Proceed with caution if you are a coffee drinker or enjoy a bit of cheese with your meal or as a snack.

$600-a-pound coffee

Human hands don’t harvest the beans that make this rare brew. They’re plucked by the sharp claws and fangs of wild civets, catlike beasts with bug eyes and weaselly noses that love their coffee fresh.

I think I’ll leave the rest to the reader but for those weak of stomach, please do not eat while reading. I would like to say enjoy, however….

Michael Yon was a guest on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show yesterday. In reading the transcript there were a few points I found interesting.

HH: Now Michael Yon, a lot of people don’t know the significance of Baquba. And so can you explain what peace in Baquba means for the larger war effort?

MY: Well, it’s huge, because al Qaeda had claimed Baquba as their capitol, their worldwide capitol. And you might recall one of the things that kind of upsets people about my reporting is I said Iraq was in a civil war, and I said that way back in February of 2005, and I continue to do so. But when I first wrote that, I was in Baquba, in 2005, and I spent two or three months here. And it was just total…you could see it, and you could see al Qaeda was trying to foment that civil war, because that’s their underlying strategy, is to do that. And so getting, fracturing al Qaeda here, and al Qaeda alienating so many Iraqis, it’s helping us to put a damper on the civil war.

This is why I like to read Michael. While I may not think there is a civil war in Iraq, he reports as he sees and feels. His reports are not dispatched to please politicians or citizens who are motivated by their political affiliations.

One other exchange I found very interesting applied to what is transpiring in Congress right now. The name of the Senator is of no consequence as it could have been any one from either side of the aisle and I believe the answer would have been the same. As a matter of fact, Guss posted an interesting editorial earlier today which I believe is worth a read and helps explain how both sides are running for their political lives from this war.

HH: Now yesterday, Harry Reid said on the floor of the Senate that the surge has failed. Do you think there’s any factual basis for making that assertion, Michael Yon, from what you’ve seen in Iraq over the last many months?

MY: He’s wrong, he’s wrong. It has absolutely not failed, and in fact, I’m finally willing to say it in public. I feel like it’s starting to succeed. And you know, I’m kind of stretching a little bit, because we haven’t gone too far into it, but I can see it from my travels around, for instance, in Anbar and out here in Diyala Province as well. Baghdad’s still very problematic. But there’s other areas where you can clearly see that there is a positive effect. And the first and foremost thing we have to do is knock down al Qaeda. And with them alienating so many Iraqis, I mean, they’re almost doing it for us. I mean, yeah, it takes military might to finally like wipe them out of Baquba, but it’s working. I mean, I sense that the surge is working. Reid is just wrong.

I hope for our sake (meaning the country) and for the citizens of Iraq that Michael is right in his assessment.

Complete interview can be accessed here.

We owned a Greyhound who was a bit bigger than the typical breed, but this headline led me to pictures and the story of a dog the likes of which I have never seen.

Meet the Incredible Hulk of Hounds
The hulky hound with double the muscle power

Read and see more.

I found this interesting editorial and thought I would share it with you.

DON’T be fooled by the harrumphing and tsk-ing and got cha-ing: Nobody in Washington actually cares all that much about the failure of the Iraqi government to meet its “political benchmarks,” which was the issue of the day in Washington yesterday.

Yes, it’s very bad that Iraq’s Parliament can’t agree on a hydrocarbon law - which would divide the country’s oil revenues between the nation’s regions and its three main populations. Iraq’s elected politicians are not acting on behalf of their nation’s common good, and it’s shameful.

But ask yourself this: If Iraq’s politicians had agreed on a hydrocarbon law, would terrified Senate Republicans suddenly stiffen their spines and support the “surge” - the new military offensive in Iraq - they suddenly decided wasn’t working about a week ago? The same “surge” that seems to be paying off with shocking rapidity in the once-left-for-dead province of Anbar?

Of course not.

editorial

Go get ‘em Fred.

Likely Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson hit Rudy Giuliani’s turf yesterday, talking with the city firefighters-union chief who’s going all out to derail the former mayor’s 2008 candidacy.

Thompson had breakfast with Uniformed Firefighters Association President Steve Cassidy and former Sen. Alfonse D’Amato hours before he met with Conservative Party leader Mike Long.

The Cassidy meeting came a day after the International Association of Fire Fighters unveiled a blistering Internet video attack that accused Giuliani of making decisions as mayor that led to firefighters’ deaths on 9/11.

“I was impressed” with Thompson, Cassidy told The Post, saying they’d spoken a lot about homeland-security resources and first responders.

“He’s very bright, very articulate, certainly easy to talk to . . . All the things I’d heard about him certainly seemed to be true.”

He said Team Thompson asked for the meeting, adding, “I think our endorsement’s important.”

Thompson said, “I have the greatest respect for Steve and his organization and what they’re doing.”

At a press conference with Long, Thompson said he and Cassidy “talked about where they have been, what they have done . . . They’re obviously on the front line. They’ve paid a terrible price. They sacrificed for all of us.

Feel free to post over this.

Story

Each of us has a hidden place
Somewhere deep within ourselves;
A place where we go to get away,
To think things through,
To be alone, to be ourselves.
This unique place, where we confront our deepest feelings,
Becomes a storehouse of all our hopes,
All our needs, all our dreams,
And even our unspoken fears.
It encompasses the essence of who we are and what we want to be.
But now and then, whether by chance or design,
Someone discovers a way into that place we thought was ours alone.
And we allow that person to see, to feel and to share
All the reason, all the uncertainty
And all the emotion we’ve stored up there.
That person adds new perspe ctive to our hidden realm,
Then quietly settles down in his own corner of our special place,
Where a bit of himself will stay forever.
And we call that person a friend.

Please feel free to post over this

-Poem by Carol Elaine Faivre-Scott

WOW!

The Blackstone Group the big buyout firm, has devised a way for its partners to effectively avoid paying taxes on $3.7 billion, the bulk of what it raised last month from selling shares to the public.

Although they will initially pay $553 million in taxes, the partners will get that back, and about $200 million more, from the government over the long term.

The plan, laid out in the fine print of Blackstone’s financial documents, comes as Congress debates how much managers at private equity firms like Blackstone and hedge funds should pay in taxes on their compensation.

Lee Sheppard, a tax lawyer who critiques deals for Tax Notes magazine and has studied the Blackstone arrangement, said it was a reminder of the disconnect between the tax debate in Congress and how the tax system actually operates at the highest levels of the economy.

“These guys have figured out how to turn paying taxes into an annuity,” Ms. Sheppard said. “What people don’t realize is that the private equity managers, the investment bankers, all the financial intermediaries, are in control of their own taxation and so the debate in Washington about what tax rate to pay misses the big picture.”

The debate in Congress is about whether most of the compensation that fund managers earn should be taxed at the 35 percent rate that applies to other highly paid Americans, or at the 15 percent rate for capital gains.

Questions in Congress about possibly raising taxes on such compensation were prompted in part by publicity about the rich rewards for people who run these firms. Stephen A. Schwarzman, the co-founder of the Blackstone Group, made nearly $400 million last year, for example.

Story

I don’t know about you but I think this is totally outrageous. Ignorant people, like the ones shouting, are not the best examples of what the Christian faith has to offer.

Speaks for itself.

Let’s hope that Michael Chertoff’s “gut feeling” that something bad might happen this summer is just the result of something he ate.

But what has the homeland security czar been doing, besides monitoring his belly? While Chertoff was sharing details of his physical distress over the possibility of an al-Qaeda attack, a new congressional report showed how easy it was to fraudulently obtain a license to buy radioactive material. All it took for undercover investigators to flimflam the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was a post-office box at Mail Boxes Etc., a telephone, a fax machine and some fast talking.

“If al-Qaeda had set up a phony corporation in the U.S., they could have gathered enough material to make a dirty bomb,” said Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), who asked for the sting operation.

That makes me want to reach for the Pepto-Bismol, too.

At this point, the most powerful nation on Earth has been fighting al-Qaeda for nearly a decade — much longer than it took to defeat the Nazis in World War II. Why does Chertoff still have to worry about al-Qaeda at all?

Maybe because a new U.S. intelligence estimate reportedly concludes that al-Qaeda is growing stronger, not weaker. The terrorist group’s leadership — presumably including Osama bin Laden, whom we haven’t seen in a while — has found safe haven in the remote fastness of western Pakistan. There, essentially unmolested, the group has been able to rebuild and develop a capacity for mayhem that it hasn’t had since 2001, the report is said to assert.

“We see more training. We see more money. We see more communications,” a CIA official told a House committee Wednesday

This is an editorial

And it goes on and on and on.

He lamented, in his own way, that he is unloved these days and reflected on the “war fatigue” that has gripped his country. He looked forward to the day, not so long from now, when he will retire to his Texas ranch and tell himself that he did the right thing.

Yet no matter how battered he seems, no matter how unpopular he may be in the polls, President Bush still holds the commanding position in his showdown with Congress over Iraq. Even with Republican defections, as votes in both houses made clear this week, opponents do not have anywhere near the veto-proof majorities needed to wrest leadership of the war.

The almost-certain result, according to strategists in both parties, will be at least two more months of anger and posturing but no change in direction. A weakened president is desperately playing for time while a Democratic opposition mounts its case against him and Republican lawmakers agonize over how long to stick with him. Bush will keep pressing his strategy in Iraq in hopes that it produces more than the meager results his White House reported yesterday while his foes keep scoring political points and not much else.

Editorial

Why don’t they just testify and get it over with? They may not be trying to hide anything but it sure looks that way?

House Democrats on Thursday took the first step toward holding former White House counsel Harriet Miers in contempt of Congress after she defied a subpoena _ at President Bush’s order _ and skipped a hearing on the firing of U.S. attorneys.

Over the strenuous objections of Republicans, a subcommittee cleared the way for contempt proceedings by voting 7-5 to reject Bush’s claim of executive privilege. He says his top advisers, whether current or former, cannot be summoned by Congress.

“Those claims are not legally valid,” Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., said of Bush’s declaration. “Ms. Miers is required pursuant to the subpoena to be here now.”

Republicans complained that Democrats were choosing showy, televised proceedings and the threat of court action to force the testimony rather than agree to Bush’s offer for private, off-the-record interviews.

In the absence of an agreement with the administration, House leaders and committee members were likely to pursue contempt proceedings against Miers but were still talking about when, according to some Democratic officials.

“We would not be discharging our responsibility today if we were to simply drop this,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said during the hearing.

The White House showed no sign of giving in.

“If the House Judiciary Committee wants to avoid confrontation, it should withdraw its subpoenas,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. “The committee is rejecting accommodation because they prefer just the kind of political spectacle they’re engaged in now.”

Miers’ testimony emerged as the battleground for a broader scuffle between the White House and Congress over the limits of executive privilege. Presidents since the nation’s founding have sought to protect from the prying eyes of Congress the advice given them by advisers, while Congress has argued that it is charged by the Constitution with conducting oversight of the executive branch.

Bush’s invocation of executive privilege comes during the Democrats’ probe of whether the firings were really an effort by the White House to fire and replace federal prosecutors in ways that might help Republican candidates. Democrats say testimony by numerous aides that Bush was not involved in deciding whom to fire undercuts his privilege claim.

Story

I guess something is working.

A federal law that requires people to supply their Social Security number when applying for a marriage license has forced thousands of couples around the country, particularly illegal immigrants, to put their wedding plans on hold.

The law has been on the books for about a decade and was intended to make it easier to collect child support payments. But in some places it has prevented even legal immigrants and some American citizens from getting married.

Some couples are traveling to other states or other counties willing to issue them marriage licenses.

Jonadad Luque, a Honduran immigrant legally in the U.S., wants to marry his girlfriend, with whom he has two children, ages 1 and 5. But the county clerk in Nashville would not issue them a license because his girlfriend is in the country illegally and does not have a Social Security number.

Story

If the House of Representatives ever votes a bill of impeachment against President Bush, the case would go to the Senate for hearing and the senators would be the jurors.

Please listen to this and see if you think this is an impartial juror.

I’m leaving for Dallas just before noon eastern time today and will be back in the late afternoon on Monday.

While I’ll have my laptop with me I’m not sure I’ll do much more than read the blog as we are going to be busy with our grandchildren, son and daughter-in-law.

I also want to announce that Ayschlay will no longer be blogging on our site, although he was given that opportunity. I don’t want anyone to think we had a melt-down or anything like that, and I am very grateful to Ayschlay for his contributions and hope he continues to visit and comment whenever possible.

See you all on Monday and I’m sure Guss, Sue and possibly Truman will keep you occupied with their thoughts. Sue usually posts later in the day as she cares for her grandchildren also.