More friday cat blogging

Easter is coming and the peeps are getting restless.

I took this photo to show her very silly ear ruffles. I've never seen anything quite like them on a kitty. (on display in photo above too) Click on the images to see the fluffy details.

Friday kitten blogging

Puffy tail alert!!

Let's see.... e=mc 2'd, right?

Memorial Maxx Blogging

I went strolling through my photo albums to look at Maxx pictures, and they made me so sad. I got so accustomed to seeing him that I got completely used to seeing his tumor. With the distance of a couple months, the evidence of his illness really jumps out at me. Poor little buddy. He was so brave.

I pulled a photo from a few months back, before his mouf got so bad. As always, he is missed everyday.

Late Night Maddie

This cheese chase makes me crazy!!


Hallooooooooooooooooo!!!!

Afternoon Kitten

Not a very good photo, she was crab walking and I was trying to catch it. Unpossible!! I like the funny black splotches on the backs of her hind legs. Teh silly.

And here she's just being silly. Kittens enjoy that.

Oh, and large photos are back! Click on the bottom photo for all the hilarious details. (not on the top one, just a bunch of distortion)

Borneo Leopards, Oh My!!

The clouded leopard of Borneo has been proved to be a separate species. Cool!! New Leopard Species Found in Borneo:

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - The clouded leopard of Borneo — discovered to be an entirely new species — is the latest in a growing list of animals and plants unique to the Southeast Asian country's rainforest and underscores the need to preserve the area, conservationists said Thursday.

Genetic tests by researchers at the U.S. National Cancer Institute revealed that the clouded leopard of Borneo and Sumatra islands is a unique cat species and not the same one found in mainland Southeast Asia as long believed, said a statement by WWF, the global conservation organization.

"Who said a leopard can never change its spots? For over a hundred years we have been looking at this animal and never realized it was unique," said Stuart Chapman, WWF International Coordinator of the Heart of Borneo program, which is dedicated to preserving the flora and fauna in the deep jungles on Borneo.

Excellent.

Morning Kitten rush

Halllooooooooo!!!!

See my fluffy tail.

The huntress. It's probably a good thing for the birds that she's going to be an inside cat.

Late afternoon Madeleine

If you are clicking on the photos and thinking the file sizes aren't very big, you would be right. Blogger is having a photo upload problem.

Bastards.

Aurora Borealis

I must admit that my fascination with the auroras dates back to early childhood viewing of Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer.

Ahem. Never the less, it's one phenomenon I'd like to see, and photograph, with my own eyes.

Peep Smackdown

She's figured out what to do with the peep.

A Double Shot

What is the deal with these peeps?

Halloooooooooo!!!!

She spends everyday getting cuter.

Cable has returned, woo hoo!!

Somebody accidentally disconnected the wrong unit yesterday. All fixed now.

Tuesday kitten

Her whiskers go every which way.

Late Night Madeleine

We hope to return to normal blogging tomorrow.

Spring, some more

At last, a strong enough signal to upload a picture.

Sorry, No Internet

Something dreadful has happened to my cable and my high speed internet access. No new Maddie pics until tomorrow as a result.

Right now, with the kind permission of my neighbor, I'm using her WIFI. Sadly though, the signal is weak and slow.

Check out the archives in the meantime.

Monday morning Madeleine

She loves her toys.

More fetching

By request, the other video of Madeleine fetching:

Sunday Kitten

We're having a lazy Sunday here. It's rainy and chilly.

Abu Gonzales

The NYTimes is on the right track with this editorial- The Failed Attorney General:

During the hearing on his nomination as attorney general, Alberto Gonzales said he understood the difference between the job he held — President Bush’s in-house lawyer — and the job he wanted, which was to represent all Americans as their chief law enforcement officer and a key defender of the Constitution. Two years later, it is obvious Mr. Gonzales does not have a clue about the difference.

He has never stopped being consigliere to Mr. Bush’s imperial presidency. If anyone, outside Mr. Bush’s rapidly shrinking circle of enablers, still had doubts about that, the events of last week should have erased them.

I have to beg to differ though.

Mr. Gonzales knows perfectly well what the difference is. He just chooses to put his boss' interests above the interests of the American people. In republican circles, what's good for the republican party is what's right for the American people, no exceptions.

I do not believe there is a single republican in high office left who can be trusted to put principle above party interest. Not a one. I'd love to see Abu get the hook, but I don't believe we'll get anyone much better. If they are a bush loyalist, and they will be, they'll be just as bad.

Saturday Maddie

The radioactive kitten at rest.

Austin Film Alert

For those of you in Austin, I recommend that you check out the premiere of the film Elvis & Anabelle at South by Southwest this evening.

I've seen the film in previews and it's terrific. 6:30 PM, the Paramount Theatre.

Magoo!!!!!!!

She vants to suck your blood.

Spring

Detail from the pretty tree outside my office.

More Friday cats

"I'm sleepy, leave me alone."

She loves this thing.

Halloooooo!!

Memorial Maxx

Mr. Plushy. Sorely missed.

Really Bad Video

Maddie goes mad for fetching. She's likes to do the four-legged pounce.

The Sun!!!

Via National Geographic:

March 1, 2007—Twin NASA spacecraft studying the sun have beamed their spectacular first images to Earth, helping scientists to detect and track solar storms that can fry satellites, harm astronauts, and overload power lines.

The panoramic images, released today, were taken by a suite of five telescopes on the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft, which were launched on October 25, 2006.

The pictures provide a closeup view of the sun's activity, such as this snapshot of loops in a magnetically active region that soon afterward produced a series of intense flares (top). The images also provide a progressive view of the sun's radiation all the way to Earth's atmosphere (bottom).

Scientists say this new sweeping viewpoint will let them study the flow of energy from the sun to Earth, especially coronal mass ejections—violent eruptions of electrically charged gas from the sun's atmosphere that can cause dangerous solar storms.

I just love the pretty blue pictures. Okay, the science is way cool too.

Stretch!

I've been trying to get this shot for a while. Still didn't quite get it. When she stretches, she arches her back and curls her tail over her back, almost touching her head.

I've never seen a cat do that before. It's quite silly.

Eeeeek!! Peeps!!!

There is stuff on my kitten.

Evening Madeleine

I think I'm probably spoiling you guys.

Fired US Attorneys

AP/Lauren Victoria Burke

Most of you are well aware of what's been happening with the fired US Attorneys story. If you're not, check out the excellent reporting on Talking Points Memo- Josh has owned this story, and I think without the fine work they've done, this would have been swept under the rug. As it is, it's finally blown up into a big deal, with the White House being forced to back down today. White House bows on attorney reforms. It's not the end of the story, because it never is with this crew, but it is a start.

One of the reasons this is such an important story is that it exposes one of the most insidious activities of the Bush administration. And that's their ongoing effort to infiltrate the entire federal bureacracy with Bush and republican loyalists. The damage they are doing will be felt for the next 30 years. Of course US Attorneys are slightly different, since they're political appointees, and they do serve at the "pleasure of the president." But you can be certain that from the State Department right down to the US Mint, the bushies have been installing the party faithful who can be guaranteed to promote their agenda into the distant future. Many of these people will be protected by civil service collective bargaining agreements and will be extremely difficult to dislodge.

We can't say it often enough. The republican party ALWAYS puts party ahead of their country. Eventually the country will catch on and refuse to ever return any of these jackasses to positions of power.

Other kitties

I have been remiss in posting photos of loyal reader Darryl Pearce's kitties. That's Nova, top, and Caesar. Nova is quite the plushmonster, eh?

Cherry Blossoms

Reuters/Kim Kyung-Hoon

The cherry blossoms are beginning to bloom in Japan. We don't have cherry trees here, though there is a lovely set of trees outside my window that are comletely covered in white blossoms. I'll take a snap for you guys tomorrow.

Afternoon Maddie

Action kitty!!

No Pardon?

Via Newsweek, it appears that Scooter doesn't qualify for a pardon under Justice Department guidelines. Not that that would stop Bush if he had his heart set on it.

But there’s one significant roadblock on the path to Libby’s salvation: Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff does not qualify to even be considered for a presidential pardon under Justice Department guidelines.

From the day he took office, Bush seems to have followed those guidelines religiously. He's taken an exceedingly stingy approach to pardons, granting only 113 in six years, mostly for relatively minor fraud, embezzlement and drug cases dating back more than two decades. Bush’s pardons are “fewer than any president in 100 years,” according to Margaret Love, former pardon attorney at the Justice Department.

It occurs to me that there's another reason chimpy might not grant Scooter the vindication the right thinks he deserves- Bush is pissed. He's pissed at Cheney and his office for embarrassing him and causing this public relations nightmare. And he might just let Scooter go to prison out of spite, which would completely square with Suzanne Malveaux's reporting yesterday that the WH was, "going to cut Libby loose."

My only regret is that Karl won't be occupying the adjacent cell.

Hat tip to pony-boy Holden.

Morning Maddie

Halloooooooo!!!!

Late Night Maddie

E = MC 2

See? She does too fetch.

One more Maddie photo

If you look really closely, you can see her funny little eyelashes.

Daily Maddie

Why go to Daily Kitten when you can get Maddie here, every single day?

The WAPO Editiorial Board is Dead to Me.

Because of crap like this:

A bipartisan investigation by the Senate intelligence committee subsequently established that all of these claims were false -- and that Mr. Wilson was recommended for the Niger trip by Ms. Plame, his wife. When this fact, along with Ms. Plame's name, was disclosed in a column by Robert D. Novak, Mr. Wilson advanced yet another sensational charge: that his wife was a covert CIA operative and that senior White House officials had orchestrated the leak of her name to destroy her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson.

As Dan Froomkin noted today, the Washington DC press corps was against this case from the beginning. So much so that they seem to be willfully blind to the facts not only produced at trial, but printed in their very own fucking newspaper.

Good god.

Earth to all of you- the CIA referred this case to Justice, not Joe Wilson. The CIA also said that they sent Joe Wilson because they wanted to answer the question the VP's office asked. End of story. None of this is particularly difficult. Neither is the fact that this administration ALWAYS, and I mean ALWAYS attacks the messenger.

Libby was convicted because he broke the law. He did it to save his boss embarrassment that might cost his party a presidential election.

He deserves to go to jail. They all do. And Fred Hiatt should be hounded out of the newspaper business for publishing crap like this.

Time to Clip Tweety

Tweety was on Tucker's show this afternoon, commenting on whether LIbby should be pardonned. Here's a paraphrase of what he said:

"So when is the appropriate time for Bush to do the right thing here? I mean this guy didn't rob a bank, didn't hold someone up, he basically was doing the right thing, protecting his boss."

In my humble opinion, a guy who doesn't understand that someone working for the executive branch is supposed to be serving the people of this country, then he has no business being on the air. Chris Matthews seems to think that, well okay, this was technically against the law, but who could blame him for trying to protect his boss?

Guess what? I can blame him. I'm a little sick of so-called "public servants" whose loyalty to party and dear leader come before their loyalty the the American people and the republic. And I'm more than sick of the talking heads who enable them.

Feh. A pox on all of them.

On Libby

AP/Pablo Martinez Monisvais

Check out Froomkin's excellent column today on Bush, Cheney and the LIbby mess. Froomkin argues what everyone on the left knows is true, and what everyone one on the right would love to prevent- that Bush and Cheney finally be compelled to fess up and tell the American people what they know.

The White House yesterday once again trotted out its "ongoing criminal matter" rationale. But that was never much of an excuse and at this point it is utterly pathetic. Any danger of influencing the investigation or the jury pool, to the extent that was ever a legitimate concern, is past. The chances of a retrial are almost nonexistent. In reviewing a conviction, an appellate court cannot look outside the trial record. Fitzgerald says he and his fellow prosecutors are going back to their day jobs.

And there is an enormous public-policy factor here -- something more important than the vague, theoretical possibility of influencing a fair trial. Just for example, no executive of any company would be allowed by his shareholders to remain mum on a top aide's indictment -- not to mention conviction. He'd be fired.

Why are Bush and his aides hiding behind such hollow excuses? Probably because they know that if they did talk, it might just make things worse. Arguably, they still don't think Libby did anything wrong, putting them in the awkward position of disagreeing with a federal jury's verdict. And in explaining what they say really happened, they might risk either exposing more unseemly facts or being caught in a lie.

But the main reason they are hiding behind these excuses is that they can. There's been no public cost to them from not talking.

Let me add that Bush doesn't believe he owes anyone an explanation. In his mind, the public does not have any right to know.

If anyone thinks Bush didn't know what was going on, I've got a bridge out in the parking lot to sell them. Remember that Bush learned the art of dirty tricks at the knee of Lee Atwater. HIs closest aide is Karl Rove. He employs Karl simply because he is so good at trash politics.

Any claims he makes now of being above it all are lies. Lies. The tactic of 'destroying the messsenger' has been SOP for the republican party for many, many years. It's time for the congress to take these liars on. Past time.

We be famous!!

Madeleine made The Daily Kitten. I am so very proud.

The Young Scientist

Well, I promised you guys I'd figure this out. Maddie got her brand new, baby-sized particle accelerator from the nice UPS man this afternoon.

Enjoy.