Here's my first try at a blog entry and I have been away for a week...well, 'away' is a manner of speaking: I have been on jury duty. But what an exciting week it has been!

First, it was Janice Rogers Brown who was confirmed to the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. Judge Brown has on several occasions argued that, in reaching their decisions, judges should look to 'higher authorities' rather than legal precedent or the letter of the law. Go figure!

A day later, William Holcombe Pryor Jr. was confirmed to the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, covering Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. Judge Pryor has called Roe v. Wade "the worst abomination of constitutional law" in history; he has also compared the right to same-sex relations to the right to bestiality and necrophilia. One can only be terrified at the prospect of a Bush appointment to the US Supreme Court.

And then there was Philip Cooney. Mr Cooney until very recently served as chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. He resigned last Friday over the brouhaha over his having edited government climate reports in ways that play down the direct links between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. Immediately before his White House stint, Mr Cooney was a staff attorney at the American Petroleum Institute and a lobbyist against limits on, guess!, greenhouse gas emissions. We now learn Mr. Cooney was hired by ExxonMobil. "Perhaps he won't even notice he has changed jobs," said David G. Hawkins, the director of the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council. But this is not about Mr. Cooney. It’s about Bush and Cheney and their demented plan to please their corporate buddies by undoing regulations, put in place over the course of several decades to protect the environment.

Nobody seems to care. People seem content getting fat sitting on their butt reading Time Magazine (if that!) and watching reality shows on TV. It’s all rather surreal, I say.

If all this gets you depressed, go for something funny instead !