Quotable

Brown's idiocy helps confirm this year's award:

Call it the wrong phrase at the wrong time but "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job" was named on Thursday as U.S. President George W. Bush's most memorable phrase of 2005.

The ill-timed praise of a now disgraced agency head became a national punch line for countless jokes and pointed comments about the administration's handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster and added to the president's reputation for verbal gaffes and clumsy turns of phrase.

I Miss My Cats!

Cornyn Was Right!

It seems that efforts in favor of gay marriage have in fact deranged the Natural Order of Things:

The unlikely couple of a baby hippo and a 130-year-old tortoise were still together, a year after the hippo was separated from its family by the Indian Ocean tsunami.
...
The tortoise at first resisted. But the persistent Owen kept following him around the park, into the pool and trying to sleep next to him.

Mzee relented after several days. As the bond grew, the tortoise even returned signs of affection. They are now inseparable.

Pshaw

Those silly non-American folk, refusing to accept on faith that the elections in Iraq were a perfect example of democracy in action:

An international team has agreed to review Iraq's parliamentary elections, announcing Thursday that members would travel to Iraq in response to protests by Sunni Arab and secular Shiite groups that the polls were tainted by fraud.

If We Stay, There Won't Be Civil War

More proof of the inanity of that particular argument:

Kurdish leaders have inserted more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq to lay the groundwork to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly half of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and secure the borders of an independent Kurdistan.

Five days of interviews with Kurdish leaders and troops in the region suggest that U.S. plans to bring unity to Iraq before withdrawing American troops by training and equipping a national army aren't gaining traction. Instead, some troops that are formally under U.S. and Iraqi national command are preparing to protect territory and ethnic and religious interests in the event of Iraq's fragmentation, which many of them think is inevitable.

The soldiers said that while they wore Iraqi army uniforms they still considered themselves members of the Peshmerga - the Kurdish militia - and were awaiting orders from Kurdish leaders to break ranks. Many said they wouldn't hesitate to kill their Iraqi army comrades, especially Arabs, if a fight for an independent Kurdistan erupted.

Interesting...

how so many academic presentations can make you want to gnaw your own arm off just to escape the tedium, whereas others can rekindle your faith in what you do and rejuvenate your desire to do it well. Today involved just such a panel, primarily because it was on Marxism and because Barbara Foley spoke.

She is a genius and a great speaker and head of the Radical Caucus here, and thanks to her, I remember better both what I should be doing and how I should be doing it.

AFA Working to Build NBC's Ratings

I love it when conservative groups get in a huff and generate massive buzz for shows and events that might otherwise go unnoticed, as in this case.

Assuming, of course, that NBC manages not to be beaten into submission by religious zealots:

The American Family Association is urging its members to flood NBC with letters denouncing the network's new series "The Book of Daniel" which will feature primetime's only openly gay male character in a new show.

The series is planned to debut January 6 at 9:00 pm E/P time.

"The Book of Daniel" stars Aidan Quinn (“An Early Frost”) as the Reverend Daniel Webster (pictured) an unconventional Episcopalian minister who not only believes in Jesus - he actually sees him and discusses life with him.

His children include Peter (Christian Campbell, “Trick”), a 23-year-old gay son, who struggles with the loss of his twin brother. To confound matters even more, Peter is a Republican.

Webster's daughter, Grace (Alison Pill, “Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen”), is 16-year-old daughter who just happens to be a drug dealer. Then there's the 16-year-old adopted son who is having sex with the bishop's daughter, and Webster's wife who is "addicted to martinis".

Webster's secretary is a lesbian who is sleeping with his sister-in-law. The character is only one of a handful of lesbian characters on TV this season.

Further angering the AFA is Jack Kenny, the show's writer, who also is openly gay.

Bush Fails to Bully Media

A refreshing change, I'd say. And note the word choice; I think "summoned" is exactly how Bush sees what he's doing, as though he has imperial fiat to insist that people be at his beck and call at every moment:

President Bush has been summoning newspaper editors lately in an effort to prevent publication of stories he considers damaging to national security.

The efforts have failed, but the rare White House sessions with the executive editors of The Washington Post and New York Times are an indication of how seriously the president takes the recent reporting that has raised questions about the administration's anti-terror tactics.

America: Still in the Slavery Business

Yet another fruit of the poison tree that is the "War on Iraq":

Three years after a 2002 Presidential Directive demanding an end to trafficking in humans for forced labor and prostitution by U.S. contractors, the Pentagon is still yet to actually bar the practice, The Chicago Tribune reports.
...
According to the Tribune, the concerns of five lobbying groups - including representatives of Halliburton subsidiary KBR and DynCorp - are stalling Pentagon action. These companies are specifically targeting provisions requiring companies to monitor their overseas contractors for violations. Both KBR and DynCorp have been linked to human trafficking cases in the past.

Light Blogging

In case you hadn't noticed. I am exhausted from days of waging furious War on Christmas, and I now am in the midst of a conference in D.C.

Posts will, therefore, be rather sporadic.