Sinister

A guy who was implicated in Bush election-rigging efforts in 2000 and 2004, and who was cooperating with investigators, has died in a plane crash after warnings that his plane could be sabotaged.

Coincidence? Ask Paul Wellstone, another burr under the Bush saddle. Oh, wait, you can't -- he died in a plane crash.

Improving the Washington Post

Deborah Howell is the outgoing ombudsman for the Washington Post. She has published her list of New Year's resolutions for the Post, and as has often been the case during her tenure, she misses a lot of the really important stuff. I'm so glad she was being so well paid.

The Post needs writers, editors and, yes, ombudsmen with the guts to call out war crimes for what they are. Serious journalists would go read Geneva -- the language is very straightforward -- and then look at the confirmed records of our leaders and call them out. The Post's refusal to do so represents the grossest moral failing. (And for the Post to devote all the resources it did to Bill Clinton's extramarital affair and downplay or ignore the criminal -- yes, criminal -- activities of the Bush administration is the grossest hypocrisy.) Not only is that moral failing inherently evil, it also leads to a lack of consequences for the bad actors, thereby making similar future crimes more likely.

Given the Post's timid coverage of the Bush's administration's war crimes, the blood of people yet unborn will be on the newspaper's hands.

Want to support the troops, do you?

Then stop using my tax money to pay a crony contractor to fucking electrocute them.

Suffer the children

Neglecting the victims of Hurricane Katrina -- and that's exactly what we've done -- has had its consequences:

Hurricane Katrina's youngest survivors are now the sickest children in the United States, according to a report released Monday by the New York-based Children's Health Fund and Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

Many infants and toddlers living in a Louisiana's biggest FEMA trailer park have been found to be anemic because of poor diets, at a rate that health experts said was four times the national average, according to the report. The report reviewed medical records of 261 children who lived in a federally funded Baton Rouge trailer park called Renaissance Village. This is the first in-depth review of Katrina child survivors' medical and mental health since the 2005 hurricanes. ...

Some other key findings from the study:

• 41% of children treated at the clinic who were younger than age four had iron deficiency anemia;
• 55% of elementary-school-aged children had a behavior or learning problem;
• 42% of children had hay fever, and/or upper respiratory infections;
• 24% had a cluster of upper respiratory, allergic and skin ailments;
• One-third of the children had impaired hearing or vision;
• 55% of elementary-school-aged children had a behavior or learning problem;
  

Iron deficiency anemia can cause skin diseases, fatigue and attention-deficit disorder, and other learning problems. Severe deficiency in very young children can delay growth and development and even cause heart murmurs, reports the Associated Press.

"The recovery from Katrina was actually handled far worse even than the initial response," study author Irwin Redlener, a professor at Columbia's School of Public Health told the New York Daily News. "It's just disappeared from public view with an assumption that whatever was done is over."

The Bush response to Katrina was at best incompetent and more likely criminal. Some of these children likely will have life-long health problems. Where do they go to get their health back?

Folks, this is what happens when you elect infantile, dry-drunk, no-conscience-having people you'd like to have a beer with to high office instead of people who actually know what the fuck they're doing. If you voted for George Bush, I don't want to hear any fucking whining from you about the cost of health care, especially for poor people, because it's your fault, bitch.

Back from the dead and ready to party

In the halcyon days of late 2002 and early 2003, before we embarked on the quagmire/clusterfuck that is now Iraq, I entertained and enlightened readers here. This was also the age before Google took over Blogger, so my old user ID and password no longer work, so I can't continue the blog at its original site.

So here we are, in brand-new digs. Please bear with me while I re-learn all the RSS I forgot after bailing five years ago and also add all the little sidebar gadgets and gizmos you've probably come to expect.

And, of course, expect lots of bile and spleen-venting. Because if there's one thing I'm about, it's feelings that originate deep within certain squishy internal organs. And feel free to join in the bileitude in the comments. I would say that personal attacks are prohibited, but that's not entirely true: I retain the right to engage in as many of them as I like. You, not so much.

Let the venting begin.