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The swashblogging Scaramouche has a look at USA Next and commits blatant journalism by back tracing the groups and people behind this effort.

He also has the ad up that USA Next intended to use to attack AARP.

You may be aware that the ad disappeared rather precipitously, which was explained as part of the plan by USA Next: the ad was designed to cause the liberals to overreact.

Except that Steve Gilliard reports that one of the individuals shown in the ad was annoyed by the use of his picture.

Apparently USA Next used a photograph of a gay wedding that was copyrighted by a newspaper, without permission.

The newspaper is unhappy; the people in the photo are unhappy; USA Next is in a bit of legal trouble.

This is an amateur mistake. You can do almost anything to politicians, but regular people have rights and crossing newspapers is a really bad idea.

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I’m beginning to think the White House does this as part of a concerted effort to destroy the computers of the educated in the US by having the owners spew whatever liquid they have in their mouths all over said computers when hearing the latest speech by Bush.

Today in Bratislava Bush told a crowd that Slovakia was the model for Iraq based on its transformation following the fall of the Soviet bloc.

I would wonder if anyone realizes that he has just said that Iraq should break up into separate countries based on ethnicity, because that’s what happened to the former country of Czechoslovakia following the Communist’s collapse in Eastern Europe.

One would assume that in an administration clogged with Cold-warriors at least one person might have been aware of this detail and mentioned it. Americans may not remember these annoying little facts, but the Europeans do, and now they are going to be wasting time trying to figure out if this signaled an American acceptance of the partition of Iraq.

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This CNN article may point to the reason a simple life form can live, for a given value of live, so long:New organism raises Mars questions.

It is about the discovery of bacteria in an Alaskan core sample that when brought to room temperature came back to life. The section of the sample being studied was 30,000 years old and consisted of permafrost.

If this bacteria can withstand being frozen for millennia, It is possible that the 16 million year old bacteria in the previous sample was only actually “alive” for a very short period of those years, going dormant when life wasn’t sustainable.

Some reptiles go dormant for extended periods in underground cells during drought, there’s a frog in Canada that is frozen during the winter, and we just went through the miracle/annoyance of the cicadas.

Given what we know about the extended dormant life of spores, this is a reasonable hypothesis, but study needs to be done.

[Edit: It would be nice to take a few years off and come back in September, 2008.]

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