Weird, but kinda cool.

Giant Michael Jackson robot to roam Vegas.  There are lasers involved.

We’re all pulling for her

A stunning newsflash from CNN: Versace heiress battling anorexia.

Must be a regional phenomenon

Watching the current Iranian hostage drama unfold brings back some unwelcome memories.  Have you been getting your milk, young lad?

Frustrated by lack of freely-available chemical weapons in Iraq, Al Qaeda makes its own

A couple of bombings–no big deal. But now there have been more chlorine attacks than you can count on one hand–and most of the victims have been Muslims.  Most recently, a government facility in Fallujah has been struck by chlorine suicide attack.

Try to make sense of this.  Imagine you’re AQ.  Your desperate suicide attacks just aren’t doing the trick for you,  so you enhance your attacks with chemicals and thus irretrievably link yourselves with the same fears that gave the Americans a pretext for being there in the first place.  Sounds like a winning strategy!

What is Buick’s biggest market?

Hint:  It’s not the U.S.

Better yet, what’s the AP doing with it?

A preview of “un-re-Baathification”

Concerning a draft Iraqi law drawn up to provide amnesty and restitution to certain former Baath Party memebers as part of a national reconciliation process:

The AP obtained its description of the draft law from an MP. The Post got its copy from the US embassy, which released a copy on Tuesday. By the way, what’s the US embassy doing with a copy of a draft Iraqi law?

Are news organizations the only outlets blessed to receive drafts of Iraqi legislation?

Famed former brothel Mustang Ranch burns

Where are the preservation efforts?  Just burn it down?

Hoke McMillan - April 25, 1918 - March 25, 2007

We lost a good man today.

I’ve gotta question the priorities

 Gotta love the call to action here.

Polar Bear SOS Home
Global Warming Threatens Polar Bears with Extinction!

Time is running out for polar bears. Scientists warn that rising Arctic temperatures may cause nearly all of the summer sea ice that the bears depend on for survival to vanish by 2040. Polar bears are already suffering the grim effects of global warming: birth rates are falling, fewer cubs are surviving and more bears are drowning. With more than 25 percent of the world’s polar bear populations already in decline, further warming could drive this beloved animal to extinction by the end of this century! Act now!

They forgot to mention the bear’s shrinking testicles. Why are we worried about polar bears when there are perfectly good teenagers trapped on ice here in America?

I may be terribly, terribly (intentionally) wrong, but didn’t polar bears evolve only recently –geologically speaking– in order to exploit newly formed ice sheets?

Changing the dynamic one militia at a time

According to AP/Yahoo news, the Mahdi Shiite militia may be disintegrating. A little disarray in the ranks is no wonder since the fat, toothless Fat Mookie al Sadr seems to be having some trouble reentering Iraq:

While Al-Sadr’s strategy appears to be to wait out the government offensive and preserve his force, his absence has left loyal fighters unsure of his future and pondering whether they had been abandoned by their leader, the commanders said.Al-Sadr tried to return to Iraq last month but turned back before he reached the Iraqi border upon learning of U.S. checkpoints on the road to Najaf, the Shiite holy city south of Baghdad where he lives.

“Conditions are not suitable for him to return,” said an al-Sadr aide, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. “His safety will not be guaranteed if he returns.”

Iraqslogger has updates on progress with other militias.

SOMEbody doesn’t like this war!

Street fascists bleat in Milwaukee.

An early spring thaw in Minnesota?

A terrified teen rides ice slab down river. The youth was seen scampering onto a breakaway ice floe in the middle of the frozen river, only to be stranded when the ice moved too far away from shore.

Officials rescued, measured, and tagged the teen, who was released miles upriver. Authorities were surprised by the situation and noted that it is unusual to find teens stranded on ice floes this far south this late in the season. A spokesman for the local chapter of Sierra Club suggested that anthropomorphic-forced climate changes might have played a factor in the unusual occurrence.

Spring thaw

Slowly getting back into the swing of things–these superbugs seem to last longer than they used to.

Came across the first Geico caveman commercial–first thing to make me laugh in a couple of days.

Another week off

I expect only light blogging this week as I’m getting pulled away for work again.  Feeling a little like Johnny Paycheck.

Calls for Gore to Tone it Down

Vinman will very much appreciate this article.

Today’s NYT explores the unease with which some scientists approach Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

“I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,” Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.”

Vinman (who apparently did not appreciate Gore’s film) may very well enjoy the criticisms directed at Gore in this article.

Anti-Gay BattleCry

New York Times reports on a rather militaristic Christian “youth group” that regards “gay-bashing” as critical to its mission. Try this quote out for size:

“We see homosexuality like a lot of other things that do harm to us, like lying, or cheating, or stealing,” he said, adding that he said he had seen studies suggesting that many gay people are depressed or unhappy. “And it’s not very loving to leave them in that state and not show them another way.”

Sorry, kids, but the unloving, un-Christian-like thing to do is to assume an intolerant, condescending, self-righteous and outright bullsh*t attitude such as the one captured in that quote.

Times really have changed. When I was a kid, I was taught that Jesus was all about love. Nowadays, American kids sure do seem to be inundated with the message that Jesus is all about hate. I hate to say it, but that frightens me more than the “Britney Spears effect” does.

Also, why don’t these kids do us all a favor and get excited about poor people? Why not scream at gay people less and help the poor a bit more. WWJD?

Gingrich: Sure, I cheated

- and during the Clinton impeachment to boot!

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich acknowledged he was having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, he acknowledged in an interview with a conservative Christian group.

”The honest answer is yes,” Gingrich, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to be aired Friday, according to a transcript provided to The Associated Press. ”There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There’s certainly times when I’ve fallen short of God’s standards.”

Now here’s the HILARIOUS part:

Gingrich argued in the interview, however, that he should not be viewed as a hypocrite for pursuing Clinton’s infidelity.

I am truly in awe of this man’s loudly-touted “family values.” There’s nothing quite like telling your wife that you want a divorce while she’s in the hospital for cancer treatment. Now that’s class! That’s a real doozy of a “family value” and a sacred “Christian principle.”

What a creep.

Going dark

Going dark

I’ll be offline for a few days but don’t panic–there are other inmates running this funny farm. You may notice some posts that nod to heightened cultural sensibilities, systemic paranoias, or peculiar (but tasty!) ironies, but I assure you I will address this funny business with steely focus when I return.

In the meantime, please enjoy the Washington Post’s parting shots at the Libby perjury case, and the novella written by juror #9 Denis Collins while he was supposedly paying attention to the testimony.

Cheers,

The “Divine Right” to Withhold

This one is for you, vinman.

In December 1989, one month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, President George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Malta and, in the words of a Soviet spokesman, “buried the cold war at the bottom of the Mediterranean.”

The Russian transcript of that momentous summit was published in Moscow in 1993. Fourteen years later American historians are still waiting for their own government to release a transcript.

Now lawmakers and scholars are hoping to pry open the gateway to such archival documents by lifting what they say has been a major obstacle to historical research: a directive issued by the current Bush White House in 2001 that has severely slowed or prevented the release of important presidential papers.

Interesting and predictable-at the same time!

Denis Collins, the most vocal juror in the Libby case (and former WaPo reporter, Bob Woodward associate, and neighbor of Tim Russert) gets to post his jury notes on HuffPost!

Woman Sues Doctor for Child-Rearing Costs After Failed Abortion

Woman sues her doctor for child-rearing costs after two failed abortion attempts. Her child is now two years old. Did she ever consider she could offer the unwanted baby for adoption?

Jennifer Raper, 45, last week in Suffolk Superior Court and still must be screened by a special panel before it can proceed to trial.

Raper claimed in the suit that she found out she was pregnant in March 2004 and decided to have an abortion for financial reasons, The Boston Globe reported in its Wednesday editions.

Read more

“It was therapeutic”

A US Airways flight to LA was diverted to Vegas after a security incident in LA. An Iraqi man named Al-Maliki (no, not the Prime Minister) was detained in security after tripping the wires.  Screeners found something quite interesting in the man’s, ahem, private parts.  They found a device which had a wire and what may have been a magnet concealed in his rectum, federal officials said.

The man submitted to testing and no explosives were found. The man “initially said it was (a) therapeutic” device, airport security said.

I’ll say.

Spontaneous suicide

Dead Russian reporter was investigating arms sales to Iran, Syria.   Another interesting death–this time, a jump from a balcony.

Amerika! The drama!

Oh, i bet the original Reagan Republicans loved this back when it was originally aired in 1987. Yes, that’s right, a 14-hour ABC miniseries portraying life in the tenth year of America’s occupation by the Soviet Union. YES: 14 hours of terrible accents, terrible dialogue, caricature “characters,” general ridiculousness, and…. Muriel Hemingway!

“Scooter” Libby is found Guilty

Read all about this sordid tale.

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