World Trade Center Goes Up

Egads it took long enough, but finallly the steel is going up for the World Trade Center.  No credit to the reprobate George Pataki and the New York politician that took so disgracefully long.

Stepanie Gaskell, New York Post,  reports “The first steel columns were bolted into the foundation of the new Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site yesterday.”

The World Trade Center should have been rebuilt by now, but better late than never.

Yes, I know, I didn’t do a nightly ramble, last night.  Actually that little respite was provided by my ISP.  Turns out, the whole neighborhood was without connectivity.  I know; I tried looking around on some of the neighbors unprotected wireless networks.  Don’t tell them, OK?

Anyway, by the time they managed to get the thing going, again, I was too tired to bother.  I’m actually a little annoyed, because it put me off my groove. (Yeah, Billy, I hear ya). At least it didn’t take much to fall back in, once I got things going on the LAN.

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What other project that came up tonight, is a LaserJet printer.  We managed to find an old LaserJet 5 for under a hun, with only 50,000 prints on it. Trust me, for that battleship, that’s around the block.  The printer itself, is an old friend; the at least the design is… at my last job, I built one of a scrap parts so that I’d have something nice to print on.  Initially there was some resistance from the management, but when they saw the finished product they were amazed I was able to do that in less than a couple of hours.  So, I don’t think I’m going to have a great deal in the way of maintenance problems with this thing.

The reason we got the LaserJet, it is actually quite simple; the Inkjets are too expensive and break down too often.  toner, it really is going to cost me all that much, given that I have about 15lbs. of it left over from when I was working in a place that manufactured it.
With the several computers, and the business class printer, it’s beginning to look a little too much like an office in my living room.  But, whatever.  And, no, I have not allowed the kids to put their computers into their own bedrooms, for several reasons.  The first is longer Cat 5 runs are more money. and, it’s a little easier to provide supervision when their there in the living room as opposed to in some other place.  Also, it saves a lot of conversation from one end of the house to the other when one of them pops up with “Dad, how do you do this?”

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Closer yet… to what, you ask? Why, it’s closer to Christmas, of course.

There is Christmas shopping still to be done , but we’re in better shape this year at this stage, than we have been in many years.

In going to the stores, and in driving around the last couple of evening’s I’ve noticed something; There’s a lot more around in the way of Christmas lights.  Even more so than the last week.  I suspect that there’s a number of people taking advantage of the warmer weather put out ever more lighting.

There is such a thing as taking a too far, however.  A house around the corner, and up the street a couple of blocks, burned down the other night.  Rumor has it, that the fire started in the fuse box.  The pattern of damage that I see would be consistent with that happening , since the heaviest damage is on that corner of the house that the gas and electric was fed.  Of course, they could be seen from space with all the Christmas lights they head out front.  While there were quite as many lights going on there as there wasn’t some of the pictures I showed you over the last weekend, my guess is is that their load center simply wasn’t up for the drill.  A sad happening, and to say the least, rotten timing.

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I finally got BitsBox back from the shop.  The problem; a bad thermostat.

It’s annoying; Time was when a problem like that would pop up you could pretty generally diagnosing to self and have it running again in no time. That happened with the 70 Malibu I had some years ago.  Barnett my arm all the hell, but I got a very quick diagnosis of it.  In this case, and repair took the grand total a day and a half.  See, the problem is, of electronics that they’ve been tacking on cars and trucks lately.  They tend to mask real symptoms in the car, and a lot of times don’t give you a clear diagnosis of what the problem is when they show up.

One of the problems with keeping birds, and cats, is that both spent an awful lot of their time trying to mask what problems they have, so they don’t appear to be vulnerable.  So it is with the automobile of today.  All those electronics are supposedly to increase the reliability, supposedly.  Trouble is, they’d don’t help you to fix the problem, many times, and this was one such situation.  I wonder how many people are suffering with the same kind of problems with their automobiles; all in the name of progress.

I mean, look, I make my living in a technology business.  I’ve been fairly close on the cutting edge of computer technology for the last twenty years, now.  It’s what I do. I’m hardly the neophyte type.  And yet in this case I wonder how much it’s cost us. In this case, a day and a half worth of diagnosis , for a faulty $25.00 part.  And of course, the gas mileage has been terrible for the last couple of months while I tried to sort the problem out.  (sigh)

Ah, well, it’s running OK now.  And we may actually do a road trip sometime before the end of the year.  Not sure on that one, just yet.

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By mere chance, I am reminded that this is the eighth anniversary of Bill Clinton’s impeachment.  And of course, over a places like the Democratic Underground and the Daily Kos, they are contemplating revenge. Drooling uncontrollably over the prospect, in fact.  However;Given the lack of organization that I see on the left, under Ms. Polozzi, I have my doubts that we’re going to be seeing the democrats agreeing on lunch, much less taking that kind of action against a sitting president.  And, whatever happened to the idea of actually taking care of the business of the people?  Seems that after being elected, they forgot all about those promises.  Given the number promises Bill Clinton himself forgot almost immediately upon buying Monica her knee pads, there seems to be something of a pattern brewing here.

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I notice that the first steel beam of Freedom Tower went into place today.  I’m pleased to see it go in, but I’m annoyed to see how accurate my description of the situation was a couple of years ago, when I commented that we’d have forgotten all about what happened on 9/11 to take the original building out in the first place before the first beam was laid in its replacement.

Mrs. Pelosi pledged to drain the Republican swamp and serve the People’s interest and not special interests   Well that is what she said.

Well instead draining the swamp, Mrs. Pelosi is merely replacing the Republican alligators with Democrat ones, like Willam Jefferson, and John Conyers    The San Francisco Chronicle details the special interests to which  Mrs. Pelosi will pander.

(12-19) 04:00 PST Washington — All eyes in the capital are fixed on Rep. Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco as she prepares to be sworn in Jan. 4 as the nation’s first female House speaker. But less notice has been paid to the lawmakers, lobbyists, aides, business leaders and friends who will be whispering in her ear as she leads a new Democratic Congress.

One only hopes that Mrs. Pelosi’s herd of lobbyists will not interfere with her planned coronation.

ABC News’ David Chalian Reports: As Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton continues to assess a possible presidential candidacy and the contours of a Democratic nomination fight, she has taken another step away from her 2002 vote authorizing President Bush to attack Iraq by saying that she “wouldn’t have voted that way” if she knew everything she knows now.

Like,for example, that she was going to run, and the far left would be giving her heat over it.

Look… I”m sorry, I just don’t see that she’s learnied all that much, then to now.

Denying that her vote then was the right thing to do, aside from that denial being the wrong thing morally to do.. (What hold do morals have on this woman, after all?) … is not exactly political cover, except for those alone among the far left.  I grant you, that the far left is the first hurdle she’s got to go over given the primary structure.  But it does strike me that she’s going to have a larger hurdle to get over with the general election , at which point she’s going to have to backtrack on her placating the far left.

At this stage of the game, were this anyone else, I would be asking questions like “why doesn’t she just tell the truth?”.  The problem is, I don’t think she knows what that is.  Or, cares, for that matter.

Neville Chamberlain attemped to achieve peace through appeasement.,  He failed.  

Now John Kerry has gone to Lebanon to pass out Chamberlain style advice.   Lebanon has a free, albeit tottering, government.   Syrian and Hezbollah want Lebanon to become a puppet state of Syria, again.   So rather support the people of Lebanon, who desire freedom,

Kerry again sides with the barbarians at the gate, the forces that oppose freedom.In conducting foreign policy on foreign soil, Kerry urged “reconciliation“, or appeasement with the forcing attempting to topple the free government of Lebanon.

Radical feminists assert than men are expendable.  All women need is the male’s sperm and his money, or the taxpayer’s.  Well have tried this theory for about a generation now, and some of the result are now in.

In the Washington Post, Katrina Clark tells her story of living without a father:

I really wasn’t expecting anything the day, earlier this year, when I sent an e-mail to a man whose name I had found on the Internet. I was looking for my father, and in some ways this man fit the bill. But I never thought I’d hit pay dirt on my first try. Then I got a reply — with a picture attached.

Is letting a physician impregnate single women with anonymous sperm really such a good idea?

(H/T photo:  New Times ) 

Julie Bosman and Richard Siklos of the New York Times are reporting, “Rupert Murdoch personally ordered the dismissal of Judith Regan.”

This one looks to be getting interesting.

Update:  I am sure Bit will enjoy this.  Greg Tinti, at The Poltical Pit Bull, fleshs out the story  and offers a nice summary:

A fitting end, for sure. And it’s just like my mom always said: if you sign a book deal with a suspected murderer speculating about how he killed would have killed his victims if he did it, appall the entire nation, and then scream epithets at your Jewish lawyers, you’re probably going to get fired.

Tinti provides the details which Drudge teased but did not provide.

John Hawkins has a few quotes up…. 40 of them, deemed “the 40 most obnoxious quotes of 2006″…

Here’s a taste:

32) “It’s time for us to rebuild New Orleans, the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans, and I don’t care what people are saying uptown wherever they are, this city  will be chocolate at the end of the day. This city will be a majority African-American city — it’s the way God wants it to be.” — New Orleans Mayor, Ray Nagin

25) “Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America.” — Rosie O’Donnell

16) “The entire country may disagree with me, but I don’t understand the necessity for patriotism. Why do you have to be a patriot? About what? This land is our land? Why? You can like where you live and like your life, but as for loving the whole country… I don’t see why people care about patriotism.” — Natalie Maines

10) “If I got (Condi Rice) a— on camera, I would put my Mars Air Jordans so far up her butt that the Mayo Clinic would have to remove them.” — Spike Lee

James Joyner notes:

Conservative firebrand Bob Barr has quit the Republican Party and become a Libertarian.

A former Georgia congressman who helped spark President Clinton’s impeachment has quit the Republican Party to become a Libertarian, saying he is disillusioned with the GOP on issues such as spending and privacy.

Bob Barr, who served eight years as a Republican congressman before losing his seat in 2002, announced Friday that he is now a “proud, card-carrying Libertarian.” And he encouraged others to join him.

“It’s something that’s been bothering me for quite some time, the direction in which the party has been going more and more toward big government and disregard toward privacy and civil liberties,” said Barr, 58, a lawyer and consultant living in Atlanta. “In terms of where the country needs to be going to get back to our constitutional roots … I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to do that is to work with a party that practices what it preaches, and that is the Libertarian Party.”

It would be unkind to note that Barr has nothing to lose by this move, since he’s unelectable anyway. So I won’t note that.

Yes, well, I certainly will, regardless of how a tongue in cheek your comment here is, James.The bottom line is that Bob Barr proved himself to be a nut case, to say nothing of the fact that he has a long history of taking positions which don’t translate well to his personal life.  He’s paid the political price several times for that inconsistency.  Indeed, he lost his seat over one such inconsistency.  On what basis, are we now to accept that he is a libertarian?  Simply on his say so?

Other inconsistencies include his membership in the ACLU, while belonging to the Libertarian party… Two organizations which are historically at philosophical odds with each other as few others have been. He publicly supported the Patriot Act, and yet seems to have all kinds of problems with the NSA warrantless surveillance. He claims to be about individual liberty, now, but let’s remember introducing Al Gore for a speech cosponsored by the “Liberty Coalition” . I can’t think of many people that are more anti liberty, than Al Gore.  Yet here’s Barr, water bucket in hand.

In the end, it is clear, that Mr. Barr is busy trying to sell himself to anybody who will pay the price of admission.  Anyone who is that much all over the board philosophically speaking, is not trustworthy for any kind of office. Mr. Barr, clearly holds political power higher than he does his own principles.  (Whatever those are)
As such, I am torn in the question of which is worse; his trying to join the libertarian party, or their acceptance of him.  Either way, the libertarian party has now been successful in labeling themselves as worse than useless by letting this man anywhere near what little limelight they manage to scare up.

I promised you some pictures of the neighborhood Christmas lights, and frankly, I’ve not followed through, because I’ve been waiting for snow.  It plays so much better with the light.  But while we wait, how about I give you some pictures that I’ve had on file for a couple of years, of the same neighborhood?

There’s an area within a stone’s throw of my little piece of America, that every year has some of the best Christmas lights in this part of the state, and that includes Niagara Falls, which is far better known for their show. Every year these quiet little residential side streets, which hardly see any traffic at all, suddenly explode with traffic is if their giving away something precious; and I suppose they are.

This is the house (above) that started it all. Rumor has it that the owner of this house is a retiree from the local gas and electric, though I’ve never had that confirmed. This will be about 25 years now, that they’ve been doing this kind of display at this house.  If you look very closely, you may notice that the lights are actually running between three different houses in this case.  I don’t know if this family relationships between these neighbors, but you would think that to be the case when you see the display close up.  I’ll try to get a better shot of that this year.
We’re talking middling income houses, here.  These are not rich folks.  We’re talking perhaps $100,000-$150,000 homes.

Well, once the neighborhood noticed the traffic this first set of houses was getting, well… everybody else, for blocks around, kinda fell in line, after that.  These days, just about every other house in the neighborhood, literally, for blocks around, has some serious decorations going by this time of year. When I say serious, I’m talking about the same kind of scale as this house, here.  There’s a couple that actually have refreshments sitting out in the driveway.  One guy even had a pop corn maker and a commercial grade coffee maker brewing out in front, (And yes, hot chocolate, too) for the gawkers… Of which there are many. This is a neighborhood where if you get ten to twelve cars and any other time during the year, the police get called.  This time of year it’s pretty much status quo, as you can see.

Here’s a zoom shot..(below) of the first house I mentioned.  As you can see they go through some serious buildup for this every year.  Normally we see them starting to put up these lights in the beginning of November.  Apparently, the issue is to try and beat snowstorms that come in.

I’ll have some more for you, as this season progresses.  Hopefully, we’ll have a few with some snow in the shot.

On Ironchef last night the battle was over Ostrich   Maybe if TVFN ever does a Battle Crow, Debra J. Saunders should apply.   She serves up a helping of the black bird, “After election, Foley story fizzles”

IF EVER a news story bolstered Rush Limbaugh’s low opinion of the “drive-by media,” it is the tawdry saga of former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla. When the story about Foley’s e-mails to former House pages first broke, cable news was All Foley/All the Time. The chattering classes — this columnist included — were outraged at the GOP leadership’s inexcusable failure to protect vulnerable House pages from Foley. Many pundits didn’t need proof, so happy were they to embrace U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s charge that there had been a “coverup of Mark Foley’s outrageous behavior.”

Mark Foley’s conduct was creepy.   It was neither unethical nor illegal.

You know what authentic means, in the liberal context? An authentic person is a person who can not be questioned. Cindy Sheehan is a nitwit. She also lost her son in Iraq. Because Sheehan is liberal moonbat, the MSM clamors that we must accept Sheehan’s view because she is authentic.

Well if being a Gold Star Mother, losing a child in combat, make a mother authentic, then Debra Bastian is also authentic. Bastain too lost her son in Iraq. Whereas the media fawns over Sheehan because her anti war views fit the media’s agenda, the same media largely ignores Bastian. Why?

Bastain has not taken to bashing the President George W. Bush, as Sheehan, but rather Bastian has leveled her sights on John Kerry and blasted him. Bastian says of Kerry,

‘”This man is a disgrace. He should be shunned by those serving in Iraq. He is not their friend. They [the soldiers] should not be forced to pose for pictures with Kerry the way they did when Sen. Hillary Clinton visited Iraq,”

Jim Kouri reports on Bastian’s blast, here.

Looking around this morning, I notice that Captain Ed is linking a story reporting that Judith Regan has finally gotten her comeuppance. Regan is one of those people who made think that nobody would be willing to defend. Yet, in the very first comment at CQ, that assumption is blown out of the water.

I notice also that defense takes on the very same tenor that defenders of Hillary Clinton use. I suppose that I’ve never thought of the two of them being similar in any way. But the more I think on it, with the reports we’ve heard from observers of Hillary Clinton over the years, and the reports that we’ve been seeing on Regan herself, there appears to be something to the comparison.

As the ABC article that Ed links, notes:

An industry force since the 1980s, when she produced best-sellers by Drew Barrymore and Kathie Lee Gifford for Simon & Schuster, Regan has been labeled a “foul-mouthed tyrant” and the “enfant terrible of American publishing.” She is also widely envied if not admired for her gift of attracting attention to her books and to herself.

Yeah, there might be something to that comparison, after all.

Well, let’s see. So far I’ve replaced a light switch in the bathroom, re-bolted the sink to the wall, added shelving to my office, aided my wife in rebuilding her desktop from 2000 to XP, and I’m not done, yet. I still have to re-wire the the network and power around the servers, and upgrade the Anti-Virus on one of them.

So, in short a typical Saturday.

I’d really like to add some power capacity to my office… particularly for the server supply, since I’m considering adding another server in here. Trouble is, I’ve only got 60 amp service to the house, so the line from the pole to the house isn’t up to the drill, even if the load center is. Replacing THAT would run me around two grand… so… I’ll put up with what I have.

As for the office, maybe I ought to post a couple of pictures once I get place cleaned up.  The process of having the shelves and basically ripped up 3/4 of the room. In this space only slightly larger horizontally than my van, I’ve managed to cram 4 servers, a dual monitor desktop, and all the associated electronica… along with a small mountain of sound gear, a couple printers, and a couple police scanners.

You can imagine, with all of that, it’s going to take a little while to get it cleaned up, again.

As I’ve been working today, I have been thinking with great intensity, on the situation currently going on in Iran with regards to the suppose it ‘conference’, regarding he holocaust.  I must say, that I have on the surface of some serious problems with calling it a “conference”, sine the word implies some give and take, rather than simply a bunch of people showing up to listen to a pronouncement.

“Not acceptable,” says Ban Ki Moon, new Secretary-General of the United Nations. “Repulsive,” say the editors of Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “An insult . . . to the memory of millions of Jews,” says Hillary Rodham Clinton. Global polite society is in an uproar over the Holocaust conference organized this week in Tehran under the auspices of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Moral denunciation is what reasonable people do–what they must do–when a regime that avows the future extermination of six million Jews in Israel denies the past extermination of six million Jews in Europe. But let’s be frank: Global polite society has been blazing its own merry trail toward this occasion for decades.

So says Bret Stevens, this morning in Opinion Journal.

I find the reference to Hillary Clinton, a little out of bounds. But in this case I stipulate that her statement is quite correct. It is an insult to the memory of millions of Jews. But what is more deeply insulting, and certainly more deeply dangerous, is our refusal to confront such things were we find them, instead of simply sitting back and being “polite”…. treating such acidic nonsense as a valid difference of opinion… a point of view we must respect.

But in point of fact, we must NOT respect it…we must denounce it… and the world of Islam would too, if they had any interest in peaceful co-existence as they claim.

Read again that sentence in the second para;

Moral denunciation is what reasonable people do–what they must do..

I am reminded in conversation about a comment of mine as regards American Democrats; I wasn’t seeing at the time many mainstream Democrats, coming forward and denouncing the “Bush is Hitler” meme. My comment at the time, was that the reason that we don’t see them loudly objecting, was because they don’t object…  they agree with that nonsense.

Well, the same rules apply to the world of Islam.  There is an awful lot of non- disagreement going on out there.  There is no counter-conference… none of the other Islamic nations are holding a conference to cry foul on Iran’s claims… indeed there is, comparatively speaking, nobody speaking out against this madness from within the world of Islam.

At that moment, the whole thing gelled for me.  We have not seen any counter conference… one that is actually open to conferring…

What we have seen is a total lack of objection from the Muslim dominated countries. No surprise, given that for generations such countries have been feeding their people aren’t consistent diet of anti Jewish propaganda that Hitler himself would be proud of.

It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to see where that leads us, and that continuing to be ‘polite’ in the face of this is going to get a lot of people killed.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a “4-day fete set for Pelosi’s historic swearing-in:”

12-16) 04:00 PST Washington — Tony Bennett is coming, of course, to croon his trademark “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

Carole King and Wyclef Jean will be there. Mayor Gavin Newsom is scheduled to be there, too.

And a big delegation of San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and labor leaders is jetting back East, together no less.

All will converge on Washington in early January to take part in four days of events surrounding the swearing-in of Rep. Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, who will be elected the new speaker of the House and the first woman and first Californian to occupy the post.

It took all of one day to coronate a real queen, Queen Elizabeth II, in 1953.   Why should it take four days for the Speaker of the House?