I don’t mean to rant, but this must be addressed:

“The improper communications between Congressman Mark Foley and former House Congressional pages is unacceptable and abhorrent. It is an obscene breach of trust,” Hastert, R-Ill., Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Majority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said Saturday in a written statement.

No. What Foley did was despicable, immoral, pedophilic, and wrong. The obscene breach of trust was done by the Republican leaders in congress who allowed this man to continue to violate the very laws on pedophilia he was creating for several years.

Where is the public outcry? Why am I only seeing Democratic blogs and editors digging deeper into this terrible situation? Where the hell is the religious right?

Now Foley’s lawyer is claiming that Foley is gay and was molested as a teenager by a clergyman. And… so what? Is that supposed to excuse him in some way?

Quietly, the senate is trying to hold a vote that would retroactively pardon the President for any illegal spying he may have done on the American public. It’s called the Cheney-Specter bill, and it is a very dangerous piece of legislature. In addition to writing the President a “blank check” to do whatever the hell he pleases it also infringes on your rights:

It means any lawyer, journalist or other innocent American who has ever been contacted by a person being monitored by U.S. agents could become the target of wiretaps that go on indefinitely, completely unbeknown to any judge or member of Congress.

It gets worse. The Cheney-Specter bill also would require all state and federal cases challenging such wiretapping to be transferred to the FISA court, where proceedings are secret and cases can be dismissed on any grounds.

Sound like a good idea to you? No, it didn’t sound good to me either. In fact it sounded down right scary that the Republicans behind this bill, people who declare themselves to be so freedom-loving, would be so cavalier with the freedom of their constituents. Sign the petition to stop this bill.

But you don’t have to take my word for it: John F. Kennedy has some interesting things to say about secrecy. But hell, what would he know - it’s not he had to deal with America’s freedoms being globally threa …. oh wait a minute.

Our common sense is slowly losing the battle with the “war on terror” (which is a completely moronic term - how can we wage a war on a tactic?). Check out this personal account of what happens when some guy accidently drops an iPod down the toilet on a plane and everyone freaks out. A tasty quote:

Now the questions became really pointed. What do you think about 9/11? What are your views on the Iran issue? Do you think government is too big, too powerful? Would you ever “make a point?”

He asked me if I knew how to make a bomb. “I have a degree in physics, and I’m not an idiot.” Of course I knew how to make a bomb — what kind of question is that?? The better question is, WOULD I make a bomb? The answer is no.

All this guy did was lose his iPod down an airplane toilet (after which he informed the flight attendants exactly what happened). What the hell is wrong with these people? It could even be argued that the reaction to this minor incident was itself a minor act of “terror” for all the people involved.

Obvious Alert: life is dangerous. Very little of what is being by the government can help. Get over it.

And another thing: the feverish search by the media for how “terrorists” could possibly hurt us is out of control. There are a million ways to hurt people - listing them out or having experts explain exactly how each can be executed actually HELPS terrorists (I’m talking to you, Fox “News”).

Looks like the image-makers of Reuters, CNN, and Fox have some explaining to do. Several photos that have been posted to their websites and printed in their newspapers appear to be fake. The blogosphere is already on fire - read more here:

• Little Green Footballs
• Pop Photo
• Power Line
• The Jawa Report
• Drinking From Home
• Slashdot.org

Well folks, if you’re a regular reader of this blog you knew about Vincent Ferrari’s troubles with AOL six days ago. This morning’s “The Today Show” finally picked up the story and interviewed Vincent:

This national exposure is indicative of the power that blogs (and the internet in general) can have. Some guy gets “wronged” by a billion dollar company, he blogs about it, and a few days later Matt Lauer is interviewing him. Score 1 for the little guy.

The Hi-Lite 30 is an old drive-in theater about 1 kilometer from our home. It stands in disrepair, mostly because the owners of the land have only leased it one year at a time for the past ten years to the current theater operators; they have had no incentive to renovate property that they did not own. Despite it’s current condition tens of thousands of residents still flock to see movies each summer as they have for the past 50 years. But not this year.

The story is exceptionally convoluted, but it now appears that the theater will be torn down in the name of “money for schools.” School District 131 stands to benefit if (and that’s a big IF) they can sell the 8 acres donated by Bigelow Homes. Not coincidentally, Bigelow Homes is also the developer who proposed to expand it’s existing communist commune HomeTown Aurora by 240 homes where the theater stands today. Big surprise.

You can follow all the drama at the excellent Aurora-based blog OpenlineBlog, specifically this entry which talks about the public hearing Shannon and I attended last night (you might have been able to see us in the picture if it were not blurred).

The whole situation makes me ill. I feel bad for all of the “concerned parents” who were fooled into believing that the hypothetical 1.3 million dollars the donated land was claimed to be worth could help their schools. The problem is that this estimation comes from the developer (who gets a tax write-off for the “value” of the land) and there are no current buyers for the land (in fact there are multiple parcels of land in the area that are currently on the market and not being sold, much less for the per-acre cost used to estimate the land’s value). Money is not going to solve their problems: the East Aurora High School (the only in District 131) already spends $2,000 more PER STUDENT than the surrounding districts. City Hall is not who they should be protesting - they should be protesting outside of their own school board’s meetings. Besides, with the addition of 240 homes and the accompaning children that come along with that influx of people, do they really think that’s going to help their already over-crowded schools? Morons.

I am against violence, but these people need to get their faces smacked with a heavy gauntlet of truth and common sense. About 85% of the people who spoke at the meeting supported the Drive-In, many passionately and with excellent supporting arguments backed by facts. The other 15% lived in HomeTown and appeared to be ignorant of the actual issues surrounding the drive-in. They spoke, for the first time in this months long debate, “because we care about our kids education.” Great! But this wasn’t the place to do it, you naive wastes of carbon, and you sure as hell don’t have a clue about what damage you did last night to you, your children’s, and Aurora’s future.

To the moronic few: Thanks for destroying a wonderful landmark (something unique in the western suburbs), removing cheap family entertainment (now we have to drive elsewhere to spend our money), and driving our property values down with shoddy housing and cheap strip malls (which will go unsold if they have the same luck as the half-empty strip mall 2 kilometers down the road).

This is why I hate stupid people.

current twc: 14,467

Ran across this page in delicious. Proves that we don’t have to look beyond our own borders to find scary people that are willing to damage or destroy the freedoms and ideals of this country from within. Even taken out of context there are some jaw-dropping quotes that sends a shiver down my spine. How do the individuals on this list (especially those that are in power today) still hold any sway over our population? Why can’t we see the poison in our own veins?