One Down, Two to Go

Yahoo! or at least half a yahoo, Hoo! Scientists, what would we do without them, now say that time travel is possible. At least according to their newest model. Course that model will change next week, but for now:

Quantum behaviour is governed by probabilities. Before something has actually been observed, there are a number of possibilities regarding its state. But once its state has been measured..... blah, blah, blah

Who cares about the blah-blah? Time travel is the first of the three things I need to "repair" my disastrous high-school career. Now all I need is a garden hose and a flatbed truck. OK, and maybe some duct tape.

NYT

Fraud and abuse has been a part of government contracting since forever. It's there because contracting is regulated by a set of rules and regulations. Anyone who is willing to bend and break the rules has an advantage and can make money for a time. I've been a contractor for over twenty years and I can guarantee you, nothing changes when a different president takes the helm.

Anyway, to the NYT it's just an opportunity to bash-Bush, and praise D's. Thing is, when you get this blatant, your credibility suffers:

Rep. Waxman is wisely working to map the dimensions of fraud and waste.

I'm sure they meant to say 'the wonderful Rep. Waxman is wisely working'.

Suspect Sought

I guess they're identifying this man as a "person of interest" in the anti-Obama graffiti incident in Orlando. He was seen leaving the area in a Volvo. "Driving slower than anyone I've ever seen," according to one witness.

Because You Asked for It

Best part: "Barbie doll and towel, not included."

No Green Foods Allowed

In a symbolic gesture, I cooked anti-Democratic Convention tonight. I'm sure you've read about their happy-healthy-holistic-ultra-green convention. Why, it will be so pure and wonderful, we probably won't need a president once it's done - everything will be fixed and butterflies will fill the skies.

DENVER — Warning to Southern delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver this August: it will be a no-fry zone.

As part of the effort to make the August 25-28 convention the greenest ever, the Democrats' guidelines for food catering include one that strikes at the heart of Southern cuisine: no fried food.

No fried chicken. No fried catfish. No fried green tomatoes. No fried okra. No fried anything.

In promoting healthy eating habits, the Democratic guidelines say every meal should be nutritious and include "at least three of the following colors: red, green, yellow, purple/blue and white."

Yeah? Well take this, DNC. This is the Spam I got a month or so back, when the news media was offering it as a cure for poverty. There's more salt there than I've used on my driveway in the last six winters. Take that Howard Dean.

By the way, the yellow mixed in with the Spam is crushed pineapple. And of course you can see the vegetables, including, just to fancy it up, little tiny ears of corn. They're there mainly to throw, to get my wife's attention as I fall to the ground, clutching my chest. Mmmmm salt. It was darned good.

Krugman on Oil

To paraphrase Barbie: "Economics is hard." And global economics is even harder, so us amateurs have to defer to the guys with the bigger brains. One I'm listening to is Paul Krugman; mainly because what he is saying about speculation in oil futures rings true with my understanding of how markets work.

Bottom line: speculators never burn a drop of oil. Any artificial changes they create in the daily price of oil can influence the behavior of both suppliers and users somewhat but it is not the driving force. Supply and demand are heart of it.

Cracking down on speculators won't increase supplies. Drilling will.

Project Make McCain Exciting

I think we can love McCain by November if we start taking baby-steps in that direction now.

Move America Forward - From the Frontlines

I'm making this a new post so that it will show up in searches. My video feed is still here. Several people have asked about making donations outside of the care packages. Yes, it can be done:

Phone-in donations- (866) 866-6372

(you might get put on hold for a few minutes)

Move America Forward

A reminder: the From the Frontlines web-a-thon is today at 4:00 PM Eastern.

We’ve got a star-studded line-up of troops, military charities, celebs, and talk radio stars — from Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin to Dr. Laura and Laura Ingraham to musician John Ondrasik and “Lone Survivor” author and Navy SEAL hero Marcus Luttrell — who’ll be joining us in our eight-hour marathon fund-raising drive to help send the largest number of care packages in history to our men and women in uniform serving overseas.

Upstream TV link


***Update: If you tried the site earlier and got Donald Duck sounds, try again -- it's been fixed. If you get too much garble, you might try hitting pause, waiting, then hitting play again.

Also-Donate here.

Phone-in donations- (866) 866-6372

Transitional Fossils Discovered

I was afraid of this; as more fossils are discovered, we come closer and closer to Understanding Everything. Which, Understanding, of course holds that if there was evolution, there can be no God. And, it follows that the Ultimate Authority will most likely "evolve" to become a small committee, meeting somewhere near Berkley, California.


Those of us who fear lightning are withholding judgment.

Madonna Gets Divorced

Didja see? Madonna is retaining Fiona Shackleton, Paul McCartney's divorce lawyer. So what does that mean to me? Well, probably that I should stop by Circuit City on the way home -- I usually keep TV's about the same amount of time as Madonna keeps husbands, or boyfriends, or sperm donors.

See? Celebrities do serve a purpose, if only to remind us when it's time to upgrade our appliances. Another helpful celebrity is Geena Davis. She's very helpful in determining when it's time to upgrade your computer. I start visiting the Mac store when I hear that she's dating someone new.

MSM, and Coverage of Iraq

A cynical guy might think that news coverage went down because the news got better:

According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The “CBS Evening News” has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s “World News” and 74 minutes on “NBC Nightly News.”

Sure, there's the argument that bad-news is news, and people don't care so much about good news. I say how do you know that unless you report the good news once in awhile?

Remember Cherenkoff? For three years he reported what the MSM wouldn't: good news. Sure, there has been bad news, some days more bad than good. But the good always got left out of the main stream media coverage. Now that the bad news is drying up, they'd just as soon not cover Iraq at all.

BTW, from May 19th, Iraq The Model, regarding the operation in Mosul:

As in Basra, the government gave an ultimatum for militants to hand in their weapons and offered amnesty to those not involved in crimes involving murder in order to make the operation as bloodless as possible. And indeed reports indicate that scores of militants have already handed in their weapons - an encouraging sign in a turbulent city that hardly ever trusted the government.

Among the results of the operation was the discovery of many weapons caches, which included several thousands of pounds of explosives and hundreds of rockets and artillery/mortar rounds. The amount may sound small given what’s expected to be found in a city that is the last urban stronghold of al-Qaeda, but it’s still an encouraging start since the operation began only a week ago.

Another important thing that distinguishes this operation from previous ones is the active participation of the infant Iraqi air force through transportation and daily reconnaissance sorties. Iraqi officers say that this is the first time they are able to rely on the Iraqi air force for valuable live imagery of the spread-out city.

Some of the critics of the operation noted that announcing the operation before its launch gave al-Qaeda a chance to leave the city for other places, including neighboring countries, thus enabling them to dodge the strike which might waste the chance to crush them in their last remaining stronghold. I personally disagree with this argument. What matters, after all, is to clean the city of al-Qaeda, preferably without fighting. This illustrates a very important trend that we first saw in the Baghdad operations last year; that al-Qaeda now knows that it cannot afford to confront the security forces anymore. Now, instead of digging in and fighting “glorious battles” in Fallujah or elsewhere, al-Qaeda is more inclined to run away than fight. This is a true sign of al-Qaeda’s weakening and of their ultimate defeat.

Give me good news any day.

James Fagen Video

Many have noted the inability of the MSM to note party affiliation when it's a Democrat being an ass. The latest example of this is Rep James Fagan, a (D) representative in the Massachusetts state legislature. Regarding "Jessica's Law", which would mandate a 20 year sentence for child rapists, he said he would

“rip apart” 6-year-old victims on the witness stand and “make sure the rest of their life is ruined.”

In a fiery soliloquy on the House floor, Fagan said he’d grill victims so that, “when they’re 8 years old they throw up; when they’re 12 years old, they won’t sleep; when they’re 19 years old, they’ll have nightmares and they’ll never have a relationship with anybody.”

So he's an ass, he's a Democrat, but I repeat myself... OK, that's unfair, I'm sure his comments appall some Democrats too. I would just like the news media to identify party affiliation consistently.

h/t: James Taranto

***Update: From Pat R, a list of Mr Fagen's affiliations:

ORGANIZATIONS: Massachusetts Academy of Trial Lawyers; Taunton Boys & Girls Club (Board of Directors); Taunton Little League; Taunton Youth Basketball Coach; Massachusetts Bar Foundation; Massachusetts Waterfowlers, Inc.; Babe Ruth League; High School Umpire; Bristol Ducks Unlimited; Southeastern New England Area Boys' Clubs of America (past Chairman).

Lots of child centered orgs for a man who can speak that way about how he would treat child rape victims.

Let's Be Fair

Did you see the story on Dobson attacking Barack Obama's understanding of Christianity? I'm not so sure we need to dissect every nuance of his beliefs:

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) - As Barack Obama broadens his outreach to evangelical voters, one of the movement's biggest names, James Dobson, accuses the likely Democratic presidential nominee of distorting the Bible and pushing a "fruitcake interpretation" of the Constitution.

See, I don't think you have to get every detail right. My God already knows I'm fallible. I might get some things wrong. That's not to say that mistakes shouldn't be corrected as our understanding evolves. Take this page from a Trinity United comic book for example. Can you spot the mistake?:

(clickabiggen) (of course, this was a LJ production.
Don't e-mail it all over the place claiming it's real)
(unless you really can't help yourself)

***Update: Another one:

New-kular Weapons

Remember the National Intelligence Estimate from December of last year? The one that stated that Iran's nuclear weapons program was halted in 2003, and that "We judge with high confidence that Iran will not be technically capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015." Call it the "let's keep the cowboy from getting tough with Iran" report.

Well, now :

The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said Iran could create a nuclear weapon in six months.

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei spoke on Al-Arabiya television on June 20, discussing Iran's nuclear program, and the potential for the Middle Eastern country to produce a nuclear weapon.

ElBaradei says that the IAEA inspectors would have to be kicked out first, but I'm not so sure. Is the IAEA sure there are no clandestine facilities in operation?

Those Damned Kids

"You can't always write a chord ugly enough to say
what you want to say, so sometimes you have
to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream."
-Frank Zappa

(clickabiggen)

Yee-Haaaa!

Sticky Note

Hello Weekly Standard visitors - the Pooh graphic is here.
(or scroll down to "Pooh Security Update") And thanks for visiting.

***Update: Used to be, you could put any date and time on your Blogger posts. (and many of us got rich giving ourselves stock tips in the future, ok, no we didn't. Problem was, we never believed ourselves) But anyway, Blogger changed it. Now you can only post in the present or the past, so you can't future-post a Sticky Note and have it remain at the top of the blog. This note will slowly travel into the past with the other posts. Bye note.

Recount

I finally got around to watching HBO's Recount. I'm not upset that the D's were portrayed as regular guys and the R's as calculating string pullers. (though Laura Dern went overboard in her portrayal of Katherine Harris as a ditz) It was a biased movie but hey, it's only been eight years; those wounds are still fresh.

So why do the D's still torture themselves with this story? The answer is in the HBO short on the making of the movie: The writer, or producer (not sure which) ends with "And the worst part is that now we'll never know how the election should have turned out."

Huh? Never know? Well of course he's upset. Somehow he missed the news that The Miami Herald and USA Today did a hand recount - just as would have been done had the Supreme Court not stopped it:

MIAMI, Florida (CNN) -- If a recount of Florida's disputed votes in last year's close presidential election had been allowed to proceed by the U.S. Supreme Court, Republican George W. Bush still would have won the White House, two newspapers reported Wednesday.

The Miami Herald and USA Today conducted a comprehensive review of 64,248 "undercounted" ballots in Florida's 67 counties that ended last month.

Their count showed that Bush's razor-thin margin of 537 votes -- certified in December by the Florida Secretary of State's office -- would have tripled to 1,665 votes if counted according to standards advocated by his Democratic rival, former Vice President Al Gore.

OK D's? So, you can move-on now.

Old Stuff Dividing Us?

It's nice to be told what we're going to do in advance:

"We know what kind of campaign they're going to run. They're going to try to make you afraid. They're going to try to make you afraid of me. He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black? He's got a feisty wife," he said to cheers. "Ultimately, I think the American people recognize that old stuff hasn't moved us forward. That old stuff just divides us."

Remember when they, Hillary especially, said we were calling them unpatriotic? - long before it occurred to us that they were.

Well no Barack, your wife's not feisty, but she's has appeared hostile. Your friends are anti-American, and crooks. You've done dirty land deals, and your stance on staying in Iraq just happened to track your crook-friend's prospects of landing a large contract in the rebuilding effort.

Being black is a plus for you in my book. I'd love to see Condoleezza Rice, or Colin Powell, Thomas Sowell, or Walter Williams running for president. If we could get that first-black-president thing behind us we possibly would get less of your "they're only calling my friends anti-American because I'm black, and anyway, they're not my friends."

Look, you're a good speaker. You're charismatic. But SpongeBob SquarePants is more qualified to be the president. Don't say he's not just because he's a sponge. Don't divide us. (let's put spongism behind us)

We're Possums

In the back of my head I kept thinking that the Obamadential Seal was a hoax, somebody else's photoshop. But no, this morning I found several new images of the Bamanator with the seal. Some have suggested that Obama is experimenting with the seal now because, if there is a voter backlash, he can drop it - and everyone will have forgotten it by election day. Could be. Mayhaps that is also the thinking on the monocle and the faux French accent.

BTW, I'm looking into reports that a few years back he used to dress as a superhero and claimed to belong to "The Justice League of Chicago". OK, no I'm not. I made that up. I apologize, somewhat.

That Explains It

He's from Mars. From the latest image set from the Phoenix mission:

(clickabiggen)

You may have to embiggen it, but if you look closely at the inset on the right you can see an Elvis-in-the-potato-chip. It's a classic good news/bad news: good news- he's not a Muslim, bad news- he's a Martian. Cue Dana Perino running from the White House screaming, "It's a cook book, it's a cook book!"

Chutzpah

I promise I didn't make this one. No, really. According to NYT Caucus Blog this is an official Obama seal. Kind of looks like the POTUS seal, no? From the Caucus:

It is emblazoned with a fierce-looking eagle clutching an olive branch in one claw and arrows in the other and is deliberately reminiscent of the official seal of the president of the United States. Around the top border are the words “Obama for America;” across the bottom is the campaign’s Web address. It also contains the logo of the Obama campaign, variously interpreted as a sunrise or a view down an open road.

Just above the eagle’s head are the words “Vero Possumus,”

Which, as you probably know, is Latin for: "Run over the possums". It is just amazing that the guy came up with a slogan that appeals to me, but still, the seal is a bit cheeky.

h/t: the Corner

Dumb Dog

Ever wonder how smart your dog is? Or, in my case, how dumb your dog is? Well now you can quantify it. The Dog IQ Test contains:

• A booklet of tests covering problem solving, learning ability and memory.
• A score guide.
• A results guide.
• A stop watch for recording your dogs' results.

Frankly, the test would be wasted on any dog I've ever owned. Results guide? Pulease. And it comes with a stop watch? A calender would suffice for my dogs.

They're not bad dogs, they're just terribly dumb. Susie, the smarter of the two current dogs, has exactly one trick, well half a trick. Though I should admit that I'm partially at fault for her failure to master it. See, I thought that after a long line of completely talentless dogs it would be nice to teach just one of them to roll-over. So my daughter and I set about teaching Susie. I would give the command, "roll-over", then roll her myself, then reward her with a treat. Lumber-kid and I took turns training her but it seemed to take forever. Then I realized: when I trained her, I'd roll Susie to the right. When my daughter was in charge, she'd roll her to the left. The result was that if you gave the command to roll-over Susie would flop to the ground and look confused. Well, she sort of comes preloaded with the look of confusion. But teaching her from this point is probably hopeless. We'll never know if she could have learned. So we pretty much reward her for any movement now when she attempts the trick.

Almost forgot though, she does do one other thing that sometimes passes for a trick. Have you seen those terribly disciplined dogs whose masters have taught to sit stone still while they balance a piece of meat in their nose or head? Well, we can get Susie to do that sort of. But in her case it's not discipline that stops her from going for the meat, it's just that she forgets that it's there. We usually put a nice sized piece of bologna on her head, then hold her still for about ten seconds. When we let her go she just looks around the room, "Say, do you smell bologna? I smell bologna." She'll go around the room wearing her bologna hat, searching for the source of the smell. The pay-off is when we let the other dog into the room. He trots up to her, pauses, then snatches it off her head. You can see the realization hit her, "oh yeah, I remember now.." but it's too late. We usually reward her with a new piece of bologna.

Not Great, Not So Bad

Using my four free words from the AP:

Jamie Lynn Spears gave

And this is now me: birth to a baby girl.

Which, ok, as a dad, I have to say, "bad Jamie, bad, bad." But, also as a dad, I have to say, "good girl, you let your baby live."

Al Gore's Thunderous Footprint

"Every family has a different carbon footprint,"
Jim Manzi and Andrew Sullivan have been posting on the justification for the costs of fighting [the climate] anthropogenic global warming. I've been following it but really it can be way simplified: If Al Gore, the Paul Revere of anthropogenic Global Warming, the Oscar winning Nobel laureate, the driving force, big Mac Daddy of Climate Change, if that guy does all he can to cut down on his CO2 emissions and he still goes up 10% in a year, well, what chance do I have of making a meaningful change? In fact, Gore's usage went up by more that my entire electrical usage for the year. I could cut the electric lines and live in a tree and still not cancel out the Master's energy increases.

Now I know that Al buys energy that is green, in fact, butterflies probably fly out of his electrical outlets. His 213,210 kilowatt-hours is probably influenced by the fact that the electrons want to go to Al Gore's house, they rejoice at being harnessed to do Al's work, to power the lights that illuminate his saintly face. And I know it makes no difference to Al that he is getting rich by his investments in companies involved in this greenification. Why rainbows most likely come from the man's butt.

So don't get me wrong when I say that short of opening up an electroplating business, or smelting aluminum in my basement, I don't see how I could ever hope to match Al Gore's energy usage. [and this not counting the tons and tons of jet fuel the man burns off every month] I can't even match him. So if he is trying to save us, if this is his best, well, what chance do we have?

Thursday Cute

In case this one hasn't been e-mailed to you yet:

Share

That's Easy For You to Say

He wasn't in your soup.


btw, anyone remember Fire Marshal Bill?

News in Brief

From the AP:

"Israel on Wednesday urged...."

Pooh Security Update

Update on Richard Danzig, presumptive National Security Advisor in an Obama White House:



I know I'll sleep better at night knowing that Disney has got my back.

for those who want to swipe them and have a white BG:

Just Because

Not the Onion, No Really

It's good to know that not every member of the Obama team has Ché posters on the wall; some of them have Pooh. From the Telegraph:

Richard Danzig, who served as Navy Secretary under President Clinton and is tipped to become National Security Adviser in an Obama White House, told a major foreign policy conference in Washington that the future of US strategy in the war on terrorism should follow a lesson from the pages of Winnie the Pooh, which can be shortened to: if it is causing you too much pain, try something else.

Mr Danzig told the Centre for New American Security: “Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.”

.......Mr Danzig spelt out the need to change by reading a paragraph from chapter one of the children’s classic, which says: “Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming down stairs. But sometimes he thinks there really is another way if only he could stop bumping a minute and think about it.”

So maybe this is where the "let's just sit down and just talk to everyone" philosophy comes from. Sure, it sounds good, except for being naive and completely divorced from how the world really works. Except for that.

Hey, maybe we can get Iranian operatives out of Iraq by giving the troops umbrellas and having them march up and down the streets of Baghdad saying, “Tut, tut! It looks like rain...”

Good News

Al Gore throwing his weight behind Obama has to be good news, right? Gore, the out-gasser, has got himself some negatives, plus, how many people would be swayed by a Gore endorsement who weren't already supporting Obama?

Hey, more good news, looks like McCain supports some offshore drilling. Add ANWR to that and he just might be on the right track.

Mime Attacks Rampant

I just uploaded them all because Blogger is on crack and only uploads images when it darn well feels like it lately.


Of course there are steps you can take to thwart them:


Look closely, this one blends in perfectly:


Of course, mimes aren't the only hazard:


(this last one isn't mine - not even sure if it's a photoshop)

Before the Pounce

A good mime can impersonate a manhole cover so well that his victim can look right at him without realizing anything is amiss. Unsuspecting cyclists and small pets don't stand a chance.

Aliens Discover Alcohol

"I remember being lifted up by a beam of light... then
this little guy with a big head threw up on me."

Apparently the livestock mutilations have gotten sloppy to the point of making grown veterinarians weep.

No, really, it was a kid in a car, trying to escape police by dazzling them into submission with his mad driving skills. (it didn't work)


via Interesting and Funny World

Tell 'Um Chuck

Drill Deep, Leave a Mess

Tim Russert

He asked the tough questions, even of the queen:

She [Hillary] afterwards tried to cover these embarrassing gaffs by unleashing what Shuster called “the Clinton fog machine,” whose apparatchiks used tactics of distraction that included “trashing the [debate] moderators” by accusing NBC’s Tim Russert and Brian Williams of unfairness to their candidate.

Remember him trying to nail down where she stood on the issue of issuing driver's licenses to illegal aliens? (and I think she came down in favor of issuing them but not giving them to the immigrants, or, issuing them then arresting everyone involved) Then she spun and spun for days. Great to watch.

I expect Russert would have helped to expose the wires holding up Obama's halo, had he not been taken from us early. He certainly wasn't afraid to ask the tough questions. Rest in peace journalist man.

Airport Fun

Those of us on the frisk-list might welcome it but others may not:

The Transportation Security Administration says security scanners that reveal details of a person underneath their clothing are being installed in 10 airports nationwide.

Seems like passengers could have fun with this too. I know I'd have to fight the urge to strike a pose for the camera. But I'm sure some people will have a problem with it.

But hey, the pat down is more, um, personal. I say scan away.

Light Blogging

Means more pictures. The wife and kid are going to Florida, so it's been busy around here.

Why Lumberjacks Don't Hitchhike

Common Sense

From where? Oregon, of course: Global warming an excuse to make America weaker, letter to the editor.

Global warming activists won't be satisfied until they see an America way down the ladder of leading nations, until you are paying $6 per gallon for your gas and until you cannot afford to put food on your dinner table.

Too Many Headlines

Running down the Drudge headlines:

Hong Kong Orders Killing of All Chickens After Fatal Bird-Flu Strain Found...

Stocks fall sharply as oil prices surge...

'May peak at $150-170 soon'...

Corn hits new record...

AZ search for illegals hits water parks...

FDA has tomato Salmonella reports from 17 states...

Outbreak hits 167...

then I see:

US life expectancy tops 78!

And I'm all, "Noooooo! Not extra years of this, change it back! Change it back!"

Blond Joke

In her Politico interview Scarlett Johansson expresses amazement that an important man like Barack Obama has the time for an e-mail relationship with her:

Johansson is somewhat shocked that he keeps up their back-and-forth correspondence. “You’d imagine that someone like the senator who is constantly traveling and constantly ‘on’ — how can he return these personal e-mails?” she asks. “But he does, and in his off-time I know he also calls people who have donated the minimum to thank them. Nobody sees it, nobody talks about it, but it’s incredible.” She adds, “I feel like I’m supporting someone, and having a personal dialogue with them, and it’s amazing.”

He has followed her career as well, telling her that his favorite performance was her turn in “Lost in Translation.” He’s a “huge movie lover” and “knows who every actor is,” she said.

Well, here's the thing Scarlett, Some guys just care about the little people. Sheesh girl, can't you see he just wants your vote? You want an uncomplicated dialog about political things, my e-mail is in the sidebar. And I won't beg for your vote.

Unbelievable

I'd suspect the Onion, but this isn't even a little funny.

“Whenever I wanted to play in the yard he beat me and asked me to go to the bedroom with him. This lasted for two months," added Nasser. "He was too tough with me, and whenever I asked him for mercy, he beat me and slapped me and then used me. I just want to have a respectful life and divorce him.”

This from an eight year old, forced into marriage with a thirty year old.

h/t: ¡NoPasaran!

What McCain Said

The Obama campaign has to cut the quote in order to make it work for them.

Then and Now

Before The Prince of Tides, Cape Fear, and even 48 Hours, Nick Nolte began his creative career in the early 70s as a print ad model at the Elenore Moore agency in Minneapolis, Minnesota, according to IMDb. Here, he's transformed from a dude into a stud by a pair of $10 h.i.s white jeans. Clearly the leader of this Double N Ranch western shirt posse, Nolte, finished with a long hard day of dogie rustling, is about to hit the town with his pardners in search of a fine cold sasparilla.

Fast Learners

TheObamafile:

From the time Barack Obama was sworn in as a United State Senator, to the time he announced that he was forming a Presidential exploratory committee, he logged 143 days of experience in the Senate. That's how many days the Senate was actually in session and working.

After 143 days of work experience, Obama believed he was ready to be Commander In Chief, Leader of the Free World, and fill the shoes of Abraham Lincoln, FDR, JFK and Ronald Reagan.

Swift Vets:

John Kerry's service in Vietnam lasted 4 months and 12 days, beginning in November 1968 when he reported to Cam Ranh Bay for a month of training. His abbreviated combat tour ended shortly after he requested a transfer out of Vietnam on March 17, 1969, citing Navy instruction 1300.39 permitting personnel with three Purple Hearts to request reassignment. So far as we are able to determine, Kerry was the only Swift sailor ever to leave Vietnam without completing the standard one-year tour of duty, other than those who were seriously wounded or killed.

ABC Promotes Pregnant 'Man'

Newsbusters' Scott Whitlock is following the pregnant "man" story. He's right, there has been a lot of coverage of this. Is there an agenda, a metrosexual, rules out the window, we're living in a new world agenda? If so, this is an awfully lame way to illustrate it.

So a woman who looks like a man is pregnant. Looking like a man doesn't make her one. Some fairly adventurous young people with an inability to imagine the future get horn implants; that doesn't make them devils or goats, they just look like devils and goats, they're still just young people.

Maybe this isn't social engineering, maybe ABC's fascination with this story is just a freak show. If it is, listen up NBC, it can easily be undone and overshadowed by the next logical step: "New Jersey Goatman Becomes Pregnant"

***Update:
Five minutes after posting this I run across:

A woman on a hen night [girls night out] who did not know she was pregnant gave birth while dressed in a bumblebee costume.

So the ABC headline writes itself, Bumblebee Gives Birth to Human Baby.

The Number Two Slot

So the Democrat nomination is settled and now they have to decide who they want for the second slot.


No, not the Vice Presidency. Now they have to decide on First Lady. Sure, this would traditionally go to Michelle Obama, but if desire counts for anything, Chris Mathews will be a force to contend with.

Watch What You Say

So the rumor I heard last month is true. Barack Obama is setting up an internet anti-smear squad:

Barack Obama is recruiting senior staff to a new unit which will combat virulent rumour campaigns on the internet that threaten to cost him votes in the presidential election against John McCain.

The article doesn't say, but I've heard that this unit won't do anything but identify the sources of the rumors. Once he has the names, Obama will take care of the offenders himself, using the black arts and voodoo spells he learned as a youth in Jakarta.

Bush Lied?

Did President Bush mislead us on Iraq intelligence? The Rockefeller report says:

On Iraq's nuclear weapons program? The president's statements "were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates."

On biological weapons, production capability and those infamous mobile laboratories? The president's statements "were substantiated by intelligence information."

On chemical weapons, then? "Substantiated by intelligence information."

On weapons of mass destruction overall (a separate section of the intelligence committee report)? "Generally substantiated by intelligence information."

Delivery vehicles such as ballistic missiles? "Generally substantiated by available intelligence."

Unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to deliver WMDs? "Generally substantiated by intelligence information."

Iraq's support for terrorist groups other than al-Qaeda "were substantiated by intelligence information."

Statements that Iraq provided safe haven for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other terrorists with ties to al-Qaeda "were substantiated by the intelligence assessments,"

Statements regarding Iraq's contacts with al-Qaeda "were substantiated by intelligence information."

h/t: NRO

One Less Worry

NASA takes a look at the earth's greenery and finds:

They found that over a period of almost two decades, the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2%. About 25% of the Earth's vegetated landmass -- almost 110 million square kilometres -- enjoyed significant increases and only 7% showed significant declines. When the satellite data zooms in, it finds that each square metre of land, on average, now produces almost 500 grams of greenery per year.

Why the increase? Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas indispensable to plant life. CO2 is nature's fertilizer, bathing the biota with its life-giving nutrients. Plants take the carbon from CO2 to bulk themselves up -- carbon is the building block of life -- and release the oxygen, which along with the plants, then sustain animal life. As summarized in a report last month, released along with a petition signed by 32,000 U. S. scientists who vouched for the benefits of CO2: "Higher CO2 enables plants to grow faster and larger and to live in drier climates. Plants provide food for animals, which are thereby also enhanced. The extent and diversity of plant and animal life have both increased substantially during the past half-century."

So OK, defenestrate that tired old "they paved paradise and put up a parking lot" fear. We've got green, and we're getting more, and moreover, no government program is responsible for the increases. So now you only have to worry that temperatures are at record levels, and it's all our fault, and OMG we're all going to die, my face is melting, my face is melting. Well, no, and no:

Lush as the planet may now be, it is as nothing compared to earlier times, when levels of CO2 and Earth temperatures were far higher. In the age of the dinosaur, for example, CO2 levels may have been five to 10 times higher than today, spurring a luxuriantly fertile planet whose plant life sated the immense animals of that era. Planet Earth is also much cooler today than during the hothouse era of the dinosaur, and cooler than it was 1,000 years ago during the Medieval Warming Period, when the Vikings colonized a verdant Greenland. Greenland lost its colonies and its farmland during the Little Ice Age that followed, and only recently started to become green again.

I'll note too that: no government regulation cooled off Greenland the first time around, no bureaucracy is nudging it back towards green, and that CO2 levels can be ten times higher than they are today without any significant burning of fossil fuels.

Consider this dead horse beaten.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

Before long Akiko began to doubt that this even was a bus stop.

The Civil Right to Get Shot-up by Gangsters

The MPDC tries to help out a DC neighborhood so, of course, the usual suspects oppose it:

WASHINGTON - Police in the nation's capital set up controversial vehicle checkpoints Saturday in a neighborhood reeling from gun violence, with civil liberties groups considering legal action and closely observing officers.

Police in neon yellow vests stopped motorists traveling through the main thoroughfare of Trinidad — a neighborhood near the National Arboretum in the city's northeast section. Police checked drivers' identification and turned away those who didn't have a "legitimate purpose" in the area, such as a church visit or doctor's appointment.

The checkpoints were announced after eight people were killed in the city last weekend. Most of the killings occurred in the police district that includes Trinidad. Already this year, the district has had 22 killings — one more than in all of last year.

The checkpoints have drawn harsh criticism from civil rights groups.

"Trinidad should not be treated like Baghdad," said Mark Thompson, the leader of the NAACP's local police task force.

Thompson was joined Saturday morning by about a dozen activists representing myriad groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, at the intersection where the checkpoints began in the evening. They warned of legal action if residents' constitutional rights were violated.

The NAACP should ask the residents what they want before they criticize the police for making an effort to clean up the neighborhood. The check points are an inconvenience for some, yes. But the biggest inconvenience is for gangsters and white drug customers who are coming in from the suburbs.

"It seems interesting that police are willing to easily cast aside fundamental freedoms for quick-fix, lazy law enforcement tactics," said Johnny Barnes, executive director of the ACLU for the National Capital Area. "We're going to do everything to make sure that the rights of citizens are protected."

What? A lawyer calling the police lazy? Not to disparage lawyers, but isn't that sort of like a bowler calling a football player slothful? And what's this, "It seems interesting"? Is it just me, or is that teenage dork-talk? "It's interesting to me that you think Captain Kirk could take Captain Picard in a street fight."

Obviously Johnny Barnes has some better way of fighting crime. Someone from the MPDC needs to send him an employment application.

Vice President?

I'll apologize in advance to those of you who get this image stuck in your head.

I felt a little guilty adding twenty pounds to those thighs... but then I thought about some of the photoshops of Bush and I got over it. Would a Clinton-Obama ticket ever happen? I really can't imagine it.

There's Normal, Then There's Normal

Another just-the-headline:

Baby Miraculously Survives Abortion, Expected to Live 'Normal' Life

Bug on the Wall

I don't like killing bugs. But I have to admit I get a little boost when I hear a faint, "daaaaaddy" from across the house. There's a particular "daaaaaddy" you get with bug emergencies, and it's distinctive. I always respond to the call, ready my paper towel, face the bug and say, "My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!" Then the "toilet ride" with farewells and apologies "for having killed you."

It never gets old.

The Smoke Filled Room

Wik-wikki-wikki:

A political machine is an unofficial system of a political organization based on patronage, the spoils system, "behind-the-scenes" control, and longstanding political ties within the structure of a representative democracy. Machines sometimes have a boss, and always have a long-term corps of dedicated workers who depend on the patronage generated by government contracts and jobs. Machine politics has existed in many United States cities, especially between about 1875 and 1950, but continuing in some cases down to the present day.

It's a Miracle

No, not another Obama miracle, this is miracle fruit, or miracle berry, so called because of it's ability to temporarily change the way other foods taste. I've ordered some, yum. Course it's been ten days so it might just be another 'put money into the internets and watch it not come back' kind of deal. While I wait, I'm making bets with myself as to which will happen first: 1) the berries get here or 2) the Michelle Obama "whitey" tape surfaces.

So next week, perhaps, I'll be either experimenting with taste perception, or listening to Obama (the obvious tool of the Chicago slum-lord industry) say, "This is not the Michelle Obama I thought I knew." or, possibly, "I really hardly knew her, only to have lunch or dinner with one or two times a year, really, she was just an acquaintance."

Inside, I'm rooting for the fruit.

This is Progress

I read the Newsbusters headline: CBS: WaPo’s Sally Quinn Says Hillary ‘Is A Tortured Person’, and I didn't nod approvingly. I am just so growing as a person.

Rezko Convicted

Maybe it's true that Obama only knew Rezko as a businessman, a "seemed like a nice guy" kind of fella. Now we learn (surprise-surprise) that Rezko is a crook. Whew, I guess Obama is lucky Rezko didn't swindle him in that perfectly normal, commonplace, you-buy-the-house-I'll-buy-the-yard-deal.

RFK

I just heard an RFK remembrance on the news-radio. As Hillary noted, it was 40 years ago today that Sirhan Sirhan gunned down Robert Kennedy. They mentioned Sirhan, but made no attempt to describe him or his motivations. It's probably just as well, if they had spoken of motivation, they would have chalked it up to a mental illness. Which in a way it is; call it angry Arab syndrome:

What was never considered by writers and journalists, in their quest to find a motive for Sirhan's act of murder, was the effect that teachers and influential adults in Jerusalem's Arab community had on the young Palestinian. The way a nation educates its children on the characterization of other races and religions will often determine the relations between them. Populations are not culturally prone to hatred – they are educated toward it as studies of Nazi Germany show. The anti-Semitism inculcated in German children in the 1930s and 1940s remained with them into their old age and the West German government's post-war attempts to promote anti-fascism had no effect on those who grew up during the Third Reich.

The propaganda used by Palestinians had no less an effect on the younger generations of children from the 1940s to the present day. From an early age Sirhan had been taught by educators, family members, and friends that the Jews were "treacherous," "an evil enemy" and it was his "duty" to rid Jews from Palestine. Sirhan's generation was taught to hate, despise, and fear Jews, to believe that it was not only right for every self-respecting Arab to fight the Jewish state and that it was just and desirable to destroy it. Undoubtedly, this milieu of hatred had an intense effect on Sirhan as he grew up.

Sirhan's irrational hatred and anger towards the Jews did not originate with any mental illness he may have suffered. In fact, his attitude was no different from that of the majority of Palestinians and the rest of the Arab peoples. His ideas were entirely rational within the norms of the Arab world. As Glubb Pasha, an Arab military leader and British officer (and no lover of Jews) reported in 1945, "They (the Arabs) were painfully conscious of their immaturity, their weakness and their backwardness. They show all the instability and emotionalism of the adolescent (characterized by) their touchiness and …readiness to take offense at any sign of condescension by their elders. Slights gave rise to outbursts of temper and violent defiance."

They're still building little Sirhans today. It's a shame but:

"We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us"
- Golda Meir

Oh How the Mighty Have Fallen

Or, I imagine so at any rate.

A Paris court has convicted one-time film star Brigitte Bardot Tuesday, June 3, 2008, of provoking discrimination and racial hatred by writing that Muslims are destroying France.

It's odd, Oriana Fallaci and Bridget Bardot get in trouble for stating the obvious about some Muslim immigrants, not odd that they criticize, or surprising that they're in trouble for it - it's odd that it's the women who speak up and there aren't more men willing to do the same. Burning cars and rioting promotes racial hatred -- remarking on who was doing the burning doesn't.