General Who Ran Guantanamo Bay Retires

Another proof that if your public service in the Bush administration is a big enough snafu, you’ll get a medal for it. In this case, the Distinguished Service Medal.

News item: man arrested for taking a cell phone picture, from his home, of the police arresting someone on the public street nearby. This is a civil rights violation, and I hope he sues them until they can’t sit down.

is just a great post, by SusanG on DailyKos. How much sweeter it was to be inspired to learn, before the era of the Wcon.

I recommend this post on Escapable Logic …

… We bloggers are, overwhelmingly, the descendants of serfs and laborers. We have opinions that are poorly informed, strongly held, weakly projected and universally unheeded. The cruel fact is that the voices of people-who-blog, like ladies-who-lunch, have a trivial effect on the vectors of our culture or our government or big business, which happily pulls the strings of government.

Yet we write as if we matter.

OK, true. But he has some interesting thoughts on what to do about it. Meanwhile, it seems to me that the mainstream media has been just as frustrated in impacting public policy as the blogosphere, under the current administration. I can’t imagine a news article or editorial that would even make Bush blink. His edifice is utterly immune.

Normally, this sort of thing doesn’t even register on my existential radar. But this is just right, like an avocado perfectly over-ripe for guacamole. And the matrimonial equivalent of a Darwin Award.

I just thought you might be sitting out there wondering, perhaps discussing it among yourselves, over dinner, or over the potting mix in the garden department at Wal-mart. So …

I’ve been on a diet now for almost a year, and I’ve lost 85 pounds. Got a ways to go, but the wind is at my back.

You’re welcome: now you don’t have to watch Entertainment Tonight to get the poop.

Here are remarks made last week by Congressman John P. Murtha, on America’s occupation of Iraq and its effects on our country. They’re brief, excellent, and important.

Oh man, I hate it when somebody figures out the heart of my darkness, which compels me to admit my essential, insegrievious hypersomething. The quantum superposition of indolence.

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

-Pearl S. Buck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1892-1973)

The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.

-Lorraine Hansberry, playwright and painter
(1930-1965)

Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are
as outraged as those who are.
— Benjamin Franklin

‘Cause when love is gone, there’s always justice.
And when justice is gone, there’s always force.
And when force is gone, there’s always Mom. Hi Mom!
— Laurie Anderson