I’m moving this weekend.

The last two times I made this announcement on this blog, I moved 1,600 miles. This time I’m moving 1/3200th of that distance — a half mile down the road to a quiet complex of apartment townhomes. Should be a much easier trip, despite the insanity of my life right now.

I might not be online much for the next few days, though, depending on the competence of the cable company. Given my history with Cox, I’m not optimistic.

Hard to believe I’ve been back for six months. I’ll be happy to see the back of this apartment. It was never that great to begin with, and on top of that I have far too many painful, confusing memories attached to it for such a short period of time.

Jonathan Coulton’s “Thing a Week” experiment ended today with his 52nd song, a Queen cover. Quite an achievement, when you think about it.

He has started selling Thing a Week CDs on his site, but the full set includes every song from mediocre to brilliant. I might put together a mix of just the brilliant ones and post them here (with links), when I have the time.

A bit of background is in order here: on Sept. 10-11, ABC aired a controversial miniseries created by and marketed to conservatives called The Path to 9/11, which essentially pinned the blame for 9/11 on Bill Clinton, something the Rush Limbaugh crowd has said for years.

The marketing claimed the miniseries was based on the official 9/11 Commission Report, but the film featured several scenes that never happened — they were completely invented, and the producers admitted as much — including a scene where US troops have Bin Laden surrounded, and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger fails to give a “go” order to kill him.

In reality, Clinton tried to kill Bin Laden several times, including lobbing missiles at his terrorist camps in Afghanistan in 1998. At the time, the right wing claimed he was “wagging the dog” to distract the nation from the far more important issue of tracking exactly where Clinton kept his penis. The media obligingly played clips of Wag the Dog while discussing the strike on Bin Laden.

Earlier today, Fox Newsmonkey Chris Wallace interviewed Clinton on Fox News Sunday and asked him why he didn’t do more to prevent 9/11.

I think Wallace was expecting Clinton to respond with polite equivocation and platitudes. Instead, he kipped up, slammed Wallace with a Rock Bottom, tossed his elbow pad to a cameraman, bounced around the studio, and finished him off with a People’s Elbow.

Watch the video here.

I still have some issues with Clinton — he governed too conservatively, and often triangulated between right and wrong to find a “centrist” position that was almost as wrong — but he did help give us eight years of competence and economic prosperity. It’s heartening to see him defend his legacy.

So how’s that invasion and occupation of Iraq going? Let’s do a little rundown:

- Saddam had no WMDs. Sanctions were working. Liberals suspected as much before the invasion, but logically you can’t prove a negative. And no, the WMDs were not magically spirited away to Syria, no matter how often Sean Hannity says so.

- Saddam had no connection to Al Qaeda, and in fact viewed Bin Laden and his organization as a threat to his power. Again, liberals — including me — knew this as fact before the invasion, but were mostly ignored by both parties.

- To date, 2,700 US soldiers have died, almost 20,000 have been wounded, and Iraqi deaths are in the high five figures. A civil war rages in all but name.

- Congress is about to approve additional funding that will raise the total cost of war to $400 billion (double the GDP of new boogeyman Iran), with another boost on the horizon that will bring it to $500 billion. All of this is deficit spending.

- But Bush made us safer, right? Heh. A new National Intelligence Estimate by 16 spy agencies concludes that the three-year violent occupation of a Muslim nation has, shockingly, inflamed the anger of Muslims worldwide and worsened the threat of terrorism. Who could’ve seen that coming?

Except, you know, those weak-on-defense liberals…

Maybe that’s why liberals are always mocked and ignored on national security issues — it’s tougher to get along with someone who’s always right.

UPDATE: Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Bush has announced that the decision to leave Iraq will have to be made by the next President. As usual, he’s ducking the responsibility of making the hard choice. Which means we’re in Iraq until at least early 2009. Whee!

All Hail Discordia!

Disputed Dwarf Planet Named After Troublemaking Goddess

According to Greek mythology, the goddess Eris was so miffed at being left off the guest list of a banquet of the gods that she stirred up the Trojan War.

Could there be a better name than that of the goddess of discord for the dwarf planet that spawned a pitched battle among astronomers and threw the public’s ideas about the solar system into a cocked hat?

Apparently not. The executive committee of the International Astronomical Union decided this week to name the object known as UB313 after the troublemaking Eris.

If you don’t get the joke, this might help. I might have to dig out my copy of the Principia Discordia for another look.

Via Digby:

I just heard Tucker Carlson casually say that he told his “lesbian leftist friend” (probably Rachel Maddow), “when al Qaeda takes over you’ll be the first one hung up by your thumbs.”

From a comment on this very blog:

America must unite or learn to speak Arabic

On top of that, we have our own leaders and their pet pundits describing current events as a “Clash of Civilizations” or a World War.

My question is the same as Digby’s, but with more swearing: In what POSSIBLE FUCKING SCENARIO does Al Qaeda “take over” the US?

How is this passing for a legitimate viewpoint at all, let alone the official viewpoint of the ruling majority party?

Go here to see the first page of the backup story for Narbonic, vol. 4.

Note that not only did MY first glimpse of the backup story come after the artist posted this page in a LiveJournal, but this is my first knowledge that Shaenon had even FOUND an artist for the backup story. And I’m the publisher. Harrumph.

The latest poll of AZ-08 shows Giffords with an insurmountable lead over Weiss, who would have to get almost every undecided vote just to catch up, and Huffman pulling within 9 points of Graf. Huffman and the RNC have plastered the airwaves with anti-Graf ads, lambasting him for “not standing with Bush during a war,” which I think completely misreads the current mood of the public. But apparently the strategy is working well enough to make it a race.

In the general election, both Giffords and Weiss have 10-point leads on Graf out of the gate, which both proves and disproves my previous analysis. I was right that Graf will (unfortunately) be a stronger candidate than people think, especially if he plays the anti-Mexican card over and over. I was wrong in thinking Weiss has a better shot than Giffords at beating Graf.

In fact, I’m withdrawing my earlier endorsement of Patty Weiss. At Drinking Liberally a couple of weeks ago, Jeff Latas said in conversation, “If I wasn’t in the race, I’d vote for Patty… but man, she’s getting some bad campaign advice.” She’s been going negative against the frontrunner Giffords (of course), but apparently, the way she’s been doing it has reflected badly on her and probably cost her votes. If she wins the primary, she’ll be getting the same bad advice against Graf, too.

So never mind. It doesn’t matter when Gabby Giffords has such a huge lead, but I’ll cast a vote for Latas on Tuesday. He’s a former Air Force pilot and Pentagon weapons manager who has strong stances against the Iraq occupation and in favor of alternative fuels and net neutrality. Maybe he can’t beat Graf, but he’s not going to win anyway, so I might as well give my favored issues some support.

Meanwhile…

The latest DL hosted two Democratic candidates for State Superintendent, Slade Mead and Jason Williams. I’ll be voting for Mead, a charmingly-slobby policy wonk with a great backstory and experience in the legislature. Both candidates have a good grasp of the issues, but Mead knows the players involved, and he was personally recruited into the party AND the race by Gov. Napolitano and Jim Pederson. Plus, his name sounds like a brand of liquor.

To recap my endorsements:

State rep – Steve Farley
Superintendent – Slade Mead
US House – I’m voting for Latas, but Giffords has the best chance in the general

Tucson folks, remember to vote on Tuesday.

Not everyone has a Birthday Movie — a movie that was released on your date of birth — since you pretty much have to have been born on a Friday.

But I do.

According to IMDB, on September 10, 1975, one movie was unleashed on an unsuspecting American populace: Mitchell, starring Joe Don Baker, Linda Evans, and John Saxon, which went on to greater glory as one of the most infamous episodes of MST3K.

Top THAT.