Tim Russert of NBC News has died at the age of 58, the network says.

Again with the Uprising, begob:

At the major ballot-counting center in Dublin, Finance Minister Brian Lenihan struggled to speak to reporters as anti-treaty activists jubilantly drowned him out with songs and chants of “No!” He eventually gave up and walked out, as one activist waved a sign reading “No to foreign rule” over his head.

Just rebel to the core, is all :}. OK here’s the deal ~ or rather, the No-deal (emphases added; and, Hat tip: sister-in-law Paddy Patty Ash :) ~~

Ireland’s voters have rejected the European Union reform treaty, a blueprint for modernizing the 27-nation bloc that cannot become law without Irish approval, electoral officials said Friday.

In a major blow to the EU, 53.4 percent of Irish voters said no to the treaty. Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen now will join other EU leaders at a summit next week to try to negotiate a new way forward.

Anti-treaty groups from the far left and right mobilized “no” voters by claiming that the treaty would empower EU chiefs in Brussels, Belgium, to force Ireland to change core policies — including its low business tax rates, its military neutrality and its ban on abortion.

Among such “far left” groups was (naturally :) Sinn Féin (whose name is translatable to English as, appropriately enough, “Ourselves Alone” :). The treaty rejection is not only a blow to the EU’s grand plan :> but also a shillelagh upside the heads of the Republic’s mainstream political parties, all of which advocated a Yes vote ~ and perhaps especially a whack across the kneecaps of Fianna Fáil’s Brian Cowen, who has replaced the formerly unsinkable (and Always incomparable :) Bertie Ahern as Taoiseach.

More after the break.

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Hehe.

We’ve got a big weekend coming up, in terms of the calendar: tomorrow is Flag Day (and the 233rd anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Army), which of course means it’s also Becky’s birthday. And then Sunday is Father’s Day — my first as a dad — and thus the final day of the U.S. Open, which will be kind of a big deal since we’ll be visiting the golf-loving Zaks.

But before any of those special occasions can arrive, we have to get through today, which is… [cue horror-movie music]… Friday the 13th!! AAAAAHH!!! ;)

So, has anyone had any bouts of bad luck yet?

Personally, I don’t suffer from Paraskavedekatriaphobia — and a good thing, too, because tonight Becky, Loyette and I are flying to Phoenix! The drive to the Nashville Airport will be Loyette’s longest car ride to date, followed by her first-ever plane trip. Wish us, um, luck!

UPDATE: A Friday the 13th fire and power outage in Washington, D.C.!

Commuters should expect major delays on Metro’s Red Line this morning
after a fire on the tracks near the Dupont Circle station, officials
said. At the same time, a power outage in downtown Washington is
affecting thousands of homes and offices, as well as traffic signals
and Metro elevators and lighting.

It sounds like the fire and power outage were unrelated and coincidental. LOL! Friday the 13th is off to a rip-roarin’ start. (Hat tip: ChrisN.)

You know those "House Divided" license plates — they’re really popular here in the South — for families in which the spouses root for rival schools? Well, the governor and first lady of California have something similar going on, except it relates to politics rather than sports, and it’s on their house instead of their car:

Heh.

Of course, while the Schwarzenegger-Shriver split gets front page treatment in the New York Times, the same thing happens every day in the Carville-Matalin household. :)

(As for those license plates, I need a customized USC/Notre Dame version that says "A Man Divided." Heh. Okay, not really, but it’d look cool, anyway…)

If you haven’t been following the Kozinski kerfuffle, here’s a helpful roundup of links.

InstaPundit’s tongue-in-cheek take: “Since it’s generally thought that men are disproportionate consumers of porn because of their gender, and because, hormonally, they’re driven to favor visual stimuli, then obviously punishing porn consumption constitutes sex discrimination, and is probably unconstitutional. Plus, research establishes that porn is good for America. You don’t hate America, do you?” Heh.

My preview of the hurricane season is up on Pajamas Media. Perhaps the most interesting point is this:

There…seems to be a new focus among the [seasonal] forecasters on explaining the uncertainties inherent in their task. NOAA, for instance, now includes percentage probabilities along with its predictions of storm activity, somewhat like the margin of error in a public opinion poll. And the margin is quite high: “an above-normal season is most likely (65% chance), [but] there is a significant 25% chance of a near-normal season and a 10% chance of a below-normal season.” (Definitions here.) “This outlook is probabilistic, not deterministic,” NOAA’s introduction states. It is “based on predictions of large-scale climate factors known to be strong indicators of upcoming seasonal Atlantic hurricane activity,” but there are “uncertainties inherent in such climate outlooks,” which the percentage probabilities are designed to take into account. …

Still, despite these acknowledged uncertainties, and despite the recent failures, forecasters have soldiered on and tried their best to accurately predict the 2008 season. In fact, the Klotzbach/Gray team has based its forecast on a newly tweaked model, designed to correct some of the errors of previous years. Cynics might compare this to college football’s BCS, which has repeatedly changed its formula to compensate for previous years’ problems — the sports equivalent of “hindcasting” — only to see brand new problems develop in subsequent seasons.

On the other hand, this is how the science evolves, and Klotzbach and Gray are forthright in admitting that it is a work in progress. In any event, “hindcasts” based on the new model come much closer to the mark than the real-time forecasts did in all of the last four years, which is significant, since 2004 and 2005 were both well above average (and were under-forecasted), while 2006 and 2007 were below average (and were over-forecasted). “The new hindcast model improves upon our real-time forecasts by approximately 60%…over the period from 2004-2007,” Klotzbach and Gray write.

Read the whole thing.

P.S. Naturally, the comments are all about… you guessed it… global warming. *sigh*

Google Street View has come to Knoxville.

For instance, here’s the place I just came back from — the Knoxville Visitor
Center on Gay Street, where the WDVX Blue Plate Special takes place
every weekday:

View Larger Map

And here’s a look at the Gay Street Bridge, seen from across the river in South Knoxville, with several downtown buildings, the Sunsphere, and the Henley Street Bridge in the distance:

View Larger Map

(Hat tip: Michael Silence.) More after the jump.

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As I mentioned earlier, a severe thunderstorm pounded North Knoxville this afternoon. I had a bird’s eye view of the storm from the parking garage downtown where I park for work, and I was able to capture several still frames of cloud-to-ground lightning from the videos I took with my digital camera. Here’s the best one:

Here’s what the storm looked like on radar at that very moment:

A wider, animated radar view can be found here. There are more lightning pics — and other storm photos — in my Flickr gallery, and several of those photos are highlighted on my photoblog.

UPDATE: One of my lightning videos is now on Flickr as well. You can see several lightning strikes, including the one pictured above.

P.S. The thunderstorm gave way to a beautiful sunset several hours later. Here are a couple photos of that:

Again, visit my Flickr gallery and my photoblog for more.

In the tony Hartford outer suburb of Simsbury, law enforcement authorities (alerted by a vigilant citizen) recently thwarted a Terror plot whose perpetrator(s) had deployed a Chicken with an unusually sinister Stuffing:

…A motorist on Powder Forest Drive Friday morning noticed what looked like a whole chicken — the kind bought at grocery stores for roasting — with a pipe bomb stuffed inside, police said Monday.

When they arrived on the scene around 9 a.m. officers found the roaster had an improvised explosive device where the fowl’s innards should have been.

They closed the road for part of the morning as the Hartford Police Department’s bomb squad was called to detonate the device, police said.

In its recent history, Simsbury and local residents have had their problems with hungry black bears, roaming coyotes and escaped emus. Now town folks can add store-bought chicken, stuffed with a bomb, to the list of odd animal incidents.

With the chicken and bomb taken care of, police are left to investigate who’s responsible for the strange incident.

Police Capt. Matthew Catania would not describe the bomb Monday, but said it was “capable of causing harm to a person.”…

Which, thank God it didn’t occur, would definitionally have been Worse than the Irreparable harm already inflicted upon the Chicken :>.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Now ~ not to abruptly Pivot to the Negative or anything like that ;> ~ of course the reason Connecticut in general, and our Capital region of Hartford in particular, may Welcome this (only-by-the-grace-of-God) bit of Comic relief ~ is, that over the past week or so we have been quite-understandably Pounded all to Pieces, on the Cablenewsies & the Internets, about the astonishingly-tepid Videotaped response of his Lower Park Street neighbors to the depravedly-indifferent hit-&-run Rundown of Angel Arce Torres, age 78, who (it now develops) will spend whatever remains of his life on a ventilator in the hospital.

Following closely on the heels of various other recent Hartford horrors, including the brutal mugging/beating of 71-year-old former Deputy Mayor Nick Carbone ~ who has probably done more to help All the people of Hartford than any other living person ~ all this has set off some considerable sociological soul-searching in & around the city of my birth, and my son’s. / Also, on a purely Practical level, the Staties are coming in ~ Again ~ to give the Local constabulary a hand. Hey ~ it’s a Start.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

So. You can perhaps see why we kind of Like the Simsbury Chickenbomb story. At least it has a happy Ending. (Well. Apart from the Chicken. / Fire in the Hole, indeed. :)

Four people were killed when a tornado struck a Boy Scout camp in western Iowa, a state safety official says.

Tried to watch the Shuttle & ISS fly overhead, but the sky was too bright and hazy (even the Moon is somewhat dimmed by wispy clouds, so the spacecrafts didn’t stand a chance). Anyone have better luck elsewhere?

Big thunderstorm over North Knoxville. Lots of lightning.

Don’t you love it when Glenn Reynolds gets a little pervy with his photography? I sure do! But what does Dr. Helen think? ;)

(I kid, Glenn, I kid!)

Kimberly Kagan, president of the Institute for the Study of War, and Frederick Kagan, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, claim in the WSJ:

America is very close to succeeding in Iraq. The "near-strategic
defeat" of al Qaeda in Iraq described by CIA Director Michael Hayden
last month in the Washington Post has been followed by the victory of
the Iraqi government’s security forces over illegal Shiite militias,
including Iranian-backed Special Groups. The enemies of Iraq and
America now cling desperately to their last bastions, while the
political process builds momentum.

These tremendous gains remain fragile and could be lost to skillful
enemy action, or errors in Baghdad or Washington. But where the U.S.
was unequivocally losing in Iraq at the end of 2006, we are just as
unequivocally winning today.

(Hat tip: Youngblai.) I have no idea whether the Kagans are correct, but in general, the problem with claims like theirs is one of credibility: back in 2006, most folks on the Right did not contemporaneously admit that we were "unequivocally losing in Iraq," so it’s hard to know how much credence to lend to their claims now. (Honest query: I’d be curious if somebody can find an example of the Kagans bucking this trend back in ‘06, and forthrightly admitting then that we were losing. Maybe they did; I have no idea. But many conservatives — and administration officials — didn’t.)

Listening to a hawkish conservative who always claimed we were winning say, "we were losing then, but we’re winning now," is sort of like listening to a far-left liberal who opposed the war in Afghanistan say, "we should have stayed out of Iraq and focused on Afghanistan." Maybe they’re right, but they have no credibility saying it!

Actually, though, the former example is arguably worse than the latter one, because whereas a lefty who rallies ’round a war he opposed is making a self-contradicting statement of opinion, a hawk who rewrites the war’s history is making a self-contradicting statement of fact. And, as the saying goes, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but nobody’s entitled to their own facts.

That’s what makes this Iraq debate so frustrating for someone like me — someone who is by no means an expert on what’s happening in Iraq, but who wants to support the right course of action based on sound
reasoning and properly understood facts. Both sides are so committed to their ideological preconceptions that it’s seemingly impossible for them to agree on what the facts are. The Left will claim we’re losing, or are inevitably bound to lose, and must therefore get out, whether that’s factually true or not; and the Right will claim that we’re winning, and can succeed if only we keep at it for a little longer, and must therefore stay the course, whether that’s factually true or not.

For many on both sides, I think, it’s past the point of being dishonest: they’re so committed to their argument that they convince themselves to honestly believe their version of reality. One of the reasons I’m undecided between Obama and McCain is because I feel like I’m choosing between these two camps, both of which have ideological blinders on, which is not exactly an appealing choice — and meanwhile, I don’t have the requisite information to decide whose preconceptions are closer to the truth, largely because I don’t trust either side to present that information accurately! Nor do I trust the liberal media, or the conservative media, or the right-blogosphere, or the left-blogosphere. On this issue, it seems like everybody has an agenda.

What are the actual facts? Are we winning or losing? Is there a reasonable hope of genuine success in building a reasonably stable and at least somewhat democratic Iraq, or are we just wasting our time on a quixotic and unsustainable effort to do so, and suffering needless losses in the process? If we leave, will things get better or worse — and if worse, how much worse? The "facts on the ground" that would help answer these questions are absolutely essential pieces of information for any rational decision-maker, yet they get lost in the fog of war — and, perhaps more pertinently, of politics. Argh.