Posts from — August 2007

I’ve added A.M. in the Morning! to my blogroll for a very specific purpose. Ana Maria has moved back to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to help her family recover after Katrina. while Scout at First Draft keeps New Orleans on peoples’ minds, too many think that the rest of Gulf Coast has recovered and is doing great.

Ana Maria makes it clear:

When I arrived back in March, I was shocked at everything. From the total disappearance of so much of my home town here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast through the evaporation of nearly every home and business along the 40-50 miles of beach going east to Biloxi, which is as far as I’ve traveled that way. Then going west to see family in New Orleans was more of the same: destruction, devastation, disappearance, and evaporation.

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Over at First Draft the herder of ponies dispenses some wisdom: a US endorsement of a candidate in an election in a Muslim or Middle Eastern country is the equivalent of a Jane Fonda endorsement in a GOP primary.

Someone needs to remind the Hedgemony that Diebold isn’t supplying the equipment and Clearpoint isn’t scrubbing the voters’ rolls in other countries.

Oh, I would add Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega to the list of anti-victories.

Overheated

Bast, it’s hot, when does it cool off?

[Editor: Property demonstrates what you have to do when you don’t have sweat glands and it’s hot and humid.]

Friday Ark

SIGGRAPH 2007 is finishing up in San Diego today. It is the conference for computer graphics and digital imaging.

The BBC reports on furniture that acts like a chameleon and virtual art for mobile phone cameras.

If you think nuclear winter is a good idea. The Russian long range aviation and started flying Tu-95 strategic bomber missions over US bases again, starting with Guam. The Tu-95 Bear fills the same slot as the B-52, a long range strategic nuclear bomber. Very distinctive aircraft, you can’t miss them, or misidentify them.

Speaking of bombing, the Dow closed down 300 points for the day.

My expert on Hedgemony thinking confirms there was no reason to muck about with the FISA laws, although he was initially attracted to the fishy smell.

It isn’t just hot and humid in the eastern US, it is also polluted.

According to Jeff Masters, the current high pressure system that is dominating the weather in the East is generating ozone and trapping particulate matter, some of it from the wildfires out West, in addition to the triple digit heat indexes.

If you don’t have to go out and breathe it, don’t.

The ‘Joliet’ Jake Blues Award for Insincere Apologies goes to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for their attempts to explain the vote on the FISA law.

The Stalin Prize for Government Control is awarded to the “Blue Dog” Democrats who didn’t have a problem giving the Hedgemony the power to invade the privacy of Americans without the inconvenience of a warrant.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

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Decisions are for the media and party insiders, not common “people.”

CBS’s Kathy Frankovic wastes everyone’s time by looking at what voters want: Scrap The Primary System, Polls Say

For nearly 20 years, seven out of 10 have said the same thing — that it would be better to have one national primary day with all states holding their primaries at the same time.
…

Probably what makes voters want a national primary is, most of all, a sense of fairness — that everyone should have a chance to participate equally. The public takes similar positions when it comes to the general election. They object to the projection of election returns before polls are closed, and have long supported a uniform poll closing: 73 percent across the country told CBS News in December 2000 that they favored setting a single poll closing time on election night, to make all polling places across the country close at the exact same moment. In that same poll, 71 percent supported having a single method of voting so that every polling place in the country would have the same rules and would conduct elections in the same way. Just 25 percent thought that voting process should be determined by states and counties. [Read more →]

The Washington Post reports on the Department of Homeland Security’s latest attempt to take no responsibility for anything and to run out the clock: States feel left out of disaster planning

Bruce Baughman, Ashwood’s predecessor as president of the National Emergency Management Association and a 32-year veteran of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said that a draft of the revised plan released to state officials last week marks a step backward because its authors did not set requirements or consult with field operators nationwide who will use it to request federal aid, adjust state and county plans, and train workers.

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We were down for an hour because: Routing Issue

From: jdw

This problem appears to be resolved. The problem was an incorrectly-behaving router in the Global Crossing network.

Limelight is waiting for an explanation from Global Crossing, and we are waiting for the explanation from them. In the mean time, we will continue to monitor this situation.

Such situations are very frustrating for us. Since we are not a Global Crossing customer, we were entirely dependent on other people to resolve the problem, leaving us powerless to do anything but sit on our hands and try not to scream. While it took longer than we would have liked, they did get the problem fixed.

We apologize for the inconvenience and problems caused by this routing issue.

It only took a week to finally let these guys do their job: Navy And FBI Join Bridge Collapse Search.

The Navy dive teams are on stand by in case they are needed anywhere in the world. They load their equipment into an airplane and can be on their way in hours, not days. They train to work in ship wrecks, and are familiar with working around jagged metal and debris.

The FBI has apparently brought along a submersible to use in charting some of the more dangerous areas, but the Navy divers train in currents, so they will be able to make rapid progress.

I just don’t understand why it took a week for this to happen.

I don’t see how Rupert Murdock can ever reduce that standards of the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page when it already publishes dreck like Propaganda Redux.

The author is one Ion Mihai Pacepa, who is identified by an enterprising headline writer with the phrase: “Take it from this old KGB hand: The left is abetting America’s enemies with its intemperate attacks on President Bush.”

First off, the author was a Lieutenant General with the Romanian security apparatus, not the KGB, and the Romanians were not major players during the Cold War. The Romanians were not favored in the Eastern Bloc, not simply because they were non-Slavs, although that played a part to the xenophobic Soviets, it was mostly because they were allied with Hitler and invaded the Soviet Union from the South.

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You don’t want to attempt impeachment because you can’t get a two-thirds vote in the Senate, so why do you believe you can pass an amended version of the carte blanche you handed to the Shrubbery over the weekend? You don’t honestly think he’s going to sign a bill that reduces his power to tap your telephones do you?

Unless you can come up with two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate to pass realistic legislation, you would be better off working on impeachment, because the Hedgemony has no intention of engaging in negotiations or in compromise.

You may as well get used to fact that you aren’t going to get anything done while he’s in the White House.

Y’all might be interested in this post by Susan S., a Florida progressive, My confrontation today with Sen. Bill Nelson on FISA.