Underage drinking is pretty much a nod and wink type offense, it's just funny in this case since they're so oblivious to how it looks with their father being the president, and how they are unable to control themselves.  Being as their dad is a Republican, party of moralizing condemners, they get a free pass other than some snarky media comments.  Can you imagine the crucifixion Chelsea Clinton would have gotten for being caught with Zanex or drunk in public?  Jerry Falwell types would have called press conferences daily to thunder about the damnation brought on by permissive liberal parenting.

• Billy Bob Thorton and Angelina Jolie are separated and appear sure to divorce.  This is the biggest celebrity divorce shocker since Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, Drew Barrymore and Tom Green, or even Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock.  Oh wait, they aren't divorced yet.

Most people couldn't imagine why Jolie was with a creepy old guy like Thorton in the first place, especially given that he'd been married five times already.  Clearly an odd couple, photos of them together always looked a bit like a kidnapping. Thorton is a weird guy, but Jolie is obviously pretty kooky too though, what with the tattoos, wearing a pendent of Billy Bob's blood, talking so much about their deviant sex life, etc.  Ironically, she seems to have been the one to break up the relationship.  When they got together she was all wild and up for anything, traveling with Billy Bob, partying, fitting into his lifestyle.  However she adopted a Cambodian orphan child last year, and has gotten all maternal and conservative as she stays at home with the kid, and isn't available to go out on tour with Billy Bob and his band.  In addition she's somehow involved with the UN and is going on trips to various miserable refugee camps around the world.

Billy Bob married a hot, sexy, wild, party girl.  She turned into a socially-conscious mom, meanwhile he's out on tour with some rock band.  I don't think anyone on earth is surprised to see them breaking up; they were way busy showing how in love they allegedly were, with the blood and all of that; relationships of that intensity are doomed, though I expected more of a public blow up style disaster.  Shame they're going out with a whimper.

• Sickening story yesterday of a guy throwing a kitten on a lit barbeque.  I didn't post about it since it was just distasteful and nasty.  The kitten died from the injuries after being burned alive.  The guy who did it is being prosecuted and might get up to 5 years and a $5000 fine.  Here's his mug shot, and he looks about how you'd expect.  Stoned, unshaven, white trash.  You suspect that 5 years in prison for him would be just a nice break from being evicted and unemployed, and they'll be lucky to get $500 from selling his worldly goods, much less $5000, but perhaps I'm stereotyping a bit.

• Gray Davis is the California governor, and he's up for re-election this year.  He seems very beatable, what with the California power crisis last year (caused largely by electric companies, including Enron, manipulating the market and screwing the state over) and budget problems this year.  However the Republican challenger, Bill Simon, is a kooky billionaire businessman who shot from off the map to win the Republican nomination over established, more electable politicians. There were lots of allegations at the time that Gray Davis did all he could to sabotage the other Republicans running, since he figured to have a better chance to beat Davis than the other guys.  His scheming worked perfectly, and this political neophyte is now choking. Simon backed out of a planned meeting with Latino law enforcement officials, saying he had something come up.

"It was simply a scheduling conflict," said Simon spokeswoman Jeannine Campos. "It wasn't a matter of avoidance."

Simon had no public events on Saturday.

Furthermore, Simon has an IRS scandal brewing at the worst possible time, when all the Bermuda tax shelters and outrageous reports of CEOs profiteering on their bankrupt companies is triggering an anti-uber-rich backlash.

Simon's name appeared, along with those of dozens of other wealthy investors, on a list the IRS released as part of a federal lawsuit against the giant public accounting firm KPMG LLP over tax shelters it promoted.

Looks like Gray Davis really won the lottery on this one.

ascinating and indepth article on John Ashcroft can be seen here.  The man is now the Attorney General, and as such his personal opinions and preferences shape the laws, and how they are enforced.  As the article details, he has through his entire career pushed his own agenda whenever possible.  This isn't an indictment of him; just about every politician and judicial figure does the same thing, it's just that Ashcroft's beliefs are very hardcore right wing, and make no concessions for public opinion.

In more than two decades of public life as state attorney general, governor and U.S. senator from Missouri, Ashcroft repeatedly pursued extraordinary means to achieve his political ends. State police blocked a father from taking his brain-dead daughter to a hospital in another state so he could remove her from life support. Nurses at a rural family clinic were threatened with prosecution for distributing contraceptives. A state official assisting a voluntary integration plan for St. Louis schools was threatened with the loss of her job.

And in his term as U.S. senator, Ashcroft tried to change the Constitution to match his beliefs several times, introducing or co-sponsoring seven amendments, including ones to permit school prayer, to ban flag burning, to define human life as beginning at fertilization, and to make it easier to amend the Constitution.

He's certainly a man of his beliefs, and doesn't let any squishy sentimentality get in the way.

Missouri state Sen. Harry Wiggins, for one, recalls a meeting with Ashcroft and a group of Kansas City community leaders when he was governor. The group had tried for months to see the governor about funding to keep open Kansas City's only hospice for AIDS patients.

As the meeting began, Wiggins recalled, Ashcroft appeared uninterested until he focused on the facility being a "home" not a hospital.

"Then you have my attention," the governor said, according to Wiggins. "I'm looking for where it is cheapest to send them to die."

Wiggins said: "Governor, that's not what we're here for. These are human beings."

Ashcroft replied, "Their pain and suffering is a result of their own misconduct."

Rather a medieval PoV on things, isn't it?  I can so easily see him 500 years ago pressing witches to death under huge rocks, or drowning them and if they float declaring them innocent of sorcery.  You might think him quite capable of that sort of thing today, given the chance, and I don't know that I'd dispute that accusation.

None of these examples thus far are necessarily damning.  I personally disagree with him on most issues, and think he's probably clinically insane, given his fanatical Christianity, which crosses over to lunacy of a superstitious nature in many areas.  I'm not comfortable with a man in a position of power who gets his motivation almost entirely from his very unconventional interpretation of ancient scriptures.  Calling him an American version of some Taliban Kaliph is not much of a stretch; he is sure his way is right, regardless of any logic or public opinion.  He's not interested in objectivity or debate or analysis.  He gets his directives from another plane of reality; whether you think that's God's word or voices in his head depends on your own religious values.

The article does discuss a number of things he's done that reflect poorly on him, regardless of your agreement or disagreement with his agenda.

In his one term in the U.S. Senate and as a potential candidate for president, Ashcroft was an avowed opponent of judicial activism, saying courts are not the place to shape the law.

In opposing the judicial appointment of a former California Bar Association president, Margaret Morrow, Ashcroft argued that she would try to impose her beliefs on society, "rather than have the culture initiate through their elected representatives those things which the culture prefers."

Of course him saying "courts shouldn't shape the law" is amazingly bald-faced hypocrisy, being as he's spent his entire career trying to do just that.  It's also a pretty dumb comment if you think about it; what the hell is a court going to do but shape the law?  That's the whole purpose of courts.  What he meant, is shape the law in ways he disagrees with.

He's long opposed any sort of integration as well, fighting court-ordered integration of St. Louis schools (after white flight left only poor inner city schools full of black children) all the way to the Supreme Court.  Whether this is a sign of racism or not is open to debate.

At his confirmation hearing last year, Ashcroft said his opposition to the busing plan was not based on race. "I want to have the opportunity to say with clarity that I do not support segregation," he told the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I support integration."

He opposed the St. Louis settlement, he said, because the court had ordered the state to pay the cost of busing students, when the state "had not been found really guilty of anything."

Ashcroft later rode his opposition of the busing integration to his election as governor.  I don't see how this can be seen as anything other than playing a race card for the white vote.

In 1984, Ashcroft used the school busing issue in his run for governor, questioning whether his opponent in the Republican primary, the St. Louis County executive, was as opposed to the integration plan as he was.

Now maybe Ashcroft really didn't want to keep the blacks out of the white schools, and he was really opposed to it for financial reasons, as he claims.  But you'd have to be a fool to believe he wasn't getting votes from all of the white racists in a rather racist state for his stance.  Is he responsible for the racist views of his supporters?  Again, debatable.

The article also lists a couple of examples of Ashcroft using his power years later to get back at people who had opposed or thwarted him years earlier.  He's competitive, he's vicious, and he has a long memory.  A dangerous enemy.

He's also obviously lied about his associations with racist institutions.  He got an honorary degree from Bob Jones university, which is quite a nut house, openly expressing hatred of Jews, Catholics, practicing total segregation, etc.  Ashcroft claimed he didn't know of their political leanings.  Uh huh.

In 1983, when Ashcroft was state attorney general, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a landmark case ruling that the university could be stripped of its tax-exempt status because it discriminated.

He was interviewed by Southern Partizan magazine in 1988.

Southern Partisan Magazine, which promotes a romanticized view of the Confederacy, over the years publishing articles defending David Duke and slaveholder practices, published an interview with Ashcroft in 1998.

Ashcroft in the interview, "Your magazine helps set the record straight. You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like Lee, Jackson and Davis."  He later claimed to not know what the magazine was about, just like he didn't know what Bob Jones university was about.

The whole "I love the southern heritage, but I'm not a racist." is such a weird ideology.  Everyone else sees it as code for "I support slavery", but there are still educated white men who go on and on about it, defend the Confederate flag, pretend the whole Confederacy wasn't about continuing their racist slavery, etc.  And white supremacists don't really hate Jews and Blacks, they just like the Nazis' uniforms and Wagner a lot, right?

Ashcroft is playing it cleverly though, he associates with the racist groups and promotes their agenda enough to guarantee him of their support, but never actually joins anything, or issues any really damning quotes.  So he can honestly say things like, "Let me express to you that I believe that racism is wrong. I repudiate it. I repudiate racist organizations. I'm not a member of any of them." and has plausible deniability.

Basically Ashcroft is always going to boil down to how you feel about his agenda and beliefs.  If you agree with him on issues you'll see him as an honest crusader for his beliefs, some of which happen to overlap with those of some pretty odious groups.  If you disagree with him on issues you'll see him as a mental patient and dangerous zealot.

That being said, I defy anyone, love or hate him, to watch this video of him singing and not get the creeps.

In related news, I've been wanting to say something about the eerily-totalitarian "TIPS", AKA "Informants 'R Us" concept the government is promoting, but it's easier to just link to TMW's several posts about it.  Note that the Post Office has already opted out.  Before you start thinking that no one cares about fighting terrorism, do you really think given the events of last 9/11 that people wouldn't call the FBI or police if they thought they saw something suspicious, TIPS or no TIPS?  Also note that the FBI had field officers reporting constantly on suspicious Arabs taking flight training, and that higher ups did nothing with the memos.  If critical FBI briefs weren't being read and acted on, what the hell are they going to do with millions of wild goose chase reports a week?  It's a totally unworkable concept.

It's been commented on before, but as they keep doing it; what's up with all of the Orwellian acronyms for the new government projects?  First off we've got the Office of Homeland Security, which sounds straight out of a Russian propaganda film from about 1953. Now TIPS, which stands for "Terrorism Information and Prevention System".  Months ago the USA Patriot Act was passed, which doesn't sound so bad until you realize it's actually the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism".  Who the hell sat around thinking up name after name until they came up with a name, nay, a sentence where the first letter of all the important words worked out like that?  Give it a reasonable, functional name, and make an acronym for it if need be, but don't construct an undignified name that's like something from a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon.

[Totally OT, but while looking for a pic of that Calvin and Hobbes strip I saw a link to this speech Watterson gave in 1989.  If you are like me and read the comics occasionally, but think virtually all of them suck, and wonder why all the good ones quit (Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Blood County), or just want to hear some more of the Calvin and Hobbes creator's philosophies on things, check it out.

...we have established cartoonists who have grown so cavalier about their jobs that they sign strips they haven't written or drawn. Anonymous assistants do the work while the person getting the credit is out on the golf course. Aside from the fundamental dishonesty involved, these cartoonists again encourage the mistaken view that once the strip's characters are invented, any facile hireling can churn out the material. In these strips, jokes are written by committee with the goal of not advancing the characters, but of keeping them exactly where they've always been. So long as the characters never develop, they're utterly predictable, and hence, so easy to write that a committee can do it. The staff of illustrators has the same task: to keep each drawing so slick and perfect that it loses all trace of individual quirk. That way, no one can tell who's doing it. It's an assembly line production. It's efficient, but it makes for mindless, repetitive, joyless comics. We need to see more creators taking pride in their craft, and doing the work they get paid for. If writing and drawing cartoons has become a burden for them, let's see some early retirements and some room for new talent.

This so perfectly describes any number of popular strips now (the last 15 years of Garfield, for instance, a cartoon that was really something cool and clever when it began) that I'm hard-pressed to add anything in comment.]