The Politburo Diktat

The LLama Butchers: The LLama Geography Quiz
Vauban-style fort?

Near river or the sea?

Controversial?

Okay, my guess was the Fort Griswold area, near the Groton sub base, on the Thames River, Connecticut. But, having spent many happy childhood days with my Dad at Fort Griswold - reliving the Revolutionary War, I knew the picture showed something else.

Was I close?

My blogging today will largely be updating the blogger family tree, probably over 300 entries. If you’re a blogger and haven’t added your name, please do so.

In real news, a few things caught my eye this morning:

Iraq’s draft constitution is adopted by Iraqi voters - Two Sunni majority provinces had rejected it by over 66%, but Ninevah produced a ‘’no'’ vote of only 55 percent. The constitution passes. Good news, although I think the even better news is that so many Sunnis participated.

George Galloway hits back at US Iraqi oil fraud claims “So, sue me,” he says. “Now wouldn’t that be loverly?”

Althouse: “Harriet Miers is — is an extraordinary woman.”

I read this as a sign that the nomination WILL be withdrawn: he’s setting up the Krauthammer exit strategy with the documents; he did not address the question that was asked directly; and he fuzzes things over with irrelevant assertions about what a fine woman Miers is.

Bush Adamant on Withholding White House Documents on Miers

This is the make-or-break of the Miers nomination. Everything else is, as Bush called it, “background noise.”

While the pundits and the bloggers can rail against Miers all they like, ultimately the U.S. Senate will, or will not, advise and consent to the nomination.

Some Senators, including Republican Sam Brownback, have called for release of documents from her work in the White House.” Bush has refused.

(more…)

• Valerie Plame
• Joe Wilson
• Niger
• uranium
• July 6, 2003
• Karl Rove
• Scooter Libby
• Judy Miller
• The New York Times
• Patrick Fitgerald
• Fitzmas

… again, it would not disappoint me.

Louisiana Libertarian: Carnival of the RINOs

The latest RINO Sightings is up. Lots of Raging goodness.

These data mining Able Danger guys issued a second warning about the Cole two days before it arrived at Aden. Shaffer, the one going on the record, is getting trashed by DIA. WND

Congressman Weldon: you are going to hear the story that they also identified the threat to the USS Cole 2 weeks before the attack, and 2 days before the attack were screaming not to let the USS Cole come into the harbor at Yemen because they knew something was about to happen.

(So this does not square with the 9/11 commission-who refused to hear testimony about Able Danger- and their outline on the Cole.)

(more…)

I oppose the Miers nomination.

She is an under-qualified crony.

Latest Tradesports odds. (33 on evening of Saturday, Oct. 22)

Take your stand at the TTLB blogger’s poll.

An excerpt from George Will’s latest:

(more…)

Update: over 380 Bloggers recorded.

I am making a family tree of the blogosphere.

Bloggers, please leave a comment noting:

1. your blogfather, or blogmother, as the case may be. Just one please - the one blog that, more than any other, inspired you to start blogging. Please don’t name Instapundit, unless you are on his blogchildren list.
2. Don’t email me to tell me that you have no blogfather/mother. That’s fine. But what I’m doing here is tracking intellectual heritage, even a strong influence. If the idea of blogging came to you fully-formed and no other blogger influenced you, I do not object. But I’m tracking lineages here.
3. Include your blog-birth-month, the month that you started blogging, if you can.
4. Identify your blog as Left, Right, or Other
5. If you are reasonably certain that you have spawned any blog-children, mention them, too.

See The Blog Family Tree page.

I had to move it. Wordpress would not upload it any more; it was too large.

The Tradesports odds on Miers’ confirmation dropped like a rock over night, from over 60 to 20 (now rebounding to 35-40):

Captain’s Quarters: The Final Act Of Miers Nomination Begins

Captain Ed reports on a not-so-subtle signal that Senators Brownback and Graham sent the White House, starting with this item from Hill News:

Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) are calling for the White House to turn over internal documents related to Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers’s service as White House counsel, breaking with Republican colleagues who say the boundaries of executive privilege must not be pushed. …

Graham’s and Brownback’s push for greater disclosure will give Democrats political leverage should they ask for memos and other documents shedding light on Miers’s work within the Bush administration’s inner circle. It would take only two Republicans to defeat Miers in committee, although that would not prevent the nomination’s automatic discharge to a floor vote.

Captain Ed reads the tea leaves (accurately, I think):

Whether or not the White House recognizes it as such, the pair used this demand to send a shot across the bow of the administration. The White House has long defended the right of the executive to retain attorney-client privilege when nominating a counsel to another post, even to the federal bench, a position well worth defending. Both Senators understand this and have long backed that position. They would not issue demands that abandon this important precedent lightly — well, perhaps Graham would, but not Brownback.

They want to tell the White House that Bush has sent an insufficient candidate to the bench, and that the only possible way the Judiciary Committee could justify a vote to confirm her is to find significant work that just doesn’t appear in her public record. That message can be boiled down further: under the current circumstances, they are not prepared to support her, and in fact do not see themselves moving off that position.

Read the rest of Ed’s article.

Charles Krauthammer concurs that thsi request may offer a face-saving solution for the White House.

Perhaps this thing will end mercifully soon.

Pharyngula::Pycnogonid tagmosis and echoes of the Cambrian

The real questions and issues in evolutionary biology are a lot more interesting than the worn-out Creationism debate. Here’s one:

I’m going to introduce you to either a fascinating question or a throbbing headache in evolution, depending on how interested you are in peculiar details of arthropod anatomy (Mrs Tilton may have just perked up, but the rest of you may resume napping). The issue is tagmosis.

The evolutionary foundation for the organization of many animal body plans is segmental—we are made of rings of similar stuff, repeated over and over again along our body length. That’s sufficient to make a creature like a tapeworm or a leech (well, almost—leeches have sophisticated specializations), but there are further steps involved in making a fly or a spider or a human. There is an arrangement of positional information along the length of an animal, so one segment can recognize whether it is near the head or the tail, and the acquisition of new patterns of gene expression based on that positional information that cause the development of specialized structures in different segments. That process of specializing segments is called tagmosis. It’s how a fly forms mouthparts in head segments, legs and wings in thoracic segments, and no limbs at all in abdominal segments.

Don Surber has a Cute Puppy Photo And Link Fest going. Check it out.

Larry Bernard contemplates a particularly disturbing threesome.

Leftie Station Not Measurable

Some have proposed that the standard for a permissable abortion should not be the viability of the fetus (the present standard), but rather the fetus’ vitality, using the measures of detectable brain wave and heartbeat.

Even by that standard, I’d say it’s time to “exercise a woman’s right to choose” on Air America:

Air America, the liberal talk network carried on WWRC-AM (1260), went from bad to nonexistent. After WWRC recorded a mere fraction of a rating point in the spring with syndicated shows from the likes of lefty talkers Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo and Stephanie Miller, Arbitron couldn’t detect a measurable listenership for the station this time around.

Body Believed to Be WWII Airman to Be ID’d

An ice-encased body believed to be a World War II airman who crashed in 1942 was chipped out of a Sierra Nevada glacier and taken to a laboratory for identification, a deputy coroner said Thursday.

Blustery weather kept rangers at Kings Canyon National Park from reaching the frozen remains for two days after ice climbers reported last weekend they had seen a man’s head, shoulder and arm protruding from the thick ice.

About 80 percent of the body was buried in the glacier on 13,710-foot Mount Mendel. The area can only be reached by hiking two or three days, or by helicopter when the weather allows.

The crew had to be careful not to damage the remains and worked slowly because they didn’t know how the body was positioned, Picavet said. The remains were then flown to the Fresno County Coroner’s department.

…
Military officials said there are 88,000 Americans still missing from past wars, most of them, 78,000, from World War II

SplogSpot Spam Blog Search Engine

Have you noticed these odd ’spam blogs’ showing up in your referral logs or perhaps trapped by your spam filter?

Splogs, spam blogs, got alot of attention over the weekend as hundreds of thousands of fake blogs were launched via the Google Blogger / BlogSpot interface resulting in some trashed search results and feed aggregators.

Jim Hedger, columnist for SEJ and editor at Stepforth, says that “Splogs most often get their content by scraping, the process of sending an electronic copying bot to take everything it sees, recreating it on an unlimited number of instant documents. By running advertising generated through the AdSense program, the owners of the splogs make money when visitors click on the ads. In other words, literally millions of instant sites have sprung up over the past twelve months, most of which are free-hosted Blogs, containing content scraped out from the original sites.” Since a lot of these splogs run Google AdSense, Google is making a bit of revenue off of blog spamming.

Here is splogspot.com, a search engine of “splogs,” or spam blogs.