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100_0509, originally uploaded by lumberjack.

Life is good.

My crew

100_0506, originally uploaded by lumberjack.

The neighbors didn't know what hit them.

Numbers Numbers Numbers

Here's a good site for tracking the electoral vote.
It's so very much beats crayons and the road atlas.
Paint um all red George.

Halloween Fun

Cute flash pumpkin carver. Happy pumpkin everyone.

Kerry Says Saddam 'Might Be Gone' Had He Been President
Fri Oct 29 2004 10:02:35 ET

NBCNEWS Brokaw interviewed John Kerry Thursday evening.

Brokaw: "If you had been President, Saddam Hussein would be in power."

Kerry: "Not necessarily."

Brokaw: "You said you wouldn't go to war against him."

Kerry: "That's not true. Because under the inspection process, Saddam Hussein was required to destroy those kinds of materials and weapons."

Brokaw: "But he wasn't destroying them."

Kerry: "That's what you have inspectors for. That's why I voted for the threat of force, because he only does things when you have a legitimate threat of force. It's irresponsible to suggest that if I were President, he wouldn't be gone. He might be gone, because if he hadn't complied, we might have had to go to war, but if we did, we would have gone with allies, so the American people weren't carrying the entire burden. And the entire world would understand why we did it."

So except for the magical thinking that he would somehow get the bribed French and Russians behind our effort, Kerry is saying he pretty much agrees with the President's actions.

All American Athlete

It looks like Kerry is determined to play catch
on the nation's tarmacs until someone takes
a picture of him that makes him look, well.... better
than this.

Iraqs_WMD_Vol2scaled

Iraqs_WMD_Vol2scaled, originally uploaded by lumberjack.

From the report from the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD:

Possible Connections to
Terrorist/Insurgent Groups
ISG uncovered evidence of a possible connection
between Al Quds program director 'Imad 'Abd-al-
Latif Al Rida and terrorist/insurgent organizations.
In December 2003 after Coalition forces captured
Saddam Husayn, a source who worked on Al Quds
claimed that Dr. 'Imad had told him that four Al Quds
UAVs were to be used as "flying bombs" to assassinate
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

According to the source, four UAVs were to be
given to a former Hamas member named "Abu
Radin" who was a friend of Saddam Husayn. Abu
Radin, who was no longer loyal to Hamas, would
take the UAVs to Jordan, install 5 kg of C4 explosive,
and use them to attack Sharon at the Wailing
Wall in Jerusalem.

Although uncorroborated, this story is similar
to the well-documented Iraqi plan to use the Al
Musayara-20 UAV as a "flying bomb."
Additionally, a document obtained by ISG reveals that
on 23 December 2000, Dr. 'Imad signed a memorandum
with the Air Force and senior members of
the Fedayeen Saddam agreeing to develop helicopter
UAVs for the Fedayeen Saddam. This memo stated
that the project had been coordinated with Huwaysh
and the work would be a cooperative effort of MIC,
the Air Force, and Fedayeen Saddam.

During initial testing, the UAV was diffi cult to control
and the test deemed a failure. As a result, all
work was suspended on the helicopter UAV project.
The prototype was destroyed by cruise missiles on
the third day of OIF.

The Internet Was Made for This Sort of Thing

From the internet, where it's not uncommon to find an open letter to the guy who stole your camera:

To The Person Who Found My Camera
Dear Sir/Madam:

First of all, I'd like to congratulate you on the acquisition of a Casio Exilim S20 compact digital camera. No doubt it was an exciting find after your fine meal at Houston's on Park, where delicious spinach dip is the signature item.

As you may have noticed, the Casio Exilim is a 2.0 Megapixel beauty with a 4X digital zoom. At under a half-inch thick, it's the perfect camera to put in your pocket and lose while dining out.

No doubt, you're wondering why the memory card contains 17 close-ups of a cat's ass......

Forgive Ashlee Simpson

So what's a little lip-synching? I say we
forgive her. And if this keeps happening, then I
suggest we punish Cher.

Al Qaqaa Explosives

What are the chances that common sense will be used by any of the newspapers covering the missing Al Qaqaa explosives? Wouldn't you think that the average terrorist would feel pretty much stocked up after he stole his, oh, I don't know, first 20 tons of RDX? One pound of this stuff will bring down an airplane. Think you'd need 30 tons, you know, in case of a rainy day? And if the bad guys have this stuff, why are their roadside bombs still made from salvaged explosives from warheads? Why haven't the car bombs been bigger? Load a car to the gills with high explosives and you could have some pretty impressive body counts. Anyway, so now the report comes out for those who really can imagine terrorists making dozens of trips to the depot to get just the last scrap of high explosives:

(CNN) -- The mystery surrounding the disappearance of 380 tons of powerful explosives from a storage depot in Iraq has taken a new twist, after a network embedded with the U.S. military during the invasion of Iraq reported that the material had already vanished by the time American troops arrived.

NBC News reported that on April 10, 2003, its crew was embedded with the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division when troops arrived at the Al Qaqaa storage facility south of Baghdad.

While the troops found large stockpiles of conventional explosives, they did not find HMX or RDX, the types of powerful explosives that reportedly went missing, according to NBC.

The International Atomic Energy revealed Monday that it had been told two weeks ago by the Iraqi government that 380 tons of HMX and RDX disappeared from Al Qaqaa after Saddam Hussein's government fell.

In a letter to the IAEA dated October 10, Iraq's director of planning, Mohammed Abbas, said the material disappeared sometime after Saddam's regime fell in April 2003, which he attributed to "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."

Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003. According to NBC, troops from the 101st Airborne arrived the next day to find that the material was already gone.