The Day After (an Al Gore fantasy)

Thursday May 27, 2004 8:00am EDT

Donald Rumsfeld resigns.
Paul Wolfowitz resigns.
Condoleeza Rice resigns.
George Tenet resigns.
All of the National Security Advisors resign.
John Ashcroft resigns.
The whole cabinet resigns.
Dick Cheney resigns.
George W. Bush resigns.

Dennis Hastert is President. The Executive Branch of government is demoralized and in disarray. The Legislative Branch of government is jockeying for power after the the change in leadership. Are you happy Mr. Gore?

Or did you mean “should resign after a suitable period of adjustment”? They’re called elections, Mr. Gore. And you’re not running in the next one. Deal with it.

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Voila!

The esteemed Merde in France links us to this tidbit:

Paris airports authority remove all mention of collapsed 2E

Aeroports de Paris (ADP), the state authority in charge of Roissy Charles de Gaulle Airport have removed all mention of the tragedy-struck Terminal 2E from their website within a day of the disaster. see www.adp.fr The authority’s website has no news of the disaster but what is extraordinary is their revision of maps of the airport to make it look as if there never was a 2E.

At left the upper of the two maps is the ADP map which for Terminal 2 shows halls A, B, C, D, and F. But no E! It is still shown clearly in the bottom righthand corner of the lower map which is from the World Airports Guide.

The Soviets redid the photographs of officials on the reviewers stand of past May Day parades whenever Stalin had one of his former close colleagues shot. But they were never as quick as this to rewrite history. TOLLROADSnews 2004-05-24

It’s a 24/7 news world out there, folks. Now you see it, now you don’t!

UPDATE:

Sadly, No! tells us that news of the removal of references to the terminal has been exaggerated (or reported incorrectly as the case may be).

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My world and welcome to it

Donald Sensing, blogger and Methodist minister, has posted an excellent commentary on the Ascension of Jesus which we celebrated yesterday:

“The Ascension of Christ is a critical element of Jesus’s story, and therefore of our salvation. But we are a scientifically minded, technically trained people, and unlike the uneducated, superstitious masses of earlier centuries, we know better than to believe in fairy tales like the Ascension story. At least, that’s how I used to think, including for quite a while after I became committed to Christ. But I think now that we cannot gut the story of Jesus of its miraculous content, leaving holes in the narrative, and expect something sensible to remain. If Jesus didn’t heal the sick in inexplicable ways, then what did he do? Just preach? There have been countless thousands of extraordinary preachers since Jesus’ day. Quick, name two, not including Billy Graham … or Donald Sensing. So preaching itself gets no monuments dedicated to you.

Read the whole thing.
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Shows that didn’t get a chance

A friend mentioned today an article she’d read about television series that never really found their audiences. This started me to thinking and here’s my list of shows I loved that just never caught on.

To qualify for this list the series had to have been shown on network TV—I’m stretching things by including Fox—and been cancelled after a season or less.
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Of movies and Moore

John of Iberian Notes writes this in a recent post:

In today’s La Vangua, Xavier Batalla has read an article by Sidney Blumenthal, of all people, in the Guardian, so he has an analysis of the two schools of American foreign policy according to Sid. Now, Sid, as everybody knows, is by no means a neutral source; in fact, he’s about the most extreme Clinton / Democratic Party partisan out there. Mr. Batalla does not mention this either in his article or his dandy little fact-sheet on the two opposing schools, which Sid apparently provided. According to Sid and Mr. Batalla, school Number One is the “Globalists”, exemplified by a photo of a smiling Bill Clinton waving to somebody, and the other is the “Hegemonists”, exemplified by a photo of a scowling Paul Wolfowitz. Above these two photos, by the way, is a still from the movie “Seven Days in May”, an early-60s thriller in which the Army tries to pull a coup d’etat, whatever that has to do with anything. (Europeans keep referring to movies when trying to explain America. This is not precisely an accurate basis for analysis.)

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Russian paranoia alive and well

From the online publication Pravda.ru (no relation to the old newspaper) we have confirmation that the fine old Russian tradition of paranoia is alive and well. In an interview with Utro, Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov,
vice-president of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems, had this to say:

We received NATO’s invitation for some of its military exercises, such as Balttops or the maneuvers in Poland. But all exercises always have two stages. First – when Navy is capturing terrorists’ submarine. By the way, how can a sub with terrorists appear in the Baltic Sea? After capturing the sub, the commanders drink Champaign and say good-bye to the guests. Then the second, real stage of exercises starts – landing on the seashore with aviation support and destroying enemy”s objects, taking over settlements, destroying enemy”s aviation. All this is aimed against Russian Baltic Fleet.

He also has some extremely interesting things to say about the effects of mass media on opinion-forming among young people in Russia. As they say, read the whole thing.

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Carrots for the B’s

Part of the nightly preparing for bed ritual in our home is giving Nip and Tuck, our two bunnies, their ration of fresh food. We feed Nip and Tuck a quarter cup of kibble per day each—an eighth of a cup each twice a day—as much timothy hay as they want, and two cups of fresh food. The fresh food is usually Italian flat-leaved parsley or cilantro. But occasionally they’ll get apple, carrots, cabbage leaves, or banana.

On the nights that we give Nip and Tuck carrots bedlam breaks out. Not from the rabbits but from the dogs. As I clean and prepare the carrots the dogs become more and more excited. There’s no disguising it from them. They can smell a cut carrot from anywhere in the house.

Qila, our most exciteable, will begin barking. The others will take it up and start barking or, possibly, howling. As I bring the carrots to the B’s the dogs crowd around me. Mira, our youngest, may start to jump. That cannot be allowed.

I put all of the dogs into a sit, give the B’s their carrots and then solemnly give each dog—oldest to youngest—a two inch piece of carrot. They each gratefully accept their carrot and take it to a quiet corner where they can happily chomp down on it without fear of Mira creeping up and stealing it from them.

Peace returns to the house.

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Only in Russia

From the online publication Gazeta.ru comes the following story Army called in to save beer:

Russia’s infatuation with beer has grown steadily over recent years and the army is no exception. So, when soldiers were called in to bolster a week-long struggle to rescue 10 tonnes of beer trapped under Siberian ice, it only took them a day to retrieve it…the delivery lorry didn’t really matter.
The lorry carrying the beer sank when trying to cross the frozen Irtysh River, and a rescue team of six divers, 10 workers and a modified T-72 tank have managed to save the load, but not the truck. The driver managed to jump to safety before the lorry sank.
”The situation hasn’t developed according to our ideal scenario,” the deputy head of the Cherlaksky region, told the agency. Temperatures were around minus 27 degrees Celsius (minus 17 degrees Fahrenheit) in the region, near the Siberian city of Omsk and around 2,200 km (1,400 miles) from Moscow.
The soldiers eventually managed to retrieve the barrels of beer but the rope holding the lorry snapped and it slipped back under the water. The local Omsk brewery where the delivery had been destined to arrive said the freezing temperatures probably kept the quality of the beer from deteriorating and said it will still accept the consignment. It plans to sell the beer at a discount.

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Shots at a wedding party

In his post today, The Wedding Party, Wretchard at the Belmont Club presents an intriguing analysis of the development of the story over an eleven hour period. He presents a table showing a comparison of the same story as reported at four different points. The table paints a clear picture of the challenges facing even professional observers in the high data flow world we’re confronted with today. Jumping into that flow at different points can present very differing views of the actual underlying events.
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Parties and Temple Grandin

The comments sections of blogs are like parties. Some are like college keg parties (atrios, LGF). They can get pretty rowdy and rude and some downright unpleasant things can be said. There are even rougher parties. I don’t go there.

Some are like pizza and beer with friends (Electric Venom). Pleasant banter. An off-color comment now and again. A nice place to drop in and visit.
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