Randomness...

It is so strange when you go away for a few days and then come back refreshed and ready to fight the good fight and nothing... what a boring news weekend. But I did manage to pick up a few post worthy bits here and there. From Cthulhu I found this little gem, Get Your War On. My favorite one is halfway down the page. It starts, "Glassy-eyed, no cognitive ability, persistent vegetative state. Poor Terri Schiavo - the unwitting personification of the Christian Right. Except she's not a disgusting hypocrite."

I know, I know, old news. But just to show you how bad it is, both Doonsbury and Tom Tomorrow are doing Jeff Gannon/Guckert. And who do you think the rest of the blogosphere is talking about, Tom DeLay, and Bill Frist, and the Nuclear Option, which has changed its name to "Constitutional Option" because President Bush can't say nuclear. The only good news in any of this is that Frist would have used his option by now if he thought he had the votes. And the more DeLay, his old puffed-up pompous self, spouts-off about teaching the judiciary a lesson, the less likely Frist is to have the votes of moderate Republicans in the Senate.

One thing in the Chronicle that caught my attention was this article, trying to make sense of the DeLay trip fiasco. In a nutshell, Congressmen are not supposed to take money (and trips and gifts and such) from lobbyists. They can accept these things from non-profits, and sometimes lobbyists sit on the board of these non-profits. So when they travel with their "good friends", it is as non-profit board members, not as lobbyists, even when they pay for the flights, hotel rooms, golfing and theatre tickets with their lobbyist credit cards. And the congressmen don't know that their "good friends" have the wrong hat on when they pay their bills, so they are not responsible for any misunderstanding. And their wife is actually being paid by the lobbyist's company, as an employee, so her travel expenses are covered legally by her employer, the lobbyist who is her husband the Congressman's "good friend". And the trip, a fact-finding mission to the mean greens of Scotland and back-water stages of London's West-End, include a visit with the former PM of England who has been out of office for a decade and is bed-ridden by a debilitating series of strokes. And the big kicker is, there may not actually be anything wrong here, because the whole thing is completely legal. Except, of course, if Tom DeLay were to use his power to influence legislation on behalf of a lobby from which he has been enriched. That would be wrong.