Posts from — August 2009

From Haaretz: Lieberman summons envoy in U.S. over leaked rebuke of government

The Foreign Ministry on Saturday summoned for consultation a senior Israeli diplomat who in a confidential memo criticized the government for harming ties with the U.S. last week.

A ministry statement said that Israel’s consul-general in Boston, Nadav Tamir, would arrive in Jerusalem next week to give a clarification to the ministry’s director-general.

The memo, which was addressed to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, stressed that the public spat with the U.S. over the issue of a settlements freeze has alienated a significant number of American Jewish supporters.

Tamir, a veteran well respected diplomat, wrote the memo under the heading “melancholy thoughts on Israel-U.S. relations.”

Tamir’s missive is considered unusual given the blunt, pointed nature of the criticism against the premier’s policies.

“The manner in which we are conducting relations with the American administration is causing strategic damage to Israel,” Tamir wrote. “The distance between us and the U.S. administration has clear consequences for Israeli deterrence.”

“There are American and Israeli political elements who oppose [U.S. President Barack] Obama on an ideological basis and who are ready to sacrifice the special relationship between the two countries for the sake of their own political agendas,” the consul general in Boston wrote.

This was private correspondence that Lieberman has managed to drag in the public arena by his ham-fisted handling as he awaits to the see if he will be indicted for corruption. The problem can be seen in two reports in the media:

[Read more →]

Today marks 35 years since Tricky Dick Nixon slithered out of the White House.

To bad no one learned anything from the event.

One of the complaints being made about whatever Congress is doing about health care is that the process is being rushed.

Since 1943 Congressman John D. Dingell of Michigan has introduced a bill for universal health care coverage of one form or another in every session.

John Dingell, Sr. died in 1955 and was replaced by his son, John Dingell, Jr., who is the current Dean of the House as the longest serving member.

I fail to see how 66 years is a rush to judgment.

The CBC reports: Massive B.C. wildfire pushed by rising winds

Cooler temperatures were welcomed Saturday by crews battling the Terrace Mountain wildfire in the B.C. Interior, but rising winds have breathed new life into the massive blaze.

As a result, 2,150 Kelowna residents are under an evacuation order, with 2,526 on evacuation alert, according to Kelowna emergency operations centre spokesman Bruce Smith.

Earlier Saturday, a fire information officer had predicted that rising winds would likely cause trouble.

“The winds are up, so we could see some flare-ups on the interior of the fire,” Mitch Miller told CBC News.
…

More than 400 firefighters are still fighting the blaze, which encompasses about 85 square kilometres of Okanagan forest.

They get a fire line established and then the winds kick up and the fire leaps them. The terrain reduces the effectiveness of backfires that were successful in the Mount McLean fire. The winter snow is the only sure solution for the province.

The BC Fire Map shows there on now four active fires on Vancouver Island alone.

There is a basic fallacy abroad that liberals are all the same, and it just isn’t true. American liberals are notably different than Europeans of the same political label based on different histories and a different view of economics.

If you want to study American liberalism the course work is not onerous. Read the works of John Locke, Charles de Secondat (Baron de Montesquieu), Jean Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Those were the people who were read by the men pushed the Revolutionary War and founded the United States.

That prepares you to understand the American branch as expressed in the works of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison.

The core of the American branch is found in two passages that should be familiar to everyone who has graduated from high school:

[Read more →]

McClatchy: Health care debate degenerates into brawls, death threats

Joe Galloway: What this country needs is an outburst of common sense

Suburban Alaskan demonstrates the danger of not wearing hats in the winter: cranial frostbite

Just a reminder – THERE IS NO BILL!!! OK, GOT IT?

I haven’t the slightest idea what people are attacking or defending, because there is no single bill that is identified as THE BILL. There are a half dozen or more competing plans coming out of various committees in the House and Senate. Until the Congresscritters decide on a bill, no one, NO ONE, knows what they are talking about.

Update: I almost forgot to mention – the “912” that you may see mentioned is Glenn Beck’s version of the Sturmabteilung [SA], that he aims at his chosen “targets”. He should be held personally responsible for what they do, because he sends them on their “missions”.

As I wrote over in comments at the Culture Ghost: “If you could bottle and sell stupid, the local economy would soar.”

The Pensacola Beach Blogger has been doing yeoman’s work patiently explaining the situation which has resulted in a Federal judge charging two Pace high school officials with criminal contempt.

Naturally, the facts are meaningless to people who consider themselves to be victims of vicious secular discrimination, and having their freedom to force their religious views down everyone’s throats violated. Make no mistake that only their religious views count. If you are a Catholic, your choices are to send your children to school in Pensacola or Fort Walton Beach, or have them put up with evangelical agitprop. This isn’t about just non-Christians complaining, it is about the freedom of/from religion for everyone who isn’t an evangelical.

And this “Christian” approach really works to instill morally, as in “Jay teachers accused of sex with students”. All of the trademarks of the earlier Janelle Bird soap opera. That abstinence sex education is really taking hold 😈

If you aren’t an evangelical, the reception in Santa Rosa county is a bit different: Santa Rosa says no to Coptic church retreat. There’s no room for one of the oldest branches of Christianity in Santa Rosa county.

This is what the selfishness of the “Reagan Revolution” has spawned. Only the “elect” have freedoms and rights.

The BBC notes that Twitter went down because of a Web attack ‘aimed at one blogger’

A “massively co-ordinated” attack on websites including Google, Facebook and Twitter was directed at one individual, it has been confirmed.

Facebook told BBC News that the strike was aimed at a pro-Georgian blogger known as Cyxymu.

The attack caused a blackout of Twitter for around two hours, while Facebook said its service had been “degraded”.

Google said it had defended its sites and was now working with the other companies to investigate the attack.

“[The] attack appears to be directed at an individual who has a presence on a number of sites, rather than the sites themselves,” a Facebook spokesman told BBC News.

“Specifically, the person is an activist blogger and a botnet was directed to request his pages at such a rate that it impacted service for other users.”

Anyone want to guess where the attack originated? Come on people you can get free anti-virus and anti-spyware software that will stop your machine from becoming part of these attacks. ISPs can clamp down on this garbage. Make these people work for their attacks, don’t help them out with an unprotected machine.

The academic world really needs to look at its systems, because I’m tired of sending e-mails about spammers using their networks. You don’t need to censor anything, but you do need to protect your own infrastructure.

Florida’s junior Senator, Mel Martinez, has decided to make things in state politics more interesting, reports the Miami Herald, and every other Florida news source, by resigning early, as in ASAP.

The names of possible placeholders like Connie Mack, Bob Martinez, and Jim Smith have surfaced, as well as the “cunning plan” option: Charley Crist steps down as governor, elevating Lt. Gov. Jeff Kottkamp, who then appoints Crist to the Senate [oh, yeah, give Kottkamp power and expect him to “do the right thing”].

I think we can all assume that Charlie won’t be appointing Marco Rubio.

It may be irrelevant, but the resignation of Martinez a day after he voted for the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, and listened to his Republican colleagues race-baiting the process, makes one wonder if he was tired of the Repub caucus?

Come on, Charlie, let’s have some fun – appoint Katherine Harris.

The Gathering

Hi…hello…hi…

[Editor: The Gray-nosed Cat looking towards the camera is the only tom. KT2 is in the foreground, with KT and KT4 in the background. The Lone Ranger is the tuxedo on the left who is greeting Toes, the newest mom in the group. I was actually looking for the kitten(s), but she has moved out of the pump house.]

Friday Ark

The BBC has an interesting report on a couple of studies that show that rooks are smarter than you would assume. They use tools and understand the displacement of liquids.

They are probably working with squirrels, so watch your back.

A friend took advantage of the “Clunkers” program and bought a new truck, the first new truck he ever owned.

The local auto repair sector is in mourning. The “Clunker” he traded in was the equivalent of a separate industry. Boats have been purchased, children have gone through college, weddings have been funded with the money for repairing it. It had around 68,000 total miles on it, and he bought it used.

Three sets of tires, three radiators, two air conditioning compressors, 5 batteries, two alternators, a new fan belt every six months, freeze plugs, head gaskets, etc. It had 20 gallons of gas in the auxiliary tank that had been inaccessible for months, and the gas gauge on the accessible tank didn’t work. Wiper blades would just fall off when you used them. The passenger side mirror came off when I closed the door one day because the screws were too small for the clips in the door and the double-sided tape used to hold it place when the mirror was installed, finally gave out.

“Lemon” doesn’t begin to describe that truck, and yet, every time you suggested that he get rid of it, he would say, “this time they found the real problem”.

When he said that they couldn’t take it apart and sell parts, I breathed a sigh of relief. I don’t doubt it will break the crusher when they go to “cube” it.

Via WTF is it now?, a report about an encounter of a Congresscritter and the Teabagging Clown Show: Congressman Parker Griffith hosts Impromptu town hall-like meeting at Crestwood Hospital in Huntsville

Griffith said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, another Democrat from California, was “trying to force” the bill on to the floor, but the conservative-leaning Blue Dog Democrats – of which he is a member – halted it.

His answer to what most people see as a health care system in need of reform is to make private insurance more competitive and expand medical schools so that more doctors can get into the field and take care of people.

“You can’t reform an industry around scarcity,” Griffith said, adding that the crisis is as much an access issue as it is an insurance issue.

He repeatedly said he won’t support a public option for insurance, but several in the crowd repeatedly criticized him for taking the “liberals’ side” in the health care debate.

This guy is to the right of Genghis Khan, as everyone in his district knows, which leads to the conclusion that the people in crowd aren’t from his district, and only know that he has a D after his name.

I would note that he hasn’t figured out that if you don’t have insurance, you don’t get access, and that we have plenty of doctors, but they’re heavily weighted towards specialties, rather than the family physicians that are needed. He should really read the research on doctors which shows that more doctors increases costs, rather than decreasing them, which is what happens in other fields, i.e. the “free market” model doesn’t work in health care.