Variation 2

merchandise.

Thanks for Freeper Travis
McGee for the underlying text

News from Russia, and around the world:

• Good to see that capitalism is taking root in Russia. Too bad the subject of the photo is doomed.
• Ladies and gentleman I give you the Russian "Not Ready for Stacked and Packed Players." I have to give them points, however, for displaying such apparently horrible gun handling skills.
• Picture of the winner. I wonder if that is a new uniform she is wearing? Didn't they learn from last year's Miss Universe debacle that armed service and beauty contests don't mix.

 

    Former Texas Attorney General Indicted

One of the biggest developments yet in the tobacco-fee saga: a federal grand jury is charging former Texas attorney general Dan Morales and his friend Marc Murr with conspiracy and mail fraud over Morales's attempt to gain hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for Murr from the state's tobacco settlement.[From Overlawyered]

Maybe we could get some of those Texas Law Men to come up to Connecticut and check out our AG Dick Blumenthal.

Martha Dean, the Republican candidate for state attorney general, accused incumbent Richard Blumenthal on Wednesday of using a "sham bid process" to improperly steer up to $65 million from a lawsuit against the tobacco industry to a former law partner and the partner's spouse.

"It's time to ask: What authority did Mr. Blumenthal have to give away millions of dollars of our money to his personal friends?" Dean said during a press conference in the Legislative Office Building. Dean was generally critical of Blumenthal's handling of the tobacco suit, saying it amounted to "extortion" of the tobacco industry and was an improper encroachment by the attorney general on the regulatory authority of the legislature.

But Dean's sharpest attack was aimed at Blumenthal's decision to hire the law firms of his former partner, David S. Golub, and Golub's wife, Kathryn Emmett, to help litigate the state's lawsuit. Dean said that Golub and Emmett did a minimal amount of work but were paid much of the $65 million reserved for Connecticut's lawyers under a settlement of the suit.

In a statement issued by his office Wednesday, Blumenthal dismissed Dean's criticism. "Regrettably, the truth about the 1998 settlement has been distorted and misrepresented by critics who ignore the tens of thousands of lives saved, billions of dollars produced for taxpayers and, hopefully, many children stopped from beginning to smoke," he said. [Hartford Courant - September 5, 2002]

Dean's criticism fell mostly on deaf ears last year. Maybe we'll have to wait for Blumenthal to be an ex-AG for any real investigation into to this, because for now Blumenthal is keeping sealed the records

My latest variation.

 
Connecticut's Senator Christopher "Golden Leash" Dodd appeared on Imus this morning, and I think I caught him being less that truthful.

Imus and Sen. Dodd were discussing Senator Lieberman's decision to not withdraw from his Senate race in 2000 in order to commit fully to his run for Vice-President. The question came up when Don Imus asked him if Dodd had decided to run for the Democrat Presidential nomination, would he not have run for another Senate term. Senator Dodd replied (might not be exact, but I transcribed it pretty well):

I don't think anyone expected Joe to walk away from his Senate run, that was a different set of circumstances. Joe was picked in August to be on the ticket [so it was too late for him to withdraw]."

The conversation moved on, and somehow Imus wound up asking if "There were any mayors of cities in Connecticut that weren't under indictment?" Sen Dodd came back with a Zinger, then another selective remembrance:

Well, we've had a perfect record for so long [we wouldn't want to mess it up].

You know, if Joe had stepped out of the Senate race than that guy [Indicted for lots of nasty things and ex-mayor of Waterbury Phil Giordano] could have been a U.S. Senator if he'd run unopposed.

[Ignoring the fact that having a not-yet-indicted likely-felon as a Senator wouldn't really be all the ground breaking.]

Giordano would not have run unopposed. All commentators in the state knew that CT State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has been salivating for years to get such a shot, and the party could have easily picked him to fill Lieberman's space on the ballot. It is also widely acknowledged that Blumenthal, a man whom I personally detest, a man who will sue anyone so long as there's TV camera there to cover the suit, would have beaten Giordano by at least 20 points even without Donk voter fraud.

Nope, 'ol Joe Lieberman simply wanted to hedge his bet. His excuse for not stepping down was the rather lame, almost laughable [Baltimore Sun,October 27, 2000]:

The deadline for Lieberman to drop out is today, but he said emphatically yesterday that he would not do so.

"I really think it would, in many ways, be an act of bad faith if I pulled out at this point," Lieberman said.

That position has caused grumbling in party ranks.

and from the The Boston Herald, November 8, 2000

In New Haven, Conn., Gore's running mate, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, voted for himself twice - once on the presidential ballot and once for his re-election to the Senate. "That felt good," Lieberman said as he left the voting booth. Lieberman's wife, Hadassah, wept as she voted for her husband. Lieberman's refusal to step down from his Senate race infuriated many Democrats. If Gore is victorious, Lieberman will have to leave the Senate, leaving GOP Gov. John Rowland to appoint a GOP replacement.

That move could be costly to Democrats' hopes of taking back the Senate, especially if the results last night left left both parties in a 50-50 deadlock.

The Connecticut Senate Spin Machine is already working on damage control for 2004, hoping to remove all memory of the fact that Joe Lieberman selfishly ran for both his Senate seat and for the VP slot, risking Donk control of the Senate, just because he had no faith that he and Al would win.

Sorry, Senator Dodd, this one isn't quite ready to go down the memory hole just yet.

Rainman - The Game

I found a blog, with Blogger's "Random Next Blog" feature, whose posts consist merely of a picture, with description, of what the author had for lunch that day. If you want to, and I can't imagine that you would, feel free to check it out here: Lunch.

[The link to Zocor (a cholesterol lowering drug) makes me wonder if this isn't the pharmaceutical industries answer to Raging Cow.]

Google wishes Michelangelo a Happy Birthday
with this snappy version of its logo.

Dave Barry posted a few times on his blog about a Monster Cheeto. I take it as one of the signs of the apocalypse that this story has been picked up by CNN.

"We call it Seasoning Accumulation," Cogan said. "If you love cheese, this is the Chee-to for you. It's beyond dangerously cheesy."

Pseudonymous blogger "Hank Hill" hits one out of the park with his Thank You Letter to A Peace Protestor, ostensibly written by Supreme_ruler_Saddam@Iraq.Gov.

[[And for completeness, here is a link to the full translation of Saddam's Letter to America. (Have a barf bag handy should you brave reading this tripe.)]]

This post, over at C&S, reminded me of Robert L. Kocher's excellent four part series, (scroll down to) Hillary Clinton Must Be Stopped.

A borderline psychotic extremely leftist mass media, about 90 percent of whom supported George McGovern and the Clintons, are inundating and injecting borderline psychotic cognitive processes and unreal unhealthy emotional modeling into the individual and public psychological structure.

More to the case and point, Hillary Clinton is a master at manipulating all this. When she first began being active in national public life, and when she only slightly later began positioning herself to run for the senate, some of the acts she pulled were so outrageous that the belief was that she could not possibly win enough votes to become anything but an obnoxious truck stop waitress back in Arkansas. She was insulting, contemptuous, and obviously a fake.

I'm putting together a care package for my friend who got shipped out to Kuwait. I was wondering what the rules and restrictions were on package size and content, so I went to the Official Post Office website and, as you might expect, it and its search engire were entirely worthless. Google came to the rescue in a flash, and I found this page at Oconus.com that allows you to put in an APO/FPO zip code and it returns the applicable rules and restrictions.

Does anyone know where I can get a lighter, shaped like a fat Chinese boy, that shoots flame out its private parts?
                  Never mind.

Labels: ebay, weird

CNS News has another article that explains, among other things, how the pilots of cargo aircraft were excluded from new regulations requiring the creation of a system to arm flight deck officers.

"I don't understand, frankly, why the conference committee took the cargo [pilots] out of this bill," [Senator Boxer] added. "It made no sense then, it makes less sense now."

It isn’t so much that they took cargo pilots out of the bill as it is that they changed the language of the bill to include the word passenger before the word aircraft, thereby limiting the program to pilots of passenger aircraft.

What I want to know is who offered this amendment in committee? Are the proceedings of the conference committee public?

The primary opponents of arming cargo pilots appear to be the cargo airlines. Pam Roberson, a spokesperson for FedEx, said her company opposes their pilots having any weapons.

Any weapons, other than the entire damned plane, that is. If September 11^th taught us nothing else it should have taught us that the plane itself is the most fearsome weapon involved in this debate.

"We oppose lethal weapons, such as firearms, and also non-lethal weapons, such as stun guns, on our aircraft," Roberson said.

Well, without having armed pilots, that’s all your going to do. Oppose them. Vehemently. Even very vehement opposition is no match for an armed hijacker, Ms. Roberson.

Note also the strange construction of the sentence, which when diagrammed contains this main clause, “We oppose lethal weapons on our aircraft.”

"We believe the presence of weapons would pose a substantial threat to the safety and security of crew members,

"Presence," as though the weapons would be floating about the cabin unsecured, like potato chips in front of an orbiting astronaut. "Presence," blurs the distinction between an armed flight crew and armed hijackers. This is a very carefully crafted sentence, hoping to fool people into not making the critical assessment of this idea. It hopes to blur difference between arming the pilots, who are already in charge of the aircraft, and allowing weapons willy-nilly onto FedEx aircraft by anyone who wants to bring/smuggle one aboard.

as well as the structural integrity of the aircraft."

As the CNS article goes on to tell, experts agree that there it is highly unlikely that a handgun could damage the structural integrity of an aircraft. Since it operates a fleet of over 600 aircraft you would think that FedEx could have laid its hands on this information instead of just spouting its suspect assertions to support its propagandized view of this matter.

FedEx's primary federal lobbyist is Cassidy & Associates. I would interested to know with whom members of Cassidy might be friends with on the conference committee that snuck the word passenger into the bill that was suppose to allow the arming of all pilots.

Roberson said FedEx believes there is a more effective way to protect their pilots and aircraft.

Really, and what might that be?

"Safety and security of all FedEx employees is our top priority," Roberson explained. "We believe that a systematic approach, including strengthened cockpit doors and some of the other measures that are being taken, represent a better approach to aircraft safety."

More extremely weaselly language. If read quickly the sentence suggests that FedEx has installed strengthened cockpit doors, but read on.

But Bunning noted that not only are there no new reinforced cockpit doors on cargo planes - as have been required on passenger planes - but also that many cargo planes have no doors at all.

That fact, combined with the knowledge that federal air marshals are never on cargo planes, leads cargo pilot Leon Laylagian to wonder why anyone would want to exclude cargo pilots from the program.

Why? Good question. Could be hoplophobia, could be fear of liability. Most likely though it is FedEx's desire to keep its employees disarmed, fearing the power it perceives that pilots might wield should they no longer be legally barred from carrying a useful means of self-defense.

"The elimination of cargo pilots from this effective layer creates a gaping hole in national security," Laylagian said. "The alternative is to accept locking the front door and leaving the back door wide open."

Which pretty much nicely summarizes damn near all security measures taken in America since September 11^th. Creating an illusion of security, as well as the illusion that Congress has, and is using, the power to actually improve security.

The Connecticut Lottery has halted, for now, sale of animated gambling software that I blogged about yesterday.

Bonus. I found another picture of one of the lobsters in Rockland, Maine. This one is a Lobster dressed as a lobsterman.

Well, the long awaited civil suit against FBI Special Agent Christoper "Chris" R. Braga (and others) has been brought by Joseph Schultz, the entirely innocent young man that Agent Braga shot in the face with a .223 caliber M4 (M-16 variant) at point blank range. Mr. Schultz is seeking $10,000,000.00 in damages.

Attack of The Clone Lobster

My wife and I drove through Rockland, Maine last June on our way to Halifax, NS. I stopped and took the following pictures of whatever-the-hell-this-is on a large public green in the middle of town. It was even more surreal in person.

Even though I took these as digital pictures, in a slippage remniscent of forgetting a roll of film in a camera, I just found them on my laptop's hard drive a few days ago.

Anyway, I thought people might get as much of a kick out of the "Star Wars-Revisited" lobster as I did. You can click on any of the pictures to open a larger, more detailed version of that picture.

 

 

UPDATE:I've taken the large versions of the lobster photos off of my server to prevent bandwidth overload.

The NYT has a story about written by a reporter who shipped out to Kuwait with a group from the 101^st Airborne. All that time with the soldiers and you'd think that Jim Dwyer would have picked up the fact that it is Gerber knives that many soldiers carry, not Berber knives. I guess Mr. Dwyer is more comfortable with basement carpeting than he is with sharp, pointy objects.

My best friend from high school , now a Major, shipped out with the 9^th of the 101^st last Friday. In June he told me that he expected to be shipped out within a year for a "Rendezvous with Destiny" (a 101^st motto). He was right about the year part, I just hope that the Destiny that he has a Rendezvous with is a happy one involving a lot of years in retirement.

I have a theory that, there are only so many possible variations of the human face that are easily distinguished from one another. (If the viewer is given a finite time to inspect the face.) I peg the number of available faces somewhere above 10,000 and somewhere south of 10,000,000.

I first developed this concept after leaving the small city I grew up in to attend university (in The City of Evil). One of the first friends that I made at Cornell swore that I had a long-lost identical twin brother in his Wisconsin high school class, and he had pictures to prove it. He went so far as to have his parents mail him some old pictures for comparison. The resemblance was striking, so long as you ignored the fact that his friend was at least five inches taller than I am.

Given the very strong resemblance between me and my parents I never considered the possibility that I was adopted. I jokingly told my dad about my friend's assertion that I had been separated at birth. He assured me, in good humor, that the only child abandoned in our family was me -- that time they left me in the forest for a month with a family of otters.

After I graduated from college I worked for a while, back in my home town, driving an ambulance for a private company. I was in and out of our local hospital at all hours of the day and night picking up and dropping off. On a few occasions that summer I had bizarre encounters with several people who, despite my nametag and uniform shirt, clearly were mistaking me for someone else.

Eventually I discovered the source of their confusion. One patient that we were picking up to transfer to a big city hospital wondered if I was working a second job driving ambulance to make extra money. Playing along, I asked her "What do you think my first job is?"

"Well, you're a resident, aren't you?," she countered.

"No, I'm headed off to law school in the fall, I'm not a doctor," I answered, wondering if she was a psych patient.

"Well, do you have a brother who works at this hospital who is a doctor, because there is one who looks exactly like you."

"Do you know by chance if he is from Wisconsin?"

Through some helpful nurses, a few of whom saw the resemblance, I eventually tracked down this doppelganger in the Cardiac Care Unit. Like my photo-clone in college, the resemblance was striking, if not more so. We looked like damn near twins in the face, and we shared our choice of eyewear, mophead hair and alert eyes. He was within an inch of my height.

It wasn't quite like looking in a mirror, but it was fun, and obviously memorable as I write this account almost a dozen years later.

Turns out he was from Vermont, not Wisconsin, as I asked him. We shared a second laugh when he told me that we had another look-alike in Texas, and yet another look-alike on Long Island that he had heard about from two different sources.

I joked that we should start a club.

He went back to work and I went forward with a good story.

(A few years later I worked with a fellow with whom customers often confused me. I blamed that resemblance on the impersonal nature of our task, and the inattentiveness of the clientele.)

---

Anyway, I told that story to segue into this one. There lives on Long Island a pair of twin girls, born in Mexico on the same day, adopted by two New York families, who recently accidentally discovered that they were separated at birth.

A friend of Adriana's ended up at Tamara's 20th-birthday celebration and talked and talked about how much Tamara looked like this friend of his. This friend told her how this girl she resembled so much was born in Mexico, as Tamara knew she had been, and also had celebrated a birthday recently.

The rest of this happy story is worth reading.
Yes, this is a bit lighter fare than the typical stuff I post on this site, but even a comedian needs to find joy once in a while.

The WSJ has a great article today about the Technical Support Working Group, an "Obscure U.S. Agency that Seeks Gizmos to Combat Terrorism". Their most likely to be purchased by individuals invention so far is a $3.00 dosimeter for detecting exposure to a radioactive event.

Do you remember all the furor surrounding the alleged use of the illustrated Joe Camel to entice young smokers? Well how about using a cute, animated cartoon character to entice new gamblers?

In the new game, Treasure Tower, players may use their computer mouse to lead a cartoon character from ancient Babylonia through "a fantastic and humorous universe" of exotic Middle Eastern passageways, palaces and hidden doors in search of cash prizes. There is a one-in-260,000 chance of winning $25,000 in the game, which goes on sale Thursday.

Oh, and I guess I should point out that it is the State of Connecticut that is selling the game.

Maybe my SpongeBob slot machine idea wasn't too far off the mark after all.

The Hushmail server that handles my mail is down so email to me might bounce.

UPDATE:The server is back up but all the mail I received at that address since February 1 of this year is toast. If you emailed me in the past few days, please do so again.

Have you seen the SpongeBob branded special edition Barbie? How about the SpongeBob 1911 pistol?

What next, SpongeBob condoms, SpongeBob slot machines, SpongeBob bourbon, SpongeBob douche and SpongeBob brand contraceptive-sponges?

Hmm, that last one might just work.

The Instapundit linked to this article in The Register about a proposal from the Justice Department to criminalize the use of encryption technology in the furtherance of a crime.

The article declares this a bad idea and Prof. Reynolds makes a pretty good point that it would likely provide federal prosecutors a bit too much discretion in when they choose to apply its provisions.

Both skip what I consider to be some needed analysis of a law in this arena.

• Does it pass first amendment muster?
• Would it be legal under the fourth amendment?
• What does it accomplish beyond the benefit of simple conspiracy charges?

My gut feeling opinion is that encyption is simply a form of speech, simply a more private way of sharing information, so unless the contents of the conversation could be criminal I doubt that a law criminalizing a from change could survive a first amendment challenge.

Second, the fourth amendment assures us that people have a right to be secure in their papers. Finding that such ensures a right to encryption would require a broad reading, but not beyond the scope of other such inventive law making from the bench.

Thirdly, I see nothing here that would serve to accomplish anything that would help law enforcement beyond simple conspiracy laws. Terrorists and other naer-do-wells planning to undertake bad events will not abandon the use of encryption simply because it makes what they are doing illegal in yet another way.

In the words of Claire Wolfe, "If laws worked there would be no crime."

Seems like those delusionally self-important human shields really do think that they are important, so important that many of them are dragging their asses home now that shooting will likely start.

'I am ashamed to be leaving you at this time of need, but I'm going out of pure, cold fear," Godfrey Meynell, 68, told the two Iraqi factory workers standing before him. His white hair was, as always, unbrushed; his navy windcheater zipped up to the chin. "This power plant is next to a bridge, surrounded by Republican Guard," he continued. "It's obviously a prime target." The men, who understood this fear too well, returned his handshake and thanked him warmly.

As he heaved his rucksack into the taxi, Mr Meynell, a former Colonial Office civil servant, was tearful. He was not, however, the only "human shield" fleeing Baghdad yesterday in a state of high emotion. Nine of the 11 British shields on the pioneering wave of red double-deckers left this weekend. At the Andalus hotel five kilometres away, Dr Abdul Hashimi, the official overseeing their mission in Iraq, had issued the shocked group with an ultimatum: deploy to the "strategic sites" hand-picked by the government or leave immediately.

It was a chilling twist in the saga of the human shields' mission to stop a war in Iraq. It was also inevitable. I accompanied the first wave of shields throughout their 3,500 mile, three-week journey aboard three double-decker buses from Europe to Baghdad and remained with them while they battled unsuccessfully with Iraqi officials to be allowed access to the civilians most thought they had come to protect.

The eccentric, eclectic group, none of whom fitted the "peacenik" stereotype, may have been drawn from all ages, backgrounds and experience, but they all shared one trait: naivety. Beset by problems on the road, lack of sufficient funds or a clear, universally-shared agenda, most had been tested beyond their limits before they even arrived in Iraq.

The article goes on to detail how their support bus was absconded with for a while, how they blew a 500 £ donation on Prozac to cheer up Iraqis, how they blamed the CIA when they took a screw in one of their tires, and even an incident where one shield started writing and posting whiny notes about how someone had stolen her nuts. [Well, there certainly were plenty to steal.]

Seems that these fools are being chased out by the Iraquis because the only things that they are willing to shield are places that will not likely be targets!