November 8, 2004 by s.z.

Law and Annie Okay, I didn't feel very well last night (it's either a cold, or clinial depression), so I just sacked out and watched TV.  Besides the scariest scary name in the new Simpsons "Tree House of Terror"ep (also noted byAtrios), one other thing perhaps of interest was the Annie Jacobsen "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" ep.  (If you haven't seen it and don't want it "spoiled," don't read any further.)    The ep starts with an executive announcing that their company has been awarded a government contract for their latest cool new product (a new kind of land mine that the DoD has been testing), and that it wouldn't be Wrapped Too Tight Bob who would be heading the project.  Bob calls his wife and whines, and then tells her to take his car and get the registration renewed.  The wife stares at a tipped-over deck chair, and generally seems nervous -- has somebody been watching her?  On the way to run her errand, she stops for gas.  Some Middle-Eastern men stare at her.  One of them approaches her, but doesn't say anything.  She gets in the car, gives her four young sons their ice-cream, and then drives away.  The kids make a mess with the ice-cream.  The woman gets stressed. A couple of minutes later, the car explodes.  There had been a pipebomb with a timer under the car. The gas station attendant tells Goren and Eames (our heroes) about the Middle-Eastern men.  He says that they were talking amongst themselves in Arabic, and that one of them had approached the woman, and then made a throat-cutting gesture with his hand.  The police get a fingerprint from the air hose, and track down the "throat cutting" guy.  They find that he came here from the Middle East on a student visa that has EXPIRED!  They take a SWAT team and break down his door, and question him (and scare his wife and son).  He says that he and his companions were lost, and he was just going to ask the woman for directions -- but she seemed to be having problems with her kids, so he changed his mind.  The gesture was to his friend, to tell him to stop yammering at him for getting them lost.  And what were they doing at that location, which wasn't anywhere near where they worked?  It seems that they were musicians, and were playing at a school "One World" festival. And what about the expired visa?  The man's lawyer says that his client had requested an extension.  And his visa had expired in the meantime, meaning that he was here illegallly?  No, it was still being adjudicated, which meant that he was here legally, and had done absolutely nothing wrong except be Middle-Eastern. Anyway, the rest of it was basically the Andrea Yates story (isolated wife suffering from post-natal depression who has several small children; controlling husband who makes her home school the kids and who dismisses her difficulties by telling her she just needs to try harder).  But I liked how they mixed Annie into that.  I guess we shouldn't be surprised when we learn that it was ANNIE HERSELF who carried that McDonald's sack into the lavatory! And speaking of Scaredy Cat Annie, last month the Houston Press featured their own version of her, one Angie Smith (not her real name, because "Angie" doesn't want people laughing at her to her face), who works for the paper in "retail sales." Here are the highlights of her story: First, Angie noticed a Middle Eastern-looking man flipping through a magazine, but he wasn't reading it, he was looking around the plane!  Another Middle-Eastern man, this one in a pink Izod shirt (aha!) spoke to the first man, but sat somewhere else.  Then four men boarded, got near Angie's row, and told the first man that he was sitting in their seat.  That all seems normal enough, right?  Mais NON! But in this case, the passenger simply jumped up and moved to a seat in the next row back -- without looking at his ticket. Smith thought this was odd. She started wondering if he even had a seat. You know, because airlines always let people on board who don't have seats. Anyway, then some OTHER people boarded the plane and told the guy he was in their seat, so he stood in the aisle for a while. Smith was really starting to worry now. "We're on row 33. He's just standing there. I was starting to get a little panicked." You know, if a guy sitting in the wrong seat makes you panic, you really shouldn't be flying. Anyway, the man finally sits by the guy in the pink Izod shirt, which was apparently his assigned seat, because nobody else tells him to move. Smith decided to talk with the flight attendants. She carefully kept her back to the row where the two men were sitting and explained about the seat-jumping and how the two men ended up sitting together. "Maybe they're just gay," one attendant said. Because gay men do this thing all the time.  They're well known for trying to avoid sitting next to other men. Seriously, I've seen this exact thing happen at least four times that I can remember (and probably more that I can't, since it's so unremarkable).  A person doesn't like his assigned seat, and sits in a better one, hoping that nobody shows up to claim it.  They do, so he moves to another empty row -- he is displaced again.  Finally, when the plane is full, he has to go sit by the guy his company assigned him to travel with, the obnoxious guy in the pink shirt. But back to "Angie" and her thrilling tale of danger.  The other flight attendent tells her that all passengers' names are run against an FBI list, and no terrorists could get on board.  And that reassures her? "We're all dead," Smith thought as she made her way back to her seat. And when they all died, Angie was vindicated.  The End. Okay, actually nobody died, but the men did hog the restroom (one went inside and did unknown nefarious things, while the other one waited right outside the door).   The End.  Okay, it's not the end.  We have to suffer through a sensationalist retelling of Annie J's story, and then learn how Angie whined to everybody in the goverment about her near brush with death when she got back, but nobody gave a rat's ass, including the long-suffering David Adams of the Federal Air Marshal Service.  Annie Jacobsen laughs when told of David Adams's advice on reporting possible terrorist activity. "Dave Adams is the guy who told me I had untrained civilian eyes." And, in fact, when talking with the Press, Adams used that same phrase to explain that these "untrained eyes" may not understand the difference between actions that are a little out of the norm and those that are dangerous. Yeah. and when those "untrained eyes" are coupled with a "hysteric brain," and you throw in some "swarthy guys," those eyes can't even figure out the difference between reality and their own private disaster movie. Adams insists that they "have no information…that there is widespread probing of any of our commercial aircraft. However, we would be in the wrong business…to think that there's a possibility that it's not taking place." Possibility versus probability: Congress didn't want to dance around this one, and launched an inquiry into "security gaps" aboard aircraft following Jacobsen's story. And untrained eyes or not, Jacobsen's account, backed up by other passengers and by the facts of the case, persuaded Congress that perhaps the Federal Air Marshals weren't quite as on top of things as they'd like to think. Two men get on a plane and go to the bathroom together. Let's all pray they're gay. Again, because gay men are always using the lavatory while they fly, and yet they hardly ever blow up the plane. Anyway, I think that Annie has officially made it to urban legend status, and I hope she at least gets a campy horror flick out of it. 6:09:16 AM

Who Said It? Googlegirl got it -- yesterday's Mystery Guest (the one who said that Karl Rove dwelt in a miasma of darkness, and was always shedding dirty ideas wherever he went) was Laura Bush.   (Yeah, Laura, we really believe that you love Karl "Pig Pen" Rove.) And here are a couple of First Twins items from that same Newsweek piece that we especially enjoyed: Sometime during the winter of 2003-04, her last at the University of Texas, Jenna Bush had a bad dream, according to her mother. In the dream she imagined her father losing the election. Jenna had a revelation. She wanted to be with her father and be involved in the campaign. She called her mother and sent her father a message telling him about her desire to help. "It was very moving to George," the First Lady told NEWSWEEK. Um, if God sent Jenna a revelation that showed her Dad losing the election, who was it who helped him to win?  (Again, could it be ... SATAN?) Anyway, that dream inspired her to campaign for George.  Here's an anecdote about how she helped: At the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, she paused at what was clearly meant to be an applause line in her speech. When no one clapped, she looked straight at a girl in the front row and said, "Clap!" As the audience dutifully clapped, Jenna turned to Barbara and both girls laughed. Hey, it's Mean Girls 2: The Final Conflict. Anyway, who said this? October 27, 2004 Dear God, if John Kerry wins, I really honestly would fear for my own, and every other American's, life. I watched on TV a John Kerry supporter being asked what he thought of the terrorist threat. While standing there with his daughter in his arm, he said, "I'm not worried about, if they hit us they hit us." There you go!!! Terrorism is like just some natural phenomenon, like a fire or a hurricane or something, and if they hit - and kill - us, oh well! The same people were complaining Bush does not, essentially, give them enough welfare handouts. It amazes me these people want want want ..... they want everything except their own life. October 28, 2004 I got the following guestbook sig:  I just noticed your little disclaimer stating that rants and updates are not archived? Would this be so that you don't have to eat crow later on? Also, would it be too much to ask that you quit generalizing and assuming that all Democrats are on welfare? My Rants and Archived page is not updated because I don't want coworkers stumbling across something I said about work here. [...] I specifically said *one* Kerry supporter below was asking for more welfare handouts from Bush. This is not "generalizing" that all Democrats are on welfare - although many Democrats are on welfare and all welfare recepients are Democrats. See what a college education can do for you! 4:23:29 AM

Answers to "Martyrdom" Quiz You probably don't care, but I came up with "examples" 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, and 13.  All except 13 were all from articles that are quite supportive of religion, but did ask some questions about Bush's hijacking of "morality" (I did add some loaded words to my recaps, so I could sound like William Donohue).  The fact that my examples don't sound any more "bigoted" than Mr. Donohue's (at least, to me) seems to prove my point that some people (Donohue and the editor of NewsMax's "Insider Report," to name at least two) are trying to claim that any criticism of the plan to restrict marriage is anti-religion bigotry, as is even noting the fact that the GOP has demonized the Democratic Party as the "anti values" party.  (Thanks to commenter Paul for providing Donohue's Catholic League press release, in case you want to read his "examples" of bigotry for yourself.) I find it quite amusing (in a bleak kind of way) that the evangelical/"values" crowd is still trying to maintain that they are the persecuted outsiders even as they try to use their "mandate" to make laws that reflect their beliefs binding on everyone. Number 13 was taken from an article about Jerry Falwell's 2003 appearance on "60 Minutes".  I searched, but can't see where the Catholic League ever denounced it.  However, I did find a 2002 transcript from that late, surrealistically-titled program "Alan Keyes is Making Sense," in which Falwell and Donohue both appeared (but in separate segments).  For fun, let's read an example of each man's totally non-bigoted remarks: KEYES: Welcome back to MAKING SENSE. Earlier this week at the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, past president, the Rev. Jerry Vines expressed his blunt views on Islam. Here is what he said: “Pluralists would have us to believe that Islam is just as good as Christianity, but I'm here to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that Islam is not just as good as Christianity. Islam was founded by Mohammed, a demon-possessed pedophile who had 12 wives, and his last one was a 9-year-old girl. And I will tell you, Allah is not Jehovah either. Jehovah's not going to turn you into a terrorist and try to bomb people and take the lives of thousands and thousands of people.” [...] KEYES: Now, Reverend Jerry, I think a lot of folks would look at this statement and on the face of it think that that must be pretty offensive. How dare anybody say that, and so forth and so on. How can you step up to defend what might fall on many ears as a pretty extreme formulation?  [...] FALWELL: And so I was simply saying that while I have no idea whether the man was demon-possessed or not — that's for somebody else to decide — I did hear Dr. Vines, who is a man of God, a great pastor, state some historical facts which he believes to be so, in a closed, private session of pastors. [...] KEYES:  Mohammed comes along — from a Christian point of view, he is falsely saying he offers a road to salvation, and he supports it with supernatural acts.  What, according to Baptist theology, must be the origin of that supernatural power? Is it God? I'm directing it to Jerry Falwell. FALWELL: As a Christian, of course, the answer would be, that we would think that that's satanically inspired.  A fun fact: Word Spell check suggests that you replace "Falwell" with "falafel." Anyway, here's part of the Donohue segment: DONAHUE: Most gay priests are not molesters. But most molesters are gay. Now, do you agree with that, Sipe, or not? SIPE: That's not what my... DONAHUE: You didn't study that, I know. So you can't answer it. (CROSSTALK) SIPE: I spent 25 years at this. That's not what Fred Berlin's research shows. DONAHUE: What do I care? I'm asking you a question. All you have to do is go in the “Dallas Morning News” and look at all the names of the priests who have molested. Everybody knows, as was said in “The Weekly Standard,” we're talking about the elephant in the sacristy. The fact of the matter is, theological dissidence enables behavioral deviance. And we do have a gay subculture and we better root it out. And anybody who wants to have a gag order on this, who says you're homophobic for mentioning the obvious, is somebody who I think wants to shut down debate, like you do And I think that's all we need to say about tolerance and bigotry for today. 12:59:49 AM