Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Oh… wait.

Spain’s Governing Party Suffers Heavy Losses

By RAPHAEL MINDER, The New York Times

Published: May 22, 2011

MADRID – The governing Socialist Party suffered heavy losses on Sunday in regional and municipal elections, even as tens of thousands of Spaniards calling themselves the “indignant” said they would pursue their protests to force an overhaul of the country’s political system.

Conceding defeat on Sunday night, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero said that his Socialist Party had been understandably punished by voters for overseeing an economic crisis that had left Spain with a 21 percent jobless rate, more than twice the European average.

…

Mr. Zapatero, who has been in office since 2004, announced in April that he would not seek a third term, and the extent of the Socialists’ loss suggests that, even with a new leader, the party will struggle to hold on to power in the general election, expected next March.

Never mind.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

I’m rooting for the guy you don’t see in the Tigers cap (not the one with the mustache in the Ferrari).

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Our idiot Washington political “elite”-

Democrats’ New Tactic: Praising 2012 Republicans

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR, The New York Times

May 20, 2011, 7:27 am

Here’s how the strategy could work, according to several Democratic advisers involved in implementing it:

1. Convincing conservative voters that Republican candidates like Mr. Romney or Mr. Huntsman hold similar views to Mr. Obama might make them unacceptable in a Republican primary dominated by Tea Party activists.

…

2. If Republican candidates like Mr. Romney or Mr. Huntsman push back against the Democratic praise, they run the risk of looking like they are flip-flopping on positions they once proudly held.

…

3. Finally, if one of the Republicans emerges as the party’s nominee despite the Democratic plaudits, it may be tougher for that candidate to draw distinctions with Mr. Obama on those issues where they have seemed to agree.

Will this work?  C’mon, we’re talking D.C. strategists here.  Even they don’t expect it to work-

“None of us think that the Democratic party can dictate the outcome of the Republican nomination fight,” said one strategist. “But we can have some fun.”

Or it could just be that Obama is actually a Republican, implementing Republican policies.

As read by Keith.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Are we through yet? Tue May 03, 2011 at 09:15:47 AM EDT

Evidently the answer is no, we’re not through yet.

35 killed in Taliban attack on road workers

By Ben Farmer, Kabul, The Telegraph

4:40PM BST 19 May 2011

Up to 100 attackers then opened fire with AK-47s, heavy machine guns and rocket propelled grenades from surrounding hills, prompting a battle with guards lasting more than two hours.

By dawn on Thursday, when the attackers left the camp after burning or stealing several vehicles, 25 staff were also missing and 12 were injured, according to a senior manager at the company.

…

Noorullah Bidar, director of the company, said: “They [the Taliban] destroyed a lot of our equipment including vehicles and equipment used for road construction … we don’t know why they attacked us … they are doing this to prevent reconstruction in Afghanistan.”

36 killed in attack on work crew in Afghanistan

By Laura King, Los Angeles Times

May 19, 2011, 8:48 a.m.

The Taliban and other insurgents sometimes target work crews on infrastructure projects, regarding the building companies as collaborators with the central government and foreign forces. But most such projects have substantial security contingents, and it is unusual for militants to be able to kill so many in a single strike.

…

The construction company’s owner, Noorullah Bidar, one of 20 people injured in the attack, said from his hospital bed that all those slain in the predawn attack in Paktia province were Afghan nationals.

Rohullah Samon, a spokesman for the provincial governor, said the dead included laborers, technical personnel and security guards. Eight assailants died in the attack as well, he said.

Update:

At Least 35 Killed in Attack on Afghan Road Crew

By RAY RIVERA and SANGAR RAHIMI, The New York Times

Published: May 19, 2011

The crew attacked Thursday was working on a road not far from the Gardez-Khost Highway, a 64-mile project that has been one of the most troubled and costly transportation projects in Afghanistan.

Since work on the highway began in 2007, there have been at least 364 attacks on the highway, resulting in the deaths of 19 people, almost all of them local Afghan workers. The highway project, which has been financed by the United States Agency for International Development, has come to symbolize the pitfalls of corruption and danger of trying to push development in areas strongly lacking in security. It has cost about $121 million so far, with the final price tag expected to reach $176 million, or about $2.8 million a mile.

Construction contractors trying to build in many of these volatile areas have been accused of paying off local insurgent groups, including the Haqqani network, to allow work to continue, in turn helping to finance the insurgency. Some security outfits have also been accused of themselves facilitating attacks in order to extort more money for security.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

I don’t know whether any of you have had the pleasure (and I mean it sincerely, I enjoyed it very much) of visiting Mud Island in Memphis which I suspect is very much covered in mud at the moment.  The chief attraction is a scale model of the Mississippi and while the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ may once have been a water park it was pretty green and uninviting when I was there (and I’ve swum in some scummy water, let me tell you).

I suspect that soon they’ll have to make some modifications.

You see, the thing about it is the Mississippi as Mark Twain knew it and we know it today is an obsolete river.  

It’s not the shortest and steepest route to the Gulf of Mexico anymore, the Atchafalaya is, and the Army Corps of Engineers knew this back in 1963 when they constructed the Old River Control Structure to begin with.  The point was to save the commercial centers of Baton Rouge and New Orleans, not flood control at all.

But as Twain would tell you the mighty Mississippi is a big river and not one that will be denied.  Opening the floodgates will only make the Atchafalaya deeper and steeper than it is now and soon enough, in even human not geologic time, the pressure of all that water will not be denied.

The Control of Nature

ATCHAFALAYA

by John McPhee, The New Yorker

February 23, 1987

The Mississippi River, with its sand and silt, has created most of Louisiana, and it could not have done so by remaining in one channel. If it had, southern Louisiana would be a long narrow peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico. Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand-frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go off in utterly new directions. Always it is the river’s purpose to get to the Gulf by the shortest and steepest gradient. As the mouth advances southward and the river lengthens, the gradient declines, the current slows, and sediment builds up the bed. Eventually, it builds up so much that the river spills to one side. Major shifts of that nature have tended to occur roughly once a millennium. The Mississippi’s main channel of three thousand years ago is now the quiet water of Bayou Teche, which mimics the shape of the Mississippi. Along Bayou Teche, on the high ground of ancient natural levees, are Jeanerette, Breaux Bridge, Broussard, Olivier-arcuate strings of Cajun towns. Eight hundred years before the birth of Christ, the channel was captured from the east. It shifted abruptly and flowed in that direction for about a thousand years. In the second century a.d., it was captured again, and taken south, by the now unprepossessing Bayou Lafourche, which, by the year 1000, was losing its hegemony to the river’s present course, through the region that would be known as Plaquemines. By the nineteen-fifties, the Mississippi River had advanced so far past New Orleans and out into the Gulf that it was about to shift again, and its offspring Atchafalaya was ready to receive it. By the route of the Atchafalaya, the distance across the delta plain was a hundred and forty-five miles-well under half the length of the route of the master stream.