Specter joins Feingold in waking up to reality

 Politics, Uncategorized  No Responses »
May 032006
 

Arlen Specter has finally grown a pair and is calling for hearings on W’s presidential power grab. The impetus was this article from the Boston Globe, calling out the massive number of signing statements that POTUS has issued and how his use of them differs from past POTUS’s. It also calls attention to the fact that W is the first president in modern history not to issue a single veto. Not one. Another sign that something’s not right. Did W have a basic government class in high school or college or was he doing lines in the bathroom or something. Here’s more on what Specter said.

Glenn Greenwald sums it up:

To recap: a Republican Senator is vowing to hold hearings because the President of the United States has embraced theories which maintain that he has the right to break the law and has, consistent with those theories, been breaking the law repeatedly and deliberately. Maybe some journalists other than Savage and The Boston Globe could tell their readers about that extremely significant fact.

Stephen Colbert got nervous laughter at the White House Correspondents dinner on Saturday because he dared to point out that the press hadn’t been doing their jobs. Of course, many on the right interpreted the nervous laughter was Colbert bombing. He wasn’t. He was right on and when somebody hits that close to home, people get uncomfortable. It’s about fucking time.

Update: More on Colbert’s performance.
[tags]stephencolbert, bush, abuse, specter, feingold, signingstatement, constitution, bostonglobe[/tags]

 Posted by on May 3, 2006 at 11:52 am

Minor Post-Frustration Venting

 Rant  2 Responses »
May 012006
 

Crowded H-E-B, Oltorf and Congress, 5pm yesterday.
I choose the only “20 Items or Less” line because there’s only one person in front of me, a woman in her 20’s, fairly cute. Since the other lines were longer, I’m wondering if the 20 items limit is too much work for people or if it’s an odd number to choose as a cut off, maybe most people have less than 10 or more than 20 items. I think this is the first time I’ve noticed a “20 Items or Less” line.

As I start to unload our items from the cart to the conveyor, noting that we’re safely under 20 items, I realize that she’s over the 20 item limit. Way over. It’s really easy to tell since there’s a monitor over the conveyor showing us all how many items have been scanned. It numbers them. As the total reaches into the thirties, the checkout woman pauses and asks if the rest of the items belong to the woman. She replies that they’re hers and the clerk continues to check her out, the total eventually reaching 42 items. I would’ve cut her some slack until 25, but anything over that, there’s one of three things going on: you’re an inconsiderate asshole, you can’t read, or you can’t count. Instead of saying something, which I should’ve done, I kept quiet and vented to The Boy on the way out to the car, pointing out that there’s a reason why he needs to learn how to count, read, and not be a jerk.

What would you have done? Public humiliation? Snide comment? Death penalty?

Update: Apparently, Stepan had a similar experience a few hours before at one of them newfangled self-checkout H-E-Bs.

[tags]heb, checkout, grocery, rant[/tags]

 Posted by on May 1, 2006 at 11:20 am
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