It’s short. Just watch it. Explore the insanity that is the modern conservative mind.

“How is holding them in a prison in Guantanamo that meets all the standards here or holding them in a prison in your neighborhood, your hometown, New York, Chicago, or Cleveland? What’s the difference? If they are in jail, they’re in jail. What the real difference is we have a place where we can secure them even if the military commission that tries them doesn’t find them guilty.”
–Representative Michael Rogers (R) - Michigan

Why would we need to detain or secure someone in a prison, if said person was found not guilty? What an idiot. No, not an idiot … an evil, small-minded, and un-American moron. The legal systems of both our country and our military don’t imprison people who are found not guilty at the end of their trial/commission. Not saying innocent people don’t end up in prisons, but we usually take the time to falsely find them guilty first. When I heard Mr. Rogers saying this last night, I had a serious WTF?! moment.

The Daily Show bit from which I grabbed the above quote was funny and worth watching. Well, funny in that sad sort of way Daily Show bits tend to be. Stewart makes it funny, but it’d be even more funny if this kind of stupid crap wasn’t going on out here in reality.

“Ladies and gentlemen, just figure this … you got somebody, he’s really weird, and his sexual orientation is he likes to have sex with ducks. Is he protected under hate crime? Is he protected if he likes to have sex with little boys? They haven’t made that clear!”
–Pat Robertson (on the recently passed hate crimes legislation)

The only reason I bothered transcribing and posting that idiocy is so you’ll know what the two awesome chicks in the following video are singing about … though the chicks are still awesome and the song hilarious, even if you don’t know the background.

Last night I saw Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on one of our news programs flapping his jaws about the Gitmo detainees. It’s worth sharing.

REID: I’m saying that the United States Senate, Democrats and Republicans, do not want terrorists to be released in the United States. That’s very clear.

QUESTION: No one’s talking about releasing them. We’re talking about putting them in prison somewhere in the United States.

REID: Can’t put them in prison unless you release them.

QUESTION: Sir, are you going to clarify that a little bit? …

REID: I can’t make it any more clear than the statement I have given to you. We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.

Does that make sense to anyone else? It makes no sense to me. No one has been suggesting we just turn them loose on American soil, and we can’t “put them in prison” unless we “release them” … huh?

Do any of the people screaming about how we can’t possibly put such dangerous people into our prisons not realize we have a whole bunch of really dangerous people already in our prisons? Have they not compared the “prison” at Gitmo with our super-max prisons? Gitmo is a cardboard box compared to our super-max prisons. If these people were so dangerous and capable that a super-max prison on US soil can’t contain them, they would have already broken out of Gitmo and taken over Cuba.

Additionally, we don’t even know how dangerous or not most of these detainees are, as we never bothered to figure that out. They are labeled as extremely dangerous because they are in Gitmo. Obviously, anyone who is in Gitmo MUST be dangerous, otherwise, why would they be there? It’s ridiculous logic.

Our prisons are more than capable of holding anyone at Gitmo, and our court systems are more than capable of holding trials for even the most hardened of criminals. Reid and the rest of the panicky elected officials are mental if they think otherwise.

Here’s a clip from last night’s Daily Show that brings the point home:

Beautiful.

I remember the first time I saw the Milky Way in its entirety. I’m sure it wasn’t the first time I saw it, but it was the first time I really noticed it. I was away at band camp somewhere near Marble Falls. It was Friday night, and all of us were sprawled out in a grassy area to watch a movie (one of the Herbie, Love Bug ones) on a screen set up on a makeshift stage. I’d lain back on my blanket just as the band director turned off the spotlights, and the majesty of the stars filled my view. It took my breath away, and it must have done so for everyone. No one moved to start the movie, and in the darkness could be heard whispered “Wow” and “Awesome” and “Oh, look over there!” That night, a few hundred teenagers and a handful of adults stopped and stared at the sky as though we’d never seen it before.

I haven’t seen anything but the brightest of stars in a decade. Austin has awful light pollution. Even my mother’s back yard, where I spent many nights after that trip to band camp lying in the cool grass and staring upwards, isn’t as dark as it used to be. I keep meaning to go out, away from the cities, to see the Milky Way again, but it never happens. There’s never enough time (or a million other excuses). I’m sure that after not having seen the sky as it should be seen in so long, it would amaze me again just as it did when I was a teenager.

I think we should go camping in West Texas this fall. Nothing out there but flat desert and darkness and a sky to cover it all.

[spoken in an excited, nasally, almost valley girl kind of way with breathlessness and hand waving] “Like, OMG!!! I totally can’t believe he ordered a burger without ketchup! And Dijon mustard? He ordered Dijon mustard?! OMG! OMG! OMG! Who does that?!?!”

This is completely worthy of being listened to (at least for a minute or two) just for the funny factor. Sad funny, but still, it made me laugh for a minute or so.

I guess when the only thing your opposition has to gripe about is your choice of condiments, life’s not going too badly.

We can’t be the only working class people in America that has a spicy or Dijon mustard in our fridge. Can we? Also, the hamburgers at the places I get hamburgers come default without ketchup. I didn’t realize eating a burger without ketchup was a criminal offense. I put ketchup on my fries, not my burger. I guess that makes me an elitist too. Ha!

Between twenty thousand and forty thousand people die every year in the USA from flu or complications of flu (pneumonia). These deaths are caused by the usual types of flu viruses we all know and hate –the ones that go around every year. I repeat: normal old flu viruses kill between twenty thousand and forty thousand people a year in the USA. Even using the smallest of those two numbers, that is an average of fifty-four people a day. I only mention this because I had the opportunity to be exposed to some television news today.

Holy cow. Panic much?
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“I just wanted to see how much of an insult it was to be called an ‘ignoramus’ … since I didn’t know what it meant, I just Googled it. It’s an ‘ignorant lawyer’! We all know Barack Obama is a lawyer, so Chavez was saying he was an ignorant lawyer.
–Gretchen Carlson, Fox & Friends - Fox News

Gretchen Carlson needs to Google the difference between the etymology^† of a word and its definition^††. I know, I know, the first entry at Google for “ignoramus” has a lot of words and symbols before it gives the definition, so I can see how the feeble-minded, unaccustomed to reading information out of a dictionary might be confused, but the definition is most certainly there. “Ignoramus” according to the page she read at Merriam-Webster states quite clearly that the meaning of the word is an utterly ignorant person or a dunce. Perhaps Ms. Carlson didn’t know the meaning of “ignorant” or “dunce” and couldn’t be bothered to look those words up.

I would however suggest that any adult speaker of English who doesn’t know –without looking it up on Google or in a dictionary– what kind of insult the word “ignoramus” is or what it means may very well be an ignoramus.

1. † While Merriam-Webster only gives the etymology of the word from its recorded usage in a 17th century play of the same name (Ignoramus) about an ignorant lawyer, that is not the word’s definition. In fact, it’s not even the correct and full etymology. “From New Latin, a grand jury’s endorsement upon a bill of indictment when evidence is deemed insufficient to send the case to a trial jury, from Latin, we do not know, to be ignorant.” I trust my much better paper dictionaries over anything she could possibly find as the first link of a single word search on Google, thank you very much. [↩]
2. †† What the word means, dear Gretchen, in common parlance … not where the word came from. If we used the historical use of words to define their present usage, “preposterous” would still mean “in the wrong order” rather than “absurd” … which is what not knowing what ignoramus means is: utterly absurd or preposterous. Didn’t Gretchen go to grade school? Has she really never been called an ignoramus before or even heard the word somewhere in her 43 years of life?! [↩]

A demonstration of the Cat Triangulation system, by which I can always tell when something is amiss in the house and exactly where the problem is by seeing in which direction all three cats’ heads are pointing. This time it is something scratching around and being noisy in the wall of the shower. It sounds like a mouse. It would be the first mouse to be in the house.

Hope it finds its way out of the house and doesn’t die in the shower … or possibly worse, find its way out into the open where the cats (at least two of them) will surely kill it ruthlessly and with no mercy. No, actually, the cats killing the mouse would not be worse than it dying in the wall, so let’s hope it just finds it’s way out of there.

For all I know, it’s just a Texas Cockroach. I kid you not, we grow them as big as mice around here. Sometimes bigger!

Oh please just make it go away. Die, get out, be killed by cats, I don’t care! I want to take a shower again sometime in the future, and I don’t want to take a shower with something crawling around in the wall. Eeek!

Having trimmed down my backlog of stored and unwatched video podcasts, and unsubscribed to the things I never seemed to watch regularly, I thought I would share with you the ones that seem to be my favorites … or the ones I watch with any amount of regularity anyway.

Beautiful Places in HD^† (online or iTunes HD or Standard)

Ancient Places TV (online or iTunes) No longer in production, but old episodes still worth watching! Wish they still made it!

Craft Magazine Podcast (online or iTunes)

Spitzer Space Telescope Podcast (online or iTunes)

New Yorker Animated Cartoons (online or iTunes)

StartCooking (online or iTunes)

Ultra Kawaii (online or iTunes)

Many of these are available for subscription through services other than iTunes at their online home.

1. † OnNetworks, by the way, has all kinds of interesting little shows. [↩]

Lin just emailed this to me, and I laughed my butt off. Thought I’d share.

“You can’t foment. That’s a violation… You can’t create yourself an impression that a stock’s down, but you do it anyway because the SEC doesn’t understand it. But a hedge fund that’s not up a lot really has to do a lot now to save itself, so … this is different from what I was talking about at the beginning where I was buying the Q’s (?) and stuff. This is a … just blatantly illegal, but when you have six days and your company may be in doubt because you are down, I think it is really important to foment, if I were one of these guys.”
–Jim Cramer, December 22, 2006

That’s from a video made for and by TheStreet.com. I was exposed to it last night on The Daily Show. To me, it was the clips shown from that one video (currently available on YouTube) that were the most damning things Jon Stewart threw at Jim Cramer last night^†. Not that there wasn’t a lot of damning things thrown at Cramer during the course of the show-long interview. Boiled down to its essence, Jon Stewart smacked Jim Cramer’s dick into a lemon cream pie. There wasn’t anything funny about The Daily Show last night, but it did make for good TV viewing.

If you haven’t been keeping up with the Cramer vs. Stewart battle of words, and I imagine many people haven’t been, it started on Monday night, when Jon Stewart blasted CNBC for their lack of foresight concerning the impending economic situation we now find ourselves in. He didn’t single out Cramer for abuse, but attacked the entire cabal of talking financial heads at the network. Stewart’s guest that night was supposed to be Rick Santelli, who was recently getting a lot of news coverage for this recent on-air rant^††.

“The government is promoting bad behavior… I’ll tell you what, I have an idea. The new Administration’s big on computers and technology. How about this, President and new Administration, why don’t you put up a Web site to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the loser’s mortgages, or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people who might have a chance to actually prosper down the road and reward people who actually carry the water instead of drink the water…”

“This is America. How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors’ mortgages that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”
–Rick Santelli, CNBC

Santelli had more sense than Cramer. He ducked out of his appearance on The Daily Show at the last minute. Cramer decided, quite foolishly, to take offense at Stewart’s poking CNBC, and started talking back. After all, Jim Cramer is a financial analyst on CNBC, and Jon Stewart is just a comedian. A comedian! What could Stewart possibly know about anything?! Well, Stewart is smart, and he’s go fantastic staff who love nothing more than to dig through hours of video and internet archives looking for damning clips and quotes. Cramer would have been wise, since he was not the sole topic of the original rant about CNBC, to have kept his mouth shut and ignored it. But he didn’t, because Stewart is a comedian.

“A comedian attacking me. Wow. He runs a variety show”
–Jim Cramer, The Today Show

A word to the wise: if you feel you have been attacked by The Daily Show and must say something about it, do not say it on national TV first thing in the morning. You will get skewered for it that night. And that’s exactly what happened, and kept happening, because Cramer kept going on other TV shows and fighting back … against this comedian he felt he was better than and who he woefully underestimated.

So every night this week, The Daily Show skewered Cramer, and every morning, Cramer fought back. It’s been highly entertaining, and last night it culminated with the show-long interview of Cramer on The Daily Show. I don’t know why he went on the show. I imagine he thought he’d come out of it looking good, that Stewart, being just a comedian on a “variety show”, couldn’t possibly make him look bad. Well, Cramer looked bad, and Jon Stewart effectively won the war of words. Never underestimate a comedian. I’ve known more than a few, and every last one of them was sharper than your average tack. The stupid ones don’t get their own TV shows, or if they do, they don’t last long.

You can watch the complete episode of last night’s Daily Show here, and all this week’s Cramer bits from The Daily Show are currently featured on the front page at the show’s web site. Definitely worth watching. It’s some pretty serious stuff, with just a little funny on top. Not your usual Daily Show. Also the show-long interview, something I don’t recall ever happening on The Daily Show in all the years I’ve been watching it, ran longer than the show, so there are outtakes … a lot of outtakes. Almost another whole show worth of outtakes. I haven’t watched them yet, so I’m going to embed them behind the cut and go make some more coffee. I have the feeling, the outtakes are going to be really, really tasty with coffee^†††. I love it when Jon gets angry.
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1. † There were a lot of damning things in this Cramer video, especially how he suggested how easily Apple stock could be manipulated with lies and rumor-mongering. This video, by the way, was made shortly before the MacWorld Expo at which the iPhone was presented, so his comments on how to drive the stock down by rumor-mongering about Verizon and AT&T not liking the iPhone is interesting, to say the least. I’m no financial expert, but I’m pretty damn sure this kind of thing is excessively illegal. [↩]
2. †† The whole Santelli rant is worth watching, if your blood pressure can handle it. What an ass. [↩]
3. ††† Full disclosure: I hate Jim Cramer. He’s on the list of people I don’t allow to appear on my TV screen, right up there with Bill O’Reilly and Nancy Grace (to name a few). Getting to see him have his dick handed to him by Stewart was delicious to me. I can’t wait to watch the episode again and to see what the outtakes contain. [↩]

I love contact juggling. Maybe someday I’ll try to do it myself, even though I am a huge klutz.

“Health care is a privilege. For some people it’s a right, but for everyone it’s not necessarily a right.”
–Representative Zach Wamp, Tennessee, on MSNBC

Of course, I have some choice words I’d personally like to say to Representative Wamp, but I think I’ll let the Universal Declaration of Human Rights say it for me.

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Article 25, UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Yes, in the United States right now, health care is a privilege. It is a privilege for those who can afford it and a privilege to those who are currently healthy. Here are a few health care facts for Representative Wamp to consider:

*Although nearly 46 million Americans are uninsured, the United States spends more on health care than other industrialized nations, and those countries provide health insurance to all their citizens.

*Premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance in the United States have been rising four times faster on average than workers’ earnings since 1999.

*Every 30 seconds in the United States someone files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health problem.

*About 1.5 million families lose their homes to foreclosure every year due to unaffordable medical costs.
–source

But wait … he goes on (and on, and on):

“The 45 million people who don’t have health insurance, about half of them choose not to have health insurance.”
–Representative Zach Wamp, Tennessee, on MSNBC

Perhaps he should do some research rather than pulling statistics out of whatever orifice he pulled his false statistics from. I suggest he begin by reading some studies, like this one by The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Of the uninsured who are employed, 64% aren’t offered an employer-sponsored healthcare plans. Only 20% of uninsured working adults who are offered employer-sponsored healthcare plans decline the coverage, and they often do so because they are unable to afford their share of the premiums. And then, of course, there are the unemployed, the sick, and the disabled who have no access to any potential employer-sponsored healthcare plans at all. Where Mr. Wamp came up with his 50% of uninsured people choosing not to have health insurance, I do not know, but it doesn’t jive with any studies or statistics I have been able to find, unless he means having to choose between having a roof over one’s head, food in one’s belly, and functioning utilities or having health insurance is some kind of choice people make willingly.

Since Mr. Wamp seems to feel that healthcare is a privilege, then I suppose he wouldn’t mind if we the people, the ones who pay for his nice elected-official-style healthcare plan, decide we don’t want to do so anymore. Let him pay the exorbitant fees for buying private, non-employer sponsored healthcare, or let him sit at home and hope he feels better tomorrow because going to the doctor isn’t in the budget (and never will be) … as so many of the rest of us do.

My pro-life voting record has been solid throughout my 14-years in the House. While my party does not control the legislative agenda, I will continue to fight against the loss of innocent life.
–Representative Zach Wamp

Yes, the Republicans … so very pro-life, until you take your first breath. Then you are on your own, baby!

But Representative Wamp does agree with me that dying bees are a serious issue. Too bad he doesn’t think dying humans are important too.