Some of you may be too young to remember the great comic strip, Calvin & Hobbes.  Worse, you may recognize Calvin from plagiarized stickers on the back of pickups  in which he's peeing on an another brand of truck, a football team,or  (my personal fave) "my ex".  (I do like my Honda, but I'll never understand why that should make me hate every Toyota on the road.)  There's even a sticker around that shows Calvin kneeling at the cross, which is kind of bizarre, as I've read the bible a couple of times and I don't remember the part where Jesus espoused copyright infringement.

-- over the bump I promise to get to the point quickly --

Like many of you, I am on the GOP mailing list. I signed up years ago to help me keep tabs on the other side.  Sometimes I fire off a terse "get out of the closet you effing hypocrite" type response to the asinine letters I get from tools like Ken Mehlman and Laura Bush.

 -- come over the hump for a sec --

As a few of you know I run a very small wine blog dedicated to reviewing cheap juice sold at Trader Joes's. I never thought I would cross-post from there to here, but this calls for it.

It's been nearly a year since I've addressed the issue of buying blue wine on my wine blog. (short version: drink Gallo, believe it or not.) Since then, I've mostly kept my political views separate from my thoughts about wine.  

But recently, it's come to my attention that a major proponent and financial backer of California Proposition 85 is Don Sebastiani, owner-founder of Don Sebastiani & Sons, former CEO of Sebastiani Vineyards and winery, and former CA state assemblyman.  

Follow me over the bump to learn a little about Prop 85 and one of its principal backers.

You know how the Bush marketing team likes to put up little banners whenever Bush gives a speech or signs a bill. You know, like "Cleaning up the Environment"  and "Mission Accomplished"  and "Making Lots and Lots of New Jobs"  and "Protecting Our Cities from Catastrophe".  All that good stuff they've been doing.  This is the CEO presidency, remember, and that's how big business does things.  If Bush gets another term he'd probably rename his home the "Verizon Wireless White House".

--Anyway, I digress --

I am now a Qwest customer.  It was  painless. And it was the right thing to do.

Here in No Cal, the old phone monopoly, AT&T, is now the name of the new phone monopoly.  (Hopefully they'll stick with that for a  while and stop renaming the damn ballpark, but that's another issue.) And it looks like AT&T has been submitting all my call records to Bush's KGB.  And maybe worse.  

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I'm starting to think that Bush's fish might overtake Carter's rabbit in the national lore.

Over at MSNBC they're running a little poll inspired by Bush's latest fish story.  No, they haven't learned what Kos readers learned ealier today, that Bush either lied or doesn't know a carp from a bass, and no, they don't point out what Atrios readers know, which is that other presidents have had somewhat loftier achievements.

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It's getting to be an old story. Sometimes it's an airstrike in Iraq. Sometimes it's a predator strike elsewhere in the nabe.  We say we were trying to kill  high-value targets.  People on the ground say these targets were not there.  Some or all of the dead are women and children.  

Now I'm a die-hard liberal, but also what I would call a mainstream American, so if there was ONE air strike and it DID kill Osama or his REAL number two, I guess I would have to live with the death of a few innocents.

Once.

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In the last day or so, Kos has said he needs more money to buy a house and users sick of me-too, nutty, and "BREAKING" diaries have said they need higher quality content on the site.  How do you kill both of those birds with one stone?

  ---- more after the bump ----

Hey, check out the NYT site - they have a  new article up on Cindy, with a large photo.

Link Here.

I won't quote, because you need to read it for yourself, but it's a pretty good, sympathetic piece and it makes a good case for why time, place, and Cindy may have created the journalistic version of the perfect storm, so that this story may have very long legs.

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Bill, I need to talk to you about today's New York Times homepage.  Look, you're just not reporting the news.  I know you're upset about Judy being in jail and all, but this is not good:

Now come on, Bill!  No doubt it's true, but is that really the story you should be reporting?

:::more:::

Simple. It's because we keep shooting so many of them.  (Though of course the exact numbers are a state secret.)  Check out this story, Shots to the Heart of Iraq, in today's L.A. Times

Three men in an unmarked sedan pulled up near the headquarters of the national police major crimes unit. The two passengers, wearing traditional Arab dishdasha gowns, stepped from the car.

At the same moment, a U.S. military convoy emerged from an underpass. Apparently believing the men were staging an ambush, the Americans fired, killing one passenger and wounding the other. The sedan's driver was hit in the head by two bullet fragments.

The soldiers drove on without stopping.

More below:

Occasionally, after a glass or four of wine, usually amongst a very politically mixed crowd, my wife will say in a loud voice, "Well, John (that would be me) thinks all Republicans are evil, and I just don't think that's true."  Obviously I adore the woman or I would have divorced her years ago for throwing me under the bus like that, but still it gave me great pleasure just now to email her this article from the NY Times,  with the personal note "No, honey, not ALL Republicans are evil"

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Somebody already noted in a diary yesterday what CIA chief Porter Goss had to say recently when asked about the whereabouts of mass murder Osama bin Laden, who, in case you had forgotten ordered the destruction of the World Trade Center and the murder of over 3,000 Americans -- well, actually  he ordered the destruction of the WTC, the Pentagon, and the Capital, and the murder of many more Americans.  I believe that George Bush was absolutely right to promise that he'd deliver bin Laden, dead or alive, for these crimes, and I trusted him to do it.  But, as you know, bin Laden has been forgotten as Bush decided instead to piss away a few thousand more American lives, not to mention a few hundred billion American dollars, in Iraq.  

Sooooo... almost four years later, where the hell is Osama bin Laden anyway, Mr. Goss?

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Tonight I was reading my two boys, 6 & 8, the third-to-the-last chapter of Monsieur Eek
by David Ives, a fabulously subversive children's book about what happens when the 21 citizens of the fictional coastal town of  MacOongafoondsen discover a shipwreck.

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Two great columns just posted on 2 of the nation's formerly great dailies.

First up, Bob Herbert of the soon-to-be pay-for-play NYTimes op-ed page.  Today the greatly underrated Herbert picks up the Deep Throat story and the failed presidencies of Nixon and Johnson and links all that to the most dysfunctional presidency of them all, that of GW Bush.  

Mucho pinche mas pinche luego:

Today's LA Times has one of the most fascinating, disturbing articles I've read in a long time.  Here's a fat chunk to get you started.

lots more below...

NPR isn't there for the humor, right?  Well, not until they hired that hack Tucker Carlson, who's always good for an unintentional guffaw.  

But yesterday I'm driving along, I shit you not, in my Volvo, sipping a goddamn latte, very close to San Francisco Bay, listening to the News Hour, on which Margaret Warner is tossing softballs about Bush's budget to Senators Gregg and Conrad.  Needless to say this is barely keeping me awake, as, even though I'm aware that the Bush deficit is likely to bankrupt the America that my kids will inherit, talking about it makes for pretty dull radio, so I'm completely unprepared for this, as Warner, no doubt told by the NPR brass not to push to hard lest the wingnuts yank NPR's funding, ever-so-gently points out that Bush's alleged deficit cut doesn't include the cost of the war, a point that Conrad, BTW, totally fails to nail:

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Looks like either David Brooks is smokin' some very good shit, or his pals among the Bushites have been passing the bong themselves.  Tomorrow's column is a classic; it portrays the dawning of the second Bushite term as a hopeful time of renewal, not the colossal clusterfuck that we all know looms on the horizon.

Some choice excerpts:

Oy! More below: