Changing Places

These days certainly are way too much like the 70s. Let’s have more than a concert for them this time.

Wunder Blog : Weather Underground

Tropical Cyclone Sidr made landfall at 1430 GMT in western Bangladesh as a mighty Category 4 storm with 150 mph winds. Sidr is the second strongest cyclone to make landfall in Bangladesh since reliable record keeping began in 1877. The only stronger storm was the 1991 Bangladesh Cyclone, which struck eastern Bangladesh as a Category 5 cyclone. The 30 foot storm surge of that storm killed at least 140,000 people. Sidr is the Arabic word for the the jujube tree.

More from Chris Mooney at The Intersection:

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center finally gave in and rated the storm at 135 knots–or 155 mile per hour winds. This is the cutoff for Category 5. There may be some weakening by landfall, but what we’re expecting is a borderline Cat 4/Cat 5 striking along the path shown above. You’ve gotta figure the storm surge is going to be more than 20 feet. There are supposed to be vertical evacuations in Bangladesh, but I just don’t know what’s happening on the ground….

And from CNN:

Hundreds of thousands of coastal villagers sought shelter inland Thursday as a tropical cyclone — accompanied by strong winds, heavy rainfall and high waves — started battering Bangladesh’s southwestern shores, officials said.

Residents of Barisal, Bangladesh, shelter against the rain Thursday as Tropical Cyclone Sidr approaches.

Tropical Cyclone Sidr was centered nearly 93 miles (150 kilometers) south of Mongla port at 6 p.m. local time (7 a.m. ET) in the Bay of Bengal off the Khulna-Barisal coast, said Shahjahan Alam at the Meteorological Department in the capital, Dhaka.

Sustaining winds up to 149 mph (240 kilometers per hour), the storm was likely to make landfall late Thursday near the Sundarbans mangrove forests in Khulna district, 85 miles (136 kilometers) southwest of Dhaka, Alam added. He warned of flooding from possible storm surges as high as 20 feet (6 meters).

Volunteers helped evacuate thousands of people Wednesday from the coast and the government warned ships to seek shelter as the cyclone roared offshore.

And from the BBC, here’s hope that they were way more prepared for this one:

But Mr Karmakar added that most of the five million people living in the area should already have been evacuated or have taken cover in cyclone shelters or government buildings.

Operations have been suspended at the main ports of Mongla and Chittagong.

The southern seaside resort town of Cox’s Bazar appeared to be deserted after the cyclone warning was issued on Wednesday evening, reports said.

Southern Bangladesh is often hit by cyclones, but experts say the latest one is a category four storm, the most powerful so far in the season.

Bangladesh developed a network of cyclone shelters and a storm early warning system, after a cyclone killed more than 500,000 people in 1970.

Casualties from cyclones has been significantly reduced as a result, officials say.

Sheril R. Kirshenbaum at The Intersection:

On August 28, 2005, I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. Like so many, I felt helpless understanding the devastation that would ensue in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast from Hurricane Katrina. Just over two years later, I have that same feeling.

Because Bangladesh is one of the low-laying regions most at risk from sea level rise, as a marine biologist I’m all too familiar with how vulnerable it is to flooding and storm surges. It’s also one of the most densely populated countries and – as Chris has expressed – I fear this storm may be a worst case scenario. It’s my sincere hope that we’re mistaken.

I don’t understand why we haven’t been hearing more in the news about Sidr’s approaching landfall and what’s taking place on the ground in Bangladesh to protect as many as possible. What we can do now, at least, is prepare to come together, organize, and ready ourselves to provide aid. As we approach Thanksgiving in the United States, I hope readers will open their hearts to those on the other side of the world who will need our help most.

The one red flower in bloom in my yard today. Named, strangely enough — Donna Darlin’

“Don’t be a fool. Go back and stand under that one red flower and walk straight ahead for that last hard mile. Go up and knock on the old weathered door. Climb up to the cave. Crawl through the window of a dream. Sift the desert and see what you find. It is the only work we have to do.”

Old Indian Woman, Edward S. Curtis, 1910

“Today the old woman inside you is collecting bones. What is she remaking? She is the soul Self, the builder of the soul-home. Ella lo hace a mano, she makes and re-makes the soul by hand. What is she making for you?” — Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., “Women Who Run With the Wolves”

Busy week here. Wrapping up on completing the new patio (still haven’t taken pictures, maybe today…) and doing therapy work with Darwin. Between the stress of having people here every day working on the patio, having the dogs cooped up in the house all the time, and just not getting enough time to care for myself lately, I’m feeling pretty wiped out. Time to collect the bones and rebuild….

One way or another. The Supremes kept him from doing it as president, but this man will always find another way, it seems.

Good for you, Mr. Gore!

Al Gore joins famed Silicon Valley venture capital firm | Reuters

In a career marked by second acts, Al Gore, the former vice president of the United States and co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, is becoming a partner at Silicon Valley’s most storied venture capital firm.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers said on Monday that Gore, a campaigner for action to slow global climate change, will join the Menlo Park, California-based venture capital firm as a partner focused on alternative energy investments.

The venture firm, which since 1972 has backed seminal computer start-ups ranging from Sun Microsystems to Compaq Computer to Amazon.com to Google Inc, has emerged in recent years as a leading funder of alternative energy companies.

Gore, 59, is joining the Kleiner board as part of a collaboration between his Generation Investment Management fund and Kleiner Perkins to fund so-called “green” business, technology and policies that address global climate change.

OK, today I need a blog called What Devilstower Said.

This is getting ridiculous. ;^) But then, I really enjoy it when everyone else is starting to say all the things I’ve been spouting for years. My husband was really getting sick of listening to my rants. It’s only taken seven years for most people to realize what was obvious to me was going to happen from the beginning. My biggest personal regret is the friends I lost who thought I was crazy and stopped talking to me because they couldn’t accept that Bush and company really would make things this bad. Of course, they won’t bother admitting it now, either.

Americans have needed a wake up call for a long time now, since the seventies when it first really became obvious to some of us that we needed to change the way we live in this country. Going off the gold standard and starting the long downward spiral into debt, cutting deals with the Saudis, could only save us from the reckoning for so long. Unfortunately, we’re about to get it. In spades. Even compact fluorescent lights aren’t going to save us — it’s too little, too late to save us from the choices we made in creating the sprawlconomy.

And here’s yet another great posting on what’s really going down.

Daily Kos: The Enormous Cost of NOT Going Green

It’s impossible to put forward any energy plan, no matter how mild, without facing a deafening chorus of “it’ll cost too much!” That’s the ultimate tool of the burn-everything status quo, the idea that any attempt to limit the damage we’re doing to the world would be so costly that it would sink our economic ship.

But even ignoring the fact that conservative policies celebrating unregulated greed have now brought us to the edge of the biggest economic abyss in a hundred years, there’s something left out of all those dire warnings about the cost of going green. It’s the enormous cost of not going green.

High oil prices are fueling one of the biggest transfers of wealth in history. Oil consumers are paying $4 billion to $5 billion more for crude oil every day than they did just five years ago, pumping more than $2 trillion into the coffers of oil companies and oil-producing nations this year alone.

The total US national debt just hit the $9 trillion mark this week — a value that seems so large as to be incomprehensible. It will take generations to repay even if logical fiscal policies are restored. Yet it’s less than five years worth of what we’re pumping out of our country to preserve the oil industry. $2 trillion is a year is the price we pay for utter cowardice in changing our relationship to energy.

We shy away from changing how we make cars, because we’re concerned about jobs in the auto industry. We hesitate to halt destructive energy extraction, because we worry about trickle of revenue it generates. We never acknowledge that the price of preserving the status quo far exceeds what it would take to break free of the current paradigm. Faced with eminent starvation, we can’t stop fighting over the last can of beans long enough to plant a garden.

Here’s the deal. Terrorism is not the challenge of our lifetimes. Changing our relationship with energy is the challenge we have to face right now.

In the United States, the rising bill for imported petroleum lowers already anemic consumer savings rates, adds to inflation, worsens the trade deficit, undermines the dollar and makes it more difficult for the Federal Reserve to balance its competing goals of fighting inflation and sustaining growth.

Thirty five years ago, energy companies campaigned that we would all “freeze in the dark” if the Clean Air Act was passed. They were wrong. Now they want to tell you that we’ll all be broke if we try to sever their control over our lives. They’re wrong again. Unless we shake our timidity, twenty years from now they’ll be looking down at a ruined world from the top of their mile-high skyscrapers in Dubai. And they’ll be thinking “Lord, what suckers they were to fall for that.”

Have It Both Ways: Perspective From a Progressive Ex-Pat – CommonDreams.org

Before quitting our jobs, selling our home, and disposing of our vehicles, my husband and I established a non-profit organization, Steady Footsteps, Inc., to frame the work that we wanted to do in Vietnam. Our assets, which were not–and never would be–sufficient to allow us to retire in the US, are enough to support us comfortably in Vietnam and to give us a start on the work of our organization.

For the price equivalent of one modest American car, our organization purchased motorbike helmets for every employee of the Da Nang City Health Department. (Motorbikes comprise 90% of the road traffic here in Vietnam and Traumatic Brain Injury is epidemic.) In return, the Da Nang Department of Health agreed to mandate helmet-wearing by every employee traveling to and from work. This project has received so much publicity, as the Vietnamese government and media work to enhance traffic safety, that I have become a bit of a celebrity–prompting cries of, “Oh, I saw you on TV!” wherever I go.

The helmet project, as well as my on-going, unpaid job of mentoring Vietnamese physical therapists and physical therapy students, has afforded me both access and credibility with decision-makers here and an opportunity to counter the influence of multinational corporations as they try to push the Vietnamese health care system towards the American private insurance model. Will my progressive ideas hold sway here? Who knows? But I am here full-time in a country where personal connections mean a lot and I think that I have a much better shot at influencing the delivery of health care here in Vietnam than I ever did in America. And, because I am present and plugged-in and personally aligned with Vietnamese people who genuinely want to help those less fortunate than themselves, I can discretely offer them support in small projects that they initiate themselves, such as replacing a roof for an indigent typhoon victim, buying seeds and gardening tools for an ethnic community, or pouring a concrete floor for a little mountain clinic.

So, buck up, Progressives! You may or may not bring down BushCo, but you, as individuals and as members of caring communities can make a difference in the world. Look to your own strengths and think about how you can make the world a better place. You don’t have to live in America in order to take part in the American conversation. Think about taking your energy and your assets elsewhere. We Americans are wealthy, both materially and experientially. Why not take those assets to a place where you can be your own best and most effective self?

Virginia Lockett is an American physical therapist who lives with her family in Da Nang, Vietnam. She is president and founder of the non-profit organization, Steady Footsteps, Inc. She offers her reflections on life in Vietnam and in America here.

My new name for a blog – What Joseph Stiglitz says.

The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com

After almost seven years of this president, the United States is less prepared than ever to face the future. We have not been educating enough engineers and scientists, people with the skills we will need to compete with China and India. We have not been investing in the kinds of basic research that made us the technological powerhouse of the late 20th century. And although the president now understands—or so he says—that we must begin to wean ourselves from oil and coal, we have on his watch become more deeply dependent on both.

Up to now, the conventional wisdom has been that Herbert Hoover, whose policies aggravated the Great Depression, is the odds-on claimant for the mantle “worst president” when it comes to stewardship of the American economy. Once Franklin Roosevelt assumed office and reversed Hoover’s policies, the country began to recover. The economic effects of Bush’s presidency are more insidious than those of Hoover, harder to reverse, and likely to be longer-lasting. There is no threat of America’s being displaced from its position as the world’s richest economy. But our grandchildren will still be living with, and struggling with, the economic consequences of Mr. Bush.

…

It is natural to wonder, What would this money have bought if we had spent it on other things? U.S. aid to all of Africa has been hovering around $5 billion a year, the equivalent of less than two weeks of direct Iraq-war expenditures. The president made a big deal out of the financial problems facing Social Security, but the system could have been repaired for a century with what we have bled into the sands of Iraq. Had even a fraction of that $2 trillion been spent on investments in education and technology, or improving our infrastructure, the country would be in a far better position economically to meet the challenges it faces in the future, including threats from abroad. For a sliver of that $2 trillion we could have provided guaranteed access to higher education for all qualified Americans.

…

The continuing reliance on oil, regardless of price, points to one more administration legacy: the failure to diversify America’s energy resources. Leave aside the environmental reasons for weaning the world from hydrocarbons—the president has never convincingly embraced them, anyway. The economic and national-security arguments ought to have been powerful enough. Instead, the administration has pursued a policy of “drain America first”—that is, take as much oil out of America as possible, and as quickly as possible, with as little regard for the environment as one can get away with, leaving the country even more dependent on foreign oil in the future, and hope against hope that nuclear fusion or some other miracle will come to the rescue. So many gifts to the oil industry were included in the president’s 2003 energy bill that John McCain referred to it as the “No Lobbyist Left Behind” bill.

Benziger Winery, Glen Ellen

I guess it’s not a big surprise that I would like such an interesting wine with a fascinating history that almost went extinct. Besides, it really tastes good and is very different from other wines. It seems to be a real troublemaker for its growers, too. Sometimes I think I just have a great appreciation for truly good things in life that are difficult to achieve. They are somehow the sweetest victories of all.

Viognier – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The origin of Viognier is not completely known with several theories abounding. Most experts agree that Viognier is an ancient grape that may have originated in Dalmatia and was brought to Rhône by the Romans.[2] One legend state that the Roman emperor Probus brought the vine himself to the region in AD 281. Another legend has the grape packaged with Syrah on a cargo ship navigating the Rhone River en route to Beaujolais when it was captured by a local group of outlaws known as culs de piaux near the site of present day Condrieu.[3]

The origins of the name Viognier is similarly obscured with the most common namesake being the French city of Vienne which was a major Roman outpost. Another legend has it drawing its name from the Roman pronunciation of the via Gehennae meaning the “road to Hell” as a possible allusion to the grapes difficulties in growing.[3]

Viognier was once a fairly common grape, though it is now a rare white grape grown almost exclusively in the northern Rhône regions of France. Around the 1960s, the grape was almost extinct when there were only eight acres in Northern Rhône. The popularity of the wine, as well as its price, has risen and thus the number of plantings have increased. Rhône now has over 740 acres (3 km²) planted.[2]

Viognier has been planted much more extensively around the world since the early 1990s. Both California and Australia now have significant amounts of land devoted to the Viognier grape. There are also notable increases in planting in other states of the United States and in other countries.

The decline of Viognier in France from its historic peak has much to do with the disastrous introduction of phylloxera insects from North America into Europe in the mid- and late-1800s, followed by the abandonment of the vineyards due to the chaos of World War I. By 1965, only about 30 acres of Viognier vines remained in France, and the variety was nearly extinct. Even as late as the mid-1980s, Viognier in France was endangered. Paralleling the growth of Viognier in the rest of the world, plantings in France have grown dramatically since then.

I kind of enjoyed this description. It’s filled with the usual wine-tasting idiocy, but it does give you some idea of how good this wine really is:

For those who haven’t experienced Viognier, the first glass is quite a revelation. First and foremost there is the wine’s heady perfume — a melange consisting of all or some of the following: honeysuckle, citrus blossoms, oriental lychee nuts, very ripe white melon, freshly picked peaches and apricots, and ripe pears just after they’ve been peeled — that immediately gets your attention. According to Craig Williams, winemaker at Joseph Phelps Vineyards, Viognier contains floral compounds (called terpens) that are also found in Muscat and Riesling. So, think of the most wonderfully aromatic Muscat or Riesling you’ve ever encountered, then concentrate and double that perfume and you have Viognier.

Your nose tells you the wine will be sweet — like a Muscat — but your palate is surprised to encounter a dry nectar offering flavors that resemble a mixture of ripe pears, lemon-lime citrus, almonds, spice, peaches and apricots, sometimes with a honied nuance. Lush and viscous on the palate with more body than most Chardonnays, the wine’s aftertaste is not at all cloying, but fresh and vibrant, impelling you to take another sip.

More on Viognier here, including this quote, which made me smile:

Oz Clarke describes this as a ‘swooning wine ….. wine that just oozed sex and sensuality.’

Yeah, well, maybe that’s why I really like this wine!

As Hecate would say, “Someday I’m going to have a blog called “what John Said”"….

AMERICAblog: A great nation deserves the truth

Our country is in serious trouble. Under George Bush and the Republicans we not only lost our leadership as the moral standard-bearer of the world, we now risk losing our leadership as the financial bedrock of the world. People no longer have confidence in America. And all of the republicans’ flag-waving and “we’re number one!” slogans have done nothing to fix some very serious problems that they’ve caused and ignored. We can’t go on like this. Pretending that we’re winning in Iraq, pretending that we don’t have a health care crisis, pretending that global warming doesn’t exist, pretending that massive federal budget deficits don’t matter because lowering taxes supposedly makes money (even though Reagan and Bush have now both broken the budget by lowering taxes). We can’t keep pretending that everything is okay when it’s not, simply because the Republicans are afraid to admit that they’ve royally screwed up our country.

Pretty much sums up the last seven years….

We’re remodeling our side patio and it’s almost done – I’ll post pictures soon. I’m looking for a big outdoor table (6-7 feet), preferably recycled wood if I can find a nice one. Anyone know any good sources, preferably in the San Diego area or that ships cheap/free?

I’m checking Craig’s list and such, too….

Televangelist Pat Robertson today endorsed Republican presidential candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani, saying the former New York mayor’s promises to appoint conservative judges and protect Americans “from the blood lust of Islamic terrorists” should trump conservatives’ concerns about Giuliani’s support of abortion rights.

I ran across this quote today in Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Sixty Days and Counting”. How true it is again today.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency, Philadelphia, Pa. – June 27th, 1936

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.
…

The savings of the average family, the capital of the small business man, the investments set aside for old age—other people’s money—these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.

Throughout the Nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

An old English judge once said: “Necessitous men are not free men.” Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government.
…

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business. They granted that the Government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the Government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.

Robinson’s character, Phil Chase, as president of the United States, then continues:

But then we forgot again. We went back to imagining that things could only be as they were. We lived on in that strange new feudalism, in ways that were unjust and destructive and yet were presented as the only possible reality. We said, “people are like that”, or “human nature will never change” or “we are all guilty of original sin, or “this is democracy, this is the free market, this is reality itself.” And we went along with that analysis, and it became the law of the land. The entire world was legally bound to accept this feudal injustice as law. It was global and so it looked like it was universal. The future itself was bought, in the form of debts, mortgages, contracts — all spelled out by law and enforced by police and armies. Alternatives were unthinkable. Even to say things could be otherwise would get you immediately branded as unrealistic, foolish, naive, insane, utopian.

But that was all delusion. Every few years things change completely, even though we can’t quite remember how it happened or what it means. Change is real and unavoidable. And we can organize our affairs any way we please. There is no physical restraint on us. We are free to act. It is a fearsome thing, this freedom, so much so that people talk about a “flight from freedom” — that we fly into cages and hide, because freedom is so profound it’s kind of an abyss. To actually choose in each moment how to live is too scary to endure.

So we lived like sleepwalkers. But the world is not asleep, and outside our dream, things continued to change. Trying to shape that change is not a bad thing. Some pretend that making a plan is instant communism and the devil’s work, but it isn’t so. We always have a plan. Free market economics is a plan — it plans to give all decisions over to the blind hand of the market. But the blind hand never picks up the check. And you know — it’s blind. To deal with the global environmental crisis we now face without making any more plan than tot rust the market would be like saying, “We have to solve this problem so first let’s put out our eyes.” Why? Why not use our eyes? Why not use our brains?

Because we’re going to have to imagine our way out of this one.

With this kind of crap going on, it’s a wonder anyone bothers. We didn’t have a lot of problems with airport security this time around for our trip. My main annoyance was waiting for the idiots in front of us to figure out how to put their stuff in the bins. But really, this kind of thing just shows how stupid it all really is and how abusive it can become.

So I guess if anyone is ticked off at you, don’t give them your travel date or flight number. You never know what they might do.

Man angry with son-in-law fingers him as terrorist to FBI – Yahoo! News

A man in Sweden who was angry with his daughter’s husband has been charged with libel for telling the FBI that the son-in-law had links to al-Qaeda, Swedish media reported on Friday.

The man, who admitted sending the email, said he did not think the US authorities would be stupid enough to believe him.

The 40-year-old son-in-law and his wife were in the process of divorcing when the husband had to travel to the United States for business.

The wife didn’t want him to travel since she was sick and wanted him to help care for their children, regional daily Sydsvenska Dagbladet said without disclosing the couple’s names.

When the husband refused to stay home, his father-in-law wrote an email to the FBI saying the son-in-law had links to al-Qaeda in Sweden and that he was traveling to the US to meet his contacts.

He provided information on the flight number and date of arrival in the US.

The son-in-law was arrested upon landing in Florida. He was placed in handcuffs, interrogated and placed in a cell for 11 hours before being put on a flight back to Europe, the paper said.

The FBI contacted Swedish intelligence agency Saepo, which discovered that the email tipping off the FBI had been sent from the father-in-law’s computer.

The father-in-law has been charged with aggravated libel.

He has admitted sending the email, but said he didn’t think “the authorities were so stupid that they would believe anything. But apparently they are.”

He said he “couldn’t help the US authorities’ paranoid reaction”.

Off to our friends Devin and Jamie’s wedding in Sonoma this weekend…. back Tuesdayish…

UPDATE:

The wedding was great, the bride was beautiful, our birthdays were a lot of fun and the wine was fabulous!

I have a new favorite wine. I got a couple bottles that some friends are driving home with for us (we flew up to Oakland and didn’t trust TSA to send it back home on the plane. As it was they messed up stuff in our luggage and broke one of our wine glasses….) Good luck getting any of this wine, though – there were only about 320 cases made!

We ordered some other wines from Imagery Wine (another Viognier, a White Burgundy, a Sangiovese, and a Port) and Benziger, too. We chose these wineries because they are growing organic and biodynamic grown vines, and the wines are excellent.

Heh. Yeah, cause Congress should do what Osama wants instead of what the people of the United States want! Oh, wait…. that wasn’t what he meant?

Moron.

Think Progress » Bush Grasps For Relevancy By Bashing ‘MoveOn.org Bloggers’ And ‘Code Pink Protesters’

In a politically-charged speech this afternoon at the Heritage Foundation, President Bush brazenly attacked congressional leaders for not immediately granting him all the funding he has requested for the Iraq war.

Lawmakers should stop listening to “Moveon.org bloggers and Code Pink protesters” and start listening to the “warnings of terrorists like Osama bin Laden,” Bush said to a rousing ovation:

When it comes to funding our troops, some in Washington should spend more time responding to the warnings of terrorists like Osama bin Laden and the requests of our commanders on the ground, and less time responding to the demands of MoveOn.org bloggers and Code Pink protesters.

I got a tiger named Archeleron. Can’t wait to see this movie – the books are wondrous! Thanks to denialism for the link.