Happy 13th

Happy Friday the 13th.

Sorry. I just had to say that.

So, the higher courts have annulled all those Evil Gay Marriages performed in San Francisco earlier this year (cause we all know how Dangerous those Little Old Ladies are. Frickin' Terrorists). The closer it gets to election time, the more exhausted I'm getting with politics, so I'm not going to rant much except to say that Every God-Fearing Republican should *love* the idea of *more* people getting married. More people getting married means more people with combined household incomes, it means more children with more than one parent, it means a better economy (more wedding dresses, tuxedos, receptions, ceremonies, more work for flower shops, bridal shops, catering companies). It means more people are going to get sucked into the outwardly appearing monogamous pair-bonding ritual. The royal "we" can get that much bigger. On the other side, all of us hippies can rah-rah the great blanket of hetero instituitions now available to everyone, in a free and democratic sort of way. You know, the sort of way that includes, um, everybody.

To be honest, I didn't form a real stance about the issue of same-sex marriage (aside from: yea, whatever) until I thought of it this way: If I was born a man, and I wanted to marry a woman, I could. But because I'm born a woman, if I want to marry a woman, I can't.

And then, suddenly, my feminist lens clicked down over my vision, and lo and behold, I realized I - as a woman - was being denied one of the rights of citizenship. Regardless of whether or not I ever wanted to marry a woman (I do not personally believe in getting married, myself), society was telling me I couldn't because of the sex I was born with. Regardless of whether or not I want to be a lawyer, or graduate from Harvard, I want to have those rights. I want to be able to own my own property, earn my own income, and be financially independent of father/husband/son. In other words, I want to be considered a full human being and an American citizen.

One of my buddies got into a heated debate with a Mormon friend of hers about whether or not the Mormon church would ever perform same-sex marriages, if such unions became legal at the government level.

The Mormon vehemently replied, "The church would never do that!"

I'm sure they said the same thing about interracial marriages fifty years ago.

Institutions are not monolithic. There are no absolute truths.

And, on a final political note of news, this amuses me:

.

Touching Base

It's been a busy week.

My buddy and roomie, Jenn, has been in New Orleans all week doing a big social psych conference. I've spent much of my time being delayed due to all the filming going on downtown for the new Batman movie. I got to sit on a train for fifteen minutes while Batman got to direct traffic - they didn't want our El train riding through their shot. Mostly, Batman being directly in downtown has meant some blocked-off streets, and a bunch of camera boom trucks, huge lighting trucks (which I mistook for firetrucks when I saw only their front end), trailors for crew (complete with aircon, of course), and a couple of "SWAT: City of Gotham Police" trucks.

It's been a surreal week heading through downtown for my kickboxing classes, to say the least.

I tallied up a couple more agent rejection letters ("We'll reject your manuscript without reading a page! Don't you love publishing!!?")and worked on some of the never-ending rewrites for book one, as I just can't seem to leave it alone.

In other news, gabe the agent poseur is imploding, which amuses me, the Columbine diaries are being released, idleness is one of the greatest virtues EVER, and (drumroll) my webpage is up.

Have fun.

The Wall. Next Question?

"No, I don't have prom pictures, but I have pictures of me on the Great Wall of China."

- Mary Lou Retton (Olympic gold-winning gymnast)

I'll be posting less this week - doing some heavy rewriting on several projects.

Ciao.

Settling by the Sea

I WANT TO BUY THIS PROPERTY....

This is why I go to work everyday.

Starbucks

Coming back to the US after a year and a half in South Africa, I made a startling discovery:

There really was a Starbucks on every corner.

I should have been tipped off when I came back to the parentals' abode for the holidays in Dec `03 to find my small, sleepy home town had acquired a Starbucks.



Here in Chicagoland, this is my local Starbucks that I visit on workdays. This is the Starbucks two streets over from the one above, which I go to on days off.

Want to add to the Starbucks on your corner photolibrary? Or just really geeky, like me? Check out Starbucks Everywhere.

Amen

Matt Taibbi cuts out all the bullshit from Kerry's acceptance speech...

"When I was done cutting, there were only two lines left.
I was born in Colorado.
America can do better."

In other news, this guy is fucked.

Too bad for him he's not a rich football player. Maybe he can blame Liberal Intolorence, or say he was Channeling God. That always works in those god-fearing states.

Changing Lanes

"Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still."
Chinese Proverb

It's after my strength training class on Monday, the day after my climbing class, and I've just lost about a gallon of water. Our MA school doesn't have air conditioning, just a bunch of big fans, and on a 95 degree day in Chicago, well, it feels like it doesn't have much of anything.

I'm sitting in the locker room, staring at the lockers while unwrapping my hand wraps, that slow, ritualistic unwinding that gives you time to space out or ruminate. I'm ruminating.

I hurt all over. Mondays are always the toughest, likely because they're coming just after my Sunday climbing class. And we did strength training today, meaning squats, weights, and martial arts stance drills (all of which still seem to baffle me), and then krav maga, which has more bag and mitt drills (which I bowed out of). I also managed my first jogging session last week, on Friday, which I'll be repeating again this week. It gives me four days of hard exercise a week, which contents me - for the time being.

And I'm sitting here thinking, "Fuck, this is hard."

My set point is "sedentary geek." I'll read a book a day and write you a couple academic papers a week while working on a novel and keeping track of US politics while teaching myself how to use PowerPoint, but ask me for a right front kick, left jab, right cross high, right cross low, front kick combo and I'm likely to spend most of my time during that drill trying to understand how all those things can go together and yet still find me upright at the end.

And I'm tired.

When I was a kid, I believed I was going to have a really interesting life. I believed I was destined for all sorts of adventures, that if I just sat around in my dusty little one-horse town and waited long enough, cool shit would happen to me. This is the "overlooked ordinary hero" syndrome common in just about every fantasy novel. That whole, "extraordinary events make ordinary people extraordinary" thing. So I sat around and waited.

At thirteen, I began to panic. I felt really old. A teenager all ready, and nobody had ridden up, tapped me on the head and said, "You are the One."

It was really depressing. What was the world waiting for?

I ran out of the house three days after turning 18 in a desperate attempt to make something *interesting* happen. Instead, the person I shacked up with turned out to be a flake, and I hit rock bottom at a really young age. I realized that no, despite all those mythological stories about "overnight" successes pervading the American media landscape, nothing was ever going to happen to me. I was going to work as a waitress my whole life.

Or not.

I keep trying to build up this life, this cool gift, with choices. Take the tough path. It usually hurts. And it's always hard. I've been making a life out of choosing the tougher, more interesting road for several years now, and I don't intend to cease doing it. My choices get me to interesting places.

Me. I do.

The people who help me along the way can only help me with my own choices.

So I'm staring at the lockers, my handwraps are on the floor, and I'm heading back to the showers. On Wednesday I'll be there again, wrapping up my hands, still sore from Monday, and bowing out on the floor before kicking my own ass in that lifelong pursuit: being better. Despite or because of the fact that it's hard, and it hurts.

I've decided on a place I want to be, a life I want to have, and these are the steps I need to take to get there. To be better than I was the day before.

Today's Quotes

From: Quotable Woman

"If you weigh well the strengths of our armies you will see that in this battle we must conquer or die. This is a woman's resolve. As for the men, they may live or be slaves."
- Boadaceia

"How many husbands have I had? You mean apart from my own?"
- Zsa Zsa Gabor

"A hundred years from now? All new people."
- Anne Lamott

"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."
- Hedy Lamarr

"When mom found my diaphragm, I told her it was a bathing cap for my cat."
- Liz Winston

"No more tears now; I will think about revenge."
- Mary, Queen of Scots

"People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."
- Rebecca West

"The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more."
- Colleen McCullough

"I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career."
- Gloria Steinem

"The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed."
- Edna O'Brien

Amusement

"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Contrary to what you've just seen, war is neither glamorous nor fun. There are no winners, only losers. There are no good wars, with the following exceptions: The American Revolution, World War II, and the Star Wars Trilogy. If you'd like to learn more about war, there's lots of books in your local library, many of them with cool, gory pictures."

- Bart Simpson

From Alas, A Blog

and for something completely different...

I went to a local megastore to buy a computer hutch for my oldest daughter, and, while I was there, I ran into one of the most talented students I have ever known. She graduated a year ago with a major in English and a minor in information systems. Now she works as a cashier. She wore a red smock and a little plastic nametag with the word "Target"

And one more...

Who doesn't like Teresa? Oh. The ones who still think women should be seen and not heard...

According to the chattering class, Heinz Kerry is -- and I quote -- "too outspoken," "too opinionated," "slightly zany," "eccentric and unpredictable," "the queen of direct" and -- cover your ears, kids -- "says what she thinks, when she thinks it."

Where's Our Line?

I'll be fascinated to know where we'll draw the line. Concentration camps? Death squads?

"We caution people not to write about bombs because if they're going on vacation, their travel plans will be disrupted," she said.

Random

Some random miscellany:

Plastic surgeons today warned people not to have cosmetic surgery to try to gain celebrity looks.

And, in case there was any further dissent about the reason there are still more dead people in the middle east: Saddam controlled a country at the centre of the Gulf, a region with a quarter of world oil production in 2003, and containing more than 60% of the world's known reserves. With 115bn barrels of oil reserves, and perhaps as much again in the 90% of the country not yet explored, Iraq has capacity second only to Saudi Arabia. The US, in contrast, is the world's largest net importer of oil. Last year the US Department of Energy forecast that imports will cover 70% of domestic demand by 2025.

Alternative energy source, anyone? Might be a lot cheaper than invading a desert country and killing thousands of people. Oh, right, but then all those US oil barons would be out of a job. Well, shit, then. There are some interesting predictions in this article. Maybe it's just too much to ask people to tell the truth before they start killing people. Maybe it would be a lot harder to kill people if we told each other the truth.

On a lighter, distracting note: I just can't stop laughing.

About Brutal Women

So, at some point, I should address the fact that brutalwomen.com is a rather bad porn site. That is, that's why I don't own that URL. Though I'd prefer to have it.

Of course, any configuration of URL that includes words like "women" or particularly "girl" are likely going to be porn sites. Porn sites jumped on this internet wave pretty quick and early (I wouldn't go so far as to say prematurely...).

I still stick by my decision to use brutalwomen.blogspot.com, and I apologize to those whose internet filters cull me. There's censorship for you.

Things I Can't Sell

Two Girls

Two girls, a he and a she, married along the far shores of the Shadow Sea. They were both very small, delicate in the wrists and ankles, light enough to fly. Frost kissed their eyelashes. They lay in the snow, dressed all in martyr's white. We stoned then to death at dawn. The blood was very beautiful.

The Women of Our Occupation

The drivers were big women with broad hands and faces smeared in mortar grit, reeking of the dead. Their eyes were filmed over with memories of dust. When we did not see them passing through the gate, ferrying truck loads of our dead, they came to us in dreams, the women of our occupation.

Wonder Maul Doll

We'd set down in Pekoi as part of the organics inquisition team, still stinking of the last city. We're all muscle. Not brains. The brains are out eating at the foreigners’ push downtown, and they don’t care if we whore around the tourist dregs half the night so long as somebody’s sober enough to haul them out come morning. When the brains aren’t eating, they’re pretending to give us directions in the field, telling us where to sniff out organics. They’re writing reports about how dangerous Pekoi is to the civilized world.

Sho

There was a boy in the snow. He was not beautiful.

He was left to me because I am an old person, a man by right of absence, not presence. I had all those organs removed years ago. The boy was carried and set down -- not gently -- in the gutter along my street, three doors from my stoop. The streets were bitter cold. If I left him where he lay, no doubt, the unbeautiful boy would become as the trees, coated in icy frosting and pushed into the sewers by the street sweepers in their growling machines.

I'm thinking it has... ahem... something to do with the themes...

Gaping Void

I love this guy....

More on the Politics of Fear

President George W. Bush may be tapping into solid human psychology when he invokes the September 11 attacks while campaigning for the next election, U.S. researchers said on Thursday...

"A lot of leaders gain their appeal by helping people feel they are heroic, particularly in a fight against evil," Greenberg said in a telephone interview from Hawaii, where he presented the findings to a meeting of the American Psychological Association...

Greenberg, Solomon and colleagues then decided to test the idea further and set up four separate studies at different universities.

"In one we asked half the people to think about the September 11 attacks, or to think about watching TV," Solomon said. "What we found was staggering."

When asked to think about television, the 100 or so volunteers did not approve of Bush or his policies in Iraq. But when asked to think about Sept. 11 first and then asked about their attitudes to Bush, another 100 volunteers had very different reactions.

"They had a very strong approval of President Bush and his policy in Iraq," Solomon said....

The volunteers were aged from 18 into their 50s and described themselves as ranging from liberal to deeply conservative. No matter what a person's political conviction, thinking about death made them tend to favor Bush, Solomon said. Otherwise, they preferred Kerry.

"I think this should concern anybody," Solomon said. "If I was speaking lightly, I would say that people in their, quote, right minds, unquote, don't care much for President Bush and his policies in Iraq."

Snapshot from my Worklife

I work at - shall we say - a Dilbert sort of office. As I've signed a confidentiality agreement, that's about all the background I can give you.

Try this one.

And, another, for a good idea.

Watch This.

If you haven't watched this yet, you should.

And... Ah, consumer America: buy a loop of red string for $25.99. I mean, it's "mystical," man (via Boingboing)

Weighing In

Ranting:

I loathe clothes shopping.

I've hated shopping for clothes since I was about eleven or twelve, when my mother could no longer find my size in the children's section and had to drag me - kicking and screaming - into the women's section of Mervyn's to find a pair of jeans that actually fit me (this was back before there were "teen" sizes/sections). At the time, I was horrified at what I saw as the out-of-control escalation of my weight. I'd been hounded about being overweight since I was about five or six, and being dragged to the women's section of the store just before the sixth grade was just about all I could handle.

I had failed. It was all over.

A year or so later, I started bleeding.

Women's section, indeed.

What, did I expect I was going to stay on the kid's side forever?

But in fact, most women I know rebel with mortal terror against the escalation of fat that their bodies kick in during and after puberty. All that hip, thigh and butt weight is quickly being toted as the next big "epidemic" threatening the Civilized World, `cause someone with a fat ass is taking up too much room on the subway.

You want to know what the number one cause of death is, worldwide?

Infectious and parasitic diseases, also related to poor health care and malnutrition. Funny, I wouldn't have guessed that.

But let's not get too far off topic. I was ranting here.

So I went looking for a pair of pants the other day. I'm not a small woman. I've vacillated between 175lbs (my preferred "fighting weight") and 270lbs (my highest benchmark, which I hit briefly when I was 18) for the last twelve years. The war against my body is ongoing.

According the infamous and ludicrous BMI "charts" that the US health and diet industry continues to promulgate, I have to be 168lbs in order to be at a "normal" weight for a woman. Most of the people I go to high school with would say 150. Hollywood would say 130. Everyone would say, and has said: Less is more.

As a woman, there should be less of you.

For the entirety of my life, I've been told that there should be less of me. Going clothes shopping reminds me of this.

I am fascinated at the American fear of fat people not only because it was so often directed toward me, but even more because I direct it at other people. I'll be at the grocery store, watching some fat-ass stacking up doughnuts and rice crispy treats, and I'll start an internal diatribe against The Fat. I'm standing next to my own cart whose contents rarely change from week to week: strawberries, bananas, lean ground pork, skinless chicken breasts, string cheese, half & half, eggs, tomatoes, onions, cilantro, green onions. There's not an ounce of shit in my entire cart. If I'm feeling especially rebellious, I might add some whole wheat pitas or rice noodles.

All this health: boxing classes twice a week, a climbing class on Sunday, bike ride on Saturday, and starting today - jogging once a week: and I don't look like a fucking supermodel. I will never look like a supermodel. I will never, in fact, be even 150lbs, unless I want to work out three hours every day and look like I walked out of Auschwitz. I don't have that sort of body, or that sort of metabolism.

So I stare at my whole wheat pitas and growl at the Fat Masses who allow themselves the luxury of chocolate eclairs and doritoes.

And, of course, I am ever cognizant of the woman behind me: a thin blond cheerleader type sneering at *my* fat ass and lusting after my whole wheat pitas while she looks down at the apples and non-fat milk she's bought to sustain her for the week.

I've been told my body's all wrong for most of my life. First, because I was a "girl" which somehow had a world of meaning outside of the way I actually viewed myself (you know - as a person). There were and are things that "girls" do that make them girls, and if you don't do them, you start to feel a little like a failure. I don't wear makeup. I don't carry a purse. I don't dress fem: that means no skirts, no dresses. I can't dance. I can't sew. My cooking skills are merely adequate. I'm not thin (a recent addendum to the "being female" camp). I'm too tall (5'9 is the average height of the American male, not the American female). My feet are too big, like giant portable skis (size 11). My breasts are too small. I have the wrong color hair (brown, not blond). I don't like soap operas. I don't like romance novels. I don't like big butch men. I don't like girls enough. I can defend myself from most threats. I know how to change a tire. I have too much education. I'm loud. I'm opinionated. I speak out of turn. I swear a lot. I drink beer. I don't care much for roses. I find syrupy sentiments exasperating.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to be smaller, quieter, to dress the way I was supposed to, to stop talking about myself, to pretend I was stupider, to pretend I read less and partied more. But at the end of the day, that only made me more miserable.

I remember a highschool boy friend hauling me home after school one day and saying, "I have to show you something."

He pulled out a book of ancient Greek art and opened it to full color pages of nude and partially nude statues and portraits of women. Anyone who's seen a lot of Greek work and its Renaissance imitators knows that their female subjects tend to be hourglass or pear-shaped women, fleshy, intimidating figures big in the hips and thighs. They often look like they could thwart an onrushing chariot merely by holding out one strong arm.

"See," this guy said to me, reverently turning the pages of the art book. "These are real women. This is the way women are supposed to look. This is how you look."

I likely should have been flattered. A lot of the men I've met expect me to be flattered when they compliment me, as if their opinions are some sort of manna from heaven. In fact, I was startled.

"How women are supposed to look?" Isn't that the whole problem? Men deciding how I'm supposed to look, and giving me a grade based on their opinion? Who the hell gave you white male assumption of privilege to assess my worth? Oh, that's right: you were born white and male. Congratulations. Manna from heaven.

And really, this is what it all came down to.

When I stepped back and looked at the Fat Issue as being about class, about affluent people looking for another way to look down on poor people, sure, that made a lot of sense too. Weight loss symbolizes sacrifice and restraint and good pious Christianity, which would, of course, be really popular in Puritan America. Hungry women get more media attention. Hungry women get more attention, period.

"You're so thin! Did you lose weight!" is considered the highest of compliments.

The reply to that, in fact, should be, "Yea. Do you think I have cancer?"

So, fat is a class issue, sure. Yea. And it's a feminist issue, because the vast majority of dieters, the vast majority of people hounded about weight, are women. Because women generally have a higher ratio of body fat than men (women with less than 10% body fat do not menstruate. If women don't menstruate, the human race dies out. So...).

To get us back to the beginning: Why do I really care about my pants size anyway? Is it because I think people will look down on me? Sure. Because I won't find attractive clothes? Sure.

Hey, wait a minute. Why do I want to be so attractive? Who am I trying to attract? I am not, in fact, attempting to attract anyone, and have not been trying for quite some time. So what gives?

Fat is, at its heart, about standards of beauty. And who controls them. By controlling standards of beauty, you can control people.

What do you do to silence a strong, smart, financially and emotionally independent woman so that you'll feel superior to her?

Tell her she's fat.

Make her neurotic about something she can't change, or worse, something she can only change with thousands of dollars of surgery performed by a (male) doctor, dollars she'll earn working in a crap job she hates for a (male) boss. Tell her the same sorry story that I've been getting since I was six years old: there's something wrong with you. You have the wrong body. You have the wrong bones. The wrong shape. The wrong mouth. The wrong hair. The wrong eyes. It's just all wrong.

Who's telling you this? Pretty much every loud, blaring media outlet around. The vast majority of them owned by... Huh.

Men.

After settling on my pair of pants and bundling it into my bag, I walked down Washington and stopped in at a sandwich shop for dinner before my boxing class. I settled on an Italian sandwich packed in thin bread, no sides, and an iced tea. I stared vehemently at my sandwich. I wanted to eat the whole thing. I wanted to eat the whole thing not only because I was hungry, but because I wanted to wave a big "fuck you" at the entire marketing industry. How can the opinions of other people have so much weight on my mood? Why do I give a shit about what number is on my pants, as long as they fit? Who the fuck cares? I WANT TO EAT THIS GODDAMN SANDWICH.

I ate half the sandwich, set it back on my plate, and stared at it. I was satiated, but not totally full. I would be hungry again in two hours. I stared at the sandwich. I WANTED TO EAT IT. I WAS VERY HUNGRY.

But I couldn't eat it. I went through a list in my head of what I'd eaten that day. A protein shake. A string cheese. Half a cup of brown rice with chicken.

AND I WANTED TO EAT THE REST OF THE SANDWICH.

I thought about health, and losing weight, and what were people going to think of me at Christmas? I thought of the numbers on the tag, I thought of the girl who was a size 8, standing in front of me in the line to the dressing rooms. She was not built like me. She didn't have these broad shoulders and these bones. She also didn't have these arm muscles. Mine are much scarier. I thought of the fact that I was not, had never been, and would never be one of the Beautiful People. My face would not launch a thousand ships - and that was a good thing. I was a writer, and a human being, and I really liked who I was and what I was doing with my life.

I went through, again, an inventory of what I'd eaten that day.

AND I WANTED TO EAT THE REST OF THE FUCKING SANDWICH.

And then...

Greedily, rebelliously --

I did.

I ate the rest of the sandwich. I was full. I was happy. Then I had a great boxing class. I went home to my own place that I upkeep with my own money and curled up in my own bed that I paid for myself, in a room that was all mine.

I'm not even 25, and I've been to lots of places, met really strange and weird and funny people... I've done some crazy things. I've done some wonderful things. I write books. I sell short stories. I can pick people up and carry them around the room.

And there I was, sitting in a sandwich shop, spending 15 valuable minutes of my time obsessing about whether or not to eat another serving of bread.

There is something fucked up about a society that's ground at me so much that I still catch myself performing these perverted parodies of self hate.

Who are other people, to tell me how to look, what to wear, what to eat?

The answer is, in the end: they're no one.

I think the greatest fuck-off of all is that the world conspires to make you think that it's got you in a corner, that there's no way out. No way up that wall.

They're wrong. And the minute we realize that, I think, everything changes.

Wouldn't that fuck things up.

Speech! Speech!

Great speech by Al Gore on the politics of fear... wouldn't it be great to have an educated president again?

Fear drives out reason.

It suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction.

It also requires us to pay more attention to the new discoveries about the way fear affects our brains...

The root word for democracy - "demos" - meant the masses of common people, who were an object of fear in the minds of many of our country's founders.

What they wanted was an orderly society in which property would be safe from arbitrary confiscation (remember the Revolutionary War was in significant measure about taxation).

What they believed was that a too pure democracy would expose that society to the ungoverned passions of what today we call "the street:" of people with little to lose, whose angers could be all too easily aroused by demagogues (note the root, again) and turned against those with wealth.

So the Constitution of which we are so proud is really an effort - based at least as much on fear as on hope -- to compromise and balance out the conflicting agendas of two kinds of Americans:

those who already have achieved material success, and those who aspire to it: those who are happy with the status quo, and those who can only accept the status quo if it is the jumping off place to something better for themselves.

That tension can never be fully resolved, and it is perfectly clear at the present moment in the profoundly differing agendas of our two major parties.

Neither has the fear that underlies these differences gone away, however well it may be camouflaged.

Somewhere along the line, the Republican Party became merely the name plate for the radical right in this country.

The radical right is, in fact,

a coalition of those who fear other Americans:

as agents of treason;

as agents of confiscatory government;

as agents of immorality.

This fear gives the modern Republican Party its well-noted cohesiveness and its equally well-noted practice of jugular politics.

Even in power, the modern Republican Party feels itself to be surrounded by hostility: beginning with government itself, which they present as an enemy; extending to those in the opposition party; and ultimately, on to that portion of the country whose views and hopes are represented by it - that is to say, to virtually, half the nation.

Under these circumstances, it is natural - perhaps tragic in the classical sense - but nonetheless natural - for the modern Republican Party to be especially proficient in the use of fear as a technique for obtaining and holding power....

In many ways, George W. Bush reminds me more of Nixon than any other previous president.

Like Bush, Nixon subordinated virtually every principal to his hunger for reelection.

He instituted wage and price controls with as little regard for his "conservative" principals as Bush has shown in piling up trillions of dollars of debt.

After the oil embargo of 1973, Nixon threatened a military invasion of the oil fields of the Middle East. Now Bush has actually done it.

Both kept their true intentions secret.

Like Bush, Nixon understood the political uses and misuses of fear.

After he was driven from office in disgrace, one of Nixon's confidants quoted Nixon as having told him this:

"People react to fear, not love.

They don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true."

Holy Crap

Viacom's launching a new channel: Gay Channel Now Set To Launch Feb. 17

No shit. That's cool.