Month: March 2003

And what is ‘I support the troops’ supposed to mean anyway? Who is actually, materially supporting the war effort happening half a world away? Sometimes I think people are actually just saying, ‘I really am just too busy with other things to care about this right now – but I’m sure the it’ll end up […]

In the largest FBI investigation since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, federal agents will try to interview 11,000 Iraqi-Americans and Iraqi visitors to the United States by the end of this week.

“What do we learn from the Frums and the Coulters? That American values?indeed, that all post-Enlightenment, western-world values?are a very recent overlay, superimposed on much older impulses. They promote ancestral, pre-western thinking. They tell us that our own specific tribe must be right?and that all other tribes must be evil and wrong. These impulses say […]

I am sitting here at home typing. It is so damned cold in this house. Dad is watching another interminably long t’ai chi tape. Heather and Brooks are out having breakfast with one of Brooks’s friends who happened to be in town. Mom is primping for the funeral. The visitation has been arduous for dad. […]

Much has happened. Ron has decided to take the voluntary furlough with the airline. He’s dodged the bullet twice already and figured he wouldn’t miss the cut off to get laid off again. This way he can have benefits and keep his seniority for 9 months and collect unemployment. He just can’t work a job […]

I will recall tonight when in 30 years the actions begun tonight blowback in our faces. Maybe it will happen sooner. One lone weblogger reports from inside Iraq. All I keep thinking about is a bomb going off in the Red Line tunnels and flooding the entire city and instantly drowning hundreds of people. That […]

“U.S. consumers would not benefit from knowing which grocery stores, restaurants and butchers stocked meat products potentially contaminated with deadly bacteria, the top U.S. Agriculture Department food safety official said on Wednesday.” (via Metafilter)

Congressman Dennis Kucinich was blasted by the Post for speculating at the petroleum imperative of the Big Fat War – but the Post refuses to print Kucinich’s rebuttal. Alternet’s got it: What valuable commodity does one reprehensible, megalomaniacal tyrant (Saddam Hussein) control that another reprehensible, megalomaniacal tyrant (Kim Chong-il) does not?

‘If American forces carry out a pre-emptive strike on the Yongbyon facility, North Korea will immediately target, carry the war to the US mainland,” he said, adding that New York, Washington and < ahref="http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/07/1046826533281.html">Chicago would be “aflame”.’

Roger Ebert tears into the ‘prayer in school’ farce: This is really an argument between two kinds of prayer–vertical and horizontal. Vertical prayer is private, directed upward toward heaven. It need not be spoken aloud, because God is a spirit and has no ears. Horizontal prayer must always be audible, because its purpose is not […]