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Can you believe it--our House Majority Leader for all these years has just been indicted! The former Houston bug exterminator Tom Delay, angered by the "gummint red tape" that hampered his business, rose to unbelievable heights of power in Washington as a Congressman. It has always amazed me how deferential the moneyed elite has been to this sick cracker. It's McCarthyism all over again--a bully everyone fears (the other is Bush). Here's hoping the slush-funds and redistricting scams Delay instigated will all come to light and the Thousand Year Republican Reich he, Norquist, Abramoff, and Bush were building will all start to come apart. Criminal scum--I mean, alleged criminal scum.
Jimmy Carter Did Not Wear a Sweater Because of Energy
"Dick Cheney carpooling downtown with Brownie? Rummy Rollerblading down the bike path to the Pentagon? Condi huddling by a Watergate fireplace in a gray cardigan?" That's catty Maureen Dowd on Bush's recent call for energy conservation. All fine, all fair, except for the reference to Jimmy Carter's cardigan. The following was posted here three years ago, and will continue to be reposted periodically until people stop repeating the myth that Carter wore a sweater because of energy:
One issue that came up [in an an earlier thread] is the popular myth that back in 1979, Jimmy Carter urged Americans to wear sweaters and turn down the thermostat to 68 degrees, an image trotted out by right-wing commentators to show the impotence and nerdiness of energy conservation (as opposed to the Cheney approach, which is to secure foreign oil supplies by force). The only problem with the Carter story is it isn't exactly true. In the "crisis of confidence speech," given at a time of gas lines and rationing, Carter urged Americans to turn down thermostats--perfectly sensible advice--but didn't bore us with a precise setting. He also didn't say anything about sweaters. Yes, he was wearing a sweater, as he had been doing since his Inauguration in '77. Admittedly dorky, the cardigan was meant to be a symbol of his laid-back Populism, after the Imperial excesses of the Nixon years. It had nothing to do with energy--that's pure Republican disinfo. Unfortunately it's become tenacious urban folklore, as a Google search of "carter sweater thermostat" shows.
A disgusted loved one in Texas sent this, which is making the rounds of email forwards down South with the caption "Why Texas Had Few Looters." Uh, I think Texas had few looters because it had Rita and not Katrina. These suburban wankers would last about two minutes in a real gunfight.
Nancy Smith has posted a selection of her photos of the Art@!)Work show on her site artloversnewyork. That's the group-show-in-a-cube-farm where I kept "office hours" over several weeks in May. The top shot is me drawing and "drinking the Koolaid" at the opening, looking happier than any man in a cubicle has a right to be. Several people pointed out that my Wacom tablet--discreetly in shadow in the photo--wasn't "period" if I was truly trying to channel my art-at-work life circa 1995. I know, I know. But there were other discrepancies, the main one being I never tacked up anything visual in the cube in '95. It was all hidden.
