Paucity

I'll be away from the Intertubes for a few days.

So please, surf the blogroll. And their blogrolls.

Republicans Are Willful Idiots

Republicans announced Thursday that they plan to call a white firefighter to testify against Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor during her Senate confirmation hearings that open Monday.

I have seen nothing to indicate that the 2nd Circuits decision in the Ricci case was not correct in accordance with the then-existing Supreme Court precedent. Lower courts are bound to decide cases based on the guidance of the Supreme Court. If the Supremes later reverse themselves, they are entitled to do that, but no lower court is entitled to decide a case if their decision would contradict what the Supreme Court has previously held.

For Republicans to claim otherwise is nothing more than cynical political grandstanding.

That Sub Is So Fraked

Last march, the USS Hartford, a Los Angeles class submarine, collided with the USS New Orleans in the Straits of Hormuz.

According to a report in today's the New London Day, the Electric Boat Shipyard in Groton, CT now has repair contracts for that boat amounting to $37.4 million. The work will not be completed until after the first of next year. I don't know for certain, but it sure sounds to me as though they have to replace the entire sail of the boat.

This is not a good year to be on another ship and need repair work. Between the Hartford's collision and the USS Port Royal's grounding in February, the navy's repair budget has probably taken a beating. Unless it is a mission-critical repair, I'll bet that other ships are being told to eiher fix it themselves or suck it up.

(The Day's public access expires within 24 hours, so there is no point in linking to them.)

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.

Buried deep in an article about the CIA's lying and deceiving Congress for the last eight years was this little tidbit:

In a related development, President Obama threatened to veto the pending Intelligence Authorization Bill if it included a provision that would allow information about covert actions to be given to the entire House and Senate Intelligence Committees, rather than the so-called Gang of Eight — the Democratic and Republican leaders of both houses of Congress and the two Intelligence Committees.

The Gang of Eight has not been effective at doing anything, so far as I can see. When they are "read into" a program that is highly questionable if not outright illegal, they don't do anything to stop it. They might as well expand it to the "Gang of Nine" with the ninth member being the statute of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial.

Beyond that, as for all those Republicans and their allied Hindenbergs who were demanding that Nancy Pelosi should step down for accusing the CIA of lying to Congress, Hell will probably freeze over before they apologize to her.

For Your Reading Pleasure.

This floating around an e-mail chain. I don't know who wrote it; purportedly it was written by a farmer who used to fly fighters for the Junior Birdmen.

I went out to plant corn for a bit to finish a field before tomorrow morning and witnessed the Great Battle.

A golden eagle - big bastard, about six foot wingspan - flew right in front of the tractor. It was being chased by three crows that were continually dive bombing it and pecking at it. The crows do this because the eagles rob their nests when they find them.

At any rate, the eagle banked hard right in one evasive maneuver, then landed in the field about 100 feet from the tractor. This eagle stood about 3 feet tall. The crows all landed too and took up positions around the eagle at 120 degrees apart, but kept their distance at about 20 feet from the big bird. The eagle would take a couple steps towards one of the crows and they'd hop backwards and forward to keep their distance. Then the reinforcements showed up!

I happened to spot the eagle's mate hurtling down out of the sky at what appeared to be approximately Mach 1.5. Just before impact the eagle on the ground took flight, and the three crows which were watching the grounded eagle, also took flight thinking they were going to get in some more pecking on the big bird. The first crow being targeted by the diving eagle never stood a snowball's chance in hell. There was a mid-air explosion of black feathers and that crow was done! The diving eagle then banked hard left in what had to be a 9G climbing turn, using the energy it had accumulated in the dive, and hit crow #2 less than two seconds later. Another crow dead!

The grounded eagle, which was now airborne and had an altitude advantage on the remaining crow, which was streaking eastward in full burner, made a short dive then banked hard right when the escaping crow tried to evade the hit. It didn't work - crow #3 bit the dust at about 20 feet altitude.

This aerial battle was better than any airshow I've been to, including the warbirds show at Oshkosh! The two eagles ripped the crows apart and ate them on the ground, and as I got closer and closer working my way across the field, I passed within 20 feet of one of them as it ate its catch. It stopped and looked at me as I went by and you could see in the look of that bird that it knew who's Boss Of The Sky. What a beautiful bird! Not only did they kill their enemies, they ate them.

Humor Break

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

The Obama administration said Tuesday it could continue to imprison non-U.S. citizens indefinitely even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges by a U.S. military commission.

Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department's chief lawyer, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that releasing a detainee who has been tried and found not guilty was a policy decision that officials would make based on their estimate of whether the prisoner posed a future threat.

Other than not torturing people, this makes Barack Obama different from George Bush and Dick Cheney how, exactly? Obama can string together a coherent paragraph, that's the real difference?

Between that and hiring a Monsanto thug who is hostile to government inspection of slaughterhouses as the FDA guy in charge of food safety, I'm not seeing a hell of a lot of difference between the two administrations anymore.

(H/T)

Back to the Future

In a direct challenge to Microsoft, Google announced late Tuesday that it is developing an operating system for PCs that is tied to its Chrome Web browser.

The idea, as I understand it, is that Google expects people to shift more and more to netbooks and to run their applications (and store their files) on the Internet. The netbooks become, in essence, "dumb terminals" which have to access the Internet in order to perform the desired functions.

Which is just the way that office computing was done 30 years ago when companies had huge UNIX-based VAX servers from Digital Equipment Corp. You logged on at a terminal that was a keyboard and a CRT.

I, for one, am not comfortable with the idea of my stuff residing on a server that is under someone else's control. At least in the old days of the VAX or IBM mainframes, there was someone that I could to talk to (or threaten) if something went wrong. Here, if I were to use the "cloud computing" idea and my data got munged, who has the backup? Who do I talk to?

Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Microsoft. But this idea of having my stuff dispersed to Babbage knows where just doesn't wash for me.

"Cutting and Running" or "Deserting One's Post" Is Not a Bad Thing,If You Are a Republican.

Sarah Palin's bombshell that she is resigning as Alaska governor actually has boosted her a bit among Republicans, a nationwide USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, though it also has dented her standing among Democrats and independents.

Politicians are elected for defined terms. There are a handful of accepted reasons for leaving before the term up: Death, ill health, taking another post (usually by election), massive scandal or felony conviction. "Being bored" or being ground down by ethics complaints because one is a sleazeball who likes to skate on the edge are not acceptable reasons.

So what would a President Palin do if her ethics were questioned? Have a personal melt-down and quit? Would she get bored because Congress kept sending her legislation? Bailin' Palin can't handle the stresses of being the governor of a fairly empty state, how in Hades could she handle the stresses of being the president of a nuclear power and of one of the larger nations on the planet?

The plain fact of the matter, though, is that neither party has enough supporters to win the presidency without the support of both independent voters and crossover support from some of the other party. That is not going to happen with Palin. If the GOP is in the wilderness, now, Palin will drive them right into the Empty Quarter.

Sarah Palin is to the GOP what Jim Jones was to his cult in Jonestown.

Robert Strange McNamara

Died in his sleep at age 93.

Over 58,000 American men did not have the luxury of dying in their sleep in their old age, thanks in no small measure to Mr. McNamara's decisions as Secretary of Defense for both JFK and LBJ.

And that is all I have to say.