Jim

Dude - just missed you out there. Good job on Father's day!

Ha! Sat on the coiled rope in our little bathtub sized bivy and cozied up.

I had the camera around my neck but she was grunting a bit and I didn't want to ask her to pause! She rocked! KK- I dunno, maybe around 30 deg(?). Things froze up.

Trip: Dragontail Peak - Serpentine Arete Date: 6/14/2008 Trip Report: Laura called and pried me away from work on Friday with the threat of "the weather forecast is perfect, we'll not get this again". So I ignored the piled up work to get a chance to climb a route we've both wanted to get on for a while. We were lucky enough to get the only dry campsite at the base of the Colchuck moraine and then kicked steps to the base of the route to avoid the need for crampons in the morning and stashed our gear up there (good idea Laura!). The next morning we were up at the base around 6:00 and were joined there by another team. After a brief discussion we decided to let Joe and Dave go first as they seemed faster than our 50-something team. Off they went and true to their word we never saw a rock come our way - thanks guys. It was my first lead of the year - Ha! Good place to work off the cobwebs. We let the leader climb w/o a pack so the second had some extra work. 5.7 pitch It took us a while to find our pace with the rope work on the low fifth and fourth class pitches. low fifth Unfortunately we were not quick enough and by the time we got below the summit block it was obvious we were not going to get back down Asgard Pass in the light so we decided to find a bivy nest for the evening. The weather was good but it was a bit of the shiverfest just before dawn. We saw one huge falling star just as we settled down for the evening and the overall view is hard to beat. I'm sure a few folks, including Joe and Dave, had a chuckle seeing our headlamp up there. Bivy site At first light we were up and at 'em and sat on the back side in the sun at the rappel station where we munched and waited an hour for the snow to soften up. We then had two full-length rappels to the glacier and trudged over to the pass where a cool breeze flowed down to the lake. Cool enough to make the snow hard, which made for a longer route down. Rappel 2 Backside The Enchantments still look like a good ski tour! After a fuel up at the Heidlebuger in Der Village we drove home and to our spouses. A good climb that emphasized the need to get the running belay thing down early. We both consider it an accomplishment as we're both approaching 55 and not getting any quicker - so it seems. Gear Notes: doubles of camalots from green to blue (could have managed with a single blue), 10 small to medium nuts, 1 yellow & 1 red alien, two small tri-cams. 12 runners, 3 cordelettes. Ice ax, no crampons. Be quick! Approach Notes: No snow until the lake

I'm not sure which question you are talking about. You stated that you think the government would be qualified to censor the media, but failed to state how that would work--or how it's constitutional. I think that's a discussion ender right there. You haven't answered my questions about border screening and how it would be carried out in a manner liberals would find palatable and effective. You haven't been paying attention. The Supreme Court ruled that free speech is not unconstrained under the Constitution. You should be, if you're not, aware of the quote regarding yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. Likewise there have been numerous cases on the public's need to know vs state secrets. And porno - what?Like you've never heard of the Larry Flint case or the Ohio museum case? For someone always wrapping themselves in the flag you seem to be woefully ignorant of how this all works or even of recent case history. Try Goggles on the Internets.

Here's one of the many reasons in detail: US President George Bush admitted, in his weekly radio address on December 17, 2005, that he ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct electronic surveillance of US citizens without seeking warrants. The admission followed the publication of the story in the New York Times on December 16 that approximately 500 such warrantless searches were being conducted at any given moment continuously for the last 4 years. The New York Times admitted knowing about the story for "a year," but sat on the story at the request of the Bush Administration. The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution says, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." For decades, at least until the Supreme Court ruled the practice illegal (United States v. United States District Court, Eastern District of Michigan 407 U.S. 297, 313 (1972)) the NSA routinely violated the Fourth Amendment by conducting warrantless surveillance on US citizens. In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Despite the law's Orwellian and unconstitutional secret court proceedings, it did codify into law the bedrock principle that warrants are necessary to legally eavesdrop on US citizens. The law included a provision declaring that using the FISA process of obtaining warrants from the FISA courts is the "the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance…may be conducted." Fewer than ten of the over 15,000 requests for warrants to the FISA courts have been denied since 1978. President Bush, in a press conference on December 19, claimed that he ordered the electronic surveillance because, "this is a different era, different war. It's a war where people are changing phone numbers and phone calls, and they're moving quick." Yet, Joshua Marshall's Talking Points Memo of December 17 pointed out, FISA has an "Emergency order" provision allowing a wiretap to proceed immediately in "emergency situations" as long as the Attorney General retroactively applies for a warrant within 72 hours. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted this point on Nightline on December 21. Lawyer Martin Garbus, on Democracy Now, December 19, 2005, said that ordering such wiretaps without warrants, "Is a crime.... it is an impeachable offense." Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, said, "Eavesdropping on conversations of US citizens and others in the United States without a court order and without complying with the procedures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is both illegal and unconstitutional. The administration is claiming extraordinary presidential powers at the expense of civil liberties and is putting the president above the law. Congress must investigate this report thoroughly. We also call upon Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to appoint a special prosecutor to independently investigate whether crimes have been committed." A special prosecutor could refer a case to the House for possible impeachment. Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), on WAOK radio on December 20, 2005, reminded listeners that Bush is "Not King, he is president." Since, "He deliberately, systematically violated the law," Lewis recommends proceeding directly to impeachment.

If it was such a moral imperative then why did the Idiot need to form the Iraq Study Group to develop a marketing plan to sell it to the public? If it was so important than just state your case and be honest about it. James Baker, former Sec of State, says "No one asks me anymore why we didn't go to Baghdad". For all "intents and purposes" the Idiot and his band lied to the public and Congress. Funny, in a not funny way, that if Iraq was such a moral threat to the world why did we cozy up to them and send them weapons, biological weapons, and provide them with intelligence until Saddam showed too much independence? Well because at that time he was OUR dictator and provided a counterweight to Iran in the region. So it was ok that he was mowing down the Kurds with weapons we gave him, but when he starting yanking on the leash it was time to move in. Get real - do think if Iraq's major export was vegetables that we would be interested? There is no morality involved - it's the Idiot and his buddies who had their eye on Iraq for a long time and wanted to make a statement. They succeeded but not in the manner intended. Anyone with a long term vision and world view has said this was a strategic blunder.

I have a bet with PP on this. How about you? I could always use more food and

I just watched this speech for the first time. Oh God that was painful. Obama in a landslide for sure.

We were up at Silver Peak basin when it was way hot the weekend before Memorial Day and decided the west slope to Annette Lake was a bit to avy prone that day, so we traced our tracks back to the Silver Fir chair. So we went back on June 1, dropped a car at the Annette Lake trailhead and started from the pass again. A bit foggy but dry and we only ran into a pair of skiers on the ridge who had come up the west side. Cool, about 41 deg on the ridge. After a quick lunch we skied down to the lake. It was a great run. Found a snow bridge on the creek and crossed to the west side of the valley to ski down to the John Wayne Trail. Some recent big avy action on that side of the valley. Still a good ski all the way down. With some minor alder surfing right before the JWT. A 3/4 mile hike out and a decent 5 hr outing and home for dinner.

Impressive!! I had 580 myself. Other folks in the office are not carrying their weight lately.

I hear ya. 50 miles in this week so far. Riding the one with fenders today.

I'm 4 months into that 10 month waiting list. These get to drive in the HOV lane STP or did they have passengers? I'm curious about why you would buy this car. I looked into them and the milage is not so hot for such a little car. A Honda Civic does just as well with much more room. I saw two reviews in the NYT that said the thing had extremely poor handling and pickup, and not great milage. So what's up? great gas mileage, great pickup, great handling... and you at least might get thrown out of harms way in the event of a crash ... just sayin.. My wife's middle-schoolers would get a kick out of her pulling up to school with this, but it's hard to see how she could pile on all the work she brings home. Now only if that '89 Mazda she has would die already.

I'm 4 months into that 10 month waiting list. These get to drive in the HOV lane STP or did they have passengers? I'm curious about why you would buy this car. I looked into them and the milage is not so hot for such a little car. A Honda Civic does just as well with much more room. I saw two reviews in the NYT that said the thing had extremely poor handling and pickup, and not great milage. So what's up?

Yea. Especially with the 25% of the delegates still pushing for Ron Paul.

No. They're just stupid for clinging on to the SUV dream and Americans are stupid for buying them. We'll see if the Chinese and Indians are any brighter as they go forward en masse towards higher rates of car ownership.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: May 28, 2008 Imagine for a minute, just a minute, that someone running for president was able to actually tell the truth, the real truth, to the American people about what would be the best — I mean really the best — energy policy for the long-term economic health and security of our country. I realize this is a fantasy, but play along with me for a minute. What would this mythical, totally imaginary, truth-telling candidate say? For starters, he or she would explain that there is no short-term fix for gasoline prices. Prices are what they are as a result of rising global oil demand from India, China and a rapidly growing Middle East on top of our own increasing consumption, a shortage of “sweet” crude that is used for the diesel fuel that Europe is highly dependent upon and our own neglect of effective energy policy for 30 years. Cynical ideas, like the McCain-Clinton summertime gas-tax holiday, would only make the problem worse, and reckless initiatives like the Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep offer to subsidize gasoline for three years for people who buy its gas guzzlers are the moral equivalent of tobacco companies offering discounted cigarettes to teenagers. I can’t say it better than my friend Tim Shriver, the chairman of Special Olympics, did in a Memorial Day essay in The Washington Post: “So Dodge wants to sell you a car you don’t really want to buy, that is not fuel-efficient, will further damage our environment, and will further subsidize oil states, some of which are on the other side of the wars we’re currently fighting. ... The planet be damned, the troops be forgotten, the economy be ignored: buy a Dodge.” No, our mythical candidate would say the long-term answer is to go exactly the other way: guarantee people a high price of gasoline — forever. This candidate would note that $4-a-gallon gasoline is really starting to impact driving behavior and buying behavior in way that $3-a-gallon gas did not. The first time we got such a strong price signal, after the 1973 oil shock, we responded as a country by demanding and producing more fuel-efficient cars. But as soon as oil prices started falling in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we let Detroit get us readdicted to gas guzzlers, and the price steadily crept back up to where it is today. We must not make that mistake again. Therefore, what our mythical candidate would be proposing, argues the energy economist Philip Verleger Jr., is a “price floor” for gasoline: $4 a gallon for regular unleaded, which is still half the going rate in Europe today. Washington would declare that it would never let the price fall below that level. If it does, it would increase the federal gasoline tax on a monthly basis to make up the difference between the pump price and the market price. To ease the burden on the less well-off, “anyone earning under $80,000 a year would be compensated with a reduction in the payroll taxes,” said Verleger. Or, he suggested, the government could use the gasoline tax to buy back gas guzzlers from the public and “crush them.” But the message going forward to every car buyer and carmaker would be this: The price of gasoline is never going back down. Therefore, if you buy a big gas guzzler today, you are locking yourself into perpetually high gasoline bills. You are buying a pig that will eat you out of house and home. At the same time, if you, a manufacturer, continue building fleets of nonhybrid gas guzzlers, you are condemning yourself, your employees and shareholders to oblivion. What a cruel thing for a candidate to say? I disagree. Every decade we look back and say: “If only we had done the right thing then, we would be in a different position today.” But no politician dared to do so. When gasoline was $2 a gallon, the government never would have imposed a $2 tax. Now that it is $4 a gallon, the government should at least keep it there, since it is really having the right effect. I was visiting my local Toyota dealer in Bethesda, Md., last week to trade in one hybrid car for another. There is now a two-month wait to buy a Prius, which gets close to 50 miles per gallon. The dealer told me I was lucky. My hybrid was going up in value every day, so I didn’t have to worry about waiting a while for my new car. But if it were not a hybrid, he said, he would deduct each day $200 from the trade-in price for every $1-a-barrel increase in the OPEC price of crude oil. When I saw the rows and rows of unsold S.U.V.’s parked in his lot, I understood why. We need to make a structural shift in our energy economy. Ultimately, we need to move our entire fleet to plug-in electric cars. The only way to get from here to there is to start now with a price signal that will force the change. Barack Obama had the courage to tell voters that the McCain-Clinton summer gas-giveaway plan was a fraud. Wouldn’t it be amazing if he took the next step and put the right plan before the American people? Wouldn’t that just be amazing?

Ponzi Schemes. Please research. Not everyfraud in life is exposed, not every crime is discovered or punished. Profound maxims aplenty in this thread. But we're talking about a concrete situation here. The administration made the presence of WMD in Iraq one of the central platforms that the case for invading Iraq rested upon, and made an on-the-ground search for WMD to validate those claims an essential part of their post-invasion plans. If you *know* that there are no WMD in Iraq, there is no plausible post-invasion scenario in which the absence of WMD will not be documented if you fail to discover any there - unless you plan to put them there yourself. Occam's razor time - hell, Occam's stone tool/primate-digging stick time - they thought they'd find WMD there, and they didn't. Come on. You're being as intellectually dishonest as the Idiot. The WMD story was found to be false as they were trying to persuade the public. They twisted the intelligence. They lied. Powell's UN speech was riddled with holes within an hour of completing it. The whole WMD, mushroom cloud thing was great and effective theater. Their assumption was that everything post-invasion would be great and they could skirt around the justification issue and just say "see, the bad guy is gone and democracy is flourishing where a dictatorship used to be". It didn't quite work out that way. Any critical analysis of the facts points to 1) they were lying, 2) they knew they were lying, and 3) they thought it would be forgotten in the thrill of victory. That said - it could not have been accomplished without the approval of the democrats in Congress. Many of who, including Hillary, made a calculated decision to vote for the war, even with all the retoric they knew was BS, because they were chickenshits and were afraid of being called to task for their vote.

The thing about many of the lighter weight tents is that the uppr tent is made of mesh. I've been in some windy storms in a few of these and 1) their colder, and 2) all kinds of grit gets blown into the tent. I'm debating about a new tent as well. Something like the BD Mirage or an Eldorado.

I think this just bears out what is strikingly evident now. That the Idiot and his group were very good at politics and lousy at governing. They did an impressive PR campaign for the war, getting ex-generals on board to push their positions as talking heads on the news channels, leaked false tid-bits to headline hungy reporters and then pointed to those stores as evidence of what they were saying, and generally ramped up the retoric. As far as dissent in the Pentagon - the White House made it known it was their way or the highway - which caused a stream of retirements and loss of command positions before and during the war. The necons just kept promising the flowering of democracy without any forethought regarding the region's complex history, religous divisions, or ethnic tensions. It was less naivete and more adherence faulty reasoning and idealism.

I was thinking that when I win my bet with PP regarding Mcain's flame-out in the fall that he could take me to a game and buy beer and dogs. But that may not be a good idea.

We need last weekend's weather this weekend. Friking big system in the Rockies spinning stuff into eastern WA. Doesn't look very promising for the mountains. May try to sneak in a day ski somewhere. Not sure I'm up for a potential wash out at WA pass, however.

Please don't attempt adding any clarity to Glasscowsuck's distorted view of American politics. He is...mmm...how you say...a stupid fuck mother. Let's be specific here. The Dems package included increasing the amount that would be paid for college, which has not kept up with the cost of 4 yr schools. The Dems also wanted someone who was in the reserves, went to Iraq, to be paid the cost of continuing their education. The way it works not is that if you complete your tour and finish your commitment of your tenure, but don't resign up, you lose your benefits. So the only way you can get an education is to continue sign up in the reserve and continue to get pulled over to the action. Basically it's a veteran's benefit except you don't get it unless you stay in active duty. WTF? The Repubs are "concerned" that after two or three tours of Iraq a person might feel that was enough and decide to use their benefits, get a degree, and move on to another career.

My advice would be to do it, just plan it out so you're not stuck financially when you get back. I took off 3 months back when I was 35 or so to go climb in Patagonia with a buddy who worked at the same place. We just went into the boss and made our pitch. They new we would just quit if they said no and they would have lost our skills. Now that I'm 51 I'm planning on taking 4 months off in a year and I'm not going to ask for time of I'm just going to tell them I'm going. If they want me back, that's great, if not I'm getting recruited regularly anyway. I've also managed to take off either 3 wks in a row or a month each of the last 5 years with some careful planning and some catchup time before and after. If you're thinking hard about it you should do it - it will give you a much needed rest and fresh perspective. Work is a good thing for may reasons, but you can get worn down even by a job you really like. Good luck.

That critter looks too alive to be associated with the Mariners.