Homer the Homeless Goose

I'm sad to report to friends of Homer the Homeless Goose that his sole surviving daughter, Hazel II, died peacefully in her pen on Monday, February 6th after a very short illness. She was 14 years old and like Homeless people, she did not have health or burial insurance so I buried her in my front yard. A memorial gathering for Hazel II will be held at the Homeless Memorial on Town Lake on Saturday, April 1st at 2 pm. We will also celebrate Homer's 18th Birthday and kick-off a campaign to recruit and select an appropriate retirement home for the famous Goose. For those of you who don't know the story of Homer the Homeless Goose, a little history lesson is in order.

Read the full story here.

must see tv

Crooks & Liars - Olbermann: Panic in the falafel-sphere

I Do Not Wish to Be Associated With Torture

Hon. Pete Hoekstra, Chair
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
Washington, DC

Dear Congressman Hoekstra:

As a matter of conscience, I am returning the Intelligence Commendation Award medallion given me for "especially commendable service" during my 27-year career in CIA. The issue is torture, which inhabits the same category as rape and slavery - intrinsically evil. I do not wish to be associated, however remotely, with an agency engaged in torture.

Reports in recent years that CIA personnel were torturing detainees were highly disturbing. Confirmation of a sort came last fall, when CIA Director Porter Goss and Dick Cheney - dubbed by the Washington Post "Vice President for Torture" - descended on Sen. John McCain to demand that the CIA be exempted from his amendment's ban on torture. Subsequent reports implicated agency personnel in several cases of prisoner abuse in Iraq, including a few in which detainees died during interrogation.

The obeisance of CIA directors George Tenet and Porter Goss in heeding illegal White House directives has done irreparable harm to the CIA and the country - not to mention those tortured and killed. That you, as Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, show more deference to the White House than dedication to your oversight responsibilities under the Constitution is another profound disappointment. How can you and your counterpart, Sen. Pat Roberts, turn a blind eye to torture - letting some people get away, literally, with murder - and square that with your conscience?

If German officials who were ordered to do such things in the 1930s had spoken out early and loudly enough, the German people might have been alerted to the atrocities being perpetrated in their name and tried harder to stop them. When my grandchildren ask, "What did you do, Grandpa, to stop the torture," I want to be able to tell them that I tried to honor my oath, taken both as an Army officer and an intelligence officer, to defend the Constitution of the United States - and that I not only spoke out strongly against the torture, but also sought a symbolic way to dissociate myself from it.

We Americans have become accustomed to letting our institutions do our sinning for us. I abhor the corruption of the CIA in the past several years, believe it to be beyond repair, and do not want my name on any medallion associated with it. Please destroy this one.

Yours truly,

Ray McGovern

Fristed

Glenn Greenwald - Bill Frist threatens to re-structure the Intelligence Committee in order to block NSA hearings.

WTF???

Men have been mad about the erotically seductive scent of the vagina since time immemorial. Now you can have it anywhere, anytime - with the authenically natural vaginal fragrance VULVA Original [NSFW], the sensual accelerator.

(via Something Awful)

how low can you go

Bush administration lawyers, fighting a claim of torture by a Guantanamo Bay detainee, yesterday argued that the new law that bans cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees in U.S. custody does not apply to people held at the military prison.

A Senate committee yesterday rejected a bipartisan proposal to establish an independent office to oversee the enforcement of congressional ethics and lobbying laws, signaling a reluctance in Congress to beef up the enforcement of its rules on lobbying.

Amnesty International releases report - Abuse of Women in Custody: Sexual Misconduct and the Shackling of Pregnant Women

Media Girl - Conservatives can't wait to enact forced pregnancy laws, state by state (updated).

friday random ten

Photo by Ryan McManus

SXSW, Part II

"Black Knight" - River City Tanlines
"Supreme People" - Blackalicious
"Pucker Up" - The Ends
"Do the Emotion" - Million Dollar Marxists
"Exit Strategy" - SSM
"Schliterbahn" - The Old-Timerz
"Musical Body Ecstasy" - Gito Gito Hustler
"In Case Of Rapture" - Gretchen Phillips
"Good To Know You" - Gem
"Static" - Zom Zoms

thursday morning reads

driftglass - "The Alexander Butterfield Moment"

Walter Cronkite - "Telling the Truth About the War on Drugs"

Crooks and Liars has the bu$h-Katrina early warning video.

FXFU 2006

Fuck By Fuck You
Great Music, Free Admission, Free Beer

FXFUa'll #1
Friday, March 17, 2006
Typewriter Museum, 1306 E. 6th Street (map).
Starts at 3pm.

Power of County (Portland)
Clampitt, Gaddis and Buck (Portland)
Zero Skills (Austin)
Lone Bird (Bellingham)
Juanita Family and Friends(Portland)
The Headliners (Portland)
Corrine Rose (Austin)
Ching Chong Song (Brooklyn)
Rebel (England)
Rev. Peyton and His Big Damn Band (Indianapolis)
Possesed by Paul James (Austin)

FXFU #8
Saturday, March 18, 2006.
Typewriter Museum
Starts at 1pm.

The Juanita Family Players (Portland, Or)
Graves Bros Deluxe (SF, CA)
The Emeralds (tokyo)
Attic Ted (San Marcos, Tx)
DMBQ (Tokyo)
Shellshag (SF, CA)
The International Playboys (Missoula, MT)
TODD (London, England)
Parts & Labor (BRKLN, NYC)
Gorch Fock (Austin)
Rev. Peyton and his Big Damn Band (Indianapolis, In)
Migas (Austin)
Attack Formation (Austin)
Night After Night (SF, CA)

FXFU, Austin

wednesday morning reads

Sheriff Prosecuted for Diverting FEMA Truck to Aid Katrina Victims

Molly Ivins - Bush's Carnival Tricks

National Weather Service To Give Hurricanes Full Names

Cannibal Mormon Crickets, Torture-rack Ants, Revenge of the Zombifying Wasp and more, in Circus of the Spineless #6.

NorCal Roller Girls ready to bout

The NorCal Roller Girls skate their first bout this Saturday, March 4^th.

Chico Hustlers vs. Sac-City Rollers

Saturday, March 4, 2006

Cal Skate, Hwy 99 & E. Park Ave., Chico, CA.

Tickets are $10 in advance, $12 at the door.

Doors open at 7pm, bout at 8pm.

Read more about the NorCal Roller Girls here.

tags:roller derby, rollergirls, NorCal Roller Girls, Chico

Texas Rollergirls Season Opening Bout

The flat track Texas Rollergirls kick off their 2006 season this Sunday, March 5^th.

The Hell Marys (Hell Yeah!) take on the Hustlers in the first match.

Last year's season champions, the Honky Tonk Heartbreakers skate against the Hotrod Honeys in the second match.

Sunday, March 5, 2006.

Playland Skate Center

Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door.

Doors open at 6:30pm.

Please visit the Texas Rollergirls website for more info.

tags: roller derby, rollergirls, Austin, Texas Rollergirls

preznit not welcome in India

Arundhati Roy

On his triumphalist tour of India and Pakistan, where he hopes to wave imperiously at people he considers potential subjects, President Bush has an itinerary that's getting curiouser and curiouser.

For Bush's March 2 pit stop in New Delhi, the Indian government tried very hard to have him address our parliament. A not inconsequential number of MPs threatened to heckle him, so Plan One was hastily shelved. Plan Two was to have Bush address the masses from the ramparts of the magnificent Red Fort, where the Indian prime minister traditionally delivers his Independence Day address. But the Red Fort, surrounded as it is by the predominantly Muslim population of Old Delhi, was considered a security nightmare. So now we're into Plan Three: President George Bush speaks from Purana Qila, the Old Fort.

Ironic, isn't it, that the only safe public space for a man who has recently been so enthusiastic about India's modernity should be a crumbling medieval fort?

tuesday morning briefs

At least 35 people have been killed and scores injured by four bomb blasts in Baghdad, a day after a curfew to stop escalating violence was lifted.

The federal government has agreed to pay $300,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by an Egyptian who was among dozens of Muslim men swept up in the New York area after 9/11, held for months in a federal detention center in Brooklyn and deported after being cleared of links to terrorism.

34%

preznit bu$h to slash AmeriCorps budget (Save*NCCC)

Prosecutors call it a corruption case with no parallel in the long history of the U.S. Congress. And it keeps getting worse. Convicted Rep. Randall "Duke" Cunningham actually priced the illegal services he provided. Prices came in the form of a "bribe menu" that detailed how much it would cost contractors to essentially order multimillion-dollar government contracts, according to documents submitted by federal prosecutors for Cunningham's sentencing hearing this Friday.

usquebaugh-baul

weapons-grade whisky

A 17TH-CENTURY firewater, more than two spoonfuls of which was said to be enough to kill a grown man, is to be revived by a whisky distillery in Scotland.

A single drop of the ancient drink of “usquebaugh-baul” was described by the travel writer Martin Martin in 1695 as powerful enough to affect “all members of the body”. He added: “Two spoonfuls of this last liquor is a sufficient dose; if any man should exceed this, it would presently stop his breath, and endanger his life.”

Twelve barrels of the world’s most alcoholic whisky, or enough to wipe out a medium-size army, will be produced when the Bruichladdich distillery revives the ancient tradition of quadruple-distilling today. With an alcohol content of 92 per cent, the drink may not be the most delicate single malt ever produced but it is by far and away the world’s strongest. Malt whisky usually has an alcohol content of between 40 per cent and 63.5 per cent.

With the first spirit run expected at lunchtime today, the distillery urged whisky lovers to tune in live on its webcams — “that is, if the distillery doesn’t blow up in the process”.

The US Secret Service admitted in 2003 that it had been monitoring the distillery because the difference between distilling a fine whisky and making chemical weapons was “just a small tweak”.

R.I.P.

Octavia Butler

Frederick Busch

Texas Rollergirls Win 2006 Dust Devil Tournament

The Austin Texecutioners, traveling team of the Texas Rollergirls won all seven of their bouts at the first National Flat Track Roller Derby Tournament.

Championship Bout
Texas 129 v. Tucson 96

3^rd Place Bout
Arizona 115 v. Minnesota 88

Final Four
Texas 114 v. Arizona 81
Tucson 136 v. Minnesota 75

US Rollergirls has scores for the entire tournament.

tags: roller derby, rollergirls, Dust Devil, Texas Rollergirls

Dust Devil Final Four

Ken Lambert/The Seattle Times 

2006 Dust Devil Tournament
Sunday, February 26, 2006 (MST)

1p-2:30p Texas 114 v. Arizona 81
3p-4:30p Minnesota v. Tucson

5:30p-7p 3rd Place Bout
7:30p-9p Championship Bout

tags: roller derby, rollergirls, Dust Devil