Oh, and I finally picked up Loudain Wainwright III's album, The Last Man on Earth, and I love it to pieces. Most of the songs are about death, his mother's death in particular, which is of course up my alley. I like his wry sense of humor. It's a little strange to notice all the cross-references in his and his son's (Rufus Wainwright's) albums. I can't help but think about each in relation to the other. I do wonder, though, if he stands by his claim in the song "The Last Man on Earth" that he doesn't "give a damn which idiot runs this country" after what has happened in the last few years (I think the album was recorded back in 2000 or early 2001, before 9/11).

I'm reading the book Terrorism and Tyranny by James Bovard, which is primarily about the Bush administration's response to 9/11, particularly its curtailing of civil liberties via the Patriot Act. The first few chapters discuss the first war on terrorism during the Reagan administration and how subsequent administrations failed to act responsibly towards the threats of bin Laden and Al Qaida, leading up to the W. Bush administration's willful ignorance and lack of action before September 11th. It's been good to recap the events leading up to 9/11, especially since the 9/11 commission hearings took place today and will continue tomorrow. Although the Clinton administration certainly had their fuckups (its handling of the first WTC bombing, its failure to procure bin Laden after Sudan offered to capture him, the useless bombing of an abandoned Sudanese pharmaceutical factory), at least Richard Clarke appeared to realize the magnitude of the Al-Qaida terrorist threat at the time that the Bush administration took over, although he and George Tenet were apparently ignored by Dr.Rice and the rest of Bush's administration. Ugh. This is probably old news, but I missed a lot of these details the first time around (due to the stress of newly starting medical school, I guess), and am pretty horrified as I read about them now. Not to mention how ridiculously scary and unconstitutional the Patriot Act is, and how proposals for amendments were promptly shot down, and how it was rushed for approval before most of the signers even had a chance to read it.