March, 2006 archive

Have they no shame?

Cindy Sheehan is a nutcase.

Privatization of the future?

Why not? They’ve contracted out everything else.

Stepping into a potential political minefield, Blackwater USA is offering itself up as an army for hire to police the world’s trouble spots.

Cofer Black, vice chairman of the Moyock, N.C.-based private military company, told an international conference in Amman, Jordan, this week that Blackwater stands ready to help keep or restore the peace anywhere it is needed.

(snip)

Taylor and Black said the company would undertake such a mission only with the approval of the U.S. government.

William F. Buckley, Jr., is a powerful thinker. He has always been a powerful and persuasive writer. Somewhere around here, I still have a copy of God and Man at Yale.

He’s thinking about George W. Bush:

William F. Buckley Jr., the longtime conservative writer and leader, said George W. Bush’s presidency will be judged entirely by the outcome of a war in Iraq that is now a failure.

“Mr. Bush is in the hands of a fortune that will be unremitting on the point of Iraq,” Buckley said in an interview that will air on Bloomberg Television this weekend. “If he’d invented the Bill of Rights it wouldn’t get him out of his jam.”

Buckley said he doesn’t have a formula for getting out of Iraq, though he said “it’s important that we acknowledge in the inner councils of state that it (the war) has failed, so that we should look for opportunities to cope with that failure.”

Conservatives are deserting the current Federal Administration, for it is not conservative, it is radical.

I’m Jr. My son’s the III.

(ring, ring)

Me: Hello.

Caller: Frank?

Me: Speaking.

Caller: (Comment that would mean nothing to anyone but my son.)

Me: [Stating that that doesn’t apply to me] Which Frank are you looking for?

Caller: [Confused] Junior?

Me: Speaking.

Caller: [Silence]

At that point I usually have mercy on them.

has gone right into the crapper:

Ann Garcia had to thread the needle. On the one hand, the No. 1 executive at her former company hated the use of profanity, seeing it as a sign of not having learned to communicate effectively. On the other hand, the No. 2 executive appreciated a potty mouth now and then because it indicated passion. He “felt that if you weren’t swearing, you probably didn’t care enough,” Garcia says.

I enjoy a good swearing match as much as the next person. But, frankly, I’m tired of hearing George Carlin’s seven words, and their cousins, nephews, and nieces, in the restaurant, the coffee shop, the workplace, and the schoolyard.

Save them for where they were meant to be: the locker room.

I guess I’m old. I remember when a bra was an undergarment, not a fashion statement.

So much for Republicans running the government like a well-run business. It’s more like Adelphia:

The nation’s chief tax collector said Wednesday that using private agencies to collect debts under a new program will cost more than hiring additional agents to do the job.

But IRS Commissioner Mark Everson also said it’s a necessary part of Washington’s budget battles.

(snip)

Everson disagreed that the program wastes taxpayer dollars. It’s necessary to use the private companies, he said, because hiring more IRS employees shows up on the federal budget as an expenditure. The budget doesn’t acknowledge the extra money that additional employees might collect.

Build a fence (Dana Summers in the Orlando Sentinel):

With a tip to Phillybits.

It doesn’t come much blunter than this:

I’ve argued this on Bill O’Reilly and other Fox News shows. I ask, who would you want to pay to be a torturer? Do you want someone that the American public pays to torture? He’s an employee of yours. It’s worse than ridiculous. It’s criminal; it’s utterly criminal. This administration has been masters of diverting attention away from real issues and debating the silly. Debating what constitutes torture: Mistreatment of helpless people in your power is torture, period. And (I’m saying this as) a man who has been involved in the most pointed of our activities. I know it, and all of my mates know it. You don’t do it. It’s an act of cowardice. I hear apologists for torture say, “Well, they do it to us.” Which is a ludicrous argument. … The Saddam Husseins of the world are not our teachers. Christ almighty, we wrote a Constitution saying what’s legal and what we believed in. Now we’re going to throw it away.

The current Federal Administration has to go. It violates the history, spirit, and ideals of this Great Experiment in self-rule and betrays the blood of the Founders, while hypocritically wrapping itself in the Flag and the Bible.

It is beneath contempt.

With a tip to Huffington Post.

With a tip of the hat to Phillybits.

Take a look at this article:
http://www.politicalgateway.com/news/read.html?id=6732
And answer the question:
Are you ready for a new American Civil War?
Then take a look at this picture:
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/004840.htm
And ask yourself the same question again:
Are you ready for a new American Civil War?
Are you ready to quit your job, join a National Guard unit and clear out illegals?
Are you ready for urban warfare?
Are you ready for internal borders and checkpoints?
Unless the answer is ‘yes’ to all of the above, I suggest it is time for conservatives to stop giving the President a hard time for his desire to take a moderate course regarding illegal immigration and curing it.

This is not to say that I unequivocably agree with Mr. Bush’s proposals or with just about anything on Redstate.org. In fact, I unequivocably am up in the air over this issue.

There are some things about which I am not up in the air:

The source of immigrants that seems to cause the most upset is Mexico. Persons fulminate that, because the southwestern border is so porous, it may allow for entry of (there’s that word!) terrorists. Yet, none of the 9/11 attackers came through the land borders of the United States.

But our government (and by this I do not mean the Bush administration so much as the Federal Law Enforcement Bureaucracy) has already demonstrated that it cannot spot a terrorist when one is handed to it on a plate.

But who are the proposed laws looking to penalize? Not terrorists, but the overwhelmingly South and Central American population of immigrants.

Furthermore, the proposal to make criminals of those who would feed the hungry, clothe the naked, or heal the sick are, frankly, disgusting. Especially since they are proposed by many of the same persons who in other forums parade their religiosity.

I find the xenophobic hysteria that seems to be sweeping certain quarters of our society, including our elected representatives incongrously assembled, extremely troubling. To this Southern boy who grew up under Jim Crow, many of the proposals smack more of racism than of rationality.

Perhaps the best course of action would be to take the advice of the National Rifle Association as regards gun control: Let’s try enforcing the laws we have.

Coincidently, as I write this, Daniel Schorr’s commentary on All Things Considered addressed just this in his commentary tonight. Marketplace also had a provocative commentary, but the link’s not up yet.

The surest way to stop a real discussion of issues is to start insulting people; insults stop the brain from working.

I find myself both amused and dismayed these days when persons, usually of a right-leaning persuasion, accuse other persons, usually of a left-leaning persuasion but not always, of being “communists.” Communism is discredited and dead, dead, dead. But the insult still works–it brings reason to a halt.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel has a worthy suggestion in today’s Washington Post:

Here’s a modest proposal for improving national political discussion: Stop equating our opponents with famous dictators, their chief executioners, police apparatus or ideologies. I’m all for learning from history, but times are hard enough in American politics — with war, threats to national security, the greatest divide between rich and poor in our history and deep cultural divisions. Present differences deserve to be described in contemporary terms. The purpose of public speech is not just to restate anger but to clarify the principles and evidence that fuel it — in ways that invite discussion, not inhibit it. The demons are already among us — so let’s muster up some new analogies

There was an earlier article on this that has reached the “you have to pay for this search” stage, but this one captures the–er–essence of the situation:

All Liberty Property Trust wanted to do was install 116 environmentally friendly waterless urinals at its new Comcast Center tower so it could compete for the title of America’s tallest green building. But the answer from Philadelphia’s plumbers union was, in so many words, go flush it.

The earlier story pointed out that this would not affect any jobs–the facilities still would have to piped and plumbed.

Former first lady Barbara Bush donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund with specific instructions that the money be spent with an educational software company owned by her son Neil.

Remember Neil Bush?

. . . Bush has done something that no other American has ever accomplished: He has become the embarrassing relative of not one but two presidents.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Bush embarrassed his father, George H.W. Bush, with his shady dealings as a board member of the infamous Silverado Savings and Loan, whose collapse cost taxpayers $1 billion.

Now Bush has embarrassed his brother George W. Bush with a made-for-the-tabloids divorce that featured paternity rumors, a defamation suit and, believe it or not, allegations of voodoo.

The family’s still there to take care of him.

With a tip of the hat to HuffPost.

. . . And one of the most delicious things about the profoundly parasitical world of blogs is that you don’t have to have anything much to say. Or you just have to have a little tiny thing to say. You just might want to say hello. I’m here. And by the way. On the other hand. Nevertheless. Did you see this? Whatever. A blog is sort of like an exhale. What you hope is that whatever you’re saying is true for about as long as you’re saying it. Even if it’s not much.

Works for me.

KDict defines the literary essay as follows:

2. (Lit.) A composition treating of any particular subject;
— usually shorter and less methodical than a formal,
finished treatise; as, an essay on the life and writings
of Homer; an essay on fossils, or on commerce.
[1913 Webster]

The essay, despite reports to the contrary, is not dead.

There was a delightful musing on the income tax time in today’s local rag.

El Reghas found the answer here:

If you’ve ever wondered, as we have, just exactly what the internet is for, then prepare your mind for true enlightenment.

Ready? Good – now proceed directly here and follow the on-screen instructions.

We rest our case. It’s fair to suggest that the whole of human scientific endeavour has been leading to this point: