Posts from — February 2008

The Associated Press reports a beagle has won the Westminster Dog Show. Three-year-old K-Run’s Park Me in First [“Uno”] is the first beagle to be chosen best in show at one of, if not the, most prestigious dog shows.

Him, I could vote for.

I think I’m going to be forced to upgrade my template and WordPress in the near future because there is obviously something that isn’t appreciated by Firefox and IE in the coding. Firefox renders the site properly, but doesn’t always load it and IE hates my header graphic.

I’ve added a Feedjit widget to the sidebar after seeing it at Fallenmonk’s and Maru’s place. If you open the options you can stop it from tracking you for this site. The reported locations are only approximate. It tells people I’m in Freeport or Santa Rosa Beach. No one really lives in Freeport, and no one I know can afford to live in Santa Rosa Beach.

Actually I should lighten up on Freeport. It started out as a “free port”, as in a smuggling and pirate’s haven, and then someone noticed the major problem – it’s on Choctawhatchee Bay, not the Gulf and you have to pass the Coast Guard at the Destin Pass to get there. They once had the best local seafood restaurant on the Coast, Nick’s, but it burned down and wasn’t rebuilt. I guess the thought of losing that aged deep fry oil was too much for the owners. It takes years to get a grill, pots, and pans seasoned the way you want.

February 12^th, 1809 saw the birth of two men whose lives still reverberate today: Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. Born an ocean apart in very different circumstances they would both lead lives that inspire admiration and hatred to this day.

It’s kind of like those old Mickey Rooney & Judy Garland films, there’s a problem, well we’ll just have a show and solve it with the money. The concept was then “borrowed” for The Blues Brothers.

Given the current state of disaster facing the final year of the Shrubbery, instead of a borrowing from Rooney & Garland to raise money for the multi-trillion dollar deficit, the Hedgemony has decided to borrow from the well known team of Stalin & Beria to stage a show trial. There’s no bread available so they’ll stage a circus, complete with the possibility of death.

This would have been more impressive if Colonel Morris Davis hadn’t stepped down as chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo because he felt the process was politicized. I’m going to accept Colonel Davis’s opinion of the proceedings, and call them show trials.

[Hat tip to Fallenmonk]

CNN is reporting: U.S. deficient against Muslim insurgents, study says

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The U.S. military is seriously deficient in meeting “the threat of Islamist insurgencies,” says a Pentagon-commissioned study released Monday.

The Rand Corp. report characterizes “U.S. military intervention and occupation in the Muslim world” as “at best inadequate, at worst counter-productive, and, on the whole, infeasible.” The Pentagon asked the nonprofit research organization to review strategies to thwart insurgents.

The United States should instead focus its priorities on improving “civil governance” and building “local security forces,” according to the report, referring to those steps as “capabilities that have been lacking in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

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First off, we settled that “states” thing in 1865. You make it a national primary, not a lot of separate state primaries or caucuses or straw votes.

You limit voting to registered members of the party. Independents have obviously demonstrated that they have no interest in political parties, so why should political parties have an interest in what they think about the party’s candidate.

Every registered member of the party is mailed a ballot containing the names of every candidate. Candidates have to be members in good standing of the party, and file a fee to run. The fees will cover the cost of the mailing.

Everyone receives the same ballot with a prepaid return envelope. In front of each name are circles to be filled in indicating a first, second and third choice. The ballots are then mailed back to a counting center.

Candidates get 3 points for a first choice, 2 points for a second choice, and 1 point for a third choice. The candidate with the most points wins.

Every Democrat has exactly as much say as every other Democrat in the process. There is no problem with state laws or parties. There is little possibility of weather affecting anything. The choice will absolutely be the choice of the entire party.

It is simple, straightforward, relatively inexpensive, and unites the party in the decision process. There is no reason for the current operatic process that is used, and no evidence that it produces a “better candidate.”

Since there’s no available information as to where “Gunner Dick” is today, and whether or not he’s “hunting”, if you’re an attorney, you might want to wear one of these today. You wouldn’t want to have to apologize to “Deadeye Dick” for getting in his way like Harry Whittington did two years ago today.

The Associated Press has a feature on people who are dependent on the stock market for their retirement. This is the wonderful future that the Hedgemony thinks everyone should share – the cat food diet when corporations behave badly and the market drops like a rock.

If you look at brokerage literature or web sites you may notice in some inconspicuous place warnings like these: “Brokerage Products: Not FDIC Insured • No Bank Guarantee • May Lose Value” or “Yields quoted are past performance and no guarantee of future results”. They are telling you that you are gambling on your future, and that gamble doesn’t always pay off. Are you feeling lucky? Well, are you?

CNet reports on another of the many “security” mandates about to take effect: Federal buildings become Real ID zones

…Starting May 11, Americans living in states that don’t comply with new federal regulations could be barred from entering Washington D.C.’s visitor center and collecting the complimentary maps and brochures–unless they happen to bring a U.S. passport or military ID with them.

That not-very-welcoming rule is part of a 2005 law called the Real ID Act, which takes effect in just over three months. It says that driver’s licenses from states that have not agreed to Real ID mandates from the Department of Homeland Security, or which have not requested a deadline extension, can no longer be used to access “federal facilities.”

The Federal government still hasn’t managed to design, much less produce, a reasonable ID card for airports or seaports, but you are going to need a “Real ID” card to report for Federal jury duty…except that you won’t if your state has said that it will produce a “Real ID” at some point, then the unReal drivers’ license you currently have is fine… possibly.

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Florida License Plates

Beneficiary

A weekend feature of Why Now.

Snark

That’s a form of Snark I’m familiar with – a ground launched cruise missile with a nuclear warhead. It’s launched by the two solid rocket motors and then the jet engine takes over when it’s airborne.

Of course there’s the original snark from the pen of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson [AKA Lewis Carroll], in his work “The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in 8 Fits)”.

But let’s discuss the form that requires a “snark mark”, perhaps an interrobang [ ‽ ], winking emoticon 😉 , or my own twisted version 😈 .

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If you have an interest in the weather, Dr. Jeff Masters has a good post on the Super Tuesday Outbreak which had at least four EF-4 [166-200 mph] tornadoes and the possibility that one of the nine EF-3 tornadoes may have scoured a 120-mile track across Tennessee.

There are also links to sites with even more information, but according to Tom DeLay we don’t know if there is global climate change.

Sinfonian of Blast Off! covers the latest attempt to paper over the mess created by the Democratic National Committee rules in the real world.

I’ve covered some of this before, but let me expand a little.

“A number of people have been lumping Florida and Michigan together because both states moved their primaries and the Democratic National Committee took away all of the delegates from both states. The situations are not the same.”

That is what is known as a fact. The two cases are similar only in that the primary dates occurred before February 5^th.

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Here we are 9 months before the election and people are already talking about polls showing who going to win. In case you have missed it, the polls taken the day before primaries haven’t been able to predict who was going to win them. People do not start paying any attention to the Presidential election until after labor Day at the earliest. Making decisions based on what polls are reporting today, isn’t just a waste of time, it is a form of insanity.

Give it a rest, or have you forgotten what happen when people decided to select the “most electable” candidate in the 2004 primaries?

It is going to be a Democrat against John McCain and media, so forget the polls, they don’t include the media.