Posts from — February 2006

…In fact, the only person I can think of that is dumb enough to support it is John Tierney who is so divorced from reality he doesn’t even get visitation rights.

Via Oliver Willis, for your consideration: Kwale Killer Kartoon.

Echnide also noted: Flemming Rose on The Cartoons, but she had a commenter, Mark from Ireland, who lives in Denmark and reads Danish.

Mark filled in some background on the newspaper involved and the political situation. You should read it for yourself and make up your own mind. My Danish isn’t good enough to say from my own reading, but this isn’t the first time I’ve heard what Mark is saying.

It would certainly explain the way this was handled by the Danish government. Refusing to meet with ambassadors from Muslim countries is a FEMA level screw-up.

British historian David Irving has been found guilty in Vienna of denying the Holocaust of European Jewry and sentenced to three years in prison.

He had pleaded guilty to the charge, based on a speech and interview he gave in Austria in 1989.

First, people like David Irving and Fred Phelps, the professional haters, deserve anonymity. Any and all reference should be eliminated from memory. Their existence pollutes thought.

Having said that, the Austrian law is wrong. The existence of this law in Austria and a similar law in Germany are understandable, but they are an exemption to free speech, and they provide fuel for Muslim extremists and anti-Semitic elements. These exceptions are the reason for the call for Holocaust cartoons in Iran.

Free speech has to be just that. If you are not willing to defend your enemy’s right to say hateful things, you don’t really believe in free speech on a practical level. This is why the ACLU will defend Nazis and Rush Limbaugh, they believe in everyone’s rights, not just those that agree with them.

On an intellectual level I believe in free speech. On a personal level I wouldn’t be unhappy if certain people fell face first into a fire ant mound.

I don’t want to go all whiney, but as bad as the Congresscritter from the First District of Florida has been for years, Joe Scarborough being the most familiar to most people, I haven’t really gotten into the guy who was the alternative in the last several elections, and who has apparently decided to run for the Senate in 2006.

If you have the courage, check out Tom Wells of the Family Values Party. No it isn’t a satire, and that really is the Wells who appeared on my ballot.

Some choice.

There’s nothing worse that being invited to someone’s estate for a weekend and then having to apologize for causing a scene due to a misunderstanding with another guest.

Avoid this social faux pas [pronounced fox pass by real Americans] by wearing this friendly reminder of your status over your SOV™ Dragon Skin® Flexible Body Armor when you take to the field for a fun-filled slaughter of small birds after enjoying a repast of burned flesh and fermented grain.

Don’t think of yourself, think of the shame of your family knowing you’ve burdened the health care system by taking up space in an Intensive Care Unit and causing a surgeon to miss weekend tee times to dig metal fragments out of your body. Think of having to face the media to explain how you blundered in front of the weapon of someone much more important than you, causing them to waste days of expensive staff time trying to fashion an excuse acceptable to the world.

I talked about illiteracy in the Muslim world. Michael at Musing’s Musings, Bulldog at Main & Central, and Anne at Peevish have all posted on this.

Folks, you can’t present a landfill as a gated community, no matter how much you pay a PR firm. The US government has a history in the area, and while this administration may have forgotten about it, the people who live there haven’t.

Iraqis and Iranians remember that the US supported Saddam for years during the Iran-Iraq War. Iranians know about the US involvement in bringing the last Shah to power. The Afghanis remember how the US left after the Soviets were pushed out. The Kurds remember being screwed by Republican Presidents since Nixon. Americans may not remember, the locals do. The locals don’t differentiate between administrations: the American government is the American government.

The Danish imams didn’t use Blackberrys, blogs, or e-mail to build support for their point of view; they sent a delegation of religious leaders to the religious leaders in the various Muslim countries. Information comes from the mosque, not the ‘Net.

PR is not going to overcome Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, or Fallujah. PR is not going to overcome calls for “crusades” by Americans. PR is not going to overcome the burial of “wedding parties”, women and children, the old and weak. PR is not going to offset the lack of water, sewers, electricity, and fuel in Iraq.

If Rumsfeld would like to improved relations with the Muslim world he could start with a heart-felt act of contrition followed by the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. These people have lived under repressive regimes for years and they know propaganda when they hear it.

He has a series of podcasts hosted by The Guardian that are reasonably bizarre. [I just noticed this is also Silly Site o’ the Day by Elayne.]

You have to wonder if parents realize their child will be weird and therefore name them Karl, or being named Karl makes a child weird.

If you have an interest on some background for the sports, you could do a lot worse than the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s website.

If you don’t know what a luge is or have never seen a curling spiel, they have explanations for every event. [Spiel is German for game and is the term for a curling match.]

They also have a cartoonist, Instigator, available for some levity, Canadian style.

Italian television is watched in the former colony of Libya, and riots broke out in the very conservative Muslim nation resulting in the death of 10 protestors, shot by Libyan police in an attempt to protect the Italian consulate.

Mr. Calderoli has resigned.

Actually it only affects OSX version 10.4 and you have to install the file, “latestpics.tgz”, so you would have to be incredibly stupid to have your machine affected, but it shows someone cares enough to start wrecking havoc on Macs.

“My family and I are deeply sorry for all that Vice President Cheney and his family have had to go through this week,” Whittington said.

Imagine if I had said that, or you saw it on TBogg. This may be that particular form of “Southern polite” that mystifies outsiders and delights insiders.

Only Harry’s friends know for sure.

She pointed to low bush in her backyard where I found a red fox vixen lying on her side. The fox appeared to have an injury to her fore legs and was not able to get away. If the vixen had been at all aggressive I would have put her down, suspecting rabies, but she acted defensive so I called Animal Control as she was too large for my carrier.

The laws about animals are really confusing. You have to have the proper license to deal with the specific animal. For alligators and bears you have to call a licensed trapper, migratory waterfowl belong to the Feds, but red foxes are a non-native wild animal so Animal Control will deal with them.

In about 15 minutes a young woman drove up in a white van, and Miss Thelma showed her age: “My goodness, they’ve sent a girl!”

Despite being “a girl”, she made a quick capture with a minimum of force and removed the animal from Miss Thelma’s yard. They are probably going to have to put the vixen down because the forelegs looked broken, but there’s a chance.

So, I go out and am feeding the cats at 5pm and suddenly it’s raining feathers. Just about three feet above my head a sharp shinned hawk has caught a dove. The hawk wasn’t much bigger than the dove and it struggled to fly away with it. Because of the awkward flight I was able to see the distinctive tail banding that confirmed my initial identification.

Wild animals have shown great resilience to the intrusion of man.

In comments Steve Bates pointed to an article by Steven Clemons at The Washington Note who identifies the basis for the claim as Executive Order 12958, which was written under the Clinton administration.

I’m with Clemons based on personal experience: Cheney has been given the authority to classify information, but the only information he can de-classify on his own under the order are those he classified.

Protecting classified information is expensive, so it has a time span. Based on time limits, documents are reviewed periodically for declassification. The key is that the decision to approve declassification is made by the authority for the original classification. NSA cannot declassify CIA documents.

The President can request declassification, and that request would probably be honored, but the form has to be signed by the original classification authority to be legal. Every classified document has a paper trail.

As I’ve mentioned it in the past here is the text I’ve been referencing in Executive Order 12958 – Classified National Security Information:

Section 1.8. Classification Prohibitions and Limitations.

(a) In no case shall information be classified in order to:

(1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error;

(2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency;

(3) restrain competition; or

(4) prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of national security.

Just so we’re clear on this.