Today:

     Today Bush announced the name of his next appointment to the Supreme Court Bench, one Harriet Miers. Who is Harriet Miers you ask? Good question. Unfortunately nobody knows anything about Harriet Miers because she hasn't ever really done anything. Is she a good pick? A bad one? Who the hell knows. She has served exactly 0 days as a judge, so her record is therefore imposable to analyze.
    She, like anyone else in any position of power in the executive branch of government these days, got her job because she knows George W. Bush, and he apparently doesn’t know any judges. I suppose he knew one, already got him on the court, and was just plain tapped out of ideas for whom to turn to next.
     I sort of feel bad for W on this one. Government is large, and as president there are a lot of appointments to be made. He's been president for a while now and is probably running low on close friends and political contributors, the people that have propped him up for decades that he can place in all the high levels of government. If we have learned anything from him, it’s that being a close friend of George W Bush pays off big.
     But DAMN. TWO Supreme Court justices. He probably didn't want this to happen nearly as much as Ralph Nadir. For different reasons, but still, that’s a lot of work, and George W. bush has never really been much of a workaholic. I can see him, brow furrowed in the oval office, staring expressionless at a list of names provided to him (I like to picture the list being written on the grey paper with the great big lines that they you use in 1st grade, Maybe he even has the big pencils) trying to come up with a cohesive thought, some token bone of a name that will make his fanatical right wing supporters, and all the non-crazy members of the country happy at the same time. People are calling him about it constantly, even cutting into his horseshoe playing time.
    Then, Harriet Miers, HIS WHITE HOUSE COUNCIL, walks into the room. There eyes meet. She, being a member of the council that submits names, has ensured that HER name appears on the list, gives him a knowing smile, then maybe goes to get him a Yoo-Hoo. He picks her name, just to get his homework over with. Maybe he'll celebrate with another 6 week vacation.

    To say things have not been going well for Republicans would be kind of an understatement. How bad is it? Let's just do a short list:

     Remember that inspiring story a while back involving that guy who had shot a couple of people in a Georgia courthouse, then had taken a lady hostage only to release her some time later after she had read to him passages from the huge Christian inspirational moneymaker 'A Purpose Driven Life'?
    Yeah, it was a heartwarming news story wasn't it?
    It just wasn't true.
    It turns out that while she may have indeed read him said religious text, the thing that really helped turn the tide was the fact that she gave him some of her meth stash.
     I had wondered about that story. It seemed weird to me that a crazed just-killed-two-people-today gun slinging maniac who now had a hostage to take care of, would let her bust out her current reading material and read a few passages aloud to him. I've seen the movies, and hostage situations usually involve, say, being bound to a bed with extension chords and masking tape. Less book club, and more fight club. And as it turns out, SHE WAS bound to a bed with extension chords and masking tape. I don't know about you, but I find it hard to read when my extremities have been bound the posts of my bed. Nothing to hold the book up.
    It seems that the way she managed to get herself freed from the bed, was that the crazy gun slinging maniac wanted some weed. Further proving the old adage, always give a homicidal maniac what he wants, she felt compelled to comply. Except that she didn't have and weed. To rectify such an embarrassing social blunder, she offered him some of her crystal meth supply instead. A real ice breaker. Soon they were higher than Rush Limbaugh, she busted out the reading material, and she was on her way to being the living example of the redemptive power of faith that she is today. Its just that she left that whole part about the meth out when she told the cops, only choosing to include it in her new book, ON SALE SEPTEMBER 30TH.
    Not to diminish the power of the book any, I haven’t read it, nor have I ever taken methamphetamines, but it seems to me that a man in that state of mind might have just as easily had a religious experience if she had read him The Cat In The Hat Comes Back. He was F'ed up. He was crazy. The headlines from the Wall Street Journal might have done the trick. Maybe it was just because she was nice to him, and he was high. The story just isn't so clear cut now, that's all I'm saying.

     Have you ever wondered why the computer/typewriter keyboard is set up the way it is as opposed to say, alphabetically? Well today I did, and for an answer I turned to where millions of other people can now turn for answers to their stupid, unimportant, time wasting questions. GONE are the days of laboring over the name of that guy from that one movie, only to have to see it hopelessly stranded on the end of your tongue. Before the internet, if were one were plagued with some question, some random tidbit of trivia, and no one you knew could produce the answer, then you were simply out of luck. Maybe you could do something drastic like LOOK IT UP IN AN ENCYCLOPEDIA, but not many people had them, and more often than not that would require a trip to the library.
     Now we have the Internet.
   After a quick search, very quick, I discovered that, as is often the case, the internet is conflicted and there are two schools of thought on the manner:

1. It was arranged the way was it in order to prevent jamming on early typewriters.
2. The order was chosen based on careful thought into which were the most commonly used letters, then arranged to place those letters closer to the fingers.

    I am off this weekend to see none other than the Godfather of Soul himself, Mr James Brown. He will be performing in what must be a true career highlight, Eastern Illinois University's gymnasium. Guess times have been hard for the crazy old bastard, as its not even a very nice gymnasium, but we'll see if he can rise up to his mantle of "The Hardest Working Man In Show Business". I hope so. I don't know if I can take an hour of "the most worn out old man in show Business".

    The Cokeheads and the Crazies: A match made in heaven.

     Scientology reaches out to Kate Moss

    The article says that, “Scientology has become quite proactive in reaching out to people." While we can't know exactly what that means, I like to think it involves Tom Cruse chasing coked out supermodels around with a butterfly net.

     Would you like to chat with God?     

     Well you can't. You can however chat with a easily derailed online program, found Here, that responds to your real life questions in a creepy-till-you-fugure-it-out kind of way. I have found that you can actually have quite a long conversation with the robot, even if it isn't a deity.

     Yep. I was right. In his speech about the hurricane last night he mentioned both 9-11 and terrorism. Observe:

    "Four years after the frightening experience of September 11th, Americans have every right to expect a more effective response in a time of emergency."

    "In a time of terror threats and weapons of mass destruction, the danger to our citizens reaches much wider than a fault line or a flood plain."

    Wow.