Ok, so the White House is denying that Shrub said at a summit in Jordan that god told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. And granted, there seem to be no actual recordings of the comment. However, it appears to be backed up by at least one witness, and, really, doesn’t it sound entirely within Shrub’s character to say such a thing? Is there any doubt in anyone’s mind anymore that the US’s shift from a democracy to a monarchy to a theocracy is complete?

What’s that saying about those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it?

Given the recent furor over inexperienced Friends of Bush being given top positions in the administration, you’d think that Shrub would have had second thoughts about nominating old friend and White House council Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. She has zero judicial experience. She’s a lawyer; she’s never been a judge. In fact, she has only held the post of White House Council since February of this year. I thought that the Democrats remained totally spineless on the John Roberts confirmation. I can only hope that they will summon at least a tiny bit of courage and say “no” to putting another Michael Brown on the Supreme Court.

But then, Shrub often doesn’t have a first thought, let alone a second. How else can one explain putting a person who’s never sat on the Supreme Court in charge of the Supreme Court? Or making someone who is openly contentious of the United Nations ambassador to the United Nations? Or giving out the job of Attorney General as a consolation prize for losing an election to a dead man?

Shrub appears to have learned nothing from the total man-made disaster that emerged from hurricane Katrina. He has zero concept of the consequences that arise from granting positions of power to those who haven’t earned them. When politicians in this country give powerful posts as rewards to friends and those who spent lots of money to get them elected, we call it cronyism. When leaders of other countries give powerful posts as rewards to friends and those who spent lots of money to get them elected, we call it corruption.

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Against Banned Books (Please Spread This Pic & The Text), originally uploaded by lyingsaucer.

This is absurdly late, but it’s Banned Books Week. So why not choose one of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books and subvert yourself?

For my part, I’m reading Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. It’s about a group of women in Tehran, Iran, who gathered in secret to read forbidden Western classics. With Banned Books Week leading into the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, it seemed doubly relevant.

“If you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

–Former Secretary of Education William Bennett, demonstrating that gambling addiction isn’t his only problem, on his talk-radio program Thursday.

Mountain lions have returned to the Black Hills of South Dakota. Over the last decade, mountain lions, which once existed as little more than rumors, have gained a foothold and established a sizeable population. Now state officials say that there are too many lions and have authorized South Dakota’s first-ever mountain lion season. Already, over 1,000 licenses have been handed out.

Problem is, there are only an estimated 150 lions in the Black Hills. The entire population could be wiped out in a single hunting season. Mountain lions are already extinct in many neighboring states in the west; South Dakota does not need to add to that. In theory, the season will end when 25 lions are brought into the Rapid City Game Fish and Parks office. How realistic is that? With 1,000 hunters prowling around the hills and prairies on opening day, what are the odds that the kill will be no more than 25 lions? I’ve seen these guys hunt and fish. It’s common practice to take well over your limit and simply conceal the extra.

It’s true that because a mountain lion has such a large territory (300 sq miles), they have encroached into populated areas as their numbers grow. However, if it’s becoming a problem, the GFP should partake its own controlled hunt to cull their numbers. Letting a bunch of hunters do the job for them will only cause overkill and destabilize a mountain lion population that’s only now emerging from the brink of extinction.

Which Office Moron Are You?
Rum and Monkey: jamming your photocopier one tray at a time.

I’ll smoke you a kipper, because you’ll be back for breakfast. You’re the cult television show quoting, user account deleting, soap loathing IT Manager.Something in your childhood has made you the way you are. You’ve been hired to provide a service to everyone else in the office – you make the computers run, and you make them run well. You’ve streamlined everything; you’ve removed all the viruses and installed all the firewalls. The only trouble – the only hole in your veneer of digital perfection – is the way you laugh at everyone.

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At summer’s end, originally uploaded by olivander.

“Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. … It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh; — a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush — this the light dust-cloth — which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still. A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above.”

–H.D. Thoreau, Walden

Legendary director Robert Wise died Wednesday from heart failure. He was 91. Wise’s long career as a director ran the gamut of genres and gave us some of its greatest classics: The Day the Earth Stood StillRun Silent Run DeepWest Side StoryThe Haunting (a personal favorite of yours truly), The Sound of Music, The Andromeda Strain, and (debatable as a classic, but a landmark nonetheless) Star Trek: The Motion Picture.It’s telling that perhaps his most minor contribution to cinema was as an editor, splicing together such greats as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Citizen Kane, and The Magnificent Ambersons.

In typical fashion, Shrub has managed to turn tragedy into profits for his rich buddies. On Friday, Shrub suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires federal contractors to pay at least the prevailing wage of the area in which they are working. For instance, the average roofer in Louisiana may normally make $12 an hour (a figure pulled straight out of my butt); suspending the Davis-Bacon Act means that federal contractors working in Louisiana can pay their roofers as low as the minimum wage of $5.25 an hour. There are a lot of unemployed people in the hurrican zone right now who are going to be temporarily hired by these contractors, and they aren’t going to be paid what they deserve.

And who is going to benefit from this change? BushCo’s old corporate pals. Two of the biggest federal contracts handed out so far have been to Kellog Brown and Root–a subsidary of VP Cheney’s old company Halliburton (Remember them? The no-bid contractor who has made over $9 billion taxpayer dollars so far for work in Iraq)–and to Shaw Group, both clients of Shrub’s former campaign manager and head of FEMA Joe Allbaugh. It’s worth noting that Allbaugh resigned his position as head of FEMA to form a firm called New Bridges Strategies, which exists solely to discover profit opportunities for American companies in war-ravaged Iraq.

In addition, the CEO of another contractor, Bechtel Corp, is a Shrub appointee to the Export Council. A former Bechtel CEO and Bush for President 2000 campaign chair in Maine, Ross Connelly, was appointed to the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a government entity which secures loans for American companies working in foreign countries.

One of the largest contributors to the human suffering in New Orleans and elsewhere on the Gulf coast was cronyism–inexperienced people appointed to high-ranking positions not because of what they could do, but because of who they knew. It seems that BushCo has learned nothing and is merrily bumbling along in the only way it knows how: political payback.