Nesting towhee

The chaparral environment we live in is particularly rich in bird life, and the California Towhee is one of the more common birds here. This particular female towhee decided that our enclosed patio (which is filled with all sorts of junk), and in particular this hanging safety helmet, was exactly the right place for her nest. I first noticed the nest a week or so ago, by the little piece of straw hanging out. I took the helmet off its hook and looked inside, and there was the nest, complete with five light blue eggs, speckled with black, gray, and brown. I carefully put the helmet back, and to my relief the momma towhee went right back to it.

Over the past week, we've been watching momma, and she's gradually gotten more used to our comings and goings. The helmet happens to be hanging right over a doorway that leads out of our patio and into our outdoors cattery. This isn't the kind of peaceful, out-of-the-way place I'd imagine a mother towhee would be looking for! We use that doorway perhaps 10 or 12 times a day, and there are two cats in easy visual range of the nest. But momma must have liked it for some reason...

This morning I took my camera to see if I could get a picture or two. I took the first picture with a flash from about 6 feet; momma seemed completely unperturbed. I then put a stool about 3 feet from the nest and stood up on it — momma didn't like that one bit! She took off suddenly from the nest (startling me), and then landed a few feet away, scolding me. To my surprise, she then started darting at me, obviously trying to scare me away or to get my attention. She even landed briefly on my hand (still holding the camera) and flapped about. I stepped off the stool and momma landed on the handle of a hanging weed whacker, where I took this second picture (from about 8 feet, again with a flash). When I stepped back a couple of feet, she went right back to the nest.

Brave, good momma...

P.S. Click on the pictures for a larger verion...

"Hell, no"

Claudia Rosett, despite being a card-carrying member of the MSM, has a terrific track record of old-fashioned reporting combined with crisp (and often entertaining) prose. She's one of our secret weapons in the cause of freedom.

In a column in the Weekly Standard (registration required), she takes aim at Kofi Annan's recent response at a news conference to a reporter's question about whether he was considering resigning. Her column starts out with a crisp summary:

IN THE EPIC UNITED NATIONS Oil-for-Food scandal, we now have a moment of high farce, with what will surely be remembered as Kofi Annan's "Hell, no" press conference--named for the secretary general's belligerent answer on March 29 to a reporter who, quite appropriately, wondered if Annan shouldn't think about resigning sometime soon. The U.N.-authorized inquiry into Oil-for-Food wrongdoing, led by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, clocked in last Tuesday with its second interim report on a program now infamous as the biggest fraud in the history of humanitarian aid. That same afternoon, Annan summoned the media to the blue-curtained U.N. briefing room to announce his great relief at "this exoneration."

What exoneration? Despite its scores of investigators, $30 million budget, and more than 10 months on the job, the Volcker inquiry has addressed only a few narrow issues. The focus of this second interim report was Annan's role in the U.N.'s hiring in 1998 of an Oil-for-Food contractor, Swiss-based Cotecna Inspection, S.A., which employed Kofi Annan's son, Kojo, as a consultant, while bidding on the lucrative U.N. contract to inspect Oil-for-Food imports in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Cotecna, coincident with its U.N. labors, kept paying Kojo Annan from 1999 through early 2004, five years after he had quit. These are intriguing matters. But Volcker has yet to address the bulk of the Oil-for-Food program, and his final report is not expected till mid-summer. It was Annan himself who just last year was urging all and sundry to wait for Volcker's final wordbefore reaching any conclusions.

Now, in his rush to exonerate himself, the secretary general seems to have forgotten that Oil-for-Food was a vast endeavor, running from 1996 to 2003, in which the United Nations, in the name of providing for the sanctions-squeezed people of Iraq, oversaw more than $110 billion worth of Saddam Hussein's oil sales and relief purchases, much of that riddled with billions in graft. All but the first month of this exercise was administered and--in the words of one of Annan's spokesman--"audited to death" by Annan's Secretariat. It was Annan who personally signed off on Saddam's shopping lists, and repeatedly urged the Security Council not only to continue the program, but to expand it in size and scope, which allowed Saddam to rake in yet more illicit billions from oil smuggling.

The column goes on to back up these points with specifics.

We're left with the feeling that Kofi's "Hell, no" required quite a bit of chutzpah...and it just reinforces our previously held position that the world would be much better off without Kofi at the helm of the United Nations. And without the United Nations at all.

Dead wrong?

James Robbins at the National Review has an interesting take on this question. From his column:

Ultimately the Iraq Survey Group did not find as much evidence of WMD programs as expected. But note — the same Post poll cited above found that 56 percent of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein had WMDs before the war that have not been found. The Fall 2004 Duelfer report concluded that Saddam had intended to reconstitute his WMD program after sanctions were lifted, and desired to maintain the expertise necessary to do so. And it is still fair to ask, if Saddam was not trying to acquire WMDs, what was he doing? The Duelfer report notes the following changes in Iraq's Military Industrialization Commission (MIC), Saddam's secret organization in charge of WMD development, in the years leading up to the war:

"Between 1996 and 2002, the overall MIC budget increased over forty-fold from ID 15.5 billion to ID 700 billion. By 2003 it had grown to ID 1 trillion. MIC's hard currency allocations in 2002 amounted to approximately $364 million. MIC sponsorship of technical research projects at Iraqi universities skyrocketed from about 40 projects in 1997 to 3,200 in 2002. MIC workforce expanded by fifty percent in three years, from 42,000 employees in 1999 to 63,000 in 2002."

So the MIC enjoyed a budget increase from fifteen billion to one trillion Dinars over seven years for nothing? MIC technical research projects increased 80-fold for no particular reason? Then there was the very well-chronicled systematic deception campaign that U.N. inspectors encountered every time they went into Iraq. In more than one case inspectors would pull up to a site and be halted; surveillance would pick up vehicles being loaded in the back and hurrying away; inspectors would then be allowed in. What was being carted away so quickly? If nothing was there, what was going on? One theory behind the deception campaign was that it was itself a deception — it was not so much that Saddam had something to hide, but rather he wanted to make us think he had something to hide in order to deter us from attacking him. That rationale was clearly too clever by half if true, at least judging by the results. (It is better to act like North Korea and say you have nuclear weapons whether you do or not.)

But I don't buy that explanation. The deception campaign was too systematic, too thorough, in ways that went well beyond what would be necessary simply to generate suspicion. This activity continued during and after the war when it would make no difference. One case in point — an exploitation team went to check out an apartment in an otherwise unexceptional residential area that was allegedly being used as a WMD site. They arrived to find the apartment stripped. The floor tiles were missing, the walls cleaned, the plumbing fixtures gone, the pipes under the floors ripped out. This was not the result of looting — the apartment had been sanitized, disinfected. How many such sites could there have been in Iraq? Were they all found and checked? Strains of biological organisms that could be weaponized were found in a scientist's home refrigerator — how much such dispersal took place? Not to mention allegations that critical nuclear and chemical program components were taken to Syria, Iran, or Russia.

Indeed. It seems very unlikely that Saddam would invest all that time, effort, and money into a gigantic practical joke on his buddy Hans Blix.

I remember in the runup to the Iraq war there were news reports about a large freighter that had sailed from Iraq and was then circling about in the Indian Ocean. The speculation was that this freighter was carrying Saddam's stocks of biological and chemical weapons, and that he'd sink it rather than face the music on WMD charges. I never heard the end of this story, but...it seems much more plausible to me than the practical joke.

Meet the chairman

According to Mohammed at Iraq the Model, the Iraqi Assembly has finally selected a chairman. At this hour I could not find corroboration for this on any MSM outlet; coverage of the Pope's passing is dominating.

This is very good news for Iraq. Given the very complicated rules and the coalitions that had to be put together to accomplish this, and the fact that this is the first time the Iraqis have ever engaged in a process even remotely like this, the progress is remarkable.

Mohammed reports that the choice is Hachim Al-Hasani, currently the minister of industry. His description paints him as a trusted moderate, who is likely to focus on governmental corruption — which sounds like a terrific place to start.

Let's hope this good start translates into good execution...

UPDATE: This good news has now been confirmed by numerous sources.

Quote for the day

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

   Dr. Samuel Johnson