LAKE LANIER, Georgia (CNN) -- Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue on Saturday declared the northern region of Georgia in a state of emergency as its water resources dwindled to a dangerously low level.Oh well. They probably couldn't have managed to ship it to Georgia either. Anyway, this is all the fault of those hippie mussel-huggers (that's mussel, Bunky, let's pay attention here) says Rep. John Linder (guess). The drought in Georgia, that is.
(CNN)
10.20.2007
And we just dumped all that water we bought for Katrina, too
Gail Collins is a national treasure
Now Mitt Romney — there’s a man who can put the pep into pander. “I am pro-family on every level, from personal to political,” he told the summiteers. (Take that, Rudy.) He reeled off anti-abortion pledges — not just the requisite anti-Roe Supreme Court nominees, but promises to “oppose abortion in military clinics, oppose funding abortion in international aid programs and I will work to ban embryonic cloning.” He was almost as impassioned as he was during his Senate race against Ted Kennedy when he talked about the “dear, close family relative who was very close to me” who died from an illegal abortion and his firm conviction that “we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering on that.”
(NYTimes)
Now even you have a reason to read the Times.
10.19.2007
But I guess this'll do
FBI agents raided a Las Vegas storage warehouse belonging to magician David Copperfield, seizing nearly two million dollars in cash, US media reported Friday....
The FBI did not say what they were looking for.
(AFP via Raw Story)
File under stories that go downhill from here
Jerry Carson, the proud owner of The Cake Gallery in SOMA, which specializes in erotic cakes...
(The Guardian's San Francisco Blog)
Wait a minute - I think there's a joke in here somewhere
WASHINGTON - Viagra and other impotence drugs are about to bear new warnings that users may experience sudden hearing loss.
(AP via Yahoo! News)
In fact, I think I heard it in...oh sorry - speak louder, you say? - I think I heard it in high school. But that was a long time ago so maybe I'm not - I say, maybe I'm not remembering exactly.
10.18.2007
Woohoo! Google!
Just when I was beginning to wonder what's the point, Google finally (notice the italics there?) implements Safari support. Safari now works with Google Docs (an excellent thing, BTW) and with the Blogger editor. It did with Blogger before, but only with a partial set of tools. Now they're all there. Google, way to go!
(Later: OK, maybe not exactly. Google Docs seems to work pretty well but the Blogger interface is still a little iffy. But we're making progress here, Google. Keep it up.)
And speaking of awesome and wonderful things, if you like Bach and have never heard Janine Jensen play it (or even if you have) go immediately to the iTunes Music Store and search for "The Bach Album." As usual, you can purchase the tracks individually (or most of them) or buy the entire album. It's a treat.
Maybe not
"Can I give a satisfactory answer to what we're going to be doing with those things in five or 10 years? Probably not," he said at a lunch sponsored by the Center for a New American Security. "Wrap them in shrink wrap and put them in asphalt somewhere is about the best thing that we can describe at this point. And as expensive as they are, that is probably not a good use of the taxpayers money."Those things? The armored vehicles known as MRAPs - at about a million bucks per. And he? Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway.
Read more at Danger Room.
Piker
A thief has stolen a life-size cardboard cut-out of a policeman that was intended to deter shoplifters at a supermarket.
(Ananova)
Once upon a time, I'm not saying exactly when, I stole the POLICE sign from over the police department door in the town hall of a certain Midwestern town, I'm not saying which one. In fact, now that I think of it, let's just forget I mentioned this at all, OK?
Let this be a lesson to you, Bunky
Although some details are not yet publicly known, officials familiar with the investigation say the problem originated at Minot when a pylon carrying six nuclear-armed cruise missiles was mistaken for one carrying unarmed missiles.
(Washington Post)
So see, they had these nukes lying around up there in Minot and some guy picked up a few and bolted them onto an airplane by mistake and they got flown from Minot - that's in North Dakota, which is up there on the top - to Louisiana - which is on the bottom - by mistake. Six of them, to be exact. Which constituted, according to some guys who used to be in the Air Force, "one of the worst breaches in U.S. nuclear weapons security in decades." Not ever, mind you, and not the, but one of the worst in a while, anyway. As the result of which - well, nobody seems to be sure yet but maybe - a couple of guys might get fired and a few others get letters of reprimand, which is sort of like a slap on the wrist without the slapping part. So, hey. The Air Force, according to some guy who merits quote marks in the Post, is "getting back to the roots of accountability." No word on where it's getting back from - presumably some branch, or possibly even a leaf.
The Air Force says there was "little risk" of something really bad happening like, you know, blowing up Kansas or Iowa. "Little," of course, is an elusive concept when you're talking nukes. So I don't know, I'm just saying here, maybe you ought to dig the hole a little deeper, JIC.
Geezer power, woohoo!
The insulting idea that, as [Mona] Shaw puts it, "they thought just because we're old enough to get Social Security that we lack both brains and backbone."
So, after stewing over it all weekend, on the following Monday, she went downstairs, got Don's claw hammer and said: "C'mon, honey, we're going to Comcast."
Did you try to stop her, Mr. Shaw?
"Oh no, no," he says.
Hammer time: Shaw storms in the company's office. BAM! She whacks the keyboard of the customer service rep. BAM! Down goes the monitor. BAM! She totals the telephone. People scatter, scream, cops show up and what does she do? POW! A parting shot to the phone!
"They cuffed me right then," she says.
Her take on Comcast: "What a bunch of sub-moronic imbeciles."
(Washington Post)
One more thing that isn't working out too well
...fueled by record oil and natural gas prices and resentment of what he lambasted in February as Bush's "almost uncontained hyper use of force," [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has led global opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq , hosted Palestinians on the U.S. list of terrorist groups, sold anti-aircraft missiles and other arms to Iran and stymied Bush's drive to tighten U.N. sanctions on the Islamic republic for refusing to suspend uranium enrichment.
The Kremlin has steadily increased spending on defense modernization and revived symbolic long-range aerial reconnaissance patrols toward U.S. and European airspace.
Putin also has threatened to re-target Russian nuclear missiles at Europe if Bush deploys U.S. missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic, declared his intention to trash treaties that eliminate a class of nuclear missiles and limit conventional military forces in Europe and compared the United States under Bush to Germany under Hitler.
The U.S.-Russian tensions are a far cry from June 2001 , when Bush declared after his first meeting with Putin in Slovenia that he'd looked in the Russian leader's eyes, found him "trustworthy" and "was able to get a sense of his soul."
(McClatchy)
Imagine that.
10.17.2007
Keeping your fingers crossed is not a recommended security technique
BOSTON (AP) -- The Home Depot Inc. said Wednesday that a laptop computer containing about 10,000 employees' personal data was stolen from a regional manager's car in Massachusetts....
The laptop contained names, home addresses and Social Security numbers of certain Home Depot employees, most in the Northeast, DeFeo said.
''We have no reason to believe that the data contained on the laptop was the target of theft, or that any personal information was accessed or used improperly,'' DeFeo said.
(NYTimes)
Just pointing out, is all.
10.16.2007
Me first!
They [other states] have grown increasingly furious with Iowa and New Hampshire, which has not set its [primary] date either, for insisting on maintaining their first-in-the-nation status. The fight to be first, or at least early, has boiled over into a roiling interstate feud.Is this an election we're talking about here or just some kind of party game? I still think we should have a year-long reality show, vote a couple people off the ballot every week, and go with whoever's left at the end. It would make about as much sense, and we could watch them eat bugs and snakes. Plus, if everybody had to pay a buck every time they called in to vote, maybe we could raise enough money to patch the potholes.
(NYTimes "The Caucus" blog)
10.15.2007
Kucinich
Addressing the Latino Congresso in Los Angeles October 7:
Now the people in the Administration of George Bush better remember their Miranda rights, because when I'm elected President I'm going to see that they are arrested. I'm not kidding here! I want to let you to know something; how I feel about what's happened to our country. We have been led into a war based upon lies -- an unjust a war. We've seen our civil liberties taken away because of lies. The President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defense are all part of this. They're going to be held accountable under the law. If someone runs a traffic light, they'll get a ticket here. There are a million dead Iraqis and almost 4,000 dead American soldiers as a result of this war. Where is the accountability?
(MyDDD)
Like a Timex, this guy just keeps ticking
[Idaho Sen. Larry] Craig's attempt to withdraw his guilty plea was rejected earlier this month. He told an Idaho TV station yesterday that he plans to file an appeal today.
(NY Daily News)
10.14.2007
Can't say he's not famous
Sen. Larry Craig was named Saturday night to the Idaho Hall of Fame.
(PageOne)
So moonlighting as a gay impersonator then
VATICAN CITY (AP) -- A Vatican official suspended after being caught on hidden camera making advances to a young man said in an interview published Sunday that he is not gay and was only pretending to be gay as part of his work.
(CNN)
So sorry now
When I called him "Pruneface," it was campaign rhetoric.
(Mayor Coleman Young of Detroit re Ronald Reagan, 1980)
And much, much more in "Regrets Only," an Op-Ed in this morning's New York Times.
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