Month: March 2006

I Voted For The Roof

It will probably cost me my membership in the Libertarian Secret Decoder Ring Society, but I went ahead and voted for the stadium improvements and the new rolling roof to cover Kauffman and Arrowhead Stadiums in Kansas City.

The darn thing is just way too cool.



Images via kcchiefs.com[*1] .

The Immigration Hullabaloo

I can’t seem to get worked up over the Big Crisis Of The Week:  immigration/illegal aliens/border control/whatever you want to call it.

Maybe because several things just seem to me to be common sense:

1.  People who are in the country illegally have commited a crime for which the appropriate punishment is deportation to their source country.  If they have families here or there that will suffer, that’s their fault, not mine, not the Federal Government’s.  My fallback position is to build an enormous camp in the Arizona desert where we’ll put all the illegals who can’t or won’t go back to their home countries, enter them into the legal immigration process, and have them wait their fair turn along with the people in those countries who are playing by the rules.

2.  If it’s too easy to cross the border to become a person covered by #1 above, then let’s put up a big ol’ fence to make it harder.  It’s our border.  We get to decide whether we want it to be a shallow river, or a Great Wall of America.

It seems to me that just following through on points 1 and 2 would pretty much clean up any problem we have with our immigration system.

Hired For Looks? Lara Logan, CBS

Lara Logan, a CBS News “reporter” in Iraq, had a bad day during her appearance on CNN’s Reliable Sources.

Gateway Pundit[*1] has most of the story. Click over there to get this party started, now . . .

But, one blog story isn’t enough to fully document pretty Lara’s bad day. The real punchline is in this exchange between pretty Lara and Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz, courtesy Newsbusters.org[*2] :

KURTZ: I want to play for you a piece of tape involving Laura Ingraham, the conservative radio talk show how who was on “The Today Show” earlier this week and criticized “The Today Show” for not doing more from Iraq.

Let’s listen to what she had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LAURA INGRAHAM, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: To do a show from Iraq means to talk to the Iraqi military, to go out with the Iraqi military, to actually have a conversation with the people instead of reporting from hotel balconies about the latest IEDs going off.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: What do you make of that comment about reporting from hotel balconies?

LOGAN: Well, I think it’s outrageous. I mean, Laura Ingraham should come to Iraq and not be talking about what journalists are doing from the comfort of her studio in the United States, the comfort and the safety.

I mean, I don’t know any journalist that wants to just sit in a hotel room in Iraq. Does anybody understand that for us we used to be able to drive to Ramadi, we used to drive to Falluja, we used to drive to Najaf. We could travel all over this country without having to fly in military helicopters.

That’s the only way we can move around here. So, it’s when the military can accommodate us, if the military can accommodate us, then we can go out and see.

I have been out with Iraqi security forces over and over again. And you know what? When bob Woodruff was out with Iraqi security forces and he was injured, the first thing that people were asking was, oh, was he being responsible by placing himself in this position with Iraqi forces? And they started to question his responsibility and integrity as a journalist.

I mean, we just can’t win. I think it’s an outrage to point the finger at journalists and say that this is our fault. I really do. And I think it shows an abject lack of respect for any journalist that’s prepared to come to this country and risk their lives.

KURTZ: All right. I do…

LOGAN: And that’s not just me. That’s the crews, that’s all the people that make up our teams here.

KURTZ: I do want to point out that Laura Ingraham was in Iraq last month for eight days, and that was part of the reason for her appearance.

Hm. Maybe Lara wasn’t hired for her looks, after all. Maybe it was her incisive knack for getting the facts right. Yeah, that must be it.

Update:  In re-reading pretty Lara’s rant, she did say something I totally agree with:

I think it shows an abject lack of respect for any journalist that’s prepared to come to this country and risk their lives.

Yes, Lara, it does show a lack of respect.  But you see, respect is not given.  It is earned.  Go out and earn it, like Michael Totten[*3] , Michael Yon[*4] , and so many other Internet reporters have.

Why Are You Using Internet Explorer?

Oh, yeah. Because the morons at Microsoft decided to imbed the damned thing into the Windows operating system so that you pretty much can’t get rid of it even if you want to.

‘Critical’ IE bug threatens PC users[*1]

A dangerous new exploit in Internet Explorer could put PCs and data at risk, Microsoft has admitted.

The flaw, for which code has already been published on the internet, could be exploited to set an email-borne virus free on the unsuspecting public.

Potential viruses could come as an attachment that conceals the code, or could possibly redirect users to a site that will unleash the code on the user’s machine, leaving the computer open to remote attack. Once the PC is being controlled by a malicious user, it can then be used to launch attacks on other PCs.