A couple of boys stopped by about 6-9 years old and assisted in the process. As they did, I noted the continual parade of three and four-packs of young, tanned, toned, bikini-clad blonde teenage girls walking by. Nice work if you can get it, I thought (for both myself and them).
As I rubbed more Aloe lotion on this morning, I thought of our sea sculptures and other shore images (including eating Shriver’s fudge – yummy! – after an hour or two of rides at Castaway Cove) while I read the following news stories:
From Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer editorial page:Sorting out whose toys belonged to whom when we were finished was a bit of a chore. I eventually ended up taking my best guess and making a few different piles for each participant. Of course, the young one insisted on jumping in the moat several times, sending ocean water and muddy sand flying in every direction.
The unraveling of L'Affaire Rove offers two possibilities:
Either presidential adviser Karl Rove wasn't telling the truth to President Bush about his role in revealing the identity of a CIA officer. Or Bush wasn't telling the truth to the public about Rove's involvement. Neither option is defensible.
Rove has been choosing his words carefully on this matter for two years, a parsing that could not have escaped the President's attention. He has said he did not reveal the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame, and never even knew her name.
But Rove was involved in giving away her identity; that much is clear from recent statements by Rove's lawyer and from an e-mail written by Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper about his conversation with Rove in July 2003. Rove told Cooper that the wife of former ambassador Joe Wilson, who had accused Bush of hyping Iraq's nuclear ambitions prior to the war, "apparently" was a CIA employee specializing in research on weapons of mass destruction.
That would be Plame. So technically, Rove was correct when he claimed he never revealed Plame's name as payback for Wilson's criticism of Bush. But to contend that he had no role in revealing her identity is to engage in goofy posturing worthy of the old TV spy series Get Smart.
I was eventually able to divert him long enough to start expanding his castle moat when I asked him if he knew where his yellow-handled shovel was, which I’d failed to put in his pile of toys. He looked at me quizzically and said “I dunno” (we later found it).
From Chris Floyd’s latest column (regarding Bush and the Iraq War):The young one worked alone for a little while, as some of the boys went off to play in the ocean. When two of them returned, one started working again on the castle for the moat without saying anything, apparently angry, while another said to him in a pleading way, “I wasn’t calling you a name. I was just joking. Here, I’ll say something about myself if you want.”
Bob Herbert, who has been incandescent for months now, usefully (reminded us in a recent New York Times column) of the comedy routine that Bush performed for a sycophantic audience of TV and radio "journalists" back in March 2004: the infamous "hunt for WMD" in the Oval Office. As you'll recall, this was a series of cutesy shots showing Bush peering behind the office curtains, looking under the rug while cracking wise: "No weapons of mass destruction under here! Maybe they're over here?" and so on.
I thought then - and still think - that this performance was one of the most revealing - and sickening - episodes in American political history. The cynicism of it defies belief, outstrips all comprehension. Imagine sending men and women to die - and to kill - in a war over weapons of mass destruction, then joking about the fact that no weapons were ever found. All this, while thousands continued to die, including your own soldiers.
The fact that Bush would engage so openly in such murderous cynicism was a telling revelation: it showed, or rather confirmed, that America was being led by a brutal, mocking, heedless Caligula, a spoiled, shallow, vain and selfish fool, a moral psychopath incapable of ordinary human empathy. The reaction of the "journalists" present was another soul-sinking revelation: they laughed. Oh, how they laughed. "What a kidder this Dubya is, eh? What important insiders we all are - real players, tough and savvy - sharing this special moment of "knowing" laughter with the president!" As far as I know, not a single person walked out in protest, not a single "journalist" refused to take part in this open mockery of the dead - our own, and the tens of thousands of Iraqis who had died for the WMD chimera that Bush now found so funny.
My update (from CNN today):
A suicide bomber blew up a vehicle Wednesday near a U.S. military convoy and large group of Iraqi children in Baghdad, killing 27 people, Iraqi police and hospital officials said.
Iraqi police said most of the dead were children. The attack also left 20 people wounded.
Not so funny, eh?
From Brian McGrory’s column in today’s Boston Globe:A few yards away from us, I noticed a kid who was playing rough with another and scolded by his mother for doing so. As he got up and walked away from playing by the water, he picked up some muddy sand and threw it at the sculpture that his friend was working on, causing his mother to scold him even more.
"Today, I'd like to take a few moments to express profound thanks to Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the third-ranking Republican in the US Senate. In fact, all Bostonians should thank him for sharing his incredible wisdom and insight about this city and its depraved ways.
Specifically, here's what Santorum wrote about the church pedophile scandal on a religious website called Catholic Online. ''When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political, and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm."
So thank you, senator, for setting us straight about the problems with the clergy. Thank you for letting us know that all those pedophilic priests and the church leaders who covered up their crimes are the fault of every Bostonian.
Who knew that the president of Harvard, the people at the Museum of Science, and Mayor Thomas M. Menino were to blame for Cardinal Bernard F. Law's decision to move predatory priests from one parish to another? Here's who knew: Senator Rick Santorum.
(If Santorum were to visit,) what would he find up here, anyway? He'd find one of the most Catholic cities in the country.
He'd find academic institutions that are the intellectual engine of the nation, schools, by the way, that have churned out plenty of Republican leaders, George W. Bush among them.
And he'd find a city that is pretty much the birthplace of civil political discourse, a concept that Santorum essentially violates every time he opens his mouth."
By the way, according to the most recent polling data available from The Daily Kos, Democratic challenger Robert Casey Jr. is leading Santorum by 50 to 39 percent (however, the Senate election is over a year away).
Just stay over there and don’t bother to mess anything up over here, I thought. I don’t feel like dealing with a bully, because I have to be careful about getting in the face of other people’s kids, not that I want to anyway. I wasn’t too worried, though, because the boy’s mom had things well in hand.
In Monday’s Bucks County Courier Times, Republican State Rep. Matthew Wright justified the 16 to 34 percent pay raise the legislature authorized about a week ago, saying it took “courage” for him to vote for it. He partly used as justification the fact that he “has to be on call for his constituents on a 24/7 basis.”As we were finishing up, the young one decided to walk over towards the jetty and look for hermit crabs along with the other kids. I told him not to, because the sign was posted telling everyone to avoid the jagged stones and rocks upon which one could get seriously injured. “We have to obey the rules,” I reminded him.
Wright, however, had no comment on the fact that PA legislators receive the following perks: $129 in expense money for every day they’re in Harrisburg; up to $650 a month or $7,800 a year to lease a car; fully paid health insurance valued at $13,000 a year; and a fully paid pension.
As the Bucks County Courier Times noted, “The increasing cost of health insurance alone has wiped out the salary increases most people have seen in recent years. In all likelihood, millions of Pennsylvanians are taking home less than they were a few years ago.”
As I read the news and recalled the day before, I turned the radio on to the classic rock station, and I heard the following lyrics from an old Jimi Hendrix song:From Wikipedia.org:
On August 27, 2003, the State of Oklahoma filed a 15-count indictment against WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers. [6] The indictment charged that he violated the state's securities laws by defrauding investors on multiple occasions between January 2001 and March 2002. [7] These charges were dropped, with the right to refile retained, on November 20, 2003. [8] An agreement to extend the statue of limitations on these charges, allowing Oklahoma prosecutors time to see the results of federal sentencing, was signed on March 30, 2005. [9]
Federal authorities indicted Ebbers with security fraud and conspiracy charges on March 2, 2004. [10] [11] An amendment to the indictment on May 25, 2004 increased the list of charges to nine felonies: one count each of conspiracy and securities fraud, and seven counts of filing false statements with securities regulators. [12] Ebbers was found guilty of all charges on March 15, 2005.
Ebbers was sentenced today to 25 years in prison.
“And so castles made of sandHow perfectly appropriate, I thought.
Fall into the sea
Eventually.”
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