Lucie Videos

So I've got a channel set up at YouTube with some really cute videos of Lucie. Drop by and check 'em out. Here's one to start you off:



Fair warning: make sure the volume's not cranked!

Deer, meet headlights

This is the political equivalent of going quail hunting with Dick Cheney.

Newt Gingrich is an asshat

You can do a whole round-up of the stuff that people have blamed the killings at Virginia Tech on:

• video games, of course, but also


• lax gun control (just to note, Cho didn't use an assault weapon)


• too much gun control


• the sissification of men in a world where women have the audacity to, like, not sleep with psychopaths


• And even terrorists and jihadist imagery
  

But Newt Gingrich is a leader. He's a trailblazer. He's willing to speak the hard truths. Also, he's an asshat.

By way of comparison

While the U.S. is mourning the deaths of 32 students and faculty members at Virginia Tech, what are they doing in Baghdad? I say this not to belittle the tragedy in Blacksburg, but conversely to illustrate just how horrible it is to be an Iraqi: just today, almost five times as many people were killed in this Baghdad attack as died at Seung Cho's hand. And this happens every day in every city across Iraq.

Flags are half-staff across America. Think there's any chance people in Iraq might be a bit upset too?

Glenn Greenwald on the "unconservative conservatism"

I was unaware that there was a federal database containing records of citizens' pharmaceutical consumption. I'm extremely interested in that. But anyways, Glenn's recall of the infamous "jackbooted thugs/black U.N. helicopters" hysteria from the right in the late '90s is exactly what I was thinking of, also. How do you go from that to "more surveillance, please"? I think it's a matter of who holds the power. Once it wasn't Clinton, then an all-powerful omniscient federal government could be trusted, it would be right, if only the solons of America had the correct letter to the right of their names (George W. Bush, R), then we could make sure that everyone followed the straight and narrow.

Let's just make sure that we don't hear a bunch of bullshit from the GOP about individual rights and freedom from government interference again when their brief and tawdry moment in the sun is over...

This is what conservatism has come to

Better more surveillance than another 9/11. Man. I'm not an absolutist when it comes to privacy rights, but I find it amazing that the pro-surveillance group comes from two active contributors to the National Review and that an active (if relatively conservative) contributor to the New Republic is the anti-surveillance group. Can we now agree that the Bush Administration has stood the old concepts of conservative and liberal on their head?

Bob Barr, at least, remains consistent.

Democrats to hold fast on Iraq benchmarks in new spending bill

How do I know? Check this out:

Cheney... predicted that Democrats will be forced to cave... [saying that] Congress will end up passing a "clean" bill that funds the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without any troop withdrawal timetables. "They will not leave the troops in the field without the resources they need," Cheney said of the Democrats... "I'm willing to bet the other way -- that, in fact, they will."

So Dick Cheney is making a prediction. This is the guy who predicted that our troops would be greeted as liberators. That there were multiple significant connections between the 9/11 plotters and Iraq. That the Iraqi insurgency was in its last throes. And who can't even manage to shoot caged quails without occasionally catching his buddies in the face with a wad of buckshot.

You know your loser friends who fail at everything and you joke that you would go to them for advice if only so you'd know what not to do? Cheney's that guy and if he's predicting the Democrats will fold, I feel much more comfortable now that the Democrats will stand fast on the benchmarks in the new spending bill.