Gonna be a little light around here for a few weeks.  Not disappearing.  Just busy.  Real life and all.  Thanks.

If the Ten Commandments are part of our constitution’s "heritage," what else should be included?
African slaves working the grounds outside
592   57.7%
Loudspeakers explaining Deism, over and over, slowly
240   23.4%
Large murals of the Iroquois Confederacy
138   13.5%
A 20-foot framed portrait of John Locke
56   5.5%

New Salon story (after you sit through the ad) looks into the Pentagon’s practice of returning wounded soldiers under cover of darkness, with roughly the same willingness to be seen as a Pentecostal minister furtively buying porn.

Why are they so afraid to let Americans see what’s happening to Americans?  New poll at left.

New website I’m starting to like a lot: WatchingAmerica.com.  It’s a Buzzflash-like roundup of headlines, but collected from media sources all over the world.

To those of you not yet in the habit of reading the news as it’s written overseas, the selections might seem biased, or even bluntly anti-American.  Which, um, is the thing.  After reading local papers during my own recent bounces around the planet, I can’t say this is particularly unrepresentative.

In any case, if you’re interested, the bottom of the front page also provides a ton of links to the home pages of media from across the planet, so you can easily do your own digging and think for yourself.  Bush really has alienated vast swaths of humanity, and the only place that isn’t screamingly obvious is within these very borders.

It’s a bit like having to live in an alcoholic household, really.  Inside the house, Dad’s really a good guy who just needs us to love him a little more and work a little harder and meanwhile the "good" kids are the ones enabling him and the ones who actually see that he’s just a selfish f***ing drunk are very, very bad.

I suppose this puts people like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh in the enabling-mother role, unable to see the faults in the man they love, no matter how obvious, and willing to lash out at anyone who asks why he’s picking fights, not taking care of the house, and running up enormous debts.

Seems about right.

WatchingAmerica.com just makes it a little easier to go over to the neighbor’s house and see what our kitchen screaming matches sound like from across the street.

This goes so nicely with a Healthy Forests Initiative that leads to cutting down more trees and a pending Consumer Protection bill which screws every consumer in America:

What do you do with a State Department official who actually says things like "There’s no such thing as the United Nations?"

Why, you make him ambassador to the United Nations, of course.

I’m starting to think the Bush administration isn’t a government, but a highly-sophisticated form of Dada performance art.

If Bush suddenly appoints Leonide Massine as our new Secretary of Dance and Donald Rumsfeld shows up with both of his eyes on the same side of his head…

Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Among the things we didn’t hear about over the weekend here in the world’s most isolated open society: a sporting event involving athletes from 13 countries on 4 continents, all to continue raising money for victims of the tsunami.

Granted, it was a rugby match, and most Americans don’t really care about rugby.  What I’m more struck by is the degree to which the tsunami is "over" here.  It certainly isn’t where it actually happened, and apparently a few people are still fairly aware of that.  (I’m guilty, too.  So the Tsunami Relief module is going back up for a while.  Literally the least I can do.)

Also of note: this benefit, which may raise in one blow fully half as much as Bush originally offered from the entire U.S. of A., was considered important enough that several top players missed important games with their professional teams, with no second-guessing I can find.  In American terms, it’s a bit like Tom Brady skipping an NFL game or Roger Clemens bailing on a start in a pennant race in order to do the Muscular Dystrophy telethon.  In other words: unimaginable.

Which just shows how backwards the rest of the world must be.