Posts from — February 2006

Mrs. Anne L. Armstrong, ranch owner, former US ambassador to the United Kingdom, Medal of Freedom winner, Bush Pioneer, not part of the hunting party. [Note, when the White House refers to Mrs. Armstrong, they mean Anne Armstrong.]

Miss Katherine Armstrong, daughter of Anne, lobbyist, Bush Pioneer, former chairwoman of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, hunt guide, witness. [Note, she took back her maiden name after her divorce.]

Pamela Pitzer Willeford, US ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, Bush Pioneer, hunter, witness.

Harry Whittington, attorney, presiding officer of the Texas Funeral Service Commission, Bush Pioneer, hunter, victim.

Richard Cheney, Vice President of the United States, hunter? suspect?

Synopsis:

On Saturday afternoon, Miss Armstrong drove the three hunters out to an area on her mother’s ranch where she suspected there would be quail. Using dogs she located two coveys of quail and told the hunters where the birds were.

The three hunters leave the vehicle, and flush quail from the first covey. Mr. Whittington felt he had killed at least one bird and proceeded to search for it, while Mr. Cheney and Ms. Willeford walked east [based on Ms. Willeford statement about the location of the sun] to the second covey.

Having completed his search, Mr. Whittington walked towards the other two hunters, in sight of the vehicle according to Miss Armstrong.

When Mr. Whittington was approximately 30 yards away, the second covey was flushed and Mr. Cheney took aim at a bird and following the flight fired his weapon, striking Mr. Whittington.

Facts:

Mr. Cheney had a 28 gauge Perazzi shotgun and was using 7½ shot.

A standard ¾ ounce load of 7½ shot is 262 pellets.

Approximately 70% of the pellets from a 28 gauge shell will remain within a circle 30 inches in diameter at 30 yards.

According to reports from the hospital approximately 100 pellets struck Mr. Whittington’s face, neck, and torso with sufficient force to penetrate his outer clothing and penetrate his chest nearly to his heart.

This would indicate that Mr. Cheney discharged his weapon at a point approximately two feet from Mr. Whittington’s head.

If he couldn’t see Mr. Whittington’s head, he certainly couldn’t see a quail.

Speculation:

Some of the quail from the first covey ran rather than taking flight. When Mr. Whittington was walking towards the other two hunters he flushed one or more of those birds. Mr. Cheney heard the birds fly up [the sound is distinctive], whirled and fired without getting a clear sight picture.

We don’t know if drugs or alcohol were involved because local officials were blocked from interviewing Mr. Cheney for an extended period after the incident. Everyone said there was no chemical involvement, but they are friends and political allies of long standing.

Conclusion:

Even accepting the witness statements as true, Mr. Cheney displayed a reckless disregard for the safety of others and caused a serious injury to another human being. At 6-foot, Mr. Whittington should have been clearly visible at a distance of 30 yards. Miss Armstrong stated that she saw him, but apparently made no effort to alert the other hunters.

The delays in reporting, and Cheney’s failure to make himself available to local law enforcement, all argue for more of an investigation.

Blame Esther A. Howland (1828 – 1904) of Worcester, Massachusetts. Her guilt is writ large by the Greeting Card Association’s Esther Howland Award for a Greeting Card Visionary. She imported the concept to the US from Britain to bolster her father’s stationery store in 1847.

Of course, it wasn’t long before the stationers had infiltrated school boards and imposed the now mandatory exchange in the classroom to push the low end product of Asian children and prisoners.

Seeing the success of the card merchants, the confectioners jumped on board to fill the lull between Christmas and Easter with the benefit that the bulk of purchases would be made by desperate men with less sense of taste than a golden retriever. If the box was red, heart-shaped, and said chocolate, a man would buy it.

There were at least three Saint Valentines and all were martyrs, as they should have been for the trouble they’ve caused. None are the reason for the “holiday”, only the excuse. They lived at a time when life and men were short and brutal, so the romantic aura of the holiday is pure piffle. At least one was reportedly part of a draft dodging scheme during the Roman Empire, marrying people so the men could avoid being deployed to foreign wars, bachelors being preferred for catapult fodder. [see Cheney, Richard]

It is to be hoped that the individual who first wrote: “Roses are red, violets are blue” was eaten by rabid wolverines, or had hemorrhoids.

Section 120.05 Assault in the second degree

A person is guilty of assault in the second degree when:

4. He recklessly causes serious physical injury to another person by means of a deadly weapon or a dangerous instrument.

Assault in the second degree is a class D felony.

It’s only three to seven years in Attica.

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department issued Cheney a warning for not possessing a required stamp on his hunting license.

Yep, an experienced, law-abiding hunter.

You know this wasn’t his idea.

The headline says: Chertoff overhauls FEMA, rejects criticism.

The text says he’s going to hire some people to do the work that the political appointees are supposed to be doing, and check to see if he can find out how FEMA did things ten years ago when they were competent.

They didn’t do anything wrong, but they are going to change everything.

Maybe someone could ask Ken Lay, Jack Abramoff, or Tom Noe?

Update: Culture Ghost has “found” the pin.

I would guess that after destroying our ability to find out what Iran was up to, they decided to try diplomacy.

Do you feel safer?

The report was leaked to the media, and the Democrats boycotted the committee in a bid for a non-partisan commission, but not even the Republican House members could figure out how to put lipstick on this pig.

This report is going to be a classic of government malfeasance and nonfeasance – what they did, they did badly, but mostly, they did nothing.

Grass is green; the sky is blue; the Federal government totally failed the victims of Katrina.

Peter Benchley, author of the novel, Jaws, and a screenwriter on the Spielberg movie based on the novel, has died at home in Princeton, New Jersey as a result of a lung disease. He was 65.

He was the grandson of Robert Benchley, and son of the author Nathaniel Benchley.

They managed to shake up the status quo during their lives, and after.

CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston reports that a tip from Shannen Rossmiller – a judge from Conrad, Montana who in 2004 helped snare a Washington state national guardsman who was considering defecting to al Qaeda – was what pointed the FBI to Reynolds.

“Rossmiller was scanning terrorist websites when she noticed a post from Reynolds seeking $40,000 dollars to by fuel trucks to blow up refineries in New Jersey and Wyoming and a section of the Alaska oil pipeline,” said Pinkston.

My first thought was why wasn’t the government taking this obvious step, monitoring web sites associated with terrorists and setting up stings. They do it to catch child molesters, so why aren’t they doing it to catch terrorists?

The other thing that bothered me is the interaction between law enforcement and “amateurs”. They are generally referred to as “vigilantes”, “meddlers”, and other less kind terms, so having the same individual involved in two different cases is odd.

Then I saw Scout Prime’s article on First Draft and things came into focus.

The story of 7 Seas Global Intelligence is “fishy”. The use of Realtime Spyware is probably falls under the heading of an illegal wiretap making the results unusable in court and therefore a waste of time without a warrant. If the Feds used any of that information to obtain a warrant, the warrant isn’t valid.

This smells of another Federal program to trash the criminal justice system in an attempt to show that they are doing something about terrorists. As a judge, Ms. Rossmiller should be aware of how far from legal her efforts actually are.

Oh, $40,000 wouldn’t by[sic] one tanker, much less multiples, just check used truck listings. The offer was obviously ridiculous. This effort seems to be more appropriate for mental health professionals than law enforcement, and it certainly does nothing to make me feel safer.

Showing roots of thinking derived from Leo Trotski’s Extraordinary Committee [CheKa] they have identified blogs as a national security threat. Apparently bloggers spread “misinformation”. The only bloggers willingly spreading misinformation are those that parrot what they hear coming from the mouths of official spokesweasels.

If you want to stop the spread of misinformation during a crisis, turn off the microphones in the White House briefing room.

This is another reason to move off Blog*Spot, TypePad, etc.: the government is targeting these sites to control the information flow.

“I am the Jesus Christ of politics,” Italian media quoted him as saying at a dinner with supporters on Saturday night. “I am a patient victim, I put up with everyone, I sacrifice myself for everyone.”

Giuseppe Giulietti, a leftist parliamentarian, joked that he was sure that “God the Father and the rest of Jesus’ family did not take this very well.”

The garden of governments around the world need pruning to prevent the spread of the blight. The cross pollination of government and religion produces sanctimonious kudzu.

It is one of the most famous sentences in all of American rhetoric: “My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total.” But what catches the eye today is the sentence that followed that famous declaration, the sentence that makes one so ashamed for Al Gonzales. Barbara Jordan’s great, deep voice brought the impeachment hearings against Richard Nixon to an awed silence when she vowed, “And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”

Thirty years ago, this state could produce Barbara Jordan — and now we send that pathetic pipsqueak Al Gonzales. Enough to provoke a wailing cry of “O tempera, O mores!” even from the depths of Lubbock.

Can I get an AMEN?

Slate Shot

It took me a minute to decide which story the picture was for.