Blue Crab Boulevard

Robert Novak is calling a third place finish for Hillary Clinton as highly probable. This may well explain the high rpm spin that Tom Vilsack is attempting to apply in advance of the caucuses (previous post).

1. The Democratic field looks to shake out this way:
   1st Place: Barack Obama
   2nd Place: John Edwards
   3rd Place: Hillary Clinton
   4th Place: Bill Richardson

My guess is that Hillary's internal polling is showing a real problem and they sent Vilsack out to provide as much spin as humanly possible with a face familiar to Iowans. I've speculated before that a third place finish might be a real problem for Clinton going into New Hampshire. Not much longer to wait now.

The Clinton campaign is generating spin at unprecedented levels today, with one of her surrogates saying she has accomplished everything and a third place finish is hokey-dokey. Yeah, sure.

As the presidential candidates engage in furious pre-caucus spin, one of Sen. Hillary Clinton's most prominent Iowa supporters said Wednesday that she's already accomplished what she needs to in Iowa and can declare success even if she finishes in third place.

Former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack told ABC News that Clinton has shown that she can appeal to a wide swath of Democrats, which is what she came to Iowa to do.

"She has done what she needed to do here," Vilsack said shortly before a Clinton campaign event in Indianola. "When she started the process she was way behind — it's now by all standards a competitive race."

Asked if the order of finish matters, Vilsack deflected the question.

"She absolutely had to be competitive, and she's accomplished that," he said. "Obviously, everybody's interested in winning, and I think we're going to do well. It's tight. There's no question about that."

Vilsack's comments stand in marked contrast to optimistic predictions he has made in the past, including last May, when he endorsed Clinton's candidacy.

Offhand, I'd say Vilsack is angling for the VP nod. Certainly a high-ranking cabinet post. But he's an Iowa pol - and he knows darn well he is spinning at extreme rpms. In fact, he puts these guys to shame.

All you duffers out there will have experienced the infamous lost ball. That happens when a golf ball simply vanishes after you hit it. Many of you have learned to curse your clubs, the course, your skills (or lack thereof) or even the gods of golf themselves. But we suspect there is another reason altogether: the snakes took the ball.

BRISBANE, Australia - A snake has been saved by surgery after mistaking four golf balls for a meal of chicken eggs, a veterinarian said Wednesday.

A couple had placed the balls in their chicken coop at Nobbys Creek in New South Wales state to encourage their hen to nest, Australian Associated Press reported.

They found the balls missing last month and a lumpy carpet python nearby.

They took the 32-inch non-venomous snake to the nearby Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary, where senior veterinarian Michael Pyne operated to remove the balls from the snake's intestine.

Carpet python, indeed. That was actually the common fairway python. We now know what is causing all the lost golf balls - it wasn't our fault at all! We humbly expect credit for the newest golf term: "python."

The brand new labor government in Australia has wasted no time in setting forth their authoritarian agenda. First up: internet censorship. Civil liberty groups in Oz are going bonkers over this one, the Rudd government, however, is pushing forward.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, a member of the Labor team which ousted conservative prime minister John Howard in a November election, wants filters in place to shield children from online porn and violence.

Under the plan, Internet service providers would provide feeds filtered free of pornography and other inappropriate material to houses and schools.

Conroy has rejected criticism that the move will debase the freedom of the world wide web and represents a step towards the kind of Internet censorship in place in China where sites are regularly blocked and cyberdissidents arrested.

"Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the Internet is like going down the Chinese road," he told national radio on Monday.

"If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor government is going to disagree."

But chair of the Australian Privacy Foundation Roger Clarke said the plan would not only be ineffective but could have substantial side-effects.

"Many pages will end up getting blocked that shouldn't be blocked," he told AFP. "We don't need that, we need an open Internet."

Clarke said it was the role of parents and guardians, not the government, to protect children from inappropriate material.

"It's not the government's business to control information flows," he said.

"That's the kind of thing that goes on in oppressive countries, in authoritarian countries.

"That's not what the government is there to do."

I'm against these types of government interventions anywhere, including here in the US. Clarke is exactly right: it is not the government's job to control information, no matter what the goal is. Because this is a slippery slope - at some point, the government will decide what else you can and cannot see.

It is ironic that the left, that screams incessantly about perceived authoritarianism, is actually the first to plant a jackboot on the necks of citizens. It's always for the best of reasons, they say. For the children or some such. But the boot comes down.

The Wall Street Journal recounts the story of Dennis Kucinich and his close encounter with a UFO. Kucinich himself absolutely refused to have anything to do with the story, but two people who say they were with him at the time of the incident have come forward to tell their story.

Here's what happened, according to separate interviews with Mr. Costanzo and his former girlfriend:

The day was strange from the start. For hours, Mr. Kucinich, Mr. Costanzo and his companion noticed a high-pitched sound. "There was a sense that something extraordinary was happening all day," says the girlfriend. She and Mr. Costanzo say that none of the three consumed alcohol or took drugs.

As they sat down to a dinner, Mr. Kucinich spotted a light in the distance, to the left of Mount Rainier. Mr. Costanzo thought it was a helicopter.

But Mr. Kucinich walked outside to the deck to look through the telescope that he had bought Ms. MacLaine as a house gift. After a few minutes, Mr. Kucinich summoned the other two: "Guys, come on out here and look at this."

Mr. Costanzo and his girlfriend joined Mr. Kucinich, where they took turns peering through the telescope. What they saw in the far distance, according to both witnesses, was a hovering light, which soon divided into two, and then three.

After a few minutes, the lights moved closer and it became apparent that they were actually three charcoal-gray, triangular craft, flying in a tight wedge. The girlfriend remembers each triangle having red and green lights running down the edges, with a laser-like red light at the tail. Mr. Costanzo recalls white lights, but no tail.

Mr. Costanzo says each triangle was roughly the size of a large van, while his former girlfriend compares it to a "larger Cessna, smaller than a jet certainly." Neither recalls seeing any markings, landing gear, engines, windows or cockpits.

The craft approached to within 200 yards, suspended over the field just beyond the swimming pool. Both witnesses say it emitted a quiet, throbbing sound — nothing like an airplane engine.

"There was a feeling of wanting to communicate something, but I didn't know what," says Mr. Costanzo.

The craft held steady in midair, for perhaps a minute, then sped away, Mr. Costanzo says. "Nothing had landed," he says. "No strange beings had disembarked. No obvious messages were beamed down. When they were completely out of sight, we all looked at each other disbelieving what we had seen."

Mr. Costanzo is afraid that people are ridiculed if they come forward with stories of this type. We here at Blue Crab Boulevard are quite happy to make his fears come true. When we originally heard about the incident we suspected that it might be Uncle Guido testing his new hovercraft. The description seems about right, after all. If it wasn't Guido, it may have been someone else sending directions to Denny, of course.

Meanwhile, Kucinich has asked all of his supporters in Iowa to vote for Barack Obama on the second ballot.

SIOUX CITY, Iowa – Representative Dennis Kucinich urged his Iowa followers today to select Senator Barack Obama as their second choice at the caucuses on Thursday if his support is not strong enough to be viable in the 1,781 precincts across the state.

“Senator Obama and I have one thing in common: Change,” Mr. Kucinich said in a statement today.

The two spoke briefly by telephone before Mr. Obama flew here for an afternoon rally. In a statement, Mr. Obama took advantage of the opportunity to point out that he, along with Mr. Kucinich, opposed the war in Iraq. “He and I have been fighting for a number of the same priorities,” Mr. Obama said.

Gee, it makes you wonder why the UFO story was published just at this particular time, doesn't it?

NortonPete sent me a link about this from the San Francisco Chronicle and today it showed up in the New York Times as well. It seems the FBI has reopened the investigation into the 1971 hijacking by someone calling himself DB Cooper, or sometimes Dan Cooper. The only unsolved aircraft hijacking in American history is getting a fresh look by an agent who was all of four years old when it happened.

CHICAGO — It is considered one of the great unsolved mysteries of American crime: how a seemingly quiet man in his mid-40s hijacked an airliner somewhere between Seattle and Reno in November 1971, then parachuted in his loafers and trench coat, making off with $200,000 in cash.

Who was he? Did he survive? After all these years, federal authorities say they still do not know, and the case lingers and vexes and fascinates as the only unsolved airplane hijacking in United States history. “It’s a mystery, frankly,” agency officials said in a December news release issued periodically to update old cases.

But now, with the advantage of technologies that were not available decades ago and with newfound attention from an agent on the West Coast, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has announced that the cold case is officially hot again — and the search is on for the parachuter who called himself Dan, and sometimes, D. B. Cooper.

And, for the first time, the F.B.I. is providing pictures and information on the Cooper case to the public on its Web site, fbi.gov. The agency hopes that pictures like the one of Mr. Cooper’s black tie, which he removed before jumping, will prompt a memory, or that someone will offer fresh insight into what happened to all that cash, some of which was scattered in the wilderness and found by a young boy in 1980. (Already, a DNA sample taken from the tie has ruled out several men who claimed to be the parachuting hijacker.)

Here is the FBI news release on the reopened case. Basically, Agent Larry Carr is treating the case exactly the same way the FBI treats bank robberies. They release everything they have to the public and wait for someone to step forward with the information needed to break the case. If DB Cooper were still alive today he would be 85 years old. The crime can't be prosecuted now, too many years have passed. For the FBI and Agent Carr, it is more about just being able to finally close the books on one of the most enduring crime mysteries in American history.

Although there will be a warming trend starting in a few days, before the US gets to that it has to get past the arctic chill that is gripping the Eastern half of the nation. Freezing weather is predicted all the way down to South Florida.

The Eastern Seaboard has joined the rest of the eastern half of the nation under a frigid dome of arctic air.  Biting winds will result in even colder RealFeel® temperatures, which has prompted the issuance of Wind Chill Advisories.

The East Regional News story reports highs today across the Northeast will be at least 10 degrees colder than Tuesday's highs. The blustery winds today will produce heavy lake-effect snow in the snow belt areas to the lee of the Great Lakes.

The Winter Weather Center reports the heaviest snow will fall to the lee of Lake Michigan, with over 6 inches forecast today. Other snow belt areas could receive 3 to 6 inches, while lesser amounts will fall along the spine of the Appalachians as far south as the northern mountains.

The Severe Weather Center lists the numerous snow-related warnings and advisories. Motorists should be alert for snow covered roads and snow squalls that could rapidly reduce visibility.

The lake-effect snow will pile on top of snow that has fallen since New Year's Eve. The combination of the storm system currently impacting Atlantic Canada and lake-effect snow dumped nearly 20 inches of snow in Elkhart, Ind.  South Bend, Ind., has already received 12.5 inches, with an additional 3 to 6 inches forecast to fall today.

Heavy snow on Tuesday spread across New England and New York for the second straight day.

The jet stream is swooping all the way down to Florida right now, and the bitter cold is following right along with it. (The graphic they have shows just how big a loop is hanging across the country right now.) I'm glad I don't live in the lake-effect snowbelts this year. It is shaping up to be a really bad year for that phenomenon.

Accuweather says that Washington, DC weather is currently pretty cold, but will be warming up a bit later in the week. Which is a good thing, since Washington area school heating systems are breaking down left and right. Despite millions of dollars invested during the 1990s in new heating systems, the school district's abject failure to do routine maintenance has caused the expensive systems to fail in many schools. The damage is so bad that many of the systems are a complete loss. Water treatment for all of the district's boilers would have cost around $100,000 per year. Instead they have spent more than $100 million in emergency repairs.

The Army Corps of Engineers came to the District in the late 1990s on an expensive mission: launch a massive overhaul of decrepit school buildings, which eventually included spending $80 million to replace ancient heating systems with brand-new boilers to last 25 years or more.

Since then, 40 of the 55 renovated heating systems have broken down or needed major repair. Public schools officials failed to maintain the new equipment, leading to problems such as damage from mineral deposits that built up because the water was not properly treated, repair records and interviews show.

It would have cost just $100,000 a year to remove harmful minerals from the water flowing into all of the more than 400 boilers in the public schools. But maintenance officials say there was never enough money for it in their budget.

As a result, heating systems old and new have been breaking down all over the school district. Administrators had to sink more than $10 million into emergency repairs this year alone, prompted by cold classrooms at 71 schools in February that displaced hundreds of children.

The failing boilers are a testament to the school system's longstanding inability to keep its buildings in shape or make the best of huge infusions of money. This decade, records show, the schools have spent more than $116 million to replace or overhaul heating and air-conditioning units, including the Army Corps projects. This winter, officials trucked in temporary boilers for seven schools where the systems have failed.

Read it all. It is a testament to the absolute inability of the local government in Washington to exercise any kind of intelligent management to the upkeep of the infrastructure. But then, the tax office in Washington, DC could not keep an eye on something like $30 million that was embezzled by employees recently, either. Chief Financial Officer, Natwar M. Gandhi, called those thefts "immaterial" when they were discovered. Just $100,000 of that stolen money could have averted $116 million in additional waste. Read the whole thing - it will enrage you when you read how badly maintained the Washington schools are. Despite huge influxes of tax money, they can't keep the buildings in reasonable working order.