What a suprise!

Well, well, how surprising -- ". . . with Saturday's constitutional referendum appearing more likely to divide than unify the country, some within the administration have concluded that the quest for democracy in Iraq, at least in its current form, could actually strengthen the insurgency . . ." Oh, quel suprise -- so, actually, Bush can argue that they have stayed the course long enough, and it would actually enhance democracy if the US just pulls troops out before the congressional midterms next fall? Except, of course, for the 20,000 troops who will hunker down on those permanent bases.
I don't know if they can actually sell this one to the American people as peace with honour, considering that war with dishonour is the more likely scenario for the next six months regardless of how many purple fingers are waggled.

Cutest kitten ever

Just for fun, I stole this from The Poorman.
The photo is actually entitled "cutest kitten ever".

Pandemic Flu Awareness Week

This week was Pandemic Flu Awareness Week on the blogs -- I haven't had anything to contribute to this discussion, but here is some handy information about personal preparedness.
Though I find the survival articles interesting -- for example, it would not have occurred to me to stockpile brown rice as a diet staple -- I am probably not scared enough or organized enough to make disaster preparedness part of my daily life. However, I did find this post from Aetiology
How ready are we, and what can YOU do? which gives some pretty basic advice that I can follow:

. . . wash your hands . . . many of us still don’t do it correctly. It is recommended to wash with soap and running water for at least 20 seconds . . . Teach your children to do this as well: have them count to 20 or sing their ABC’s while washing their hands . . .
If you’re sick, please, please, please stay home. Adults are contagious for ~5 days and children for up to 21 days after becoming sick. Don’t go and expose others when you’re coughing, sneezing and hacking all over the place.
Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth . . . re-train yourself not to cover your mouth with your hands when you cough: use a tissue, or the crook of your arm—-something that won’t come into contact as often with surfaces, or with other people.
Get a flu shot. No, it won’t protect you from “bird” flu, but should that virus spread, it will prevent you from being co-infected with both viruses and passing along any potential recombinant viruses . . .
Get stocked up. You should always have a supply of food, water, medications, and basic household necessities on hand in the event of any kind of disaster . . .

Great line of the day

Crawl Across the Ocean writes:

. . . our 'qwerty' keyboard receives it's non-intuitive layout ad part of a scheme to slow typists sown do that they wouldn't overload the typewriters of the say. . . . it occurred to me that - in this era of spell-checkers - if I has been allocates the task of redesigning the keyboard, the best thing to so would be to come up with a layout which minimized the chanced of mid-typing something but still creating a valid word at the dame time. I wouldn't put the 's' and the 'd' beside each other, that id for sure.

Emphadid mine.

Mark A. R. Kleiman: Patrick Fitzgerald's mousetrap

Mark Kleinman's blog on Patrick Fitzgerald's mousetrap explains the latest Plame theory-of-everything pretty well, a scenario which is particularly believable in terms of the egotistical personalities involved in this story. Read the whole thing.

Some earthquake photos

(AFP/Sajjad Hussain) Survivors in Kashmir


(AP Photo/B.K.Bangash) A makeshift ward is set up outside a hospital in Abbotabad.


REUTERS/Danish Ismail Rescue in Srinagar


REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood Volunteers gather at the site of a collapsed apartment building in Islamabad.
More photos here.

Good Better Best

Good.

Cam Cardow, The Ottawa Citizen

Better.

Non-sequitur

Best.

Ann Telnaes

Great line of the day

From firedoglake: "Note to self: do not EVER play poker with Patrick Fitzgerald."
I've put up a few new links, and reorganized a few of the existing ones. One of the new ones is Firedoglake, where this line comes from -- its part of an interesting article on the latest in the Plame story.
All over left blogistan, the cry is going up -- "Oh please, oh please, oh please . . . ". (This quotes WTF is it Now? orgiastically contemplating even the possibility of a Rove frogmarch moment. But everyone else feels the same way.)
If you thought right-wingers were disappointed with Hariett Miers, I cannot even imagine the gloom in left blogistan if Fitzgerald announces next week 'so long and thanks for all the fish.' However, I don't think he will -- he has been too serious in his approach, on everything from interviewing Bush and Cheney to jailing Judy Miller, to be shooting blanks. There are all sorts of scenarios being booted about, but the one everyone seems to think most likely is that Scooter is going down, maybe also Rove, and maybe with Cheney and/or Bush as unindicted co-conspirators -- see also Lawrence O'Donnell's stuff, and emptywheel's stuff.

By Howie, I think he's got it!

Dean Aims to Overhaul Democrats -- well, well, will wonders never cease. A story which is positive about: 1)Howard Dean, and 2) what he is doing with the Democrats.

Dean is putting four or five DNC staff members in every state with orders to organize every precinct. One of the organizers' first mandates is to conduct four major events a year, one or two of which are mainly social. Dean learned from his own campaign that it is critical to form relationships that turn into small communities and build into networks of people who feel part of a bottom-up operation with a purpose larger than themselves. It's a long-term investment that runs counter to the political culture in Washington that, in the last years of the 20th century, has valued multimillion-dollar TV buys over grass-roots organizing. 'You've got to recruit people. You've got to ask them to do something,' Dean said. 'You have to treat them like a community.'

Absolutely correct, Howie.

A Hallway Moment

IAEA, Agency Chief Win Nobel Peace Prize I'll bet this announcement made John Bolton run down a hallway screaming.

Sudoko

Apparently this is the newest fad -- its been going on for months in European newspapers, for years in Japan -- but I just heard about it so it is new to me!
Anyway, the aim in a Sudoko puzzle is to fill in the blanks with numbers. Each square must contain each of the numbers 1 to 9, and each row and each column of the whole puzzle also contain each the numbers 1 to 9. Its a logic game, not a math game. Here's an example of a typical Sudoko puzzle:

Above is a typical Sudoko puzzle -- click here for the solution. For background on the game and the fad, see the Wikipedia article here. And for a web-version of Sudoko, here is a webpage where anyone can play.

Sewing them back on . . .

. . . one stitch at a time -- Senate votes to restrict treatment of detainees
One of the many hysterically funny scenes from Fawlty Towers is when Basil is trying to hide from Sybil that he has been betting. She sneers at him "Basil, you know what I will do to you if I find out you have been gambling," and he mutters "You'll have to sew them back on first."
Anyway, I was reminded of that visual when I read about the Senate vote on the anti-torture provision.

Another great line of the day

Atrios sums up the source of right-wing anger : against Miers:

Wingnuttia is rather angry at the choice. I don't think this is because they're really concerned that she's not conservative enough for their tastes, although that's part of it. They're angry because this was supposed to be their nomination. This is was their moment. They didn't just want a stealth victory, they wanted parades and fireworks. They wanted Bush to find the wingnuttiest wingnut on the planet, fully clothed and accessorized in all the latest wingnut fashions, not just to give them their desired Court rulings, but also to publicly validate their influence and power. They didn't just want substantive results, what they wanted even more were symbolic ones. They wanted Bush to extend a giant middle finger to everyone to the left of John Ashcroft. They wanted to watch Democrats howl and scream and then ultimately lose a nasty confirmation battle. They wanted this to be their 'WE RUN THE COUNTRY AND THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT' moment. Whatever kind of judge she would be, she doesn't provide them with that.

I thought this was a perceptive comment. There is an amazing degree of "gottcha" in the US political sphere.
It behooves us to try to avoid that kind of wingnuttery. For example, I don't agree with Stephen Harper and the Conservatives, but I don't think he is an incompetent moron who hates Canada -- in the US, it seems like the right wing is encouraged to feel that way about the librulls. Maybe its just divine inspiration.

Great line of the day

Mike Whitney writes in Iraq: a right-rolicking cock-up:

Rumsfeld has no intention of allowing the free media to chronicle and photograph the orgy of terror he has engendered in Iraq. The American people must never see the countless lives that are sacrificed or ruined so they pedal-about in their behemoth luxury-vehicles. An iron curtain has been drawn around Iraq, allowing the invading power to wreak havoc across the country with complete impunity. Nearly a full year has passed since Falluja was leveled in a drunken fit of revenge and still the apocryphal 'free press' hasn't produced pictures of the devastation for their American audience.

Emphasis mine. Maybe I noticed this paragraph because I have been thinking along the same lines as Mike Whitney that there is bad stuff happening in Iraq these days which isn't getting reported because no one is there to do this job.

Sisters in Spirit

Here is a campaign I just read about -- Sisters in Spirit -- which is aiming to raise awareness about the number of missing Aboriginal women in Canada. It is at least 500 since 1985. On the site, they list three Saskatchewan teenagers who went missing just this summer. It is very frightening to realize how little publicity these cases get.
The federal Liberals are supposed to be supporting them with some bucks for a hotline and database and research funds, but after the big announcement the dollars aren't coming.

Heritage Minister Liza Frulla, responsible for Status of Women, now says the money will be released sometime after that Oct. 17 hearing. She has been repeatedly criticized in the Commons for not moving sooner. "Over the summer six more aboriginal women disappeared," Conservative MP Lynne Yelich of Saskatchewan said Friday. "The Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations issued a warning of the potential risk of abduction. The problem is real. The Liberal reaction is not. When is the government going to treat this with the urgency it deserves?"

I agree. Its has just too easy for society to ignore the disappearance of Aboriginal women; without this research, the magnitude of the problem is difficult to grasp. How many years did it take for the Vancouver police to realize that women were being systematically murdered? Even here in Saskatoon, we have had serial killings of Aboriginal women -- a fellow was convicted about 10 years ago -- and it looks like Edmonton may have a serial killer operating now.