Palin hits back at Obama, media after slip-up - Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON (AFP) – US conservative standard bearer Sarah Palin has accused critics of unfairly singling her out after a slip of the tongue [confusing North and South Korea] reignited debate over her grasp of world affairs....
"(The media) couldn't resist the temptation to turn a simple one word slip-of-the-tongue of mine into a major political headline," Palin wrote on her Facebook page late Thursday.
Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Good enough for Afghanistan
As of today, we have been in Afghanistan for as long as the Soviets were. USA! USA! USA! Proudly capturing Osama bin Laden for 9 years, 50 days.
Indiana residents question Ohio manure imports - Yahoo! News
WINCHESTER, Ind. – The cleanup of a popular but algae-fouled Ohio lake has angered some Indiana residents who argue a federally backed effort to truck livestock waste across state lines is only moving the problem to their region.
In honor of the holiday.
A man was given a parrot. As it turned out, this parrot was rude, obnoxious, obscene.
The guy talked to it quietly and with civility. He played Chopin, Brahms and J. S. Bach.
Nothing helped and one day close to Thanksgiving when the parrot had yet again told him what he could do to himself, he grabbed it, opened the freezer door and
stuffed it in. How that bad bird squawked! When it got quiet, the guy opened the door and the parrot, looking genuinely remorseful, hopped out onto his forearm."I am sincerely sorry for my despicable behavior. I promise to change my wicked ways if you will forgive me."
The guy said, "Sure."
The parrot said, "Sir, may I ask you a question?"
"Okay."
"What did the turkey do?"
Limbaugh attacks Obama for thanking Native Americans on Thanksgiving | Raw Story
Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh took to airwaves Wednesday to blast President Barack Obama for thanking Native Americans for their part in Thanksgiving.
And...
Fox reporter rewrites history, claims socialism almost killed Thanksgiving | Raw Story
If America hadn't embraced capitalism, none of us would be alive. And if Democrats were in power, we'd all be starving.
Or at least that's how Fox News reporter John Stossel tells it....
"Had today's political class been in power in 1623, tomorrow's holiday would have been called 'Starvation Day' instead of Thanksgiving," Stossel begins, in a column titled 'The Lost Lesson of Thanksgiving."
We're not starving here until after the football game.
So, Did Spam Ever Leave the Cans? A Meaty Mystery Is Making Waves - WSJ.com
A 12-ounce can of Spam, roughly the size of a fist, won't spoil for years if unopened. Hormel Foods Corp. launched Spam during the Great Depression, calling it a "miracle meat in a can." The tinned loaf became a staple food for U.S. soldiers battling in wars abroad.
If you don't have enough to worry about yet, try this:
Did the people on that cruise ship that lost power a week or so ago have to eat Spam? (A helicopter was photographed schlepping a palate of the stuff to the cruise ship's deck.)
If you overdo the food this weekend and need a little zero-calorie entertainment, try a movie called Designing Woman, in which a New York sports writer (Gregory Peck) and a New York fashion designer (Lauren Bacall) meet poolside in California and after spending a few days together on a sailboat (no sailing is involved) get hitched and return to New York where their worlds collide and hilarity ensues.
This movie is so 50's it will make your teeth hurt, right down to its Andre Previn score. But you will feel hungry again in a couple of hours.
U.S. Corporate Profits Rose in Third Quarter - NYTimes.com
The nation’s workers may be struggling, but American companies just had their best quarter ever.
American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or noninflation-adjusted terms.
...what are these non-business friendly policies the wingers keep complaining about?
Sheriff Dart: 5% of Chicago’s Foreclosures DON’T Have Problems | Emptywheel
The WaPo has a story on the growing realization that the banksters have been engaging in massive fraud to keep churning out foreclosures. It includes a detail about Chicago Sheriff Thomas Dart’s refusal to enforce foreclosures I did not know: that when he had a sample of foreclosures reviewed, he found that only 5% of them had all their paperwork in order.
(Emphasis mine.)
TSA chief: Resisting scanners just means delays - Yahoo! News
Why does this sound to me like some frustrated teacher to a bunch of third-graders?
Why can't we do better?
Full Body Scanner Lobby: Michael Chertoff & Rapiscan | NowPublic News Coverage
Rapiscan has already sold 150 full body scanners to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), with a price tag of $25 million.
Seriously. When I was a tyke (yes! tyke!) it was a common practice, at least in Lincoln, Nebraska, for shoe stores to have X-ray machines into which one could stick one's feet to see if one's new shoes fit. These machines were vertical boxes with toe space along one side of the bottom, like the toe space under a kitchen counter only deeper, and three viewing ports on the top. In the children's shoe store, one viewing port would be low enough so a tyke could look into it; the other two were for the sales person and the Mommy. I loved going to the shoe store and watching my toes wiggle.
When my mom took me and my little sister shopping at a department store downtown (nobody did pre-school or day care in the 40's, that's what moms were for) my sister and I would run off to the shoe department to play while mom shopped. Play with the X-ray machine. You looked in there, your feet would be all green and you could see the bones. Cool.
In the late 40's and early 50's I'm pretty sure I got an X-ray every time I went to the dentist. Whenever you twisted your ankle it would get X-rayed to to see if it was broken. And just for good measure, some guys with a big van would come around to the schools every year so all the kiddies could get their chests X-rayed for TB.
I've lost count of the number of things, just in my lifetime (see, I'm not even counting trying to cure syphilis with arsenic) that started out as a really good thing and turned out, later, to be holy shit that stuff will kill you, run!
So I'm not too worked up about all this fuss at the airports. Suck it up, get yourself zapped, and get on the plane to Topeka. If you're going to Topeka, that's what you deserve.
That said, I have a whole lot of trouble thinking all this airport stuff is much more than an entertainment designed to make some people feel safer, some richer, and cover (but thoroughly scan) everybody's collective ass. Sure enough some day some terrorist will blow up an airplane but flying is still a whole lot safer than driving and nobody even checks your breath when you get into your car. More to the point, nobody checks the other guy's. (And if the new airport searches persuade more people to drive, it's likely more people will die on highways this year.)
Every year flu puts more than 200,000 people in a hospital and somewhere between 3,300 and 49,000 of them die, depending on how severe a given year's flu strain is, and yet something like 43 percent of Americans decline the usually free and generally safe shot that would prevent them from getting it at all.
We - humans, I'm talking about here, not necessarily just Americans, although I sometimes wonder - are really, really bad at assessing risk. It would be nice to think the people who are friggin' paid to do it are somehow better, but I fear they're not.
T.S.A. Now Finds Itself on the Defensive - This Land - NYTimes.com
At a Checkpoint, Terror Fears and Testy Travelers
Looking for PETN, Scanning Grandma at the Airport, and the Future of Air Travel | Informed Comment
Our generation perhaps, and the next one almost certainly, will have the unprecedented experience of having their world become larger and less accessible, after two centuries during which it shrank and seemed conquerable. Cisco’s telepresence technology may be the future much moreso than the airlines.
There Will Be Blood - NYTimes.com
The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming.
(Noted by our alert Midwest bureau.)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Government agents hired to drive nuclear weapons and components in trucks sometimes got drunk while on convoy missions, including an incident last year when two agents were detained by police at a local bar during one, according to a report Monday by the U.S. Energy Department's watchdog.
Passenger Chooses Strip-Down Over Pat-Down | NBC San Diego
When a San Diego man opted out of security screening using the Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) at Lindbergh Field Friday, he stripped down to his underwear in an attempt to avoid the pat-down procedures.
Wolanyk's attorney said that TSA requested his client put his clothes on so he could be patted down properly...
A sprawling sports complex planned in the village of Lakewood would feature baseball fields, bicycle trails and restaurants meant to draw families from throughout the region. In return for kicking in $500,000 apiece, foreign investors in the project would jump to the head of the nation's often-tangled line for legal immigration and win a route toward U.S. citizenship for themselves and their families.
