April Week 3, 2006

Monday  April 10 , 2006

I took the truck in to get the ball joints repaired on a recall... Looked at an 98 Expedition, nice truck [SUV]... I think I will trade the Tundra in for it... we'll see...

Christy got some medication for her cough... finally. she also took Grandma to Colville so the Vet could look at Grandpa's ancient Dachshund, Heidi. Grandpa has been feeding it people-food for 13 years and she has pancreatitus, ie: it's pancreas is so clogged with fat it can't digest it's food and is in serious pain...

Good article:

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=7970

Tuesday  April 11 , 2006

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

VOLTAIRE [Francois Marie Arouet] (1792-1832, playwright/philosopher)

I went to the dentist today and had to stick around town till 1530 to get my teeth back... It's hard to amuse yourself in Colville for five and a half hours. I forgot about the Movie theater... damn. I went shopping instead, almost bought an Ford Expedition ...

We took Pop in to get him fitted for a new hearing aide...Hearing aids are expensive.

They picked up Heidi at the Colville Animal Clinic, Grandpa got a lecture from the little Vet lady she really laid into him about what she can and can not eat... now she is on a diet of cottage cheese and rice... it's killing him not to be able to feed her.

Wednesday  April 12 , 2006

Calie had a bloody nose this morning so I took her to the Dr... by the time I got there it had stopped and he couldn't be sure what was causing it... damn... poor Calie, she's peen putting up with these nose-bleeds since she was five...

Christy has been coughing for a few days... not good, Last night she coughed while half reclining on the couch only this time she felt something snap. She was in pain all night and could only sleep leaning on a pillow. I took her into the Doc after I got back with Calie... the X-ray showed a broken rib... damn. She is in a lot of pain, well, she was, the Doc gave her some wicked cough syrup... she's in Ya-yaville at the moment.

Mike got his truck back from Ken Starkey... $122, spark plugs were loose, spark plug wire burned in half, it was a mess.

Broke my record of $16 at the dump, I spent $23... almost 500 pounds of trash and junk from down by the shop and I have just barely scratched the surface... the fella that lived here before we bought this place was in a big hurry I guess. I am finding a lot of Paramedic paraphernalia down the side of the hill and in the trash pile...

Still can't find Christy's keys...

It's raining pretty damn hard now, harder than I have seen it rain since we moved up here, it has been raining off and on all day.

Thursday  April 13 , 2006

I wasted the whole day taking Christian down to Deer Park [76 mi] to get his braces removed and find out they wouldn't do it, he was an Orthodontist but he was just starting and wasn't comfortable removing Christians braces without consulting a . Now we have to call someone else and do it all over again.

If I could write worth a damn I would write like this:

The Old Scout

April is here, time to cut loose of politics
April 4, 2006

Columnists should not write about politics. Take it from me, it's a bad idea. You pick up your bright sword to harass the heathen Republican and your prose style goes limp, your verbs droop, and words such as "comprehensive" and "funding" creep in and you become thin-lipped and hissy, like Miss Whipple in study hall telling the boys in the back of the room to shape up or be sorry. Well, they aren't going to shape up. What will shape them up is the day of reckoning and it's not here yet.

It's spring in Minnesota, the snow is gone except behind the garage, so it's time to turn over a new leaf and let other people rag on the president. He is who he is, and anybody who hasn't formed an opinion of him is not paying attention. I am going to sit and read poetry and wait for the enormous old crabapple tree beside our driveway to bud and then blossom, a mass of brilliant purplish flowers like a Mardi Gras float parked beside the house - you can almost hear the brass band playing "Just a Little While to Stay Here." Or maybe it's a funeral and the purple flowers are from the deceased's old pals who are shuffling along beside the coffin, hankies in hand, on their way to the graveyard and then to O'Gara's for a commemorative bump of whiskey. You can get all this just by looking at a crabapple tree. Visions of the vast grandeur of the sensuous world, intimations of mortality.

What vast grandeur do you find in Washington these days? The Abramoff-DeLay saga is the story of weasels. Small-time grifters and flimflam men wheedling favors and skimming money off the top. Nobody in the Republican majority could be shocked by any of this, so why should you and I?

The people who are getting reamed by this administration are people under 30, and they are, like, okay with that. They walk around with little wires coming out of their ears and 10,000 tunes on their iPods, and if you go, like, Global Warming, they are, like, Whatever. And you go, Government Deficit, and they are, like, Duuuuuuuuuuuude.

Our country has been entered into a thirty-year war against Islam, and I will not be fighting it. I am, like, 63. In fact, I am not only like 63, I am 63 and will soon be 64 when I hope you will still need me and feed me. I am sitting pretty. If the polar icecap melts, it's no problem in Minnesota: The ocean isn't going to wash up on our doorsteps. No hurricanes on our horizon. None of my friends are penguins. If Iran gets the bomb, are they going to fly all the way to Minnesota to drop it?

Politics is a slough, and maybe we should let the weasels have it for now. Even if two more Republicans follow the Current Occupant into office, this country will still be around in some form or other. Cities may crumble and we may be forced to reside in walled compounds and hire security men to escort us to Wal-Mart and back, but much will remain, such as love, for example, and the quickening one feels in the spring. Flowers will bloom in whatever wreckage we make. Somewhere, someone will sing the old songs about love walking in and driving the shadows away.

People have been falling in love through every dismal era of history and through every war ever fought. Enormous black headlines in the newspapers and agitated talk in the cafes and yet she waited for him on the corner by the hotel where they had agreed to meet, and as traffic streamed past she watched the buses pulling up to the curb, looking for his familiar shape, his beautiful face, his slight smile. Under her arm, a newspaper, and inside it a columnist shaking his tiny fist at corruption, but it isn't worth two cents compared to what's in her heart. When her lover steps down, the air will be filled with bright purple blossoms and they will embrace and turn and go into the hotel, and on this, the future of the world depends.

Take the day off, dear reader, and ignore the world and let the president play his fiddle. Find the one who means the most to you and make yourselves happy. If that be ignorance, make the most of it.

© 2006 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, INC.

Friday  April 14 , 2006

Not much doin today... took Pop's car in for brakes but they didn't need them, his tires on the front were shot though and Ken moved them to the rear admonishing me to get them replaced ASAP. Tried to work in the shop... too wet out... distracting, been at least an hour a day for about seven days, today it only stopped raining for an hour...

Saturday  April 15 , 2006

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.

Flaubert

Calie's team won both games today... Calie got up to bat once and flied out to first base and she scored once as a pinch-runner for the pitcher... if I haven't mentioned it before, the pitcher is great... Heather Pope... awesome.

We went to see Ice Age/The Meltdown... with 'Meltdown' in the title it is aptly named... a poor imitation of the original with no story worth telling...Tomorrow is Easter, a holiday celebrated by practically all religions to acknowledge the Vernal Equinox... beginning of Spring, Rebirth etcetera.

Some people value the worldwide variety of March and April celebrations, because they demonstrate the diversity of religious belief within our common humanity. They respect both their own religious traditions and those of other faiths for their ability to inspire people to lead more ethical and fulfilled lives. Religious diversity is, to them, a positive influence.

Others reject the importance of all celebrations other than the holy days recognized by their own religion. Some go so far as rejecting some of their religion's holy days when they are discovered to have Pagan origins (e.g. Easter and Christmas).

Some consider religions other than their own as being inspired by Satan. Thus the equinox celebrations of other religions are viewed as Satanic in origin, and intrinsically evil.

Me, tomorrow is Sunday, the kids will be yaha because we gave them candy... ho hummmm...

Sunday  April 16 , 2006

Stupidity has a certain charm - ignorance does not.

Frank Zappa

It snowed today... hard, nothing stuck down here but Linton Mountain is white.

Autumn and I went to the Easter Egg Hunt at Metaline Park... we were too late but Mrs Meyer took some eggs from her grand daughters basket and laid them where Autumn could find them... I love this town.

 I took the plow off the tractor and put the mower back on... what a colossal pain in the ass... it took about 3 hours, the plow actually came off pretty easy but the mower was a bitch... I asked for some help but no one came, getting up and down to get tools and go from side to side on the tractor was wrecking my knees, and wrists too for some reason... I suspect that old Arthur Ritus has my wrists too...  damn.

I had a debate with my boss last night about Sy Hersh's terrifying New Yorker article describing Bush administration plans to attack Iran, potentially with nuclear weapons. After reading the Hersh piece, my boss was understandably worried, describing his reaction to the article in road-to-Damascus-revelation terms. They're going to do this, he said.

I told my boss that I couldn't believe it was possible the Bush administration would do this. I ran through all the reasons why an attack on Iran, especially with any kind of nuclear weaponry, would be the height of folly.

Iran, unlike Iraq, has a formidable military. They own the high ground over the Persian Gulf and have deployed missile batteries all throughout the mountains along the shore. Those missile batteries, I told him, include the Sunburn missile, which can travel in excess of Mach 2 and can spoof Aegis radar systems. Every American warship in the Gulf, including the carrier group currently deployed there, would be ducks on the pond.

The blowback in Iraq would be immediate and catastrophic, I reminded him. The Shi'ite majority that enjoys an alliance with Iran would go indiscriminately crazy and attack anyone and anything flying the stars and stripes.

Syria, which has inked a mutual defense pact with Iran and is believed to have significant chemical and biological weapons capabilities, would get into the game.

China, which has recently established a multi-billion dollar petroleum relationship with Iran, might step into the fray if it sees its new oil source at risk.

Russia, which has stapled itself to the idea that Iran's nuclear ambitions are for peaceful purposes, would likewise get pulled in. Blair and Britain want nothing to do with an attack on Iran, Berlusconi appears to have lost his job in Italy, and Spain's Aznar is already gone. If the Bush administration does this, I told my boss, they'd instantly find themselves in a cold and lonely place.

The nuclear option, I told my boss, brings even more nightmarish possibilities. The reaction to an attack on Iran with conventional weapons would be bad enough. If we drop a nuke, that reaction will be worse by orders of magnitude and puts on the table the ultimate nightmare scenario: a region-wide conflagration that would reach all the way to Pakistan, where Pervez Musharraf is fending off the fundamentalists with both hands. If the US drops a nuke on Iran, it is possible that the Taliban-allied fundamentalists in Pakistan would rise up and overthrow Musharraf, thus gaining control of Pakistan's own arsenal of nuclear weapons. All of a sudden, those nukes would be loose, and India would lose its collective mind.

It was a cogent argument I made, filled with common sense. My boss seemed mollified, and we bid each other goodnight. Ten minutes later, I had an email from my boss in my Inbox. He'd sent me Paul Krugman's latest editorial from the New York Times, titled: "Yes He Would." Krugman's piece opens this way:

"But he wouldn't do that." That sentiment is what made it possible for President Bush to stampede America into the Iraq war and to fend off hard questions about the reasons for that war until after the 2004 election. Many people just didn't want to believe that an American president would deliberately mislead the nation on matters of war and peace. "But he wouldn't do that," say people who think they're being sensible. Given what we now know about the origins of the Iraq war, however, discounting the possibility that Mr. Bush will start another ill-conceived and unnecessary war isn't sensible. It's wishful thinking.

Great.

Things have come to a pretty pass in the United States of America when the first question you have to ask yourself on matters of war and death is, "Just how crazy are these people?" Every cogent estimate sees Iran's nuclear capabilities not becoming any kind of reality for another ten years, leaving open a dozen diplomatic and economic options for dealing with the situation. There is no good reason for attacking that country, but there are a few bad reasons to be found.

The worst of the bad reasons, of course, is that an attack on Iran would change the conversation in Washington as the 2006 midterm elections loom. Bush and his congressional allies are about as popular as scabies right now, according to every available poll. If the current trend is not altered or disrupted, January 2007 may come with Democratic Rep. John Conyers Jr. sitting as Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee with subpoena powers in hand.

"As Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recently pointed out," continued Krugman in his editorial, "the administration seems to be following exactly the same script on Iran that it used on Iraq: 'The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The US secretary of state tells Congress that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The secretary of defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism. The president blames it for attacks on US troops.'"

For the moment, one significant departure from the Iraq script has been the Bush administration vehemently denying that an attack on Iran, particularly with nuclear weapons, is an option being considered at this time. Bush himself called the Hersh article "wild speculation," and White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan bluntly stated that the US is committed to diplomacy. Gary Sick, an Iran expert quoted by columnist Jim Lobe in a recent article, seems to think the reputation for irrational and dangerous actions enjoyed by the Bush administration is being used as a psychological lever. "That is their record," said Sick, "so they have no need to invent it. If they can use that reputation to keep Iran - and everybody else - off balance, so much the better."

Then why this cold feeling in the pit of my stomach? Julian Borger, writing for the UK Guardian, has some added insight. "Vincent Cannistraro," writes Borger, "a former CIA counter-terrorism operations chief, said Mr. Bush had not yet made up his mind about the use of direct military action against Iran. 'There is a battle for Bush's soul over that,' he said, adding that Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser is adamantly opposed to a war. However, Mr. Cannistraro said covert military action, in the form of special forces troops identifying targets and aiding dissident groups, is already under way. 'It's been authorized, and it's going on to the extent that there is some lethality to it. Some people have been killed.'"

A battle for Bush's soul? Some people have been killed? It's a wild day here in Bizarro World when I find myself in total agreement with Karl Rove. It is the uncertainty in all this that makes the situation truly terrifying. No sane person would undertake an action so fraught with peril, but if we have learned anything in the last few years, it is that sanity takes a back seat in this administration's hayride.

I bought a coffee this morning at the excellent café‚ around the corner, which is run by a wonderful Iranian woman. I asked her point-blank what would happen in her home country if we did attack. She dismissed the possibility out of hand. "I read that Krugman article," she said, "but there's no way they would do this. They'd have to be crazy."

Indeed. Too bad that hasn't stopped them yet.

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to

What to do when the emperor has no clothes
February 28, 2006

These are troubling times for all of us who love this country, as surely we all do, even the satirists. You may poke fun at your mother, but if she is belittled by others it burns your bacon. A blowhard French journalist writes a book about America that is full of arrogant stupidity, and you want to let the air out of him and mail him home flat. You hear young people talk about America as if it's all over, and you trust that this is only them talking tough. And then you read the paper and realize the country is led by a man who isn't paying attention, and you hope that somebody will poke him. Or put a sign on his desk that says, "Try Much Harder."

Do we need to impeach him to bring some focus to this man's life? The man was lost and then he was found and now he's more lost than ever, plus being blind.

The Feb. 27 issue of The New Yorker carries an article by Jane Mayer about a loyal conservative Republican and U.S. Navy lawyer, Albert Mora, and his resistance to the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. From within the Pentagon bureaucracy, he did battle against Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo at the Justice Department and shadowy figures taking orders from Dick (Gunner) Cheney, arguing America had ratified the Geneva Convention that forbids cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners, and so it has the force of law. They seemed to be arguing that the president has the right to order prisoners to be tortured.

One such prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was held naked in isolation under bright lights for months, threatened by dogs, subjected to unbearable noise volumes, and otherwise abused, so that he begged to be allowed to kill himself. When the Senate approved the Torture Convention in 1994, it defined torture as an act "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering." Is the law a law or is it a piece of toast?

Wiretap surveillance of Americans without a warrant? Great. Go for it. How about turning over American ports to a country more closely tied to 9/11 than Saddam Hussein was? Fine by me. No problem. And what about the war in Iraq? Hey, you're doing a heck of a job, Brownie. No need to tweak a thing. And your blue button-down shirt - it's you.

But torture is something else. When Americans start pulling people's fingernails out with pliers and poking lighted cigarettes into their palms, then we need to come back to basic values. Most people agree with this, and in a democracy that puts the torturers in a delicate position. They must make sure to destroy their e-mails and have subordinates who will take the fall. Because it is impossible to keep torture secret. It goes against the American grain and it eats at the conscience of even the most disciplined, and in the end the truth will come out. It is coming out now.

According to the leaders of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, our country is practically as vulnerable today as it was on 9/10. Our seaports are wide open, our airspace is not secure except for the nation's capital, and little has been done about securing the nuclear bomb materials lying around in the world. They give the administration Ds and Fs in most categories of defending against terrorist attack.

Our adventure in Iraq, at a cost of trillions, has brought that country to the verge of civil war while earning us more enemies than ever before. And tax money earmarked for security is being dumped into pork barrel projects anywhere somebody wants their own SWAT team. Detonation of a nuclear bomb within our borders - pick any big city - is a real possibility, as much so now as five years ago. Meanwhile, many Democrats have conceded the very subject of security and positioned themselves as Guardians of Our Forests and Benefactors of Waifs and Owls, neglecting the most basic job of government, which is to defend this country. We might rather be comedians or daddies or tattoo artists or flamenco dancers, but we must attend to first things.

The peaceful lagoon that is the White House is designed for the comfort of a vulnerable man. Perfectly understandable, but not what is needed now. The U.S. Constitution provides a simple ultimate way to hold him to account for war crimes and the failure to attend to the country's defense. Impeach him and let the Senate hear the evidence.

© 2006 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, INC.

By Sidney Blumenthal