Fun With Play-Dough

What’s worse then having a cheating husband? Having a famous cheating husband. And if that famous cheating husband is a politician, you have to stand next to him while he apologizes, and watch while everything you’ve vicariously lived for crumbles. Then, when the dust settles (and boy, does that take a long time) you try to get a divorce, and you still can’t do it without making headlines. Poor Dina McGreevey; she thought she had it all.  I guess Governor’s mansions aren’t as comfy as they used to be.

Brian Crowder deserves to have ‘dumbass of the week’ branded on his hideously large forehead. Why doesn’t he take a blowtorch to that awful hairdo, if he likes fires all that much? When police chased him, he got out of his car and ran. All police had to do was trace the owner of the car (surprise, they can do that!) and go to Crowder’s house. When he tried to run again, a police dog caught him, and he had to be transported to the hospital for minor injuries. I hope the dog bit him somewhere south of his navel. Honestly, setting fires? While sporting a mullet?

A family of four adults and one child, flying from Vancouver to Winnipeg, “lost” their four-year-old son, because all adults thought he was “with someone else”. They actually made it all the way onto the plane and into the air before finding out he wasn’t with them, and even then they only realized it because they were told…

What?!

A break from Politics; some weird news instead:

I think the good people of Tallahassee, Florida have given up on trying to make their primary count, and moved on to more important issues. The fake bull testicles that dangle from many trailer hitches have now officially been banned. Apparently, the “Truck Nutz” were so upsetting to Gun shop owner-slash-Senator (who voted for him?) Cary Baker. Anyone caught still sporting these fun and classy decorations will be fined $60.

Poor Floridians.  No Nutz, no Primary: they just can’t get a break.

Here’s another winner: A woman in Modesto, California, drove around with her cat on her lap. Yeah, I know. Kitty apparently thought that was a very stupid idea as well; the woman got scratched, hit and toppled a power pole and shut the whole street down for an hour.

And people wonder why Americans don’t have much of a reputation abroad.

However, Americans have by no means the monopoly on acting stupid. In Italy’s San Giovanni Rotondo, the body of Padre Pio was dug up and put on display, 40 years after his death.

Followers are delighted because “He seems like he is sleeping. Even if they had to re-do the face, its better remembering him this way than looking at a slab of cold marble,” said Domenico Masone, deputy mayor of Pietralcina, the town where Padre Pio was born.” (Reuters)

The body was found, upon ripping it out of the ground, to be “in fair condition”. The face, however, had to be reconstructed because it had decomposed too much.

You think? 

Revenge of the Animals: a Florida woman was killed today when an Eagle Ray jumped on her boat and stabbed her. Attacks like this are incredibly rare, according to all the experts. Tell that to James Bertakis, 81 years old at the time, who had the same thing happen on October 18, 2006, and lived to tell. He is now known as ‘Stingray Jim’.

In other news, Bush found it necessary to defend the Iraq war. I wonder why that is newsworthy; it’s not exactly a surprise, is it? Of course he is going to defend it; what else is he going to do? Admit fault? Like hell.

What burns me is that, in spite of all this “War is Great” rhetoric, aftercare for veterans in this country sucks. PTSD, homelessness, sexual assault; we don’t want to address these problems; we just want to sit back and congratulate ourselves on how well the surge is going. A country can’t separate combat from its aftermath; what happens to the brave women and men after they get back home is part of this war. A large segment of the military has to continue fighting long after their deployment ends, and that is neither a Republican nor a Democratic issue; it is just plain wrong.

We keep hearing about the housing market, trouble on Wall Street, and the fact that the dollar is more or less on life support. All very bad things. Still, much more concerning is how the credit crunch is affecting the student loan market.

And yes, that’s not a typo: it’s a market.

Several large lenders have pulled out of the student loan business altogether. If my daughter were 16 instead of six, I’d be hyperventilating right now.

Having said that, this might be a good time to think about this whole issue surrounding student loans; nobody should graduate with a diploma in one hand, and tens of thousands of dollars’ worth in loans in the other.  The government should step up and set guidelines; better test scores and a higher grade point average should entitle anyone to have a first rate education. Washington can certainly find an earmark for that? 

We have: sex industry (yes, we’re not done), mortgage crisis, and primary woes. 

Yum; more sex talk on Larry King tonight. Good old Larry, I knew he would milk this like an overripe cow.  Not even there, and he still manages to pull the sex strings. I imagine him saying; hey, I can’t make it tonight, but can somebody make sure the topic is sex, sex, and more sex? Oh, I know! We’ll get Dr. Drew! Isn’t he sort of bored anyway, now that Celebrity Rehab is over and done with?

Hurrah for Sex.

My husband had a great idea. How about the government, instead of dumping their money on Wall Street, or giving us a tax cut that, let’s face it, really isn’t going to help anybody, buys up all the houses that are for sale right now? From what we’re hearing, people are having a bit of difficulty selling their houses. They can put returning service men in these houses, and the people that they buy from can move on and buy a new house; there would be a ripple effect, and voilà, housing market improves. There. 

One Florida voter said he had no appetite for another primary, and he added: This is a great lesson for the National Democratic Party.

What lesson would that be? Don’t tell Florida what to do because they can’t effing follow instructions? 

I have the prefect solution. We take every single politician in Florida, put him or her in jail for a week or two, preferably solitary lock-up, then we ask them: Are you ready to play ball? If they hem and haw, we throw them in the sea and tell them not to come back.

Then we’ll give all of Florida to Louisiana; they could use the tourism and besides, as shady as Louisiana’s reputation is when it comes to politics, at least they didn’t screw up the primary. 

Now, how is this Howard Dean’s fault?

They were told not to do it, they did it anyway, and now they’re crying foul.

What were they thinking? We’ll just do it anyway, and national headquarters will budge? Whichever candidate won our primaries will champion our cause? Guess again.

As always, it’s the voters that pay the price; every vote in America should count. They will need to vote again, especially since Obama wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan.

If Crist and Granholm could just swallow hard and apologize, they might have a chance to solve this. I’m afraid, in cases like this, egos always get in the way of common sense. I can’t help but ask myself, if Charlie Crist got caught speeding, would he expect the police officer that pulled him over to pay the ticket?

So what about that little IED in New York? Isn’t it a bit of a sad bomb? I mean; it didn’t even disrupt traffic for long. If that were the perpetrator’s goal, it would have been easier to throw a rock at a couple of streetlights, or start a fight with a taxi driver. No one got hurt, so it will be out of the news within hours, so what was the purpose? Attention? Is there a man somewhere, sitting at home right now, congratulating himself on…on what, exactly?  Apparently, there were similar signatures at two other events, the May 2005 explosion outside the British Consulate, and the October 2007 one outside the Mexican Consulate.  Is it the same guy? It’s like connecting the dots, without having all the dots.

It sounds like an episode of Numbers, doesn’t it? I think attackers like this (I refuse to believe that whoever did this rode away on a bike), when they finally get caught, should be publicly spanked. These kinds of people aren’t scary; they’re just annoying.

The other issue of the day: Will Huckabee get his own Television show? Does anybody care? We all know he’s just waiting for that phone call…