What I see here on the ground in South West LA (oil patch red) is a sudden and almost complete absence of those once ubiquituous yellow ribbon magnets each and every one of them once the marker of a Bush supporter.

Where have all the yellow ribbon magnets gone?

Is the Commander-in-Thief just trying to repurpose the wasted billions and billions poured down the rabbit hole of 'Star Wars' missle defense by spawning a new set of fears to mobilize his 'base' (who are base enough already...base, adj. - debased, low, vile, despicable.)

Bad enough that Condi Rice is promising the Japanese protection against nuclear attack presumably in exchange for their central bank contiuing to prop up the running-on-empty dollar. By what means exactly does she propose to fulfill this guarantee?

"All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting." -George Orwell

>>Not, of course, American quantities -- each of us uses on average eight times the energy that a Chinese citizen does -- but relatively serious quantities nonetheless.<< Bill McKibben

Ummm...

1) there are 4 times as many of them than there are of us

2) it's not that they're somehow more virtuous; it's merely that the 'average' Chinese (80%) is a poor, barely subsistence, farmer out in the countryside who simply cannot afford high consumption of energy

3) consumption is in any case growing 2.5X faster than in the West due to rapid urbanization, and

4) China is one of the least energy efficient consumers anywhere using nearly triple the energy per unit of output as we do, partly because the costs are so heavily subsidised.

Are we hurtling toward disaster? Nope. We're 'there' already.

here in almost incandescently red (Kerry got 28% - attribute that to the presence of ULL) oil patch/Catholic, anti-abortion, anti-contraception SW Louisiana, I've been keeping my own running list of sightings for nearly a month now.

Day 28: 2

Used to be I see a dozen at every traffic light. Sometimes a dozen on a single vehicle - generally a vast SUV - Explorer or Bronco. Was some message beamed out that was accessible to only the tinfoil hat brigade?

The other weirdness I noticed here was that right up until the 2004 election I saw virtually no Bush/Cheney bumper sticker/yard signs, billboards.

Really. But after - after - suddenly there those nasty little black 'W''s were everywhere.

What? Weren't sure that the 'fix' would work?

>>Joseph Smith finds golden tablets with another testament of Jee-bus?

-- Anonnymouse

What's even more astonishing is that they then claim to have 'lost' them somewhere.

"Oh! Gosh darn! I just know I packed the holiest of holy golden tablets somewhere.'?

Likely story.

'Drilling for oil' on Wall Street.

I happen to live in SW LA where the crazy boom-and-bust cycles of the oil biz play out with regularity.

I sat in a deposition not long ago wherein the supervisor for a off-shore capping (some like a burial detail) company was led through his work experience.

It went something like this:

A: "I worked for ____ but they went bankrupt. Then I worked for ____ from ____ to ____, but they went under. Then I set up my own services company but it went under, too. Then from ___ to ____ I was with _______ but they were acquired by _________ and I was down-sized. Then I was with ______ but they moved their operations to Houston....

Q: Are you currently employed?

A: No. My most recent employer failed.

There's an acute shortage of skilled and willing off-shore services workers now despite the soaaring wages, some 20 years after the '86-'87 bust, which is also known as the 'diaspora' in which LA lost almost 15% of it's population and bumper stickers proclaimed:

"Would the last person out of Lafayette, please turn off the lights?"

My 35 year old, high-school educated neighbor is pulling down probably $160k or more off-shore, a bonanza made possible by Katrina.

And all I can think is 'Here we go again.'

"And I said on my program, if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush administration again."

-- Bill O'Reilly, "Good Morning America," ABC, 3/18/03

but you've got to look at the dramatic change in hotel housekeeping staffing which is now almost entirely made up of immigrants, legal and otherwise...

I had occasion to work in a couple of New Orleans hotels in a capacity which took me from the loftiest penthouse suites to the filthy waste-oil disposal containers on the basement loading docks and I speak from that experience: virtually every service occupation is now dominated by immigrant groups.

Leave the gilded 'front' of any four star hotel for five minutes and you'll find youself in 'back-of'the-house' which might as well be in any benighted 3rd World country you can name.

all the usual 'Commander-in-Thief' and 'Thief Executive' circumlocutions to avoid ever placing the word 'President' as a modifier to the proper noun 'Bush' unless the reference is to the 41st President.

I really like 'Current Occupant' and hope RichEmery wouldn't mind if I adopt it.

Oh, and I just switched to Firefox 2.0 and the newest feature is auto spell-check. Cool. But it won't help the serial homonym abusers out there. I wish you knew who you are.

That's 'duct tape' unless you're suggesting something the WWF and Audubon Society would likely regard as abuse of innocent migratory water fowl. To say nothing of kinky. Or 'Duck Tape' as a trademarked brand. Pick one.

It's 'straitjacket' not 'straight'.

Strait as in 'narrow and constricted'. As in the Straits of Magellan or 'dire straits'.

Straight, adj, extending continuously in the same direction without curving.

People, learn your homonyms. You're supposed to know the difference.