195. LITTLE PINK HOUSES FOR YOU AND ME

From the Archives

(February 2006) Sometimes I think I should just quit reading the news because stories such as this one leave me shaking my head in disbelief like the curmudgeon that I seem to have become, and then, instead of scribbling these tidbits into my journal as I once did, I wind up regurgitating this wild mix of random factoids into my blog like so much hip-hop news sampling.

My latest head-shaker? Well, there’s a Seattle group called C-YA (Catholic Youth Abstaining) that could come up with nothing better to do (since they’re abstaining from sex, natch), than to copy those idiots who object to “Happy Holidays” greeting cards and so launched a put-the-saint-back-in-Saint-Valentine’s-day campaign.

I though this story was a spoof at first because the group doesn’t provide any details about who their revered saint is or why we should consider him relevant to our lives, but then I went to their webpage and saw their floating discombobulated Jesus head that looks exactly like the Jesus that Southern Baptists used to print on their paper funeral fans and, well, knew it was legit.

I’m thinking maybe I should log onto some fundie websites and encourage them to protest this site, perahps by launching a put-the-body-back-on-the-bobbleheaded-Jesus campaign.

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Meanwhile, the CIA has apparently gotten away with secretly removing over 55,000 pages from public access (even though they are required by law to report such removals to the Information Security Oversight Office.

Yup. Access to 9,500 documents was secretly revoked, depriving historians and the public of our nation’s history and of our cold hard facts.

These documents do not appear to contain sensitive information that a terrorist might use to harm our country either, but do demonstrate agency incompetence sometimes.

Example: a CIA assessment released just two weeks before 300,000 Chinese troops entered Korea states that Chinese intervention was "not probable."

That one’s classified now.

(Maybe they need a new category for documents that contain “bureaucratic sensitivities”?)

One odd twist to this scandal is that historians—let me guess, Bush will classify them as liberal historians—who have copies of these now-reclassified documents may now be in violation of the federal Espionage Act.

No big surprise but, now that it’s been caught red-handed, the administration is, in typical fashion, writing off the whole thing as a “bureaucratic quirk.”

You see, gullible citizens, these reclassified documents were never properly declassified (even though they were reviewed, stamped as declassified, given freely to researchers, and published), and so they remain classified (said the Grinch to Cindy Lou Who as he stuffed her Christmas tree up the impossibly small chimbly), which means that pulling these documents from public access now is not illegal at all.

Let me guess. They didn’t inhale either.