'The Best of TBH Politoons'
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Jimmy Breslin: Remove Bush Over War Lies (commondreams.org)
When anybody you elect tries to end the war, Bush blocks all intentions with a veto or threats of a veto that prevent it. And his Supreme Court is ready to validate whatever he does, this court with its five Catholic justices, and a chief who falls on his face a couple of times that we know of.
Froma Harrop: Big Coal's Unregulated Plunder (creators.com)
It's awfully hard to make coal pretty. When you dig deep for it, you risk the lives of miners, as seen in the tragedy at Utah's Crandall Canyon Mine. If you mine it by lopping off the tops of mountains - as is done in Appalachia - you rape the environment.
Froma Harrop: Tough Trying to Be Perfect (creators.com)
Larry Craig did wrong, but what did the Idaho Republican really do wrong? A penchant to focus on the part of sex scandals that don't have to do with sex has long been my curse. According to the police report, the senator was in a bathroom at the Minneapolis airport when he allegedly came on to an undercover cop in the stall next door.
Jim Hightower: REBUILD THE MIDDLE CLASS (jimhightower.com)
When told that polls show that Americans are now worried about inflation, a clueless George W said, "They cite inflation?" You see, he's told that inflation is up only 2.7 percent - but he's totally ignorant of the fact that milk prices are up 13 percent in the past year, oranges 20 percent, dried beans 11 percent, and both bread and chicken up 10 percent. That's nothing for the elites, but these are staples for the real America that the elites no longer see or hear.
Mark Shapiro: Residence Hall and Fraternity/Sorority House Fires a Growing Threat (irascibleprofessor.com)
Fire safety probably is the last thing on the minds of parents when they send their sons and daughters off to college. However, a recent report [1] from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) notes that fires in campus residences are on the rise at the same time that the number of structure fires, in general, is falling.
Katie Halper: Comic Will Durst on the All-American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing (AlterNet.org)
Will Durst talks about his new show in Manhattan, getting flipped off by Olympia Dukakis, helping the terrorists win, necrophilia and other things liberals enjoy.
Andrew Tobias: Eggplant And Asperger's (andrewtobias.com)
John Conwell: "My daughter had a phobia about food touching. It went so far as our having to serve her dinner on 3 or 4 plates. Meat, Veg1 and Veg2, followed by dessert. She would eat one then another plate clean. My wife and I decided to break her of this habit. We took her to a nice restaurant and we ordered our dinner. She ordered a peanut butter and jelly sandwich 'ON THREE SEPARATE PLATES PLEASE.' We gave up and she grew out of it mostly."
Tim Page: Parallel Play, A lifetime of restless isolation explained (newyorker.com)
My second-grade teacher never liked me much, and an assignment I turned in annoyed her so extravagantly that the red pencil with which she scrawled "See me! broke through the lined paper. Our class had been asked to write about a recent field trip, and, as was so often the case in those days, I had noticed the wrong things ...
Why sci-fi still has a future (guardian.co.uk)
Ridley Scott thinks sci-fi films have entered a black hole. Maybe he's not watching the right ones, says Paul Howlett.
Leather forecast (guardian.co.uk)
Leather jackets are back after a decade in the doldrums. But what do they say about the people wearing them? By Imogen Fox.
Hubert's Poetry Corner
HANGIN' it OUT WITH SENATOR LARRY CRAIG
HOW HE ROLLS?
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Way too hot.
My computer really dislikes this weather.
The Rip-Off In Iraq
War Profiteers
Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.
And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it's not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over -- not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureaucracy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profiteering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.
It was an awful idea, perhaps the worst America has ever tried on foreign soil. But if you were in on it, it was great work while it lasted. Since time immemorial, the distribution of government largesse had followed a staid, paper-laden procedure in which the federal government would post the details of a contract in periodicals like Commerce Business Daily or, more recently, on the FedBizOpps Web site. Competitive bids were solicited and contracts were awarded in accordance with the labyrinthine print of the U.S. Code, a straightforward system that worked well enough before the Bush years that, as one lawyer puts it, you could "count the number of cases of criminal fraud on the fingers of one hand."
War Profiteers
'The Big Joe Blues'
Pete Seeger
Decades after drifting away from the Communist Party, 88-year-old banjo-picker Pete Seeger has written a song about the Soviet leader that's as scathing as any tune in the folk legend's long career.
"I'm singing about old Joe, cruel Joe. He ruled with an iron hand. He put an end to the dreams of so many in every land," Seeger wrote in "The Big Joe Blues."
Seeger said he left the Communist Party around 1950 and apologized years ago for not recognizing that Josef Stalin was a "very cruel misleader." But he told The Associated Press on Friday that the song he finally finished this year is a first for him, despite three visits to the Soviet Union beginning in the '60s.
"It's the first overt song about the Soviet Union," Seeger said during a phone interview from his Hudson Valley home in Beacon. "I think I should have though, when I was in the Soviet Union - I should have asked, `Can I see one of the old gulags?'"
Pete Seeger
Still Inspiring
'On the Road'
Nearly 40 years after his death, and a half century after the release of his most famous novel, "On the Road," Kerouac remains an author who inspires motion. Students still re-enact his rambling, improvised trips across the country. Baby boomers retrace their own youthful journeys. Tourists seek out Kerouac landmarks, like this mill town the author left as a teenager but to which he always returned.
Some celebrities are ignored, or shunned, by their hometowns, but Kerouac's name is easily found in Lowell, with its red brick buildings, winding canals and cobblestone streets. You can start at the Visitors Center where Kerouac walking tours are offered and maps handed out, noting such attractions as his actual birthplace and a favorite bar.
Kerouac has his own park, shaded by weeping willow trees and centered by a circle of granite columns inscribed with excerpts from "On the Road" and other works. A few miles south, at the Edson Cemetery, his marker is ever adorned with stray tributes. Recent leavings include cigarettes, a bandanna, black flip flops and a note, stabbed into the bare ground by a pencil, that reads, "The only people for me are the mad ones. Here's to you Jack!"
'On the Road'
Performs In Iran
Osnabrück Symphony Orchestra
The woman musicians wore headscarves, but that didn't hinder them in playing Beethoven and Brahms in a rare performance by a Western classical orchestra in the capital of the Islamic Republic.
The Osnabrück Symphony Orchestra, a 60-member ensemble from Germany, performed Wednesday and Thursday in front of hundreds of enthusiastic Iranians who rarely get the chance to hear live Western music.
Western musical performances in Iran have been rare since the 1979 Islamic revolution, when the country's clerics outlawed all pre-revolutionary music.
Music gradually made a comeback in Iran in the 1990s under the reformist President Mohammad Khatami. But when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad replaced him in 2005, the new hardline president banned state radio and television from playing Western music.
Osnabrück Symphony Orchestra
Paid To Heat Up Vegas Clubs
Celebrities
Celebrities often make appearances and walk the red carpet as part of the deal for coming to a nightclub. In return for generating media coverage, they receive all sorts of free goodies, if not cash. For nightclub operators, it has become the standard way of getting their establishments known.
Besides buzz, it generates more patrons, more people willing to pay a $30 cover charge, $15 for a cocktail and $500 for a bottle of name-brand vodka or champagne.
"If you quantify that in terms of the amount of press they got off it, the press they got off it was priceless," the former executive said.
Celebrities
Breaks Back While Sleepwalking
Mick Quinn
British rock band Supergrass has cancelled a homecoming gig in Oxford, England, after its bass player broke his back while sleepwalking .
Mick Quinn fell from a first floor window at a villa in the south of France, a representative for the band said Friday. Surgeons at a specialist spinal unit in Toulouse have repaired two broken vertebrae, and are caring for Quinn's damaged heel.
Quinn's recovery could take several months. As a result of the accident, the group's September 23 gig at the Oxford Carling Academy has been pulled.
Mick Quinn
Painting Technique Secrets Uncovered
Leonardo da Vinci
Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci avoided the palette and mixed colors directly on the canvas, Italian researchers said after they reconstructed his work step by step "as if watching him while he painted."
Using a scientific device to analyze Leonardo's "Madonna of the Yarnwinder" painting, researchers at the University of Florence said they were able to pinpoint virtually every stroke made by the famous Italian artist on the oil masterpiece.
That showed the Leonardo avoided mixing colors on a painter's palette like his contemporaries did. Instead, he applied thin layers of paint directly on the canvas in different colors one on top of the other to create a rich texture.
Leonardo da Vinci
Suspends 10
WWE
World Wrestling Entertainment has suspended 10 of its wrestlers for violations of a policy that tests for steroids and other drugs, the company said Thursday.
Stamford-based WWE says it issued suspension notices based on independent information from the prosecutor's office in Albany County, N.Y., which has been investigating illegal steroid sales.
Neither the WWE nor the Albany County district attorney's office would comment on the suspended wrestlers' identities Thursday. No criminal charges were filed, they said.
WWE
What Equal Time?
Fred Thompson
While Fred Thompson's "Law & Order" character disappears from NBC starting Saturday because of concerns over federal equal time provisions, cable viewers will still have plenty of opportunities to see his District Attorney Arthur Branch.
TNT will air 23 episodes of the drama next week alone, apparently unworried about limiting Branch's airplay even as the Tennessee Republican plans to announce his presidential candidacy.
"TNT has no plans to alter its schedule," spokeswoman Shirley Powell said, a stance that could provoke a fight in the courts or before the Federal Communications Commission.
Equal time rules require TV stations to provide the same airtime to opponents when a candidate appears on the air. The many exceptions - news shows, talk shows, interviews, documentaries - essentially mean the rules apply to entertainment programming.
Fred Thompson
Engulfs Texas Park Trail
Spider Web
Entomologists are debating the origin and rarity of a sprawling spider web that blankets several trees, shrubs and the ground along a 200-yard stretch of trail in a North Texas park.
Officials at Lake Tawakoni State Park say the massive mosquito trap is a big attraction for some visitors, while others won't go anywhere near it.
Spider experts say the web may have been constructed by social cobweb spiders, which work together, or could be the result of a mass dispersal in which the arachnids spin webs to spread out from one another.
Park rangers said they expect the web to last until fall, when the spiders will start dying off.
Spider Web
Guilty Plea Expected
David Hans Schmidt
A man known for brokering deals involving compromising celebrity photos and videos has agreed to plead guilty in a plot to extort more than $1 million from Tom Cruise for the actor's stolen wedding photos, according to court documents unsealed Thursday.
David Hans Schmidt, 47, has agreed to plea guilty to one count of sending communications for purposes of extortion. He faces up to two years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine under a plea agreement filed Aug. 24.
It wasn't known when Schmidt, who is free on $100,000 bond, might enter his plea in court. A phone message left for his attorney, Nancy Kardon, was not immediately returned.
David Hans Schmidt
Musical's Macabre Display
'Assassins'
Call it theater of the macabre: A jar containing a small piece of tissue from the body of John Wilkes Booth, President Abraham Lincoln's killer, will be on display when the musical "Assassins" opens in Philadelphia.
In fact, it will be a twin bill: theatergoers will also be able view a piece of the brain of the lesser-known presidential assassin Charles Guiteau, the man who killed President James A. Garfield in 1881.
The specimens will be on loan to the Arden Theatre from Philadelphia's Mutter Museum, which boasts a large collection of medical oddities. They will be on display in the lobby for one night, the opening of "Assassins" on Sept. 19.
'Assassins'
Lives Up To Name
Andy Dick
David Stroupe said it was one of the worst experiences with a performer in the history of the Funny Bone Comedy Club.
He was referring to Andy Dick, a former co-star on the 1990s sitcom "NewsRadio," who appeared at the Funny Bone last weekend.
Stroupe, the club's managing partner, said the 41-year-old actor-comedian made inappropriate comments while on stage, groped patrons, took women into the men's room and urinated on the floor and on at least one person.
Andy Dick
Playing Brutus, Stabs Himself
Kent Hudson Reed
Julius Caesar lay dead and Brutus was talking to his co-conspirators about swords and blood when he paused and excused himself, saying "I seem to have stabbed myself."
Aspen actor/director Kent Hudson Reed accidently cut his leg open with the knife he was using in an outdoor performance of "Scenes from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar" on Wednesday.
He tried to carry on, "but my boot was filling up with blood and I was flubbing my lines, wondering if I was going to pass out, wondering if the audience could see the blood."
Kent Hudson Reed
In Memory
Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson, a leading world beer critic who praised the brews of Belgium and acknowledged he would never be as famous as "that Michael Jackson," has died. He was 65.
Jackson, known as "the beer hunter," died Thursday of a heart attack at his home in west London. His body was found by his house cleaner, Paddy Gunningham, his long-term partner, said Friday.
Jackson especially loved Belgian brews. His books "The Great Beers of Belgium" and "World Guide to Beer" introduced them to many export markets, including the United States.
His TV documentary series, "The Beer Hunter" - which popularized his nickname - was filmed around the world and shown in 15 countries.
He worked as a beer critic for more than 30 years, writing in newspapers and gastronomic magazines, holding seminars and giving speeches, appearing on U.S. talk shows and writing books about beer and whiskeys published in 18 languages.
Michael Jackson
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