Students Heckle Gonzo at Harvard Law

Associated Pravda (as John Aravosis at AmericaBlog calls the Associated Press) reports in the Huffington Post (image from Hispanic Magazine).

Gonzales Heckled at Harvard Reunion
AP | April 28, 2007 11:27 PM EST

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A small group of student protesters, including one wearing a black hood and an orange jumpsuit, heckled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as he posed with old classmates Saturday during their 25-year Harvard Law School reunion.

"When the photographer was getting everybody set up and having people say 'cheese,' the protesters yelled: 'say torture, instead,' 'resign' and 'I don't recall,'" said Nate Ela, a protester and third-year student.

Law school spokesman Mike Armini said the impromptu protest was so small that some of those attending the photo shoot did not notice it.

Ela said the protesters followed Gonzales into the law school's library, chanting "shame" and "resign," before the attorney general's security detail took him to his motorcade.

Gonzales was at the university to deliver a lunchtime speech, a visit that was unannounced to students. But word spread quickly after his motorcade and security detail were spotted.

Gonzales is resisting pressure to resign as lawmakers question whether he could effectively run the Justice Department amid the controversy over the firings of eight prosecutors.

Cal Thomas, Prescient Sage of the Ages

Tom Tomorrow nails Cal Thomas in the Huffington Post:

There's one other quote that I just didn't have room for, which I'd like to include here. In his column of April 15, 2003, Cal Thomas wrote:

When the Berlin Wall fell and Eastern Europe escaped from the shackles of communism, I wrote that we must not forget the enablers, apologists and other "fellow travelers" who helped sustain communism's grip on a sizable portion of humanity for much of the 20th century. I suggested that a "cultural war crimes tribunal" be convened, at which people from academia, the media, government and the clergy who were wrong in their assessment of communism would be forced to confront their mistakes. While not wishing to deprive anyone of his or her right to be wrong, it wouldn't hurt for these people to be held accountable.

That advice was not taken - but today we are presented with another opportunity in the form of scores of false media prophets who predicted disaster should the U.S. military confront and seek to oust the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein. The purpose of a cultural war crimes tribunal would be to remind the public of journalism's many mistakes, as well as the errors of certain politicians and retired generals, and allow it to properly judge their words the next time they feel the urge to prophesy...

All of the printed and voiced prophecies should be saved in an archive. When these false prophets again appear, they can be reminded of the error of their previous ways and at least be offered an opportunity to recant and repent.

On that last paragraph, at least, Cal and I are in agreement.

An archive of Cal Thomas's columns can be found here at Townhall. The April 15, 2003 column is here. The charming picture came from Faux News.

An appropriate political appelation

I heard a caller on KPOJ refer to the ultra-religious supporters of der Führer as "burning Bushies". This phrase has had very little circulation ( a measly 6 hits in The Google) , but it has been around for at least a year.

A reference I particularly enjoyed reading was an essay by Gidon Remba, Why Jews Can't Be Conservative, at Chicago Peace Now. His essay concludes:

Jews can’t be conservative Republicans. Not if they take seriously the best values of their own moral tradition, reflect thoughtfully on the imperatives of justice and on their enlightened self-interest as Jews and Americans.

The entire essay is interesting but I would argue that this applies not only to Jews, but to any person, educated or not.

There is also a very funny blog written by Antonia Zerbisias at the Toronto Star. Her blog has a category called burning Bushies; it is well worth a detour, but it is a shame that it is not more current. Ms. Zerbisias is a sharp wit.

ANOTHER New Holiday

I don't know how I missed this. There are over 10,000 hits for "cake and cunnilingus day". This is getting very competitive with "Steak and blowjob day" (27,000+ hits). Let's just review the calendar:
February 14 - Valentine's Day
Roses and chocolates for your loved one.
March 14 - Steak and Blowjob Day
Steak and duh for your loved one.
April 14 - Cake and Cunnilingus Day
Cake and more duh for your loved one.

Sure beats the pants off of Ember Days or Rogation Days.

Alberto's Preparation

Mike Malloy had a very funny line about Alberto's testimony today. He said the only preparation that Gonzales got was PreparationH.

(Alberto's image is from SparklePony.)

The O in GOP Doesn't Stand for Original

I don't know what to do about the plagiarism business except to talk to my students and make sure that they are sensitive to the issue, and that they really understand the difference between working together and copying. Some get it, and some don't.

Blue Oregon had a post on this very subject. (Oregon House Republicans: Who's plagiarizing who? by Kari Chisholm)

I don't know what the consequences will be for the legislators, but I know that they will not enjoy being known as plagiarists.

A Blue Oregon reader left comments containing links to other similar "op-ed" pieces.

Here are my excerpts of the second paragraph from each of these "op-ed" contributors:

State Rep. Bruce Hanna (R-Lane/Douglas) in the Eugene Register-Guard: ("Bill would dedicate existing funds for Oregon State Police patrols")

Fortunately, there is a bill to provide dedicated funding for the Oregon State Police. I have co-sponsored House Bill 3535 to permanently dedicate 1 percent of the general fund revenue dollars ($127 million) to a special fund for OSP's Patrol Division. It ensures round-the-clock coverage by putting 140 troopers back on the road to cover major highways, allows for future growth, and does not raise taxes.

State Rep. Kevin Cameron (R-Salem) and State Rep. Vicki Berger (R-Salem) in the Salem Statesman-Journal: ("Job can be done without new taxes")

Fortunately, there is a bill to provide dedicated funding for the Oregon State Police. We have co-sponsored House Bill 3535, which will permanently dedicate 1 percent of the general-fund revenue dollars ($127 million) to a special fund for the Oregon State Police's patrol division. It ensures around-the-clock coverage by putting 140 troopers back on the road to cover major highways, allows for future growth and does not raise taxes.

State Sen. Jeff Kruse (R-Roseburg) and State Reps. Susan Morgan (R- Myrtle Creek), Wayne Krieger (R-Gold Beach), and Bruce Hanna (R-Lane/Douglas) in the Roseburg News-Review ("A plan to provide state police protection without new taxes")

Fortunately, there is a bill to provide dedicated funding for the Oregon State Police. We have co-sponsored House Bill 3535 to permanently dedicate one percent of the General Fund revenue dollars ($127 million) to a special fund for OSP's Patrol Division. It ensures round-the-clock coverage by putting 140 troopers back on the road to cover major highways, allows for future growth, and does not raise taxes.

State Rep. Wayne Scott (R-Canby) in the Canby Herald ("24/7 state police protection . . . without new taxes")

Fortunately, there is a bill to provide dedicated funding for the Oregon State Police. I have co-sponsored House Bill 3535 to permanently dedicate 1-percent of the General Fund revenue dollars ($127 million) to a special fund for OSP's Patrol Division. It ensures round-the-clock coverage by putting 140 troopers back on the road to cover major highways, allows for future growth, and does not raise taxes.

State Rep. Patti Smith (R-Corbett) in the Gresham Outlook ("24/7 state police can become reality")

Fortunately, there is a bill to provide dedicated funding for the Oregon State Police. I have co-sponsored House Bill 3535 to permanently dedicate 1 percent of general fund revenue dollars ($127 million) to a special fund for OSP’s Patrol Division. It ensures round-the-clock coverage by putting 140 troopers back on the road to cover major highways, allows for future growth and does not raise taxes.

State Reps. Vicki Berger (R-Salem) and Kevin Cameron (R-Salem) on Vicki Berger's official web page ("A PLAN TO PROVIDE 24/7 STATE POLICE PROTECTION WITHOUT NEW TAXES")

Fortunately, there is a bill to provide dedicated funding for the Oregon State Police. We have co-sponsored House Bill 3535 which will permanently dedicate one percent of the General Fund revenue dollars ($127 million) to a special fund for OSP’s Patrol Division. It ensures around the clock coverage by putting 140 troopers back on the road to cover major highways, allows for future growth and does not raise taxes.

All of these were traced back to one author, Mr. Kevin Curry, who used to be the communications director of then State House Speaker Karen Minnis.

Donna Nelson, whatever else you think of her, writes her own shinola.

No shit!

The Globe always exhibits only the highest standards of journalism.

Woman: Bowel caused alleged shoplifting

April 16, 2007

CAPE CORAL, Fla. --A woman arrested for shoplifting has blamed the crime on irritable bowel syndrome, authorities said. Helen Gallo, 61, of Clearwater, was arrested Sunday after allegedly shoplifting from a Cape Coral grocery store, The Daily Breeze of Cape Coral reported.

Gallo reportedly told authorities that she could not wait in line because she has irritable bowel syndrome, according to the newspaper.

Gallo was charged with petit larceny and released Sunday from the Lee County jail on $500 bond.

Gallo did not answer a telephone call placed to her home by The Associated Press. It was not known if she had an attorney.

Katrina vanden Heuvel Heads off Competition from Colbert

My subscription to The Nation had lapsed. It just kicked in again. I feel reborn.

Welcome to Baghdad

These videos are made by Iraqis. These could be my students. It just makes me weep.

There is much more here at their site.

More cheeky humor from the Brits

Those Pommie bastards do have a way about them. A conductor friend sent me this.

Backstage at "Flying Dutchman"

Here I am backstage with Joanna backstage at "Der Fliegende Holländer." The conductor was charming. It was some of the most enjoyable singing I've done - "Steuermann, lass die wacht" is one of the great operatic choruses - but the staging was physically demanding and it did not help that the staging director was less than charming.

But all in all, I was so moved by the music that the stage director could have made us stand on our heads (and, at times, it seemed to come to that) and I would have given it a go.

I thought the show was a great artistic success.

Brain Teasers for Dumb Fucks

We recently saw Mike Judge's Idiocracy.

Its premise is simple:

Smart couples have one or two offspring, and morons have 30.

Keep this up for 500 years, and the inevitable result is the gene pool will get pretty shallow.

I don't think this is very good genetics, but the film has more than a few good moments.

The most popular TV show in the future is "Ow, My Balls." I have never seen a reality TVshow (I prefer unreality), but this seems to be close to the mark.

Here is a puzzle page for the smart folks in the future.

Zbiggy hits the zbig time with John Stewart

Matthew Yglesias posted this clip of Zbigniew Brezinski and John Stewart. It will make you ache for the days of the Carter administration. Just imagine, we have sunk so lo as a country that Brezinski seems a pillar of rationality.

The question "What is this shit?" can now be answered with authority

There are those who, in fact, can't tell shit from shinola.

Now there are online resources for those seeking to answer the eternal question, "What is this shit?"

The Bristol Stool Form Scale

According to the the very nice folks - they don't seem very stuck up, at all - at the International Foundation for Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders (IFFGD):

Developed at the University of Bristol, U.K., the Bristol stool form scale is a recognized, general measure of stool consistency or form. Using this scale, you can help your physician sort out patterns or changes in bowel habit. Remember, this is intended as a general, not exact, measure. Use this guide to complete your diary and worksheet, and share the information with your physician.

The Standard Euro-turd

Dr. John Crippen, writing in his award-winning

Best Medical Weblog, Best Literary Medical Weblog, Best Health Policies/Ethics Medical Weblog

diary ("Dr John Crippen's weekly diary. The trials and tribulations, the pleasures and pitfalls of family medicine in the modern British National Health Service"), here recounts his "rite of passage" with an elderly patient.

I now digress to tell you about the statistical phenomenon of discontinuous variation. The height of the population is an example of continuous variation; there is a gradation of height throughout the population. Discontinuous variation is something that is either "on" or "off". For exampale, some people excrete asparagus in their urine. Some do not. You will know if you do.

The pastime of inspecting your stools after a bowel action is another example of discontinuous variation. Some people do. Some people do not.

Patricia does not. And even if she did, she would never talk about it.

Now, for the first time in her life, in order to win her pads, she not only has to examine her stools, but she has to classify them from 1 – 7 according to the Bristol Stool Form Scale:

Patricia is horrified.

Horrified or not, she is a meticulous sort and wants to get it right. She is baffled by the classification and is uncertain whether her stools are Type 2, 3 or 4. So she needs to consult an expert. She thus arrived with her Bristol Stool Form Scale chart and a Pyrex bowl with cling film across the top. Inside was a stool. I was able to tell her that it was unequivocally a Type 3 stool.

I know these things, because I am a doctor.

Later, I phoned the Turd-Commissar and told her that Patricia was elderly and upset. All she needed was nursing input and pads. Sorry, that is not on the protocol. Her stools must first be categorised and classified.

I think it must be Brussels. We have the Euro-sausage and the Euro-banana. Soon we will have the standard Euro-turd.

All quite hilarious in that typically British fashion.

If you are still confused, try the revised Bristol Stool Form Table

After the iBook, the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone...

A friend in Portland sent me the link to this very funny Apple parody.

Words of Wisdom from the Brits

Kevin Drum's story of a week ago in Calpundit needs more attention. As he then wrote,

A fellow named Giles Coren wrote a book review for the Times of London recently that incorporated the phrase "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," noting that it contained all 26 letters of the alphabet in a 35-letter sentence. An editor changed it to "a lazy dog" but failed to change "35 letters" to "33 letters."

Mr. Coren, of whom the BBC reports,

Journalist and author Giles Coren's novel Winkler has won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award for the most awkward description of an intimate encounter.

The food critic's book describes a sexual act between a man and a woman, in which "she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands".

The rest of the winning passage is unprintable for a family audience.

penned an email response, which was duly reprinted in The Guardian Online.

From: Coren, Giles
Sent: 10 August 2002 16:41
To: James, Anita
Cc: Wells, Dominic
Subject:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. how fucking difficult is that? it's the sentence that bestrides the fucking book i reviewed for you. it is the sentence i wrote first in my fucking review. it is 35 fucking letters long, which is why i wrote that it was. and so some useless cunt sub-editor decides to change it to "jumps over A lazy dog" can you fucking count? can you see that that makes it a 33 letter sentence? so it looks as if i can't count, and the cunting author of the book, poor mr dunn, cannot count. the whole bastard book turns on the sentence being as i fucking wrote it. and that it is exactly 33 letters long. why do you meddle. what do you think you achieve with that kind of dumb-witted smart-arsery? why do you change things you do not understand without consulting. why do you believe you know best when you know fuck all. jack shit.

that is as bad as editing can be. fuck, i hope you're proud. it will be small relief for the author that nobody reads your poxy magazine.

never ever ask me to write something for you. and don't pay me. i'd rather take £400 quid for assassinating a crack whore's only child in a revenge killing for a busted drug deal - my integrity would be less compromised.

jesus fucking wept i don't know what else to say.

[I have often thought that last sentiment while grading.]

Kevin Drum added:

It reminds me of why I like the British press: they print things the way people say them. For example, back in February The Economist ran a story about Stephen Byers, the transport minister. Apparently one of his advisors had suggested burying some bad news by releasing it on the day of Princess Margaret's funeral, his chief information officer had responded with an email advising against it, and within days of the exchange becoming public it was announced that both had "resigned." But they hadn't, or at least the chief information officer hadn't, and he had detailed notes to prove it. Oops. Or, as one participant said, “We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department is fucked. It's been the biggest cock-up ever and we are all completely fucked.”

After Scooter's verdict, the Democrat's inquiries into Walter Reed, the US attorney firings, and another week of triumph in Iraq, I imagine there are now many parts of the White House repeating this part:

“We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department is fucked... we are all completely fucked.”

Stephen Byers was the British transport secretary who was ridiculed through the UK. Here is the lead-in to the BBC story of May 24, 2002.

It's official. Stephen Byers has become a joke.

On this week's episode of Radio 4's comedy I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, Graeme Garden announced the following late arrival to the Society Ball for MPs.

"Welcome please Mr and Mrs Bennett-is-Stephen-Byers-still-there? and their son Gordon."

For him to become the butt of a joke on the most unpolitical of comedy shows is something of an achievement. But as an opinion poll indicated this week, Stephen Byers is not a popular man.

His popularity rating has even slumped below Mrs Thatcher's at her lowest ebb.

In a poll, his popularity was measured as minus 49%, a figure calculated by subtracting the number of people who think he is doing a bad job from those who think he's doing a good job.

It's no mystery how he has gained such notoriety. Some of his low points include:

• The Jo Moore thing, when he backed his special advisor after she wrote an e-mail advising 11 September was a good day to bury bad news.

• Being ridiculed when he claimed to have secured an extra £2.2bn investment in the railways, only for the Treasury to deny it.

• Facing accusations of lying when he told Parliament his press chief Martin Sixsmith had resigned, when in fact he hadn't.

Oh. The 9-11 business. THAT Stephen Byers. Is there no home for him in the Bush administration? FEMA, perhaps?

ADDENDUM:See the Dictionary of English slang and colloquialisms of the UK (Letter c) for British usage of the "c-word".

cunt (!) *	Noun. 1. The female genitals. 2. Women from a sexual viewpoint. Offensive. 3. A despicable person. Derog. and coarse, and with its associated meanings is consequently particularly offensive. 4. A very familiar term of address. E.g."Hello you old cunt, how are you? You're looking well." 5. A difficult thing or task. E.g."I'm not offering to help him move house, he's got a piano and it'll be a cunt of a job to shift it." Exclam. An exclamation of anger, surprise, frustration, disappointment. * Undoubtedly the most offensive and taboo of all vulgarisms, and particularly so to women, however its use is becoming more frequent. Consequently it is gradually losing its offensiveness and perhaps will in due course become as accepted as 'fuck' in its use. The word goes back to Middle English, cunte, and before then it can only be speculated upon, however some believe its origins lie with the Latin, cuneus, meaning wedge.
cunted	Adj. Very intoxicated by drink or drugs.
cunt-face	Noun. A contemptible person. Also cuntface.
cunt-faced	Adj. Very intoxicated.
cunting	Adj. An intensifier. E.g."If this cunting weather doesn't improve within the next 24 hours we'll have to cancel the whole trip."
cuntox	Noun. A contemptible person.
cunt struck	Adj. Sexually besotted by a woman. Also cuntstruck.
cunty	Noun. A contemptible person.
cuntybaws *	Noun. 1. An objectionable person. [Scottish use] 2. Occasionally used as a term of address. [Scottish use] * From cuntyballs.

Exposing the False Science Idol of Evolutionism

Read The Non-Moving Earth & Anti-Evolution Web Page

As they say,

Take your time.

Check it all out.

Decide for yourself.

It is a hoot.

IGUDESMAN & JOO

Very funny. Gives one a new appreciation for John Cage's composition, 4'33".

another one for the collection

A rare US plunge!

The headline doesn't contain the magic word, but look carefully into the lede:

A funny Brit

Matthew Parris (The Guardian: "political journalist and former Tory MP"), co-author with Phil Mason of Read My Lips: A Treasury of Things Politicians Wish They Hadn't Said, wrote this very funny commentary in today's Times (UK).

From The Times
March 01, 2007
I dare you to read this and refute (not rebut) my case
Matthew Parris: My Week

Some television people came round recently to record interviews for a new Grumpy Old . . . series, so I had to work myself up into a passably grumpy state to discuss things like romance, class and politics. Fine — but the trouble was that, after the TV crew had gone, the grumpiness stayed. I started to see everything with a grumpy eye. I turned to the morning papers and — tut, tut — there was that word “refute”, misused yet again by a journalist.

Harrumph. Look, we must of course take care not to become boring old farts about the misuse of words...

Mr. Parris is a regular commentator for the Times. His most recent columns include:

• The urgent need for a new public lavatory policy
• No, we don’ t really want politicians to listen to us
• It’s unfair. My argument should be as loud as yours