It's morning somewhere

CROSS PLAINS, Texas (AP) -- By the time the smoke cleared Wednesday, more than 100 homes across wildfire-stricken Texas and Oklahoma lay in ruins and at least five people were dead, including two elderly women trapped in their homes by the flames.

The hardest-hit community during Tuesday's blazes was Cross Plains, a West Texas ranching and oil-and-gas town of 1,000 people some 150 miles from Dallas. Cross Plains also lost about 50 homes and a church after the flames raced through grass dried out by the region's worst drought in 50 years...

...Wind gusting to 40 mph drove the flames across nearly 20,000 acres in the two states. At least 73 blazes were reported in Texas over two days, and dozens more broke out in Oklahoma.

Fires were still smoldering Wednesday in four Texas counties. One new fire broke out Wednesday in an isolated area of eastern Oklahoma but was quickly contained.

Severe drought set the stage for the fires, which authorities believe were started mostly by people shooting off fireworks, tossing cigarettes or burning trash in spite of bans imposed because of the drought. A fallen power line apparently started one Oklahoma blaze...

Rush Limbaugh: "Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society." [The Rush Limbaugh Show, 8/12/05]

...An illegal, criminal war means that every related U.S. death and injury, every related Iraqi civilian death and injury, every person tortured, every home and building destroyed become war crimes as a result - under established international law.

There are those on talk radio or cable shows who scoff at international law. They rarely tell their audiences that the United States has played a key role in establishing these treaties, like the Geneva Conventions, and the United Nations Charter. When these treaties are agreed to by the U.S. government, they become as binding as our federal laws.

By these legal standards and by the requirements of the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, the war-declaring authority), George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are probably the most impeachable President and Vice President in American history. An illegal war based on lies, deceptions, cover-ups and their repetition even after being told by officials in their own administration - not to mention critical retired generals, diplomats and security specialists - of their falsity should have prodded the House of Representatives into initiating impeachment proceedings. But then, Bush did not lie under oath about sex...

...The crime, says Professor David Cole of Georgetown Law School, is "punishable by five years in prison." Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School said that the President ordered such a crime and ordered US officials to commit it..this is a serious felony..what happened here is not just a violation of Federal law, it's a violation of the U.S. Constitution.an impeachable offense."...

"I thought the Thomas More Law Center made a huge mistake in taking this case and in pushing this case to the extent they did," Santorum said Wednesday. He said he would end his affiliation with the center.

The leading Democratic challenger in Santorum's 2006 re-election battle, state Treasurer Robert P. Casey Jr., accused him of backtracking on intelligent design.

Casey spokesman Larry Smar said Wednesday that Santorum's statements were "yet another example of 'Election Year Rick' changing his positions for political expediency." Casey has led Santorum in recent polls.

Large demonstrations broke out across the country Friday to denounce parliamentary elections that protesters say were rigged in favor of the main religious Shiite coalition.

Symantec, Norton, McAfee AV flawed...THERE ARE holes in the libraries of anti-virus products from Symantec, and Norton which could be used to gain control of an infected machine....

...AntiVirus Library’s job is to detect malware by looking at a number of files in different formats. ...

...If the virus writer knows what they are doing, they can remotely control the library to gain complete control over the affected system. ...

...Symantec said the flaw affects AntiVirus Corporate Editon, Brightmail Anti-Spam; Client Security; Gateway Security; Norton AntiVirus; Norton Antivirus for Macintosh; Norton AntiVirus for Microsoft Exchange; and Norton Internet Security...

PITTSBURGH (AP) -- Nearly 5,000 people who got inoculations to ward off hepatitis will be each mailed checks for $162.23 next month from the bankrupt restaurant chain tied to a food-poisoning outbreak two years ago.

Chi-Chi's Inc. will pay $800,000 to those who had to get shots because they ate at a western Pennsylvania restaurant during the outbreak or because they were closely related to someone who got sick.

More than 600 people were sickened, and four eventually died, from eating at the Chi-Chi's in the Beaver Valley Mall. The settlement doesn't cover those who sued for other medical damages or death...

WASHINGTON Calling Bush a president and not a king, Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold says Bush overstepped his authority when he approved spying on suspected terrorists without court orders.

Feingold said, "He is a president, not a king." Feingold later said, "The issue here is whether the president of the United States is putting himself above the law, and I believe he has done so."

...However, there is one aspect of it that I haven't seen addressed, and that is the discrepancy between the level of anti-terrorism commitment the Administration pretends to have, vs. the level of commitment they've actually demonstrated thus far...
...For me, it begs the question: Is preventing terror attacks the end which justifies the means of violating individual rights, or are those violations an end unto themselves?

WASHINGTON – The Army met its recruiting goal for November by again accepting a high percentage of recruits who scored in the lowest category on the military’s aptitude tests, Pentagon officials said Thursday, raising renewed concerns that the quality of the all-volunteer force will suffer.
The Army exceeded its 5,600 recruit goal by 256 for November, while the Army Reserve brought in 1,454 recruits, exceeding its target by 112. To do so, they accepted a “double digit” percentage of recruits who scored between 16 and 30 out of a possible 99 on the military’s aptitude test, said officials who requested anonymity...

...“The documents tell me that military intelligence is back conducting investigations and maintaining records on civilian political activity. The military made promises that it would not do this again,” he says...
...Since March 2004, CIFA has awarded at least $33 million in contracts to corporate giants Lockheed Martin, Unisys Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation and Northrop Grumman to develop databases that comb through classified and unclassified government data, commercial information and Internet chatter to help sniff out terrorists, saboteurs and spies...
...One of the CIFA-funded database projects being developed by Northrop Grumman and dubbed “Person Search,” is designed “to provide comprehensive information about people of interest.” It will include the ability to search government as well as commercial databases. Another project, “The Insider Threat Initiative,” intends to “develop systems able to detect, mitigate and investigate insider threats,” as well as the ability to “identify and document normal and abnormal activities and ‘behaviors,’” according to the Computer Sciences Corp. contract...

WASHINGTON - The world has shirked its duty to help prosecute Saddam Hussein, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday. "The international community's effective boycott of Saddam's trial is only harming the Iraqi people, who are now working to secure the hope of justice and freedom that Saddam long denied them," Rice said...

There are a lot of men out there who really hate women. I mean really, really hate them - want them suffering and/or dead hate them As with a certain class of racist, they prefer to blame every woman for any slight - real or imagined - done to them throughout the entirety of their lives. I have been appalled lately by the tone and tenor of rhetoric flying around especially as regards the subject of rape.

I posted on this issue - here, and at a variety of other web sites, most of whom were either discussing the Oregon Case, or the anniversary of the Canadian Massacre. You would think that, universally, rape would be considered wrong - along with all violence against women. Well - evidently that's not the case. Many men went beyond mere paternalistic chiding that we woman were too `fixated' on the subject; I read posts overflowing with name-calling, venom spewing gender specific hatred; some of the comments tipping the scale so far into the red, alarms went off.

BREWSTER, Mass. (AP) -- More than two dozen whales and dolphins became stranded on the shores of Cape Cod Bay last week, and experts say the snowstorm may have contributed to their deaths.

In all, at least nine pilot whales and 24 dolphins died. Five of the whales and seven of the dolphins had to be euthanized, while the rest were found dead, according to Kristen Patchett of the Cape Cod Stranding Network, a group that works to free stranded animals...

Twelve people were arrested during a riot at Cronulla beach of Sydney, Australia's largest city, on Sunday in which mobs attacked people of Middle Eastern appearance.

Earlier in the day, thousands of people gathered at the beach in response to calls to retaliate for the bashing of two lifeguards a week ago, according to Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) radio...

...Meanwhile, NSW Ambulance Service said one of its vehicles, which had been transporting six injured people, was attacked.

One ambulance officer was hit over the head with a glass bottle and another on board received lacerations...

BEIJING (AP) - Armed with guns and shields, hundreds of riot police sealed off a southern Chinese village after fatally shooting as many as 10 demonstrators and were searching for the protest organizers, villagers said yesterday.

It was the deadliest known use of force by security forces against Chinese civilians since the killings around Tiananmen Square in 1989 and marked an escalation in the social protests that have convulsed the Chinese countryside.

During the demonstration Tuesday in Dongzhou, a village in southern Guangdong province, thousands of people gathered to protest the amount of money offered by the government as compensation for land to be used to construct a wind power plant.

...Swiss-based environmental group WWF said on Monday its researchers photographed the strange animal, which looks like a cross between a cat and a fox, in the dense, central mountainous rainforests of Borneo...
...Researchers hope to confirm the discovery by setting cage traps to catch a live specimen, but warn that Indonesian government plans to clear the rainforest to create the world's largest palm oil plantation may interfere with plans, WWF said...

...Any CEO of a corporation who screwed up as many things as George W. Bush would have been fired by its board of directors...

...Earlier this year, Terri Schiavo lay in a permanent coma connected to a feeding tube. Her husband said she would have wanted that tube removed. But Republican members of Congress passed a resolution to maintain the tube, causing Bush to fly from his ranch in Texas to Washington to sign that legislation. As his pen was poised to sign the document, Bush said, "If there is an error in this matter, it is best to err on the side of life." Why didn't Bush make that same judgment in early 2003 when millions of Americans protested against a possible invasion of Iraq, as did many foreign leaders? Bush had no qualms about killing and wounding thousands of soldiers and innocent civilians. In view of his miserable record, his arrogant lack of good judgment and his failure to understand the gravity of his record, President Bush (and Vice President Dick Cheney) should be shown the exit door with a proviso to never darken the Oval Office again. That should be exit strategy No. 1!...

STATELINE, Nev. (AP) -- A shootout across a high-stakes players lounge in Harrah's Tahoe casino killed one man, injured two sheriff's deputies and sent gamblers running for the doors Saturday afternoon, authorities and witnesses said.

No one else was in the lounge, just off the main casino, at the time, Harrah's spokesman John Packer said.

Investigators were still trying to determine who fired first and what led to the confrontation. They were questioning a woman believed to have been with the suspect, a man described as about 50 who died at the casino...

...Austin, Texas -- The Lord Impersonator is back again. This fella reappears every couple of years and causes no end of trouble. The jokester goes around persuading feeble-minded persons he is the Lord Almighty and that they are to do or say some perfectly idiotic thing under his instructions...
...I kind of doubt Katrina was designed by the Lord as a form of urban renewal. I think it's a big mistake for us to go around putting our own puny interpretations on stuff that happens and then claiming the Lord meant thus-and-such by it. It is my humble opinion that some folks should do a lot more listening to God and a lot less talking for Him...
...Some Christians seem to me inclined to lose track of love, compassion and mercy. I don't think I have any special brief to go around judging them, but when the stink of hypocrisy becomes so foul in the nostrils it makes you start to puke it becomes necessary to point out there is one more good reason to observe the separation of church and state: If God keeps hanging out with politicians, it's gonna hurt his reputation...
...I'm afraid one actually has to allow for the denial and self-delusion that make it possible for people to be both self-righteous and sleazy at the same time. We are all capable of fooling ourselves in a grand variety of ways...

..."I can't understand why it's all right to corrupt an election when you're investigating corruption in elections," Campbell said Friday...

...As Faber observed, vote-buying has long been suspected in the region. Even John F. Kennedy's 1960 campaign allegedly supplied cash to Logan County's political bosses to help him win the West Virginia primary...

"I don't think I'll be sending the sheriff out to bring the president in," said Strother, a Republican who has a grandson serving in Iraq. "It seems to me that the president has plenty of things to occupy his attention. Jury duty is a very important civic function, but running the country, I think, especially in wartime, takes priority over jury service."