Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_1,_2006

courtesy of Wikipedia.

Link: http://digbysblog.blogspot.com

....from Matt at Political Spaghetti concerning the efforts of Intelligence Design advocates to further their, um, hypotheses:

A working biologist like myself scoffs at terms used by IDers like "physical evidence." What do they think this is? Law & Order?
Seriously, IDers constantly confuse legal and scientific evidentiary systems. Scientists don't produce "physical evidence" -- they report on observations. Occasionally they produce something like a fossil, but even then the fossil has to be accompanied by recorded observation, which must be accepted in good faith, following a peer-review process and barring controversy, by colleagues.
They've always known that theirs is a logically weak position. They have to show by elimination that a materialistic theory is insufficient.
"Physical evidence" my ass.

Link: http://www.anonymousliberal.com/2006/03/fictitious-kylgraham-floor-debate.html

Answer: When the administration wants to create a bogus entry for the purposes of supporting a court motion.
Read this entry here for the amazing tale of how an entire exchange was invented for the purposes of supporting an administration submission to the courts.
Here's one more example of why I believe that the current Administration are a bunch of duplicitous, dangerous, incompetents who need to be removed from office at the earliest possible opportunity.

Not content with slandering a Jewish journalist (for which he is still fending off a one-month suspension), Ken Livingstone appears to be still studying hard at the George Galloway School Of Diplomacy.
The other day, he alleged that the current US Ambassador to London is a "chiselling little crook". This is over a dispute between the Mayor's office and the US Embassy in London over the failure of the embassy to pay the London Congestion Charge for vehicles driven into central London. The embassy justifies the refusal to pay on the grounds that the charge is a tax, and by diplomatic convention, embassies do not pay taxes. The Mayor's office believes that it is a fee (like parking tools or road tolls) that should be paid.
Despite the entertaining nature of Ken's language, he is danger of becoming a less stylish parody of Gorgeous George at this rate. He needs to engage his brain more often before opening his mouth.

...I wrote a posting on autoracing1.com where I picked up on Robby Gordon's weekend comment that most ovals are unsafe for OW race cars. He is right, and it is largely due to the pre-eminence of NASCAR. Here is what I posted:

In the spirit of trying to move thinking forward, in the aftermath of a death at an open wheel oval track, I'm going to make a statement.
I read somewhere that Jeff Gordon has stated that oval tracks are unsuitable for open-wheel race cars.
I'm going to take that statement one step further.

The current generation and configuration of american oval race tracks are largely unsuitable and dangerous for open-wheel race cars.

The reason for this is that when a North American oval track is being built or updated, the #1 concern of the ownership is getting NASCAR dates. The holy grail is a Nextel Cup date, but a second-tier (Busch) or third-tier date (ARCA etc.) is also highly desirable. These dates usually sell-out. Open-wheel events are a long way down the pecking order of consideration.
As a result, oval tracks are optimized for non-aero closed-wheel race cars. The #1 concern is good "Stock" car racing.
Therein lies the problem, for a race track that is suitable for stock cars is usually not suitable for aero wing cars, which are capable of much higher cornering forces.
There are a number of oval tracks in the USA that have always been unsuitable for open-wheel winged cars. Talledega and Daytona are two examples. With wings and current horsepower levels, I shudder to think that sort of speeds a properly-sorted OW car would achieve at those two tracks. The speeds would probably be at the limit of human endeavour, and the insurers would have a fit.
Other superspeedway tracks are marginal. Indianapolis is a track where OW drivers are almost flat all of the way round in qualifying, with little or no lift in race trim. California Speedway is currently flat all of the way round, with the race set-up mainly consisting of seeing how much drag can be removed from the car.
Texas Motor Speedway is flat all of the way round if the car is well set-up. The IRL can race there because of its horsepower range; CART infamously tried and failed to race there because their horsepower range took cornering forces into the "Death Zone" where drivers were starting to experience symptoms of G-Loc.
Homestead is an example of an oval track that was originally OK for open-wheel cars, with lap speeds in the 185-190 mph range. The cars would have to lift for corners, because the track was almost flat. However, when NASCAR raced there, it was found that there was only one racing line for stock cars, which limited overtaking and racing opportunities. So...they increased the bank angles on the corners.
The result is that NASCAR drivers have two racing lines at Homestead, and the NASCAR fans are happy. However, the increased bank angle has resulted in the open wheel cars being essentially flat-out all of the way round, with speeds having rised to 215-220 mph. In the race on Sunday, the leading cars seemed to be flat all of the way round, with the only drop in rpm coming from tire scrub on corner entry.
This is an underlying trend...with a few exceptions, modern american oval tracks are optimized for stock cars, not winged racing cars, and as a result many of those ovals are unsuitable for open-wheel race cars.
It is my belief that any combined OW series (when it emerges and whatever it is called) should seriously trim the number of oval tracks on the schedule, and only race on oval tracks where speeds are controllable and where driver skill (other than eyes-shut throttle-stuck-to-the-floor bravery) is part of the overall winning equation. Unless this is made a strategic goal of the series, I forsee two outcomes:

1. Future serious accidents and possible deaths as the high speeds result in mechanical failures or human errors
2. Continuance of a policy of optimizing oval tracks for stock cars at the expense of open wheel cars

In the long-term, (2) will not change until open wheel racing recovers enough market share to have influence over racing venues. However, making a decision to not race on unsuitable tracks in the short-term puts down a marker for the long-term.

However, it seems that some folks have to be fighting the IRL vs. CCWS war 24x7. Within a short period of time, this gem appeared in the thread:

This is always such a transparent argument.
Eliminate ovals, and you eliminate the IRL. What could be easier?
It gets couched in different words, as gshelvin has here, but it is the same old tired argument.
No one makes these guys race on ovals. If there is no one to race, there are no races. Let market forces dictate what it necessary. It always has in the past; it will in the future.

So I responded thusly:

I just knew that somebody would barge into this discussion and attempt to throw strawman arguments on the table about people attempting to abolish the IRL...tbyars, you win the award. Time to grow up and engage in a discussion on its merits instead of inventing straw men.

my response was followed by the following two:
(from tbyars)

Truth hurts, huh, gshelvin. Your agenda has always been clear. You knew someone would say it because you KNOW it is the truth. Very obvious. Simply a troll.

(Note that he can't even spell my name correctly)
(from indycool)

gshev, I agree with tb on this one. You are using the tragedy at Homestead to promote an anti-oval (read: anti-IRL) agenda. I hate it when people play political "safety cards." Because it always seems like when they do, it comes around and bites someplace else (sadly and tragically, as it did with Scott Brayton, Jeff Krosnoff and Gary Avrin in 1996). And THAT's scary.

Given that the responses have done nothing other than bring up a bogus strawman argument that I never made, I decided to up the ante:

indycool and tbyars, I regard the suggestion that I am promoting some sort of agenda to neuter the IRL to be an insult to my intelligence and the intelligence of other folks on this board.
Go back and read my starting post again, and see if you can improve your comprehension of the English language. Then come back here and kindly stop dropping strawman drivel and lowering the standard of debate. If you are that concerned about my "agenda", please feel free to complain to the moderators. I am prepared to defend my posting to them at any time.

Watch for the next exciting instalment. If the mods want to ban me, then that is their perogative. However, I hope that they can understand that there are some folks who cannot consider an argument on its merits, and instead resort to tired paranoid claptrap. (The rest of the discussion, by the way, has been pretty good, with folks making some good points).

A few months ago, a good friend of mine came round to watch the Sunday NFL game slate (I have a membership to NFL Sunday Ticket). Before the games started we got to talking about politics (amazing that, with me being devoid of political thought and all that...). I opined that the current Exective branch were incompetent on multiple fronts (I think that I overdid it because after I had been listing examples of their manifest incompetence for a while, I saw his eyes glaze over).
Today, we find out that a secret team of undercover operatives has succeeded in smuggling materials that could be used to build atomic devices into the USA across both the border with Canada, and the border with Mexico.
It appears that a Senate committee is already onto this issue like a Rottweiler onto a piece of steak, so we will no doubt soon be treated to the usual spectacle of Senators On Television as they in turn impersonate a pack of Rottweilers, savaging hapless government witnesses.
That will be the cheap TV theatre (pull up your seats ladees and gentlemen, get out the beers and watch the maulings), but just like Sunday at the Coliseum, that will be bloody entertainment that has nothing to do with the underlying issues.
The basic issue is that the current borders of the USA are, for all practical purposes, indefensible.
The total lengths of the borders (including land and sea) are staggering. The US-Mexico border is nearly 2000 miles long, and is crossed by 350 million people a year crossing legally. The US-Canada border is a gargantuan 5522 miles in length (including land and sea borders). That does not include the land-to-sea border along the East and West coasts of the USA, where any boat could land. Add all of those borders together and you have a total of well over 10000 miles (!) of potential locations where people can enter and leave the USA. That is before you add in all of the Ports and Airports of Entry.
The idea that the DHS can cover all of the possible entry points 24x7 is a fanciful pipe-dream.
If it is geographically impossible to prevent terrorists from entering the USA, then a different strategy is required. The obvious answer would seem to be to reduce the possibility that people will be aggressively determined to come into the USA to blow parts of the country up (accepting that, alas, there will always be a small number of crackpots who don't need a reason...but that could apply to people born and living within the USA - see McVeigh, Timothy).
The USA does appear to have such a strategy, but it isn't working too well. Attempting to eliminate terrorist threats by a mixture of economic bribery and military prowess is a doomed strategy. Every country that has tried it has been forced to abandon it after a period of time where things first seemed to be improving, then they got worse again. The problem with fighting terrorism by military means is that the terrorists do not have to "win" in any conventional military sense. All that they have to do is to not completely lose. As long as a few of them are alive and able to plan and execute the odd outrage, they can plausibly claim to be active, and they can continue to gather local support.
The only sensible long-term strategy is one whose basis is to eliminate the root causes of terrorism; namely, suppression of legitimate ethnic, religious, territorial and political aspirations.
Changing strategy now will be hard for the USA. For a start, it will involve having to remove support from a number of regimes around the world who are controlled by authoritarian scumbags. The old policy that your enemy's enemy is your friend simply does not work very well in a multi-polar world (it is doubtful if it worked in a bi-polar world, but that didn't stop both the USA and Russia from making it a central plank of their foreign policies). A change in strategy will also involve a public acceptance of the uncomfortable reality that the USA cannot simply eliminate by economic or military means any group with which it has a violent disagreement. Geopolitical realities and the limits of conventional military power make that sort of black-and-white comic-book warfare a thing of the past. This, in turn will require the USA to start paying a hell of a lot more respect to multi-lateral bodies such as the United Nations (which, I seem to recall, they helped to create) instead of pissing and moaning all of the time about those organizations, and wondering why they won't help the USA.
However, my fear is that no searching examination of the realism of trying to prevent the non-preventable will occur. We can expect a lot of huffing and puffing, chestbeating and grandstanding in the next few days and weeks by Politicians Anxious To Get On Television, and then the whole episode will be forgotten until the next domestic terrorist outrage, at which time the finger-pointing will start over. Absent from any of this will be any serious, contemplative and strategic discussion about how the USA might try to ensure that a smaller number of people hates the country in the years to come.

Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12037180/#060327

Here is Eric Alterman's summary of the Media Matters wrap-up on Washington Post Journalistic ethics when it comes to sucking up to Right-wingers. (As in, hire a young conservative pundit to be your "conservative blogger", then discover that he is a serial plagiarist, get him to resign, but fail to admit any culpability and insult your readers along the way).

* WashingtonPost.com executive editor James Brady denounces progressive readers who "insult" Post employees, but hires employees who insult progressive readers.

* The Post hired a Republican operative to write a blog, equating that partisan political activist with its own reporters.

* The Post's media critic repeatedly downplayed and distorted progressive criticism of the newspaper in order to dismiss it.

* Post national political reporter/columnist distorted progressive criticism in order to dismiss it, while insulting readers.

* The Post's ombudsman feels free to comment on WashingtonPost.com bloggers who she thinks are liberal, but deflects questions about a Republican operative hired to write for the website.

Now, throw in a few more things worth remembering about the Post:

* The Post has paid nowhere near as much attention to evidence that President Bush is breaking the law by authorizing domestic wiretaps without a court order as it did to President Clinton's comparatively insignificant relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

* Post polling director Richard Morin and Deborah Howell have given misleading, nonsensical, and insulting reasons for the Post's refusal to ask a poll question about whether people support impeachment proceedings, claiming among other things that such a question would be biased -- even though the paper asked such questions about President Clinton.

* In 1994, the Post called for an independent counsel investigation of the Whitewater deal, even while acknowledging that "there has been no credible charge in this case that either the president or Mrs. Clinton did anything wrong." Now, the Post says there is evidence that President Bush's domestic spying operation is illegal -- but it won't call for an independent investigation.

Link: http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=132311

For some time it has been apparent that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has an expansive idea about privacy when it applies to him. However, it appears that he is also a classless jerk. Read this article for the latest interesting communication device that he used when responding to a question.
Is filming for The Sopranos already done? I think he is worthy of a bit-part as an activist judge on that program. He seems to have the right level of communication skills. As Juanita herself puts it:

No, Your Honor, that's not Sicilian, that's just rude, crude, and socially unacceptable.

One of the more bizarre stories unfolding right now is how Katherine Harris appears to be adopting increasingly desperate measures to continue her campaign for the Senate. Having seemingly been unable to raise enough money from outsiders to finance her campaign, she announced 2 weeks ago that she was prepared to spend up to $10m of her own money to continue her campaign. She has also recently and blatantly made religion a bigger theme in the campaign.
Now there is this article which reveals that Harris' existing advisers may be about to leave her campaign, as it becomes increasingly theocratic in tone and content.
My hypothesis is that Harris expected full support from the Republican Party for her campaign against a Democratic incumbent. However, that support not materialized. She seems to have developed a sense of entitlement about that support; thus, instead of bowing to the inevitable, she is digging in, financing her own campaign, and seems to be determined to continue with what her advisers are telling her is an impossible campaign.
What next? If the St Petersburg times report is correct, Harris will soon find her campaign rudderless, as her leading advisers quit. She will then have to determine if she really wants to spend that $10 million or not.
All along, her political career seems to have been guided by assumptions that she could expect total support from the Republican Party at state and national level. I wonder what thought patterns gave rise to those assumptions. Maybe she has information about the 2000 recount saga that might be damaging to the GOP if revealed, and she is one of the few people who knows "where the bodies are buried?"
However, she simply has too much baggage at this stage in her career to be a plausible senate candidate. She wants to fight an established incumbent in a year where the President's poll ratings are currently very poor. If she tries to run an attack-ad campaign, she will no doubt find this videotape being used by her opponents. Other bizarre recent behaviour includes her being interviewed in three-quarter profile on "Hannity and Colmes" last year when she announced her Senate bid. (I just have to laugh watching this video, since it reminds me of the "Leon" advert where he refuses to talk to Joe Buck until Buck lets him show his "good side" to the camera...). Based on her recent TV appearances, she comes across as a vain, narcissistic flirt, with an absolute sense of entitlement. I forsee a train-wreck for her campaign.

Link: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/03/24/bush_shuns_patriot_act_requirement/

...courtesy of the Boston Globe. When Presidents sign legislation into law, they often issue Signing Statements to the media. These are usually of the form of "today I signed into law the Squibble-Turdfarm Act, which will mandate the provision of affordable flat-screen TVs to all Americans, thereby contributing to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness...(insert further self-congratulatory puffery here)".
However, after signing the extended Patriot Act into law a few days ago, President Bush issued a Signing Statement, that went well beyond the normal self-congratulatory back-slapping. In this statement, he wrote:

"The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information . . . "

Now...I'm not a trained lawyer, but to me that wording indicates that the President intends to apply his own judgement as to what information he will decide to release to Congress or any other oversight body. This is in direct contravention of the requirement spelled out in the act for him to inform Congress about the use of the provisions in the act.
This is bullshit. The President does not have this power. He and the other members of the Executive Branch are expected to obey the law, just like you and I. He does not get to decide which parts of which law he will obey.
The only person in the Legislative Branch so far to point this out was Sen. Patrick Leahy (the same Patrick Leahy who was memorably invited to, er, have sex and travel by the sitting Vice-President a while back).
To be fair to President Bush, previous presidents also used this tactic when signing legislation. However, the level of abuse of this practice is extraordinary in the last 2 presidential terms. This article explains how this latest gambit by the Executive is merely the latest instance of a long-standing abuse of the signing statement process by the current administration(more than 500 signing statement challenges thus far).