Posts from — April 2006

If you remember the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies of the 1930’s and 40’s you will be surprised to learn that Cheetah, Tarzan’s chimpanzee companion turned 74 over the weekend.

Cheetah is recognized as the world’s oldest chimpanzee.

Both Melquiades “Mel” Rafael Martinez, US Senate [R-FL] and Carlos M. Gutierrez, Secretary of the US Department of Commerce are immigrants. If they had been from Mexico, Central America, or South America, they would probably not be legal.

Their “legality” is based solely on the fact they emigrated from Cuba, and are covered by an amnesty, a special law that only applies to Cubans. If a Cuban sets foot on US soil, s/he is automatically allowed to stay in the US. You have to be a really good professional athlete to get this deal if you are from any other country.

The “problem” with the immigration system is that it isn’t fair. Some people get to cut into line, or get a separate line. If you make the system fair and efficient, people will use it. It shouldn’t require a lawyer to immigrate to the United States.

The IRS has all of the tax forms on-line in PDF format. You can fill them in and print them out in Adobe Reader.

This service is provided for those whose cat seems to have eaten a major portion of the Form 1040SE and deposited it atop the Schedule A in a soggy mess. The site gets very busy starting on April 14^th.

It doesn’t do any calculations or error checking, but when the local post offices and libraries seem to have stopped carrying forms, or don’t carry the forms you need, it is quite handy.

They also have the instructions in PDF format.

Remember the Application For Automatic Extension of Time To File U.S. Individual Tax Return is Form 4868, but you must pay any amount you may owe on or before April 15^th or there will be penalties.

Via Steve at The News Blog, if you know anyone displaced from New Orleans, let them know about http://www.DemVote.org/, a site that can help them vote in the coming election. All of the information they need at one place put together by Democrats Abroad, an ex-pat organization that helps Americans vote when they live overseas.

Via Scout at First Draft, a PBS NewsHour video link on why we need to rebuild the levees, unless you think we don’t need to a quarter of our refineries and domestic oil and gas production.

Of course, there’s also the little thing about New Orleans being the port for exporting everything produced along the Mississippi River basin, as well as the importing of coffee.

Update: The guys and gals of 3 Old Men have taken a break from building in Georgia to build in Jackson, Mississippi with Habitat for Humanity.

There needs to be a special award for animal blogging captions. This has to be in the lead for the all time best caption.

Although this is a contender in the long form, and it’s PO’ed Patricia’s birthday.

There several entries I wrote yesterday that I will never post because I was too angry and it really came through. Writing them was better than yelling at the cats or my neighbors and the effort reduced the pressure.

Let me just say that if the Congress doesn’t start doing its job regarding oversight and stop this Iran madness the immigration protests will be overwhelmed by the protests against another attempt to lie us into a war.

If you want to worry about nuclear weapons in Southwest Asia, worry about Pakistan. Iran doesn’t have any and won’t even have the ability to construct them for years.

If you want to promote democracy in the region do something about Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait.

If you want to promote stability in the region, have Israel comply with UN Security Council resolutions and disable its nuclear arsenal. It is a bit disingenuous to demand Hamas renounce violence while Israel is launching aerial assaults on Palestinians and building more settlements on occupied land.

The header graphic and the Why Now? at the bottom are links to the main page if you go wandering around the site. The links in the text and on the sidebar open in a new window. It’s a brute force approach necessitated by the way the site is structured and changes in the HTML language.

This is a handy piece of code:

<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”5; URL=https://whynow.dumka.us/”>

If you stick this in with the other META tags at the top of the page it transfers the viewer automatically to a different location. If you go to my old Blogger site, after 5 seconds you will come here. Not everyone notices when you move, so it’s always nice to leave a forwarding address. Don’t forget to change the URL to your new site.

HaloScan has some great spam software, because I had a few trolls, but no spam at the old site. Now I’m having to deal with it. I have no idea what these people think posting in comments will do for them. You don’t see it because of the way commenting works in WordPress, but they are relentless.

A majority of the House of Representatives is Republican. A majority of the Senate is Republican. The current resident of the White House is a Republican. Republicans control all of the levers of power. If there are problems with the government, the problems belong to Republicans.

When the Shrubbery tries to complain about problems with his pet projects, or doesn’t like the budget bill, he needs to talk to the people in charge, who are all Republican.

Deficit spending is the result of Republican decisions. The massive expansion of government is the result of Republican decisions.

At this point all of the problems belong to Republicans, because the Democrats have been shut out of any role in the process. The Republicans changed the rules in the House and the Senate to ensure the Democrats are powerless and outside the loop. The Republicans even changed the rules for lobbyists, so Democrats can’t even share in the bribes.

All of the failure, mismanagement, cronyism, incompetence, and generally pitiful performances are covered with large elephant-shaped labels, because they belong to the Republicans.

There is an old saying:”No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session.” That’s why I have a storm flag with a black outline of Florida instead of a square flying in my sidebar when the legislature is in session.

This piece of travesty started at Maru’s place, which directed me to the Pensacola News Journal, and finally to the Pensacola Beach Blogger.

PBB covers the whole sordid affair of special legislation at the state level to screw Orange County out of property taxes from a religious theme park and then segues into our local whackos and their attempts to avoid taxes and regulations.

I’m willing to go along with not taxing places of worship, but theme parks, publishing empires, media facilities, rental property…this has got to stop. If it’s a profit making enterprise in competition with the private sector, it needs to pay taxes because it’s a business, not a religion.

Rook makes the very valid point about calls for Democrats to create a plan for Iran. With the intelligence as corrupt as we now know it to be, how can we be sure there is “a problem” with Iran?

Grillz are fancy ornamental overlays for teeth, the name coming from the grill on cars. They are often created from gold and precious stones.

CBS reports: Feds Want to Seize Suspects’ Grillz. The Feds were actually taking these people to a dentist to seize their fancy dental work with a forfeiture order before their attorneys intervened.

I’m sorry, but this is sick and it is being done in our name.

If you have any interest in nature photography you really should be stopping by Facing South on Fridays for bird blogging. R. Neal, formerly known as SKB, has a great eye, and consistently presents wonderful pictures.

Sharing

I’m sure I will fit, Dot.

[Editor: Dot is unhappy with Ringo’s attempt to share the chair, especially with Ringo’s absurdly long tail wrapping around her head.]

Friday Ark

From the BBC: Bush ‘ordered intelligence leak’.

The Libby revelation should put an end to people claiming that the Shrubbery is concerned with national security when it comes to leaks, and make plain that politically based leaks are a problem that originated with this White House.

These people use classification to silence their critics and de-classification to attack them. They could not care less about national security. Corruption, cronyism, and incompetence – the guiding principles of the Shrubbery.