Many people have been blasting the Hualapai Indians responsible for the opening of the brand new shiny walkway over the Grand Canyon. Now, I hate sullying our natural beauty as much as the next bleeding heart liberal, but doesn't this strike you as a TAD hypocritical? Let's recap: we come to your unspoiled eden of a continent, and proceed to systematically annihilate everything and one you hold dear. When we are done slaughtering you, we proceed to make and break treaties leaving you with small, token parcels of land, leading what remains of your once-proud culture to sink into unprecedented levels of alcoholism and poverty. In exchange, we give you casinos. A few hundred years of raping the land for profit later, when you are finally assimilated enough into the American way to do the same bloody thing, we point fingers and cry foul. Go us.

Oh, and we also managed to drive all of the brown-bar-ba-loots away in the interest of thneeds, which everyone needs. How I miss the brown-bar-ba-loots....

On a related note, Al Gore, who has his own gravitational pull at this point, testified before the House and Senate on global warming today. (Note to Al: If you are thinking of '08, lay off the cheetos.) Texas Rep. Joe Barton, the leading Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee apparently got into a testy exchange with the Veep, stating "You're not just off a little, you're totally wrong," and "Global warming science is uneven and evolving." On the bright side, gotta love the rebuttal from Gore: "If the crib's on fire, you don't speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action." All I have to say is, whatever cataclysmic event occurs in my lifetime, we are so asking for it.

Note to self: Develop flame-retardant baby.