And the article is top drawer as well. All about Fitzgerald, Wilson, Plame, Cheney and Libbey. Ladies and gentlemen, Midnight in the garden of Moe and Curley.
These two paragraphs are wonderful.
Outside, in the garden of Moe and Curley, it’s midnight, and all we can hear is the famous, "woo, woo, woo," echoing off the broken statues and the ivy covered pillars which mark the ruins of Mr. Fitzgerald’s slow roast of an inquiry of a pitiful digging around of trying to make a solid case out of a Virginia ham sandwich, 2 gherkin pickles, one slice of imported Stilton cheese, slightly off mayonnaise, a malleable grand jury and a sweeping array of stooges.
It is rumored that Mr. Fitzgerald’s next subpoena in this weighty matter of state is going out to one Mr. Larry Fine, for a number of suspicious notes written to a Mr. Vernon Dent.
Read it all.
Verizon has issued a statement - here's the text. This is pretty straightforward. The USA Today story appears to be false. Now, the question becomes did USA Today get suckered into reporting a political hit piece out of their desire to get a leak of the year prize? Oh sorry, that should read Pulitzer.
I don't think USA Today is going to look very heroic, or even very credible, pretty soon.
One of my commenters earlier said something to the effect that the companies were trying to protect themselves from a lawsuit by issuing these statements. I pointed out that to do so would destroy their credibility when any suit went to trial. I think these companies are telling the truth, because to lie right now would be their ruin in court.
The Mexican Government will sue us if we use any troops to apprehend their illegal immigrants? Are these people completely out of their minds?
Mexico said Tuesday that it would file lawsuits in U.S. courts if National Guard troops on the border become directly involved in detaining migrants.
Mexican border officials also said they worried that sending troops to heavily trafficked regions would push illegal migrants into more perilous areas of the U.S.-Mexican border to avoid detection.
A word of advice, then. If you're so freaking worried about your citizens KEEP THEM IN YOUR OWN COUNTRY. This has reached a point of complete insanity. You know what? It's about time for Americans to stop doing business with American businesses that employ illegal immigrants. Period.
And it's about time to sue the Mexican government for all the money we spend on having to patrol the border, too.
Ward Churchill has been found to have committed plagiarism, fabrication and falsification of material and was disrespectful of American Indian traditions in his writings by a review panel at Colorado University. Apparently all five members found these allegations to be true, but the board differed in recommendations for punishment. Three called for a five year suspension without pay while the others called for two years. The majority believed that Churchill could, in fact, be terminated.
The Governor of Colorado has called on Churchill to resign. Which would be honorable, considering his serious breech of academic standards. Of course, that means Churchill will refuse to do it.
A guy who fakes a native American background has no honor.
Continuing on my
project to visit one member of the Fighting 101st each day, today I found myself at the
Anti-Strib. Tracy has a helpful rewrite of the Bush speech. (That's also where I got the link to that last post.).
Never, not once did I ever have a high school teacher that looked like this.
It would have made high school much more fun.
The headline from an article in The Hill today states: GOP hopes ‘Speaker Pelosi’ will scare voters this fall. It goes on to detail the various strategies being use by politicians of both parties regarding the upcoming elections.
But, Blue Crab Boulevard has obtained a special candid picture of Nancy Pelosi preparing for her recent appearance on Meet The Press. The photographer from the Magic 8-Ball Photography and Port-a-Potty service risked grave danger to get this exclusive shot.
(Well, what did you think of when you read that headline?)
We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have remarked several times about the fact that Cyprus seems to have more than it's share of odd news. We're not sure what causes that to be the case. Perhaps it's the climate, perhaps it's the population.
Perhaps it's the political candidates.
Costas Kyriakou is promising Cypriot voters Utopia and that means sex. A colourful candidate among a sea of suited businessmen and lawyers, Kyriakou says he is offering voters an alternative in the island's May 21 parliamentary elections.
Kyriakou, a dropout from philosophy school, is now a farmer. And he believes Cyprus should be organized into Utopian communities with lots and lots of free love. He is conducting his campaign mostly on foot through the Western region of Cyprus. He's not new to politics, either.
He ran in the presidential election of 2003, where he won 0.44 percent of the vote, the highest figure among a smattering of fringe non-party candidates.
Utopos disputes this. "I received 73 percent," he said.
We see why he dropped out of school. Before they caught up with him.
It looks like the Dutch are succeeding in silencing Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She appears to be planning to step down from her seat in Parliament and will hasten her departure for the United States. One hopes she does so before the Dutch succeed in making her stateless as well.
She has admitted for years that she was not completely truthful when she applied for asylum. For this to suddenly become an issue smacks of political payback for something. One hopes that Ms. Rita Verdonk, Minister of Immigration can manage to fix her hair and makeup without a mirror.
Since she sure shouldn't be able to look herself in the eye after this.
UPDATE: Ayaan Hirsi Ali's letter of resignation from Parliament.
UPDATE: It looks like there is a substantial chance that Rita Verdonk is going to lose her job over this if the running reports of what is happening in the Dutch Parliament are correct. There's a massive push by a lot of factions to force Verdonk to grant citizenship immediately. Methinks Rita stepped in it this time.
Ok, this must be weird news day here at Blue Crab Boulevard. I have no other way to explain this item:
US researchers patent cannonball device for rescue services
Apparently DARPA has patented a device to shoot emergency personnel to the top of a five story building. Inspired by the circus act of the human cannonball, the device would consist of a ramp, a chair, compressed air to drive the chair and computer control.
Oh, and a volunteer with more bravery than common sense.
There's a lot of discontent on the President's speech last night. Bill Frist has a post up at Volpac - and he's getting pasted in the comments section.
I may have underestimated how badly the right was going to take this (although I expected it to be bad). The amount of upset is getting bad right now. Frankly, when the open borders people start demonstrating, all hell is going to bust loose on this issue.
Repeat it over and over again until the meme catches hold. Similar to how Dana Priest got her Pulitzer, by repeating a rewritten story from 2003, Texas Rainmaker points to an astonishing trail of articles by Will Lester of the Associated Press.
Lester is asserting (over and over again) that cell phone only households are skewing polls. Now, while I have a significant amount of training and experience in both statistics and design of experiments, I am no pollster. Nor do I really want to be. But this meme is particularly designed to advance a leftist agenda. As if polling were not already heavily skewed left (as I have pointed out over and over). Lester wants to justify skewing still further left.
I'm throwing the flag on Lester. Go take a look at the trail of articles at Texas Rainmaker.
Every once in a while an article appears which is impossible to comment on. This would be one of those:
Pink Taco Restaurant Name Causes Stir
BellSouth denies it has ever given any information to the NSA, directly contradicting the USA Today report from last week.
A report Thursday by USA Today identified BellSouth Corp., along with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., as companies that had complied with an NSA request for tens of millions of customer phone records after the 2001 terror attacks. Experts said the agency was likely seeking to detect calling patterns in the mountain of data.
"Based on our review to date, we have confirmed no such contract exists and we have not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA," the company said in a statement.
BellSouth spokesman Jeff Battcher said in a telephone interview, "we cannot find anyone within BellSouth who has ever been approached by the NSA."
Fascinating development.
UPDATE: USA Today on the same report.
Henry Kissinger has an opinion piece in today's Washington Post that attempts to give some good advice on the issue of nuclear proliferation.
The world is faced with the nightmarish prospect that nuclear weapons will become a standard part of national armament and wind up in terrorist hands. The negotiations on Korean and Iranian nuclear proliferation mark a watershed. A failed diplomacy would leave us with a choice between the use of force or a world where restraint has been eroded by the inability or unwillingness of countries that have the most to lose to restrain defiant fanatics. One need only imagine what would have happened had any of the terrorist attacks on New York, Washington, London, Madrid, Istanbul or Bali involved even the crudest nuclear weapon.
Lately, the arguments coming from the left have been along the lines of "you have a better chance of being killed by (insert accident of choice) than of being killed by some guy living in a cave. I have seen this meme both here and on other blogs.
And it's a dumb argument. Because if the guy in the cave gets a nuke, the odds change instantly. Not in a favorable direction.
I'm not sure that Kissenger's strategy for negotiation that he lays out in the article would work or not. It very well might. On the other hand, it appears that Kissinger assumes Iran and North Korea will act rationally. I'm not completely sure of that fact. But it certainly appears to be an approach at least worth exploring. One thing he writes captures the entire issue, I think.
The issue before the nations involved is similar to what the world faced in 1938 and at the beginning of the Cold War: whether to overcome fears and hesitancy about undertaking the difficult path demanded by necessity. The failure of that test in 1938 produced a catastrophic war; the ability to master it in the immediate aftermath of World War II led to victory without war.
The debates surrounding these issues will be conducted in the waning years of an American administration. On the surface, this may seem to guarantee partisanship. But thoughtful observers in both parties will know that the consequences of the decisions before us will have to be managed in a new administration. The nuclear issue, capable of destroying mankind, may thus, one hopes, bring us together in the end.
Amen to that last sentence.
Uncategorized | Gaius Tuesday, 16 May , 2006 | 
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