This Week's Columns

Hola again, childrens!
For you: This week's Commie Girl, a hilarious musing on homeless children--that's right! Kids what got no homes!

This week's Eight Days! Plan your social life!

And this week in Art, which if I remember correctly is about . . . what again? Oh! Boobs!

Please to enjoy!

I'll Say This Once

There's a hullabablog going about pharmacists refusing to fill birth control prescriptions. Here, for instance, is Jesse from Pandagon:

Don't take the job if you can't do it. And that isn't just filling the prescription, it's giving the women enough information to otherwise obtain the prescription if you aren't willing to do it. This isn't the car dealer refusing to sell you a Prius because you don't have good enough credit, this is a scientific professional denying you healthcare because they don't know what they're talking about. Healthcare (which, uh, isn't a normal market) can't function by these rules and fulfill its purpose.

What people are not picking up on is that Karen Brauer is just the beginning of a concerted effort; the far-Right doesn't just pick up talk radio and let it drop a year later when it hasn't yet panned out. Like they stacked the schoolboards in the '80s (Goodbye, evolution!), they will now stack the pharmaceutical colleges with likeminded folk. It will be a mission. Ralph Reed's people will have filled all the slots, and folks who believe the birth control is the same thing as abortion will be holding your prescription hostage.
Don't misunderestimate them.

Friday Commie Blogging

Meet Lenin.

Fernando Botero Takes on Abu Ghraib

Via Counterpunch

Strap It . . . Wha???

Via Salon:
"He's going through the same thing I went through," Lott told the Chronicle. "If you are a conservative Republican leader from the South . . . strap it on, baby, because you are fixing to get it."
I need to think about this some. Can anybody help with what Senator Lott might have been trying to say?

It Burns! It Burns!

Last night I met up with my homegirl Arrissia. I hadn't seen her in forever, except when she showed up to my birthday party so late, bogged down in down-the-mountain traffic from Big Bear, that I was already within a half-hour of passing out. To be fair, I might not have been in my coma if I hadn't had to listen to a party guest talk at length about how she wanted to go back for a master's in poetry.
It's nice to have a girlfriend who's known you so long, you can say, "You'll never guess who I heard from!" and she says, "Your asshole mechanic!" and she's right, even though it's been probably six years since you've seen him. How did she do that?
I'd been "dating" my asshole mechanic for close to 10 months (I think we went to lunch once) when I called him up one night. "Hey!" I said. I might be able to get tickets to Junior Brown. If I do, do you want to go?"
"I would think you would invite me after you knew whether you had the tickets," he told me.
So I apologized.
Then Junior Brown's wife called me and offered me two tickets after she read a piece I'd written about the band, and I went, and I didn't take my mechanic.
So I heard from him this week. "I read what you wrote about me," he emailed. "It's not talking shit if it's true."
I think he was under the impression that my story on The Cock I wrote for the OC Weekly's "Parts is Parts" Sex Issue was about him.
It wasn't.
But then I started to regret my bitchy reply ("Oh, you," I said. "I didn't think you read."), because as I recall, he was really good at it, and I'm a fucking nun lately.
So I apologized.
"I guess I'm maybe sorry I was so rude, despite the fact that you were such a dick, because as I recall you were pretty good at it," I wrote.
"Good at being a dick or having one?" he asked.
"Maybe both," I clarified.
"Fare enough," he wrote back.
Arrissia says I can't sleep with him now if he doesn't know how to spell fair.
I tried to argue, but she still says no.

Well, Said the Little Red Hen

I'll do it myself.
And she did.

Got home from work at 9:15

and there's a pigeon trapped in my fireplace, behind the screen.
I could get it out myself, but I don't want to. It's a-flappin' and a-beatin' its wings and it's filthy from the ashes--not that it wasn't filthy before.
It's a pigeon.

So, who do I call? Animal control? No after-hours.
The sheriff's? They told me to call the Anaheim PD.
The Anaheim PD? Told me to call Animal control's after-hours.
Granted, they're pretty busy shooting disabled people. I've no idea what that story was about. It might have been the most unsatisfying LA Times story in history.

Congratulations

Congratulations to the LA Times on its Pulitzer for public service reporting. Its series on the problems at King Drew was absolutely outstanding, with a team of reporters working for more than a year on the story. It's the kind of thing the mainstream media can do a lot better when they're not getting their asses axed for profit margins.

OCMA Tonight

I'll be co-hosting the Orange County Music Awards at 8 p.m. at the Grove of Anaheim, with the lethally adorable Dave Styles. (KIIS-FM. And he's adorable. How embarrassing is that?)(Also? I think I accidentally licked his ear.)
Last night at the Galaxy we saw Nikka Costa, a sexy-motherfucker mix of Macy Gray and Fiona Apple. (Also? I think I accidentally licked his ear.)
Come on out and see us.

Sandy Berger

From Kevin Drum:

....Archives officials have said previously that Berger had copies only, and that no original documents were lost. It remains unclear whether Berger knew that, or why he destroyed three versions of a document but left two other versions intact.

Bizarre and inexplicable.

Maybe he shredded them even though he knew they were copies because they were classified and he didn't want other people to see them . . . KNOWING that the originals were safe in the Archives.
But that's just a guess.

So, when they gonna finish up all those investigations they promised us before the election? Just wondering.