Bill O'Reilly's War on Christmas. Why does Falafel Man hate the baby Jesus?

Update: As expected, the change has been made from "Holiday Ornament" to "Christmas Ornament," but it still says "holiday tree." It would appear that Faux News is losing the War on Christmas. Morons.

Update #2: Again, as expected, "holiday tree" has now been changed to "Christmas tree." Christianity has been saved! Huzzah!

Flip-flopper. I thought Shrub said mixed messages = bad

Jawbone. Caught a few minutes of Shrub's "strategery for victory in Iraq" (shouldn't he have had one before starting a war? or before declaring "mission accomplished"?), and it sounds like more of the same, just different packaging and a different backdrop.

But he's doing that thing with his jaw more and more it seems. You know--he pauses in between completing sentences, looks out into the audience, and his jaw juts out in a circular motion. He's been doing this a lot more the past year, I think. What the fuck is up with that? I've tried to emulate the movement but can't. Maybe I'm not on the right kind of meds.

Anyway. Blah blah blah.

Neologisms. Flipping around the channels this morning, I came across two segments on "Cyber Monday." What's this, you ask? It's the new moniker for the Monday after Thanksgiving. A LexisNexis news search indicates that this term made its first appearance just eight days ago. And I already hate it.

What I'm thankful for. A monkey washing a cat.

Medals of Freedom for Everyone! They still don't get it.

Speaking of FEMA, this is the time of year when agencies begin touting their accomplishments over the past year. So a Department of Homeland Security e-mail Monday focused on some of its great moments in 2005.

DHS Today will highlight FY05 Accomplishments in this column over the next several weeks. This week's focus is on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The top FY05 FEMA accomplishments included:

Hurricane Katrina: The response to Hurricane Katrina was FEMA's largest response in its history . . .

If by "accomplishment" they mean "fuck up" and by "largest response" they mean "worst response ever," then yes, I would have to agree.

If this made the top 5, I'd hate to see what missed the cut.

Lies. I always found it amazing that two years after 9/11, 7/10 Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was directly involved. But now it's even more amazing considering this:

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

Yet somehow 7/10 people made the link. Now how did that happen? Read the article for an idea.

You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. That's essentially the message sent today by Iraqi leaders who called for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces. They also said, "Resistance is a legitimate right for all people, terrorism does not represent resistance. Therefore, we condemn terrorism and acts of violence, killing and kidnapping targeting Iraqi citizens and humanitarian, civil, government institutions, national resources and houses of worships." Hmm...who does that leave out as targets?

Who the fuck do they think they are, telling us how they're going to run their country? Give an inch of democracy, and they try to take a mile. Saddam isn't dead yet. We've backed him before, we'll do it again if that's what it takes to send a message and win this war.

Who Would Jesus Piledrive? Wrestling for Jesus. Courtesy of a Friend of Gary.

Unnatural.com

Any time, Any place.......Internet
24-7: This guy has no life!

Hmm...I'm sure there's some irony in here somewhere.

Crazies. The Washington Post really has no standards.

"Last throes." Three bombings in Iraq kill nearly 100. Eventually there won't be any more corners to turn because they'll all have been bombed. And then we can declare victory and leave. Because if we left before then, there would be chaos. Chaos like daily bombings.

Where the hell do the insurgents get all this crap to build bombs? Oh, right...maybe those 380 tons of missing explosives, the ones which Giuliani blamed the troops for not searching hard enough.

Go ahead...you know you want to. Shrub's bald head fetish has been well-documented.

I can only imagine the amount of restraint it must have taken for him in this scene. You can see it in his face. He just wants to run from one head to the next, rubbing and kissing, kissing and rubbing.

Uhhhh...what is this crap? To be read as if it were Butthead saying it. What? You're too good for Beavis and Butthead?

So BGW's post reminded me that I, too, wanted to post about the latest bit of rabid nationalism sans irony from the wackjobs on the right who still think Bush is swell. They call themselves The Right Brothers. We'll call them the 35 Percenters.

They've got this tune. And they want to get it played on the MTV. And if MTV won't play it, then it's a blatant case of censorship. So here are some of the lyrics:

Ted Kennedy – wrong!
Cindy Sheehan – wrong!
France – wrong!
Zell Miller – right!

Economy is on the rise kicking into overdrive
Angry liberals can't believe it's cause of W's policies
Unemployment's staying down, Democrats are wondering how
Revenue is going up, can you say "Tax Cuts"

This song fucking ROCKS! And not just because it totally rips off Billy Joel's craptacular "We Didn't Start the Fire" and makes it 43 times better (get it? 43? ha!). But because it speaks the truth.

Why would these nutjobs want their video played on MTV? By directing their legion of fans to MTV, wouldn't that increase the likelihood that their brethren would be exposed to the sex, drugs, and violence that litter that wasteland?

Oh man...because I can't resist these things, I went to these fools' website. I wouldn't recommend it. I'm not even giving you the link. Here's an example of what I did find:

Click here to see the new video for "I Want To Live" - the amazing pro-life song on the new CD "II". Terri Schiavo is fighting for her life, and so are thousands of unborn children. Take three minutes to listen to this song and let others know about it, as well.

Wow. I wonder how they felt when it came out that Schiavo had been clinically braindead for years despite Bill Frist's video-diagnosis. There's even a section where they post comments "from the left" and "from the right." I'll let you guess which side this one came from:

If you're looking for a background singer, my dog makes similar sounds to your vocal performance when he's licking his b***s.

If you said "from the left," give yourself a point.

Unnatty.

11/15 New Development: It's possible there are other Unnatty stalkers. Found a phony request for passengers to go to Philly. Mysterious?

In the basement of the University Center, there was a ride board where people could post offers/requests for rides to and from wherever. And here is the posting in question:

The veracity of the post was never determined. And so we never figured out whether or not there were actually others fascinated by Unnatural Man, even if they called him by another name such as Bizarre Boy or Mr.Strange or That Dude With the Plastic Skin.

But assuming that the post was actually real (and that by taking it, we probably kept him from having a riding companion)....Leaving early on a Wednesday for Philly? Willing to pay for everything including lunch just to have someone ride along?

It is...Unnatural.

Bad news for Bushie. Maybe he just won't come back from his trip to Asia.

Item! Document says oil chiefs met with Cheney task force.

A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.

The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated.

Lucky for industry officials, Ted Stevens (R-Oil) didn't swear them in. Though as the article points out, "a person can be fined or imprisoned for up to five years for making "any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation" to Congress." Oops! They investigated Rafael Palmeiro's testimony regarding personal use of steroids. The same courtesy should be extended to oil executives' testimony regarding national energy policy.

Item! Woodward was told of Plame more than two years ago.

Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed.

In a more than two-hour deposition, Woodward told Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald that the official casually told him in mid-June 2003 that Plame worked as a CIA analyst on weapons of mass destruction, and that he did not believe the information to be classified or sensitive, according to a statement Woodward released yesterday.

Bob Woodward, total hack. Evidence of hackery. And doesn't this mean that this particular senior administration official didn't "fully cooperate" as Bush ordered and as Scotty McMuffin has claimed all members of the adminisrtation have done? And who the fuck "casually" mentions that sort of thing?

Item! Commander Cuckoo Bananas rumored to be earning his title.

Sonsofbitches. 9/11 didn't change everything.

WASHINGTON - Congressional budget negotiators have decided to take back $125 million in Sept. 11 aid from New York, which had fought to keep the money to treat sick and injured ground zero workers, lawmakers said Tuesday.

New York officials had sought for months to hold onto the funding, originally meant to cover increased worker compensation costs stemming from the 2001 terror attacks.

But a massive labor and health spending bill moving fitfully through House-Senate negotiations would take back that funding, lawmakers said.

Meanwhile, Shrub is calling for another $70 billion in tax cuts. Values, man.

Unnatural Hair. Building on the Bryan Adams motif:

11/14 UC Dinner
New Bryan Adams hairstyle--very suspicious.

11/15 UC Dinner*
New Hairstyle-- I think it's the Luke Perry look today.

The jacket, the posters, the license plate, the hair. Only one word to describe it. That's right-- Unnatural.

*logged by someone else

Plans. GOP lackeys criticize Dems for not having a plan on Iraq. Dems develop plan. GOP takes Dems' plan as their own.

Falafel. Bill O'Reilly supports terrorism.

“If Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, 'look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.'"

Falafel is angry that people in San Francisco don't want military recruiters in their schools. But I had no idea that stopping another attack was as simple as just letting al qaida know that America is "off limits." Pure genius.

Ahnold on Ahnold. After all his initiatives in the $300 million California special election went down in flames, Ahnold sez, "If I would do another 'Terminator' movie I would have Terminator travel back in time and tell Arnold not to have a special election."

And while he's at it, the Terminator can travel back to October, 2003, and tell Kullyfornians that electing the guy who starred in "Jingle All the Way" as governor is a really bad idea.

Unnatural Tray. Having failed to get a picture of Unnatural Man, we turned to collecting other trophies. The first trophy was the sign on his dorm room door with his name on it. But this was largely unsatisfying. So we set our sites on bigger prizes. And on November 9, 1994, we acquired the Unnatural Tray.

11/9 U.C. [Dining Hall]*
Can place immense amounts of food on his fork at one time. We now have possession of Unnatural tray.

What is the Unnatural Tray? Why, the food tray that he used at dinner that night.

But we weren't done with the Man that night, as evidenced by the following entry:

11/9 Old Dominion Room [# censored]*
Brushes his hair w/ a very large brush-- More Bryan Adams posters-- I think this guy may be dangerous.

Funny, us calling him dangerous.

* entries recorded by someone else

Go democracy! I was shocked to read that people have been reporting problems with touch screen voting in today's election in Virginia. And the problems just so happen to be with the computer trying to register votes for Kaine as votes for Kilgore. Shocked, I say.

Why I love my Legal Counsel. I'm flipping around the channels during a Daily Show commercial break, and I stop on "The Situation with Tucker Carlson." Because I figure somebody should. Tucker's got some yahoo on the show who has apparently written an anti-Al Franken screed titled "Pants on Fire" or something with equal gravitas. Tucker says to the guy, "To be honest, I haven't read your book." A ringing endorsement off the bat. "I don't even know if what you write in here is true."

And because I can't help myself, I have to jabber something about just how poor that is. To which my Legal Counsel points out that Bill O'Reilly would automatically be agreeing with this hoser, and she says, "Tucker's a pussy." I ask if I can quote her on that, and she says, "It's true. I speak the truth."

Threatdown. Comedy Central picked up the Colbert Report for another year. Hooray for freedom.

Heckuva job, Brownie. "I am a fashion god."

1174 to go. On the one-year anniversary of when Americans went to the voting booths and screwed the pooch, this month's affirmation on my Despair.com calendar seems particularly fitting.

As Shrub's approval rating dips to 35%, it would be so easy to say, "I told you so," but I'd like to think that I'm better than that.