63%...

...of Montanans are beautiful & intelligent people. I knew it all along. Must be the Ortman influence.

Oh

So my loyal four readers don't worry - there is some torn cartilage in my shoulder. It is operable, but we opted for a cortisone injection, instead. It feels fine this a.m. Had a great time with Joe, the New Guy & the SideKick. Plus, I apparently got a great deal on several hundred dry fly hooks.

ReThug Job Creation?

Or health care refore? Or school funding reform? Or social services reform? Not from the ReThugs. Instead, we get this.

Good

This guy deserves it.

"Calling Scott Jensen's actions 'common thievery elevated to a higher plane,' a judge sentenced the former Assembly speaker Tuesday to 15 months in prison for his role in directing aides to do campaign work on state time.


Jensen, 45, was also fined 2,000, ordered to serve 45 months of probation after his prison sentence and banned from the Capitol while on probation.

The Capitol ban was sought by prosecutors because another convicted legislator, former Assembly Majority Leader Steve Foti (R-Oconomowoc), works as a lobbyist while serving a work-release sentence in the Waukesha County Huber Jail. Foti is serving a 60-day jail sentence after pleading guilty to one misdemeanor count of ordering on-the-job campaigning by an aide.

Dane County Circuit Judge Steven Ebert said he was outraged by Jensen's use of Assembly aides to subsidize the campaigns of GOP Assembly candidates, calling it a 'secretive but highly organized theft' that put all Assembly Republican legislators in his debt."

MRI

I'm off to Duluth, MN, today for a MRI on my shoulder. I've developed the same pain I had four years ago, & this is after the local morons supposedly fixed it. This time, they're going to inject a dye into the shoulder & then do the MRI. Hopefully, they will be able to figure out what's up. The exercises I've been doing with the rubber bands seem to be doing some good.

Cripes

Over at Digby's, Tristero has a great post concerning Bu$hCo's character. In it, he quotes from an article by Gail Sheehy that appeared in 2000. Here is one that explains a lot to those of us who have already seen what a WATB Bu$hCo is.

"Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn't lose. He'll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him. "If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15," says Hannah, now a Dallas insurance executive. "If he wasn't winning, he would quit. He would just walk off.... It's what we called Bush Effort: If I don't like the game, I take my ball and go home."

Emphasis added.  Amazing, isn't it? & this is the man will have been in charge for 8 years. We have a lot of work to do in order that America is once again what we, at least in my age group, thought it could be.

1,2,3,4

What're we fighting for?

A young female Afghan lawmaker who once called powerful tribal leaders "criminals" and complained publicly last week there are warlords among parliament members now sleeps in a different house every night after a fresh influx of death threats.

Real ReThug Compassion

What about the atheists?

After a flurry of legislative moves, we are left with this as the hurricane season approaches: Pray.

Global, Whatever That Was

The Christian Aid charity says this about global warming:

The Christian Aid charity has warned that 184 million people in Africa alone could die as a result of climate change before the end of the century.

Read more about this in L.A. Times, The New Zealand Herald, The Boston Globe, Guardian Unlimited, & Rueters.

The Lap Dog

Tony Blair is sounding more & more like George Bu$hCo. I suppose this is a way to protect himself from prosecution for war crimes.

Randi Speaks

A Chickenhawk says he "has friends" in Iraq. & that's why he doesn't have to join up. What a tool.

Andes Discovery

Stuff like this is so cool. Check out the pics:

Musician

Gateway

Photos by: Robert Benfer / University of Missouri

Reality Has A Liberal Bias

No rose petals here, apparently.

New Genus

More of the story.

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Chordata

Class: Mammalia

Order: Primates

Family: Cercopithecidae

Genus: Rungwecebus

Species: R. kipunji

Hobbes

I can remember reading The Leviathan back in college at Madison. A yellow covered book. I fancied myself a philosophy major at the time. I got through the book & understood how just the utter weight of money & power could alter freedom, even without the philosophical underpinnings that Hobbes provided. Billmon has a long post about Bu$hCo & Leviathan. It's a good read, so, goddamnit, read it. Here are a few parts I liked. Now, go find your own.

If someone would just translate The Leviathan into modern colloquial English – or even better, turn it into a comic book – I think Shrub might discover a new favorite philosopher. Maybe not on same plane as Jesus Christ (and certainly not as politically advantageous) but a thinker even more in tune with his own ideas about the power and majesty of the unitary executive.

By Shrub’s ideas, of course, I actually mean those of the ultra-conservative legal scholars who invented the doctrine of the unitary executive and turned into our own home-grown version of the Fuhrerprinzip – now backed by the ability to process 10 billion bits of telecommunications data per second. Big Brother, eat your heart out.
....

The ultimate enemy, in the Hobbesian universe, is anarchy – the dreaded war of the all against the all – in which human life is rapidly reduced to its natural state: “solitary, poor nasty, brutish and short.” Even the most ruthless repression is preferable to that horror, just as to our modern-day security fanatics any constitutional violation is justified if it reduces, even slightly, the odds of another 9/11.

Here again, Hobbes would probably line up with the GOP spin machine. He also had little patience for complaints about civil liberties, which he dismissed as simply childish misreadings of the ancient Greek and Roman political texts:

The Athenians and Romans were free, that is free Commonwealths, not that any particular men had the liberty to resist their own representative [he meant ruler] but that their representative had the liberty to resist, or invade, other people.
....

But phone records, of course, are just the electronic frosting on Big Brother’s birthday cake. The NSC program is simply one of a horde of data mining organisms cloned from Admiral Poindexter’s original Total (as in totalitarian) Information Awareness program, which predates 9/11. To protect the program from Congress’s feeble attempts to kill it, Rumsfeld apparently broke it down and shipped the pieces to other provinces in his empire, with the NSC (not surprisingly) inheriting the core functions. (When Rumsfeld jotted down that note on 9/11, reminding himself to “sweep it all up; things related and not,” we should have realized he was speaking literally.)
....

Leviathan, in other words, is almost free of any restraint, save the arbitrary limits – such as they may be – set by the Cheney administration or, perhaps more importantly, by custom and habit. The creature doesn’t know all the things it can do, but only because it hasn’t tried to do them yet. But it’s starting to figure this out, and it’s going to take more than an election and a few corruption probes to make it back down. Having entrusted their security and their liberties to the beast, Leviathan’s subjects will be lucky not to wind up like Jonah, lodged in its belly.