on april 17, william morrison, an attorney whose clients have included members of numerous polygamous sects, pointed out on the diane rehm show that according to court documents, “sarah barlow” claimed to have been beaten so badly by her husband that she was hospitalized with broken ribs. “we’ve got a search warrant based on an anonymous telephone call, that can be independently verified, and we haven’t seen the verification yet. … we don’t know that any of this has happened, because the person has not been proven to be a reliable informant.”

now, according to this cnn article, a pre-paid cell phone that was used by “sarah barlow” in one of the calls that precipitated the raid on the FLDS ranch has been linked to a woman recently arrested for making false reports of sexual abuse to the police.

coincidence?

the NYT online has the following headline on one of its stories:

“US Economy Unexpectedly Sheds 17,000 Jobs”

now, is it just me, or are other people also wondering who’s going to clean up all that mess? i know if my dog unexpectedly shed 17,000 anything, there’d be a blitz of brushing and sweeping. and how odd - it sounds as though all of a sudden, poof! seventeen thousand jobs, just gone. all at once.

and wait, if i’m remembering my colbert report coverage, didn’t mister prez just tell us that it was only the rate of increase of new jobs that was slowing, not that the economy was actually losing jobs?

one wonders, was the labor department instructed to withhold that report until after the state of the union address? mmmmm? (i’m making skeski-like noises now) nooooo, it couldn’t be. of course, as one mister harris was quoted as saying, “it could just be a statistical quirk.”

yeah. and as wayne would say, “sha! and monkeys might fly out of my butt.“¹

___________________________
¹ how incredibly juvenile of me. yes, yes, i know it might just be a statistical blip. an oddity of reporting. and it’s certainly not a trend.

but still…

the queen decides to honor salman rushdie with a knighthood, and iran’s response - it’s a clear show of hostility toward islam!

ugh. i’m reading hitchens’ god is not great right now. a good read to begin with, and this latest religious whine is just cake. religion poisons everything.

update: hey, look at that. the vatican’s jumping on the stupid train as well (albeit a different wagon in the train). stop funding amnesty international, pope rat has decreed - how dare they support a woman’s right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term?

*sigh* and i’m trying to figure out how to work in the tidbit that Although the late twentieth century STD epidemic has been curtailed in all prosperous democracies, rates of adolescent gonorrhea infection remain six to three hundred times higher in the U.S. than in less theistic, pro-evolution secular developed democracies. yay religion.

bush stays in bed for several hours at the g8 summit, dan bartlett doesn’t know if it is viral or food poisoning.

now, let me be clear: i am not advocating anything, particularly not anything sinister. that would be illegal. besides, presidential succession via assassination is a disruptive thing in any country. but it does pose a fascinating hypo: the president of the united states falls victim to an assassination attempt while attending an overseas summit. what result domestically?

as the political season ramps up for the ‘08 elections, rhetoric is flying high and even the republican candidates can’t distance themselves from the bush administration quickly enough. cheney ascends to the presidency (officially); he could become an ‘08 contender, especially if the media eats up what’s sure to be his “i told you so” darkside pap. (although kucinich’s attempt to impeach cheney would instantly become more relevant.)

any thoughts?

###

in other news, the beeb has the most awesome headline of the day:
patient sheds green blood like mr. spock of the starship enterprise.

scooter gets 30 months. (it bothers me that the link on cnn’s main page reads, “libby to find out soon if he’ll go to jail.”)

bush leaves office in 19 months.

according to reuters and cnn, female cheetahs “sleep around,” practice “serial infidelity,” and engage in “duplicitous behavior.”

bwah?

i just converted the six-digit decimal representation of my birthdate to binary. by hand. then i checked my work here. and then briefly considered writing the formula to automate the conversion.

holy crap, i need to get a job.

===============
it looks like bob zoellick has a new one (job, that is). this should come as a surprise to, oh, nobody.

to hear my dad tell it, back in the day (say, 25 years ago), a country would get a good family planning program going, only to have it derailed by a visit from pope jp2.

ffwd to today: on the heels of pope rat’s visit to brasil, lula launches a program to provide heavily subsidized birth control pills through ten thousand pharmacies nationwide.

sounds like they’ve stopped buying what the vatican’s selling.

in other news, an ottawa appeals court decided that a five-year-old boy has three legal parents: the lesbian couple who made the decision to have a child, and the friend who agreed to father the child. it was the legal status of the biological mother’s partner that was in question.

it is amusing to me that the washington post calls wahhabi ideology “puritanical.”

that’s it. it’s too much. i’m sticking my head in the sand until next november.

maybe it was the three hours spent at walter reed, and the fact that the kid with the above-the-knee left leg amputation who was sitting in the waiting area when i got there was still there, same chair, same position, when i left. or the kid in the cafeteria, trying to untangle his service dog’s leash with his prosthetic hand. or the guy wheeling himself into the elevator with a thick stack of medical records precariously balanced on what was left of his lap.

or maybe it was the realization that if this Court rolls back roe, women’s equality (such as it is) could easily be history.

it may have been bush’s 1776 gaffe, and his “i’m just a dumb kid” attempt to cover it up, but really, that’s so minor. more likely it’s his vow to veto the second iraq spending supplemental.

fires in los angeles, drought in florida, and rogue tornadoes decimating towns in kansas. sounds nigh-on biblical, doesn’t it?

paris hilton driving drunk on a suspended license. brad & angelina splitting up. what is this world coming to, that such things are considered news?

another fired u.s. attorney, terrorists in new jersey, pope rat in brasil. i’m telling ya, it’s more than i can handle.