crap that's pissing me off

Dear Internets,
Yeah, yeah, long time no see, where ya been? Sort-of starting a business, though it turns out that this business about the business of america being business is one of the reasons we often fantasize about living in some other country. Right now, we'd just like some paid vacation please.

Don't get me started on job hunting. Let's just say that Guantanamo could replace all its barking dogs and menstruating interrogators with a complicated system of resume-sending, phone screens, interview quizzes, and salary negotiations followed by complete silence, and sidestep Geneva Convention issues entirely while reducing inmates to a perfect state of learned helplessness.

A baby is snoring in the bed next to me.

It's fall, so yes folks, it's time to yank out the blue LED happy light and give myself cataracts again. Busy september, with the boy starting preschool ("It'll be a nice break for you!" everyone kept insisting. Hah. The pediatrician said "Expect at least two colds a month for the entire first year." This makes me happy I did not, as urged, put him in preschool last fall, when I was miserable enough!) and us doing consulting and me being a teaching assistant for a programming class and max with the orchestra and the chamber group and looking for something nice, stable work he doesn't feel is contributing to the evil in the world. Doesn't this sound just like one of those letters people send in their holiday cards? Oh wait, I forgot to mention Ari's french classes. No organized sports activities, thank god.

Wait, I had a reason for wanting to post this morning. Fucking politics. Fucking Democrats. A sense of the fucking senate that MoveOn is out-of-bounds? Got anything better to do with your time, people? Like grow fucking spines???!

things raising my blood pressure:
- sense of senate about moveon
- failure to restore habeas
- tasers
- Bush to veto child health insurance bill because it "federalizes healthcare". Can't he even pretend to give a shit anymore?
- How can you not manage to get a bill passed for soldiers to get some fucking leave time so their families don't entirely fall apart more than they already are? How hard can that be? [interesting: that last link is for Digby, and I just realized that even though I know Digby is a chick, I still hear Digby in my head as a guy.] Right, and shouldn't republicans even have to stay up late and sleep in their clothes and read from the phonebook to filibuster, not just threaten a filibuster to get their way? If it was good enough for Strom Thurmond, it should be good enough for them!

Oh, and in the realm of unbelievably creepy, apparently Iraqi prisons are being turned into re-education camps.

The U.S. military has introduced "religious enlightenment" and other education programs for Iraqi detainees, some of whom are as young as 11, Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, the commander of U.S. detention facilities in Iraq, said yesterday.

Stone said such efforts, aimed mainly at Iraqis who have been held for more than a year, are intended to "bend them back to our will" and are part of waging war in what he called "the battlefield of the mind." Most of the younger detainees are held in a facility that the military calls the "House of Wisdom."

And

Stone said he wants to identify "irreconcilables" -- those detainees whose views cannot be moderated -- and "put them away" in permanent detention facilities. Psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors and interrogators help distinguish the extremists from others, he said.

And

The 25,000 detainees now being held in U.S. facilities in Iraq include more than 820 juveniles, Stone said, most of whom are held in the House of Wisdom, which opened last month and is located at the Camp Victory military base near Baghdad's airport. He said that six additional young people had been sent to him just yesterday, and that "the trend is towards the youth," including 11-, 12- and 13-year-olds. He described older juveniles -- the 15-, 16- and 17-year-olds -- as "harder nuts" and said that 50 to 60 of them have been removed from U.S. detention facilities and turned over to Iraqi authorities for trial.

And finally

Stone described a sort of religious insurgency that occurred at one detention facility on Sept. 2. "We had a compound of moderates for the first time overtake . . . extremists. It's never happened before. Found them, identified them, threw them up against the fence and shaved their frickin' beards off of them. . . . I mean, that is historic."

My goodness, now people. We're just gonna go right in there and have a great and glorious cultural revolution now, aren't we. Thugs for moderate Islam! We'll transform the whole world!

Well, that's all from me now, folks. I've gotten myself depressed about the larger issues in life, and successfully distracted myself from the fact that our sink overflowed and leaked into our neighbors' apartment, I'm going through a house-envy period, the stovetop is filthy, and Max is stuck in limbo about a job he was very interested in. Oh wait, distraction not working anymore.... Quick, think about the failure of restore habeas!