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Otto is his name, and he’s pretty important. He’s also pretty funny, so if you’re looking for something funny, you could do worse than cruising by and giving him a read.

I would not like the Krab, or the hair suit. I might like to tour the underwear factory, I’m not sure, but I’m sure I’ll keep reading Otto for a while. At least until I get bored or forget about him like all the other funny blogs out there.

this is just a test
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I don’t cook. Ever! But, if I did, Cooking For Engineers would be my kind of recipe site. The way those recipes are layed out is a work of genius.

Gahhhh! I don’t know why I let myself get sucked into games like House. I always seem to get stuck about half way through. I found one key. I can’t find the other. I suspect I need to solve the security alarm or something, but the game has like a million numbers in it, and none of them seem to work.

I need a walk through.

Update: Well, I found the second key, but I’m still highly stuck.

I don’t get very political here very often, but this coming election seems pretty important to me, so I felt I needed to rant a little about national security.

Most of the people I’ve spoken with recently who are supporting Bush for a second term feel he would be better at responding to terror. I’m not sure where that perception came from. I know that part of it is that lots of people have drawn a connection between Iraq and terrorism thinking that Iraq in some way facilitated the attacks of Sept. 11. Several bi-partisan commissions have determined that there were no ties between Iraq and Sept. 11. Lots of people I speak with seem to be unwilling or unable to accept that though.

Still, if (as every expert but Cheney) says, Iraq was not complicit in September 11, then Iraq was a distraction from the war on terror. It couldn’t be more simple than that.

We destabilized a dangerous region of the world, and we didn’t do it as a response to 9/11. Sure, the country was ruled by a thug, but it was a thug, who was contained and could not pose a serious threat to US interests. Even if you believe they were working towards weapons programs, you must recognize that they were years away from being close to having them. Either the Bush administration realized this and deliberately mislead us, or they were hopelessly naive. Either way, I don’t understand how anybody could be willing to give him a second chance.

Even if you feel we would have eventually had to deal with Iraq, we didn’t have to do it while we were still going after the people that actually attacked our soil. Sure, Iraq is better off without Saddam. The US at this particular moment in time simply isn’t. We created additional terrorists in the world while eating away at our ability to go after the people who were truly guilty of those Sept. 11 attacks. This war that Bush wanted and got has made Americans less safe, not more.

And then there’s Senator Bob Graham’s new book that brings to light facts that I didn’t know.

Story:

Two of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers had a support network in the United States that included agents of the Saudi government, and the Bush administration and FBI blocked a congressional investigation into that relationship, Sen. Bob Graham wrote in a book to be released Tuesday.

And in Graham’s book, Intelligence Matters, obtained by The Herald Saturday, he makes clear that some details of that financial support from Saudi Arabia were in the 27 pages of the congressional inquiry’s final report that were blocked from release by the administration, despite the pleas of leaders of both parties on the House and Senate intelligence committees.

Bush had concluded that ”a nation-state that had aided the terrorists should not be held publicly to account,” Graham wrote. “It was as if the president’s loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America’s safety.”

Any president is going to respond aggressively to terrorism in this day and age. A president who will address the problem as an intelligence and police matter as opposed to a war on nation states seems to have a better grasp on the correct solution. I don’t know what kind of job Kerry would do. I have every reason to suspect he’ll do a fine job. I do know what kind of job Bush will do. We’ve seen him doing his job for the past 3+ years, and US is more endangered now that we were when he took office.

He talks a tough game. In his black and white “I’m a straight shootin’ cowboy” view of the world, he probably even believes he’s being effective. He’s not though, and I think you’d be hard pressed to find a president who could possible be less effective at protecting us from terrorism than Bush. If that’s the issue that’s going to decide the election for you, I urge you to look past they hype to the reality of what this man has done to protect and/or endanger you and the people you care about.

MetaFilter has an interesting discussion of how the left and right of American politics delivers its message. The thread starts a bit slow with the typical position defending, and I don’t know how it will end, but there are some interesting thoughts there.

Black Chick’s Tongue in my mouth — Heh!