A Lot Of Gas About Gas

And so we come to another election season.The Democrats, desparate to regain control of at least one chamber of congress are in full attack mode. The media, overwhelmingly members of the Democratic party do not even have to consiously parrot the party line - its automatic for them.

So the attacks go on. Mary McCarthy! Bush Lied! Leaker in chief! Secret prisons!. Warrantless wiretaps!

High gas prices!

So the Dems go on full tilt. Railing about high gas prices and promising government intervention to curb those greedy oil companies. Make them pay! Make them stop gouging! We'll even drop taxes for a bit!

Never mind that the far left has maintained for a long time that gas is too cheap. Never mind that the global warming enthusiasts are demanding less fuel use. Never mind that the press is screaming almost daily about global warming!

Cheap gas - we can all get behind that!

The Democrats, in their blind lust to reacquire control are rolling their constituents (especially the "net roots") and the Republicans,too.

And the Republicans are obliging them.

How about a little bit of integrity and a small application of principle?

UPDATE: And the oil speculators who are actually a big part of why the prices are so high, immediately ran for some political cover.

Pass The Word On This

OK, this is not good folks. It seems there is a thriving trade in stolen computer data in Afghanistan. Locals who work on the base are using zip drives to steal files and then selling them.

Damn it, put a sign-on password on your computers right now. This will at least make it difficult for them. Set your screensavers to lock to a password after no more than a few minutes untended. Please?

Any Milbloggers who read this, pass it along. This is serious.

Not Worrying About A Nuclear Iran?

Then how about a nuclear Sudan? Iran is considering transferring nuclear technology to Sudan. You know, those lovely people who are perpetrating genocide in their own country. Iran appears quite confident that Russia and China will back them. They may be right.

This should be a wake-up call to every thinking American. Stop trying to overturn the last election or to paralyze government. This is serious folks, we need to start thinking about our country.

Gas Pains

Texas Rainmaker has a very detailed breakdown on what's wrong with all the wailing and gnashing of teeth coming out of Washington over high gas prices.

I happen to agree that price controls are a very bad idea indeed. Taxing corporations is a sneaky way of taxing people. The companies pass taxes along to the consumer. You can tell it's an election year.

WARNING!

Twice today I went to the National Journal website. Both times a trojan downloader tried to get onto my system from something on their site. I have no idea what it is. I had to run a AV scan in safe mode the first time to get it off the system. The second time, Kaspersky stopped it from setting.

According to the log, the script is identified as "whats_after_a_w.html" and it appears to set (or try to) a trojan downloader on your system.

If anybody knows a safe way to contact their webmaster, they should be notified they have a problem.

UPDATE: I sent them an email and they were very nice about getting right back to me. It appears that there was a problem with the meta-refresh that they were using. Myself and some other people had problems with it. I'm not sure if they changed it or removed it, but I am no longer having the sirens go off when I go there.

Frankly, I was impressed with how fast they looked into it and got back to me. They seem to have a tightly run organization over there.

Are We The Only Ones?

Who think something is a bit strange here. 

Note that Osama popped up a couple of days ago and told his troops to head to the Sudan to open a front against the world. Today Zarqawi pops up and actually releases a video showing his face. Up until now he's been wearing a mask.

It sounds as if things are going badly for them right now. It's almost as if Zarqawi is almost desperate to keep people loyal to him. He specifically sounds very unhappy that the political process is going ahead regardless of his mayhem and murder.

All this popping up makes me think it's time to play a little Whack-A-Mole.

UPDATE: Confederate Yankee has discovered the Acme™ connection! Beep beep.

Strategy Page On Being Revolted By Generals

I noted the other day that it seemed like the meme about the retired generals was about out of steam. I think there's a reason for that. Even the press realized they were crossing a line. Oh I know there are still a few diehards yapping about it, but they are not getting any traction.

Strategy Page has another little post mortem on the subject. They point out that the average soldiers made their voices heard through blogs and the internet. Let's put it this way; the generals weren't getting much support. I can personally vouch for that. My son, despite not being a big fan of Rumsfeld in the past and really not caring a lot for Bush (Which predates Bush's first election, BTW) thought the generals were extremely out of line. As in he thought somebody should pull them aside and tell them to sit down and shut up. And make them if they didn't want to do it voluntarily.

The mass media ran with the six generals, but got shot down by the troops and their blogs, message board postings and emails. It wasn't just a matter of the "troop media" being more powerful. No, what the troops had going for them was a more convincing reality. Unlike the six generals, many of the Internet troops were in Iraq, or had recently been there. Their opinions were not as eloquent as those of the generals, but they were also more convincing. Added to that was the complaint from many of the troops that, according to the American constitution, it's the civilians (in the person of the Secretary of Defense) that can dismiss soldiers from service, not the other way around. While the six generals were only expressing their opinions (which only active duty troops are restricted from doing, because of the different military legal system they operate under), it rubbed a lot of people (military and civilian) the wrong way because of the constitutional angle. 

I think the communication between soldiers and between soldiers and families that is possible today is a good thing. I think taking control of the narrative away from a few badly slanted press gatekeepers is also a good thing.

What A Great Story

I have never heard this story. I was never a baseball fan and don't remembering hearing about it back when it happened.

In 1976, two young men tried to burn an American flag on the field at Dodger stadium. They doused it with lighter fluid and were trying to light it when centerfielder Rick Monday ran up, grabbed the flag and ran back to the dugout with it. Then third base coach Tommy Lasorda went after the two men and tried to get them to swing at him so he could respond. Of course the punks wouldn't.

"When these two guys ran on the field, something wasn't right. And it wasn't right from the standpoint that one of them had something cradled under his arm. It turned out to be an American flag. They came from the left-field corner, went past Cardenal to shallow left-center field.

"That's when I saw the flag. They unfurled it as if it was a picnic blanket. They knelt beside it, not to pay homage but to harm it as one of the guys was pulling out of his pocket somewhere a big can of lighter fluid. He began to douse it.

"What they were doing was wrong then, in 1976. In my mind, it's wrong now, in 2006. It's the way I was raised. My thoughts were reinforced with my six years in the Marine Corp Reserves. It was also reinforced by a lot of friends who lost their lives protecting the rights and freedoms that flag represented.

"So I started to run after them. To this day, I couldn't tell you what was running through my mind except I was mad, I was angry and it was wrong for a lot of reasons.

"Then the wind blew the first match out. There was hardly ever any wind at Dodger Stadium. The second match was lit, just as I got there. I did think that if I could bowl them over, they can't do what they're trying to do.

"I saw them go and put the match down to the flag. It's soaked in lighter fluid at this time. Well, they can't light it if they don't have it. So I just scooped it up.

"My first thought was, 'Is this on fire?' Well, fortunately, it was not. I continue to run. One of the men threw the can of lighter fluid at me. We found out he was not a prospect. He did not have a good arm. Thank goodness.

"Tommy Lasorda was in his last year as third-base coach before he took over for Hall of Fame manager Walter Alston. Tommy ran past me and called these guys every name in the longshoreman's encyclopedia."

"A lot of people don't know this, but he beat me to the flag," recalls Lasorda. "I saw Rick start running over from center field to left. I didn't know what it was, but as soon as I saw him start, I took off and I ran out there, and of course, by that time, Rick had picked up the flag and continued running. When I got there, I see these two guys and I told them, 'Why don't one of you guys take a swing at me?' because there were 50-something thousand people in the ballpark and I only wanted them to swing at me, so I could defend myself and do a job on them."

Stories like this make you proud to be an American.

A very belated thank you to Rick Monday for what he did on that bright spring day thirty years ago. Monday still has the flag.

Central Command

I received an email from the US Central Command asking if I could place a link to them here. So you'll notice there's a hotlink on the sidebar. It's a good source for information you won't see in the MSM.

Here's a link if you want to add it to your own site: http://www.centcom.mil/

And a logo to copy:

Shanghai Or Bust!

Chinese bra manufacturers have had to greatly expand their production of larger cup size bras, due to increased demand. It seems that improved nutrition and physical exercise has expanded Chinese women's bust sizes.

The report, seen on the daily's Web site Tuesday, said that the Hong Kong-based lingerie firm Embry Group no longer produces A-cups for larger chest circumferences and has increased production of C-, D- and E-cup bras to meet pressing demand.

The Beijing Institute of Clothing Technology released a report last week saying the average chest circumference of Chinese women has risen by nearly 1 cm (0.4 inch) to 83.53 cm (32.89 inches) since the early 1990s, the daily said.

In a weirdly related item, it seems supporters of various candidates for election in Mexico City have taken to bragging about their leader's - er - physical attributes. It seems that bragging about the relative size of one's manhood is not only politically correct, it's almost required. So is making fun of your rival's - er - shortcomings.

No word on if there has been a demand for larger cup sizes.

Killer Chimps!

Police in Sierra Leone are searching for as many as 20 chimpanzees who killed a taxi driver and injured three Americans. The chimps escaped from a sanctuary for orphaned or abandoned animals.

The Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in forested hills outside the Sierra Leonean capital Freetown where the incident happened, has been closed since Sunday's attack by the screaming and excited apes, which mobbed and mauled the four men.

"Some people had turned up at the gate before normal opening time, and before staff could react, they realized somebody was being attacked," the sanctuary's director, Bala Amarasekaran told Reuters.

The animals killed local taxi driver Issa Kanu and bit and mauled three U.S. employees of a construction company helping to build the new U.S. embassy in Freetown.

Local villagers are keeping their children home while police and sanctuary employees try to round up the illusive apes. If you should happen to be over in that neck of the woods keep an eye out for the escapees. They're considered armed and extremely dangerous. For your convenience, we have provided a handy reference as to what the chimps may look like:

Kind of adds a whole new dimension to the term "guerrilla warfare", doesn't it?

How Spin Is Made

In today's Washington Post an applied lesson in spin. Mary McCarthy had her lawyer talk to the press. The article states in the first paragraph that the lawyer denied she leaked any classified material.

A lawyer representing fired CIA officer Mary O. McCarthy said yesterday that his client did not leak any classified information and did not disclose to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest the existence of secret CIA-run prisons in Eastern Europe for suspected terrorists.

Unfortunately that is not what the direct quote from the lawyer actually says.

Cobb said that McCarthy, who worked in the CIA inspector general's office, "did not have access to the information she is accused of leaking," namely the classified information about any secret detention centers in Europe. Having unreported media contacts is not unheard of at the CIA but is a violation of the agency's rules.

(Emphasis added)

What this does is mislead by misdirection. Saying someone did not have access to information is not even remotely the same as saying that person did not leak information. But the reporter says that the satements are the same.

There was an online chat with a Washington Post reporter today. Dafna Linzer took questions.

MilBlogs And Milblogging

A very nice writeup of the subject today from the BBC of all places. They actually covered the recently complete Milblogger Conference in Washington.

Over the course of a day of discussions taking place both in person and online - and, naturally, among a panel of official conference bloggers - participants wrestled with questions about how to blog without violating military security, how much leeway the military should give to bloggers, and how milbloggers could help influence - or force - the mainstream media to cover the war in Iraq better.

I'm not exactly sure if Blue Crab Boulevard counts as a milblog. In a way it is, as part of the reason I write this is to stay in touch with my son. That's also the reason there is a bit of humor on the site. I know it gives him a laugh.

Standing Room Only

It seems the Airbus consortium is quietly pushing a wonderful new concept. Not content with building a double-decker aircraft that will seat about a half a million people, they want to get even more people crammed in. So they are approaching several Asia airlines with the idea of standing room only. Yup, they want to stand people up against a backboard and harness them in.

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard, always first with the best news have an exclusive photograph of what the new concept will look like in action. Welcome to the future of air travel!

UPDATE: To say Fausta is incensed about this development would be somewhat of an understatement.

Stolen Honor

Here's a post from ThreatsWatch by Steve Schippert that perfectly captures what happened to America and to our servicemen during and after Vietnam. Far too many men who served their country had their honor stolen (or more properly, clouded) by media that controlled the flow of information.

Now, according to Cronkite and all those who shared his twisted view, the battle against communism was nonsense and the military was different.

The battle was not to be against communism, but clearly against America’s own military by the sole arbiters of information flow. The battle was engaged against John.

That offensive, launched in living rooms and coffee shops from coast to coast, went unchallenged from military service members in the field. There was no mechanism nor the technology for them to rebut or directly dispute the nonsense that the Tet Offensive of 1968 spelled doom for South Vietnam and American involvement there. For, if a credentialed member of the media did not report it, it was never heard or considered.

It was this single caveat that enabled an agenda-driven media establishment to dictate the course of a war, successfully snatching political defeat from the jaws of a military victory.

It was this single caveat that enabled an agenda-driven media establishment to shroud, obscure and effectively steal the honor of honorable men like John, forever altering the course of their lives.

The media directed the fabrications about Vietnam, repeated them endlessly and made the falsehoods into "common knowledge". One of the very early posts on this blog addressed just a few of those myths.

In many ways we're fighting the exact same war again now. No, Iraq isn't Vietnam, but there are some who want it to be. I'd rather not cooperate in allowing honor to be taken away from the soldiers again.