pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LITTLE PINK HOUSES FOR YOU AND ME (No. 298 � Tuesday, 21 February 2006) Sometimes I think I should just quit reading the news because stories such as this one leave me shaking my head in disbelief like the curmudgeon that I seem to have become and then, instead of scribbling these tidbits that caught my attention into my journal as I used to do, I wind up regurgitating this wild mix of random factoids into my blog like so much hip-hop sampling. My latest head-shaker? Well, there�s this Seattle group called C-YA (Catholic Youth Abstaining) that could come up with nothing better to do (since they�re abstaining from sex, the poor souls) than object to the term �Happy Holidays.� Hence, they have launched a put-the-saint-back-in-St.-Valentine�s-day campaign. What�s next? Put the Christ in the leprechaun?I though this was a spoof at first because they didn�t provide any details about who this saint is or why we should consider him relevant, but then I went to their webpage and saw a floating discombobulated Jesus head that looks just like the image that Southern Baptists print on paper fans for their summer funerals. I hope that another Christianist group will soon protest C-YA and stage a put-the-body-back-on-Jesus rally. And, because the Disney McVillage wasn�t enough suburban avarice for the American appetite, Martha Stewart built 650 mini-versions of her mansions in the Raleigh suburb of Cary NC�a place that locals refer to as the acronym for �Containment Area for Relocated Yankees.� Homes in Marthaville (my name, not hers) were gobbled up at a mere $200,000-450,000 so now she�s building Marthavilles all over the country. Do you think this is a good thing? And you know how Bush is claiming that the president is commander in chief of every damn thing like the dictator he wants to be? Well the irony of this latest in a long string of [fill-in-the-blank]-gate government scandals makes it clear that he does not believe that previous so-called commander-in-chiefs� executive orders matter. Folks who remove public documents such as the ones Rumsfeld�s cronies have been secretly removing from the National Archives are required by law to report such removals to the Information Security Oversight Office. The CIA and other agencies have gotten away with secretly removing over 55,000 pages from public access, but historians doing research recently noticed that materials they�d copied had gone missing and they�re publicizing this fact.Yup. Access to 9,500 documents was secretly revoked, depriving historians and the public of our nation�s history, our cold hard facts. The documents do not contain sensitive information that a terrorist might use to harm our country. They do demonstrate agency incompetence sometimes though. For example, a CIA assessment released just two weeks before 300,000 Chinese troops entered Korea states that Chinese intervention was "not probable." That one�s classified now. Maybe they need a new category: documents containing �bureaucratic sensitivities.� One odd twist to this scandal is that historians�let me guess, Bush will classify them as liberal historians�who still have copies of secretly reclassified documents may now be violating the Espionage Act.In typical Bush&Co. fashion, now that they have been caught red-handed, they are writing off the whole thing as a �bureaucratic quirk.� You see, gullible citizens, these reclassified documents were never properly declassified (even though they were reviewed, stamped as "declassified," given freely to researchers, and even published), so they actually remain classified (said the Grinch to CindyLouWho as he stuffed the tree back up the chimbly), which means that pulling the documents from public access is not really an illegal reclassification at all. Please please please please PLEASE tell me that they have not succeeded in stacking the courts with judges who will back up such obscene claims. � Okay, now it�s late afternoon Wednesday. I didn�t get a chance to finish this entry today because well, I have to work for a living. The staff of my division pulled off a grand scheme today. See, my birthday was last week, but I was on vacation. An editor whose birthday was also last week suggested that the two of us go to lunch to celebrate our birthdays and we chose today�only really she organized for the entire division to be in a room in the restaurant. They were all waiting on us to walk out the door, then she said �Oh, can I stop by my house? I forgot something.� And they all rushed to the restaurant. I walked in and they said �Surprise! Happy birthday! Happy boss day (whenever that was!)� and we had a great time.So, in honor of surprises, I�m going to end my entry with a list of things for which I am grateful - a list that is currently making the rounds on the Web: - I am grateful for sweet tea and radar detectors 5:34 p.m. - 2006-02-22 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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