Disinfotainment Today Issue #123 - "Real Life vs. Politics!"

The game is played with an infinite number of pieces. Each player starts with 10 randomly selected pieces that they believe are the only pieces, whether poor, white, male, ugly, and lucky (plus five more), or rich, black, female, lovely, and fascist (plus five more).

As each player interacts with other players, they realize that reality consists of many more pieces than the 10 they were originally dealt. Many players immediately drop out of play and keep the cards they were dealt rather than accept any reality other than their own. They keep to themselves, not allowing other players to catch a glimpse of their reality. Such players are routinely beaten and strangled.

All players are born with "reality tunnels" that only allow them view 10 pieces of reality at a time. All players are encouraged to trade pieces since the only possible way to solve the problem is to see as many pieces of the puzzle as possible. People who memorize their pieces and trade them off as soon as possible have the greatest chance of solving the puzzle.

If the puzzle had only a thousand pieces, and there was no picture on the cover, and you had only 10 pieces at one time, and they just happened to all be blue, you might be forgiven for believing that the whole puzzle was sky and only sky. If you had to put reality together without the picture on the cover of the box, and you had only 10 pieces, and somehow they were all brown, you might be forgiven for believing that the whole puzzle and not just part of it was dirt. If all you ever saw were green pieces, it would be perfectly natural to come to the conclusion that reality was foliage and nothing but foliage. Their reality, whether dirt, sky, or foliage, makes sense to them according to their pieces, though totally misconceived since the reality puzzle consists of dirt, sky, AND foliage. People whose pieces fit together have got it easy.

But what if the random pieces of reality you've been dealt don't have anything in common? Pity the poor fool born with a multitude of mismatched pieces, some with straight edges and one with an actual corner. If such a player told others of their reality, hoping to trade some pieces away, people who's pieces only came from the middle would think they were lying. After all, people from the middle have never seen a straight edge and therefor don't believe in them.

If a player looks at the reality cards they've been dealt, and one's green, one's blue, one's brown, two are totally black, two are totally white, one's half brown, half blue, one's half black, half white, and one's just nuts, containing a seemingly random collection of shades of every color, they are to be forgiven for wanting to trade away as many as possible. They are blessed with a wider perspective that does them no good without the details. They know that every player who says that reality is one thing or another are nuts. Reality is everything.

When a player with an all green hand meets a player with an all red hand, they've got to share at least one card (it doesn't have to be their best). As long as players memorize their cards, it's okay to trade them away in order to get a glimpse of a cards they've never seen.

Some cards keep coming back at you. Some pieces contradict other pieces so completely that players who find themselves with both in their hand at once often go mad before getting the opportunity to discard. All cards are worthy of examination, though some cards are so similar that the player rapidly trades them, missing important clues along the way. All hearts aren't alike, neither are clubs or diamonds, and you'll never get four of a kind if you discard every spade.

Every piece only makes total sense in context with the eight pieces surrounding it. The chances of achieving "the hand of the nine" through random selection and constant trading are infinitesimal but worth the game. Such a player has received a reality clue worth a thousand points but mysteriously only put down as one. Once a player has ten reality points through fast and furious trading, they may think you're hot shit, but not necessarily. The player's pieces could STILL all be green so they'd STILL maintain the misconception that reality is foliage.

In some countries, any hand of nine must be played. All reality clues are shared with everybody and all players get more and more conscious.

In some countries, any hand of nine must be kept, you're stuck with it the rest of your life, good or bad, and nobody else gets a clue till you die and your hand is put back in the shuffle.

The winner is the player who takes the most into consideration and who's approximation ends up closest to reality.

I was going to transcribe some of the best parts of Paul Krassner's latest CD The Zen Bastard Rides Again when I realized that all of it was the best parts. Either that or I'm lazy.

Like a schizophrenic Zen Buddhist, Paul is at two with the universe. He clarifies the difference between typing and actually saying something in public. The very fact that these words come out of Paul's mouth and an audience doesn't recoil in horror is proof that there's hope in the world. He remains at the cutting edge of political satire, and as long as people like Paul can get away with this, the rest of us are safe. He's the canary in the mine shaft of comedy. Paul talks about things the rest of us barely have balls enough to write about. If there were no Paul Krassner, I would have to invent him whenever someone asked me who was my mentor in journalism.

"A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.
"Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!"
- Buddha: Zen Flesh, Zen Bones -

How could a supposedly seasoned journalist like Dan Rather fall for the oldest trick in the "Dirty Rovian Tricks" book? Anybody who's been awake over the past 4 years knows the levels this administration's propaganda meister will stoop to. Check out McCain's 2000 run for President. Time for Dan to retire. He's been played like a Stradivarius.
- Rita Morrison

It's the "what" question you asked to identify itself, not the "why" inquiry-into-its-location notation.
- chris mcfarland

Is this legal? No, really, is this legal? Seriously, Isn't this against the law?
-Todd Myers

When will they stop hammering nails?
or
On my checks and credit cards, why are all the letters in my name upper case?
- Bill Moses

Worst case scenario: What would have happened if they had let Cat Stevens into the country and allowed him to keep his appointment to have lunch with Dolly Parton?

Send your answer to stupidquestion@disinfotainmenttoday.com.

(sung to the tune of Jingle Bells)

Oh what fun it is to be the new head of CIA

(sung to the tune of Moonshadow)

I'm being followed by a John Ashcroft

John Ashcroft, John Ashcroft

Leapin' and hoppin' on a John Ashcroft

John Ashcroft, John Ashcroft

(sung to the tune of Tomorrow)

You're only a commie dupe

     Russ Meyer died last week but his films live on, one in particular...
    It was 1970, and I had just moved to New York City to be an actor when someone in my class at the Lee Strasberg Institute invited me to a preview of a new movie. It was the first time I had ever been to an advance screening, and the theater was large and packed. When the film began, the audience started laughing, and they never stopped until the film ended, whereupon they immediately jumped to their feet in hysterical applause. But then it turned out the film was not really over, and they all went back to their seats for the first of innumerable codas, whooping and hollering in the most outrageous reaction to a film I had ever seen.
   It was a most baffling encounter, and I could not figure it out for years afterward. I knew I was laughing too, but I could not tell if we were laughing AT the picture or WITH it. To this day, I'm not really sure if it's a comedy, but it unquestionably cracks me up. It is simultaneously the best and the worst movie ever made, and that screening is still one of the most exhilarating experiences I've ever had in a movie theater. The film was Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
   Ten years later, through a startling twist of fate, I accidentally became a film critic for the L.A. Weekly, where my assignments were invariably B movies. After seeing and writing about thousands of B's, I kept coming back to Russ Meyer's films as the epitome of exploitation. I concluded that Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was unquestionably the best B movie ever made, the one against which all others must be compared. Some classic B's, such as Plan 9 from Outer Space, are fun because they are clearly the work of an idiot who thinks he's a genius. Others, like Amazon Women on the Moon, are fun because they are deliberately camp. What puts Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in a league of its own is the way it miraculously straddles the line. There's no way to tell whether the filmmaker is in on the joke until you actually meet Russ Meyer and see the twinkle in his eye.
   When I was voted in as a member of the Los Angeles Film Critic's Association, it was not that I had any particular desire to hang out in a crowded room with a gaggle of hatchet men and women, but you take what you can get. Actually, they're a fun bunch, and I was attracted to a series of screenings that the association was doing in conjunction with the UCLA Film and Television Archives, in which a member/critic showed a film with the movie makers present and then discussed the film afterward with the audience.
   While other critics salivated over the prospect of getting Martin Scorcese to discuss The Last Temptation of Christ, I daydreamed about seeing Beyond the Valley of the Dolls again on a big screen. I called Russ Meyer and he bragged about a perfect 35MM print he had. He agreed to let us show it and to personally attend the discussion. I called Edy Williams, one of the unforgettable stars of the film ("I'd like to strap you on some time."), and she also agreed to attend.
   I had no idea if film critic/screenwriter Roger Ebert considered Beyond the Valley of the Dolls a highlight or an embarrassment in his career, so I was delighted when he agreed to fly in from Chicago to attend the screening. My cup runneth over when I was miraculously able to gather the entire living cast as well, including novelist Michael Blodgett, Charles Napier, Dolly Read, David Gurian, and John LaZar, whose performance as Z Man ("This is my happening and it freaks me out.") is a genuine marvel that ruined his career. It was a fun reunion, since many of them had not seen each other in 20 years.
   This turned out to be one of the most popular screenings in the Critic's Choice series, and more than 200 people were turned away at the door. The Voyager Company shot the discussion as a documentary to be included on the letterboxed laserdisc for their prestigious Criterion Collection. It never came out because 20th Century Fox refused permission, despite Mr. Meyer's approval, despite the fact that it wasn't available in any other format, and despite the fact they had no plans to release it themselves. Were they embarrassed about it? I can't imagine why, unless they've got something against transsexual superheroes who run around beheading Nazi manservants and guys dressed like Tarzan.

     Michael Dare: I can't possibly explain why this is one of my favorite movies of all time. There's no excuse for it. I can't say it's a best movie ever made, but it's certainly one of my favorites.
   For the Los Angeles Film Critic's Association to pay tribute to this film is sort of like the National Wine Critic's Association paying tribute to Boone's Farm. First of all, I'd like to ask Russ Meyer how on earth he convinced 20th Century Fox to let him make this movie.
   Russ Meyer: Well, I think Roger said it. He said they put the nuts in charge of the asylum. The man that gave us our shot - or there were two men - Abe Burrows, an Obie playwright, and Darryl Zanuck. And they'd seen an earlier film that was making a few bucks in New York, and they couldn't get a print because we were booked into about 190 theaters. And at that time that was a lot of theaters for an independent film.
   So they had to go to a theater that was local to them, and it happened to be a stroke house down on 42nd Street. So the two big people went there and saw the film and supposedly, Burrows said, "Well, if a klutz like that can make a film that successfully and that attractive for $69,000, you ought to throw him a bone." So that's how it really began.
   I went over to Fox and met the son, Richard Zanuck, and he gave me five thousand bucks. And by that time I had become quite friendly with Roger. We thought a lot about the same kind of ladies, anyway. We had a little bit in common. I respected the fact that he was much younger than myself and could put a certain amount of input into the picture that I couldn't by myself.
   Fortunately, not for some people, but the Manson murders had come along at that time, so I was able to incorporate that as a basis for the ending of the film. Zanuck himself in a long cablegram that he sent me from Cannes after Roger finished this marvelous treatment said, "I think it's a little tough, that whole aspect of utilizing the Manson killings, but I'm sure you'll use good taste when you do present it."
   Roger then completed the script, and it was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life to work under circumstances where, heretofore, I'd only worked with a crew of five, and now I had about 55. A lot of Indians to do your bidding. And I shall never forget it. It was an experience that was probably the most rewarding period of my life. That's a long speech for me.
   Dare: Mr. Ebert, what was the specific assignment that you were given here? Did you have guidelines?
Roger Ebert: A camp, rock 'n' roll, horror, exploitation musical. I had been a fan of Russ's work since The Immoral Mr. Teas, which played for two and a half years at the Illini Theater in my hometown - providing people with someplace to go during final exam week and in-between too. It was a long run.
   And I had seen all of Russ's movies subsequent to that, including Motor Psycho!, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Mud Honey!, Lorna, Mondo Topless, and Eve and the Handyman, and the others.
   And so when the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article about him, "A Tribute to King Lear," written by the reporter with a marvelous name of Stephen Lovelady, I wrote a letter to the editor of the WSJ saying that I thought it was about time that Russ Meyer was acknowledged as an original filmmaker. And as a very good filmmaker.
   In times to come, and years to come, and into the next century, Russ Meyer's films will be seen as art in the same sense as Andy Warhol's work and Al Capp's work - popular art of a very particular and original and unique nature.
   Just recently I put myself way out on a limb. I saw Wild at Heart, David Lynch's new film, at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palm d'Or, the grand prize of the Cannes Film Festival. And it sounded a little bit strange to be writing these words, but I felt to be honest to myself that I had to say that "there was nothing in Wild at Heart that Beyond the Valley of the Dolls didn't do better twenty years earlier."
   When it was mentioned earlier that this movie was part of postmodernism, it seems to me that the only true postmodernist works are those which were made before anybody knew that they were postmodernist - because, you see, once you know what you're doing, you're not doing it anymore. How can you set out to be postmodernist? At that point it's too late. You're premodernist again.
   And this movie is exactly what it is, an extremely original and unique film. There's not another movie like it, as far as I know. I wish there were.    So, after I wrote the letter to the WSJ, Russ wrote me a letter, and the next time he was in Chicago we had dinner, and then when I came out here we had dinner again, and we eventually became friendly.
   When 20th Century Fox offered him to opportunity to produce Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which at that point was only a title, he called me up and offered me the job, and I took it. I came out here.
   He tried to get me to stay at the Sunset Retirement Home. He felt it would be very quite there, and I'd get more work done. I wound up at the Sunset Marquis, but I quickly became aware of Russ's theories about writing, which was that it was much the same activity as typing.
   We were supplied with a suite of offices at 20th. We had a secretary named June in the middle, and at the left was Russ, and on the right was me. He insisted that the doors be kept open so that he could hear if the typewriter was going, and if there was ever a moment when there wasn't any typing going on, I would hear [Shouts.] "What's the matter?"

When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ball point pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion dollars developing a pen that writes in zero gravity upside-down on almost any surface including glass and at below freezing to over 300 C. The Russians used a pencil.

You don't need a parachute to skydive, you only need a parachute to skydive twice.

Consequences:
* Hit to Rather's reputation
* Hit to CBS's reputation
* Hit to the media's (already questionable) reputation

Conservative response:
* Unmitigated, eye-popping outrage
* Calls for Rather's resignation
* Calls for an investigation by the House of Representatives

Consequences:
* American public misled and frightened into an invasion of a sovereign nation that posed no threat to the U.S.
* Hit to America's reputation
* Over 1,000 Americans dead
* Over 7,000 Americans injured
* Tens of thousands of Iraqis dead
* Iraq turned center for terrorist recruitment
* Hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayers' dollars gone
* Anti American sentiment at record highs
* Iraq on the verge of civil war

"I want to deceive him just enough to make him want me."
- Blanch Dubois: A Streetcar Named Desire -

"Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities."
- Aldous Huxley -

"Many researchers claim the name al-Qaeda was made up in the middle 90s by a variety of American functionaries (one of them being none other than Richard Clarke) as an all-purpose villain the U.S. could blame as a convenient reason for its military adventurism."
- al Qaeda: A Non-Entity Before 9/11 -

"Stop and think for a minute. Do the acts of terror accomplish anything for the group that is blamed for the terror? Does terror achieve their ends, obtain the results they want? Or isn't it obvious that the acts of terror are actually achieving the objectives of those who claim to be the victims of the terror, to gain them sympathy and political alliances?"
- Is 'Al Qaeda' the Modern Incarnation of 'Emmanuel Goldstein'? -

"Viewers of late-night comedy programs, especially The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on the cable channel Comedy Central, are more likely to know the issue positions and backgrounds of presidential candidates than people who do not watch late-night comedy, the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey shows.
"Polling conducted between July 15 and Sept. 19 among 19,013 adults showed that on a six-item political knowledge test people who did not watch any late-night comedy programs in the past week answered 2.62 items correctly, while viewers of Late Night with David Letterman on CBS answered 2.91, viewers of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno answered 2.95, and viewers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart answered 3.59 items correctly. That meant there was a difference of 16 percentage points between Daily Show viewers and people who did not watch any late-night programming."
- No joke: Daily Show viewers follow presidential race -

"It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it."
- Aristotle -

"In the case 'Sony Corp. vs. Universal City Studios' the Supreme Court ruled that movie studios could not hold VCR manufacturers liable when customers made illegal copies, because VCRs also had "substantial non-infringing uses". But now, Senate bill S. 2560, known as the 'INDUCE Act' would undermine the Betamax decision by creating a new kind of liability: the VCR maker of tomorrow could be sued for 'inducing' their customers to make infringing copies.
"'The iPod, the recordable CD-ROM, the VCR, and even the Xerox machine all owe their success to the foundation laid out by the Betamax decision,' said Holmes Wilson, co-founder of the Downhill Battle, which is organizing the call-in day. 'But now,' says Wilson, 'a handful of very well-connected entertainment companies are trying to undermine that foundation.'"
- Music group organizes "Save Betamax" online protest in opposition to INDUCE Act -

"Your kids can download the 'America's Army' video game for free. Well, it is free for them. You have already paid for it with your tax dollars. In the game, kids get to kill people with cool weapons that look and respond like the real things. They get to ambush terrorists and, when caught in a firefight, they can hear bullets whistle past their ears and even hear the shell casings from their M-16s clatter onto the concrete floor.
"The only thing better would be an actual war with actual weapons! Which is pretty much how the Army hopes your kids will respond."
- Joan Ryan: Army's war game recruits kids -

"You do not become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society."
- Vaclav Havel -

"Do I have a feeling of America going backwards? Sure. And I can't tell you how frightening it is - to see battles we thought we had already won... We're fighting to vote again. We're fighting to protest. This is a major crisis. We're at the edge of a cliff. Do we fall off? Or do we step back?"
- Toni Morrison -

    "Municipal officials said 20 homes closest to Neve Dekalim had been destroyed. However, an official with the U.N. Relief and Works Agency later said on condition of anonymity that 35 houses had been razed.
    "Fathi Zaroub, a father of four, said he lost his two-room house. 'We were forced to leave the house under intensive shooting from the sky and from the tanks,' Zaroub said by telephone from the camp. 'We took nothing from our belongings. We ran away in our pajamas, and we have no other refuge... I don't know where I am going to take my children.'
   "Zaroub said the homes of most of his relatives had also been destroyed."
- Ibrahim Barzak: ~~Florida hurricane destroys homes~~ Israel Destroys Refugee Homes, Kills One -

"They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life... they come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.
"How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that, rather than controlling terrorism, his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice."
- E.L. Doctorow: The Unfeeling President -

"Mr. Bush doesn't seem to care that by using Mr. Allawi as a puppet in his campaign, he decreases the prime minister's chances of debunking the belief in Iraq that he is a Bush puppet - which is the only way he can gain any credibility to stabilize his devastated country and be elected himself.
"Actually, being the president's marionette is a step up from Mr. Allawi's old jobs as henchman for Saddam Hussein and stoolie for the C.I.A."
- Maureen Dowd: Dance of the Marionettes -

"Do you have a Christmas card list? Or sing in a church choir? Are you a member of a Veterans group? What about the other parents on your child's soccer team? Have you touched base with your old friends from school lately? Odds are a lot of those people aren't registered to vote, but they may support the President... Every four years, people tell you this election is the most important of our lives. This time, it's true. The choice we make on November 2nd will determine the way we fight the War on Terror; whether doctors and patients or government bureaucrats will make our health care decisions; and whether we keep our economy on the right track or let higher taxes derail our recovery."
- Ken Mehlman: Bush campaign manager -

    "During the early part of the war, there was more deception than truth in the comments and press briefings of the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Among the fabricated stories was the early surrender of the commander and the entire 51st Iraqi mechanized division. We were told of an uprising in Basra -- it did not happen. We were told Iraqis had stolen U.S. uniforms to commit atrocities -- this was not true. We were told on White House and State Department Web sites that the Iraqi military had formed units of children to attack the coalition -- untrue. We were told of a whole range of agreements between the French and Iraq before the war over weapons -- false. We were told Saddam had marked a red line around Baghdad and that when we crossed it Iraq would use chemical weapons -- completely fabricated.
    "We were told of an elaborate scheme by Saddam's forces to ambush U.S. Marines on March 23 as they fought toward Baghdad. The president mentioned this incident many times. It turns out what really happened that day is that the Marines were repeatedly attacked by a U.S. Air Force A-10. It was a friendly-fire incident, not an Iraqi ruse. But building on the theme of Iraqi evil was more important than the truth.
    "Military intelligence officials' prewar assertion when no WMD were found that Iraq had moved its weapons to Syria is another example of information denial. But although the Iraq Survey Group report to be released at the end of this month will announce once and for all that Iraq did not have WMD, the WMD argument already served its purpose in garnering support for the invasion. The important message now remains: Iraq = terrorists = 9/11."
- Sam Gardiner: The enemy is us - In war, you deny information, spread lies and use psychological warfare. An expert on military information operations explains how Bush has mastered this technique -- and used it against the American people -

"In a remarkable interview Pakistan President Musharraf talks to CNN's Paula Zahn. Musharraf paints an uncertain and dangerous picture and does not help Bush's notion that Iraq is making progress and that it will be all right. Bush consistently ignores the opinions of others and believes his convictions are correct. Bush is consistent, yeah, but he is consistently wrong."
- Cary W. Blankenship: Does Bush Actually Know What Foreign Leaders Think? -

    "What would the United States look like if it were in Iraq's current situation? The population of the U.S. is more than 11 times that of Iraq's, so a lot of statistics would have to be multiplied by that number.
    "Violence killed 300 Iraqis last week; the equivalent, proportionately, of 3,300 Americans. What if 3,300 Americans had died in car bombings, grenade and rocket attacks, machine gun spray and aerial bombardments in just one week? That is a number greater than the deaths on Sept. 11.
    "And what if those deaths occurred all over the country, mostly in the capital of Washington, but also in Boston, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City and San Francisco?
   "What if the grounds of the White House and the government buildings near the Mall were constantly taking mortar fire and those inside were fearful of stepping outside?
    "What if all the reporters for the major television and print media were trapped in five-star hotels in Washington and New York, unable to move more than a few blocks safely and dependent on stringers to know what was happening in Oklahoma City and St. Louis? What if the only time they ventured into the Midwest was if they could be embedded in Army or National Guard units?"
- Juan Cole: If the War Were in the U.S. ...Last week alone, more than 3,000 Americans would have been killed -

"I believe that the Palestinians have a right to a homeland as much as anyone else. Look, the fact is we support Israel, and when it gets right down to it, no one in the Middle East hates us for our freedom. It makes me ill when I hear that. They hate us for two reasons: We support the house of Saud, and we support Israel. Until we get rid of the taboo of simply talking about it, we're not going anywhere. Criticizing our relationship with the Saudis is off the table because of the money, and the same goes for Israel although there is also a little collective guilt involved over WWII that needs to be worked out. Look, I don't have an anti-Zionist bone in my body, but we have got to be able to talk about these things."
- Steve Earle: The Unquiet American -

"The greatest men are not who fight other men in battle, but those who fight ignorance."

"If there is one thing we know about bin Laden before the start of the Iraq war, it is that he wasn't in Iraq. With the invasion of Iraq, bin Laden got all the benefits of being America's public enemy No. 1 but none of the disadvantages. He got an explosion of anti-Americanism around the world, potential recruits lined up out the cave door and around the block for future suicide missions, swell new opportunities for terrorism in the chaos of Iraq itself, and the forced retirement of Saddam Hussein, whom he never cared for. He got a thousand Americans dead and hundreds of billions of capitalist dollars gone -- results that would make any terrorist episode a huge success -- without his having to lift a finger. And meanwhile, every bomb dropped on Iraq was a bomb not dropped on him. What's not to like?"

- Michael Kinsey: Osama's Candidate -

"Never moon a werewolf."

"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."
- Mark Twain -

"One of the big secrets of finding time is not to watch television."
- Bob Keeshan (Captain Kangaroo) -

"Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."
- George H. W. Bush in his 1998 memoir A World Transformed -

"I was ecstatic they re-named 'French Fries' as 'Freedom Fries'. Grown men and women in positions of power in the U.S. government showing themselves as idiots."
- Johnny Depp -

"I have this incredible dream that one day, one minute, the whole world, at the same time, will decide it's time for peace and love. So I just do my part. And I think that's all you can do. I'm not telling anyone else what to do. I do this and that's the end of my story."
- Ringo Starr -

"What you do is of little significance. But it is very important that you do it."
- Gandhi -

"This clumsy comedy would be hilarious were in not for the fact of our kids getting slain daily and $4 billion getting squandered per month."
- The Man in the Yellow Hat -

"There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats."
- Albert Schweitzer -

"Peace and the survival of life on Earth as we know it are threatened by human activities which lack a commitment to humanitarian values."
- The Dalai Lama -

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
- George Orwell -

"I want my husband home. I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police, in a place they're not welcome."
- Luisa Leija -

"If there's one thing you can say about mankind, there's nothing kind about Man."
- Tom Waits -

"At one time in our not so distant past, there was a bounty on the heads of the Indian people. Along with animal skins, they would bring along Indian scalps to barter at the trading posts. Red skins -- get it? It means a dead Indian's scalp. There's no getting around the true meaning -- it's a part of a notorious time in our country's history. The term Redskins has long been part of this nation's vocabulary, especially when it comes to sports teams. But it is derogatory... Schwarzenegger had an opportunity to extinguish this racist reference by California schools by banning the use of Redskins as a school mascot. Unfortunately, he chose not to."
- Our Voice: Schwarzenegger erred in his rebuke of mascot bill, Redskin is racist, derogatory term -- has no place in school -

"A friend in Washington D.C. is someone who stabs you in the chest."
- Donald Rumsfeld -

"Law Professor and civil liberties expert David Cole has some astonishing news today. With the collapse of the Detroit terror convictions a few weeks ago, Ashcroft's record is one of zero terrorism convictions since 9/11.
"Until that reversal, the Detroit case had marked the only terrorist conviction obtained from the Justice Department's detention of more than 5,000 foreign nationals in anti-terrorism sweeps since 9/11. So Ashcroft's record is 0 for 5,000. When the attorney general was locking these men up in the immediate wake of the attacks, he held almost daily press conferences to announce how many 'suspected terrorists' had been detained. No press conference has been forthcoming to announce that exactly none of them have turned out to be actual terrorists."
- Ashcroft: Not a Single Post 9/11 Terror Conviction -

"Yes, OF COURSE any of us would have run a better, smarter, kick-ass campaign. Of course we would have smacked each and every one of those phony swifty boaty bastards down. But WE are not running for president -- Kerry is. So quit complaining and work with what we have. Oprah just gave 300 women a... Pontiac! Did you see any of them frowning and moaning and screaming, 'Oh God, NOT a friggin' Pontiac!' Of course not, they were happy. The Pontiacs all had four wheels, an engine and a gas pedal. You want more than that, well, I can't help you. I had a Pontiac once and it lasted a good year. And it was a VERY good year."
- Michael Moore -

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
- Margaret Mead -

"It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world..."
- George Washington: 1796 farewell address to the nation -

"This afternoon, while schmoozing a minor aide, I saw a copy of a Pentagon memo concerning the forthcoming draft. I could not copy this and it took me about twenty minutes, in brief segments, to read it through. The White House and the Pentagon have worked out a plan to call up all reservists and National Guard units if and when Bush is reelected. The moment that the election results are poured in concrete, orders, now drawn up and waiting, will be issued throughout the United States. I am not speaking of a few units but all US Guard and Reserve units. On the same subject, the pending Universal Draft is also a done deal. Everything is in place awaiting the President's signature. This is planned for June of 2005 and contains some real shockers. Women will be called up as well as men. There will be absolutely no deferments of any kind permitted. Persons with medical problems such as diabetes, cardio-vascular disease, chronic asthma, physical deformities such as a club foot or hunch back, vision problems, etc. will be called up! If a draftee has a medical problem but can move around, they are subject to the draft but will be assigned to non-military positions such as clerk-typists, maintenance positions and so on. There will be absolutely no deferments for someone with a family to support or who is enrolled in any kind of a school. Students may be permitted to complete their semester and will then be compelled to report at once to their nearest enlistment center. For example, as I read it, an 18 year old girl with two children and no husband to support her will be subject to the draft. There was a discussion about what to do with the children and if the family cannot raise them during the draftees tour of duty, then some kind of Federal Child Care center will have to suffice. The nominal ages covered are from 18 through 26 but a special exception is now in the orders for anyone with what the Army calls 'technical skills' such as proficiency in computers, foreign language skills and so on. These poor jerks are subject to the draft until they are 35! Again, no deferments will be allowed unless the subject is already working for a government agency and is certified by his superiors as 'vital' to whatever 'war effort' the Army deems important. These orders, note, came from the desk of George W. Bush to Rumsfeld but Bush will cite a vague 'national crisis' to cover his useless ass. The top brass at the Pentagon are having fits about this. Why? Because for decades they have been downsizing, closing bases and so on. I have been told by Pentagon people that they would have no place to put the anticipated great flood of draftees if and when the draft is activated. One said to me, 'Where the fuck do these dim bulbs expect us to house them? In local hotels?'"
- The voice of the White House -

"A presidential initiative called The New Freedom Commission on Mental Health has issued a report recommending forced mental health screening for every child in America, including preschool children. The goal is to promote the patently false idea that we have a nation of children with undiagnosed mental disorders crying out for treatment.
"One obvious beneficiary of the proposal is the pharmaceutical industry, which is eager to sell the psychotropic drugs that undoubtedly will be prescribed to millions of American schoolchildren under the new screening program. Of course a tiny minority of children suffer from legitimate mental illnesses, but the widespread use of Ritalin and other drugs on youngsters who simply exhibit typical rambunctious, fidgety, and impatient behavior is nothing short of criminal. It may be easier to teach and parent drugged kids, but convenience is no justification for endangering them. Children's brains are still developing, and the truth is we have no idea what the long-term side effects of psychiatric drugs may be. Medical science has not even exhaustively identified every possible brain chemical, even as we alter those chemicals with drugs."
- Rep. Ron Paul: The Psycho State -

"The morphine-free poppy was discovered in 1995 in the Australian state of Tasmania, which grows 40 percent of the world's legal opiates. It was first sown as a commercial crop in 1997 and now makes up about 40 percent of the entire Tasmanian poppy crop."
- Patricia Reaney: Morphine-Free Poppy Holds Key to New Pain-Killers -

"An electronic device that uses spinach to convert light into electrical charge has been developed by US researchers. Shuguang Zhang at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, and research collaborators integrated a protein complex derived from spinach chloroplasts with organic semiconductors to make a solar cell that could be combined with solid state electronics."
- Spinach could power better solar cells -

"The Super Bowl 'wardrobe malfunction' is not just a scandal; it's now been ruled a criminal act. The Federal Communications Commission has fined CBS a half-million dollars for the incident. This is just the beginning of a crackdown. The FCC now calls for the power to regulate cable television, in addition to broadcast media. Congress has voted to increase by tenfold the maximum fine that the FCC may impose, from $27,500 to $275,000. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps has vowed that he will not be satisfied until 'I see us send one or two ... cases for license revocation.'
"In this headlong rush to expand the government's authority over the media, no one has paused to consider whether the government should have such authority in the first place. No one has noticed that the very existence of the FCC is a flagrant violation of the right to free speech."
- Robert Garmong: Government Should Not Control the Airwaves -

"Since it was signed in 2002, the No Child Left Behind law has focused attention on the kids who can't keep up, but research shows that gifted kids are also at risk. In a 2000 study for Gifted Child Quarterly, Joseph Renzulli and Sunghee Park found that 5% of the 3,520 gifted students they followed dropped out after eighth grade. Astonishingly, that's almost as high as the 5.2% of non-gifted kids who dropped out. Untold numbers of other highly intelligent kids stay in school but tune out. 'When we ask exceptional children about their main obstacle, they almost always say it's their school,' says Jan Davidson, a co-author of the new book Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds. 'Their school makes them put in seat time, and they can't learn at their own ability level.'"
- John Cloud/Thornburg: Saving the Smart Kids - Are schools leaving the most gifted children behind if they don't allow them to skip ahead? -

"It may be hard to imagine that someone could defeat a district attorney by insisting he is too tough on crime, but that's exactly what happened last week in Albany County. Throughout the summer and into the fall, a little-known lawyer named David Soares waged a relentless attack against his former boss, District Attorney Paul Clyne, by pounding away at a single idea: Democrats should vote out Clyne because he does not support reforming the state's harsh drug laws."
- Jennifer Gonnerman: The People's Prosecutor -

"...Aristophanes, who surely must be God, has given us George W. Bush, a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this one, and who has merely reaffirmed for me the maxim that informed the writing of all these books and that makes our lives as Americans as precarious as anyone else's: all the assurances are provisional, even here in a 200-year-old democracy. We are ambushed, even as free Americans in a powerful republic armed to the teeth, by the unpredictability that is history."
- Philip Roth: The Story Behind The Plot Against America -

"Americans cannot escape a certain responsibility for what is done in our name around the world. In a democracy, even one as corrupted as ours, ultimate authority rests with the people. We empower the government with our votes, finance it with our taxes, bolster it with our silent acquiescence. If we are passive in the face of America's official actions overseas, we in effect endorse them."
- Mark Hertzgaard -

"The number of Iraqis dead since March 2003 is by now at least eight times the number of people who died in the World Trade Center. They had their last words, and their last thoughts as their worlds came down around them, too. I've attended more wakes and funerals this last year, than I've attended my whole life. The process of mourning and the hollow words of comfort have become much too familiar and automatic."
- Riverbend: Baghdad Burning -

"A Travis County grand jury returned 32 indictments in the 2002 Republican fund-raising investigation Tuesday, alleging felony election code violations against a top aide to U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, the head of a political group DeLay founded and eight corporations that provided money for their activities.
"Among the companies indicted on grounds that corporate money was illegally funneled into the 2002 legislative elections were Sears and Roebuck, Westar Energy Inc., Cracker Barrel Old Country Store and Bacardi USA."
- Jay Root and John Moritz: 32 Felony Indictments Returned in DeLay Case -

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