TW3 and Update

October 24th, 2007

Here’s a quick post and an update.

Schools have been closed due to air quality; can’t see the sun, it’s thick out there today. Some homes in this area have been evac’d but we seem stable at the moment. Emergency mode is NOT fun.

Light and Love to Diana, who’s in the Santa Clarita fire zone — Deb and Dirah and Annie who are in San Diego zones — others I might have missed. God/dess knows who you are.

The wind is not so bad today — that’s the good thing. The fires continue — that’s the bad.

Jude

HARPER’S WEEKLY REVIEW
October 23, 2007

Michael Mukasey, President George W. Bush’s nominee for
attorney general, received a warm reception on his first
day before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he
decried torture and promised a nonpartisan Justice
Department. On his second day, however, he hedged on
whether waterboarding is torture and argued that the
president could disregard laws passed by Congress. “I
don’t know,” said Senator Patrick Leahy, “whether you
received some criticism from anybody in the administration
last night after your testimony, but I [sense] a
difference.” The Senate Intelligence Committee agreed to
grant retroactive immunity to phone companies that
provided the government with subscribers’ phone and e-mail
records, and the House failed to override President Bush’s
veto of the SCHIP health care plan, which was intended to
provide health insurance to 10 million children. Arkansas
lawmakers were unable to muster enough votes to ban
tobacco-chewing in the state’s legislative
chambers. Vladimir Putin traveled to Iran and cautioned
the United States against a military strike; President
Bush responded by saying that democracy might not be in
the “Russian DNA” and threatened World War III if Iran
acquired nuclear weapons. Iranian and Chinese companies
won contracts worth $1.1 billion to build power plants in
Sadr City, Iraq, and the Turkish parliament authorized
attacks on Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq by a vote of
507 to 19. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice painted an
upcoming U.S.-sponsored Middle East peace conference as a
“moment of opportunity” for Israelis and Palestinians,
while film director David Lynch claimed that 250 experts
in Transcendental Meditation could end that conflict by
dissolving “the suffocating rubber clown suit” of hatred.

The Dalai Lama received the Congressional Gold Medal. “We
are furious,” said Zhang Qingli, secretary of China’s
Party Committee of Tibet Autonomous Region. “If the Dalai
Lama can receive such an award, there must be no justice
or good people in the world.” Pakistani opposition leader
Benazir Bhutto returned from self-imposed exile to
Karachi, where bombs struck her welcome parade, killing
134 and wounding 450; police believed they had found the
bomber’s head. State inspectors visited a Texas youth jail
to find spoiled food, overflowing toilets, walls smeared
with feces, and a curriculum reliant on crossword
puzzles. It was reported that students at 31 New York City
high schools will now receive thousand-dollar prizes for a
top score on any advanced placement exam and that middle
schoolers in Portland, Maine, can obtain birth control
pills from their schools without notifying parents. In
England, cooks at a Suffolk middle school discovered
maggots in a rice dish, and a government study found that
50 percent of Britons will be clinically obese by 2050. A
British restaurant began serving gray squirrel pancakes. A
poll revealed that a quarter of Germans think National
Socialism had “good sides,” including low crime, low
unemployment, and “the encouragement of the family.”
French president Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife divorced.

James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for his role in the
discovery of DNA, said that while he wishes everyone were
equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find
this is not true.” Lynn Cheney announced that her husband
and Barack Obama are eighth cousins. “Every family,” said
the Obama campaign, “has a black sheep.” A New York man
was arrested after wearing a stolen Rolex watch to his
parole meeting, an Ohio woman stood accused of digging up
her ex-boyfriend’s grave and stealing his ashes, and a
Virginia woman was fined for attacking a Comcast store
with a hammer after the company cut off her phone and
Internet connections. “I smashed a keyboard, knocked over
a monitor and I went to hit the telephone,” she said. “I
figured, ‘Hey, my telephone is screwed up, so is yours.’”
A New Jersey woman sent 80,000 cans of Silly String, which
can locate trip wires, to U.S. troops in Iraq; a military
spokesperson thanked her but admitted that soldiers don’t
use as much Silly String today as they did at the
beginning of the war. Forty-nine percent of New Jersey
residents admitted they’d rather live somewhere else. Taku
the killer whale died unexpectedly at the San Antonio
SeaWorld, 5 of the world’s 350 remaining Asiatic Lions
were found dead next to an electric fence in India, and
the curator of the Rotterdam Natural History Museum asked
the public to donate pubic crabs, claiming that their
population was dwindling as a result of Brazilian
waxes. “When the bamboo forests that the Giant Panda
lives in were cut down, the bear became threatened with
extinction. Pubic lice,” he explained, “can’t live without
pubic hair.”

– Paul Gleason
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/10/WeeklyReview2007-10-23

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves