Posts from — August 2006

Mike Thomas of The Orlando Sentinel endorses some candidates. You don’t have to be a Floridian to appreciate his logic, especially his reason for endorsing Cruella de Harris in the Republican Senate primary.

These people are mad – stark, raving, bonkers!

CNN records the pathology in Sen. Burns: Terrorists drive taxis by day, kill at night and Bush: U.S. in fight against single, worldwide terrorist network.

Yeah, okay. It must be Yellow Cab. because they seem to be everywhere. Instead of tapping telephones we’ll monitor the taxi radios, and instead of airports, we’ll watch cab stands.

I know, let’s reduce the lead in the DC water system and start adding Thorazine^®. The world would sleep better at night.

Via Billmon I found this piece, Nasrallah for Prime Minister – of Israel, by Bradley Burston in Ha’aretz, a major Israeli newspaper.

If Nasrallah isn’t interested in the Israeli job, maybe we could get him to rebuild Iraq or the Gulf Coast. He seems to know what he’s doing, which is more than anyone in the current administration can claim.

You should read the Burston piece to be reminded what it was like when we had real newspapers.

If the point of Rummy’s foray into Harry Turtledove‘s most familiar genre was to annoy people, he definitely succeeded.

Watertiger was the earliest mention I saw, but Steve Bates was only a quarter of hour after her in posting and the swarm has been building ever since. Poputonian notes that The Other Media Ain’t Buyin’ It Either.

Keith Olbermann’s piece, Feeling morally, intellectually confused?, is highlighted, but you would be better off seeing the video at Crooks and Liars, as MSNBC requires using the 6-megaton version of IEb [Incompetently Executed browser].

This is what happens when you try to run government like a business: management believes that everything can be solved by marketing. Maybe the focus groups loved it, but the “clients” aren’t buying it.

There are a few things that most people aren’t aware of when viewing the recent Gulf Coast photo ops of the Shrubbery. They involve conditions and realities that people who don’t live down here have no reason to know about, but which impact on the meaning of what they were being shown on television.

Some may wonder why Biloxi was chosen for the Mississippi photo op: was it the fact that the Presidential Pimpmobile could land at Keesler AFB? That was probably part of it, but the main point was the fact that a chunk of Biloxi has been re-built while most of the Coast is still devastated.

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Blogger is having some problems that they think they have fixed, but they thought they had them fixed the last several days.

They aren’t down, they are just a little tentative.

Over at Facing South R. Neal re-runs his entries from last year. He was filling in for Chris Kromm and started on August 29^th.

Refresh your memories of what it was like and how totally out of touch this administration was with conditions on the ground.

While Mustang Bobby awaits the arrival of Ernesto, I’ll take the time to bid good bye to one of my old alternate landing fields – Wake Island.

The Air Force evacuated Wake Island today in anticipation of the arrival of Super Typhoon Ioke. With 155mph constant winds and 190mph gusts that are generating 50-foot waves, Wake Island is about to be scrubbed clean of just about everything.

The Pacific is experiencing the same kind of typhoon season this year that the Atlantic experienced last year – multiple large destructive storms.

Let’s clear this up for people who don’t understand hurricanes. The winds and storm surge wiped out the Mississippi towns of Lakeshore, Waveland, Bay Saint Louis, Long Beach, Gulfport, Biloxi, and Pascagoula, the Alabama towns of Bayou La Batre, Dauphin Island, and Gulf Shores, and the Louisiana parishes of Plaquemines and Saint Bernard. These were the areas that caught the eye and the Eastside of the storm. These places were pretty much leveled by Katrina, as the storm surge was like a tsunami, knocking down everything in its path. [I’m 250 miles East of landfall and we had an 8-foot storm surge.]

There was lesser damage as the storm moved inland because friction from the land slows the wind down.

The buildings in New Orleans sit behind the windbreaks of the levees and floodwalls. Many single story buildings were never subjected to hurricane force winds because of the protection of other buildings. The multistory buildings were the ones that were battered by the winds.

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Colorado authorities asked Emily Litella to tell the media that all charges have been dropped.

In the Florida Democratic primary things are starting to heat up. I just got a “hit piece” on Jim Davis that was sponsored by Florida’s Working Families, Inc.

According to The Center for Public Integrity this 527 group is funded by agribusiness, principally the citrus and sugar industries.

Knowing that Davis’s opponent, Rod Smith, is the chairman of the Florida Senate’s agriculture committee and a farmer might help people understand this piece.

The most current piece of legislation that this piece highlights is the Bankruptcy Bill [Senate bill 256, April 14, 2005]. I am not unhappy to learn that Davis voted against this bill, which FWF characterizes as a bill “limiting the amount of interest credit card companies can charge”, rather than a bill that makes it almost impossible to escape credit card companies.

Steve Bates of the Yellow Doggerel Democrat is moving to a new place: www.yellowdoggereldemocrat.org.

Adjust your blogroll and feeds.

A little more than a year after being the host of Katrina’s out-of-town try-out as a hurricane, Mustang Bobby of Bark Bark Woof Woof is looking at Ernesto’s current track with real concern.

Ernesto was weakened by Haiti’s mountains, and will be affected by Cuba’s, but the water is warm and the wind shear is down, so conditions are ripe for it to spin up before hitting the Florida peninsula.

People along the Atlantic coast should start paying attention because South Florida is too flat to really slow down hurricanes, and there is very warm water off the coast.

Commenting on the Iranian situation Juan Cole notes:

Supreme Jurisprudent Khamenei’s pledge of no first strike against any country by Iran with any kind of weapon, and his condemnation of nuclear bombs as un-Islamic and impossible for Iran to possess or use, was completely ignored by the Western press and is never referred to. Indeed, after all that talk of peace and no first strike and no nukes, Khamenei at the very end said that if Iran were attacked, it would defend itself. Karl Vicks of the Washington Post at the time ignored all the rest of the speech and made the headline, ‘Khamenei threatens reprisals against US.” In other words, on Iran, the US public is being spoonfed agitprop, not news.

Although Iran’s protestations of peaceful intentions are greeted cynically in the US and Israel, in fact Iran has not launched a war of aggression in over a century. The US and Israel have launched several during that period of time.

Here’s the problem: I know of several instances of the American and Israeli governments flat-out lying to their people and the world, but I can’t find the same kind of example for Ayatollah Khamenei. I’m opposed at the most basic level to many of the man’s beliefs, but I can’t say that I know him to be a liar.