Blue Crab Boulevard

Mayors resign. The mayor of Alice, Texas has resigned because of her dognapping of a neighbor's pet Shih Tzu.

The mayor of a small town in Texas has resigned after secretly keeping her neighbour's Shih Tzu while pretending it had died.
Neighbours had asked Alice Mayor Grace Saenz-Lopez to look after the dog, Puddles, during a holiday. She called them to say it was dead.

But the dog, which Ms Saenz-Lopez had renamed Panchito, was later seen at a dog groomer's and at her sister's home.

A custody hearing on Monday is expected to decide who keeps the pet.

Ms Saenz-Lopez had filed a police report to say that Puddles was missing.

While we here at Blue Crab Boulevard are not absolutely certain that a Shih Tzu is properly classified as a dog rather than as a rodent with aspirations (we're sure we will be hearing from outraged Shih Tzu owners over that), we cannot sanction the theft of other people's pets - whatever they are. We do, however, sometimes think of strangling the neighbor's rooster.

(H/T to NortonPete for sending in the link to this story.)

I'm guessing at this point that the author of this piece from the New Hampshire Union-Leader is an Obama partisan. It's possible he is just an anti-Clintonist, but he seems intent on slamming the Clintons - hard. (I've linked to another piece of his in the same paper. Based on those two points, I'm pretty sure he's partisan). Regardless, he rips into Bubba in this new piece with a vengeance.

Hillary has used Bill as an attack dog because she knows he's effective. And she knows their diehard supporters are forgetful. If it's true that the couple made a deal long ago that he would have his political career if she could then have hers, then it's playing out, regardless of how good or bad it will be for America. Ultimately, it's all about the Clintons.

When Barack Obama and John McCain talk about the importance of judgment, it stands in stark relief to the judgment Hillary has shown in unleashing her husband. Average voters and distinguished leaders can say that he's hurting her, but if you think she's going to rein him in, think again. She knows he gets the ladies squealing.

He defends his passionate remarks by saying how much he loves her. Well, he's made a career out of defending his passions. He does best in the defensive position and deliberately places himself there. I watched him do it in Peterborough during the primary, when he accused the press of a "broad agreement" to lay off Obama. He's a counterpuncher who likes to step backwards into the ropes, where we can feel sorry for him. Then he comes out swinging and we cheer. A professional victim.

Perhaps that's why women respond so well to Bill. He cocks his head, opens those puppy dog eyes and apologizes. Oh, come here honey-bubba, it's OK. But two women from opposite ends of the political spectrum, Maura Liasson from National Public Radio and Peggy Noonan, a former Reagan speechwriter, don't buy the act. Two weeks ago, they agreed that Hillary's dispatching of Bill drains all credibility out of her image as feminist — he's doing the dirty work, the heavy lifting, while she cultivates her compassion and likability.

Maybe she's punishing him, but she's punishing us, too. And we've endured enough punishment, thank you very much. When I step back and think about Hillary's candidacy, it takes some real chutzpah to ask Americans to trust her and her husband after what he's put us through. So much so that it can only be the consummation of a promise made long ago. Hillary did not forget. It's payback time — for Bill, not for us.

We must cast a cold eye on Hillary's ambitions, too, and what she's willing to do to achieve them. After all, they provide a hint of the Hillary we would see as President, her willingness to have others savage her opponents, to use lies and innuendo, to distort facts she knows to be true, and to send an infamous perjurer out to present her case.

Pretty strong stuff, red meat for folks who genuinely do not like the Clintons - either one - very much. I would not have put things in quite the same way, but he's hitting Bill Clinton hard here. Personally, no longterm reader here can doubt that I dislike the Clintons and their machinations rather deeply. That said, I still think Hillary the most beatable candidate the Dems could run - in part because of Bubba and his antics.

Thanks to commenter theo for pointing this one out to me.

Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni have married in a ceremony at the Elysee Palace in France.

PARIS (Reuters) - French President Nicolas Sarkozy married supermodel-turned-singer Carla Bruni at the Elysee Palace on Saturday, just three months after they started dating, French officials and family said.
 
The pair tied the knot at a low-key, civil ceremony conducted by the mayor of the Paris district that houses the president's grandiose official residence.

"I married two voters … who live at 55 Rue du Faubourg St Honore," Mayor Francois Lebel told Europe 1 radio, giving the official address of the Elysee.

"The bride was wearing white and was ravishing, as usual," he said, adding: "The bridegroom wasn't bad either."

Congratulations to the happy couple and best of luck.

You can't hide your lyin' eyes
And your smile is a thin disguise
I thought by now you'd realize
There ain't no way to hide your lyin eyes
(Don Henley/Glenn Frey, Lyin' Eyes)

It's all so familiar. A contrite look, a little bit of a lip quiver and then the big gun comes out - biting the lower lip and turning up the soulful, lying eyes to full wattage. Bill Clinton's going to lie to the people again tomorrow at a series of appearances at black churches across the Los Angeles area.

On Sunday the former president is scheduled to visit black churches in South Central Los Angeles, where he's expected to offer a mea culpa to those who "dearly loved him" when he was their president, Rep. Diane Watson (D-Calif.) says.

Watson, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus who has endorsed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), tells us she'll usher the former president to more than half a dozen churches in her district where she says he needs to "renew his relationship" with congregants who were turned off by his racially tinged comments in the days leading up to and following the South Carolina primary. (Such as when Clinton compared Sen. Barack Obama's landslide victory to Jesse Jackson's wins in 1984 and 1988.)

The four-term congresswoman said she asked Clinton to write a letter to each congregation they'll visit on Sunday "explaining his commitment to civil rights and equal rights." She says the letter "is in development" but that "he knows what needs to be in it: He needs to renew his relationship with the South Central community."

Watson is among the half of the divided black caucus supporting Hillary Clinton instead of Obama for president. She remains loyal to the Clintons, she says, despite her own uneasy feelings over Bill injecting race into the primary campaign.

She says she warned Sen. Clinton that the acrimony in South Carolina could have a backlash in California, one of 24 states voting on Super Tuesday. "I said, 'Hillary, you have enough you can be proud of. This is not the first time they have seen or heard of you. Your husband was in our community, they love you, we must recapture that passion. Do not get involved in the immature squabbles.'"

She says while Clinton will probably not be allowed to speak at the churches, he will at least be introduced and his presence made known by a publicly elected official from their own community "who they have known for decades."

Yes, yes. He did not have sex with (There's that familiarity again) He did not play that card, that race card. Only he did. If the people buy his empty apology this time, they are allowing themselves to be played like a cheap violin by a master of the cheap violin. Joe Gandelman has some thoughts about this blatant hypocrisy. He observes that Bubba has managed to steal the limelight away from his wife once again. The media will doubtless drench itself gushing over the Clintonian mea culpa and Hillary will be effectively drowned out in the ensuing tidal wave of stories about it.

"The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'"

I've written before about those words that Eddie Adams wrote in Time Magazine describing the photograph he took of General Nguyan Ngoc Loan summarily executing a captured Viet Cong. Eddie Adams, who died in 2004, regretted taking that picture and the damage he had done to a good man's reputation.

Daniel Finkelstein at The Times Online Comment Central writes today about a revisionist myth again propagated by British televison. 

Sadly Adams is dead, so the programme featured a different, but also distinguished, war photographer Philip Jones Griffiths. And Jones Griffiths described his feelings about the photo and his own decision to track down and photograph the executed man's widow.

Jones Griffiths had strong views on the photo and gave them to us.

He dismissed the idea that the executed man had been a killer saying both that the idea that the man had just killed others was "kind of propaganda" and that "he wouldn't have been much of a Vietcong soldier" if he hadn't tried to kill people. He clearly viewed the photo's power as being its revelation of the evil of the war and America's involvement.

These were interesting, legitimate, opinions. But it is a shame that it wasn't mentioned that they were not remotely the views held by Eddie Adams of his own photo.

No, what Adams thought is what I opened this post with.

Punxsutawney Phil has, er, spoken. Having seen his shadow, the rodent is confidently calling for another six weeks of winter.

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - America's most famous groundhog emerged from his burrow early on Saturday and declared that winter will last another six weeks.
 
Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow shortly before 12:30 p.m. British time to the cheers of more than 30,000 people from as far away as Alaska and Texas, one of the largest crowds in the 122-year history of the event in the central Pennsylvania town of Punxsutawney.

The rodent was taken out of a tree stump on a hill called Gobbler's Knob, and delivered his prognostication to William Cooper, President of Punxsutawney's Inner Circle, who organizers say is the only person in the world who can speak "groundhog-ese."

According to the tradition that may have links with the European festival of Candlemas, if the groundhog sees his shadow, it will mean six more weeks of winter. If not, there will be an early spring.

Actually, the weather prediction skills of any given burrowing rodent seems no better or worse than some human professionals. But we here at Blue Crab Boulevard maintain that if the groundhog sees his shadow, it will be six more weeks of winter. If he doesn't, it will be a month and a half.

On February 2, 1870, the Cardiff Giant was finally revealed as a fraud in court. In fact, both of the fakes were declared fake. The original one and the plaster copy that PT Barnum had been showing - while declaring the original fake to be fake. Confused yet?

The Giant was the creation of a New York tobacconist named George Hull. Hull, an atheist, decided to create the giant after an argument with a fundamentalist minister named Mr. Turk about a passage in Genesis that stated that there were giants who once lived on earth.

The idea of the petrified man did not originate with Hull, however. In 1858 the newspaper Alta California had published a bogus letter that claimed that a prospector had been petrified when he had drunk a liquid within a geode. Some other newspapers had also published stories of supposedly petrified people.

Hull hired men to carve out a 10-feet-long, 4.5 inches block of gypsum in Fort Dodge, Iowa, telling them it was intended for a monument of Abraham Lincoln in New York. He shipped the block to Chicago, where he hired a German stonecutter to carve it into the likeness of a man and swore him to secrecy. Various stains and acids were used to make the giant appear to be old and weather beaten, and the giant's surface was beaten with steel knitting needles embedded in a board to simulate pores. Then Hull transported the giant by rail to the farm of William Newell, his cousin, in November 1868. He had by then spent $2,600 on the hoax.

When the giant had been buried for a year, Newell hired two men, Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols, ostensibly to dig a well. When they found the Giant, one of them has been attributed to saying "I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!".

Between the time the Cardiff Giant was "discovered" and the revelation that it was a fake, many intelligent people fell for the hoax. A man who watched the odd hoax unfold before his eyes,  Andrew Dickson White, wrote:

The current of belief ran more and more strongly, and soon embraced a large number of really thoughtful people. A week or two after my first visit came a deputation of regents of the State University from Albany, including especially Dr. Woolworth, the secretary, a man of large educational experience, and no less a personage in the scientific world than Dr. James Hall, the State geologist, perhaps the most eminent American paleontologist of that period.

On their arrival at Syracuse in the evening, I met them at their hotel and discussed with them the subject which so interested us all, urging them especially to be cautious and stating that a mistake might prove very injurious to the reputation of the regents, and to the proper standing of scientific men and methods in the state, that if the matter should turn out to be a fraud, and such eminent authorities should be found to have committed themselves to it, there would be a guffaw from one end of the country to the other at the expense of the men intrusted by the State with its scientific and educational interests. To this the gentlemen assented, and next day they went to Cardiff. They came; they saw; and they narrowly escaped being conquered. Luckily they did not give their sanction to the idea that the statue was a petrifaction, but Professor Hall was induced to say: "To all appearance, the statue lay upon the gravel when the deposition of the fine silt or soil began, upon the surface of which the forests have grown for succeeding generations. Altogether it is the most remarkable object brought to light in this country, and, although not dating back to the stone age, is, nevertheless, deserving of the attention of archaeologists. [7]

At no period of my life have I ever been more discouraged as regards the possibility of making right reason prevail among men.

As a refrain to every argument there seemed to go jeering and sneering through my brain Schiller's famous line:

"Against stupidity the gods themselves fight in vain." [8]

There seemed no possibility even of suspending the judgment of the great majority who saw the statue. As a rule, they insisted on believing lt a "petrified giant," and those who did not dwelt on its perfections as an ancient statue. They saw in it a whole catalogue of fine qualities; and one writer went into such extreme ecstatics that he suddenly realized the fact, and ended by saying, "but this is rather too high-flown, so I had better conclude." As a matter of fact, the work was wretchedly defective in proportion and features; in every characteristic of sculpture it showed itself the work simply of an inferior stone-carver.

The Cardiff Giant has been called the greatest hoax in American history. Well, that's probably not true any longer if it ever was. There are lessons here for people who have declared that they "understand the science" of a number of subjects.

The "real" Cardiff giant is on display at the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, New York. I have seen it myself. (Photograph here.)

Dan Gerstein, who has been the target of the angry crowd over at the Daily Kos on a number of occasions, says that the angry left is beginning to collapse. He acknowledges the contributions of the kossacks, but says they have already peaked and are now in decline.

The Kossacks and their activist allies — who skew toward the Boomers — believe that Republicans are venal bordering on evil, and that the way Democrats will win elections and hold power is to one-up Karl Rove's divisive, bare-knuckled tactics. Their opponents within the party — who skew younger and freer of culture war wounds — believe that the way to win is offer voters a break from this poisonous tribal warfare and a compelling, inclusive vision for where we want to take the country.

The country got an initial taste of this tactical tussle in 2006 when the Lieberman-Lamont Senate campaign in Connecticut went national — and an initial test of the relative merits in the general-election portion of that race (in which I was Joe Lieberman's communications director).

With a discredited Republican candidate in the race, the choice came down to two Democrats who actually agreed on most issues outside of Iraq, but differed on the kind of change we need in Washington. Mr. Lieberman called for a new politics of unity and purpose; Mr. Lamont mostly called for Messrs. Bush's and Lieberman's heads.

The hope candidate soundly beat the Kos candidate — Kos actually taped a commercial for Lamont — by 10 points. More importantly, Mr. Lieberman won independents (the biggest voting bloc in the state) by 19 points, which is all the more remarkable because they opposed the war by a margin of 65%-29%.

This year's Democratic nominating battle is a far better barometer of the respective generational approaches within the party. That's because it is happening within the context of a true intra-party competition, there is no real disagreement on Iraq or any other core issue, and there is no incumbent. Not least of all, the two young attractive change candidates (Edwards and Obama) running against the establishment candidate (Hillary Clinton) have been offering opposite conceptions of change.

Gerstein acknowledges that some people are going to charge that he is indulging in a little grave-dancing, having been on the receiving end of the koz kidz venom. But he also points out that the results of the primaries show that people really are getting sick and tired of vicious partisanship. Read the whole thing. You may or may not agree with all of what Gerstein says he sees happening, but there is certainly a cautionary tale for those on the right who are heading into that angry territory that the left has lived in for so long. Gerstein points out that page views on the Kos site are down dramatically and that Kos himself has reluctantly endorsed Obama. And now the MoveOn folks - a group that originally formed to support Bill Clinton - has jumped over to Obama as well. Something to think about.

Only outlaws will have snow shovels. Two women in a grocery store parking lot foiled a double purse snatching by grabbing a snow shovel from the would-be robbers own truck and beating the heck out of the criminal masterminds.

MARYLAND HEIGHTS, Mo. - It looks like a couple of suburban St. Louis purse snatchers picked the wrong women to attack. The victims fought back — with a snow shovel.
 
Police in Maryland Heights released details of the Sunday incident outside a Schnucks grocery store. The women were unloading groceries when the thieves tried to steal two purses from their cart.

One of the women grabbed a shovel from the suspects' pickup and smacked one of the men upside the head. The other woman jumped into the cab and attacked the other suspect, then grabbed the keys so he couldn't drive away.

The AP report should be bronzed or something. I do not recall ever reading the words "upside the head" in a news report from them unless they were quoting someone. The thief required a number of staples in his wounded head to fix the damage the crime-fighting shovelist dealt him. One hopes the police department in Maryland Heights awards the women a golden shovel award for their crime-busting skills.

Conditions in China continue to deteriorate as the brutal winter weather continues. The storms are hitting at the worst possible time, when millions of people are trying to get home to celebrate the Lunar New Year, unfortunate timing that is exacerbating an already bad situation. And the winter weather is not going to get better.

GUANGZHOU, China (AFP) - China warned Saturday the worst was not over in its national weather crisis as desperate holiday travellers jammed transport hubs and others endured bitter winter storms without power or water.
 
Bracing for still more foul weather and an accelerating travel rush, China has doubled the number of troops and paramilitary forces aiding winter storm relief efforts to more than a million, state media reported.

The worst winter in decades has caused massive transport bottlenecks and power outages across wide areas in the lead-up to next week's Lunar New Year, China's biggest annual holiday.

The China Meteorological Administration said some of the worst-affected central, eastern and southern provinces faced several more days of snow and freezing rain from a cold front parked over the region since early January.

"The most difficult period is still not over yet. The situation remains grim," Premier Wen Jiabao said during a Cabinet meeting, the China Daily reported.

China has mobilized more than one million troops, forced coal miners into national service to keep coal flowing and are estimating total damages of more than $7.5 billion dollars so far. There is no end in sight at the moment, either. Rutgers Snow Lab shows that most of China is snow-covered at the moment.