News from around Blogonia

This is the last weekend of my lovely at-home vacation, and once again, I didn't get nearly as much done as I'd hoped. You see, when a decision has to be made as to whether to do something fun or do housework, fun always wins out. This creates a situation in which it takes 12 hours just to clean the basement family room, including tossing about a hundred videocassettes of things I haven't yet watched after eight years and things I'll never watch again -- and organizing the remaining 100+ into categories....and getting rid of eight years of Family Handyman and Today's Homeowner magazines that I was keeping from our early days as homeowners, when I felt capable of doing myself just about anything not involving tall ladders.

So what this means is that while the outside of my house looks great, with all manner of new annuals planted, and everything mulched (there's something kind of empowering about dragging bags of mulch around, don'tcha think? Or is that just a girl thing?) -- but the inside still looks like a college dorm after a particularly wild party. Six months after we had new windows installed, the interior painting is still in a state of paralysis, with each room having to wait till something in another room is done. Today, I have a wallpaper border looking at me dolefully, determined to not come down easily. You see, many bullets were sweated putting this sucker up, but when you change colors, the old border just doesn't work anymore. Now I remember why I never wanted to use wallpaper.

But while I was at home attempting vainly to be a self-contained DIY network show, important things were going on in the world, which my fellow denizens of Blogonia have dutifully covered while I was slacking off looking at 157 shades of green and a wallpaper border for the kitchen.

First, you'll notice that we have a Big Brass Blogroll of the Big Brass Alliance member blogs. This sucker is really taking off, folks, and we have visions of Bush, Cheney, and Rove being led out of the White House in handcuffs dancing in our heads.

Second of all, here are some interesting stories you won't want to miss regarding the wankers of the right:

• Is there a perfect storm brewing involving the Downing Street Memo, Jack Abramoff, and Ohio Republican crook Tom Noe? John Aravosis reports on money the Bush campaign received from "Bush Pioneer" Tom Noe. Noe's fundraising is being investigated by a Federal grand jury.


• Politicsnj.com has a nice page about NJ Gubernatorial candidate and long-time wanker Bret Schundler stealing a photo from a Dean rally for his own campaign because he can't gather enough people for a canasta game, let alone a rally.


• Kos covers the no-holds-barred steel cage deathmatch between mainstream so-called journalists and bloggers, as the FEC prepares to squash political blogging by parsing the definition of "journalist", so as to ensure that only Administration-approved commentary is allowed on the internet.


• Shakespeare's Sister comments on the weekly Friday Night Bush Administration Trash Dump. This week it's the U.S. Southern Command, which runs the prison at Guantanamo Bay, admitting that "American jailers at the Guantanamo prison for foreign terrorism suspects splashed a Koran with urine, kicked and stepped on the Islamic holy book and soaked it with water." They call this "mishandling." Meanwhile, the lunatic Michelle Malkin is sticking with the "Newsweek lied, people died" meme, focusing on one detainee who ripped up his own copy of the Qu'ran. Obviously, Ms. Maglalang has never heard of the "It's OK to knock your own team" rule.


• Joe Gandelman passes on a BBC story that indicates I may have enough lifespan ahead of me to finish that novel after all:
  

  Curvy women are more likely to live longer than their slimmer counterparts, researchers have found.
  Institute of Preventative Medicine in Copenhagen researchers found those with wider hips also appeared to be protected against heart conditions.
  
  Women with a hip measurement smaller than 40 inches, or a size 14 would not have this protection, they said.
  
  The researchers say hip fat contains a beneficial natural anti-inflammatory.



• And of course, the Nixon Revisionism in the aftermath of the Deep Throat revelation continues. My favorite entry in this catalog of idiocy is from Ben Stein in The American Spectator, who proves why no one is interested in going mano-a-mano with Ben Stein's intellect anymore, not even for cash:
  

  Now, we read that Mark Felt's family and Mark Felt put out their story solely to make money off it. So, this makes the family's karma even more unnerving. The father, patriarch, Mark, took out his anger and frustration for being passed over at the FBI, by ruining the career of the peacemaker, Richard Nixon. So, he condemned a whole subcontinent to genocide and slavery and poverty to please his own wounded vanity. (Maybe his nickname should be "sour grapes" and not "deep throat" because he has as much in common with that fox as with a porn star.) And, blood will tell, as the old saying goes: his posterity is now dragging out his old body and putting it on display to make money. (Have you noticed how Mark Felt looks like one of those old Nazi war criminals they find in Bolivia or Paraguay? That same, haunted, hunted look combined with a glee at what he has managed to get away with so far?)
  

  
  You've got to love a revisionist history which claims that the reason we lost Vietnam was because of the Democrats' hounding of that ol' peace-lover himself, Richard Nixon. By that logic, I expect next week an essay from Pat Buchanan acknowledging that 9/11 was able to occur was because of the Republicans' hounding of Bill Clinton. Sauce for the goose, baby.