Barbaro Rosseland, 5, of Norway, undergoes explosives detection screening at Palm Beach International Airport. Inside the "Puffer", a burst of air pushes dust particles from your clothing to be analyzed for bomb material.
"It was no trouble at all," Ingvild Mo--Barbaro's mother-- said with a shrug following her screening. "I like fresh air."
August approaches, and unless the Bill Murray movie comes to town, I--for the first time in at least 25 years--likely will end the summer without having gone to the movies.
Sure, I'm cheap and a churl when it comes to me paying to go see slop I spent years watching on the clock ushering. But check out my Netflix queue and about all that's out this summer that I'm even mildly interested in seeing even at home other than Broken Flowers is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Bewitched, and The Brothers Grimm.
So, with the streak all but at an end, but a legacy left to tarnish, is it time to say, "Enough"?
Quick review of the "Profile Views" for Hydrablog reveals that Stalin Malone is the clear winner.
Stalin Malone: 90 views. Great Job Stalin, almost six times the nearest rival. Clearly in a class by himself. Legend of the blogosphere.
Mike3000: 16 views. Just added a fancy picture...looking to make a move.
McLieberman: 16 views. McLieberman better do something, Mike3000's picture could break this tie.
Unknown Blogger: 8 Views. Clearly the Cincinnati Bengals of this blog.
90 views, seriously...90? I mean people aren't even checking out the other bloggers just to see. How's that? The rest of us need to take a long look in the mirror and ask if we have what it takes to hang with the likes of Stalin Malone.
Quick note to those that argue that renewable energy is overly subsidized against carbon fuels. Notice that Tom Delay, GOP budget minded, fiscally responsible House Majority leader is fighting hard for: “A Senate-passed requirement for an inventory of offshore oil and gas resources and a House-approved measure, pushed by Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, to provide $2 billion in subsidies for research into oil exploration in the deepest parts of the Gulf of Mexico.” Notice, this is $2 billion for RESEARCH into EXPLORATION. Its not even money to recover known quantities. Its taxpayer money to find out if we can look for something. Not to mention that at oil companies are doing great right now and are flush with cash to do this all by their lonesome. Here Bush has it right, “With oil at more than $50 a barrel, energy companies do not need taxpayer-funded incentives to explore for oil and gas." But the GOP controlled congress has other thoughts: The energy bill under consideration on the Senate floor would reduce royalty payments for oil and gas producers drilling in federal waters -- a break worth almost $100 million over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
I am not using this to justify "green" subsidies. This is to point out that everyone eats at the federal trough. I wonder who would survive if everyone had to fend for themselves? About the only given there is that the Nuclear boondoggle would be exposed.
Should Congress fail, Daylight-Savings activist Jim Ahmed vows to set this clock forward again and again until Washington gets it, and gets some sun!
"DON'T COME TO ME WITH A PROBLEM, COME TO ME WITH THE SUN!"
Two weeks ago, the Underground was the world's busiest subway system, ferrying three million people each day through London.
"Madrid carried terror to the heart of Europe, but we never believed we would be a lonely, unique case," said Jorge Dezcallar, the head of Spain's foreign intelligence service during the Madrid attacks. "[Madrid] just had the bad luck of being chosen as the first target, but not the last. London, like Madrid, proves how vulnerable we are."
And this is who "we" are: Brits and Spaniards, yes, but also Pakistanis, Australians, Israelis, Americans--Christians, Jews, and Muslims--and, oui, the French.
Take Tony Blair, for all that's wrong with the war in Iraq, at his word: "[Islamic extremism] and the violence that is inherent in it did not start a few years ago in response to a particular policy."
Nor should Paris count on Islamofacism's end safely beyond the secularized borders of France, a nation that licenses its clerics, bans religious dress in its schools, and imports more than 400,000 barrels of oil per day from caliph-avorites like Saudi Arabia and Algeria.
Algeria, a Mediterranean neighbor to Spain and the North African Al Qaeda hotspots from which the Madrid bombers came--Morocco and Tunisia--knows terror, too: Between 1992 and 1998, more than 100,000 Algerians were killed during the army-led Algerian government's struggle with the Islamic Salvation Front and other Islamacists such as the Armed Islamic Group. France perhaps remembers the Armed Islamic Group as the terrorists responsible for the 1994 Air France murder-hijacking in which the fully-fueled plane was meant to be crashed into the Eiffel Tower, as well as Paris subway bombings that killed eight people the following year.
No, the Armed Islamic Group attacks against France were not, as those in Madrid and London, the work of Moroccans, or Tunisians, or Pakistanis, or British nationals of Pakistani descent, or Jamaican-born British residents like Germaine Lindsey, who murdered 27 people on the Piccadilly line train. And the Armed Islamic Group had no apparant hand in the Al Qaeda attacks since 2002 against French citizens in Morocco and Tunisia and Pakistan and Yemen.
Yet, somehow, it's all about Iraq?
There is no federally recognized "reporter's privilege." When a journalist refuses to reveal a source's identity to a federal grand jury, that journalist stands on principle, not the law.
Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine, by revealing the identity or identities of confidential sources in Time's reporting on Valerie Plame, abandoned principle and broke what little of my trust in confidentially sourced reporting remained.
"The journalist and the lawyer were fighting in my head," Pearlstine said. "But if presidents are not above the law, how is it that journalists are?"
They're not. Concealing sources is not a right or a privilege, it's a responsibility. A journalist who accepts this responsibility should accept the consequences.
A confidential source not worth fighting for 'til the source says the fight is over is a source whose side of the story isn't worth writing or reading.
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