Ad Homonym December 22, 2005March 3, 2017 You would think after all that hoopla for ‘the best Christmas card of the year’ I would have tested the link. Ah well, fixed now. · So Elton John tied the knot yesterday. Gays and lesbians can do that now, more or less, in the U.K., Canada, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, but not in any of the fundamentalist countries. (In America, it’s perfectly legal for gays and lesbians to marry, so long as it’s not the person they love. For example, Sir Elton could marry Ellen DeGeneres without the slightest legal hiccup. He just couldn’t marry his partner of 12 years, David Furnish.) · What a language we speak. It’s fine to grind pepper, but there’s a fine, you’ll find, for grinding it too fine. Ewes use yews to rub up against and scratch their backs. · Mike Albert: “You are SO unfair! The Senate Intelligence Committee report found no evidence that the Administration influenced intelligence, the British Butler report found the same thing, the March 2005 Robb-Silberman report on WMD found the same thing. All THREE found no misdeeds by Bush, all three are bipartisan, and all three had no dissenting minority report at all. Yet you chose to publish a partisan minority report critical of Bush. How can you claim to be fair when you don’t even acknowledge these more credible and numerous positive reports?” ☞ Those three came out before the Downing Street memo (“the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy”) was revealed on May 1, 2005. So to the extent they affirmatively stated what you believe they stated, Mike, maybe they have a little egg on their faces. But, as detailed here, the Robb-Silberman report did not purport to answer this question – and neither, I believe, did the Senate Intelligence Committee report or, really, the Butler report (which focused on the Blair, not the Bush, Administration). I don’t claim expertise here, but the more that comes out about WHIG (the White House Iraq Group), the more one doubts the Administration was straight with Congress or the people. Turns out, the experts said those “aluminum tubes” were not suitable for nuclear reactors. Turns out we did not attack Iraq only as a last resort. Turns out that, though we don’t torture, dozens died during our questioning. (Turns out that “by far the vast majority” of the tax cut did not go to “people at the bottom of the economic ladder” – surprise, surprise.) But with Hanukkah and Christmas fast upon us – and what a synchronicity that is – I think it’s time to give the politics a (brief) rest.