Duke Cunningham (R - Rancho Santa Fe), the congressman from San Diego county who plead guilty to bribery and income tax evasion, is one greedy motherfucker. Check out the court papers (pdf) which describes what he allegedly took! $2.4 million in cash and prizes. And just think... all for a few votes. It's absolutely mind boggling.

I wonder who ratted him out... he must have been a really big dick to somebody.

"I am not aware of another case of bribery by a member of Congress involving anywhere near this amount of money. It is truly staggering," said Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

The case likely reinforces San Diego's position as the nation's new darling of public corruption. Indeed, the district attorney's corruption trial of six former city of San Diego pension officials kicked off Monday morning only a block away from the federal courthouse. Both the pension and Cunningham court hearings began at 9 a.m.

And former City Councilman Ralph Inzunza was sentenced to 21 months in prison less than three weeks ago in the same building where Cunningham softly answered a "yes, your honor" every time Judge Larry Alan Burns asked him if he admitted to committing bribery, fraud and tax evasion Monday.

The city still awaits the results of a nearly two-year parallel probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission and two wings of the Justice Department, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office. (Voice of San Diego)

Mariah Carey is fucking fake singing in a thanksgiving football half time show!

It's Farmer Boy's Boys in Temecula. The signs inside and outside of this restaurant state that they serve "The World's Greatest Burger". My opinion was that this restaurant did not serve me the world's greatest in terms of taste burger. What was I thinking? It's freakin' advertising! Companies have been using this form of hyperbole since forever.

Dubya has been defending his war in Iraq policy by saying the administration's critics had the same intelligence he had when he made the decision to go to war, and that to criticize now is tatamount to "re-writing history." (He also says that criticizing the policy now is anti-American and unpatriotic!) Well, in a NY Times editorial the paper repeated my conclusion: Bush and his surrogates are the ones rewriting history!

(Mick and Bianca Jagger) The official photographer of the British royal family died today from a stroke. Lord Lichfield took advantage of his royal "insiderness" and shot some of the most celebrated people of our time.

This is my friend Bridgit Decook. She is part of Sufjan Stevens' band, which recently concluded a tour of Europe in support of his recently released record, Illinois. See her extensive collection of pictures from the European tour.

Terrell Owen, the professional football player who was suspended from his team for bad behavior, is pictured walking in front his grassless, million-dollar home.

San Diego progressives have a lot of self-examination to do over the next three years. Donna Frye was defeated by Jerry Sanders in the city's mayoral race to replace Dick Murphy, who resigned after a few months into his second term, and it appears that low voter turnout was the culprit. Not only did Sanders beat Frye, but he demolished her. Sanders received 156658 votes or 53.87% to Frye's 134133 or 46.13%. It wasn't even close. In this city, registered Democrats outnumber registered republicans 39% to 33%. Progressives must have stayed at home yesterday.

Except for one of Schwarzenegger's four ballot initiatives, all passed in San Diego county. The one that didn't pass was the redistricting initiative. Statewide it was a defeat to the Republican governor. San Diego county, however, is still a bastion for Republican/conservative activism. If SD progressives and liberals put their votes where their mouths are, and went out and voted--like the county's Republicans do--the city would be a different this morning.

San Diego progressive who didn't vote in this election have nothing to complain to me about when City Hall goes up for sale to the developers and San Diego big business.

Dubya isn't looking too fine in this AP photo from Argentina, location of the Summit of the Americas. He's still being dogged by the Valerie Plame outing investigation, which has followed him to South America.

I'm a Firefox browser evangelist because it's superior to Microsoft's Internet Exploder (sic) in many ways. David Pogue, a technology columnist at the New York Times, interviewed Blake Ross, a youngster who helped launch Firefox. Here's a portion of that interview:

BR: Firefox is a Web browser. Kind of a competitor for Internet Explorer, but made for the average person. Made for people who don't want to spend all day cursing at the computer. We want you to surf the Web without worrying about spyware, viruses, or pop-up ads.


DP: And how were you, a bunch of volunteers, able to do this when the best and the brightest, highest paid programmers from Microsoft could not?


BR: First of all, they dropped the ball. Internet Explorer hasn't been updated since 2001. And so when Microsoft basically disbanded the Internet Explorer team, the Web started to outpace the Web browser.


We guide our development by what our users want, not by the dollar. You know, no other factors come into play except these features that people are asking for. So basically I go home and I say, "Hey, Mom, you know, what's still wrong with the internet? What's bothering you?" And she tells me.


DP: You ask your mom?


BR: Well, she'll yell at me. And I'll say, "Mom, calm down. What's wrong?" And then I'll fix that.


DP: I wonder why Bill Gates's mom couldn't do the same thing?


BR: Yeah (laughs).


DP: How does the open source movement work, and what was your role?


BR: Firefox is an open-source product, the result of tens of thousands of volunteers all over the world. People in Europe can be coordinating with people in the United States, can be coordinating with people in Africa. All putting the user input into this browser. It's really a global effort.


My role, along with another teammate at Netscape, was--we looked at this Mozilla browser and we said, "We have great technology here. But nobody's using it. What's the problem there?"


And talking to other users, we found out that it was just too hard for them to use. So we just stripped everything out of Mozilla. And we redesigned features and the entire user interface to streamline everything-- to make it as simple as possible.


DP: So are you getting rich?


BR: I'm not making a dime off of Firefox. But it's enough for me to get an email from a grandfather in Mississippi telling me that he can finally get on the Web and communicate with his grandchildren.


Of course, Firefox itself opened up a world of possibilities for me personally. You know, I'm working on a start-up right now. It's much easier to get funded. It's much easier to get my name out there than it used to be.


DP: What I can't understand is, when I was a teenager, I had more than enough other stuff like social life and learning to drive and going to school and everything else. How are you able to do something of this magnitude while you're 14, 15, 16?


BR: Basically, I had to sacrifice any semblance of a normal social life while I was in high school. I just kind of gave up, you know, parties and going out with friends. All of it went toward this project. I think it's paying off now.


DP: All of the people that we're talking for this story started in their early teens. And all of them made their marks in Internet-related fields. Is the Internet what's allowing very young people to achieve extraordinary things? Or could smart, ambitious people have made their mark in some other area at that young an age?


BR: Yeah, the Internet is really the great equalizer. It really levels the playing field. There's absolutely nothing else stopping me from writing a great piece of software and just putting it out there on the Web for anyone to use. And it doesn't matter if it came from a 50- year-old experienced software developer or it came from a 19-year-old kid in California. If it's good software, people will use it.

"In my administration, we will ask not only what is legal but what is right, not just what the lawyers allow but what the public deserves," presidential candidate George W. Bush said while campaigning Oct. 26, 2000.



Bush's reliance on faulty military intelligence as the main reason for warring in Iraq, his administration's attempts to seek revenge on those who would publicly oppose his decisions, and the use of torture--and its approval of use from higher ups--are just some of the contradictions to the above campaign promise this man has offered to his minions of unsuspecting lemmings.

The president has no credibility, and his lack of truthfulness and honesty--tenets which are supposedly held in high regard for men of women of evangelical faiths--is causing great harm onto this country's ability to mobilize the world against extremism. This president is a lame duck in every sense of the word. Some have suggested Bush be impeached and tried for high crimes, some of which have caused the death of countless innocents.

I have just been notified that a fish fry will take place at Sparky's this Sunday starting around 10 A.M. in conjunction with the San Diego Chargers/New York Jets football game.