Tell me if you think this is funny.

A guy gets a call from his wife's doctor to tell him that there was a mix-up in his wife's blood test. They don't know if she has Alzheimer's Disease or AIDS. The husband asks what the doctor is going to do about it, and the doctor says "We're going to drop her off about ten blocks from your house. If she finds her way home, don't fuck her." 

Would you tell this joke to someone with AIDS or Alzheimer's? I say you can because they're not the butt of the joke, the husband is. It's not a joke on them, it's just a joke that happens to contain the words AIDS and Alzheimers. Just because a joke may contain certain buzzwords doesn't mean it's a joke ON the buzzword.

I bring this up because somebody got offended at one of my jokes last week, a joke that contained the word "lesbian." (The letter is reprinted below.) They accused me of telling another "gay" joke, displaying insensitivity to my homosexual readers. I'll let you decide, but first, here's a joke you've heard before that isn't funny. 

Why did the moron throw butter out the window? He wanted to see a butterfly. 

I don't blame you for not being amused, but since the butt of the joke is the moron, only morons would actually be offended. Change the word "moron" to gay or blonde or Serb and the joke makes a statement that gays or blondes or Serbs are morons because they become the butt of the joke. That's one reason why humor is a sense. You've got to be able to tell whether the teller is just trying to be funny or is actually making an offensive statement. A joke can feel wrong without actually being wrong. It's also why I like puns. They're just wordplay. There's no butt of the joke so no one can possibly be offended. A bad pun might clear a room but not because of racism or sexism. A pun is a joke without a butt.

Bill Hicks had this problem with Letterman on his last broadcast appearance on the show. He had a joke that contained within it a cripple who was a vital part of the joke but who was not the butt of the joke. The network had a policy against making fun of cripples so they wouldn't let him tell it. Hicks explained that there was no way a cripple would be offended by the joke because the joke wasn't on the cripple, they were just part of the narrative, but no go. It seemed the policy wasn't that cripples couldn't be made fun of but that the very word cripple couldn't appear in a joke under any circumstances. This made Hicks nuts. He tried to tell the joke without using the word cripple and bombed horribly, but they invited him on again. The next time he learned his lesson and just did his routine the way he saw fit. They refused to air it, thus creating the holy grail of the lost Bill Hicks tape that no one has ever seen but the NBC censors.

So last week I hinted that Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers probably wasn't a lesbian because what do lesbians know about premature withdrawal. Now I ask you. Are lesbians the butt of this joke, and don't get smart. Leave that to me. I know there's an inoffensive lesbian butt joke here somewhere and I'll let you know when I find it. In any case, I insist this is a joke that simply contains the word lesbian but is in fact not derogatory towards them in any way, unless lack of knowledge of a generally heterosexual sexual practice is derogatory. What it makes fun of are the people who accused her of being a lesbian.

I love lesbians. Really. They're A-OK in my book, even though a lesbian once broke my heart. But are lesbians so humorless that the word lesbian can't even appear within 500 yards of a joke, even if the joke isn't on them? I don't think so. No lesbians complained, only one gay guy, who won't be the butt of any jokes in this column. Except for that one.

The New Covenant with America
by Robert B. Reich

1. Competence. We promise America a competent government headed by people with expertise and experience. We will never appoint or confirm cronies whose main qualification for office is personal connection or party loyalty.
2. Fiscal responsibility and a capital budget. We will get the federal budget back under control by barring special spending (pork to political loyalists back home) and corporate welfare (subsidies to particular industries like agribusiness, oil, and pharmaceuticals). We will create a national capital budget so that federal construction money never again goes to bridges to nowhere in Alaska and instead goes to stronger levees in New Orleans.
3. Fighting terrorism and getting out of Iraq. We will fight terrorism with a strong military and with economic investments and aid for poor nations that are often the breeding grounds for terrorism. But we will withdraw American troops from Iraq. As even our generals now tell us, our presence there is incubating new terrorists and fomenting anti-Americanism around the world.
4. Ending torture and respecting the rule of law. We will respect the Geneva Conventions. We will never condone torture or keep people imprisoned indefinitely without due process of law.
5. Reducing oil dependence and greenhouse gases. We will reduce American dependence on oil and reduce global warming. By 2020, 20 percent of our energy will come from solar, wind, biomass, and other alternative sources. Also by 2020, America will utilize 20-percent less fuel than today.
6. Restoring the middle class. We will restore the growth of the American middle class and of middle-class incomes. Supply-side economics, which rewards the rich with generous tax breaks and tells us that the resulting economic growth will trickle down to everyone else, has proven a cruel hoax. Little or nothing is trickling down. A quarter of all the benefits of economic growth now go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans. We are determined to reverse course.
7. A progressive tax code. The cost of making the nation's homeland secure against terrorism and natural disasters and of providing adequate health care and education -- without falling deeper into debt -- will require more federal revenue. Yet the middle class cannot afford more taxes. It's time for the rich to bear their fair share. We will impose a surtax of one-tenth of 1 percent per year on net worth in excess of $1 million and will roll back the administration's tax cuts for those earning more than $300,000 a year.
8. A minimum health-care wage. The cost of health insurance for the typical family is rising by double digits, while 46 million Americans are without insurance altogether. We will establish a simple minimum health-care wage offering basic health insurance -- one free checkup per year, five free medical visits, one free dental, choice of doctor or dentist limited to an approved list, free drugs up to $1,000 per year -- to any American wishing to join. The expected large scale of this program will give government bargaining leverage to get low prices from providers and drug companies.
9. Lifelong education through progressive vouchers and re-employment insurance. We will finance every K-14 student (that's right -- two years beyond high school) with a progressive voucher in an amount inversely related to family income. (This year, for example, it would range from $15,000 for students from families at or below the poverty line to $3,000 for students from families in the wealthiest 10 percent.) The vouchers could be used at any publicly certified school. In addition, we will turn the unemployment insurance system into a re-employment insurance system. Recipients will get job training, job-search assistance, and, if the new job pays less than the old, wage insurance paying half the difference for a year.
10. Maintain separation of church and state. We will never allow religion to dictate whether an individual must be kept on life support, young people can gain access to birth-control information or counseling, women will have the freedom to choose to terminate a pregnancy, research can be done on stem cells or any other potential scientific innovation, or public schools must teach nonscientific interpretations of sacred texts. 

Robert B. Reich is co-founder of The American Prospect.

 Gallery of the Week

If Fox News Had Been Around Throughout History

Calling All Artists

I Feel So Much Safer Now

   "A 67-year-old man who says he doesn't even like watching movies has been sued by the film industry for copyright infringement after a grandson of his downloaded four movies on their home computer. The Motion Picture Association of America filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against Fred Lawrence of Racine, seeking as much as $600,000 in damages for downloading four movies over the Internet file-sharing service iMesh. The suit was filed after Lawrence refused a March offer to settle the matter by paying $4,000...    "'I personally didn't do it, and I wouldn't do it. But I don't think it was anything but an innocent mistake my grandson made.' Lawrence said his grandson, who was then 12, downloaded The Incredibles, I, Robot, The Grudge, and The Forgotten in December, without knowing it was illegal to do so.
   "The Racine man said his grandson downloaded the movies out of curiosity, and deleted the computer files immediately. The family already owned three of the four titles on DVD, he said."
- Grandpa Is Sued Over Grandson's Downloads -

    "Dr. Rafil A. Dhafir was sentenced to 22 years in federal prison on Thursday, October 27th, 2005 for sending humanitarian aid to starving Iraqi civilians through his charity Help the Needy. Dr. Dhafir is an esteemed member of the Muslim community here in Syracuse, New York, and he is respected nationally and internationally. His sentencing follows 31 months of detention without bail and a 17-week trial... The 60-count indictment included International Emergency Economic Powers Act, IEEPA, violation, money laundering, wire fraud and Medicare fraud, and the government won conviction on every count except one where they had mistakenly listed the wrong bank.
    "I believe it is impossible to overstate the message that has been sent to the Muslim community via this detention, prosecution and sentencing. It says, in no uncertain terms: If we can get Rafil Dhafir, we can get anyone. It also lets them know that a pillar of their society can be felled without so much as a call for equal justice from the non-Muslim community...
   "I did not know Dr. Dhafir before attending his trial. Everything I know about this man comes directly from the proceedings. I thought my sharply different experience of the proceedings would be cause for discussion in the press, at least, if not concern. The trial struck me as similar to the show trials of the former Soviet Union in the 1930s that I have seen. There were days when I literally cringed because the evidence of the government was so weak...
   "Dr. Dhafir's case is one that sets legal precedents, right here on our doorstep. And it also raises questions about selective prosecution and freedom of speech - Dr. Dhafir was a vociferous critic of the US policy in Iraq, as I witnessed in a fund raising video during the court proceedings. I believe this extreme outspokenness was a major contributing factor to Dr. Dhafir's present situation. Barrie Gewanter, Director of the ACLU-CNY, has stated that her organization has concerns about selective prosecution because comparable violations have been addressed with civil fines...
   "Dr. Dhafir wrote a 46-page pamphlet that was handed out to the media after he was sentenced. In one paragraph toward the end of the piece Dr. Dhafir says: 'What was the result of Feb 26, 2003 besides imprisoning of innocent people? Scores of innocent elderly American cancer patients died needlessly, innumerable tens of thousands of Iraqi needy (children, women and men) died, and more than that suffered malnutrition and the humiliation of poverty. An entire segment of our society here was treated as criminals, intimidated, interrogated and threatened. Never in the history of the Islamic Society of Central New York had we had so many cases of depression and suicide that the mosque had to engage the services of a psychiatrist to help out. The dream of this Republic being a sanctuary for the oppressed was shattered on that day and a new sad reality was erected in its place.'"
- Katherine Hughes: Individual Responsibility and Complicity -

    "An Ohio woman was arrested after she didn't pay just more than $1 that she owed in income taxes, WLWT-TV in Cincinnati reported.
   "Deborah Combs owed the city of Loveland $1.16 last year, but she also hadn't filed her city income tax forms in five years, the television station said.
   "She said officers pulled her over and acted as though she were a violent criminal.
   "'One sheriff approached my car with his hand on his gun,' she said. 'Another from the other side of the car leaned in and said, "Are you Deborah Combs?" He said, "We have a warrant for your arrest." I was absolutely shocked.'"
   "Combs said she thinks the arrest and charges are over-the-top for the amount she owed. 'What they've spent in stamps is more than what I owe,' she said."
- Ohio Police Arrest Woman For $1 In Unpaid Taxes -

"A Denpasar court has set a date for the trial of Australian model Michelle Leslie. The former underwear model, who was arrested for ecstasy possession two months ago... Leslie was arrested in August when Bali police allegedly found two tablets of the designer drug in her handbag during a sweep at a rave party in the hills near Kuta. She faces a maximum 15-year sentence for drug possession."
- Date set for model's trial -

Plop and Drop of the Week

   "What if you had a power unit that generated substantial electrical energy with no fuel? What if it were so rugged that you could parachute it out of an airplane? What if it were so easy to set up that two people could have it running in just a few hours? Now there is such a device - built by a small Virginia start-up - and the federal government has taken notice.
   "SkyBuilt Power Inc. has begun building electricity-generating units fueled mostly by solar and wind energy. The units, which use a battery backup system when the sun is down and the wind is calm, are designed to run for years with little maintenance...
   "After hurricane Katrina, SkyBuilt units could have been rushed to the scene and set up in hours, restoring power to hospitals, evacuee centers, police and fire departments, and cellphone towers.
   "One big drawback of solar energy until now has been that it was a 'custom industry,' says Scott Sklar, vice president of SkyBuilt. Components are usually put together on-site, and differ from location to location. 'When you buy a car, do they ship in all the pieces to your front yard and have somebody assemble it? I'm afraid not. We [at SkyBuilt] learned something from Henry Ford,' he adds.
   "SkyBuilt follows the Ford model. Its MPS units are what Sklar calls 'plop and drop, plug and play.'
   "It works this way: Parts for each Skybuilt unit are packed into standard-size shipping containers. The containers, specially modified and strengthened, can be moved by ship, truck, train, or even dropped by a laser-guided parachute to the most remote location.
   "Once on-site, the container is opened, and arms and poles are attached to the outside to hold solar cells and wind turbines. A prototype built here in Arlington has been running steadily for more than a year without repairs or maintenance."
- John Dillin: The latest investor in green energy - the CIA. Within hours, solar and wind energy units can be up and running in war or disaster zones. -

Evolution or Intelligent Design?

   "The U.S. generals running the war in Iraq presented a new assessment of the military situation in public comments and sworn testimony this week: The 149,000 U.S. troops in Iraq are increasingly part of the problem.
   "During a trip to Washington, the generals said the presence of U.S. forces was fueling the insurgency, fostering an undesirable dependency on American troops among the nascent Iraqi military, and energizing terrorists across the Middle East.
   "For all these reasons, they said, a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops is imperative."
- Seattle Times news services: Top generals say U.S. troops' presence may fuel insurgency -

   "There is a parallel investigation into the uranium forgeries themselves that has been going on for a couple of years now lead by the FBI. But once again few are holding their breath - particularly given the way the Bureau's previous investigation into the post 9/11 anthrax attacks appears to have been frustrated once it became clear that the evidence was leading to people at the Department of Defence as the source of the material used...
   "On 1 August 2004 the Sunday Times in London ran the following eyebrow-raising disclosure: 'The Sunday Times has tracked down a mysterious middleman who was a key figure in the notorious Niger uranium hoax before the Iraq war, writes Nicholas Rufford. Speaking to a reporter in a cafe in Brussels last week, he claimed he had been an unwitting dupe in the scam, which embarrassed both Tony Blair and George W. Bush over Saddam Hussein's phantom weapons of mass destruction. The middleman, an Italian who uses the name Giacomo, is a small-time tipster said to have worked for Italy's armed forces and intelligence services. He says Sismi, the Italian foreign intelligence service, used him to disseminate fake documents purporting to show Saddam had tried to buy uranium for nuclear bombs from Niger. I received a call from a former colleague in Sismi,' Giacomo said. "I was told a woman in the Niger embassy in Rome had a gift for me. I met her and she gave me documents. Sismi wanted me to pass on the documents but they didn't want anyone to know they had been involved." He came into possession of a bundle of telexes, letters and contracts that appeared to show Saddam had struck a deal with Niger for 500 tons of uranium ore, enough when refined to make several weapons. Giacomo said he regretted the hoax but had believed the documents were genuine when he passed them to intelligence contacts and a journalist. The hoax had far-reaching effects. Presenting his dossier on Iraq's weapons in September 2002, Blair accused Saddam of seeking 'significant quantities of uranium from Africa'. Bush reiterated the charge in his state of the union speech. When Giacomo's documents were discredited by the International Atomic Energy Agency last year, George Tenet, then director of the CIA, apologized. The British government and MI6 claim, however, they have independent evidence of Iraq's 'Niger connection'."
- Weapons Of Mass Financial Destruction -

"The right wing machine, for the last 40 years, has successfully cowed the media into thinking there's a liberal bias, which there isn't, and then WAY overcompensating the other way. There's a reason they have to spend so much money and time pushing these narratives into the marketplace and manipulating the masses. It's because right-wing ideas and right-wing cruelty is not the norm -- it isn't. That's why they have to steal elections, that's why they have to use the threat of terror, that's why they have to gay bash, and manipulate your emotions. And what right wing radio hosts do -- they capture the people's lesser nature. It's very easy. The Bush campaign also brought out the worst in people. People's lesser nature is easily tapped into. You make people loyal when they're sitting in fear, in a heightened state of anxiety or anger. That's what the right does because it's easy."
- Five Minutes With: Janeane Garofalo -

"criminal: n. A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation."
- Howard Scott -

"journalistic excellence: to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted."
- Joseph Pulitzer -

"If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance, we must provide a safe place for their perception."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt -

    "The predicament becomes instantly clear when you enter Bethlehem, passing from the outer reaches of Israeli-controlled Jerusalem into territory administered by the Palestinian authority. First, you see the barrier, grimly snaking from east to west. Then there is the inevitable checkpoint: 50 or so yards of sandbags, prefabs and breeze blocks, where soldiers warily check the documents of foreign visitors and those fortunate Palestinians whose IDs allow them to travel north. Here, the incense-laden piety of the Church of the Nativity is replaced by a cold tension - though its nervy ambiance is as nothing compared with a similar installation that lies another half mile inside Bethlehem's limits.
    "Rachel's Tomb is the burial place of the wife of Jacob, described in the book of Genesis. It's a Jewish holy site, where women come to pray for their children - though, in one of those unfortunate coincidences that so unsettle Middle Eastern politics, it adjoins a Muslim cemetery. Though well within the Palestinian territory enshrined in the 1993 Oslo accords, its sanctity ensured that it would form an enclave 'under the security responsibility of Israel', with the proviso that the 'free movement of Palestinians' on the main road that links Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron would be guaranteed. Now all that is a memory: an austere concrete roadblock, draped with the Israeli flag, scythes the road in two. Meanwhile, work is proceeding on a fortified corridor that will ferry Israeli traffic to and from the tomb, and take its place in the 500-mile length of concrete, tarmac and wire that forms the barrier, built - according to Ariel Sharon - 'in order to defend our citizens against terror activities.'
    "What this means for the local residents is simple enough. Where once there was a teeming neighbourhood, festooned with cafes and souvenir shops, there is now an arid no man's land where Israeli soldiers pace along the deserted store fronts; the few businesses that are left face imminent extinction. The grandly named Bethlehem Souvenir Centre, where displays of religious knick-knacks - vast wooden crucifixes, framed crowns of thorns, small phials of water allegedly from the River Jordan - stretch into the distance, was once busy and prosperous. Now it seems destined to fall into dereliction."
- John Harris: Marooned - Bethlehem, a place of Christian pilgrimage for centuries, will soon be encircled by Israel's security barrier. Is the town to become no more than a museum among ancient shrines? John Harris meets the people campaigning to keep it alive -

"It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil."
- Fredrich August von Hayek - 

"Just because there are only two explanations for something doesn't mean one of them is right."
- Random Idiot -

    "An uncivil war rages inside the walls of the West Wing of the White House, a bitter, acrimonious war driven by a failed agenda, destroyed credibility, dwindling public support and a President who lapses into Alzheimer-like periods of incoherent babbling...    "White House staff members say the White House is like a wartime bunker where shell-shocked aides hide from those who disagree with their actions and office pools speculate on how long certain senior aides will last.
   "Bush, whose obscenity-laced temper tantrums increase with each new setback and scandal, abruptly ended one Camp David meeting by telling everyone in the room to 'go fuck yourselves' before he stalked out of the room.
   "Senior aides describe Bush as increasingly edgy or nervous or unfocused. They say the President goes from apparent coherent thought one moment to aimless rambles about political enemies and 'those who are out to get me.'
   "'It's worse than the days when Ronald Reagan's Alzheimers began setting in,' one longtime GOP operative told me privately this week. 'You don't know if he's going to be coherent from one moment to the next. What scares me is if he lapses into one of those fogs during a public appearance.'
   "Aides say Bush, who has always had trouble focusing during times of stress, is increasingly distant during meetings, often staring off into space during discussions on the nation's security and other issues.
   "'Bush usually reserves his celebrated temper for senior aides because he knows they can take it,' the Daily News reported. Lately, however, some junior staffers also have faced the boss's wrath.
    "'This is not some manager at McDonalds chewing out the help,' a source with close ties to the White House told the paper. 'This is the president of the United States, and it's not a pleasant sight.'"
- Doug Thompson: Bush's Increasing Mental Lapses and Temper Tantrums Worry White House Aides -

"Scooter Libby need not worry about losing his job. He must realize that there is always an  opening at FOX News for a right-wing convicted felon. I envision the 'Ollie and Scooter Hour.'"
- Karl Azid: The Three Stoolies -

"If instant World Government, Charter review, and a greatly strengthened International Court do not provide the answers, what hope for progress is there? The answer will not satisfy those who seek simple solutions to complex problems, but it comes down essentially to this: The hope for the foreseeable lies, not in building up a few ambitious central institutions of universal membership and general jurisdiction as was envisaged at the end of the last war, but rather in the much more decentralized, disorderly and pragmatic process of inventing or adapting institutions of limited jurisdiction and selected membership to deal with specific problems on a case-by-case basis ... In short, the 'House of World Order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great 'booming, buzzing confusion,' to use William James' famous description of reality, but an END RUN AROUND NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY, ERODING IT PIECE BY PIECE, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault."
- Richard N. Gardner, in Foreign Affairs (April 1974) -

"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers. The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth." 
- Aldous Huxley: Brave New World, foreword to 1946 edition -

"...our impulses are being redirected. We are living in an artificially induced state of consciousness that resembles sleep.....the movement was begun eight months ago by a small group of scientists who discovered, quite by accident, these signals being sent through tele......the poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices......their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent, to ourselves, to others, we are focused only on our own gain. We ha......please understand, they are safe as long as they are not discovered. That is their primary method of survival. Keep us asleep, keep us selfish, keep us sedated......they are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery. The revolu......we cannot break their signal, our transmitter is not powerful enough. The signal must be shut off at the source. We have......................."
- Broken transmission of rebel group in the John Carpenter movie, They Live -

"The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed, I suppose. They placed me under arrest. And I wasn't afraid. I don't know why I wasn't, but I didn't feel afraid. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen, even in Montgomery, Alabama." 
- Rosa Parks -

"Let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world."
- Henry David Thoreau -

"...the Federal Government has demonstrated with abundant clarity that whenever its financial survival is at stake, it will not hesitate to ignore any paper restraints that may stand in its way, and will use its monopoly over what passes for 'justice' for its true purpose, which is to provide a veneer of morality over its monstrous exercise of raw power."
- Jim Davies: The Suppression of Dissent -

"The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer."
- Henry Kissinger -

"When they discover the center of the universe, a lot of people will be disappointed to discover they are not it."
- Bernard Bailey -

    "The scene is Las Vegas and the trial, that of Irwin Schiff and his friends and employees Cindy Neun and Larry Cohen. None of them profess to be anarchists and all accept, approve and willingly pay taxes that are enacted into law; but thirty years of research have convinced Schiff that the US 'income tax' has not been enacted into law. I happen to agree--but again, it's not my purpose to argue that point; rather to show what government does to try to suppress such a conclusion. All agree that by publishing his findings and showing how to frustrate the IRS ' attempts to collect a trillion dollars a year despite the perceived absence of legal right, Schiff has cost the FedGov many billions of dollars; and whether he's right or mistaken, that's an achievement to put all of us to shame. It's several billion dollars' worth of evil, havoc and mayhem that the government could not wreak--thanks to the efforts of one good man.
    "The FedGov's endeavors to prevent anything but the vague semblance of a fair trial were funneled mainly through the federal judge presiding--one Kent Dawson, may his name forever live in infamy...
   "Supposedly, criminal trials in Anglo-American Law are adversarial; with a prosecutor and a defendant competing and a judge to provide each with fair opportunity to present his case and with a jury to decide who's right. It's a given that the judge must have no 'interest' in the case, so as to keep the proceedings impartial. Yet here, the presiding judge was being paid over $160,000 a year by the client of one of the two parties, and his future career was wholly dependent on an outcome of the trial favorable to that party, and his freedom from a damaging future IRS Audit might likewise have been contingent on his performance in securing one."
- Jim Davies: The Suppression of Dissent -

"A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention."
- Aldous Huxley -

"So little time and so little to do."
- Oscar Levant -
"We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know."
- W. H. Auden -

"The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. -

"The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
- George Bernard Shaw -

"Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness or have gone stark raving mad."
- Norm Papernick -

"We often do good in order that we may do evil with impunity."
- Francois De La Rochefoucauld -

"It matters not whether you win or lose; what matters is whether I win or lose."
- Darrin Weinberg -

"No means are necessary to be completely here. Neither active means on the one hand, nor passive means on the other. Because in both ways, you are trying to move away from the immediate now. But you see, it's difficult to understand language like that. And to understand what all that is about, there is really one absolutely necessary prerequisite, and this is to stop thinking. Now, I am not saying this in the spirit of being an anti-intellectual, because I think a lot, talk a lot, write a lot of books, and am a sort of half-baked scholar. But you know, if you talk all the time, you will never hear what anybody else has to say, and therefore, all you'll have to talk about is your own conversation. The same is true for people who think all the time. That means, when I use the word 'think,' talking to yourself, subvocal conversation, the constant chit-chat of symbols and images and talk and words inside your skull. Now, if you do that all the time, you'll find that you've nothing to think about except thinking, and just as you have to stop talking to hear what I have to say, you have to stop thinking to find out what life is about... The easiest way to stop thinking is first of all to think about something that doesn't have any meaning."
- Alan Watts -

"At a time when people are so conscious of maintaining their physical health by controlling their diets, exercising and so forth, it makes sense to try to cultivate the corresponding positive mental attitudes too." 
- His Holiness the Dalai Lama -

"Only fools are positive."
- Moe Howard -

Everything Else

A Nov. 2, 2005 CBS poll has Bush's favorable rating at 33% and Cheney at 19%. 

Of course only the poor take busses so why should the administration care that Greyhound has shut down hundreds of community bus stations listed here.

Confused? I don't blame you. Read Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict - A Primer.

I know you've got something better to do than play X-rated versions of Mah-Jong, Tetris, Pong, and other popular games.