Category — Uncategorized

The Christian Science Monitor noticed that the US does not consider Taliban terrorists.

The Raging Grannies are under surveillance, but the group blowing up the US and NATO military in Afghanistan aren’t terrorists? People who key SUVs are terrorists, but the group that sheltered Osama bin Laden isn’t?

It has been a busy day, and I’m not ready for this level of cognitive dissonance.

CNet is reporting that the Financial sector awakens to Net neutrality issues. Andante at Collective Sigh has the same story from a different source.

If you are a brokerage with a large ‘Net presence, your clients are not going to be happy waiting for a trade to take place. Your IT system is part of your overhead, and now it is going to be subject to increased costs that have not been factored in to your budget.

Steve Gilliard noticed the Sir Tim has also come out for neutrality.

As a service in explaining some of what’s going on I offer the Wikipedia entries for:

Dr. Vinton Cerf and ICANN, one of the Internet related boards he sits on; and then there’s Sir Timothy Berners-Lee and his creation, the World Wide Web [no, it is not the same as the Internet].

For desert there’s the article on Net Neutrality.

Telcoms and cable companies are not your friends. They are constantly adding “features” to justify increasing your bill. Did you ask for 6 shopping channels? Do you like paying for “caller id” and then having to tell the telco service people what your phone number is? If it was such a great idea why don’t they use it?

All Things Considered has a story, Small Paper Uses Profits to Train New Reporters [text & audio], about the newspaper in the town of Anniston, Alabama that gives some hope for the future of journalism.

When his daughter decided she didn’t want to get involved in the newspaper business, the publisher of The Anniston Star decided to forgo multi-million dollar offers for the paper and change it into a “teaching newspaper”, along the lines of a teaching hospital. A non-profit foundation was created by the publisher, and the University of Alabama supplies the students as Knight Community Journalism Fellows.

I linked to the Star when they were fighting with the Department of Defense over the incineration of chemical weapons at the Anniston Army Deport.

This isn’t a glorified student newspaper, it continues its role as the local newspaper for Anniston, while the students learn their job by working as “residents” under the oversight of their professors and the professional staff.

On NPR’s Day to Day they ran a piece on the May Day immigration demonstrations and featured Congressman John Hostettler [R-Indiana].

Mr. Hostettler came on as “Mr. Law N. Order”. John really likes the laws of this country…well, most laws. He’s not really fond of laws about wandering around with a loaded 9mm Glock pistol in your carry-on bag.

IOKIYAR

There were about 500 people demonstrating in Pensacola, which seemed to come as a surprise to local people.

You let Lowes and Wal-Mart build their big-box stores, and you are going to have people who are less than fluent in English and who run like they grew up wearing sandals – a crouch and a scuffing as they run – familiar to residents of South San Diego County.

After the hurricanes in 2004 and 2005 the area’s Hispanic population jumped, and I have it on good authority [my next door neighbor] that Wal-Mart has expanded its grocery section to include “all kinds of Mexican food with foreign language labels” and Saturday night is “Mexican night, most of the cashiers don’t speak good American.”

If this continues she might have to go back to her hometown: Andalusia…Alabama.

The life guards at the beginning of the season have for some time come from Poland, and the last time I was getting my driver’s license renewed there were a number of people in the waiting room speaking Russian.

Until the government gets serious about the borders, and stops giving businesses the incentives to import labor when they are unable to export the jobs, people had better understand that we are going to have immigrants, just like their ancestors.

The first woman to command the Space Shuttle, Eileen Collins [Colonel, USAF retired], is leaving the agency to spend some time with her children. In her case, she has a son and daughter who will be in elementary school, so this isn’t a political excuse.

The birth of her son caused NASA to require female astronauts to now undergo a pregnancy examination before flight, as she also proved to be the first pregnant woman in space.

This is just another sign of the eclipse of the space program under the Shrubbery. There was a time when astronauts had to be kicked out, because no one wanted to leave the excitement.

The Pensacola Beach Blog called it Comedy at the Edge, Stephen Colbert’s performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It was the truth; and most of the people sitting in that room can’t handle the truth, they hide from it.

Wikipedia notes that “In British common law, an outlaw was a person who had defied the laws of the realm.” The Shrubbery isn’t acting above the law, he has placed himself outside of the law. The conduct described in Glenn Greenwald’s post makes him the outlaw President, and puts him on the same level as any petty third world despot. He uses money from the Treasury to reward his friends and punish his enemies.

Digby calls it a Constitutional Crisis, but it is a simple case of a man of limited intellect ignoring the rules rather than attempting to understand them. He has never been held accountable for anything, so he isn’t interested in starting now.

I think Digby should retire the metaphor of the “little old lady clutching her pearls” given the reality of Helen Thomas, Madeleine Albright, and the Raging Grannies. I would think that draft-age Republican bloggers, or David Brooks would be suitable substitutes.

Steve writes about the Wall of Secrecy that has been created to hide the crimes. This is camouflage used to cover what they are doing.

As Phinky and PSotD have noted, we use a host of words in American English that have been borrowed from other languages.

Apparently Texans are now supposed to remember the Poplar, in Saint Anthony.

As Николай Васильевич Гоголь said at the end of his краткое содержание Нос: “Кто что ни говори, а подобные происшествия бывают на свете, — редко, но бывают.”

[Edit: everyone should read the short stories of Nicholas Gogol so they can wonder how a 19^th century Russian writer could understand life under the Shrubbery. There are good translations on-line and you can start with The Nose. Come on, you didn’t really think that corruption, cronyism, and incompetence were new? They are part of every empire.]

John Kenneth Galbraith, economist, writer, US ambassador to India, and witty, erudite conversationalist died Saturday at age 97.

Born in Canada, he chose to make the United States his home, and we, as a country, were better for it.

[Update] From the BBC: “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”, and the phrase, “conventional wisdom”, belong to Mr. Galbraith.

If you are in for some absurdity be sure to see Colonel Sander’s typing pool over at Pandangon. Apparently they didn’t like their medals.

I borrowed some Javascript from Michael to avoid opening a book and “reinventing the wheel” to produce a countdown calendar for the Shrubbery and to track how long Osama has been wandering about since the “Wanted: Dead or Alive” poster was announced.

One of my diversions on the roll The Daily Kitten was down for over a week as the result of what amounted to a denial of service [DOS] attack every day when the ailurophiles hit the site at the posting of the day’s kitten. The problem has been resolved with a new server, but that kind of spike can make a system administrator’s life a nightmare.

Maru is on vacation and out of contact with the ‘Net for a week.

Rook has hit a burn out and is on hiatus. I hope the time out helps him recharge and return to the battle in time for the elections. We need every voice available to balance the misinformation campaign.

I’ve added two diversions to the roll:

Crap I Drew on My Lunch Break is a comic strip that updates on Tuesday and Thursday. It is an acquired taste.

Mythstory is written by Chris Regan, who has been working on a cable television show, The Daily Show, but I won’t hold that against him.

First it was the big cheese, Osama bin Landen, then it was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi , the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, and now Ayman al-Zawahiri, the real and only number 2 in al Qaeda, has made it to the studio. They seem to have time to make their media dates.

Maybe al Qaeda is on Spring Break?

As the late Senator Everett Dirksen [R-Illinois] said: “a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you are talking about real money.”

Over at Facing South they are wondering if anyone will ask Rumsfeld about the over one trillion dollars that the Department of Defense can’t account for in its records.

When the Republicans said they were going to run the government like a business, they apparently meant Enron.

A terabyte of money, $ 1,000,000,000,000 – that’s real money, and Congress isn’t holding hearings.

The Shrubbery doesn’t has a problem with Dubai buying Doncasters, the British company that makes parts for the engines used in Abrams tanks.

He gets to retire in less than 1000 days, so why should he care?

Via All Hat, No Cattle, Rush Limbaugh was arrested on one count of fraudulently obtaining prescription medication [doctor shopping], but he isn’t going to trial or prison.

In New York we called the process ACD [adjournment in contemplation of dismissal]. He spends 18 months in a rehabilitation program, pays for the cost of the investigation, keeps his nose clean, and everything disappears. No record of anything.

Some poor kid with a couple of marijuana cigarettes caught within 1000 feet of a convenience store would be facing years in prison, but wealthy white Republicans walk away with their voting rights intact.