(no subject)

Goddamn, been reading way too many "Christmas Invasion" spoilers and I'm really hurting for the new Doctor Who. Pics and spoilers just aren't enough, not by a longshot. Even the teaser in the boxed set wasn't enough. *pout*

Had a nice, quiet Xmas this year, a little social time, talked to my family, got the coolest gifts, and now I'm back to work again. *sigh* Well at least I'm on my own this week so I can listen to music while I'm getting shit done. And no conversations or meetings to deal with, hooray! I've developed something of an aversion to meetings these days. I expect I'll be due for at least one more next week, but I'm not thinking about that until then.

Got some work done on the Super Secret Project, and a reasonable amount of writing in (just shy of 10,000 words at present, and I'd say it's about 1/3 of the way finished). Hoping to do a bit more this week. If I can get it to about the halfway mark by next weekend I'll be on track to finish it by the end of January, which is my goal. We'll see how it goes.

Today I play the role of airport chauffeur rather than commuting kitty sitter. May come in for a few hours tomorrow, certainly some on Thursday...then La Fondue...mmm. I'm going to have to exercise pretty hard this week if I want to work that off :P

(no subject)

Ok best new award EVAH!
The Claude Rains Memorial Gambling Awareness Award, if you don't get the reference, shame on you, go rent Casablanca now, now, now!

Are we clear? Has everyone got that? For nearly a year, the fact that Democrats have been saying that it is illegal to fire mid- or low-level political public employees solely becaue of their political beliefs has partly obscured the fact that it is illegal to fire mid- or low-level political public employees solely becaue of their political beliefs, because of course Mr. Ehrlich said that it was all a big coinkydink that the people he happened to have his fixers make up a "death list" and fire as soon as he got into office were Democrats and that Democrats were just bringing it up because they don't like him, so it was clearly a partisan cat fight and we lost sight of the blatantly illegal thing, especially since the Democrats were being all venomous about it.

Kind of a bitch for those mid- or low-level political public employees who were illegally fired solely becaue of their political beliefs, but that's show business. I mean, they did decide to be Democrats. Nobody held a gun to their heads.

Political choices have consequences.

Funny that. Oh and Ann Coulter once again proves that she is rabid, mad-dog, foaming at the mouth bat-shit nuts:

I have difficulty ginning up much interest in this story inasmuch as I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East, and sending liberals to Guantanamo. .

But if we must engage in a national debate on half-measures: After 9/11, any president who was not spying on people calling phone numbers associated with terrorists should be impeached for being an inept commander in chief.

via World o' Crap

Um, "dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East"? WTF? And um here's to spying on those brown-skinned people! Er, and yeah let's televise torture...maybe we could build a huge arena or, coliseum, yeah, and then we could throw suspected terrorists in and let them battle each other to the death. Oooh, or maybe we could put some starving lions and tigers in there for them to fight with their bare hands! Now we're cooking! Power to the police state, baby!

I have this sudden, intense mental image of Annie dressed up as Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS...

Wolcott sums it up

James Wolcott talks about the wingnut preoccupation with liberals getting beheaded:

Civilized people were appalled, disgusted, and sobered by the vicious execution of Daniel Pearl, and the beheadings that followed. But many of the warbloggers are not civilized people. It is clear that despite their sincere protestations of horror, rage, and pity, the execution of Daniel Pearl aroused them on some primitive, subconscious level. They got off on it. It functioned as death porn to their seething, frustrated psyches. (Frustrated, because the war in Iraq simply hasn't gone the way they thought it would or should. They have been denied the glorious clearcut victory they craved.) The beheading ritual tapped into their sadistic impulses, and excited their own fantasies of torturing their foes. When rightwing bloggers and posters conjure that under Islam, Democrats--which they've come to call dhimmicrats--will get what's coming to them (i.e., the business end of a butcher's blade), it's as if it's a horrible fate that couldn't possibly happen to them*--because it's a death wish directed outward. The Islamic terrorists serve as proxies and stand-ins in this imaginary theater of cruelty, enacting what they (the warbloggers) would like to mete out to us (their domestic adversaries). Sometimes the punishment they seek is more Jacobean, as when Michael Fumento greeted Cindy Sheehan's threat to tie herself to the fence in Crawford, Texas to protest the 2000th military death in Iraq with the sentiment, Good, let her lash herself to the fence: "Leave her there and maybe the crows will do the world a favor and eat her tongue out."

It's no accident that it is the rightwing bloggers and pundits who have been avid about defending the use of torture against suspected terrorists. Nor is it an accident that many of them pooh-poohed Abu Ghraib, sluffing it off as no more harmless than fraternity hazing. But what their decapitation odes reveal is that what they'd really like to do is permit torture closer to home. Domesticate it. Trivialize it. Completely destigmatize it as a tool of the state.

I don't worry about this being actually implemented, though I worry fractionally more every day. I'm interested in it more as a pathological rash afflicting the more rabid warbloggers. It's a sign of impotence, this lurid fury of theirs. It bugs the hell out of them that those of us who opposed the war have turned out to be right. It thwarts the hell out of them that Ward Churchill still has tenure, that they couldn't convict Sami Al-Arian down in Florida, and that their latest purple-finger festival fizzled out so soon. If postwar Iraq swirls down the drain, they'll be looking for someone to blame, and since they never blame themselves for anything (a bedrock neoconservative trait), they leaves nobody here but us chickens. I dread to think of the imaginary punishments they'll devise for us appeasers, turncoats, and traitors; I'm sure they'll be quite vivid. I may have to quarantine myself from these sites to preserve my serene disposition.