Bush’s Refrain on Iraq Joined by a Smaller and Smaller Chorus To illustrate the progress in Iraq, Bush ticked off statistics on the Iraqi security forces (200 operations in two weeks), the number of Iraqi battalions (more than 130, covering 30,000 square miles), the number of tips (4,000 in December), the number of weapons caches and bomb plants found (1,800), and the amount spent to defeat improvised explosives ($3.3 billion). He declared that the Iraqi police academy “will include many, many more Sunnis.” Wait a minute. This is The Shotgun Approach. The strategery by which poorly prepared college or post-collegiate…
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BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin gets around, finally, to making this observation: “We are being lied to.” Yep, we sure are. Finally, several days after I first heard part but not all of it, here is the link to This American Life’s Guantanamo report, “Habeas Schmabeas.” This is the one where part of it, in explanation of the origin of the legal concept of habeas corpus, entails a visit to Westminster Abbey. I was wrong about the guide, his name is Tony, and thus is not the same one we had when we visited the Abbey year before last. And remember, the…
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Huffington Post, that haven for lefty slebs, has a new blogger, and I say “Right on, right on, see you at the barricades.” The Blog | George Clooney: I Am a Liberal. There, I Said It! | The Huffington Post The fear of (being) criticized can be paralyzing. Just look at the way so many Democrats caved in the run up to the war. In 2003, a lot of us were saying, where is the link between Saddam and bin Laden? What does Iraq have to do with 9/11? We knew it was bullshit. Which is why it drives me…
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I just sneezed, extra-juicily, all over it. Gah. So, yes. Still sick, but not as a dog. Maybe I’m just sick as a cat – cute sneezes, lying around all day, demanding to be fed, etc. At least there have been no hairballs, yet. I’m going to try to add in the “Recent Comments” thing again later. It stopped working, and I couldn’t figure out if it was related to an upgrade somewhere, a plugin conflict, or what. I’ll probably be stopping by Learning Moveable Type’s tutorial to figure it out. Spoke to Mom on the phone – she sounds…
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It’s been raining and thundering and lightning off and on for a couple of hours. Just now, things started to get very noisy outside – heavy rain… WHOA! We lost power for a couple of minutes after a lightning strike very close by. Suddenly, I was completely in the dark, which is not all that uncommon for me, frankly. After a few seconds my eyes adjusted enough to find the proper keys on my laptop to hibernate, so I pulled the plug and shut down. Grabbed a flashlight, because I had heard David holler and figured he was down in…
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This is some of what I’ve been tweaking and playing around with on Flickr. I keep tinkering around, though, and I really need to get the Maui blog entry finished and published. Maybe today or tomorrow? I’ve got more surfing photos, but so far I like this one the best. Via: Flickr Title: Satori 2-28-2006 4-42-45 PM 874×701 By: GinnyRED57 Originally uploaded: 11 Mar ’06, 6.04am PST This guy was so relaxed, he could have been meditating. He was one with the wave.
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Teresa Nielsen Hayden has posted a “differently illegible” version of her nielsenhayden.com: tangible artifacts | CafePress” href=”http://www.cafepress.com/nielsenhayden.11458217″>blue on yellow nutbar T-shirt at CafePress I’m tempted, it’s a great design. And then, of course, the yellow indicates that I’m a happy, optimistic person. I heard about this on WWDTM this morning, then when I saw the nutbar-yellow T-shirt just now thought “Wall-la! I want a T-shirt that shows I may be a nutbar conspiracy theorist, but I’m an optimistic one.”
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Prisoners without Trials – Blumner: Treatment of Guantanamo prisoners unprecedented in U.S. In the 1660s, England’s Lord Clarendon was in the habit of sending prisoners to remote islands and military garrisons in order to put them out of reach of the due process protections afforded by English courts. For these misdeeds, Clarendon was impeached, and in 1679 Parliament passed the Habeas Corpus Act, which made it illegal to ship prisoners away to deprive them of their rights. It appears the Bush administration never got that memo. Just an “oh ho!” moment after following up on a detail from This American…
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BBC NEWS | Americas | Shoe alert shuts New York airport New York’s LaGuardia airport was evacuated and flights were halted for about two hours after a man’s shoe set off a false alarm during screening. A search was launched for the man after he was allowed to pass through security despite setting off the alarm for explosives residue. Oh, so that’s what it was. The really troubling thing is that after he was selected for secondary screening, he put his shoes on and walked away. Somebody screwed up, royally, by not keeping an eye on him the whole time,…