Now I don't know what I'll be doing.

Can anyone summarize where the EU goes from here now that Ireland has voted no ? As somebody said, you have to ask what they were thinking when they asked each country to ratify. You just knew somebody would refuse.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Any cheering news today?

No

"Ne te courbe que pour aimer..." René Char

I have a trip to the Hawking Centre and sunday lunch with the neighbours lined up.  I'll give the darkroom a bash as well.

Ad astra per aspera

Perhaps a quick quote or quick comment section on the front page for such short items might work. They might not even need to have replies enabled.

To show how this might work, my nomination for such an item for today:

In response to the Supreme Court ruling restoring habeas corpus to Guantanamo prisoners Scalia wrote:

"The game of bait-and-switch that today's opinion plays upon the Nation's Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed"
[my emphasis]

My reply:

"Reinstating the death penalty certainly caused more Americans to be killed"

Exactly what sort of Catholic education did Scalia get?

Policies not Politics
---- Daily Landscape

A-fucking-men

The Belgian team told a conference that activity within a "default network" in the brain appears to match the level of consciousness of the patient. Some believe the default network is associated with daydreaming. The findings were reported in New Scientist magazine.

 "We could just scan someone for 10 minutes and get an easily quantifiable readout. The default network in the brain's cortex appears to be more active when the brain is not actively working on a goal - hence the proposed link with daydreaming".

52 Dem
48 Rep (calling Lieberman a Rep)

Committee resources go elsewhere, and Udall and Warner can push money over to other candidates.

Very stupid on the GOP's part, because that means money out of two key states Obama's looking to pick up.

Where's your motherf*%&ing flag pin?

These final words calling for a vote on the Senate floor have been uttered by the presiding officer, from a chair that oversees the entire Senate chamber.  If someone were watching the proceedings on C-SPAN or from the small visitors' gallery above the chamber, they would see a puzzlingly empty spectacle.  In most cases, only a few senators are on the floor, having spoken while standing behind one of a hundred desks that form a semicircle in front of the elevated platform where the stiff, seemingly bored presiding officer sits behind a parliamentarian, two legislative clerks, and a journal clerk.  With that, those observing might be forgiven for thinking that the debate they have just witnessed was nothing more than kabuki, a pantomime of stilted, false formality played out to deaf ears, as unheard and unremarkable as a tree falling in an empty forest.

But in almost every Senate office, indeed at almost every desk, the television sets and computer monitors are on, having followed the floor statements that precede the vote.  And much more has been done, well before the speeches began.  Committee hearings have been held.  Memos have been written.  Recommendations have been drafted.  Discussions and internal debates have taken place.  All that remains is for the individual senator to decide which way he or she will vote.  And within fifteen or twenty minutes, depending on the rule attached to the legislation, that vote must be cast personally, a yea or nay offered to the roll clerk sitting just below the presiding officer.

Some votes are easy, either because they are perfunctory, such as judicial and military nominations that have been extensively scrubbed by trusted committee chairmen, or because they are procedural, calling upon a senator's loyalty to the party leadership, or because the philosophical arguments are clear.  Some votes are enormously difficult.  Many involve great stakes for the nation on issues that are far more complex than the inconclusive legislative answers that are being offered, a dilemma that many senators identify as "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good."  Others involve deliberate traps by clever members of the opposing side, meaningless in their true impact because of procedural gimmickry but designed to soil the voting record of senators up for reelection and to provide fresh fodder for the bombast of the talk-show crowd.  Casting such "gotcha" votes, one cannot help but think of Rudyard Kipling's knowing lament in the classic poem "If":  "If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken / Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools ..."

Jim Webb, A Time To Fight

The third, fourth, and fifth paragraphs of chapter one.

Pictures and reminders fill my office.  Samuel Cochran, B. H. Hodges, my parents, my wife, my brother and sisters, my fellow Marines from a time of brutal combat in Vietnam, my five children and one stepdaughter; those who went before me, those who were young with me and grew older by my side, and those who will be here long after I am gone.  They look over my shoulder as I work.  They give me balance, and a sense of accountability.  I owe those who went before me the knd of country they fought to create and wanted to perfect.  I owe those who served alongside me the kind of country we tried to protect.  And I owe my children the kind of country they want to see preserved and further greatened.

Two pages later.  Damn I wish I could write like that.

Somewhere in cyberspace, the ghost of de Chardin is smiling.

The insurance companies say that there are fewer accidents on non-13th Fridays, than on Friday the Thirteenths. One reading of that data could be that lots of people are being especially careful. Wonder why.

In Helsinki though it was calamity time: there was a nasty fire in the Ministry that backs onto the Presidential Palace, and a little while later, two trams collided - not a shunt, as you might imagine, but a broadside as two sets of rails intersected. 17 hurt. And still further, Calamity Matti, the PM, had to address the recent party donations scandal at the Center Party conference in Joensuu (East by the border with Russia).

You can't be me, I'm taken

Well, yes- George Bush may come out of his Catholic closet once the November lottery results are in. He was so chummy with Ratzinger that voices have it he's gone Cathy just like his Iraq War cohort Blair.

And the mobster Berlusconi is thumping for McCain-- all the more a good reason to side with Obama. The utterly servile ass-licking by Berlusconi will have its consequences: Italian military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan upcoming. So macho.

What kind of nonsense is this: football is war - or, war is a game...


The struggle of man against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting.(Kundera)

seems quite happy with life.

The ducklings at my son's school, three weeks on.  All fourteen are thriving.

"The Government's view is that the Constitution had no effect there, at least as to noncitizens, because the United States disclaimed sovereignty in the formal sense of the term. The necessary implication of the argument is that by surrendering formal sovereignty over any unincorporated territory to a third party, while at the same time entering into a lease that grants total control over the territory back to the United States, it would be possible for the political branches to govern without legal constraint.

    Our basic charter cannot be contracted away like this. The Constitution grants Congress and the President the power to acquire, dispose of, and govern territory, not the power to decide when and where its terms apply. Even when the United States acts outside its borders, its powers are not "absolute and unlimited" but are subject "to such restrictions as are expressed in the Constitution." Murphy v. Ramsey, 114 U. S. 15, 44 (1885). Abstaining from questions involving formal sovereignty and territorial governance is one thing. To hold the political branches have the power to switch the Constitu