Month: July 2004

We just learned that one of our nieces has scoliosis and is going to have surgery next week — a 10 hour procedure. Pretty daunting stuff and she’s just 14.

So we’re putting together a care package for her, to help make the time go by easier in the hospital (a five day stay) and during her convalescence at home (another 4 – 6 weeks). We’re putting some useful stuff like a journal pad, some fun pens, and lots of fun warm socks (hospitals are COLD). But we — or the kids — decided to read some books for her. (She’s not a big reader herself, or we would just send along some books.)

Continue reading “books on tape”

[IP] " I write badly, therefore I am a would-be terrorist":

Suddenly a light went on in my head. I remembered the passenger on my left leaning forward in his seat as I scribbled while we waited for takeoff. Seconds later, he’d clambered hastily over me without apology to make his way to the front of the plane. I’d assumed intestinal complications, but now that I thought about it, he hadn’t used the bathroom. He’d spoken briefly with the flight attendants and returned to his seat. As the security woman looked at me, I now realized the passenger had been about as interested in my puzzling prowess as she was.

So an otherwise respectable citizen works on the NYTimes crossword puzzle and jots down a note to himself — some dialog for a novel he’s working on — but the note contains the word “bomb.” Not as in “there’s a bomb on this plane” or “I have a bomb in my briefcase” but “I know this is kind of a bomb,” to be spoken by a 19 year old female character. I guess people of my generation would say “bombshell.”

And his seatmate on the flight reported him as a suspected terrorist to the cabin crew. I would be concerned by a passenger who climbs out of his seat and distracts the cabin staff with cockamamie stories about passengers with exploding crossword puzzles. I never heard of anyone taking over a plane without getting out of his seat. While I realize no one wants to take a chance that they aren’t sitting next to the next Richard Reid, over-reacting might be worse.

The New Republic Online: July Surprise?:

Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs by the election

[. . . ]

A White House aide told [Lieutenant General Ehsan] ul-Haq last spring that “it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July”–the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Do you feel safer, knowing that no one in the administration has cared about these high value targets until election time? Do you feel you’re getting your money’s worth?

Didn’t that book of Orwell’s describe the use of stage-managed events to keep the proles in line?

In Through the Out Door:

Talk that gay rights activists are going to out closeted Bush administration members and politicians is getting louder and louder around here — not so much a whisper campaign but a deafening roar. [ . . . ] The whole idea of outing has always seemed like overkill to us, anyway. We think being a gay Republican — Wow! Your own private hell! — must be torture enough.

Washington Blade Online:

[Barney] Frank, to the contrary, has said he came out because he was “motivated by two factors: my deep personal unhappiness with my life as a closeted public person, and my view that it would be helpful in our fight against homophobia if I joined approximately 432 of my House colleagues in being honest about my sexual orientation.”

435 take away 432 leaves, um, 3. And that’s not openly gay members, but closeted ones. In a sense the fact that there are gays staffers and electeds means that one’s sexual orientation really doesn’t have any effect on anyone’s job performance. It’s not that much of a stretch to claim that the practice of hiring or continuing to employ gay staff make the arguments for discrimination unsupportable.

I guess it all comes down to whose children we’re concerned about.

Military Analyst Describes Abuse of 16-Year-Old in Iraq Prison:

A military intelligence analyst who recently completed duty at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq said Wednesday that the 16-year-old son of a detainee there was abused by U.S. soldiers in order to break his father’s resistance to interrogators.

The analyst said the teenager was stripped naked, thrown in the back of an open truck, driven around in the cold night air, splattered with mud and then presented to his father at Abu Ghraib, the prison at the center of the ongoing scandal over abuse of Iraqi detainees.

What will come of this?

Hosea 8:7 – “They sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind.” So much for the moral values of our Christian leaders: this comes right out of the Crusades.

The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > Cheney on the Hustings: The Reluctant Candidate:

ALTOONA, Pa., July 4 – By the second rally of his weekend campaign swing, Vice President Dick Cheney seemed to be getting the hang of it, delivering an entire line of his standard stump speech looking at the audience instead of the podium as he usually does.

Then the audience got a little too excited. Their cheers forced him to read the same line twice. The vice president is a man who likes to get on with things.

“You guys want to hear this speech or not?” he asked, not angrily but not quite kidding.
[ . . . ]
“I think his style is very effective,” said Steve Schmidt, a campaign spokesman. “He was a tremendous asset in 2000 and he’ll be a tremendous asset in 2004.”

Oh please please please please keep him on the ticket.

Having seen this, it becomes obvious the GOP daren’t recruit McCain to replace BigTime . . .
DNC Video: McCain:
“DNC Video: McCain on Bush”

:

John Kerry’s 757 was in hgr 4 pit [Pittsburgh Airport] tonight John Edwards vp decals were being put on engine cowlings and upper fuselage.