Wednesday - September 07, 2005

Quote Of The Day

“What the American people have seen is this incredible disparity in which those people who had cars and money got out and those people who were impoverished died”
-- Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.)

No, the Senator from Massachusetts was not referring to Chappaquiddick and Mary Jo Kopechne but was instead referring to the plight of the poor in New Orleans during the recent tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. The Bloviating Blimp From Boston used the words above to take a shot at Supreme Court nominee John Roberts and he questioned “whether he stands for “a fairer, more just nation” or for “narrow, stingy interpretations of the law to frustrate progress.”

In order to refresh the Senator’s alcohol-fogged memory about poor people drowning while rich people run away, we present the following two pictures from July 19, 1969.

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 09/07/2005 at 04:47 AM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Outrageous •  
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   Tuesday - September 06, 2005

Your Government At Work

Firefighters Stuck in Ga. Awaiting Orders
ATLANTA, GA (AP)

Hundreds of firefighters who volunteered to help rescue victims of Hurricane Katrina have instead been playing cards, taking classes on FEMA’s history and lounging at an Atlanta airport hotel for days while they await orders. “On the news every night you hear (hurricane victims say), `How come everybody forgot us?’” said Joseph Manning, a firefighter from Washington, Pa. “We didn’t forget. We’re stuck in Atlanta drinking beer.”

As of Tuesday, some of the firefighters, like Thomas Blomgren of Battle Creek, Mich., had waited at the hotel for four days. Now he and a colleague have been told they may be sent to a hurricane relief camp in South Carolina to do paperwork rather than help the devastated Gulf Coast. “FEMA hired the best of the best firefighters, got them together and gave them secretary jobs,” Blomgren said. He and colleague Steven Richardson said they followed FEMA’s advice and brought huge packs filled with special firefighting suits, sleeping bags and lifesaving equipment to survive in harsh conditions for as long as a month. “But we’d be better off bringing pencils and cell phones,” Blomgren grumbled.

Tony Russell, the Federal Emergency Management Agency official in charge of the firefighters, said he is trying to get them deployed as fast as he can but wants to make certain they are sent where the need is greatest. When FEMA called for 2,000 firefighters from across the country, it made it clear the mission was one of community service and outreach—not firefighting, Russell said. The firefighters are paid by FEMA for their time. “People are in need,” Russell said. “Sometimes you just need to mop the floor if that’s what’s best for the victims.”

Desk work may be the first priority for some firefighters for now, but the mission’s needs could rapidly change, Russell said. Those who are upset, he said, are free to go. “This is not a draft,” he said. Russell said it takes at least two days to process and train the volunteers, who continue to arrive each day in Atlanta for FEMA training. Some 500 firefighters have been sent to needy areas and hundreds more await their marching orders, he said. In the meantime, the firefighters—some from as far away as Washington state—have received vaccines and specialized training, including classes on sexual harassment, the history of FEMA and how to deal with ethnic groups.

Throughout the hotel, burly firefighters in navy blue shirts loafed on couches Tuesday. A few sat outside in the gentle August breeze, enjoying boxed meals. Kelly Wayne Sisson, a firefighter from La Mesa, Calif., lounged with a candy bar in hand on the floor of the hotel lobby. “It’s been frustrating because we’ve been here for a couple of days,” he said. “But FEMA’s a big machine. We’ll get sent out when the time is right.”

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 09/06/2005 at 10:08 PM   
Filed Under: • Outrageous •  
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Want Some Beads?

Princess Cameron’s adult site is donating 100% of all new membership $$$ to Hurricance Katrina relief for the next seventy-two hours. Spank the monkey (or kill a kitten) and help a refugee. This is what makes America great!

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 09/06/2005 at 09:45 PM   
Filed Under: • Odd-Strange •  
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What will it take?

This is an interesting articel by a city planner on what the next steps are for housing the mass of humanity in the south.

Each evacuee should be assigned a FEMA case manager. Evacuees and those residing in shelters should be interviewed within a week to determine their individual immediate and near-term needs.

[snip]

FEMA should already have people surveying rental housing markets in surrounding unaffected areas and placing deposits vacant apartment and home units. As units are held for victims, these data should be loaded into the GIS and an inventory compiled.

[snip]

FEMA will likely develop temporary and interim group sites, which no doubt will be labeled by the media “refugee camps.” Temporary housing encampments are FEMA’s bread and butter. I’m sure that there are many very experienced people at FEMA who are likely gearing up to meet this need as we speak. Remember, these will be temporary and the accommodations will be tolerable as they will be air conditioned, offer a semblance of privacy, and evacuees will have access to clean water, food, and showers. Think about the temporary facilities constructed in Iraq for our soldiers and you get the picture. Do our soldiers live in “refugee camps”?

Real interesting, especially when he delves into the question of one big “camp” versus many little camps.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/06/2005 at 03:28 PM   
Filed Under: • News-Briefs •  
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The Skipper’s Little Buddy

Bob Denver, TV’s Gilligan, Dead at 70
LOS ANGELES -Sep. 6 (AP)

Bob Denver, whose portrayal of goofy castaway Gilligan on the 1960s TV show “Gilligan’s Island” made him an iconic figure to generations of TV viewers, has died. He was 70. He died Friday at Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital in North Carolina of complications from treatment he was receiving for cancer, his agent, Mike Eisenstadt, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. His wife, Dreama, and children Patrick, Megan, Emily and Colin were with Denver, who also had undergone quadruple heart bypass surgery earlier this year.

“He was my everything and I will love him forever,” Dreama Denver said in a statement. Denver’s signature role was Gilligan, but when he took the role in 1964 he was already widely known to TV audiences for another iconic character, Maynard G. Krebs, the bearded beatnik friend of Dwayne Hickman’s Dobie in the “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” which aired on CBS from 1959 to 1963. Krebs, whose only desire was to play the bongos and hang out at coffee houses, would shriek every time the word “work” was mentioned in his presence.

Gilligan on the other hand was industrious but inept. And his character was as lovable as he was inept. Viewers embraced the skinny kid in the Buster Brown haircut and white sailor hat. So did the Minnow’s skipper, Jonas Grumby, who was played by Alan Hale Jr., and who always referred to his first mate affectionately as “little buddy.” “As silly as it seems to all of us, it has made a difference in a lot of children’s lives,” Dawn Wells, who played castaway Mary Ann Summers, once said. “Gilligan is a buffoon that makes mistakes and I cannot tell you how many kids come up and say, `But you loved him anyway.’”

TV critics were less kind, dismissing the show as inane. But after it was canceled by CBS in 1967, it found new audiences over and over in syndicated reruns and reunion films, including 1981’s “The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island.” (It also led to the recent TBS reality series “The Real Gilligan’s Island.") One of the most recent of those films was 2001’s “Surviving Gilligan’s Island: The Incredibly True Story of the Longest Three Hour Tour in History,” in which other actors portrayed the original seven-member cast while three of the four surviving original members, including Denver, narrated and reminisced.

“Gilligan’s Island” writer-creator Sherwood Schwartz insisted that the show had social meaning along with the laughs: “I knew that by assembling seven different people and forcing them to live together, the show would have great philosophical implications.” Denver went on to star in other TV series, including “The Good Guys” and “Dusty’s Trail,” as well as to make numerous appearances in films and TV shows. But he never escaped the role of Gilligan, so much so that in one of his top 10 lists — “the top 10 things that will make you stand up and cheer” — “Late Show” host David Letterman once simply shouted out Denver’s name to raucous applause.

“It was the mid-’70s when I realized it wasn’t going off the air,” Denver told The Associated Press in 2001, noting then that he enjoyed checking eBay each day to keep up on the prices “Gilligan’s Island” memorabilia were fetching. “I certainly didn’t set out to have a series rerun forever, but it’s not a bad experience at all,” he added.

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 09/06/2005 at 03:20 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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SNAFU

First, I’m glad Frank is back in the saddle. I have to return to work and hope you all had fun with the posts over the weekend. I had to fly out late last night and am back on my current contract in Seattle building a web site for another corporate client.

Second, I tweaked several things about Skipper’s blog site over the weekend. Some he requested and some I just threw in for grins. He is especially pissed that I tweaked the stylesheet to create those nice dropcaps at the start of articles. It seems he has been trying to get that to work for nearly a year. All I can say is: leave it to the pros, Skip - you’re welcome.

Third, the Skipper is doing OK down in Mississippi. He’s lost a lot of weight (a good thing) and has a mild case of sunburn. He says the stench in the air is unbelievable. He promises to be back by Saturday evening. All the family is OK but the death toll keeps rising. At last report, he was looking for Sean Penn and intends to kick the living shit out of him if he finds him.

Finally, Skipper has been out of the “news loop” for the most part and is just catching up on the current “blame game” going on. I’ve never heard him so angry. He says fix the problem first, then point fingers. He also suggests filling in New Orleans to a height that is above sea level and rebuilding only then. I agree.

Gotta run for now. Cheers!

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 09/06/2005 at 12:22 PM   
Filed Under: • Personal •  
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Plenty of Troops

From the always-resourceful James Taranto:

Plenty of Troops

	One of the myths the Angry Left has been peddling in the wake of Katrina is that there aren’t enough National Guardsmen to deal with the disaster because they’re all off in Iraq. National Review Online’s James Robbins offers a dose of reality:
		Take the Army for example. There are 1,012,000 soldiers on active duty, in the Reserves, or in the National Guard. Of them, 261,000 are deployed overseas in 120 countries. Iraq accounts for 103,000 soldiers, or 10.2 percent of the Army. That’s all? Yes, 10.2 percent. That datum is significant in itself, a good one to keep handy the next time someone talks about how our forces are stretched too thin, our troops are at the breaking point, and so forth. If you add in Afghanistan (15,000) and the support troops in Kuwait (10,000) you still only have 12.6 percent. So where are the rest? 751,000 (74.2 percent) are in the U.S. About half are active duty, and half Guard and Reserve. The Guard is the real issue of course--the Left wants you to believe that the country has been denuded of its citizen soldiers, and that Louisiana has suffered inordinately because Guardsmen and women who would have been available to be mobilized by the state to stop looting and aid in reconstruction are instead risking their lives in Iraq.
	Recall, too, that many of the same people who are now say the National Guard is too important to waste on American security overseas a year ago were insisting that George W. Bush was a bum for serving in the Texas Air National Guard while “war hero” John Kerry was in Vietnam.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/06/2005 at 12:12 PM   
Filed Under: • Military •  
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In the Meantime

Bill Whittle has posted Tribes.  Go read it (and the other essays if you haven’t yet).

It is time well spent.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/06/2005 at 09:19 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • Philosophy •  
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Back in the Saddle

Thanks to Ronnie for being so diligent this weekend.  When the weather is 75 degrees and sunny on a long weekend, the last thing I want to do after spending an eternity in an air conditioned cube farm is sit in front of a computer on the weekend.  As much as I love you guys, the fresh air won out.  What a weekend it was!  I got to:

• Mow the grass
• Make some new screens for the house
• Clean the barn
• Paint one of my kid’s room
• Convert our tack room to a hen house for the winter
• Wash the truck
• Take the family bike riding
• End with a bonfire and hot dog cookout

Now, back to work and fighting off the moon-battery that assails us every day.  To all those who sent links over the weekend, I’ll be having a look at them shortly. 

Carry on.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/06/2005 at 07:17 AM   
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   Monday - September 05, 2005

Atlantis

New Orleans: Modern-Day Atlantis?
(NEW YORK TIMES - Sept. 5)

Nothing lasts forever. Just ask Ozymandias, or Nate Fisher. Only the wind inhabits the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado, birds and vines the pyramids of the Maya. Sand and silence have swallowed the clamors of frankincense traders and camels in the old desert center of Ubar. Troy was buried for centuries before it was uncovered. Parts of the Great Library of Alexandria, center of learning in the ancient world, might be sleeping with the fishes, off Egypt’s coast in the Mediterranean.

“Cities rise and fall depending on what made them go in the first place,” said Peirce Lewis, an expert on the history of New Orleans and an emeritus professor of geography at Pennsylvania State University. Changes in climate can make a friendly place less welcoming. Catastrophes like volcanoes or giant earthquakes can kill a city quickly. Political or economic shifts can strand what was once a thriving metropolis in a slow death of irrelevance. After the Mississippi River flood of 1993, the residents of Valmeyer, Ill., voted to move their entire town two miles east to higher ground.

What will happen to New Orleans now, in the wake of floods and death and violence, is hard to know. But watching the city fill up like a bathtub, with half a million people forced to leave, it has been hard not to think of other places that have fallen to time and the inconstant earth. Some of them have grown larger in death than they ever were in life.

The most famous lost city of all is one that probably never really existed, Atlantis, the fabulous island civilization swallowed by the sea, which was referred to by Plato. Some scholars think he might have been inspired by one or more real events. Among them is the destruction of Helike, a city on the Corinthian coast, which was swallowed by an earthquake and a tsunami one winter night in 373 B.C., during Plato’s lifetime.  “For the sea was raised by an earthquake,” wrote the Greek geographer Strabo, “and it submerged Helike and the Helikonian Poseidon.” The city went down like the Titanic with its entire population on board. An expeditionary force sent from a nearby town the next day found no survivors and no bodies to recover.

Though not the seat of empire like fabled Atlantis, Helike was a significant and prosperous city. It was the head of a confederacy of 12 Greek city states, the First Achaean League, whose successor, the Second Achaean League, was recommended as a model of federalism by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in their Federalist Papers. It minted its own coins. Lured by the prospect of an underwater time capsule, archaeologists have long sought the remains of the sunken city.

Five years ago, after a dozen years of searching, a team of archaeologists led by Dora Katsonopoulou of the Ancient Helike Society in Aigion, Greece, and Steven Soter, a geophysicist with New York University’s Center for Ancient Studies, said they had found the lost city - not in the sea but on the coastal plain next to it, near Aigion, about 45 miles northwest of Corinth. It may have been gradually raised by seismic activity, said Dr. Soter. Moreover, he said, three rivers feeding the coastal plain deposit sediment that helps build it up. In expeditions every summer, Dr. Soter and his colleagues have uncovered more and more of the city, including a road that goes almost a mile across the plain, walls, buildings, coins, pottery and a cemetery, although they have not found the center of the city yet.

Recently they have found a whole new and unknown city, dating from 2200 B.C., the early Bronze Age, near Helike. The sediments of this ruin contain marine and lagoonal microfauna, Dr. Soter said, suggesting that it too, may have been swallowed by an earthquake and a tidal wave like Helike, but 2,000 years earlier, only to rise again. It may be, he said, that there have been recurrent floods and abandonments on the plain, the land rising and sinking, cities blooming out of the reborn mud.

There is in the picture a kind of immortality for the dead, as well as for the perennials blooming on the flood plain. If Helike can give rise to the vision of an Atlantis, a collection of scrolls can forever change our concept of learning and memory and empty stones can inspire us to reveries, what can we expect from jazz, gumbo and soft air at one of the trading crossroads of the world, so blessed and cursed with water?

New Orleans will never die. It is already larger than life.

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 09/05/2005 at 08:55 PM   
Filed Under: • History • Philosophy •  
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Shrieking Banshee Alert

Hillary Clinton Jumps On Katrina Bandwagon
(NEW YORK DAILY NEWS - Sept. 5)

With many blaming the growing scope of Katrina’s devastation on the Bush administration, Sen. Hillary Clinton called yesterday for a 9/11-style probe into how the federal government responded to the crisis.

“It has become increasingly evident that our nation was not prepared,” Clinton (D-N.Y.) said in a letter to Bush asking him to set up a “Katrina Commission.”

“The slow pace of relief efforts in the face of a mounting death toll ... seems to confirm that our ability to respond to cataclysmic disasters has not been adequately addressed,” she said.

Her call echoed statements of Republicans such as Arizona’s Sen. John Kyl, chairman of the Technology and Homeland Security Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who plans a hearing and has said the catastrophe in New Orleans could have a lot in common with a terror attack.

A White House spokeswoman deferred comment to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who appeared on numerous Sunday morning broadcasts insisting there would be time to lay blame later.

Clinton has decided at least one thing without waiting for any commission reports. She said she plans to introduce legislation to split the Federal Emergency Management Agency out of the Department of Homeland Security and give it back a cabinet-level director like it had in her husband’s administration.

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 09/05/2005 at 02:43 PM   
Filed Under: • Hildabeast •  
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Whine

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 09/05/2005 at 08:52 AM   
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Roberts Elevated

The Next Chief Justice Of The Supreme Court?
WASHINGTON (AP)

Moving swiftly, President Bush will nominate John Roberts to succeed William H. Rehnquist as chief justice, a senior administration source said Monday. The president was to make the announcement in the Oval Office before leaving for another trip to the hurricane-battered Gulf Coast.

Bush met with Roberts at the White House on Sunday evening for about a half an hour and then offered him the top position at the Supreme Court on Monday morning, the administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because Bush had not announced his selection.

Bush already had nominated Roberts to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. It would just take a little paper shuffling to change the nomination for Rehnquist’s seat.

The president still wants Roberts to be on the bench when the Supreme Court resumes its work on Oct. 3, the official said. That means Bush would have to find a new nominee for O’Connor’s seat. She has offered to remain on the bench until a successor is seated.

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 09/05/2005 at 06:54 AM   
Filed Under: • Judges-Courts-Lawyers •  
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Miranda Confusion In Florida

Fla. Scrambles to Change Miranda Warnings
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP)

Gorman Roberts’ manslaughter conviction was overturned because of a single word. Roberts, now 20, was convicted of pushing 5-year-old Jordan Payne in February 2002 into a Pompano Beach canal, where he drowned. But his conviction and three-year prison sentence were thrown out in May 2004 when an appeals court ruled the Miranda rights warning he got from Broward Sheriff’s Office investigators was incomplete.

The warning, which said suspects “have the right to talk with a lawyer and have a lawyer present before any questioning,” failed to spell out that defendants also had the right to an attorney “during” police interrogation as well. It was corrected in November 2002.

Gorman Roberts’ manslaughter conviction was overturned because of a single word. Roberts, now 20, was convicted of pushing 5-year-old Jordan Payne in February 2002 into a Pompano Beach canal, where he drowned. But his conviction and three-year prison sentence were thrown out in May 2004 when an appeals court ruled the Miranda rights warning he got from Broward Sheriff’s Office investigators was incomplete.

The warning, which said suspects “have the right to talk with a lawyer and have a lawyer present before any questioning,” failed to spell out that defendants also had the right to an attorney “during” police interrogation as well. It was corrected in November 2002.

Since then, more than two dozen other Broward County cases—including murders, robberies and illegal drugs—have been affected because of the faulty Miranda warnings. Convictions have been reversed in some, defendant statements suppressed in others.

“It’s frustrating and disappointing because our detectives diligently investigate crimes and obtain good statements and confessions,” said sheriff’s spokesman Jim Leljedal.

Since the Supreme Court’s 1966 ruling in Miranda v. Arizona, which produced the well-known police rights advisory that begins “You have the right to remain silent,” state and federal courts have issued several decisions on how to put the ruling into practice. Few rulings, however, have focused on a single word, as Florida’s 4th District Court of Appeal has in several cases.

“Miranda was meant to be easy to use,” said Stephen Saltzburg, law professor at George Washington University. “I think what you have is a court interpreting Miranda in an overly technical manner.”

But Ellis Rubin, the Miami defense attorney who first challenged Broward’s Miranda warning, said precise language is essential if criminal suspects are expected to understand their legal rights.

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 09/05/2005 at 06:25 AM   
Filed Under: • Crime •  
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

1. Keep a firm grasp of Right and Wrong
2. Stay involved with government on every level and don't let those bastards get away with a thing
3. Use every legal means to defend yourself in the event of real internal trouble, and, most importantly:
4. Keep talking to each other, whether here or elsewhere

It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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