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Mouse Burns House story false!

According to the homeowner, the mouse was dead when he threw it on the fire, which he shouldn’t have started because of the high winds.

It is assumed that the wind blew sparks into the house, causing it to burn.

Update: Len at Dark Bilious Vapors was properly skeptical.

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Excerpt from the White House of the Shrubbery’s VFW speech today:

As veterans and soon to be veterans, you have placed the nation’s security before your own lives. You took an oath to defend our flag and our freedom, and you kept that oath underseas [sic] and under fire. (Applause.) All of us who live in liberty live in your debt, and we must never forget the sacrifice and the service of our veterans.

Apparently his mind rejected the oath that you take when you enter the military – you take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not the flag. He seems to have a personal problem with the Constitution, almost as if he is rejecting its existence in his alternate universe.

Don’t ask me why he said “underseas”, I assume he was just mumbling again or the reception on his earpiece was bad.

I have nothing against the flag, but it is a battle signal, not an object of adoration. It’s a violation of the Flag Code to put it on uniforms, but they do it anyway, and he signs small flags with a marker, which is also a violation. I certainly never took an oath to defend the flag for the military, law enforcement, or public service: all three were to support and defend the Constitution. The Shrubbery and the country would be better off if he stopped waving the flag and started reading the Constitution.

Trick Flag Question: how many stripes on THE Star Spangled Banner, the flag that Francis Scott Key wrote about in the poem.

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Since people seem interested and no one bothers to check the “Internets”, “Dick” Cheney has gout, the disease of a lot of over-indulgent rich guys.

Why this is so secret that his press office doesn’t just tell people says more about the paranoia of Cheney’s people than the seriousness of the ailment. It is painful and some of the medications cause fluid retention, a side effect that he should have been made aware of before he was given the prescription.

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Stuck inside a funding package for the Department of Justice is a new law making it a felony to be anonymously annoying on the Internet. It was supposed to address Cyberstalking but it is so badly written that someone is going to have to drag this thing through the courts so it can be thrown out as unconstitutional.

Anonymously Annoying describes most of the news groups on Usenet. If P. Lapin can’t attack Muffy, International Kitten of Mystery, over Easter customs, what’s the point? [rec.org.mensa] People who complain about spam have never been part of a full-bore flame war.

Given the way this law was passed, Congress had better have given itself an exemption, because the law is definitely annoying, and it certainly was enacted in an anonymous fashion.

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The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that Jill Carroll, a freelance writer currently on assignment in Iraq has been kidnapped and her translator killed.

As the Pensacola Beach Blog noted, the media in the US were about the only people who honored the request not to announce her name while negotiations for her release were initiated.

I would assume that the request to withhold her name was to ensure that those who were going to negotiate could eliminate false claims and deal only with those who could supply them with her name.

Unfortunately, the media doesn’t always think beyond scoops, and the negotiators don’t provide reasons for their requests. This has been going on for a while, the kidnapping of journalists, and you would think that a procedure would have been established.

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