---

Lieutenant HRH Princess Elizabeth

This is what the daughter of a leader who believes in the war he is fighting looks like.

---

---

I like oatmeal. I like it with butter, sugar, and milk on a cold morning; I love it as a cookie with raisins. If I had to choose between oatmeal raisin and chocolate chip cookies, it would be tough, but the chocolate would lose by the thinnest of margins. While I draw the line at haggis, I really do like oatmeal.

What I don’t like is waiting on a Flash animation by Quaker Oats blocking my view of the news headlines at the ABC News site, nor the Flash-launched pop-up that I had to kill. [Yes, folks, Flash can avoid your pop-up blocker and throw up an extra ad in the background.]

I hope ABC made some money on that ad, because it has cost them my clicks for the foreseeable future. As for Quaker Oats, there are other people who make rolled oats and don’t make obnoxious ads.

---

---

Some incompetent at Compound W¹ has released a statement by the Shrubbery that congratulates the Iraqis on their efforts to draft a constitution. The BBC reports that he supports their “heroic efforts”.

They missed the artificial deadline, agreeing only that they would continue to call the country the Republic of Iraq, but they have been taking lessons from the US:

They invoked Hasert/DeLay Time for the vote on a constitution, interpreting by the end of August 15^th to mean the end of August 22^nd, and Blackwell of Ohio voting rules by intuitively know that a show of hands was three-quarters plus one votes necessary to change the rules without having to actually count, since there were a lot of extra people in the chamber who weren’t supposed to be voting, like American officials.

---

Steve Bates of Yellow Doggerel Democrat reported on this with The Skittish Are Coming, but the Day to Day segment in which Alex Chadwick talks with Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) adds an interesting element.

In response to questions, Culberson admits that the Shrubbery has done nothing about the problem: the Border Patrol hasn’t been expanded as authorized by Congress; $6.8 billion in money for Homeland Security hasn’t been spent; there has been nothing done in response to the drug war going on in the frontier zone of Mexico.

Culberson admits that he has introduced his bill to address a problem that has been totally ignored by a former governor of Texas who has the power and resources to do something.

---

Finally, people need to know that there are good people in Texas in addition to those who blog.

When a movement started to close the road to Bush’s ranch and move Mrs. Sheehan’s protest out of sight, she reports that a landowner on the road has offered her the use of his land.

I’m not going to assume that the landowner is a liberal or a Democrat; I would rather believe he is displaying the traditional manners of a Southerner. I realize that the manners I was taught as a child have been little in evidence, but I would hope that there are still pockets of traditional values, even under rude reign of the Religious Reich.

[Update: Apparently the county can’t legally take any action for 30 days for public comment, so this isn’t a problem, as the protest will be over when Bush returns to Washington.]

---

1. Coined by Rook’s Rant

---