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.

This isn’t actually a tornado-victim cow that had a tree blown through its head…

It only sorta looks that way.

Another entry from our Stellaluna-writing friend Janelle, this is an Ankole, native to Africa, and hopefully a low-gravity region.  Because, dang.  That’s a lot of horn to have to carry around.

Sometimes if Ankoles are having trouble getting up, a couple of pudus will climb under each horn and lift with all their might.

Which doesn’t actually accomplish anything.  But the Ankoles always appreciate it anyway, and they let the pudus think it made an enormous difference.

William H.T. "Bucky" Bush, brother of Bush 41 and thus uncle to the Chimpinator, just pocketed almost half a million dollars, thanks to a sweetheart no-bid contract the Pentagon just coincidentally gave the company he worked for.  (See "Uncle Bucky and the Rocket-Fueled Breasts" and links, below.)

This was hinky enough that even the DoD’s own inspector general is quietly taking a second look.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA for whom I actually enjoy voting) has now asked Rumsfeld to hork up the contracts so the rest of us can have a look-see.

As an aside on bias in news reporting: can you imagine the media firestorm if say, Hillary’s second cousin’s company had pocketed $450,000 from a no-bid Pentagon contract.  Can you imagine?

The howling and hissing would frighten wildlife.