Posts from — January 2007

The Pensacola Beach Blog notes that State Farm Settles Mississippi Katrina Claims, which is good news for Trent Lott and other Mississippians who have been stiffed by State Farm for a year and a half. Hopefully the other insurance companies will also settle, and people along the Gulf Coast can move forward with rebuilding their lives.

Policyholders in each of the affected states are going to be required to go to court to get similar deals, because the laws and regulations are different in each state, but the framework is there for possible settlements.

I’ve had my “legislature warning flag” on the sidebar because the Florida legislature has been meeting in special session to deal with the property insurance crisis in the state. Rates have been skyrocketing despite record profits for the insurance companies.

Frankly, the free market doesn’t have an answer for the situation where private enterprise isn’t interested in providing a service. The state has had to create its own insurer of last resort, but that company isn’t allowed to compete with private companies and is required by law to charge more than the private companies for coverage.

The Republicans have passed a bill, but it seems to be predicated on the state not being struck by hurricanes any time soon, which is not a good bet.

When the Shrubbery talks about private insurance companies being the best solution for health care coverage, he obviously has never had to deal with those companies as a claimant. He seems to assume, like Trent Lott did, that you will get what you paid for. That only works if you are ready, willing, and able to sue them.

If you are attempting to place another link for the search engines and you try to impress me by telling me what an insightful writer I am, you might not want to use a comment on Friday Cat Blogging.

So, to impress the world with how seriously he takes energy conservation and weaning the US off foreign oil, the Shrubbery made a speech that is at the White House site: President Bush Discusses Energy Initiative. The speech was given at the DuPont Theater, Hotel du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware, about 100 miles away.

Nothing says concern for conservation more than taking a helicopter from the White House to Andrews AFB, and then flying two 747s a hundred miles [one plane for him and one for the motorcade vehicles and support staff] and then coming back.

It would have used less oil to have chartered buses and brought the audience to the White House.

The transcript may say “Democratic”, but the Shrubbery said “Democrat”. The hateful spirit of Joe McCarthy still exists in the language of the Republican Party.

The word is spelled and pronounced “NUCLEAR”.

The accent is on the second syllable in both “IRAQ” and “IRAN” and the initial vowel is short.

Dr. Cole would be happy to explain the relationship of the various Muslim groups in the Middle East, because it is glaringly obvious that no one in the White House has a clue.

Update: Look, you stupid twit, buy a dictionary – McCain’s escalation is a tactic, not a strategy. You don’t have a strategy, which is one of the big problems with your war.

Update 2: Oh, the civilian reserve idea, it’s called the Peace Corps, and it has been around since Kennedy. Look in your government phone book and you can call and ask them about what they do.

Yesterday:

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Publishing on the old Blogger was failing with “Error 550” since approximately 5:30PM PST. It was fixed at approximately 8:00PM PST.< /p>

New Blogger was unaffected. Sorry for the inconvenience.

And it has started again for the old sites at 1:30PM CST.

Update: I was wrong, it was new sites:

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

New Blogger has had troubles this morning, which you may have seen with slow requests and 502 error pages.We are working on this and hope to get it resolved very soon.

Update, 1PM: These issues have been resolved. We are continuing to monitor and diagnose closely. We apologize for this morning’s poor performance.

You may still see 502 errors on occasion, but waiting a few seconds and reloading the page should work. This is mostly limited to a handful of blogs, however.

While the headline on the BBC article, Ninja kitten band win Coke battle, could be interpreted many ways, the basic story is that Joel Veitch of Rathergood.com has received a settlement from Coca Cola over the unauthorized use of one his band’s songs and associated animation in an ad in South America.

Joel’s work is definitely an acquired taste, but it’s nice to see that he has been compensated for his work and creativity.

While I gave the general English translation of the word in an earlier post, Dr. Cole provides a short lecture on its meaning and derivation and an overview of the Arabic language.

This is the part of the State Of The Union where a President with a popularity of 28% introduces invited people who have actually done something, so that the audience will applaud with real fervor.

While “claptrap” is currently defined as “pretentious but insincere language” it originally described something injected into a performance to guarantee applause, literally a “trap” to capture “claps”. The last six SOTU speeches have been examples of both definitions.

Update: If you care, here are the transcripts of what the Shrubbery read and Senator Webb’s response.

[If you go quickly you will see that in the caption on the picture of Senator Webb says: “Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, whose son is serving in Vietnam, beat Republican George Allen in November’s elections.” I guess CNN has fired all of their fact checkers and editors who know the lad is in Iraq, not Vietnam.]

Scorpio at Eccentricity is in the process of moving to http://scorpio-eccentricity.blogspot.com, and will do it after the archives are moved over. [Update: the move is complete.]

Steve Gilliard & Jen of News Blog have already moved to http://www.thenewsblog.net leaving their archives at the old place. Apparently Blogger won’t move more than 1000 posts to the new version of the software, so the “big guys” are forced to make decisions.

In the Spocko v. Rodent dust-up, supporters of the Rodent have accused Spocko of attempting to deny the minions of the Rodent their rights of free speech.

To be denied your rights of free speech the government must be involved, as in this Associate Press story, Pa. Man’s Letter Brings Secret Service:

An elderly man who wrote in a letter to the editor about Saddam Hussein’s execution that “they hanged the wrong man” got a visit from Secret Service agents concerned he was threatening President Bush.

The letter by Dan Tilli, 81, was published in Monday’s edition of The Express-Times of Easton, Pa. It ended with the line, “I still believe they hanged the wrong man.”

Tilli said the statement was not a threat. “I didn’t say who _ I could’ve meant (Osama) bin Laden,” he said Friday.

… [snip]

“He said, ‘Keep writing, but just don’t make no threats,'” Tilli said of one of the agents.

See the difference. Spocko didn’t send armed men from the government to the radio station to warn the announcers to watch their language, as happened in the case of Mr. Tilli.

As has been widely reported: Chavez tells U.S. government: ‘Go to hell’. Having won multiple elections by overwhelming majorities, and with a legislature controlled by his supporters, Mr. Chavez doesn’t want to waste time submitting his decisions to that legislature, so he had them pass a law that allows him to rule by decree for 18 months.

The US government has raised all kinds of complaints about Mr. Chavez’s “anti-democratic” actions, without explaining the difference between what he is doing and what the Shrubbery has been doing for 6 years with a Republican Congress and no oversight.

I would note that Mr. Chavez has very high approval ratings, hasn’t invaded anyone, and doesn’t have a huge budget deficit, so there are differences between his presidency and the Shrubbery’s.

The electorate voted against the war. The generals on the ground said McCain’s surge wasn’t necessary. Now, via Bill Scher, we find a Washington Post article, Embattled, Bush Held To Plan to Salvage Iraq, providing us with the view of the Iraqi government:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had a surprise for President Bush when they sat down with their aides in the Four Seasons Hotel in Amman, Jordan. Firing up a PowerPoint presentation, Maliki and his national security adviser proposed that U.S. troops withdraw to the outskirts of Baghdad and let Iraqis take over security in the strife-torn capital. Maliki said he did not want any more U.S. troops at all, just more authority.

So, we now know that Kristol, Kagan, McCain, and Lieberman are about the only people who support this incredibly stupid idea.

Scout at First Draft, among others, have noted the report covered in Michael Brown: Politics Played role in federal Katrina Response.

I would like to add my personal knowledge to this. After Katrina, locally, we concentrated on helping Mississippi because we had worked out a route to get there over the roads that were left and they absorbed the fury of the hurricane from the coast to well inland.

I live in a small town of less than 400 but we organized a trailer full of supplies and the truck and drivers to get it there. We were really upset when the governor of Mississippi, Hailey Barbour, would get on television and say that everything was wonderful and FEMA was great and Mississippi would be good as new in no time. The local officials and the drivers who returned said the area was a bomb zone, no supplies were being brought in, FEMA expected people to travel great distances, etc. – exact same conditions that they were complaining about in and around New Orleans.

The sheriff of a rural Mississippi county was charged by the Feds when, fed up with the lack of response, he took some of his people to a FEMA distribution point and “highjacked” a truckload of supplies for his county.

The progress in Mississippi is generally the result of the corporations that own the casinos rebuilding, not any action by the state or FEMA. With a much larger Federal grant for housing than Louisiana, Mississippi is barely moving forward, and the local governments are still dependent on donations from neighboring states for equipment and supplies.

The politics played by Hailey Barbour in talking about the response may have resulted in larger grants, but the rebuilding is just as hampered by the incompetent and inconsistent FEMA administration, and the lack of government resources that affect Louisiana.

Florida is still waiting for FEMA to make up its mind about the 2004 hurricanes so we can finish our recovery, but we aren’t holding our breath.

Florida License Plates

Beneficiary

A weekend feature of Why Now.