Dick Cheney and Aaron Burr

So now the US has two Vice-Presidents who shot someone while in office. At least Cheney didn’t kill his guy.

A friend of mine with some actual experience hunting had this to say about the whole thing:

As a hunter, this perhaps one of the WORST POSSIBLE THINGS you can ever ever EVER do.

Quail hunting is dangerous. From what I read the lawyer was hidden from Cheney’s sight and then another covey flushed into the Veep’s direction.

RULE 1 of hunting: NEVER EVER EVER have 2 groups of hunters who aren’t parallel with each other in some fashion. Draw a line and don’t cross it. Better yet, stay spread out and never deviate.

The Veep is a f*cking asshole…but his hunting companion is none too bright either. Cheney’s actions would have him banned from most hunting clubs in my area for life.

‘Grease’ and the Culture Wars

Remember a week or so ago, when I posted a report about a small town where trying to educate kids about opera by way of “Faust” was considered too radical?

Now another town has decided that “Grease” and “The Crucible” are inappropriate (the NY Times notes that they are the second-most frequently performed musical and drama in US schools). And all it took was three letters to the school’s principal to start the censorship ball rolling.

Even better is the chilling effect this will have for upcoming productions and even on the drama teacher’s career:

The teacher and her students are now ruling out future productions they once considered for their entertainment value alone, like “Little Shop of Horrors,” a musical that features a cannibalistic plant, which they had discussed doing next fall.

Torii Davis, a junior, said that in her psychology class earlier that day, most students predicted that “Little Shop of Horrors” would never pass the test.

“Audrey works in a flower shop,” Ms. Davis said. “She has a boyfriend who beats her. That could be controversial.”

Ms. DeVore went down a list of the most commonly performed musicals and dramas on high school stages, and ticked off the potentially offensive aspects. ” ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ has smoking and drinking. ‘Oklahoma,’ there’s a scene where she’s almost raped. ‘Diary of Anne Frank,’ would you take a 6-year-old?” the drama teacher asked.

“How am I supposed to know what’s appropriate when I don’t have any written guidelines, and it seems that what was appropriate yesterday isn’t appropriate today?” Ms. DeVore asked. The teacher said she had been warned that because of the controversy, the school board might not renew her contract for next year.

I wonder what those head-in-the-sand culture bigots would think of “South Pacific” … the guy who sleeps with a Polynesian girl gets killed off, after all … maybe they would consider that appropriate punishment for immoral behavior. The underlying message, that bigotry will lead to unhappiness, might just sail right over their heads though.

ADDENDUM: Something I remembered after I hit the “submit” button — back in the day, quite a few of the music/drama types in my high school class were enamoured of the Stephen Schwartz musical, “Godspell” (which is a muscal adaptation of the Gospel of Matthew). We begged our theater teacher to schedule a production of it. He refused, saying it would be too controversial. And given that the Jewish population of our school was probably better than 50% I suppose he was right. He did not generally shy away from controversial subject matter — one of the productions we did do during my years at school was the Schmidt / Jones piece “Celebration”, which includes a number in which two characters are making love while a third person watches.

Is there a point to my anecdote? Not really, I just thought it was interesting to show how what is and is not ‘appropriate’ for high school students can vary so widely.

Weekend Cat and Camera Blogging

Ah, the mixed emotions of being a cat owner. This morning I woke up to find that somebody, probably Tommy, had pried open my underwear drawer, dug into the contents, and dumped pretty much everything onto the floor. I’d post a photo but Scott’s still asleep and I don’t want to wake him.

Instead, here’s a photo of one of Gimi’s favorite places to be:

Gimi and My Monitor

It’s cute and all, but kind of hard to get stuff done when he’s up there.

On a side note, I think I’m going to be getting a new digicam for my birthday this year. Got any suggestions for a good 5 megapixel model in the $300 price range? My current camera is a Sony DSC-P30 and it’s held up very well over time; I wouldn’t be thinking about replacing it at all except that it’s only 1.3 megapixels and I’d really like to be able to take print-quality photos with the digital.

At any rate, I’m looking hard at some newer Sony models but Scott thinks I should look at some other as well.

Between Barbed Wire and Tinfoil

As William Gibson pointed out, paranoia is often narcissism. Dave Neiwert makes an excellent point today about the fine line between healthy concern and paranoia:

I recall that the right also used to claim that Clinton was not just building concentration camps, but he was also secretly wiretapping American citizens. That he was assassinating political enemies in secret. That he was remaking the presidency into a virtual dictatorship with limitless powers. All without a smidgen of anything approaching factual evidence.

And now we have a president who really is not just preparing to building mass detention centers, but who has been conducting illegal domestic surveillance, who has claimed the power to order assassinations on American soil, who does appear to be claiming limitless powers as a “wartime” executive. Is it any wonder, really, that people’s paranoia meters are running at full blast?

I remember reading some of the Y2K websites back in 1999, and was vaguely amused to find how often they would wander into “New World Order” tinfoil hat rhetoric. Just because we’re seeing similar rhetoric on the other side of the spectrum doesn’t make it more true. As always, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

All of which is not to sat that there’s no potential for abuse here. There definitely is, and we need to be aware of it. But jumping to the exact same conclusions that proved to be groundless in 2000 is probably not the way to go.

Back to the 80s

My initial response on seeing this story was that it had to be some sort of bad joke. Apparently not.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been “authorized” by Cheney and other White House “superiors” in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.

Libby specifically claimed that in one instance he had been authorized to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein’s purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to correspondence recently filed in federal court by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

The article goes on to note that this is essentially the Oliver North defense, and that it more or less worked for North.

In the North case, the Iran-Contra independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, was forced to dismiss many of the central charges against North, including the most serious ones-that North defrauded taxpayers by diverting proceeds from arms sales to Iran to finance the Nicaraguan Contras-because intelligence agencies and the Reagan administration refused to declassify documents necessary for a trial on those charges.

Given this administration’s penchane for secrecy, I would not at all be surprised if it worked again.

UPDATE: Shakes is POed too, but also feeling apathetic:

Every day, there are new stories emerging about which I should feel outraged, and yet five years of no accountability is making me weary. How many hundreds incidents of unethical or flatly illegal behavior am I meant to read without having the slightest bloody ability to do a damn thing about it?

Indeed. I feel the same way.