So that's why...

This is why two trellises in the back yard were laying on the ground when I got home. At 1:00 AM.

This is why I'm going to have to spend time tonight repairing one of them.

Let the fun begin!

Oh goodie...

Bonds in '06. I can't wait. No, really...I can't wait.

Who knew?

Nobody cleared Sim on this whole vacation thing. As Will Smith says to a chortling Jeff Goldblum, "We got to work on our communication!"

I guess the real question is, does he have any interesting travel stories? Like, spending 3 1/2 hours in traffic on the way to the airport, only to discover (THANK GOD!!!) that the flight (last one of the day, mind you) is delayed more than an hour.

Only to get to the ticket counter and realize it's been delayed another 15-20 minutes, which turns into a full 35 minutes at the gate. [sigh]

I went to bed at 1:30 this morning. Blogging will be sluggish at best!

Big Easiness

Paul would have you believe that you are going to be left in the steady hands of The Simster in his absence. He out and out lied.

The Simster will neither be here for the weekend nor will his hands be steady. For you see, tomorrow he will be boarding a big ole jet airliner and embarking on a weekend jaunt to New Orleans for his best friend's bachelor party. You can imagine the rest. So I guess My Dogs is on hiatus until Monday. I leave you in the capable hands of...the archives.

Travelin' Man

I'll be gone again this weekend. You will once again be in the trusty-hands of your Captain Sim as you travel the blog-friendly skies.

Where else, California. This one is important, even momentous, and there will be more forthcoming as soon as next week. Much to the Rumor Man's delight.

Part of the reason for this trip, aside from our mysterious cloak-and-dagger exploits, revolves around some tests that my mother-in-law is undergoing. We are all hopeful that the problem is easily detected and as easily corrected. In the meantime, we'll be taking advantage of the opportunity to visit cooler climes.

Besides, I'll get her back in spades--she's coming out for a week to help with a second surgery my wife is having in August. Yes, August.

Heh!

Saber rattling, nuclear style

China says "Ready to use N-weapons against US." Scary at first but once you read it for what it is (posturing), it starts to seem a little surreal. Kind of like watching Kruschev bang his shoe at the UN must have been...

China is making too much money to risk becoming the worlds largest parking lot over Taiwan. Still dangerous however...

What do you do about it?

A lot of people define a blog as a sort of on-line diary or journal, a recording of thoughts about the personal, public and private. I've viewed this one as more of a commentary than a journal.

While I share stories about the dogs with tongue-firmly-in-cheek, the only other postings about anything very personal have pertained to my wife's recent surgery and even those were not overly revealing.

We are enduring a number of difficulties in this season of our married life. It starts with my wife's recent health problems but is not limited to them by any means. It also involves her heart-ache at living 450-miles from her closest family. None of these hurt as much as wanting a child and not having one; and nothing hurts more than not having one than learning that you won't be having any of your own.

We've known for some time that there are issues keeping us from having children. As of two years ago it became clear that both of us were affected to some degree. The hope was that in both cases there were solutions available.

It turns out that there are solutions available, but only for one of us. After further testing, we've learned that my issues are essentially un-fixable. This is where we find ourselves then after nearly four years of trying to become parents, of doctor visits, tests and more tests; We will not be having a family of our own.

So now what? We've had brief discussions at various times in the past about adoption but have not ultimately resolved the issue one way or another. Frankly, I always assumed that when push came to shove, if we really wanted kids we'd be finding a way to have them ourselves. So now there are no more options.

Generally speaking, us men don't spend a lot of time growing up in conscious thought about what our family will be like in adult-hood. In contrast, my wife had already planned to be married by 25 and had names chosen for her two children. Contrasting yet again, I vaguely saw a future with a wife and kids but never had spent time fleshing it out and putting names and faces to the dream.

Only as we've gone back-and-forth over the last 4 years about whether and how much we want a family and the occasional tears the discussion produced, was I just beginning to go through the same process. And now, this is where it ends up. Just as my heart finally understands how much it wants children, it learns that it cannot have that dream.

There aren't words for this.

Jinx: no thanks

The Padres start the second half of the season with a 5 1/2 lead over Arizona in the NL West. Despite a really poor month, the club still managed to grow its lead over the Snakes by a game. Of course, the Padres have been struggling mightily to overcome injuries which have sidelined regulars Ramon Hernandez, Phil Nevin, Mark Loretta, Dave Roberts and starting pitcher Adam Eaton. All are expected to be returning over the next month.

But the Padres aren't the only ones struggling with injury problems. The Trolleywreck's problems have already been documented in this space. Since then, LA outfielder JD Drew has been lost for the season. The Dogs are now 7 1/2 games off the pace and although they've hung tough in recent weeks, they just don't have the horses anymore. I expect them to fade further back in coming weeks. San Francisco is still struggling without Barry Bonds, Armando Benitez and a healthy Jason Schmidt. Rumors have them in sell-mode as the trade deadline approaches. Which brings us to the Diamondbacks, the Padres' opponents tonight as they kick off the second half. Arizona has some nice players. Troy Glaus, Craig Counsell, Javier Vasquez, Luis Gonzalez and Brandon Webb have kept the D'Backs in this thing. But barring a major move or two before the deadline, Arizona doesn't frighten me.

But you never know. And the Friars failed to put the Dogs away when they had the chance a couple of weeks ago and the same thing could conceivably happen this weekend against the Snakes. Which is why this article in today's Union-Tribune unnerved me. Don't jinx us, people. Things look good, but the good guys ARE capable of being challenged. I would sure feel better if GM Kevin Towers were to swing a deal to improve the offense. There are a lot of rumors that the Pads are active in trying to make something happen as the deadline approaches. They recently made a strong move by acquiring reliever Paul Quantrill from the Yankees. But the team is still struggling with runners in scoring position and 3B Sean Burroughs isn't getting it done with the bat. Of course I am a strong advocate of either replacing Burroughs with Xavier Nady or platooning them. But if the club is unwilling to give up on Slapstick Seany, they definitely need to get another bat for this offense if they are going to win the division and have any chance in the playoffs.

It will never lose

The Belmont Club addresses the most recent example of jihadi violence on Muslim children in Iraq. Wretchard's conclusions are insightful:

There are those who, after the London bombing, had convinced themselves that all Muslims were enemies of civilization. There are sound arguments for that: the existence of the Jihad, the silence of most Islamic clergy. But what of the children? What of the Muslim children who are the targets of these "freedom fighters", "resistants" or "militants", whichever the BBC prefers to call them? In what category do they belong? The empirical fact is that no group has been killed more often and more brutally by the "Jihad" than Muslims themselves. During the French Algerian war several times more Algerian Muslims died than French. Anyone with a calculator can see the same is true in Iraq. One of the targets of the London bombing was a subway station frequented by British Muslims. The first objective of terror, indeed of the Terror, and the first objective of the Jihad is to maintain internal control over its base. For as long as internal control can be maintained, a terrorist movement need not defeat its armed enemy. It will never lose; hence in the estimation of the Peace generation, it will always win.

Logically, a large part of the War on Terror will consist of creating an insurgency within the insurgency. Fighting Islamic extremism must comprise organizing a revolt against Islam's internal oppressors. That would include waging intellectual war against Islamic fundamentalism within its own theological context -- a reformation -- it will include creating clandestine cells to strike at the gangs which beat women and intimidate men within the community.

Wholly unsatisfactory

That is how I found this commentary from the Christian Science Monitor on the Rove-Plame affair:

Just on face value, and that's a huge caveat because no one knows what the grand jury in this case knows, it doesn't look as if Mr. Rove has broken the law. But leak? Yes.

And perhaps, when one clears away all the weeds in this overgrown story, that's the bottom line - the leaking. The question is why? If the motives were not in the nation's interests but to score political points, then leaking is an unsavory practice, and sadly, a typical one in Washington. You might even call it a garden variety.

That's it? That's all we get...?! Newsflash: leaking is nearly always unsavory! This is wisdom-coming-down-from-on-high? Hardly.

Why we do it

In case you were curious, here's one guy's guess at why we Lab owners own Labs.

One more step to the middle

The Hill reports that Senator Clinton is co-sponsoring a Democrat bill to increase the size of the US Army.

Dragging out the old MBA one more time

Sim wonders why people won't just wait for the Fitzgerald investigation to run it's course before making arguments about Karl Rove's innocence/guilt. To wit, I hypothesize the following corollary to the idea of Net Present Value:

Much as in Finance where dollars now are worth more than dollars later, a good Bush-bash now is more valuable than a Bush-bash later. Just as in Finance though the trick is not in the computation itself, it is in finding the accurate rate at which to discount-over-time the value of the bash.

At least he sounds reasonable

Michael Medved is interviewing Ted Rall this hour. He is being quite a good guest and not at all the slavering, raving maniac I might have thought him.

But he's still out of his mind when it comes to his politics...

When he puts his mind to it...

Steve Benson can be funny!

Sadaam and al-Queda

Claudia Rosett writes a concise, clear statement about the truth behind the Administration's linking of Al-Queda to Sadaam's Iraq.

But there's another speech Mr. Bush still needs to give. That would be the one in which he says: I told you so--there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. In some quarters, that would of course provoke the usual outrage. Since the U.S.-led coalition went outside the corrupt United Nations to topple the Baathist regime in Baghdad more than two years ago, it has become an article of faith that there was no such connection. Typical of the tenor in both the media and western politics is an article that ran last month in The Economist, describing Iraq as Mr. Bush's "most visible disaster" and opining that "even Mr. Bush's supporters admit that he exaggerated Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda."


Actually, there were many connections, as Stephen Hayes, writing in the current issue of the Weekly Standard, spells out under the headline "The Mother of All Connections." Since the fall of Saddam, the U.S. has had extraordinary access to documents of the former Baathist regime, and is still sifting through millions of them. Mr. Hayes takes some of what is already available, combined with other reports, documentation and details, some from before the overthrow of Saddam, some after. For page after page, he lists connections--with names, dates and details such as the longstanding relationship between Osama bin Laden's top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Saddam's regime.

The Administration had an idea; the general shape and outline of a relationship. The last two years have provided some--but not a complete--detail of it, in the form of Iraqi documents, correspondence and financial records.

Hayes' collection of evidence is far from complete, but compelling none the less. Read both pieces, as they are the best affirmative argument for what the President has maintained to date.

Doggy ruminations

Lileks spends some time on his dog today. Thinking thoughts that at the same time are ones you never want to think and remind you about all the reasons you love your animals to begin with:

Unless you’re single or childless, you don’t give a lot of time to thinking about how you’ll miss your dog. I would guess there are millions of American men like me – got the dog before the kid, treated him as an ersatz offspring until the real thing came along and made you feel foolish for dressing him up in a bomber jacket for Halloween. You get busy with your child, and the dog recedes, gets old, becomes ambulatory furniture with weird warts hanging off his snout, that tired annoyed expression and a hitch in the step when he tries to get up the bed. He’s the only family member whose end you will arrange on purpose. You’ll make the call. You’ll take him to the same place you took him every year to get his shots. Two go in, one comes out. But you don’t think about that; why should you?

Maybe I'm a bad owner, but I must confess that there are times I already anticipate the sad day that "our first" must go and all the tears that will be associated with it. Makes me enjoy even more when she lays down next to me on the floor and rests her head on my crossed-legs.

Just as Lacy is a needy people-pleasing dog, Cassie is independent, reserved and much-less needy. But she will be missed just as much for the living-contrast she offers as for her sweet disposition and personality. Bottom-line, once they're part of the life you don't want them to go; ever. Even if it comes after a dozen wonderful years.

Some dogs become rugs; some dogs become indistinguishable from the sofa pillows on which they sit. That’s not Jasper. How he talks! The range of his vocalizations are so wide and varied you wish you could give him the Gift of Consonants and hear what he really has to say. But I know: MORE PIZZA THROW THE HEDGEHOG NOW THROW IT AGAIN.

Do people who have cats ever put their faces in the creatures just to smell them? Smell that good cat smell? Is there such a thing?

Gnat will remember him, I think. But there is something poignant about the sight of a four-year old kid hugging a ten-year old dog – a moment that meant everything to everyone, and will be remembered by neither in the end. But if “the end” is what counts above all, why bother with anything.

What counts, of course, is the simple present you’re granted anew as the day rolls on, the moment when you see the dog on the floor staring up at the crumbs from her Pop Tart, knowing he cannot eat them because I am watching. I can leave the room, and he won’t eat them. He awaits permission. As noted on this page long ago, the relationship between man and dog is a dim reflection of the relationship between man and God, inasmuch as we don’t know what we don’t know, but intuit there is a Rule, an Order that hovers above us. The difference is that God never leans over from the kitchen table and grants permission to eat the Pop-Tart. In so many words, anyway.

Ultimately that is what it's about with your pets. Lacy has no long-term memory; she no more recalls riding in a box in the car with my wife from Prescott down to Phoenix than she does of her very first trip to the dog park. She only knows she loves the dog-park (and mommy too!).

It's about today. So what are we going to do today? THROW THE HEDGEHOG NOW THROW IT AGAIN.

HuffPo: On Moral Relativism

Wow, I never expected to read this on the Huffington Post. It's weird, but I'm occassionally coming across some good stuff over there. Here's a quick taste of the snark:

When faced with something truly evil, like Karl Rove's leak, it's easy. Call for the bastard's head. But what about terrorists - or “bombers” - as the BBC calls them? That's a tough one, because although what the bombers did was bad - OUR country does some pretty bad things too! And really, who's to say what's bad anyway? That's judgmental. And being judgmental is wrong. Unless you're a judge. And even then that's probably not right either. Who's to say? Not me. Probably not even a judge! Judges aren't cool!

Under cover at the CIA

If we're to believe that Valerie Plame was in fact a covert CIA operative as of July, 2003 then I guess we have to believe that CIA op's go deep-undercover...at Langley. As analysts.

Valerie Toensing, co-author of 1982's IIRPA, doesn't buy that, and neither would I:

There has been some dispute, moreover, about just how secret a secret agent Ms. Wilson was.

"She had a desk job in Langley," said Ms. Toensing, who also signed the supporting brief in the appeals court, referring to the C.I.A.'s headquarters. "When you want someone in deep cover, they don't go back and forth to Langley."

Doesn't pass the sniff test. More conventional reading way back in '03 from Nicholas Kristof:

"First, the C.I.A. suspected that Aldrich Ames had given Mrs. Wilson's name (along with those of other spies) to the Russians before his espionage arrest in 1994. So her undercover security was undermined at that time, and she was brought back to Washington for safety reasons."

"Second, as Mrs. Wilson rose in the agency, she was already in transition away from undercover work to management, and to liaison roles with other intelligence agencies. So this year, even before she was outed, she was moving away from "noc" — which means non-official cover, like pretending to be a business executive. After passing as an energy analyst for Brewster-Jennings & Associates, a C.I.A. front company, she was switching to a new cover as a State Department official, affording her diplomatic protection without having "C.I.A." stamped on her forehead."


John Podhoretz's column today clearly delinieates exactly how and why many a conservative refuses to get apoplectic over the Rove-Plame connection:

There's no mistaking the purpose of this conversation between Cooper and Rove. It wasn't intended to discredit, defame or injure Wilson's wife. It was intended to throw cold water on the import, seriousness and supposedly high level of Wilson's findings.

Rove was suggesting to Cooper that that folks lower down in the CIA than its own director commandeered the process so that the husband of one of their own could get the gig. And the husband in question then went and misrepresented his findings to various journalists (The Washington Post's Walter Pincus and The New York Times's Nicholas Kristof) and then in his own now-famous Times op-ed.

This Rove-Cooper conversation discredits Wilson, not Plame. In fact, nothing we know so far was done either with the purpose of exposing or even the knowledge that these remarks would be exposing an undercover CIA operative.

But Plame's undercover status at the time was and is a little questionable in any case. How undercover could she have been when her name was published at the time as part of Joseph Wilson's own biography online?

So if the offense wasn't against Plame, what of the offense against Wilson? There was no offense. As many of Joe Wilson's own hottest defenders would no doubt argue in relation to President Bush, exposing a liar is not only not a crime, it's a public service.

And Wilson lied. Repeatedly.

You don't say!? Indeed. The SIC report made it clear, with documentation, that Plame had in fact pushed Wilson for the job, something he denied on his own. Furthermore, they point out that Wilson's report had far less impact on CIA analysis of Iraq's efforts at obtaining uranium than it seemingly had in Wilson's own mind.

With that in mind, Podhoretz concludes that: Thus, Rove was telling Cooper the truth. According to one of Cooper's e-mails, "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. He [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate Iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger . . ."

J-Pod concludes by painting quite a different picture of Wilson than what Wilson's adoring fans work at: Karl Rove didn't "out" Valerie Plame as a CIA agent to intimidate Joe Wilson. He was dismissing Joe Wilson as a low-level has-been hack to whom nobody should pay attention. He was right then, and if he said it today, he'd still be right.

And if Valerie Plame wants to live a quiet spy life, she should stop having her picture taken by society photographers and stop getting stories written about her on the front page of the Times.

This is hardly a one-stop-shopping collection of links and story-lines, but I wanted to post something that was working hard at being somewhat comprehensive. Why?

I can't stand the screaming of the usual suspects over this. Rove, and very possibly nobody, broke the law. Minus that, all they're left with is the hand-wringing over a CIA operative's 'outing'. With, of course, all the attendant bile directed at Karl Rove for being Karl Rove.

Some get indignant over the perceived political handling of the Wilson-Plame affair. That, seems to me, is a fair criticism. That of course posits that Rove was attempting to push-back at Wilson by discrediting him via his wife.

Lest we forget though, politics is nasty sometimes. I mean, if it were not, what exactly would Rove have had to push-back at anyway!?

Irresponsible.

Well, I finally got around to seeing Michael Moore's celebrated opus, Fahrenheit 9/11. I have but one reaction:

Are you kidding me?

This was the source of so much controversy? This film actually received the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival? This was the movie that John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and others claimed was a "must-see?" Someone, anyone took this mess seriously and found value in it? Again, are you kidding me?

Now to be clear, no money went into Moore's pocket as the result of me witnessing this trainwreck of a film. It was on cable, so it was going to run anyway. After having learned of the movie's storyline upon its release and having run into a celebration of Michael Moore's irresponsible films overseas, I resolved to do nothing to enrich this man. I kept my word.

But I was curious, it was on and I did watch the damn thing from beginning to end. Although I was frequently challenged not to turn it off, I stayed the course and watched, desperately seeking something of value. From the petulant opening where Moore claims Bush stole the 2000 election because a family member worked for FoxNews (?) to the ludicrous portrayal of idyllic pre-war Iraq to the shameful concluding scenes where he brazenly uses the grieving mother of a soldier who died in Iraq as human prop, I found myself thoroughly irritated. But beyond that, my overriding reaction was one of being completely underwhelmed. This film is thoroughly devoid of value.

I won't regale you with all of the errors, smears, unsupportable implications portrayed as absolute fact, carefully edited videotape and lazy argumentation. The film is simply riddled with errata and most have been enumerated and discussed elsewhere.

Rather, I'd like to write about the film in the overall. First of all, as I said above I am really quite shocked that this film received as much attention as it did. It yields little in the way of new information or insights. When it does purport to raise earth-shattering insights, they are of the ilk that bubbles up largely through a labyrinth of looney leftwing websites that specialize in advancing conspiracy theories. Surely this plays well among the peanut gallery, but the "gotcha" grandstanding fails to live up to a strong documentary tradition which includes The Fog of War, Control Room and The Trials of Henry Kissinger. Instead of reaching for those etheral heights, Fahrenheit 9/11 settles in comfortably among Bulworth, Wag the Dog and Bob Roberts as pure political satire.

Sourcing on the film is extremely weak. Washington Congressman Jim McDermott gets the bulk of the "analytic" airtime. Jim McDermott? You mean the same Jim McDermott who became a puppet of Saddam Hussein during an ill-advised pre-war trip to Iraq? Except for two or three clips of Richard Clarke, there are no terrorism, international affairs, Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan or oil experts quoted anywhere in the film. None. While edited Bush Administration video is often used to great cinematic effect, we get virtually no meaningful analysis from subject-matter experts who would allow us to place the administration video in any sort of context whatsoever. And it's not like anti-war experts aren't out there. I recently saw this film, which received far less acclaim and was likely filmed on a much smaller budget. While its claims are equally outlandish, at least experts like David Albright, Robert Baer and Larry Johnson are heavily leveraged. In short, for someone levelling charges of high crimes, Moore's support is extremely weak. This is just flabby, intellectual laziness. Consider the source.

But the predominant reaction I had was to the irresponsible treatment of this subject matter. These are grave issues and serious charges. They are deserving of earnestness and intellectual rigor. But Moore impugns his film and himself by continually alternating between making a documentary and groveling for cheap laughs. He vacillates between somber tones when dealing with 9/11 or grieving parents and pure schlock when portraying the war in Afghanistan as an episode of "Bonanza" in which the faces of Bush, Blair, Cheney and Rumsfeld are superimposed over the comboys of the Ponderosa. We see a similar disconnect in the treatment of American soldiers throughout the film. On the one hand, Moore argues that our heroic soldiers are the sad victims of the Bush Administration's heartless militarism. And yet at several junctures in the film, Moore actually ridicules American troops through a cartoonish portrayal of them as moronic, buck-toothed red-staters who get their jollies by killing and desecrating the bodies of dead Iraqis. How can this blatant contradiction be explained, much less overlooked?

In sum, this film doesn't know what it wants to be. One the one-hand it seeks to be taken seriously as a well-researched documentary. On the other, it aspires to light-hearted satire. The result is that it fails on both counts. The film does not hold up to intellectual scrutiny and it fails as a satire because a) the subject matter isn't funny and b)the satirical moments are often contradicted by the weak efforts to make legitimate points.

This thing won a Palme d'Or and created heated controversy? How? It must be more a tribute to its timeliness in tapping in to anti-Bush and anti-American sentiment, than to anything contributed by the film itself. To be controversial it must demonstrate at least some intellectual rigor. And yet this film has remarkably little. Sorry, I just don't get it.

At the end of the day, I don't really care much about what Michael Moore has to say. I don't lose much sleep over it. Much like I don't care what Al Franken, Anne Coulter and Rush Limbaugh have to say. But last year, I traveled to Europe and Africa and I came across a lot of people who had seen Moore's films and read his books. He's a kind of cult figure overseas and what I find very sad is that he is viewed as something of a scholar and a paragon of "the truth." Most don't understand that he's a political satirist. Although many, or even most, Americans can see through Moore's flimsy arguments I worry that those consuming his message overseas are adopting Moore's films as the unvarnished truth. In the sense that he does get worldwide distribution, I find it highly irresponsible for him to make films like this. If he is going to level such serious charges, is it not incumbent upon him to support his accusations? Did he ever give any thought to the impact F 9/11 might have as a terrorist recruiting tool? Oh, that's right. Based upon his ridicule of the American public's concerns about terrorism, Moore must not worry about the implications of such a hyped threat.