Blue Crab Boulevard

I got a girl, her name is Peg
She looks kind of pretty but she's got a wooden leg
She's got a leg shaped like the leg of a chair
But when it comes to dancing, no one can compare

Peg Leg Peggy she really knows how to hop
She really knows how to hop
She really knows how to hop
When it comes to dancing she's the queen
She sounds just like a sewing machine
Peg Leg Peggy she really knows how to hop
She really knows how to hop
She really knows how to hop
(J. Entwistle, Peg Leg Peggy)

Okay, inquiring minds want to know one thing: who rides on who's shoulder? The Telegraph reports that a parrot is about to be fitted with a wooden leg.  

A one-legged parrot that keeps slipping off his perch is to be fitted with a 'wooden leg'.

George, a ten-year-old African Grey, lost a claw after being attacked by a wild animal which broke into his cage a year and a half ago.

The missing limb means whenever George tries to sleep, he slips off his perch, squawking "Bloody Hell!" in surprise.
advertisement

Concerned for her pet, the bird's owner Sheila Weare sought advice from experts at the University of Salford.

Mrs Weare, from Crewe told the BBC: “You can tell by the way he fidgets that he's not comfortable and he has to bite the bars of his cage at night to balance."

In the hope of giving bird and owner a good night's sleep, the perch will be fitted with a specially-moulded slot, into which George will be trained to insert his stump at night. 

The real problem will come when the pirate tries to balance on the parrot's shoulder. Polly will want a truss after that. There is actually one element of this story that disturbs me greatly: Dr Glyn Heath, who is the person making the parrot's new leg has also constructed "a 'wheelchair' for a paraplegic rat," according to the report. 

Now I'm going to have nightmares about rodents on skateboards.

(Side note: If you have never heard John Entwistle's Rigor Mortis Sets In album (where Peg Leg Peggy appears), you have missed some of the greatest lead bass ever played.)

It will be interesting if the study is replicated and the same result shows up, but this is almost to funny for words. Doctors have been warning about high cholesterol levels for years now and recommending ever more stringent treatments to get that serum level down. Right? Sounds all healthy, except for one teeny thing:

Low cholesterol levels appear to be linked to a much higher risk of stomach cancer.

Some studies have linked low cholesterol levels to higher death rates from cancer in general, Dr. Kouichi Asano, of Kyushu University, Fukuoka, and colleagues explain in the International Journal of Cancer. "With respect to gastric cancer, a limited number of studies suggest this inverse association, while others do not."

The researcher looked into this in a study involving some 2,600 residents of Hisayama, Japan, who were followed for 14 years.

Gastric cancers developed in 97 subjects. After accounting for age and gender, stomach cancer rates rose significantly with descending cholesterol level. For example, among subjects with the highest cholesterol levels, the gastric cancer rate was the equivalent of 2.1 cases per 1000 persons per year; among those with the lowest cholesterol, the rate was 3.9 per 1000 person-years.

Yes, I know that, in general, the other diseases caused by or exacerbated by high cholesterol are likely more statistically dangerous. But results like this show that things are always more complicated than the popular, "consensus" opinions would have you believe. Remember, doctors prescribed milk for ulcers for years - probably one of the worst things you can give an ulcer patient.

There is a lot of storm and fury right now over an anecdote that Barack Obama made at last night's debate. I'm not going to pile on this one, but will refer readers to some of the folks who have, including Jake Tapper who claims that he has fact-checked and believes the story is accurate. Here's Obama's quote:

"You know, I've heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon — supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon," he said. "Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq.  And as a consequence, they didn't have enough ammunition, they didn't have enough humvees.  They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief."

Here's part of the result of Tapper's fact check:

The Army captain, a West Point graduate, did a tour in a hot area of eastern Afghanistan from the Summer of 2003 through Spring 2004.

Prior to deployment the Captain — then a Lieutenant — took command of a rifle platoon at Fort Drum. When he took command, the platoon had 39 members, but — in ones and twos — 15 members of the platoon were re-assigned to other units. He knows of 10 of those 15 for sure who went to Iraq, and he suspects the other five did as well.

The platoon was sent to Afghanistan with 24 men.

"We should have deployed with 39," he told me, "we should have gotten replacements. But we didn't. And that was pretty consistent across the battalion."

You can go read the rest. I'll just point out one thing here. The story is almost five years old according to Tapper's source. It seems a bit late to be making an issue of it now, rather than when the officer was deployed. (Since the officer told Tapper that he trained at Fort Drum, I'm wondering if he was assigned to the 10th Mountain Division. How much equipment are they supposed to have?)

One other point while I am visiting this topic: Had the military not been downsized so extremely during the 1990s, would this have been an issue at all?

Keep those things in mind as this story unfolds. 

Put down the clubs, ladies, I am merely repeating the title of a book that is up for the prestigious Oddest Book Title Award. No really. Please put that down. 

"I was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen" recounts the tale of a fictional U.S. World War Two fighter pilot who is captured by jungle pygmies led by a sadistic woman.

Its sequel, which is not on the shortlist released by trade publication The Bookseller (www.thebookseller.com) Friday, needs no explanation: "Go Ahead, Woman, Do Your Worst."

"How to Write a How to Write Book" and "Cheese Problems Solved" are likewise self-explanatory as is the equally eclectic niche tome "People who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr. Feelgood" that strives to put the English east coast resort on the map.

While none of the above may challenge the sensibilities too much, others are likely to prove more divisive. Try "If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs" or "Are Women Human? And other International Dialogues."

The website is here. Please put that down, it looks sharp. The award is formally called the Diagram Prize. I regret to inform readers that the keepers of the prize somehow managed to pass over what simply has to be the most scintillating book title in recent history this year: Squid Recruitment Dynamics. Honest.

Oh heck. Now the squids are going to be after me, too.  

Lorie  Byrd suspects that the reason  Hillary Clinton is losing  is what  amounts  to  political  soul-cleansing by Democrats. They are, she says, just plain tired of the Clintons. 

1. Democrats don't want a return to non-stop scandal defense mode. Democrats like to wrap the Clinton scandals up in a blue dress and say they were all about sex, but that is ridiculous. There were numerous scandals in the Clinton White House well before anyone knew who Monica Lewinski was and many of them involved Hillary. The travel office firings, subpoenaed billing records, Whitewater, and FBI files are only the beginning of the list. It goes on for a while and includes names like Vince Foster, Johnny Chung, and the FALN.

Why on earth would Democrats want to sign up for a second ride on the Clinton scandal train when they could opt for a clean slate candidate? Besides, it would not be so easy to deflect future scandals as it was previous ones. I don't think Ken Starr will be making a repeat performance as boogeyman and he was a necessary element to the Clinton scandal survival strategy. Without a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy to oppose, there is not so much enthusiasm for defending the Clintons.

I believe there is a whole group of Democrats out there who are secretly enjoying being able to vote against a Clinton. They can take out their frustrations with the Clintons and still vote for a Democrat. For the first time in 16 years, Democrats can vote against a Clinton without having to vote for a Republican to do it.

2. The Clinton is no longer the hip one in the race. Think about it. In Bill Clinton's presidential primary he was up against Paul Tsongas, Tom Harkin, Bob Kerrey, and some other people I don't even remember. In the general elections he was up against George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole. Hillary, in sharp contrast, is up against the Obamassiah who makes women swoon.

There is quite a lot more, go over and have a good read. I suspect that all of the reasons Lorie gives are very likely correct. People, including hard core Democrats are simply tired of the Clintons. The more they go on the attack, the more people realize just how badly they wish that Bill and Hillary would just go away. 

I'm not at all sure that they will go away if she loses, of course. She'll still be around and will probably make another attempt at gaining the Oval Office.  

A heavy winter storm is lashing New York City and is expected to dump nine inches of snow - never a pleasant event there.

NEW YORK (AP) — A winter storm blanketed much of the Northeast on Friday, delaying flights at the region's major airports and causing havoc during the morning commute.

"Already, this is the most significant storm of the season for New York City," said National Weather Service meteorologist Jim Connolly.

The massive system, which had brought everything from freezing rain to sleet to snow in parts of Kentucky, Missouri and Illinois on Thursday, lumbered eastward and northward overnight.

The weather service predicted 6 to 9 inches for New York City, where snow began before dawn. Up to a foot was forecast in some suburban counties, and 10 inches in Connecticut.

Storm warnings extended northward across Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. In many places, snow was changing over to rain, sometimes freezing rain.

Flights at John F. Kennedy International Airport and Newark International Airport were delayed more than five hours, and in Philadelphia the average arriving flight was 4½ hours late. Some airlines waived their fee for passengers rebooking tickets.

Driving was no more fun than flying. The speed limit along the New Jersey Turnpike was reduced to 35 mph, and jackknifed rigs shut down southbound lanes of Interstate 95 for a couple of hours in Greenwich, Connecticut.

And on an even more cheerful note, there is another storm queued up and ready to march across the nation. 

As this storm exits the East, a new Pacific storm is poised to move into the West Coast by Saturday night.  The West Regional News story reports that storm will slam the region with heavy rain, snow and strong winds that will cross the mountains into the Central Valley.

Strong winds gusting above 60 mph will lash the California coast north of Monterey Bay, while 3 to 4 inches of wind-whipped rain falls on northern California. Strong winds will help to create large ocean waves and swells along the Pacific coast.

The storm will slam the Sierra with heavy snow before the rain and snow move into Southern California and the Intermountain West Sunday.

West Coast Expert Meteorologist Paul Yeager states, "I expect that there will be 3 to 5 feet of new snow in elevations above 7,000 feet, with generally all snow from 5,500 feet and higher. As snow levels lower on Sunday, snow might fall as low as about 4,500 feet, which means that there might be some snow in the valleys of western Nevada as well."

By Monday, the storm will reorganize over the Plains. Expert Senior Meteorologist John Kocet reports the re-generated storm next week will mirror the characteristics of the storm currently slamming the East. Through midweek, the system will spark snow across the northern Plains and Midwest and severe storms across the South.

They are also predicting arctic cold sweeping in behind this next storm - as in really arctic cold, far below normal for this time of year. Keep the snowshovels handy, folks. Winter is still going strong. 

A Dallas motorcycle police officer has died as a result of an accident while escorting Hillary Clinton in that city.

DALLAS - A police motorcycle officer died after a crash while escorting Hillary Rodham Clinton's motorcade to a campaign rally.

"I have just learned of the death of a Dallas policer officer in a devastating accident that occurred as the motorcycle officers were leading our cars to this site," Clinton told reporters at a Dallas rally. "We are just heartsick over this loss of life in the line of duty."

Clinton said she planned to call the officer's family to express condolences, as well as the police chief.

There are no details yet as to how the accident happened. I'll update when more is available. My heart goes out to the officer's family.  

UPDATE: Just one of those terrible accidents that sound like such a little thing: The officer hit a curb and lost control of his bike. 

The Dallas Police Department said Senior Cpl. Victor Lozada-Tirado was traveling southbound on the Houston Street viaduct when he struck a curb, lost control of the motorcycle and went down.

Lozada-Tirado was transported to Methodist Central Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

A Dallas police officer since December 1988, Lozada-Tirado was married with four children, according to police. CNN affiliate WFAA-TV in Dallas/Fort Worth reported he was 49.

There were no other vehicles involved in the accident, police said, and the motorcade was able to continue to the site without further incident.

While the Democrats are playing populist demagogue politics, promising protectionist policies and confiscatory corporate taxes, other countries have laid the groundwork to get all the jobs that will disappear in the US if those populist policies become law. Iceland and Taiwan are cutting corporate taxes.

Iceland is known as the Nordic Tiger because of rapid economic growth. Much of the nation’s prosperity is the result of free-market policies, including a 36 percent flat tax on labor income, a 10 percent flat tax on capital income, and a corporate tax rate of just 18 percent (down from 50 percent at the end of the 1980s). But Iceland is not resting on its laurels. The government has just announced a reduction in the corporate tax rate:

The corporate income tax will be cut from 18 per cent to 15 per cent, effective for the 2008 income year and come into force in the 2009 assessment year.

Meanwhile, even though the 25 percent corporate tax rate in Taiwan is already substantially lower than the 39 percent-plus rate in the United States, Taiwanese politicians apparently recognize that globalization and tax competition are powerful arguments for even lower rates. Tax-news.com is reporting that the government therefore plans to slash the corporate rate to 17.5 percent - and also make unspecified reductions to personal income tax rates:  

Global trade will go on even if the United States decides not to play any longer. The jobs will merely migrate to new, friendlier places. Corporations looking to make new investments will have a choice between countries that promise to take little of their returns in taxes or an enormous chunk of them.

If you were making the decision, which would you choose? Prosperity or beggaring yourself? 

Peggy Noonan reflects on Barack Obama's speeches. She judges him to be a brillant speaker - provided you don't actually read the words he delivered so brilliantly. Delivering words well is not eloquence.

Barack Obama's biggest draw is not his eloquence. When you watch an Obama speech, you lean forward and listen and think, That's good. He's compelling, I like the way he speaks. And afterward all the commentators call him "impossibly eloquent" and say "he gave me thrills and chills." But, in fact, when you go on the Internet and get a transcript of the speech and print it out and read it–that is, when you remove Mr. Obama from the words and take them on their own–you see the speech wasn't all that interesting, and was in fact high-class boilerplate. (This was not true of John F. Kennedy's speeches, for instance, which could be read seriously as part of the literature of modern American politics, or Martin Luther King's work, which was powerful absent his voice.)

Mr. Obama is magnetic, interacts with the audience, leads a refrain: "Yes, we can." It's good, and compared with Hillary Clinton and John McCain, neither of whom seems really to enjoy giving speeches, it comes across as better than it is. But is it eloquence? No. Eloquence is deep thought expressed in clear words. With Mr. Obama the deep thought part is missing. What is present are sentiments.

Noonan knows speeches and speechwriting well, of course. She knows the territory, so to speak. I would point out that there is a huge difference between true eloquence, truly delivering great thoughts in a brilliant manner and acting. Actors can take meaningless dialog written by a hack writer and deliver them brilliantly. So far, that is what Obama appears to be doing: delivering boilerplate exceedingly well.

That is not to say that meaningful words have not been delivered during this campaign, as Noonan goes on to point out. It's just that the words that have have a meaning have not been uttered by the candidate himself:

His problem was, is, his wife's words, not his, the speech in which she said that for the first time in her adult life she is proud of her country, because Obama is winning. She later repeated it, then tried to explain it, saying of course she loves her country. But damage was done. Why? Because her statement focused attention on what I suspect are some basic and elementary questions that were starting to bubble out there anyway.

Here are a few of them.

Are the Obamas, at bottom, snobs? Do they understand America? Are they of it? Did anyone at their Ivy League universities school them in why one should love America? Do they confuse patriotism with nationalism, or nativism? Are they more inspired by abstractions like "international justice" than by old visions of America as the city on a hill, which is how John Winthrop saw it, and Ronald Reagan and JFK spoke of it?

Have they been, throughout their adulthood, so pampered and praised–so raised in the liberal cocoon–that they are essentially unaware of what and how normal Americans think? And are they, in this, like those cosseted yuppies, the Clintons?

Why is all this actually not a distraction but a real issue? Because Americans have common sense and are bottom line. They think like this. If the president and his first lady are not loyal first to America and its interests, who will be? The president of France? But it's his job to love France, and protect its interests. If America's leaders don't love America tenderly, who will?

I am seeing more and more media analysis pointing out just how devoid of real meaning much of what Obama says really is. I suspect that this trend is going to continue as the media honeymoon Obama has been enjoying  begins to give way to hard scrutiny.

The New York Sun publishes an editorial that pounds Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for their increasingly protectionist stances. Both candidates are taking shots at the North American Free Trade Agreement, abandoning the defense of the treaty to John McCain. The sun points out the absurdity of that.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Mr. Obama has distributed fliers in Ohio showing "a locked factory gate with a large 'closed' sign on it" and language blaming Senator Clinton for having backed Nafta. In his speech Tuesday night in Houston after winning the Wisconsin primary, Mr. Obama said, "We're here because there are workers in Youngstown, Ohio, who've watched job after job after job disappear because of bad trade deals like Nafta, who've worked in factories — who've worked in factories for 20 years, and then one day they come in and literally see the equipment unbolted from the floor and sent to China."

Mrs. Clinton, rather than defend the value of free trade to growing our economy by expanding American exports, providing cheaper goods for American consumers, and increasing overall prosperity both at home and abroad, has been scrambling away from one of her husband's greatest accomplishments. The Journal article reports that the Clinton campaign responded to the Obama flier by saying that, contrary to its claim, the candidate never said that Nafta was a "boon" to the American economy. Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton herself, campaigning in Ohio, said, "My opponent has taken to attacking me on Nafta. The fact is, neither of us were in the Senate at the time, and I've long been a critic of the shortcomings of Nafta." Mrs. Clinton may not have been in the Senate at the time, but she was in the White House at the time, and she wants credit for that as part of her 35 years of experience that is supposed to make her qualified to be president. Breathtaking.

So who is left to defend the trade agreement that President Clinton and Vice President Gore worked so hard to achieve? Well, one can just click on YouTube to bring up a video with Mr. McCain explaining, "I know Nafta was a good idea. It's created millions of jobs, and it has helped the economies of all three of these nations. All you have to do is go to Detroit and see the thousands of trucks lined up every day, or go to our Southern border. …Free trade is something I think that is vital to the future of America. As a free trader, I will open up every market in the world."

Obama has already proposed close to a trillion dollars worth of expensive new Federal programs - and is at the same time arguing against the kind of agreement that has helped the American economy thrive. A growing economy generates more tax revenue than a stagnant or contracting one. Yet both Obama and Clinton appear to be willing to walk away from that agreement. Both also preach that they will raise taxes on corporations. So what they are proposing is taking more from a smaller and smaller pie. Consider for a moment what those policies will do to jobs in this country.

Hint: there will not be more jobs.