Saturday, March 25, 2006

Legends in their own minds......


Me n' Pinetop after his performance at the Muni, Eureka, Ca. 3/25/06

It was just a shitty camera-phone, but it was "priceless" to me cause as soon as Pintop seen that camera he had to git in the picture. :)

That man don't miss a thing.......even at 92

Thursday, March 23, 2006

And the Band Played On..........


The sixteenth annual Redwood Coast Jazz Festival kicked off at the Adorni Center, with dignitaries arriving in style.

Donna Landry, from the world famous A-Train, stopped to "throw a pose" for photographers outside the Big Band Dance opening.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Sixteenth Annual Jazz Festival


The sixteenth annual Redwood Coast Jazz Festival kicks off this thursday night and continues thru the weekend. Yours truly has been selected (hornswaggled) to be the "band driver coordinator" et al. Iffin yur near Humboldt County, California this weekend come check it out.


official site here











I can't wait to go back to work so I can relax. :)

Friday, March 17, 2006

Fox News Reporter Blows It

Feingold Calls Warrantless Wiretaps an Impeachable Offense
Thursday, March 16, 2006 By Liza Porteus

Fox News Story

WASHINGTON Although President Bush's authorization of
warrantless wiretaps is likely an impeachable offense, Sen. Russ
Feingold hopes to be a "voice of moderation" in not pushing the
Senate toward that option, the Wisconsin Democrat said Thursday.

I sent an email to Feedback@foxnews.com :

"I request that Fox News retracts this statement and clarifys it. Is this Liza's opinion that the "warrantless wiretaps is likely an impeachable offense"? The statement is not in quotes.

I will await (patiently) for a response. This is exactly how the MSM (and rarely Fox) play the "tell a lie long enough and it becomes the truth" syndrome.

Despite the fact that most (80%) of the people in this country favor the NSA listening to terrorist calls coming into the country, President Bush has stated, (and the attorney generals office has confirmed) that this is an authority granted the President under the War Powers Act.

Powerline has some excellent articles here and here.

Updates: (pending)

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Russell Feingold...............RIP?

Rovinsworld decided to "search" the pages of four large newspapers (online) the day after Russ Feingold introduced his censure motion.

The Washington Times posted this story on the front page, but the other three had nothing.

But was I surprised to find this in my "search" for the story in NYT's search engine. The search found no entries but suggested "Search Paid Death Notices and Paid Memorial Notices for" and there is Sen. Russell Feingold. (Click on Photo to enlarge)

Papers of Record, that published this story: SF Chron..........not in the last 30 days.

LA Times: Posted this story about Feingolds intentions (before Feingold took the resolution to the floor) : Democrat Plans to Ask Senate to Censure Bush By Richard Simon, Times Staff WriterMarch 13, 2006:

WASHINGTON — Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.) said Sunday that he would ask the Senate to censure President Bush for authorizing a warrantless domestic spying program, signaling a new determination by Democrats to keep the heat on the White House over the controversial eavesdropping by the National Security Agency.

Today's search of the LA Times found nothing, but by broadening the search I found this nice one by Rosa Brooks in an op-ed:

They can't even win a war of words Democrats are mired in smallness. How hard can it be to craft a message of passion? March 10, 2006

"Part of the problem is ambition and cowardice, which together make a lethal combination. Too many would-be Democratic leaders think that "playing it safe" is the way to go. They're fine with criticizing the administration, but the minute they take any flak themselves, they go scurrying back into their holes. In place of a willingness to take risks and speak from the heart, they offer a craven and misguided dependence on polls, focus groups and "expert strategists."

'TOGETHER, America can do better." When you hear that, do you feel inspired?

I didn't think so.


Rosa never mentions "Ridiculous Russ"



I hear the kids at "Lost-Kos" have gone nuts (as usual) on this, but stay tuned.

Feingold may very well have one foot in the grave, (politically), and it appears the MSM isn't going to help with the shoveling.

Saturday, March 11, 2006

McCain and His Chances

Did anyone happen to see the near "end run" the Dems nearly used to attempt to show this nation how tough they are (not) on national security? They so dearly wanted their up or down vote on the ports deal. Bigotry aside, the Dems think the lemmings of protectionism is crutial to getting elected. With the Dems having virtually no solid platform to run on they will be willing to grab onto anything reactionary that appeals to the masses. This ports deal was to be the first step on the plank.

Let me first say, IMO, this UAE deal should have been a slam dunk.Handled properly, the Bush administration could have had the lead in putting "real" security restrictions on the deal, stalling long enough to get a consensus. Singling out UAE as the only foreign operator in our ports is a joke. Unfortunately, UAE's "book of past" is still too much in the present. Yes, even Billys cigar will come back to haunt Hillary. Speaking of William Jefferson, I still wonder what slick Willy "promised" the Sheiks at UAE for his 300k? Did Bill know inadvance that his wife would be standing there ready to tell the nation that the UAE has no business handling our goods? Maybe I'm giving too much credit to Willy's vision on this one.

While many will say that the President has entered the lame duck status for good after this affair, IMO, President Bush has the moral high ground on this one and the bigots on both sides of the isle will go down in history as passing up one of the best opportunitys to form genuine relationships with the middle east and the Arab community. National security my ass!

When the Dems grabbed this one by the throat, (and the MSM andtheir polls) the momentum was too much for the chickin-shit Republican Party to be seen as soft of security. At that point they had no choice but to join in the defiance.

And where was John McCain in this horserace? He certainly wasn't on Bush's side. What a hypocrite.

Friday, March 10, 2006

On the Front Lines and Home


By BASSEM MROUE, Associated Press Writer Thu Mar 9, 6:28 PM ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Residents reported curious declarations hanging
from mosque walls and market stalls recently in Ramadi, the Sunni
Muslim insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad. The fliers said Iraqi
militants had turned on and were killing foreign al-Qaida fighters,
their one-time allies.

Read it all

It appears maybe the tide is turning and so are the people of Iraq. Tired of the foriegn fighters they are turning on them. This is good news.

And then some better news.........Capt. B from One Marines View has made it home.
At his website he says "we're still kickin ass".

Welcome home Cap, you done good. Semper Fi

Thursday, March 09, 2006

Snow Advisory in Eureka?

...SNOW ADVISORY IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 AM PST FRIDAY...THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN EUREKA HAS ISSUED A SNOWADVISORY...WHICH IS IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 AM PST FRIDAY.A VERY COLD AIR MASS MOVING INTO THE AREA IS ALLOWING WIDESPREADRAIN AND SNOW SHOWERS TO MOVE INTO NORTHWEST CALIFORNIA. SNOWLEVELS ARE CURRENTLY AROUND 1000 FEET...BUT WILL DROP TO500 FEET THROUGH THIS EVENING. SNOW LEVELS WILL TEMPORARILY DROPTO SEA LEVEL IN THE MORE INTENSE SHOWERS...WITH ACCUMULATIONS OFUP TO 1 INCH AT THE LOWER ELEVATIONS. 2 TO 4 INCHES IS LIKELYABOVE 500 FEET BY FRIDAY MORNING.

This is so rare in Eureka (sea level) I remember getting three inches in 1989 that fell right on the beach. Quite a site.

Live Blogging is Fun

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A United Arab Emirates-owned company has agreed to turn over all of its operations at U.S. ports to an American "entity," Sen. John Warner said Thursday.

Reading a statement from DP World on the Senate floor, Warner, a Virginia Republican, said the reason is "to preserve" the strong relationship between the UAE and United States.
via CNN

Live blogging news conference

Harry Ried calling for an up or down vote. They are appearantly are being denied a chance to vote on their precious ammendment that tells Bush "no to Dubai" Reid throws in Katrina.

Schumer gets his two seconds of national network coverage and blamm! see ya

Fox switches to GW live signing the Patriot act. Now there is what I call knowing what a priorety is. The timing of all this is sweet!

Cnbc is still running the Democratic press conference. Dodd, Schumer, Ried, Menendez, and Hillary all lined up to bitch about not being able to vote on this ammendment (at this time)

Cnbc is the only station that remained with the dems, now have switch to GW signing also
Both Cnn stations and msnbc have switch to GW and the Patriot Act signing.

This is all too fun! Hillary never got her national press, but I'm sure the MSM will get her message out.

Rovs Evenings Post

From Captains Quarters:

Are The Democrats Coming Apart?

A coalition of Democrats have begun an effort to wrest control of the Democratic Party away from the train wreck of Howard Dean's chairmanship. This coalition, led by former Clintonista Harold Ickes and funded by George Soros, has selected Ickes to head a data-mining project intended on giving better voter information to key Congressional campaigns:

A group of well-connected Democrats led by a former top aide to Bill Clinton is raising millions of dollars to start a private firm that plans to compile huge amounts of data on Americans to identify Democratic voters and blunt what has been a clear Republican lead in using technology for political advantage. The effort by Harold Ickes, a deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White House and an adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), is prompting intense behind-the-scenes debate in Democratic circles. Officials at the Democratic National Committee think that creating a modern database is their job, and they say that a competing for-profit entity could divert energy and money that should instead be invested with the national party.

Ickes and others involved in the effort acknowledge that their activities are in part a vote of no confidence that the DNC under Chairman Howard Dean is ready to compete with Republicans on the technological front. "The Republicans have developed a cadre of people who appreciate databases and know how to use them, and we are way behind the march," said Ickes, whose political technology venture is being backed by financier George Soros.

"It's unclear what the DNC is doing. Is it going to be kept up to date?" Ickes asked, adding that out-of-date voter information is "worse than having no database at all."

Ickes's effort is drawing particular notice among Washington operatives who know about it because of speculation that he is acting to build a campaign resource for a possible 2008 presidential run by Hillary Clinton. She has long been concerned, advisers say, that Democrats and liberals lack the political infrastructure of Republicans and their conservative allies. Ickes said his new venture, Data Warehouse, will at first seek to sell its targeting information to politically active unions and liberal interest groups, rather than campaigns.

It looks like Soros is playing both sides of the street. His money helped launch MoveOn and keeps it going to this day, and that faction of the party is the same that pushed Dean into the top spot at the DNC. Now Soros has chosen to also finance Ickes and his attempt to bypass Dean's inept leadership and the DNC altogether by building a competing GOTV machine.

This puts Democratic candidates in a real bind; normally they would work with their elected leadership to coordinate voter strategy and outreach. However, now they will have to choose between that official leadership and this shadow elite that wants to use Soros' money to bypass the party's official management. This promises to set up a serious split in the party, with incumbents and challengers forced to choose between the two cliques. Even though Soros has involvement in both factions, it will likely develop into a split between the leftists that insisted on Dean for the chair and the people who believe that the Democrats have to come back to the center to be competitive.

In an election that appears to hold the most promise for Democrats in over a decade, this could not come at a worse time. The immediate blame for this goes to the Clintonistas, who have never been happy with Howard Dean -- and who could blame them? The real problem started with his election and the emergence of the Left in the Democratic Party, and the loss of common sense and electoral intelligence it portended.

I find it deliciously ironic that this split will probably become unavoidable all because of a dispute over the best management of data mining. Too bad the Democrats didn't have this kind of enthusiasm for it when Able Danger and LIWF於心底;或者,讓我某日再認識你。

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

The Will of this Nation

Nearly 56 years ago, in 1950, the Truman administration issued what would become a framework for America's Cold War strategy for four decades. In a formerly classified document called NSC 68, the Truman administration said, quote, "Our fundamental purpose is more likely to be defeated from lack of will to maintain it than from any mistakes we may make or assault we may undergo because of asserting that will," unquote. Today our nation is again in a long struggle. And again, the toughest challenge will be to maintain our national will to persevere and to prevail.

Secretary Rumsfeld

The "backbone" of this country and their "will" has deteriorated into the passive society of the 60's. Again.

Patriotism has taken a back seat to privilege and the pursuit of power. The democratic party is so incensed with regaining that power they have no regard for the overall safety and security of the nation. In their minds everything that this administration has done to fight terrorism is wrong. Dead wrong. And yet they offer no plan or a better idea, other that to bash Bush for political gain. And these people want to be back in power for what reason? To protect us? Maybe they can talk the mullahs and terrorist to death.

I believe Truman and Rumsfeld are right to question the resolve of this nation. The term "united" in this fight is no where to be found.

Shame

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Mailer, the People, and the Elite Left

While watching Norman Mailer being interviewed on FNC last evening, I was reminded again of how far the political left of today has come from the founding tenets of political liberalism. It is easy enough to seize on Mailer’s claim that the 52% of Americans that voted for George Bush are simply “stupid,” or that we went to war in Iraq to assuage the ego of white American males, or that Cheney withheld the shooting story from the press for 24 hours, knowing that the press would become crazed, and thus show its worst side to the American public.

Perhaps Mailer’s self-avowed elitism explains the first claim; indeed, if there were a Maureen Dowd Award for Self-absorbed Elitism, Mailer’s insistence that 52% of Americans are stupid because they voted for George Bush would surely be a nominee. It is not because the 52% are uninformed, not because after comparing the options, they settled for the lesser of two evils, not because they made a judgment that their concerns and values were more likely represented in Bush than Kerry. No; they voted as they did because they were “stupid.”

But this of course is an inversion of the view of our Founding Fathers. Steeped as they were in the Enlightenment thought of the time, the Fathers drafted a Constitution that they thought would protect the people from government. In Mailer’s world, democracy must be protected from the people.

In Mailer’s world, democracy is a noble enterprise and therefore tenuous – always to be protected from the baser instincts of the people whose natural state, according to Mailer, is a tendency toward fascism. Put aside for the moment the Left’s fascination with the unfounded comparisons between President Bush and fascism. The difference between the elite left and the authors of modern democracy lies in what sustains our best impulses.

Mailer reviles Bush in part because he “speaks in clichés,” because he does not elevate the language. Indeed Mailer goes so far as to claim that what sustained the British during the ebb and flow of empire is….Shakespeare.

Really? This is what we are to think? That it was Shakespeare that sustained the British during World War II? Or compare the British reaction to Ghandi’s independence movement to the Chinese reaction to Tianemen Square. Are we really to think that the difference in the two governments’ reactions is fundamentally to be found in the British being able to “fall back on” Shakespeare and the Chinese only being able to fall back on Confucius or Lao Tzu?

Here is a far more likely explanation: The British government of 1947, unlike the Chinese government of 1989, thinks that the actions of a government and a people are answerable to some independent moral order, that our nobility lies in our ability to rise above our baser instincts and act according to a code that is independent of our speeches, of our party documents, or even of our best authors. And that independent moral order holds that killing innocent protesters is wrong. The British government of 1947 may have made a number of political calculations, but only the most cynical would claim that they did not also think that killing innocent protesters was, is, and will be wrong. Unlike the Stalinist Beijing government, whose only interest was what the party said, quite apart from what the people wanted. Stalinism answers only to its own party-line view; no facts interfere, and no notice need be taken of the choices of the people. The difference between the two governmental reactions is better explained by their differing views about whether our actions can be judged by some extra-human moral order.

One need not be Christian to prefer this explanation over Mailer’s “Shakespeare explanation.” The intellectual source for Ghandi’s views lay in Hinduism, which looks to a reality other than the speeches and artwork of the most recently celebrated humans.

But in Mailer’s world, the only justification of our noble experiment in democracy lies in our speeches, in our social constructions, in our judgments about what is valuable. For Mailer, as for so many others in the contemporary elite left, all that matters is our latest theory. Some claim is a fact, some assertion is a reason to act if it fits with our most recent story of our success or failure. It does not matter that there is no evidence, no facts outside of his own theory that support Mailer’s claim that Cheney judged that withholding the shooting story for 24-48 hours would craze the media so that they would fly into a rage, thus further undermining American’s confidence in the media. Nor does it matter that the sociological-psychological theory has yet to be invented that would sustain the claim that the current war in Iraq came about to assuage the egos of white American males. All that matters in Mailer’s view is that the latest theory, the latest fad of interpretation can explain another event in a manner suitable to the elite left. For there are no facts of human nature, and there are most certainly no facts about a moral order that has its source in something other than what human beings say. For the elite left, “spinning a good yarn” is all that remains of “searching for the truth.”

Whatever one thinks of the Enlightenment view that people are guided by rational self-interest, and that given the needed information, they will make far better choices for the course of their own lives than any government could – whatever one thinks about this view, it still recognizes that there are facts about human nature, facts about the world that are not of our own making. And our political theories ought to be accountable to these facts. It is ironic that the some of the 20th and 21st century heirs to the Enlightenment should have come to the view that government must be protected from the people.

There is a sadder irony to Mailer’s view. It is, of course, a sad irony, for example, that the elite left can no longer make sense of Martin Luther King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” with its insistence that the rightness of the civil rights movement lies in a moral order that is not the creation of human beings. Or, for example, that in their rush to advance human rights, they have to cross their fingers when they read those famous words in the Declaration of Independence – and hope that some intellectual will finally come up with an explanation of human rights that does not in the end depend on something extra-human, on some divine being.

The sadder irony lies in Mailer’s insistence that the only truth lies in our own speeches, our own stories of our self-invention, our own self-serving and self-absorbed accounts of human nature. For Mailer does not apparently see that once the left decides that there is no extra-human moral order, no extra-human set of facts to which we can appeal to judge our theories and conjectures, that the real worry is not fascism. There really is no chance that we will wake up early in November of 2008 and find that George Bush has decided to call off the election, claiming that he knows what’s best for us.

No, the real irony is that the left – fearing that the people are too stupid to entrust with the American experiment in democracy – will collapse into its ultimate perversion. The British are sustained by Shakespeare, and we are sustained by the elite left’s view of the direction our democracy should take. It may be that the elite left has already decided that their view is no longer answerable to any facts, that the people can no longer be trusted, that the people are too “stupid” to run their own government or their own lives. But if the elite left is on the road to concluding that all that matters is their view of how our democracy should function, that there are no facts that limit their conjectures, that we are only guided by our own speeches, our own inventions, our own theories, then the elite left is surely on the high road to Stalinism. And the irony is that the elite left – the group that prides itself so on its intellectual superiority to the people – should be so oblivious to this danger.

by Onejacktwomany

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

SF Moonbats Created

I've created a new blog specifically for San Francisco.

It's called SFMoonbats

The have lost their minds and my heart:

San Francisco's supervisors jumped into national politics Tuesday, passing a resolution asking the city's Democratic congressional delegation to seek the impeachment of President Bush for failing to perform his duties by leading the country into war in Iraq, eroding civil liberties and engaging in other activities the board sees as transgressions.

The supervisors, in voting 7-3 for the resolution, ensured that San Francisco again will become grist for radio and TV talk shows. The city has appeared in the national media spotlight recently for voters' passage in November of a nonbinding measure banning military recruiters from public high schools and for Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval's recent comment on a Fox News show that the United States doesn't need a military.

Full Story here