Questions For Those Still Approving of Bush - "And, with so many people in my own Nebraska-based family among those still blindly supporting the president, I've come up with more questions. But this time, my inquiries are serious and meant to truly gauge whether Bush backers understand reality and knowledgably support him or whether the president has just been phenomenally successful at superimposing his face over the American flag. Here we go:"
http://bobgeiger.blogspot.com/2005/12/questions-for-those-still-approving-of.htmlEyewitness: "I Never Heard the Word 'Bomb'" - ""I don't think they needed to use deadly force with the guy," says John McAlhany, a 44-year-old construction worker from Sebastian, Fla. "He was getting off the plane." McAlhany also maintains that Alpizar never mentioned having a bomb."
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1138965,00.htmlAir Marshals lied about slain Latino passenger saying "I have a bomb" - "It now appears that Air Marshals lied about a mentally ill Latino passenger saying "I have a bomb" just before they shot him at the Miami International Airport yesterday. The fact is Air Marshals over-reacted when dealing with a Middle Eastern looking passenger who was experiencing a "fear of flying" panic attack."
http://www.aztlan.net/air_marshals_shoot_latino_passenger.htmWaking Up in Bizzaro America - " Someday in the near future, millions of American are going to wake up in the morning only to discover that somebody slipped a whole different country under their beds while they were asleep. ... Welcome to Bizzaro America, where citizens are deprived of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. The government can lock them up and seize their assets based on suspicion alone without ever charging them with a crime. Homes are broken into without the owner’s knowledge and searched for evidence of misdeeds that never see the inside of a courtroom. Wars are started, countries are occupied, prisoners of war are tortured, and the proud citizens of Bizzaro America say nothing. Democratically elected leaders and unhindered voting rights don’t exist here. Bizzaro Americans hold “elauctions” instead of elections. As a formality, they still go through the motions of casting ballots, but the corporations that sponsor the elauctions predetermine the outcome. Americans accustomed to having separation of church and state learn to embrace creationism being taught in their science classes. The President decrees that televangilists are the only Bizzarolanders qualified to appoint the country’s Supreme Court Justices."
http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/Commentary/1052.htmlRice with Indefensible Brief; Cheney in Last Throes - "European reaction to visiting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's statements on torture can be summed up in lead commentary Wednesday in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, among the most widely respected German newspapers. Under the title "Justice à la Rice," the editor "translated" her message into these words: "The end justifies the means and terrorism can be fought with borderline methods on the outer edges of legality." He added: "Rice came to Germany to begin a new era. She has resoundingly failed to do so. Injustice remains injustice, and a wrong policy remains a wrong policy. On this basis you cannot re-launch the trans-Atlantic relationship." There was no mushroom cloud, but Rice is radioactive nonetheless. ... Vice President Dick Cheney, whose unbridled chutzpah has led him to take public and well as private credit for being the intellectual author of US policy on torture, has become such a glaring liability that his tenure may be short-lived. There is a growing possibility that the vice president will resign at the turn of the year "for reasons of health," and that his partner-in-crime - in what Colin Powell's former chief of staff at the State Department, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, has labeled the "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" - will choose to retire to his home in Taos early next year."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120905Z.shtmlRummy exit rumored; Lieberman eyed for job - "White House officials are telling associates they expect Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to quit early next year, once a new government is formed in Iraq, sources said yesterday."
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/372921p-316984c.htmlRumsfeld says 'I have no plans to retire' - "U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the craftsman of U.S. Iraq war strategy and a magnet for criticism, said on Thursday he had no plans to retire from the post more than 2-1/2 years into the conflict."
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyid=2005-12-08T183309Z_01_RID866679_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ-USA-RUMSFELD.xml&rpc=22That End-Of-Empire Feeling - "Is the United States in the last throes of empire? That sounds like an ideologically loaded, fatalistic and defeatist question. But it’s what I’ve been wondering about at the start of this holiday season. Might future historians look back at the Bush II days and ask if this was the point when the country started slipping? Might the war in Iraq be regarded as a desperate act of a superpower that had already peaked? Will economists of the latter 21st century examine our economic decisions and say, “What were they thinking?” Or has the Grinch gotten to me?"
http://www.guerrillanews.com/headlines/6468/That_End_Of_Empire_FeelingMilitary Will Request $100B For Iraq Next Year, Murtha Reveals - "MURTHA: Twenty years it’s going to take to settle this thing. The American people is not going to put up with it; can’t afford it. We have spent $277 billion. That’s what’s been appropriated for this operation. We have $50 billion sitting on the table right now in our supplemental, or bridge fund we call it, in the Appropriations Committee. They’re going to ask for another $100 billion next year."
http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/07/murtha-100b/The War in Iraq Costs - "Below is a running total of the U.S. taxpayer cost of the Iraq War."
http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182"Christ" or Christmas? WWJD? - " I fail to understand why these same Bible totin’, Bible quotin’ people won’t stop for a minute to consider their demands for Christmas to be put back into the season when the bigger picture seems so lost on them. They keep making these religious demands for Christianity to be taught as science in the guise of Intelligent Design, for religious documents to be displayed in public buildings and for other blatantly Christian symbols to be part of everything from city seals to courthouses. Do they for one minute think that by doing this, that society will suddenly experience mass conversion to Christianity, thereby becoming upstanding and moral in the way they imagine? Have any of them ever opened their Bibles to see what hypocrites and Pharisees they have become? I may be a Unitarian Universalist now, but I was raised Roman Catholic, know the Bible and I see first hand that the message of the Christ has been lost on far too many who claim to be so-called “Christians”."
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1207-35.htmWhat flight? - ""The New White Flight" was the title of an eye-opening article in the November 20th issue of the Wall Street Journal. It was about a high school in Cupertino, California, where a growing Asian American student population is causing rising academic standards -- and causing many white parents to withdraw their children from the school and some to move out of the community. The school has some of the highest test scores in the state. But, although everybody is in favor of high academic standards in the abstract, not everyone is in favor of having to struggle to meet those standards."
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/thomassowell/2005/11/24/%20176688.htmlProf. Critical of Creationism Resigns Post - "A University of Kansas professor who drew criticism for e-mails he wrote deriding Christian fundamentalists over creationism resigned Wednesday as chairman of the Department of Religious Studies."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051208/ap_on_re_us/creationism_professorBCS draws fire in Congress - "Wednesday's congressional hearing on the state of the Bowl Championship Series turned into a question-and-answer session about why Division I-A football does not have a postseason tournament to decide its champion."
-- Who gives a shit? Doesn't congress have more important issues to worry about?http://www.ajc.com/sports/content/sports/1205/08bcs.htmlForeclosures up 35 percent this year - "Home mortgage foreclosure filings are on the rise in gritty cities and leafy suburbs, according to a new report showing a 35 percent increase statewide through October."
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/12/07/foreclosures_up_35_percent_this_year/Former condom advocate embraces abstinence & fidelity - "A senior research scientist with the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies once advocated the use of condoms and clean needles for the prevention of the spread of HIV/AIDS. Now, after evaluating the ABC Model of AIDS prevention championed in Uganda, Edward Green says promoting the values of fidelity and abstinence is far more effective than just promoting correct condom use."
http://www.sbcbaptistpress.org/bpnews.asp?ID=22228Cancer drug may help short boys be taller - "The drug tamoxifen, usually used to treat or prevent breast cancer, may help short boys attain a normal adult height, researchers report."
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=healthNews&storyid=2005-12-08T192225Z_01_HAR869719_RTRUKOC_0_US-CANCER-TALLER.xml&rpc=22Big brain means small testes, finds bat study - "The brainier male bats are, the smaller their testicles, according to a new study. Researchers suggest the correlation exists because both organs require a lot of energy to grow and maintain, leading individual species to find the optimum balance."
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8429Why this brain flies on rat cunning - "It sounds like science fiction: a brain nurtured in a Petri dish learns to pilot a fighter plane as scientists develop a new breed of "living" computer. But in groundbreaking experiments in a Florida laboratory that is exactly what is happening. The "brain", grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a single rat embryo, has been taught to fly an F-22 jet simulator by scientists at the University of Florida."
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/12/06/1102182227308.html?ratsU.S. Life Expectancy Hits All-Time High - "U.S. life expectancy has hit another all-time high - 77.6 years - and deaths from heart disease, cancer and stroke continue to drop, the government reported Thursday."
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20051208/D8EC84700.htmlCameras accuse 2,600 of speeding - "Nestor Traffic Systems photographed more than 2,600 alleged speeders this fall -- snapping as many as seven cars a minute -- in and around Akron school zones. The take in fines in that 19-day period: nearly half a million dollars."
http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/news/13347408.htmUser tries to extract meth from own urine - "A 22-year-old tried to extract methamphetamine from his own urine after smoking the drug in a South San Francisco hotel room, prosecutors said. Instead, Daniel Zeiszler spilled some solvent on himself, took a smoke break and ignited his right hand, arm - and the hotel room."
-- A candidate for the Darwin award.http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2005/12/04/build/nation/98-meth-urine.incSanta tops fictional rich list - "SANTA Claus has topped the the Forbes Fictional 15 - a list of the world's richest fictional characters."
-- Why do we need this information?http://finance.news.com.au/story/0,10166,17501578-31037,00.html
Quote of the Day"I believe God wants me to be President."
~ George W. Bush
