Posts from — October 2007

La Bella Donna

Where’s dinner?

[Editor: The matriarch of all the feral cats decided to drop by for a nosh. Molly is the oldest and most senior alpha female. Normally she comes by at dusk.]

Friday Ark

In Memoriam

Last weekend Athenae at had to say good bye to Stripe, the last member of her original troika of ferrets.

Blogtopia™ is fertile ground for neologisms, newly coined words.

While reading various peoples’ reaction to the attacks on young Mr. Frost by the Blight I came across a pair that I really like.

Echidne offers Malkinized, which can be considered “swiftboating by blogs” and Watertiger offers us Malkintents, for the mob which gathers around Ms. Malkin’s hangin’ tree, as opposed to the “ditto heads” who are limited to AM radios.

As my Mother is constantly telling people who try to tell her she can’t say something – “I’m an old lady, what are they going to do?”

Doris Lessing [no, not Paul Krugman’s cat, the real one] is the 88-year-old British writer who just won the Nobel for literature and isn’t very impressed. Jams has the more formal BBC interview, while August has her instant response when told by the reporters waiting for her on her front stoop.

If she decides to give a Nobel lecture, I would expect her to say whatever she thinks.

The BBC confirms an earlier report: Turkey recalls ambassador to US

Ankara is recalling its ambassador to Washington for consultations amid anger at a vote in Congress labelling the mass killing of Armenians as genocide.

The passing of the resolution by a House committee on Wednesday despite appeals by the Bush administration was denounced by President Abdullah Gul.

Turkey accepts there were mass killings in 1915-17 but denies genocide.

Turkey’s foreign ministry said the ambassador would return to Turkey for a stay of “a week or 10 days”.

“We are not withdrawing our ambassador,” said ministry spokesman Levent Bilman.

“We have asked him to come to Turkey for some consultations.”

I hope Ms Pelosi is happy, but she must be aware that the Armenian community tends to vote Republican and I don’t think this attempt to curry favor is going to do much to alter that. This is the same kind of pandering that the Miami Cuban community gets through the Cuban policy.

Manufacturers have removed over-the-counter cough and cold medications in response to over 50 deaths, almost all of which believed to have been caused by overdoses. The medications were designed for children two and younger, all had warnings against overdose, but the warnings don’t seem to have been effective.

CNN provides a List of withdrawn infant cold medicines.

It has been reported for some time that these medications have the most minimal of effectiveness, but people insist on taking pills if they don’t feel 100%.

As bad as it is when these people move nations out of the “Don’t like the US” into the “Hate the US” column, the real international damage is when they take a close ally, long-time friend, commercial customer and move them directly to the “Hate the US” column.

These people have managed to take the Turks for granted, and expended no effort in understanding the little things that make Turkish politics easy to navigate with a minimum of effort. There are a few “hot buttons” in Turkey and you press them at your own peril, because the reaction will be extremely negative.

Most people forget that until after World War I, the Ottoman Empire was the Middle East. The Turks ruled over everything south of Russia from India to Egypt. Having backed the wrong side in that war, the price was the breaking up of the empire into the countries that are causing all of the problems today.

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Update: Scout at First Draft has a picture of the Frosts on their front stoop. The winger value estimate on the property isn’t even in the realm of possibility.

By now everyone is aware of what Mad Kane refers to as the Shrubbery’s No Child Left Alive plan, and the response by a middle-school kid from Baltimore.

The Blight response should have been predicted, as you have to have your innate human sense of decency removed to exist in their closed world.

They have said nothing about the New York City school board being forced to pay for the private school education of the child of a wealthy businessman, but the fact that a humble carpenter receives subsidized health insurance for his children is unendurable.

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Michigan has joined Florida in the DNC penalty box for scheduling an early primary. No delegates from Michigan, and the candidates are pulling out to avoid problems with the party rules.

This whole thing is bollixed up – they voted for the current rules, and then try to change them when they get back to their home states.

Personally I’d prefer no primaries until the Spring to shorten the entire process. It would certainly make the convention more meaningful, because lately everything is decided before the convention starts making the cost of putting it on a real waste of money.

Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog, among many others, has made the issue the way the legacy media™ treats Democrats in general and Mrs. Clinton in particular, as opposed to the way GOP candidates are treated. Well, yes, that is nothing new or unusual, the media has been suffering from CDS [Clinton Derangement Syndrome] for an extended period, and the symptoms have only gotten worse with media concentration.

But the issue, the real issue, is not being addressed.

The CNN version covers the real issue: Clinton engages in heated exchange over Iran

…Clinton began by telling Rolph “the premise of the question is wrong,” and argued the measure calls for the terrorist label so sanctions can be imposed. The sanctions, she also said, will “send a clear message to the leadership” and lead to stronger diplomatic efforts.

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CBS reports that the same people who destroyed our ability to monitor Iran’s nuclear program by outing Valerie Plame have destroyed another program by leaking: Report: White House Ruins Terrorist Intel

(CBS) A small, privately run intelligence analysis company says that a Bush administration leak has ruined years of clandestine work to find and exploit al Qaeda secrets on the Internet, the Washington Post reports.

SITE Institute, one of many private companies that troll extremist Web content and use secret methods to find unreleased material and release it early, against the wishes of the militants creating it, was the first to obtain an Osama bin Laden video last month.

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McClatchy reports that the Osprey finally arrives in a combat zone, after more repairs. Actually, the story indicates that 9 out of 10 arrived, with number 10 still in Jordan for repairs.

It turns out that this is above average for Ospreys, as normally only 8 would have made it and only 6 would be fully operational. For this level of performance the taxpayers shell out about $110 million a copy.

The Blackhawk UH-60 only carries half as many people, but then, it only costs $6.5 million. It doesn’t have the speed, range, or fuel economy of the Osprey, but are those features worth the extra money?

It’s almost as if they don’t know we have two wars, a huge deficit, a struggling economy, a collapse of the housing market, a rising crime rate, and the government listening to our phone calls.

Oliver Willis notes that the The Press Is Broken: “The NY Times does a photo investigation of which candidates do and don’t wear flag lapel pins.” They actually assigned people to look at photographs to determine who spent a buck on a flag pin, and whether they wear it constantly.

August Pollack deals with this overwhelmingly critical issue in his latest cartoon: Flagged for context.

In Wrong is right Paul Krugman looks at the claim that you can’t take anyone seriously who opposed the Iraq War, even when, like Barack Obama, they opposed it for exactly the right reasons. Apparently the only people who can be taken seriously are warmongers.

You have to wonder if the legacy media™ will figure out in time to save itself that people stop reading and listening when they notice it isn’t covering anything important, and it keeps getting things wrong.

The guys coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan are getting a great kidney specialist, which is good.

My Mother has to find another kidney specialist, which is always a pain.

The real problem is that her current specialist is too damn old for the military crap. He did his bit and got out, but he’s been recalled because they are short-handed. He’s willing to serve, but wonders when some of the others are going to get to sacrifice for this mess.

I’m waiting for them to tell him to get a haircut. He is not exactly a diplomat.

Mustang Bobby notes: Happy Thanksgiving, Eh? Yes the second Monday in October is Thanksgiving Day in Canada.

The Federal government has decided to call it Columbus Day, even though it should be the 12^th of October which was the second Wednesday in 1492. But it’s okay that the holiday is on the wrong day, because Christopher Columbus [AKA: Cristoforo Colombo, Cristóbal Colón] didn’t find what he was looking for and identified what he did find incorrectly. The important thing is that a large area of the map got changed from “here be dragons and sea serpents,” to “here be gold and cannibals” and no mention was made of the oppressive heat, mosquitoes, or hurricanes.

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