Pleased to meet you …

Don’t you feel warm and fuzzy all over when someone cares about you enough to play really good April Fool’s jokes on you? Here’s our White House Administration, showing us they care: 

“I know we’ve made tactical errors, thousands of them I’m sure, but when you look back in history, what will be judged is did you make the right strategic decisions.”

- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, from Glenn Kessler’s article in today’s Washington Post.

bc sez: Indeed, Ms. Rice. Indeed.

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee…that says, fool me once…shame on…shame on you. You fool me, you can’t get fooled again.”

- President George W. Bush

April Fools, everybody.

bc

In today’s Washington Post, there’s an interesting article describing a quiet little White House program to collect and chemically test sewage taken from the public waste treatment system in Fairfax County, VA.

Post Writer Bill Turque says that the Bush Administration “is probing the mysteries of Fairfax’s sewage for a clearer picture” of illegal behavior in the suburban DC county, presumably performing chemical analysis of the waste for signs of drug usage amongst the population. A “clearer picture”, indeed.

In the light of the flaps over the Administration’s perceived attacks on American Civil Liberties, such as the Domestic Spying/Wiretap Programs, certain provisions of the Patriot Act and the summons of Google Internet Search data , it’s astonishing that the Bush Administration would publicly squat to this new low, given the dumps that Bush’s poll numbers are in lately.

While the Administration is saying that this effort is this is currently limited to testing for urinary byproducts of cocaine, what’s to stop them for testing for other things? And with this precedent set, what’s to limit the Government from testing the sewage coming right out of your house as it goes into the public sewer system under the streets? 

Are we paranoid for thinking that this Administration is interested in sifting through Our Personal Wastes for Nuggets of Intelligence that would be valuable to them in the Domestic War On Terra (ahem), as long as they have a legal perch to do so?

Let’s not forget that Morality Laws (Sodomy, etc.) are on the books in some areas; the potential for use of this type of investigation for wide-ranging information gathering is more than a little disturbing.

Imagine a Bush Administration Sewage Test and Recovery Directorate (BASTaRD) working in the sewer outside your house:  ”Hmm, here’s a trace of Paxil… there’s some Lithium-sign, whoa- I think they had corn *and* asparagus for dinner, ok, there’s some Ritalin… Ah, got ‘em! There’s personal lubricant here! We’re goin’ in!”

On the other hand, there is a bright side to all this; if you want to get in touch with the Bush Administration to tell them what you think, now you know how to send them a message. Gift-wrapped, if you like.

Me, I’m letting my bowels do the talking.

“President Bush, get out of our shit!”

bc

P.S. Are you SURE that those folks taking your trash twice a week aren’t delivering your goods to the Government Intelligence Morality Processing (GIMP) center?

P.P.S. Here’s a new twist to the term “data dump”…

If I said anything about this it would detract from the caption.

Found on DrudgeReport 3/23/06 @ 15:00

Down here in the 10^th circle, it’s Lost Monday.

No work whatsoever is getting done, and no one is bothering to pretend otherwise.

Lost Monday is the first business day after the NCAA Tournament Committee releases their selections of 65 Division I Men’s College basketball teams for the tournament to determine this year’s National Championship.

At the open of business on Lost Monday, corporate internet firewall bandwidth is saturated with traffic to Yahoo and the other big sites hosting office pools, as people put on their green Bracketologist visors and start researching the “little guys” invited to the big dance. “Ok, Belmont has twenty wins, but who the hell did they beat? Monmouth and Hampton in the play-in game: Does it matter?”

Workers drink their coffee black right out of the office pot, cranking out test bracket after test bracket on the network printers, fast breaking through the cubes on their way back and forth to the coffee machine in the hopes that none of their co-workers will notice how they’re spending their time. The panicky scrambles to the supply room to find more paper or to refill empty toner cartridges before being discovered is most of the cardiovascular exercise some folks will get in an entire year. And it’s usually all for naught, as if their co-drones could help noticing the strata of discarded bracket sheets bearing the NCAA Final Four logo layering their desks like a fenced yard bearing a 50 ft. oak on a late fall day.