June, 2007 archive

Still nothing from Waste of Newsprint on how Senator Thompson should spend his remaining years in the bosom of his family.

. . . should, of course, be filed against the entire Current Federal Administration for violating their oaths of office.

But the best I can do it charge my battery. I dragged the boat battery out of the crawl space and put it to charge today. Those things usually last, maybe, three years, because of the hard usage. This would be year four.

We’ll find out tomorrow if it holds a charge or if I need a new battery.

Shake down cruise this coming weekend.

This is me. I’ve been published.

Oh, my.

A NZ couple are fighting the powers that be for the right to name their son “4Real”, the New Zealand Herald reports.

Pat and Sheena Wheaton claim the Department of Internal Affairs has deployed the Births, Deaths, and Marriages Registration Act 1995 in refusing to register the name. The law forbids “names that resemble an official title or rank, names that are unreasonably long, and names that may cause offence to a reasonable person”. It also advises that parents “avoid names which would cause their child to be teased or made fun of”.

And this surprises us how?

A military officer and former member of a Pentagon unit that decided to indefinitely imprison some detainees from Afghanistan and Iraq has said in a sworn affidavit that the process of reviewing their cases was “fundamentally flawed” and that the results were influenced by pressure from superiors rather than based on concrete evidence.

(snip)

In his affidavit, Abraham said there was considerable pressure from commanders for officers serving on the tribunals to determine that detainees were enemy fighters. He also said that it was “well known” that those officers who concluded otherwise would have to explain their findings to McGarrah and his top aides.

He said he and two fellow panel members were closely questioned by McGarrah and his deputy after they decided that there was not enough evidence to conclude that a prisoner was an enemy fighter, and were then ordered to hold an expanded hearing to reconsider their conclusion.

Pretty consistent with the Current Federal Administration’s track record on truthiness.

. . . thy name is Cheney.

I’m not going to bother writing anything about this when Phillybits has already dealt with it.

No, I haven’t found the time or the energy to explore this topic, except to say that the bigotry of some of the anti-immigration persons disgusts me, but I did hear a reasoned and civil discussion of the issue earlier this week.

You can listen to it here (Real) or go to the website and look for hour 2 of the June 19, 2007, show. The show’s description from the website:

Does the U.S. need immigrants? Do immigrants contribute to economic growth in certain business sectors? How do immigrants impact the wages and job opportunities for the unskilled workforce? We talk with Wharton professors BERNARD ANDERSON and PETER CAPPELLI.

It’s not like my kids don’t know me.

(Aside: You know, as a father, I must have done something right.

Her politics are left.)

Picture this:

Some poor black or hispanic or even white kid who kills someone while taking money gets [mumble] years in the slammer.

Some rich white guys who kill three women while making money get a letter from the mayor saying they should not serve any time.

Hmmm, they must be upstanding citizens like Scooter Libby.

Addendum, 6/23/2007:

Still not right. They got house arrest, probation, and community service.

The Current Federal Administrator vetoed the stem cell research bill. That means that all those embryos piling up from in vitro fertilization will just get thrown out the back door as red bag waste.

His position would make sense if he were against test-tube babies in the first place. If that were the case, all those frozen embryos would not have been created.

But I guess it’s better that they be thrown out the back door than that they do some good in the world.

In other news, 3,531 American soldiers dead in Iraq as of today.

Those embryos referred to above never lived. But those Americann soldiers lived and died–and they died for a lie. But at least they didn’t die for research.

The stench of NeoCon hypocrisy overwhelms me.

Addendum, later that same evening:

DelawareLiberal and Balloon Juice.

As if jury duty is not bad enough, now, several people have reported that someone claiming to be from the U.S. District Court is calling asking why they did not report to jury duty.

The unsuspecting victims are then asked to give the caller their name, date of birth and Social Security number.

It’s a scam, said David W. Thomas, U.S. Marshal of the District of Delaware.

The man is an imposter, and victims are warned never to give out any confidential information over the phone.

Thomas said the telephone call appears to be legitimate, because the scammers use spoof cards that make the victim’s caller ID look as though the call is coming from a federal government telephone

This has been a public service announcement.

.

Steve points out that Republicans are distancing themselves from the Current Federal Administration.

And he also points out their hypocrisy in doing so:

Let’s get this straight, though. They are doing this because of poor poll numbers. They should be doing so because of Bush’s incompetent decision-making. But Republicans are only focused on winning — values, competence and doing the right thing are the furthest things from their minds. Of course, if they were about competence, they’d be pissing on both Rove and Bush.

How much a gram?

South Carolina Treasurer Thomas Ravenel was indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury for distribution of cocaine.

(snip)

Thomas Ravenel is the state chairman for former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign.

Addendum, 6/20/2007:

Phillybits wonders how long before leading Conservative pundits and professors petition for him to serve no time, because he’s a leading member of the community.

With a tip to my pastor:

. . . in the world of Bush:

The Army general who investigated the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal has said he was forced into retirement by civilian Pentagon officials because he had been “overzealous.”

In an interview with Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba’s first since retiring in January, he said that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior civilian and military officials had treated him brusquely after the investigation into the formerly American-run prison outside Baghdad was completed in 2004.

He also said that in early 2006 he was ordered, without explanation, to retire within a year.

“They always shoot the messenger,” Taguba told the magazine. “To be accused of being overzealous and disloyal – that cuts deep into me. I was ostracized for doing what I was asked to do.”

They just can’t handle the truth, can they?

Because if they faced the truth, they would face their own perfidy.

On the way to the jobsite, I stopped at the ATM that I use most frequently so I could, like, you now, eat lunch.

This is what I saw:

I got a card from Afghanistan.

I hope he comes home safe after his 12 15 months.

Down the road a piece, there is a judge who has sued a dry cleaner for $54,000,000 because, alleges the judge, the dry cleaner lost the judge’s pants. That turned out to be the primary subject of an online chat featuring Marc Fisher, a columnist for the Washington Post. The chat is a hoot to read, but it also got serious.

As preface, one of our neighbors just got a nice wooden gym for his daughter. More landscaping was being done today, and we were wondering what was being done. One of our theories was that he was getting extra fall protection installed under it, because (in my words) “everyone is afraid of liability.” (Full disclosure: Turns out he was just getting some sod around the edges of the play area.)

But Mr. Fisher honed right in on this type of thinking in his chat (emphasis added):

. . . as a society, we’ve done a terrible job of shielding ourselves from the idea that we must act to protect ourselves from liability rather than to do the right and humane thing. This is true in virtually every aspect of contemporary life: schools, churches, businesses, real estate, government. Wherever you turn, whether it’s the neighborhood playground or the workplace, decisions are made because of some lawyer’s advice that you could be sued, rather than because of what’s right and in the interests of the community.

I have seen this in corporate life, where decisions are based, not on the right action, but on the possibility that some bozo with enough money might sue. And in private life.

And the public contributes to it, with the thinking that, whenever something goes wrong, there must be someone to blame and that someone should, by God, pay.

And, you know, that’s just not right.

Sure, there’s plenty of times when there’s someone to blame. Think of just about everything touched by George W. Bush. Think about melamine in pet food. Melamine in people food.

But sometimes, bad things just happen, because life is a messy, disorganized, chaotic, out-of-control thing.

As I was driving back from the cooling tower place, in heavy summer weekend traffic, I was passed by a Beemer. As it went by, speeding well above the limit (as was almost everyone else), I noticed that, in the back of the front headrests were mounted video screens.

Now, I remember many long drives with my parents–my maternal grandmother lived 485 385 miles away and we visited her at least twice a year.

They were usually pretty miserable drives. In the early years, before the opening of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, it was up at 4:30 a. m. to catch the ferry. Then down the road. The road took us through the center of every town and city on the way, including Raleigh and Charlotte, North Carolina; it was before bypasses. (I still remember the North Carolina State Penitentiary that we passed leaving Raleigh–a pretty forbidding looking place.)

If we were lucky, my parents would stop at the Red Apple Restaurant in Roanoke Rapids, NC, for breakfast; in later years, when my parents had a little more money, they would even treat us to breakfast on the ferry (it was an hour and a half crossing and all the ferries had full restaurants).

Later on, with the opening of the Bridge-Tunnel and the construction of Interstate 85, the 11 hour trip turned into an 8 or 9 hour trip.

But it was still a long time to be stuck in a car with my brother. And the feeling was probably mutual.

My parents often had to point out the center vinyl seam of the back seat and inform us that we each had to stay on our own side of the line. (When the seams disappeared, I think they resorted to masking tape, but I’m a little hazy on that.)

And, looking back on it, I’m glad we didn’t have the capability of watching DVDs. Instead, we fought; we looked out the window watching the country; we talked and read and generally had to figure out some way to amuse ourselves (it was a big treat when one of us got to ride in the front passenger seat).

I still remember the mailbox somewhere near Roanoke Rapids that some farmer had created out of a pot-bellied stove (the mail got dropped into the stove pipe), the Burma Shave signs, the tobacco barns with the ads on them, and all the bridges (I had my parents under strict order that, if I were napping, they should wake me if they were approaching a bridge).

Had we been able to watch movies, we might have been quieter and fought less.

But we wouldn’t have read, counted license plates, or done many of the other things we did to pass the time.

And we would have arrived with numb, dumbed-down brains.

It is not right for parents to numb their children’s brains for the sake of quiet in the car.

And it is not good for children not to learn how to amuse themselves.