Tuesday, August 22, 2006

What’s New(s) This Week?

JonBenet is news again, apparently. I’ve seen just as much writing, admittedly mostly on blogs, about why this isn’t a national news story worthy of 24/7 coverage as I have seen about the actual case itself. Me, I think it just provides the national news media an excuse to relax their hard working brains after dealing with the really hard stories of the day. Sure, I feel terrible that a young girl like that was brutally murdered. But many, many children go missing every single day and a great many of the cases do not end up with a happy ending. What’s special about this one? Besides that entire, incredibly creepy part about her being in beauty pageants for six year olds, all decked out to look like some midget hooker, I mean.

This story is just another extension of the “missing damsel” stories that we have been bombarded with for the last decade, it seems. I guess the whole thing about Natalie Holloway and Aruba has played itself out. (Let’s all thank our Respective God, Gods, or Goddesses that MSNBC finally dumped Rita Cosby. Who actually decided that giving an airhead like that her own show was actually a good idea?) And the media seems to have put a collective bow on the Lacy Peterson story. We haven’t had a great “missing damsel” story to latch onto in ages. So, just as with Hollywood and their love of sequels, we have the JonBenet Ramsey story, Part Deaux. It gives reporters the chance to breathlessly report on the trivial without actually having to do actual reporter stuff like, oh, research and investigations. Nope, news and entertainment are now so enmeshed with each other, reporters cannot help fall over the line from one to the other, since that line does not exist anymore.

George Allen’s campaign in the Virginia Senate race is still grinding its’ gears, trying to recover from the entire “Macaca” incident. Politicians should never forget the First Rule of Holes; when you find yourself in one, stop digging immediately. I can’t see how his advisors thought that having him issue multiple, conflicting explanations three or four days running on how he just made up the name, it was referring to guy’s hairdo which wasn’t really a Mohawk, how it wasn’t really racist, how he was really just calling the guy a s**thead, etc. was really a good idea. That’s as bad as George Bush trying to explain his rationale for tax cuts for the rich, or why we are in Iraq, or pretty much everything he has ever done while in office. People stop believing you after about the second or third attempt. If, as a parent, your kid tried something like that, you might smack him one (DISCLAIMER: This is not a statement in support of abusing your children. Shame on you if you do.) and send him to his room.

But really, you really have to question this guy’s credentials for holding political office if he can’t prevent himself from saying something incredibly stupid and something that, even if he didn’t mean it to be a racial slur, could very easily be used by your opponent to make you look racist, and the guy is pointing a video camera at you. It seems to me that voters of the great state of Virginia would like to make sure their elected representatives have at least some modicum of intellect before actually, you know, like... voting for them.

Bush’s new and improved strategy for Iraq is, hold on now, staying the course! Now, why didn’t I think of that? Jeez. The man is a genius.... Not. However, he did admit, when pressed by a reporter, that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. Hey, doesn’t that make Dick Cheney look like a complete idiot or maybe just a chronic liar? But then, that doesn’t stop them. In fact, I bet that someone in the administration, within the next month, will somehow manage to claim that Saddam did indeed have a tie in to those dreadful events of 9/11. They don’t even care they are inconsistent or that anyone with a dial up modem can retrieve their exact quotes or (even better) a video of them contradicting what they just said earlier. Does not compute...

Joe Lieberman’s all puffed up in self righteous indignation over being called on not being a Democrat. I mean, he just is running for Senator for the state of Connecticut on a third party ticket, but it isn’t like he isn’t really a Democrat at heart, you know. The American people are just silly that way, trying to put labels on everything. Like, is there a civil war going on in Iraq or not? Apparently, because Iraq doesn’t have a place named Antietam or Gettysburg, Donald Rumsfeld is not ready to call it a civil war, even though in excess of 3400 Iraqis were killed in July alone. Nope, nothing civil about that at all. If it were not beneath the notice of this administration, which it definitely is, it would be considered to be highly uncivil. But back to Lieberman. So, apparently, the thought process at work here is that he, or anyone else for that matter, can run for office for whatever party they designate for themselves, regardless of whether or not they had been rejected in their party’s primary election, and then expect to be welcomed back to the warm hearth of their party with all their party credentials intact, even after talking some serious smack about the actual party nominee and thus giving the opposition party lots of ammo. Uh-huh....

*Whack!* Go to your room! Just wait until your father gets home!

Pluto’s status as a planet is still up in the air. Scientists seem to be undecided about taking the obvious course and calling Pluto something other than a planet and offending every single school kid in the world while invalidating every science book written since the 1950’s, or calling it something else like a ‘Plutoid’. Right now, the official version is that Pluto has been finally granted full planethood just because it was one already (sort of like Paris Hilton being labeled as a “famous person” for no other reason than she is famous). But, in order to do that, those knowledgeable scientists, also known for giving us “black holes”, “dark matter”, and the ever-popular Higg’s boson, had to grant planethood to several other planet wannabees, such as Pluto’s moon named Charon, the Asteroid Formerly Known as Ceres, and something called 2003 UB313, which has the current nickname “Xena”. (God help us, we are now naming astronomical bodies with names out of a really crummy syndicated television show aimed at horny adolescents with an authority complex.)

The inclusion of Charon is, for me, something of a mystery, since Pluto itself is smaller than several moons within the solar system. So, if Charon, which is only 1/4 the size of Pluto, is designated a planet, then shouldn’t Titan, Callisto, Io, Ganymede, and Europa all be anointed with the title of full-fledged “planet” as well? Hey, our own moon is pretty big, about the same size as Mercury, which is an undisputed member of the Solar System Eight, and it’s certainly round. What’s up with this? I think we need to start a grassroots write-in campaign for the Moon. “As Big And Round As Any Planet!” could be the rallying cry. Or maybe, “I’m Not George Bush!”, since that seems to be working so well for Lieberman.

Oh, and the Preznit like fart jokes. Not too much commentary to be added about that.

Until next time, kiddies!

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