Posts from — November 2006

Well, I went out last night because of the promise of the Leonid meteor shower, and while the sky was clear after the cold front moved through, I had absolutely no sightings and was chilled through and through.

I doing a re-hab on a house for a friend, which is a change from sitting at a desk beating on a keyboard, but when you start by hauling off 6080 pounds of junk, the job is not the touch-up the trim and repair a few electrical problems that was mentioned.

One of the pieces hauled off was the tank that belonged on one of the toilets in the house, so it’s time to install a new toilet.

The nail holes are nothing compared to the fist holes in the walls indicating someone among the former tenants had major anger management issues.

If I wasn’t ready for some physical labor I would have begged off, but I don’t see the December 1st “available to rent” date as realistic, too many things would have to go right for that to happen.

[Read more →]

Florida License Plates

Beneficiary

A weekend feature of Why Now.

When it comes to adolescents many of the “primitive” societies have a much better system than Western “civilization.” There is usually some task set for children at about age 13 that carries a certain level of risk. If the individual successfully completes the task, they are accepted as an adult.

Lacking a traditional structure for this rite, middle school and high school students devise their own systems for determining who should be accepted into the “tribe.” And who should be rejected.

Bullying in one form or another is a feature of the American version of this rite, and it has resulted in major incidents of physical and psychological violence. While the damage to the victims of physical violence is obvious, one of the less visible effects is that some of the victims become media pundits who have never grown up and are still attempting to be accepted as adults.

[Read more →]

Just to prove they really don’t understand what happened to them, House Republicans have voted to “stay the course” by re-electing their losing leadership, minus Dennis Hastert. Of course the fact that Boehner and Blunt were primarily challenged by ideologues even more right-wing, shows the Reptilicons have been listening to pundits instead of voters.

Youthful Stupidity

I can take him this time.

[Editor: Blaze, last seen curled up asleep on the end of a 2X6, prepares to attack TipToes, a hefty tom who is young enough to enjoy playing with kittens. Blaze has mistakenly attacked Gray Nose in this manner and got swatted across the yard for the error.]

Friday Ark

Everyone seems to believe that it’s time for James Carville to go away and hide somewhere or find real work behind a counter at a Tom Thumb [7-11 if you are outside of the South], something he might be qualified for with enough training.

You should always stop by Jams’ place [Poor Mouth], especially for cat blogging because he has the most interesting comments around.

Terry at Nitpicker notes that while the wingers might want to help John Bolton out, if the nasty old Senate won’t give him his job, giving him the proceeds from bake sales and blegging is actually illegal.

Finally, Phinky of Ignorant Hussy is on a three-month hiatus due to a job that is taking her to “the sandbox”. Good thoughts for her wouldn’t go amiss.

Continuing their shift into a regional minority party the Dixicons in the Senate have brought back Trent Lott of Mississippi to be Minority whip, he beat out Lamar Alexander of Tennessee by one vote. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky became Minority leader replacing William Frist of Tennessee. The other members of the leadership team will be Senators Jon Kyl of Arizona, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, John Cornyn of Texas and John Ensign of Nevada. Two Westerners well down the list to provide balance?

Senator Mel Martinez of Florida is the head of the National Committee because, apparently, no one else wanted the job and Mel always does what he’s told.

Wikipedia already has their 2008 Presidential election site up and working.

Below the fold is a listing of all of the people who have either talked about running, are running, or people want to run for President, without the usual group of people who run every time to get a seat in the conventions. Within their groups they ordered by my subjective opinion on “popularity,” so don’t assume any great significance.

[Read more →]

The problem of nominating Hillary Clinton in 2008 is that some people hate her. There is no real reason to hate her, but some people just begin foaming at the mouth when her name is mentioned. There’s nothing she can do about it, because she doesn’t deserve the hate.

Strong negative feelings are really difficult to get around, and when they are irrational, it can be dangerous to try. The attacks started when she was First Lady and have never stopped. It makes no sense, because she was a victim in the Whitewater deal, losing money, and she was the aggrieved party in “Monicagate”. She is a DLC centrist Senator if you look at her record. Other than a few key positions on choice and gay rights she votes to the right of most Democrats.

She is in the unfortunate position of being an icon for the Right of everything they hate about liberals, even though she is definitely not a classic liberal. She is so careful to avoid conflicts that I view her as a timid Senator, waiting for a consensus to form before she will take a position.

While I have great personal sympathy for what she has had to put with since 1992, I can’t support her for the 2008 nomination because I can’t see her fighting for people. She strikes me as passive, and I’m beyond the point that I want a passive President – there is too much that needs to be undone following the disaster that is the Shrubbery.

I’m mired in a project that is taking up all of my time so I will not be doing a lot of posting or commenting until it’s done.  Throw in Thanksgiving and visiting family and time is further reduced.

In 1890 the Punch cartoonist, painter, and book illustrator, Sir John Tenniel, drew a cartoon, titled Dropping the Pilot, that had Kaiser Wilhelm II putting German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck “ashore” so he could personally take “the helm” of the German Empire that was created by the hard work of Bismarck.

In 1945 Daniel Bishop used a variation to depict Winston Churchill losing the election.

PZ Myers at Pharyngula has up a modern variant by Steve Bell, with the Shrubbery as the Kaiser, Rummy as the Chancellor, and the entire “ship of state” lying on the bottom.

Very nice snark, that will probably appeal generally to history geeks who are aware of the earlier cartoons.

Last July I wrote about this battle of symbols and the limited number of VA approved symbols for grave markers.

CNN is now reporting: Soldiers’ widows sue for pagan symbols on headstones. Actually they are suing over using the Wiccan five-pointed star in a circle symbol, I wouldn’t get into characterizing it beyond that point.

No one complained when the US Army Air Corp used a five-pointed star in a circle on US aircraft during World War II. Five-pointed stars are quite popular on the flag. You can display the atom-A of atheists and the stylized H for humanists, so why is there a problem with allowing the Wiccans to use their symbol?

The VA has been stalling, probably hoping the widows would give up, but they have just been forced to go to court. Wicca is a religion recognized by the military. Wiccans hold meetings on military bases, and Wicca appears on dog tags. This is just more Christianist pettifoggery, forcing people to jump through more hoops because they won’t do what a small group of spiteful people want.

Nothing but Server Error 500 from Blog*Spot blogs:

Monday, November 13, 2006

Blog*Spot blogs on the current version of Blogger are showing 500 errors. Our engineers are investigating. Blogger.com and blogs on the new version of Blogger are unaffected.
Posted by Pete at 18:33 PST

I’m having issues with Firefox after Windows decided to pull a reset of its own accord. My defaults are whacked and reloading didn’t clean up the problem.

I overheard a sound bite of John McCain on one of the Sunday gabfests during NPR’s Sunday All Things Considered. He said that we needed to send in more troops and get rid of al-Sadr and the Mahdi militia.

John, we don’t have any more troops. The current level of 150K+ has been achieved by not letting people leave when their replacements arrived. The Republican executive didn’t expand the number of troops, and has been poaching the Reserves and Guard to reach this level. John, your party has controlled Congress in the 5 years since 9/11 and you haven’t pushed the executive to expand the armed forces, so this is your problem if there aren’t enough troops.

John, we don’t have the troops to neutralize the Mahdi Army, and suggesting that the US attempt to again take action against Hojatoleslam Sayyid Muqtada Al-Sadir, a direct descendant of the Prophet, the son and son-in-law of martyred Grand Ayatollahs, is grounds for commitment. Do you have any idea how much of the Iraqi army and police are loyal to al-Sadr before the government? Do you understand that al-Sadr is the only major figure in Iraq who wants to maintain it as a single nation?

Retire, John. Go away and shut up before you get more American service men and women killed with your foolishness. You were an airplane driver, you don’t know anything about the infantry. Ask Jack Murtha, he led ground pounders and knows what’s going on, which is why he wants our people out of Iraq.

We lost when we didn’t maintain security after the invasion, and let the Iraqi military dissolve with its weapons. We won the war, but never established the peace.

Atrios has more of the madness of John McCain.

Update: Don’t miss Steve’s latest doggerel: McLame.