collateral damage

in March of 2003, secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld said during an interview with George Stephanopolous on ABC's This Week, said about the Iraq invasion:

"So it's not just that we win, it's also how we win. And if you think about it, the Iraqi people are in large measure hostages to that vicious regime. And we can do this, and we can do it, I hope and pray, with limited loss of innocent lives."

the los angeles times reported yesterday, however, that at the lowest possible estimate, 50,000 Iraqi citizens have lost their lives since the U.S. led invasion in March 2003. this number is almost certainly too low because of provinces like Al Anbar and the Kurdish territories that have reported or recorded no such data to Baghdad officials.

and, as the article also points out, 50,000 people in a country of only 29 million would here mean proportionally about 570,000 U.S. citizens, or a 9/11 disaster every 5 or 6 days since March 2003.

!!

the long way

i'm sure i'm not the first to praise my soul-group the Dixie Chicks' new album, but what a great first verse to an album:

"My friends from high school

Married their high school boyfriends

Moved into houses in the same ZIP codes

Where their parents live.

But I, I could never follow

No I, I could never follow. . ."

i urge everyone who likes the Dixie Chicks at all to purchase a copy of the album: you won't be disappointed.

49!

what the. . . ? forty-nine, (count 'em), forty-nine U.S. senators voted in favor of adding discrimination to our Constitution this morning.

of course, this is well below the two-thirds threshhold for actually amending the Constitution, but really. . . 49?! do nearly half the states actually think that gays marrying will somehow harm straight people's marriages??

more importantly, do nearly half the states actually think that putting the tom-boys and nancy-boys in their place will somehow manage to lower the divorce rate, the single parent rate, the poverty rate, the low test scores. . . ?

do nearly half the states actually think that the big gay problem is actually bigger than our montruous debt, our negative personal savings, our unwinnable and unaffordable war in Iraq, our administration that cloaks itself continually in the tragedy of 911 to get whatever it wants no questions asked Constitution-be-damned, our diminished and diminishing national status as a moral bulwark in the world, our millions upon millions of uninsured individuals, our crumbling infastructures, our rising water levels, our corrupt politicians and business leaders?

i do think the answer is NO. i truly believe that the American people are smarter than that.

i think that those pandering, smarmy senators and back-room pollsters will have a shock come November when we the people will remember them as playing that big gay fiddle while Rome was burning.

so slide over here

maybe it's because i was completely dead at spin class this morning, but when that old INXS song came on in the middle of a tortuous "hill," i was transported back nearly 20 (!) years to seventh grade.

"your moves are so raw"

in 1986-87, i spent approximately three straight months locked in my room, (ahem), "studying," and listening to two cassette tapes (remember those?): "kick" and "faith." to this day, no other albums seem so fundamentally and inherently "sexy."

". . . what do you think? can't take it all. . ."

perhaps i'm just confusing going through the onslaught of puberty with being really affected by some decent pop music. but really, what's the difference anyway? i suppose we all have those types of mental associations that can transform a multi-million dollar album into a type of ultra-personal anthem. we all, at one time or another, have a strong belief that Michael Hutchence (or his equivalent if one exists) knows every corner of our inner soul, unlike our stupid, uncool parents.

"everybody does, yeah that's okay"

remind me never to be twelve years old again.