born live love die

One of the Cheney women is at it again. Last time, it was Mom Cheney, gettting up in Wolf Blitzer’s grill because he dared to ask her about comments she had made. At the time, she was on his show to shill her book for kids. She has been involved with policy for most of her adult life, and she wanted Wolf to kiss off on any attempt to ask questions about policy today.

This time it is Liz, the not lesbian. She writes an op-ed for Wapo that is full of spin and half truths. You could call them lies, but it seems that would require a higher level of proof and more time than I am going to spend on this. Let’s just say that full, complete, candid truth and Ms Cheney are strangers.

She writes the op-ed to trash Hillary Clinton.

Sen. Hillary Clinton declared this weekend, ” I’m in to win.” Anyone who has watched her remarkable trajectory can have no doubt that she’ll do whatever it takes to win the presidency. I wish she felt the same way about the war.

Liz is talking about the war for which her father manufactured the evidence, or oversaw the manufacturing of evidence, or oversaw the vetting of manufactured evidence that bolstered the cause for war. We hung Germans after World War II for doing that.

She praises Joe Lieberman and damns Chuck Hagel and then trots out the big lies.

Lie number 1: we are at war

America faces an existential threat.

This is as paranoid as you can get. This is saying that the very existence of America is the causes others to destroy America. I guess Liz doesn’t buy that whole “beacon of liberty” schtick.

Lie number 2: quitting helps the terrorists

If we restrict the ability of our troops to fight and win this war, we help the terrorists.

This is an axiomatic statement of the authoritarians. There is no element of reason here. The assumption is that this war can be won with arms. There is no counter insurgency that has been won with arms. This is a civil war, and this war will wage until one side prevails or all actors have used every military option.

Lie number 3: beware the polls

In November the American people expressed serious concerns about Iraq (and about Republican corruption and scandals). They did not say that they want us to lose this war.

Nobody wants to lose a war, but the American public can see that there is no winning position to be gained in Iraq. The polls show that much.

Lie number 4: retreat from Iraq hurts us in the broader war

We are fighting the war on terrorism with allies across the globe, leaders such as Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. Brave activists are also standing with us, fighting for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the empowerment of women. They risk their lives every day to defeat the forces of terrorism.

Liz is out of her depth here. Now she wants to make this about women’s rights? Life for women in Iraq has gone from bad under Saddam to hell. Read Riverbend’s blog, Baghdad Burning, to see what it is like. Yes, there are people who are risking their lives to defeat terrorism, but Liz wouldn’t know them. They are drawn from the political underclasses of America who her father is working to screw over.

Lie number 5: our soldiers will win if we let them

I don’t have to quote Liz here. This is an old song and it sounds as off key now as it did then. Liz doesn’t know what she is talking about when it comes to military issues and she is trading on the lives of those who are willing to step up in the service of our country.

I don’t think that I am Liz’s target audience because I can think. I suspect that she didn’t write this, that it was ginned up by some flack in the office of the Vice President and spammed around under Liz’s name. These Cheney women want a double standard. They want the forum to spout Administration talking points, but don’t want to be treated as just another politician. If Liz is going to let her name be used in this fashion, she should be held to account. She should be held up to the ridicule she deserves.

Scarecrow, writing at FDL, asks the right question:

How credible is the notion that George W. Bush is a brilliant, perceptive military analyst capable of thnking through the weaknesses and illogic of military strategies formulated by the nation’s senior military officials and almost single-handedly moving them to see the wisdom of his new plan for moving forward in Iraq? Don’t answer that yet, until you’ve heard the argument.

Heh.  This better be a damned good argument.

Ever since it became clear that Bush’s plans for escalating the Iraq war might be in serious trouble in Congress, let alone with the American people, his closest advisers have been trying to portray the President as increasingly disillusioned with his military chiefs and more and more convinced that he had to take personal charge of military planning to ensure victory in Iraq.

The President’s neocon supporters have been laying the foundation for months by portraying Generals Casey and Abizaid as weak, failed military leaders following policies that would lead to disaster. Furthering this view on Sunday’s MTP, Senator McCain openly criticized Casey and stated that he was inclined to vote against General Casey on his nomination to the Joint Chiefs. In another version of the classic “stab in the back” theme, the neocon view is that they were right in leading us to war, but the weak, defeatest generals failed us. Fortunately, our wise Commander in Chief is setting things right, having replaced the wrong generals with the only General who is capable of getting our military strategy right. Expect more of the blame-the-past-generals theme in coming weeks as the neocons try to blame everyone but themselves for their disastrous foreign policies.

Read the whole thing.

Clarkson, Georgia will never be the same.

Early last summer the mayor of this small town east of Atlanta issued a decree: no more soccer in the town park.

“There will be nothing but baseball and football down there as long as I am mayor,” Lee Swaney, a retired owner of a heating and air-conditioning business, told the local paper. “Those fields weren’t made for soccer.”

In Clarkston, soccer means something different than in most places. As many as half the residents are refugees from war-torn countries around the world. Placed by resettlement agencies in a once mostly white town, they receive 90 days of assistance from the government and then are left to fend for themselves. Soccer is their game.

But to many longtime residents, soccer is a sign of unwanted change, as unfamiliar and threatening as the hijabs worn by the Muslim women in town. It’s not football. It’s not baseball. The fields weren’t made for it. Mayor Swaney even has a name for the sort of folks who play the game: the soccer people.

Caught in the middle is a boys soccer program called the Fugees — short for refugees, though most opponents guess the name refers to the hip-hop band.

This is the story about a band of boys and their families who endured much and now must endure the sticks and stones of Americans.  But not all Americans.  It is a great story.

Yes, sometimes, you need to muck out the brain.  Like after a stroke.  And someone has invented a brain cleaner.

An injury to the brain can be devastating. When brain cells die, whether from head trauma, stroke or disease, a substance called glutamate floods the surrounding areas, overloading the cells in its path and setting off a chain reaction that damages whole swathes of tissue. Glutamate is always present in the brain, where it carries nerve impulses across the gaps between cells. But when this chemical is released by damaged or dying brain cells, the result is a flood that overexcites nearby cells and kills them.

And then you need to muck out the brain.

A new method for ridding the brain of excess glutamate has been developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science. This method takes a completely new approach to the problem, compared with previous attempts based on drugs that must enter the brain to prevent the deleterious action of glutamate.

Read the whole thing.

I have been thinking about the ill that is factory produced meat. This article puts PAID on it.

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That’s a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.

Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America’s thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield’s total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company’s slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.

Yes, where there are pigs, there is pig shit, lots of pig shit.

Read the whole article and remember it when you order bacon in a restaurant.

Ball lightning had been anecdotally described, but has now been created in the lab.

Ball lightning has mystified electricity researchers since Benjamin Franklin first flew his kite in 1752. The very next year, Russian scientist Georg Richmann was killed by ball lightning while flying a kite modeled on Franklin’s experiment.

Since then, dozens of hypotheses have been offered to explain ball lightning, from Nikola Tesla’s seminal 1904 treatise, “The Transmission of Electrical Energy Without Wires,” to the most recent explanation offered by University of Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand) professors John Abrahamson and James Dinniss, that ball lightning is just vaporized silicon.

Here’s the theory: Sand, or silicon dioxide (also called silica) can be vaporized by a lightning strike in the presence of carbon, causing the short-lived, glowing, floating objects called ball lightning. The theory maintains that the silicon vapor glows from the heat produced when it recombines with oxygen in the air. That, according to the hypothesis, maintains the ball shape due to condensing silicon on its outside surface that is bound by the electric charge of the lightning.

To test the hypothesis, Pavo and Paiva subjected a silicon substrate to a high-voltage arc with 140 amps of current. As they moved the electrodes apart, an arc vaporized the 350-micron-thick substrate, creating luminous orbs the size of a golf ball.

140 amps of current is a lot of current.  Don’t try this at home.

In my last post, I commented on the politics being played in New Hampshire, how they are gearing up for the next election. We just had one, and now they are positioning themselves for an election to happen in 2008?

If politicking year around is the only way to get bums like Attorney General Gonzales out of office, then I would do it. In committee yesterday, he asserted that the Constitution does not grant the writ of Habeas Corpus. Senator Specter doesn’t let him get away with it. Well, at least not much.

GONZALES: I will go back and look at it. The fact that the Constitution — again, there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution. There is a prohibition against taking it away. But it’s never been the case, and I’m not a Supreme —

SPECTER: Now, wait a minute. Wait a minute. The constitution says you can’t take it away, except in the case of rebellion or invasion. Doesn’t that mean you have the right of habeas corpus, unless there is an invasion or rebellion?

GONZALES: I meant by that comment, the Constitution doesn’t say, “Every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right to habeas.” It doesn’t say that. It simply says the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended except by —

SPECTER: You may be treading on your interdiction and violating common sense, Mr. Attorney General.

They have been violating common sense for a while, Senator, and you have been helping.

I’ve been to New Hampshire. It is a lovely place and I met many nice people there. But watching TV must be like walking through a minefield. Moveon.org is already running commercials there about the election in 2008.

Over the past several election cycles, Moveon.org has demonstrated a willingness to throw its weight around in the political process.

Today provides yet another example, as the influential liberal group is up with television commercials intended label Sen. John McCain — the leading Republican candidate for president in 2008 — as the leading supporter of sending more U.S. troops to Iraq.

In the ad, as images of McCain and President Bush flash across the screen, a narrator intones: “John McCain has done more than just embrace George Bush’s failed policy in Iraq. It’s actually his idea to escalate the war there.”

Jeez, govern already.  Life isn’t all politics.

The Bushites are not even bothering with the second part of the double standard.  They are sticking with just the first part.  Attorney General Gonzales is leading the Bushite charge to rid themselves of meddlesome judges.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says federal judges are unqualified to make rulings affecting national security policy, ramping up his criticism of how they handle terrorism cases.

In remarks prepared for delivery Wednesday, Gonzales says judges generally should defer to the will of the president and Congress when deciding national security cases. He also raps jurists who “apply an activist philosophy that stretches the law to suit policy preferences.”

The US Constitution has become a policy preference.  I’ll be looking for that to be featured on Fox News tomorrow.

How children absorb language is interesting.  Both JMan and Bookzilla are at the oath emitting stage: they both want to use oaths at moments of exasperation, but they don’t know any and are casting about for some that are socially acceptable but still edgy enough to capture the frustration.

JMan says “Gosh!” when a car crashes during a Playstation racing game.  In years that will come too soon, he will probably transition to exhortations of Divine intervention to perform things that are not anatomically possible, but that is in the future.  Right now, his “Gosh!”, repeated in a way that no one else would repeat it, is okay to hear.

JMan comes to the table and talks about the game that he has been playing on the Playstation 3.  I ask him a question.  He responds by saying that he already told me about the feature and I wasn’t listening.  I am about to pull rank on him when I realize that I have said those exact words to him.  We are in “do as I say, not as I do” territory.  I ask him if I have said that to him, and he denies it, sensing a social transgression.  I say that I have used those words and they were true then and probably true for me.  I undoubtedly applied some verbal context to get him to pay attention, and that tone of voice is what I heard and to which I objected.  He tries to soften it by saying that I’m supposed to take care of him and he is not supposed to take care of me.  I’m not comfortable with the double standard, but tell him that I will try to pay more attention to what he is saying in the future.

JMan sits across the table from me.  He is looking at the box for the Playstation 3 he had just been playing.  He eats his oatmeal without looking at it.  He asks about the font used on the box.  Seven years old and he talks about things in terms of font and font appearance.  The ways that computers have changed the lives of children are not easily measured.

He asks about the Playstation 4.  I try to explain that it is being planned now.  I try to explain product life cycles and how each generation of system leads to the next.  I tell him that the next platform will be coming out in about eight years.  I do a little math and tell him that if I am still around when the Playstation 6 comes out, I will be 76 and he will be 31.  He’ll probably be a parent.  I tell him that I’ll give his kids Playstation 6s.  He said:

“You go, Grandpa!”