Five-deferment Dick isn’t going to like this.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is planning to move legislation that would place strict ethics limits on executive-branch officials, going further than the ethics reforms the lower chamber adopted for itself last month.
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and a close ally of [...]

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First of all, just a point to some of the interesting points at the Bloggasm interview with Skippy the Bush Kangaroo about the debate of the size and scope of blogrolls on the supposed “A” list blogs:
as you may or may not know, google search hierarchy ranking depends in part upon the number of links [...]

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In word only.
The Bush administration plans to cut funding for veterans’ health care two years from now — even as badly wounded troops returning from Iraq could overwhelm the system.
Bush is using the cuts, critics say, to help fulfill his pledge to balance the budget by 2012.
After an increase sought for next year, the Bush [...]

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Ladies and gentlemen, the publisher of the newspaper of record.
Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of the New York Times, has taken some flack for sounding a bit glum about the prospects for print journalism at the World Economic Conference, held last month in Davos.
On Feb. 8, the newspaper Ha’aretz quoted Mr. Sulzberger thusly, responding to [...]

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I think of this song a lot these days. Laura Nyro:

Come on people
Come on children
Come on down to the glory river
Gonna wash you up
And down
Come on people
Come on children
There’s a king at the glory river
And the precious king, he loved the people to sing
Babes in the blinking sun sang
“We shall overcome”
I got fury in my [...]

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McCain’s so befuddled.
Republican presidential hopeful John McCain (news, bio, voting record) said Monday he fears an offensive by Iraqi insurgents similar to the Tet offensive by the Viet Cong that sent U.S. casualties soaring in Vietnam nearly 40 years ago.
McCain, a Vietnam war veteran who spent 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war, said [...]

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I’ve been meaning to take that little American accent quiz that Brendan put up last week. SO and I were talking about it a few weeks ago & lo and behold there it was again, a cosmic reminder that I should waste five minutes pandering to my colloquial vanity. So, as if I [...]

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The hell you say!
Analysts from the CIA and other agencies “disagreed with more than 50%” of 26 findings the Pentagon team laid out in a controversial paper, according to testimony Friday from Thomas F. Gimble, acting inspector general of the Pentagon.
The dueling groups sat down at CIA headquarters in late August 2002 to try to [...]

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Won’t get fooled again.
Saturday’s New York Times features an article, posted at the top of its Web site late Friday, that suggests very strongly that Iran is supplying the “deadliest weapon aimed at American troops” in Iraq. The author notes, “Any assertion of an Iranian contribution to attacks on Americans in Iraq is both politically [...]

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Here’s a way to support the troops: don’t fuck them after they’ve done their duty.
Family and friends had convinced [US Marine Jonathan Schulze] at last that the devastating mental wounds he brought home from war, wounds that triggered severe depression, violent outbursts, and eventually an uncontrollable desire to kill himself, could not be drowned [...]

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It’s not the McLins, who are having their property damaged by creatures afraid of the light, that are the terrorists.
An Army couple in Fayetteville is upset about the war in Iraq and says they are being terrorized.
Last night, someone spray-painted the word terrorist on their home and tore down anti-war signs in their yard. The [...]

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Krugman:
Attacking Iran would be a catastrophic mistake, even if all the allegations now being made about Iranian actions in Iraq are true.
But it wouldn’t be the first catastrophic mistake this administration has made, and there are indications that, at the very least, a powerful faction in the administration is spoiling for a fight.
Before we get [...]

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This is in honor of the new and impending BushCo war. They Might Be Giants covers the Phil Ochs anti-war song:

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It’s all so painfully familiar, isn’t it?
The Associated Press, The New York Times, Reuters and others also reported on a briefing in Baghdad today, agreeing beforehand to the condition that none of the three U.S. officials taking part could be named or even described closely.
The Times, after accepting the terms, found itself in the embarrassing [...]

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1. Who Invited You - The Donnas
2. Daydream Believer - The Monkees
3. The Game of Love - Michelle Branch
4. Four Strong Winds - Neil Young & Sara McLachlan
5. Blue Sky Mine - Midnight Oil
6. Moonlight and Roses - Cheryl Wheeler
7. Tennessee Stud - The Little Willies
8. Give Back the Key to My Heart - Uncle [...]

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Did you know that people still get mail partially delivered by Pony Express?
When people hear the words “Pony Express,” they associate it with the route from St. Joseph, Mo., to Sacramento, Calif.
However, the idea of having horse riders carry mail through a state that wasn’t part of the original Pony Express is not [...]

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“Timing Is Everything” is one of the best songs I ever wrote, and I penned it with my old bud Greg Pomparelli. (Who has since disappeared off the face of the earth, last known to be in Florida. If you meet him, tell him I’m looking for him.) Anyway, it’s a duet, a bluesy rocker [...]

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one of the biggest weeks of the year for spousal surveillance…

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They post some really interesting stuff. Some of them get more traffic than I do, some of them get less. At least once a day, I figure I ought to spread the love and link to a post that I appreciate. I have over 200 feeds on bloglines right now and it [...]

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Willie Nelson and Sinead O’Connor cover the Peter Gabriel song:

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The best comedy is the kind you don’t even have to make up:
Yesterday, during hearings on the State Department’s 2008 budget, Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) slammed the U.S. military’s ban on gay servicemembers, saying the Pentagon “seems more afraid of gay people than they are [of] terrorists,” and that if the terrorists were smart, “they’d [...]

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