Don't ask

Among the previews before Brokeback Mountain* at the Dupont Circle Loews last night: a lengthy recruitment spot for the Army National Guard.

*which made me cry like a child. Beautiful movie. You should see it.

District proposes looting Metro funds for stadium project

Hey, it makes sense, right? Use public transportation money to fix a new public transportation problem. Ooops, did I say "fix"? I meant "fund a new public transportation problem."

DC officials are now considering reaching into Metro's joint development fund to help pay for upgrades to the Navy Yard stop on the Green line. The upgrades will be needed to accomodate the huge surge in traffic to and from the proposed new baseball stadium in Southeast DC.

Some might say this is exactly what the joint development fund is for. However, I predict that all the civic-minded folks who have opposed the $500 million+ publicly funded stadium will not find this arrangement to their liking either.

Craigslist pick of the day: mystery cookie

The post is here.

I won! I won!

Last night, I played Drag Queen Bingo at Club Chaos for the first time.

Not only did I win, but I won porn.

And not only did I win porn, but I won straight porn.

Yesssssss.

One Senator, clearly very proud of his lack of opposition to torture

It's a good thing that Senators can remain anonymous when they place a hold on pending legislation, 'cause nobody wants to be that guy. Especially when that guy is trying to block the passage of anti-torture measures. As in this case, in which an unnamed Republican has placed a hold on an intelligence authorization bill that includes amendments requiring reports to Congress about the treatment of U.S. detainees. (NYT)

Who could it be? Perhaps it's one of the nine, all R's, who opposed the McCain amendment to prohibit torture by the military:

Ted Stevens (AK)
Pat Roberts (KS)
Thad Cochran (MS)
Tom Coburn (OK)
James Inhofe (OK)
Kit Bond (MO)
John Cornyn (TX)
Jeff Sessions (AL)
Wayne Allard (CO)

Boo-yah!

Yesterday the Senate upheld a filibuster to keep Arctic Refuge drilling out of the Defense appropriations bill. (WP)

Your Incredible Hulk tie won't help you now, Senator Stevens. Congratulations, Arctic defenders!

[Previously: Merry Christmas from Ted Stevens]

Ironic pet tricks

I am not usually one to blog about pets. However, I am visiting my parents for the holidays, and they have a very funny dog. She is a very small, very young border collie named Faye. And this is why she is hilarious:

1. She recently consumed a very early edition of...Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. HAHAHAHA.

2. She has a favorite TV show, and it's Bonanza. (When the theme music comes on, she perks up her adorable ears and bops her head back and forth.)

3. She is both smart and flexible. I have trained her to perform the yoga position "downward facing dog" on command.

The new local spot

I have never felt like so much of a chi-chi bourgeois liberal urbanite as I did just now while drinking an eight dollar cocktail at Busboys and Poets (14th & V NW) and reading The Nation as I waited for my chi-chi bourgeois liberal urbanite friends. Please kill me.

But I have to say, the art is pretty cool. And so is the pesto veggie lasagne.

My web publishing service is lazy and distracted

Blog isn't publishing properly. Blogger™ explains:

"There were errors.
001 Broken pipe"

Dude, what are you doing back there?

Bush support jumps--no, actually, it surges

Are you telling me that Sunday night's "up is down, freedom is slavery" speech worked? (WP) Because at the time I thought, "I'm missing the first fifteen minutes of The Family Guy for this crap? I mean, this is certainly funny, but not in quite the same way."

Oh, America, you're such a tease. You responsibly give Bush bad numbers in response to his most inexcusable fuckups, but then this. I'm not talking to you anymore.

Merry Christmas from Ted Stevens

House Backs Arctic Drilling at End of Marathon Session (NYT).

So, to bring everybody up to speed, this is the result of the latest attempt to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas development. Senator Ted Stevens* (R-AK) got drilling language attached to a bill to fund the Department of Defense and Katrina reconstruction. Very difficult to vote against. Dirty, dirty, dirty.

I want to be pissed at the House, but hell, if I had to work until 5 a.m. on a Sunday night, I might vote away my own mother. Actually, it gets even worse for those hard-working public servants, because this is what they were voting on at 6:20 a.m.:

H.R. 4510: to direct the Joint Committee on the Library to accept the donation of a bust depicting Sojourner Truth and to display the bust in a suitable location in the rotunda of the Capitol.

*Who, I recently learned, frequently wears an Incredible Hulk tie to work

Bah, humbug

TO: Anonymous MySpace user, anonymous Xanga user, Ballparkguys.com, and all the people who are using that one image of the Grinch I posted last year
FR: Waage
RE: Blogging etiquette 101

Hi, nice to meet you. I'm glad to see your websites are getting so many hits. I can tell they are because you have deep linked to images on my site, and many, many people are downloading these images each day.

So here's the thing: it's fine if you want to use images from my blog, but can you please host them on your site instead of just linking to mine? That way you can use your bandwidth, and I can use mine. Alternatively, you may link to the page containing the image. That's fine too.

Thanks, and have a happy holiday season.

Keep your filthy hands off my identity

Weird. So, a few months ago someone filched my debit card info and emptied my bank account. While traumatic at the time, it was resolved pretty quickly, and I forgot all about it. But now it is becoming clear that my personal information is on the market. I have received numerous "phishing" phone calls that attempt to obtain personal information such as my social security number under the guise of checking some account or other. (I got one of these calls today and it really shook me for some reason, making me feel violated and insecure.)

DC is the number 1 metro area for identity theft, my friends. Buy a shredder.

There's a horror movie in here somewhere

Now it turns out that the French face transplant donor may have committed suicide. (NYT)

Important ethical questions are raised by this possibility, but all I can think of is that one episode of the Simpsons when Homer gets a hair transplant from Snake...

Appropriate captions

Gggah! Where is Senator McCain's left eye?

Some people never leave Northwest

I express astonishment that the DCeiver had never heard of or been to the Capitol Hill bar affectionately known as "Finn McCarBombs" until just now. (DCeiver in Wonkette) The rest of us have been there more times than we can remember.

Countdown to the big party

"Most people need only to know that they are drinking Champagne to be happy." (NYT on low price, quality champagnes)

Damn right. It doesn't have to be from France.* It doesn't have to be served in a flute. In fact, it doesn't even have to come in a bottle, and it could be drunk with a plastic bendy straw.

*Though of course, dahling, if it's not from the Champagne region of France, it's not Champagne--it's "sparkling white wine." Raise your hand if you first learned this from watching the Quentin Tarantino movie Four Rooms as a teenager.

Enviros! Listen up! Kristof's got something to say!

My favorite is when Nicholas Kristof gives advice to the environmental movement. Not because he's 100% off base, but because he does so in a tone that is always a weird combination of ignorance and mild condescension. For example, see Has Kristof ever BEEN to Washington?, 3/19/05.

In today's NYT Kristof is in fine form, with a really good suggestion about how the environmental movement can assert a positive vision. The suggestion is: North American cheetah reintroduction. (Why didn't we think of this sooner?!?! I must convince my organization to hire a Pleistocene re-wilding specialist immediately!)

As usual, on the right track with the "positive vision" thing, but...ummm...we're all kinda busy with...some..other...stuff...

DeLay redistricting under review

Occasionally cheaters don't win. And it's a beautiful thing to see. (WP)

The same "win at all costs" ethic that gave Bush II the presidency, by some accounts*, also drove the Texas redistricting. Maybe the slow but steady fall of DeLay and his handiwork is proof that this ethic doesn't pay in the end.

*See Jeffrey Toobin, Too Close to Call, 2001; also Joshua Green, "Karl Rove in a Corner," Atlantic Monthly Nov. 2004.

Blogs I like

It's the holidays and I feel like spreading some love. I don't do the blogroll thing (not enough margin space), but here are some independent* blogs that I have been digging recently. Maybe you will dig them too.

What Would J. Crew Do?
Vote Pombo Out
Go Fug Yourself
The All Spin Zone
Drinking Liberally DC

*i.e., not run by mainstream media outlets, corporations, or Nick Denton.

Don't eat the orcas.

They are chock-full of PCBs. Mmmm! (CNN)

It's simply more bad news for one of the world's most regularly screwed regions (environmentally speaking)--the arctic. Whether it's persistent organic pollutants, global warming, or oil drilling, the Arctic Circle and its denizens definitely take a lot of crap.

Freaky looking trees

Just posted some pictures from my recent side trip to Joshua Tree NP. Beautiful! But wear sunscreen. And, according to the Park Service, carry 2 gallons of water around with you.

Andrew Sullivan's easy out

In this week's Weekly Standard, columnist Charles Krauthammer takes issue with the idea of a "no torture, ever" policy, arguing that in some cases, torture may not only be morally permissible, it may be morally required.* And"once you have gone public with a blanket ban on all forms of coercion," he argues, "it is going to be very difficult to publicly carve out exceptions."

Andrew Sullivan responds in The New Republic that, while Krauthammer is right that torture may be necessary in rare circumstances, that does not mean it needs to be legalized. Sullivan suggests, instead, that while we should place a legal ban on torture, we must recognize that such a law may have to be broken. For example, the President in a hypothetical "ticking time bomb" situation might simply have to violate the ban.

This is a clever turnaround of Krauthammer's argument, and I applaud Sullivan for it. At the same time, I’m disappointed in Sullivan for passing the buck on the important moral question of whether torture is ever permissible. "Well, maybe it is, but I don't want to be the one to enshrine that in law...let's leave it up to the president to decide...when the time comes..." Well, we all know what happens when we do that.

The bottom line is, America needs to decide whether torture should ever be permitted. Even for those who were horrified by the events at Abu Ghraib, this may be a difficult decision when they walk through some of Mr. Krauthammer's hypotheticals. But it is a decision we have to make.

You and I can argue about whether or not torture is ever excusable, but what is definitely inexcusable is to shun responsibility for what our government does to people in its custody.

*"Ethics 101: A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He's not talking....Not only is it permissible to hang this miscreant by his thumbs. It is a moral duty."

Fall fashion critique, vol. II: ugly. ass. pajamas.

(OK, so it's not fall anymore. But having posted a Volume 1 it seemed appropriate to add a Volume 2.)

Picture this: your loved one finds the cute, pink-wrapped Victoria's Secret gift box underneath the tree on Christmas morning. "Oh, you shouldn't have!" she coos as she tears off the paper. With anticipation, and a loving glance your way, she opens the box, expecting something strappy, tasteful, and maybe a little bit naughty. But instead, she finds this:












Yes, that is a neon leopard print. Yes, I know, my head hurts too.
(Victoria's Secret, $35)

Can we stop Febrezing our coats now?

Wow. The DC smoking ban actually passed (WP). This will undoubtedly be a boon to public health, as in New York, which has seen a decrease in the smoking rate among other benefits.

But then there are people like the friend of mine who felt the need to smoke a little extra as he related news of the ban at The Ugly Mug last night. It makes me wonder whether we will see longer-term decreases in the overall smoking rate, but shorter-term, more intense smoking as people smoke while the smokin's good.

I'm no lawyer...

...but I sure like to see justice done. Tom DeLay's felony money laundering charge has been upheld, despite his lawyers' valiant efforts to convince the judge that all the transactions in question involved checks, while the relevant statute only refers to funds. And checks, my friend, are hardly funds. (NPR, WP) Not being a lawyer, I have no idea whether this argument is common or even credible, but I do think it's pretty funny.

This puts a little damper in DeLay's plan to ultimately return to his position as House majority leader. I mean, if the judge had dismissed the charges, Americans and the GOP would understand that Mr. DeLay is just as pure as the driven snow and welcome him back with open arms, right?

HAHAHAHAHAHA

I'm laughing not because that's ridiculous, but because it's probably true. And it's a bitter laugh.

Good news for Washington

Turns out that alcohol and caffeine actually may "cancel each other out," just like your alcoholic campaign staffer friend always told you. (Reuters via WP)

Target hates Jesus

The American Family Association helpfully offers a list of retailers who have demonstrated that they are anti-Christmas--indeed, anti-Christian!--by leaving the word "Christmas" out of their holiday marketing campaigns.

And I applaud AFA. Because they really know how to pick their battles. Calling something a "holiday sale" instead of a "Christmas sale" is very akin to ordering "french fries" instead of "freedom fries." It's a slippery slope, with paganism, socialism, and probably also homosexuality at the bottom.