It's morning somewhere

...But a lot's changed since timber companies clear-cut Louisiana's swamps. The state has lost 1,900 square miles of coast - an area the size of Delaware.

The reasons are many, and logging is among them...

The first one is DRAFT REPUBLICANS, and it is available from now through Tuesday, August 2. The second one is HE LIED TO START A WAR, IMPEACH HIM, and that one will be available from Friday, August 5 through Tuesday, August 9. The third one is JUST SAY NO TO MEN WHO AREN'T PRO-CHOICE, and that one will be available from Friday, August 12 through Tuesday, August 16. The fourth and last one is IF YOU VOTED FOR GEORGE BUSH, THANKS, YOU ASSHOLE, and that one will be available from Friday, August 19 through Tuesday, August 23.

DODDRIDGE, Ark. (AP) - A tour bus and a pickup truck collided Saturday on a highway in southwest Arkansas, injuring 31 people...
...The bus was carrying members of a church youth group that was returning to Baton Rouge, La., from a trip to Tulsa, Okla. Both drivers were flown to hospitals...

...This is no longer an issue of differing political opinions or philosophies. This is war, a fight for survival

In other words: No rules.

Bush, in my opinion, is criminally insane, a pill-popping dry drunk whose erratic behavior and reckless actions threaten world peace and the future of this nation far more than any Islam-spouting religious fanatic. He is an enemy of the state, a mood-swinging despot who threatens the very freedoms that form the foundation for this country. He has created a police state where basic American freedoms have vanished under an politically-exaggerated threat to national scrutiny, milked the human tragedy of 9/11 for his personal agenda and ripped the Constitution to shreds through the USA Patriot Act, a rights-robbing piece of legislation put together by his former attorney general, the bible-thumping John Ashcroft, an inept former Senator who couldn’t even win an election against a dead man...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Bad weather forced President Bush to cancel a trip Wednesday to the Boy Scouts' national jamboree where tens of thousands of youngsters have been saddened by the deaths of four of their leaders in a tragic accident...
...The White House said Bush would instead travel to the gathering on Thursday evening...
...At the last jamboree four years ago, Bush also canceled his appearance because of bad weather, in which lightning strikes caused minor injuries to two Scouts, and spoke to the group a day later via videotape...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The government is investigating a possible new case of mad cow disease but says there is no threat to the U.S. food supply...

...The animal died in April, but the veterinarian who removed the brain forgot to send in the sample until last week, Clifford said...

...The brain-wasting disease is known medically as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. In people, eating meat products contaminated with BSE is linked to about 150 deaths from a fatal disorder called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Most of the deaths were in the United Kingdom, where there was an outbreak in the 1980s and 1990s...

”We know for a fact that there are weapons there.”
Ari Fleischer
Press Briefing, Jan. 9, 2003

"We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”
Donald Rumsfeld ABC Interview,
March 30, 2003

”I'm not surprised if we begin to uncover the weapons program of Saddam Hussein -- because he had a weapons program.”
George W. Bush
Remarks to Reporters, May 6, 2003

”U.S. officials never expected that "we were going to open garages and find" weapons of mass destruction.”
Condoleeza Rice
Reuters Interview, May 12, 2003

”They may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer.”
Donald Rumsfeld
Remarks to Council on Foreign Relations, May 27, 2003

More than 500 inmates are currently being held at Guantanamo. Only four have been charged...
...protests in the prison facilities were already under way by late June.
...The lawyer said that they had been prompted by detainees' anger over the quality of their drinking water.
He said the protests had then expanded in scope and detainees had begun citing their indefinite detention and inhumane conditions as reasons for the protest.

PHOENIX (AP) - During a 2002 high school trip to the Canadian border, four students ended up facing deportation after immigration officials learned they had been brought into the United States illegally as toddlers.
On Thursday, U.S. Immigration Judge John Richardson threw out the deportation case, saying agents had questioned the Arizona students based on their Hispanic appearance...

It's 2006. Republicans sweep all major House and Senate races. Tampering with the electronic ballot boxes that count most of the nation's votes has become so obvious that nobody other than Republican stalwarts believe there was a fair vote. The left wing of the Democratic party is irate. Millions of outraged people swarm upon Washington D.C. and threaten to bring the government of the United States to a standstill. What to do, what to do?

The microwave energy penetrates a living tissue (such as human skin) to a depth of 0.5 millimeter and almost instantly produces a heating sensation that within seconds becomes intolerable and forces the subject to flee. The sensation immediately ceases when the individual moves out of the beam or when the beam is turned off.

Raed of Raed in the Middle has some very bad news. His brother Khalid of the blog Tell Me a Secret has been abducted by the new Iraqi mukhabarat.

We're all praying he'll be alright and that Allah/God gives his family the strength to make it through this.

Nid3eelek bil salameh wil rijoo3 ila il a7ibeh wil ahal wil 7'irooj min hathihi il mi7neh bi 7'air ya Khalid...

- posted by river @ 12:01 PM

The report concludes the following numbers in response to the question of "Who did the killing?"
• U.S.-led forces killed 37% of civilian victims.
• Anti-occupation forces/insurgents killed 9% of civilian victims.
• Post-invasion criminal violence accounted for 36% of all deaths.
I think these numbers are more than enough to shut the mouths of the war supporters who accuse Iraqis of targeting each other.

...He was 85...
...The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease, he said...

Today's Freedom Quote:
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" -- Isaac Asimov (through his character, Mayor Salvor Hardin from book 1, part III of the 'Foundation' trilogy, "The Mayors")

Hewlett-Packard is to lay off about one in ten of its workers as part of its long-awaited restructuring.
The US computer and IT giant said it planned to cut 14,500 jobs over the next 18 months in an attempt to save $1.9bn (£1.1bn) a year.
The announcement is the first major strategic move by its new boss, Mark Hurd...
...HP said it expected most of the jobs to be lost within support areas such as IT, finance and personnel...

..."Cost of the war": a cliché to normalize the carnage, like the anaesthetizing term "collateral damage" and that new semantic horror, "torture lite." And yet the "cost of the war" report, by now a hackneyed convention of American journalism, includes only American casualties -- no Iraqis -- itself a violation of the American mainstream media's own professed commitment to "objectivity." Three years of "anniversary" articles in the American media adding up the so-called "cost of the war" in Iraq have focused exclusively on Americans killed, American dollars spent, American hardware destroyed, with barely a mention of the Iraqi dead as part of that "cost."...

I was sick for three days-, listless and depressed. Then I barfed all over the Persian carpets, as is my habit when barfing in the house. Up came all these little wads of green stuff. You could bounce the rubbery little villians off the floor.

...Even so, we shouldn't get hung up on him or the other minor figures. In the end, this scandal is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which all others, Rove included, are at most secondary players...

It's unlikely that any White House officials considered that they were doing anything illegal in going after Joe Wilson. Indeed, the line between national security and politics had long since been all but erased by the Bush administration. In the months after 9/11, the Republican National Committee, a part of Rove's empire, had sent out a fund-raising letter that showed the president aboard Air Force One in the hours after the attack.

July 25 issue - Karl Rove is a hunter. His favorite quarry in Texas is quail; in Washington, it's foes of George W. Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rove was focused intently, with a touch of anger, on his prey...
...In the World According to Karl Rove, you take the offensive, and stay there. You create a narrative that glosses over complex, mitigating facts to divide the world into friends and enemies, light and darkness, good and bad, Bush versus Saddam....

Okay- alone amongst the progressive/liberal blogosphere, I'm going to have to break the sad news, to those sharks swimming around the recent "Rove-gate."

You've fallen into another distraction, here. Rove is laughing at us, and at you.

This is the Bush/Rove tactics at their most transparent.

I'm not diminishing the outing of Plame, in any way, in saying this. What Rove did was unconscionable, treasonous, and criminal- but ya know what?

This is the way Rove does things- notice that, in recent months, scandal after scandal has been pouring out of the republicans and the Bush bowl? First it was Tom Delay- then it was the Downing Street Memo- now, it's Rove.

They know how the american media works, and are well aware of how short the american attention span is. Yes- all the chickens are coming home to roost, and while we on the left enjoy seeing this happen, Rove and the Bush crime family are sitting back, and letting at all unfold- they know they'll never be called to account...
...

The city's utility department claimed Cook used 10 million gallons of water last month, charging her $29,787 for water, $43,581 for sewer, plus $893 for municipal tax.

...Former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts said Tuesday that "Karl Rove ought to be fired." With Kerry on Capitol Hill was Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y. a possible 2008 presidential contender, who indicated her agreement with Kerry's view.

"I'm nodding," she told reporters.

It was McClellan who provided the previous assurances about no role for Rove, but he refused to repeat those assurances Monday.

"Did Karl Rove commit a crime?" a reporter asked McClellan.

"This is a question relating to an ongoing investigation," McClellan replied.

McClellan gave the same answer when asked whether President Bush has confidence in Rove, the architect of the president's successful political campaigns...

...The pivotal role of Lewis Libby sets the stage for the impeachment or forced resignation of the Vice President. This, Lyndon LaRouche has emphasized, is a precondition for any effective U.S. government response to the onrushing global financial meltdown. The reason to force Cheney's resignation is not just the Plame leak, which emanated from his office; however, the involvement of Libby, along with other Cheney staffers, including John Hannah, in the orchestrated destruction of Wilson, Plame, and the Brewster Jennings proprietary, affords a sufficient cause for Cheney's impeachment.

Cheney's departure, and replacement by a qualified, experienced figure, such as several leading Republican Senators, would create the safe conditions for the removal of President George W. Bush, for the good of the nation...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Global estimates have routinely underestimated the true number of people killed in armed conflict, including during the war in Iraq, according to a report released Monday...

HAVANA (AP) - Fidel Castro's communist government, laboring to recover from widespread damage caused by Hurricane Dennis, turned down a U.S. offer of $50,000 in aid, American officials said Monday...
...During an appearance on state television Monday night, President Fidel Castro said Cuba would accept no American assistance while the U.S. trade embargo of more than 40 years remains in place...

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - North Korea said Monday it does not need nuclear weapons if it is not threatened by the United States, another sign of progress following Pyongyang's agreement over the weekend to return to disarmament talks...

Start a National Energy Race. Challenge the American people to come up with an alternative to fossil fuels the way Kennedy challenged the American people to fly to the moon. It took less than ten years from the start to the completion of that challenge. If the American people were challenged to come up with a clean energy solution, they could finish that challenge in less than ten years too.

It is easy for Blair to call yesterday's bombings "barbaric"' -- they were -- but what were the civilian deaths of the Anglo American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the children torn apart by cluster bombs, the innocent Iraqis gunned down at American military checkpoints. When they die, it is "collateral damage"; when "we" die it is "barbaric terrorism."

....So how hot does the water have to get? When the feds can rifle through your library reading list? When they can intimidate journalists? When a government agency can keep you off airplanes without giving you a reason? When there's not even a pretense of due process? We're not talking about prisoners at Guantanamo; this is you and me. Well, after last week, it sure as hell is me and it could be you, next....
...In all the press about identity theft, I find myself railing at having my identity as a patriot stolen--by my own government. This must not stand.

First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.

by Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945

BEIJING, July 8 -- American internet users are increasingly frustrated and frightened by spyware and viruses being secretly downloaded on their computers. The threat has caused more than nine of 10 users to alter their online behavior, according to a Pew Internet Project report...
...Some of the most risky online behaviors that seem to attract spyware are downloading peer-to-peer services and swapping files over them, visiting adult Web sites, and playing online games...
...The study's authors defined spyware as tracking software that is secretly placed on a computer. The programs can significantly slow a computer, route it to Web sites you don't want to visit or cause an annoying stream of ads to pop up...