Month: February 2006

The Republicans selected John Boehner as their new majority leader. I know a lot of folks are pleased that it wasn’t Roy Blunt.

However, consider this:

John Boehner actually handed out checks from the tobacco industry on the floor of the House to fellow Congressmen in 1995 when they were considering a bill to end a tobacco subsidy. No shit. Actually walked around, and gave out checks on the floor of the House chamber.

This is the guy the Republicans just elected to clean up the lobbying problems in the House. Can you get any more blatant?

I’ve said it before: They’re not even trying to hide their nature any longer.

…and it’ll keep going, until we get off our asses and do something about it.

I wish I knew what.

(Seen in ‘s LJ.)

This is so well done. They could’ve gone for “cheap laughs”, but went for “clever” instead:

Click on screen to see the video, and marvel at its brilliant-ness.

Finished reading Cell by Stephen King.

I really enjoyed it — This is King’s tribute to zombie apocalypse stuff: the book is dedicated to Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) and George Romero (Night of the Living Dead). The basic premise is that a signal gets carried through cell phones (called The Pulse), which essentially “wipes the hard drive” of the human mind, leaving nothing behind but base animal aggression. So, the zombies aren’t exactly dead, but they’re not human any longer. Given the widespread use of cell phones (and the habit of people to immediately try to contact loved ones when an emergency strikes), civilization pretty much collapses near-instantaneously.

King has written about the end of the world before, most famously in The Stand, but this one has the fingerprints of 9/11 all over it. Gone is the typical King method of introducing characters, getting us comfortable with them, getting to know then and then injecting something strange into their world. Nope….in this one, the apocalypse hits with 24-hour-news suddenness, on a bright Fall day, 3 pages into the narrative. He’s definitely tapped into the feelings experienced in 2001…and manages to convey them so well that I found myself hit with a familiar sense of trip-hammer panic as I was reading.

In short: Stephen King. Zombies. ‘Nuff Said.