Pauline at Perennial Student has a post up about offshore drilling (which is just as much about the different ways the story can be spun by the media, depending on whom you read and what their agenda is); she has some good links and even better commentary. I particularly appreciated the introduction to SOS California, a group working to find ways to capture/recover oil that naturally seeps into the ocean—thereby both providing energy and reducing pollution. I’d never heard of them before, but may their tribe increase.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Continuing technical problems
are continuing to foul things up; they aren’t even related, it’s just one thing after another going wrong.
I hate computers.
(Right now, anyway.)
Advertising Sarah Palin
This is a nice piece of work boosting Gov. Palin as a potential running mate for John McCain; the further along this campaign goes, the more I think Sen. McCain really needs to make this move, and not to wait much longer to do it.
HT: Adam Brickley
Is there such a thing as a moderate Democrat?
In some senses, yes; obviously, individuals can be. As a matter of practical national politics, though, Dick Morris says “No,” and he has history to back him up. Barack Obama may be moving to the center now, but if he wins in November, the Democratic leadership in Congress will pull him back to his hard-left primary positions, just as they pulled Bill Clinton hard left after his election; and the same sort of thing will happen to all those moderate Democrats the party’s raised up to run in conservative House districts around the country. Whatever their personal positions, they’ll either be reliable votes for the Democratic leadership or they’ll be marginalized right out of Congress. Which is to say, on the national level, there’s really no such thing as a moderate Democrat: whatever they say now, when it comes down to votes, they’ll vote with Nancy Pelosi.
Best-laid plans
So, the problem with the modem is fixed, but now the router no longer works properly, and I haven’t had the time yet to call tech support and get it set back up correctly . . . as such, it might be a few days yet before this blog returns to normally-scheduled programming.
The idiosyncrasies of technology
Well, with considerable help from our ISP, we’ve found out why our connection’s been wonky: apparently our modem has been hoarding IP addresses. It’s supposed to grab an available one when the computer comes on and needs one, then release it when there’s no longer a computer actively connected to it; but it hasn’t been doing that. Instead, it’s been grabbing them and keeping them—it’s currently up to four IP addresses, which has been creating a major traffic jam for our computers. The tech said he’d never seen anything like it; they’re having to bump this one up to the big technical guns to get it unsnarled. If all goes well, though, this should be fixed sometime within the next 24 hours, and the connection working properly again. That will be nice.
The tipping point in the War on Terror?
If not, it sounds like we’re at least to the tipping point in Iraq; the headline in The Times of London reads, “Iraqis lead final purge of Al-Qaeda,” and the article quotes the major general commanding the American forces in northern Iraq as saying, “I think we’re at the irreversible point.” Even Barack Obama is starting to admit he may not be able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Personally, I’d call that progress.Also, those interested in the ongoing efforts to clean up Iraq after Saddam’s rule might appreciate this story: we just finished moving the last 550 metric tonnes of yellowcake uranium from the Tuwaitha nuclear complex in Iraq (about 12 miles south of Baghdad) to Canada, where it will be used to generate electricity. Apparently, there was a great sigh of relief once the stuff was finally out of the region. Now, the goal is the decontamination of Tuwaitha. The article dryly notes that “U.S. and Iraqi forces have guarded the 23,000-acre site—surrounded by huge sand berms—following a wave of looting after Saddam’s fall that included villagers toting away yellowcake storage barrels for use as drinking water cisterns,” which just makes me shudder; the sooner that place is safe, the better.HT: Bill
Democrats for faith-based initiatives?
I’ve said before that one of the things I appreciate about Barack Obama is his commitment, as a liberal Democrat and a Christian, to making the case to his fellow Democrats for allowing and heeding religious voices and arguments in the public square; it was thus no surprise, but nevertheless a good moment, to see him make the case for continuing and expanding the current administration’s support for religious social-service organizations. What I didn’t expect was to see the Rev. Wes Granberg-Michaelson, the General Secretary of the Reformed Church in America (my home denomination), weigh in with the comment that in doing so, Sen. Obama is only rebalancing the issue and reclaiming a prior Democratic position:
In September 2000 I was at a breakfast for religious leaders at the White House when President Clinton said that regardless of who was elected that fall (Bush vs. Gore), faith-based initiatives would be one of the new challenges to be worked on by any president. And the best speech on the subject was given by Al Gore during that campaign. So this never was seen as a “Republican” idea until Bush was elected, and then many more Democrats began to distance themselves from the initiative. . . .The pundits have it wrong. This isn’t a right-wing or a left-wing idea; it isn’t a Republican or a Democratic idea. It’s simply a good idea.
I have a great deal of respect for Wes, and I certainly agree that this shouldn’t be “a right-wing or a left-wing idea”; equally, I hope his optimism that this can be an issue on which the parties can make common cause proves out. However, I think he’s forgetting something: there are a lot of Democrats who don’t agree with him, who think this is a “right-wing idea,” want no part of it, and want no part of Sen. Obama speaking out for it. I agree that the marginalization of the Christian Left, to the point where folks like Jim Wallis are basically rubber stamps for the secular Left, is a bad thing; I’m not, however, optimistic that it can be reversed as easily as all that. I applaud Sen. Obama’s commitment to continuing and expanding the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives—but if he’s elected, I’ll be very much surprised if that’s a commitment on which his party permits him to follow through.HT: Presbyweb
Maybe they should lay off the Guinness, eh?
If you’ve ever flown Aer Lingus, the national airline of Ireland, you might want to take a moment and say a prayer of gratitude that you made it home. As Lindsay Watt noted recently on her blog Random Dispatches, for an airline, they seem to have a small problem with geography. Apparently upstate New York has moved to Québec without telling us, taking Maine with it:
You may also notice, down in the corner, that they’ve relocated New Orleans. Nice of them to do that, but maybe a little late. Pittsburgh, meanwhile, appears to be somewhere in Ohio. For the whole map from Aer Lingus’ inflight magazine, check out the original post.HT: Strange Maps
When the bank is your sweetheart
Apparently, when Sen. Barack and Michelle Obama bought their Hyde Park mansion, they got “an unusually low discount interest rate” on their $1.3 million home loan from Illinois’ Northern Trust Bank, well below what others could have expected to get. As political news, this isn’t in the same category as Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-CT, and Sen. Kent Conrad, D-ND, getting sweetheart deals from Countrywide Financial Corp.—unlike Countrywide, Northern Trust isn’t in the middle of a financial scandal—or even the news that Sen. John and Cindy McCain were four years behind on the taxes on their California beachfront condo (they had nearly caught up on their back taxes when the story broke); but it does highlight the fact that when you’re a rising star, when you have influence and your influence is increasing, everybody wants a piece of you, and everybody wants to get on your good side. It also highlights the fact that the appearance of impropriety, or of partiality, can be as damaging as the real thing. (Just ask Sen. McCain, who’s been criticized in some quarters for having lobbyists on his staff even though he’s never yet changed positions at a lobbyist’s behest.) This is yet one more thing at which Sen. Obama doesn’t have much experience; I hope for his sake (and for all of ours) that he’s guarding his heart, and his integrity, carefully.“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Great men are almost always bad men.”—Lord Acton