LEAVE IT TO PEEVER

– Bumper sticker of the week: Which is worse: Screwing an intern or screwing the country?

– Quote of the week: "Whenever we separate ourselves from a given situation (for example, through inattentiveness, neglect, impatience, negative judgments), we "kill" something valuable....people, things, one’s own composure, the moment itself....These small-scale incidences of violence accumulate relentlessly, are multiplied on a social level, and become a source of the large-scale violence that can sweep down upon us so suddenly.... One need not wait until war is declared and bullets are flying to work for peace.... A more constant and equally urgent battle must be waged each day against the forces of one’s own anger, carelessness, and self-absorption." Kenneth Kraft

– Right-wing Republicans have gone goofy: Right-winged Republican politicians and strategists are getting ready to steal another election. In Texas, they tried, under the leadership of Tom Delay, to redistrict the state in order to come up with some additional right-winged Republicans to join him in Congress. The Democrats left the state in protest. The only mistake they made was going back. Most observers have recorded this session as the worst in Texas history. That’s saying a lot. In Washington, the Republican chairman of a committee called the Washington police to have the Democratic members removed from a meeting where he wanted only Republicans. The Democrats suggested to the police that they arrest them and refused to leave. To avoid a constitutional disaster, the police got smart and left by themselves. The chairman ended up apologizing. Now Republicans are hoping to recall the governor of California. Leave it to Republicans to misuse the recall laws. They say he ruined the economy and caused an energy crisis. A typical Republican strategy: ignoring reality and perverting the truth. The President, of course, had nothing to do with these things. This all amounts to Republicans beginning to get desperate to reappoint their King for another four years. We can’t allow that to happen.

– Bush’s approval rating falls to 53%: Exactly one year ago, I predicted Bush’s approval rating would be at 40% by election time. I am now worried that that may not be low enough to keep him from being reappointed. Corporations are giving him hundreds of millions of dollars, the Supreme Court has not changed, and brother Jeb is still in Florida. We have to drop it to 25% or lower. Over the next 15 months, watch them:

1. Raise the most money ever for an election, in the history of the world.

2. Increase warnings about terrorist attacks. They want us to stay scared.

3. They will take our military into at least one or two additional countries, to play on our patriotism and nationalist fervor.

4. You will get a refund check in the mail, making it hard for you to complain about the growing national debt, since you are now a part of it.

5. An all out attack will be made on the leading Democrat to emerge from the primaries. This will be brutal and merciless. You will have never seen anything like what is about to happen.

– Any government that would kill the sons of any man and put it on the front page, as though they were some kind of hunting trophy, is a disgrace to the world.

– If Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes governor of California, let’s hope an earthquake takes them quickly and painlessly. Otherwise, we’re going to have to put up with another right-winged idiot.

– Some folks over on the south side didn’t have telephone service for about a week after one of our recent storms. That wouldn’t happen on the north side.

– Why do companies remove their billing services from their local service centers:

• They don’t want to look at you while they’re screwing you.

• It lowers their employment numbers. Seems employees are a liability nowadays.

• They want to remove themselves from blame if there are any problems. Hey, we let somebody else do that. They must have screwed it up. You can never find the person who made the mistake.

• It helps deflect criticism of the actual service being provided, which today seems to be on the decline. The company creates layers of insulation that keep you at arm’s length away from the management. They don’t want to be yelled at for the poor performance of the company they are responsible for. That would hardly seem right.