From the AP wire:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush, dispatching Vice President
Dick Cheney to the Middle East, said the goal is to get
Israelis and Palestinians to hold firm to the promises they've
made toward peace.

Bush said Monday in the Oval Office that Cheney would "reassure
people that the United States is committed to a vision of peace
in the Middle East."

That's the funniest thing I've read in days. Thank goodness my tea isn't cool enough to drink yet, else I'd've probably ruined this keyboard.

Sigh. 315.5 days to go.

This is the sort of news story that just gets me so mad. When I get really mad at a story on the radio, I've been known to start yelling back at it. I can't do that here, but I'm going to try the next best thing.

Back in the heyday of Mystery Science Theater 3000, fans had great fun taking Usenet postings -- mostly spam and bad fanfic -- and setting Joel (or Mike) and the Bots on them. You can find many of these at The MSTing Mine.

What I'm doing here is similar, but not necessarily intended to be funny. The article is written by Deborah Zabarenko, and appeared on the Reuters newswire yesterday. I've pared it down a bit.

     WASHINGTON, Jan 7 (Reuters) - The United States delayed
     a decision on whether global warming threatens polar
     bears, saying on Monday new data and public comment
     required more time. Environmentalists vowed to sue
     for quicker action.

New data? Like, maybe, the polar bears are dying even faster than you thought? Public comment?! How many people do you need telling you "Bite me!" in order to get the message? Here's one more: Bite me!!

     The deadline for deciding whether to list the big white
     bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act is
     Wednesday but Dale Hall, head of the U.S. Fish and
     Wildlife Service, told reporters it would take as much
     as a month more to analyze all the information.

This is the first time you've ever looked at the information? Dude, you've been part of the Fish and Wildlife Service since 1978! You put 300 species onto the Endangered Species List between 1991 and 1997. Come on.

     This is the first time global warming has been a factor
     in proposing threatened status for any U.S. species,
     Hall said, and that has added to the complexity of the
     decision.

It won't be the last. You should have been prepared for this. Oh right, I forgot. Your boss and his cronies don't believe global warming exists.

     The act indicates the one allowable reason for a delay
     in adding a species to the list is "substantial
     scientific uncertainty" but Hall denied in a telephone
     news conference that this was the reason.

Of course. Your boss doesn't believe global warming exists, but you don't dare actually stand up and say that.

     "I'm not saying that there is scientific uncertainty
     under the act and it's unfortunately one of those
     times ... we'll have to miss the deadline in order to
     provide the quality product that needs to be provided,"
     he said.

Quality product?! We're not talking about Gund bears here! It's a pretty sounding excuse for foot-dragging and stonewalling, is what it is.

     While all the other 1,300 or so species on the list
     were clearly threatened by deforestation or vanishing
     wetlands, Hall said the climate connection to the polar
     bear case required help from government scientists to
     understand the various impacts of global warming.

But we can't really trust those government scientists. At least not until someone other than George W. Bush is signing their paychecks.

     The Endangered Species Act defines a threatened
     species as one likely to become endangered in the
     foreseeable future. Hall said the scientific data
     would "help us understand that 'foreseeable future'
     question:  what's going to happen in the next 45
     years, because that's really the question."

Oh, come on. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this one out. Or a biologist.

     "The Bush administration has squandered seven years
     denying the devastating scientific evidence of global
     warming," Kert Davies of Greenpeace USA said in a
     statement. "Stalling has cost us dearly, putting the
     polar bear at risk of extinction and jeopardizing the
     future welfare of billions of people around the world."

     Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council and
     the Center for Biological Diversity said in a joint
     statement they plan to start the legal process on
     Wednesday with a formal notice to sue, as required
     under the Endangered Species Act.

Thank goodness someone's doing something.

P.S. The walrus are dying too.

In the spring of 1980, for an exercise in my eighth grade class, we were asked to name our heroes. In front of my whole class, I named you. I didn't live in San Francisco. I never had. But even at the age of thirteen I knew who you were and what you had done for the city you then served as Mayor.

When you became a Senator I voted for you with pride, and continued to do so until I moved out of California in 1997. Even after I moved, when your campaign fundraisers called me, I contributed. Not much, perhaps, but I did what I could.

But over the past few years, your positions politically have shifted from center to so far right I no longer recognize you as a Democrat. The right wing screaming heads on the radio wouldn't know what to do if they couldn't characterize you as a "San Francisco liberal" -- which they can only do because you still live there, more or less.

When you authored the PERFORM Act in 2006, I quit sending money to your campaign. To gut the principles of fair use to benefit the profits of record companies is terrible.

But yesterday you decided to endorse the appointment of Michael Mukasey, despite the fact that he will not acknowledge the fact that waterboarding is torture -- and this after it was revealed that former Deputy AG Daniel Levin told President Bush it was -- because he had undergone it himself!

With that move, you lost the last of the respect I once held for you. I have nothing left but contempt.

I'm sorry, but your argument that "first and foremost, Michael Mukasey is not Alberto Gonzales," is not good enough.

Not. Good. Enough.

NOT GOOD ENOUGH!

You should be ashamed of yourself, Senator.

So what if the President makes Mukasey the AG in a recess appointment? That argument isn't good enough either. The Senate managed to stand up to the President in the case of John Bolton, and the world didn't come to an end. And that was when the Democrats were in the minority! What's the good of having a majority in Congress if you are just going to roll over for the President anyway? It is no wonder that Congress' approval ratings are less than half the President's, and his are pathetically low.

From hero to contemptible in two short steps.

For shame.

"A diplomat should have both the mind of an internationalist and the heart of a patriot. And, when I say patriotism, I don't mean bigoted nationalism."
--Japanese diplomat Naoko Saiki

And it appears that at least a few US diplomats are practicing this principle. Or at least, exercising some enlightened self-interest:
Rice Answers Anger Over Iraq Service

I'm not exactly a fan of George Will; the vast majority of the time his political views are widely divergent from mine. But you know the saying about even a broken clock being right twice a day? I think this is one of these moments.

And I can never resist sharing a good quote that strikes me as being perfectly dead-on.

Speaking of self-proclaimed "social conservatives" (aka the Religious Right), on This Week with George Stephanopolis, and quoted on the excellent Crooks and Liars:

"But there’s a vanity in this group right now. They call themselves 'values voters.' I’ve news for them: 100% of the American electorate are values voters; they vote their values … And this, this, kind of semantic imperialism that they have where they say 'we vote values'. Everyone else votes what?"

---

"It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat."
--Richard Hofstadter

---

In 1947, a year and a half after the Second World War ended, life in Japan was still pretty grim. Tokyo district court judge Yamaguchi Yoshitada vowed that he would eat nothing but what was provided by official rationing.

In November of that year, he starved to death.

Ted Kulongoski isn't facing starvation. But his food situation -- at least for this week -- isn't pretty.

This week, Oregon governor Kulongoski took the challenge to eat on $21 a week -- that's how much the average food stamp recipient in the state has.

In a time when the Federal Government would rather remove the very word "hunger" from its reports on the subject than admit that there are, in fact, people going hungry in the wealthiest nation in the world, Governor Kulongoski deserves a lot of kudos for stepping up and reminding people that this problem exists. And seeing for himself exactly what it feels like.

---

This one's a bit topical, might not make it into the permanent collection. But it was too good to pass up.

"October Surprise Number Five: Osama bin Laden is captured! How does this occur? We go looking for him."

--Brian Unger

---

At the 2006 World Horror Convention last May, Joe and I had the great pleasure of meeting Larry Santoro, a writer and producer from Chicago. He was kind enough to hang out with us on the first evening of the con despite nearly falling over from lack of sleep, and to even give us a shout-out in his blog when he got home. I also had the opportunity to listen to him read from his forthcoming book.

Larry keeps a blog as well, and his most recent entry, At Home in Bluffton: Custodians of Chaos, is well worth checking out. It's in large part an excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut's upcoming memoirs, and well expresses the dismay heading toward despair that Larry and many of us are feeling at the way our country has gone.

---

Anyone want to take a guess as to which national leader said this?

Lately, I often hear the terms "winner" and "loser" groups. Surely
there will be people who succeed and those who will not when
tackling a difficult situation. However, people should not put
themselves down just because they are part of the "loser" group.
The real significance is in the act of challenging ourselves to
take on a difficult problem. I believe we must create a society in
which people may keep challenging themselves even after failing
once or twice by providing people in the so-called "loser" group
with abundant opportunities.

I would rather point out that aside from these "winner" and "loser"
groups, there is the "waiting" group who are not challenging
themselves. We must create a society in which even those in this
"waiting" group will exert their talent and skills to their fullest
and in which each person will utilize their own ingenuity and
innovation. I will continue to advance reforms while aiming to
realize a society where people help each other out if there are
those whose talents or skills are not enough to stand alone, and
one well supported by a sustainable social security system.

( the answer behind the cut )

"[The Geneva Convention] basically states you gotta treat all war prisoners with a shred of humanitarian dignity or you can't call yourself a fair and civilized Christian superpower, and if you don't follow those basic rules you are, in essence, no different from the terrorists and the dictators you claim to abhor and you are bombing the crap out of."
-- Mark Morford

From one who was certainly in a position to know, a cautionary word to the neocons of today:

"Sure we'll have fascism in America, but it'll come disguised as 100 percent Americanism."
--Huey P. Long

This was the next entry on my list, but somehow with the current political situation, it seems so, so apt:

"If you're born in this world you're given a ticket to the freak show. If you're born in America you're given a front-row seat."
-- George Carlin

It was only yesterday that it was revealed that Michael Brown is still being paid by FEMA, being paid apparently as a consultant in the investigation into what went wrong at FEMA in the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. I wasn't expecting him to go in and admit that he screwed up, or that he had no competence in the field and only got the job because he was a college buddy of his predecessor at FEMA, who himself only got the job because he was one of the President's buddies. Naah, to have Michael Brown look in the mirror to find who screwed up at FEMA was about as likely as having OJ Simpson look in the mirror "to find the real killers."

But today, this man has the colossal gall to get up there and not only blame everyone but himself, but to hold a personal pity party in front of Congress!

Brown, quoted on the CNN.com website: "I guess you want me to be the superhero that is going to step in there and suddenly take everybody out of New Orleans."

( Impolite and loud response behind the cut for the delicate of hearing )

Leo Rosten once wrote that the definition of "chutzpah" was, a man who has killed his parents asking for mercy from the court because he's an orphan. I have to believe this little performance of Michael Brown's ranks right up there.

Hoo boy. I'm looking at an old VHS tape from our collection, which is supposed to have some Blake's 7 on it, but so far has some Good Morning America instead. The story is really kinda spooky though: it's all about the government asking libraries to watch for people who might be Soviet spies copying documents and stuff. There's one person saying, "Well, isn't there a civil liberties question here?" and the government guy saying, "I don't think that applies to foreigners ..."

Sigh. There really is nothing new under the sun, is there?