Still Coughing, But on the Mend
"Gore's speech was one no minimally decent politician could have delivered. It was entirely dishonest, cheap, low. It was utterly hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts - bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in smarmy tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible. But I understate." -- Michael Kelly
Interesting trip to the rifle range yesterday. The road is now clear of snow, except for the small amount that fell recently, but the trees were still covered with ice from Friday's and Saturday's freezing rain. Many of them were bent over the road, preventing passage. I spent fifteen or twenty minutes ripping and cutting branches off to make a passage under the still bent tree limbs. A saw would have made the job easy, but my Steve Ryan Model Seven knife served amazingly well. I bought this particular knife because it was advertised as a "working knife". Its thick, strong blade was a great asset. The space I made under the bent trees was not tall enough for the pickup trucks that most of the guys drive, but it worked fine for my Honda Civic, and I was able to drive the rest of the way up the road to the rifle range.
William Marvel at Veterans Against the Iraq War - Vets March and Teach in Washington - a report from the war zone in DC. [trt-ny]
As soon as George Bush launched his invasion of Iraq, I started for our nation's capital. I drove over roads that were crumbling because the various states lacked money to repair them, and I visited municipal libraries and manuscript repositories that had all cut back on services because their funding had been reduced. When I arrived in Washington, however, I discovered that there was plenty of money for police. The city is an armed camp, with concrete barriers and hordes of cops blocking every intersection within detonation distance of our privileged and protected representatives.
Baltimore and the District of Columbia are encircled with electronic signs inviting reports of "suspicious activity" and offering the number of the federal snitch hotline. The swarms of police therefore amuse themselves by badgering the targets of paranoid informants. While I was there, a Washington Post reporter was detained for inquiring about the function of an environmental monitoring device near the Mall: someone had reported him for his "suspicious questions." Now, thanks to the "Patriot" Act, the only probable cause police need to accost a citizen is an anonymous tip from some nitwit.
