1. The new peanut butter Hershey’s Kisses. I like them, I guess, but not as much as the Kisses with Almonds.
2. Y’all, I am such a doofus. Having Kleinheider and Knucklehead devote posts to me yesterday and our Wayward Boy Scout also threatening to slap my ass… well, it tickled me. In a girly way. Today, I wore eyeliner and, I can’t even tell you, it’s so ridiculous, a necklace. Shoot. What next? Lipstick? What the fuck?
America, if you don’t find this hilarious, I just don’t know how to talk to you.
For the last five years, this administration has argued that we can do whatever the fuck we want, world opinion be damned–torture people, make them disappear into secret prisons never to be heard from again, listen in on the phone conversations of US citizens without warrants, etc.–as long as it keeps America safe, or, frankly, gives the appearance of keeping America safe.
Then, yesterday, the President was all like “Well, we can’t just be running around telling the United Arab Emirates that they can’t run our ports just because it’s an Arab country. It wouldn’t look right. What kind of message would that be sending the rest of the world?”
And then he threatened to veto any legislation that Congress might approve that halted the deal. Yes, the “Tough on Terror” President is going to side with an Arab country against the US Congress. You can almost hear the Democratic leadership wetting itself with glee.
Time and time again the Democrats have been handed political gold only to turn it into lead. But finally, here comes a political opportunity so easy that even they cannot fuck this up, because Republicans are also on-board.
And all this veto talk that was so important yesterday? Well, it doesn’t take a seasoned journalist to interpret what this headline means: Bush Didn’t Know About Ports Deal. He’s going to try to back away from all that tough talk to save some political face.
Still, it’s pretty funny that something that was so important yesterday that he was going to veto any effort to derail it, is so unimportant today that the President didn’t even know about it.
If the market must be utterly free, then George Bush is right and there is no reason why the United Arab Emirates shouldn’t control our ports.
I feel I owe Sarcastro. I think you do, too.
You don’t just send folks off to shoot at people and get shot at and to defend our country or liberate whoever needs liberating or tell them to do something and then blame them for doing it and then bring them home and set them loose to fend for themselves.
If Sarcastro goes crazy or ends up with long-term effects from exposure to oil fires or whatever, because of what we asked him to do, then we owe it to him to take care of him once he’s home.
He doesn’t want to be taken care of. But really, tough shit.
He’s free to barricade himself in his house and refuse all help, but that doesn’t mean we’re not obliged to make it available.
My nephew regularly shows up at my parents’ house with weird rashes and burns and scrapes. He’s four. A lot of times, this shit just happens. Hell, I have a big bruise on my arm right now and I don’t know where it came from. I’m just an easily bruised person.
But when he comes into my dad’s room late at night and pats my dad’s arm and says, “It’s okay, Grandpa, sometimes mommies don’t come home.” it makes me want to drive over to North Carolina and run my sister-in-law over.
I don’t, because all I have are my suspicions and a four year old nephew who doesn’t think there’s anything weird about the way that he lives and who has no interest in explaining where every strange bump and scrape on his body came from.
If you’ve known me longer than five minutes, though, you know that I’m terrified for him.
What do I want for him more than anything? I want him to live until August. I want him to get enrolled in kindergarten, because the law says he has to be, and I want him to go to a public school, because that’s all his mom can afford to send him to, and I want him to be so cute and charming to a tax-payer funded teacher that when he starts showing up late or not at all, because his mom can’t be bothered, I want a Department of Family Services to swoop in there and rescue him.
I can’t do this. I have a job and just one car. I don’t have unlimited wealth to hire a private detective to follow him around and make sure he’s okay. No one in my family has enough money to quit their jobs and move to North Carolina to keep their eye on things and intervene if need be.
Plus, she moved to North Carolina, in part, to keep my family out of her hair.
I need for there to be someone with the weight of the government behind him or her who can force her to do right by my nephew.
He deserves that, even if we aren’t rich enough to provide it for him.
Tiny Cat Pants 