The Governor-Elect of California
Contemplates Doing to a Playmate
What He's Going to do to the State

Might I point out that while it's certainly hypocritical of Republicans to have attacked Clinton for sexual impropriety while ignoring Schwarzenegger for behaving pretty much the same way, it's equally hypocritical of Democrats to have defended Clinton while attacking Schwarzenegger for behaving pretty much the same way. My life in Hollywood, including 20 years of covering the scene for publications like the LA Weekly and Daily Variety, has given me a different perspective on the so-called "sexual battery" committed by musclehead. 

Those of us who lead normal lives can understandably be mystified by this type of sexist behavior, but you've got to understand that for every woman who was turned off by musclehead's grabbing at them, there were 100 other women who were turned on by it. Women who were throwing themselves at him. Try to imagine, day in and day out, women throwing themselves at you, women willing to do absolutely anything you ask. Try to imagine that every time you grab a strange woman's breast, you don't get a slap in the face, you get a blowjob. That's what life is ACTUALLY LIKE for people like musclehead and Clinton and other people of enormous power in Washington and Hollywood. After years of such a life, it's perfectly understandable that they end up with a deranged sense of entitlement. They think every woman wants to fuck them because every woman they meet DOES want to fuck them. Almost. Every once in a while they go about their normal routine of dropping their pants or groping someone and the gropee mysteriously doesn't respond by dropping their clothes too, but they're the anomalies. 

I once dated a famous actress. I was insecure because I wasn't rich and figured I'd be unable to show her the kind of time she was used to. I was wrong. Everything was free. We'd go to a movie and we wouldn't have to buy tickets, the manager would come out and cordially show us to a seat. We'd go to a bar and the drinks would be on the house. Live your life like that for a while and you come to expect that sort of treatment, and you risk looking like a dilettante if you don't get it. 

If 99 out of a hundred women drop their panties for you at the slightest touch, I think you can somehow be forgiven for those few times you touched someone who didn't respond, as long as you didn't push it by proceeding any further, which musclehead apparently didn't, and which I don't believe Clinton did either. To normal people like you and me, it looks like piggy behavior. To people like musclehead, it's just another day in the life of getting laid by an endless parade of new women every day. 

In any case, I don't think I'm being paranoid by believing the whole "scandal" was a devious ploy by the Republicans to distract the media from the REAL story, that musclehead has already planned to forgive California's debt to Enron instead of pursuing payback, which was Davis' plan, and that he's going to continue in the ruinous march towards deregulation of the utility industry. (The latest)

"He looks like a condom stuffed with walnuts."
- Molly Ivans -

And speaking about hypocrisy, will liberals please quit whining about how Rush Limbaugh belongs in jail instead of rehab? NOBODY BELONGS IN JAIL FOR SUBSTANCE ABUSE. Quite the opposite. Everybody in jail for substance abuse should be freed immediately. Even assholes like Limbaugh don't deserve the implementation of unjust laws.

ASCII Version of the Kobe Bryant Case

         __
     __/o \_
     \____  \ 
         /   \
   __   //\   \
__/o \-//--\   \_/
\____  ___  \  |
     ||   \ |\ |
    _||   _||_||

Time for Musclehead to Use Those Frequent Flyer Miles

According to the California constitution, Cruz Bustamante will become the official Governor every time Governor Schwarzenegger leaves the state.

Spam Quote of the Week

"Buy.com is giving away a Segway! Simply purchase anything on Buy.com and be automatically entered! No purchase necessary."

Puzzle of the Week

Keith Richards has his own website. Check out "Ask Keith" but don't read the answers, click on "hear Keef" and try to decipher what he's saying.

Shockwave Games of the Week

Proof that games can be original, clever, and very funny. You're an egg and you've got to get out of the refrigerator before you're turned into an omelet. Don't miss One Man's Fridge.

Create your own superhero. Be sure to click on the "all random" button a few times.

Shockwave Movie of the Week

Okay, I'm going to have to insist you look at Forehead Shavecut and explain it to me after you stop laughing.

Calling All Filmmakers

Entertainment attorney Mark Litwak has an excellent site with a guide to financing independent films and a glossary of industry terms.

Also there's the latest Art of Funding newsletter.

Screenwriter's Voice at UnderGround Online not only reviews movies but scripts of movies in production. Full of great spoilers, including M. Night Shyamalan's next. Fascinating comparisons of scripts to the final product.

Spooky Cartoon from Hell

This is the actual Dilbert cartoon from the 2001 desk calendar

The Bush/Schwarzenegger Connection

Guess who also went AWOL from the army?

Don't Take My Word For It

"A hundred thousand elephants,
A hundred thousand horses,
A hundred thousand mule-drawn chariots,
Are not worth a sixteenth part
Of a single step forward."
- Buddha -

"Large nations do what they wish, while small nations accept what they must." 
- Thucydides -

    "All right, let me see if I understand the logic of this correctly. We are going to ignore the United Nations in order to make clear to Saddam Hussein that the united Nations cannot be ignored. We're going to wage war to preserve the UN's ability to avert war. The paramount principle is that the UN's word must be taken seriously, and if we have to subvert its word to guarantee that it is, then by gum, we will. Peace is too important not to take up arms to defend. Am I getting this right? Further, if the only way to bring democracy to Iraq is to vitiate the democracy of the Security Council, then we are honor-bound to do that too, because democracy, as we define it, is too important to be stopped by a little thing like democracy as they define it.
   "Also, in dealing with a man who brooks no dissension at home, we cannot afford dissension among ourselves. We must speak with one voice against Saddam Hussein's failure to allow opposing voices to be heard. We are sending our gathered might to the Persian Gulf to make the point that might does not make right, as Saddam Hussein seems to think it does. And we are twisting the arms of the opposition until it agrees to let us oust a regime that twist the arms of the opposition. We cannot leave in power a dictator who ignores his own people. And if our people, and people elsewhere in the world, fail to understand that, then we have no choice but to ignore them.
   "Listen, Don't misunderstand. I think it is a good thing that the members of the Bush administration seem to have been reading Lewis Carroll. I only wish someone had pointed out that Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are meditations on paradox and puzzle and illogic and on the strangeness of things, not templates for foreign policy. It is amusing for the Mad Hatter to say something like, 'We must make war on him because he is a threat to peace,' but not amusing for someone who actually commands an army to say that. As a collector of laughable arguments, I'd be enjoying all this were it not for the fact that I know -- we all know-- that lives are going to be lost in what amounts to a freak, circular reasoning accident."
- Peter Freundlich -

"People are just about as happy as they make up their minds to be."
- Abraham Lincoln -

"Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there."
- Will Rogers -

"No nation ever had an army large enough to guarantee it against attack in time of peace or insure it victory in time of war."
- President Calvin Coolidge -

"Don't steal. The government hates competition."
- Anonymous -

"Gun Control isn't about guns. It's about control."
- Anonymous -

    "Let your sleep tonight be untroubled, citizen! The fiend Tommy Chong is now safely in the custody of the Taft Correctional Institute in Bakersfield, California. For the next nine months, this sixty-five year old, meditating, wood-working, charity-giving, inner-city youth-teaching father of six - who's been married to the same woman for more than thirty years - will be kept from mixing with polite society, for our own safety and protection, of course. Chong was arrested in February, and was recently found guilty of contravening a rarely-enforced federal sub-statute which lists 'bongs' (but not 'waterpipes') as illegal drug paraphernalia. Chong sold custom glass pipes on his website, ChongsBongs.com. If he'd called his company ChongsWaterPipes.com, instead, he would probably be a free man today.
   "Courtroom Trivia: During the trial, attorneys for both the defense and prosecution admitted to having never heard of the law used to prosecute Chong before Witchfinder General Jesus H. Ashcroft decided to initiate two targeted anti-stoner crackdowns with codenames that might just as well have been thought up by Sgt. Stedanko himself: Operation Pipe Dreams and Operation Headhunter."
- The Daily Dirt (Warning: intelligent commentary surrounded by hard-core sex ads) -

"The public has been led into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. We are today not far from a disaster." 
- T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), Sunday Times of London August 22, 1920 -

"Rush Limbaugh is a lame professional Swine and he makes a good living at it. He is like a hired Geek in some traveling backwoods carnival -- the freaks who bite the heads off Chickens -- but Limbaugh is a modernized Geek who thinks he can bite the heads off of people."
- Hunter H. Thompson -

"I take prescription painkillers because of Bill Clinton's penis."
- Rush Limbaugh's penis -

"A politician should do two terms - one in office and one in jail."
- Bumpersticker -

"Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it."
- Pablo Casals -

"The Supreme Trick of mass insanity is that it persuades you that the only abnormal person is the one who refuses to join in the madness of others, the one who tries vainly to resist. We will never understand totalitarianism if we do not understand that people rarely have the strength to be uncommon."- Eugene Ionesco - "Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring it about?"
- Maurice Strong, Head of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro -

"Whenever you do something that is truly worthwhile, you are going to alienate somebody."
- Jack Lemmon -

"Both enlightened Europeans and well-meaning Israelis have expressed the far from unreasonable opinion that Sharon and his ministers have gone mad. After all, Syria and Israel have adhered to the cease-fire agreement brokered by Henry Kissinger for 29 years. There has been no incident across the border in the Golan Heights, despite the prolonged occupation of this Syrian territory and the blatant arrogance of its annexation. Why has the beleaguered Israeli prime minister embarked on yet another front, in addition to his war against the Palestinians in the Territories and Hizbullah in Lebanon?"
- Haim Baram: Israel's Ideological Raid on Syria -

"An adviser who persuades Bush to adopt Policy X does not have to be worried that our President will keep turning it over in his mind, monitoring its progress, reading and thinking about the complaints of its critics, perhaps even re-examining it on the basis of subsequent developments, and announce one day that he prefers Policy Y. This does not happen. He knows what he thinks, and he has to be told it only once."
- Michael Kinsey: Why Bush Angers Liberals -

"Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him."
- Aldous Huxley -

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

"kleptocrat nation (klepte krat nashen), n. 1. a body of people ruled by thieves. 2. a government characterized by the practice of transferring money and power from the many to the few. 3. a ruling class of moneyed elites that usurps liberty, justice, sovereignty, and other democratic rights from the people. 4. the USA in 2003."
- Jim Hightower -

"The wicked thing about both the little and the great 'collective faiths,' prehistoric and historic, is that they all, without exception, pretend to hold encompassed in their ritualized mythologies all of the truth ever to be known. They are therefore cursed, and they curse all who accept them, with what I shall call the 'error of the found truth,' or, in mythological language, the sin against the Holy Ghost. They set up against the revelations of the spirit the barriers of their own petrified belief, and therefore, within the ban of their control, mythology, as they shape it, serves the end only of binding potential individuals to whatever system of sentiments may have seemed to the shapers of the past (now sanctified as saints, sages, ancestors, or even gods) to be appropriate to their concept of a great society."
- Joseph Campbell: Myths To Live By -

"[Kilgore Trout, the science fiction writer] wrote a story one time about an optimistic chimpanzee who became President of the United States. He called it 'Hail to the Chief.' The chimpanzee wore a little blue blazer with brass buttons, and with the seal of the President of the United States sewed to the breast pocket....Everywhere he went, bands would play 'Hail to the Chief.' The chimpanzee loved it. He would bounce up and down."
- Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions, 1973 -

"Rush Limbaugh is a hero to some and a big fat idiot to others. But when it comes to his criminal investigation for allegedly buying thousands of prescription painkillers, his politics are irrelevant. As long as no one else was harmed as a consequence of his drug use, Rush Limbaugh should not face incarceration or otherwise be punished for what he chose to put into his own body. Neither should any other American, regardless of class, age or race."
- Matthew Briggs: Hero or Big Fat Idiot, Rush Limbaugh Should Not Face Prison -

"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resorting to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy." 
- Robert L. Jackson, Chief U.S. Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunals -

"The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character, and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. Only by the vision of that Wisdom can the horoscope of the ages be read, and by falling back on our better thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which is innate in every man, we can know what it saith. Every man's words, who speaks from that life, must sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity, and to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Over-Soul -

"What are our duties as patriots? Is one a patriot if they fly the flag, to stand for the national anthem? Yes and no. One may do these things and be filled with love of country, but if that is all you do, then you have not done enough. In this time, and in this place, and with all that is happening in this country and around the world, the duties of a patriot go far, far, far beyond flying the flag. The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'"
- William Rivers Pitt -

"We are suggesting nothing short of a revolution. But revolution is not terrorism. The organization required to stage a revolution is enormous. It will take immense labor. It will take immense struggle. It will require commitment and fearlessness and the conviction of right reason and moral rectitude."
- Michael Rectenwald: Total Recall (of our rights), And What Is To Be Done! -

"These principles and these tastes, I am their fanatic adherent; and fanaticism in me is the product of the persecutions I have endured from my tyrants. The longer they continue their vexations, the deeper they root my principles in my heart."
- The Marquis de Sade -

"I hate to spread rumors - but what else can one do with them?"
- Amanda Lear -

Everything Else

Mandatory reading: The Top Ten New Copyright Crimes. #1) Watching PBS without making a donation.

Because meth is a relatively new problem in Minnesota, City Pages has published Meth Myths, Meth Realities: What we know--and what we don't--about methamphetamine's history, chemistry, and impact on users, which is a fascinating, comprehensive, and very objective look at the drug.

Wanna go to MIT? Why bother? Do it at home. All their course material is free online.

Running out of space on your hard disk? How about switching to a web browser that's only 409K? Go to tiny apps and replace some of those mammoth programs with tiny ones that do the same thing.

Join the campaign to stop war profiteers.

Is nuclear waste trucked by your home? Find out here.