Friday, February 24, 2006

Anagram MARTA map

This anagram MARTA map is for Doug. (He loves both maps and words. Click to enlarge.)

Anagram key. Via BoingBoing, which has more here, here, here, here and here.

UPDATE: As if that wasn’t enough, Cory posted more this morning.

Moyers in CA on money & politics

Truthout has the full text of Bill Moyers’ prepared remarks for an eight-day speaking trip in California on the issue of money and politics:

I will leave to Jon Stewart the rich threads of humor to pluck from the hunting incident in Texas. All of us are relieved that the Vice President’s friend has survived. I can accept Dick Cheney’s word that the accident was one of the worst moments of his life. What intrigues me as a journalist now is the rare glimpse we have serendipitously been offered into the tightly knit world of the elites who govern today.

The Vice President was hunting on a 50-thousand acre ranch owned by a lobbyist friend who is the heiress to a family fortune of land, cattle, banking and oil (ah, yes, the quickest and surest way to the American dream remains to choose your parents well.)

The circumstances of the hunt and the identity of the hunters provoked a lament from The Economist. The most influential pro-business magazine in the world is concerned that hunting in America is becoming a matter of class: the rich are doing more, the working stiffs, less. The annual loss of 1.5 millions of acres of wildlife habitat and 1 million acres of farm and ranchland to development and sprawl has come “at the expense of ‘The Deer Hunter’ crowd in the small towns of the north-east, the rednecks of the south and the cowboys of the west.” Their places, says The Economist, are being taken by the affluent who pay plenty for such conveniences as being driven to where the covey cooperatively awaits. The magazine (hardly a Marxist rag, remember) describes Mr. Cheney’s own expedition as “a lot closer to ‘Gosford Park’ than ‘The Deer Hunter’ - a group of fat old toffs waiting for wildlife to be flushed towards them at huge expense.” READ ON.

Bill Moyers is President of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy.

It’s a Dick Cheney world out there

More from the text of Bill Moyers’ prepared remarks for his California speaking trip:

Watching these people work is a study of the inner circle at the top of American politics. The journalist Sidney Blumenthal, writing on Salon.com, reminds us of the relationship between the Armstrong dynasty and the Bush family and its retainers. Armstrong’s father invested in Rove’s political consulting firm that managed George W. Bush’s election as governor of Texas and as president. Her mother, Anne Armstrong, is a longtime Republican activist and donor. Ronald Reagan appointed her to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board after her tenure as Ambassador to the United Kingdom under President Ford, whose chief of staff was a young Dick Cheney. Anne Armstrong served on the board of directors of Halliburton that hired Cheney to run the company. Her daughter, Katherine Armstrong, host of the hunting party, was once a lobbyist for the powerful Houston law firm founded by the family of James A. Baker III, who was chief of staff to Reagan, Secretary of State under the first George Bush, and the man designated by the Bush family to make sure the younger Bush was named President in 2000 despite having lost the popular vote. According to Blumenthal, one of her more recent lobbying jobs was with a large construction firm with contracts in Iraq.

It is a Dick Cheney world out there - a world where politicians and lobbyists hunt together, dine together, drink together, play together, pray together and prey together, all the while carving up the world according to their own interests.

Here’s the Blumenthal article he’s talking about. None of it is metaphoric.

The WORST PROFESSOR EVER! (Vote early & often)

From World O’Crap:

Who is the world’s worstest professor? Per the FrontPage magazine poll, as of now, it’s Michael Bérubé; In fact, Michael is about 1000 times worse than Ward Churchill, the guy who, only a few months ago, was worse than Osama bin Laden. Michael is c. 5000 times worse than Bernardine Dohrn, who was part of the leadership of the Weather Underground, and even made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. And ProfessorBérubé is more than 10,000 times worse than ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers.

(Ayers, as we are reminded by Jamie Glazov in an interview David Horowitz consented to give to FrontPage about his book, “was the leader of the terrorist ‘Weatherman’ cult” who accidentally blew up his girlfriend while making a bomb. But Horowitz reveals something even worse about Ayers “Even when I was a leftist Bill Ayers struck me as a superficial human being, and essentially thoughtless.")

So, you can see just how evil Bérubé must be.

And with your help, he can be even worse. Vote now to ensure that Michael gets the recognition he deserves. (And since you can apparently vote as many times as you want, your opinion can really make a difference.)

The last time I quoted Michael Bérubé was when he called academic freedom a cornerstone of a free society (and pointed to the $1,000 popcorn maker). That’s bad Bad BAD! But to see what he’s been up to lately I moseyed on over to Bérubé’s place and dug around a bit. Shortly I found my way to this:

[Y]ou know, dear friends, I resent being called “the very professor who calls [Horowitz] a liar without checking the facts.” The truth—and I use the term advisedly—is that I called Horowitz a liar while hyperlinking to the facts.  Horowitz lied about the student in Colorado, he lied about the biology professor who allegedly showed Fahrenheit 9/11 to his class, he has lied about me (actually, the line about how my “entire political focus since 9/11 has been in getting our terrorist enemies off the hook” comes closer to actual slander), and—I can’t believe I forgot this one!—he lied—to O’Reilly, on one of his many Fox News appearances—about his speaking engagement at Hamilton College.  Or, as Horowitz put it at the time, “I fibbed about my invitation to Hamilton and about my Academic Bill of Rights . . . because it was truer to say that I had to be invited by students . . . than to say the faculty there—the Kirkland project in particular, which is what we were talking about—would invite me.”

Whew! That’s ONE BAD PROFESSOR. I’m going to place my vote (again) right now.