The Notorious District Six turned themselves in at 5 am this morning. After a series of bureaucratic fuck ups at MPD headquarters that caused them to be held for 8 hours, each posted $100 bond and was released.

“I hope that counts for our fine,” Joel Gardner, the imfamous Karl Rove mooner said, referring to the outcome of his plea agreement in the face of a disorderly conduct charge. “We might have to pay another $100, plus like $500 each for the lawyer.”

Because this media-savvy bunch turned themselves in on a national holiday, we can’t get ahold of their mugshots until tomorrow. Thanks, dicks.

Previous Posts:
Karl Rove to spend retirement persecuting AU students who showed him their asses
Assgate Heats Up
Blue Moonin’
Notorious District Six to turn themselves in on Monday

Nice hat.
After spending a semester making music in eastern Alaska, who wouldn’t seek out troubadour Zach Condon (of Beirut fame) and A Hack And A Hacksaw‘s Heather Trost? With the appropriately-named Alaska in Winter, Brandon Bethancourt did just that, the end result being his first LP, “Dance Party In The Balkans.”

First of all: one of the best album titles of the year. Already, you half-expect stomping on old, dirty floorboards in some obscure Eastern European town with a troupe of traveling gypsies. Or is that just me? Either way, the imagery works. The album itself marries East(ern European) to West(ern European), combining the Balkan-influenced instrumentals with synths and vocoders. Lots and lots of vocoder. In fact, it can get a bit much; it’s like that damned Imogen Heap song infused itself with 80 percent of “Dance Party.” Unlike Imogen Heap, Bethancourt’s vocals are actually more delicate and more appropriate, especially when they’re in put in conjunction with very subtle piano and relatively unaltered (and currently unidentified) female vocals in “Horsey Horse.”

I think that most people would agree that the last track off of “Dance Party” is the best. Featuring a singing Zach Condon, it might sound a bit discrediting of Bethancourt’s abilities to call “Close Your Eyes We Are Blind” the album’s best, but the combined use of Condon’s slightly-strained vocals with Bethancourt’s vocoder along with the instrumentation plays off well and makes it the richest of the tracks. Enjoy.

Featured Song: “Dance Party in the Balkans” by Alaska in Winter

Download: “Dance Party in the Balkans” by Alaska in Winter

Featured Song: “Close Your Eyes We Are Blind” by Alaska in Winter

Download: “Close Your Eyes We Are Blind” by Alaska in Winter

A Colorado Springs elementary school recently announced a ban on a timeless playground pastime – tag. While not the first school in the country to ax the game, the addition of Discovery Canyon Campus Elementary is indicative of a growing trend: the sissification of America.

When asked about the ban, Assistant Principal Cindy Fesgen claimed that “it causes a lot of conflict on the playground” and an apparent increase in tattletailing:

“Well, I don’t want to be chased, but he won’t stop chasing me, or she won’t stop chasing me.”

The kids are still free to run as long as no one is running in front of them. While the notion of “tag, you’re IT!” is now only a very distant, painful memory for these fortunate elementary students, Discover Canyon is also spearheading a brave new educational model, mainly that:

Life is fair.

Conflict is both unsavory and outdated.

When encountering conflict, complain loud and long until someone else does something about it.

Forget personal negotiation.

Because life is fair. And let’s none of us waste our time trying to solve the actual problems surrounding our mediocre-at-best public education system.

Featured Song: “We Are The World” by USA for Africa

Source:
Springs elementary gives tag a timeout

Ordinarily, your humble editors here at Culture Warrior would revel in the destruction and public humiliation of someone like Larry Craig. Back in October of 2006, when deviant gay sex among Republican members of Congress was new, we reveled in the sinking of Rep. Mark Foley and, with him, Republican Control of Congress. Craig is a closeted gay man who, over his years in the Senate, hasn’t been particularly gay friendly. He, of course, is your typically “family oriented” conservative Republican and in a particularly hypocritical move, he voted to censure openly gay Rep. Barney Frank for having sex with a prostitute. Craig also has a long history of having anonymous sex with men in public restrooms, as revealed last year by a gay rights blogger. So by all counts, we should be having a ball with this. And yet, there is something unmistakably sad about Larry Craig’s situation and it’s ruining all our fun.

Once, before eating dinner at the Diner in Adams Morgan, we went to wash our hands in the men’s room. After a moment at the sink, a gentleman in the bathroom stall pushed the door open enough to reveal that he was vigorously masturbating, querying, “wanna come suck this dick?” That, friends, is public lewdness, and certainly the kind of thing we would hope law enforcement would try and keep a handle on in public places. The kind of foot-tapping, wide-stance bullshit that got Larry Craig into this mess seems to be a far more predatory preoccupation for police. This is America, and if two consenting adult individuals want to get their fuck on in the privacy of a bathroom stall, that seems to us to be their God-given right. We really hate to be defending this guy, you know, because we think he’s an asshole, but since we can’t enjoy this we have no choice but to try and spoil it for you too.

The second thing. The list of Republican elected officials and political appointees under investigation for corruption is staggeringly long. In the past two years there have been dozens of persons of interest, un-indicted co-cospirators, resignations, convictions and jail sentences. Most of this administration’s major decision makers are criminals, from the Vice President on down (We give Bush a pass – we’re strong believers in animal rights and, as smart as chimps are, we don’t really feel they have the very human sort of awareness necessary to commit a crime and therefore can’t be put on trial). You also have guys like Ted Stevens, in the Senate for decades and corrupt just about every second of it, but it’s Larry Craig who gets thrown out in three days just tapping his foot in a bathroom stall.

He’s gone, and the GOP is probably going to lose that seat and so, fine, we’ll take it. But honestly. There’s a war on.

Condi tells Congress that it’s the ‘motion of the ocean’ that matters.

Any questions about the judgment of those running the executive branch should be put to rest as attention turns to the salvaging of legacies. A piece in today’s New York Times looks at a relatively unphased, if not completely culpable, member of the Bush administration’s ecforts to sace her place in history. Though Condoleeza Rice will probably prove more adept at this particular task than George Bush, posterity will unlikely remember what most of these people do after January 2009. No matter how reformed an image Condi puts forth in the coming years, the most indluential years are behind her, culminating in her 2003 statement, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” The fact that no such cloud would ever have been possible will be lost on no one.

In her last months as Secretary of State, Condi is trying to turn her record around by focusing on Arab-Israeli peace and containment of North Korea, doing the kind of work that could easily have been achieved in the first months of 2001, when diplomacy was replaced by arrogance and delusion. These current efforts and xertaibl welcomed and long overdue, but sadly for Condi’s legacy, too little too late on issues too peripheral to the damage she helped wreak. For Rice, as well as for Bush and whoever else associated with this White House seeks redemption, only a realistic look at Iraq, acceptance of responsibility and a concerted effort to extricate American combat forces would give these players a chance not to be completely rebuked by history. Anything less is more of the same.