Now that the White House told The Onion to stop using their seal, 
what could be more appropriate than...

Similarly

According to How to make money on your news content website, "The most popular ad network for independent publishers is Google's AdSense program. AdSense is a 'pay per click' (PPC) program, where you earn money each time one of your readers clicks on a Google-served ad. Since you earn money on clicks, rather than completed sales, PPC ad networks can provide a more reliable source of income for sites whose readers are not looking to make a purchase right away."  So I signed up only to be rejected because they said my logo represented copyright infringement. Very interesting. Google says they own a typeface and it can't be satirized so I can't use their service. Oh well, who needs to make money anyway.

Hypocrisy of the Week

Dubya Pretending to Care About Rosa Parks

If Bush had been president when Rosa Parks did her thing, he would have made sure she was prosecuted to the full extent of the law, just like he's done with everyone currently doing what she did. He's pretending he respects her while consistently showing total disdain for the entire concept of civil disobedience. Reverend Alan Boesak said, "We give credibility to unjust laws by obeying them," and that's exactly what Rosa Parks did. She refused to give credibility to an unjust law. Does anyone truly believe that Bush is behind THAT concept? If so, they're a beacon to gullible idiots everywhere. When's the last time Dubya GOT on a bus, much less a bus to Martin Luther King's promised land, with equality for all and justice not just for the privileged.

The most important lesson Rosa Parks taught us is that breaking the law for a greater good is not only acceptable but mandatory in certain situations. It's not a big leap from sitting at the front of the bus to smoking a joint on the beach. Okay, maybe it IS a big leap, but take it I shall. Both show total disregard for a bad law, and I maintain that both actions deserve the same respect. The current war against drugs is as heinous as the war against blacks, and any time I hear about someone getting busted for any amount of any drug, I not only wish they had gotten away with it, I want them to stand up like Rosa Parks and declare that it was an act of civil disobedience.

"Yeah, right, they're not practicing civil disobedience," some will quibble, "they just want to get high," sounding as ridiculous as someone saying "Yeah, right, Rosa Parks wasn't practicing civil disobedience, she just didn't want to give up her seat to a white man." Rosa's point was that on a public bus, anyone should be able to sit where they please, and drug users and dealers should also be making the point that anyone should be able to ingest what they please, but they're either too stoned to make the point or rightfully afraid of a punishment that doesn't fit the crime.

In the current state of our legal system, jury nullification, or putting the law on trial instead of the accused, is an illegal defense, making all acts of civil disobedience illegal from the get-go. You can't even argue that you committed the crime to point out the law was unjust. This administration proudly displays her body in the Capital while actively preventing anyone from following in her footsteps.

Three things need to happen. The FDA has to be swept free of corruption, all drugs, including those currently illegal, need to be put under their jurisdiction, and the DEA needs to be abolished completely. All are impossible without an entirely new congress of unbribable people with conscience, so what are we supposed to do, just sit back and let them arrest us for our chosen source of amusement, happily getting wasted on booze in public bars while keeping our pot smoking under wraps? I've mentioned before my disdain for the medical marijuana movement because I don't think you should have to prove you have cancer to fire one up, any more than you should have to prove you have a headache to take an aspirin or prove you're depressed to take a shot of Scotch. But you take what you can get. Sick people getting their medicine takes priority over everyone's right to catch a buzz before watching Seinfeld, but I still insist that one of the whole points of growing up is no longer needing a mommy and daddy to tell you what to consume. We should all be allowed to make our own mistakes. That's what being an adult is all about.

Without fair elections or civil disobedience on a grand scale, what chance is there to change things?

Most Inappropriate Use of Tom Delay's Head

Harriet Miers and the History of Premature Withdrawal

   It's well known that if Harriet Miers' father had practiced premature withdrawal, this whole article would have a different title. So where did she get it from, this idea of withdrawing prematurely? Now that daddy's little crony has become the preeminent spokesmodel for premature withdrawal, it's time to take a closer look at this practice that has effected millions, and figure out what sort of message Harriet Miers is sending to our children. Is she saying that premature withdrawal is a good thing? After all, premature withdrawal of funds from an IRA account causes severe penalties, just as premature withdrawal from Vietnam would have caused the whole world to turn communist, and premature withdrawal from Iraq would cause a sudden drop in oil revenues from record profits to near record profits.
   Harriet Miers has never married and has no kids. A lot of people are claiming that the very fact she has no kids is proof she's been practicing premature withdrawal for decades, while others say she's a lesbian, in which case, like I said, how did she learn about premature withdrawal in the first place? (Lesbians, help me out here.)
   These and other questions remain unanswered at this time, but Disinfotainment Today is...

Management apologizes for the fact that the rest of this article has been prematurely withdrawn. We really don't know the point this article was trying to make, and at this point, we don't care.

History Lesson from Hell

Despotism, a 1946 film from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Measures how a society ranks on a spectrum stretching from democracy to despotism. Explains how societies and nations can be measured by the degree that power is concentrated and respect for the individual is restricted. Where does your community, state and nation stand on these scales?" Accurately predicts our current slide into fascism. Like one viewer says, "These guys must have had a crystal ball. A very, VERY timely bit of film. Hardly dated. It could be remade today with exact same script. Just change the haircuts, clothing and use color film."

Most Inappropriate Use of Valerie Plame's Head

Most Inappropriate Use of Maynard G. Krebs

"Insiders say that if Karl Rove resigns, President Bush will not function effectively. Wait a minute, all this time he's been functioning effectively?"
- David Letterman -

   "Vice President Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans. 'Cruel, inhuman and degrading' treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department annually issues a report criticizing other governments for violating it. Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve legal language that would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an open advocate of torture.
   "His position is not just some abstract defense of presidential power. The CIA is holding an unknown number of prisoners in secret detention centers abroad. In violation of the Geneva Conventions, it has refused to register those detainees with the International Red Cross or to allow visits by its inspectors. Its prisoners have 'disappeared,' like the victims of some dictatorships. The Justice Department and the White House are known to have approved harsh interrogation techniques for some of these people, including 'waterboarding,' or simulated drowning; mock execution; and the deliberate withholding of pain medication. CIA personnel have been implicated in the deaths during interrogation of at least four Afghan and Iraqi detainees. Official investigations have indicated that some aberrant practices by Army personnel in Iraq originated with the CIA. Yet no CIA personnel have been held accountable for this record, and there has never been a public report on the agency's performance."
- Vice President for Torture -

"National Guard units returning from overseas operations have left equipment, such as radios and trucks, for follow-on forces, according to David M. Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, who testified before the House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform on 20 October. The Army National Guard estimates that its units left over 64,000 items valued at over $1.2 billion overseas. However, the Army cannot account for over half of these items and does not have a plan to replace them, as Defense Department policy requires. Non-deployed Guard units now have only about one-third of the equipment they need for their overseas missions, which hampers their ability to prepare for future missions and conduct domestic operations." 
- Natl. Guard Leaves Equipment Overseas -

"Fishing for a good time starts with throwing in a line."
- Tom Waits -

"The number one illness in North America today is Depression. And the number one cause for Depression today is stress. And the number one cause of stress today in people is the frustration of trying to control events that are not in our control. In order to find our way in life we have to lose stress. My suggestions is to go Teflon not Velcro. Let the stress that others lay on you, or you lay on yourself, slide off like two fried eggs in a well-greased pan. People who are stuck on themselves get stuck in themselves. There is no quicksand like ego. Get stuck in it and you're sunk. Ego, ergo, I go."
- Noah benShea -

    "[W]hat they were covering up was much more than the outing of Valerie Plame. They were covering up the way the White House had used lies and deception to lead us into a war that was reckless and unnecessary - what Lt. Gen. William Odom, National Security Agency director under Reagan, has called 'the greatest strategic disaster in United States history.'
   "The reason why Cheney, Rove, and Libby were so aggressive in attacking anyone who questioned their rationale for war is because, by the summer of 2003, it was becoming embarrassingly clear how wrong they had been about Iraq - wrong about WMD, wrong about flowers thrown at our feet, wrong about the cost of the war. Had their incompetence not been so grotesquely manifest, there would have been no need for the attack on Wilson - and the resulting cover-up - that has now landed them all in such legal hot water.    "If Rove and Libby are indeed indicted (adding Cheney to our Merry Fitz-mas gift list would just be getting greedy), I believe it will shake up our government in a way we haven't seen since Watergate.
   "To borrow a phrase from that era, let me make myself perfectly clear: I'm not saying that Plamegate is the same as Watergate. I'm saying it's worse. Much, much worse. No one died as a result of Watergate, but 2,000 American soldiers have now been killed and thousands more wounded to rid the world of an imminent threat that wasn't.
   "Could there be anything bigger?"
- Arianna Huffington: Plamegate: Worse than Watergate -

    "Conspiracies to defraud usually begin with a goal that is not in and of itself illegal. In this instance the goal was to invade Iraq. It is possible that the Bush team thought this goal was laudable and likely to succeed. It's also possible that they never formally agreed to defraud the public in order to attain it. But when they chose to overcome anticipated or actual opposition to their plan by concealing information and lying, they began a conspiracy to defraud - because, as juries are instructed, 'no amount of belief in the ultimate success of a scheme will justify baseless, false or reckless misstatements.'
    "From the fall of 2001 to at least March 2003, the following officials, and others, made hundreds of false assertions in speeches, on television, at the United Nations, to foreign leaders and to Congress: President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his Under Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz. Their statements were remarkably consistent and consistently false.
    "Even worse, these falsehoods were made against an overarching deception: that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks. If Administration officials never quite said there was a link, they conveyed the message brilliantly by mentioning 9/11 and Iraq together incessantly - just as beer commercials depict guys drinking beer with gorgeous women to imply a link between beer drinking and attractive women that is equally nonexistent. Beer commercials might be innocuous, but a deceptive ad campaign from the Oval Office is not, especially one designed to sell a war in which 2,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died, and that has cost this country more than $200 billion so far and stirred up worldwide enmity."
- Elizabeth de la Vega: The White House Criminal Conspiracy -

    "And then there's this remarkable story in Bellaciao, developing the Michael Ledeen ties to the Niger forgery discussed here a year ago last August and again last July, which traces the caper back as early as January 2001...

'At night, between the first and second of the January 2001, a mysterious thief came to the embassy of Niger in Rome and into the residence of the counselor in charge. It turned out that some letterhead and seals (see photocopy) were missing. A second dossier on Niger-Iraq trade soon came into [SISMI asset Rocco] Martino's hands, one that included references to uranium trafficking. Martino claims he got it from embassy personnel and that he thought it was authentic.'

    "January 2001. That is, nine months before 9/11, it would seem the Niger forgery was already in motion."
- Rigorous Intuition -

"wikiphobia: fear of all people's opinions given equal weight."
- Clyde's Dictionary -

"Kofi Annan, Coming to a Computer Near You! The Internet's long run as a global cyberzone of freedom - where governments take a 'hands off' approach - is in jeopardy. Preparing for next month's U.N.-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (or WSIS) in Tunisia, the European Union and others are moving aggressively to set the stage for an as-yet unspecified U.N. body to assert control over Internet operations and policies now largely under the purview of the U.S. In recent meetings, for an example, an EU spokesman asserted that no single country should have final authority over this 'global resource.'"
- Adam Thierer and Wayne Crews: The World Wide Web (of Bureaucrats?) Keep your U.N. off my Internet -

    "Joseph and Lamoy Andressohn are a couple who are trying to change things and to provide a higher quality of life for their children. Through the challenges of the dietary discipline that they face every day they are paving the way for a better future for everyone. And yet they peacefully and with humility accept the consequences of their courage; the ultimate extreme punishment that society has dealt them. I can think of no greater torture than to have my children taken from me. When I look at the peace and love in Lamoy's beautiful face I am moved to tears. The picture on the rawfriends website was taken in the midst of all this tragedy! Surely she is a highly evolved human being. I have been helping to spread the word about the website where the Andressohns' story can be read. And several people have asked me the same question, which I will answer here. Some articles reported that the baby who died was only 7 lbs. at 5 months. People have been asking me why this didn't alert the parents that something was wrong. First of all their were four different birth weights recorded, one of them showing 13 lbs., another showing 7 kilograms (which is roughly the same). However baby Wohyah was born with a birth defect and had no thymus gland. Babies with this condition sometimes die before they are two months old. It is a testament to the raw vegan diet and the spirit of the Andressohns that Wohyah was blessed with 5 months to experience the love of his parents and siblings before taking leaving of this plane.
   "Many other facts have been left out of the Andressohns' story online for the sake of brevity. I learned these in my conversation with Steven Gibb. For instance out of 60 friends of the Andressohns who were called to the stand, 58 of them had nothing but good things to say. Only two people gave negative comments. One was that the Andressohns exercised with their kids in the hot sun; a "crime" most of us are surely guilty of every summer. And the other was a neighbor who said that the children had refused candy when offered, and had said that it was bad for you when questioned why..."
- Jinjee Talifero: What Really Happened to The Andressohns Raw Vegan Baby? -

"The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science - or of any honest intellectual inquiry."- Stephen Jay Gould - "Sometimes Israel means Israel, sometimes Zionist means Zionist. But sometimes it means something else. We need to know this, we need to become sensitive to the sometimes encrypted message, if we are to meet and defeat the true enemy. Because in every instance, Nazi means Nazi."
- The Left, The Right, and the Wrong -

"The Founding Fathers never imagined that our nation would need laws to protect us from someone like Bush."
- Tony Seton -

"There is excellent reason to believe that the Department of Defense is deliberately not reporting a significant number of the dead in Iraq. We have received copies of manifests from the MATS that show far more bodies shipped into Dover AFP than are reported officially. The educated rumor is that the actual death toll is in excess of 7,000. U.S. Military Personnel who died in German hospitals or en route to German hospitals have not previously been counted. They total about 6,210 as of 1 January, 2005. The ongoing, underreporting of the dead in Iraq, is not accurate. The DoD is deliberately reducing the figures. A review of many foreign news sites show that actual deaths are far higher than the newly reduced ones."
- Brian Harring: The Bush Butcher's Bill -

    "The real human cost, of course, is far greater than 2,000. It includes the 198 members of the 'coalition of the willing' who have died, almost 300 private contractors, 73 journalists, the 15,220 Americans who have been wounded, and the invisible dead from what the Guardian's Julian Borger called the 'extraordinarily high number of accidents, suicides and other non-combat deaths in the ranks that have gone largely unreported in the media.'
   "And then there's the sad fact that those deceased Americans and allies are a fraction of the number of Iraqi dead.
   "Extrapolating from a study of post-traumatic stress disorder published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 41,000 U.S. marines and army troops reported that they believed they had killed at least one Iraqi civilian in the 15 months following the 2003 invasion.
   "Estimates of Iraqi troops killed during the invasion range from 5,000 to as many as 45,000 projected by the Guardian. General Tommy Franks guessed it was 30,000.
   "While we're supposed to consider these "bad guys" and ignore their deaths, the majority were young men trying to escape poverty in a country with an unemployment rate as high as 70 percent during the sanctions regime.
   "The real human toll includes, too, the estimated 3,450 Iraqi police and security forces who have been killed in what is already a low-grade civil war. And according to Iraq Body Count, a website that gathers media accounts of civilian deaths, between 26,000 and 30,000 Iraqi civilians have died from coalition actions through Monday.But even those totals are dwarfed by the number of dead -- by some estimates over a million - caused by the U.N sanctions that started with Bush I, and continued under President Bill Clinton, whose Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, once described the effects of the sanctions on Iraq's children as 'worth it.'"
- Iraq's War Dead -

"The most remarkable aspect of my father's skills as a parent can be illustrated by the most powerful of all my memories of him. In all the years of his concern, tutelage and care I cannot recall hearing one mean-spirited or soul-crushing criticism, and I never witnessed his hand raised in anger regardless of provocation. This by no means reflected the purity of my youthful character, but rather my fathers forbearance and patience with fools. He was a man of mature years who had not forgotten one detail of the confusing struggles of his own boyhood, and tailored his parenting skills accordingly. In short, I received from my father as much as any son has a right to expect, and much more by some standards. It would appear to me that only a deeply disturbed father would want to see his progeny fail at anything in life. It is in the nature of most fathers to fervently yearn for their children's success in everything. It appears to represent one of the imperative bonding codes necessary between fathers and children, especially if an offspring shows a particular interest or inherent skill in his father's trade or profession."
- Thomas Steinbeck on John Steinbeck -

"Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd arrested porn site owner Chris Wilson, of Lakeland, Fla., on 300 obscenity-related charges on Oct. 7. Wilson's site, NowThatsFuckedUp.com also has offered soldiers free access to pornography in exchange for gory images of dead Iraqis."
- Mark Glaser: Can a Florida sheriff police obscenity on the Internet? -

"CORRECTION: We mistakenly quoted Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison calling for accountability from top White House aides Libby and Rove by saying, 'Something needs to be said that is a clear message that the rule of law is intact and the standards for perjury and obstruction of justice are not gray.' In fact, when Senator Hutchison made the remarks, she was calling for accountability from President Clinton in 1999. More recently, in regard to accountability for Libby and Rove, she referred to perjury as a 'technicality.' We regret any confusion caused by our error."
- Ironic Times -

"God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through."
- Paul Valery -

Everything Else

How can you possibly learn your physics without seeing these flash animations? You can't have your pudding unless you learn your physics.

Here's an excellent guide to digitizing vinyl.

Remember, stressed spelled backwards is desserts.