A pretty cute public service message, actually, even it does make Barbie out to be a bit of an easy slut:
If I Had The Time And Inclination To Waste My Life….
…I just might spend it doing this.
Pictured above is (obviously) an island.
But what is unique about it is this: it is a do-it-yourself portable island.
It was built by one guy, and it rests on top of 250,000 empty plastic bottles, which cause it to float. The bottles were combined in nets, then plywood and bamboo was lay down to act as the base. On top of that, he lay sand, planted mangrove trees, and even a two-story tall bamboo structure.
A motor built on one side of the island allowed to be mobile. Here’s some more on the island:
Sadly, the DIY island was destoyed in a hurricane in September 2005. Bot not to worry — he’s building another one.
In Which I Address Paul McCartney’s Ex-Wife
"There are many other kinds of milk available. Why don’t we try drinking rats’ milk and dogs’ milk?"
My answer:
Because that’s disgusting?!?
“As Far As I Know” Being The Operative Phrase Here
Bill O’Reilly, criticizing the USO:
"As far as I know, the only famous people in the past year were (country music singer) Toby Keith and me."
The facts from the USO (PDF format):
Just through September of this year, we produced 37 overseas tours with 241 performances for 98,000 troops in 14 countries, 9 stateside tours, 15 celebrity education events for military dependents, and 48 celebrity visits to military hospitals. … For 2007, we expect to take approximately 19 celebrities to Afghanistan and more than 35 to Iraq.
Plame Responds To McLennan’s Assertion That “Bush Knew”
Valerie Plame released the following statement in response to this new story:
Nov. 20, 2007 10pm EST
Santa Fe, New Mexico–I am outraged to learn that former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan confirms that he was sent out to lie to the press corps and the American public about two senior White House officials, Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby who deliberately and recklessly revealed my identity as a covert CIA operations officer. Even more shocking, McClellan confirms that not only Karl Rove and Scooter Libby told him to lie but Vice President Cheney, Presidential Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and President Bush also ordered McClellan to issue his misleading statement. Unfortunately, President Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s felony sentence has short-circuited justice.
Vice President Cheney in particular knew that Scooter Libby was involved because he had ordered and directed his actions. McClellan’s revelations provide important support for our civil suit against those who violated our national security and maliciously destroyed my career.
Baaaad Idea
AP:
SAN MARCOS, Texas – Mike Guzman and thousands of other students say the best way to prevent campus bloodshed is more guns.
Guzman, an economics major at Texas State University-San Marcos, is among 8,000 students nationwide who have joined the nonpartisan Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, arguing that students and faculty already licensed to carry concealed weapons should be allowed to pack heat along with their textbooks.
Yeah, that sounds like a good plan. Students on large campuses, free from parental supervision for the first time in their lives, where alcohol is easily available, carrying concealed weapons. What could possibly go wrong?
Hmmmmm
Conservapedia, for those who don’t know, was created (by Phyllis Schlafly’s son) as a response to the supposed "liberal bias" of Wikipedia. I’ve written about it before — it’s unintentionally hilarious.
Wonkette looks at the most viewed pages on Conservapedia, and concludes that conservatives must "harbor secret gayness".
UPDATE: Balloon Juice analyzes this:
Let’s unpack this a bit more. If those statistics are right, the page on homosexuality has been viewed 82% as often as the conservapedia home page. Maybe repeated editing amplifies the view count of particularly popular pages, but that still strikes me as just short of insane.
Regadless of whether 81% of conservapedia visitors want to hear bad things about teh ghey or some more rational number like, say, 50%, stuff like this makes it pretty hard to take seriously the tear-stained accusations of intolerance whenever a prominent conservative figure turns out to be a gay whore, a gay porn star or a public restroom perv.
Why You Shouldn’t Go To Low School
For what it’s worth, I have a hard time placing myself in any of the three categories set out in the above essay. I’m certainly not "the sucker" (the lawyer working long hours in a small firm for little pay), nor "the underpaid do-gooder" (the underpaid public interest lawyer). I’m probably closest to the "corporate serf", although I don’t quite earn buttloads of money (say, as much as a partner). On the other hand, I’m certainly doing far better than the average worker, and better than many two-income familes. And the hours, for the most part, are fairly nine-to-five, so I can have a bit of a life outside of work.
I think the essay also plays into the negative sterotype of lawyers. To be sure, the profession does have its fair share of asshole know-it-alls, as well as lawyers who fight about every detail just for the sake of fighting. But my experience is that this tends to be the exception, rather than the rule. One commenter agrees:
My experience of law, both in school and with those in practice, is that there is not really a higher percentage of arrogant, picky, petty jerks in the law than in other professions with highly educated individuals.
It is probably a bit different in big-city practice (i.e., New York), but so much depends on your locale that it is hard to generalize like the article does.
Anyway, for anyone thinking about law school, the article is well worth reading. The comments are even more informing.
VERY Important Supreme Court Case
Perhaps the most important Second Amendment case evah, and the U.S. Supreme Court has decided to take the case. I blogged about it back in March, so (if you’re interested) you can get the background.
What’s at stake? Theoretically, the whole ball of wax. The central issue is whether we as individuals have the "right to keep and bear arms", or whether we merely have that right as members of "the militia". The Second Amendment itself is kinda vague on this point. If the Court decides the latter, then it is possible that guns — even handguns — could be banned for any reason.
Let me put it this way — if the Court decides in favor of D.C., you will be hearing about "the Heller case" just as much as you hear about Roe v. Wade.
Again, I refer you to my earlier post.
Given the way the Court works, expect arguments in early spring and a decision in June 2008.
UPDATE: Here is the specific question before the Supremes:
"Whether the following provisions — D.C. Code secs. 7-2502.02(a)(4), 22-4504(a), and 7-2507.02 — violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with any state-regulated militia, but who wish to keep handguns and other firearms for private use in their homes?"
More background on this case at SCOTUSwiki
After a hiatus of 68 years, the Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to rule on the meaning of the Second Amendment — the hotly contested part of the Constitution that guarantees “a right to keep and bear arms.” Not since 1939 has the Court heard a case directly testing the Amendment’s scope — and there is a debate about whether it actually decided anything in that earlier ruling. In a sense, the Court may well be writing on a clean slate if, in the end, it decides the ultimate question: does the Second Amendment guarantee an individual right to have a gun for private use, or does it only guarantee a collective right to have guns in an organized military force such as a state National Guard unit?
MY EARLY TEA-LEAF READING: Like so much else that comes across the recent Supreme Court, Justice Kennedy is the swing vote. And my reading of Kennedy is that he will deem this the right to bear arms an individual right, making the decision 5-4. I’ll even go out on a limb and say that Souter will side with the majority, making it 6-3. That will put the decades old controversy to rest.
Frankly, my research suggests this is the right conclusion. I’m not a fan of guns, but I think the Framers would have argued that it was intended to be an individual right, rather than a collective right.
What will not be resolved, at least conclusively, is the degree to which the federal government, states and municipalities can nevertheless restrict "arms" ownership despite the constitutional guarantee of a right to bear arms. I mean, I think everyone — including Charlton Heston — agrees that tactical nuclear weapons should not be availble at the local K-mart. The question is: where do you draw the line?
Clinton “Inevitability”?
New ABC News/Washington Post poll shows Obama with lead in Iowa.
The Good News Out Of Iraq
A diarist at Kos makes an observation:
The news this morning is full of signs of peace settling over Baghdad as increased troop levels help to quiet the insurgency.
Officials said privately that they hoped to foster a sense of normalcy and encourage limited travel to Iraq, particularly by business people and aid workers. They mentioned that Baghdad International Airport is preparing to reopen in a few days.
Wait, wait, wait. That was 2003.
No, here’s how nice things are in Iraq.
Ammar Hussein finally felt it was safe enough to keep his pizza shop open until midnight. Life was returning to normal in Iraq’s capital. Most nights, families crowded around plastic tables outside his shop to eat pizza and ice cream.
Darn it, that was 2004. This must be the right article.
The amazing realisation is that somehow normal life continues. Shops open, people go to work. Even the Crazy Frog mobile phone ring tone has become the latest fad in Baghdad.
Sorry again, 2005.
Let’s just skip 2006 and go straight to today.
The number of bodies appearing on Baghdad’s streets has plummeted to about 5 a day, from as many as 35 eight months ago, and suicide bombings across Iraq fell to 16 in October, half the number of last summer and down sharply from a recent peak of 59 in March, the American military says.
Ah, paradise.
Don’t misunderstand. I very much hope that this period does represent a real, sustained move toward normalcy in Iraq. Certainly the millions of Iraqi refugees are hoping for the same thing. After months in which tens of thousands of people were fleeing Baghdad each day, around 1,600 a day are now trickling back. That really is a good sign. But there have been a number of "lulls" in violence, and what we’re now looking at as the "lowest number of attacks since February 2006" only means that "normal" has been redefined as worse than anything in 2005, or 2004, or 2003.
As optomistic as I would like to be, I can’t help noticing that first article, the one from a few weeks after the war "ended," includes this paragraph.
Nonetheless, 33 American soldiers have been killed and scores wounded since major hostilities ended in May, making the postwar period the most hazardous peacetime era for Americans.
Normal, is relative.
Yup. It ain’t over yet. And has Kevin Drum correctly points out, a decrease in violence means nothing if there isn’r progress at the political level.
UPDATE: The L.A. Times informs us that our military leaders are cautious as well:
But military and government officials warned at the start of the clampdown that it would not have lasting success unless it was matched with political progress. It is a message being repeated with a new sense of urgency, now that Iraqi leaders can no longer blame huge bombs, mass abductions, and street-by-street fighting as an excuse for political paralysis.
Supporting The Troops
I don’t care if you are for or against the war in Iraq — this is just plain wrong:
The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments.
To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses up to $30,000 in some cases.
Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.
Memo to the Pentagon — it’s called an enlistment bonus for a reason. They enlisted, so they get the bonus.
Trying to get the money back AFTER they’ve enlisted and had their limbs blown off — well, that’s just Scrooge-like.
For what it’s worth, the congressman of the soldier spotlighted in the above-linked story, Democrat Jason Altmire, has introduced a bill to prohibit the Bush administration from asking the troops for refunds.
Mr. Altmire, D-McCandless, held a news conference yesterday at the Ross municipal building with Spc. Kaminski and other veterans to tout legislation he has authored to aid wounded soldiers.
At the forefront was a bill introduced last week and sent to committee that targets a Defense Department policy preventing eligible soldiers from receiving their full bonuses if discharged early because of combat-related injuries.
“Hard as it may be to believe, the Department of Defense has been denying injured servicemen and women the bonuses that they qualified for,” Mr. Altmire said.
He said he drafted the legislation after hearing “outrageous” examples of bonuses being denied…. Mr. Altmire’s legislation, the Veterans Guaranteed Bonus Act, would require the Defense Department to pay bonuses in full within 30 days to veterans discharged because of combat-related wounds.
I wonder if Republicans will block it.
UPDATE: Professor Volokh did some "quick research" on this and finds:
that the military does have this sort of policy, on the theory that the bonus is an advance payment for a full term of service and the soldier isn’t entitled to keep it unless he completes the full term — even when the failure to complete the term is a result of a combat wound.
It’s a stupid theory, and a crappy policy, no matter how "legal" it is. As one of Volokh’s commenters snarkily writes:
"It’s time for these coddled soldiers to start bearing some of the burden that we here in the homeland have been carrying since 9/11.
Don’t they realize that we are at war?"
Bush Implicated In Plame Scandal
…by none other than Scotty McLellan, in his new book, which contains the following excerpt:
"The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
"There was one problem. It was not true.
"I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the president himself."
I suspect that as the days of the Bush Administration winds down — and certainly into the next Administration — we’re going to learn more and more about the criminal doings of the President himself. After all, it was the President who got in front of the cameras and specifically said that he would get to the bottom of the Plame leak, and if it turned out to be someone on his staff, he would take apporpriate measures. Now we learn (a couple of years after it matters) that the President knew all along that Rove and Libby were involved.