There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about reviving phonics and arithmetic drills, but Linda Chavez has an interesting column today on the lost art of diagramming sentences, and the dismayingly poor quality of schoolchildren’s writing skills.

I wonder if this is included in the curriculum in jounalism school.

Naawwwww…

According to Sam Dealey, Houston Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee is literally a limousine liberal. In contravention of government ethics rules, each morning, she has one of her staffers pick her up in a limo at her Capitol Hill apartment, and drive her to her House office building–one and a half blocks away.

Boy, and they say people in LA don’t like to walk. This reminds me of the scene in LA Story, in which Steve Martin walks out of his front door, down the sidewalk to the street, gets into his car, starts it up, pulls it forward to the next house, gets out, and walks up and knocks on the door.

Of course, we have to consider that she’s not the sharpest tack in the box. This is a woman who, when the Sojourner landed on Mars, asked if it landed near the Apollo landing sites. And she serves on the Subcommittee of Space and Aeronautics.

I have no further comment.

According to Sam Dealey, Houston Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee is literally a limousine liberal. In contravention of government ethics rules, each morning, she has one of her staffers pick her up in a limo at her Capitol Hill apartment, and drive her to her House office building–one and a half blocks away.

Boy, and they say people in LA don’t like to walk. This reminds me of the scene in LA Story, in which Steve Martin walks out of his front door, down the sidewalk to the street, gets into his car, starts it up, pulls it forward to the next house, gets out, and walks up and knocks on the door.

Of course, we have to consider that she’s not the sharpest tack in the box. This is a woman who, when the Sojourner landed on Mars, asked if it landed near the Apollo landing sites. And she serves on the Subcommittee of Space and Aeronautics.

I have no further comment.

According to Sam Dealey, Houston Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee is literally a limousine liberal. In contravention of government ethics rules, each morning, she has one of her staffers pick her up in a limo at her Capitol Hill apartment, and drive her to her House office building–one and a half blocks away.

Boy, and they say people in LA don’t like to walk. This reminds me of the scene in LA Story, in which Steve Martin walks out of his front door, down the sidewalk to the street, gets into his car, starts it up, pulls it forward to the next house, gets out, and walks up and knocks on the door.

Of course, we have to consider that she’s not the sharpest tack in the box. This is a woman who, when the Sojourner landed on Mars, asked if it landed near the Apollo landing sites. And she serves on the Subcommittee of Space and Aeronautics.

I have no further comment.

I’m almost certainly not the only person to point it out, but we need to keep hammering on this point: the irony of the federal government investigating anyone else’s accounting practice is profound. If I kept my books like these guys, I’d have been locked up long ago.

There’s a good editorial in today’s Journal by Thomas Bray that expresses some concerns that I’ve had since the undeclared “war” on terrorism began. I’m not as concerned, however, with his main point. He was disconcerted when the President said in the SOTU that “time is not on our side,” and believes that it contradicts his September 20th speech, in which he stated that the terrorists’ ideologies will be consigned to the unmarked grave of history.

I don’t see the contradiction. It’s possible to believe in ultimate inevitable victory, while still being concerned about near-term tactical attacks. The president wasn’t saying that we may lose the war if we are not expeditious–he was simply saying that, in doing so, we may suffer greater casualties than need be, and greater casualties than September 11, if we don’t continue to put pressure on all sources of terrorism.

However, I, like Mr. Bray, have been, and continue to be, disquieted by the seeming lack of any criteria by which we will know that the war is over, and by our continuing refusal to formally declare it. This is particularly troubling in the face of the continued erosion of our civil liberties that is being justified in its name.

Posts are a little slow today, not because I’m under attack, but because I decided that it was time to upgrade my 400 MHz K6-2 to a 1.2GHz Duron on my Windoze machine, AND I’VE BEEN SPENDING THE LAST SEVERAL HOURS TRYING TO GET THE THING WORKING.

I changed out the motherboard, and when I tried to boot, it couldn’t find my W2K drive. When I boot into W98, I can see the drive, but it still won’t boot into W2K. Scandisking the drive doesn’t help either.

This is being posted from one of my Linux boxes.

I hate Microsoft.

Hmmmmm…. maybe I am under attack–it’s just a little more subtle…

I’ve somehow gotten on an anti-WTO/anti-capitalism/anti-everything mailing list based in London called Global Resistance.

Compare this delusional self-congratulatory nonsense:

We went along with the students to a Reclaim the Streets action immediately preceeding the main protest. We reckoned on 3-4000 were there – a brilliant sign. Marching through Central Park in the clear and cold weather was pretty surreal, and when we arrived at the main assembly point it was certain all expectations had been outstripped. The protest was young, a swathe of homemade banners and puppets, inventive slogans and many many pretzel jokes. The police presence was extraordinary. A few young people wearing masks were arrested near the beginning of the march, but it soon became clear that the polioce were not going to charge into the demo risking a full blown riot. Shops along the route remained open, and passers by appeared to have seen through the press hysteria and showed sympathy and solidarity with the protesters.

One coffee shop full of shoppers had a line of customers sitting in the window holding up “Bad Capitalist – No Martini. Shut Down the WEF” leaflets. Discussions had on the demo reflected constantly people’s delight with such a big turnout. Estimates ranged from 20 to 30,000. I think it’s safe to say there were 25,000 there.

With this story from the paper formerly known as the Paper of Record.

The New York forum — which attracted 7,000 protesters at its height on Saturday — has drawn far fewer activists than the estimated 50,000 who came to Seattle and the 100,000 who came to Genoa, Italy, for global economic conferences.

Note the reference to “pretzel jokes.” I’ll bet they were real knee slappers.

Will Warren has a wonderful new poem up in honor of a fatuously stupid commentary by FAIR, on how we can no longer handle immigration in this country because we’re running out of room.

We?ve all heard tell of Isadore the Cowboy,
Who drove them dogies all across the range;
For Jews, the urban places were a killjoy:
They all became proud members of the Grange.

What’s particularly ironic about this is that the Great Plains are actually emptying–states like Nebraska and the Dakotas are declining in population, and the average age is dramatically increasing as young people leave and head for the cities. After settling a frontier a century ago, we’re now abandoning it.

It might be a good place to move in libertarian-bent people to start up new communities, if we had a federal government that would follow the Constitution…

For those who, like Perry de Havilland, thought that my post about Blogdom attacks was an excuse for my not posting–sorry for the confusion. I was simply expressing general concern.

I myself don’t use blogger, and have had no technical difficulties at all. (I’m obviously not important enough to be attacked.)

I was simply busy over the weekend, and in addition, was undergoing a (temporary?) shortage of pith and wit.