Today in History

George asked Dick to be his VP

Spoiler Alert
or
Won't Get Food Again

Clint Eastwood has given his permission to "spoil" the end of Million Dollar Baby, which I've read about but haven't seen, so here goes. Clint Eastwood has killed hundreds and hundreds of people in his movies, people who didn't want to die, but let him kill one single person who actually wants to die and the wing-nuts go apeshit. Sounds to me like he did the right thing.

Here's a simple question. If you had a choice between dying right now or remaining immobile in a bed for a minimum of fifteen years before your inevitable death, which would you choose? Hilary Swank's character has that choice and makes it. Unfortunately, brain-damaged Terri Schiavo never had that choice, it has been made for her in a legal case that's my profound irritation of the week. 

Her husband wants the feeding tubes removed to allow her to pass away. Her parents say no, she's alive, she's aware, she's enjoying her life of no food, no books, no music, no television, nothing but a bed and an occasional hug from her parents. One might ask if she can laugh and respond to her parents, as they claim, why can't she blink once for yes, twice for no, and answer the question of her life support herself?

There's a popular Petition to save Terri Schiavo and Jeb Bush is on their side as the Schiavos try every insane measure possible to keep their daughter alive, including seeking legislation that would remove a spouse from guardianship if he or she lives with someone else. Michael Schiavo now lives with his girlfriend and their children instead of remaining true to his comatose wife for fifteen years. (For a complete update, read John-Thor Dahlburg's Judge Prolongs "Right-to-Die" Case) Michael doesn't seem to be a saint, but I've never sided with the saints myself.

I had the same choice with my mother. She was wasting away from a syndrome which was robbing her of her ability to control her body, one horrible step at a time. First she couldn't walk, then she couldn't talk, then she couldn't hear and could barely see. The only aspect of her existence that afforded her any pleasure whatsoever was eating, so I relieved her from the drudgery of hospital food by taking her out for meals regularly. Bagels. Tacos. Homemade chicken soup. She wolfed them down with palpable excitement.

Then I got the call. My mother had lost the ability to swallow. She would never eat or drink again and would need a feeding tube for the rest of her life. The doctor needed my permission to put in the tube. Perhaps I'd like to come by and talk about it.

As my mother's legal guardian, it was my choice. The doctor made it quite clear. He'd been through this a million times. There was no chance of recovery; there was only prolonging the inevitable. With the feeding tube, she'd remain deaf, dumb, and blind for the rest of her life, in a bed, with an uncomfortable tube going into her stomach through her nose. Without it, my mother would starve to death within a week. He would ease the pain by increasing her morphine. She wouldn't feel a thing. He didn't recommend putting in the tube. He assured me it was the right thing to do, and that hundreds of people made the same difficult decision about their parents every day.

It was a no-brainer. I followed the doctor's orders. I let her go, despite a complication that was eerily similar to the Schiavo case - asshole family members with their own agenda who thought I was killing my mother to increase my inheritance. (The whole sordid tale is in Chapter 16 of Here Comes the Son, my novel that became The Bachelor's Baby.)

I maintain that the choice of putting in a feeding tube and the choice of taking out a feeding tube are the same. In either case, you're deciding if someone lives or dies.

I would have thought this whole issue was settled by the Karen Ann Quinlan case, decided by the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1975, which gave her parents permission to remove her feeding tube. The oral arguments contained the following dialogue between the court and the attorney for the Quinlans (from Michael S. Lief and H. Mitchell Calwell's superb book And the Walls Came Tumbling Down - Closing arguments that changed the way we live)...

THE COURT: Well, Mr. Armstrong, suppose instead of Karen Ann Quinlan being in a deplorable condition in which she is, she were conscious, had cognitive powers, but was on the verge of death from some terminal illness and said, herself, to the doctors and to the hospital that she did not want artificial means of this kind to be employed. What is the law as to that?

MR. ARMSTRONG: Given that circumstance, we would advise that an individual, if death is imminent and the medical measures proposed are futile, in that they offer no hope of cure or any known treatment, then we most assuredly would assert that she a fortiori has a constitutional right to come before the court.

And the court found for the Quinlans, stating "[W]e are transferring to the plaintiff as guardian the choice of the attending physician... we herewith declare the following affirmative relief on behalf of the plaintiff. Upon the concurrence of the guardian and family of Karen, should the responsible attending physicians conclude there is no reasonable possibility of Karen's ever emerging from her present comatose condition to a cognitive, sapient state... the present life-support system may be withdrawn and said action shall be without any civil or criminal liability therefore on a part of any participant, whether guardian, physician, or others. We herewith specifically so hold."

Clint won an Oscar for withdrawing a life support system. Too bad he can't help Terri Schiavo.

Calling All Computer Hackers

I wish to hack the Internet Movie Database and put myself in as an extra in movies from the past. Third sperm cell from the right in Woody Allen's Everything you Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask? That's right, Michael Dare. I'd also like to have been one of the slaves in Spartacus (Sleazius), a dick double in Deep Throat, and an anonymous network executive in Network. What the hell. Make me a Klansman in Birth of a Nation.

Stupid Question of the Week

If you could put yourself in the IMDB as a character in any movie, what would it be?

Send your answers to stupidquestion@disinfotainmenttoday.com.

Song of the Week

Breathing Through a Tube
To the Tune of Bringing in the Sheaves

Breathing through a tube
Breathing through a tube
I can see the pontiff
breathing through a tube

Repeat until there's a new Pope.

Summer Project

With just 250,000 plastic bottles, you can build your own floating island.

Belated Christmas Gift from Hell

Get your OJ Simpson memorial steak knife holder here.

Calling all Plagiarists

The NSNC (National Society of Newspaper Columnists) is having their annual column-writing contest but I can't afford the entry fee. Anyone who DOES have the entry fee is welcome to just grab any of my past columns, slap their name on it, and give it a shot. The deadline is March 15, 2005. Here's the NSNC Code of Conduct...

    As a newspaper columnist, I will strive to inform, educate and entertain my readers. I will work hard to provoke them to think - whether they agree or disagree with my efforts to depict truth as I see it.
    I will offer my opinions and the reasons I hold them as clearly and as fairly as I can. I will never take advantage of my position to achieve unwarranted personal gain not available to others or use my column to settle personal scores. I will disclose potential conflicts to readers whenever possible.
    I will never make up a quote, a source or a story when depicting true events. But I will reserve the right to engage in parody and satire.
    I will work hard to earn and keep the trust my readers and editors place in me. I will never plagiarize [unless asked to by Michael Dare]. Whenever possible, when I make a mistake, I will correct it.
    I will listen to my critics and, in person, treat them with dignity and respect because they pay me the high honor of reading me, even if they disagree. Similarly, I will treat with personal courtesy those whom I may criticize in writing before and after writing about them.
    I will always remember that my job is a privilege and honor because being a columnist represents the basic American rights of free speech and open discussion.

Don't Take My Word For It

"Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity."
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing -

"Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind."
- Henry Miller -

"The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a 'pet' notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different."
- John Dewey -

"What society requires from art - is that it function as an early warning system."
- Elizabeth Janeway -

"Jeff Gannon ... He is a White House correspondent who has been lobbing softball questions at the president and his press secretary, turns out he is actually a paid escort for wealthy homosexuals... He actually had two jobs - one obviously was sleazy and shameful and the other was a gay male prostitute... I think I know what Bush meant now when he said he has a mandate."
- Bill Maher -

"We must not give only what we have; we must give what we are."
- Cardinal Mercia -

"Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use."
- Emily Post -

"Whatever happiness is in the world has arisen from a wish for the welfare of others; whatever misery there is has arisen from indulging selfishness."
- Buddhist Proverb -

"We have made the Reich by propaganda."
- Joseph Paul Goebbels -

"It's not what you gather, but what you scatter that tells what kind of life you have lived."
- Helen Walton -

"Your order is meaningless, my chaos is significant."
- Nathaniel West -

"Behind the initiation to sensual pleasure, there loom narcotics."
- Pope Paul VII -

"My name is Carl Webb and I'm a soldier protesting illegal orders (Stop Loss Program) to serve in Iraq beyond the length of my contract which ended in August 2004. I refused to report for training with the Texas National Guard at Fort Hood and left Austin, Texas back in August with the intent of eventually turning myself over to the military authorities."
- Carl Webb -

"Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life."
- Joseph Conrad -

"Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference."
- Iris Murdoch -

"Nothing is as terrible to see as ignorance in action."
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe -

"Watery women laying in ponds giving out swords is no basis for a system of government!"
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail -

    "Study after study now shows the undeniable link between foods and disease. Unfortunately, our own government does not yet have the courage to tell the truth about the links between these food products and chronic disease. Even with the recent updating of national dietary guidelines by a panel of experts at the USDA, the conclusion left out any advice that would have told Americans to limit their intake of added sugars.
    "Any guesses on why that happened? It's no more complicated than good old-fashioned food politics: the soft drink companies, sugar industry and mass food producers lobbied the USDA to make sure the new guidelines would not cause a decrease in the sales of their products. So the anti-sugar message was censored. The result, no doubt, is that more Americans will continue to consume added sugars, and they will increasingly be diagnosed with diabetes and obesity as a result...
   "Now here's what's really interesting about all of this. The more successful the food lobby is at suppressing information that would prevent chronic disease in the American people, the more the pharmaceutical industry benefits financially. Why is that? Because as more Americans eat added sugars, processed foods, hydrogenated oils and other foods and food ingredients that promote chronic disease, the more prescription drugs they will need to treat those diseases. Thus, in a rather bizarre and sickening way, the pharmaceutical industry has the food industry to thank for creating more customers!
   "Likewise, the people making decisions at the FDA have USDA officials to thank for protecting the profit base that keeps drug companies in business and keeps many FDA officials in positions of power. It's a fascinating economic cycle, and strangely all of this counts towards the Gross Domestic Product. Every dollar spent on junk foods and prescription drugs to treat the diseases promoted by those foods is counted as 'productivity' in terms of economics. Yet there's nothing productive about this at all! Technically, productivity is being destroyed by these foods and medicines because they interfere with the healthy productivity of the American population and reduce lifespan."
- Mike Adams: Disease-promoting ingredients in everyday foods and groceries are far more dangerous than terrorists -

"Bush is denying reports today that he plans to invade Iran. Oh, we're still going to invade, we just don't have any plans."
- Jay Leno -

"If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom."
- Robert Frost -

"In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from."
- Peter Ustinov -

   "It seems that Negroponte either oversaw a stunningly inept U.S. intelligence operation at the embassy in Tegucigalpa, missing major events occurring almost under his nose, or he is someone ready to tolerate atrocities including torture, rape and murder while slanting intelligence reporting to please his superiors in Washington.
    "Whichever it is incompetence or complicity it is hard to understand how Negroponte, the current U.S. ambassador to Iraq, can be expected to fix the intelligence flaws revealed by the Bush administrations failure to connect the dots before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks or to avert the scandalous use of torture on Muslim suspects captured in Afghanistan and Iraq.
    "Despite the bipartisan praise Negroponte's nomination is eliciting, a clear-eyed look at his record would suggest that the Bush administration intends to continue making two demands on the U.S. intelligence community: that analysts wear rose-colored glasses when assessing U.S. policies and that field operatives turn a blind eye to atrocities when committed by U.S. clients or American interrogators.
    "Given the human rights records of the Honduran military and the Nicaraguan contras who set up shop in Honduras in the early 1980s, Negroponte will have no moral standing as a public official who repudiates abusive interrogation techniques and brutal counterinsurgency tactics. Indeed, some cynics might suggest that's one of the reasons Bush picked him."
- Robert Parry: Negroponte's Blind Spots - 

"Barrera recalled how he nearly suffocated people with rubber masks, how he attached wires to their genitals and shocked them with electricity, how he tore off a man's testicles with a rope. 'When they were very weak, we would take them to disappear.'"
- Battalion 316 member Jose Barrera -

"We did a search of all the cables that were written during the time that I was Ambassador to Honduras, from 1981 to 1985, and we could not find any references to the 3-16th Battalion."
- John Negroponte covering his ass -

"To be poor and white is a paradox in America. Whites, especially white males, are supposed to have an advantage they exploit mercilessly. Yet most of the poor people in the United States are white (51%) outnumbering blacks two to one and all other minority poverty groups combined. America is permeated with cultural myths about white skins association with power, education and opportunity. Capitalist society teaches that we all get what we deserve, so if a white man does not succeed, it can only be due to laziness. But just like black and Latino ghetto dwellers, poor laboring whites live within a dead end social construction that all but guarantees failure."
- Joe Bageant: Poor, White and Pissed - A Guide to the White Trash Planet for Urban Liberals -

"Americans like tragedies with happy endings."
- Gore Vidal -

"A blind man will not thank you for a looking-glass."
- Thomas Fuller M.D. -

"If you ask me, this country could do with a little less motivation. The people who are causing all the trouble seem highly motivated to me. Serial killers, stock swindlers, drug dealers, Christian Republicans. I'm not sure that motivation is always a good thing. You show me a lazy prick lying in bed all day watching TV, and I'll show you a guy who's not causing any trouble."
- George Carlin -

"We all lie in the gutter, but some of us look up at the stars."
- Oscar Wilde -

"When the remedy you have offered only increases the disease, then leave him who will not be cured, and tell your story to someone who seeks the truth."
- Jalal-Uddin Rumi (1207-1273): Persian Sufi Mystic Poet -

"The United States is not a nation to which peace is a necessity." 
- Grover Cleveland -

"And if you think that's stunning, there's a secret tape of Osama bin Laden and he admits to one time trying pork."
- David Letterman -

"The matter which now embroils Europe, the presumption of dictating to an independent nation the form of its government, is so arrogant, so atrocious, that indignation, as well as moral sentiment, enlists all our partialities and prayers in favor of one and our equal execrations against the other. I do not know, indeed, whether all nations do not owe to one another a bold and open declaration of their sympathies with the one party and their detestation of the conduct of the other. But farther than this we are not bound to go; and, indeed, for the sake of the world, we ought not to increase the jealousies or draw on ourselves the power of this formidable confederacy. I have ever deemed it fundamental for the United States never to take active part in the quarrels of Europe. Their political interests are entirely distinct from ours. Their mutual jealousies, their balance of power, their complicated alliances, their forms and principles of government are all foreign to us. They are nations of eternal war. All their energies are expended in the destruction of the labor, property, and lives of other people. On our part never had people so favorable a chance of trying the opposite system of peace and fraternity with mankind and the direction of all our means and faculties to the purposes of improvement instead of destruction."
- Thomas Jefferson: letter to James Monroe, June 11, 1823 -

"The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -

"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say."
- Will Durant -

"Many would be cowards if they had courage enough."
- Thomas Fuller -

    "A newly published book by author and investigative journalist Gary Webb suggests that Paul Wellstone, the Minnesota Senator killed in a plane crash in 2002, together with his wife, daughter, three staff assistants, and two pilots, was actually at the controls of the plane at the time and crashed it on purpose because he was despondent over ill feelings between him and the Bush family.
    "In Prodigal Son of a Bitch, set to hit the bookstores next month, Webb suggests that Wellstone's opposition to Plan Colombia had given rise to bitter words between him and the elder Bush, "a man he looked up to almost as a father." According to Webb, since the senator took up the cause of Colombian farmers whose crops are being destroyed by US sponsored chemical spraying, the affection went only one way. The former president is on record referring to Wellstone as 'this chicken shit.'"
- Anwar Valdez: Gary Webb: Did Wellstone Commit Suicide? -

    "They really do not want to discuss this, of course, in Tinseltown. They still see only their heroes and our villains. And they continue to win everything alone. Remember Steven Spielberg's D-Day spectacular Saving Private Ryan? Someone simply forgot that 72,000 British and Canadian troops were also involved. And if Hollywood is to be believed, it was the Americans who captured the Enigma coding machine from a German submarine; never mind that the Brits were there and accomplished that six months before the Yanks entered the war.
    "Not everything has been quite so eagerly promoted. We hear less, for instance, about the effects of the powerful relationship that has grown over the years between the Pentagon and the Hollywood studios, a partnership that not only can save millions of dollars for filmmakers and produce fine recruiting propaganda for Washington, but can twist history and reality to produce the ultimate in international spin."
- Brian Courtis: Hollywood's dirty little secret. It's the scripts that pay a high price when Hollywood goes into battle. -

"Two step formula for handling stress: 1. Don't sweat the small stuff. 2. Remember that it's all small stuff."
- Anthony Robbins -

"If you want to recapture your youth, just cut off his allowance."
- Al Bernstein -

"Never raise your hands to your kids. It leaves your groin unprotected."
- Red Buttons -

"Children should be like waffles - you should be able to throw the first one away."
- Mary Alice Messenger -

    "Look. We all know that telling teens to abstain from sex is like telling tequila to abstain from the lime. Telling teens to repress their burgeoning beautiful natural chemical lustful cosmic urges that have been only recently delivered to them on the wings of salacious and well-lubed angels is like telling a fervent piano devotee that Mozart is a hack.
    "People who advocate such nastiness should be ashamed. Ashamed and humiliated and then flogged with the dead fish of their own tepid and miserable sex lives. Just an opinion...
   "And oh my great goddess would it not just be goddamn shockingly fabulous if we could somehow be bold and different? If we could, for example and across all of America's public schools, teach the absolute opposite of abstinence? What a utopia we could envision. What a radical and gorgeous and messy and funky and delirious new world we could perhaps slowly, slyly nudge into being. Don't you think?
    "Which is to say, what if our schools, from kindergarten on, from our earliest textbooks and curricula and chalkboard diagrams, contained unashamed and unembarrassed and all-natural and healthily playful and (as time and age permitted) deeply informative and honest and raw and real information about human sexuality, all woven naturally into the curriculum much like math and reading and biology and revisionist world history and all those lies about World War II and Vietnam and Communism and religion? I mean, can you imagine?"
- Mark Morford: Sex And The Disgruntled Teen - More proof that *not* having sex is sad and dangerous - even in Texas. What is wrong with us? -

"I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
- Thomas Jefferson: letter to Benjamin Rush, September 23, 1800 -

"We believed... that man was a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights, and with an innate sense of justice; and that he could be restrained from wrong and protected in right by moderate powers confided to persons of his own choice and held to their duties by dependence on his own will. We believed that the complicated organization of kings, nobles, an priests was not the wisest nor best to effect the happiness of associated man, that wisdom and virtue were not hereditary, that the trappings of such a machinery consumed by their expense those earnings of industry were meant to protect and by the inequalities they produced exposed liberty to sufferance. We believed that men, enjoying in ease and security the full fruits of their own industry, enlisted by all their interests on the side of law and order, habituated to think for themselves and to follow their reason as their guide, would be more easily and safely governed than with minds nourished in error and vitiated and debased, as in Europe, by ignorance, indigence, and oppression. The cherishment of the people then was our principle, the fear and distrust of them that of the other party."
- Thomas Jefferson: letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823 -

    "In the next couple months, the U.S. Supreme Court will issue a decision on Raich Vs. Ashcroft - the landmark case on whether the federal government can continue to persecute medical marijuana patients. Although hope springs eternal within the human breast, many of us do not expect a favorable decision. The question then, is what happens to California's medical marijuana law if the Raich decision does not go the way we want.
    "The answer is - nothing changes. That's right nothing changes. The newspaper headlines might blare that medical marijuana is declared illegal, but that is just the usual media hyperbole. The fact is that the Raich decision is only deciding if the Feds can continue to arrest medical marijuana patients - it has absolutely nothing to do with the constitutionality of California's or any other state's medical marijuana laws. Those laws will remain on the books and are still enforceable on a state level.
    "The problem, of course, is that law enforcement (especially Riverside County law enforcement) will be jumping up and down waving their hats in the air proclaiming that medical marijuana is now illegal. They are wrong - completely 100% dead wrong."
- Lanny Swerdlow: Marijuana Anti-Prohibition Project -

"In their eyes there's something lacking. What they need's a damn good wacking."
- George Harrison: Piggies -

    "Our news system used to rely on information and informing people. There would be facts that would be debated. These guys today have moved into a storytelling mode a Hollywood narrative technique has invaded the realm of news and information. So what were presenting now is not necessarily information designed to inform people or deepen their understanding of how institutions work or what the choices are in the world, but rather to convey a story line. And that story line is the Jessica Lynch story damsel in distress. The idea of the war being presented like a sporting event a sports metaphor where generals are diagramming how we marched into Baghdad so it looked like a Super Bowl play.
    "These techniques of the merger of show biz and news biz reduced the war to an entertainment event, and everybody played their part in it. And there was a lot of high drama. What's going to happen? Are we at risk? Our boys are in the field. And so, you basically shift the publics identification from thinking about the reasons that were there whether or not we should be there to what's happening to our soldiers in the field. Your loyalties go to the soldiers and you forget about the politics and the policies that led to the war...
   "A film called The Power of Nightmares was just done by the BBC. The idea was that in the earlier part of the century, politicians organized around dreams, around things we could hope for the Great Society, civil rights, women's emancipation issues that were about peoples hopes and dreams. Now we have an administration that's organizing itself around our nightmares, around fear, and basically being the strong father figure. This authoritarian leadership model is eroding civil liberties, our democracy, and effectively deploying large amounts of money from the corporate world to basically help them realize their self interests. This is something which has come out of a country that's gone through a tremendous transformation over the last twenty years, where the gap between the rich and poor is growing tremendously.
    "But the military-industrial interests recognized that the scariest thing that ever happened was the end of the Soviet Union - suddenly that threat disappeared.
    "So we needed a new threat because a threat keeps that machine going. Instead of a military-industrial complex, we now have a military-industrial-media complex. Media is the front line of the corporate system. And media transmits the values, sells the products. All of this is about selling, not telling. The tradition of journalism is being eroded. And in its place we have impressions, images, archetypes, icons, celebrities and the like. This is how public opinion is now being massaged and manipulated. The war was a testing ground, not only for new weapons systems and techniques, but also for new communications strategies."
- Danny Schechter: Weapons of Mass Deception Filmmaker Declares War on the War Propaganda Machine - 

"Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake whole relationships."
- Sharon Stone -

"I'm just a girl from a trailer park with a dream."

- Hilary Swank -

"Dia Mohammed, the director of Hillah General Hospital, said most of the 110 dead and 133 wounded were recruits waiting to take physicals as part of the application process to join the Iraqi police and national guard."
- Ali Al-Fatlawi: Iraq suicide bomber kills at least 110 -

 "Lazy fokes stummucks don't git tired."
- Uncle Remus Plantation Proverbs -

"I didn't see a thing."
- Bubbles the chimp's testimony at Michael Jackson's trial -

"It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that."
- G. H. Hardy -

"The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not."
- Eric Hoffer -

    "Most presidents have to face betrayal sooner or later. (See John Dean revealing Nixon's cover-up, or David Stockman revealing the underside of Reagan's fiscal policies.) What's uncanny about the Bush administration is that its dissidents invariably recant, usually in zombie-like fashion.
    "Enough apostate Bush loyalists have retracted their heretical views that certain recognizable tropes have emerged. First, the heretic's repudiation of his own deeds should obviously contradict his own principles...
   "Second, there should be little or no explanation as to how the apostate came to change his mind...
   "Third, the recanting heretic's explanation should make no sense."
- Jonathan Chait: George Bush's Stepford Critics, You're likely to recant, zombie-like, if you betray the president. -

"George W. Bush wants to create an 'ownership society.' But it is a strange form of ownership. More and more houses are really owned by mortgage finance companies. Cars are owned by GMAC and other auto financiers. People expect to retire on the equity locked up in their houses. But at any minute, a single word from Japanese or Chinese central bankers would whoosh across America like a tornado, knocking down real estate prices from Santa Monica to South Beach. And Social Security? A forensic accountant could pore over the books for 1,000 years and never find a trace of the cash supposed stashed away for Americans' retirement. It doesn't exist!"
- Bill Bonner: Suddenly Going Sane -

    "Number of House members in 1979 who voted against making Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday: 133.
    "Number who are still in the House: 9.
    "Number who are Vice President: 1."
- Harper's Index for January 2005 -

"It's not enough for a song to be good... it oughta be good for somethin'"
- Woody Guthrie -

"The interactions with her family and our appearance in her room appeared to require some effort and exertion from Terri. From time to time, she would close her eyes as if to rest. This happened primarily when no one was paying particular attention to her, but we were talking among ourselves. After a few minutes or when one of the visitors approached her and started to talk directly to her again, Terri would open her eyes and begin her grunting sounds again in response to their conversations. Although I approached her, leaned close and stroked her arms and spoke to her, she did not verbally respond to me."
- Barbara Weller (an attorney for Terri Schiavo's family): Eye-Witness Account on Terri's Current Condition -

"Desperate Military Housewives: There may be a lot of dark secrets on Wisteria Lane but not half as many as there are in the homes of America's military families. 'DMH' peels the curtain back on the home-front havoc being caused by President Bush's stop-loss policies and the extended tours of duty that result. Don't miss the very special episode where the president promises to 'support our troops,' then proposes a budget that slashes veterans' benefits and leaves one in five military families needing food stamps or Women, Infants and Children program aid to get by. Is it drama? Is it comedy? We produce. You decide."
- Arianna Huffington: Rummy TV - Fire up those TiVos, disinformation fans; Rummy TV is coming soon to a flat screen near you. "If you hate the truth, you'll love DoD TV!" -

    "The students in my general chemistry class almost never open their textbook. My reason: The less I use the book, the more they learn.
    "While some textbooks are excellent, most bore my students and frustrate me. 'Readability formulae' produce mind-numbing prose. Since textbooks are marketed nationally, they must comply with content standards for all states, resulting in ten-pound tomes that cover all topics superficially. Many promulgate scientific misconceptions or even outright errors. They present ideas didactically as discrete facts to be accepted, rather than as clues of principles to be discovered and explored.
    "Some textbooks do a fabulous job of making science relevant, but others insult students' intelligence by oversimplifying and fragmenting the subject matter so much that it becomes incomprehensible. Still others explore only a few topics instead of a standard content set.
    "I didn't set out to banish the book from my classroom. During my first year of teaching general chemistry, I based much of my curriculum on the textbook. In my second year, I gave each student a textbook yet assigned very little from it. Finally, in my third year, I scrapped it altogether and haven't used it since. I realized the textbook's deficiencies and substituted alternate curriculum for topics that my students needed help in mastering. As I added more extra resources, I found that students learned far more when I didn't assign the book."
- Geoff Ruth: No Books, No Problem -

"During his trip to Germany on Wednesday, the main highlight of George W. Bush's trip was meant to be a 'town hall'-style meeting with average Germans. But with the German government unwilling to permit a scripted event with questions approved in advance, the White House has quietly put the event on ice. Was Bush afraid the event might focus on prickly questions about Iraq and Iran rather than the rosy future he's been touting in Europe this week?"
- With a Hush and a Whisper, Bush Drops Town Hall Meeting with Germans -

"Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics."
- Fletcher Knebel -

"Once the game is over, the King and the pawn go back in the same box."
- Italian Proverb -

    "I work with real children every day, not twisted data in neat little boxes. My students are living beings. Some clean, pressed and smiling, others crumpled and beaten down by life. Their test scores may be reflective of their academic abilities or of what occurred at their houses the night before. Nevertheless, I believe in them, have high expectations for them, and do everything in my power to scaffold their way to success. I love what I do and I relish each challenge.
    "There's a troubling assumption driven by the No Child Left Behind Act that all the great teachers are in schools with the highest test scores, while all the poor ones work in at-risk schools.
    "The truth is that there are fabulous, well-trained teachers everywhere and a surprisingly high percentage in at-risk schools. The small segment of educators, who I think shouldn't come within earshot of children, unfortunately exist in schools of all socioeconomic levels."
- Theresa Crowley: Teacher gives observations from at-risk trenches -

    "For all of the conveniences and advances that we have grown so accustomed to comes a slew of environmental toxins - chemicals and other materials largely from industry and carelessness - that have very much saturated our water, our food and the very air we breathe.
    "Many of these toxins are things that you can't see, smell or feel, at least not right away. One of the major problems with them is just that. We don't realize that we're being affected until we come down with a chronic disease after years of subtle and often consistent exposure to a combination of these toxins."
- Dr. Joseph Mercola with Rachael Droege: How to Avoid the Top 10 Most Common Toxins -

    "Disclosures that an alleged homosexual escort working for a pro-Republican website was granted access to the White House press room has led to efforts in the nation's homosexual press to 'out' top-ranking Bush administration officials and GOP leaders based on uncorroborated, undocumented and unnamed sources.
    "In the last week, reports in New York's Gay City News and 365Gay.com and other homosexual-friendly publications and blogs have made specific allegations about individuals based exclusively on unnamed sources and rumors and playing off the sensational revelations about Jeff Gannon by daylight a credentialed 'reporter' covering the White House for two politically partisan websites, while allegedly moonlighting as a $200-an-hour male escort and purveyor of explicit websites like HotMilitaryStud.com and MilitaryEscorts.com. Those sites have since been removed from the Internet."
- Joseph Farah: Homosexual press hot to 'out' Bush figures - Gannon-gate leads to charges about top Republican officials -

    "The Bush administration is hiring more reporters. Only this time, it wants them to keep quiet.
   "The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last week placed a help-wanted listing on journalismjobs.com, an employment website. The department sought reporters to participate in TOPOFF 3, a biennial exercise directed by Congress that simulates a terrorist attack on the United States.
   "The posting, which has since been taken off the site, sought applicants who can write copy for an online news service reporting events within the exercise for an audience of exercise participants."
- Jim Snyder: Wanted: Journalists who can keep quiet - 

"Earlier this evening we brought you the news that Craig's List had a listing, purportedly on behalf of the Social Security Administration's Office of Communications, asking for participants for a series of focus groups on selling privatization. As a slew of readers have now informed us, the ad has just been pulled. Needless to say, we made a copy."
- Joshua Mikah Marshall: Talking Points Memo -

    "You know who I hate? Plagiarists. Thieves of the lowest order because, unlike normal thieves, they steal ideas and thoughts, not just your possessions. To some people, the people who like their thinks better than their things, this is the worst betrayal and most capital crime on the spectrum.
   "For a man like Ron Brynaert, it is sacrilege. For weeks, Brynaert has studied, analyzed, and published his research on GannonGate and the plagiarism in the media on his blog, Why Are We Back in Iraq?, and for weeks various blogs have been using his research without crediting him. Plagiarizing him and dishonoring themselves.
   "Well, I’m happy to report that Ron finally got his due. When The Raw Story wrote their piece about Gannon and Eberle over at Talon news being serial plagiarists, they credited Ron’s work on that story. Then AmericaBLOG credited him when they used his stuff...
   "We need to be careful in the blogosphere that we do not allow ourselves to become the disingenuous hucksters that the MSMers have become. If we want to represent ourselves as the new media, then we need to hold ourselves to some kind of standard in the way we conduct ourselves. Everything has rules, even this anarchy we love in the blogosphere.
    "Sure, we don't have to answer to an editorial board, but we have to answer to ourselves. We have to sleep with what we do. Maybe that's not difficult for some people to do, to shit on the little guy and sleep at night, but I'm glad to see that there are some people out there willing to have what the MSM claims but never delivers: Integrity."
- He Finally Got What Was Coming to Him -

    "'The premise of the play is that, after the fall of Stalinism, everyone is saying capitalism has triumphed, and Marx is angry. All his ideas are being twisted, so the powers that be send him back, but instead of sending him to Soho, London, where he lived, they send him to Soho, New York, right into the heart of capitalism. It's really about what Marx would say if he could see the world today.'
   "The term 'socialism' carries a stigma in this country, so should we be afraid? 'Stalinism was an obscene perversion of socialism. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to live in Stalinist Russia,' says Jones. 'Socialism to me means worker's power. We work our whole lives to make a tiny group of people wealthy, and at the ends of our lives, we have nothing, relatively speaking. And now, with Bush taking away Social Security, we'll have less. Why should we work so hard?'
   "'What if all of us were the bosses and the workers and we all decided what to do with the money, rather than all those decisions being made privately by the owners? At work, there's no democracy. The bosses decide what you're going to get paid, what your quality of life is, what the quality of life of your children is. No say, no democracy. That sphere is privately held. Then there's this other political sphere in which politicians manage everything. It effectively means there is no real democracy in our lives.'
   "No democracy? Now there's something to fear. 'I think the play is popular because a lot of people in this country are asking themselves questions. Why are things the way they are? Why couldn't the government provide health insurance for the 43 million people without it but managed to come up with billions for a war?'"
- Barry Pineo: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad socialist? In Howard Zinn's play, Karl Marx is back, and he's pissed -

    "At the core of the global warming dilemma is a fact neither side of the debate likes to talk about: It is already too late to prevent global warming and the climate change it sets off.
    "Environmentalists won't say this for fear of sounding alarmist or defeatist. Politicians won't say it because then they'd have to do something about it. The world's top climate scientists have been sending this message, however, with increasing urgency for many years."
- Mark Hertsgaard: It's much too late to sweat global warming. Time to prepare for inevitable effects of our ill-fated future -

    "It's kind of interesting that so many right-wingers (Butt Fumes, Inaccuracy In Media and Impossibly Expensive Republic to rename a few) tried to defend the presence of Jeff Fugazi Gannon of Talon Fugazi News owned by Bobby Fugazi Eberle of GOPFUGAZIUSA, by attacking a real journalist, Helen Thomas, for being just as partisan. Actually, Jeff Gannon has attacked Helen himself for attempting to get between America and the 'truth.'
   "Check out this transcript of a White House press briefing conducted by Scott McClellan who seems to prefer the fugazi over the real in his job as a liaison to the press...
   "I'm gonna let every interested blogger in on a secret. Do you want to know how many times a fake-ass news organization like Talon News/GOPUSA got to ask questions during White House Press Briefings, Congressional Briefings and rare-and-oh-so-short Presidential Press Conferences? Then Google 'told Talon News.' If you want to know how many Republicans are lying when they say they don't know who Bobby Eberle is...then add his name to that same search."
- Ron Brynaert: Why Are We Back in Iraq? -

    "Concluding a yearlong study on the effectiveness of President Bush's sweeping education law, No Child Left Behind, a bipartisan panel of lawmakers drawn from many states yesterday pronounced it a flawed, convoluted and unconstitutional education reform initiative that had usurped state and local control of public schools.
    "The report, based on hearings in six cities, praised the law's goal of ending the gap in scholastic achievement between white and minority students. But most of the 77-page report, which the Education Department rebutted yesterday, was devoted to a detailed inventory and discussion of its flaws."
- Sam Dillon: Report Faults Bush Initiative on Education -

    "Let me, for one, offer my conditional support for Washington State Senator Bob Morton's proposal to split his state in two. Morton has put a plan before the Washington state legislature to break the Republican-leaning eastern part of the state off from the liberal, Seattle-centric region west of the Cascades.
   "I say Congress should get right on it, as long as they make a 52nd state at the same time: Washington, DC. We'd have the liberal West Washington; the conservative Central Washington; and (2,000 miles east) the liberal, majority-black East Washington. Henry Clay would be proud."
- Mark Leon Goldberg: The American Prospect: Tapped -

   "MR. McCLELLAN: Good morning, distinguished and virile gentlemen of the news media. Please be seated. Well, except for the new correspondent from PowerBottoms.Com – because you are looking just fine right where you are, Kyle. Today, in the wake of a certain uneventful, non-scandalous resignation, President Bush has directed me to promptly fill all vacancies here in His beloved Press Pool – in a manner befitting the tight, beefed-up security desired by a nation entrenched in the communal showers of war.
    "All top-notch fellas are strongly encouraged to apply using the all-new quick and easy form. We're looking for a few high-caliber men – rough and ready media pros with an insatiable hunger for exposing facts, who'll probe deep for the truth, willing to stay on top to get to the bottom of things, but showing the necessary versatility to bring a whole new meaning to the term "rock-hard news." I eagerly await your applications."
- PRESS SECRETARY SCOTT McCLELLAN UNVEILS STRICT NEW CREDENTIALING APPLICATION TO ENSURE ROCK-SOLID INTEGRITY OF THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS POOL -

    "A special task force of the National Conference of State Legislatures today released the results of a 10-month study that identified specific areas of the act that need to be changed if states are to guarantee that young people will learn at their full potential...
   "Task force co-chair Steve Saland, a New York state senator, noted that the idea for No Child Left Behind originated in the states, but that its restrictions stifle state innovations. 'We believe the federal government's role has become excessively intrusive in the day-to-day operations of public education,' he said. 'States that were once pioneers are now captives of a one-size-fits-all educational accountability system.'"
- NCSL News: State Legislators Offer Formula for Improving No Child Left Behind Act - New report asks Congress and the administration to recognize special challenges to schools and students -

"Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization... The history of civilization is in considerable measure the displacement of error which once held sway as official truth by beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths. Therefore the liberty of man to search for truth ought not to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge."
- Felix Frankfurter: U.S. Supreme Court Justice -

"Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Robert H. Jackson: U. S. Supreme Court Justice -

"He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man..."
- Samuel Adams -

    "Three Iraqis have been killed after US marines entered Haqlaniya, intensifying a campaign to bring Iraq's western province of al-Anbar under control.
    "The Iraqis were killed on Wednesday when they drove towards a building occupied by the marines.
    "'A pickup truck drove towards the building. Iraqi soldiers waved at it to stop but they didn't stop. They didn't pay attention. They turned around, and that's when we shot them,' said Major Richard Seagrist.
   "There were no US casualties."
- Iraqis killed as marines enter town -

"The beheaded body of a woman has been discovered in the suburbs of the town of Erbil, Northern Iraq, the Iraqi daily Sabah reported. Police say the body might of the journalist who was kidnapped two days ago in the town of Mosul. Raeda Wazzan, a journalist working for a government-funded television station, was kidnapped along with her son, aged 10."
- Beheaded Female Body Found in Northern Iraq -

   "I don't know how many citizens of the Empire surf the web looking for the truth. It is sincerely depressing reading the corporate press in the United States, hacking through the chaff, looking for the wheat, reading between the lines in search of the truth. I scan the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, etc, looking for stories that make sense. It is comforting to know there are journalists out there - not in the United States - who tell it like it is. For instance, Eric Margolis of the Toronto Sun.
   "Margolis writes of the Rafik al-Hariri assassination: 'A Syrian role in the crime defies logic, though not possibility. Syrian President Bashar-el-Assads regime is desperately seeking to avoid providing U.S. President George W. Bush with a pretext for war and has urgently sought improved relations with Washington.'
   "But Bush, the Strausscons, and the scary Israeli Likudites who provide the ideological foundation for Bush's foreign policy in the Middle Eastare not interested in improved relations or peace for that matter. In fact, they want to destabilize Syria and go after Hezbollah. Israel would welcome Syria's implosion, as it did Iraq's. Hence current Israeli efforts to press the White House and Congress to overthrow Syria's unloved, isolated regime, whose only ally is Iran - itself a leading target on Americas Mideast hit list. 
- Kurt Nimmo: Israel Killed al-Hariri to Set the Stage for a Confrontation with Hezbollah -

    "To a libertarian the fundamental wrongness of the curfew is obvious. This particular one forbids people under the age of 18 from being in a public space or private establishment into which the public is invited (i.e., a store, theater, concert hall, etc.). In other words, if a 17-year-old wakes up at 5 a.m. and goes to buy breakfast at a diner, he can be ticketed, fined, and forced to do community service, at the discretion of the police. That situation is absurd. So are many other situations made possible by this law...
   "Well, the first reason given for the law is that juveniles commit crimes. Fine so why not enforce laws against those crimes, instead of targeting people who haven't committed any crime at all? Because that's what a curfew does it punishes people for being potential criminals. They haven't actually done anything wrong in being out at night, but if they were allowed to stay out, they might. Looking at the next paragraph in the bill, we find out that punishing actual crime doesn't work. Why not? Well, according to the City Council, 'the offensive activities of juveniles are not easily controlled by existing laws and ordinances because the activities are concealed whenever police officers are present...' In other words, New York's Finest, the police, can easily be outwitted by a bunch of children...
   "They're doing it for fines and community service. A parent or guardian can be fined up to $250 if he allows his child to be out of his supervision past midnight. This lets the government make money from people who not only did not commit any real crimes, but did not even commit the supposed crime of being out late at night. In other words, peaceful, law-abiding citizens who have decided that their children are mature and responsible can be punished for raising their children well enough to be out past midnight."
- Neal Zupancic: State-Assisted Parenting -

    "Roberta Hagen has spent much of her life in pain. She took Vioxx, until it was taken off the market for causing heart problems. Then she switched to Celebrex. But all Cox-2 inhibitors, Vioxx, Celebrex, and Bextra, are controversial, so some doctors are moving away from prescribing them, to a more basic approach.
    "Pain often comes from inflammation, and research shows that some foods can help. Fruits like strawberries, citrus, and melons, as well as nuts, soy, flax seeds, and oil fish like salmon."
- Doctors Turn To Natural Pain Relief -

"The active ingredient in marijuana may stall decline from Alzheimer's disease, research suggests. Scientists showed a synthetic version of the compound may reduce inflammation associated with Alzheimer's and thus help to prevent mental decline. They hope the cannabinoid may be used to developed new drug therapies."
- Marijuana may block Alzheimer's -

"Someone's got to explain to me why they want to develop 'new drug therapies' when all they have to do is advocate smoking marijuana."
- Xarvon, alien investigator -

"To make money, you idiot."
- earthling -

"I might still be alive today if I'd only smoked marijuana."
- Ronald Reagan: seventh level of hell -

"I don't remember inviting YOU to the party."
- Dante -

    "Just days after 9/11, many analysts identified sites that store toxic chemicals as a major terror risk, and called for new safety rules. But as The New York Times reported last fall, 'after the oil and chemical industries met with Karl Rove ... the White House quietly blocked those efforts.'
    "Nearly three and a half years after 9/11, those chemical plants are still unprotected. 
    "Other major risks identified within days of the attack included the possibility of terrorist attacks on major ports or nuclear plants. But in the months after 9/11, the administration flatly refused to allocate the sums that members of the House and Senate from both parties thought necessary to secure these sites."
- Paul Krugman: Wag-the-Dog Protection -
 

Everything Else

Want to write an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times? It's easy. Just follow these guidelines.

Instead of listening to Democracy Now! on my television while writing Disinfotainment Today, now I watch Democracy Now! on my computer while writing Disinfotainment Today.

Time-Warp has an excellent interface as a guide to gadgetry through the ages but little actual information. They seek your help filling in the gaps.

That Guitar Man has lots of great songs, particularly Welcome to Jesusland.

These pictures of a fire in a high-rise office building in Madrid that DIDN'T collapse will inevitable force you to question the collapse due to "fire" of a couple other buildings.

Uggabugga has some hilarious replacements for the anti-AARP ad that was pulled.

A fascinating and completely convincing study of why you should add a lot more fresh lemon juice to your diet.

Uruknet, a major online source of news from occupied Iraq, was removed from Google because one single person complained, then so many people complained about the removal it was put back a few hours later.

Why would anyone want to know who links to me?