Dowbrigade

New
Belgian identity cards have been printed with spelling mistakes in a bid
to fool forgers.

The identity cards include the country name in the three official Belgian
languages of French, German and Dutch as well as English.

Instead of ‘Belgien’ in German, the ID cars incorrectly say ‘Belgine’
and instead of ‘Belgium’ in English, they say ‘Belguim’.

According to Luc Vanneste, of the government department in charge of issuing
the cards, other errors will be printed on the card to further confound
fraudsters.

He said a similar system had proved successful in the United States.

What! The Dowbrigade whips out his driver’s liscence and begins scouring
for mispellings…..Of course, as one of the worst spellers to ever have
been admitted to the English Teacher’s Guild, how would we know?

Better idea – SCAN the liscence, and then OCR it, and run it through
the spell-checker in our word processor. We will blog the results when
they come in from our highly qualified tech team.

In the meantime, has anyone heard of this nefarious government plot
to INTENTIONALLY plant misspelling in official U.S. government documents?
Is Dan Quayle working for the Department of Homeland Security? Do they need copywriters? This could
explain a lot…..

from Ananova

As
predicted in this space as early as last November, the moderate wing
of the Republican party ("Rational Republicans") is feeling its way towards
a
"Middle Path" strategy in preparation for an eventual split with the
"Evangelical Republicans" and a strong run at the Presidency in 2008.

Under the inspirational, if egomaniacal, leadership
of John Mc Cain, they are reaching out to moderate Democrats, "Realists"
who realize that the traditional Democratic party is dead in the water
and taking on bilge faster than they can bail.

We continue to believe that Colin Powell is a major
player in this emerging coalition, but as astute observers will note,
he is nowhere to be seen. In the considered opinion of the Dowbrigade
he is laying low publicly but extremely active behind the scenes, pulling
strings and praying he didn’t stay aboard the Bush battleship too long
to avoid being infected
with the Bush plague in the minds of the electorate.

He is obviously
praying for that salvation of career politicians in the age of sound
bites and rapidly revolving news cycles – the impaired memory of the
electorate – but his dog and pony show in front
of the
United
Nations is going to be hard to forget, and easy for electoral opponents
to drag out of the archives in all its self-righteous prestidigitation.

Unless,
of course, that opposition is the Bush Regime itself, which would
be put in the contorted position of exposing the
perfidy of the ex Secretory of State while avoiding the fact that
said perfidy was at its own behest.  We look forward to an entertaining
and amusing campaign…

WASHINGTON — The caller could barely contain his
anger. ”Who appointed Mc Cain to be head of the Republican Party?" he
asked.

”The media," responded conservative talk radio host
Laura Ingraham.

For at least a decade, the political right has dominated
Republican primaries, making it difficult for moderates such as Mc
Cain to emerge as the party’s nominee for president. But with the Monday
night
agreement, greeted with dismay by interest groups on both the left
and the right, the Arizona senator threw down an early gauntlet, openly
defying
the party’s conservative base.

”The strategy all along is to transcend the swamp
fever of the right, and build a different kind of coalition — with
fiscal
conservatives, national defense hawks, and moderates who are discomfited
by the influence of the religious right," said Marshall Wittmann,
a former top Mc Cain aide and onetime legislative director for the
Christian Coalition.

from the Boston Globe

Unholy Alliance – related analysis from the Dowbrigade

On a cold rainy night in Boston, Memorial Day around the corner though Spring hasn’t sprung, let alone Summer, it is nice to remember another world, in its way as different and as fantastic as Star Wars, but in reality only 18 hours away, by plane and bus…

The legends in this collection can trace their origins to the Chavin culture.
Reaching its height between 400 and 600 B.C., the Chavin civilization was known
for its intense design skill, fueled by ritual use of psychedelic snuff, especially
visible in their advanced textile and metal work. After a prolonged and gradual
decline, they were eventually conquered by the Incas less than a hundred years
before the arrival of the Spaniards.

The Heart Sickness

Before the existence of the tiny town of Huacllan, in the same spot lived
the tribe of the  Wallas. The cacique (chief), a man much respected
and feared for his honor and his cruelty had a daughter named Kori (Gold),
whom he adored.

Kori was secretly in love with a man with a disfigured face, which made
him horrible to look  at. And despite her strict father, she married
him in secret.

The caique discovered what his daughter had done, and mortally wounded to
the depths of  his heart, he swore revenge, and had his son-in-law secretly
poisoned.

The beautiful young widow asked to move away from the palace. She traveled
to the coast,  intending to settled on the beach in front of the ocean,
whose immensity would help her  forget her loss.

But when she had barely arrived at Kuta-Kocha, near the heights of Huacllan,
she felt a  terrible pain in her heart. She became sick, and could not
continue her travels. She remained  their, and her servants built a
beautiful palace, from whose roof one could contemplate the green llanura
whose enchantment dissipated her sadness.

And time passed.

A powerful Inca who was traveling through the area to bring it into his civilzed
reign, arrived  at the palace of the sad princess. During the time he
remained as her guest, she told him of  her sickness. The generous ruler
took pity on her, and promised to bring, from the distant  land of Quito,
a magical stone.

The king kept his promise. When he got back to Cuzco, and on the way to Kuta-Kocha,
he  left the miraculous stone in her garden. Upon leaving, he said:

"Put a few small pieces in boiling water, and then drink it."

Since that time, every time the pain and the sorrow tortured her, beautiful
Kori drank the  potion that the king had given her.

With the passing of the years, the prodigio appeared. The princess was cured.

And from the furthest corners of the land her subjects began to appear to
ask for a small  piece of the miraculous stone, to cure their sicknesses
of the heart.

This stone still exists, although it is now quite small, for those who know
of its existence still visit it, to chip off little pieces.

Links to all ten of the Legends