Just got an email here, and boy is it about time. I have been raising hell for almost a year now that we didn’t have a candidate in the pipeline to go up agaist the Great Nothingness, Lamar Alexander.

We do now. Fella named Kenneth Eaton. I'm far enough away from Nashville that the name didn't ring a bell but evidently he's been politically active--to the extent of running for mayor anyway--for awhile now. It won’t be quite as satisfying as putting a "D" on the seat formerly occupied by Bill "KatKillah!" Frist, (grrr, Harold Ford) but I’ll take Lamar!’s as a consolation prize. Here's what he had to say:

This is great news for Iraq, if the government can enforce it. Whether it's such good news for us, the country to which the people (and their vast stores of everything from guns to hardened vehicles to helicopters) are supposed to be repatriated toot-sweet, is, um, another question.

Oh, we made such fun of "Baghdad Bob," aka the Iraqi Information Minister. Now no lesser body than the Iraq Study Group essentially confirms: yup, he was pretty much on target. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Tony Norman explains:

Nicknamed "Baghdad Bob" by a credulous American press corps all too willing to parrot Bush administration propaganda, the Iraqi bureaucrat had a talent for lurid prose that hinted at a poetic sensibility beneath the nonsense.

And it was more than "poetic," it turns out he was telegraphing a great whacking lot of military strategy right out there in front of God and everybody, including television cameras. Might have helped if somebody capable of understanding had been listening.

Carry on below...

Voting on the old dinosaur machines in Pennsylvania and other places had its flaws, but there was one part they made helpfully stupid-proof. After you pulled the little levers to register your vote in each race, you pulled a BIG lever that opened the curtain and allowed you out of the booth. That lever was what officially "cast" your votes into the little counters inside the machine. Very 1930s-ish technology but (unless the damn machine threw a shoe, or tossed a wire off a pulley which they were prone to do, trapping you inside and causing a hysterical call for a repairman) it worked.

I just (that is to say, at circa 9:30 a.m. CDT 8/12/06) got my first actual push poll of this election cycle! This is a happy and exciting moment, not unlike seeing the first hummingbird of spring. (You folks farther north would say "first robin" of spring but here they don't actually go away over winter.)

The caller was a polite young gentleman from, he said, "MSI Research." This turns out to be Market Strategies Inc; I know because my caller ID said "Lavonia Michigan" and that's where this outfit is based.

Details belooooow....

[cross-posted at Corrente]

Sometime before 5:15 p.m. Central Daylight Time today, Thursday July 27 2006, every network station on my Dish TV-supplied signal began displaying a blue screen with the words WE ARE HAVING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES--PLEASE STAND BY. The problem persisted until 5:55 p.m. or thereabouts when everything (at least the NBC signal) came back on for the final story of the day, appropriately enough about those stunningly annoying "Head-ON" headache inducers/remedy ads.

This was not just NBC that was out either. CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX were all off-"air", and all displaying the same blue box described above.

This is probably an entirely insignificant story. You are excused in advance for not reading it, but just damn if I can let it go without any notice whatsoever. It's just such a quintessential "Bush Appointee Sleaze" tale...sort of like Mike "Mustang" Brown but with the only casualty being a decrepit old buffalo rather than thousands of dead people in New Orleans.

Sound interesting after all maybe? Read on.

Stuck at home by the gas prices over a long weekend? Want to do a little Citizen Journamalising?

Go here:  Lenin's Tomb.

No, I am not suggesting a quick vacation to Moscow. This site, evidently run by a Brit, has got a spectacular catch on something I haven't seen anywhere else (other than the Atrios comment thread where alert citizen Pooleside provided this link.)

It seems that a Baton Rouge company called IEM Inc. got a half-million dollar FEMA contract to devise and run the emergency services plan for a catastrophic hurricane striking New Orleans.