2007 archive

I have read his columns for years.

Now he’s leaving.

With a somewhat equivocal good-bye.

With a tip to Eschaton.

In my new job, I’ve been going through printer cartridges like mad. We continually print out documents for review by customers.

Today, I went out to buy lots of cartridges for my trusty Lexmark (which has served me well for five years and certainly repaid the $37.00 I paid for it on AOL Outlets) and came home with this:

30ppm color and tax-deductible, with cartridges that will cost half as much as what I’ve been paying.

It rocks.

Who woulda thunk?

The pro-smoking lobby got a small boost on Monday after a South Carolina woman cheated death by nipping outside the house for a cigarette.

Brenda Comer, of Rock Hill, had just finished washing the dishes at around 11am when she popped out for a gasper. At that moment, The Seattle Times dramatically recalls, “an 80-foot-tall oak tree, felled by winds gusting up to 40mph, crashed through the roof.”

(Aside: Rock Hill is just a half-hour from where my mother grew up and it’s where she went to school.)

. . . said, “The law is an ass.”

In this case, the witness was also an ass:

The first witness in a lawsuit Wednesday between two neighbors was Buddy the donkey, who walked to the bench and stared at the jury, the picture of a gentle, well-mannered creature and not the loud, aggressive animal he had been accused of being.

I heard some excerpts of the hearings today.

Abu hasn’t realized he’s dealing with the Big Boys now.

He’s clearly not up to the task.

Addendum, Later That Same Evening:

Oh, my, the illustration is well worth the subscription fee.

Susie on amnesia.

To quote my brother, “Jesus Christ! The bodies are not cold yet and this has become a political argument about gun control?”

There has been a lot of stuff flying about in the right and left blogosphere trying to turn the actions of a lone nutcase into some kind of political symbol. I was working at home most of the day, and, when I do that, I stay out of the blogosphere (or, frankly, I wouldn’t earn my hourly rate).

As I said in the comments to my initial post on this topic, this proves nothing about gun control, one way or the other. Someone who is willing to die in order to kill, frankly, cannot be stopped from killing.

It says nothing about the University’s response to the initial shooting. They had two dead and a shooter who appeared to have fled. If you look back over similar cases that have been in the news, whether in the workplace, the campus, or the school, someone who goes on a killing spree goes on a killing spree, all at once. He doesn’t disappear for two hours and then come back for more.

As far as I am concerned, the police probably thought, with good reason, that they had a “Law and Order” case on their hands, where what was needed detective work and pursuit, and saw–again, with good reason–no cause to incite panic across the community with a lockdown.

(And if I read later that some ambulance chaser has sued Tech or Blacksburg or the Virginia State Police over this, I think I shall puke.)

So to those who think this will “reopen the dialog on gun control”–sorry, wrong case. They would do better to look at what happens daily on the streets of Philadelphia, where the homicide rate so far this year has outstripped the Julian date.

And to those who think letting the students pack heat would have ended this sooner, I suggest they learn a little about guns–they are noisy, messy, dangerous, and difficult to use skillfully–and stop masturbating to visions of the Man with No Name.

And to those who think that, somehow, the victims should have tried to overpower this nutcase who came after them with guns a-blazin’, well, John Cole and Phillybits said it better than I.*

____________

*John Cole is a Pajamas Media blogger. Phillybits wouldn’t be caught dead in Pajamas Media (he appears from time to time on Kos; I don’t know whether he actually wears pajamas, and, frankly, I don’t want to know). It says something when they agree.

Eugene Robinson:

Today’s topic is credibility — specifically, recent claims by certain high-ranking present, former and perhaps soon-to-be-former Bush administration officials. The aim is to answer a simple question: Should we believe these three Bush loyalists if they tell us that rain falls down instead of up, or should we look out the window to make sure?

(snippage)

Rove, Wolfowitz and Gonzales are making the last-ditch argument of a cheating husband caught in flagrante: Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

Ya know, every time I think the Current Federal Administration has exhausted the depths of sliminess, it surprises me with new bouts of creativity.

Tangiers, 18th and Locust, 6 p. m.

I won’t be there–I have a meeting.

Maybe they should stop worrying about our emails and pay attention to their own:

Security researchers have traced spam-sending botnet clients back to networks run by the US military.

Support Intelligence, the firm whose research on honeynets revealed that the networks of at least 28 Fortune 1000 companies contained malware-infected spam-spewing PCs, has found evidence of bots running behind military networks.

This week, Waste of Newsprint was busy claiming that Don Imus should not have been fired. (I can’t argue with him on that. The firing was clearly a commercial, not a moral decision. Had it been a moral decision, Imus would not have been on the air in the first place. Waste’s reasoning, though, seemed to have more to do with his own experiences than with Imus’s conduct.)

Nothing about Senator Thompson, though.

My father and my brother both went to Tech, as did many of their and my classmates and acquaintances.

It was the place to go if you expected to be a farmer or an engineer (though today it is much more). Indeed, the Tech alumni on the Eastern Shore of Virginia are amongst the most active and most giving of any.

When my father was there, it was all military. That’s how he ended up in France as an officer, rather than as a private. (I remember how, when I was applying to college, I got an advertisement to sign up for ROTC. My father took it out of my hands and said, “You don’t need this.”)

When my brother was there, ROTC was an option. (My brother opted out. He wasn’t particularly keen on going to Viet Nam either.) He knows well both of the buildings where the shootings took place.

I have been on campus (which is filled with glowering gray stone buildings of unimaginitive monumental architecture), so I and everyone in my family feels some relationship to what happened there today.

God be with the students, family, faculty, and staff of VPI.

_______________

It appears that the shooter saved the Commonwealth the trouble of executing him. And, in Virginia, he undoubtedly would have been executed.

And, in a case like this, I really couldn’t get worked up about it. The problem I have with the death penalty cases is the inability of the legal system to find the guilty party. (That inability, though, is so pervasive as to invalidate the death penalty on practical grounds; that’s the difference between a moral argument and a practical one.)

No, it’s not a deterrent. Anyone who so argues is a fool or a sophist. Frankly, the bad guys don’t stop in the middle of a crime and think, “Now, wait a minute. I might get the chair for this!”

Rather, some persons simply forfeit their right to remain members of the polity.

Addendum, Later that Same Evening:

Phillybits on the disgusting efforts to use this event to score political points before the damned bodies are even cold.

When I saw this

I emailed Phillybits that I was planning to do something about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the NeoConservatives (as differentiated, I must say, from Conservatives). Then I find out today that Glenn Greenwald has beat me to it (some gyrations required to get to the full post):

. . . the Kagan/Kristol/Krauthammer war propagandists continue to say whatever they have to say in order to find a way to stay in Iraq forever. Our Serious Beltway pundits continue to embrace that reasoning because staying is the only way to avoid the reality of how wrong they were. And the disconnect between what Americans want and think, and what our government (and the “small but powerful” faction that controls it) does, continues to grow without any end in sight. On the most crucial issues faced by this country, nothing matters less to the Kagans and the Fred Hiatts (and, increasingly, to many disturbingly tepid Congressional Democrats) than the views of Americans. Within that disconnect lies most of the sicknesses ailing our political culture.

Ya know, it’s really really really wrong to start a war just because you can.

Addendum, 4/16/2007

Professor Cole.

Daniel Metcafe interviewed by Tony Mauro.

Gene Weingarten:

Dear Heloise: We have an ugly bush in front of our house. We had high hopes when we planted it there six years ago, but it has gone completely out of control and become an embarrassment. All the neighbors are talking about it and wondering why we haven’t removed it. It’s reflecting badly on my whole family. What’s the best way to get rid of this unsightly, horrible thing? — H.C.E., San Antonio, Tex.

Dear H.C.E.: This is a tricky one. Bushes can be really stubborn, and terribly resistant to removal. You need to buy several peach trees and plant them around the bush, creating an imprisonment or impoundment by peach trees. Technically, this is called im-peaching a bush. ARE YOU LISTENING, PEOPLE? DOES HELOISE HAVE TO DRAW A LITTLE CRAYON PICTURE FOR YOU?

Opera 9.20 is out with SpeedDial:

5 1/4 inches in the last 36 hours. One tree limb down and all that grass I cut on Saturday will grow right back. (And, life being what it is, the drive belt on my mower is broken and the bolts I need to remove to replace it are rusted fast–I actually had to push the darn thing.)

The other local rag, the one I consider not worth a subscription, has some good pictures of the flooding here and here.

If you look at them, you might have the same question I do.

Why do some people confuse their personal automobiles with these?

I wrote about private armies earlier.

Now comes the Washington Post with an story on their shadowy world of lawlessness (by which I mean, they are subject to no law–and they act like it).

But a Washington Post investigation of the incidents provides a rare look inside the world of private security contractors, the hired guns who fight a parallel and largely hidden war in Iraq. The contractors face the same dangers as the military, but many come to the war for big money, and they operate outside most of the laws that govern American forces.

The U.S. military has brought charges against dozens of soldiers and Marines in Iraq, including 64 servicemen linked to murders. Not a single case has been brought against a security contractor, and confusion is widespread among contractors and the military over what laws, if any, apply to their conduct. The Pentagon estimates that at least 20,000 security contractors work in Iraq, the size of an additional division.

Private contractors were granted immunity from the Iraqi legal process in 2004 by L. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. occupation government.

Addendum, 4/16/2007:

Capital Hill Blue.

Those pens that, when you turned them upside down, the young lady’s swimsuit disappeared?

A long time ago I wrote about this.

The invading hordes of Jerseyites are on the run in a victory for Delaware’s coastline.

(Once again, all they need to do is move two miles up the river, where the boundary is in the middle.) After all, their relationship with Pennsylvania as regards the Delaware River is truly hunky-dory these days.

I wasn’t going to mention this story, simple because I suspect it’s been beat to death:

Students who took part in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex as those who did not, according to a study ordered by Congress.

Dana Garrett’s comment on Delaware Watch was just too good to pass up:

. . .we shouldn’t expect our schools to have more sway over the minds of our children than those adults who naturally have more influence with them . . .

And any of us who have children know that even that sway is tenuous at best.

Administration Seeks to Expand Surveillance Law

The Bush administration yesterday asked Congress to make more non-citizens subject to intelligence surveillance and to authorize the interception of foreign communications routed through the United States.

and

Explaining Missing E-Mails, Attorney Says Rove Thought RNC Saved Them

Karl Rove’s personal attorney yesterday dismissed any suggestion that the White House senior adviser purposely deleted e-mail to evade scrutiny, saying that Rove was always under the impression that his messages were being saved by either the White House or the Republican National Committee.

The Current Federal Administration cannot be trusted with their own damn emails. What indicates that they can be trusted with anyone else’s?