You're not gonna believe this topic!

[Tripp]

Damn Dirk Tungsten and his booze.

[Moetown]

The weeks seem to get longer, while the weekends end before I really get to enjoy them. I feel like getting drunk at work.

[Tripp]

here's a column you might find interesting.
...
Must've been another bad week to be president. Any time a sitting president gets on TV and says, "Running the country isn't a popularity contest," you know the administration smells trouble. Didn't Daddy say that too, a few months before he lost his own popularity contest? (Of course, if I were the Hand Puppet, I wouldn't be much concerned with losing popularity contests either. He lost the last one he was in and he still became president.)

And the hits just keep on coming. Following the exposure of VP Dick Cheney as an apparent pathological liar (he told a whole slew of obvious lies and pointed misimplications on NBC's MEET THE PRESS) both Sec. Of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Hand Puppet himself came out and said they knew of no connections between Saddam Hussein and 9-11. The Hand Puppet couldn't quite bring himself to admit there is no evidence, and instead stated we hadn't "found" any, an argument the administration is now well practiced in using courtesy of Iraq's still-absentee weapons of mass destruction. The Hand Puppet claimed to understand why so many Americans (if a Washington Post poll can be believed) believed Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9-11, which was big of him, considering it's his administration that has most fostered and manipulated that perception.

In fact, that perception was the underlying cause for the Iraq War, since the measure that gave the Hand Puppet authority to pursue it called for military action not against Iraq, but against "nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001..." The admission that the administration knew there was no Saddam/al-Qaeda connection is tantamount to admitting they knowingly misused their authority. If the White House didn't know there was no connection before they went to war, it could only be because they ignored all their own intelligence briefings.

Though that appears to be standard procedure for this administration. For all Republicans blame "the al-Qaeda threat" on Clinton's inaction, it now comes out that Clinton was prepared to take action against bin Laden but chose not to saddle his successor, whoever that would be, with a war. Instead, Clinton's people gave the Hand Puppet's national security advisor Condaleeza Rice a full briefing on the scope of the problem and outlined possible steps to take against him - but all that basically went unreported to the current administration, not surprisingly since the Hand Puppet since inauguration has done whatever he could to ignore or undo as much of Clinton's presidency as possible. It was only a week before 9-11 that the administration finally got around to discussing the possible threat of terrorism, almost a year after the Rice briefing. If they were inert in the interim, it can't be laid at Clinton's doorstep.

Of course, this is only a problem now because the press has finally decided to ask a serious question or two, which more than anything explains Monday night's double dose of Hand Puppet, courtesy of ABC MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL and a powderpuff interview from FOX NEWS.

The situation hasn't been helped by the sudden reappearance of the administration's invisible man, Dick Cheney, who managed to top his MEET THE PRESS liefest with the equally sudden blessing of his once and future firm, Halliburton, with a slew of profitable government contracts absent of competitive bids. If Iraq has been anything, it has been a godsend to Halliburton's coffers. But Cheney's also been on a tear to preserve the "integrity" of the Energy Policy meetings he held with various "experts" in the administration's early days. Thanks to lawsuits from citizen's groups, we now know his "consultants" were strictly executives in the energy sector, no scientists or citizens' advocates allowed. The same suits resulted in an order that the minutes of the meetings be released, and that's what Cheney's going to ground to prevent. Considering what has gone on in America since those days, it's easy to wonder what he wants to keep hidden so badly. Was anything discussed regarding the subsequent organized bilking of California by energy cartels, resulting in a greatly depleted state treasury that was trumpeted as a major argument for the recall of California governor Gray Davis? Were they discussing the potential value of Iraqi oil well before the invasion? (Don't forget, Rumsfeld's first reaction to 9-11 was that it provided a rationale for the invasion of Iraq, a move both Cheney and Rumsfeld had been arguing for at least since 1998.)

When the dust settles, lies and corruption will end up the hallmark of this administration. The arguments for going into Iraq. The claim that New York City's air was perfectly fit to breath following 9-11. The handing over of public agencies to those openly hostile to their purposes. Then there's the scam cooked up by Utah's senators and the Bureau Of Land Management to swap protected government land in Utah - some of the most scenic in the state and home to various endangered species - for basically worthless Utah state land. The official appraisal places them at equal value, despite the former's greater size and the vast pools of oil there. The oil's the crux of the matter. Independent appraisers put the value of the state land at $35 million and the value of the federal land at over $150 million. Yet the Hand Puppet's Bureau Of Land Management was so keen to go ahead with this deal - Utah could easily turn around and license the land off to oil companies - that their negotiator told their several appraisers who objected to the deal as basically a looting of the government to shut the hell up. You probably haven't heard about the investigation into that, but the land swap essentially amounts to a payoff for the Hand Puppet's supporters in Utah, the most conservative state in the West. (Remember, Utah's governor, whose main environmental claim is that pollution in Utah has skyrocketed under his administration, is the Hand Puppet's pick to head up the Environmental Protection Agency.) Just another of a million stories in the Hand Puppet's Naked Nation.

[brainfiber]

Hey I'm trying to figure out what i'm going to do with my friends when they come into the city next friday.

i thought of a sleazy city tour -- adult book stores, peep shows, capped off with a sleazy nudie bar stop.

then i saw this:

Living Masters celebrates the full diversity of comic and cartoon art as work from the greatest living practitioners of comic books, comic strips, animation and political cartooning joins the Fabergé Easter eggs and other incredible artworks on display at the Forbes Gallery.

cap that off with a trip to see

The American Effect  ---
Whitney Museum of American Art --that's where they have the big "old superhero" wax figure thing

Then i thought of a "Shots" tour...where we would tour places where people were shot...the dakota, outside the times square studio where tupac lost his testicle...harlem for malcom x...at least i think that's where he was shot...and in between we could go to a bar and do a shot.

[Moetown]

You could take them to places where they would most likely get shot.

[shabbadoo]

I don't believe this topic!

[brainfiber]

hey continuing a conversation from yesterday...what your saying if i'm in the market for a new computer...and i don't play games...then a mac would be better?

I actually was a mac person at first. Had a 165c powerbook during collage...but once i started working everything was pc, and at that point it you couldn't really transfer stuff from macs to pcs easily...so i went the pc route.

[regular tom]

this topic is the Dick Cheney of topics.

or maybe the EMF of topics.

you're unbelievable!  OH!

[regular tom]

go mac, young man.  all those pc to mac to pc transfer issues are a thing of the past.  

[regular tom]

i thought Giuliani got rid of all the NYC sleaze.  he didn't get rid of all the rats, so i say take your friends to the jersey side of the port authority and purchase some stolen handguns and take the subway around town getting off at random platforms to shoot some rodents when the trains pull away.  

[brainfiber]

man they are expensive though...i won't be in the market for one anytime soon.

actually my dad grew up in weehawken and they actually used to do that with bb guns.

RATS...they eat they don't sleep...

Ben, the two of us need look no more

[regular tom]

i did a lot of growing up in weehawken, but i was 22 and 23 when i lived there.  and i didn't have a gun.  

and i don't have a gun.  


now i'm coming as i am!  


(nevermind)

[brainfiber]

as long as you had a whiplash smile

[shabbadoo]

Oh yeah, all of the translation of PC files is seamless.  Most documents will open easily with either the Mac or PC version of the program and Mac recognizes all the different disk formats.  And if you have Virtual PC, you can even run your favorite Windows apps right alongside the Mac ones.  And OSX is rock solid.  I haven't had one system crash since I installed it about 4 or 5 months ago.  I've had a couple of programs that sometimes will crash or quit unexpectedly still (not often), but it's usually the 'classic' ones (OS9).  If you really like MS Office, the Mac version is quite popular.

(ok BF, here comes "the speech")

What it gets down to is this: Apple makes a superior operating system because they've been the big innovators since the beginning of personal computing.  They invented (or first implemented) the whole concept of "user-friendly": windows, pop up menus, scroll bars, graphic icons, using a mouse (point and click).  All the while Microsoft was still milking DOS, Bill Gates' circa 1976 operating system, which was revolutionary at the time, but 10 years later it was quite antiquated.  Eventually they had to catch up, so what did they do?  They made a knock off of the Mac OS and even had to buy sections of the code from Apple to do so.  Then they used their position and questionable business practices to dominate the market.  Plus, they licenced thier OS to anybody and everybody who could stick some chips in a box and call it a PC, while Apple wouldn't sell a licence to anyone and remained very selective when it came to developers and quality control.  As a result, Macs are more expensive, but better designed and more reliable.  Plus, you know if you buy something that is Mac compatible, that is going to f'in work right and virtually seamless the first time you use it...  

[TheSTLKid]

duh, raven's "rock until you drop" is easily the best album of 1981.