something rather nasty surfaced over the weekend, first in a comment thread in the editorial pages at the asheville citizen-times, and later @ taylorsucks.org.
in october of 1999 with very little opposition the house passed h.r. 1887, a bill with a rather clumsy title called the "to punish the depiction of animal cruelty" law. the bill, which amended title 18, made it illegal in the united states for anyone to create, sell, or possess depictions of animal cruelty with the intention of placing that depiction in interstate or foreign commerce for commercial gain. for the purposes of this bill:
lookie what was waiting for me when i got home from work today! (click to enlarge - you can actually read some of it as well!)
(i'll try to get a pic of the other side of it a little later)
i don't have time right now to properly rail against this thing, but i can tell you that i made a few phone calls...
- called the Asheville office to voice my concern, and was immediately transferred to DC
- the woman in dc (whose name I did not get - she sounded young) assured me that franking information was all public knowledge, and that I had to get in touch with the "house admin legal resources" (sic), and gave me the phone number for the house switchboard. either she didn't know how to transfer my call to the house switchboard, she didn't want to transfer my call to the house switchboard, or taylor was too cheap to buy a phone with a "transfer" button on it. (the latter makes the most sense; if i understand it correctly, franking comes out of each representative's office budget.)
anyone who actually got to stay up late enough to watch last night's edition of the colbert report (i'm not among them - i usually have to rely on crooks and liars) got to see this:
on my way back to work from getting lunch, i heard the first salvo from the taylor campaign on the radio. it's an ad addressing immigration; the gist of it essentially claims that heath shuler and the rest of the democrats running for congress across america are going to stage some kind of overthrow with the help of "california liberal nancy pelosi" and the votes of illegal immigrants.
i fully intend on posting this audio for everyone to hear as soon as i get my hands on it (this weekend sometime, if not sooner).
this probably isn't the right forum for a post like this, and i apologize in advance if that's the case, but i really had to share this story...
yesterday i was talking to a friend of mine (who wishes to remain anonymous, natch - i'll call him "dave") who was at the asheville tourists game (perhaps you've seen video footage of manager joe mikulik's recent meltdown that got him suspended for a week, fined $1,000 and single-handedly raised billy martin-style histrionics to a whole new level) against the hickory crawdads on sunday, july 2nd.
click on the pic to enlarge. the hi-res original will be available soon is available now by clicking here. (warning to dial-up users - it's 9.44 megabytes)
even at 18% of the original size you'll still be able to make out the individuals in the source images.
cross-posted from the syntax of things - i apologize for the redundancy, but this story hits a little too close to home for me...
a friend of mine up in maine, les rhoda, had an uncle named donald greene. i never got a chance to meet the man, but by all accounts he was a warm, loving and charitable man who lived life to the fullest. he worked in the avation industry, and was a trained pilot. his family will remember him for the man that he was. the rest of the world will remember him as a passenger on united flight 93.
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