Prairie Weather

Unusual overflight

The closest Air Force base here is a long way off, but its training flights often come over this ranchland. Two small mom 'n' pop jetlets, one following the other, zip from NW to SE, following quite precisely the wet weather creek which bisects the lower pasture, sometimes (rarely) following the fenceline.

They used to fly over on Tuesdays. Then they switched to Thursday or Fridays. Never on weekends. Never on Sundays! In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq there were more flights and, by gosh, maybe a couple of weeks before the invasion, two training flights during a weekend -- on a Saturday.

Since then there have been many fewer flights. I'd half forgotten about them until I heard them roar over about an hour ago, on a Sunday.

Hmmm. What should we be expecting this time?

Cyberclonebloggers hard at work, late at night

Josh Marshall purports to be a real person with real news, substantive and updated frequently. He's often first on the story. Don't miss what he has to say..

Or rather, what they have to say. It's impossible for a single blogger to know and report on so much in so little time. You heard it here first, folks. Josh Marshall is not one person.

More on this when we find out just how many there are and whether they're.... human.

GOP Precinct Chair Urges Vote for Democrat

A couple of weeks ago our friend P Diddie, intrepid reporter from the fiefdom of Tom DeLay and tireless volunteer in the effort to dump DeLay and put Richard Morrison, lawyer and environmentalist in Congress, wrote a wonderful update for this blog, called "Wave Goodbye to Tom DeLay."

Today an email came in from the Morrison campaign with this most interesting news. Bev Carter is the GOP chair for Fort Bend Country which DeLay depends on and she's endorsing his rival, Richard Morrison.

Bev's Burner - Fort Bend/Southwest Star - Oct. 27, 2004 by B.K. "Bev" Carter

It won't kill you....

Come on, It really won't hurt too much. I promise that parts of your body will not fall off. That's right! You, too, can vote for Democrat Richard Morrison to replace that scoundrel Tom DeLay.

In my weekly column last week, I admonished you to find and recruit someone in the next two years to run against Tom DeLay in the Republican primary. However, I've had second thoughts about that. I was wrong. Most of the people who vote in primaries are the party hardy voters. They'd vote for DeLay because they are used to voting for DeLay and sadly, the Fort Bend Republican Party has been highjacked by the Christian Right (which are neither), and DeLay plays to them. A friend of mine admitted to me that she had early voted for DeLay before reading my column. "Why did you do that?" I asked because I knew that she was aware of some of DeLay's more villainous actions. "Habit," she replied.

So it is my belief that the only way we can rid ourselves of this DeLay pest is to hold our nose and cross over and at least vote on the Democrat side of the ballot for Richard Morrison as our U.S. Congressman.

A Little About Morrison...

Morrison, an attorney, is married with four children. He and his wife are active at Holy Rosary Church in Rosenberg. As an attorney, Morrisom (sp) has advocated for environmental and consumer rights and in the case Kerr vs. Harris County he protected the property of Houston area residents from improper condemnation and seizure. On the issue of the economy and jobs, Morrison supports deficit reduction, no sales tax increase, tax cuts for families and small businesses, closing loopholes that allow corporations to move off shore and evade taxes and incentives for companies that keep jobs in America.

He says that health care must be available and affordable to all, especially seniors and children. He will also work to preserve Medicare and Medicaid, help small businesses provide health care coverage to their employees and support stem cell research.

On education, Morrison supports "good pay and fair benefits for teachers" and the passage of HR 594 and opposes all unfunded federal mandates placed on school districts. He says he will also work to reduce air pollution and protect lives and property from floods and support extending passenger rail lines into District 22.

"I will take the 'war on terror' to the terrorists without compromising our essential civil liberties. I support the sunsetting of the extreme provisions of the Patriotic (sp) Act, which gives the federal government excessive power to spy on innocent citizens," he says.

Why I can't support Teflon Tom...

Tom DeLay has almost single-handedly made the Republican party the party of derisive action. He has turned his governance over to the very lobbyists that are only interested in their own industry. Our "Teflon Tom" belongs to the school of "leave no CEO behind." He has woven a cloudy group of money, lobbying, and grass-roots true believers that push right-wing pressure on the entire Republican agenda and therefore on the country's agenda. These true believers are ideological extremist. (sp)

This far-flung network is composed of money pockets that are state or federal PAC's, direct-mail operations, partisan right-wing religious groups that have aggressive sounding acronyms like ARM, ROMP, STOMP. They sound suspiciously like the off books entities created by Enron, don't they?

DeLay has been rebuked by the House Ethics Committee three times overall, two times in the last ten days. These admonishments are unusual for any legislator, especially one who wants to be speaker of the House. Some watchdog groups have called for him to resign.

The 62-page Ethics Committee report chastised DeLay for trading support for the congressional candidacy of the son of retiring Rep. Nick Smith, R-Mich., in exchange for Smith's vote on Bush's Medicare Bill, for asking federal aviation officials to track an airplane involved in a Texas political spat, and for conduct that suggested political donations might influence legislative action.

Yet, in a press conference reminiscent of "Baghdad Bob,' DeLay applauded the admonishments and said they proved he was clean. He said, "I'm very pleased that the ethics committee and these honorable people that serve on that ethics committee have dismissed the frivolous charges brought against me." Talk about spin. They didn't dismiss the charges. They admonished him.

Tom has openly declared himself sent by God to "stand up for a biblical world view in everything I do and everywhere I am." For him, politics is a "battle of souls." He says that he seeks a "God-centered" nation that, among other things, would curb contraception, discriminate against homosexuals, outlaw abortion, end the separation of church and state, and post the Ten Commandments in every school (even though Tom has violated more than a few of the Ten himself).

He states that "our nation will only be healed through a rebirth of religious conviction and moral certitude." The thing that concerns me is that this biblical world view sounds suspiciously like the "end times" prophets and I don't really like someone who wants to see the end of the world be the same someone with the power to affect (sp?) the end of the world.

Tom DeLay has been in Washington the past 20 years and in Austin the six years before that. The framers of both the U.S. Constitution and the Texas Constitution did not intend that serving in the body politik would be a full-time, lifetime occupation. They expected volunteers to serve for a few years then go back home and work a real job.

I think it is time to send DeLay out to get a real job.

Media disable explosives?

Josh Marshall parses the media's treatment of the explosives story this morning and ends with these observations:

Apparently, at least three weapons inspectors -- probably more, including the Times -- are certain that's the material in question. But to the folks at CNN it's still an open question.

They seem to want to play by the White House rules, under which each separate ton of explosive material must be identified in videotapes from embeds and then certified as authentic by every conceivable expert under the sun before the president will have to admit that maybe something went wrong.

And of course no one can bring the issue up in a political context until the presidential commission Jeb Bush appoints in 2010 comes back with its final report two years later.

Cats. Friday.

Okay. I don't want to be out of step with the rest of cyberhumanity. So here are my cats. Because it's Friday.

Dalai is in her usual place. Click to see her.

Then, in order to play fair, I'll add a photo of her brother who always finds the farthest point in the house away from his sister . He lives mostly in the bidet except at night when they go out in the garden and cooperate in the capture of small dying gifts to leave for me in the bathtub.

I used to be just a cat person but recently have added dogs to the household. They are very, very different. I don't know anyone who understands this as well as does Alastair Reid, translator (Neruda, Borges), teacher, and poet. Here's his poem, "Curiosity":

Curiosity
may have killed the cat; more likely
the cat was just unlucky, or else curious
to see what death was like, having no cause
to go on licking paws, or fathering
litter on litter of kittens, predictably.

Nevertheless, to be curious
is dangerous enough. To distrust
what is always said, what seems,
to ask odd questions, interfere in dreams,
leave home, smell rats, have hunches
do not endear cats to those doggy circles
where well-smelt baskets, suitable wives, good lunches
are the order of things, and where prevails
much wagging of incurious heads and tails.

Face it. Curiosity
will not cause us to die
only lack of it will.
Never to want to see the other side of the hill
or that improbable country
where living is an idyll
(although a probable hell)
would kill us all.
Only the curious
have, if they live, a tale
worth telling at all.

Dogs say cats love too much, are irresponsible
are changeable, marry too many wives,
desert their children, chill all dinner tables
with tales of their nine lives.
Well, they are lucky. Let them be
nine-lived and contradictory,
curious enough to change, prepared to pay
the cat price, which is to die
and die again and again,
each time with no less pain.
A cat minority of one
is all that can be counted on
to tell the truth. And what cats have to tell
on each return from hell
is this: that dying is what the living do,
that dying is what the loving do,
and that dead dogs are those who do not know
that dying is what, to live, each has to do.

"I hope I am not responsible for Armageddon."

Jeanne at Body and Soul is doing a yeoman's job, keeping a kind of ongoing diary about the discovery of the explosives in Iraq, adding to it as more information comes in. As Daniel Schorr just said in an NPR commentary, when we look at what's been leaking out of the administration we have to wonder how much more dangerous stuff we still don't know about.

Body and Soul links to a very revealing op-ed piece in today's Boston Globe by Peter Galbraith who describes a meeting with Paul Wolfowitz to express his concern by the aftermath of the war and the "catastrophic aftermath of the invasion -- the unchecked looting of every public institution in Baghdad..." An excerpt:

On April 16, 2003, a mob attacked and looted the Iraqi equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control, taking live HIV and black fever virus among other potentially lethal materials. US troops were stationed across the street but did not intervene because they didn't know the building was important.

When he found out, the young American lieutenant was devastated. He shook his head and said, "I hope I am not responsible for Armageddon." About the same time, looters entered the warehouses at Iraq's sprawling nuclear facilities at Tuwaitha on Baghdad's outskirts. They took barrels of yellowcake (raw uranium), apparently dumping the uranium and using the barrels to hold water. US troops were at Tuwaitha but did not interfere.

And then there's the recent revelation of the explosives cache:

...This equipment could be anywhere. But one good bet is Iran, which has had allies and agents in Iraq since shortly after the US-led forces arrived.

This was a preventable disaster. Iraq's nuclear weapons-related materials were stored in only a few locations, and these were known before the war began. As even L. Paul Bremer III, the US administrator in Iraq, now admits, the United States had far too few troops to secure the country following the fall of Saddam Hussein. But even with the troops we had, the United States could have protected the known nuclear sites. It appears that troops did not receive relevant intelligence about Iraq's WMD facilities, nor was there any plan to secure them. Even after my briefing, the Pentagon leaders did nothing to safeguard Iraq's nuclear sites.

I supported President Bush's decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein. At Wolfowitz's request, I helped advance the case for war, drawing on my work in previous years in documenting Saddam's atrocities, including the use of chemical weapons on the Kurds. In spite of the chaos that followed the war, I am sure that Iraq is better off without Saddam Hussein.

It is my own country that is worse off -- 1,100 dead soldiers, billions added to the deficit, and the enmity of much of the world. Someone out there has nuclear bomb-making equipment, and they may not be well disposed toward the United States. Much of this could have been avoided with a competent postwar strategy. But without having planned or provided enough troops, we would be a lot safer if we hadn't gone to war.