Sen. Dan Patrick
Texas State Senate

Dear Sen. Patrick,

Kudos to you for introducing SB 1567, the Texas Baby Purchasing Act of 2007. Undoubtedly, it will save the lives of many blastocyst-Americans.

But what about their tiny spermatazoan-American brothers? Your bill does nothing to protect them. Indeed, it completely ignores the tubesock holocaust. I hope you'll consider amending SB 1567 to address this terrible oversight.

It's a lot easier to protect spermatazoan-Americans than you might think. All you need is a few collection points around the state, a number of modified milking machines, a good supply of mason jars, ink that fluoresces under UV lighting, a few Perry Como albums, a stipend for the donors, and a lot of cellar space.

Here's how I see it working. You offer every man in the state a stipend, say $15 dollars a visit, to drop by their local legislator's office every couple of days to liberate their little spermatazoan-American citizens. To prevent cheating, we apply a UV fluorescent ink to their hands when they visit and then examine their little soldiers under a black light at their next visit. This will allow them to have normal relations with their wives while alerting us to any inappropriate touching on their part.

I know what you're thinking. It won't work on Democrats, because they like to put their little soldiers in ladies mouths -- often while they're trying to kiss that mythical sailor in the boat the femislamunistofscists are always so excited about -- but I think that's something we can work on for the next legislative session.

I'd like to go into this with you in more detail and show you my modified milking machine prototype. It's great. I call it Sheila. I haven't left the trailer since I built it.

Please have your legislative assistant give me call to set up an appointment.

Heterosexually yours,

Gen. JC Christian, patriot

Republicans vacating the Capitol are dumping a big spring cleaning job on Democrats moving in. GOP leaders have opted to leave behind almost a half-trillion-dollar clutter of unfinished spending bills.

There's also no guarantee that Republicans will pass a multibillion-dollar measure to prevent a cut in fees to doctors treating Medicare patients.

The bulging workload that a Republican-led Congress was supposed to complete this year but is instead punting to 2007 promises to consume time and energy that Democrats had hoped to devote to their own agenda upon taking control of Congress in January for the first time in a dozen years.

In one course, an advanced trauma treatment program he had taken before deploying, he said, the instructors gave each corpsman an anesthetized pig.

“The idea is to work with live tissue,” he said. “You get a pig and you keep it alive. And every time I did something to help him, they would wound him again. So you see what shock does, and what happens when more wounds are received by a wounded creature.”

“My pig?” he said. “They shot him twice in the face with a 9-millimeter pistol, and then six times with an AK-47 and then twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. And then he was set on fire.”

“I kept him alive for 15 hours,” he said. “That was my pig.”

“That was my pig,” he said.

Speaking in an interview with Fox News, Mr Cheney said that insurgents were using the internet to time their attacks, although he did not provide any evidence to that effect.

"There isn't anything that's on the internet that's not accessible to them. They're on it all the time. They're very sophisticated users of it," Mr Cheney said.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush signed a bill Thursday authorizing 700 miles of new fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, hoping to give Republican candidates a pre-election platform for asserting they're tough on illegal immigration.

''Unfortunately the United States has not been in complete control of its borders for decades and therefore illegal immigration has been on the rise,'' Bush said at a signing ceremony.

''We have a responsibility to enforce our laws,'' he said. ''We have a responsibility to secure our borders. We take this responsibility serious.''

He called the fence bill ''an important step in our nation's efforts to secure our borders.''

TWO, COUNT THEM, PENE
posted 7:44 PM

This case of diphallus reminds me of that tiny but grimly inexplicable web-genre of DIY willy-whittling that Warren Ellis makes a point of keeping us all abreast of. How poignant, that the gentleman so gifted prefers instead to surgically opt for mono-dicked orthodoxy -- considering the apparent number, however small, of Xacto-wielding body-mod hobbyists out there, bent on home bifurcation.

Bush's proposals would narrow the U.S. legal interpretation of the Geneva Conventions in a bid to allow tougher interrogations and shield U.S. personnel from being prosecuted for war crimes.

But Bush's former secretary of state, Colin Powell, endorsed efforts to block the president's plan.

Powell lent his support to three Republican senators Thursday saying that Congress must not pass Bush's proposal to redefine U.S. compliance with the Geneva Conventions, a treaty that sets international standards for the treatment of prisoners of war.

Powell sent a letter to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., one of the Republican lawmakers seeking limits to legislation on interrogations, in the latest sign of GOP division over White House security.

''The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,'' said Powell, who served under Bush and is a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ''To redefine Common Article 3 would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk.''

...

One, Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., earlier this year confronted Bush over his wiretapping program at a GOP retreat. Now she is the sponsor of a bill embraced by House GOP leaders -- but not the White House -- that would restrict the domestic surveillance program and step up congressional oversight.

A member of the National Security Council under Bush's father, Wilson is facing a tough election challenge in her home state. A day earlier, Republicans abruptly canceled a scheduled committee vote on her bill that was expected to send it to the floor where the administration would push for amendments.

In the New York race, Mrs. Clinton’s landslide carried its own broader significance. By performing strongly among a liberal, antiwar primary electorate, she showed that her vote for military action in Iraq in 2002 did not damage her political standing as it did with Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, who lost his bid for re-nomination last month to an antiwar candidate, Ned Lamont.

Mrs. Clinton’s little-known opponent in New York, a union organizer named Jonathan Tasini, tried to tap into voter anger over Iraq, yet he had little money and did not effectively turn the race into a message-sending moment about the war.

“Clinton’s work ethic, her lack of enemies, and her fund-raising help for other Democrats have insulated her from party criticism, including on Iraq,” said Ken Sherrill, a political scientist at Hunter College. “I got a taped phone call from Susan Sarandon urging support for Tasini, but that’s all I really heard about him.”

The lesson learned from the Democratic reaction to Israel's war of choice is that the Dems are only likely to oppose war as long as the war in question can be framed as a fight against Iraqi insurgents and/or Shi'a death squads, rather than a fight for Israel. But the Iraq occupation isn't going to fit neatly into that frame much longer. In fact it's already slipped out of it. The Dems -- always a little slow on the uptake -- just haven't realized it yet. But when the time comes to choose (for Israel, or against war with Iran) I fully expect to see Ned Lamont in the front ranks of the pro-war phalanx, right next to the last great white Democratic anti-war hope, Howard Dean.

People tell me I shouldn't get hung up on this because, you know, if the Dems get in they'll make sure the seniors get their Social Security checks a little faster -- or they'll keep the Supreme Court out of the hands of legal madmen or do something about global climate change or save the whales or whatever else it is that's supposed to make the Democratic Party infinitely preferable to the Republicans.

It's not that I discount these differences entirely -- although they're easily oversold. But compared to the fate that awaits the republic, and the world, if the United States deliberately starts a war with Iran, those other considerations start to look pretty insignificant. I mean, we're talking about World War III here, fought by people who want to use tactical nuclear weapons. I'm supposed to put that out of my mind because the Dems might be a little bit more generous about funding the VA budget??? I'm sorry, but that's fucking nuts.

I've never been one to bash (much) Bush's pre-9/11 obliviousness to the Al Qaeda threat -- he definitely wasn't the only one sleepwalking towards catastrophe that summer. Like most critics of Path to 9/11, I'm also not pretending the Clinton Administration was a model of anti-terrorist vigilance on its watch. But I think any fair reading of the record, including the 9/11 Commission report, will show what an obscene mockery ABC and the White House presented to the nation's couch potatoes tonight.
...
There's not much point in kvetching about it now, I suppose. This is the United States of Amnesia, and history is for losers. (A friend of mine likes to say that in the Middle East, what happened a thousand years ago is far more important than yesterday's news. Here, they're both irrelevant.) Still, the prime-time propaganda we've been subjected to over the past few days makes that "you've covered your ass now" crack a particularly acidic pill to have to swallow.

Angry, Lentz lobotomized the thing. "Just punishment," he declared. "This box didn't deserve to think." Hurting the circuit seemed no more sadistic than forcing it to learn in the first place.

He blurred the device's retention. He reduced the scope and breadth of connections. Then he tested it a last time in its weakened state, empiricism now taunting all three of us. To my astonishment, the learning algorithm rose up from its reduced straits and began to get the picture.

With the economy beginning to slow, the current expansion has a chance to become the first sustained period of economic growth since World War II that fails to offer a prolonged increase in real wages for most workers.

That situation is adding to fears among Republicans that the economy will hurt vulnerable incumbents in this year’s midterm elections even though overall growth has been healthy for much of the last five years.

The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity — the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic wellspring of a nation’s living standards — has risen steadily over the same period.

As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as “the golden era of profitability.”