When the Zags lost, I lost all interest in the NCAA tourney, though they have had a lot of major upsets.

If Kerry is guilty of felony conspiracy, will the Donks pull a Torch-act? That is, replace him as they did Torrichelli in New Jersey? (I'm stunned Lautenburg is still there, I gave him 6 months.) More on the VVAW meeting.

I just got new glasses, so the earpiece on these fell off yesterday. Such timing! Rich glued it and it's working again, and the new pair is still in the glove box as my backup.

I have a suet block out and the magpies are having a great time with it. It's something to see them flying up and trying to hover like the hummingbirds, and it's interesting to see them next to the goldfinches. Such a size difference!

Rich took the lawn mower back.

I had three caches I wanted to pick up off the first page. The nearest ones are 5 miles away now (except for one that snuck in yesterday!) We went out to the old Arco Arena, which I'd never have recognized in the fancy-dancy building it's become. Then down along a power line track for one that was put out on St. Patrick's day, and another downtown near a paint store. Outside are all these colored pipes, a nice artwork, and the cache is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Clever! Then we went to look at one, a terrain 4. It's under the freeway. We don't do terrain 4s, but there it was, and we couldn't just ignore it. Rich climbed up the wall and looked at it... the code word was "extend." (The cache owner had used it a couple of times in the description, too.) Hmmm. Well, obviously we were to go to X street. Then the clue "there are more than one way, in fact, there are two" led me to the one way sign, and sure enough, the cache.

That one was fairly easy. I also tried to figure out a San Jose cache where the coordinates are all in smilies. We'll find out tomorrow if I was right.

Someone picked up the Mario Travel Bug and was threatening to take it to Italy! Noooooo. It's already been lost once after being taken off route from Tahoe to the Mojave desert, and now it's in the Bay Area. I wrote and asked if they'd just please move it along to its goal. While I was about it, I found out the Fitch bug got picked up last September, by a team of college kids in the San Diego area! They've gotten involved in, of all things, school. I wrote and nagged them, as well. Abercrombie is in Texas. Guy Smiley has been dancing around central Oregon, and Raggedy Ann is in the Chicago area, which is close to the goal, but no closer after months.

My other bugs are doing all right. After months lost, my Rex dinosaur has visited dinosaurs in Maryland and people are taking it around. West Nile Skeeter is in southern California, and our own travel bug that goes with us has 7500 miles on it.

I was in the process of changing tapes, and spied "Edward Quartermaine," one of my faves from General Hospital so I watched him for awhile. I didn't recognize anyone else on the soap, although one woman could have been a substitute for one of the actors... then I discovered I was watching Days of our Lives! No wonder I didn't recognize any one! When did "Edward" leave GH??

Oh, shucks, we missed Dandelion Days. It might have been fun, a fair in Jackson. We'll have to look out for it next year.

Glenn on tax rebates. Ours is going for property taxes, since we no longer have them on the mortgage.

Richard Clarke's infomercial on CBS (who own the publisher of the book, which is blurring the "news" feature) seems to be just a one-day wonder, unlike the AWOL smear. Partly, of course, that's the 8 years of Clinton administration with all the terror attacks: makes it hard to point fingers at Bush after 9 months. Partly, I think, it's the 9-11 commission, and as someone pointed out, the blatant partisanship on both sides is going to produce more heat than light, and turn people off. It's too soon (instant gratification) and too partisan. It's a shame. I don't know how I'd react if I had had a loved one in the towers, but I don't think I'd be trying to place blame on anyone but the terrorists.

So having failed to contain al Qaeda during its formative decade, and having made almost no mention of this grave threat in the 2000 campaign, these officials now want us to believe that in their final hours they urgently begged the Bushies to act with force and dispatch. Sure.
...
We'd take Mr. Clarke's words more seriously if, as America's lead anti-terror official from 1998 through Mr. Bush's first two years, he had warned someone that al Qaeda might have a strategy to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings. He already knew that an Egyptian had flown one plane into the drink and that al Qaeda was interested in flight training. Why didn't Mr. Clarke connect those dots?

In 1998, according to the New Republic, Clarke "played a key role in the Clinton administration's misguided retaliation for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which targeted bin Laden's terrorist camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan." The pharmaceutical factory was, apparently, just a pharmaceutical factory, and we now know how impressed bin Laden was by cruise missiles that miss.

Powerline Blog says: "Richard Clarke is a bitter, discredited bureaucrat who was an integral part of the Clinton administration's failed approach to terrorism, was demoted by President Bush, and is now an adjunct to John Kerry's presidential campaign."

Hugh Hewitt:

Al Qaeda took root in Afghanistan and metastasized during the Clinton party. Repeated strikes on the U.S. abroad, culminating in the bombing of the Cole, went unpunished except for the symbolism of tossing some cruise missiles into the Afghan mountains. The attempt to pin blame on the eight months of Bush Administration control on the basis of "warnings" delivered is transparent posturing from the same gang that gave Osama a pass for eight years while his camps trained and dispersed thousands of fanatics throughout the world.

The political operation on the Democratic side is in chaos, repeatedly attempting to rewrite the national security situation and repeatedly failing. Their focus groups and polls must be telling them that they have to move public opinion on this issue or lose big in the fall. But that's like trying to move Mount McKinley from Alaska to Hawaii. The perception that the Democrats are weak on defense and hesitant to engage the terrorists is out there because the Democrats are weak on defense and hesitant to engage the terrorists.