Personal Musings category archive

So, I’m on the way to the bank this morning and someone passes me (at a reasonable speed) in a bright, shiny, new black Lamborghini.

I want that car.

The closest I’ll ever get to it is probably a used Fiat.

(According to the Car Talk guys, Fiat stands for “Fix it already, Tony.”)

Is not dead. Check out this story from Mithras.

No. Not that kind.

This kind.

We’ve been hearing a tap-tap-tapping rap-rap-rapping on a tree.

Two yellow-bellied sapsuckers (as opposed to yellow bloodsuckers) have taken up residence in a tree right next to the back porch.

I’ve been noticing white flakes near the base of the tree. I was thinking they were some kind of petal from a spring flower, until, today, I got off my anatomy and actually walked outside to look at them.

They were flakes of wood.

I followed the trail of wood flakes upwards along the tree trunk until I spotted the hole in the side of the tree. Even as we speak, the pair are busy working on an addition to hold their brood.

I found a diagram of a woodpecker nest here. Looks like they have their work cut out for them before their three bedroom split is ready for full occupancy.

I’ll try to get some pictures, but it might be a few days and ladders will certainly be involved. I’m thinking that, if I get on the porch roof, I should be close enough to get some decent shots without scaring my new neighbors.

I seldom cast stones at the main stream media, but they have earned this rock.

Most of the stones cast at them are not cast at news reporting, but at opinion columnists. Opinion columnists trade in, natch, opinions, and they have the right to be stupid mistaken (though, damn! I’d love to have a job where I could get paid large sums of money for being consistently, repeatedly, continuously wrong, wrong, wrong, but then I’m neither Tom Friedman nor the CEO of Citibank).

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times broke the story that many of the persons who posed as “military analysts” for various media outlets were in the pocket of the Pentagon and likely spouting the Bushie line in their “analyses.”

If you wanted more, you pretty much had to listen to NPR or read the left blogosphere.

The story has been pretty much ignored by those media organs implicated in that same story.

Who woulda thunk?

Glenn Greenwald has addressed it in great depth here and here.

ASZ talked about it here.

But in the print and broadcast media? Nada. Zilch. Nil.

The bottom line is that the Bushies pressured persons to lie to the public about what was going on in Iraq and implied that their sources of income would be jeopardized if they did not toe the Republican Party line.

This week, On the Media interviewed one of these analysts who who found his role as Bushie toadie to be–er–uncomfortable. From the website:

As reported in The New York Times last weekend, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and others have turned, again and again, to military analysts – retired members of the armed forces hired by broadcast and cable networks – for their supposed expertise on the war. Only, it turns out, the analysts were often coached by the Pentagon in what the Times said were “hundreds of private briefings.” Among those named was Maj. Robert Bevelacqua, a former Green Beret and Fox News contributor through 2005. Bevelacqua discusses his own role in the march to war.

Visit the website or listen here:

I don’t know about you.

But I am tired of liars running our government and tired of our government suborning perjury–well it’s not perjury unless you are under oath lies.

Lying. It’s a Bushie thing.

(Aside: I didn’t use to give money to Democrats. Then there was Bush.)

I had to fill up with gasoline on the way to DL last night.

$3.57 per gallon.

Driving to my training gig this morning, I saw prices in Pennsylvania in the $3.75 range.

Three houses on my way had Corvettes parked in front “for sale by owner.”

Now, Corvette mileage ain’t bad, at least on the highway. Not great, but not terrible. But Corvettes are essentially toys.

My guess is, those folks have to sell the cars so they can eat or pay their mortgages.

Josh Marshall:

Now that the nomination process for the Republicans is over, McCain is running and hiding from what he said on his quest for the nomination. He’s no Horton the Elephant–but, then, we have already established that “Horton the Elephant could not have been a Republican.

More from TPM:

The rub here is this: McCain does not want to leave Iraq. Period.

He wants tens of thousands of troops to stay in Iraq permanently. He made a big point of this during the primaries when it was politically advantageous to do so. And he followed up with a qualifier explaining that it’s okay because our occupation of Iraq will soon be like our presence in Germany and Japan where nobody gets killed. But there’s little reason to believe our occupation of Iraq will ever be like that.

(snip)

The relevant point is that McCain believes American troops should stay in Iraq permanently. His pipe dream about Iraq turning into Germany doesn’t change that. It just shows his substitution of wishful thinking for sound strategic judgment.

It’s the best catch there is.

I was at the dentist’s today have a temporary cap replaced with a (what I hope will be a) permanent one.

Unfortunately, in this case, my dentist is very good. The temporary cap fit so perfectly that it didn’t want to break free and come out.

The tech wiggled it and wiggled it. No go.

It wasn’t very pleasant, because, as she wiggled the cap, the tooth rocked back and forth. The tooth itself didn’t hurt, but the rocking did. I nearly crushed my cell phone, which I was holding in my hands.

Finally, she said, “I’m not trying to hurt you” and called in reinforcements.

I said, “That’s okay. I know you aren’t working for Dick Cheney.”

She laughed.

because he meant what he said, and he said what he meant.

As I have mentioned before.

And, like most politicians who call themselves “conservative,” he has no principles. Just conveniences.

Josh Marshall has more.

Addendum, 4/27/2008:

Trudy Rubin. Follow the link for the complete analysis:

As the Democratic candidates battle each other, McCain’s ideas about America and the world have gotten too little coverage. Some see him as George W. Bush redux; others say his opposition to torture and his concern about global warming show he’s more open-minded.

In an obvious effort to distinguish himself from Bush, McCain describes himself as “realistic idealist.” Yet his speeches and comments reveal a disturbing lack of realism about the world, especially the Middle East.

(snip)

Has the Arizona senator not noticed the world has changed since George W. made similar pronouncements at the turn of the century? The illusion that America alone can shape the globe should have passed.

(snip)

Yet, when McCain lays out how he’d exercise American power in Iraq and elsewhere, he seems unaware of the consequences of seven years of Bush policies.

(Link Fixed.)

I voluntarily did more today than I have done in a month.

I started a Sauerbraten. I’ve considered cooking one before, but the problem is that you have to start three days ago.

Now, I didn’t use the recipe that I linked to. Rather, I used the recipe in the New York Times International Cookbook by the Greatest Cookbook Author Ever.

I also prepared a ratatouille for tomorrow (again, not the linked recipe). It’s sort of a vegetable casserole with aubergine, zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, onions, and assorted other stuff. Takes about half an hour to cut everything up and about an hour of messing about with the ingredients before it’s ready to go into the fridge for tomorrow.

I spent all afternoon slaving over a hot stove. So Linda cooked supper.

The Phillies were ahead, 6-0.

Now it’s Phillies 6, Pirates 5 (which turned out to be the final score) in the bottom of the eighth.

But, whatever the outcome, it is undeniable that the Pirates have the dumbest looking uniforms on the planet.

Sales of new homes plunged last month to the lowest in 161/2 years, as housing slumped further at the start of the spring sales season, a government report yesterday showed.

Also, the median price of a new home fell compared with March 2007 by the largest amount in nearly four decades.

16 1/2 years ago.

Oh, yeah.

A Bush was president then.

Tradition.

No DL for Me

I had to work late at the jobsite, then I had to come home and work some more.

And tomorrow I have to walk into a classroom and be dynamic.

But it’s all billable.

I Love My Cell Phone

My client told me I should be able just to jack into the network and be on the internet, even though I could not log into the company network (which I have no desire to do anyway).

The network port appeared to be dead. Of course, a wise IT Department will turn off unused ports. It’s just good security.

So I fired up the good ole “Internet Connection Sharing” on my cell phone, jacked the computer into the cell, and, badda bing! I was on line. I did have to move the phone around a bit to find the sweet spot for the connection in the cubicle inside the big steel building, but, once I did, it worked just great okay. Not as fast as a T1 line, but not as slow as dialup.

Inquiring minds want to know.

Circling the wagons. God forgive that a Bushie and the truth should be found in the same room:

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

More comment here:

Who knew that the biggest threat of the 21st century was telling the American people the truth? The question is, will a media obsessed with flag pins and hair cuts devote any time to covering a story that damns the Bush administration, their own military analysts, and of course, themselves?

Delaware has already had its primary, but, because we here in upper Delaware are in the Greater Philadelphia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the local media have been all Pennsylvania primary all the time, not just the local rag that I read, but the more local rag headquartered just down the road.

Unlike Mithras, I am not personally invested in the Pennsylvania primary (though I know how I would like it to turn out, just like I know who I would like to see win the Phillies game tonight).

Like Mithras, I can’t wait for it to be over.

From Steven D.:

How can you parody these people?

The dogwoods are starting to bloom.

In two days, the area will be ablaze with dogwoods.