SADDA_ HUSSE_N

Maggie Blogging

Santa's gift from last year is all grown up now.

Art Blogging

"Get Mother a Drink" by DC artist Dana Ellyn. Check out her work at DanaEllyn.com. This was intended to be a gift for someone else but I've decided that I like it too much to give away. Art, like life, can be a bitch.

Holiday Photo Blogging

Maggie as Santa's Little Helper. She doesn't seem too excited about it ...



My first apple pie ...



The view from the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center. I kind of liked the blurred effect of shooting without a tripod ...

Huckabee Who?

Yet another outgoing Republican't governor who is running for president has said something really stupid. I know, I know -- it's hard to keep up. This time it's Governor Huckabee of Arkansas trying to distance himself from the pack by not being an anti-immigrant nutcase.

"One of the great challenges facing us is that we do not commit the same mistakes with our growing Hispanic population that we did with African Americans 150 years ago and beyond. We're still paying the price for the pathetic manner in which this country handled that," Huckabee said ... "I think, frankly, the Lord is giving us a second chance to do better than we did before."

Now follow his "logic": God is giving "us" a second chance to avoid racism. Not with the victims of the original racism (guess it's too late even if you are an omniscient god) but with a surrogate group that wasn't lucky enough to be kidnapped and transported half-way around the world.

Maybe Republican'ts should just stick to bigotry. They're good at it and it would keep them from making unintentional John Kerry-like blunders whenever they open their mouths.

Fly Me To The Moon

In a recent posting on Slate, Gregg Easterbrook demolishes the Bush Administration's call for a permanent, manned moonbase. NASA is eager to play along because it guarantees a bigger budget. Yet the scientific justification for this effort is nonexistent. Although it does raise the question of whether the money-sucking sounds of the NASA bureaucracy can be heard in the vacuum of space.

Creative Unemployment

Great stop-motion movie:

Silly, Silly Gays

Even Santa Gets Hungry

Santa prepares to eat two more children...

Taming The Wild Mustang

This simply can't be true. AutoWeek magazine is reporting that Ford will bring out new versions of its popular Mustand: four-door sedan and station wagon models. Yikes!

Don't faint yet. They say it won't slink into showrooms until 2011. The December 18 issue of the magazine has illustrations. This is the best I could do for now:

New Jersey's Christmas Present

With little notice by the national press, the state legislature in New Jersey just approved civil unions for same-gender couples. The only difference with "marriage" is the name.

The state Supreme Court had issued a ruling in October declaring that the state constitution requires equal treatment of citizens. Gov. Jon Corzine has said he will sign it. Obviously, he isn't running for president.

Of course, it should be pointed out that withholding the name "marriage" is just vestigial bigotry. Yet conservatives in New Jersey wanted to stop both the name and the legal benefits from being granted to gays.

"We're going to vigorously oppose civil unions if it raises up to marriage without the m-word," said John Tomicki, president of the New Jersey Coalition to Preserve and Protect Marriage, a group of clergy, scholars and conservative groups.

Despite the usual rantings of such rightwingers, New Jersey has delivered a rather nice Christmas present to the nation. Thanks Noo Joisey!

For those who plan to go there to check out the new law, here's some information on the Jersey Turnpike.

Do As We Say, Not As We Do

The hypocrisy of the Bush Administration has now reached a new high -- or is that low? They encourage young citizens to volunteer for military service despite the fact that almost none of those in the Administration have served. Vice President Cheney "had other priorities." Even Dubya's truncated stint in the National Guard was designed to avoid actual service. And they don't expect their children to serve, either. Not Dubya's party-girl twins, not Cheney's daughters (whose birth, ironically, kept him out of Viet-Nam), not Senator Frist's children and not Mitt Romney's boys. I guess they all have other priorities.

Yet the news that Mary Cheney, the vice president's lesbian daughter, and her partner have decided to have a child just can't be exceeded in the hypocrisy department. This, after all, is the administration that pushed for an anti-gay marriage amendment to the US Constitution. Mary even refers to her partner as her "wife." That's kind of like saying Dubya is "leader of the free world." Wishing don't make it so.

Wonkette has a poll to let readers vote on who the father is. My favorite part is the caption on Wonkette's photo, reproduced below:


"Mary and Heather Cheney with their infant baby girl, Suri."

Strung Out Orthodoxy

Until I read the latest issue of Harper's, I had no idea that Orthodox Jews were allowed to string fishing lines on street lights, and the like, in New York City. [The link does not yet work since the issue is still on newsstands.] They do this to fool God -- and the City lets them use public property to do it. Basically, by divine decree, the orthodox are prohibited from doing many things outside the home on the Sabbath. It's a day of rest, don't you know? To get around this restriction they simply declare that a continuous loop of string can outline a "home" in satisfaction of god's law. In the case of New York, this "home" encompasses 4000 acres. To Orthodox Jews, apparently, god is either an inattentive idiot or a lousy lawyer.

Looking into it, I discovered that the OJs are trying to do the same thing in Santa Monica, California. However, the Lord moves in mysterious ways and is using the California Coastal Commission to tie this string scam up in knots. Farther from the coast, OJs have successfully created eruvs, as they are called, throughout Los Angeles. These god-fooling string houses exist around the world. Who knew?

This story highlights two things for me. First, religious rules are a bunch of hogwash (oops! hogs are not kosher...) and religious leaders know it. Second, governments are almost always willing to bend the rules in favor of creating "special rights" for the religiously impaired.

Romney and the MittWits

Outgoing Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney is not going out fast enough. One of his last-ditch efforts to screw his successor is the appointment of an executive director of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center. This state-created board oversees stem cell research funding. Despite the scientific nature of the post, Romney's appointee has no science background and no search was conducted to find candidates for this position. I think we can see how a Romney Administration would handle federal agencies, can't we?

Romney is rapidly cornering the market on conservatives in his all-but-announced race against John McCain and Rudy Giuliani for the Republican't nomination in 2008. He is surrounding himself with like-minded MittWits who will give him the conservative street cred he craves. Anti-tax conservatives Glenn Hubbard and Greg Mankiw will co-chair Romney’s Economic Advisory Council, and Cesar Conda, a former Cheney staffer , will be senior economic advisor to Romney's PAC.

Now all Romney has to do is point out that Giuliani has gay friends and McCain has a dark-skinned daughter and the nomination should be his.

Republican't Party

In response to the way conservatives always say "the Democrat [sic] Party," bumper stickers have begun popping up that tell the truth about the GOP. It all started with some "hopping mad" taxpayers from Texas.

Hopefully, pundits will begin to pick up the theme. America has suffered from a false "fairness" imposed on political debates by the mainstream media. Bigots and liars are presented as legitimate experts and are rarely challenged by the press -- they leave that chore up to the opponents of bigotry and the defenders of truth. Yet the debate is always presented as a two-sided, "he says, she says" waste of time. If the MSM won't do its job and expose the truth about Republican'ts, you might as well take advantage of their timidity and hit back.