One of these two is too feminine to be doing a man's
I feel bad, promoting kittahs while my auxiliary dog is at the vet for to have his wobbily-dangleies made wobbled and gone. Truth is, I had nothing to do with it. The wife made the appointment and took him down to the vet. I pretended to still be asleep when he jumped on my head this morning and informed me, "Guess what? I'm going for a ride!"
Dog One had already taken that ride so he pretended jealousy, "Oh gee, wish I could go, let me know how that works out for ya." Then he rolled around on the floor laughing once they were out the door.
If you've paid any attention at all to what's been going on in Egypt this last week, you know president Hosni Mubarak is in big trouble. I'm going to get out ahead of my president here and say Mubarak should get out now. This will all be over before Obama has a position on it.
Mubarak made several fundamental mistakes. Here's an example of his failure to control the press:
No, he couldn't have shut down the New York Times. But if he'd had the tiniest bit of media savvy, he would have infiltrated the crowds with a few antiabortion protesters... and voila:
Protests? What protests? His media problems in this country would have vanished overnight.
Cracking heads was wrong. Shutting down the internet was wrong. Oppressing his people was wrong. Get out now. And let's hope Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood are afraid enough of Israel to stay out of it. (I know they aren't frightened by anything the Great Glowing Negotiator might do to them)
Andrews AFB, Md., President Obama stands ready to go on
As promised, pics from the Wonderkid, er, Thunderkid, no, Lumberkid. They started off this year in the DC Armory because the Verizon Center was full. She took a picture of the ceiling because of all of the "holes". I think the explanation they settled on was, "Well it's an armory, they must shoot the guns through the roof sometimes when they get bored.
It's really kind of spectacular. These kids, getting up at hours that I have successfully argued with previous employers don't exist, or riding buses all night, or flying in, all to make a statement about what they know is right. They slept on floors, or didn't sleep. They ate church sandwiches. They shivered. They marched.
All so silly men like Arthur Ochs Sulzberger can pretend that they don't exist. I'm sure that it's the digital age killing the once great newspapers, but I can't help but wonder if abandoning real news in favor of an agenda didn't hasten their downfall. Maybe there was once a time when being ignored by the NYT meant obscurity. Now I think it's a badge of honor.
Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Sulzberger.
Thanks for this kids. You're my heroes.
You younger folk won't remember, but it used to be that whenever you'd kiss a woman in the old days, music would start playing. This worked everywhere, at the beach, at the movies, in the city park. That bit at the end is just Sir Shatner mixing it up I think.
Finally someone has applied science to keeping fit. That doesn't sound right. It's like they spread science across keeping fit like it was peanut butter. The science, I mean, is the thing getting spread. There, that explains it.
I was going to have them leaving a Rohypnol super store, but I don't know if there is such a thing.
My incredibly good friend (depending upon your interpretation of 'incredibly good friend') Jonah Goldberg posted this Simpson's clip:
In the SOTU Obama says:
Our infrastructure used to be the best, but our lead has slipped. South Korean homes now have greater Internet access than we do. Countries in Europe and Russia invest more in their roads and railways than we do. China is building faster trains and newer airports. Meanwhile, when our own engineers graded our nation’s infrastructure, they gave us a “D.”...
... Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail. (Applause.) This could allow you to go places in half the time it takes to travel by car. For some trips, it will be faster than flying –- without the pat-down. (Laughter and applause.) As we speak, routes in California and the Midwest are already underway.
Inside the terminal on a recent weekday, four passengers lined up to board a flight, outnumbered by seven security staff members and supervisors, all suited up in gloves and uniforms to screen six pieces of luggage. For three hours that day, no commercial or private planes took off or landed. Three commercial flights leave the airport on weekdays, all bound for Dulles International Airport.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a man who should take one step back,Rep. Dennis Kucinich has sued a U.S. House of Representatives cafeteria for selling him a sandwich wrap that caused dental damage when he bit into an olive pit, according to a Jan. 3 lawsuit filed in Superior Court for the District of Columbia.
The Cleveland Democratic congressman's lawsuit seeks $150,000 in damages from companies that operate the Longworth House Office Building's cafeteria.
The genius of the plan lay in convincing the DemocratsAnd then, well, the speech started. Not President Obama's best. Then again, his best is anyone else's extraordinary.
Heard about the Palestinian document kerfuffle, aka Palileaks? No they weren't part of Wikileaks. And there is some question about their authenticity.
But reading about them reminded me of my first reaction upon seeing accounts of American diplomatic cables in the news. It seemed to me that the only way to fight Wikileaks would be to poison the forest. There are hundreds of thousands of trees out there and you don't want people seeing them, and you can't make them go away, so what can you do? My thought was that you could toss in several thousand of your own, ersatz, trees. (ersatz- it's a kind of conifer) That is, add fake cables. Some just weird, some to counter information already leaked, some inconsequential, some preposterous.
You'd first have to take down the Wikileaks servers, then add your own -- serving doctored files. Then add whistle-blower-whistle-blower sites, trumpeting the presence of fakes and purporting to expose the bad cables. And then sites claiming to expose disinformation sites.
Most citizens wouldn't have the energy to sift through the mess; I mean, most people don't read past Yahoo headlines, right? Just muddy the water until it's impossible to tell what is real and what is not.
There's probably a flaw in my plan. And it may only work going forward, on what Sir Julian releases in the future. Plus there's the risk that some of your wildest fakes will come to be regarded as true - "Hugo Chavez has on several occasions expressed romantic interest in Rosanne Barr. See what the embassy can do to make this happen."
Still, something to think about.
Imagine my surprise when I noticed this post had gone all Multiplicity, and appeared a half dozen times. I was tempted to leave them all up, but pixel depletion issues shamed me into getting rid of most of them. I planned on deleting all the duplicates but I couldn't decide which one I liked best.
So I left these two up. You probably have a favorite; many people would pick this one because it has more writing, and seems like more value per page load. Those who appreciate direct, uncluttered, minimalist posting might favor the other.
In America you have the freedom to have an opinion. Exercise your freedom by picking your favorite. E-mail it to your friends. Maybe buy one of my "I Like the Second One" t-shirts from Cafe Press. Just don't abuse your freedom by... well, to tell you the truth, I'm not sure how you'd go about abusing the freedom to have a favorite. The whole area of Opinion Freedom Law is kind of murky.
via
Well, my kid is back on her bus for a 6 hour ride back to school.
I can't bug her to send me photos of the march because she'll be busy making up for the lost day. But if I get any, I'll post them.
The March that Isn't There for 2011 is spooling up and non-coverage has already begun.
The Lumberkid is in this march, just as she has been every year since she was tall enough to not get stepped on. This is the first year she had to come to DC from out of the area though. She boarded a bus at midnight last night and rode through the night to get here. Now she's out in the bitter cold with many tens of thousands of others in The March They Pretend Isn't There. She couldn't get a seat in the Verizon Center so this year she'll rally at the DC Armory.
Imagine that, the Verizon Center and the Armory full of protesters, with even more people joining in for the march, and still the grudging news coverage is dwarfed by Jon Stewart's Lets Have Fun Rally.
When I was the Lumberkid's age Pravda could make news events disappear by just not covering them. These days, with alternative media everywhere, even Pravda can't get away with it. But still the main stream media in the US resists acknowledging the biggest recurring yearly protest in the nation's capitol. The New York Times did not print a single word about last years march. Not one.
If you're interested in the March you can tune into EWTN. The web feed seems to be overwhelmed at the moment but that may change through the day. Chances are your local cable provider carries EWTN, too.
Stay warm Lumberkid.
JFK was killed by a nasty little Marxist and Bobby by an anti Israel zealot. They have nothing to do with political discourse today; and they certainly have nothing to do with that crazy kid in Tuscon.
The only way the JFK and Gabrielle Giffords shootings were alike was in the attempt by the media to score political points from the tragedies. Dan Rather got away with the lie that Texas school children cheered at JFK's assassination. Christiane Amanpour and her despicable friends tried to paint the entirely un-centered Jared Lee Loughner as right of center.
But Amanpour hides her mendacity behind common garden variety stupid: She claims that the Kennedy assassinations were "so traumatic that the country never fully recovered.." (at 19 sec.) What? In what area did we not recover? What aspect, what tiny slice, what minuscule bit of America is still diminished because of the assassinations? Of course we fully recovered, you ignorant cow. It's what we do.
MATTHEWS: Let`s start with the connection between political rhetoric and violence.....
Don't you hate when you read an article, have a relevant comment to make, post it, and then see that there are already 19 pages of comments? I hate that. And, I just did it again on this article:
by Mark Weaver
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON -- The Governors Highway Safety Association says pedestrian deaths increased in the first half of 2010 and the First Lady's program to get Americans to be more active could be partly responsible.
Governors Highway Safety Administration spokesman Jonathan Adkins told 630 WMAL that Michelle Obama is "trying to get us to walk to work and exercise a little bit more. While that's good, it also increases our exposure to risk."
(1/20/2011 5:57:16 PM)
The article is misleading because it assumes that people have listened to Michelle and are walking more because of it. It's just not true.
It's true that on Michelle's organized walking events there have been more fatalities than you would expect, but that's because she dares people to dash across streets with their eyes closed. Most people won't try it but after near constant taunts of "chicken" someone will usually give in. The resultant accident always stops traffic; at which point Michelle will close her eyes and run past the scene shouting, "See? I can do it. I told you, I do it all the time."
- lumberjack
Richard Epstein gets it:
I just read this scary story in the Daily Caller, which confirms my worst fears about the Obama Administration and its relationship to organized labor. About two years ago, I wrote a book length study on behalf of employer organizations called The Case Against the Employee Free Choice Act, which sought to explain the enormous dangers of any efforts to strengthen the statutory protections of labor monopolies.
In working on that book, I was struck by how little success unions had had in winning labor contracts at the bargaining table under a set of stable labor rules that have been tilted in their favor for the past 50 or so years. The gist of the situation is that workers are now keenly aware that the short term promise of union riches often leads to a loss of jobs in an ever more competitive global economy.
Not my picture, but my photoshop.
I'm not pretending to be the guy in the middle, he's pretending to be me.
The man can paint.
Note to followers: I don't want to find out that these photoshops have incited any of you to riot, break flower pots, or yawn.
***From the comments: "he needs a marlboro hanging from his lips. as a one time 30yr smoker, i *know* he couldn't concentrate without one."
Done:
***OK, another update - apparently I misunderstood. This should take care of that:
Jonathan Martin, at Politico, has to know this is wrong:
In the span of a single news cycle, Republicans got a jarring reminder of two forces that could prevent them from retaking the presidency in next year.
At sunrise in the East on Wednesday, Sarah Palin demonstrated that she has little interest — or capacity — in moving beyond her brand of grievance-based politics. And at sundown in the West, Barack Obama reminded even his critics of his ability to rally disparate Americans around a message of reconciliation.
Palin was defiant, making the case in a taped speech she posted online why the nation’s heated political debate should continue unabated even after Saturday’s tragedy in Tucson. And, seeming to follow her own advice, she swung back at her opponents, deeming the inflammatory notion that she was in any way responsible for the shootings a “blood libel.”
Obama, speaking at a memorial service at the University of Arizona, summoned the country to honor the victims, and especially 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, by treating one another with more respect. “I want America to be as good as Christina imagined it,” he said.
It’s difficult to imagine a starker contrast.
"Ironically it came from a hard core liberal"
That word, Geraldo, ironically. I do not think it means what you think it means. See: predictably. 
EurekaAlert has the latest oh-no-it's-worse-than-we-thought:
Scientists are reporting that so-called "thirdhand smoke" — the invisible remains of cigarette smoke that deposits on carpeting, clothing, furniture and other surfaces — may be even more of a health hazard than previously believed. The study, published in ACS' journal, Environmental Science & Technology, extends the known health risks of tobacco among people who do not smoke but encounter the smoke exhaled by smokers or released by smoldering cigarette butts.
Yael Dubowski and colleagues note that thirdhand smoke is a newly recognized contributor to the health risks of tobacco and indoor air pollution. Studies show that that nicotine in thirdhand smoke can react with the ozone in indoor air and surfaces like clothing and furniture, to form other pollutants. Exposure to them can occur to babies crawling on the carpet, people napping on the sofa, or people eating food tainted by thirdhand smoke.
Jonah Goldberg found Debbie, who found Paula Deen's recipe of the week:
Ingredients
- 1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter
- 2 cans (14 1/2-ounces) English peas, drained
Directions
Melt the butter in small pot and add the peas. Cook over medium heat until peas are warm.
Chris Matthews concludes "So apparently Loughner 
