Links and Minifeatures 09 21 Wednesday

Carnival of Vanities is up at the skwib. Recommended: Free Money Finance, Forward Biased,

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Here we go again! Rita is now Category 4 and headed for Galveston and Houston.



Michelle Malkin has a great round up of Rita posts. If you're in the area, pay special attention to this post with actual comparative numbers from a Houston area lawyer.



Indepundit hopes for a "do over" with regards to the political fingerpointing post-Katrina. You might guess I agree with him (as I've said several times here, I am not interested in playing the blame game until the emergency is completely over, as in all refugees have either returned to their previous life or have made a new one, which Katrina's is not yet, and Rita's has yet to begin. I can hope we'll all do better this time, but I'm prepared for that hope to be disappointed.



Holy Blow The Man Down Batman! Hurricane Rita has unexpectedly grown to Category 5!. Scroll down for projected storm track. If this is you, Get. Out. Right. NOW.



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Captain's Quarters notes that the levees protecting new Orleans from Lake Portchartrain failed well within the parameters they were designed to withstand. Possible reasons: bad design or faulty construction. Given New Orleans' and Louisiana's political history, is there anybody who wants to bet money on the first of the two possibilities?



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Nifty! Mars Orbiter Spots Changes on Red Planet. Now that we've got a long term orbiter surveying the planet, I'll bet we find a lot more of this.



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Captain's Quarters talks about Environmental Moonbattery and Hillary Clinton. I think that her opposition to ANWR drilling is pure political calculation: The issue that connects her best to the leftist base while alienating her least from centrist voters. Certainly I can't pick a better issue.



I agree with Captain Ed when Hillary talks about doing other stuff instead. Precisely what is your plan, Ms. Clinton? You and your husband had eight years to catch the national ear while he was in office, and you've had four and a half in the Senate since he left. All you've done is obstruct a plan that may not be perfect, but is both reasonable and the only plan put out there to increase domestic production. Nor have you done anything to significantly bolster alternative energy sources, in the sense of said alternatives being able to furnish a significantly larger share of our energy needs. Put up, shut up, or admit that you're voting against due to a desire to appeal to a certain stripe of voters.



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Victor Davis Hanson has a good essay up on how the media use their outlets to shape public opinion.



In the same vein, Cox and Forkum on Tal Afar.





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Captain's Quarters also talks about the Roberts Hearings and the Democratic responses to President Bush nominating an extremely qualified jurist who happens to be moderately right of center. Which is the consequence of the american public electing a right of center president and coincidentally, legislative branch. All the Donkeys can do is try to filibuster and generally act like spoiled children on the way to the dentist.



Looks like they are trying to motivate the President to name someone further to the right for his next nomination, as I speculated he likely would back on July 20th, if Roberts faces significant problems.



Queen of All Evil said it more pithily yesterday.



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Michael Barone joins those who want education schools reformed along strictly scientific grounds or abolished.



Speaking as someone who's done a fair amount of instruction (although not professionally), I want to know why we have an actual education degree, particularly for front line teachers. Yes, they must know how to teach, but that can be learned very quickly. They must also know their subjects, and the number of teachers with degrees in mathematics or science is falling and has been since I was in high school. Now a first grade teacher should be able to handle addition or subtraction with general knowledge - but a high school teacher has to know not only algebra and geometry, but the concepts behind them, in order to teach well. And the degree of scientific illiteracy in physics, chemistry, and economics among the teaching profession is astounding. My older girl is just starting school, but some of the things that have supposedly come out of the mouths of those teaching the older children of friends and family would be cause for doubting their competence in random adults walking around on the streets, let alone those charged with educating our young.



Learning how to teach should be easily contained in a laboratory sequence in the final year of college, where the assignments consist of "Get up and teach your classmates a class on what the professor assigns." Other than that, teacher candidates should concentrate on learning the subject they intend to teach.



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Governor Romney of Massachusetts isn't backing down. I believe that mosques and churches are public places, and hence covered by my writings here. So as you might guess, I like the way Governor Romney thinks, at least on this one issue, and not just because it's a mosque.



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Mudville Gazette spots a story of a true American hero.



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Dr. Sanity liveblogged the Able Danger hearings.



Strata-Sphere has more on the Pentagon pulling the rug out from under the hearings.



Captain's Quarters has another angle.



Okay, so I don't want classified intelligence and intelligence gathering methods aired in open hearings. There remains the option of going to closed hearings for classified information and procedures.



Now here's the question just begging to be asked:



What could possibly cause the Pentagon to stop its officers from testifying before Congress on something this important?



It's got to be big, and it's almost certainly political, especially if the orders came from as high up the chain of command as Donald Rumsfield, as has been alleged.



It's got to be a failure of some sort. If it was a success, somebody would be leaking a la Mark Felt (aka Deep Throat).



It's got to be something that's worth the certainty of the feeding frenzy that will be stirred by trying to find something hidden.



I don't think even a concrete 9/11 warning delivered to the president himself in person qualifies. I might have believed it and taken action in defiance of political repurcussions, but then, I don't want to be president. Given the situation and the mindset of the country on September 10th, if the President had so much as put undercover skymarshals on allegedly fingered flights and nothing had happened, the press would have crucified him worse than they used to treat Reagan every time he said something true in a straightforward fashion. Yeah, it'd hurt him - hurt him a lot - but it wouldn't be fatal. The fact is that nineteen crazies did hijeck four jets and did successfully murder thousands. We figured out Pearl Harbor a few hours early, too, and nobody blamed Roosevelt that the warning was muffed.



But let's put those last two data points together. Suppose the Eeevvvill Karl Rove™ has a Plan©. Think "selling rope." Get the Legacy Media so convinced there's something you want hidden, that they will dig themselves into such a hole that when the story comes out, it can't be ignored or wallpapered over. Then when the Real Story hits, and it's so damaging to the Donkey Media Darlings that their careers are effectively over, it can't conveniently fall down the memory hole. And the Elephants get to say, "But we weren't playing politics; we were trying to protect them!"



In other words, please Br'er Fox, don't throw me into that stickerbush!



I like it!