Lost White Girl - Please Help!

Look, it's not that I'm unsympathetic. This disappearance of Natalee Holloway in Aruba is distressing, and will almost doubtlessly end in tragedy. Truly, can there be that much hope that she's even still alive at this point? Very sad. But it's been the lead story on CNN and the like for days on end now. And I can't help but wonder if this story would be getting nearly the endless and very substantial coverage it's getting now if this was a black girl from Los Angeles, or a poor Hispanic girl from the projects. As I said, it's not that I am trivializing this situation... but it's a pretty white girl from a very upscale wealthy neighborhood, so I think that has a lot to do with its prominence on the news.

Yeah, I know. I'm a cynical bastard. This is not news to me.

Meanwhile, George Bush has apparently given up on shoving his crappy Social Security plan down the nation's collective throat, having learned that bad ideas are a lot harder to sell when you can't dangle the specter of fear and uncertainty over everyone's heads. So with that firmly in mind, he's returned to his roots of using the fear of terrorism to push his agenda of shit onto the nation. That's right, kids, it's time to renew the loathsome PATRIOT Act. So Sheriff Bush has pulled out the ol' evil terrorist card because it's so obvious that if we don't infringe on citizens' rights, and if we don't work our way into having a national ID card system, if we don't profile airline passengers, and if we don't conduct 1,500 heretofore illegal wiretaps every day, those terrorists are gonna get us!

Not surprisingly, Bush's numbers continue to drop as more and more people are waking up out of their long stupor and figuring out that, hey, maybe this Iraq war wasn't such a great idea after all, and wow, we're probably not any safer from terrorism than we were before this all started... and maybe even less so.

1,700 dead American soldiers, scores of foreign citizens killed, and untold thousands of Iraqis -- military and civilians -- dead as well, and the only stories our media want to focus on for the last two months are the "runaway bride," the Tom Cruise affair of contrivance (and wow, that guy is everywhere lately, isn't he?), and now a missing high school girl in Aruba.

In local news, it's been a rather benevolent month of June so far, weather-wise. We've had somewhat regular rainfall, reasonable temperatures, and not a lot of really severe weather. Actually, I had to run the heat for a bit this morning. On June 11th! We had highs only in the upper 50s or so yesterday, and dipped down into the mid 40s last night. Some nice rain showers moved through this evening and another round came through about five hours later. I haven't had to water my lawn all week, which has been great. They're saying mid 80s by the end of next week, but forecasts beyond about 18-24 hours are notoriously inaccurate, and their chance of being correct decreases exponentially with each day out into the forecast. Time will tell.

Anyway, it's time for bed... tomorrow is the day for an annual champagne brunch that some friends of mine host down in Colorado Springs. It's always a great deal of fun... lots of good food, usually a couple of dozen people, and plenty of good wine and champagne.