Getting to know you, getting to know all about you…

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What nutcase wrote the following, concerning the idea that women should receive equal pay?

"I honestly find it
troubling that three Republican representatives are so quick to embrace
such a radical redistributive concept. Their slogan may as well be,
‘From each according to his ability, to each according to her gender.’ "

Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to your soon-to-be new Supreme Court justice, John Roberts.

Tighten up those burkhas, ladies.

Hugging Cindy Sheehan

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By now you’ve probably seen the latest output from the GOP’s
magic Reality-Inversion Machine, the device which efficiently turns
corporate handouts into displays of free enterprise, brutal oil dictators
into allies of democracy, and
convicted perjurers into paragons of truth.

According to the Machine, Cindy Sheehan is variously an extremist
fanatic and a flip-flopper (how can she be both?), a crafty media maven
and a complete tool (how can she be both?), and a pacifist zealot who
poses some kind of imminent security threat (… you get the idea by now).

Of course, she’s none of these things.

My cousin Nick has actually known her pretty well for years, it turns out.  So I can’t say I know her well, but I certainly know a guy who does.  What I hear is nothing but sincere and cool.

I received a letter last night from a longtime reader/first-time
writer named Tom from Wichita Falls.  He actually went down to visit Cindy in Crawford the other day, met her, and got a good look at who is with her there and why. He has kindly granted me
permission to share the letter with you.

I hope this might help clear up for some people who Cindy Sheehan and the people around her really are.

Today I drove down to Temple, Texas,
from Wichita Falls to visit my father’s grave.  He passed away last
October from cancer.  Naturally, I miss him like crazy.

On the way home, as I was driving through Waco, I thought of Cindy
Sheehan and decided to take a 20-minute detour to see if I could find
her.  What I found was other people who had come to Crawford out of
whatever loss or sympathy they were feeling.  From the Crawford Peace
House, I caught a ride out to the protest site with a woman who had
driven down from Maryland.  Riding along were a minister from the SCLC
and a Vietnam vet from Waco.  At the site, the first person to approach
me was a one-armed man in a Veterans For Peace T-shirt.  He asked why I
had come.  I said I had just visited the grave of my Air Force vet
father and felt that I needed to be there.  He offered his
condolences.  A woman from Fort Worth asked me to sign a guest book and
then pointed me toward Cindy.

Cindy had just finished an interview with a print journalist and was
making her way to an interview with an area TV reporter.  I smiled at
her, and she stopped.  I said, "Hi, my name is Tom, and I just wanted
to say hello."  And then she hugged me.  And we stood there on the side
of that narrow road in an embrace that lasted almost a minute.  I told
her I was sorry for her loss.  She said that there was so much more
good than bad in the world that the good just had to win, didn’t it?  I
said I sure hoped that was true.  No tears, no sobs.  Just two people
missing two other people who were with us once but now were gone.

I caught a ride back to my car with a guy who had come down from
Philadelphia.  I must have heard a half-dozen people say that they
weren’t sure why they were there; they just had to come.

The dozens of people I saw in my thirty-minute visit were sincere,
thoughtful, even somber.  The President may not be listening to them,
but for a little while on a hot farm road in central Texas, it seemed
that just finding kindred spirits drawn to this isolated corner of the
earth was an accomplishment.  There was a lot of good there.  And I
hope Cindy is right about it being strong enough to overcome the bad.

That’s all this is.  It’s all we can hope for, and all we can try for.

My condolences to Tom and his family for his loss.  And my thanks for this simple and honest letter.

Pudublogging: summer reruns

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Still working on the book and comic projects.  This blog will continue to be updated only every few days.

That said, traffic spiked enormously this week, so we may have some new visitors who haven’t met our mascot and favorite ungulate.  So here’s a rerun…

This is a photo of a group of sleepy-eyed morning pudus trotting out of their house, shortly after awakening.

And, to give you a sense of scale, this is a photo of the same pudus a
moment later, as their keeper (a gentle soul who can describe each of
their personalities in detail) emerges behind them.

Yep.  That’s a normal-sized woman’s foot.  And those are full-grown deer.

There’s more if you click "pudu" at left.

Can you spot the real threat to national security?

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Let’s see… there’s this guy.

Turns out Bush could have nailed him years ago. 

According to the CIA field commander at Tora Bora, U.S. intelligence absolutely knew that Osama Bin Laden was not only present, but virtually trapped. 
All the CIA and Special Forces guys needed was additional conventional
support to cut off his escape, and Bin Laden would have been arrested.

This was in December of 2001.

But Bush and Rumsfeld never sent the additional troops.

And then there’s this woman.

Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Casey Sheehan, a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq.

She’s
holed up just down the road from Bush’s ranch in Crawford.  She’s
unarmed, nonviolent, and carrying little but questions.  She simply
agrees with the 61% of Americans who disapprove of Bush’s handling of the war.  All she’s doing is demanding accountability from her elected president.

Ms. Sheehan is receiving a steady series of hassles and threats of arrest on constantly-changing terms.

Curious set of priorities, this.

For a man who talks so much about democracy and freedom, he certainly makes time for some unusual friends.



Those are the oil-rich dictators Abdullah, Nazarbayev, and Karimov.  I didn’t plan it this way, but the photos are proportioned roughly to the amount of oil they control.

Bush has no problem whatsoever making time for people who (respectively, and just for starters) jail free-speech advocates, persecute opponents, and even open fire on demonstrators. 

Bush’s attitude toward an American citizen exercising constitutional rights?  We already know.

And so, I ask:

Osama Bin Laden or Cindy Sheehan:

Which one will George W. Bush have arrested first?

High drama: will the leg-spinner take enough wickets?

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Thanks to the twin miracles of satellites and TiVo, I’ve had the Ashes cricket contest between England and Australia on while working for the last couple of days.

I don’t wish to bore the 85% of my readership who are guaranteed not to
care.  But it’s absolutely thrilling.  Most of the time I just keep my eyes on the keyboard
and my ears half-tuned to the gentle purr of announcers debating the placement of slips and covers and the
questionable wisdom of legging out singles when faced with a long chase.  Much of this washes over.

But every now and again, right in the middle of this tea-sipping refinement, there’s a sudden gale of googly-eyed unarticulated Wilhelm screaming. 
Like nothing in any American sport I know.  Then I look up, rewind, and
see what the hell just
happened:  A wicket!  Or not!  Usually not!  Usually it’s just a lot of
screaming!  Everybody, all at once, eleven guys bellowing like they’ve
been attacked by crocodiles!  Because the ball hit the pads first, not
the bat! 
Or didn’t!  Depending!

BLEAAAAAAAAAUUGGGGGGHHHHHH!

Shane Warne in particular seems to think his testicles are coming unspooled, about once every five minutes.

And I’m a big Shane Warne fan, mind you.  Just saying.

Between these outbursts, the announcers go back to soporific meditation, actually saying things
like (and this is a direct quote from today): "The next several hours
will be pivotal."

Which, yes, they actually were.

Cricket is the only
sport played in evolutionary time.

With frequent primal screaming.

If you’re curious at all, click the link above and hit "open" next to
"Audio And Video" in the upper right, anytime after about 5:30 am EDT
either day this weekend.  You’ll get an audio feed from
Radio Five which might make little sense whatsoever for a while, but
which will, eventually, include at least a few good
BLEAAAAAAAAAUUGGGGGGHHHHHH!s and perhaps a meandering testicle or two.

One last thing, for the three people reading this actually following
the test: is it just me, or is the English wicketkeeper so bad that he’s actually one of the
best players on the Australian side right now?

UPDATE: The second test just finished.  Warne got a pile of wickets,
but Australia’s best batsmen folded in the second innings, leaving only
the three weakest-hitting bowlers needing to score 107 runs.  The
baseball equivalent would be expecting pitchers to mount a 10-run
comeback in the bottom of the ninth.  It should have been over in
minutes.

Except it wasn’t.

Fabulous.

UPDATE AGAIN: I am informed that there is a discussion somewhere at a sports blog called The Frog where I am referred to as "America’s cricket fan."  Singular.

Excellent.  Genuinely funny.  Too bad it feels all too true.

I’ve also heard from several people that BLEAAAAAAAAAUUGGGGGGHHHHHH!
is actually a common mispronunciation of "Howzat?", which in turn is
presumably short for "excuse me, gentle umpire, but how is that shot,
in your estimation, good sir?"

You can see the resemblance.

It still sounds like eleven guys being attacked by crocodiles while their testicles come unspooled.