Fed Up with the New Hippies

Miss U.S.A., like much of the rest of America, is falling down on the job. Luckily she picked herself up and ignored the boos. Watch the above video and see if she did as well as Joe Torre at shrugging off criticism.

Lawmakers in Washington are aggressively pushing to turn the old big-bad polluter coal into a new eco-friendly fuel of the future. Who knows if robbing Peter to pay Paul will work? Why it's none other than the same parties who promised to get America out of Iraq (a.k.a Democrats) and to win the War on Terror (a.k.a. G.O.P.). If they say it works, then by golly it must work.

George Bush (he of the fighting variety) has decided he can't wait for months worth of U.N. approvals to go to war in Iran. Instead, he's going to try something he should have tried long ago and turn up the pressure on Sudan. Obviously, based upon his performance in Iraq, Bush is going to spend at least two weeks reading about the troubled region before rushing headlong into an invasion.

Speaking of happenstance invasions and semantic blockage, U.S. military commanders in Iraq are drawing back on the effusively praised accomplishments promised by Commander in Chief Bush, settling instead for more modest measures of accomplishment. It will be interesting to hear them explain the "Mission Accomplished" banner. My suggestion for the euphemism that best refers to the situation is, "Not the worst possible fuck up."

If the Bush camp can count one single victory out of the war effort, they can at least say that they defeated Cindy Sheehan. You can't win them all, George, and sometimes when you win, you still lose.

On my never ending quest to separate the wheat from the chaff, the L.A. Times published an editorial criticizing the sincerity of Eddie the Ambulance Chaser (a.k.a. Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards). Any report that cuts on a guy getting paid $55,000 to lecture on poverty in America deserves a mean-spirited attack on character. One down, Giuliani and company to go.

Salon is overloaded with cool topics that typically get overlooked. They have a great dialog with a panel of experts on colony collapse disorder and the honeybee problem. They also gave everybody more reasons to hate Republicans detailing millions of dollars worth of money made from inflated student loan interest rates. The only thing the Republicans have going for themselves at this point is that many people were so crippled by student loan debt that they will be forced to join the military in lean financial times. The G.O.P. is hoping that their voting constituency will be overseas and/or out of their voting district during the coming election, keeping the Republicans in office. This should help explain their unwavering support of the war effort in Iraq.

In media news, photographer Jahangir Razmi was given a Pulitzer Prize he was awarded 27 years earlier for anonymously taking a photograph of Kurds being executed in Iran. This inspires me to keep pulling for Buck O'Neil (and my personal favorite Ron Santo) to get the better-late-than-never vote this year, and I'm disinterested in whatever rules are keeping them out. There is a commissioner and a veterans committee for a reason.

The funny stories burn like fire, led by the wife of Google's founder spearheading an effort to test through DNA evidence provided by a CEO in a spittoon whether Warren Buffet and Jimmy Buffet were actually related. Some people really do have too much money.

The old hippies that live in Haight Ashbury district in San Francisco where they used to do drugs are fed up with the new hippies and their rampant drug use in the old hippies' new investment neighborhood (or something like that). They should try sending them to Indonesian prison, where police shut down a fully operational methamphetamine laboratory. And they say people don't learn to work in prisons!