Rainy blessings.

Friday -- another long week.
But here we are, at the weekend again, and a holiday weekend at that. With bands, parades and the summer kickoff...

I'll have to dig up the camera and take a picture of my spring gardens, after yesterday's great deluge of rain. It would pour, then turn off for a bit... then sprinkle down again, then let up... you get the idea.

Perfect for a few final plantings, and a bit of mulching in between the drops. Not too cold, this rain, but I still wish I had held off on some pepper plants, like I did the majority of the tomatoes. Otherwise, after a few weeks of growth, here's what we're* looking at: head lettuce with its little roots, romaine, onions standing in a row like soldiers, celery, broccoli, collard, a few eggplants that I perhaps overestimated early... they'll all make it. I don't lose much, which says more about the fertility of the glacier plowed black soil here, than it does my gardening skills really.

Doing a bit more with woodchips and black plastic this year too. Time spent now can save hours of weeding/watering later in the summer, I've read, and low-maintenance is my middle name...

Happy Memorial Day weekend.

May your memories be strong,
your people be true, and
your pride be forward-looking.


------------------------------------
* I often speak in the plural here, but to be clear: except for the starter plants purchased and the communally prepared/fenced plot(s), these two gardens I sow and reap are solely the work of my own two hands (working with mother nature, as best I can time it.)

38-52-77.

One morning last week or so,
those were the temperatures I awoke to hear:
The night's low, the current morning temp, and the predicted afternoon high.

We'll take it.

Yesterday, it was a hot one. Oh so dusty here lately. Even if you watered them in well, no sense in planting with the wind. This morning, we had a bit of predicted rain in the overnight, and it's still sprinkling slightly out there now.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying, yes I do have better things to do. Will get those plants in the ground, but I'm having coffee now and following links here. Including, this one:

Twice-married RFK Jr., despite the ongoing rancor with the Richardson clan, spoke about his love for Mary, their London honeymoon — and their final conversation, one day before her suicide.

“She said, ‘You know me better than anyone,’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ ” he told a hushed church, his voice breaking at times.

“And she said, ‘I was a good girl.’ And I said, ‘Yes, you were a good girl.’ ”

That, accompanied by the picture of the people, her children, carrying the casket -- their faces, eyes belying the pretty picture painted in the NYT news story this morning and the celebrity accounting given by the NY Daily News; (I wonder the last time the children saw their mother...) -- seemed pitiful.

You hope that wasn't the intent.

------------

MORE sad details from the NYPost.

1976 Hero ...

finally going home himself:

FRESNO, Calif. (AP) — The nation called Ed Ray a hero when he led a terrified group of children to safety after they were kidnapped aboard their school bus and held underground for ransom in the summer of 1976.

But the unassuming bus driver from a dusty farm town in Central California never saw himself that way, even after news of the infamous Chowchilla kidnapping grabbed headlines and inspired a TV movie.

As for the 26 children he saved, Ray became their lifelong friend until he died Thursday at 91 from complications of cirrhosis of the liver.

"I remember him making me feel safe," said Jodi Medrano, who was 10 when three men hijacked the school bus and stashed the group in a hot, stuffy storage van in a rock quarry.

Medrano held a flashlight as the bus driver worked with older students to stack mattresses, force an opening and remove the dirt covering the van so they could escape after 16 hours underground. She never left Ray's side during the ordeal.

"I remember he actually got onto me because I swore," said Medrano, now 46. "Mr. Ray said, 'you knock that off.' I thought, whenever we get home I will be in so much trouble. That's when I knew I was going home, because he made me have that hope."

Backstory.

Here's a Reuters reporter who went down to Sanford, Florida and ferreted out the details of life in the Retreat at Twin Lakes neighborhood, pre-shooting.

Worth reading, especially if you live in an racially isolated, well protected area yourself, and are inclined to buy into the racial "hoodie-hunting" hype.

By the summer of 2011, Twin Lakes was experiencing a rash of burglaries and break-ins. Previously a family-friendly, first-time homeowner community, it was devastated by the recession that hit the Florida housing market, and transient renters began to occupy some of the 263 town houses in the complex. Vandalism and occasional drug activity were reported, and home values plunged. One resident who bought his home in 2006 for $250,000 said it was worth $80,000 today.

At least eight burglaries were reported within Twin Lakes in the 14 months prior to the Trayvon Martin shooting, according to the Sanford Police Department. Yet in a series of interviews, Twin Lakes residents said dozens of reports of attempted break-ins and would-be burglars casing homes had created an atmosphere of growing fear in the neighborhood.

In several of the incidents, witnesses identified the suspects to police as young black men. Twin Lakes is about 50 percent white, with an African-American and Hispanic population of about 20 percent each, roughly similar to the surrounding city of Sanford, according to U.S. Census data.

One morning in July 2011, a black teenager walked up to Zimmerman's front porch and stole a bicycle, neighbors told Reuters. A police report was taken, though the bicycle was not recovered.

But it was the August incursion into the home of Olivia Bertalan that really troubled the neighborhood, particularly Zimmerman. Shellie was home most days, taking online courses towards certification as a registered nurse.

On August 3, Bertalan was at home with her infant son while her husband, Michael, was at work. She watched from a downstairs window, she said, as two black men repeatedly rang her doorbell and then entered through a sliding door at the back of the house. She ran upstairs, locked herself inside the boy's bedroom, and called a police dispatcher, whispering frantically.

"I said, 'What am I supposed to do? I hear them coming up the stairs!'" she told Reuters. Bertalan tried to coo her crying child into silence and armed herself with a pair of rusty scissors.

Police arrived just as the burglars - who had been trying to disconnect the couple's television - fled out a back door.
...
Police had advised Bertalan to get a dog. She and her husband decided to move out instead, and left two days before the shooting.
...
On February 2, 2012, Zimmerman placed a call to Sanford police after spotting a young black man he recognized peering into the windows of a neighbor's empty home, according to several friends and neighbors.

"I don't know what he's doing. I don't want to approach him, personally," Zimmerman said in the call, which was recorded. The dispatcher advised him that a patrol car was on the way. By the time police arrived, according to the dispatch report, the suspect had fled.

On February 6, the home of another Twin Lakes resident, Tatiana Demeacis, was burglarized. Two roofers working directly across the street said they saw two African-American men lingering in the yard at the time of the break-in. A new laptop and some gold jewelry were stolen. One of the roofers called police the next day after spotting one of the suspects among a group of male teenagers, three black and one white, on bicycles.

Police found Demeacis's laptop in the backpack of 18-year-old Emmanuel Burgess, police reports show, and charged him with dealing in stolen property. Burgess was the same man Zimmerman had spotted on February 2.

Burgess had committed a series of burglaries on the other side of town in 2008 and 2009, pleaded guilty to several, and spent all of 2010 incarcerated in a juvenile facility, his attorney said. He is now in jail on parole violations.

Sigh.

This morning, NYT's black columnist wades into the gossip-girls news... something about somebody calling the president a metrosexual Abe Lincoln. Yawn.

(When will the mainstreamers discover that if they ignored these fringe sidestories, instead of wasting column inches on irrelevant topics that give voice to the extreme, they would disappear? Cover the news that matters. If they had, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and all those other candidacies would have died for lack of oxygen. Instead, the media seems to have their own reasons for ... igniting these types of newsstories, and then keeping them alive long after it becomes clear to everyone else that it simply doesn't matter to real America.)

But Charles Blow, in his own way via brief Twitter chatter, did weigh in last night on the accumulating body of evidence that will make it difficult in the minds of many to convict George Zimmerman. Both legally, and in the marketplace of public opinion, assuming unbiased jurors:

"Martin Spoke of ‘Crazy and Creepy’ Man Following Him, Friend Says" "...she heard rising fear in Mr. Martin’s voice that peaked with words like 'get off, get off,' right before she lost contact with him..."


There is that scene in "A River Runs Through It" where they tell the father that the all bone were broken in Paul's hand after he was... ...beaten to death & the father simply asks "which hand?" They say "His right hand," and the father turns away with a sense of satisfaction. Charles M. Blow

Sigh.
Violence begets violence, Charles. Don't you get it?
Blow has written in the past of how his own participation in fraternity hazings* -- citing pledges being beaten with 2x4's -- helped him mature and grow his career. He seems almost proud.

Does he think that non-black people will cow in fear from violence and accept injustice as some type of white guilt penanace? I think those days are gone, of liberal whites appeasing the black community out of worry for what "they" collectively might do.
No fear.

I also think the days of O.J. Simpson-style justice are over.
Hope and change and all that...
Some remember Rodney King; plenty still remember Reginald Denny too. Here's a picture reminder too, of the kind of violence that can be done, even without a gun.
(People, can't we all just peacefully move along? Bigger matters to tackle, despite what you might read in the daily papers.)
-----------------------

* Much more sympathetic to me are the parents of the gay, black Florida A&M band member beaten to death on the bus by non-student black men in their mid to late 20s. This is not normal behavior, not acceptable. The parents are intend on "cleaning house" and are shining light on a situation that was overlooked for years and years, out of misguided respect for "tradition" through the band generations.

Those parents were doing it right. Their son was in school, active and participating in marching band, for heaven's sake. If violence can penetrate the school bus designed to take students to and from their public performances, where will end?

Something tells me, these two parents -- working to bring an end to the violent culture that ultimately claimed their own son -- will find a far greater "satisfaction" in the end than Martin's family will from any pictures of a bloodied Zimmerman, roughed up by the reported mixed-martial-arts attack style blows delivered by Trayvon as he sat atop his victim, trying to beat the life out of him. Luckily, a gun intervened, when no neighbors could physically intervene and the police were just minutes away.

Robert Champion. That was the murdered black man's name.

Why do you suppose his name isn't as well known in media circles, or as well discussed around American dinner tables -- black, white, Hispanic, Asian, in gay, straight and mixed families -- as Trayvon Martin or George Zimmerman? Or sadly, Mitt Romney's decades-long gone dog?

--------------
Here's Carl Hiaasen's take (columnist at the Miami Herald):

Eleven of the 13 people who allegedly participated in killing Florida A&M drum major Robert Champion have been charged with “a hazing resulting in death,” a low-grade felony. The two others are accused of misdemeanors.

You can’t blame Champion’s family for being disappointed, and a bit confused.

Champion was singled out for an attack, then beaten until he died. That it occurred during a hazing doesn’t mean it should be handled differently from any other violent homicide, yet it is being handled differently.
Way differently.

Not one of the 13 suspects was booked for murder or even plain old manslaughter, a second-degree felony that can bring up to 15 years in prison. By contrast, causing a death by hazing is only a third-degree felony for which the maximum term is six years.

In other words, a gang-style lethal assault in Florida is more leniently appraised when it’s a moronic college ritual gone awry. Six years behind bars isn’t light time, but it’s much better than the high end of a manslaughter conviction.

What do you think would have happened if Champion had been killed by a mob of strangers in a barroom, or on a street corner?

For starters, authorities wouldn’t have taken more than five months to make an arrest, especially if they had the names of everyone involved. You can also be sure that the defendants in such a case wouldn’t be charged with “hazing” — they’d be facing much heavier felonies.

Here’s how Champion died. The 26-year-old man was made to walk down the aisle of a chartered bus, parked outside an Orlando hotel, while fellow band members (and possibly others) repeatedly kicked and punched him.
Evidently this is what passed for dear tradition within the famed A&M Marching 100, now in disciplinary limbo.

Eventually, Champion collapsed. Later somebody dialed 911: “One of our drum majors is on the bus, and he’s not breathing . . . He’s in my hands, ma’am. He’s cold.”

If Champion was cold to the touch, it was likely he’d been down for a while.

Lying there, dying among his own band mates after a football-game performance.

In December, less than a month after the incident, the Orange-Osceola Medical Examiner’s Office ruled Champion’s death was a homicide, the autopsy showing “extensive contusions of his chest, arms, shoulder and back with extensive hemorrhage.”

Although coroners found no bone fractures or damage to Champion’s internal organs, there was “significant rapid blood loss” from the injuries he’d received. The cause of death was reported as “hemorrhagic shock due to soft tissue hemorrhage, incurred by blunt force trauma sustained during a hazing incident.”

So it was manifest from the beginning that Champion hadn’t fallen down the steps of the bus 20 or 30 times. He’d been battered — and not by teenagers gone wild. Most of the suspects are men in their 20s.
The state of Florida didn’t need a special anti-hazing law in order to prosecute. Long-standing criminal statutes specifically address assaults that end in death.

Nowhere in this country is it legal for 13 persons — or six, or two, or one — to strike another person if he or she isn’t a threat. Theoretically, it shouldn’t matter to prosecutors whether the assailants are wearing band uniforms, fraternity jerseys or the do-rag of a street gang.

Indirect Response.

Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett today links to a copy of his Utah Law Review article, The Harmful Side Effects of Drug Prohibition.

I've said in the past: I like Randy's work. He's not a theory-only, cobwebbed type professor, safely removed from the effects of what he's studying. That's my take anyway...

Here's Randy:

There are so many reasons why drug prohibition is objectionable, it is hard to enumerate them all. In my Utah Law Review article, The Harmful Side Effects of Drug Prohibition, I try to systematically survey just the “consequentialist” arguments against this socially-destructive social policy. If I were to revise this article today, I suppose I would emphasize even more than I did how destructive the “War on Drugs” has been to the black community, perhaps especially because of the incarceration of thousands of black men, depriving their children of fathers, but also because of how the black market profits from the illicit drug trade supports the gang structure that preys upon the community and sucks up its kids. Then there is the differential enforcement of drug laws in minority communities. And I would emphasize how the abnormal profits to be made from black market drugs is systematically destroying the entire political culture of Mexico. All this to stop some people from getting high.

But, as I said, the problem with assessing the War on Drugs is that there are so many harmful “side effects” of drug prohibition that it is difficult even to know where to begin. This article is my effort to be as comprehensive about these effects, yet still be accessible. Here is the abstract:

Some drugs make people feel good. That is why some people use them. Some of these drugs are alleged to have side effects so destructive that many advise against their use. The same may be said about statutes that attempt to prohibit the manufacture, sale, and use of drugs. Advocating drug prohibition makes some people feel good because they think they are “doing something” about what they believe to be a serious social problem. Others who support these laws are not so altruistically motivated. Employees of law enforcement bureaus and academics who receive government grants to study drug use, for example, may gain financially from drug prohibition. But as with using drugs, using drug laws can have moral and practical side effects so destructive that they argue against ever using legal institutions in this manner.

This article will not attempt to identify and “weigh” the costs of drug use against the costs of drug laws. Instead, it will focus exclusively on identifying the harmful side effects of drug law enforcement and showing why these effects are unavoidable. So one-sided a treatment is justified for two reasons. First, a cost-benefit or cost-cost analysis may simply be impossible. Second, discussions by persons who support illegalizing drugs usually emphasize only the harmful effects of drug use while largely ignoring the serious costs of such policies. By exclusively relating the other side of the story, this article is intended to inject some balance into the normal debate.

The harmful side-effects of drug laws have long been noted by a number of commentators, although among the general public the facts are not as well known as they should be. More importantly, even people who agree about the facts fail to grasp that it is the nature of the means — coercion — chosen to pursue the suppression of voluntary consumptive activity that makes these effects unavoidable. This vital and overlooked connection is the main subject of this article.

You can download it here.

In the thumbnail...

he looks a bit like Einstein, oddly enough.

Pacers.

Beat the Heat.

After winning Game 2 in South Florida by three points, the Pacers wanted to show that win was no fluke and that they're for real.

Believe it.

They're two wins from tilting the balance of power in the East.

"We're certainly happy with the win,'' said Pacers coach Frank Vogel. "But we've got a lot of work to do."

Vogel's pregame message to his team: "Keep your edge, and enhance your edge."

Doubling-down, they are.
Helps to simply play solid against the over-rated.
No matter your sport.
;-)



ADDED: The details are telling.

Roy Hibbert controlled the glass, roaming the lane on both ends and finishing with five blocks.

"My primary focus is defense, defense, defense," he said. "I embrace that role and let the offense come to me. Them being one and done, that's what we talked about in the huddle,'' he said. ''One shot and they're done."

Two more losses and the Heat are done.

With his team down 20 in the closing minutes, Spoelstra waved the white flag and pulled out first Wade, then James, who quickly removed his headband as he got to the bench and then pulled out the mouthpiece inscripted with XVI - the Roman numeral for 16 - or the number of wins it takes to get a championship.

When the final horn sounded, the three-time MVP quickly exited the floor.

"When you lose a game like that, all you try to take it away and move on to the next one," James said. "They're playing some good basketball. We're playing pretty good defense on them. We're not scoring the ball."

Indiana busted open a grind-it-out game with a 17-3 run in the third quarter, doing it with an inside-outside attack that had the Heat wondering what was coming next.

Pushed by a rocking home crowd wearing "Gold Swagger" T-shirts and chanting "Beat The Heat" every chance they could, the Pacers pushed their lead to 69-55 after three and then held off one brief run by the Heat in the fourth quarter.

Behind Miami's bench, owner Micky Arison and team president Pat Riley looked on in disbelief.

Trayvon's Cries for Help.

Today's announcements in the Sanford, Florida case confirm something I suspected way back when...

In addition to the sugary Skittles, the young man was carrying a lighter in his pocket, and had THC present in his blood and urine, indicating fairly recent drug use, not just that stored in his fatty tissue. Suspended from high school for similar reasons, the young man had been sent by his mother in Miami to stay in Sanford with his father -- presumably to straighten the boy out, to give him a man's guidance as he was in that delicate transition that affects male youth of all races: boys to men.

The drug use, the suspensions ... those were clearly cries for help. Nevermind whose voice it was on those tapes. Clearly, judging by the photos, the once joyful youngster had become a heavy-lidded teen. Surly looking. Calling himself a nigger in his Twitter handle, talking tough during his too-short time peeking in at the adult world.

What happened there, exactly? Not the night of the shooting. Turns out, George Zimmerman might have been telling the God-honest truth afterall: he spotted a suspicious-looking teen young man, whom he suspected might have been on drugs, based on his odd behavior that night in the rain. Did Zimmerman have a second sense? Or did Trayvon's actions simply tip him off to the truth?

Should Zimmerman simply have turned his head? Pretended he didn't see the boy, wandering in the neighborhood aimlessly, with no apparent direction home? Some seem to say yes. Not your concern. Kid wants to do drugs, let him be. Get back in your car, wait until a crime is committed before you begin keeping your eyes and ears open to what's going on around you...

Except, there were those burglaries. Reasons enough already for interest in unknown persons -- black or white, young or old -- wandering the neighborhood. Did Zimmerman confront the teen, ask him what he was doing there, or otherwise try to draw him into conversation to gauge his state of mind? Try to determine if he was impaired, or was simply lost? Is it odd where you're at to have teens wandering the street in the rain, allegedly looking at the homes? Would you pass on by, or would you be concerned enough to want to know more?

I suspect Trayvon's mother revealed a bit more of the truth too, when she said she understood that Zimmerman didn't go out hunting for a hoodie-clad kid that night. She said she understood things ... got out of control, and she wished George has seen her boy as just that: a boy, still growing, with plenty of good and bad decisions still before him, if only he could have lived long enough... I'd bet dimes to donuts that the mother had seen the side of her son that George Zimmerman was confronted with that night.

C'mon mothers of surly teen boys, especially those in an ... experimenting phase. Standing up to Mom, teachers, bus drivers, storekeepers. It's a rite of passage for plenty: eventually they want prove themselves, to push back against the authority they perceive to be over-controlling them.

Years before, he had the discipline of team sports. Not much dissension tolerated on the playing fields. But that was not this Trayvon, the one who emerged in the later pictures released, who self identified as a nigger gangster wannabe (which just a few short years ago -- timed to the rise of rap -- replaced the basketball superstar as the role model for black youngsters with limited life options. Goodbye Hoop Dreams, hello ghetto superstar...)

We're not there yet -- at the point of having an honest conversation here. Too bad really. Trayvon could have been saved. Tough love. Instead, the black pundits fall over themselves making excuses, pointing fingers, none seemingly willing to address ... perhaps in the end, it was the drug use, the poor choices, the impaired behavior, that might have led the young man to attack a Hispanic guy, whose only misstep might turn out to be wondering what was going on in his neighborhood that night.

What if Trayvon's father had kept the boy grounded, kept him home, supervised, and had simply told his girlfriend to go out to eat herself alone that night: that his son, his boy, needed his presence more that night...

If we don't have the courage to address the honest facts honestly, it's as though Trayvon died for nothing, really. Surely the bright-eyed, optimistic, happy-looking youngster -- dressed in his popular American brand clothing, beaming in the pics as he's being exposed to diverse things like fishing and snowboarding -- deserved better.

What really happened to take Trayvon so far off track? How do we prevent that from happening to other boys, black or white? Do we really care enough to distinguish between kids doing drugs, and consentual adult use, which leaves too many of us looking the other way, making excuses, thinking it's just a phase he's going through.

I'm waiting for those conversations, for those issues to be addressed by the black pundits who got out so far ahead of themselves on this one. Something tells me though: they won't want to go there. Doesn't fit the scripted narrative, so to speak...

Saturday.

After a week of commuting, and getting home Friday night, I'm eager to spend the off time outdoors this weekend.

We did such a nice job, the project is wrapping up early. Honest results from work efforts...

If everyone was compensated this way, I suspect we'd need less inflated salaries and comp plans supporting people whose seem to need artificial reassurance of their work worth.

Happy Satuday,
enjoy your earned independence, if it applies.

Sunday Overview.

RIP Bill Granger, aka Joe Gash.
Longtime Chicago newspaperman, and gritty city mystery author.

Raised in South Chicago, Mr. Granger attended St. Ambrose Elementary School, graduated from the De La Salle Institute in Bronzeville and then attended DePaul University, where he edited the school's DePaulia newspaper. While still in college, he joined UPI's Chicago bureau as a reporter.

"He told me that all he wanted to be was a newspaperman," his wife said. "And he wanted to do that the old-fashioned way, starting out as a copy boy and then rising through the ranks. But then (legendary Chicago journalist) Mike Royko told him, 'You can't do that anymore.' "

While serving in the Army in the mid-1960s, Mr. Granger moonlighted for a time as a night copy boy at the Washington Post, where he met his future wife, who was an intern.

After leaving active Army duty, Mr. Granger joined the Tribune in 1966 as a neighborhood news reporter, covering a broad range of topics. Retired Chicago Tribune reporter William Mullen remembered Mr. Granger as a "superb reporter and writer" during those years who was particularly skilled at covering breaking news.

"He was one of the quickest, fastest people I've ever seen out on the street," Mullen said. "He'd be taking down notes and would run for a pay phone and instead of turning in notes, he would just dictate the entire story, right off the top of his head."

In early 1969, Mr. Granger joined the Sun-Times, where he became a feature writer and TV columnist. He left the Sun-Times in 1978 and immediately began a dual career as an author and freelance columnist for the Tribune.

-----------------------

Welcome to the world, David and Wm. Romney.
Twin sons born to Tagg Romney, via surrogate mother.
How... non-conservative(?), that family planning.
Sincere congrats to him and his wife, and the little big brother.

ADDED: Actually, it sounds like there are four older siblings to the twins.

ABC’s The Note reported that the couple used the same surrogate for their youngest son, Jonathan, born in August 2010. Their other three children were not born via surrogacy.

Neither in vitro fertilization — which is one step in a gestational surrogacy pregnancy — nor the surrogacy itself are uncommon nowadays. But to some parts of the anti-abortion movement, they remain controversial because “excess” fertilized embryos can be destroyed. The Catholic Church opposes IVF.

And the handbook of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not rule out IVF for a married couple. It does say the church “strongly discourages surrogate motherhood.”

That single sentence, however, doesn’t explain how the church is defining surrogacy, or necessarily how it would regard this particular case.
...

Michael Purdy, a spokesman for the LDS Church, told the Associated Press that, while the church discourages surrogate motherhood, it leaves the decision to individual members.

A campaign official said the babies were born Friday and that Tagg Romney “made the bishops in his church aware of his family’s plans.”

Asked whether Mitt Romney had publicly expressed views on IVF or surrogacy, Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul emailed his position on stem cell research. He has repeatedly voiced support for stem cell research using excess embryos from IVF under “appropriate ethical boundaries.”

According to a biography written by a distant Romney relative, Ronald B Scott, a former Time Inc writer, at least three of Mitt Romney’s sons have used in vitro fertilization.

----------------------
Little discussed last week, lost in the coverage of whether the president's pre-dawn visit to Afghanistan was a successful campaign stunt or not, was the paperwork the president signed, committing U.S. monetary resources to that beleaguered country, via the proven untrustworthy "ally" Hamid Karzai.

Christiane Amanpour, about as trustworthy an international reporter as we're going to get, applauded the deal. Pulling out too soon, on an announced timetable leaving nothing behind would leave the ground ripe for re-organization, as happened when the Soviet Union was previously humbled on this same turf.

Still... it's just another piece of the future, promised away on behalf of Americans to come with little honest discussion of the costs or consequences, for what might prove to be little or no true gain. Particularly if the money doesn't go where it supposed to go, or bring peace and prosperity as promised.

After signing a 10-year lease and spending more than $80 million on a site envisioned as the United States’ diplomatic hub in northern Afghanistan, American officials say they have abandoned their plans, deeming the location for the proposed compound too dangerous.

Eager to raise an American flag and open a consulate in a bustling downtown district of the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif, officials in 2009 sought waivers to stringent State Department building rules and overlooked significant security problems at the site, documents show. The problems included relying on local building techniques that made the compound vulnerable to a car bombing, according to an assessment by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul that was obtained by The Washington Post.

The decision to give up on the site is the clearest sign to date that, as the U.S.-led military coalition starts to draw down troops amid mounting security concerns, American diplomats are being forced to reassess how to safely keep a viable presence in Afghanistan. The plan for the Mazar-e Sharif consulate, as laid out in a previously undisclosed diplomatic memorandum, is a cautionary tale of wishful thinking, poor planning and the type of stark choices the U.S. government will have to make in coming years as it tries to wind down its role in the war.

Plus this:

The hours-long attack in September on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul from a nearby building under construction renewed concerns about the vulnerabilities of the Mazar-e Sharif site.

“The entire compound is surrounded by buildings with overwatch and there is almost no space on the compound that cannot be watched, or fired upon, from an elevated position outside the compound,” Kelly wrote.

Responding effectively to an emergency at the consulate would be next to impossible, Kelly noted, because the facility does not have space for a Black Hawk helicopter to land. It would take a military emergency response team 11 / 2 to 2 hours to reach the site “under good conditions,” he said.

In December, embassy officials began exploring alternative short-term sites for their diplomatic staff in northern Afghanistan. A Western diplomat familiar with the situation said the United States has sought, so far in vain, to persuade the German and Swedish governments to sublet it. The diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the matter, said European diplomats have found the prospect laughable.

Public Park Scenes.

Star-spangled windsock,
still flying after the storms.

Placeholder.

Busy weekend, humid weather,
many projects -- inside and out.

Happy Saturday.
Hope to have more later...

Osama bin ... Budget.

I've got it -- a way for the president's team to get their priorities straight and properly concentrate on our shared future...

Get them to tackle the all important: (Osama bin) Budget. Make it National Priority #1. No household runs properly without a budget, nor will a nation. It's not sexxy, but I suspect in the end, in coming years, our lack of foresight in our fiscal future will cause far more casualties than those few thousands inflicted by Osama bin Laden that day in September, a decade ago.

Not to minimize losses, but to look ahead. Think of the misery index... The innocents who will eventually pay for your "popularity", lack of performance...

Perhaps, if the Man Team makes it a priority and put their true attention to it (= no more partying until you produce a plausible budget, mister. It's no picnic out here for plenty, dontchaknow...) the so-far failed economic team could come up with something plausible. Which could garner at least a few Democratic votes in Congress in support...

Make it a War.
Treat it like it matters.
Nevermind the Boomer gen, who all their lives had it easy living off the spoils of war that previous generations earned. They simply couldn't lose, or so they thought. They'll never get it -- the ones who got high in college, can't remember Woodstock, yet eased into generous compensation plans, nevermind that their performances/where they've led the country today in their respective industries (newspapers, education, higher ed), doesn't match their work output...

Make it a War. If you've got no original ideas, do what the Dems have been doing for decades (welfare to workfare, Detroit's managed bankruptcy, heck even the current pre-emptive military blueprint...), crib from the Republican's work.

You don't like the Republican/Ryan budget? Have "writers block" when it comes to producing original work of your own? Why not: take a sad song, and make it better...

Start with what they've got there, and tweak (surely there's some tweaky wannabe wonks on staff?) until you're satisfied. Keep going/cutting until the numbers balance... and you've something you can pass off as half-credible, to your own D "side" anyway.

Remember, you really can pivot off a failing strategy, even if it means dumping the emphasis on the Tom Hanks documentary, and realizing that so long as we're still at war in Afghanistan/Pakistan and nothing really ended with the man's death, nobody much wants to keep reliving your glory days. (Sitting back... trying to recapture, a lil of that Glory era. Well the time slips away and leaves you with nothing mister, but ... boring stories of... Glory Days...)

If only the president could see -- if only those surrounding him included an honest voice or two; other voices, other regions --, that times out here really aren't as good as those in the good-time Capitol. The recession is over? Really?

The future is coming... ready or not. We want more than fingers crossed, "may the odds be ever in your favor." We want a fair shot, a chance at least, that our performances will dictate our futures. Not that the results have been decided years in advance.

If only, the president didn't have that naturally relaxed Hawaiian attitude (never fooled me he was a serious South Sider, struggling as steel industries were decimated and the physical toll added up, circa the late 70s...), coupled with the "easy achievement" path that greeted the genial man and his lacksidasical attitude.

Take it seriously, man. Don't think that dividing the country needlessly with these miniscule cultural issues is going to win you the big prize. You wanted this job; you got to at least pretend you want to produce. Not just party, travel and schmooze.

So burn that midnight oil, Mr. President. Don't come out for air until you've got a credible budget. Three years is a terrible thing to waste...

Osama bin Budget. Go get 'im.
Why? Because it matters way more than your petcare policies in the long run, no matter what the aging, wannabe cool kids will tell ya.