Dick Durbin has to apologize because after he said the following:

• "On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. ... On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

He dared to suggest that something reading that might think it was a government more evil than us?!!
Whenever something like this happens, I think of what Eddie Murphy said in Beverly Hills Cop: "Disturbing the peace? I got thrown out of a window! What's the charge for getting pushed out of a moving car, huh? Jaywalking?"

Then I read the Supreme Court gave the okay for the Government to play Sim City with your house and an 8 year old is suspended for pledging allegience to the United Federation of Planets instead of the regular Pledge. Hey, maybe if he put the words "under God" in his version, he'd still be okay...or at least protected by those that cry "christian bigotry" at the slightest provocation. Or maybe they should've gagged him like that kid in Matt Groening's Life in Hell strip after he did his version of the Pledge and smugly declared "It's a free country".
Geez, I go away to lick my wounds for a few days, and everything's...*sigh* just as nuts as ever.

I wrote this yesterday, but for some reason I couldn't post it...
Friday the wife and I saw Batman Begins Unfortunately, for reasons that'll become clear as you read this post, all I feel like saying is that it's real good and want to see it again. The plan was to go grocery shopping afterward. Unfortunately, another driver informed us one of the rear tires was looking flat. Fortunately, I had an air pump that attached to a cigarette lighter and was able to inflate it to get home. But decided not to go shopping then.
On Saturday the guys came over to look at the floor, and that afternoon I was told by my dad that I had to get the Archive Room cleaned out (the one I described in a previous entry that looked like a comic shop was dropped in it) The guys working on the floor are only available on weekends, I explained I couldn't get it cleaned up by the next morning even if we worked straight through. That made for a fun shopping trip that day.
While looking at the tire and kindly offering to take it to get replaced, he found it was making a noise and it started moving. He wants to pinpoint it and fix it. I am more fortunate in that he is allowing me another vehicle to use in the meantime.
As for the Archive Room, as I am writing this, it only has 1 comic box, 2 metal shelves, and some items on those shelves. Should be cleaned in plenty of time for next weekend. However, as my parents are going out of town, we have to stay home while they work on it. Small price to pay...

As I said earlier, I got up and went to the unemployment office with a resume I put together yesterday. I was informed that I should come back next week to sign up for unemployment, or better yet, wait until after July 1st, as it's the new quarter and the maximum benefit goes up at that point.
By my calculations, worse case scenario, with the wife working and me curling up in a ball and doing nothing (you weren't the first to use that term in this situation Mike) we can last until mid August. Hopefully, I would either be getting unemployment by then, or working. I'm hoping there won't be a problem with getting unemployment. Fortunately, my mother is a union president and advised me about appealing if that happened.

I don't want to go into details (other than the accusations weren't true) but I've just been let go of my current job of almost 10 years. I am in shock and not sure what to do. I do know enough to assess my current situation that as I told the wife that if she quit working and I curled up in a ball and stayed there, we could make it the next month.
And I got the information to file for unemployment and work, will do that tomorrow morning. After that, who knows?

Mike Norton is also asking that the word gets out about this article from overseas (of course, because our liberal media wouldn't cover something like this) about how some people are using fear to get rich.
Video assignment: buy, record, rent, or Netflix Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine, that covers how the country and it's mores were found along those lines. (And watch it, too, smart ass ^_^) But the animation about the history of guns and America wasn't done by the people who did South Park, although Trey Parker appears in the movie around that time. I want to make sure that's clear, as I don't want to be portrayed negatively in in one of their films.

Also Jeff Coop writes about how the Flag burning amendment is being bandied about again, this time under the radar.

Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me has a new show that started on FX last night 30 Days about other things done for a month. Mike Norton has written about it already.
And his blog has been added to the roll on the right, where encouraging news that the first episode about his wife and him living on minimum wage for a month will be sent to members of Congress, who hasn't raised the minimum wage since 1997.

Finally Congress is getting something right: the House passed restricting investigators to look at library records and bookstore sales slips. From the article:

• Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told Congress in April that the government has never used the provision to obtain library, bookstore, medical or gun sale records.
  But when asked whether the administration would agree to exclude library and medical records from the law, Gonzales demurred. "It should not be held against us that we have exercised restraint," he said.

Reminds me of last Monday's episode of Penn and Teller: Bulls#!+! Haven't seen it yet, but it's about government watching us. Had someone pointing out that once the govenment takes something away, you won't get it back. Hopefully we can prove that wrong.

I've been meaning to link to film critic James Rocchi who blogs over at Netflix about movies. Especially since there's no easy way to find his blog on the Netflix website.
The thing that got me off my butt to link was this entry about the Dove Foundation's recent findings that G-rated films are more profitable than R-rated films:

• "But if you like pizza to the exclusion of all other foods, that's your choice ... but don't try and convince the guy down the street who makes spicy Thai to quit so he can better reflect your "values." Because I like well-made pizza and I like Thai, and I don't want to live in some Nerf world where everything has to be soft-edged and kid-friendly to the exclusion of the tastes and desires of responsible grown-ups."

Warning: His last entry at the time of this posting has a description of the last scene in Batman Begins. Not the ending, but the last scene. Might wanna steer clear until you see the movie.

I've seen the first two episodes of HBO's new series The Comeback starring Lisa Kudrow. Before we continue: for the record, the only episode of Friends I saw was the one where Jennifer Aniston dressed up in the Princess Leia slave outfit (with A New Hope cinnamon bun hairdo) (I know, I know, Tammy and Highlander, I'm digging that hole deeper for me.) But I digress.
Kudrow plays Valerie Cherish, star of a fictional sitcom of the early 90's called "I'm It" that is up for a part in a new (still fictional) sitcom "Room and Bored" about 4 girls sharing a beach house. The condition: getting the part requires doing a reality series about being in the sitcom. Further humiliation comes as Valerie's character is changed from one of the 4 girls to the 3 remaining girls' Aunt Sassy.
It's rather amusing to see her try to regain the spotlight, and encounter the fact that it doesn't automatically put her back in starsville. Joe Bob says check it out.

Confidential to D: thanks for your message, and getting what I was saying in my last post. It's good to hear from a fellow collector/fanboy that understands what I'm going thru.

Had problems with the foundation of Casa Collett a few years back, got it taken care of. The problem was, the previous occupants of the house put the dry wall up with the uneven foundation, so when it was jacked up, some of the walls came down. The problem with fixing those walls is I have so much stuff (sad to say one room looked like someone dropped a comic shop in it) that I couldn't get to the walls to tear down what was left and put up new walls.
Recently the floor gave out along one of the interior walls, causing it to go down at an angle. My dad and I tried to jack it back up and put blocks under it, but the problem was that the slats for the floors weren't going back into the beam.
Yesterday, he came over with someone who said they could fix it, but needed space next to that wall cleaned out by this weekend. Fortunately, the wife was off yesterday and got a lot of the books stacked up in front of the bookshelves before I got home. Even coming off a typical hard Monday, I managed to get the computer stuff and desk moved in the Archive Room (the aforementioned comic shop dump :{ ) and started getting some of the stuff away from the other wall. Also cleaned out the bookshelves and CDs and junk in the living room. It was more than I planned, as I was wanting to get the groundwork down to get everything put someplace. The incentive is to get as much done as possible by Friday my next day off, because 1) what isn't done by then needs to be done that day, and 2) I'd still like to see Batman Begins.
Well, it could be worse. Nothing is damaged, I don't have to pay for it fortunately, but there's still a lot of work to go. After fixing the floor, I need to look at getting the rest of the Archive Room cleaned out. Then see about putting up walls and painting them. Next comes getting bookshelves to put those stacks of books in and fixing up the room. After that's done comes fixing up the living room walls. I do not look forward to having to move the Entertainment Center and items therein. Hopefully we can do it before the annual New Earth Festival in late September which is the big event that for years we had to get things cleaned up for the company coming in. And that should help with the heating bills this winter. But it's so overwhelming, that's why it hasn't been done before.