Posts from — July 2007

You can forget the military or administration doing anything significant in September. The Federal fiscal year starts 1 October and Harry Reid has put the Defense appropriations bill to the side for the time being. If there is less than stellar progress in Iraq, the Defense budget will be affected.

They are going to delay any report until after the appropriations bill is passed, count on it. When they specified September they forgot about the budget. If they can’t stall and report little or no progress, the Repubs are in a bind.

The military is already trying to shift the date to November because they realized the error before the Hedgemony did.

CNN reports : Rocket launcher tube found on lawn, which is vaguely correct, in a way, if you don’t know what you are talking about.

(CNN) — Police and FBI agents are investigating the discovery of an empty rocket launcher tube on the front lawn of a Jersey City, New Jersey, home, FBI spokesman Sean Quinn said.

They also hauled in the the Army’s 754th Ordnance Company and Joint Terrorism Task Force. Too bad they couldn’t understand this part of their article:

According to the Web site Globalsecurity.org, a loaded M136 AT4 anti-tank weapon has a 40-inch-long fiberglass-wrapped tube and weighs just 4 pounds. Its 84 millimeter shaped-charge missile can penetrate 14 inches of armor from a maximum of 985 feet. It is used once and discarded.

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The Washington Post thought it was important that people know that a Hummer Owner Gets Angry Message.

The guy bought a used Hummer and parked it on the street because it was too big to fit in the garage and two masked men slashed the tires, broke the windows, and scratched an environmental message in the paint.

I don’t know what the charge is in DC, but in the law I enforced, Penal Law of the State of New York the guys would be charged with violating:

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McClatchy has a nice little piece: Coffee grounds brewed trouble for Israeli fortuneteller

This year, Kuma became one of the few people ever to be charged in Israel with practicing magic, a unique crime punishable by up to five years in jail.

In short, Kuma was the target of a modern-day witchhunt.

…

Kuma’s transgression is something known to its practitioners as tasseography. Put more simply, it is the ancient art of overturning a coffee cup — usually a demitasse used for Turkish coffee — and looking for answers in the patterns left behind by the grounds.

And that, under Israeli law, can be grounds to charge someone with illegally practicing magic.

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This week Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof reported the passing of his brother’s chocolate Lab, Reese, and Cat Daddy & Dr. Squeeky reported the passing of his black shorthair tom, Sebastian.

A Group Shot

You haven’t heard the end of this, flash boy.

[Editor: A rare moment of peace with the entire crew together. Income is not exactly sweetness and light. He is also responsible for several bedtime “surprises.”]

Friday Ark

Día de la Independencia
República de Colombia

¡Viva Colombia!

This is really annoying. It costs some people money, but it just wastes my time and ‘Net bandwidth.

I use a separate program for e-mail, Pegasus, and it doesn’t launch anything or display fancy formatting, because I don’t want it to. What is does with my e-mail is save it as text, and I read it as text.

I few minutes ago I checked by e-mail and received this:

Caro membro Banca Di Roma,

Una nuova gamma completa di servizi online e adesso disponibile !

Per poter usufruire dei nuovi servizi online Banca Di Roma occorre prima diventare UTENTE VERIFICATO.

Followed by this link:

<a onclick=”return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)” target=”_blank” href=”http://sccontracting.net/www.bancadiroma.it/site/”> https://www.bancaroma.it<WBR>/</a>

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Pierre Tristam reports on the important items being dealt with by the Flagler County Board of Education. With all of the pressures that schools are under these days from “No Child Left Behind,” the changes in the tax laws, the inconsistent funding from the state of Florida, the requirements of the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test, the A-Plus Schools program, and all of the rest, it is nice to see that these people have focused in on the real problem in their school – what students wear.

They have decided that students in Flagler County need to wear uniforms. Now I can understand that, I spent twenty years in uniforms, so I thought I’d help them out. See, the thing about uniforms is that they really need to be uniform – you can’t have uniformity if the girls wear one thing and the boys another.

After due consideration I have two suggestions:

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Knowing that Louisiana Senator Vitter will need to have a “resurrection” tour to make amends with his constituents, I thought I’d find him an appropriate theme song.

Maybe his wife could find him an autographed picture of Lorena Bobbitt for his office.

Mad Kane favors us with another wonderful piece: The Full-a-Bluster Song.

Kevin Drum of Political Animal has another episode of why you can’t trust the telecoms: Telephone Kvetching.

Lurch at Main and Central has two pieces: Irony Lives On, in which the Hedgemony tries to find a new marketing slogan for Messopotamia, and Supporting the Troops, in which the White House details all of the terrible things the Congress is doing to hurt the troops, like giving them pay raises and not increasing medical insurance co-pays.

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CNN parrots the MAC-V MNF-I report: U.S.: Senior al Qaeda in Iraq leader held. It was a patriotic capture on the the Fourth of July of the Media Director of Al Qaeda in Iraq who supposedly coordinates with AQ-HQ on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

What do they have against press secretaries? They arrested al Sadr’s press secretary in January with much fanfare. I guess it’s critical that AQ-I’s websites will no longer be up-to-date.

The situation is simple: the Hedgemony screwed up and pulled people away from the real counter-terrorism mission in Afghanistan to attack Iraq for no reason. As a result, the original franchise is still going strong in the Northwest Territories of Pakistan, and an opportunist in Iraq opened shop after the occupation was botched.

The foreign fighters in Iraq are coming from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and most of the attacks are carried out by Baathist elements, but these idiots are blaming Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah.

We have to impeach these people to get someone in power who at a minimum understands that you will never hit a target if you don’t aim at it.

Before you risk vertigo on what will follow get mellow with the Byrds.

So the folks at Danger Room earn their money by reading things so you don’t have to, like the latest de-classified National Intelligence Estimate that is carried on CBS as U.S. Warns Of “Evolving” Terror Threat, which is every bit as creative as the pirouetting pachyderms in Fantasia and it should read “Revolving,” because it keeps turning up when useful for the Hedgemony.

Sharon Weinberger presents Homeland Security Advisor: U.S. Fighting a “Single Determined Enemy” in which Frances “Whirlpool” Townsend fails to inform us exactly when it will be “determined” who, what, and/or where this enemy is, and how he, she, it, or they will be dealt with, only that we have to believe, or something bad will happen to someone, somewhere, at some time.

Noah Shachtman looks at it and pronounces the Intelligence Estimate: Snoozeville. Not only that, he locates other people who just don’t care if Tinkerbell or Frances Townsend fade away waiting for “a success that hasn’t occurred yet”.

You may have seen the news about the shooting at the office of the governor of Colorado:

… a man in a dark suit some described as a tuxedo appeared outside the offices of Gov. Bill Ritter. He refused to drop a handgun, and was shot and killed by a patrolman on the governor’s security detail.

The man said before he was shot, “I am the emperor and I’m here to take over state government,” said Evan Dreyer, the governor’s spokesman.

No one besides the gunman was injured.

Now they are talking about new security measures and the need to install metal detectors at the entrances.

What part of “No one besides the gunman was injured” don’t these people understand. The system in place worked. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Before banning sippy cups, snack packs, or “cremains” how about taking a minute to thank the people who did their job in a competent manner, and not question their worth by adding a lot of expensive equipment.