The Dutch are really going to town with this euthanasia stuff. Old people, the terminally ill, babies, people in comas, the mentally retarded- the Dutch have a needle with their name on it. Everybody except for geriatric junkies whose eyes would light up like Christmas trees at the sight of a syringe. Those guys they'll wrap up in cotton.
Go figure.
It seems they're having a hard time scaring up demonstrators for those big anti-Bush protests in Canada:
Hopes for early mass protests in the streets of Ottawa on the eve of Tuesday's visit by US President George W. Bush fizzled out, as journalists outnumbered demonstrators.
A loose coalition of groups opposed to just about everything Bush supports had promised two demonstrations hours before Bush was due to jet into Ottawa Tuesday aboard Air Force One.
The first demonstration -- of Palestinians and sympathisers of the Palestinian cause opposed to Washington's support of Israel -- attracted less than 40 demonstrators.
According to a quick head count by journalists, the protest attracted 39 demonstrators, 42 journalists and television crew members and three police officers.
A second, ostensibly larger, demonstration scheduled for the midst of the evening rush hour -- was called by a group calling itself Students Against Bush.
Nobody turned up. Further protests however were expected on Tuesday.
Efforts to contact protest organizers were unsuccessful, with the phone numbers listed by organizers remaining unanswered.
They might want to try a combination demonstration/carwash to help draw in more people.
Steven Gardner seems to have taken the biggest hit of all by coming out against John Kerry. I hope all those Swiftie officers take care of the lowly enlisted guy from Kerry's boat who stepped up to the plate when he was needed. I'm sure they have plenty of cash left over to throw a swabbie a bone.
Only Picasso could so powerfully depict the essence of human conflict.
(Via Siflay Hraka.)
Finding himself down-at-the-heel, Sandy Berger's dipping his toe in the waters of screenplay-writing.
Get ready for Crazed Iraq Vet Syndrome.
One article has Vietnam vets with more than a 30% PTSD rate and another has it at 15%. Both got their figures from unnamed "studies". It's irritating that these nothing-but-the-cold-hard facts-journalists don't cite the sources in their work like any high-schooler has to.
They might as well be blogging in their jammies.
In any case, it appears Iraq vets are to be the new looney tunes. So pass on that torch, whackjob 'Nam vets, I bet your arms are tired, and shame on any of my fellow Desert Stormers for trying to steal anybody's psycho thunder. If over-consumption of pork patties and Starburst Fruit Chews are enough to put you over the edge mentally, then you're a wienie anyways.
Now excuse me while I go have a flashback.
Democratic Party talking head Susan Estrich tells us what went wrong with Teresa Heinz Kerry and the American public. She turned people off with the sense that:
she is an egocentric, arrogant, full-of-herself, spoiled rotten witch, with a checkbook, who thinks that just because she's rich she's smarter than anybody else.
Don't forget "cactus".
(Via FR.)
After a thirty-year hiatus, the Afghan Open is back. Don't jingle the change in your pocket, because golf hooligans will be dealt with severely:
At a resort that became a battlefield, Afghans teed off on Friday in their country's first open golf tournament in more than 30 years.
As is still the way in Afghanistan, the first shot of the day at the Kabul Golf Club went to the local militia commander, applauded by his men with shouldered Kalashnikovs.
But organisers say they hope their tournament, contested by 40 local caddies in a picturesque valley just outside the capital, will help bring a new era in which the only risks are from golf balls, not bullets, flying down the fairways.
The club describes itself as the best and only course in Afghanistan and promises "golf with an attitude".
Hazards are unorthodox, from the bombed out club house below the dramatic first tee on a ledge high up the valley, to the odd spent shell or scurrying lizard. Club pro Mohammad Nazir Popal insists there is no danger, even though the nine-hole course became a battlefield in the 1990s.
The troops in Kyrgyzstan had their own Macy's Parade.
We're in Kyrgyzstan? How about that.
This cook in Baghdad turned one of the thousands of frozen turkeys shipped into Iraq into the plastic photo op one seen here
Marines don't even take off their flak vests for Thanksgiving dinner
And these are the clerks
A neighbor family complained so much about this man's decorating of his house for Christmas, that he decided to forego his annual extravaganza and instead put up a giant Grinch just for them. The Grinch is pointing at the house of the grinchy, pisser-on-of-cornflakes neighbors.
Go play Zork for Thanksgiving. That's what I'm doing.
We have all the old Infocom games, but not a computer old enough to play them on. It's nice that they have Zork I, II, and III downloadable for free.
Lilly had her first Thanksgiving. So far there's nothing she didn't like about it. She appreciates the eat, nap, eat, nap quality of this particular holiday. She even managed to steal an entire bowl of corn and scoot out to the livingroom with it.
I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving Day. Enjoy the Thanksgiving weekend. The world will always have problems and we have so few holidays. Rest and enjoy this time.
I hope all of you have a wonderful one today.
Duane all dressed up in snaps
Wail on, Skydog!
Ozzy fighting with a burglar? I doubt it. On good days he has the physical coordination of Hermann Dornemann, and on bad days, Fred Hale.
It might be Ozzy's working brain Sharon is sexing up a robbery to grab that last bit of spotlight time.
Loud-mouthed clerics loathing to give up power might be thinking twice about pissing on Iraq's cornflakes:
Masked gunmen on Tuesday assassinated a Sunni cleric north of Baghdad, police said — the second such killing in as many days.
Sheik Ghalib Ali al-Zuhairi was a member of the Association of Muslim Scholars, an influential Sunni clerics group that has spoken out against nationwide elections to be held Jan. 30.
Allawi has these old pals of Saddam on his mind:
''The forces of darkness and terrorism will not benefit from this democratic experience and will fight it, but we are determined that this experiment succeeds.''
Gone are the days when the only name on the ballot is Saddam's.
A Stryker Brigader shares his chaw with an Iraqi soldier
Soon there'll be spit cups everywhere
The Daily Recycler has the very cool video of President Bush rescuing the Secret Service agent.
According to the newspaper story, Chilean security had been giving the Secret Service grief all day.
If I'm understanding the sequence correctly, one agent got roughed up but didn't resist and ended up out by the limo. The other agent raised holy hell, and this is the one the President waded into the fracas to get.
You're not stopping this guy
UPDATE:
Here's another copy with English audio. "You're not stopping me!"
UPDATE II:
The agent's name is Nick Trotta. His old high school has a webpage for him. He is the son of Italian immigrants and very religious. It was a priest who put his name forward to the Secret Service, as he found out later.
It's clear he's everything a Secret Service agent should be. For a while there, I think he was the only protection the President and First Lady had.
There's another Florida skunk ape sighting story in the newspaper, this one from around Lakeland. Funny thing is, the woman who says she saw it by the highway can't remember if it stunk or not. That ruins it for me. Without its famous overpowering stench, it's just an ape in a ditch. People have been reporting sightings for 200 years now.
My brother swears he saw one. I told him saying things like that makes him sound nutty to people, but that makes him tell it more. He enjoys flying in the face of public opinion.
Do I think he saw one? Hell, no. I think he saw a bear or something and his vivid imagination turned it into a skunk ape.
I, on the other hand, once got woken up by a ghost soldier in the barracks at Fort Devens.
Vanilla Ice needs to take a break from his red-hot-like-an-iceberg career and go pick up his kangaroo and goat from Animal Control.
Let some of these street guys get a little money in their pocket and they start with that marsupial nonsense.
Duane and motorcycles- a bad combination.
Wail on, Skydog!
The gift of sight
Michelle Rafferty, a Duluth, Minn., police officer, comforts her beloved partner, Timber, after undergoing cateract surgery on both of his eyes. Newspaper readers were so touched by the story of Timber, who was blind, that they donated more than than $20,000
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Duluth cop is dog's best friend
Standing outside the operating room door, feeling helpless, Duluth police officer Michelle Rafferty fought tears Tuesday as her partner went under the knife.
He lay unconscious on a table at a clinic in Blaine, his tail tucked between his furry legs, his tongue flopped out the side of his narrow German shepherd muzzle.
Dr. Robert Larocca leaned over the police dog's motionless head, peered into a microscope at its clamped-open right eye, and began cutting.
The ventilator whooshed as it breathed for the dog, a new police recruit named Timber, like the wolf, whose career would be very short unless Larocca could restore his sight.
And losing her partner would devastate Rafferty.
"Lightning struck when I got that dog," she said. "I couldn't have a better one. He's like a kid or a best friend."
Timber has been with the Duluth Police Department for only five months.
He's a quick study, tough with bad guys, and has a good nose for marijuana and cocaine. Plus, he has something less common in police dogs: an amiable, almost sweet disposition. He makes friends wherever Rafferty takes him.
But not long after they were paired in May, Rafferty began noticing that something was wrong.
"He'd catch the end of tables and run into chairs," she said. He'd pause in doorways or on the edge of ditches, looking back at Rafferty as if to say, "You go first."
Timber, she learned, had cataracts, a clouding of the lenses in the eyes. In dogs, the problem is often inherited, a vet said, and he was probably born with them.
Seeing-eye cop
As word spread through the department, Rafferty, a 12-year veteran who just became a K-9 officer this year, took a lot of ribbing.
When they called Timber "Stevie Wonder" or "Ray Charles," she played along, allowing that she had become Timber's "seeing-eye human."
But inside, Rafferty was terrified that the department would send Timber back. In the short run, it might be less expensive to exchange Timber than to pay $2,500 to $3,000 for surgery to repair his eyes.
Rafferty, 36, had loved animals since childhood and had always dreamed of being a K-9 officer. Timber was her first dog partner. As the newest K-9 officer, she'd been given the oldest K-9 squad vehicle, and now, as fate would have it, a nearly blind dog.
But she didn't mind. From the moment they'd met on a freight dock at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and he'd fallen asleep with his head in her lap on the ride home, a bond had grown. They had been through K-9 school together, and he'd become part of her family at home. He'd proved his worth on the street, twice finding drugs in cars. She'd watched him struggle to search buildings, even though he couldn't see much.
She couldn't bear the thought of letting him go.
"He's an officer; he's one of us now," she said. "If I broke my ankle, the department would take care of me. In the same way, we should take care of him."
When Rafferty pleaded Timber's case, Chief Roger Waller listened, and he agreed that it might cost less to fix Timber's eyes than to train a new partner for Rafferty.
Plus, he could see how determined she was to keep her partner.
But with budget cuts looming, Waller didn't know how the department was going to come up with the money. Undaunted, Rafferty said she'd put it on her own credit card.
Timber's new lenses
That's how Timber ended up on an operating table Tuesday at Midwest Veterinary Specialty Group, unconscious, a mask of bare skin where the hair had been shaved from around his eyes.
Larocca, the surgeon, one of only three board-certified veterinary ophthalmologists in Minnesota, does eye surgery on everything from hamsters to horses to sea lions.
He assured an anxious Rafferty that the surgery to fix Timber's cataracts is routine and highly successful, with useful vision returning more than 90 percent of the time.
Ophthalmology technicians Jane Hoffman and Maria Crowley assisted, preparing Timber and monitoring his vital signs and the various instruments and machines. He needed a ventilator because Larocca used a drug to paralyze him to prevent even the slightest eye movement.
After making a small incision near the edge of the cornea, Larocca inserted a small, slender rod attached by tubes to a machine.
Through a technique called "phacofragmentation," he gradually cut the damaged lens inside Timber's eye into small fragments, which the instrument simultaneously vacuumed out.
He then enlarged the incision and slipped a new, clear plastic polymer lens inside.
Finally, he sewed the incision shut, using a thread that will dissolve in a few weeks.
The team then turned Timber over and followed the same procedure on his left eye.
Loving promise
Rafferty waited nervously during the 1½-hour operation, occasionally peeking through a window in the operating-room door. She was invited to watch but didn't think she could stand to see her dog's eyes being cut. Her father, Ron, drove over from Stillwater to wait with her.
"I go to accidents with injuries all the time and endure it," she said. "But this gets to me."
Afterward, she was at Timber's side again, stroking his neck and speaking softly as he came out of the anesthesia, a plastic cone around his head to keep him from scratching at his eyes.
He was groggy and whimpery and apparently unaware that the world around him was about to make a lot more sense.
Larocca said that the operation went very well and that Timber would be able to see normally within hours. He should be able to return to work in four to six weeks.
"They regain vision right away," he said, gently patting Timber's head. "It's real neat to see."
On a rug on the floor of the recovery room, Rafferty cradled Timber in her arms, hoping he somehow understood that his pain, which she seemed to feel as much as he did, meant that they could stay together.
"When this is over, we'll go home and watch football," she said into his ear.
David Lee Roth on his new career as a paramedic:
"I have been on over 200 individual rides now.
Not once has anyone recognized me, which is perfect for me."
A US Marine of the 1st Division writes the words 'Dark Horse' on a beam of the bridge western Fallujah, Iraq, where the bodies of two American contractors killed by militants were strung up in March, sparking the earlier U.S. siege, Sunday, Nov. 14, 2004. An earlier message left by soldiers reads: 'This is for the Americans of Blackwater that were murdered here in 2004, Semper Fidelis 3/5.'
UPDATE:
Kyer is right in his comment. I did miss the PS. Let me fix that:
While driving to work the other day over in North Fort Myers, my sister saw something that made her blink her eyes four or five times to make sure what she was seeing was real:
It was a road crew made up of midgets.
There was one white guy and one black guy, and all the rest of the crew were midgets wearing safety vests and hardhats.
They must have gone down as a group to the labor pool that day.
She said it was something to see at 7:15 in the morning.
For a good read try this one on a Bradley crew's 19-hour shift in Fallujah:
But the enemy did not appear until 6:45, when a man's thermal image appeared running between the arched windows on the ground floor of a mansion. Another silhouette appeared on a nearby roof.
On the monitor, the men watched Ames aiming the Bradley's gun, but the silhouettes didn't reappear and Ames didn't shoot. Twenty minutes later, an RPG found the Bradley. A sudden, high-pitched bang rocked the vehicle from side to side and the men crouched a little lower, ducking their helmeted heads like turtles disappearing into shells.
Searching for an open shot, the Bradley almost backed into a tank behind it. And then the tank fired its main gun, wrecking the opulent house across the way.
As dust and quiet settled, Ames griped, "How come they get to shoot the mansion?"
--------------
Bradley crew's shift: 19 hours in Fallujah shooting gallery
Sun Nov 14, 9:40 AM ET
By James Janega Tribune staff reporter
After nearly 18 hours in the claustrophobic urban canyons that constitute the front lines of the battle for Fallujah, the crew of the lead Bradley Fighting Vehicle was cramped, weary and low on ammunition.
Then they came under heavy enemy fire for the first time all week.
Within 15 minutes, as shooting erupted around them, their radio crackled with the news that their company commander's vehicle, blocks behind them, had been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. The blast killed an interpreter and severed a soldier's arm. A Bradley that sped to the rescue was hit by another RPG that slipped under its high-tech armor, wounding the driver.
A block away, they heard the boom as a third rocket from insurgents took out the transmission on a huge Abrams tank. The tank's turret wouldn't move. Nor could the tank drive in reverse or pivot.
In a quiet voice that cut through the garbled shouts on his radio, Sgt. Jack Ames, 29, the Bradley's gunner, noted to the six other soldiers and one reporter on board: "Wow. We're the only ones left here."
After five days of fighting in Fallujah, the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division had found Iraqi resistance in the last place the insurgents could hide: the tight streets of the Shuhada district on the city's south side. "Shuhada" translates as "martyrs."
They fought for a night and much of a day in streets so narrow they couldn't turn around, cruising devastated roadways that any second could explode in a barrage from rockets and Kalashnikovs.
Inside the troop compartment of Bradley Alpha 2-1--a space hardly larger than two refrigerators--a hulking 17-year-old from Florida crouched across from a skinny 24-year-old team leader, weighed down by 65 pounds of gear. Along with the reporter, two other soldiers crammed in, buried in equipment and juggling two machine guns, a grenade launcher and an anti-tank missile launcher the size of a fence post. The weapons were useless inside the vehicle. But in this neighborhood, getting out and fighting on foot would be too dangerous.
Ames and the Bradley's commander, Lt. Michael Duran, 24, rode in the turret above the troop compartment. Spec. Clint Hardin, 23, rode up front, steering the 30-ton vehicle using a monitor and periscopes.
The men in back slept uneasily for much of the night, leaning helmets against metal or one another as the Bradley's 25 mm gun tore apart houses and buildings where insurgents were thought to be hiding.
But at dawn, rifle rounds began pinging off the Bradley's armor and the RPGs began exploding, rocking the vehicle, raining dust on the men inside and sucking the air from the compartment again and again.
Search and destroy
Bradley Alpha 2-1's 19-hour mission into Fallujah began at sunset Thursday, hours after a briefing for battalion officers.
The goal was to move ahead of U.S. Marines and find the insurgents, remnants of a rebel force that in previous months had turned Fallujah into one of the most dangerous cities in Iraq (news - web sites). Failing that, the soldiers were to destroy the insurgents' hiding places, preventing them from being used to ambush the Marines.
In the normally bustling battalion command tent, two dozen senior soldiers in stifling body armor listened silently.
"Destroy everything you can destroy. Make sure you keep together," Lt. Col. Jim Rainey told his officers, reminding them of the rules of engagement established to protect civilians. "Given those constraints, kill everything that you can kill."
At dusk, Alpha 2-1's commander Duran led 36 soldiers into his and three other Bradleys for the assault. He would take the platoon into battle.
As Hardin cranked Alpha 2-1's diesel engine, he recounted the vehicle's war.
Since arriving in March, the men had run over eight bombs. Since fighting began in Najaf in August, the Bradley had been hit by 16 RPGs. One of them smacked the front armor outside Hardin's seat.
"Felt it, heard it, instant migraine," he said in a San Antonio twang. "I didn't see it coming, and it blew up right in front of my face."
Duran crawled into 2-1's turret next to Ames, a tiny man who sucked down cigarettes and travel mugs of Iraqi instant coffee, which he brewed throughout the night. He, Ames and Hardin would stay awake the entire night.
Up the back ramp clambered Pvt. Thomas Dennis, 17; Spec. David Garcia, 24; and Spec. Jimmy Baca, 26. Their job would be to jump out and fight if needed.
Last in was Sgt. Charles Thornton, 23, who sat and shouted "Close it!" over the engine noise. The heavy ramp clanged shut. The desert disappeared, and inside Alpha 2-1 all became noise and dark.
It was 6 p.m.
Until 1 p.m. the next afternoon, the crew's only view of the outside world would be on a green 8-by-10-inch monitor that switched between the gunner's thermal sights and an aerial-photo map of Fallujah that showed positions of friendly forces. It fizzed out periodically.
Fallujah became a shooting gallery on the screen, with everything that looked as though it could hide a bomb or an enemy sniper drawing fire from Ames' gun.
Working where tanks can't
DOOM-DOOM-DOOM. A cistern exploded in a cascade of water, sending a cat screeching into the darkness.
A suspected spotter for insurgent snipers appeared in an upper-floor window. Ames shot. DOOM-DOOM-DOOM. The man never reappeared.
Working in twos and with Alpha 2-1 in the lead, the four Bradleys of Duran's platoon rolled through streets so narrow tanks wouldn't enter; they couldn't have swung their cannons. The platoon essentially was on its own.
Obstacle by obstacle, the Bradleys sent high-explosive shells into the streetscape. Some found roadside bombs, many didn't. Mostly the night was quiet.
Inside the troop compartment, the soldiers dozed and watched the monitor, seeing the eerie infrared shapes of palm trees waving in a nighttime breeze they could not feel, as Bradleys slipped down broken streets crisscrossed with electrical extension cords above.
They tensed as Alpha 2-1 passed a blown-up bus where they thought explosives could have been planted. They listened on the radio as another platoon spotted a mortar team on a nearby block, raining shells down on them.
At midnight, six hours into the patrol, another company of Bradleys behind them stumbled on a huge ambush waiting to happen: A pile of concrete and metal bars, which snarl the tracks of Bradleys and tanks, a tipped-over fuel tanker packed with explosives, a gigantic dirt pile behind that, and a three-story building full of suspected insurgents.
Tanks, an Air Force AC-130 Spectre gunship and a Navy F-18 fighter dropping a bomb came in and destroyed the building.
The first bad news came at 2 a.m.: An Abrams lightly damaged in battle had tipped over in a ditch north of town. The tank's driver died instantly, prompting a sharp expletive from Garcia, who sat closest to the radio and relayed each scrap of bad news.
More came at 3:55. Alpha 2-1's mission was supposed to end at dawn. Instead, Duran relayed another message: "Continue to press the enemy." The soldiers groaned.
But the enemy did not appear until 6:45, when a man's thermal image appeared running between the arched windows on the ground floor of a mansion. Another silhouette appeared on a nearby roof.
On the monitor, the men watched Ames aiming the Bradley's gun, but the silhouettes didn't reappear and Ames didn't shoot. Twenty minutes later, an RPG found the Bradley. A sudden, high-pitched bang rocked the vehicle from side to side and the men crouched a little lower, ducking their helmeted heads like turtles disappearing into shells.
Searching for an open shot, the Bradley almost backed into a tank behind it. And then the tank fired its main gun, wrecking the opulent house across the way.
As dust and quiet settled, Ames griped, "How come they get to shoot the mansion?"
Low on ammo
Two hours later, RPGs erupted from the direction of a mosque. The platoon's four Bradleys opened up, firing for more than an hour as shapes of people flitted across the monitor in the troop compartment.
"We're getting low on ammo," Ames warned, reading off a list of what he had fired--hundreds of high-explosive shells that blew holes the size of dinner plates in cinder-block walls, and hundreds of other shells designed to take out enemy fighters.
When rocket fire picked up again, frustrated Bradley gunners trained their sights on buildings but held their fire. The Marines, who had arrived on foot, were too close--and right in the line of fire.
Alpha 2-1 was trying to find a way south to clearer shots when the insurgents' attack began in earnest.
"I'm hit!" Alpha Company's commander, Capt. Ed Twaddell, shouted over the radio at 11:43. The armor-penetrating RPG punched a half-dollar-size hole in his Bradley's back gate, then filled the troop compartment with light, noise, gore and flying metal before lodging in the turret where he was standing.
"I saw light and a flash down by my knee, and then the turret filled with smoke," Twaddell said later, his face still covered in soot and dust.
His interpreter, sitting behind him, had been killed instantly, a baseball-size gash in his side.
Two blocks north of Alpha 2-1, a Bradley maneuvered to help, disgorging a medic and soldiers under a hail of gunfire. Within minutes a penetrating RPG exploded under the second Bradley's driver compartment, wounding a man from West Virginia who had survived RPG shrapnel to the neck when his Bradley was hit in Najaf.
For an indeterminate time, Alpha 2-1 was all alone. Somehow the crew had been separated from the platoon's other three Bradleys, spread out somewhere in the tangle of buildings.
The crew heard another explosion at 11:59--the RPG shot that disabled the Abrams. Duran found his other Bradleys on the radio and ordered them to stand guard around the tank as more tankers hooked a tow bar to it. It took a half-hour.
As the armor limped north through town, a lone Marine hiding behind a tree flagged Alpha 2-1 and gestured toward a house across the street, indicating that an insurgent was inside.
Ames pumped his last few rounds into the top floor. Emerging from behind the tree, the Marine waved happily.
"No problem, buddy," Ames said wearily as Hardin drove slowly back to camp.
They arrived at 1 p.m., 19 hours after they had left.
But within an hour, Alpha 2-1 and its crew had refueled, reloaded and returned to Fallujah.
I was reminded recently of how most staff at the White House stay there until retirement. If any of you remember the mini-series "Backstairs at the White House," based on the non-fiction book of the same title, the house staff is there through administration after administration. Tina Hager's series of portraits of the staff of the executive residence offers a glimpse into why people would want to work there forever.
You can't send that, but you can send something.
The Christmas mailing deadline for regular postage is today
Deployed Tampa reservist Bernie Haithcock dodged having his home confiscated by his homeowner's association over a $200 payment after a local businessman, Robert Hoskinson, paid the ever-mounting bill in full:
"It just got under my skin that these lawyers and association people would do this to that guy," said Hoskinson. "That gentleman's signed up to protect our country, and you've got lawyers who haven't signed up for anything, trying to make him pay hundreds of dollars."
Hoskinson added: "So I'm paying the bill, because God forbid a lawyer in this town goes hungry."
The bill with legal fees eventually came to $1,148.50.
Y'all go watch Okie Toby Keith's "I Wanna Talk About Me" video, and revel in his Red-State goodness.
After that, learn about how the Blue States are battling against an invasion of Dollywood values:
"I'm not sure where we went wrong," says Ellen McCormack, nervously fondling the recycled paper cup holding her organic Kona soy latte. "It seems like only yesterday Rain was a carefree little boy at the Montessori school, playing non-competitive musical chairs with the other children and his care facilitators."
"But now..." she pauses, staring out the window of her postmodern Palo Alto home. The words are hesitant, measured, bearing a tale of family heartbreak almost too painful for her to recount. "But now, Rain insists that I call him Bobby Ray."
Here's one I missed from last month. After an Ivan-spawned tornado hit James Abney's trailer in Marianna, there wasn't anything left standing but the faucet. The people at Delta Faucet saw this pic, and recognized the faucet for one of their own. They called the county sheriff to track Mr. Abney down, and gave him $10,000 as a down payment on a new home. He chose his new home to be in Alabama.
Hey, if Arafat did die of AIDS, as rumor has it; think he'll make it into the quilt?
+
?
I've written before of the military service of my father. He served for thirty years and fought in three wars. We don't have too much in common service-wise. My war, the Gulf War, was very different from his three.
We do have similar ice cream stories, though.
When he was a young sailor out in the Pacific, he and his friends stole the CO2 from a nearby fire extinguisher, hid in a closet, and made ice cream from a mix. An officer caught them. The greatest danger aboard ship is not flood, but fire. They had rendered a fire extinguisher useless and according to regulations, the officer should send them to the brig.
Instead, the officer asked them to give him a bowl. He ate his ice cream while they stood there and then he told them that when they were finished eating they were to repair the fire extinguisher.
When I was on maneuvers once in Augsburg, we were in place waiting to repel the attack of Gold, or whichever color was coming to fight us. We'd been waiting for the attack for hours, lying quietly, fingers on triggers, when suddenly we heard a cheery, chiming little melody, and a German ice cream truck came rolling down the avenue of approach.
A bunch of the guys got up and started running to the ice cream truck, hands already reaching for wallets. I heard the Captain cursing, then he screamed angrily, "You knuckleheads! Get back here!" The jingling song coming from the loudspeaker on the truck must have drowned out his words, because they kept going.
A few seconds later I heard the Captain's voice again, but this time the tone was different. And this time he called out, "Hey! Bring me a vanilla cone!"
This evening I found on the floor a completely flattened can of dog food. It had been emptied of food, yet the pop-top lid was undisturbed. There were teeth marks on the side.
Whoever did this was either drunk or had no opposable thumbs.
In lieu of burial, Mr. Arafat has asked that his body be exploded in a crowded Israeli marketplace, as is the custom of his people.
The White House has put out word daily of calls flooding in from around the world to congratulate President Bush on his re-election victory. But somehow, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero just hasn't been able to get his call past the switchboard.
There may be a language barrier involved. Perhaps the operator doesn't speak Ovine.
Or it may be the President is just very busy taking meetings with other folk:
Meanwhile, Bush met privately on Tuesday at the White House with Spain's former prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, who was a chief Bush ally in the war in Iraq.
(Via Beyond Salvage.)
Here's Duane with some of the band.
The good-looking guy front and center wasn't in the band, although he joined them onstage many times.
Little brother Gregg looks particularly retarded in this photo.
Wail on, Skydog!
Broward SOE Brenda Snipes had a special helper down at the office:
What was John Kerry campaign activist Dan Lewis doing in nonpublic areas of Snipes' office while the election was being planned and votes were being counted? We may never know.
There are Republicans who would no doubt be concerned that Lewis, a political consultant helping Kerry, was allowed to roam at will in Snipes' office.
Snipes said about Lewis: "He's helping me on many levels." Gisela Salas, the deputy supervisor, said Lewis "has been functioning as Dr. Snipes' adviser."
None of this inspires great confidence in the impartiality of Snipes' office.
Snipes needs to have folks like Lewis sign an affidavit that they are not involved in any campaign on the ballot before allowing them to be volunteers or advisers in the elections office.
It was in that office that I spotted Lewis and asked him what he was doing. He smiled and said flippantly before walking away: "I'm not here."
Let's hope by the next election, he's telling the truth and not just joking.
We've got a streak going here in Broward: three SOE's in a row to bungle elections and consider themselves above restraint. You'd think Snipes would be on her toes considering police were used to remov her predecessor from the building.
Tom Wolfe explains the election results but doubts our betters will get it:
The truth is that my pals, my fellow journos and literary types, would feel more comfortable going to Baghdad than to Cincinnati. Most couldn’t tell you what state Cincinnati is in and going there would be like being assigned to a tumbleweed county in Mexico.
They can talk to sheikhs in Lebanon and esoteric radical groups in Uzbekistan, but talk to someone in Cincinnati . . . are you crazy? They have no concept of what America is made of and even now they won’t see that.
I can't remember who blogged it, but having Christiane Amanpour report from the parking lot of the Dairy Queen in Possum Trot, Texas would be something I'd like to see. She might find some interesting things going on down there.
Wolfe, like many others, is pointing to James Webb's ethnography book "Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America," as an introduction to the people who decided this election.
I won't hold my breath waiting for people to "celebrate our diversity".
Godspeed to all the Coalition forces in Fallujah
They've taken the pulse of the Democratic Party in Florida, and according to Sen. Skip Campbell, Broward Democratic Chairman, it's time to break out the defibrillator:
"We're dead. Need CPR."
Analysts concur:
"The Democratic Party in Florida has just done a horrific job," said Aubrey Jewett, a University of Central Florida political science professor.
"There's no way to soften this. There is no silver lining anywhere in this election for Democrats.
"I just can't be negative enough."
Sen. Campbell is at least dealing with reality and not condescending that those who voted the other ticket need to be "educated" [Hello, Ms Pelosi]:
''We've got to win back those folks who say they are Democrats but they're voting Republican,'' Campbell said. ``We've got to find out what it is about the Democratic Party that they're against, or we become a nonentity.''
He can begin his search right here.
Cheer up, despairing Anybody-But-Bushers. There is a throng of Canadians offering you a hand in marriage and a ticket out of Bushville.
(Via FR.)
Firas of Iraq and Iraqis is very pleased with the results of our election. In fact, he stayed up all night to watch them roll in.
He'll be having his own free elections pretty soon, thanks to President Bush.
Congrats are also in order to President Karzai, maker of history as the first president of Afghanistan. The best of luck to him and his administration.
According to this editorial in the Ames Tribune, the dastardly Southerners have made nice people permanent members of the political underclass. He lists all the things he thinks a Democratic candidate must be in order to appeal to us, and finds it impossible-- even though Mr. Clinton managed to do it not so long ago. Twice. He's opting for blue state secession and annexation to Canada, not having the guts to try to start a new country.
Take off to the Great White North, ay?
His reading list must include Iowahawk:
Kerry's lack of success in the South was largely due to the fact that Southerners are uneducated and often 'slow.' Studies have found that special needs students often learn better through repetition, so it will be important to continually remind Southerners that they are violent inbred monkey-people.
I've seen a lot of that lately. Tell me again why we should vote for a party that despises us?
Be sure to read the behind-the-scenes Newsweek article "How Bush Did It." It's coming out in installments, and I can hardly wait for the next one.
This one is pure entertainment. The Teresa stories alone make it a delightful read.
It makes you wonder why we didn't hear this stuff while the campaign was going on.
UPDATE:
Campaign life was rough for John Kerry, as is apparent in this cry-from-the-heart:
I'm running this campaign myself," he said, looking at Nicholson and the other aides. "I get myself breakfast. I get myself hairbrushes. I get myself my cell-phone charger. It's pretty amazing."
It is!
Not everyone in Crackerville is pleased with the election. Mr. Cracker finds the re-election quite distressing and even waved his hands about when discussing it. For him, that's the equivalent of getting a rifle and climbing a tower.
The one thing we could agree on is that if the Democrats want to win, they need to field a moderate Southerner. He says he doesn't understand why they didn't do that this time, and gets very upset with talk of Hillary running in '08, because there's no way she's going to win.
Bring us the genuine article, and a lot of us will vote for him. Drag a New England liberal across the trail, and he'll be ignored. As Governor Schwartzenegger puts it, "Let's be honest."
What were they thinking?
European leaders called the President yesterday to express in coded terms their hopes of improving trans-Atlantic ties with Laura, whom they all desire, but none can obtain
Duane and J. Geils backstage.
Wail on, Skydog!
Not only do Americans not give a rat's ass what celebrities think:
A battalion of entertainment industry glitterati shifted their powerful names and images from America's theatre marquees to its campaign flyers as they came out in force to lobby for the Democrat's White House bid.
But it simply wasn't enough to defeat Republican President George W. Bush.
They apparently give negative rat's ass:
But voters ultimately were not dazzled by the star power and outspoken celebrities can actually be a liability for a Democratic candidate in more conservative and Republican area of the country.
A note of personal thanks to Springsteen, Affleck, and all the Hollywood libs:
Your superlative work in getting on people's last nerve with your Tinseltown sanctimoniousness helped keep my guy in the Whitehouse. Kudos! *Muah* Don't ever get over yourselves.
I'd like to recognize and thank John Kerry for being gracious in his concession speech. He conducted himself like a gentleman and put the good of the country ahead of his ego. While this used to be the norm in conduct for the aftermath of Presidential races, it's now something I pray for and am grateful for when it happens. May he never devolve into a bitter, sniping, Loserman like Gore.
I, Florida Cracker, single-handedly delivered Florida to Dubya. I have no link for that- I simply know it to be true. It involved going into the swamp at midnight, but I got the job done.
You're welcome.
A poke in the eye to all these mystified people who assumed that lots of new voters and a big turnout could only benefit the Democrats here in Florida. The joke's on y'all, ain't it?
Go ask Zell Miller why the Democratic Party lost the South. He'll tell you all about it.
Things are looking good here for the President, even with Broward being factored in. Hopefully, I'll be crowing tomorrow along with my fellow 34-percenters.
The Panhandle is in a later timezone than the rest of Florida. It's heavily Republican, and should dunk Florida in a big ol' tub of red Ritz dye.
I pray for God for bless, guide and protect our country on this important day.
It cracks me up when I read of people from either party saying if the other guy wins, they're moving. They all need to go out and buy some perspective. Me, I ain't going nowhere. Presidents come and go- this is my home forever.
BTW, I have a ten-spot riding on Dubya's winning, and I plan to collect.
Vacation is over, and I'm back at work since yesterday.
Homelife is full of dog drama at the moment, what with the new addition, and I'm glad to have some relief from the election.
The News-Press called to do a follow-up on Lilly, for coverage of when the former owner goes to court.
When we were out for a walk, a girl in an SUV drove past, turned around, got out of her truck, and offered assistance for my presumably injured dog. I didn't know what to say, and the words "naturally crippled" came out of my mouth, along with "thank you" and "sorry". I'll have a better response next time. This is a upscale area, with lots of well-coiffed foofoo dogs. I may well have the only partially paralyzed three-legger in town. Maybe Lilly could do with a big bowl of stem cells.
The President swung by Lancaster County again, and the Amish are apparently still in the grips of Bush Fever
Either this boy is "English" (I think I spot a zipper) or the Amish have indeed set aside their pacifism in order to put a million pitchfork holes in Osama
All this negativity isn't good for us as a people. Please, God, let there be a clear winner on Election night and may the loser behave like a gentleman. I don't want this to go on until the last lawyer's dead:
"People are being ugly," said Joyce Griffin, elections supervisor for Monroe County who blames media reports about election missteps and mistakes. "They are convinced by all the negative news that every elections official in the state is crooked and we're all degenerates. If I were a prostitute I'd be getting more respect."
