Month: February 2003

I just put a pair of white ankle socks in my mailbox. You probably don’t want to know why. I just hope they get picked up before the mail-person sees them and fears what the future might hold…

There were tons of anti-war protests all over the world this past weekend. Here in Austin (supposedly Bush-country) one of the largest political rallies in the city’s history was held. Here are some great pictures.

This new DVD player is going to drive me to the poor house. I have terrible impulse control when confronted with movies I want…so far, the damage includes the movies Amadeus, Memento, The Fisher King and Witness and a box set of all the Sports Night TV show episodes. I really want the Criterion version of Brazil, but it’s so expensive.

Wow – further signs that Bush and company have ADD.

The United States Congress has stepped in to find nearly $300m in humanitarian and reconstruction funds for Afghanistan after the Bush administration failed to request any money in the latest budget.

Remember all those quotes about how America was going to help the poor people of Afghanistan get out from under the mantle of the evil-ones? How we weren’t going to walk away from Afghanistan after dropping bombs on them? How, after killing many innocent citizens of the country, we would “Marshall Plan” Afghanistan? Guess Bush didn’t remember all that… Gee, what support the people of Iraq have to look forward too!

Here’s another article about the denial of AIDS funds to organizations that support/talk about abortion as an option. Essentially, the current position states that if an organization has separate financial divisions for family planning and AIDS help, they can get the money. This way, the Bush can impose his own personal sense of morality while appearing to be “compassionate” at the same time. Of course, never mind that this compartmentalization demand is impractical.

But Planned Parenthood’s Sherk argued the policy is unworkable. Women, especially in poor countries, are unlikely to visit separate facilities to meet different health care needs. Additionally, the costs of setting up separate facilities would be prohibitive for cash-strapped nongovernmental organizations.

[Kirsten Sherk is the spokeswoman for international programs at Planned Parenthood.]

Why not just give the money to the UN-sponsored Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria? Oh yeah, because according to the Bush administration, anything not unilateral is bad.

Ah, yes. How predictable. There are some strings attached to that AIDS money that Bush talked about in his state of the union address:

President Bush has decided to allow organizations that promote or perform abortions in poor countries to qualify under some circumstances for part of the $15 billion he has proposed to fight AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean, an administration official said Friday night.

[emphasis mine] So, just under some circumstances? If a woman is HIV positive and pregnant with a high probability that her child will be born HIV positive (because throughout her pregnancy she hasn’t been able to afford the drugs that would decrease those chances), she will be forced to bring her child into the world – a child that will present an even further financial burden to herself and the government and for whom she won’t be able to afford the drugs needed to extend his/her life. That just makes no sense to me.

And I thought the Patriot Act was bad…Patriot Act II is in the works. Here’s what Dr. David Cole, Georgetown University Law professor had to say about the “secret” and proposed legislation:

This proposed law, he added, “would radically expand law enforcement and intelligence gathering authorities, reduce or eliminate judicial oversight over surveillance, authorize secret arrests, create a DNA database based on unchecked executive ‘suspicion,’ create new death penalties, and even seek to take American citizenship away from persons who belong to or support disfavored political groups.”

Here’s a wonderful interview with Kurt Vonnegut – a long time favorite of mine.

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup díetat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

To make things even worse (read entry from earlier today), every time I try to reinstall Netscape (the standard first attempt to fix any windows problems), it causes a “system error” and the install stops.

There just aren’t enough words for how ticked I am at Microsoft right now. Last night, I did the standard Windows updater thing (because god forbid they write good, secure code the first time). One of the items on the list was a patch that would offer “better support for systems who don’t use Internet Explorer as their default browser.” Well, this sound made for me! Now, every time I try to launch Netscape, my system crashes. Grrrr.