Chihuahuas attack police officer

Here’s further proof that truth is stranger than fiction. Surely no one would make up the phrase, “A pack of angry Chihuahuas.”

Chihuahuas attack police officer
Fremont, Calif. – A pack of angry Chihuahuas attacked a police officer who was escorting a teenager home after a traffic stop, authorities said.

The officer suffered minor injuries, including bites to his ankle, Detective Bill Veteran said.

The five Chihuahuas escaped from the 17-year-old boy’s home and rushed the officer in the doorway Thursday, authorities said. The teenager had been detained after the traffic incident.

The officer was treated at a hospital and returned to work less than two hours later.

Waking in Memphis

I never checked into an Airport [hotel name here] before, so it didn’t occur to me how close to the actual airport the Memphis Airport Radisson would be when I volunteered to get bumped from my flight home. I’m figuring about a hundred yards. It wasn’t too bad at first, but at 2:57 AM, the wind must have shifted directions because they suddenly changed from taxiing past to jets taking off rockets launching and shaking everything that wasn’t nailed down. Now I know how FedEx gets you your packages on time.

Thermodynamics is Grand

On the leg back to Memphis, I saw another fascinating demonstration of physics. We took off from a gray day, overcast and cold and climbed through the clouds and burst into sunshine. From above, the clouds looked like a shining desert of downy dunes stretching to the horizon. While the sight was incredible, it wasn’t unique in my experience. However, what I’d never seen before was the edge. Somewhere over the [seemed too late to be the Tennessee and too early to be the Mississippi] River, the clouds suddenly stopped; a long, crisp edge that reminded me of quiet surf lapping at the beach, leaving a line of foam as the waves recede. Thermodynamics is grand.

 

Former conservative bashes former liberal for switching teams

Media Matters – Chris Matthews: 2005’s Misinformer of the Year

I keep waiting for Chris’ nose to turn brown.

The Earth is Round

I witnessed a beautiful physics lesson this morning. The first leg of my annual sojourn north started before dawn but as the A360 climbed from the runway, the horizon began to appear out the window from my seat over the starboard wing. Armed with a 1018 random song playlist and Shure headphones to silence the engine a dozen feet away, I watched the sky gradually lighten from a thin line of pink to a colorful band that covered the spectrum, not a clearly banded summer curve but a blend that showed every possible combination of color bounded above and below by the blacks of the horizon and the night sky. At first, I thought the sky was completely cloudless until the realization came that the hills on the Florida horizon I was having trouble identifying were the tops of clouds far to the east, their bottoms hidden by the curve of distance. What took minutes on the ground stretched into an hour as the plane raced west on its path north to Memphis, like a slow motion movie with a cool soundtrack. The earth is round. 

Putting the conclusion before the hypothesis

Media Matters – Former fellows at conservative think tanks issued flawed UCLA-led study on media’s “liberal bias”

We thought this one was a little loopy and I was going to post something snarky like, “Study proves factual reporting and logical reasoning skills indicate liberal bias” but the Brock Squad beat me to it (although they are a little lighter on the snarkiness, they do indulge their liberal bias or at least my definition of it) and this comment, Counting bumps on reporters’ heads might lead to better accuracy of liberal or conservative bias than the study by thes clowns.- skiploader1111 / Wednesday December 21, 2005 08:32:19 PM EST” started my day off with a smile.

 

Mr. Delay, prepare for your delousing.

Lobbyist Is Said to Discuss Plea and Testimony – New York Times

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 – Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist under criminal investigation, has been discussing with prosecutors a deal that would grant him a reduced sentence in exchange for testimony against former political and business associates, people with detailed knowledge of the case say.

If anything untoward befalls Ol’ Jack, be sure to duck while the conspiracy theorists’ heads explode.

via thinkprogress

Why isn’t it necessary…

… to torture captives, spy on Americans without judicial review, take away my toenail clippers at the airport while doing nothing to secure our ports?

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.� -William Pitt

That’s why not. If we give up the freedoms we have in the name of protecting the freedoms we have, we still lose the freedoms we have.

Snoopgate

Bush’s Snoopgate – Newsweek National News – MSNBC.com

Jonathan Alter states the obvious:

President Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate—he made it seem as if those who didn’t agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda—but it will not work. We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

While I’m not convinced the President’s strategy will be entirely ineffective, we can certainly hope Alter’s other prediction comes true:

This will all play out eventually in congressional committees and in the United States Supreme Court. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced. Similar abuse of power was part of the impeachment charge brought against Richard Nixon in 1974.

In order to test this hypothesis, the Democrats will have to regain control of Congress and I for one would really like to test this hypothesis. One of the clearest things about the Constitution is that no man, not even the President, is above the law.

The Abyss is Gazing Back

Why are we even having a conversation about the merits of torture?

After all, the motivation behind the Geneva Conventions was morality, not legality and despite neocon yattering to the contrary, torture doesn’t yield reliable information from patriots (and yes, all people willing to die for their cause consider themselves patriots) as witnessed by Sen. John McCain.

Let’s recap: If a combatant is captured, they can do you no harm. Torture doesn’t work anyway. Don’t torture.

Now for the most part, the objections to the objections about torture seem to hinge on the fact that the global terrorists aren’t following the rules, therefore we (the good guys) shouldn’t have to.

Unfortunately, this is like saying it’s OK for the class bully to twist the arm of of some kid (who not coincidentally pissed him off before) to tell the bully which of his friends just smacked him in the head with a spitball* so the bully can beat them up and take their lunch money. The bully justifies himself because shooting spitballs is wrong and he is the biggest and strongest so nobody can stop him. But let’s face it, the kid whose arm is in a bind is not going to give up his friend. After enough resistance to satisfy his own self esteem, he will blurt out the name of weird kid with glasses, hoping the bully won’t hit a kid with glasses but if he does, oh well, it’s the weird kid but at least he may still have a shot at throwing a curve-ball.

The problem here is that if the bully continues to indiscriminately twist arms without ever finding out who is behind the spitballs (especially if everyone thinks it’s obvious that he already knows who shot the spitball), not only will he continue to take spitball fire every time he turns his head, eventually the class will decide, “Enough, already” and gang up on him. Not coincidentally, the bully’s grades are gonna drop since he’s no longer paying attention to his home work because he’s obsessed with enforcing the spitball ban.

Perhaps the bully should watch the news instead of 24 reruns.

 

Whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you. – Nietzsche 

(*My spitball analogy is not intended to trivialize what happened at the WTC. We appropriately responded to that by going after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. At least it would have been appropriate if we’d actually completed that mission rather than getting distracted by the Food for Starving MIC Executives Welfare Program in Iraq. My intent was to highlight the juvenility of the justification of torture.)