A Story

I once worked with a guy who I thought was a straight shooter. He and I were on night shift together for quite a long time. I never once had an occasion to think anything he ever told me wasn't factual. One night, he told me about a previous job he had held. He had been a security guard at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York. Here's the story he told me.

One night, he had been called to the "R" wing of the hospital to deal with an escape. The R wing - I suppose they still call it that - was the psychiatric ward. A patient had gotten out of the secure wing but was still in the hospital. He had, in fact, been cornered in a room by staff members who had called security for assistance. My friend responded.

When he got to the location, he found that the escapee was inside a lab area with only one entrance. The staff were making sure he could not get out, but they needed a bit of help securing the man. My friend stepped into the room to see a man wearing just a robe. When my friend approached the man in the bathrobe, the man began to talk. As my friend told it, the man appeared to be completely lucid, not at all agitated and just asked to talk for a moment. The man told him that he had been a researcher at the cancer clinic at the hospital.

The man told my friend that he had discovered a cancer treatment that cost almost nothing and that was amazingly effective. When he tried to get the lab's supervisors interested, he had, instead of being proclaimed a hero, been bundled off to the R wing. He pleaded with my friend to help him. When the request was refused, the man became highly agitated. My friend had to subdue him by force. The staff came in an sedated him, then took the man back to the R wing.

My friend looked at me after telling me all this and said, "I don't know if he was telling the truth. But what is he was?"

So, here's a news item.

Edmonton, AB (AHN) - It is expected there would be no problems securing funding to explore a drug that could shrink cancerous tumors and has no side-effects in humans, but University of Alberta researcher Evangelos Michelakis has hit a stalemate with the private sector who would normally fund such a venture.

Michelakis' drug is none other than dichloroacetate (DCA), a drug which cannot be patented and costs pennies to make.

It's no wonder he can't secure the $400-600 million needed to conduct human trials with the medicine - the drug doesn't have the potential to make enough money.

Michelakis told reporters they will be applying to public agencies for funding, as pharmaceuticals are reluctant to pick up the drug.

At roughly $2 a dose, there isn't much chance to make a billion on the cancer treatment over the long term.

I suppose we ought to see if Michelakis ends up in a ward somewhere.

Canadian Cruelty Update

We brought you the story of the cruel treatment of illegal immigrants by Canadian authorities earlier. They captured the offender and subjected him to inhuman conditions of confinement while searching for volunteers to transport the felon back to California. Well, it appears that two good Samaritans have stepped in to rescue the poor prisoner from Canadian purgatory.

MONTREAL (AFP) - A California skunk that hitched a ride aboard a commercial truck to Canada this month has found safe passage back home after causing a stink here.

"We do have a confirmed ride to California for the little skunk," said Nathalie Karvonen of the Toronto Wildlife Center, which cared for the animal during its Canadian stay.

The four-pound (1.8-kilogram) female had traveled nearly 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) in five days without food or water in a sealed container, arriving in Canada slightly dehydrated but otherwise unharmed……

….A California radio host, Tracy Nealy, and her producer Ryan Miller finally heeded a plea for help, agreeing to come get the skunk and drive it back home, Karvonen said.

They are expected to pick up the black and white skunk at the Canada-US border near Buffalo or Detroit in about 10 days, she said.

Their return route is being plotted and other arrangements are being made to feed and care for the critter along the way.

A charming rescue, right? Except for one small problem. A very cursory search of Google for "Tracy Nealy" does not turn up a radio show host. It turns up nothing at all. But thanks to an alert and completely unreliable informant we have obtained an interesting fragment of a newspaper clipping. Now we in no way imply that the people in the two stories are in any way related, but we find the whole thing disturbing…….

The Byrd-Reid Full Spin Ahead Earmark Protection Racket

I mentioned earlier the disgraceful Washington Post spin-o-rama article that tried to blame the failure of a cloture vote on the Senate ethics bill on Republicans. Jonathan Weisman tried his level best to spin the entire thing based on the Gregg amendment that would have allowed certain pork barrel earmarks to be stripped out of an unrelated bill by the President. The earmarks would then be sent back to Congress for a straight up or down, on the record vote. Robert "Show Me The Porky" Byrd and and Harry "We Need Real Reform Only if it Includes Earmarks" Reid are trying mightily to kill that amendment. Then trying with the WaPo's assistance, to paint it as Republican obstruction of ethics reform. Weisman called the amendment "an unrelated measure."

Funny thing. Robert Reich strongly - in fact, vehemently - disagrees that earmark reform is unrelated to ethics reform.

Democrats are eager to show they're serious about reforming the way Congress does business. So they're pushing a new ethics and lobbying bill that will ban gifts, meals, and free trips from lobbyists and their clients, and require that the legislative sponsors of all earmarks for pet projects be identified in the legislation.

But calling these reforms is like saying you've cleaned the house when all you've done is taken out the garbage.

The real scandal in Washington is the everyday bribery that remains legal. I'm talking about campaign contributions given for legislative favors — a particular provision in this or that bill, an amendment here, an earmarked appropriation there. Lobbyists orchestrate this contemptible process. And members of Congress keep it going because the money buys television time for their re-election campaigns, and television advertising keeps them in power.

The system is out of control. It cost the average candidate three times more to run for Congress in 2006 than it did in 1990, adjusting for inflation. Members now devote most of their time to fund raising instead of representing their constituents.

The solution: ban the damn earmarks. Outright. The Gregg amendment is at least a step in that direction and would make porkers like Robert Byrd have to stand up and vote on the record rather than slipping it in behind the voter's backs. Everyone should be able to get behind this. This is not partisan. Kill the pork. Now.

Is The Surge Already Working?

The Associated Press of all outlets, is reporting that the "Mahdi Army" of thug Muqtada al Sadr is increasingly off balance and appears to be reeling under pinpoint attacks that is capturing its highest commanders. The Maliki government appears to have withdrawn all protection from the murderous gang and they may be in trouble.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Mahdi Army fighters said Thursday they were under siege in their Sadr City stronghold as U.S. and Iraqi troops killed or seized key commanders in pinpoint nighttime raids. Two commanders of the Shiite militia said Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has stopped protecting the group under pressure from Washington and threats from Sunni Muslim Arab governments.

The two commanders' account of a growing siege mentality inside the organization could represent a tactical and propaganda feint, but there was mounting evidence the militia was increasingly off balance and had ordered its gunmen to melt back into the population. To avoid capture, commanders report no longer using cell phones and fighters are removing their black uniforms and hiding their weapons during the day.

During much of his nearly eight months in office, al-Maliki has blocked or ordered an end to many U.S.-led operations against the Mahdi Army, which is run by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the prime minister's key political backer.

As recently as Oct. 31, al-Maliki, trying to capitalize on American voter discontent with the war and White House reluctance to open a public fight with the Iraqi leader just before the election, won U.S. agreement to lift military blockades on Sadr City and another Shiite enclave where an American soldier was abducted.

But al-Maliki reportedly had a change of heart in late November while going into a meeting in Jordan with President Bush. It has since been disclosed that the Iraqi leader's vision for a new security plan for Baghdad, to which Bush has committed 17,500 additional U.S. troops, was outlined in that meeting.

Al-Maliki is said by aides to have told Bush that he wanted the Iraqi army and police to be in the lead, but he would no longer interfere to prevent U.S. attempts to roll up the Mahdi Army.

This is very big news. Assuming this continues, the Mahdi Army could collapse under the pressure or at least cease being anything like effective. There appears to be much more happening here than just a surge in US troops, which really hasn't begun yet. The change in tactics and the change in policy of the Maliki government could well turn things around.

Pentagon Withdraws Report

In a bizarre turn of events, the Pentagon report that warned that coins containing tracking devices had been slipped to defense contractors in Canada has been withdrawn. The Defense Security Service had insisted that the report was true only last week.

The Defense Security Service said it never could substantiate its own published claims about the mysterious coins. It has begun an internal review to determine how the false information was included in a 29-page report about espionage concerns.

The service had contended since late June that such coins were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

"The allegations, however, were found later to be unsubstantiated following an investigation into the matter," the agency said in a statement published on its Web site last week.

Intelligence and technology experts were flabbergasted over the initial report, which suggested such transmitters could be used to surreptitiously track the movements of people carrying the coins.

Experts said such tiny transmitters almost certainly would have limited range to communicate with sensors no more than a few feet away, such as ones hidden inside a doorway. The metal coins also would interfere with any signals emitted, they said.

We'd just like to point out that Canadian dollar coin is affectionately known as the "Loony". Just saying.

Roof Rats Over Phoenix

The Animal Uprising™ is busy ramping up for its themed celebration next year of the Year of the Rat. Word has come from Phoenix, Arizona that a plague of roof rats (rattus rattus) has descended on the area.

An infamous creature has made its return to Valley homes, shacking up to get away from the cold weather.

Roof rats are back, hitting homes in parts of east Phoenix and south Scottsdale.

The little rodents love to chew, meaning their sharp teeth could munch through electrical wiring, possibly sparking a fire.

Now there is a handy guide to identifying rats available online to inform you how to tell a roof rat from a norway rat. We quote:

When distinguishing the Norway rat from the Roof rat, pull the tail back over the body. The tail of the Roof rat will reach the nose. The tail of the Norway rat will not reach beyond the ears.

We don't know about our readers, but we here at Blue Crab Boulevard have no intention of ever pulling a rat's tail up over it's head to see what species it is. For any reason. And you can't make us, either. We don't care if it is a roof rat, a norway rat or the giant rat of Sumatra. It's a freaking rat. We have some handy instructions for the person who wrote that handy guide…….

Sorry, just an attack. At any rate, rattus rattus is the rattus that is credited with the spread of the Black Plague that wiped out a good deal of Europe's population a while back. And rats do cause fires, as California found out recently. So Phoenix, you better get on the stick and repel the invasion of pestilential pyromaniacs! 

Deer Overrunning Iowa

The Animal Uprising™ is well on the way toward its goal of overrunning the state of Iowa. The animals are intentionally targeting the traditional home of the first stage in the presidential nomination process in an attempt to subvert the American electoral process.

CENTERVILLE, Iowa — It’s difficult to imagine an Iowa landscape without whitetailed deer.

In 2004, the Iowa Department of Transportation said 8,000 drivers reported collisions with deer, causing an estimated 600 injuries to motorists.

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources estimates that at least 12,000 deer are killed on Iowa roads each year, resulting in $13 million in vehicle damage. In 2003, 10 motorists were killed in Iowa as the result of vehicle/deer collisions.

But at one time deer were virtually extinct in the state. In 1898, the Iowa Legislature closed the state’s deer season year around to protect the few remaining deer left from years of almost unrestricted hunting.

Today’s state deer population came from the escape of animals from captive herds, deer migrating in from surrounding states and transplanting programs of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources .

In western Iowa, most of the deer population can be traced back to 1894 when 35 whitetails escaped from the captive herd of William Cuppy of Avoca.

…….

From 1993 to 2004, the deer population continues to grow. For 1993, the post-hunt deer population was estimated at 198,600. By 2004, that number had climbed to 360,000.

The growth rate is exponential. By 2008, the deer will handily outnumber actual humans in the state. The 2005 population of Iowa is listed as 2,966,334. The sad thing about it is that Iowa almost had them in 1898! It's all that Cuppy guy's fault! Just wait until all those politicians go to give a speech and all they see is whitetail deer as far as the eye can see. Oh hell. Now they'll be going for the Bambi vote….

Carter Speech Will Have Rebuttal

Jimmy Carter's speech at Brandeis University will not be allowed to pass unchallenged after all. Despite Carter's refusal to debate Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law School professor will be giving a rebuttal following Carter's appearance.

Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz will step on stage afterward to rebut the former president's remarks despite having been booted from an earlier booking to debate Carter on his assertions.

“I think the inaccuracies of Carter’s points have to be pointed out. Carter said he wrote the book in order to stimulate a debate, but he won’t debate. I’m debating him whether he’s there or not,” Dershowitz told FOXNews.com.

“If his chair is empty, then that’s his decision,” he said.

Dershowitz joins a growing pool of critics, including a longtime Carter aide, Jewish groups and academics who allege inaccuracies and distorted history in Carter's best-selling book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” The book has sold about 70,000 copies.

Carter recently accepted an invitation to speak on Tuesday at the nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored college near Boston after having cancelled an earlier invitation. He will talk for about 15 minutes and then take questions from the audience for 45 minutes.

Opposition to Carter's distortions is growing. The more Carter tries to divert attention, the worse it is getting for him. Which is only fitting given the reprehensible nature of Carter's distortions of fact in this latest screed. So keep squirming, Jimmy, it's a bit like quicksand. The more you thrash, the faster you sink.

Gates: Iran Overplayed Hand

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is being quoted as telling the Saudi and Gulf state rulers that Iran has overplayed its hand and is becoming a serious regional concern. Well, yeah, but its nice to see that acknowledged by the administration finally.

Gates met with Saudi King Abdullah Wednesday night and with the emir of Qatar on Thursday during a swing through the Gulf aimed in part at rallying Arab allies against Iran.

Gates, describing his message in those meetings, said the Iranians were being "very aggressive" and "believe they have the United States at some disadvantage because of the situation in Iraq."

"In fact, to be precise, I told them both the Iranians were overplaying their hand, and one of the consequences of that was that they raise real concern in the region and beyond about their intentions," Gates said.

He said the Iranians had grown bolder since 2004 "when I think they were very concerned about having us on both their eastern and western borders and weren't sure what might come next."

Gates acknowledged that US difficulties in Iraq since then have given the Iranians "a tactical opportunity. But the United States is a very powerful country," he added.

Asked whether Washington should try to engage Iran diplomatically, Gates said the United States should not open a dialogue with Tehran without first strengthening its position.

"And, frankly, right now there is nothing the Iranians need from us," he said. "So in any negotiation right now, we would be the supplicant: 'We want you to stop doing x, y and z.'"

If Gates can get the other regional governments to assist, a real crisis can be averted. If the United States is forced by internal politics to retreat from Iraq, the entire Gulf region will be in serous danger from an unrestrained Iran. It is in the regional goverments best interests to start behaving as if they understood the implications of the situation to their own countries. There are increasing signs that Ahmadinejad has overplayed his hand internally as well. Increased pressure right now could cause his government to fall. There is at least a chance the replacement government would be less interested in causing a confrontation with the US and Iran's neighbors.

UPDATE: Others: Gateway Pundit, Jules Crittenden,

Blind Drive

In Spain they do at any rate. At a very high rate of speed, too. A Spanish court has ruled that a man caught driving 154 km per hour (96 miles per hour) in a BMW was actually blinded in an automobile accident in 1998.

MADRID (Reuters) - A blind man caught speeding on a Spanish motorway has been cleared of fraud after a judge rejected an insurance company's allegation that he could really see, court officials said on Thursday.

Domingo Merino was charged with fraud after insurers Mapfre said he had not been blinded in a traffic accident for which they were ordered to pay him 550,000 euros (361,268 pounds) in compensation in a 1998 case.

Merino told the judge his wife let him take the wheel on a straight stretch of road. The phenomenon of the blind driving is no surprise to anyone who has driven in Boston, of course.

Time And Space

A Danish scientist, one who actually appears not to be a raving lunatic, by the way, has actually done a study on why aliens haven't found the Earth yet. His conclusion? There simply hasn't been enough time.

Using a computer simulation of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, Rasmus Bjork, a physicist at the Niels Bohr institute in Copenhagen, proposed that a single civilisation might build eight intergalactic probes and launch them on missions to search for life. Once on their way each probe would send out eight more mini-probes, which would head for the nearest stars and look for habitable planets.

Mr Bjork confined the probes to search only solar systems in what is called the "galactic habitable zone" of the Milky Way, where solar systems are close enough to the centre to have the right elements necessary to form rocky, life-sustaining planets, but are far enough out to avoid being struck by asteroids, seared by stars or frazzled by bursts of radiation.

He found that even if the alien ships could hurtle through space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, - Nasa's current Cassini mission to Saturn is plodding along at 32km a second - it would take 10bn years, roughly half the age of the universe, to explore just 4% of the galaxy. His study is reported in New Scientist today.

Bjork says that a discovery of the Earth by aliens will not occur in our lifetimes. Which is, of course, patently absurd. Aliens are already here bombarding New Jersey, even though it is hard to tell. But Bjork is Danish and may not have heard of that event. But there is another example closer to his home. If aliens have not visited Earth, how do you explain George Galloway?

The Very Definition Of Spin

Today's Washington Post coverage of the ruckus in the Senate over the Gregg amendment is practically the dictionary definition of spin.

Senate Republicans scuttled broad legislation last night to curtail lobbyists' influence and tighten congressional ethics rules, refusing to let the bill pass without a vote on an unrelated measure that would give President Bush virtual line-item-veto power.

The bill could be brought back up later this year. Indeed, Democrats will try one last time today to break the impasse. But its unexpected collapse last night infuriated Democrats and the government watchdog groups that had been pushing it since the lobbying scandals that rocked the last Congress. Proponents charged that Republicans had used the spending-control measure as a ruse to thwart ethics rules they dared not defeat in a straight vote.

"It's as obvious as the sun coming up somewhere in this world that they tried to kill this bill," a furious Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said last night in an interview. "And all 21 Republican senators up for reelection are going to have to explain how they brought down the most significant reform ever to come before this Congress. They brought this baby down."

But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said insistence on a line-item-veto vote was proof that the GOP is serious about passing the toughest possible overhaul of the way Congress conducts its business. Efforts to give Bush power to strike individual items from spending bills have been struck down by the Supreme Court, but Senate Republicans insist that the latest version will pass constitutional muster.

It is not a "line item veto" nor is it an "unrelated measure." Jonathan Weisman presumably has been reporting politics long enough to know that. The amendment would allow pork barrel items to be stripped out of unrelated legislation and sent back to Congress for an up or down, on the record vote. It is very much tied to ethics reform. The vote that failed last night was a vote on cloture. Harry Reid tried to cut off debate and eliminate an on the record vote for the amendment.

This is blatant political spin and is really beneath the Washington Post. Harry Reid needs to allow a simple up or down vote on the amendment. Everyone should be able to get behind a measure that would cut the pork barrel spending that is so often a political payback to lobbyists. This should not be a partisan issue. It is instructive to look at who actually derailed the bill:

Reid and McConnell worked to reach a compromise that would have brought the Gregg bill to a vote in the coming weeks, but that pact could not overcome the objections of Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), an opponent of the line-item veto.

Government Bytes also has coverage.

More About The Suppression Of Speech

Apropos the articles I linked yesterday:

The Weather Channel’s (TWC) Heidi Cullen, who hosts the weekly global warming program "The Climate Code," is advocating that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) revoke their "Seal of Approval" for any television weatherman who expresses skepticism that human activity is creating a climate catastrophe.
 
"If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval. Clearly, the AMS doesn't agree that global warming can be blamed on cyclical weather patterns," Cullen wrote in her December 21 weblog on the Weather Channel Website. [Note: It is also worth taking a look at the comments section at the bottom of Cullen’s blog, very entertaining.] See: http://climate.weather.com/blog/9_11396.html This latest call to silence skeptics of manmade global warming has been the subject of discussion at the annual American Meteorological Society’s Annual conference in San Antonio Texas this week. See: http://www.ametsoc.org/meet/annual
"It's like allowing a meteorologist to go on-air and say that hurricanes rotate clockwise and tsunamis are caused by the weather. It's not a political statement…it's just an incorrect statement," Cullen added. [Note: Hurricanes (Cyclones) in the Southern Hemisphere do rotate clockwise. Also, Cullen and the media have ignored the growing climate skepticism by prominent scientists see: (Link removed)

Cullen’s call for decertification of TV weatherman who do not agree with her global warming assessment follows a year (2006) in which the media, Hollywood and environmentalists tried their hardest to demonize scientific skeptics of manmade global warming. Scott Pelley, CBS News 60 Minutes correspondent, compared skeptics of global warming to "Holocaust deniers" and former Vice President turned foreign lobbyist Al Gore has repeatedly referred to skeptics as "global warming deniers."

The suppression of points of view that differ is chilling for a democracy. If the skeptics are wrong, they can be proven so by reasoned debate. If you cut off that debate by essentially criminalizing opinions that you disagree with you look more and more like people like (T)Hugo Chavez. Tyranny comes in many guises. This is one of them.

Defending The Indefensible

Will Hutton, writing in the Guardian, has an astonishing piece of moral relativism that is difficult to comprehend. While insisting that he is not apologizing for Mao's depredations in China, he proceeds to apologize for them anyway. He informs readers that Mao's cruelty laid the groundwork for modern China.

Nobody wants to be an apologist for Mao. Even the Communist party, five years after his death, delivered the verdict that his crimes during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution meant that he had been 30% wrong. Mao was undoubtedly responsible for monstrous crimes, but if today's China ever completes the transition to a more plural economy and society it will be more obvious than ever that he was the man who partially laid the platform for today's China. And from this may one day emerge a country with the liberties of the rest of Asia and the west.

In the first place, there is context. Life in the China of the first half of the 20th century was cheap, as writer Lu Xun wrote after witnessing the nationalists clinically murder students in Shanghai in 1926. After the imperial throne fell on New Year's Day 1912, China imploded into territories dominated by warlords over whom the nationalist government never established proper dominion.

Let's just mention that Hutton is extremely selective in his recounting of history. He completely neglects the fact that the situation in China after the fall of the last emperor was a bit more complicated than he paints it. There were other players and an internal civil war going on between the Kuomintang and Mao's communists. The nationalists were actually making progress against the warlords until Japan invaded.

No, let's go on to the one true test of this kind of relativism. Substitute Hitler for Mao. Or Stalin for Mao. Or Fidel Castro for Mao. Substitute any dictator; substitute any country. Hitler paved the way for modern Germany, right? Does that excuse the other things he did? This kind of reasoning is disingenuous and serves only to whitewash the murderous legacy of the cruelty of dictators like Mao. Sure, there are always a few good things if you look hard enough or twist things around. But the devil's ledgers cannot be balanced with this kind of bookkeeping.

Another Opinion

Despite the Washington Post's reporting on the latest manufactured outrage in the "Arab street", Richard Brookhiser, writing in the New York Observer points out one indisputable fact about Saddam Hussein's hanging: He will not be coming back. And Brookhiser says that not to be snarky or cruel, but to point out a fact about dictators and their regimes.

Whatever happens in the wake of President Bush’s new Iraq strategy, one thing won’t: Saddam will not come back. This is not a statement of the obvious, or a lame joke. The power that dictators and their supporters acquire by actual acts of violence is augmented by fear—fear of their omniscience, their omnipresence, their indestructibility. In the worst cases, fear is transmuted into a servile love: If only Stalin knew, thought many prisoners of the gulag, I would be saved. The aura of fear is born as dictators rise to power, and lingers after they are deposed, so long as the dictator does. Saddam’s followers, and even the man himself, no doubt believed that he might come back, even from prison. And who could say they were wrong? If the final Götterdämmerung came to Iraq, who might make what deals with whom to save his own skin? Saddam’s skin is now past saving; his sons’ skins shriveled a while ago.