drat fink

chapel hill vice

kerry/edwards

the awful truth

$55 million + Time

xing

mexican kids/fireworks be!ow

say goodbye good

a friend of mine used to boast that he was the second best driver in the world. my reflexive response being, "so whos the best driver in the world?" his answer was jason h, a friend from back home. im sure some qualifying information was offered at the time but i cant remember what it entailed. for certain there was at least one heroically juvenile act of death defiance that was performed under self created duress.

so were having breakfast at a diner this morning. hes telling me about a friend whos a paraplegic. had been in a car accident. mentions a name in passing. it makes a vague impression. he had alot of friends from back home who i had never met. they were just a mess of names with fragments of someone elses memory attached. but there were enough bells being struck in my head to reach a critical mass for me to ask if this was the individual who he once considered the greatest driver on earth. it was.

but things get worse for poor jason h. now, not surprisingly, im a little fuzzy on the details. im not sure if he was married or got married after the accident but the girl that he was "going with" at the time stayed with him. and apparently was there for him in his time of greatest need. and perhaps he was not sober in whatever respect when his accident occured so she easily could have said he brought it upon himself and left him to his own fate.

but she stayed on and possibly married. i cant imagine it was a good life caring for someone entirely dependent on you but she had undertaken the task as many would, as many do. something wasnt right though, and not knowing them i have no idea what these people were like, but one night jason called friends and relations to express concerns about his wife. if anything were to happen she was to blame. i dont know how they responded but he was found dead the next day from an overdose. ultimately she was charged and convicted.

an insurance policy figures into the story as well, one which his wife expected to collected on. but it turns out he had been married previously and it had never been properly anulled so its likely she never would have received any of money.

or at least this was what my friend believed to be true. he isnt exactly a glowing example of journalistic rectitude.

(but then, who is these days?)

"so i guess that makes you the best driver in the world now?"

"good luck with that."

subterranean homeland blues

"The most intriguing story in Washington these days is a subterranean conflict that reporters cannot cover because some of them are involved. A potent guerrilla insurgency has formed in and around the Bush presidency--a revolt of old pros in government who strike from the shadows with devastating effect. They tell the truth. They explode big lies. They provide documentary evidence that undermines popular confidence in the Commander in Chief. They prod the media and the political community to ask penetrating questions of the Bush regime. Doubtless, these anonymous sources act from a mixture of motives--some noble, some self-interested--but in present circumstances one might think of them as "embedded patriots.""

your headline here

"Politicians often rewrite history to their own purposes, but, as Bush's remarks suggested, there was more than passing significance to his revisionist account of the Spanish-American War. It reflected not just a distorted view of a critical episode in U.S. foreign policy but the rejection of important, negative lessons that Americans later drew from their brief experiment in creating an overseas empire. The United States' decision to invade and occupy Iraq wasn't, of course, a direct result of this misreading of the past. If Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (the administration's leading neoconservative) had remembered the brutal war the United States fought in the Philippines or similar misadventures in Mexico, or the blighted history of Western imperialism in the Middle East, they still might have invaded Iraq. But they also might have had second, third, or even fourth thoughts about what Bush, unconsciously echoing the imperialists of a century ago, called a “historic opportunity to change the world.”"

still carb free!

breakdown of the supremes on padilla et al.

boston harbors

dnc convention blog

showcasing democracy

"BOSTON, June 8 -- The head of Boston's mass transit police said Tuesday that officers will begin random baggage checks in the first program of its kind instituted by a major American city to help guard against explosives being detonated in stations or on trains."

rrjr

"Whom would Jesus torture?"