Nice catch from ‘Lights at Exit Stage Left: Mike Leavitt the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services put his parents in the wrong Medicare Part D plan and they had to switch before losing benefits.

This is not a slam on Mr. Leavitt, because he didn’t design the system, but if he can’t figure it out, how are people without his resources supposed to make the choice?

NTodd is just too nice to these people in his post: The Clothes Don’t Make The Person.

The woman was held captive for almost three months, so her clothes would be pretty gamey if she hadn’t changed them. She was dumped in the street outside the office of the Iraqi Islamic Party wearing what her captors gave her to wear. Last time I checked there are a shortage of malls open in Baghdad right now and going down the side streets looking for a Gap or Banana Republic was probably not on the woman’s agenda. She would probably be thinking that she would like something in desert camo and Kevlar that featured the aroma of Hoppe’s gun oil.

This isn’t the “Stockholm syndrome”: it’s called common sense. She wanted to avoid notice and get the hell out of there before another group of Iraqis decided to grab her. In addition to the political kidnappings there are an obscene number of garden variety kidnapping for ransoms going on at the moment in Iraq.

Everyone who questioned Ms. Carroll’s wardrobe should be sent to Iraq and required to walk two blocks in the middle of Sadr City wearing West Coast casual Friday.

Since I do almost all of my text creation off-line I don’t worry too much about the editor in blogging software, but WordPress has one feature that I really like, the ability to break a long post up so people who aren’t interested don’t have to scroll through it. I looked at a couple of ways of doing this in Blogger, but they were too much trouble to do it the way I wanted. WordPress has the feature built into its editor.

It also allows you to schedule posts. For example, I can set up a Friday Cat Blogging post anytime before Friday, and it appears at the time I designated. I don’t have to wait or fake the post time.

Another feature I like is the way that WordPress allows you to maintain your blogroll, and to create multiple blogrolls. If you are just starting out, this is a lot easier than editing the template in Blogger.

However if you have a large blogroll and don’t want to type it all in again you have a new adventure waiting for you: OPML [Outline Processor Markup Language]. Apparently this format was created for RSS feeds and it is the only import format that WordPress recognizes. I go into that below the fold.

The other annoyance was the way the default linking works. I prefer the blogroll links to open in a new page, but not the internal site links. I also needed to establish the header graphic as a link, as the original template puts text over that graphic and ties a link to the text, as at The Yellow Doggerelist.

This site, Oliver Willis, and The Yellow Doggerelist all use the default Kubrick template, but we have derived different looks from the same basic layout. Steve’s site is closest to the original.
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They’re not angry, they’re mad, barking at the moon mad.

TBogg has some fun with a Florida condo association who are upset because someone has taken down their American flag and replaced with a Mexican flag. The referenced article implies it was those terrible “illegal aliens”.

Reality check – you are working without documents in a foreign country, making $50 a day if you get paid and hiding from the authorities. You are going to buy a flag of your nation to put on the flagpole of a bunch of rich people who will call the police?

How about, you are a native born landscaper who has lost a maintenance contract for a condo association because your competitor is using undocumented workers and you want everyone to know what the condo association has done? You take the American flag that was on the pole, because real Americans would hire American workers.

House Republicans apparently don’t like the Senate immigration bill:

“I say let the prisoners pick the fruits,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, one of more than a dozen Republicans who took turns condemning a Senate bill that offers an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants an opportunity for citizenship.

“Anybody that votes for an amnesty bill deserves to be branded with a scarlet letter ‘A,'” said Rep. Steve King of Iowa, referring to a guest worker provision in the Senate measure.

If my name was “Rohrabacher” and I was born in Coronado, San Diego county, California and went to schools in Palos Verdes and Los Angeles I don’t think I would be questioning whether people named Garcia were in the state illegally. I might have questions about guys named Schwarzenegger who have heavy accents.

Somehow I don’t think the rural communities of the Central Valley are going to be quite as receptive to hundreds of convicted criminals bussed in as Dana seems to believe, even if the concept didn’t smack of slavery.

As for King, see Mustang Bobby on Obsession. After the impeachment of Clinton, Republicans should have learned not to invoke The Scarlet Letter. They forget that Ronald Reagan was the only President who had been divorced. [Jackson doesn’t count, it was his wife who had the divorce problems.]

A Cuddle of Kittens

Go away!

[Editor: I stumbled onto this group out back under a tarp next to a back-up air conditioner. They must have been born during the first week of March, which is early.]

In Memoriam: Hank and Sheena.

Friday Ark