Well, if you look online, you probably can find it. That’s what Dan Twohig did- he was just poking around looking at real estate, and found a picture of the not-so-secret-anymore submarine base at Bangor, Washington. So he posted it on his blog.

I drive by Bangor occasionally when I’m heading out to my dad’s house on the Olympic Penninsula. Lots of people do; Highway 3 is a fairly busy road. And the sub base is a big deal- lots of our subs use it.

What’s surprising about what Twohig found is that it shows the propeller of a Trident missile submarine. They are designed to be as quiet as possible, and the prop is a big big part in that.

Click here to see the picture. It’s a Trident in the dock, and you can clearly see the prop. Pretty amazing that the Navy screwed up and had it exposed.

I work photographic flights all the time. They fly all over the United States, shooting pictures for all kinds of governmental and private agencies and businesses. Apparently that’s what happened here; it might be that the Navy had the schedule for when Russian and Chinese satellites were going to be overhead, didn’t think they were going to be exposed, and had the stern of the sub uncovered for a while.

But wouldn’t it just make more sense to have built a big canopy over the entire facility?

Anyway, the fact that this image is still on the web, a month after Twohig first put it out there, indicates that the Navy doesn’t really care about it- from which we can deduce that the bad guys either have the picture already (or better ones, more likely) or that we know somehow that they already have this prop design. Either way, it’s not a security breach anymore, so they haven’t suppressed it.

…because you know it’s not going to be anywhere near as truthful as this one.

Basically, the GAO has found that the Iraqi government has only met 3 out of 18 benchmarks that were laid out by Congress.

Okay, so Iraq is still an abject failure. We pretty much figured that, didn’t we? But what I found interesting in this news story was this second paragraph:

A draft of a Government Accountability Office report also questions whether some aspects of a more positive assessment by the White House last month adequately reflected the range of views the GAO found within the administration.

What they’re saying here is that the White House is STILL lying to the American people about what’s going on. They have people, inside the White House, who hold different viewpoints on how well/poorly things are going, but those views are suppressed.

You know, the Republicans made a lot of noise and even tried to impeach President Bill Clinton because he lied to the American people and during court proceedings. It was about a personal matter- did he get a hummer from a woman who was not his wife- but it was so important that they felt the need to put him on trial for it and try to kick him out of office. Nobody died, nobody was hurt (except Monica’s reputation, but that’s as much her own fault as anything, so I’m not feeling that bad for her.)

Now we’ve got an American President who continues to lie to the nation- and these lies are costing us hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of injuries, and most importantly thousands of lives- both Iraqi and American.

Why aren’t people more upset? Are we simply benumbed to the whole thing?

Just wait for the White House report on how things are going. They’ve managed to arrange it so that General Petraeus will be testifying to Congress on September 11th (the Democrats get outmaneuvered yet again), continuing their deceptive tactic of making the American people think that Iraq has something to do with the 9/11 attacks. The White House report will be a whitewash; it’s their only hope for covering Bush’s legacy.

One thing about living this close to the ballpark- when there’s a real event type of game, you feel it. The people walking down the street have more spring in their step, they talk louder, the scalpers hawk their tickets with renewed enthusiasm (naturally, since it’s a bigger payday for them) and generally people have an energy to them that’s noticeable.

I got home today and took Indy for a walk down Occidental. I found a guy willing to part with a single ticket to tonight’s game- a lousy one- for $15. I think he recognized me as a local resident. I know most of the scalpers by sight now, since they’re out pretty much every night. It’s interesting to see how many tickets they’ll have that they snagged via some kind of nefarious means; lots of them showing one dollar as the face value because they’re some kind of promotional deal.

Tonight, Tuesday, and Wednesday afternoon are three huge games for the Mariners. We’re playing against our division rivals, the Angels; we’re only two games back going into the series. Win all three and we’ve got the AL West lead. Right now we’re also in the lead for the wild card slot for the playoffs.

Hence, the energy on the street, and the sold-out status of Safeco on a Monday night. We haven’t had this kind of excitement at the park in over three years, since the Mariners have really sucked for a few seasons.

Anyway, I’m taking the nice easy walk down Occidental to the park. It’s about 15 minutes to gametime as I type this and I can still be in there in ten and see the first pitch. It’s nights like this- 75 degrees, sunny, happy people walking to the park- that I bought in this location for!

A little over a year ago, I wrote about how the Seattle SuperSonics had been purchased by a group from Oklahoma City. In that post, I wrote:

The Sonics were just sold to a group of investors who are from Oklahoma City. This group has been trying to bring a basketball team to OKC, which doesn’t have one of its own- but which had the New Orleans Hornets playing their home games in OKC this past season thanks to the hurricane clobbering New Orleans.

The Hornets are going to play in OKC in 2006-2007 as well, and then (everyone supposedly hopes) move back to New Orleans once the city is back on its feet.

So for the 2008-2009 season, OKC will be back to not having a team again.

The Sonics, on the other hand, have a lease in Seattle that expires after the 2009-2010 season.

So let’s see. These guys want to bring a team to OKC. They’ll need one starting in 2008. The Sonics can’t go anywhere without breaking a lease until 2010. And the new owners assure us that they have no intention of trying to move the Sonics.

Yeeeeeaahhhh, riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Just how big a set of fools do these guys think we are?

Last week, one of the minority owners in that group was quoted in the Oklahoma Journal-Record:

“We didn’t buy the team to keep it in Seattle, we hoped to come here. We know it’s a little more difficult financially here in Oklahoma City, but we think it’s great for the community and if we could break even we’d be thrilled.”

Oops.

See, for the past year, the majority owner of the Sonics has been pretending that he really really wants to keep the team in Seattle. They tried (not very hard) to get the state Legislature to pass a bill that would fund a new arena in the Seattle area. They claim that they’d prefer to build a new arena right in Seattle, or in Bellevue or Renton. But gosh, the economics of the sport are such that they need taxpayer help, blah blah blah…

And the entire time, the city’s leaders and state reps and so forth have acted as though this whole thing wasn’t obvious from the get-go. Even last week, the owner said:

“It is my hope we will see a breakthrough in the next 60 days that will result in securing a new arena for the Sonics and Storm in the Greater Seattle area.”

Sure, pal. We believe you- a square shooter from Oklahoma City wouldn’t steer us wrong!

Except your buddy, the co-owner, told us the truth:

“We started to look around and at that time the Sonics were going through some ownership challenges in Seattle,” McClendon told the Journal Record. “So Clay, very artfully and skillfully, put himself in the middle of those discussions and to the great amazement and surprise to everyone in Seattle, some rednecks from Oklahoma, which we’ve been called, made off with the team.”

Now the NBA is fining McClendon $250,000 for his comments. Exactly what rule the guy has broken is unclear… but apparently speaking the honest truth costs you a quarter-million in the NBA.

It’s a shame. Oklahoma City is a nice town, but they’ll be extremely lucky to break even there; it’s a tiny TV market and while they might be able to sell a lot of tickets in the first few seasons (not a lot to do in Oklahoma in the winter), they won’t get nearly the prices that they can get here in Seattle.

The real tragedy is cities being held hostage by these teams for tax dollars to subsidize millionaire players and billionaire owners.