If George W. Bush Ran The NBA... [Nov 21, 2004]

Ron Artest would win the Most Valuable Player Award.

Intelligence would show that the drink the fan threw on Artest contained a teaspoonful of anthrax.

All NBA fans would be reclassfied as enemy combatants.

The owners would push through a midnight rule change that makes it impossible to suspend any player who "shares the goals" of the NBA.

And the government would scale back financial aid for hundreds of thousands of low-income college students, thereby creating more interest in the NBA as a career option.

Wah-wah. Internet humor is funny.

Tom DeLay. This long and kind of boring article from Mother Jones tells you all you need to know, except that DeLay is a key member of the Council For National Policy, which is kind of like a Dominonist retreat organization that plots the end of the world about three times a year. Every single thing that's going on right now involving DeLay is part of the Christian Reconstructionist plan to bring the United States to heel by replacing the Constitution with a legal system that literally interprets the Old Testament as law. Party!

Meanwhile, Howard Ahmanson, the very wealthy man who makes Dominionism possible, is a major financier of electronic voting machine companies. Note that the article I just linked was published a year and a half ago. In New Zealand. You know. If our journalists had just...oh, never mind. Press criticism, at this point, had might as well be croquet for all the good it's doing us.

We now live in a world where, very soon, journalists for major American newspapers will begin going to jail in large numbers for refusing to reveal their sources. This story from Iraq bodes ill for the future. My dear fellows. If you're attempting to bring democracy to the savages, don't you think it's a little uncouth to detain their journalists? A leisurely scroll to the bottom of this link reveals that the Iraqi government, which isn't influenced at all by the American government, has warned the news media in Iraq that it must "be precise and objective in handling news and information...otherwise we regret we will be forced to take all the legal measures to guarantee higher national interests."

Ominous rumblings indeed from the cradle of civilization. It's a war, so of course governments are going to attempt to manipulate the press, whether the press supports its goals or not. But threatening the press is very bad, and so is detaining journalists. Those kinds of things happen here, and here, and also here.

Nothing like that is happening here, and by here I mean the United States. But, in a world where the word "purge" is being used ironically to describe the removal of political opponents, it might. It really really might. When will the "stalkerazzi" stop tormenting Hilary Duff?