Fellowship 9/11

I figure about half the people on my Friends page are going to link to this over the next week or so. Fellowship 9/11, Michael Moore visits Middle Earth. It starts out pretty well, the first five minutes or so are pretty funny. Then the writer decides to put more effort into sliming Moore than in exploring his own comedic premise. (Why oil instead of, say, mithril?)

More Otterness

Looks like there are Tom Otterness sculptures dotting Broadway from 60th up to 168th. (Man, that’s a fucked-up rollover script.) We ran into the Large Bear at 96th St the other day.

I’m really tempted to walk up Broadway to Games Club this Friday, if it doesn’t rain.

Outrage overload

Florida in Nevada
Two former employees of a private voter registration company (funded by the Republican National Committee) claim that they saw their supervisors rip up and trash hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Nevada Democrats’ voter registration forms:

"We caught her taking Democrats out of my pile, handed them to her assistant and he ripped them up right in front of us. I grabbed some of them out of the garbage and she tells her assisatnt to get those from me," said Eric Russell, former Voters Outreach employee.

Eric Russell managed to retrieve a pile of shredded paperwork including signed voter registration forms, all from Democrats. We took them to the Clark County Election Department and confirmed that they had not, in fact, been filed with the county as required by law.

WMDs? Weren’t we worried about WMDs?
Back before the invasion, the UN was keeping an eye on Iraq’s collection of high-precision dual-use equipment, stuff that could be used to help construct nuclear weapons. Precision milling and turning machines, electron-beam welders, that sort of thing. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency slapped seals on the equipment and checked in on it every so often to make sure it wasn’t being used for an illegal weapons program.

Well, what with the war and all, the inspectors can’t get in to inspect; they’ve been reduced to checking satellite images. And the US military apparently can’t be bothered to keep track of this stuff, because a lot of it is gone. Totally gone. Whole buildings missing.

Bob Barr leaves the coalition

Holy crap. Bob Barr. Lifelong Republican former Congressman Bob Barr from Georgia. Bob Barr who, as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, issued the formal request to to the Committee Chairman that got the Clinton impeachment officially underway. That Bob Barr. Bob fucking Barr is having doubts about voting for Bush.

How the hell can this election even be close?