Friday Cat Blogging: More Kitten Cuteness

The fosters are slowly getting bigger. Pansy, the bigger of the two, will probably only be with us for another week. Marcy is smaller and weighs less; we figure we’ll have her another two weks before she’s old enough to be adopted into a permanant home.

Becasue it is very hard to get Pansy to hold still long enough to be photographed, I give you more shots of Marcy this week!

Marcy visits Tommy in the office.

She is going to be one beautiful cat when she’s all grown up!

Whither the EU?

Some big things are afoot in Europe. It seems likely that France will vote this week to reject the EU constitution. If they do vote to reject, the constitution will not be able to be implemented, causing a serious issue for the 25-member European Union. Bloomberg’s been covering this because of the potential effect on the Euro exchange rate, but other than that I haven’t found much US coverage.

Predictions that a ‘no’ vote from France will “kill” the EU may be premature, but it’s a real possibility. It all depends on whether there’s a willingness to do further work on the EU constitution. Getting 25 different countries to agree on anything is really, really, hard, so going back to the drawing table could mean years of additional negotiations and voting. Not an appealing prospect.

From what I’ve been able to glean in the English-language press, the anti-constitution opposition feels that

the charter enshrines an “ultra-liberal” economic model, putting market interests ahead of social concerns and does not protect workers enough.

Amazing. They’ll vote the EU constitution down because it doesn’t protect workers enough. I’m not sure if I’m impressed or annoyed, or both, by this. I’m impressed that the people of France feel so strongly about the issue that they’re willing to bring the whole EU-nification process to a halt over it. Annoyed because I think the EU is generally a good idea and that the French acting to derail the process is short-sighted of them.

And a minor side-note, note the use of the word ‘liberal’ as being pro-business, not pro-worker, in the Reuters UK piece. No matter what side of the Pond you live on, ‘liberal’ seems to be a bad word.

About that Filibuster

Given the power inequalities in the situation, and that fact that a number of right wingers seem to be extremely pissed off by the compromise, I think the Demcrats did about as well as could be expected in the Senate Showdown.

Josh Marshall has some good points on the matter:

[the] whole tenor of the Republican ultras on the Hill today is to demand unimpeded power, to push past conventions and limits, to go for everything. And here they got turned back. A sensible Republican party might be satisfied to have gotten three of its nominees — numerically speaking, they did fairly well. But this whole enterprise was based on wanting it all, on not accepting limits, on rejecting government by even a modicum of consensus with a sizeable minority party. They got stopped short. And the senate Republican leadership is undermined.

So this isn’t a pleasant compromise. But precisely because the Republicans — or their leading players — are absolutists in a way the Democrats are not, I think this compromise will batter them more than it will the minority party, which is after all a minority party which nonetheless managed to emerge from this having fought the stronger force to something like a draw.

No, I am not happy three unqualified judges get sent to the federal benches as part of the deal. But at least there is a compromise and there is still hope of more in the future.

Uh Oh

Per Reuters:

Syria has severed military and intelligence cooperation with the United States, its ambassador to Washington told The New York Times in an interview published on its Web site on Monday.

The ambassador, Imad Moustapha, told the newspaper in an interview given last Friday at the Syrian Embassy in Washington, that his country had, in the last 10 days, “severed all links” with the U.S. military and Central Intelligence Agency

Not that I am any kind of a fan of Syria, but that’s not good news.