Le Bag du Grab

-- Senator Dianne Feinstein of California is a wee bit upset with the idea that the Central Intelligence Agency was spying on the United States Congress (those not wishing to sully themselves with electrons from the National Review may click here for much the same information). To wit, Sen. Feinstein says that the agency looked at computers accessed by members of the panel she chairs, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, when the committee was investigating the CIA for something it did. The Committee thought the CIA should stop, the CIA didn't want to stop and so, Sen. Feinstein says, it snooped into the computers looking for a way to head off the investigation.

I also am not impressed with the CIA in this matter; one must question the judgment of any agency with the word "intelligence" in its title that believes such would be found in the United States Senate.

-- We may have an explanation for the sometimes...different...worldview of U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston. In a speech this week, she offered praise of the Constitution of the United States, which had governed us for "400 years." This has led some to conclude that Rep. Lee is actually from the 22nd century, a time in which said Constitution, adopted in 1787, might indeed have been around at least 400 years.

My own solution is that the Congresswoman is not from our future, but instead from a parallel universe. In this alternative Earth, the United States was indeed formed in the 17th century and the Constitution adopted in 1687. Also, the resolution of the Vietnam War was significantly different and there are still two Vietnams, as Rep. Lee suggested in 2010. And Neil Armstrong took an even bigger step for mankind than he did in our world, planting the flag of the United States on Mars instead of just the moon. Usually, Rep. Lee is able to conceal her allohistorical origins, but she occasionally slips up. I for one certainly hope that she is at some point able to return to her timeline and allow her counterpart to return to our universe, but I don't know if anyone is researching the topic.

They should be, of course. Because the alternative explanation is that the voters of Texas' 18th Congressional District send someone to Congress who is not simply presumed to be empty in the attic but proven to be so.

-- According to Harry Reid, multi-billionaires Charles and David Koch don't want the United States to help folks affected by fighting in the Ukraine. Or at least, they're ambivalent enough about it that they want to be sure they get some kind of tax break out of any deal that includes passage of a bill providing relief. Since the brothers previously allowed the Majority Leader of the United States Senate to mock the way the names of two private citizens is a homonym for a slang reference to cocaine, we might also surmise that the dingy gray smear that occasionally presides in the Senate is from another universe.

One in which neither thought nor decency ever developed.