"I had to do my research. I checked the schedule for the ceremony and realized that I would be speaking just before the senator got his award. And that's when the idea for a preemptive strike began to brew in my little stressed-out brain. What if I tore McCain's speech apart before he even opened his mouth?"

Word of the day: ductile

1: capable of being drawn out or hammered thin
2: easily led or influenced
3: capable of being fashioned into a new form

"I learned to be like a ship's rat, veined ears trembling..." --Anne lamott

Bush may have signed a law that didn't pass, violating the Constitution.

"The Gods have become diseases." --C.G. Jung

"He created an illusion and lived his days and nights within its confines. That illusion was his Japan. He found in Japan the ideal coupling of the cerebral and the sensual, mingled and indistinguishable, the one constantly recharging the other and affording him the inspiration to write.

He came at a time when virtually all foreigners were here to instruct, pontificate and lord themselves over the Oriental upstart; yet he himself came solely to learn, to fossick, to discover what his temperament had taught him was beautiful and potent in the human spirit. Fresh off the ship in 1890, he wrote of the Japanese to his friend and subsequent biographer Elizabeth Bisland, "I believe that their art is as far in advance of our art as old Greek art was superior to that of the earliest European art-groupings. We are barbarians! I do not merely think these things: I am as sure of them as of death. I only wish I could be reincarnated in some little Japanese baby, so that I could see and feel the world as beautifully as a Japanese brain does..."

Lafcadio Hearn: interpreter of two disparate worlds from Japan Times

Word of the day: fossick

Australian & New Zealand: to search for gold or gemstones typically by picking over abandoned workings

Stephen Colbert from Comedy Central headlined the White House Correspondents' Dinner recently, thoroughly roasting Bush (who was sitting just a few feet away) in front of hundreds of reporters and assorted dignitaries. He didn't spare the press:

"But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!"

Bush and the audience were squirming throughout the whole thing, with just a few nervous giggles here and there when Bush was targeted. Afterwards Bush mutely shook Colbert's hand and quickly left.

The next day the event was all over the liberal blogs, but the mainstream media only reported on Bush's own performance with a Bush impersonator, completely omitting mention of Colbert, who was the headliner at the show. Even the New York Times, that "bastion of liberalism", didn't so much as mention Colbert's presence.

Editor and Publisher did justice to the event here

Media Matters has analysis of the lack of critical mainstream media coverage of the dinner and a comparison with past White House Correspondents' Dinners.

CSPAN's video feed of the dinner

Some other videos and transcripts of it here.

This reminds me of a recent "die-in" protest that was held during Hillary Clinton's speech at our school. A couple dozen students layed down to symbolize the dead in the Iraq War, in protest of Clinton's hawkish pro-Iraq War stance. A reporter for one of the student papers saw a man photographing the protestors and went over to ask him who he was... turned out he was a photographer for the New York Times. She asked him what he though of the protest. "Think?" he answered, "I don't think. I've learned to stop thinking on this job a long time ago."