There’s a Brady Bunch episode where Bobby brings a toy gun to school.  I remember this thinking it would be one of those moments, kind of like the instructional video in Dodgeball, when you realize how gullable/innocent our society was at one point. 

So here’s a kindergarten student who was suspended for 10 days after bringing a gun to school.  The story was forwarded to me with two discussion topics:

1. Parenting-responsibility-guns in the home? 
2. 10 days?!?!

Kindergarten student brings gun to school

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Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 5:29 AM GMT+4

7 Comments »

The British haven’t been as ruthless in classifying documents pertaining to the pre-Iraq War negotiations as our government has.  Bad for President Bush and the tens of thousands who have already died, as intent is no longer a question.  Documents now prove that our President even proposed painting an American surveillance plane in UN colors in hopes that it would be shot down by Saddam, hence providing a clear cut justification for what was inevitable from day one of his first term.  His mind was made up long before 9/11, and that fact alone makes him a criminal in my opinion. 

Read the rest of this entry �

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 6:25 PM GMT+4

4 Comments »

H. RES. 717  Resolved, That the Secretary of Commerce is directed to transmit to the House of Representatives, not later than 14 days after the date of the adoption of this resolution, a copy of the final draft report, produced by the professional staff of the Technology Administration, entitled: `Six-Month Assessment of Workforce Globalization In Certain Knowledge-Based Industries’.

Congress requested this assessment, spent $335,000 to have the analysis done, and the result was a 200 page report.  The administration did not like what the report had to say, so they cut it down to a 12 page summary, which the analysts say misrepresents their findings.  This resolution is up for a vote tomorrow morning. 

Taxpayers are concerned about the outsourcing of jobs overseas, so we urged our leaders to find out more about it.  We paid for the study.  The truth concerning the state of our economy shouldn’t be something so easily ‘classified’.  That is…unless our leaders are taking notes from Russia and China! 

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 11:58 PM GMT+4

12 Comments »

In the Texas thread an interesting discussion broke out over the correct punnishment for a DUI.  Personally, I think hard time should be handed out for crimes where there’s a victim, but when the victim is oneself, society is basically wasting time and money by throwing years at the problem.  It’s a fact that prison teaches people how to be better criminals, and like a child receiving a spanking, if the punnishment doesn’t fit the crime, remorse isn’t the result…instead it’s anger. 

How about these crimes, generic, but ballpark what you think is an appropriate sentence:

• Possession, 1 ounce of pot
• Possession, 1 ounce of methamphetamine
• DUI, 1st offense
• DUI, 4th offense
• Vehicular Manslaughter (driver was impaired)
• Vehicular Manslaughter (driver was on their cell phone)

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 8:24 PM GMT+4

38 Comments »

To understand how the finest military in human history could continue to fail in this war, one could create a list or perhaps listen to Donald Rumsfeld speak on any topic for a few minutes, only to be informed afterwards that the man speaking was in charge of the operation.  However you go about it, the end result is normally confusing, and for the ‘just tell me the good news’ crowd, anything more complicated than ‘O’Doyle Rules!’ simply won’t work. 

No, it’s not a topic one can remain positive about for long if any of the pre-war quotes are matched up with what actually happened.  Yet there’s a good contingent of hard working Americans who insist on believing that our reason for being there is just, and that the lack of results simply makes no sense.  It’s the American who’s sick of hearing about how much life sucks for the Iraqi. 

This American most likely hasn’t gone three days without electricity, nor have they gone out for their morning walk to find twenty decapitated bodies on the side of the road.  These ‘details’ of what life is like for those living in Iraq come to us daily, and whether we like to acknowledge it or not, over 80 journalists have already given their lives to bring the news to us.  Heroic indeed, but a scapegoat is needed, so for political reasons, it’s just 80 dead liberals.  Good for them. 

I’d like to go around all of that and instead focus on the question of ‘why’ hundreds of billions of dollars in equipment, training and expertise hasn’t gotten us anywhere versus the insurgency.  Books have been written on this topic, many in fact, because Vietnam presented the exact same situation and provoked the same lame excuses from those in charge.  I’m going to sum it up for you in one paragraph…

One ring, two fighters.  The insurgency has great footwork, speed, and despite lacking that one punch that can turn the entire fight around, it’s jab is constant and damaging over time.  The US military is slower to react, often chasing it’s opponent around the ring, launching haymakers that hardly ever land, yet always draw a positive response from the crowd.  Over time the wear and tear shows, and even though the judges’ scorecards are unanimous, the beast continues to stand up and fight the next round. 

Lots of fighters never know when to throw in the towell, and unfortunately for them, often times their speech patterns remain altered forever.  The body never knows when to stop, but the brain has been sending it signals for years already. 

(Not the best one to date – but I’m getting over a case of food poisoning – I suspect Taco Bell is responsible)

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 7:44 PM GMT+4

4 Comments »

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Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 6:47 PM GMT+4

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You can be staying in a Dallas hotel, drinking at the bar downstairs and if you’re having too much fun (judgement call), an undercover police officer will run you in.  The dragnet is an attempt to lower the amount of DUIs in the state, but of course, whether or not you drove yourself to the bar is inconsequential.  Texas Logic, it’s a state of mind, with this being just the first example…

Next month the state is planning a series of sting operations aimed at lowering the number of prostitutes operating within major cities.  They’re going to bust women purchasing condoms in bulk if they appear to be ’skanky’ at the time.  Governor Rick Perry hailed the two initiatives in a recent speech, “if you plan on being sloppy or skanky ’round here, there is a place for you…and the name of that place is Oklahoma.”

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 2:00 AM GMT+4

37 Comments »

Basically a bureau chief in Vermont submitted a column written by one its own, Senator Patrick Leahy, on the “growing threat to our democracy by infringements imposed by the Bush administration on America’s hallowed Freedom of Information Act”, and was abruptly fired after 27 years on the job!  The man’s name is Chris Graff, someone who was “easily the most respected voice in Vermont journalism, running the AP bureau here and hosting the weekly journalist roundtable discussion on Vermont Public Television”.  His grave sin apparantly was “moving an item written by a ‘partisan politician’ without including a rebuttal from a partisan politician of a different stripe”. 

So in America today, a state bureau chief cannot run a column written by his own Senator.  The man has to search out a counter-point to the piece or whatever the Senator has to say cannot be heard.  In other words, the voters of Vermont don’t deserve to hear Leahy’s opinions on government unless certain unstated conditions are met beforehand.  Either that, or whatever Leahy has to say angers a higher-up on a personal level, and in today’s US media market, that’s enough to warrant the termination of a career 27 years in the making.

The column wasn’t written by a liberal version of Ann Coulter, it was written by the US Senator these readers happened to vote for several times already.  Leahy’s chief of staff was quoted as wondering, “how open government could be partisan?”  Well, there’s a lot at stake at this point in our republic’s history, and the amount of criticism aimed at our President has become downright inconvenient!  The very notion of our elected leaders expressing their thoughts and ideas in opposition to the President wouldn’t fly in Russia, so why should it in the United States of America?

Indeed, what’s good enough for Russia is good enough for the USA!  Just like we all learned in school growing up.  If Senator Leahy wants to be heard, he just needs to fill out the proper form, get all the required stamps, say twenty “Hail Bushs” and it wouldn’t hurt to donate $10,000 to the Republican National Committee.  It’s the system our founding fathers fought for, and the tradition of freedom our soldiers are dying to protect at this very moment…in Iraq.

First, since former USA Today president and publisher Tom Curley took over the reins at AP in 2003, things have taken a turn for the worse. Graff isn’t the first veteran AP bureau chief to get axed recently. Curley’s new Gannett-style policies and guidelines are being imposed with an iron fist by his new team of managers. There are complaints the news is being dumbed down by corporate, and the AP gold standard is being turned into cow flop.

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 8:18 PM GMT+4

26 Comments »

• Is illegal immigration responsible for higher energy costs?
• Is illegal immigration responsible for the escalating national debt?
• Is illegal immigration responsible for the Iraq War?
• Is illegal immigration responsible for low test scores in schools across the country?
• Is illegal immigration responsible for an increasing amount of household debt?
• Is illegal immigration responsible for global warming?

I don’t think 6 million out of 300 million represent the cause of most of our problems in America.  Read the rest of this entry �

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 8:49 PM GMT+4

44 Comments »

Did I call this or what?  Worse than just Iran (in the mail), we’ve got “allies” (rich scumbags in charge of countries full of oil and uneducated, jobless, mosque-folk) now shifting cash reserves from dollars to euros.  Don’t expect this to get a moment of domestic air-time…I’ll keep my eyes peeled for more developments. 

As of right now, Southeast Asia continues to fund the cost of runing our government and a parasitic military industrial complex (over 40% of all federal $ spent), but as others sell off their reserves for euros, the value of what these countries currently hold diminishes.  We can raise interest rates, but whatever it takes to satisfy buyers following a sell-off of dollars will certainly not benefit the United States.      Read the rest of this entry �

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 1:28 AM GMT+4

5 Comments »

With a higher cap and McGuinest already going to the Browns, it seemed automatic that Belicheck would have enough cash to lock this guy up.  The franchise tag was used on him in the past, and perhaps that’s the reason he’s going to Indy…regardless, I’m about to drink myself stupid over this.  Cheers.

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 7:46 PM GMT+4

9 Comments »

A shiny gold donkey to whoever knows what inspired me to use this title.

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 5:10 PM GMT+4

28 Comments »

Task Force 6-26, a unit whose name and location changes based on how much heat they’ve got on them at a given time, whether it’s the Pentagon, CIA, FBI or the slabs of meat known to most of the world as ‘Iraqis’, is a group of sadists apparently armed with paintball guns, car batteries and jumper cables. The people they torture often have nothing to do with anything, but then again, the life of a sadist can get boring from time to time. As a token of appreciation though, each of them are presented a hood by the company commander, one that might have been used to cover the head of one of their victims (no lie!). Their mission is to capture Zarqawi, and by all accounts it’s going very well. In fact, a taxi driver and his family were just apprehended for ‘looking Arab in Iraq’, and as the story goes, the guy is a psychic who can predict where Zarqawi is going to be at any time, but the catch is…to make it work he has to smoke an entire ounce of BC kind and have a Zionist pelt his naked body with paintballs.

Turns out that guy was just jerking them around, but they’ve got a lot of good leads anyway. Like the guy who lives next door to the taxi driver, a fan of Allah (also someone who repeatedly stole his copy of the Baghdad Times each morning) who apparently is a distant cousin of Zarqawi on his mother’s side. They striped this guy naked, dumped a bucket of ice water on him, turned on the air conditioner and blasted Marilyn Manson as loud as it would go…just to see what would happen.

Yes, we’re really on top of things over in Iraq, and the closet S&M homosexuals of America have an incredible opportunity now to let loose and do their thing, while also being able to come home and march in a parade that doesn’t feature Cher impersonators. Read the rest of this entry �

Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Military at 1:01 AM GMT+4

33 Comments »

Montana is putting up a fight, but against BC they closely resemble jello on the inside.  Craig Smith is tearing these guys up, yet because of Montana’s outstanding shooting from beyond the perimeter, the halftime score is 32-30 BC. 

At 11:30 ET tonight there’s a heavyweight fight on HBO, Rahman vs. Toney…I know, doesn’t exactally make you want to go out and buy a big screen TV, but it should be an entertaining bout.  Can Rahman land his right (the one that droped Lenox Lewis)?  Can Toney make this fight something to remember?

Our friend Washington is not fond of ‘leftists’.  I’ll save my rant on ‘rightists’ for another day.

Posted by Al Swearengen as sports at 7:46 PM GMT+4

39 Comments »

With mid-terms coming up soon, I wanted to share this list I came across at my local library:

• 1933   Unemployment Relief
• 1935   Social Security
• 1938   Minimum Wage
• 1944   GI Bill
• 1945   United Nations
• 1947   Marshal Plan
• 1949   NATO
• 1964   Civil Rights Act
• 1965   Medicare
• 1965   Voting Rights for all
• 1965   Head Start
• 1965   Federal Aid to Education
• 1967   Freedom of Information Act
• 1993   Family Leave Act
• 1990’s   Federal Aid to Education
• 1990’s   BUDGET SURPLUS

By my count, there are quite a few things on this list that the Republican Party is either against or is currently cutting while in power:  Balanced Budgets (let alone creating a surplus), Social Security (GOP has hated this from the jump), Minimum Wage, United Nations (sending Bolton pretty much says it all), NATO (GOP bashed Clinton for participating in NATO missions), Head Start & Federal Aid to Education (funding reduced under Bush)…

This list represents what I’m proud of in terms of being an American, and in a lot of ways, it’s why I vote Democrat in most elections. 

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 2:41 PM GMT+4

11 Comments »

My favorite non-political site on the net.  As wide a variety of music in every format you could imagine.  Here’s a sample, in fact, the newest torrents as of today.  Any music fan will find something to their liking here.  100% legal, free, not for profit and kick ass!  Check It!  And make sure you show your appreciation to the community by keeping your share ratio up.     Read the rest of this entry �

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 8:13 PM GMT+4

4 Comments »

Sex is natural and a lot of fun…so we need to do something about that.    

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – An attempt to resume state spending on birth control got shot down Wednesday by House members who argued it would have amounted to an endorsement of promiscuous lifestyles.

“State taxpayers should not be required to subsidize activities they believe are immoral or unethical, relating to contraceptives or abortions,” said Larry Weber, executive director of the state Catholic Conference.

“If you hand out contraception to single women, we’re saying promiscuity is OK as a state, and I am not in support of that,” Phillips, R-Kansas City, said in an interview.

Others, including some lawmakers who described themselves as “pro-life,” said it was illogical for anti-abortion lawmakers to deny money for contraception to low-income people who use public health clinics.

So South Dakota got the ball rolling, and now the hard-core anti-sex contingent in America is in full battle dress, ready to shame their people into finally buying in to the concept that ‘Hormones Are Evil’!  Indeed, all this talk about abortion has really been about something else for a lot of people.  A fear of sex, whether it’s prostitution, STDs or even the notion of explaining to a 6th grader the differences between men and women, and how babies are made…the underlying theme is a demonizing of sex itself, a sign of the very real problem in America today, where adults don’t want their children to know about certain things, in hopes that merely saying ‘Don’t’ will keep them safe. 

Lazy adults, wound too tight, mostly married and decades past a time when each of them experienced hormonal urges that could (and in some cases did) convince them to stick it in one of the farm animals.  I once tried to make love to a water jet in a pool…that kid doing it with the pie…it’s an innocent period in our lives, complicated by ferocious chemicals clouding our judgement, 100% natural, grade A humanity. 

These older folks have forgotten about all that.  In fact, a couple more layers of this onion coming off might very well show all of us that they honestly believe that the hormones represent Satan.  And it’s not ‘natural’ to be horny as hell when you’re young…(cowards!)

So here’s how I read this: “If you live in Missouri and have sex for any other reason than to produce a child, you’re a bad person.” I disagree, and happen to also think that it’s this type of regressive thinking that creates priests who mollest children, girls who get pregnant before they graduate high school and gay men or women who get married, only to destroy their family when one day they decide that they can no longer handle living a lie.  It’s this type of negativity that leads to the foolish suppression of those natural hormones turning into a mental problem, not only for the person, but also those around them. 

Aside from all that, it’s extremely anti-woman!  As she’s the one who has to carry a child, give birth and then ‘hope’ that the boy lives up to his end of the responsibility for raising it.  So while I was able to get free condoms at Planned Parenthood, my doctor’s office AND at every Army medical facility I ever steped foot in…a kid growing up in Missouri won’t. 

Posted by Al Swearengen as Religion, Words at 3:09 PM GMT+4

8 Comments »

I trust that Al Skinner knows what he’s doing, but during most of the game today with Pacific, I was questioning how he could leave the freshman Rice out there, especially after the kid had taken bad shots, turned it over several times…OK, but I’m a fan, on my couch…and in the second overtime, Rice hit his first three after five misses, and BECAUSE Skinner left him in there, the next few years of BC basketball will be better than if he hadn’t.  Sean Marshall, starting 2, had run cold since the North Carolina game in the ACC tourney, one basket for the junior, who I was crying to be sent back in from 5 minutes left in the 4th quarter, throughout the two ovetimes. 

That’s why I’m on the couch and Skinner is…

Without the money for a dish, I’m at the will of the local station, and at first it upset me that Nevada-Montana wasn’t shown, but then Winthrop ended up giving #2 seeded Tennessee a run for their money.  Should have won actually, if it wasn’t for a phenomenal shot at the end…in fact, neither team deserved to win based on the last 5 minutes. 

GOOD MONEY:  Take Witchata St. over Tennessee in the next round…the spread will be less than 5 (my estimation), and Tennessee isn’t doing ANYTHING this year! 

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 6:36 PM GMT+4

3 Comments »

I’m a father (this is Chris), Right Thinker is a father…generally you’ll find the two of us engaged in a literal knife-fight, but every once in a while it’s important to call ‘truce’ and take a moment to celebrate…

Sweet sweet Susan with her daddy

 More pictures of Susan Byrne: Read the rest of this entry �

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 9:11 PM GMT+4

7 Comments »

This interlude between conference tournaments and the dance has opened up my curiosity concerning one subject in particular, the Iraq War. 

If you asked most insiders prior to his election in 2000, “How much expertise and wisdom will Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld bring to the table in terms of national defense and foreign conflict?”, the answer would be “a lot”.  What Bush did back then was the right thing, as the best thing an executive can do for himself is to surround him/herself with competent people who know what the job is and how to get it done.  He put his faith in these two people who he had known and looked up to for many years, and who’s to say that had any of us lived in his shoes, that we wouldn’t have made the exact same choices? 

Because the Iraq War is failing, but the more I read, the more I’m becoming convinced that it wasn’t the mistakes that were made along the way as much as the mission was impossible to begin with.  Given an invasion with the ‘proper’ amount of troops, subtract the Abu Gharib debacle and let’s say that even half of the graft that’s taken place didn’t happen…it’s still unlikely that this mission would ever have succeeded. 

Most of this has to do with the arbitrary lines drawn, which initially made Iraq the country it is today, having crunched together three ethnic groups who probably never wanted to be nationalized together in the first place.  Then you add in decades of the minority group in power, a reality that will never be forgotten by the Kurds and Shiites whose families suffered under the arrangement, and the chances of bringing these people together at all, let alone at gunpoint, was undeniably risky from the start. 

How would Bush have known all of this?  Well, he might have listened to his father and Powell instead of Cheney and Rumsfeld, but let’s not forget that the neoconservatives had been writing about how easy it would be to accomplish this mission for years.  The division began when Bush Sr. decided against invading Iraq following the first Gulf War, and the folks who thought we should have, they never stopped talking and writing about it. 

Bush was convinced that his father was wrong and that it would be possible to topple Saddam and install a democratic government, while also having the US cost covered by Iraqi oil revenue, that they would be happy to provide seeing as we liberated them.  We all know how it turned out, and subsequently the pages of National Review and The Weekly Standard have sworn off neoconservatism as a failure.  The political heavies like William Buckley have called the effort a failure, and ideas are shifting towards another ‘great idea’, most likely having to do with with something other than education, health care or national debt. 

Regardless of all this, Bush trusted in the ‘ideas’ of these men he grew up admiring, and in his shoes it most likely seemed like the only thing to do.  He was duped.  I hope he figures this out sometime soon. 

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 1:53 PM GMT+4

76 Comments »

For quite a long time Iran was under wraps, defeated by Hussein in the 80s after their army was attacked with weapons that literally melted the flesh right off of their bodies. Like an ‘old time religion’ story, fire fell from the sky and the people were terrified, resigned to return home and mind their own business for a while. And so it went for a number of years, with Saddam to the west, under pressure from the rest of the world to prove that he didn’t have any more of the ‘Sodom and Ghamorah’ juice in stock, meanwhile speaking deceptively in ways that made Iranians think he still did. It was this threat that kept Iran under control for about 20 years, and thanks to the United States of America, the monster and his liquid fire are no longer a threat. Listen to the words of our leaders, and you’ll hear them celebrating Iraq’s liberation and the freedom we so graciously rewarded them with in 2003. Knowing how little anyone involved in the planning of this war actually understood these people, their religious, cultural and historical differences, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the southern majority of Shia feel a stronger connection with Iran than the people of their own country. And why should it be any other way? How many mosques have to be blown up before it dawns on them that Sunni-Shiite love is more of a pipe dream than reality? American optimism causes me to rethink this last question, but then I simply remember the number of stories I’ve read in the past few weeks where one side or the other has lined up twenty or so fellow Iraqis and executed each one of them with a gunshot to the head. Shiites awoke a couple days ago to find four of their own, executed with gunshots to the head, then strung up with rope and hung by the neck in the center of town for everyone to wake up and see. Morticians in Baghdad have been threatened with death in recent weeks, saying that if they were to release the number of corpuses delivered to them with gunshot wounds to the head, they’d end up on the pile. And as our ’stay the course’ brain-dead-elite split hairs on what does or does not constitute a ‘civil war’, the heavies back in Iran are sitting back, enjoying translated episodes of Seinfeld, waiting for America’s money to dry up. Of course they’re supplying arms, explosives and forged ballots to Shiites, but those acts are mere drops in the bucket compared with the daily bleeding of 2 billion or so dollars out of the pockets of future generations in America. Clearly, time is Iran’s best friend now, while reality has become the United States’ worst enemy. Likely anticipating air strikes, a special brand of cowardice perfected by America, I’m probably safe in saying that the leaders of Iran could care less whether they come or not. Civilian casualties don’t really matter to either side of this potential conflict, and regardless of who dies or how many, Allah’s bound to remain alive and well for many years to come. And that’s what’s really important here, that in the end everyone’s able to get down on his or her knees and know for a fact that ‘their God’ is pleased. Well, it’s either that or something to do with pipelines and whether or not oil is traded globally in dollars or euros. Buried amongst piles of stories pointing out what everyone already knows, that Iran is insane and the Iraq war is not going well, there was a piece I read that had to do with Iran deciding to trade their oil in euros rather than in dollars. And this is the point where religion, IEDs, dirty money and nukes go right out the window. Because if oil were to be traded in euros rather than dollars all of a sudden, this entire effort, from the shady diplomacy of the 80s, to Desert Storm, to our current situation in Iraq, becomes an undeniable failure all at once. If this possibility hits the mainstream press, and Iran is determined to make such a change, you can nuke up a bag of popcorn and get ready for another instalment of ’shock and awe’. Because push and shove are quickly approaching, and Iran has become much too in love with itself in the past year. Yes, America delivered to them a gift they had once thought only the death of Saddam could produce, and like a new sports car, they’re still out there trying to see how fast it will go before the engine blows. In the meantime, all of us should take some time and consider whether or not we’re comfortable with loving Iran as much as they love us right now.

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 7:46 PM GMT+4

20 Comments »

Four years into his trial and he’s stiff before the verdict is decided.  The law, growing at all times, appears to be complicating quite a lot these days.  In fact, experts predict that by the year 2030 it would take approximately 38 years to complete a trial of this magnitude.  

My attraction to the law is such that my primary goal is to never have to step foot in a courtroom.  I can read, and therefore will appreciate this phenomenon from a distance. 

But back to the dead prick experiencing rebirth as a penguin this very moment…Russians are being told that he was poisoned, and knowing how easily they’re taking the restoration of Stalin’s memory currently on full blast, it might only be a few years before they’ve got the Russian population programed well enough to staff a respectable set of death squads.  A self-affirming sence of unity that provides dissidents a timely death to look forward to for not pledging allegience to the flag and REALLY meaning it deep down, from the heart all the way out to the tips of every hair on your body (Moscow has developed a device that can determine this, it beeps, has a couple of lights). 

Nationalism to the tune of “Stalin and Milosevic got a raw deal”…if a poll is done that says up to half of the Russian population backs up this sentiment, will we assume that it’s because they’re worshiping Allah?   

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 3:03 AM GMT+4

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The pile of things I’ve read concerning politics, all signifying things I want to sit down and write about for a while, don’t seem to matter at all, like that part of my brain packed some clothes, said ‘later’ around the office up there, and is now on vacation in some Xanadu it thought up on it’s own one day when the sex portion of the brain had the body’s full attention. 

Like the character named ‘Andy’ in Shawshank Redemption, it slowly dug a hole out, little by little each time it could, until finally one day something more powerfull and addictive came my way and away political brain crawled, through cramped space, some of it filled with the kind of waste that’d kill average renegade body tissue on contact, on outside to freedom, to come back through the front door the day after this obession finally moves on, this silent but deadly drug the rest of this head cannot resist…

March madness.

Downright deadly when your team is so damned good you’re looking into a home equity loan, putting the money down on them to run the table.  I once used to say, “can’t think of a good reason to ever deal with the Russian mob”, but that’s all over now.  This Eagles team is serious! 

They CAN’T lose! 

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words, sports at 12:42 AM GMT+4

No Comments »

Al Skinner – Head Coach – Boston College Men’s Basketball

It’s been a long time coming, as a number of us here at deadissue.com have admired this man for a while now.  Today’s win over North Carolina (in their back yard, for the SECOND time in one year) may have woken the world up to how good this team really is.  For the product I’ve seen on the court these past few months, I credit Skinner’s leadership and ability to teach.  Boston isn’t the easiest place to run an operation like his…indeed, the streets manage to gobble up at least 1/4 promising players the team recruits. 

That’s a story for another day though…because right now Boston College is in the ACC Championship against Duke, the team they lost by one point to at home earlier this season. 

It was something special, seeing the disappointment of just about every fan in the building, when they had finally realized that a Duke-North Carolina final wasn’t in the cards.  Even better than that though, is how the Eagles operate out there as a complete unit.  Take a look at their offensive sets against Duke if you can…that’s Al Skinner’s work…a masterpiece, a symphony, a team!

Posted by Al Swearengen as Words, sports at 8:37 PM GMT+4

8 Comments »

Deadissue.com…Journalism, Journalism…Deadissue.com

OFFICIAL SAYS SHIITE PARTY SUPPRESSED BODY COUNT   By Ellen Knickmeyer  Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 9, 2006; Page A01