Hammer Mill Days

Hmmm... thought I shut that thing down. Lincoln - have you been using this computer again? How 'bout you, Anti-Lincoln? Big Zamboola? Right. Must've been the other ones. Man god damn. Oh, hi. Lucky thing you're reading this, really. Some of our Big Green travel associates have been monopolizing our one reliable connection to the "Internets", as Stephen Colbert calls it, for their own evil purposes. No, I don't mean Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been cavorting with his fellows in Captured By Robots, or that the man-sized tuber is plotting with his co-religionists in some kind of anti-animal jihad (I believe the are Unitarians, but don't quote me on that). Nay, I refer to their recent obsession with so-called "social networking" sites - your MySpaces , your FaceBooks , your Linkedins (though one might have thought that the Lincolns would be all over that last one.... it is for the more mature amongst us, after all....) So... how, you ma...

Has George W. Bush finally decided he needs some kind of positive legacy, if only to strengthen his "brand" as a defense / oil industry consultant in the near future? Perhaps. Though one could hardly imagine a more flaccid and lackluster initiative than the one he has set in motion with the Annapolis conference. It took some real effort to sustain the delusion that the United States was some kind of honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton; with the current administration, the suggestion is merely laughable. For almost seven years, Bush has aligned himself with some of the most reactionary political forces in Israel. He called Sharon a "man of peace" even as he was smashing the life out of hundreds of Palestinians during the dark days of Spring 2002 (I recall a Newsday article by Ed Gargan from that time describing how IDF soldiers even vandalized a girl's school, smashing windows, stealing musical instruments, and sc...