« May 2006 | Main | July 2006 »
It all makes sense now; Norm Minetta was the only Democrat in the Bush cabinet. He's going away now, and I have just a little glimmer of hope that someone with a modicum of common sense will take over command of the Flying Nail Clipper Nazis.
Being an American of a certain age, I've never done the soccer thing. We had a teacher from England when I was in the ninth grade that tried to get us interested, but like the metric system it never took.
Afterwards, when the 'game' became widespread in the schools I held a certain distain for it because it seemed that the teachers merely used it to tire the kids out. I've heard reports recently that they don't even assign goalies so that everybody scores and there are no 'self-esteem' problems if one gets by. The schools also saved a bundle on equipment as they didn't have to buy bats and gloves or spring for a new basketball hoop. I never knew a kid who could tell me the rules.
So yesterday I spent a little over an hour with some ex-pat Brazilians at the local Mall where they had set up a giant TV to watch Brazil play their first game at the World Cup. The event was staged so the local TV station could capture the world's most famous fans on camera and put a blurb on the local news. They singled me out twice for an interview, which was a mistake. I'm pretty sure they didn't use my "I'm an American and I don't understand what you're saying" quote.
Nonetheless my point would be that since I've been here in Latin America soccer has been creeping into my consciousness. I did have to return home last night and have a dose of Miami beating (barely) Dallas, but all in all it's been relatively painless. Perhaps it's because my significant otro is Brazilian and even the Costa Ricans cheer for the five-time cup winners and current defending champions.
The Brazilians get passionate about damned near everything and they're fun to watch (go to a CART or Indy race in the States and watch the Brazilian section climb the fence), thus the cameras at yesterday's event. They dance and sing and chant and talk funny and wave the flag, and when they've had a libation or two, well, they're more fun to watch than Mets fans taunt the ball girl at Shea Stadium. Clothing is known to be optional on certain occasions in Brazil.
So I have some advice to you guys back in the Estados Unidos, don't watch the home team. At least not yet. Nobody in the soccer world respects them anyway and they've already lost their first to the Czech Republic. Watch the Brazilians. It's easy to cheer for a winner, and even if they don't take home the prize this year it's pleasant to watch the fans while they're trying.
If that doesn't sting too much maybe take a look at the Germans. They've just won their second game in their group and they are the host country. If they win the next one they'll definitely make the finals (I think- I won't even make an attempt to decipher the arcana involved for rankings this time around) and the country will be nuts.
The great Brazilian Pele tried to kick-start the American soccer experience decades ago to no avail, and who knows if it will ever catch on in the States. But if somebody would get creative and start some kind of 'foreign exchange' around Carnival time it could have half a chance.
I downloaded Google Earth a few months ago, which is a compliment to their online map feature. No matter what the haters say, and I'm not a fan of some of Google's policies especially as they pertain to their China project, this is an amazing 'free' feature.
Unless you're one of my three friends that read here you may want to skip the rest of this.
So I'm wasting time on the internet last night winding down getting ready for bed and I figure I'll visit my own site (this one right here) and check out my blogroll. I don't know why I don't do this more often. I put the sites there in the first place because I originally read something from them that I found worthy, yet I hardly visit them. Within the first two links I found that I needed to re-title one of the blogs as they had changed their name.
On the third link-click I find this:
Outside the Arab and in the Western world Islam has a fairly peaceful modern track record. Muslims in the Bulgaria and Romania have lived peacefully with their Christian neighbors. The Balkan Wars dealt with nationalism and clan loyalties rather than religion. Turkey has been very Western traditionally. Tatarstan, home of the once uber-violent Tartars, is now a peaceful Russian republic with Christians, Jews, and Muslim Tartars living together.
Tartarstan! I'm reading in fits and starts The Travels of Marco Polo, and I'm getting to the part where he was in the court of Kubla Khan and he's giving a short history of old Genghis, emperor of the Tartars. But wait, wasn't Genghis the leader of the 'Mongol' horde? An explanation awaits here.
Anyway, fire up Google Earth and travel to Tartarstan and find the capital, Kazan. From there I follow the Volga to the Moscow canal and into Red Square.
I wander around looking at traffic patterns for a bit before heading east into Mongolia and China. Then south onto Tibet, Nepal, India and Pakistan. I find Mount Everest and from there look for K2. I can't find it so I search for coordinates on the internet and locate it on the border of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and China.
While in the mountains I use the tilt control after I get to a low enough altitude and do a flyby along the Himalayan range, picking out the taller peaks and crashing through in the way mountains. I wander into nearby Afghanistan through the Pakistan border and into Kabul. God what traffic.
A quick fly-around the mountains surrounding the city from low altitude, check out the airport, then south to Kandahar. Not much detail around these parts so I head west into Iran.
Spend a short time in the south and head up to Tehran to check out the sites. I'm getting used to the low altitude flyover and do the usual 'round the mountains' stuff and then, looking south I see a road. I must have spent the better part of an hour following it southeast at about a four thousand foot elevation.
Just the other day I was bemoaning the fact that I don't have a globe. But I'd have to have a damned big one to reproduce the effects of flying around the earth via Google. You'll have to excuse me as I try to retrace my steps from last night to find the road to the Persian Gulf.
Did a quick Drudge surf just moments ago and clicked on World's who's who hold secret talks in Ottawa… where I found this info in the last paragraph of an AFP item:
Former New York governor George Pataki, Iraq's deputy prime minister Ahmad Chalabi, the heads of Coca-Cola, Credit Suisse, the Royal Bank of Canada, several media moguls, and cabinet ministers from Spain and Greece, were also expected to attend.
Emphasis mine. Looks like the foreign "presse" wants to start interfering in domestic politics early this round, as according to George Pataki dot com: "George E. Pataki, the 53rd Governor of New York State, is currently the longest serving Governor in the United States."
As they're signing up volunteers for his campaign here and taking contributions here it doesn't look like he wants to leave the Governor's Mansion anytime soon.
So what's the hubbub about in the first place? It's the "annual, ultra-secretive Bilderberg conference" in Ottowa. The conference is so secret that the AFP had to use its secret powers to find a globetrotting "conspiracy theorist" at the airport to quote for the international article:
[S]keptic Daniel Estulin, who flew from Spain to try to cover the conference, said their intent is to "create a world government ruled by an elite group of people whose main objective is to control all the natural resources on the planet."
I personally thought that was the aim of China and Venezuela, not to mention OPEC, the Trilateral Commision, the Masons, the UN and George Bush. I'm so confused. Agence France-Presse: reporting the absurd with a straight face since1835.
Update: If you're still reading, continuing my link perusal from Drudge I find an example of an American 'news' agency delivering up the goods; after the jump.
Not wanting to be seen as singling out the French for idiotic reporting I need to include this gem from the Associated Press, which is ostensibly an American 'news' agency.
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- An Iraqi man who was one of the first people on the scene after an airstrike that led to the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi told Associated Press Television News that he saw American troops beating a man who had a beard like the al-Qaida leader.The witness said he saw the man lying on the ground, badly wounded but still alive. He said U.S. troops arriving on the scene wrapped the man's head in an Arab robe and began beating him. His account cannot be independently verified.
Again, with a straight face the "news" reports that a man with "a beard" had his head wrapped in cloth and was beaten. Just maybe, if the witness was reporting the God's honest truth, the troops were administering life saving treatment. Otherwise why wrap his head? That this 'admittedly' unverifiable account of US troops beating to death an injured man whose face would be plastered all over the world's media within hours is delivered up as 'news' without any context is simply incomprehensible.
National Review has an article that takes to task a NY Times piece seemingly bent on giving away intelligence methods used in the takedown of that asshole Zarqawi. The criticism sticks, as the Times seems to always be on the side of whoever happens to be on the other side of the United States. This is a sad thing, but it could also be useful.
Quoting Andy McCarthy in NR: "Thanks yet again to people inside our intelligence community who don't know how to keep their mouths shut." Again, certain elements in the intelligence community, including the idiot married to Valerie Plame (please don't nitpick, we used him as a source), seem determined to score points against this administration at whatever cost. Again, could be useful.
Let's hope against hope that we have somebody with half a brain thinking on these things (I know they're there) and they fed the Times this stuff on purpose. I would in my perfect fantasy believe there was no GMC truck that left the bombsite just before the air strike. That there was no particular Jordanian—"The source inside Mr. Zarqawi's group, the Jordanian official said, had been cultivated at least in part by Jordanian intelligence agents."—providing us intelligence. (Zarqawi, being Jordanian should have at least a few of them hanging around.)
If I'm right, this is a perfect setup to rip apart the established cell surrounding Zarqawi and be really fun as an intelligence officer to watch as they eat their own. As the Times has been damned near useless to us in the war, which has again in the past few days been pointed out to be a propaganda war for a great part, it would be sweet to know that the Times was 'our' useful idiot(s) for a change.
Just wanted to officially note before the day is out that Zarqawi is dead. Ding dong. Asshole.
A friend of mine mentioned that she was going to go to a Unity 08 soirée next week, and knowing nothing about it I looked them up. Turns out they are an internet based group dissatisfied with the nasty nature of modern politics and want to elect a unified ticket; that is, one Republican and one Democrat, President and Vice President, in 2008. It matters not which party has the big chair. My instant analysis follows:
The one thing it seems that Unity 08 has going for it is that the left wing doesn’t like it. I’ll assume the right wing won’t be in love with it either, so if they don’t manage to nominate a ‘joke’ candidate it might have a fighting chance to interest the 'middle.' Of course it takes many millions of dollars to elect a President, and though there is a lot of money out there, I don’t think the internet is ready to cough that much up. They’ll need a significant self-interested big-dollar donor base.
That said, I doubt whether they can come up with anybody I’d vote for, simply because I’m not in the middle. There’s no passion in the middle. Clinton was in the middle and look at the muck he made of things (IMHO). Not that the economy was half bad, but our state of readiness to protect ourselves left much to be desired (and that is now our number one national priority). The only thing Bill got passionate about was himself, and that's not meant as a double entendre. The Democrats who stood beside him weren’t protecting 'him' so much as they were protecting the party. The devil’s bargain is that they got the passionate left trying to take over the party.
When I Googled “Unity 08” the fourth hit was from the good folks at the Daily Kos trying to figure out if it was a right wing conspiracy. As I read the comments it was interesting to note that these guys consider themselves the center and view Hillary and Lieberman as right wing. Some sample comments:
1). Read ANYTHING about partisanship or polarization and you'll run into this myth about how Democrats are being controlled "the Left". Uhhh yeah, that's why we can't block Hayden or Alito, and why pro-war Hillary is the party's 2008 front-runner, right?
But as long as this is solely about "right vs. left" instead of "competent vs. corrupt", the Republicans will look good. The frame of ideological polarization means that you HAVE to have an extreme left if there's an extreme right. But it's just not true.2). There is no left in this country except in the dark imaginations of the wingnut strategists. Who exactly is talking about nationalizing industry and the banking system, or creating 80% tax rates, or mandating communal agriculture, or forging a revolutionary workman's paradise? Democrats certainly aren't. Democratic positions are for the most part profoundly moderate and centrist. Americans don't even know what "Left" is anymore because of the extreme radical right tilt we've undergone and the Republicans wildly successful reframing of moderate pragmatism as "extreme", "socialist", and "left".
3). My problem with people arguing for a return to the middle is their definition of "the middle." Lieberman is called a "moderate Democrat." Horseshit! He's a conservative Democrat. He's more right wing than many Republicans. McCain is called a "moderate Republican." Horseshit, again! He's just a moderate within his own party which has turned, over the years, to radical rather than conservative.
If you’re not passionate about something you won’t go out of your way to protect it, and the world is a big bad place. This is why the world should be respectful of a Hillary presidency, and why I’m not so afraid anymore. Hillary did heavy lifting during Bill’s presidency on the legitimacy front. She’s the one that had to come out with the big lie and make it stick. If she’s elected she will protect her presidency, and by extension the country, like the proverbial lioness (the Kos Kids have a point). She's quite aware of how tarnished Bill's legacy is and the historic burden she carries.
We like the adversarial system. It’s the best one we could come up with to protect the wrongly accused at trial. Although the parliamentary system has kept Europe from ‘starting’ any wars, its consensus style of government won’t let it protect itself either. France is the fifth largest global economy (depending on measurement), yet problems with its first attempt at a nuclear powered Aircraft Carrier has resulted in the next one being conventionally powered and mostly built by Britain. The US has twelve active carriers, ten of them nuclear.
When Europe voted to field a unified army in November of 2000, they embarrassingly found they didn’t have the resources to do so.
"No new forces are being created, however, and many of the troops included in the tally are also committed to Nato."
When the tsunami hit the Indian Ocean, many governments had to get in line for available resources to transport assistance there. The US and Australia provided the bulk of the relief. A government not passionate about defending itself, can’t help others either.
We all get the proverbial half-a-loaf, but in America our loaves always seem to be bigger than everybody else’s. Unity 08 is about stopping the political fighting, but without the fighting we’ll never know where we stand, and won’t well hear, never mind listen to, the other side of the argument. Which is what will ultimately decide the fate of Unity 08. If its raison d’ etre is to “take our country back from polarizing politics” then its philosophical basis pretty prohibits it from fighting. Which means that no matter what its governing platform turns out to be, even if it's not mush, it will get its ass kicked.
The internet connection's been so iffy today I feel like I'm back in the early nineties on a walloping 33.6 dial-up connection while AOL dumps me every ten minutes. We'll see how moody it is when I hit the post button. I also can't begin to tell you how loud it's seemed in the shop today. Even though other days of sawing and grinding steel must have been just as loud, today is driving me nuts for some reason. It should be the final day of this particular ruckus. Monday starts a different type of ruckus as they begin to construct my office cage.
But… it's not totally over. You can see through the mesh floor of the mezzanine, and it gives 'just a little' underfoot as you walk on it. I think it's cool. The women are terrified of it. So I priced 1/2-inch acrylic today to add a little bite, and the quote came in at $3,000, which is pretty much what I paid for the entire structure. I have numbers for tempered glass at home, (which I can't find on the on/off internet today), but if memory serves it won't be that much less expensive, if at all. I think I'll be looking for another 'cool' alternative.
The bathroom guys came in this morning to put the final putty on the walls and then left. The general contractor that employs them wants more work out of me and is bringing another quote for lighting and metal shelving laminates on Monday. Ten minutes ago I went to inspect it, and the damned sink moves. It moves. After three plus days, the sink moves. The patch job on the wall above the sink is less than exemplary and he told my partner that she should just put a mirror over it. I'm thinking he's not getting any more work from me even if I have to fix it myself.
Following up on my Congressman Jefferson/WSJ post the other day it seems that Byron York has my back.
Me: So for eight months Jefferson refused a subpoena and the House leadership was unaware that something was going on?… Let me hear about the negotiations or lack of them.Mr. York: Among its other duties, the House Office of General Counsel represents the staff of the House of Representatives. Its purpose is not to be the lawyer for any individual but to represent the interests of the House as an institution; … [this] indicates that the House Counsel took the position that neither Jefferson nor his staff should be required to turn over the subpoenaed documents to the Justice Department. And that suggests that the months-long resistance in the corruption case, which most outside observers have attributed to Jefferson’s individual intransigence in the face of overwhelming evidence against him, was in fact backed by the House of Representatives itself.
Also 'kind of' backs up my observation of Jefferson during his press conference as a 'deer in the headlights' type. He's guilty and is relying on the kindness of strangers to dig him out of this mess, as I'm sure Dennis Hastert is not a close friend of his. As usual York comes up with some interesting information, which is well worth a read.
I've had few premonitions, but one of note was when I realized that George Bush 41 would lose his reelection bid if he didn't retract his 'read my hips' statement on breaking his tax pledge. Up until now it was the most offensive thing I'd heard uttered from a Republican to the people that put him in office. My latest prognostication is that if the Republicans don't get on the right side of this, their constituents are going to stay home come November. There's blood in the water, and Democrats aren't stupid. If they manage to reel in their left wing [granted, a big 'if'), the coming months may be remembered as the 'quiet' campaign as the Dems retake the House by default in big numbers.
Bush as Party leader needs to get out in front of this thing soon and discipline the troops, or for the last two years of his Presidency he's going to be taking direction from Hillary.