April, 2007 archive

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?

Check this out.

Ontrack.

My customers have used them. They are very good at what they do.

Lee Iacocca:

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

With a tip to Susie.

Oh, my. And honesty, virtue, and morality twist slowly, slowly in the wind.

Susie.

Yeah, he got a little wierd there towards the end. But a lot of the time he got it right.

I have enjoyed B. C. since I first started reading the Virginian-Pilot.

John Cole asks the question:

At what point did the Oval Office begin to resemble the backroom at the Bada Bing?

I will attempt an answer.

January 20, 2001.

Prologue: Senator Fred Thompson conducted himself with honor during the Watergate hearings and acts with (at least some) talent on Our Favorite Show.

Not too long ago, the big news was that Mrs. John Edwards’s cancer had returned.

After consultation with her (and it seems as clear as it can ever be to an outsider that the Edwardses love each other very much), Mr. Edwards decided to continue his campaign for president, with Mrs. Edwards’s explicit support.

And that waste of newsprint, Michael Smerconish, was all over the Edwardses like a bad suit, along with many of his wingnut compatriots.

I am waiting eagerly to see what he has to say about Senator Fred Thompson’s (as yet undeclared) candidacy in the light of today’s news. Will he suggest that Senator Thompson should chose to spend time with his family, rather than seek public office?

Inquiring minds want to know.

New Jersey–going to the dogs.

New Jersey wildlife officials are investigating what could be the state’s first documented coyote attack on a human after a recent backyard attack on a toddler in Middletown.

Note that this is not northwestern New Jersey, where they have bears. This is right near Sandy Hook (where, by the way, there is a nude beach that a friend of mine used to visit religiously–well, at least, with a sense of worship).

Or blustering buffoon?

Too many persons have forgotten that Sharpton first appeared on the scene with the deplorable Tawana Brawley case.

Dick Polman recounts the record.

Addendum, 4/12/2007:

Susie.

Reflecting back on this post, I received an email today from Mr. Loudell requesting that anyone who’d like to talk about these issues to join him tomorrow at 12:45 p.m. at The Academy of Lifelong Learning, at Arscht Hall, on the University of Delaware’s Wilmington campus.

Big time.

I frankly don’t care whether Don Imus gets fired or not. He’s made a career out of being inflammatory. And now he’s the one in the fire. Let him sweat.

Big whoop. Howard Stern is still on the air, quite joyfully naked.

(I listened to Stern once, for 15 minutes. All he talked about were his testicles. Having no interest in his testicles, I have not listened to him again.)

What is a damned shame and what should cause Imus suffering is that he destroyed whatever joy the Rutgers women’s basketball team could have had in finishing second in the NCAA tournament–that is, second in the nation–in his bid for cheap, racist laughs.

I was talking about Don Imus with my brother today. He and I don’t necessarily land on the same political squares. He cited examples of other on-air conduct, not involving race, which he finds just as offensive as Imus’s remarks, but which has not attracted attention and protests.

Back to Imus, though: both my brother and I grew up under Jim Crow. (And, if you haven’t lived it, it might be difficult to understand it.)

(Aside–Now, in our part of the world, Jim Crow was not nearly so bad as it was in the Deep South. Black persons were not expected, for example, to step off the sidewalk into the street when a white person was on the sidewalk, as they were in certain areas. But Jim Crow was a very real thing.)

My brother and I agreed on two things.

Thing one: Imus is a racist.

We are both Southern Boys. We know racism when we see it.

To paraphrase something I heard on the radio today, if you don’t have those words inside you, they won’t come out of you.

He may be a kind-hearted racist. So were many of the racists we grew up with.

But he’s one amongst many. Racism isn’t dead, though, God willing, it’s on the run. Another racist exposed. Big deal. There will be more.

And, even growing up in a segregated world, with segregated schools, all-white government, poll taxes, and all the other trappings of the institutionalized subjugation of black persons, we never heard in public in our rural Southern county the type of language with which Imus soiled the air waves. Which leads to

Thing two: No matter what words they have might used in private, “Jigaboo” and “nappy-headed” were not words even the worst racists we knew during our growing up would have said in public.

Addendum, 4/11/2007:

Two columns worth reading in today’s local rag:

Annette John-Hall on racism.

Karen Heller on the debasement of public discourse.

And in the Washington Post:

Michael Meyers (no, not that Mike Meyers) on freedom of speech.