Read all about it Yahoo and Google are both racing to provide password protected content to users as long as they're a subscriber (for now, right?). These sights start with the nice Consumer Reports magazine online, but soon to include sites such as Lexus Nexus. Lexus Nexus is a ginormous databank with highly confidential data on every single person born in a hospital in the 2nd and 1st worlds. If you think I'm kidding, read this: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7913667/

Read all about it I have been unable to finish my earnest effort to convince you the Patriot Act should not be accepted blindly in its entirety. In the interim, Marla asks you to ponder which period in antiquity this prehistoric freakshow came from and should be sent back to. Thank god he's no genius...

The Patriot Act is, as the name suggests, a measure which patriotic citizens should adore and whose only opponents can be the unpatriotic, the communists, and the socialists. Anyone who disagrees with the Act is just some fruit-looped, Birkenstocked, Greenpeace employed whackjob and there is no in-between... “with us or against us,” right? Yet I’ve been in-between, and until today, I pah-pahed the vociferous concerns of those who oppose the Act and discounted its scope and by virtue of silence endorsed its existence. I believed the Act would only present a problem to someone who already presented a problem, and that common citizens would not be within its reach. So yah, I might not agree with it in theory, but I didn’t worry about what new permissions its sprawling 800 pages gave the government, the FBI, the CIA. Guffaw, who’s it really going to impact; some long-bearded future terrorists living in San Diego? Who cares about their civil rights? I don’t have to worry about the books I check out of the library, for Christ’s sake. And so I am quite sad to have been edified, to have been lifted out of my comfortable Patriot Act fog to learn that indeed, normal, everyday citizens like us have already suffered the consequences of the civil liberties the Act stole away so loudly (it was not quietly at all). So many of us were so earnest and pure in our desires to ensure there was never, ever, another 9/11 ever, never, ever again that we’d have agreed to the passage of a law that adopted a mandatory Nazi solute to police or the construction of a Reichstag at Ground Zero. And so we got our Reichstag, and it is the Patriot Act. I truly hate to echo along with the idiot U of Colorado professor who called the 9/11 victims “Little Eichmanns." Nazi references are used so flippantly these days that using it as an analogy at all just makes people (rightfully) dismiss you as though you are a Holocaust-denying moron. But allow me to draw this parallel just for a second, before you hit the back button on your browser and go Googling or checking email. The Reichstag had been the seat of German politics as its Parliament for decades prior to its rise as the face and symbol of Nazi power. On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag was set on fire by arson; the fire was set in multiple places and an explosion followed which completely destroyed the building. A very likely mentally ill Communist party member from Holland was found behind the building during the blaze. Hitler used the fire to rouse anti-Communist sympathies. As Chancellor of Germany, he convinced the president to sign something called the Reichstag Fire Decree which effectively erased the human rights provisions of the Weimar Constitution written after World War I. He further convinced the president to activate the Enabling Act which enabled the government to pass laws by decree rather than by democratic process. I do not find it much of a stretch between how Hitler came to have so much power over Germany so quickly in those early days by virtue of the Reichstag fire and how we may have granted the FBI, the CIA, and Homeland Security (another innocuous-sounding but potentially malevolent government behemoth) powers that may endanger democracy in the long term by virtue of 9/11. I have often accused liberals of never thinking of the past or the future; Ann Coulter sums it up quite nicely with “For liberals, history began yesterday.” Yet it seems that Conservatives may be thinking in the same way, and with similar short-sightedness. Today, the US government and civil liberties will not vaporize with the Patriot Act--erode, but not vaporize. What about 100 years from now? Where will our liberties be if 800 pages more are added to this Act, and opponents are mocked by conservatives who firmly believe that we are not “safe” without it? How will Freedom of Speech, Freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, Freedom of the Press survive 1600, 2000, 2500 pages of “Patriot” Acts? I believe that they would not survive and I believe it is possible. Our tax code that would circle this planet 29 times if it were printed out in its entirety. That’s proof enough that bloated bureaucrats are more than capable of quickly writing a ton of laws in a short amount of time--the tax code is only about 100 years old. Conservatives are more than willing to point the Nazi finger when it suits them; the Nazis took away everyone’s guns before they rounded them up and murdered them, by Golly. Well now we find the conservatives are taking away our civil liberties and then rounding us up, by golly. I rarely admit I’m wrong; I rarely change my mind. But I never stop pursuing truth, logic, and liberty the way I believe it is defined not only by the US Constitution, but by the ideal we represent. We fall short of this ideal since we are human beings, and human beings can’t perfectly implement any social or democratic system; we’re too subject to those things that make us human—greed, passion, desires, jealousy—to make anything work perfectly. But as long as your eye is on the ideal, you can stay as close as humanly possible to the goal. If you turn away from the ideal as long as you think you have mitigating circumstances, anything goes. Such is the Patriot Act; an anything goes law created in shadow of the extraordinary events of 9/11, our mitigating circumstances. It has allowed the conservatives to let history begin on September 11, 2001. It allows us to think someone is insane at the suggestion that Bush has waylaid power and human rights like Hitler in 1933. But just as the Reichstag Fire Decree snowballed into the full blown Third Reich, the Patriot Act and its add-ons enables our government an excessive amount of power which will be the death of our Ideal; the United States, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. Part II to follow tomorrow

-Why do people exit elevators, escalators, stairwells, planes--and all other places where human throughput is critical--stop 4 millimeters over the threshold while everyone behind them piles up while they gaze around like a stoner waking up from a long sleep? -When will restaurants realize those cool lights they hang low over the tables are a visual obstacle worthy of my darkest sunglasses? -Why do women with a huge belly wear pants that stop below the belly button and tops that start at the rib cage, subjecting the rest of us to a dollop of blubber only a 3 month old baby should have? -How is it we can create freeways where people can drive 80 miles an hour safely (don't tell me it's not) but we can't figure out a way to control traffic and speed in parking lots without large concrete obstacles that do not slow down SUVs at all and damage everyone else's car outright?

Read all about it A young Australian woman was convicted of drug traffiking in Indonesia and sentenced to decades in Indonesian prison. I'd tender a bet that her chances for justice in Indonesia were worse than my chances in California family court as an employed person against a troll who lives under a bridge (oh, wait, that's uh, a different post). Usually you hear these stories and you slough it off a bit and say, jeezus, what were they thinking trying to bring porn into Saudi Arabia; of course they were going to get their hands chopped off! But I believe this woman was framed by the baggage handlers, and it makes my stomach turn to think of being in prison under these circumstances. I realize this was front page news 2 weeks ago but I would like everyone not to forget the plight of this woman. And big cheers to the Australians who rightly questioned why they were ever so charitable to those ungrateful psychos after the Tsunami. Not a one of them changed their opinion of the mighty United States in spite of the billions we contributed. You can keep updated on her status by going to the following web page: www.freeschapelle.com

Read all about it I find it interesting that a liberal news outlet such as ABC News would point such a level finger at another country's justice system, even if that other country is China. I'm sure China's injustices are numerous, but the example in this story is hardly more egregious than anything the US has ever done. The US has convicted and jailed for decades hundreds of people based on flimsy eyewitness testimony, faulty evidence, and a myriad of other injustices. China's civil rights violations go far beyond the wrongfully convicted; they are sweeps of protesters exerting what we would call 1st Amendment rights; they are imprisonments of journalists and other free thinkers who dare to challenge the Chines Communist Manifesto, the forced abortions on women to meet a one-child limit. That is what ABC News should highlight. There's little difference between the US and the story in this article, and a huge difference between the US and China's civil rights violations. Any time you must place your life in the hands of the government, it's flip of a coin on whether or not you will receive fair justice.

A new Eye Shadow: Kiss to Revlon The MWB team has found an absolutely fabulous new (and cheap) eye shadow; Revlon's EyeGlide Shimmer Shadow. It can be used as lipstick or eyeshadow, which is handy for your tiny beaded evening bag. As eyeshadow, it has the very nice effect of making your eyes look a little sparkly. On lips, lipliner is a must. It goes on easily in a rear view mirror while driving, but Team MWB recommends you wait for the red light in spite of this convenience.

Read all about it Aye yay yay Lucy, you'f bin teengkeeng ah-gen! These words ring more true every day; the way Lucy walked through life and thought about things was a lot different than Ricky. What a shock. SHOCK! As far as I'm concerned the women who attended the conference where Harvard President Dr. Sumners dared to even mention these diferences should have slapped that bitch who walked out on him im a big huff. As a woman, that's how I think.

Read all about it A mother's son is killed on an ATV, and she is demanding all these government interferences? How about we demand that you have a triple digit IQ before you have kids? Get real; how could you look at your 10 year-old child on a full-size ATV and think, ya, that's safe. These people, people who cannot think for themselves, create a landmine of laws and regulations which ultimately don't save anyone from themselves. This lady was just as likely to have let her kid jump off a two-story building into a pool, then sued the pool builder and demanded tougher regulations. Gimme a nanny-break!

Read all about it This is a long article, and I'll nutshell it for you because we know you're busy. Actually, the first line of this article nutshells this for us better than MWB can, and as our fans, you know we give you some good nutshells: If the European Union were a state in the USA it would belong to the poorest group of states. How about that. The Krauts, the Frogs, the Boots, and the Brits are church mice compared to the US as a whole, and can only measure up to the banjo players in Mississippi and West Virginia in GDP (if you don't know what gross domestic product is, you're not smart enough to read MWB). It doesn't stop there, my village-loving little liberal monkeys. Swedes, and others living in Scandinavian hovels which thus far were believed to be the models of pure Socialist paradise, live miserly little lives compared to the lap of luxury where most Americans reside. Except, of course, for the banjo players who haven't found a way to make their riches in banjo radio (MWB isn't even sure they have radios in West Virginia...). Ah my little monkeys in their socialist cages are already squawking, I can hear them now..."Have you seen the beggars in San Francisco? Los Angeles? Sweden doesn't have that!" Ah but my little monkeys, if you get your bananas out of your ears for a moment, you'll hear that Sweden does have these parasitic street people, and that they suck the lifeblood of the Swedish economy right out. You'll also hear that we're talking most Americans live better; I wouldn't call homeless beggars in the two most communist cities in America any fraction of the US as a whole. You'd hear, my little monkeys, that teachers in Scandanavian countries will teach you "sack lunch" as one of your first words, since most of them, yes, most these weathly white Socialist saviors up north cannot afford to go out to lunch and nearly everyone packs their lunches. Most teachers can't even afford the rare treat, a pizza, on their salaries of 55,000 US a year (since they end up with 1/2 of that and a pizza is a whopping 60-80, after taxes). Even the common plebes in handout central, France, enjoy a lifestyle not to be seen in Sweet Sweden; cafes, bistros, nice carafes of wine on a Saturday afternoon shopping trip. Our Saab-building Socialist friends drive rent-a-wrecks as well. They can scarecely afford more than one car in a family and they keep it for 15 years. Nobody does that in the US. Yes, we need cars because our decentralized society hasn't connected with public transportaion yet, but also because we don't have to. It is my belief that the socialist ways of life in these countries is at great peril; they must compete with us and our brains powered by a vast educational system and the influx of their commrades who have fled their stifling economies so they can start business (hello, Germany, Sun Microsystems was a big loss, wasn't it). They must also compete with third worlds, who don't have to pay fat cat welfare benefits. Their populations are also dwindling. They only have 1 kid per family, and between that and their emigration, they will collapse under the weight of their own elderly burdens. So much for the savior of socialism; and it proves one thing to us. That whenever you put the welfare of yourself and your future into the hands of the government, it's a toss of the dice whether or not you'll be cared for and have a good life. Better to make the best one you can for yourself, without interference.