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(Ha Ha, I live in Switzerland now.)

CJ goes boom.

Oh…the varied (well, the Top 5) ways that governments can waste their taxpayers’ money.

Right from the tap.  Yes, that’s right.  Aquafina and Dasani are essentially tap water.

PepsiCo Inc. will spell out that its Aquafina bottled water is made with tap water, a concession to the growing environmental and political opposition to the bottled water industry. According to Corporate Accountability International, a U.S. watchdog group, the world’s No. 2 beverage company will include the words “Public Water Source” on Aquafina labels.

Pepsi’s Aquafina and Coca-Cola Co’s Dasani are both made from purified water sourced from public reservoirs, as opposed to Danone’s Evian or Nestle’s Poland Spring, so-called “spring waters,” shipped from specific locations the companies say have notably clean water.

Coca-Cola Co. told Reuters it will start posting online information about the quality control testing it performs on Dasani by the end of summer or early fall.

Can you say “walking train wreck“?

Leaving aside the condition he probably deems “top secret” or “national security issues,” the following from the article:

-  deep venous thrombosis (DVT) in his left lower leg (March 2007)

-   six hours of surgery on his legs to repair a kind of aneurysm, a ballooning weak spot in an artery that can burst if left untreated (2005)

-   four (4) heart attacks

-   a quadruple bypass

-   two artery-clearing angioplasties

-   an operation to implant the defibrillator

I have shorter shopping lists.   A picture of health, right?

You’d think bumping into someone rushing around the White House would kill him…

 What would the current Supreme Court do in this case?

So maybe I’m a little behind the times on this.  I consider myself a bit of a technophile.  While reading a book, I was introduced to OpenOffice.  It is a completely free office suite that competes with Microsoft Office and WordPerfect.

It is downloadable and easy to install.  You can get it here.   It includes word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and database features.

You can also save documents in Word (.doc) format so anyone with Word can access your documents.  Here’s the word processing screen:

If you don’t want spend the money for Microsoft Office, this is an excellent alternative.  There are some differences in the layout of the menu options, but by and large it’s nearly identical. If you have any experience with Word or WordPerfect, it should be easy to figure out for you.  I haven’t played with it too much.  The few things I noticed are that it doesn’t seem to include a pleading paper macro and when you use the automatic footnote function, the number in the footnote does not come out superscripted and I cannot figure out a way to change the font to superscript it.

For most, however, these should not be serious drawbacks.  Based on what I’ve seen, it’s an excellent alternative. Check it out.

I never played rugby. One of my best friends in law school is a U.S. Marine. We went to law school together. At one point he asked me whether I wanted to join the law school’s rugby team (yes, we had one). In fact, because of my soccer background, he wanted me to be the kicker. It ultimately never happened – between school and my job during law school, etc.

Perhaps that was a good thing.

The Arizona Senate has unanimously passed a resolution banning the “Bush Lied, They Died” t-shirts from sale in the state. The shirts include the names of hundreds of U.S. troops killed in Iraq in fine print, which legislators apparently find unseemly, and which they say makes the shirts commercial speech, instead of political speech, which the Supreme Court says enjoys more First Amendment protection.

The shirts have already been banned in Oklahoma and Louisiana, and Rep. Dan Boren is pushing legislation for a federal ban.

Just because they are selling the t-shirts does not make it commercial speech. The shirts are pretty clearly political speech. The message itself isn’t commercial at all. Under this standard, states could ban the sale of any product with a message the government doesn’t like.

While some may find the t-shirts distasteful, taste is not required for speech to be protected. Then again, with the current Supreme Court, I hope this doesn’t make it there. ;-)

The party which is most hostile to gay and lesbian rights and sexual freedom seems to be the party whose members seem to almost constantly find themselves compromising sexual situations.

The most recent is that David Vitter, R-Louisiana, confessed to a “connection” to the “D.C. Madam” after a journalist reported finding the senator’s number in the escort service’s phone records.

Vitter admitted Monday that his telephone number turned up in the phone records of an escort service run by Deborah Jeane Palfrey, though he did not say he had sex with a prostitute. The records date from before he won his Senate seat in 2004.

In true Republican fashion, they think that apologies and forgiveness makes everything all better. 

“This was a very serious sin in my past for which I am, of course, completely responsible,” Vitter said in a statement given to reporters Monday night. “Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and from my wife in confession and marriage counseling.”

Vitter was one of the top backers of a failed constitutional amendment that would have banned same-sex marriage (and there’s the hypocrisy!) and serves as the Southern regional chairman of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign. In his Monday statement, he offered his “deep and sincere apologies to all I have disappointed and let down in any way.”

For the party that likes to think it takes the moral high ground, condemn those who disagree, tell people not engage in sex except within the confines of marriage and pander to the religious right, there are an awful lot of failures of moral character.

Why do Americans continue to believe anything these people say?