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Polar bear with carrot

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Rainy days and wednesdays


It was one of those awful days - blackberry was on the fritz all week, email quit as well this morning and I got a useless punjabi at tech support who may even know less than I do about her vocation.  Then a guy called who had been double charged by my credit card company so I have to send him a fat refund check.  Somebody apparently tried to fix my taillight lens improperly somewhere along my way and their hatchet job cost me a few bucks.  I stared at a big pile of bills but couldn't bring myself to actually grab a pen and write.  Leslie discovered that the snotty european woman a few doors down from our shop has been leaving candles burning all night in the old tinderbox building and I am going to have to go into legal mode to stem the potential conflagration.  My heater is on life support at home and it's freezing.  I cut a new filter but can't find a reset button. But hey, at least my mother's not coming to visit...

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I read an article in the Weekly Standard by a guy named Kirchik who says that Bush should go liberate Zimbabwe in his last few weeks in office. They have so few few troops and will probably throw flowers at our feet. Let's see, where have we heard that before?  Dick Cheney says that Waterboarding isn't torture even though his interrogators themselves are on record saying it is. Positively Orwellian.  I am not naive enough to think that I wouldn't cut a guys ball's off if he or she were poised to wreak some devastating blow to the motherland.  However the way that the torture got institutionalized and systematized is very chilling.  Too many guys getting smothered and accidently dying of heart attacks.  Terrorists must have really bad cardiac health the way they are dropping.  But if Waterboarding does fall short of torture as conceived of in the Geneva Convention, Cheney should submit to the process on national television.  Probably a walk in the park and it would draw a wide audience, I'm sure.  I actually admire Cheney's ability to never take a step back, even in the face of the truth.  Pretty dogged guy - but he looks like hell these days.  Bush says that he's no Herbert Hoover - uh, ya, Hoover was an accomplished  and talented engineer while you were an ex drunk flyboy with no apparent talent or brains to do much of anything except maybe run a  country into the ground...
You can't tell an idiot that they are not really that smart because they have no frame of reference or cognitive ability to know what smart really is.  What did the Wizard of Id say, the king is a fink? Or was it a fraud?  Bush sounds positively desperate and pathetic in his final days in his quest to frame his epitaph in some Lakoffian way as a savior of the western world and a man who put high principles over popularity. Just a smite too much collateral damage to the U.S. and the rest of the world to pull off an eleventh hour P.R. coup methinks. Maybe we could invade Zimbabwe?  Today we got a new clearance to target Somali pirates. Yippee. Shiver me timbers.

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I wonder if the underlying narrative to the change in administrations isn't really some Ivy League war being played out on a grand scale.  Harvard vs. Yale.  This is the first time the skull and bonesers have been out of the driver's seat in a long time.  Speaking of Yalie's, George Tenet has a website up where he denies railing at the "jews in the administration" in Prince Bandar's pool. Nixonian.  He says that you can ask Bandar.  A guy in Easton, PA is upset because of the outcry in naming his kids after Adolf Hitler and the Aryan Nations.  Seems like a swell family, but I'm guessing it could lead to a few skuffles on the playground. Although what did congressman what's his name say about the bigots in Pennsylvania?  Maybe the kids would get along fine.

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Speaking of swell families, Bernard Madoff's sons turned him in for his 50 billion large ponzi scheme.  I would guess that the mood at the shabbos dinner might get a little chilly in the future but you have to admire them to turn on pops. Not that they invested their money with him. Maybe Tenet is on to something? Useless slug Christopher Cox at the SEC promises a full investigation as to why reports on Bernie's shenanigans surfaced as far back as 1999 but were never investigated.

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Anyone want to post, either email me or just post if you are an author.  Just because we have had one excommunication doesn't mean that I am going to go off again like some pissy pope.

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