Quick Hits

Some wrap-up that will hopefully allow me to get away from this damn computer for a minute.

• Ladies and gentlemen, meet the next Michael Moore: Rick Santorum. I heard he just finished a two-week course at the LA Film School and picked up a Canon XL-1 with a really good camera mike. And he knows someone that knows someone that knows Final Cut. Ready to go!

• This is lovely from a military recruiter:

"GO BACK TO AFRICA AND DO YOUR GAY VOODOO LIMBO TANGO AND WANGO DANCE AND JUMP AROUND AND PRANCE AND RUN ALL OVER THE PLACE HALF NAKED THERE."

-- U.S. Army recruiter Sgt. Marcia Ramode, using her military email address to respond to Jersey City resident Corey Andrew, after Ramode learned Andrew was gay.

Tell me again how Gen. Peter Pace's thoughts about homosexuality being "immoral" isn't the prevailing opinion of the officer corps.

• The ERA is back and it looks like it will get a vote this year. 25 years ago it came within three states of being ratified. I wonder how far it could get now. In many ways the country is more socially liberal now, but the concentration of conservatives in the smaller states may make it difficult to get the required 3/4 of them to ratify. Which is ridiculous, since it's such a simple document. "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." How could that be controversial in a country where 50.7% of the population are women?

• Putting a hold on a bill to ban cockfighting is just the latest example that Tom Coburn is running to be the leader of the island nation of Crazydumbfuckistan.

• It's come to this in the US Attorney scandal: DoJ officials are now apologizing to Congress for lying. Can you get off from a federal crime just by saying "I'm sorry?" We'll soon find out.

• Just when you think that nothing is possible anymore in the world, you read a story about Iain Paisley and Gerry Adams agreeing on a power-sharing agreement, and you begin to have hope that dreams can become reality.

• The director of the National Institutes of Health has now come out for repealing the ban on new lines of stem cells for research purposes, and said that "American science will be better served" by Bush reversing his policy and giving hope that life-saving cures can be discovered. He'll be leaving the NIH to spend more time with his family soon, I'm sure. Maybe some other Karl Rove aide needs a job!

• Dissent in Iran: "activists burned an effigy of (Ahmadinejad), set off firecrackers and interrupted his speech with chants of 'Death to the dictator!'" Dissent in America: "Though the participants say they did nothing more than wear T-shirts with peace signs and carry peace banners with messages like "Kids Not Bombs"... one cop kneed a woman in the groin as she lay on the ground. Another broke a wooden peace sign that one of the participants had been carrying... one photo shows a cop with his arm around the neck of a retired priest, Frank Cordaro, in an apparent chokehold." Freedom isn't free!

• And finally, this is an hilarious account of yet another person banned by Bill O'Reilly... only this one talks back and is frankly more entertaining than the show could ever be.

Boy, you really know how to hurt a girl.

You got me fired from a job I didn't have, at a station that wasn't paying me.

Now what am I going to do? I thought a had a real future there! I mean, okay, maybe I guested twice a month for something like 5 years and never got any compensation. But it's not like I had to pay to park!