Summer Blockbusters

Both Transformers and The Simpsons are worth your money. *nodnod*

AQ

AQ -- Asperger's Quotient

I scored 25.

Listen Up, Bush and DeLay

Seen at DailyKos:

"If you talk to God, you're praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia."
-- Thomas Szasz

The Fruits of Arrogance

This is why voting matters. I made sure to take my mom to the polls because I wanted something other than one-party rule (which is so anti-American I can't even start to get into it). Karl Rove said he had the math, but in the end both houses of Congress fell to the Democrats.

And the investigations started.

They never saw it coming. I really think they thought they had eight full years to jimmy the whole nation, Constitution be damned. They never considered how Katrina would be the rupture in the dike of the seemingly impenetrable Bush administration. They tried to plug it and regain their smooth image, but it was all undone from that moment on.

Democrats were swept into Congressional power, and still the administration went forward with the plan to sack the eight (or nine, or ten, or twenty-six, depending on whose count) United States Attorneys. Did the folks in the administration really believe that the only accountability moment was the 2004 election? I think they did.

Now, we have Kelly O'Donnell asking Mr. Bush if he personally dispatched then-counsel Alberto Gonzales and former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card to the bedside of ailing then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to have him sign off on the wiretapping issue. Bush equivocates. In the Rose Garden. On national TV. She asks again. He evades again.

Now we have the Washington Post talking in plain terms about the seriousness of the President's conduct:

IT DOESN'T much matter whether President Bush was the one who phoned Attorney General John D. Ashcroft's hospital room before the Wednesday Night Ambush in 2004. It matters enormously, however, whether the president was willing to have his White House aides try to strong-arm the gravely ill attorney general into overruling the Justice Department's legal views. It matters enormously whether the president, once that mission failed, was willing nonetheless to proceed with a program whose legality had been called into question by the Justice Department. That is why Mr. Bush's response to questions about the program yesterday was so inadequate.

We are living through history, folks.

And kudos to James Comey, tying together the US Attorneys scandal with the wiretapping scandal with his incredible testimony to the Senate this week.

Silly Brain

Note to self: Chuck Mangione and Sergio Mendes are not the same person. Thanks.

Emergency

I was on my way back from downtown when I noticed a rather open fire. "That doesn't seem right," I said to myself. Turning the corner, I could tell that the porch of the house in question indeed had an uncontrolled fire blazing, next to a grill. I pulled into the nearest parking lot and dialed 911.

Seemed that several people had been calling in the same emergency. The operator asked me if I could confirm the address, and I said I could run up to the house and call her back. By the time I made it, the resident was on his porch with a hose, putting out the fire himself. I called to him, "You got it out!" He seemed surprised that someone knew what was going on, but confirmed that he'd called someone about it. Another person who'd seen the same thing was running up right behind me to make sure everything was okay. I called 911 back and let them know the resident had extinguished the fire, but she said fire trucks were on their way just in case.

Nice to know that people actually go out of their way in this town when something like that happens.

And now, time for a walk.

Scandal

By the way, Snow: Congress "Doesn't Have Oversight Ability"

I don't know why Congress is "looking for a compromise." (Well, actually, it seems only Arlen Specter is looking to do so, which would actually go a long way toward making it seem that the political fight is partisan.)

Barber

Stephen Colbert's guest from last night, Benjamin Barber, is an author from Grinnell. After Colbert demanded to know if he went to an Ivy League college, Barber acknowledged Grinnell as his alma mater. Then he said, "Well, Grinnell is the Harvard of the Midwest, so I suppose in a way you're right."

Great, great plug.

The show reruns at 8:30 p.m. ET.

Reflection on a Window

The tree is a door.
Unhandled,
it is rooted to the earth.
Its doorjambs are white,
airy and indeterminate.

What is this tree?
Why will that grain
never open or close?

Solace

The skin so discolored
after days of still blood. Hair
tucked back in an almost bun.
Breath: an illusion of the eye.
Frown set in the closed jaw--
no more food to distribute
throughout the body. The minerals
can settle.

Toes turn inward as though ashamed.
My mother turns the cloth up,
handles the calves. I caution her:
health codes. No embalming.
Her voice: "I must do this." She must
touch the body. She pushes to the thighs,
the laces of veins.

White lace trims the skin from wrist
to neck to waist. Undertakers must
have struggled. The men who shook our hands
hooked those arms, hoisted the shoulders
and unfurled that springtime dress.
The blanched skin would indent,
not spring back, under the stress.

I leave my mother with the womb
that bore her, lain out
in the shape of a woman.

Politeness

Blood accrues. Like taxes
it adds and adds until there's
a return. It sheds in silence
for hours. Like water
it slides unseen.

Obscene to speak of this
to anyone, too many
secrets sewn up.
We thread our lips
at the table, thread them

with tampon string.
Oh, but there is no thing.

Question

For those in the United States:

Can you imagine a classless system?

If so, what would it look like?

Colbert

Today is not Stephen Colbert's birthday. Today thousands of people are praying for Stephen. (He mentioned this on his show a few episodes ago.) Maybe you will join them.

Manganese Madness

I don't want to come down with "manganese madness." But I am eating collard greens.

Hot

Records show January was the hottest ever

The Gum

Some of my Grinnellian friends might remember when I got involved in a minor controversy on campus regarding a satirical piece in The Gum. The Gum is the campus satire rag, for those who do not know, and the piece I'm referring to had to do with a picture of some students sitting on a sofa in the middle of the soccer field, all alone, when they were supposed to be having a rally. The group in question is known as A.S.I.A., Asian (and Asian-American) Students in Alliance. The group charged the editors with racism, going so far as to rip out the offending page, write RACIST over the picture in orange marker, and post the pages all over campus. I wrote a letter to the editor where I defended the piece as satire, and since I was a student of color, I think my explanation as to why I didn't find racist intent in the piece to be convincing to some section of campus-at-large. (Even the professor of Intro to Shakespeare, a course I failed miserably, wrote me an email, thanking me for my thoughts on the subject.)

Now, if the editors had done something like this, I think I would have lodged complaints on the group's side.

An article in the annual joke issue of Princeton University’s student newspaper has left some readers accusing its staff of racism.

The Daily Princetonian issue included a column with a byline that closely resembles the name of Jian Li, an 18-year-old Asian man who filed a civil rights complaint against the university last summer after he was denied admission.

Li, who now attends Yale University, told The Associated Press on Saturday that his complaint against Princeton accusing the school of bias against Asian students remains under investigation.

[...] Under a byline of Lian Ji, the article published Wednesday used broken English and spouted racial stereotypes to bash the school for his rejection.

“Hi Princeton! Remember me? I so good at math and science. Perfect 2400 SAT score. Ring Bells?” the article begins. “Just in case, let me refresh your memories. I the super smart Asian. Princeton the super dumb college, not accept me.”

The article ran with a disclaimer informing readers that it was part of the joke issue, but that didn’t stop students and alumni of the Ivy League school from accusing those who wrote it of racism.

“I consider myself an easygoing person, but guys — this article doesn’t even try to use humor to hide the underlying hate,” Andre Liu, who identified himself as a 1991 graduate, wrote in a letter to the editor.