Archive for November, 2007

IN THE MAIL: The new Halo novel, Contact Harvest, by Joseph Staten. Staten was writer and cinematics director for Halo, Halo 2, and Halo 3.

THE MOST BUSTED NAME IN NEWS.

WHY PUTIN DOES IT: Because he can:

Vladimir Putin does not want to win the upcoming Duma Parliamentary elections. He does not want to win big. He wants an overwhelming victory. He wants to annihilate the opposition. And Putin probably will get what he wants.

Furthermore, Putin feels no need for any “seal of approval” from the West. He so circumscribed election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that they can’t do their job, so they’ve withdrawn.

And most Russians, with no great enthusiasm for political freedom in their national character, are okay with that.

ADVICE TO HOMEOWNERS: I’ve long thought this, but my recent plumbing-problem experience restated its importance — always own a wet-dry vac. Mine broke a couple of years ago, and I don’t use it much, so I hadn’t gotten around to replacing it. As my toilet overflowed, I wished I had. I was (barely) able to contain the leakage before it got to the carpeted areas using towels and a mop, but I was really wishing I’d replaced the wet-dry vac sooner. I immediately ordered one — they’re cheap — and it’s my fond hope that I won’t need it again. But it’s good to have one.

Also, know where your water shutoff valve is and have the necessary wrench to close it, and know where your sewer cleanout is, and have the necessary wrench to open it to relieve the pressure in backups.

UPDATE: Reader Bob Bonsall emails:

In regards to your advice to homeowners, let me also point out that any home renter should follow the same advice. We have had a double wammy of a leaking water heater and a clogged drain in our cellar stairs recently, and there’s nothing worse than trying to keep carpets dry that are getting flooded from both sides. My top priority is to get a wet dry vac so I don’t have to again enjoy the thrill of soak-wash-dry-repeat with towels at 1 am.

Indeed. And in my experience, once carpets get really soaked, they’re never the same.

And while I’m at it — know where to turn off your electricity and gas, too, and have the wrench for the gas shutoff.

MORE: Another good reader suggestion:

All good ideas, but, here’s one important idea to add to the list: have the wrench needed to turn off the gas supply hung close to the shut off valve.

If gas is leaking, or in danger of leaking, you don’t want to have to rummage through your tools to find the right wrench – especially if the electricity is off and you’re in darkness.

Excellent point.

MORE STILL: Reader Ryan Kelley emails:

All that advice is great but the absolute most important thing to have is home/renters insurance. While not at home I had a ‘sewage backup’ in my apartment which basically ruined 3 seperate rooms (drywall,
carpet, etc.).

Prevention is great but had I not had that specific flood problem covered I would have been out $10k+. Make sure that all the man-made flood problems that can occur in your home are covered.

Oh and the vacuum you linked to looks fine but for flood/leak control people might want to consider one with more than 2 1/2 gallon space. This one has a 10 gallon tank but still works for most household things and gets very good reviews. Hopefully people can figure out what’s best for them but you have earned a lot of trust some might just buy it blindly (and probably be happy with it – that’s why you’re trusted!)

Yeah, good point. I went with the 2 1/2 gallon one myself — it came yesterday — because my house has three floors and it’s easy to carry around. My old one was a 5 gallon and seemed bigger than I needed — but of course if you had a really big flood, you’d want a bigger one. On the other hand, the big ones take up more space when you’re not using them, too. To each his own.

As for the insurance — absolutely! If you don’t have that coverage, you should have it. Sooner or later you’ll probably need it. My brother emails: “One of my new colleagues had a toilet line pop off while he and his wife were away for the weekend. Trashed their entire downstairs and basement… repairs will probably come to over $30k. They’ve had to move out while the place is rehabbed. Eeeeeeeeek.”

Eeeeeeeek, indeed.

POLITICO: Murtha’s comments on ‘surge’ are a problem for House Democrats. Excerpt:

Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), one of the leading anti-war voices in the House Democratic Caucus, is back from a trip to Iraq and he now says the “surge is working.” This could be a huge problem for Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democratic leaders, who are blocking approval of the full $200 billion being sought by President Bush for combat operations in Iraq in 2008. Murtha’s latest comments are also a stark reversal from what he said earlier in the year. . . .

Pelosi, who is scheduled to speak to a Democratic National Committee event in Virginia on Friday, will surely face tough questions from reporters regarding Murtha’s statement on the surge.

“This could be a real headache for us,” said one top House Democratic aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Pelosi is going to be furious.”

Read the whole thing.

SABBATICALS FOR SOLDIERS? Well, if professors need ’em, soldiers probably do too, right?

Speaking of which, where’s my sabbatical?

SO I LOOKED AT EDITOR AND PUBLISHER and there’s nothing about the CNN planted-question scandal. There’s one story on the debate, but it’s a puff piece about a cartoonist getting his video in. Then I looked at Poynter and all I could find was this piece on covering the debates. But I’m not seeing anything about the planted-question scandal. I’m not seeing anything at the Columbia Journalism Review site, either. Journalism, cover thyself!

Well, actually I think they are covering . . . .

SOUNDS . . . MARKETABLE: “Scientists at Stanford have reversed the aging of skin in mice, making it look and act like new skin.”

Bring it on. I won’t have this baby face forever.

JOHN FUND EMAILS THIS on the CNN debacle. From OpinionJournal.com’s Political Diary:

Last week, CNN’s Anderson Cooper quipped in an interview with Townhall.com that “campaign operatives are people too” and that CNN wasn’t worried if political partisans posed questions at the upcoming GOP debate he was moderating. “We don’t investigate the background of people asking questions (by submitting video clips). It’s not our job,” is how he put it.

But now CNN’s logo has egg splattered all over it, as it scrambles to explain how a co-chair of Hillary Clinton’s veterans’ committee was allowed to ask a video question on gays in the military at Wednesday’s debate and was also flown by the network from California to the debate site in Florida so he could repeat his question to the candidates in person. CNN claims it verified retired Brig. Gen. Ketih Kerr’s military status and checked his campaign contribution records, contradicting Mr. Cooper’s blasé attitudes. Still, they somehow missed his obvious connection to the Hillary campaign which any Google search would have turned up. CNN later airbrushed Mr. Kerr’s question out of its rebroadcast of the debate, indicating that it apparently doesn’t think “campaign operatives” are legitimate questioners at the network’s debates.

Now it appears that an amazing number of partisan figures posed many of the 30 questions at the GOP debate all the while pretending to be CNN’s advertised “undecided voters.” Yasmin from Huntsville, Alabama turns out to be a former intern with the Council on American Islamic Relations, a group highly critical of Republicans. Blogger Michelle Malkin has identified other plants, including declared Obama supporter David Cercone, who asked a question about the pro-gay Log Cabin Republicans. A questioner who asked a hostile question about the pro-life views of GOP candidates turned out to be a diehard John Edwards supporter (and a slobbering online fan of Mr. Cooper). Yet another “plant” was LeeAnn Anderson, an activist with a union that has endorsed Mr. Edwards.

It seems more “plants” are being uprooted with each passing day. Almost a third of the questioners seem to have some ties to Democratic causes or candidates. Another questioner worked with Democratic Senator Dick Durbin’s staff. A former intern with Democratic Rep. Jane Harman asked a question about farm subsidies. A questioner who purported to be a Ron Paul supporter turns out to be a Bill Richardson volunteer. David McMillan, a TV writer from Los Angeles, turns out to have several paens to John Edwards on his YouTube page and has attended Barack Obama fundraisers.

Given CNN’s professed goal to have “ordinary Americans” ask questions at their GOP debate, how likely is that it was purely by accident that so many of the videos CNN selected for use were not just from partisans, but people actively hostile to the GOP’s messages and candidates?

(Emphasis added). It makes it kind of hard to trust CNN.

CANADIAN BEER DRINKERS THREATEN PLANET!

Sounds like a great plot for the next Bob & Doug MacKenzie movie!

I wish they’d make another Bob & Doug MacKenzie movie. But such genius strikes only once.

HELP IS on the way!

SPEAKING OF MISSION CREEP: Googling now counts as stalking. Well, it does if you’re, um, crazy. Or just looking for something bad to say without regard to facts.

HOWARD KURTZ ON CNN AND THE PLANTS: Nice that he’s covering it. But Kurtz reports it in a way that gives a false impression about yours truly:

Conservative bloggers, some of whom deride CNN as the “Clinton News Network,” ripped the network yesterday. At Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds wrote: “Once again, CNN demonstrates an inexplicable failure to background-check pro-Hillary questioners.” Scott Johnson of PowerLine wrote that “CNN has shown itself unable or unwilling to act as an honest broker.” James Joyner, at Outside the Beltway, said: “If lone bloggers can vet these people in less than half an hour, surely CNN’s crack journalistic team should have been able to do so between the time they selected the pool of questions and the airing of the debate?”

I’ve never called CNN the “Clinton News Network.” (I’m not even a “conservative blogger” except in the sense that I’ve supported the war, but nowadays that’s all “conservative” means to most people). And there’s a bigger problem.

CNN’s problem isn’t just bias — it’s a failure of professionalism. Frankly, if bloggers ran some sort of event and were infiltrated in this fashion, the usual media-ethics suspects would be tugging their beards about blogger irresponsibility and praising the superior layers of editors and fact-checkers at Big Media outfits like . . . CNN.

But we learn that CNN did use Google:

He said CNN never spoke to Kerr and had Google, which owns YouTube, bring the retired general and about a dozen other questioners to the debate because their videos were likely to be used, although no final decision had been made.

Using Google for plane tickets is okay. But next time, try using them for . . . Googling. As a commenter at Kurtz’s observes: “What should be noted about this issue is that CNN probably has a whole army of interns and low-level producers who could vet the possible questioners. They ‘could spend hours Googling everybody’, while the top level hacks concentrated on choosing the ‘best’ questions.”

Meanwhile, I’ll just repeat what I said earlier: If Fox hosted a Democratic debate and many of the most pointed questions turned out to come from Republican activists, but Fox didn’t disclose that, do you think it would pass unremarked?

UPDATE: Roger Simon comments: The Presidential Debates are a National Joke.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Good grief.

MORE: Another line from Kurtz’s comments:

So let me get this straight… in the Democrat YouTube debates, the “undecided questioners” are Democratic activists and in the Republican YouTube debates, the “undecided questioners” are Democratic activists.

Well, at least they’re consistent.

Heh. Indeed. And a couple of readers note that the media is sometimes more fastidious about who’s asking the questions.

STILL MORE: “Because of the irony.”

ECONOMY INFLATING? NOT SURE. Weather inflating? Sure looks like it:

With another hurricane season set to end this Friday, a controversy is brewing over decisions of the National Hurricane Center to designate several borderline systems as tropical storms.

Some meteorologists, including former hurricane center director Neil Frank, say as many as six of this year’s 14 named tropical systems might have failed in earlier decades to earn “named storm” status.

“They seem to be naming storms a lot more than they used to,” said Frank, who directed the hurricane center from 1974 to 1987 and is now chief meteorologist for KHOU-TV. “This year, I would put at least four storms in a very questionable category, and maybe even six.”

Most of the storms in question briefly had tropical storm-force winds of at least 39 mph. But their central pressure — another measure of intensity — suggested they actually remained depressions or were non-tropical systems.

A lot of people seem to be interpreting this as global-warming hype, but it’s probably just bureaucratic mission creep. If you’re the National Hurricane Center, you need hurricanes to stay in business. If hurricanes fall off, you’re tempted to cook the books just a bit. Ditto for the rest of the weather establishment. Blizzards are okay, tornadoes good for a bit of quick fun, but hurricanes are the real money-maker, combining intense fearfulness with multiday longevity like nothing else.

IF YOU MISSED IT ON XM RADIO earlier tonight, the latest episode of PJM Political is online now.

SO JAMES LILEKS’ NEW BOOK, Gastroanomalies, showed up today. I spent some time reading it and it’s great — the perfect Christmas gift for the foodies you know. If you liked The Gallery of Regrettable Food, you’ll love Gastroanomalies. My favorite so far — the “Everedy Bacon-egger,” a special skillet for cooking bacon and eggs at the same time! Though Earl Warren (yes, that Earl Warren) pitching “the California custom of the olive bowl” has got to be a strong second. But I’ve only made it to page 23 so these may be eclipsed by more favorites later on — up next is “The Wonderful World of Aspics!”