HERE LIES TOM RIDGE

Have you gotten caught up in the Desperate Housewives hysteria yet? Yeah, me neither...I'm not sure what the big deal is, but as a red-blooded American male I am constitutionally obligated to mention at this point that at least the stars are hot, and isn't that what all the hype is really about? Especially Eva Longoria and the underrated Felicity Huffman. I'm happy for Felicity, finally landing a hit show years after the deserving and brilliant Sports Night got cancelled. But none of this is what I want to write about, so let's move on...

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Ten Little Cabinet Members

And now say goodbye to Tom Ridge and Tommy Thompson. This week, both Ridge who headed the Department of Homeland Insecurity and Thompson, who ran Health and Human Services, decided to resign from Bush's Cabinet, which is starting to look less like a Cabinet and more like a valise. Don't think that this is any kind of ideological split or a resignation of principle though (the two exceptions: UN ambassador John Negroponte and former Secretary of State Colin Powell). It's time for these high powered politicos and captains of industry to get paid, since government work doesn't pay all that well and the transition from the first to the second term is as good a time to get out as any.

Unfortunately, one cabinet member who probably won't be resigining is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the mastermind behind our brilliant exit strategy in Iraq and the man who oversaw the excesses of Abu Ghraib. Things are going so well there why would we want to change, right?
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Peabo Bryson

I'm typing this at my g.f.'s apartment and it's hard to concentrate because she's watching one of those cheeseball paid programmings, in this case Time Life's collection of soul ballads from the 70's and 80's. It makes it hard to concentrate on the degenerate state of the world today when Luther Vandross is singing "Here and Now" and Peabo Bryson is exhorting us to "pick up the phone now" and order today for just four low payments of $29.99. "I trust Peabo," my g.f. says. Ah, romance. What we need is for Time Life to come up with a collection of political protest songs featuring the greatest hits of Public Enemy, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder. Maybe we could throw in The Pretenders, "Ohio", since that's where the presidential election of 2004 was lost/stolen. I wonder if anyone would buy it. Probably not, unless we could get one of the Desperate Housewives to remove a bath towel and then jump naked into the arms of Stevie Wonder. ("Oh Lawd, I just dropped a white woman!") I think I'm digressing again.

Quick Movie Recommendations

Check out Closer, Sideways, Ray and, if you have kids, The Spongebob Squarepants Movie. You can skip National Treasure, although I guess there are worse ways to spend $8.

Final Thought

This week World AIDS Day came and went and it's important to remember that the United States, under the Bush administration, is in favor of promoting abstinence in Third World countries as opposed to making it easier for contraceptives to be distributed or for AIDS medicine to be more readily available in Africa, where the disease is truly epidemic. It's not always about Iraq and tax cuts for the rich, although these are the areas where most of us see the duplicity and mendacity of the Bush administration the most. What we are dealing with here is a philosophy shaped by the most backwards-looking and religiously conservative elements of our society and that is NOT the way to go about combating AIDS and other major health threats around the world.

Peace...