Jim

"The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." GWB

Jay- Check out this site for historical ski information. You can email in questions also. http://www.woodenskis.com/index.html I can't believe someone just tossed these! Fine woodworking also had some tips on wooden ski restoration a while back. Two articles about building cross-country skis that were published in Fine Wood Working Magazine are avalible in a book called Fine Wood Working on Bending Wood. This is avalible from Taunton Press. The first article is Cross-Country Skis, the Easy Way by George Mustoe, and, indeed, it is an easy way. The second article is Cross-Country Skis, Norwegian Style by Richard Starr. This article seems slightly more complicated, but still do-able for a woodworker with even moderate skill.

You just became aware of this? And why is this? Libby fabricated such a tale that it was a slam dunk to have him indicted on false statements (not under oath while being interviewed by FBI) and false testimony (under oath in front of Grand Jury). Likely he was not charged for the leak because he was not the first - this was person A in the White House, which all believe was Rove. Why he wasn't charged with the leak is not clear to me even if he was the second one to do it. Hopefully Rove will get nailed and booted out. Slimeballs.

If you ever had any doubt about the tactics of this administration this peak around the facade is revealing. With all the talk about nationalism and protecting our country they don't blink an eye when it comes to compromising not just this one person, but the whole covert operation they built as her cover and those associated with it now - and those who in foreign countries who have been associated with it. The other peak around the curtain is how the press in this country is just a lap dog for the government. To gain access to high powered people you have to toe the line, otherwise you'll be a cub reporter forever. Judith Miller was just scanning the admistrations assertions and putting them under her byline. You bet there's a media bias. Libby is a well seasoned right-hand guy. He would not have leaked such sensitive information on his own. Most likely Rove and Cheney devised the scheme. My guess at a likely outcome. Libby will fall on his sword and Bush, in his parting days, will pardon him. Just as Reagan did so with his felons.

Counter exercises such as these are good for injury prevention as a balance to the typical rock workout.

Bush, Rove, Cheney. They haven't a shred of integrity. Always more concerned with politics than leading.

I used an auto broker to find me a good used car at auction. I was turned on to him via some friends who did the same. You give him a vehicle type, year, and price. He has a potential one checked out when he finds it. It worked well for me. PM if interested for a number.

Exerpt from NYT - Frank Rich, Oct 16 http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/101605Z.shtml It's long been my hunch that the WHIG-ites were at their most brazen (and, in legal terms, reckless) during the many months that preceded the appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald as special counsel. When Mr. Rove was asked on camera by ABC News in September 2003 if he had any knowledge of the Valerie Wilson leak and said no, it was only hours before the Justice Department would open its first leak investigation. When Scott McClellan later declared that he had been personally assured by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby that they were "not involved" with the leak, the case was still in the safe hands of the attorney general then, John Ashcroft, himself a three-time Rove client in past political campaigns. Though Mr. Rove may be known as "Bush's brain," he wasn't smart enough to anticipate that Justice Department career employees would eventually pressure Mr. Ashcroft to recuse himself because of this conflict of interest, clearing the way for an outside prosecutor as independent as Mr. Fitzgerald. THIS modus operandi was foolproof, shielding the president as well as Mr. Rove from culpability, as long as it was about winning an election. The attack on Mr. Wilson, by contrast, has left them and the Cheney-Libby tag team vulnerable because it's about something far bigger: protecting the lies that took the country into what the Reagan administration National Security Agency director, Lt. Gen. William Odom, recently called "the greatest strategic disaster in United States history." Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald uncovers an indictable crime, there is once again a victim, but that victim is not Mr. or Mrs. Wilson; it's the nation. It is surely a joke of history that even as the White House sells this weekend's constitutional referendum as yet another "victory" for democracy in Iraq, we still don't know the whole story of how our own democracy was hijacked on the way to war.

By this logic the Dems could use Bush for an excuse to screw up for the next 100 yrs. Excellent example of issue avoidance.

Bird flu found on Europe's doorstep recently in Turkey. Hey Ducknut - are you guys keeping an eye on our ducks and such?

See: http://www.skagitvalleyherald.com/articles/2005/10/12/news/news04.txt

My bad. Strunks orginal Elements of Style, from which Orwell borrows freely, was published in 1919.

Come on, the stuff grows back for crying out loud, it's not Exit 38, and it was Devil's club!

Yea, yea. See Strunks orginal The Elements of Style 1935 where much of this comes from. The later updated version by E.B. White is a classic.

No one on talk radio anyway. Plenty of others did. Selective amnesia, how convenient.

Kinda quiet on this issue.

Reality check please! But page 4 of the report, called the National Intelligence Estimate, deals with terrorism, and draws conclusions that would come as a shock to most Americans, judging from recent polls on Iraq. The CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and the other U.S. spy agencies unanimously agreed that Baghdad: had not sponsored past terrorist attacks against America, was not operating in concert with al-Qaida, and was not a terrorist threat to America. "We have no specific intelligence information that Saddam's regime has directed attacks against U.S. territory," the report stated. However, it added, "Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization such as al-Qaida could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he would hope to conduct." Sufficiently desperate? If he "feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime," the report explained. "In such circumstances," it added, "he might decide that the extreme step of assisting the Islamist terrorists in conducting a CBW [chemical and biological weapons] attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him." In other words, only if Saddam were provoked by U.S. attack would he even consider taking the "extreme step" of reaching out to al-Qaida, an organization with which he had no natural or preexisting relationship. He wasn't about to strike the U.S. or share his alleged weapons with al-Qaida – unless the U.S. struck him first and threatened the collapse of his regime. Now turn to the next page of the same NIE report, which is considered the gold standard of intelligence reports. Page 5 ranks the key judgments by confidence level – high, moderate or low. According to the consensus of Bush's intelligence services, there was "low confidence" before the war in the views that "Saddam would engage in clandestine attacks against the U.S. Homeland" or "share chemical or biological weapons with al-Qaida." Their message to the president was clear: Saddam wouldn't help al-Qaida unless we put his back against the wall, and even then it was a big maybe. If anything, the report was a flashing yellow light against attacking Iraq. Bush saw the warning, yet completely ignored it and barreled ahead with the war plans he'd approved a month earlier (Aug. 29), telling a completely different version of the intelligence consensus to the American people. Less than a week after the NIE was published, he warned that "on any given day" – provoked by attack or not, sufficiently desperate or not – Saddam could team up with Osama and conduct a joint terrorist operation against America using weapons of mass destruction. "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," Bush said Oct. 7 in his nationally televised Cincinnati speech. "Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving fingerprints." The terrorists he was referring to were "al-Qaida members." By telling Americans that Saddam could "on any given day" slip unconventional weapons to al-Qaida if America didn't disarm him, the president misrepresented the conclusions of his own secret intelligence report, which warned that Saddam wouldn't even try to reach out to al-Qaida unless he were attacked and had nothing to lose – and might even find that hard to do since he had no history of conducting joint terrorist operations with al-Qaida, and certainly none against the U.S. If that's not lying, I don't know what is.

Excellent comparision - chat on internet climber's board with major deception of president on a $5 billion/month war.

Another red herring. Try to keep on subject here. The serious subject that you're avoiding is how the Bushies continue to use scare tactics to amp up their inadequate respones to 911. Yes there is a terrorist threat that should addressed, likely more like a police investigation than some slogan "war on terror" with no apparant objective, goal, financial limit. We've royally FUed the Iraq scenario by rushing in and no plan. The "war" is lost over there, now it's just a matter of when and how we get out. Yet our idiot pres keeps trying to paint the rosy scenario while laying it on thick about "they're coming to get us". Now let's hear about how we're ignorant of other world history events.

Dusting on peaks around Metaline Falls earlier this week, not much more on flight from Spokane to Seattle yesterday.

The new McCarthys = liberals, with their inflexible, dogmatic, intolerant worldview, and penchant for conspiracy-theories, hyperbole, and paranoia. It is you who have replaced a real threat (Islamofascism) with manufactured threats "big corporations", "fundamental Christianity", "American imperialism", among others. This is like shooting fish in a barrel. More please!

He at least gets points for consistency. Always throw out an absurd straw dog option to beat upon in opposition to the Bushie line, therefore making the Bushie line seem (almost) plausible. The above is a classic example suggesting that those who are looking for an alternative to this administration's stumbling are in favor of the Taliban. Excellent! Great parallel to Bush's references to the Communist threat. Bring on the black lists! Hmmmm, who is likely to stand in for McCarthy?

Yep, they're knocking on our doorstep right now and we had better, I know, spend another 3 trillion dollars on some new weapon systems or something. Hilarious.

I had to check my bag leaving Italy (Venice) as the security guy said my webbing and harness were not allowed in carry on. After a brief discussion it was clear he wasn't backing down and off I went to check it.

Shouldn't we pontificate about their hypocrisy instead? I am willing to wager that a harangue by Jimbo reagarding the said hypocrisy could would result induce a self-inflicted mercy killing amongst any of the yuppies on the receiving end of the lecture.... Nah.. there's a strong inverse relationship to the use of such things and fitness.