Sweetsie,

Please look at how Mike and Kitty do it. Try to be closer in, more - well er romatic - on camera. I am practicing the loving look, and the creeping hand.
Yours, for better TV and more demonstrable affection.
Your sweetie-pie coo-coo

Love ya
GB

Robin died in New York in October 1953; her parents spent the next day golfing in Rye, attending a small memorial service the following day before flying back to Texas. George learned of his sister's illness only after her death, when his family returned to Texas, where the family remained while the child's body was buried in a Connecticut family plot. There was no funeral.

U.S., France OK U.N. Mideast truce pact

An official with knowledge of the document said the draft calls for a "full cessation of violence" between Israel and Hezbollah, but would allow Israel the right to launch strikes if Hezbollah attacks it.

"It does not say immediate cessation of violence," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the draft had not yet been made public.

...The full 15-nation Security Council was expected to meet later Saturday to discuss the resolution, and it was likely to be adopted in the next couple of days...

In the video, Mr. Gore appears as a sinister figure who brainwashes penguins and bores movie audiences by blaming the Mideast crisis and starlet Lindsay Lohan's shrinking waist size on global warming. Like other videos on the popular YouTube site, it has a home-made, humorous quality. The video's maker is listed as "Toutsmith," a 29-year-old who identifies himself as being from Beverly Hills in an Internet profile.

In an email exchange with The Wall Street Journal, Toutsmith didn't answer when asked who he was or why he made the video, which has just over 59,000 views on YouTube. However, computer routing information contained in an email sent from Toutsmith's Yahoo account indicate it didn't come from an amateur working out of his basement.

Instead, the email originated from a computer registered to DCI Group, a Washington, D.C., public relations and lobbying firm whose clients include oil company Exxon Mobil Corp.

A DCI Group spokesman declines to say whether or not DCI made the anti-Gore penguin video, or to explain why Toutsmith appeared to be sending email from DCI's computers. "DCI Group does not disclose the names of its clients, nor do we discuss the work that we do on our clients' behalf," says Matt Triaca, who heads DCI's media relations shop...

Traffic to the penguin video, first posted on YouTube.com in May, got a boost from prominently placed sponsored links that appeared on the Google search engine when users typed in "Al Gore" or "Global Warming." The ads, which didn't indicate who had paid for them, were removed shortly after The Wall Street Journal contacted DCI Group on Tuesday.

(AP photos)

Israel intensified their bombing raids on Beirut and northern Lebanon last night, cutting the last four highway bridges into Syria from Lebanon. They said the highway bridge bombings were to prevent arms from being transported from Syria.

Israel said nothing about cutting off the last major escape route for Lebanese civilian fleeing to safety. In the photos above, you can see that apparently only civilian vehicles were on the highways at the time.

International Aid workers say the highway bombings will prevent them from getting humanitarian aid into Lebanon. Meanwhile, around 28 farm workers unloading vegetables were killed by Israeli warplanes. Israel said the vegetables were bombs.

Details here.

It's certainly true that heat waves in July and August are not unusual. But we need to keep in mind that the first six months of this year were the warmest ever recorded in the United States. And that this summer, according to the National Climatic Data Center, more than 50 cities in the continental U.S. have set records for high temperature.

We should keep in mind, as Al Gore has pointed out, that of the 21 hottest years ever measured, 20 have occurred within the last 25 years. And the hottest year of this recent hottest wave was last year.

[According to] Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle: "In northern California, it was hotter for longer than ever on record, hitting 110 degrees four consecutive days in the nine-county Bay Area."

The truth is that humans have lived for millennia in really inhospitable climates - think Inuit and Bushmen. Yet modern technology allows us to combine those climates with an industrialized lifestyle. There's no need for siestas or igloos, for the most part. Occasionally, the weather reminds us just how inhospitable it can be, but we have the technology to defeat that, for the most part. Air conditioning makes 100 degree heat bearable (it was 117 degrees in the sun feet from where I am writing this a few minutes ago) and, if it is getting warmer for whatever reasons, more and more of the country and indeed world will adopt the technology. Central heating systems did the same for the icier parts in the past. It is the easy availability of affordable energy that has done that. It's a blow to those of us who rather like the idea of a siesta or a fortifying dram as night falls, but it is vastly increasing our ability to create wealth.

Indeed, you could view the spread of temperature control technologies as the globalization of the working conditions associated with a temperate, maritime climate. It might even be an essential component of successfully adopting that climate's most successful economic framework.

Posted at 3:39 PM

... how sad and frustrating it is that the world's greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming...and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not? If it is real, is it necessarily dangerous? What exactly are the dangers? Is global warming as dangerous as, say, global cooling would be? Are we better off with an Earth that is getting hotter or, what with the modern realities of heating homes and offices, and the world energy crisis, and the need to conserve, does global heating have, in fact, some potential side benefits, and can those benefits be broadened and deepened? Also, if global warning is real, what must--must--the inhabitants of the Earth do to meet its challenges? And then what should they do to meet them?

These are the very questions -- the sane ones, anyway -- Gore's movie addresses. But Peggums hasn't seen it, won't see it. Republicans uniformly regard Gore's film as they did Fahrenheit 9/11: as unpatriotic, an affront to the cult of Bush.

Strange Bedfellows [Iain Murray]
Pat Robertson joins Al Gore:

The Rev. Pat Robertson said he hasn't been a believer in global warming in the past, but this summer's record-breaking heat is "making a convert out of me."

On his "700 Club" broadcast, Robertson said, "It is getting hotter, and the icecaps are melting and there is a buildup of carbon dioxide in the air."

Switching sides on an issue that divides evangelical Christians, Robertson said, "We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels."

The religious broadcaster told viewers, "If we are contributing to the destruction of this planet, we need to dosomething about it."

I hope they'll be very happy together.

Posted at 2:00 pm

A draft Bush administration plan for special military courts seeks to expand the reach and authority of such "commissions" to include trials, for the first time, of people who are not members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban and are not directly involved in acts of international terrorism, according to officials familiar with the proposal.

The plan, which would replace a military trial system ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June, would also allow the secretary of defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court's jurisdiction. The two provisions would be likely to put more individuals than previously expected before military juries, officials and independent experts said.

Detainees would also not be guaranteed the right to be present at their own trials, if their absence is deemed necessary to protect national security or individuals.

"We know you're guilty. We can't tell you why, but there's a guy, we can't tell you who, who told us something. We can't tell you what, but you're guilty."

[Military lawyers] objected in particular to the provision allowing defendants to be tried in absentia, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to describe the deliberations. Another source in contact with top military lawyers said, "Their initial impression is that the draft was unacceptable and sloppy." [emphasis mine] The source added that "it did not have enough due-process rights" and could further tarnish America's image.

Why Do They Hate Us?

The Middle East has been a synonym for diplomatic challenges our whole lives. I hope that our children one day can tell their children it is the home of the Holy Land and no further explanation is needed.

..Some people are oppressed by dictators, some by Mother Nature, others by disease, still more by economics. Regardless of the cause, the oppressed all share the same misery, tears, and despair.

...The United States is the kindest, most generous country to ever exist on this planet. We spend billions all over the world feeding, caring, protecting, and building.

It is easy to understand that when you know your liberator and he does not come, it must mean he doesn't care. Hearts begin to fill with hate. Evil takes root. Soon all of your problems only exist because the United States failed to solve them.

...The Iraqi's perception is that we are all powerful. We watch them from space with technology they cannot even imagine. Surely if we wanted to turn on [some complaining young man** from the Mideast's] electricity we could do so. He has no idea how large the problem is but he knows we can do anything. He was angry. Eventually his air conditioning began running and his anger cooled.

My point is the hatred towards America isn't always based on what we did but often simply not living up to the beliefs of what the oppressed think we are capable of doing.

Some are angry because in the past we made mistakes that compounded or even extended their misery. Many are angry because we fail to live up to their expectations. Ronald Reagan once said that our opposition is not ignorant it is just that so much of what they believe is just not true.

For the United States the lesson must be -- as we head down a different path of foreign diplomacy - Evil that is ignored is indeed Evil that is assisted. The oppressed will always remember.

Next up: a renovation of the [White House] briefing room, likely with a video wall that could display everything from "flags waving in the breeze [to] detailed charts and graphs," according to a senior White House official working on the project. For TV viewers, the video feed could be the sole on-screen image, or could share the space with the speaker.

White House officials say they are weighing how -- and how often -- to use the video capability. But the new technology could help transform White House briefings -- midday exchanges with reporters in a utilitarian setting -- into more interesting viewing. Both the planned video capabilities and Mr. Snow's hiring appear to be part of a subtle but sweeping effort by administration officials to deliver their message directly to the public, particularly through video.

"We have encouraged those who have inquired or asked to assist in this effort," said Virginia Davis, Santorum's spokeswoman, of the Green Party petitions. She declined to provide specifics. "I think the bigger question here is why is Bob Casey going to such extremes to silence another voice in the Democratic process?"

Steven and Kathryn Taylor and two others at the same address who listed their occupation as students contributed $10,000 to the Green Party; five Taylor family members have contributed $20,700 to Santorum's reelection campaign.

"These photographers are obviously willing to participate in propaganda," Limbaugh said. "They know exactly what's being done, all these photos, bringing the bodies out of the rubble, posing them for the cameras, it's all staged. Every bit of it is staged and the still photographers know it."

...AP does not distribute pictures sequentially; photos are moved based on news value and how quickly they are available for an editor to transmit. The AP indicates to its members when they are sent on the wire, and member Web sites sometimes use a different time stamp to show when they are posted.

"It's hard to imagine how someone sitting in an air-conditioned office or broadcast studio many thousands of miles from the scene can decide what occurred on the ground with any degree of accuracy," said Kathleen Carroll, AP's senior vice president and executive editor.

Carroll said in addition to personally speaking with photo editors, "I also know from 30 years of experience in this business that you can't get competitive journalists to participate in the kind of (staging) experience that is being described."

"Do you really think these people would risk their lives under Israeli shelling to set up a digging ceremony for dead Lebanese kids?" asked Patrick Baz, Mideast photo director for AFP. "I'm totally stunned by first the question, and I can't imagine that somebody would think something like that would have happened."

The AP had three different photographers there who weren't always aware of what the others were doing, and filed their images to editors separately, said Santiago Lyon, director of photography.

It was here, a week ago, that Hezbollah fighters stopped several Israeli tanks and turned back an Israeli ground advance that sought to rout them from this strategic Hezbollah stronghold in southern Lebanon. Israeli soldiers have given vivid accounts of hand-to-hand combat, sneak ambushes, and fighters who sprang from a network of tunnels to surprise the Israelis.

The two Hezbollah fighters described a discipline modeled on the Viet Cong, in which fighters live off the land, scavenge vegetables and canned food, and do battle in autonomous groups with little need for command supervision.

Hussein and Hamid credited their devotion to Islam for their success against the Israelis, but they described a meticulous blueprint for guerrilla warfare built around a carefully selected force, whose members begin training at age 14.

Yesterday afternoon, downtown below Tel Masoud, Hussein was praying alone in a mosque whose rear wall had been blasted away by a shell, giving a view of the battleground above.

The fighter was by turns angry, mystical, and emotional. One day, he said, he gave his only food, a can of tuna, to a dog so hungry that its tongue was hanging contorted from its mouth.

"If I showed mercy on the dog, maybe God would show mercy on me," he said.

After scouring the battleground, Hussein returned with journalists to the hospital at the edge of Bint Jbail to visit friends. He put his head in his hands and started to weep.

"I'm not crying for the fighters. The fighters can handle it. I'm crying for the ordinary people," Hussein said.

Assuredly, Hezbollah's supporters will accuse those questioning the Qana attacks as conspiracy theorists, so I simply advise that viewers view the evidence with their own eyes, and draw their own conclusions from there.

It turns out that while he was serving in the military, unbeknownst to his superiors, Bleu Copas (whose name sounds like a stage name, which should have been a clue) had acted in three community theater musical productions: 'Ragtime', 'Children of Eden', and 'Beauty and the Beast'. And apparently he has not reformed his theatrical ways since being drummed out of the military as he has just been cast as the male lead in a production of 'Bye, Bye Birdie'. I don't know how many of you have seen a community theater production, but I can tell you from horrifying first-hand experience that community theater is not very good at all. The thought of one of our fighting men tromping around onstage with a bunch of amateur actors in front of slapped together plywood scenery singing wretched show tunes is just too horrible to imagine. I don't know how many other soldiers are currently involved in community theater but I think the Pentagon needs to launch a full-scale investigation immediately. If it turns out that there is a cabal of thespians in the military recruiting other soldiers to perform in sad little theaters across the country, it needs to be nipped in the bud as soon as possible for the safety of our country.

The idea for the program came from Brother Rick Curry, a Jesuit who founded the workshop 19 years ago to provide what he simply calls 'options' for disabled theater artists. About 3,000 disabled students have participated in acting, music, dance and writing classes since 1977, said Brother Curry, 63, but the program had never before specifically sought out veterans. Last July, however, he met an Iraq war veteran whose leg had been amputated above the knee. Brother Curry, who often wears a clerical collar, recalled that the veteran "pulled me aside and said: 'Brother, I don't know where I am. I'm more scared than I was in Iraq.'"

Brother Curry wondered if theater might help the soldier find his way. "I thought that a writing program would work," he explained. "They all have a story to tell, and telling a story theatrically gives you a voice that you can share. It emboldens you."

He speaks from experience. He was born without a right hand and forearm. When he was 6, his father enrolled him in an acting class near their home in Philadelphia to help him eliminate a stutter. Brother Curry said he experienced 'the transformative power of the arts.' He recalls the class as 'a watershed in his life,' saying acting inspired him with confidence.

The staff members had their reservations as well. "I was concerned at first," said Jerome McGill, an alumnus of the acting program who now serves as a resident playwright and mentor. "I thought these guys have kind of a macho sensibility." But the program's communal lifestyle and rigorous morning-to-evening schedule helped the two groups quickly integrate. "I realized after the first day that they really did fit in," Mr. McGill said.

Mr. Conforti's work is supported by that staple of creative writing workshops everywhere: peer criticism. Faculty and students take meals together. Trading ideas and stories throughout the day, the veterans describe the program as a "full-immersion" experience.

Mr. McGill said the work's impact would go beyond the individuals who create it. "We're going to have a whole new population of people with disabilities helping to create a body of dramatic literature about disability," he said. "It's going to enrich the literature we create."

I agree that as a practical matter, supporting a third party is suicidal. But until it's acknowledged what drives the Left into the arms of third parties and something's done about it, it'll keep happening. The Left always gets killed; the height of cruelty is to demand that it shouldn't die at least on its own terms.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 29 - The State Department agency in charge of $1.4 billion in reconstruction money in Iraq used an accounting shell game to hide ballooning cost overruns on its projects there and knowingly withheld information on schedule delays from Congress, a federal audit released late Friday has found.

The [United States Agency for International Development] hid construction overruns by listing them as overhead or administrative costs, according to the audit, written by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent office that reports to Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department...

The findings appeared in an audit of a children's hospital in Basra, but they referred to the wider reconstruction activities of the development agency in Iraq.

In March 2005, A.I.D. asked the Iraq Reconstruction and Management Office at the United States Embassy in Baghdad for permission to downsize some projects to ease widespread financing problems. In its request, it said that it had to "absorb greatly increased construction costs" at the Basra hospital and that it would make a modest shift of priorities and reduce "contractor overhead" on the project.

The embassy office approved the request. But the audit found that the agency interpreted the document as permission to change reporting of costs across its program.

Referring to the embassy office's approval, the inspector general wrote, "The memorandum was not intended to give U.S.A.I.D. blanket permission to change the reporting of all indirect costs."

The report said it suspected that other unreported costs on the hospital could drive the tab even higher. In another case cited in the report, a power station project in Musayyib, the direct construction cost cited by the development agency was $6.6 million, while the overhead cost was $27.6 million.

One result is that the project's overhead, a figure that normally runs to a maximum of 30 percent, was a stunning 418 percent.

The constant weapons raids and roadside bomb explosions began to weigh on the mind of Sergeant Lucas Murray during his year in Iraq. Watching local children play soccer, with artillery shells marking the goals, made the Boston parks architect think he could make a lasting contribution to the community simply by doing what he did for a living back home.

He built a playground.

With donations from a playground equipment company and muscle from friends in the National Guard, he constructed the park he had dreamed of, giving the children of Abraham Jaffas, north of Baghdad, somewhere to play other than trash heaps in a town still devastated from the invasion three years ago.

"The children of Iraq are the ones we want to grow up seeing us as the good guys, as opposed to an organization that came in to remove a dictator and left them worse off," Murray said. "This was my strategy for helping the war effort on a humanitarian level. We built something permanent to leave behind."

"The Americans have made a lot of promises to us, but not even 10 percent of them have materialized."

He said that, of nearly 180 medical facilities promised by the U.S., contracts were awarded for 142. Only six have been completed and turned over to the Iraqis and those "are not even fully complete."

"This comes as a sharp contrast to the Japanese," Ali said. "They have promised and delivered 13 hospitals around the country, including three cutting-edge cancer centers. The Japanese have been very faithful to us, unfortunately, the Americans aren't like that."

AS PROMISED...
I have been meaning to write "lighter" post about living in Austria, amongs the "Wieners" focusing (as is my wont) on the strange and bizarre aspects of being here. While I hate the typical "Oh my God, these people do things differently from us, isn't that kooky!" type of narrative that afflicts Slate's (among others) travel writers, there are some things that I find rather inexplicable from a culture so similar to the one I know from the US. Chief among these:

It's a great town for dogs but they don't pick up their dogs' shit. Having a very cute Labrador, I am grateful that Vienna has a lot of parks and green space which are open to dogs, and that dogs are allowed on the buses, trains and in restaurants (I can feel all you dog haters crossing Vienna off your itineraries right now). BUT, even though this is a clean city where people don't throw trash on the streets, dog owners do NOT clean up their dog poops. Even though they all eventually step in some other doggies' do, it does not occur to them to, as Gandhi said, "be the change they want." I have no explanation for this, unless it is related to the fact that:

Wieners openly and unashamedly break their own laws. One friend of mine here was commenting about driving in America and was amazed how much Americans mind the speed limits as compared to Austrians (even thought heir speed limits are higher). I, in turn, was amazed that he thought this, but it made me realize that most Americans break laws guiltily, whereas here they do it without qualms. On any given bus or train about 80% of the people are "Schwartzfaherer", i.e., those who ride without paying. There are occasional inspectors, but there are also websites that list the stations at which the inspectors will be on a given day.

Wieners are generally pretty grumpy people. When even Germans complain that Wieners are dour, you know something is amiss. For a people who invented the term Gemütlichkeit, they don't seem to be enjoying themselves very much. Again, I have no explanation for this. This is a clean (except see above) attractive well-run city with a good economy and a better climate than most of central Europe. I think it may have something to do with the fact they still haven't gotten over going from the largest empire in Europe at one time to a country the size of Maryland. Another Wiener friend of mine commented that "we don't like the Germans, we don't like the Swiss, we don't like the Italians, and we don't like ourselves very much either." The only ones they tolerate are the Hungarians, their partners in lost empiredom. This sense-of-superiority-while-looking-for-something-to-feel-superior-to feeds (I believe) into the following tendency:

Wieners like telling other people what to do. Again, when Germans complain that Wieners nag too much, you know it's a serious problem. These nags are particularly (it seems) sharp when it's over something that doesn't concern them in the slightest. E.g., when I ride my bike with my dog next to me on the leash, I always receive someone yelling at me about how I am endangering his life, even though if I were in an accident, the first thing I would do would be let go of the leash so he wouldn't be dragged into it.

And, the thing I find most annoying (OK, besides stepping in other dogs' crap):

Wieners are notorious line-cutters. Anyone who has ever been in a queue in the Third World will recognize the "triangle formation" of most Wien queues, with the apex somewhere at the end of the line and the base at the front, where numerous people are trying to edge their way in. The old ladies are particularly good at this, it seems. Also, if you are in line at a supermarket, and another cash register opens, sprint as quickly as you can to the new line, because everyone else is. None of this "I can help the next person," stuff here. By the way, if you think American sales clerks hate their jobs, wait until you see the ones here. And while we're on the subject:

Most bars and many restaurants here do not have cash registers. This can cause getting drinks at bars to be agonizingly slow, as the ubiquitous leather money pouch must be opened and the correct change pulled from the mass of coins inside. Again, I have no explanation why this is so. The technology exists, I have seen it.

OK, disclaimers: I have largely enjoyed my time here. As I said, this is a very livable and affordable city, with a lot of stuff going on, and once you make some friends, you make very deep and lasting friendships. But it is always the things one doesn't expect that stand out.

One final warning: if you are here and it is your birthday, don't mention it in a bar unless you want to buy a round for the house. That is the tradition here, the reverse of what we are used to (fortunately, on my birthday my friends here understood this and bought me a round - my tradition rules!) . I am told it is this way in most of Europe except England, so it is not specific to Vienna, but I thought it a useful bit of advice for my fellow travelers - it can save you a lot of money.