The New York Times’ Frank Rich warns that Sesame Street’s Big Bird is the “ornithological equivalent of a red herring.” The right’s latest assault on public broadcasting is “far more insidious and ingenious” than that seen under Newt Gingrich a decade ago.
The above notice, along with more details and relevant links related to this and other stories of current PR underhanded spinnings are from here — where it’s worth checking daily to make sure you’re not suckered.
Me? I’m still packing and hauling things to the new place, where I’m helping to paint the walls. Going for the day tomorrow.
No rest for the wicked.

Two heads are supposed to be better than one, right.
Not if one is your 89 year old mom (and you’re trying to get her to pack in an organized way).
Unless she’s playing with your toddler grandson.

(I took a ride yesterday with my mom out to my daughter’s to bring some stuff she can use and I didn’t want to move. Found an auger pile driver in the dollar store for the little boy who loves construction trucks. He also likes explaining how it works to anyone who’ll listen. My mom was a good listener.)
……………
When we got home, I found two heads (below) attached to my windowpane. They’re still there. I assume they’re in that position for a very good reason, but it sure does seem like it’s taking an awful long time for a couple of little bugs!

…………..

I don’t know what was in my own head when, a decade ago I rescued this old seen-better-days cactus from the deck of an at-the-time-significant-other who was moving. I think he said it was about 30 years old at the time, having been his mother’s before that. It’s ugly, unwieldy, prickly, and top-heavy. I’ve moved it myself four times now. Yet, I can’t bring myself to toss it. Now it’s part of my family.
So, move it I will, along with all the other stuff I can’t bear to throw out. Heh. Am I my mother’s daughter, or what?

All politics are performances, right? Give ’em a good show, tell ’em what they want to hear, and they go away happy. Nevermind the truth of what goes on behind the curtain. Or so our government leaders seem to think.
Take, for example, the recent news that the Department of Defense has contracted with a private company, BeNow, to gather data on high school students, even though school districts already are required to gather student stats so that they can get federal funding.
Over at Uncomment Thought Journal, Rowan takes a peek behind the curtain:
…..So why the contract with BeNow? After all, under SEC. 9528. Armed Forces Recruiter Access to Students and Student Recruiting Information of the “No Child Left Behind” Act, schools receiving federal funds must turn over the Names, addresses, and phone numbers of students on demand by the military. Isn’t that enough information? According to Chu [David S. C. Chu (U.S. undersecretary for personnel and readiness]. , it is not. The data collected under the No Child Left Behind provisions is “decentralized” and of use only to “local recruiters” and is not a centralized list of all possible recruits.
However, the data being collected for the BeNow contract goes well beyond the data collected through No Child. It includes “The new database will include personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying” according to the Washington Post article. Why the additional information just for “recruiting?” Grade point averages and classes being taken? Are the planning on focusing their recruiting on the highest G.P.A. or the lowest? Are they looking for those who are failing? This seems entirely possible, as earlier reports have note that the military is lowering their standards in an effort to meet recruiting targets.
Get a better glimpse of the hidden agenda here.
Then there’s the bit in my local Saturday newspaper by Andy Rooney (not available online)on how lobbying fattens wallets.
….Big Business is in business with Big Government, Rooney says — meaning this Republican administration.
The popular concept is that Democrats favor more government and Republicans want less. But there are no fewer government employees now than there were under President Clinton.
Government spending in Washington increased by a whopping 30 percent between 2000 and 2004 to a record $2.9 trillion…..
….Last year, Hewlet-Packard paid lobbyists $734,000 trying to get Republicans to pass legislation that would allow the company to pay a lot less tax on the $14 billion they made in profits from foreign companies they own. I wouldn’t want to have to explain it to a class of eighth-graders, but if a company pays Chinese workers 35 cents an hour and sells what they make in the United States as if they has paid the workers $25 an hour, the company makes a lot of money.
And then such outsourcing companies can pay even more lobbyists even more money to get out of paying more taxes.
And Americans are treated to a lot of circuses, but not nearly enough bread.
Speaking of circuses, I’m sure someone is going to make a movie out of the just-breaking story of the CIA Operatives who were living the good life in Italy, until they finally got caught:
They ran up tabs of thousands of dollars at some of Milan’s best hotels and restaurants. They chatted easily on their cell phones and gave out passport, frequent-flier and driver’s license numbers when booking flights or renting cars.
And now they are fugitives.
If Italian authorities are right, a CIA operation has been exposed in Milan that on some levels was brazen and perhaps reckless, even as it successfully spirited away a reputedly notorious Egyptian imam.
And, most touchingly, over at (Pro)Claiming Age. blogger Mary Godwin, with a daughter recently deployed to Iraq, begins to wish she didn’t know what keeps slipping out from behind the curtain.
In the months that have passed since Tommi’s deployment to Iraq, I have learned how to read the news faster and better than I did before. I have learned to read electronically, to read RSS feeds through online aggregators like bloglines, and to appreciate the various watchers who collect, synthesize, and engage difficult issues circling around the topics of war and the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Months of learning are bringing me to a new place now: each next story seems to raise in me a recurrent response. “Enough now,” I think to myself. “I don’t want to know.”
But we need to keep knowing, no matter how painful and upsetting. We need to keep knowing what the war is costing all of us, and especially what it’s costing those expected to fight, as well as their families waiting for them to come home — and not just American fighters and families.
We Americans have not yet felt the ultimate results of this war and the profiteering that this administration is allowing — even encouraging. There is a big mess being hidden behind Bush’s curtain of deceit.
If the next presidential election doesn’t pull down the curtain and show us how to clean up what’s been swept behind it, we weary travelers are going to be eaten alive by those insatiable lions and tigers and bulls and bears. No, we’re definitely not in Kansas any more.

i had it right there, she says. i made a green..you know….green, not velvet, you know…
felt, you prompt her.
yes, felt. i put it right there by the…. you know….the music thing.
what is it, you ask.
it’s for the music thing. i kept it there all this while and now it disappeared. you took it. why did you take it.
you take a deep breath. i didn’t take it, you say. it’s around here somewhere.
she starts crying. sits and the table and cries that people are coming in and taking things from her.
you take a deep breath, look at all the stuff yet to be packed. you pat her back, give her a tissue, tell her that it will turn up somewhere. she thinks you’re lying.
you have a headache because you haven’t had a chance to eat breakfast yet and it’s almost lunchtime.
you leave her at the table with her tissues and her fantasies and you go to your place and eat. lunch.
a knock on the door. she comes in with a green felt pouch in her hand, secured with a large gold pin.
i’m sorry, she says and kisses you on the forehead. i found it on the dresser. do you want to see what’s in here, she asks.
sure.
she carefully opens the pouch and pulls out a slim SONY remote.
you don’t tell her that it’s for a tv that she doesn’t even have anymore.
put it in the drawer with the other remotes, you say, and we’ll pack them all together.
oh, no, she says. it’s my first one, she says, smiling, returning to her apartment to, no doubt, misplace it again.
you sit down to finish your glass of homemade orangeade and read a little more delightfully escapist nonsense
the phone rings.
you’re not sleeping, are you?
no, i’m packing, you lie, because she doesn’t seem to like you wasting time reading.
i went to the bathroom, she says, and now i can’t find it.
it’s there somewhere, you say. taking a deep breath. we’ll find it later.
ok, she says. i’m going to lie down for a while.

President Bush explains his social security reform proposal.
WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: I don’t really understand. How is it the new [Social Security] plan is going to fix the problem?
Verbatim response: (Pay Attention, now…you don’t want to miss anything important.)
PRESIDENT BUSH: “Because the — all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculated, for example, is on the table. Whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There’s a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those — changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be — or closer delivered to that has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It’s kind of muddled. Look, there’s a series of things that cause the — like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate — the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those — if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.”
The above is from a press release issued by the White House. You definitely should read the whole thing.

In 1918, Dr. Marie C. Stopes published Married Love — “dedicated to young husbands and all those who are betrothed in love.”
I still have my father’s yellow-edged and fingerprint-stained 1931 edition of the book. (I have not yet finished packing up my books, amazed at the titles that I’ve chosen to cart around with me.)
Apparently the book was banned in America until 1931. I wonder if my Dad was first in line at the bookstore. 🙂
According to the Oxford University Press, which has a 2004 edition,
“Married Love” (1918) combined a lyrical evocation of marital love with a no-nonsense and detailed account of sexual intercourse and sexual pleasure. It has sold over a million copies in Britain alone and was for many people a revelation.
With a “passion” for helping the individuals in heterosexual couples to achieve an enjoyable sex life, Stopes did not approve of homosexuality. In that way, she was an unfortunate product of her times.
But in other ways, she’s right on the money with her advice for men about how women’s bodies and psyches function in tandem. While biology doesn’t have to be destiny, hormones can sure set us up on roller coasters of all kinds.
“Well, Dad,” I think, packing the slim volume in along with John Lennon’s In His Own Write and the little Pocket Poet Howl from the 50s, “Good for you. I hope that Mom read it too.”

Hey, I know it’s summertime, you’re getting ready for a little vacation fun — a little escape from the humdrum.
And so it’s a perfect time for our government and its rabid supporters to begin slipping some mean deeds by us why we veg out under the trees with our cold beers. And they’re doing that “marketing” thing again, paying some high-priced flaks to sell us some more bills of goods that are toxic to this democracy of ours (certainly what’s left of it).
Pay attention. Follow the links.
The Republican group Progress for America released the television ad “Get Ready” on June 22. In a news release, the group reports that the ad will run through July 1 as part of a $700,000 effort to “warn opinion leaders in Washington, DC and beyond that some Democrats will soon unleash a fury of dishonest and ugly attacks about any Justice that President Bush nominates to the Supreme Court should a vacancy occur.
WASHINGTON — The Defense Department yesterday began working with a private marketing firm to create a database of all U.S. college students as well as high-school students between ages 16 and 18, to help the military identify potential recruits in a time of dwindling enlistment.
ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 23 /U.S. Newswire/ — The American Conservative Union, the nation’s oldest and largest Conservative grass roots organization, sharply condemned today’s highly controversial 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that local governments may use imminent domain to take people’s homes and businesses and turn them over to private developers.
Are you all feeling a little less relaxed now? Well, at least you’re not feeling as DUMB as I do after posting about “The Medium is the Massage,” a little paperback book by Marshall McLuhan that’s been nestled in my various bookshelves since the mid-sixties. I should have taken the time to do a little research before I posted, but time is something I don’t have much of these days.
But Mark Federman, whose blog “What is The Message” looks at all things McLuhanesque, left a comment. Between his explanation, and the one left by my friend Frank Paynter, I am now more informed about how the message got massaged into the little book in my possession.
I feel like a salmon swimming upstream. I keep realizing how much I don’t know anything about. I keep realizing that my mom and I each have too much stuff and I’ll never get it packed in time for the move. And I keep realizing that there’s no stopping Bush and his crew.
I’m definitely going to hide out in the woods until it all blows over. Which it will, you know. It’s all ebb and flow. The ol’ Dharma Wheel.

That’s my scream of frustration as I try to get my mom to start packing. Her apartment is a bottomless pit of scraps of fabric and paper; hats from the 50s; shoes he doesn’t wear; little boxes filled to the top with assorted paper clips, bits of string, nails, rusted washers, broken pencils, dried up pens………. But she watches so that I don’t thow anything out.
The packed boxes are piling up. I have no idea where she thinks they’re going to fit in the smaller space into which we’ll be moving.
I’m just tired of arguing.
And I still have my own packing to do.
aarrgghh!

In case you still think that Bush is right about Social Security being in big trouble, watch this flow-chart animation that explains why it isn’t and come to your own conclusions about why Bush et al should be.

Now, here’s a mom and kid I totally understand.