But Freedom, I hardly knew ye...

Smells like idiots with authority to me... sniff sniff.


"A man trying to pay a fee using $2 bills was arrested, handcuffed and taken to jail after clerks at a Best Buy store questioned the currency's legitimacy and called police.

According to an account in the Baltimore Sun, 57-year-old Mike Bolesta was shocked to find himself taken to the Baltimore County lockup in Cockeysville, Md., where he was handcuffed to a pole for three hours while the U.S. Secret Service was called to weigh in on the case.

Bolesta told the Sun: "I am 6 feet 5 inches tall, and I felt like 8 inches high. To be handcuffed, to have all those people looking on, to be cuffed to a pole – and to know you haven't done anything wrong. And me, with a brother, Joe, who spent 33 years on the city police force. It was humiliating."

After Best Buy personnel reportedly told Bolesta he would not be charged for the installation of a stereo in his son's car, he received a call from the store saying it was in fact charging him the fee. As a means of protest, Bolesta decided to pay the $114 bill using 57 crisp, new $2 bills.

As the owner of Capital City Student Tours, the Baltimore resident has a hearty supply of the uncommon currency. He often gives the bills to students who take his tours for meal money.

"The kids don't see that many $2 bills, so they think this is the greatest thing in the world," Bolesta says. "They don't want to spend 'em. They want to save 'em. I've been doing this since I started the company. So I'm thinking, 'I'll stage my little comic protest. I'll pay the $114 with $2 bills.'"

Bolesta explained what happened when he presented the bills to the cashier at Best Buy Feb. 20.

"She looked at the $2 bills and told me, 'I don't have to take these if I don't want to.' I said, 'If you don't, I'm leaving. I've tried to pay my bill twice. You don't want these bills, you can sue me.' So she took the money – like she's doing me a favor."

Bolesta says the cashier marked each bill with a pen. Other store employees began to gather, a few of them asking, "Are these real?"

"Of course they are," Bolesta said. "They're legal tender."

According to the Sun report, the police arrest report noted one employee noticed some smearing of ink on the bills. That's when the cops were called. One officer reportedly noticed the bills ran in sequential order.

Said Bolesta: "I told them, 'I'm a tour operator. I've got thousands of these bills. I get them from my bank. You got a problem, call the bank.' I'm sitting there in a chair. The store's full of people watching this. All of a sudden, he's standing me up and handcuffing me behind my back, telling me, 'We have to do this until we get it straightened out.'

"Meanwhile, everybody's looking at me. I've lived here 18 years. I'm hoping my kids don't walk in and see this. And I'm saying, 'I can't believe you're doing this. I'm paying with legal American money.'"

Bolesta was taken to the lockup, where he sat handcuffed to a pole and in leg irons while the Secret Service was called.

"At this point," he says, "I'm a mass murderer."

Secret Service agent Leigh Turner eventually arrived and declared the bills legitimate, adding, according to the police report, "Sometimes ink on money can smear."

Commenting on the incident, Baltimore County police spokesman Bill Toohey told the Sun: "It's a sign that we're all a little nervous in the post-9/11 world.""

- It's called paranoia, Big Bill, and unfortunately we little people are all too familiar with it now thanks to backwards thinkers like your little police farce.

Sorry Cindy, we all failed you...

She's right, you know... It kinda feels like the end of the innocence. Big Daddy George and his cabinet of horror have, thus far, brought our great and powerful system to it's knees in America. Now even the once vigilant Cindy Sheehan has had enough. She's packing it in and calling it quits. Game over man, game over...

The following is quoted from CNN...

(CNN) -- Cindy Sheehan, the California mother who became an anti-war leader after her son was killed in Iraq, declared Monday she was walking away from the peace movement.

She said her son died "for nothing."

Sheehan achieved national attention when she camped outside President Bush's home in Crawford, Texas, throughout August 2005 to demand a meeting with the president over her son's death.

While Bush ignored her, the vigil made her one of the most prominent figures among opponents of the war.

But in a Web diary posted to the liberal online community Daily Kos on Monday, Sheehan said she was exhausted by the personal, financial and emotional toll of the past two years.

She wrote that she is disillusioned by the failure of Democratic politicians to bring the unpopular war to an end and tired of a peace movement she said "often puts personal egos above peace and human life."

Casey Sheehan, a 24-year-old Army specialist, was killed in an April 2004 battle in Baghdad. His death prompted his mother to found Gold Star Families for Peace.

But in Monday's 1,200-word letter, titled, "Good Riddance Attention Whore," Sheehan announced that her son "did indeed die for nothing."

"I have tried ever since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful," she wrote. "Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives.

"It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years, and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most."

Cindy Sheehan's sister, DeDe Miller, told CNN that the group would continue working for humanitarian causes, but drop its involvement in the anti-war movement. As for her sister's letter, Miller said, "She cried for quite a bit after writing it."

Sheehan warned that the United States was becoming "a fascist corporate wasteland," and that onetime allies among Bush's Democratic opposition turned on her when she began trying to hold them accountable for bringing the 4-year-old war to a close.

In the meantime, she said her antiwar activism had cost her her marriage, that she had put the survivor's benefits paid for her son's death and all her speaking and book fees into the cause and that she now owed extensive medical bills.

"I am going to take whatever I have left and go home," she wrote. "I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost.

"I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble."

Innocence

This is so fucking sad I almost couldn't stand to blog about it, however, it needs to be read by as many people as possible. The war in Iraq has cost not only trillions (yes I said trillions) of dollars, and the resources of virtually the entire known world to get absolutely nowhere in making the country A) safer B) democratic C) livable. That isn't even counting the cost of human life that has climbed by the hundreds daily for the last 4 years. That number has been bandied between 80,000 (by the Bush cafe of course) and 2 million. Now in contrast to that staggering figure, one life doesn't seem as monumentally immediate. I call bullshit on that kind of thinking.

This is Samar Saed Abdullah and her plight is a tragic and all too common one. 25 years old and sitting on death row in Iraq is a fate I can't imagine. When you consider her probable innocence, and the fact that she was tried and convicted all in one day, the story becomes even more harrowing. CNN has a few details here: INNOCENCE

Please let's all make some waves about this heartbreaking story. One of thousands just like it coming out of a place that we're supposedly making safer and more democratic. Seems to me the only thing we're helping the Iraqiis do is get rid of their oil, and cheap.

My Blog

Rod Stewart... Storm Trooper

Seems like all I ever do nowadays is sit around cursing the same 6 pseudo-news websites: Fark, Digg, Perez Hilton, Drudge, Defamer, CNN... And only rarely do I even attempt to give a shit about any of it. Is it just me or is art getting serious and the news getting comically absurd?

Anyway, throughout my day here by the window, facing the brutish Los Angeles skyline, people will send me links to sites with everything from diddle-di-do to damned if I know. Whomever sent me the following link to Brandon Bird's stunning website has a free lunch coming. Don't get too excited, we're eating KFC.

www.brandonbird.com

Brandon Bird is a modern day Dali. Unless you're a total jerk-bag with no balls or sense of humor at all, I'll bet money you'll laugh out loud at least once simply looking through his site. Without giving too much away I'll say this... It's like a time machine strapped to a TV Guide, set on "mish-mash". Beautiful just beautiful. Harrison Ford just wants to play Sega dammit.

Click here to read more...

Monday

Holy shit mondays suck... at least in America. I was wondering (as I dragged my half-dead, hungover ass out of bed this morning) if the same feeling goes on in other countries. Do they work monday through friday in France? What about Russia? Mondays in Mongolia must be a bitch...

Anyway, submitted for your perusal, a tall cool glass of 'fucking hilarious' to wash down that shit sandwich we all eat on Mondays.