Catching Up

So…during the first “drain and refill” operation after taking today’s pic I discovered, much to my chagrin, that the roof vent in my bathroom was wide open during that tropical rain squall that blew over El Casa Móvil De Pennington this morning. Which, of course, led to an impromptu mopping up operation. I now have a spotless (but still soggy) “facility.” It’s truly amazing just how much water can pour through a 12-inch square opening in the roof in such a short time. “Stupidity R Us…”

It’s pi$ing down rain as I type, yet again. But: the vent is closed now. This is a good thing.

Captain Ed, writing in response to this article in the NYT:

The Democrats thought they rode to power on a wave of anti-war sentiment, but they have discovered that their victory had much more to do with Republican failures than with Democratic platforms. Most of their new members come from center-right districts where Democratic messages about corruption and abuses resonated -- but where they see Congress' role in Iraq as limited at best. Boren represents a typical Democratic pickup district in that respect.

Now that the Democratic leadership has gone on record as wanting to limit options for victory in Iraq, Nancy Pelosi and company find that these new representatives will not play along with them. The Blue Dogs understand that timetables represent nothing more than defunding efforts under another name. They will not vote for anything that smells of defeat and retreat, and their numbers indicate that the Democratic supplemental -- even filled with hometown pork for those on the fence -- will likely fail.

[…]

On top of that, the Out of Iraq caucus threatens the bill on the Left because it gets too cute with its defunding efforts. The Left wants a clean break -- complete defunding and an end to the deployment now. Maxine Waters has assumed the leadership of this faction, and her threat to withhold support of the supplemental would also doom the bill on just that basis alone. The Democrats have only a fifteen-seat majority, and while they may get a handful of Republicans to cross the aisle for this bill, they cannot hope to make up for the losses from the Blue Dogs and the antiwar caucus.

A lot of us have been writing that the “mandate” on the war, as claimed by Madame Speaker and Harry Reid, is ephemeral at best, and non-existent outside of the ultra-Liberal Left wing of the Democratic party, at worst. And Representative Boren (more or less) proves that point. Thank the Lord for those Blue Dog Dems. I suppose I should offer thanks for the twisted logic and/or rationale being used by the “Out of Iraq” caucus against this bill, too. But I just can’t.

Both Captain Ed and that NYT articles are worth your time…here are the lead grafs from the NYT:

WASHINGTON, March 21 — Representative Dan Boren is a Democrat, but after visiting Iraq last week he announced a decision that puts him at odds with his party’s leaders: he intends to vote against their plan to set a deadline for troops to leave Iraq.

“A timeline, in effect, is cutting off the funds,” said Mr. Boren, a conservative second-term lawmaker whose territory covers the eastern swath of Oklahoma, from the bottom of Kansas to the top of Texas. “That is not the solution.”

His views have barely caused a ripple in his home district, but the House Democratic leadership has been working to keep Mr. Boren’s views from spreading through the party’s jittery conservative wing. At the same time, the leaders are trying to persuade liberals to support the legislation, even though it does not end the war nearly fast enough for their liking.

As the House prepares to vote Friday on a $124 billion Iraq spending bill, which calls for American troops to come home before Labor Day of 2008, an intensely private and anguishing debate has played out for many lawmakers through handwritten letters, telephone calls and conversations. Dozens of representatives have traveled to Iraq, even as antiwar activists staged protests in their district offices or at their homes.

The consternation among Democrats on the left and the right has made the outcome of the vote far less certain than leaders had hoped, particularly after respected figures like Representative John Lewis, a liberal Georgia Democrat, declared his opposition, saying, “I will not and cannot vote for another dollar or another dime to support this war.”

It’s getting pretty danged ugly, ain’t it?

Smash is posting a series of articles (up to Part III, now) about his adventures in infiltration. That would be him as covert operator inside last Saturday’s Moonbat March in Washington. Great writing, great pictures. Great big Brass Ones, too. Moonbats can be violent if provoked, so Smash infiltrated the march with a certain disregard for his safety. Do go read if you haven’t already been.

It didn’t get past me that Algore testified before Congress about global warming climate change yesterday. I watched a lot of his testimony (if you wanna call it that) on C-SPAN last evening, as a matter of fact. And I was pleased as punch that House and Senate Republicans didn’t just give Big Al a pass:

Al Gore, star of an Academy Award-winning film, was in town for a double feature on Capitol Hill yesterday. But instead of giving another screening of "An Inconvenient Truth," the former vice president found himself playing the Clarence Darrow character in "Inherit the Wind."

"You're not just off a little -- you're totally wrong," Joe Barton (Tex.), the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told the former vice president at a hearing on global warming yesterday morning.

"One scientist is quoted as saying, 'This is shrill alarmism,' " said Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.). The reviews only grew more savage when Gore crossed over to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in the afternoon for a second hearing. "You've been so extreme in some of your expressions that you're losing some of your own people," announced Sen. James Inhofe (Okla.), the committee's ranking Republican and the man who has called man-made global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

Senator Inhofe is rapidly becoming one of my heroes where this subject is concerned. He’s outspoken on the issue and brooks no fools, especially world-famous, Academy Award-winning and Nobel-nominee sorts of fools. Algore’s stuff may wash well in Hollyweird, but I’m not too sure how well his message plays on Main Street. Especially when there’s serious economic constraints waiting in the wings if Algore’s recommendations are accepted and implemented. The “freeze” on greenhouse gases is specifically worrisome, from my point of view. It reads and sounds like a freeze on new economic activity…pure and simple. Do we need that? I think not.