Roberts confirmed by the Senate…

Via Yahoo News/AP: Senate Confirms Roberts As Chief Justice

Part of me says “damn, this is Bush finally getting the Supreme Court, what we fought so hard against in 2000 and 2004” and write something filled with scathing righteous indignation… maybe change the borders of the blog black or something… but know what? Ever since they announced that he would be replacing Rehnquist after that old conservative warhorse passed on, I just can’t get that excited about Robert… it’s just the bad replacing the bad.

At this point, I just HOPE that people see the importance of Justice O’Connor’s replacement, and are prepared to fight it… up to and including a filibuster… 3 years of it, if necessary.

Phi Beta Iota?

FBI agents take over fraternity house

Agents displaced by Hurricane Katrina

Wednesday, September 28, 2005; Posted: 10:11 a.m. EDT (14:11 GMT)

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (AP) — A new fraternity of sorts has moved in on the Greek row at Louisiana State University: the FBI.

About 50 New Orleans agents displaced by Hurricane Katrina will be living in the red-brick home once occupied by a fraternity exiled for hazing violations.

“They’ve been jokingly referred to as Phi Beta Iota,” Special Agent in Charge Jim Bernazzani said Monday. “We even had T-shirts made up.”

The home has been empty since the Sigma Nu fraternity lost its charter in 2004 after an investigation into allegations of hazing. The fraternity has been barred from campus until the fall of 2006.

I was a Sigma Nu at Dartmouth. Via DBA (which is our house alumni mailing list, BTW)… disturbingly, the house has a blog, too.

“Dartmouth University”????

Guy In Philosophy Class Needs To Shut The Fuck Up

September 28, 2005 | Issue 41•39

HANOVER, NH—According to students enrolled in professor Michael Rosenthal’s Philosophy 101 course at Dartmouth University, that guy, Darrin Floen, the one who sits at the back of the class and acts like he’s Aristotle, seriously needs to shut the fuck up.

From the Onion. Emphasis is mine. Hello?????

via some ’05 I don’t know on DBA.

Another one for the cute-animals file…

Jack Russell registers to vote in N.Z. election

Dog’s enrollment angers local electoral official
Updated: 12:20 p.m. ET Sept. 23, 2005

WELLINGTON, New Zealand – It was almost inevitable New Zealand’s election would turn into a dog fight when you look at one of the country’s 2.83 million voters — Toby the Jack Russell terrier.

An unexpected “peace dividend”…

Penguins stay snug and secure in minefields

Tuesday, September 27, 2005; Posted: 11:46 a.m. EDT (15:46 GMT)

KIDNEY COVE, Falkland Islands (Reuters) — There’s a mating ritual going on in the minefield.

Fortunately the would-be lovers are penguins, too light to detonate the deadly mines laid more than two decades ago during a war on the far-flung Falkland Islands.

Thousands of penguins and other feathered and amphibious friends choose to nest and rest in no-go zones. The British estimate that some 25,000 land mines, mostly sown by Argentine forces in the 1982 war with Britain, remain.

via Sherm on DBA

“None Dare Call It Stolen”

None Dare Call It Stolen: Ohio, the election, and America’s servile press
Posted on Wednesday, September 7, 2005.
By Mark Crispin Miller.

The national turnout in 2004 was the highest since 1968, when another unpopular war had swept the ruling party from the White House. Yet this ever-less-beloved president, this president who had united liberals and conservatives and nearly all the world against himself—this president somehow bested his opponent by 3,000,176 votes.
How did he do it?

via a diary on DailyKOS

Super-powerful hurricanes are the “smoking gun” of global warming

This is global warming, says environmental chief

As Hurricane Rita threatens devastation, scientist blames climate change
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Published: 23 September 2005

Super-powerful hurricanes now hitting the United States are the “smoking gun” of global warming, one of Britain’s leading scientists believes.

The growing violence of storms such as Katrina, which wrecked New Orleans, and Rita, now threatening Texas, is very probably caused by climate change, said Sir John Lawton, chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Hurricanes were getting more intense, just as computer models predicted they would, because of the rising temperature of the sea, he said. “The increased intensity of these kinds of extreme storms is very likely to be due to global warming.”

Bully for them for having the courage to say it. Where is the US scientific establishment on this one?

via AMERICAblog

One of those forwarded questionaires… becoming a blog-meme, perhaps?

> Your Friends and little known facts about them

Yes, it’s one of those stupid “fill in the blanks” forwards… so, of course, I am turning it into a wannabe blog meme.

To spare the rest of you, it’s after the break.

Continue reading “One of those forwarded questionaires… becoming a blog-meme, perhaps?”

BORROW and SPEND Republicans.

Bush Rules Out Tax Hike to Fund Recovery

WASHINGTON – President Bush on Friday ruled out raising taxes to pay the massive costs of Gulf Coast reconstruction, saying other government spending must be cut to pay for a recovery effort expected to swell the national debt by $200 billion or more.

Remember all the complaints about “Tax and spend liberals” a few years ago? Well, they beat the heck out of “Borrow and spend Republicans” … can’t even call ’em conservatives, since they show no fiscal restraint… that’s not *exclusively* a conservative value, but it sure is a core part of what they claim to believe.

Sorry for the lack of content lately, guys. Busy life, should be back to my regular procrastinating and blogging soon…

I have too many DVDs, redux

I just did an incomplete recount, and if I’m counting right and have removed all the duplicate entries properly, the total is around 550-600 of them (I had an exact number, but have already noted duplicates and omissions especially ones not ordered online).

A list, for the truly masochistic (or those who want to gloat that they’ve got even more) after the break. Actually, it’s mainly for family to make sure that any Christmas gifts don’t duplicate ones I already have.

Continue reading “I have too many DVDs, redux”

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