Posts from — March 2005

Why should an American care about some weird little country on the northwest border of China? Because we have military bases there, as does Russia. It is a main smuggling route for the heroin coming out of Afghanistan and within combat range of Iran and Afghanistan for military aircraft.

The BBC has extensive coverage of the “Tulip Revolution”. If you’re a former republic of the Soviet Union you have to have a flower and a color to have a revolution: tulip and pink. There’s more here and even more on the people involved in Kyrgyzstan names interim leader.

You wouldn’t have to know about little countries with strange names if people would elect a government that minded its business, instead of everyone elses.

Quack, Quack, Quack is a new exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, showcasing the prints, posters and pamphlets of medical hucksters. For some reason that struck me as a timely event.

Andrew Cohen has an op-ed piece, The Courts Push Back that makes an important point about recent history.

I thought he liked the woman. I would be a little reluctant to turn Dubya over to Florida’s DCF. People disappear when they are under the protection of DCF, as in Rilya Wilson.

DCF has to have set some kind of new record with the cost and time overruns on its wonderful new computer system: HomeSafenet. What a great system. If you were a client named “John Smith” you either got no benefits or the benefits for everyone named “John Smith” in the entire state.

Hundreds of millions of dollars later, they connected it to their wonderful CoBRIS network which gave access to all of the private contractors who work with DCF, as well as everyone else on the Internet. No worries about identity theft, the clients are poor.

Of course, to run this marvelous system ol’ Jeb went out and found great people for the DCF leadership. Who wouldn’t want someone like Jerry Reiger, a founder and former president of the Family Research Council to provide a little responsibility for the indigent.

Billmon has his view at the Whiskey Bar.

Jack at Ruminate This says that the EPA misplaced a decimal point a couple of places when calculating human costs of mercury pollution. They had to lose a report by their own researchers, but, hey, it helps the coal burning power plants.

Would the supporters of “pirate” Social Security accounts can explain how you can make money when the Dow-Jones Industrial Average has gone from 10,587 when Dubya was inaugurated on 20 January, 2001 down to 10,470 today and that doesn’t even take into consideration the management fees and inflation. Muffy and Biff don’t seem to have done much with the tax cuts Dubya gave them, unless they’re investing in Euros.

I don’t know what Dubya has promised John McCain to enlist him in the War against Social Security, but John, one vet to another, he’s lying and will screw you the same way he has screwed every other veteran. Get real, John, he thinks veterans are paper towels: he uses them to clean up his messes and then throws them away.

Dot & Sox

Dot, why are we up here?
Because, Sox, this wrist rest is rubber and non-conductive, protecting us from lightning.
Oh, that makes sense.
And, it really ticks him off…heh, heh, heh…

[Edit: They always do this.]

It will amaze the younger among you to read what the Republican Party once represented in the US. This concept of the party is what attracted the “moderate” Republicans, some of whom are still in Congress and state offices.

About the best that can best said about the current Republican Party is that they have absorbed the worst of the old Democrats: Thurman, Helms, and the other “Dixiecrats”.

A recent series featured David Horowitz’s conservative jihad against liberal professors compared to the Chinese Cultural Revolution titled: Scenes From the Cultural Revolution with Horowitz appearing on a Mao poster.

It would appear that Mr. Horowitz was appraised of the post and issued an answer, which Billmon turned into another series that ends with Horowitz appearing on a poster that once featured Lenin.

[The poster reads: Партия – Ум, Честь и Совесть Нашей Эпохи! The Party – Intellect, Honor, and Conscience of Our Age!]

“We don’t need no stinking Constitution.”

If you watch the video of Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite [R-FL] you will get a different feel for the Schindlers and their side of the Schiavo passion play.

Oh, regarding Mrs. Schiavo’s lack of “her day in court”: she has had two three different Guardians ad Litem appointed by the Florida courts to represent her interests, and her interests alone.

The University of Miami has a timeline and links to documents and reporting on the case.

If you want to know why Mr. Schiavo won’t surrender his wife to the kind ministrations of her family, read the report of Prof. Jay Wolfson, the second third guardian ad litem, and his interviews with the Schindler family of December 1, 2003. [Warning PDF] That is the source of Mr. Schiavo’s odd remarks about “amputations”. The quick point is that the family say they would be opposing the removal of the feeding tube even if Mrs. Schaivo had left a written living will.

Bad news for all of those who want Judge George Greer removed from office. Even though he faced an opponent who concentrated on the Schiavo case in the election, Judge Greer was re-elected in 2004 by an overwhelming margin. Yes, in the state of Florida these decisions are made by elected officials answerable to the voters.

Update: Professor Wolfson was, in fact, the third guardian in this case.

Just in from my local NPR station, WUWF: the Republican government of the state of Alabama has provided no money for the state’s “Department of Homeland Security” in the budget they just passed. Do they know something that we don’t know about the “terrorist threat”?

Soon all of the camellias and early azaleas will be history.

Read the article and think about it when you listen to statements from the former governor of Texas, now President, who signed the law, and Tom Delay of Texas talk about the sanctity of life.

Where were “Bo” Gritz, Randall Terry, and the rest of the “pro-life” crowd when that baby was removed from the respirator over the objection of his mother?

Well, Australian Broadcasting tells us that English police blow up parked scooter.

A young woman’s brand new motorbike, parked outside the license bureau as she picked up her license plates, was reported as a possible bomb and blown up by authorities.

You would have thought that the location might have indicated that someone go in the building and ask if anyone owned the vehicle.

The “War on Nouns” makes people really stupid.

Extend the Hand of Brotherly Assistance to the Inhabitants of Towns and Cities Liberated by the Bushists

It has the four stripes of the four original states that thought he would solve their problems and the 31 stars representing the total number of states that harbored the same delusion.

It is displayed as a pennon, which most call a swallow-tail, and some call a serpent’s tongue. Your choice.