Posts from — March 2005

1904 – March 17, 2005

Overall the policy was successful, but some people, like Ronald Reagan, implemented it badly. Kennan was more about a network of alliances, the UN, NATO, SEATO, than a 600 ship Navy.

Melanie at Just a Bump in the Beltway has a good post, Requiem for a Fighter that includes a Washington Post article on Mr. Kennan.

Update: Glen at A Brooklyn Bridge as a post, George Kennan Dead, that includes an interview with Mr. Kennan in The Hill prior to the start of the Iraq War. Worth the read to understand Mr. Kennan’s view on the use of force.

Update2: djhlights at Exit Stage Left Today’s history lesson from 04/12/03 and Eric Alterman Altercation Slacker Friday “Quote of the Day” both comment on “X”.

[^TM Kevin Drum]

Dot

What keyboard? Why would there be a keyboard on my shelf?

[Edit: This is one of my current roommates, last seen as a kitten. She does make it difficult to type.]

Update: Here’s the Baby Picture.

Friday Ark

February 17, 1912 – March 17, 2005

She will be missed as the world is lessened whenever a creative spirit passes over.

CNN has her Associate Press obituary.

After being characterized for years as an abusive, greedy, immoral monster, Michael Schiavo went on ABC’s Nightline to tell his side of the story. Unfortunately for the tabloids, the transcript reveals nothing more than a man trying to keep a promise he made to his wife.

CBS reports on the action in the US Congress to involve “activist Federal judges” in the years of litigation, which the all too cynical Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged thinks has more to do with Tom Delay’s problems than concern for Terri Schiavo.

ABC reports that the Florida House passed the “Randall Terry” bill, but the Florida Senate is attempting to craft a bill with fewer unintended consequences.

Just to make us all feel safer, Steve at No More Mr. Niceblog [now with comments] tells us that former Green Beret, Bo Gritz, the model for Rambo, has rolled into town to make a citizen’s arrest of anyone who attempts to remove the feeding tube. Given the state of courtroom security following the Georgia shooting, things could get out of hand very quickly.

I just heard that Terri Schiavo’s parents have filed a petition with Supreme Court Justice Kennedy for an emergency hearing on violation of her religious and civil rights. This is the procedure normally used for death penalty cases.

It would be nice if a few legislators brushed up on the ex post facto and bill of attainder provisions of the Florida and US Constitutions. They are openly violating the spirits, if not, the letter of these provisions. Then they should look into the meaning and reason behind the separation of powers. This whole mess wouldn’t be such obvious hypocrisy if some of us didn’t remember what these same groups did and said regarding the death penalty. They don’t want to allow this woman to die peacefully, but they were more than happy to strap a 16-year-old with a mental capacity of 8 into “Old Sparky”¹ and pull the switch.

For the medically challenged, including Bill Frist, MD of the US Senate, Terri Schiavo will not starve to death, she will die of dehydration, just like the football players who don’t drink their Gatorade^® during summer practices. As someone who works outside during the summer in Florida, it is a process with which I am familiar. It would take the average American more than a month to starve to death, and many considerably longer than that.

If she were aware, she would go through mental confusion, weakness, and extreme fatigue before dying from dehydration. While pain would be handy to alert people of this major threat to their life, pain is not a feature of dehydration.

1. “Old Sparky” was the folksy name given to Florida’s electric chair, which was not noted for efficiency. It was replaced with lethal injection, before it could be challenged as “cruel and unusual” punishment, by the “Save Our Death Penalty” bill.

Éireann go Brách

Well everyone agrees that he died on March 17 ^th, but the year is subject to debate. This is his feast day on the Catholic calendar. Enjoy as you are wont.

Wikipedia has more on Saint Patrick’s Day, if you need more.

[Edit: The shamrocks in the picture are growing outside my Mother’s kitchen door. They are another invasive species, but good ground cover.]

The CBS News article reports that “… he said unelected justices too often choose to read new rights into the Constitution, at the expense of the democratic process.”

I would wonder if Justice Scalia has ever noticed this:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

That is the text of the Ninth Amendment to the US Constitution and, as part of the Bill of Rights, it would seem that the justice should have seen it at some point in his education.

When you read the discussion of the adoption of the Constitution you learn that there were people who did not want to include a Bill of Rights because they were afraid that if a right were omitted that would be an excuse for the government to ignore it. This amendment was included to address that concern.

Scalia doesn’t seem to understand the underlying purpose of the Constitution. At its root the Constitution is designed to limit the power of the government. The Revolution was a response to what people felt were abuses of power by the government of Britain. Rights are not subject to the passions of a simple majority of the electorate.

CBS highlights this basic misunderstanding of the balance of government power versus the rights of the individual by Scalia with its reminder that:

“During a speech last year in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a deputy federal marshal demanded that an Associated Press reporter and another journalist erase recordings of the justice’s remarks.

The justice later apologized. The government conceded that the U.S. Marshals Service violated federal law in the confrontation and said the reporters and their employers were each entitled to $1,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees.”

In 1791, a year that he seems to have a fondness for, Scalia would have been hounded out of office for this offense, if he escaped a challenge to a duel, which was still acceptable at the time. Of course in 1791 the only members of the current Court who would have been acceptable would have been Justices Rehnquist, Kennedy, Souter, and Stevens: Christian males of Northern European origin.

This is a picture of an unidentified blogger being helped into the Emergency Entrance of a hospital by members of the editorial staff of the American Governance Institute for Truth’s Public Review of On-line Professionalism magazine. The dark glasses and umbrella are necessary to shield the blogger from the effects of natural sunlight.

A spokesperson for AGIT-PROP said that they responded after e-mail from Tennessee reported that the blogger had failed to post or comment for more than an hour. He had begun to have blogging withdrawal symptoms after squirrels ate through his cable connection and the cable company’s customer service center had closed down due to a typhoon in the Indian Ocean.

In understanding the seriousness of the document you must remember that in signing the document those men, our Founding Fathers, were providing the Crown with evidence of treason that was punishable by execution and forfeiture of all property. They really meant what was said in that document. They really believed in the words the document contained. People don’t voluntarily line up for a gallows and condemn their families to poverty in the proclamation of “suggestions”.

In a letter to Joshua Speed on August 24, 1855, Abraham Lincoln wrote: “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty, –to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

Hundreds of thousands of Americans died removing the “Negro” exception. People died and were imprisoned to remove the “Woman” exception. In spite of these bloody episodes, some continue to try to create exceptions to “all Men are created equal”. This is not an “American Tradition”; it is a form of “political herpes”, a disease that we have to continually battle, but never seem able to eliminate. It keeps breaking out in a slightly different form throughout our history, nurtured by pockets of hate and ignorance.

We are now dealing with the disease as it attempts to instill a “Homosexual” exception. As with the earlier exceptions the “disease vectors” are disguising their true nature with religion. Various states and courts have begun treating the “symptoms”, but until the United States resurrects the ideals of its founders, I fear the disease will simply go dormant until it can find another carrier to spread.

Michael at Musing’s musings, Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof, and NTodd at Dohiyi Mir all have takes on the efforts of a California court to control the recent outbreak.

[Edit: Thanks to Michael at Musing’s musings for the pointer to the Lincoln letter.]

“Under the Banner of Bush Toward the Second Four Year Plan.”

Update: The multi-talented Michael at Musing’s musings has rescued your graphically impaired landlord. Digby at Hullabaloo has the original.

As I read the American media these days I can see the agitprop popping up more and more often. Bush’s recent choice of Karen Hughes to a State Department post for Public Diplomacy is just more of the same. The taxpayers are paying to be lied to, just as happened in the Soviet system. The buying of columnists, the faked news casts, the staged “town hall meetings” with pre-selected and pre-rehearsed audience members is not about information, it is about disinformation.

Public information is released, or not, based on political decisions, not its value to taxpayers. Government web sites are posting political talking points, not the non-partisan views that they are paid to provide.

Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof points to a New York Times article on this issue and Digby at Hullabaloo has a nice rant of his with a very appropriate Soviet poster.

If I had the time I would “photoshop” it to read “Under the Banner of Bush towards the second Four-Year-Plan”, but I don’t like straying outside my core competency.

People who keep pushing for the Fascist model miss the point that this administration is filled with “Cold Warriors” who have a lot more knowledge and interest in the era after World War II.

I would note that one of the things that made the Soviet system of information management so successful was self-censorship. The censors weren’t very busy as most writers didn’t even attempt to push the envelop. When you read newspapers or watch the news this will tell why certain stories don’t get reported: editors don’t want to rock the boat.

Edit: Maru at WTF Is It Now, Oliver Willis, and Jack at Ruminate This have also chimed in on this official policy of presenting fiction as reality.

1. The literal translation of “Pravda” is truth.
2. The literal translation of “Izvestiya” is news.

Fish

Eat, swim, sleep – hey, someone has to do it.

[Edit: The two-bit goldfish just eating around the aerator. These are literally two-bit, as in 25¢ fish. My Mother would like koi, but the pond would have to be deeper and larger, or there would be another “Koi named Fu” incident my neighbor had with herons.]

The Republicans are planning to eliminate this tax, while the Democrats have proposed reducing the sales tax rate if the state is so overburdened with money.

The claim is that the Intangibles Tax is on money that has already been taxed. Sorry, but the Federal income tax means that all our money is already taxed and in many cases the sales tax is collected on taxes. More than half of the price of gasoline or cigarettes is taxes, so more than half of the sales tax collected is based on taxing taxes. If gasoline is priced at a dollar a gallon, it costs $2 with the Federal and state taxes. The sales tax in Florida is 6%, so half of the 12¢ you pay in sales tax is actually on tax.

The transfer of the burden for government to the “Third Estate” continues. Oh, you can ask students in the Florida university system, or those people forced by private insurance companies into the state’s insurer of last resort, or the local governments waiting to be reimbursed for hurricane expenses if the state is overburdened with money. None of these groups seem to believe that the state has too much money.

It isn’t just fawns or feral kittens that the ants kill, this CBS article reports of the million+ dollar settlement paid by a nursing home to the family of a patient killed by ant bites.

The bite is highly acidic and is treated by a baking soda and water paste, but, by the time you realize there’s a problem, you will be treating a dozen bites.

The pesticides that are most effective against fire ants kill almost everything else, and a water table within a couple of yards of the surface would mean polluting your well if you used them.