Blue Crab Boulevard

It speaks for itself:

Obama is willing to essentially disarm the United States or so cripple its defenses that I am left without adequate words to describe how this makes me feel. All I can say at this point is that Obama may have just laid his throat open for Hillary Clinton. Maybe, just maybe, she just got her miracle. But she has to pounce - now.  

(Video via Ace.) 

The European Union has a new design for their two-Euro coin that could have been designed by a two-year old. No, really. The coin will feature a stick-figure or matchstick man as it's called in Britain. No, really.

Brussels is to issue a matchstick-man two-Euro coin to commemorate ten years of economic and monetary union.

The "deliberately primitive design," which could have been drawn by a four-year-old, was chosen from a shortlist of five and will been issued in all Euro-area countries from next year.

I maintain that the design of the coin could have been drawn by a two-year old, but pop over and have a look. Of course, this changes the meaning of this old song completely. 

The New York Times is now regarded favorably by only 24% of people while 44% have an unfavorable opinion, according to a new Rasmussen poll. These are pretty bad numbers for a paper already in a tailspin.

Just 24% of American voters have a favorable opinion of the New York Times. Forty-four percent (44%) have an unfavorable opinion and 31% are not sure. The paper’s ratings are much like a candidate’s and divide sharply along partisan and ideological lines.

By a 50% to 18% margin, liberal voters have a favorable opinion of the paper. By a 69% to 9%, conservative voters offer an unfavorable view. The newspaper earns favorable reviews from 44% of Democrats, 9% of Republicans, and 17% of those not affiliated with either major political story.

The Times recently became enmeshed in controversy over an article published concerning John McCain. Sixty-five percent (65%) of the nation’s likely voters say they have followed that story at least somewhat closely.

Of those who followed the story, 66% believe it was an attempt by the paper to hurt the McCain campaign. Just 22% believe the Times was simply reporting the news. Republicans, by an 87% to 9% margin, believe the paper was trying to hurt McCain’s chances of winning the White House. Democrats are evenly divided. 

The Times doesn't even have a majority of their target audience thinking of them favorably. The fact that most people think the Times attempted a political hit job on McCain shatters whatever credibility they had left. If the Times does not make some changes quick, fast and in a hurry, they are going to collapse.  

We can laugh about this one since nobody was hurt. A nursing home employee in Auburn, Washington made an emergency call to the local fire department. It seems the toilets were exploding with steam. 

AUBURN, Wash. - An employee of an Auburn nursing home called firefighters for help on Tuesday because the toilets were exploding with steam. The fire department said there was a boiler malfunction at Regency Auburn Rehabilitation Center that caused a minor explosion.

The blast set off the sprinkler system and flooded the floors of the three-story building.

The Valley Regional Fire Authority said no one was hurt, but water damaged electrical systems and the kitchen. So, 72 occupants had to be temporarily moved to five other rehabilitation facilities using ambulances, buses and vans.

Well, finally a true exploding toilet story! One wonders how the steam managed to get into the sanitary lines. (Possibly a blowdown line?) One thing is for sure, we have no interest in getting one of these for home. Third degree bidets sound really painful.

Carmen Kontur-Gronquist , the mayor of Arlington, Oregon who posed in her underwear on a town firetruck has lost a recall election. So she is now the ex-mayor. (First post about this incident is here , including links to pictures which are NSFW.)

ARLINGTON, Ore. - The mayor of an Oregon town who once stripped to her underwear and posed on a fire truck has been stripped of her office.T

Voters in this town of about 500 voted narrowly Monday to recall Carmen Kontur-Gronquist. The tally was 142-139. City officials said the recall is effective Tuesday.

Kontur-Gronquist said the pictures of her in black bra and panties were taken for use in a contest about fitness, but a relative posted them on MySpace in hopes it would improve the social life of the single mother.

As I wrote in that earlier post, had she posed in a bikini, there would probably have been little interest in a recall election. But politicians are held to a different standard of conduct. 

This is flat out amazing. An Irishman blinded in an accident in 2005 has had a portion of his sight restored when doctors installed - believe it or not - part of his son's tooth into one damaged eye. No, I am not making this up.

Bob McNichol, 57, from County Mayo in the west of the country, lost his sight in a freak accident when red-hot liquid aluminium exploded at a re-cycling business in November 2005.

"I thought that I was going to be blind for the rest of my life," McNichol told RTE state radio.

After doctors in Ireland said there was nothing more they could do, McNichol heard about a miracle operation called Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis (OOKP) being performed by Dr Christopher Liu at the Sussex Eye Hospital in Brighton in England.

The technique, pioneered in Italy in the 1960s, involves creating a support for an artificial cornea from the patient's own tooth and the surrounding bone.

The procedure used on McNichol involved his son Robert, 23, donating a tooth, its root and part of the jaw.

McNichol's right eye socket was rebuilt, part of the tooth inserted and a lens inserted in a hole drilled in the tooth.

The treatment has restored enough of McNichol's vision for him to be able to get around and to watch television. There have not been very many of these operations and the treatment is considered experimental. I had never even heard of this before reading this article.

William F. Buckley, Jr., once labeled "the scourge of liberalism" by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has passed away. He was 82 years old and died at his desk at home, possibly working on a column. The title Schlesinger bestowed on him delighted Buckley.

Mr. Buckley’s winningly capricious personality, replete with ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare with an anteater’s, hosted one of television’s longest-running programs, “Firing Line,” and founded and shepherded the influential conservative magazine, National Review.

He also found time to write more than 45 books, ranging from sailing odysseys to spy novels to celebrations of his own dashing daily life, and edit five more.

The more than 4.5 million words of his 5,600 biweekly newspaper columns, “On the Right,” would fill 45 more medium-sized books.

Mr. Buckley’s greatest achievement was making conservatism — not just electoral Republicanism, but conservatism as a system of ideas — respectable in liberal post-World War II America. He mobilized the young enthusiasts who helped nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964, and saw his dreams fulfilled when Reagan and the Bushes captured the Oval Office.

To Mr. Buckley’s enormous delight, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the historian, termed him “the scourge of liberalism.”

In remarks at National Review’s 30th anniversary in 1985, President Reagan joked that he picked up his first issue of the magazine in a plain brown wrapper and still anxiously awaited his biweekly edition — “without the wrapper.”

“You didn’t just part the Red Sea — you rolled it back, dried it up and left exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism,” Mr. Reagan said.

“And then, as if that weren’t enough,” the president continued, “you gave the world something different, something in its weariness it desperately needed, the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of freedom.”

The folks over at National Review are, understandably, devastated by the news. They will be rolling out many tributes to Buckley in the coming days, one can be sure. Here's the Wikipedia entry on Buckley NRO does not have an obituary posted yet, I'll update with a link when they do.

Rest in peace. 

It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead. (From The Terminator)

Dire warnings are circulating about the possibility of hunter-killer robots being unleashed, a la The Terminator movies. 

Robot soldiers that can decide who to attack will soon be roaming the world's battlefields if something isn't done about the global 'robot arms race'.

That is the stark warning from a leading robotics expert who spoke today of the dangers of allowing increasingly sophisticated robots to make decisions of life and death.

Professor Noel Sharkey, a robotics and artificial intelligent expert from the University of Sheffield, also warned that armed robots could soon become terrorists' weapon of choice.

"The trouble is that we can't really put the genie back in the bottle,” said Professor Starkey.

“Once the new weapons are out there, they will be fairly easy to copy. How long is it going to be before the terrorists get in on the act?"

Over 4,000 robots are currently deployed on the ground in Iraq and by October 2006 unmanned aircraft had flown 400,000 flight hours.

At the moment, humans can make the decision whether to attack or not but a recent policy shift in the U.S means that 'intelligent' autonomous attack robots will soon be given the power to decide who and when to kill.   

No, the genie will not go back into the bottle. They never do once they are out, no matter how many treaties are enacted. Even if governments signed onto treaties banning these things, terrorists would pay no attention to the laws any more than they do today.  There is also no way to stop a talented amateur or rogue expert from building one of these as a freelance project.

We've just got to get those ED-209's working properly here at the Crabitat.  

Made with real pets. An Australian family is under siege in their home as one or more pythons have been gobbling up the family pets. First the cat became a canapé, then the family guinea pig was turned into an hors d'oeuvre. The final straw was when an 16-foot python went for the main course: hot dog. The family pooch was swallowed whole - as pythons normally do. The family is now terrified for their children, who are 5 and 7 years old. 

Snakes alive! A giant python has eaten Scotty the pet dog. An Australian couple are living in fear for their children after a huge python slithered into their home and started devouring their silky terrier-cross chihuahua.

In the past few weeks, other pythons have entered their garden, near the northern Queensland city of Cairns, and swallowed the family cat and a guinea pig.

But the loss of Scotty has left Daniel Peric's family fearing for the safety of their children Ethan, five, and seven-year-old Talia.

"I'm not leaving them alone in any part of the house," said Mr Peric, whose home is surrounded by bushland.

It was Mr Peric who found the snake in the process of eating the dog in the garden.

"Actually watching it unfold before your eyes was pretty gut- wrenching. We'd had the dog for about five years, so it was part of the family.

"All I could see were the back legs and tail sticking out from the snake's mouth.

"I threw chairs and sticks at the python, but it was already too late - our dear dog was half way down its throat."  

The snake was removed by a reptile expert - partially digested dog and all - and is now comfortably confined in a zoo finishing his meal, so to speak. Once the pet is digested, they plan on releasing the snake back into the wild. Hopefully far from the Peric home.

Dick Morris continues to bash Hillary Clinton as he has been doing for quite some time. Today, he points out that the Clintons both are completely unable to do anything but continue to press a failed strategy. This is inflexible ineptness at its very worst.

And why do the Clintons persist in running a negative campaign even when they can't find anything to be negative about? Alienating voters with their abrasive attacks without attracting them with their content, they throw pitty-pat punches accusing Obama one day of plagiarism for borrowing speech lines from his close and consenting friend and the next day for accurately describing Hillary's healthcare plan as requiring sanctions to make those who do not wish to sign up do so against their will (albeit for policies Mrs. Clinton deems to be "affordable").

If you are going to pay the price of going negative, throw real punches. Hit Obama with big negatives. You take the backlash for going negative in order to pass the lethal message on to the voters. But if you don't have any negatives to throw and your detectives have, indeed, come up empty, then stop trying to go negative. Stop alienating people to no purpose.

But as obvious as these observations are, they seem to be lost on Bill and Hillary and the geniuses who are running her campaign. Despite defeat after defeat, we still hear about experience and still get a daily dose of so-what attacks on Obama.

The deeper reality of this campaign is that Obama has shown, by his incredible skill in the way he is waging it, an ability to handle himself and a talent for the demands of center stage that show, experienced or not, he is better able to be president than the inept Hillary.

Frankly, I continue to be amazed at just how awful the Clinton campaign has been. Her use again last night of the super-duper Saturday Night Live skit strategy shows a complete inability to come up with anything that works. My prediction: Clinton will get stomped in Ohio and Texas. I don't think she will be able to rescue herself at this point.