James Webb has started circulating a sign-on letter, currently endorsed by 22 Senators total, stating “We wish to emphasize that no congressional authority exists for unilateral military action against Iran.” I’ve examined the significance of this at the Mother Jones blog.

The Times op-ed page today features a Halloween reminiscence from a transgendered professor who grew up in a genuinely haunted house. On top of that, through secondary asides, we learn that journalist Al Hunt grew up in the house before the writer’s family bought it, and that Al Hunt’s family kept a monkey named Jesus locked in a bathroom on the third floor, and only let him out once a year on his birthday, which was of course Christmas.

And now I will never see Al Hunt’s byline again without thinking of a monkey locked in a bathroom.

People are always much stranger than you imagine, even if you have a vivid imagination.

“Hillary and Obama are kind of debating whether to invite [Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] to the inauguration or the inaugural ball.”

Ezra’s right — the media should stop politely overlooking the fact that Giuliani’s a total nutjob.

Sometimes it seems that reasonable, reality-based people who choose to engage on the world wide intertubes have to spend 95% of their time arguing that the sky is, in fact, blue on sunny days, or that many human beings do, in fact, find sexual activity to be an enjoyable and worthwhile pursuit. The latest case in point is the Greenwald/Boylan business, and if you’re not up to speed on that one, you can read about it here. (And Jonathan has more here.) My only thought on this is that I’m not entirely sure who’s playing who. I think when Greenwald specifically requested that Boylan confirm the authenticity of the email, it gave Boylan (and a thousand fact-impaired right wing bloggers) an opportunity to deny same. (Note to Glenn: next time you want to confirm an email, just send a note back asking for a clarification of some specific point, and wait to see how the other party responds. If they answer your question and do not say, “Why — I did not send this email purporting to be from me”, you’ve pretty much confirmed authorship. After that, I think it’s okay to ignore commenters questioning the color of the sky.) At the same time, the longer this goes on, the more of an ass — and more importantly, the more of a liar — Boylan apears to be. Which I guess brings up one more point: if General Petraeus’ spokesman has been all but proven to be a blatant liar, on top of just having a very strange notion of how a military public relations offer should engage civilians, isn’t that a fairly big story? Shouldn’t this be getting at least a little attention from mainstream media outlets?

(… I think it also brings up the question of whether the Colonel might be more useful to the military in some other role, but — if the facts are as they appear to be, down this particular intertubey rabbit hole — that would depend on how highly Gen. Petraeus values honesty.)

The Australian dollar sat around US $0.75 the last couple of times I was down there.

I peeked back over the summer, and it was sitting around US $0.83.

Today I glance down, and it’s at US $0.92. That’s a big move — over 10 percent, just in the last few months.

If current trends continue (and thanks to enormous trade and budget deficits, they probably will), it may not be long before the Canadian dollar is joined by the Australian dollar in passing parity in its US exchange rate.

At least this one has kangaroos on it. Five of them, in fact. So, bouncy, at least.

Last year, Princeton economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman notably suggested that the dollar would eventually suffer a “Wile E. Coyote moment,” when dollar holders would suddenly notice they’d long ago run over the cliff and hadn’t had anything under their feet in some time.

Here’s a recent amplification on that, including a brief look at theories as to what’s keeping the coyote in the air, by one of Krugman’s colleagues, the head of Europe’s Centre for Economic Policy Research.

Yikes.

… to the reader who “The Studio” — John Gregory Dunne’s wry look at life inside 20th Century Fox circa 1968 — via the Wish List.

I’m fascinated by the way there’s nothing new in politics–it works essentially the same way in every country in every period. If you want proof of this, check out my post about how 18th century British politician Edmund Burke was talking about the importance of blogs 240 years ago.

Yesterday, while suggesting some things you might want to do with your time and money, I claimed MoveOn had not focused on preventing war with Iran. Nell of A Lovely Promise points out MoveOn sent out an alert at the same time I posted that saying they indeed ARE organizing against war with Iran. The entire email is on my site, but these are the basics of what they’re planning:

We’re proposing a major campaign to prevent another war. We’ll put retired generals on tour to convince political leaders and editorial boards that this war would be a disaster. We’ll run ads challenging the Administration. And we’ll press Congress to stand up to Bush.

You can donate money for the campaign here.

Also, why not write and call your senators to tell them to sustain Dodd’s possible filibuster against telecom immunity on FISA violations? The ACLU has set up a page here. Then, sign the Open Left letter to Harry Reid.

COMING UP: I tell you what kind of toothpaste to buy. Then, shoelaces. Soon you will need make no decisions of any kind, and we will all move together en masse to Guyana.

As you may have heard, October 22-26, 2007 is Islamo-”fascism” Awareness week. Apparently conservatives have nothing better to do than raise the “awareness” of a threat so horrible that it’s burned into the brains of everyone on 9/11. As a member of the decadent left, I find it odd that self-righteous, patronizing fools like David Horowitz seem to think that we are the ones who need reminding about the threat of Islamo-”fascists”. After all, when was the last time you heard a Republican ask “Why haven’t we caught Osama Bin Laden yet?”. I hear it asked all the time by my fellow liberals.

Then it dawned on me. Sure, we liberals are perfectly aware of the threat by Islamo-”fascists”, but we just aren’t wearing our frightened, quivering hearts on our sleeves enough for Horowitz and his fellow ass-kickers to notice. To our friends on the other side of the aisle, let me assure you that we hate terrorism in the only way I think you’ll understand :

Are you looking for things to do with yourself and your money? If so, here are some possible activities from my personal Approved List:

• Donate money to Just Foreign Policy. MoveOn and TrueMajority have not made stopping war with Iran a priority. Just Foreign Policy, a fairly new organization, has. (As you can tell, they focus purely on foreign policy.) Now they’re producing videos on Iran and a national tour with former NY Times reporter Stephen Kinzer, the author of All the Shah’s Men, about the US overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953. These moves are both wise and creative, so we should fork over some money.

Then, sign up to receive their updates.

• Sign the MoveOn petition calling for Congress not to give telecom companies immunity for wiretapping us illegally for the past six (?) years. It’s not impossible to win this one. And certainly doing so would make both the good guys and bad guys take notice. There’s a reason the Republicans (and many Democrats) are so anxious to destroy MoveOn.

A few weeks back, before my little vacation, I mentioned the story of the Connecticut schoolteacher who assigned a Dan Clowes graphic novel to a student who hadn’t completed an assignment, and after a little bout of public hysteria was subsequently forced to resign.

This is how the New Haven Register intially reported the story:

GUILFORD — The parents of a freshman student whose teacher resigned after he gave her a sexually explicit illustrated book said Wednesday their daughter has been the target of harassment from fellow students, and they want the school district to do more to clarify the issue with other parents.

The girl’s father, who asked that his family remain anonymous because it has already been the target of criticism, described the graphic novel that English teacher Nate Fisher gave the student as “borderline pornography.”

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