Blue Crab Boulevard

I have had a few people try to advise me on solving the comment spam problems I have here. I'm sure they are correct in their advice. I am not, however, even remotely competent to go messing into the files on the website. So, I just trigger a plug-in that makes legitimate commenters type a few characters to place a comment. The downside is that trackbacks can't get through.

So just to let you know: if you're trying to trackback, I had to kick in the anti-spam tonight. They crap is arriving at the rate of 100 per hour.

I noted earlier a devastatingly effective political ad that has stirred up screams of outrage from the media. I rather suspect the screams are because of the effectiveness of the ad. But it is extremely funny to watch the media trying to spin the video into something it certainly is not. That is, they are trying to call the ad "racist". Please, go see the ad over at Alabama Liberation Front before you form a judgment.

The MSM (MSNBC in this case) is also trying to paint it as controversial among the Republican party. This would be the first such take I have read that makes that accusation. I actually think that the Republicans are very pleased that this ad is going viral. But hey, I'm pragmatic that way. Of course Corker did an "arms length" on this. As Ali Bubba points out, that makes it deniable. That does not - in any way - negate the effectiveness of the ad. It works because Ford himself made it work. The ad makes fun of Ford's stances on a number of issues.

But isn't racist. MSNBC knows that. But hey, thanks for helping it go viral.

Barack Obama may well be a very nice man and an honest politician from Illinois. I have lived in that state and understand the politics there far too well to comment any further on that. But aside from the fact that his name would actually not work out at all well according to the rules of The Name Game, he's been just popping up everywhere lately, hasn't he? One has to wonder, if one is a suspicious azure crustacean at any rate, why exactly he is popping up everywhere.

Being of a suspicious bent, one thing comes to mind right away: smokescreen.

Now why in the world would Barack Obama want to suddenly reverse himself on national television and declare he was going to consider running for president? Is it that he believes his sudden "rock star" image is real? Does he think he has the political chops? Does he think he can raise the cash? Does he believe the Great Pumpkin is ready to grant a wish? Maybe all of those, as unlikely as the last one is.

Or is he doing the party's bidding and throwing himself out there to try, desperately, to energize the base and get people to the polls? Is he trying to provide a smokescreen for the fact that, quite frankly, the Democrats don't actually have a party agenda that resonates with anyone but a few pollsters? If Obama can generate some smoke, maybe some people will think there is actually some heat behind it. Especially because there actually isn't.

Dafydd at Big Lizards has a heartrending biography of the compelling story of Barack Obama. The first half Kansan in the Senate. Or something.

UPDATE: Others: Wizbang, Darth Misha,

UPDATE: Thanks to Lori Byrd at Wizbang for the link. If you followed the link over, please do look around a bit while you're here.

Bob Owens at Confederate Yankee has a few things to point out to the critics of the Iraq war who demand a precipitous pullout from Iraq.

If current U.S. political trends hold, Iraq may become another Darfur, and Darfur well may be on its way to becoming another Rwanda.

As Victor David Hansen notes of unexpected outcomes today:

Where does all this lead? Not where most expect. The Left thinks that the “fiasco” in Iraq will bring a repudiation of George Bush, and lead to its return to power. Perhaps. But more likely it will bring a return of realpolitik to American foreign policy, in which no action abroad is allowable (so much for the liberals’ project of saving Darfur), and our diplomacy is predicated only on stability abroad. The idealism of trying to birth consensual government will be discredited; but with its demise also ends any attention to Arab moderates, who whined for years about our support for the House of Saud, Pakistani generals, Gulf autocrats, or our neglect of the mayhem wrought by Islamists in Afghanistan. We know now that when the United States tries to spend blood and treasure in Afghanistan and Iraq that it will be slandered as naïve or imperialistic.

Every major Democratic candidate in this fall’s congressional race—save one principled independent Democrat in Connecticut—is pushing for the United States to withdraw from Iraq. Some moderate Republicans are taking this tack as well. They claim that they want U.S. forces out of Iraq because our continued presence there only invites attacks against American soldiers, saps the national treasury, weakens our ability to respond to other threats such as Iran and North Korea, and weakens our image in the international community.

All of these points have some merit.

U.S. soldiers would be far safer if redeployed to Okinawa. There are no insurgents, no sectarian militias, and no roving bands of al Qaeda terrorists there.

The War in Iraq is indeed expensive, costing over 336 billion dollars and growing according to one anti-war web site.

Having such a large commitment of soldiers currently in, returning from, or preparing to go to Iraq certainly absorbs a significant portion of our current military strength, though it barely occupies our force projection from the Navy and Air Force to any extent.

And let us not forget that our international image is indeed tarnished, particularly among those nations of the world community run by strongmen, despots, and dictators that would see a weaker and more isolationist United States as a benefit for their own foreign policy desires.

But what no candidate in favor of withdrawal wants to address is what will happen to the Iraqi people if anti-war candidates do take control of Congress and attempt to live up to their campaign promises.

As Bob points out: what are the alternatives? If that first sentence I quoted from Bob does not send chills into your very soul, then you are playing politics, not really standing on principle. You are trying to cause political damage regardless of who dies as a result of YOUR actions.

"If current U.S. political trends hold, Iraq may become another Darfur, and Darfur well may be on its way to becoming another Rwanda."

And the blood will be on the hands of the ones who force a precipitous pullout. Not on someone else's hands. Their hands.

In vitro is a thing of the past thanks to the wonders of modern science. Host mothers? Passé. Fertility drugs? Bah, who needs them. Yes, folks there is a brand new, futuristic way to get the child of your dreams:

Vending machines!

ANTIGO, Wis. - Three-year-old Robert Moore went fishing for a stuffed replica of Sponge Bob and ended up trapped in a vending machine. The toddler's adventure began with a Saturday evening shopping trip with his grandmother, Fredricka Bierdemann, and three siblings.

Bierdemann ended the trip by giving each child a dollar and telling them to have fun in a retailer's game room.

A stuffed Sponge Bob in a vending machine's bin caught Robert's eye. He tried without success to fish it out with a plastic crane.

"I told him I could get it for him," his grandmother said. "He's a character. He said, 'Oh no, I can get it.'"

When she turned her back to get another dollar for a second try, Robert took off his coat and squeezed through an opening in the machine. He landed in the stuffed animal cube.

"I turned around and looked for him, and he said, 'Oma, I'm in here," Bierdemann said. "I thought I would have a heart attack."

Store employees couldn't find a key to the machine, so Robert waited while the Antigo Fire Department was called.

They called the fire department? Why didn't they just use the crane and grab the kid? Geeze, do we have to tell them everything?

UPDATE: Ahem. The founder would NOT be dumb enough to climb into the machine. Thank you very much.

Sometimes, we just plain scare ourselves here. We have figured out exactly, precisely how to make the Crabitat the richest blog in the world! Really, this is a brilliant plan. Earlier, we noted that US customs was searching travelers arriving from Australia to take away any Vegemite. No, really, we aren't making that up. See? We speculated on how long it would be before the Vegemite-leggers would begin turning up. Here's the brilliant part!

It seems that Australia is suffering a really severe drought. This has been going on for a while and is so bad that grain crops are really down. That, in turn is making the price of chicken feed skyrocket. The end result of that is that the cost of chicken is rising sharply.

THE price of chicken meat is set to skyrocket, with the prolonged drought having pushed the price of feed grain up 80 per cent over the past 12 months.

The executive director of the Australian Chicken Meat Federation, Andreas Dubs, said prices could rise as much as 20 per cent by Christmas.

"The current drought is putting extreme pressure on the industry, which can be expected to result in significant price increases for chicken meat, from whole chickens right through to further processed products," he said.

A spokeswoman for Woolworths said yesterday it was inevitable that the drought would have an impact on some product - especially grain-fed produce. Prices were likely to rise just before or immediately after Christmas, she said, but it was too early to say by how much.

So all we have to do is smuggle chicken feed to Australia, accept payment in Vegemite and bring that back here for the ex-pats from Oz! Is this brilliant or what? Like we said, sometimes we scare ourselves.

UPDATE: Curses, foiled again. The maliciously undermedicated StikNstien has somehow obtained a photograph. I knew there was something funny about that deal to buy the cloaking device to render the ship invisible. But $12.95 seemed like such a bargain….. Damn . Another setback on the road to ruling the universe.

Rick over at The Real Ugly American asks the question: so what exactly are the alternatives in Iraq? I have repeatedly pointed out that a precipitous withdrawal would ignite a bloodbath. Are those calling for a pullout willing to bear responsibility for what follows? So what are the alternatives?

Very interesting how unwittingly Peter Baker admits that he and his fellow objective journalists have twisted George Bush’s meaning of Stay the Course to represent “steely resolve” into “a symbol of being out of touch”. Baker and his colleagues knew full well what George Bush meant when he repeated the phrase over and over again. No matter what Baker or anyone else said or wrote as long as George Bush remains President we are not leaving Iraq until they have a stable democracy capable of governing and defending themselves.

But let’s not get hung up on another bias journalist tack. We can come back to that angle tomorrow or the next day or the next. What I would like to talk about is what exactly are the alternatives to stay the course?

We could send more troops. Any Democrats or journalists for that?

nope.

We could change our rules of engagement where far more bullets are flying, resulting in far more Iraqi civilian casualties and far fewer American ones. Any Democrats for that? how about Peter Baker?

By the way at this point I would support either change in policy. The sad fact is the Iraqis; at least a significant minority of them, the ones who count, the ones who are willing to fight and die for something have decided that they would rather fight and die for sectarian reasons or pure greed, oil revenues (sound familiar) and power rather than for democracy and safety for their families and fellow Iraqis.

The Iraqis who want those things to put it bluntly are not willing to fight for it. They are cowering in their homes or leaving Iraq to the militias, and Al Qaeda.

Go read it. Then ask the real question that the antiwar crowd dodges. What will happen? What are the alternatives? If the people who are calling for a precipitous withdrawal get their way, there will be blood on their hands. Not someone else's hands. Their hands.

UPDATE: Others: Wizbang, Sister Toldjah, Flopping Aces,

Tom Bevan notes that Harold Ford, Jr. appears to be on a roll. Not the good kind where everything is going your way. More like a car hurtling down a hill with the throttle stuck wide open and the brakes not working. In the rain.

Harold Ford, Jr. is on a bit of a streak at the moment, and it's not the favorable kind. His press-conference crashing stunt last week seems to have backfired. He's also now involved in a war of words with Steve Cohen, the Democrat running to replace him in TN-9, where Ford, Jr.'s brother lost out in the primary but is running as an Independent. And there's the new Mason-Dixon poll I mentioned earlier showing that Bob Corker has edged back into the lead. But there's more.

In the Tennessean today, questions about Ford's presence at a Playboy party at the 2005 Superbowl continue to linger, in part because the Ford campaign has done a truly miserable job of dealing with the issue.

There's still more, of course. For some reason Ford has suddenly started losing his grip on what had been up until now a pretty tightly run campaign.

Close on the heels of the op-ed today by Pete du Pont that appeared in the Opinion Journal, comes this item from the New York Sun: "Conyers Hones A Case Against President Bush". Reporter Eli Lake separates politicians words from their actions and comes to the conclusion that Representative Conyers will, for all practical purposes, be headed for impeachment hearings no matter what.

WASHINGTON — The Democratic leader of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is promising that her party has no plans to pursue impeachment of President Bush if it wins a majority in next month's elections. But she intends to allow the House Judiciary Committee to be headed by a lawmaker who has been preparing the grounds for impeachment for two years.

John Conyers, a Democrat of Michigan, is now in line to become the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which has the authority to begin hearings and an investigation into whether the planning and selling of the Iraq war was a constitutional crime. Last week, the Washington Post first reported that if Ms. Pelosi, a Democrat of California, becomes House majority leader, she will keep the seniority system intact for selecting committee chairmen in Congress. An aide to Ms. Pelosi confirmed the report yesterday.

Mr. Conyers's office has released two reports in the last year outlining Mr. Bush's various constitutional transgressions in the war on terror. The first report, released in 2005, focused mostly on his handling of pre-war Iraq intelligence. The second, released this year, was dedicated to the Bush administration's violations of the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act in authorizing the National Security Agency to listen in to some domestic phone calls without a court warrant.

Ten months ago, Mr. Conyers introduced legislation to form a "select committee to investigate the administration's intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment."

Members of Mr. Conyers's staff refused a request to answer questions on the record yesterday. A senior aide to Mr. Conyers was careful to say that his boss "has no plans to begin impeachment proceedings." But the aide added, "If evidence for impeachment is uncovered, it should be brought before the committee."

Note the sidestep there. Some very fancy footwork, but it is fairly obvious where they want to head. There is also the netroots agitation, of course. Lake points that out later in the article:

David Swanson, the Washington director of a political action committee that raises money for pro-impeachment candidates, ImpeachPAC, said he was disappointed in Ms. Pelosi.

"I think it is not the place of the broadcast media to demand that our elected officials take positions against protecting our Constitution," Mr. Swanson said. "It is not the place of Congresswoman Pelosi to claim to know where investigations might lead when overwhelming evidence of impeachable offenses is already public knowledge.

But I would encourage people around the country not to lose heart and to understand that a popular movement will be able to persuade chairman Conyers and members of the House Judiciary Committee to move forward, regardless of what Congresswoman Pelosi says on television."

142 years ago, Abraham Lincoln called his cabinet into session and asked them all to sign the back of a sealed envelope containing a document. They were not informed of the contents of the envelope. The memo that was inside read:

"This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probably that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President-elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards."

In this election the Democrats will have secured their majority in such a way that Conyers will inevitably tie the country in knots.

Note the sidestep there. Some very fancy footwork, but it is fairly obvious where they want to head. There is also the netroots agitation, of course. Lake points that out later in the article:

David Swanson, the Washington director of a political action committee that raises money for pro-impeachment candidates, ImpeachPAC, said he was disappointed in Ms. Pelosi.

"I think it is not the place of the broadcast media to demand that our elected officials take positions against protecting our Constitution," Mr. Swanson said. "It is not the place of Congresswoman Pelosi to claim to know where investigations might lead when overwhelming evidence of impeachable offenses is already public knowledge.

But I would encourage people around the country not to lose heart and to understand that a popular movement will be able to persuade chairman Conyers and members of the House Judiciary Committee to move forward, regardless of what Congresswoman Pelosi says on television."

142 years ago, Abraham Lincoln called his cabinet into session and asked them all to sign the back of a sealed envelope containing a document. They were not informed of the contents of the envelope. The memo that was inside read:

"This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probably that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President-elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards."

In this election the Democrats will have secured their majority in such a way that Conyers will inevitably tie the country in knots.

Are the cracks in the Cuban economic system finally becoming so evident that even the faithful realize it is only a matter of time until the system collapses? It certainly appears that is the case. Cuba's official unofficial pipeline to the inner workings of the party, the Juventud Rebelde newspaper, has begun talking about the problems in the economy.

In a scathing three-part series on graft in shops and bars entitled The Big Old Swindle, the Communist Youth newspaper Juventud Rebelde said on Sunday a team of university experts will investigate ways to improve services.

The articles uncovered bar employees stealing from the state by serving less beer than stipulated and taxis drivers overcharging passengers, but stopped short of recommending the privatization of such services.

"The current irregularities in the country's services, in the midst of the search for a better economic model, has meant Cuba still does not have a retail and services sector that satisfies people's expectations," the newspaper said.

The debate comes amid growing questions about the future of one of the world's last communist societies since its leader Fidel Castro underwent emergency surgery in late July and disappeared from public view.

"The important thing, to me, is that they are asking the questions. "Why doesn't it work?" a European diplomat posted to Havana said.

"My doubt is whether they are brave enough to start asking themselves questions without trying to confine the answers to Marxist philosophy," he said.

Cubans have long complained in private about poor state services, from deficient public transport to bare shop shelves. Many see privatization as the best way forward.

Since Raul Castro temporarily took over the government from his ailing brother on July 31, foreign and local experts have speculated that the younger Castro, aged 75, is more pragmatic and could move Cuba toward a more open Chinese economic model.

Cuban officials rule out following the example of China, which opened its economy to capitalist enterprise while retaining political power under the Communist Party.

It really is only a matter of time before the system fails outright. If Venezuela doesn't keep propping the economy up, the end may be hastened. And with oil prices plummeting, that may not be very far down the road.