brainrow

The Fountain of Youth continues to elude us, but there’s plenty of stuff available for my second childhood. Via Boing Boing: the complete run of MAD magazine in PDF form, on DVD-ROM.

[E]very issue of MAD from 1952-2006 on one DVD. That’s over 600 issues (17,500 pages), plus a bunch of special features such as interviews and some animation. It also runs on Mac machines, and the pages are in PDF format, which is great for printing and viewing on handheld devices (I hope).

But that’s not all. Amazon suggested 44 Years of Fantastic Four and more from the same publisher.

Ahhh, life is good.

Several years ago, someone suggested to me that George W. Bush was the worst president ever.

“Nah,” sez I, “you’re forgetting Nixon. Bush is terrible, it’s true. But Nixon was much worse.” (Remember, this was several years ago.)

“Then what would Bush have to do to make you say he’s worse than Nixon?”

“I dunno — maybe try to cancel the elections or something like that,” I said. “Heh heh.”

A few months later, a Bush appointee was talking about postponing the election in the event of terrorist attacks, and icy chills ran up and down my spine.

I tend to be fairly pessimistic. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to want a Plan B if a foreseeable disaster interferes with normal voting. But I always see the negative side when people talk about postponing elections and stuff like that.

It doesn’t help that five years of Bush and Cheney have convinced me that you can never be too pessimistic or too paranoid. The torture debate, military tribunals, martial law, open-ended detention without charges or access to a lawyer, scrapping habeas corpus, bugging phones and now, opening mail without a warrant — maybe they’ll never, ever misuse the absolute power they’ve arrogated unto themselves, and maybe they’ll never, ever make a mistake. But they’ve certainly gone to a lot of trouble to make sure no court gets to check their work.

Maybe I’m just paranoid. Maybe it was strictly in a spirit of historical preservation that Bush signed a bill to preserve some sites from the World War II era. But the headline — “Bush signs bill to preserve internment camps” — I have to confess, that gave me a chill.

Via Bob Geiger, this promotional video for a political comedy show in New York City a few days ago. (Warning: Very sensitive folks might be offended by Congressman Rangel’s reaction to “President Bush” at the end of the video.)

I wanted to say I’m not stupid. This summer I read a Camus, I read three Shakespeares. I started the Constitution. Haven’t finished it yet.

The final week of 2006 brought us the deaths of James Brown, Gerald Ford, Saddam Hussein and the 3000th uniformed American to be killed in Iraq.

Death was really big in 2006.

Every December, the year-in-review pieces seem premature to me. Isn’t it possible that the “defining moment” of a year could happen in the final days, or even the final minutes of the year?

But now it’s January. Now we have perspective on 2006.

Slate has the Bill of Wrongs — their picks for the top ten civil liberties violations of 2006. There were so many to choose from.

It starts with the president’s complaints about “activist judges,” and evolves to Congressional threats to appoint an inspector general to oversee federal judges. As public distrust of the bench is fueled, the stripping of courts’ authority to hear whole classes of cases–most recently any habeas corpus claims from Guantanamo detainees–almost seems reasonable. Each tiny incursion into the independence of the judiciary seems justified. Until you realize that the courts are often the only places that will defend our shrinking civil liberties.

That, of course, is exactly why they attack the courts.

PERRspectives has the Top 10 GOP Sound Bites of 2006:

Smash hits with a great beat you could dance to like George Bush’s thumping “Stay the Course” and Tony Snow’s haunting “Adapting to Win” are gone from the charts altogether. While the RNC classic “Cut and Run (No Surrender)” is still hanging on at #7, newer melancholy tunes from the President’s team, including “New Way Forward” (#1), “Surge” (#2) and “Fresh Eyes” (#4) now top the charts.

Soon Bush will announce his new way forward. My prediction: new lyrics, but the song remains the same.

Via Liberal Oasis, DMIBlog looks at some of the best and worst in public policy. Some of the worst:

This year, Congress tried to tie a modest increase in the minimum wage to a cut in the Estate Tax, otherwise known as the Paris Hilton tax. … It didn’t pass, but legislation to use $21.3 billion in taxpayer dollars to build a fence on the Mexican border that won’t do a damned thing to address the real reasons that immigrants come here and stay here, did. The Bush administration made it harder for women on public assistance to count higher education as workfare credits, even though a college education is proven to be the most effective way of moving women on welfare out of poverty permanently. The White House gave nurses “promotions,” making the ineligible for union membership (thanks!), while also requiring parents to present proof that their children are United States citizens before qualifying them for Medicaid. And, unfortunately, here in NYC, Mayor Bloomberg continued down a path of making it as difficult as possible for sick Ground Zero heroes – the first responders and clean-up workers – to file claims for lost wages and medical bills, a microcosm of the larger ways in which access to justice is being cut off for millions of injured Americans.

MAD magazine has its own list of the 20 Dumbest People, Events & Things of 2006. Some of it’s pretty juvenile — what did you expect from MAD? — but some of it stings. They include the Cheney hunting accident (“You’ll be blown away!”), Floyd Landis (“Pedaling Dope”), Ann Coulter’s Basest Instinct, and Bush’s Assault on the Constitution, illustrated with a Pirates of the Constitution poster. Their #1 pick is the Iraq War (Mish-mosh Accomplished), illustrated with a fake ad for “The Iraqi Quagmire Chess Set”:

OUR GUARANTEE:

With Quagmire Chess™ “the violent last throes” will go on forever.

I don’t think we should be playing this game.

A New Year’s Eve milestone:

On Sunday, with the announcement of the death in Baghdad of Specialist Dustin R. Donica, 22, of Spring, Tex., the list [of U.S. military deaths in Iraq] reached the somber milestone of at least 3,000 deaths since the March 2003 invasion.

Happy New Year.

When I tell people about the musical group The Roches, a lot of people hear “The Roaches” and imagine, perhaps, some particularly grungy punk rockers.

So there was a little murmur of surprise on Christmas day when a couple people unwrapped The Roches’ Christmas CD, We Three Kings. What must that sound like?

Actually, The Roches are three sisters, Maggie, Terre and Suzzy Roche. Here they are, doing an a cappella version of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus.

If you like that, there’s plenty more on their site. Only a little bit of it is Christmas music.

These young folks today just don’t understand that no video game is as exciting as real life.

The first time I saw an actual U.S. president live and in person was in October or early November of 1970. That year, like this one, was a mid-term election year, and Richard Nixon was traveling the country promoting Republican candidates. He spoke to a campaign rally at the Statehouse in downtown Columbus, and I went down to see him.

There was a big crowd — lots of Nixon supporters, and a small number of Vietnam War protestors around the edges of the crowd. And every word out of Nixon’s mouth seemed calculated to stir up anger and hatred in his listeners. The air was thick with it. At any second, I expected someone to start throwing punches, or worse.

On November 1, 1976, I saw another president speak at a campaign rally at the Statehouse. It was the day before Election Day, and the president was Gerald Ford. He had become vice-president when Spiro Agnew resigned, then president when Nixon resigned. Once again, there was a big crowd with lots of Ford supporters and a few protesters. But the atmosphere — that was completely different.

Ford did not preach hate. He said what he was for, and why, and asked for our support. But he didn’t ask us to hate anyone who disagreed. I was wearing a campaign button for a Democratic candidate for Senate, and one of the Republicans in the crowd kidded me about it. I wasn’t worried that he wanted to bash my skull in. Six years, and a different president, and everything had changed.

So I will always think good thoughts about Gerald Ford, the 38th President of the United States. He showed that it really does matter what the president says, and how he says it. This would be a better nation today if his successors had followed his example.

Via Boing Boing, a list of video links to the 50 Greatest Cartoons.

This is the kind of thing that makes high-speed internet connectivity desirable. The quality isn’t good enough yet, and there are other technical and legal issues yet to be resolved, but we’re headed toward billion-channel television.

Surely, with a billion channels, there will be something worth watching. Right?

In the meantime, it’s nice to catch a few cartoons.

What he said: No-Bid Dick Cheney just before the November election:

[T]he president’s made clear what his objective is. It’s victory in Iraq. And it’s full speed ahead on that basis. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

…

It may not be popular with the public — it doesn’t matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Cheney on Rumsfeld just last week:

I believe the record speaks for itself: Don Rumsfeld is the finest secretary of defense this nation has ever had.

What I hear:

John Hodgman, the Daily Show’s “resident expert,” and the PC in those new Macintosh ads, is also the author of a book, The Areas of My Expertise. There’s an audiobook version of the book available on CD, and for download from Apple’s iTunes Store.

Now, via Boing Boing, here’s the part that’s hard to believe:

I just discovered that the audio version of John Hodgman’s excellent The Areas of My Expertise (read by the author), which I’m reading and loving right now, is available FREE on iTunes! Do get it now, while you can.

Aww… it’s abridged. Only six hours and 58 minutes. Just like the CD. Obviously, the whole audiobook thing is just a clever ploy to get me to buy the book.

Still, can’t beat the price. I’m guessing it’s a limited time offer, so hurry!

Mark Fiore’s animated Remedial Iraq Study Group:

Remedial Iraq Study Group can help you reach that basic minimal level of competency that has eluded you for so long.

Cartoonist Ward Sutton looks back at 2006: The Year that Wasn’t.

Tom Tomorrow’s Year in Review: Part I and Part II.

Have another piece of cake:

On the December 16 edition of Fox News’ Journal Editorial Report, after Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason Riley claimed that it would be “very difficult,” politically, for President Bush to increase troop levels in Iraq, fellow Journal board member Robert Pollock countered: “[A]ll that means is decreasing the length of some breaks from tours of duty and increasing the lengths of some tours of duty.” Pollock added: “That’s not a hard thing to do.”

No job is too difficult for the guy who doesn’t have to do it.

More hard-hitting political cartoons via Daily Kos and Bob Geiger.

Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin:

One of President Bush’s most emotional arguments against cutting our losses in Iraq and coming home is that doing so would be a betrayal of those soldiers who have already made the ultimate sacrifice there.

For instance, at his October 25 press conference, Bush spoke of having met “too many wives and husbands who have lost their partners in life, too many children who won’t ever see their mom and dad again. I owe it to them and to the families who still have loved ones in harm’s way to ensure that their sacrifices are not in vain.”

…

Bush is certainly far from alone in being moved by the sacrifices of those in uniform. And nobody wants to believe that soldiers have died in vain.

But if they have, sending more soldiers to die after them doesn’t make it better — it only makes it worse.

And according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, even this potent attempt to pull on American heartstrings isn’t enough to overcome the public’s profound distaste for the current effort.

The poll asked: “Do you think the United States has an obligation to American soldiers who have been killed or wounded in Iraq to remain in Iraq until the mission there is completed, or not?”

A stunning 53 percent of respondents said the U.S. has no such obligation, compared to 39 percent who say it does.

We’ve all heard how Bush’s religious conversion freed him from his drinking problem. Could we get someone to talk to him about his gambling problem?

You don’t keep raising the bet when you’re holding a hopeless hand, especially when you’re playing with people’s lives.