Noble Nobel Prize

Dubya will be known as a great president. Great in the sense that:

• his butchering of the English language was complete and pronounced
• he consistently marred the global perception of American democracy and liberty
• his drinking and drug habits rivaled those of coca lords portrayed in Miami Vice
• he probably did more to widen the chasm between the rich and poor, a more than any other president since Reagan
• he ushered in a new wave of privacy violations (I'm looking at you Patriot Act and illegal wiretapping)
• he exuded the general complacency and smug attitude that afflicts Americans, thereby maintaining the status quo, and (it could be argued) accelerated the process of dumbening that we've witnessed in recent years
• he unswerving demonstrated his lack of interest and responsibility in global warming (remember the 1997 Kyoto Protocol?) and essentially whored himself out to corporate sponsorship and 'market-based' solutions.
  

I could go on...okay, let's at least honor the wonderful contributions he made to the state of Texas in his 1994 term as governor when he made it legal to carry concealed weapons and supported laws against sodomy. I think this was also the same term in which he so famously mocked the soon-to-be executed Karla Faye Tucker. Classy G-Dub! You da man!

Yes, folks, he was the 'compassionate conservative'.

But you know who was the greatest un/almost-President of recent years? Al Gore. You know the guy who won the popular vote but lost the electoral college votes back in the 2000 election? Yeah that guy. It might've been the best thing that ever happened to him, and to the issue of global warming (eff that politically correct 'climate change' nonsense).

Today Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2006, he won an Academy Award for his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Here he is from Barbara Boxer's fundraising event this Thursday in San Francisco. You can see what he has to say about his nomination, which was ratified today.

It's like the rest of the world is saying, we know, America. We know 2008 and the future years will be better. These past 8 years have been hard on us all, but we know that we're going to be able to get on with our plan to make this place better for everyone, and it's people like this who are going to be instrumental in making this happen.

Reuters a la Frankenstein

So I was looking at some Reuters news headlines today, and thought, "these all look the same! I wonder what it'd look like if I cobbled them together to read as a brief synopsis!"

So I said to myself: "Self, splice them together, but to make it real interesting and a bit of a challenge, don't edit any words, punctuation, or capitalization."

"Jeez," I said to myself, "make it difficult for me, why don't you." I tell you...that self is always slacking off...slacking bastard.

Anywho, here's your daily news report:

Hamas urged the West on Friday to accept a new Palestinian unity government in a plot apparently aimed at 20 percent of women who develop an emergency DNA test on the remains of former Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith but questionable intelligence about Saddam Hussein's links to al Qaeda killed seven military personnel. Prospects of ending North Korea's nuclear arms ambitions brightened a little on Friday as Russia would not be drawn into a Cold War-style arms race. Spain agreed on Friday to hand a judge intelligence documents about secret stone-throwing Palestinian worshippers in clashes at the end of Friday prayers.