All those Democrats are terrorists!
A Michigan man facing federal criminal charges of illegally working for Saddam Hussein's Iraqi Intelligence Service says he met with Hillary Clinton at the White House in May 1996.
[From Accused Saddam Agent Says He Met With Hillary at White House | The New York Sun]
And maybe you too, bunky. Do you really know who that last cab driver was?
I'm crawling back under my bed.
WAUSAU, Wis. (AP) -- Cars lining the street. A house full of young people. A keg and drinking games inside. Police thought they had an underage boozing party on their hands.
But though they made dozens of teens take breath tests, none tested positive for alcohol. That's because the keg contained root beer.
[From The Raw Story | Cops bust high school root beer kegger]
FALLUJAH, Mar 26 (IPS) - Iraqi doctors in al-Anbar province warn of a new disease they call "Blackwater" that threatens the lives of thousands. The disease is named after Blackwater Worldwide, the U.S. mercenary company operating in Iraq.
[From IRAQ: Fever Named After Blackwater]
A good friend in Chicago once explained to me why he listened to a classical-music station in the morning while he was getting ready for work. He said, if you listen to any of the other stations all you hear about is mayhem in the streets and traffic jams on the expressways, but if you listen to WFMT you find out it's Beethoven's birthday.
Which is pretty much what I was thinking the other day when I dumped all the "news" from my podcast list and loaded up my iPod with stuff from NPR. NPR has an awesome collection of excellent podcasts - check out iTunes or the NPR web site - any one of which makes better listening than the endless caterwauling about what Hillary said or who Obama listens to. And I don't even want to think about that other guy.
I figure it'll all be over someday, and in the meantime I'm catching up on Fresh Air.
'Most Eligible Bachelor' cleared of rape
[From 'Most Eligible Bachelor' cleared of rape - Boston.com]
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered a full inventory of all nuclear weapons and related materials after the mistaken delivery of ballistic missile fuses to Taiwan, the Pentagon said Thursday....
Despite quarterly checks of the inventory, defense officials said they never knew the fuses were gone. Only after months of discussions with Taiwan over the missing batteries did the Pentagon finally realize — late last week — the seriousness of what had happened.
[From The Raw Story | Gates orders inventory of US nukes]
The Washington Post reports Obama might be - yes, bunky! might be! - a liberal.
In most major areas, Obama has taken positions that would seem to conform to the Republican stereotype of a liberal. Like Clinton, he favors expanding the government's role in delivering health care, and would pay for that by ending President Bush's tax cuts for the rich. He would go a step further than Clinton by lifting the limit on income taxed for Social Security, now $100,000, to set that program on firm footing.
He strongly supports abortion rights and spoke out against a Supreme Court ruling last year that upheld a ban on the procedure that some call "partial-birth" abortion. He favors allowing illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses (after some hesitation, Clinton came out against that). He is outspoken on civil rights, and he has opposed Bush's judicial picks, staying out of a bipartisan effort to approve some nominees. While he supports the death penalty for the most "heinous" crimes, as a Senate candidate in 2004 he expressed support for strict gun control, decriminalizing marijuana and ending federal mandatory minimum prison sentences, issues he now rarely raises on the trail.
[From In Obama's New Message, Some Foes See Old Liberalism - washingtonpost.com]
Run for the hills!
"Without mincing words, Ford's investment in Jaguar was a disaster from the word go," Healy said.
[From Ford unloads losing Jaguar, Land Rover | Freep.com | Detroit Free Press]
Excessive landscaping will do it every time.
Larry Ellison, ranked 12th on the Forbes 500 list with a net worth of $25 billion, has bagged a $3 million tax break after arguing that his flamboyant Japanese-style estate in Woodside is functionally obsolete....
Ellison's appeal claimed the property suffered from "significant functional obsolescence" because there is a finite market for high-end luxury homes, limited appeal for 16th-century Japanese architecture and the "over improvements" and "excessive" landscaping are costly to maintain.
[From $3 million tax cut on Larry Ellison's estate]
Let alone guns. Or bombs.
The Agency that brought you bogus intelligence on the Iraq war -- a Defense Intelligence Agency operative who knew that a key US intelligence source was unreliable sat in on meetings with then-Secretary of State Colin Powell when he incorporated claims about mobile Iraqi weapons labs into his portfolio -- now brings you the Iran that is actually Iraq.
In a brief official history of their own agency, posted on their website (pdf here), the DIA confused Iran and Iraq.
Noting "world crises" in the 1980s, the agency's report cites “an Israeli F-16 raid to destroy an Iranian nuclear reactor.” (See page 14)...
In fact, Israel attacked an Iraqi nuclear reactor -- Osirak -- in 1981. Israel has not attacked Iranian nuclear sites -- or at least, not yet.
[From The Raw Story | Pentagon agency confuses Iran with Iraq in official history]
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate John McCain, looking to chart an independent course on U.S. foreign policy, called on Wednesday for a more vigorous international diplomacy and a new effort to rebuild frayed relations with allies.
[From McCain calls for more vigorous U.S. diplomacy - Yahoo! News]
BOSTON (AP) -- Call them Pavlov's fish: Scientists are testing a plan to train fish to catch themselves by swimming into a net when they hear a tone that signals feeding time.
[From Wired News - AP News]
If it works, the system could eventually allow black sea bass to be released into the open ocean, where they would grow to market size, then swim into an underwater cage to be harvested when they hear the signal.
Astronauts prepare to land shuttle in Florida
[From Astronauts prepare to land shuttle in Florida - Yahoo! News]
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The presidential candidates may have star qualities -- and they also have stars in their families, according to a genealogical study linking Hillary Clinton to Angelina Jolie and Barack Obama to Brad Pitt.
[From Study finds Clinton related to Jolie and Obama to Pitt - Boston.com]
The military plans to withdraw the five extra combat brigades that were sent into Iraq early last year -- the so-called "surge" force -- by July, which will bring troop levels down from about 158,000 to 140,000.
Petraeus and Defense Secretary Robert Gates support taking a pause of as yet undetermined duration at that point, to assess what impact the reduction in troops has on the security situation.
[From The Raw Story | Bush close to deciding future Iraq deployment: White House]
What impact on the security situation? They've been surging over there for however long now, surging all over the place, 24/7 surging for months on end, and they don't know what the "security situation" freakin' is? All this surging and they don't know what kind of are you kidding me impact it's had? Do they think we're all a bunch of morons here?
Oh. I see.
Just because you are working in the kitchen - or in the bathroom, study or garage for that matter - does not mean that you have to make do with limited or second-rate entertainment.
[From ..::WebBrick® Systems::.. Solutions]
Not for a minute! So what you do is buy a bunch of thise WebBrick things and hook them all up, whatever, and then all you have to do is, you know, find some first-rate, unlimited entertainment. To begin with.
There are several requirements for becoming a certified Chicagoan if you weren't born here.
[From Turns out, Demi Moore is just like us -- chicagotribune.com]
PS: It's Cubs and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Here's a physics professor who proves - I'm not kidding here, bunky, proves - that the cord on your iPod earbuds gets tangled up in knots.
"The way that you get a knot is the string has to bend back on itself, coil back on itself," Smith said.
[From Tangled cord? It's not just an aggravation, it's science -- chicagotribune.com]
Who woulda thunk?
