Welcome Back...

...to the sidebar to Alan, just moved to 39 And Holding, who commented on my transitions post the other day that he is still rebuilding the permalinks at his new site and has restored my link. Thank you! Now it's back to work helping local Democrats get ready for Armageddon next Tuesday. Have you volunteered or contributed in your area to help bind the beast of the pit (a.k.a. the Bu'ushistas?)

Le mot sans merci

Wolcott pinions:

Pajamas Media is a vanity plate for the upwardly servile....

While I've Been Busy Helping Candidates...

...instead of blogging each day, several changes happened to the folk on my sidebar. Mad Kane, our Poetess Laureate of the Blogalaxy (no, skippy didn't coin that term), has gotten tired of hand-coding and moved to a new site. For unknown reasons, so has The Quaker Agitator. Way back last summer, the parody ARAVOSISblog stopped, but I never got around to dropping it before now.

More mysteriously, there has been no post since August 24 at Roryshock, so I guess it's gone, too. Finally, Swede and Czech is deleting his old blog on November 1st, and is now posting at his new site 39 And Holding; this one seems to have gone all into personal self-examination mode, and no longer links to me in the sidebar, which under my link policy of APRÈS VOUS, means I suppose I'll have to delist him -- but good luck with your journey, Alan.

Believe me, I look forward to this election being over, so that I can get back to the ought-to-be real world on the web, and in the library, and all the other places I have no time for now. The way things look now, though, it may take several days to recover from the wild victory party on election night. Unless I'm caught up in Recount Madness, I'll be around more often sometime after November 7th.

Mesoamerican Tradition

Five centuries ago, before the Spanish Inquisition unexpectedly arrived and displaced them, central American rulers built huge pyramids on which to practice human sacrifices to appease angry deities. Now Ortega passes statutes to practice human sacrifices to appease angry theocrats. What's the Spanish for "Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose"?

Nicaraguan MPs passed a tough law today that bans abortions for rape victims and women who risk dying in childbirth. The tactical vote came just days ahead of the Central American republic's presidential election.

The law was approved with the support of reluctant left-wing legislators who backed it to help their party's leader, Daniel Ortega, a former Cold War foe of the United States, sweep back to power in the November 5 election.

Nicaragua's powerful Roman Catholic church and the ruling Liberal Party had promoted the law and Mr Ortega's Sandinista party supported it to avoid alienating church leaders and religious voters in the last days of a tight campaign. ...

When Mr Ortega was in power, his government reinforced a law giving women the right to terminate pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, or if three doctors stated a woman's life was at risk. ...

Hundreds of people had protested outside the National Assembly in the capital Managua yesterday, saying the law would be a death sentence for the some 400 women who suffer ectopic pregnancies in Nicaragua each year.

"They are forcing women and girls to die. They are not pro-life, they are pro-death," said protester Xiomara Luna.

(Spotted by Avedon Carol.)

Kali's Coming With Your Karma...

...and is she ever pissed. Dr. Karen Kwiatkowski (Lt. Col. USAF ret.) puts herself in prime contention to be our next Commander-in-Chief:

Imagine, dear reader, if you will, one of the first applications of this antiterrorist legislation, sans habeas corpus, flaunting all executive power, all the time. Young Mr. Bush is soon for the ranch, mumbling strangely to himself and his rare visitor about how he coulda been somebody (other than Nixon on crack). But it is the next Tyrant of the United States who will delight today’s contrarians.

Imagine – briefly – if you will, the pasty-faced, well-fed, overbearing Richard Perle, or the political canine David Frum. Imagine, if you will, our amusing curmudgeon of a Defense Secretary and his pal Dick Cheney.

Each of these has lauded, associated, and given moral, if not material support, to the Iranian terrorist group known as MeK.

According to past legislation, presidential signing statements and the MCA "Death to Habeas Corpus" Act of 2006, these lucky pundits, secretaries of defense, and vice presidents may be held incommunicado, without access to a lawyer, without being told of the "evidence" against them, without access to a court of law or an independent judge. Wait ... I left something out. Held indefinitely. Perhaps secretly. Might they be bound and gagged, sexually humiliated, frightened by dogs or sub-standard enlistees and overzealous and poorly trained officers, or the odd contractor? Why not?

How NOT To Defend Yourself

According to the WaPo:

Rep. Ron Kind pays for sex!

Well, that's what the Republican challenger for his Wisconsin congressional seat, Paul R. Nelson, claims in new ads, the ones with "XXX" stamped across Kind's face. It turns out that Kind -- along with more than 200 of his fellow hedonists in the House -- opposed an unsuccessful effort to stop the National Institutes of Health from pursuing peer-reviewed sex studies. ...

Kind joked in an interview that he has been paying for sex ever since he said "I do."

Did you sleep through the seventies, Ron? Was the whole feminist revolution just wasted on you?

Cheaper Than Fences

Looks like they've come up with an inexpensive new anti-immigrant program:

Mexican fishermen captured a 7.5-foot crocodile in the Rio Grande, the river that divides part of Mexico and the United States, authorities reported on Sunday. ... The reptile was caught on a fisherman's line on Saturday in a sparsely populated stretch of the river on the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, across from Laredo, Texas. It was turned over to a local animal shelter.

The crocodile weighed about 130 pounds and appeared to be young and in good condition....

Is this Rove's October surprise? Have the media find the legs of an illegal border-crosser in a croc's mouth? That would probably get hosannas from Malkin and her xenophobes.

Kicking Them When They're Down, Or Something....

Over at the American Street, the estimable anonyMoses has printed an excerpt from the GOP Family Values Hymnal, which begins:

Cock of Pages, cleft for me,
Let me hide my sa-la-mi

Rsad it all here. And for the many who never click through, I preserve here for posterity my own comments appended thereto:

No, no, let’s use a hymn that gets right to the point:

Foley loved the little pages
All the hunky pages he has known
Gay or Bi — they’re both all right
They can come and spend the night
He can hardly wait till they are grown