Isn’t a high-ranking official of the FBI leaking information to the press about an ongoing investigation some sort of crime? Or does merely confirming already established facts (as we were told Deep Throat did) mitigate the wrongdoing?
“Bottom line, it’s Jeb’s race to lose. We are, after all, a hereditary monarchy.”
Joel Achenbach at the end of a good blog item about Hilary Clinton and John McCain.
NewMexiKen managed to take 56 out-of-focus photographs this morning of the new Sweetie, his parents and sister. Funny how not checking to make certain the lever was on Automatic Focus can turn a simple task into a frustrating nightmare.
Fortunately others, wiser than I, were present.
Grandpa has a brand new Sweetie this morning — Alexander James, the son of Emily, official younger daughter of NewMexiKen, and her husband Rob.
Baby and mother are fine.
Photo taken by Auntie Jill when A.J. was about 50 minutes old.
From Ed Bott:
Last month, I wrote about Sen. Rick Santorum’s bill to prevent the National Weather Service from freely sharing information it collects with the public. The beneficiary in this scheme would be private companies like AccuWeather, which just happens to be based in Santorum’s home state.
Today comes news that the timing of the bill was, shall we say, interesting:
Two days before Sen. Rick Santorum introduced a bill that critics say would restrict the National Weather Service, his political action committee received a $2,000 donation from the chief executive of AccuWeather Inc., a leading provider of weather data.Asked about the connection, the Senator replied: “I don’t think there’s any coincidence between the two.”
A refreshing, although almost certainly accidental, bit of truth-telling.
“Actually there’s a lot of talk that if Michael [Jackson] is acquitted, he will be leaving the country. Or as he calls it, he’s being transferred to another parish.”
Jay Leno
was established on this date in 1923. From the National Park Service:
Pipe Spring National Monument, a little known gem of the National Park System, is rich with American Indian, early explorer and Mormon pioneer history. The water of Pipe Spring has made it possible for plants, animals, and people to live in this dry, desert region. Ancestral Puebloans and Kaibab Paiute Indians gathered grass seeds, hunted animals, and raised crops near the springs for at least 1,000 years. In the 1860s Mormon pioneers brought cattle to the area and by 1872 a fort (Winsor Castle) was built over the main spring and a large cattle ranching operation was established. This isolated outpost served as a way station for people traveling across the Arizona Strip, that part of Arizona separated from the rest of the state by the Grand Canyon. It also served as a refuge for polygamist wives during the 1880s and 1890s. Although their way of life was greatly impacted, the Paiute Indians continued to live in the area and by 1907 the Kaibab Paiute Indian Reservation was established, surrounding the privately owned Pipe Spring ranch. In 1923 the Pipe Spring ranch was purchased and set aside as a national monument.
Clint Eastwood is 75 today.
Peter Yarrow, the Peter of Peter, Paul and Mary, and the author of “Puff the Magic Dragon,” is 67.
Joe Namath is 62.
Walt Whitman, American poet, journalist, and essayist, was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, New York. His verse collection Leaves of Grass is a landmark in the history of American literature.
Whitman grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and at age 12 began to learn the printing trade. Over time he moved from printing to teaching to journalism, becoming the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1846. He began experimenting with a new form of poetry, revolutionary at the time, free of a regular rhythm or rhyme scheme that has come to be known as ‘free verse.’ In 1855, Whitman published, anonymously and at his own expense, the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Revolutionary too was the content of his poems celebrating the human body and the common man. Whitman would spend the rest of his life revising and enlarging Leaves of Grass; the ninth edition appeared in 1892, the year of his death.
The chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Assn. is worried enough about the torrid housing market to get out of it.
“I’m going to rent for a while,” said Douglas Duncan, who expects “significant reversals” in regions that have enjoyed strong home price appreciation, including Washington, D.C., Florida and California. He plans to sell his suburban Washington home, which has tripled in value since he bought it a dozen years ago, and move into an apartment.
Duncan is among a multitude of experts and consumers across the country debating the possibility of a housing bubble — a condition where prices have risen so far out of hand that they eventually crash.
From a report in the Los Angeles Times:
Tucked away in the 96-page emergency military spending bill signed by President Bush this month are four paragraphs that give energy companies the right to explore for oil and gas inside a sprawling national park.
The amendment written by Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) codifies Mississippi’s claim to mineral rights under federal lands and allows drilling for natural gas under the Gulf Islands National Seashore — a thin necklace of barrier islands that drapes the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico.
As a preliminary step to drilling, the rider permits seismic testing, which involves detonating sound-wave explosions to locate oil and gas deposits in the park. Two of the five Mississippi islands are wilderness areas, and the environs are home to federally protected fish and birds, a large array of sea turtles and the gulf’s largest concentration of bottlenose dolphins.
The legislation marks the first time the federal government has sanctioned seismic exploration on national park property designated as wilderness — which carries with it the highest level of protection.
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