Via Reuters:

The main building of the Library of  Congress was evacuated on Wednesday morning after a "suspicious odor" was detected and two people felt faint, Capitol police said.

Looks like Houston’s visionary political leadership has put us a step ahead of the nation’s capital!

Gather the family ‘round the fire, and put the kettle on, it’s Holiday season! Let us mail Holiday cards and exchange Holiday gifts. Dust off the Holiday decorations, and put up the Holiday tree, for ‘tis the Holiday season!

As the weather gets cooler, we canvas the neighborhood singing Holiday carols. Holiday parties are thrown, and shoppers bustle about their business seeking gifts in the Holiday spirit of materialism. “Merry Holiday!” they say, smiles on their faces, “I’m doing my Holiday shopping.”

The most wonderful time of the year, Holiday. When we celebrate….
something.

If all the political correctness is getting you down, some Holiday poetry will get you into the spirit. How about that classic “Twas the night before Holiday”?

Twas the night before Christmas Holiday, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings American greed bags were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St Nicholas non-religious gift-bearing-entity soon would be there.

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums nutritious healthful snacks danced in their heads.
And mamma oppressed female resident in her ‘kerchief, and I (cruel male dominator) in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap.

Read more

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The following post works best when read with an "inner-voice" that sounds like Andy Rooney.]

Don’t ya’ just hate it when stores force you to "talk" to a robot instead of a person?

I know I do.

"Press 2" for this and "press 7" for that.

I’m a complex person, with complex needs.

Why don’t you just put a human being on the phone so I can tell them what I want.

Don’t you want to take my money from me?

[End "Andy Rooney" voice.]

Anyway, a tip-o-da-hat to Mr. Paul English for compiling this handy-dandy "Cheat Sheet to Find a Human".

God Bless you, Sir.

Jeff Jacoby nails it:

Hanukkah menorahs are never referred to as ”holiday lamps" — not even the giant menorahs erected in Boston Common and many other public venues each year by Chabad, the Hasidic Jewish outreach movement. No one worries that calling the Muslim holy month of Ramadan by its name — or even celebrating it officially, as the White House does with an annual ”iftaar" dinner — might be insensitive to non-Muslims. In this tolerant and open-hearted nation, religious minorities are not expected to keep their beliefs out of sight or to squelch their traditions lest someone, somewhere, take offense. Surely the religious majority shouldn’t be expected to either.

As a practicing Jew, I don’t celebrate Christmas. There is no Christmas tree in my home, my kids don’t write letters to Santa Claus, and I don’t attend church on Dec. 25 (or any other date). Does the knowledge that scores of millions of my fellow Americans do all those things make me feel excluded or offended? On the contrary: It makes me feel grateful — to live in a land where freedom of religion shelters the Hanukkah menorah in my window no less than the Christmas tree in my neighbor’s.

I like Tony Blankley.

Gor Blimey! Bleeding-Heart Brits Take the Mickey out of Texas

It seems the across the pond lefties at the UK Guardian have a hankering for smearing and sneering at anything connected to Texas. A recent story about Kinky Friedman’s quixotic run for Governor (hat tip to Perry vs. the World) is rife with mishmashed facts and smug Euro-elitism:

Hardly surprising, then, that in nearly 150 years there has never been an independent candidate for governor. Texans like their politics like their football: two sides slugging it out for supremacy, with no interference from outsiders.

Uh, what? Do people in Florida prefer their football with lots of teams on the field at once and political races with multiple, independent candidates? And don’t football games typically have referees and TV timeouts that interfere with the game from time to time? Oh, well. The Guardian bloody well won’t mind being blinkered when when making wankers of themselves.

I had my own tussle with these Tommies when they misrepresented my blog posts for consumption by their liberal audience. It seems the Guardian likes its news stories like their soccer riots: out of control hooligans smashing opponents just because they feel like it.

BTW: For you unacculturated Yanks, here are some resources to help translate Brit slang: The American’s Guide to Speaking British, The Phrase Finder

Try to remember…

God forgive us:

Yes, an Arkansas doctor says, he destroys life. But he believes the thousands of women who have relied on him have been ‘born again.’

His first patient of the day, Sarah, 23, says it never occurred to her to use birth control, though she has been sexually active for six years. When she became pregnant this fall, Sarah, who works in real estate, was in the midst of planning her wedding. "I don’t think my dress would have fit with a baby in there," she says.

Yeah, that sounds ‘born again.’ Pity the child won’t get the chance to be born at all.

The last patient of the day, a 32-year-old college student named Stephanie, has had four abortions in the last 12 years. She keeps forgetting to take her birth control pills. Abortion "is a bummer," she says, "but no big stress."

Quotes like this scare the hell out of me.

Harrison does not get frustrated with such patients.

Unless their checks bounce, that is.

It’s one thing to honestly believe that an unborn fetus is not a human life. It’s another terrifying thing entirely to admit that it is a human life, and kill it anyway.

You know why people aren’t returning to New Orleans? It’s not because the city was a corrupt, poverty-stricken welfare-state hellhole. It’s not because countless thousands of structures were lost. It’s not because of the crippling economic impact, the even-worse-than-usual smell, or the black mold.

According to Mayor Ray Nagin, people are staying away from New Orleans because there’s not free Internet access. But the mayor is on the job:

In an attempt to boost its stalled economy, the hurricane-ravaged city of New Orleans is starting the nation’s first free wireless Internet network owned and run by a major city.

Mayor Ray Nagin made the announcement at a late morning news conference.

Similar projects elsewhere have been stalled by stiff opposition from telephone and cable television companies aimed at discouraging competition from public agencies.

Nagin said the system started operation Tuesday in the central Business District and the French Quarter. It is to be available throughout the city in about a year.

The system uses hardware mounted on street lights to cover the city.

Now I’ll be able to read Lone Star Times while fighting off looters neck-deep in alligator-infested toxic sewage. Sweet!

Star Trek fans rejoice, the Air Force has landed a prototype phaser.

While only in prototype form and years away from fielding, the weapon, known as the Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response (PHaSR) system, holds great promise, they said. The PHaSR is about the same size and weight of a fully loaded M60 machine gun - around 9 kg –[20 lbs]- but shoots a low-power beam of laser light instead of bullets. The light it generates is capable of temporarily impairing an individual’s vision, much like the disorienting glare one sees when looking into the sun, said the officials.

Those who fear government coercion or control will be delighted to know that the Department of Justice will get a prototype to explore the “civil applications” of such a device.

"Set phasers to stun, men."

E-mail the author or leave a comment below.

As long as we’re taking a closer look at the Bay Area New Democrats today, let’s not fail to highlight this editorial cartoon currently running on their website.

I tell ya’, it is precisely this sort of thoughtful commentary– and political savvy– that is going to carry Democrats to victory here in the heart of freakin’ TEXAS come 2006.

Bramanti and Courreges, take it away.

The kind, tolerant, progressive-types at Rolling Stone Magazine are no fans of President Bush, and this November 17th article on Iraq, which was just brought to my attention, reinforces that view. The first line should give you the spirit of the piece.

George Bush is just about the only person in Washington these days who doesn’t know that the United States has lost the war in Iraq.

The article is, unsurprisingly, another of those “Iraq is a quagmire” kind of stories, populated not only with peace-loving Democrats, but also former Bush-41 and Reagan administration members who disagree with the current President’s handling of the war. There is, however, an interesting passage on how to deal with our foes in Iraq. The apparent answer to all our problems is the French response.

Negotiate With the Enemy. Long overdue, say many critics of the war, is a U.S. effort to negotiate with the other side — not with radical Islamists tied to Al Qaeda and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq but with the dozen or so groups that make up the main force of the Iraqi resistance.

Not buying into that idea? Wait, there’s more. Wayne White, who headed up the State Department’s Iraq intelligence team from 2003 to March 2005, tells us how wars are won.

"There is a whole rainbow of armed groups, including organizations that are tired of fighting and want to make a deal," says White, the former intelligence official. "The only way wars end is when you talk to the enemy."

The only “talking” we did with Nazi Germany was to accept its unconditional surrender, Mr. White. Of course, we did sit down at the bargaining table in Korea and the fighting stopped, but the war never really ended, it just became a “cold” one. Negotiating also does not seem to have done Israel much good over the years either. Of course, if Mr. White’s argument was unconvincing, there is the ex-military man brought out to trash the current effort.

"The reality is, you’ve got to talk," says retired Gen. Joseph Hoar, chief of the U.S. Central Command during the first Bush administration. "But this administration is so f—ing stupid. They’ve p—-d in the soup." Hoar believes that Jordan’s King Abdullah could play a role as intermediary among the United States, the Iraqi interim government and the resistance. [Expletives deleted by LST]

There is much more in the article, but the overall flavor is defeatist. Iraq is now a roiling mess, so we must cut and run. “Let’s make a deal, let’s talk.”

Actually, more “talks” like the Marines had in Fallujah would be a far better idea.

E-mail the author or leave a comment below.

The Houston Chronicle brings word that an enthusiastic throng of almost 15 people gathered in protest outside of a pro-Tom DeLay rally yesterday, where they managed to impress all observers in that they were only outnumbered by DeLay supporters by a piddling 10 to 1 margin.

"I think he is a very unethical congressman, the worst example of a politician that we have," said Margaret Tyler, 55, a retired chemist, who was one of the protesters.

Lest anyone mistake Ms. Tyler’s sentiments as reflecting a representative sample of "average" voters in Mr. DeLay’s district, I direct you to this page from the Bay Area New Democrats website, which includes the following photograph, and caption.

 Bay Area New Democrats Francis Rankin, President John Cobarruvias, and Margaret Tyler raise a toast to the indictment of Tom DeLay.

Contacted via LST’s Inter-Psychic communications hotline, Congressman DeLay offered his standard response:

 I haven’t done this in a while, so it’s about time to revive the feature. It’s random fact time, kids.

• No matter how big or how thick, a piece of paper cannot be folded in half more than eight times.
• The Oscars awarded during World War II were made of plaster, due to shortages of metal.
• A group of crows is called a murder.

And today’s trivia question: What two fibers make up the paper on which U.S. currency is printed, and in what proportions?

Bend over:

Fatter rear ends are causing many drug injections to miss their mark, requiring longer needles to reach buttock muscle, researchers said on Monday.

Standard-sized needles failed to reach the buttock muscle in 23 out of 25 women whose rears were examined after what was supposed to be an intramuscular injection of a drug.

Two-thirds of the 50 patients in the study did not receive the full dosage of the drug, which instead lodged in the fat tissue of their buttocks, researchers from The Adelaide and Meath Hospital in Dublin said in a presentation to the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

I am reminded of some beautiful poetry by noted bard Sir Mix-A-Lot:

My anaconda don’t want none

Unless you’ve got buns, hun

On a serious note, though, my extensive network of connections in the medical field have revealed a top-secret Chinese prototype of the new syringes.

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