(no subject)

Today is Sweetmorn, day 19 in the season of The Aftermath, 3271.

Make it stop!

gsh, you'll appreciate this one. Maybe. ;)

Spot the inconsistency

PANAMA CITY, Panama (AP) -- President Bush vigorously defended U.S. interrogation practices in the war on terror Monday and lobbied against a congressional drive to outlaw torture.

"There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again," Bush said. "So you bet we will aggressively pursue them but we will do so under the law."

He declared, "We do not torture."

Over White House opposition, the Senate has passed legislation banning torture. With Vice President Dick Cheney as the point man, the administration is seeking an exemption for the CIA. It was recently disclosed that the spy agency maintains a network of prisons in eastern Europe and Asia, where it holds terrorist suspects.

In local news, our illustrious Republican gubernatorial candidate Jerry Kilgore got caught sending out misleading flyers ( "2005 Official Democrat and Progressive Voter Guide-Governor of Virginia") urging people to vote for Russell Potts, a Republican running as an independent. It was identified as being paid for by Kilgore supporters, but that note was inconspicuous and easy to miss. What people might not realize though (I missed it myself) is that the Democratic candidate, Tim Kaine, just got fined for doing the same thing first.

God, I can't wait until Wednesday morning. The campaign mailings have been incessant; I must have thrown away close to five pounds of glossy paper in the last couple of months, almost entirely from the Republican campaigns. Way to go with the targetted mailing there, bub; both of us give lots of money to the Democrats and aren't going to vote Republican without a damn good reason. The most offensive one I've gotten so far was masquerading as a personal letter from someone who turned out to be a police officer's widow out in the Winchester area, in which they managed to simultaneously appeal to the rabid death penalty supporters by talking about how Kaine wouldn't support the state executing her husband's killer (which isn't entirely true anyway) and the current crop of racist, xenophobic suburbanites by slipping in, as an aside, that the convicted murderer was "in the country illegally". It literally made me sick to read this crap. That's even leaving aside the local races, with insinuations that the other guy might just be gay because he's not married and doesn't have a family, and the "vote for him and you won't be able to fry convicted criminals anymore" and "he'll impose the homosexual agenda on us all and force us to let them thar queers get hit with the marriage penalty too just like us godfearin' straight folks and OMGWTFBBQ think of the CHILDREN!" Traffic? Jobs? Anything relevant? Not so much with that, other than Kilgore's impractical "widen 66 inside the Beltway" slogan which appeared on campaign signs just last week. (Don't ask me how he plans to make that happen in any sort of effective way short of grabbing land from surrounding neighborhoods under eminent domain, and won't that go over well.)

I actually wasn't intending to vote for governor this year, because frankly it's going to be "slightly lesser of two evils". I don't like any of the candidates. I probably will go vote, although I'm voting against people rather than for them. This is one of those times I regret the fact that Virginia's governor is limited to a single term, although in two years I bet I'll be glad of it.

(no subject)

Ed's scheduled for surgery on Wednesday afternoon, after which we'll have to dress him up as a little tiny pirate with an eyepatch. As long as we give him an ear of corn while we laugh, he'll be totally fine with it; he knows not this "dignity" of which we speak.