Locos Pocos Arbustos



The website Sploid has an, um, interesting theory on First Daughter Jenna Bush's planned trip to Latin America. As Sploid sees it, its all part of a plan for the Bushes to create a North American super state.

I'm not convinced. Is everything the Bush family does some type of evil plot?

Probably. But this looks pretty innocuous to me.

Meanwhile, I found out the other day that Natalie Portman wasn't the only dark-haired Ivy league celebrity at the Radiohead concert I attended. As Thom Yorke wrote on the Radiohead website:

on the shitlist
this'll make you laugh.

i was told yesterday that one of the daughters of the president came to NY show 2.
we were playing THe Tourist at the end of the show.. and yyes we did wander what the shuffling manhandling fighting was in the distance of the audience.
turns out it was her 6 bodyguards clearing the way for the first daughters exit. and some pour soul objected at being manhandled by the secret service. i think i would have to.

infact if i had known all this my objections would have been more forthright and extensive...if you know what i mean. which is perhaps why our lot chose not to tell me who was in the building before we went on. probably a good idea.


hmm
i dont know if we should be

A. honoured
B. amused
C. bemused
D. ask if she had a valid ticket
E. object belatedly on moral grounds
F. ask again if she had a ticket and question whether this really what our gigs are about
G. dont blame the daughter for the father
H. shutup and smile

It was Barbara in the audience. So that explains why I was strip searched and interrogated in a windowless cell for an hour before the show!!!

Of course, this is a perfect example of why Jenna really has to go to Latin America. Her sister goes to a Radiohead concert, the best kind of concert there is, and scuffles between her leering fans and her bodyguards are causing mayhem during the gorgeous, soaring finale. How embarassing! Is it any wonder she's been in the city with me for months and hasn't yet called my number?? Obviously she's afraid our relationship won't stand up to the New York City scrutiny. Page 6 is harsh.

Jenna's not going down super-south for daddy... she's going down to escape the spotlight. As opposed to Monica Lewinsky, who went down to get in it. (Shwing!)

I'm not funny.

I love the Bush twins. I suspect they're secretly embarassed at some of the things their dad's administration does. And as I said way back in the days before the voting machines in Ohio got rigged:

Yeah, I feel bad for them. I mean, they’re twins. Like the Coors Light commercial. Let them go buck naked, let them go to Mardi Gras and flash for Girls Gone Wild. These are their formative years, the years that George enjoyed without censure. You know Dubya’s staying up nights, past his 8:00 bedtime, staring at the ceiling wondering why he doesn’t see little dancing pink elephants anymore. His life has become responsible out of necessity. Every time his limo passes a bunch of GW students leaving the campus to go out on the town, you know it pains him inside. I mean, you can’t exactly drink 40’s of old E in the Oval Office. But what about his girls? Shouldn’t Barbara be allowed to chug a quart of vodka and wake up in a frat boy’s bed with only a vague recollection of the previous night’s activities?

So I think it's great that Jenna is going to Latin America. Now she can finally party away from the prying eyes of papa and papparazzi. She can chug Cuervo with Chavez, pour down some Patron with Palacio, go sake-bombing with Saca. Part of a nefarious Bush plan? I think not. Jenna just has some partyin left to do. Don't we all?

Maury Povich Is A Sick F***

Puts Girl In Quite A Pickle

Note, I totally had to mute this at work, for fear people would think I was watching a slasher film.

The Al-Queda Myth

This article, by Newsweek's Michael Hirsch, is the best I've read about the "War on Terror."

Were there really only 500 members of Al-Queda? Most in Afghanistan? Why haven't we got Bin Laden yet?

Phew! We're Still Free, For Now

By ONE vote, Congress rejected a ban on flag burning being added to the constitution. It would have been the first amendment to curb rights rather than expand them. (other than Prohibition, of course. That worked out well.)

It also would have made us strikingly similar to Saddam Hussein.

To deface his image, in Iraq, meant almost certain death or imprisonment.

Do we really want to throw people in jail for burning a flag? Do we really want to throw people in jail for hurting our PRIDE?

The flag is very nice. As far as flags go, it's a pretty nifty design, and thank God it lacks the religious symbolism that is found in many of the world's flags. That said... its a flag. It's a piece of cloth sewn by a machine in a factory somewhere.

I've had American flags handed to me at 4th of July celebrations that were stapled, yes, STAPLED, to a plastic stick.

People like to say, "people have died for that flag." But that's bullshit. Nobody ever died for a flag. Nobody ever fought for a flag. It's a flag. If you fight for a flag, you're a moron. You don't fight for a flag, you fight for a COUNTRY. A Country that is supposed to believe in freedom of expression.

Now, I don't see any reason to burn the flag. On that point, I tend to agree with the banners. Burning a flag gets a lot of people angry, and doesn't seem to get much of a message across. As a protest tactic, it's pretty weak. What are you trying to say? You're not a fan of Betsy Ross?

But it is a form of protest. It's not our place to judge whether it's effective or not. When banning something, we should consider the harm that thing does. You're telling me that cigarettes, alcohol, and Ann Coulter don't cause more pain and damage to America than a burning flag? Give me a break. If your basis for banning flag burning is that it's "a form of expression that is spiteful or vengeful" (as Arlen Specter said), then that's stupid. Posting pictures of aborted fetuses in front of abortion clinics is spiteful and vengeful too. No one's jumping to outlaw that.

This was obviously an election year tactic. But what's disturbing is how close it came to actually winning. 14 democrats voted for it. Is it any wonder why people have lost faith in them?

Budweiser Forces Dutch To Go Pantsless

And the Germans do not like the "King of Beers."

NPR story here

I Am The Law
(Says Bush)

"[Bush] has issued hundreds of signing statements invoking his right to interpret or ignore laws on everything from whistleblower protections to how Congress oversees the Patriot Act." -AP

Bush is the not the first President to use signing statements. He's not even the first to use them to express displeasure over a bill. But he is THE FIRST TO REPEATEDLY USE A SIGNING STATEMENT AS A DEFACTO VETO. What this means, basically, is that Bush feels he can circumvent the constitution. But we knew that already, right?

Clinton: Impeached For A Blowjob... I mean, lying about a blowjob.

Bush: So far, not impeached for breaking multiple constitutional laws.

Does this make any sense?

There Is A God...

...And he has a sense of humor.

Kill The President?

I of course, do not support any such thing. For one, that would leave Dick Cheney in charge of things, not only putting this nation in the hands of someone who shot their best friend, but also leaving us one heart attack away from the esteemed Dennis Hastert taking control:


"By restraining spending and by cutting the deficit, Republican policies are helping to keep our economy strong" -Dennis Hastert, apparently ignoring his party's rampant porkbarrel spending and the largest deficit in a century.

But Ben Metcalf of Harper's Magazine raises an interesting question:

Am I allowed to write that I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands?

In this day and age, it's not so certain such a statement wouldn't land your hippie ass in Guantanemo and earn yourself the label "20th Hijacker." Or at the very least, get you a face to face meeting with some pre-morning-coffee FBI agents.

Metcalf brilliantly posits that, while it may be illegal to threaten the President with death, judging by our own government's standards of legality, it is NOT a crime to write:

"I would like to kidnap George W. Bush and fly him to a prison in some faraway land where his ‘rights’ are no longer an issue, there to put a bag over his head and make him stand for hours on one leg while I defecate on his New Testament before chaining his arms to the ceiling until he dies of a heart attack, after which I will claim that he never existed?"

After all, doing those things to someone is clearly legal, according to our friend Attorney General Alberto, who refers to, among other books, Nazi/Russian/North-Vietanmese legal texts as his basis for constitutional interpretation.

But there's little hope of anyone actually doing that to Bush. Chances are, even a Democratic administration wouldn't allow him to be tried by the international community as a war criminal, despite the resume. I'll join Metcalf in saying I'd like to see the President and all the neo-cons get a taste of their own medicine, for America's sake. America is not the land of torturous opressors, and I'm damn tired of our leaders making the world think we are.

Meanwhile, we can only hope for the day when we will have a government that pursues the people who attacked us (Bin Laden and Al-Queda) instead of starting ill-planned wars against random countries with ZERO ties to those who attacked us.

We can only hope for a government which devotes resources to rebuilding cities in America wiped out by natural disasters (New Orleans) instead of devoting resources to bridges-to-nowhere and useless 700-mile fences (um, why are we talking about immigration when A MAJOR US CITY JUST GOT WIPED OUT INDEPENDENCE-DAY STYLE???)

We can only hope that one day we'll have a government who cares about the health of its uninsured citizens... instead of one that seeks to ban Siegfried and Roy from getting married.

Until then, we're stuck with Bush. Don't kill him, for the reason stated above. If you're going to kill anyone, make it Bill O'Reilly.