Maggie's Farm

This very large crested Woody Woodpecker-looking bird was extremely scarce in New England during the 50s and 60s, but they have become more common in recent years as the farmlands return to woodlands. Their numbers have always been stable in the South, I believe.

I often see them hanging around dead trees where beavers have flooded woods. The loud kuk kuk kuk call announces their presence, and the large rectangular holes they chip in trees, looking for bugs, lets you know that they are around.

More about the wonderful Pileated here at CLO. Image borrowed from the excellent CLO website.

I have rarely seen a tree with as many Pileated holes as the one below, from this photographer's website.  Interesting to see the old, healed Pileated holes in the Hemlock immediately behind.

I do not think that having the "netroots" visibly on your side is doing any favors to the electability of Dems. I have several reasons: 1. Hate rarely produces good outcomes, 2. I haven't seen what they stand for other than hatred of those who think differently - or, more accurately - feel differently, and, 3. They always sound paranoid and nutty.

Ace discusses David Brooks' piece on the subject.

Freud's concept of "the narcissism of small differences" helps explain how the Dems can be in a hot fight against one of their own most visible leaders, Joe Lieberman who, in fact, is a very liberal if not Leftist politician. In politics, you aren't supposed to eat your own. It is counterproductive, unless you are caught up in something wierd.

But what if something wierd is going on? After contemplating all of the above, and recent news on the blogs, etc., one must consider all of the rumors going around that The Daily Kos blog is a Bush-CIA-RNC Nixonian construct designed to discredit the Democratic Party. Since all of the Rovian hallmarks are there, I suspect that it is likely, but I can't prove it.

Just think about it: you set up a couple of websites to get a million angry amateurs and mentally unstable kooks (many of them probably CIA junior staff guys and RNC junior staff folks having great fun posting and cheerleading, plus thousands of Christian right-wing extremist volunteers) to dig into the core of your opposition, and weaken it from within. What could be more Rovian? More devilishly ingenious and convoluted? And to hire a haute-nurdy ex-Army guy for cover... too clever to be an accident. Don't ya think?

And, just consider - how many blogs could rent a place in Vegas for a meeting of their readers? Could your blog do that? Hmmmm. I suspect half of the attendees were plants, collecting personal info, and half looked like homeless brought in for free food and tee-shirts to set the stage for the sting, and the third half, if my math is right, was true believers. What better way to get names and ID but to gather people at hotels voluntarily? Only an evil genius could create a trap that people would take out loans to get into, while easily harvesting their credit card data, addresses, gambling and other private personal habits (I have heard a story from an anonymous source that all Vegas hotel rooms are bugged and videoed for "security" purposes), etc.

Now this Affaire Frisch - definitely a suspicious effort to discredit the Dems: she provokes, takes a fake fall, and gets her checks and reappears with another alias and a fresh outrage in a few weeks. Don't tell me she didn't intend to get "caught," because every good sting has people getting "caught" to add verisimilitude. A pro only gets caught on purpose.

And the selection of Lieberman as a target - highly suspicious to pick the one guy the Repubs would like to keep on board - it's perfect cover, while it turns the netroots against the Dems, and distracts them from the Repubs - and Lieberman will win anyway. Ned Lamont? A useful idiot in the game - a pawn, utterly unaware of his role, targeted for the multi-millions of his own he could spend to complete the charade....after all, if half of the netroots are agent-provocateur posters with CIA-generated aliases and locations, and half are pot-addled hippies stuck in the 60s and paying off their PCs with Disability checks, where else would the money for a campaign come from?

Think about it. And this is happening shortly after Rove left his White House berth for "other operations." Could all of this be pure coincidence? Didn't Rove openly say "We have a plan, and we will win"? And, to date, Markos Mole-itsas has yet to deny the rumor.

I have heard some even speculate that the rumor itself is CIA-generated, so as to appear to discredit Kos, thus adding an additional layer of cover for Markos as his visibility increases. That would be classic CIA.

As soon as Rove-Bushitler-Nixon-CIA tracks all the names they want under the guise of "anti-terror," watch out!

A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.

P.J. O'Rourke
(h/t, Right Wing News)

Whitmore, 1969 - Back from Vietnam, seeking salvation in Bob Dylan

Fiction from The Atlantic's fiction edition:

We drove under a tin-white sun. In Des Moines my brother and I had each dropped a tab of acid, and now the Midwest rushed at us—great rows of corn and swaths of open field, a startling horizon of alfalfa haze. We stared out at a diorama of little wooden bridges and clapboard houses, processions of blinking radio towers, neither of us speaking. My brother, Whitmore, drove like a man skipping bail, forcing my father’s Oldsmobile into a high-pitched whinny. He streamed his hand out the window, his knuckles whistling in the wind. Slightly mesmerized, I watched his hand as it fishtailed into an elegant sine curve. We were listening to Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home on the eight-track. This was the summer of 1969. Men were getting ready to land on the moon. The girls I knew wore slacks and smelled of sandalwood and cherry vodka. You could fit the whole world inside an album cover.

My brother had his other hand on the wheel, his index finger raised like a flagpole in exclamation at the music. He seemed to be saying, Here, this is what I’ve been trying to tell you. When “It’s All Right, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” played, I saw a single tear appear in my brother’s right eye. I looked out my window at the neon-green farms and the heat shimmering off the blacktop roads, pretending not to notice. Whitmore was twenty-three—four years older than I was. He had returned to us a few months earlier after a two-year stint in Vietnam. In the Los Angeles airport, as he disembarked from his transpacific flight in uniform, a young woman with braids spat at him. This event had dogged him all summer.

He didn’t talk much about his two years in Southeast Asia, but every now and then—when a young girl with an organdy bow in her hair sang at our church, or when my mother forced him to receive one of her hugs—he wept. One night, as we ate dinner, my parents and I stopped in mid-chew to see Whitmore, his face blotched red, quietly bawling into his pork chops and mashed potatoes. My mother touched the back of his hand, and Whitmore looked up as if someone had slapped him in the face. Trying to make light of the situation, my father said, “I didn’t think much of the pork chops either.” My mother visibly winced, but Whitmore started to laugh. He said, “This will stop, Dad. You’ll see.”

Read the whole thing in The Atlantic before the privilege is taken away.

We are always a day late and a dollar short.

Happy Birthday yesterday, Ringo! God bless ya for what you helped add to our lives. Tangled Web

Where did the time go? Good question.

Hawaii deals with race in very different ways than we do on the mainland. I think it is safe to say that most Americans' ideal is to ignore race entirely, and to deal with people as people, without preference and without prejudice.

"Created equal" was the noble, and historically mind-boggling term, as I recall. (Of course, character, manners, brains, honor, etc., are another matter...but basic human dignity is yours for free in the USA, unless you renounce it with bad  behavior or unfortunate choices. But that is free choice.) 

We posted the piece at RCP by Peter Brown this week, which asked whether Hawaii was part of the US, especially with respect to their handling of race - specifically, those descended from the native Hawaiians.

Bird of Paradise emailed us this comment on that piece:

Aside from the sheer ignorance of the writer of the actual "culture" and "ethos" of Hawaii Mr. Brown simply fails to mention that, unlike the segregated academies of the Dixie-South, the Kamehameha Schools was educating Hawaiian students in this manner (as interpreted in Princess Pauahi Bishop's will and endorsed by her husband after her death) back when Hawaii was an independent nation.  There is a strong sense of justice in Hawaii that appears to have been completely lost to Mr. Brown.  Here in Hawaii we respect the people who were once the sole inhabitants of this land and whose ancestors ruled and governed Hawaii as an independent nation (one of the few in the world during the 19th century) until a coup-d'etat overthrew the monarchy and established a republic that later became a territory of the United States and then, in 1959, our 50th state.

 

The Hawaiian people have, with little complaint (except for a few hateful individuals) been granted over 100 legal exemptions to state laws by the Hawaii legislature over the years (including access to certain private properties for gathering herbs, etc., etc.)  There are few who begrudge the admissions policies of the Kamehameha Schools (although there are many who desire that the Pauahi Biship Estate be better and more fairly administered to meet the many needs of the many poor and needy children of Hawaiian ancestry in the state.)

 

This is one reason why the Akaka Bill was supported by many in the Hawaiian & Hawaii communities (not a majority, but still a sizable number--I opposed the bill but only because it is so loosely written that the full implications of the bill would not be known until years after its passage).  By granting "native Hawaiians" indiginous legal status (as Native American tribal groups have) these exemption laws and the admission policies of the Kamehameha Schools could remain intact AS APPROVED BY THE STATE LEGISLATURE AND ENDORSED BY THE PEOPLE OF HAWAII rather than having these cultural "rights" thrown out by a bunch of legal bozos in San Francisco (who have nearly 2/3 of their decisions overruled anyway).

 

I am not pro-sovereignty for the Hawaiian people but I do desire (as virtually every resident in Hawaii does also) to extend to them certain rights and priviliges appropriate to their heritage, culture and traditions.

 

While the current interpretation of US Constitutional law may, in fact, negate those legal priviliges now enjoyed by the Hawaiian people (as distinct from the "people of Hawaii") it is nonetheless the clear consensus in this state that, in this case at least, Dickens was right when he wrote that, "The law's an ass."

 

Aloha -

In short, when perhaps our greatest need at this point in the war against Islamism is for our intellectuals – artists, people of letters, and philosophers to instill in the rest of us a sense of our own worth as inheritors of the traditions and values of Western culture, we are treated instead to lectures about moral equivalency and outright boosterism for the cause of the jihadis. In one of the greatest historical ironies in recorded history, those who have been nurtured in the freedom and tolerance of the West now would abandon the society that celebrates those values by either cowering in the shadows or giving voice to doubts reflecting the view that there is little in Western Civilization worth saving.