Posts from — August 2007

Florida License Plates

Beneficiary

A weekend feature of Why Now.

Via Ellroon, Attaturk reports on the Shrubbery’s gift to Gordon Brown.

First, no one is interested in a leather jacket with a fur collar in Maryland in July.

Second, Gordon Brown strikes me at the type of person who thinks “casual Friday” means wearing a striped button-down shirt with a suit and tie, rather than all white.

Third, when the recipient’s predecessor was openly called “the Right Honourable member from Crawford, Texas,” a jacket featuring the personal badge of the President of the United States, displays a level of ignorance normally associated with diapers and pabulum.

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The collapse of the bridge came as a complete surprise; no one thought there was a problem, right? Well, not exactly true:

Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog notes the Putting People First program proposed by candidate and Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton in June of 1992 that proposed spending $20 billion per year for 4 years to rehabilitate the crumbling US infrastructure, but the deficits run up by Reagan and Bush policies of the previous 12 years, caused Congress to ignore it.

Fallenmonk found a listing of the American Society of Civil Engineers that notes that the infrastructure Doesn’t Last Forever. There is a lot of maintenance that has been deferred to the point that maintenance must give way to replacement.

As for the specific bridge, Rook of Rook’s Rant notes that the Mn/DOT Opted Against Repairs to a bridge they knew had problems.

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Scout at First Draft notes that it’s the 217^th Birthday of the US Coast Guard, one of the few components of the DHS that knows what it’s doing and continues to do it.

The farmers in Britain are facing another crisis as foot-and-mouth disease has been discovered on a farm in southeast England. They have barely recovered from mad cow disease, and now the quarantines are going up over foot-and-mouth.

I was flying to Britain on a semi-regular basis on missions that either started or ended in Omaha, Nebraska in an earlier outbreak on the 1960s. The disinfectant baths that you had to walk through at both sites destroyed a lot of boots and socks. You had to walk through them as you got off the aircraft. Then they set off disinfectant bombs inside the aircraft, and you had to wait to unload your gear and clothing. People thought we worked in a hospital because we smelled of the bug spray for a week.

Unlike the US, most British farms are still family owned operations, and this can be devastating on top of the floods and other problems. For their sake, I hope they caught it early and it will be eliminated quickly.

Showing absolutely no regard for the fact that his carnival disrupts the lives of people who have experienced a major trauma, the Shrubbery brought the Clueless Twit Flying Circus to Minneapolis and said:

“Our message to the Twin Cities is we want to get this bridge rebuilt as quick as possible,” Bush said after visiting with rescue workers and people who watched the bridge crumble. “We understand that this is a main artery of life here.”

He pledged his support to cut through the paperwork and make Congress do its job.

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This is all about staying out of jail for breaking the law.

Laura Rozen at War and Piece has the official “excuse” for this law, Statement from the Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell:

The second item is the real reason –

Second, those who assist the Government in protecting us from harm must be protected from liability. This includes those who are alleged to have assisted the Government after September 11, 2001 and have helped keep the country safe. I understand the leadership in Congress is not able to address before the August recess the issue of liability protection for those who are alleged to have helped the country stay safe after September 11, 2001. However, I appreciate the commitment of the congressional leadership to address this particular issue immediately upon the return of Congress in September 2007.

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I really need to have someone explain why the GOP is supposedly the party of national security. Seriously, they have some people who really need some major help, and I don’t think they’re ready to admit they have a problem.

From the Ticker blog CNN Associate Producer Lauren Kornreich writes Tancredo: Threaten to bomb Muslim holy sites in retaliation

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo’s campaign stood by his assertion that bombing holy Muslim sites would serve as a good “deterrent” to prevent Islamic fundamentalists from attacking the United States, his spokeswoman said Friday.

“This shows that we mean business,” said Bay Buchanan, a senior Tancredo adviser. “There’s no more effective deterrent than that. But he is open-minded and willing to embrace other options. This is just a means to deter them from attacking us.”

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Rupert Murdock has purchased the Wall Street Journal so the obvious question based on his past practices, as on display at The Sun, is who will be the first Page 3 girl?

[Note: The Sun link is not “work safe,” nor frankly is the ?newspaper? in the US.]

Getting Prepared

Another two naps and I will last until 3AM.

[Editor: Property prepares for the 1AM tag game with her brothers.]

Friday Ark

As we used to say a long time ago, in what increasingly is becoming a distant country, the United States of America.

Fubar at Needlenose grabbed a line from a Walter Mondale op-ed piece in the Washington Post about the Carter administration: “we told the truth, obeyed the law, and kept the peace.”

Those concepts should be the main talking points of the Democratic Party. They should be on bumper stickers and literature. The GOP should be hammered with them.

Margie Kieper has been filling in at Dr. Jeff Masters for several days. At the end of today’s post she notes that she can see the site of the bridge collapse from her office window and then presents a possible scenario for what happened that involves a week of high temperatures, vibrations, and the method used to construct the bridge.

Her theory rings true to me because in the early pictures of the collapsed sections the bridge support that failed was showing under the roadbed sections. From what I saw I assumed the supports were a metal frame work, like a lot of railway bridges. But then later images showed what appeared to be concrete supports that were still standing. It was as if the support that failed had lost its concrete outer coat, before it collapsed.

The Shrubbery managed to locate the White House rose garden and let people know that he had been told about the bridge collapse…except the statement starts with:

Good morning. I just finished a Cabinet meeting. One of the things we discussed was the terrible situation there in Minneapolis. We talked about the fact that the bridge collapsed, and that we in the federal government must respond and respond robustly to help the people there not only recover, but to make sure that lifeline of activity, that bridge, gets rebuilt as quickly as possible.

To that end, Secretary Peters is in Minneapolis, as well as Federal Highway Administrator Capka. I spoke to Governor Pawlenty and Mayor Rybak this morning. I told them that the Secretary would be there. I told them we would help with rescue efforts, but I also told them how much we are in prayer for those who suffered. And I thank my fellow citizens for holding up those who are suffering right now in prayer.

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This is why you cannot trust the Hedgemony with national security:

Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball of Newsweek have a web-only backgrounder, Behind the Surveillance Debate which illustrates exactly why they can’t catch real terrorists –

Aug. 1, 2007 – A secret ruling by a federal judge has restricted the U.S. intelligence community’s surveillance of suspected terrorists overseas and prompted the Bush administration’s current push for “emergency” legislation to expand its wiretapping powers, according to a leading congressman and a legal source who has been briefed on the matter.

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