Doesn't sound like much of a party to me

President Bush will host former Vice President Al Gore at the White House, along with other US winners of the Nobel Prize, on Nov. 26. Gore and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the Nobel Peace Prize for efforts to educate and raise awareness about the effects of human-made climate change. (AP)

(Boston.com)

We're running out of Zunes!

Oh, this is horrible.

SEATTLE - The 80-gigabyte Zune media player Microsoft Corp. launched Tuesday has sold out across the Web, to the dismay of online shoppers and delight of the world's largest software maker.

(AP via Yahoo! News)

The smaller sizes not so much. But those big ones have just flown off the shelves. How many? "Quite a few," reports an Amazon Amazon spokeswoman. So, quite a few.

NBC has concluded a first-of-its-kind deal to acquire the talked-about new Internet and social network series “Quarterlife” for distribution as an hourlong drama series on the NBC network after it has first played in eight-minute segments on several Web sites.

(NYTimes)

What's next, YouTube? (That'd be kind of funny when you think about it, after all the blubbering the networks have done about shared video clips.) Well I'm just saying here, they can't have YAME. I support the writers' strike.

Eat your heart out, Fox.

Gotta love the Onion

WASHINGTON—Citing exhaustion, an overcrowded field of candidates, and little hope of making a difference in 2008, roughly 300 million Americans announced Tuesday that they will be leaving the presidential race behind.

The U.S. populace, which has participated in every national election since 1789, said that while the decision to abandon next year's race was difficult, recent events, such as disappointing victories by both Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani in regional straw polls, left them with no real choice.

(Onion)

When the country's two best sources of news and commentary are a humor magazine and a late-night TV show you've gotta start thinking the end is near.

Or the beginning.

Ringtone of my dreams, oh yeah

There's a fanfare by the Coldstream Guards on iTunes, 28 seconds, makes you want to stand up and salute. You can hear it if you search for "fanfare" - but don't use it or I'll answer your phone.

Horsefeathers and poppycock

Obama, who opened with a shot at Clinton on that very issue, looked shakiest. He acknowledged that as an Illinois legislator he voted for illegal immigrants to be trained, licensed and insured "to protect public safety." But in what sounded like a reprise of the Clinton wobble, he quickly added, "I am not proposing that is what we do."

His final answer, when pressed about support several times, was "Yes."

(SFGate)

Wobble? I think not. He wasn't asked for a proposal, he was asked for his opinion, which he explained completely and clearly, but his answer didn't please Wolfie, who couldn't fit it on a bumper sticker. So he was badgered down to "yes." What part of "yes" does this guy not understand?

I don't count myself in Obama's camp but I agree with him on one thing and the little bit of that boondoggle in Las Vegas I watched was enough for me to decide on my own personal litmus test - I don't vote for anybody who doesn't agree to remove or at the very least increase the cap on Social Security taxes. Dude, I've paid plenty of them and I know how nice it is to max out in May or June but it just ain't fair. If Social Security needs money, as the politicos like to claim, that's the remedy, and it's not a tax increase, as Clinton and the Rs would have it, it's a tax-break reduction. And that's that.

I knew that game would come to no good

These bridge-playing champions on my left are about to be stripped like Chuck Conners in Branded because they played the unthinkable trick:

They held up a handmade sign at an award dinner, that said, "We did not vote for Bush."

And then laughed about it. —The fiends!

(Susie Bright's Journal - and thanks to Sideshow)

File under Stories I Didn't Finish Reading

Here's a first: Bug-size robots have been used to coax cockroaches into unnatural acts....

(Boston Globe)

Can you spell circlejerk?

I just watched 30 minutes of a CNN-instigated food fight in Las Vegas and I'm just saying here, I give up. The only guys who made it through unscathed were Joe Biden, who laughed, and Dennis Kucinich, who was given time to utter one sentence in the whole half hour and made it tell. The rest of those bimbos can get off the stage right now as far as I'm concerned, and Wolfie too.

And who's staging that debacle, CNN Sports?

What a thoroughly discouraging waste of time.

Legal notes from all over

In 2004, Frank D’Alessandro, a court official in New York, sued the city for serious injuries that he sustained when a toilet he was sitting on exploded leaving him in a pile of porcelain. He claimed $5 million compensation. Reflecting on the demanding physical therapy in which he must now engage every morning before work, D’Alessandro declared: “It’s a pain in the ass to do all this stuff.”

...and more on "the world's weirdest cases" from Times Online.

Good point, Another

Another opined, "Redefining privacy is a bit like redefining virginity. Once it's gone, it's gone."

(Raw Story)

Ah, well, that's the solution then

No more bunged up elections. Because if they, you know, don't come out right...

The system was in good hands as the votes were counted from the sprawling Nov. 6 contests. German is the county's respected administrator of elections, and there were witnesses present as he corrected the vote totals on a sales tax referendum for a fire/ambulance district in the Cypress-Fairbanks area of northwest Harris County....

"Basically it turns out, without regard to any ballots that have been cast, you can enter arbitrary numbers in there and report them out in such a way that, unless you go back to these giant (computer) logs and interpret the logs, you wouldn't know it has been done."

(Houston Chronicle)

...you just correct them.

In good hands indeed.

(Do I need to say this again? You can not trust your government if you can not trust your elections. That's the rule.)

Nobody said evolution was perfect

SOUTHWORTH, Wash. - A man trying to loosen a stubborn lug nut blasted the wheel with a 12-gauge shotgun, injuring himself badly in both legs, sheriff's deputies said.

(Chicago Tribune)

Oh they'll take care of it all right

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information.

(AP via Raw Story)

Please.

If you're old enough to remember.... OK. You're not. Let me begin again. Once upon a time, boys and girls, when Social Security was a new thing, the Feds insisted no one - that would be no one, not a single soul - would ever know what your social security number was except you (that would be you) and the Social Security Administration (meaning them). It's printed right there on my Social Security card (maybe not yours, but then mine was issued more than half a century ago), plain as day, NOT TO BE USED FOR IDENTIFICATION.

These days, you can't even get a haircut without coughing up your SSN.

So pay attention here. They will not properly safeguard blah blah blah nothing. In fact they're already not properly safeguarding (why do you think they want to retroactively immunize the Telcos?) and they ain't about to begin.

No point worrying about "privacy" - you haven't had any of that for a good long while (if ever). Just don't think anything's getting "properly safeguarded" because it isn't. And you can take that, along with your SSN, to the bank.

Surprise!

American military chiefs have been left dumbstruck by an undetected Chinese submarine popping up at the heart of a recent Pacific exercise and close to the vast U.S.S. Kitty Hawk - a 1,000ft supercarrier with 4,500 personnel on board....

According to senior Nato officials the incident caused consternation in the U.S. Navy.

(Thanks to Spiiderweb™)

Yeah, I can hear it now. *&^%^ ##@^* *&*$ ^%&*( %$# )^#@ &^%$'n consternated.

Cue Kafka

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) issued a report to Congress on the deployment of over 40 Fusion Centers throughout the nation. Fusion Centers are the most recent effort by the federal government to establish an operational domestic surveillance program. The CRS report states that officials justifying the development of fusion centers use a number of presumptions, and that the goals of the centers seem to be unfocused with wide-ranging explanations on what they are intended to accomplish. The report outlined threats to civil liberties and privacy posed by the deployment of Fusion Centers, which have no laws governing them.

(Epic.org - emphasis mine)

Fusion centers? WTF? Turns out "fusion centers" are massive data-gathering operations. That would be data about you, Dude - data not only from government but also private sources. Oh yeah, there's a built-in profit motive - we're living in R-land now.

Moreover:

The Criminal Intelligence Summit participants stressed the need to not limit the data sharing to terrorism or terrorist related activity, but to extend it to all criminal intelligence under the general heading of "Intelligence-Led Policing."

Ain't that just dandy. (BTW, seen "Minority Report"?) Gotta hand it to that Criminal freakin' Intelligence (no oxymoron there) Summit.

That Kondi Rice said just the other day fighting terrorists is never an excuse to abridge the Constitution.

Alas, she was talking about Pakistan at the time.

Oh no!

Democratic candidates campaigning in Iowa are courting activists, sez Reuters here.

DES MOINES, Iowa (Reuters) - Six Democratic presidential contenders wooed Iowans at a raucous fund-raising dinner on Saturday, with Barack Obama and John Edwards taking veiled shots at front-runner Hillary Clinton on a night filled with dueling cheers and red-meat rhetoric.

Raucous activists, no less. Cheering raucous activists!

It boggles the mind.

Pretty amazing when you think of it

Washington accuses Tehran of arming, training and funding Shi'ite militias in Iraq, charges Iran denies, but U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker late last month noted several positive developments in Iran's involvement in Iraq.

(Reuters)

They can't find 190,000 of their own weapons and then accuse Iran of arming the militias.

Yeah, you're right. Best not think.