Posts from — April 2008

To help people to have been trashing Floridians from ignorance, here are a few facts about Florida government and politics.

Qualifications for office:

Legislature – you must be at least 21 years old, a registered voter, a US citizen, a resident of Florida for at least two years, and a resident of the district.

State-wide Offices – you must be at least 30 years old, a registered voter, a US citizen, and a resident of Florida for at least seven years.

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From Lance Mackey’s website

Update on “Zorro”
April 2, 2008:
Zorro is in Seattle with Lance and Tonya. The best news is, vets have completed an MRI and Zorro will NOT need back surgery at this time. He has a minor concussion, some bruising on the lung, 3 broken ribs, swelling, bruising & bleeding on the spine with one injured disc. Zorro is responding to things around him. They expect, with time, he will get feeling in his back legs and be able to stand and walk. Zorro will be released friday evening from the Seattle vet clinic to come home and begin his long road to recovery with veterinarians in Fairbanks. Zorro will need 6-8 months of care and therapy. Doctors are optimistic for his recovery.

Of course, this means his racing days are over, but he will still have a life in the kennel.

Ms Gruntled

I told you leaves were no fun.

[Editor: This is the youngest feral around, and she doesn’t approve of much. A litter mate was chasing everything in the yard and she just sat there. Some cats are born old.]

Friday Ark

It’s just too difficult for the Hedgemony, so Back to pencil and paper for 2010 census

WASHINGTON (AP) — Technology problems will force the government to count all of the nation’s 300 million residents the old-fashioned way in the 2010 census — with paper and pencil.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez was scheduled to tell a House subcommittee Thursday that the government will scrap plans to use handheld computers to collect information from the millions of Americans who don’t return census forms mailed out by the government.

The change will add as much as $3 billion to the cost of the constitutionally mandated count, pushing the overall cost to more than $14 billion.

The project to develop the computers “has experienced significant schedule, performance, and cost issues,” Gutierrez said in prepared testimony before a House Appropriations subcommittee. “A lack of effective communication with one of our key contractors has significantly contributed to the challenges.

“As I have said before, the situation today is unacceptable, and we have been taking steps to address the issues,” he said.

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There are more fabulous legal opinions still classified: Memo On Illegal Searches Comes To Light

(CBS/AP) For at least 16 months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, the Bush administration believed that the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil did not apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism.

That view was expressed in a Justice Department legal memo dated Oct. 23, 2001. The administration on Wednesday stressed that it now disavows that view.

The October 2001 memo was written at the request of the White House by John Yoo, then the deputy assistant attorney general, and addressed to Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time. The administration had asked the department for an opinion on the legality of potential responses to terrorist activity.

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Laura Rozen points to The Green Light, an article by Phillippe Sands in the May issue of Vanity Fair that beings up some interesting possibilities. By granting people immunity from prosecution for violation of US laws in the Military Commissions Act, the way is open for the rest of the world to prosecute them.

A stumbling block in war crime prosecutions by outside countries is that they have to wait and establish that the individuals can not or will not be prosecuted for their crimes in their own countries. The immunity granted by the Military Commissions Act clears that obstacle to foreign prosecution.

People involved with this administration may as well forget about foreign travel, or there could be a side-trip to the Hague arranged for them.

Professor Cole has more inside Iraq coverage of what went wrong with the assault on the Mahdi Army.

The short version is that thousands of members of the Iraqi Army refused to attack other Iraqis in a political dispute. Al Malaki has had to “draft” the Badr Brigade and the Da’wa militia to fill out the “Iraqi” army. This, of course, makes the American ideal of a non-political Iraqi Army a total joke – it’s an extension of a few Shi’ia political parties. This move will obviously anger the Sunnis and the Kurds.

The US is in the position of training and equipping a partisan militia in a country in the middle of a civil war.

Today is kind of a holiday in Florida commemorating the supposed date in 1513 when Spanish conquistador¹ Juan Ponce de León found² the North American continent and named it Tierra La Florida³.

1. That’s thug in Spanish.
2. The millions of people who lived here were apparently totally unaware that it was lost.
3. Shouldn’t that be “Tierra de la Florida”? I guess “Home” wasn’t a very inspired name, no matter what language is used. Most developers do this kind of thing to make believe their crummy subdivision has class.

I would like to personally thank Kos and Corrente for taking the time to ensure as many people as possible get to see the propaganda videos of the Republican Party of Florida. Without your help they might actually have to care about the fact that there were more voters registered as Democrats than Republicans in the state.

It is so thoughtful that you choose to highlight the Republican selection, rather than the selection of the Democratic Party, the audio of what happened to Dan Gelber when he tried to introduce the change in the Florida house. But then the Democratic audio clips includes the Republican asides and laughter, while the Republicans have thoughtfully removed those distractions from their clip.

But thanks to this continuing effort to hide the voter suppression efforts of the Republicans, DNC, and Obama campaign, it is highly likely that the difference in registration won’t last beyond this election cycle. I realize that discovering the truth is too difficult to do, and it might not agree with your prejudices, so spreading propaganda and misinformation is much easier.

I’m sure the people of United States will thank you for your efforts when John McCain is elected President because the Democrats made no effort to win in Florida. It’s easier to make snide and insulting comments about the people of a Southern state than working on any problem.

[Yes, this is sarcasm. Yes, I am extremely angry about it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it less true.]

Wayne Barrett at the Huffington Post covers the DNC’s screw up in a very long post.

He tells you the same thing I’ve been telling everyone for months, including the other states breaking the rules, but not being punished.

The only thing he doesn’t cover, because he isn’t familiar with Florida ballot rules is that, if the Florida delegation doesn’t get a meaningful role in selecting the Democratic candidate, that candidate will not be on the Florida ballot, so McCain wins 27 electoral votes by default without spending any campaign cash. I would remind people who think I’m kidding, that all of the Democratic candidates appeared on the Florida ballot because they weren’t allowed to withdraw their names. The state law controls the names on the ballot. A “50/50” split or seating after the candidate is selected is not going to conform to the law.

There is no time to run another election in Florida, even if people wanted to, because there is no time for a required 30-day comment period, and then running the election prior to the DNC’s June deadline.

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Update: Hipparchia has located A Shrubbery

Elayne Riggs highlights the best April Fool’s ad, which, as usual is from the BBC.

While it isn’t on the scale of the 1957 entry, The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest , it is clever.

Has Fafblog returned, or are they only toying with us?

Twenty months is a long time to pick up a Slurpee at the 7-Eleven.

to the Royal Air Force