Category — Uncategorized

Today marks Osama bin Laden’s fiftieth birthday and the 2000^th day since the Shrubbery declared he would get Osama “dead or alive.”

Why isn’t Osama in a supermax?

Alleged “D.C. Madam” Pleads Not Guilty and raised the fear factor inside the Beltway:

A former escort service owner who has threatened to sell a list of 15,000 phone numbers from her client list to help her defense pleaded not guilty Friday to racketeering.

Dick Morris has already said he’s on the list, so the names could be interesting, especially to DC area divorce lawyers.

The Anchorage Daily News, with the help from local village school kids posting on their web sites reports that four-time champion Martin Buser was first to the Yukon River.

A lack of snow, single digit day time temperatures, and strong winds are the environmental factors for the rest of the race.

With his Defense Department, Department of Veterans Affair, and Justice Department neck-deep in guano, the Shrubbery has decided to see if he can find his daughter’s cell phone, or annoy everyone living south of the US, or check on the extradition treaties, or something.

He was in Brazil to promote the burning of the Amazon basin so wealthy people can create more sugar cane fields and produce ethanol in a agricultural and commercial process that creates as much green house gas as the petroleum industry. Of course, to work, American corn farmers are going to get screwed, but what does he care.

He told the assembled masses that weren’t recovering from tear gas used in the demonstrations against him that he had doubled aid to South America from $800 million to $1.6 billion during his reign, but he neglected to mention that the $800 million was half of what was allocated before he came into office and slashed it. He assumes that everyone is like his base and the media, who don’t bother to fact check anything.

I hope nothing happens to him – we have invaded more than enough countries.

Karen of Peripetia reports on their attempts to develop a an airborne force. I think they should have developed parachutes first.

A chemical company has had its application rejected to name a new rat poison after the head of the food and drug administration who resigned when he was charged with corruption. The head of the trademark office felt it was inappropriate because the official hasn’t been convicted of anything…yet.

Oh, this happened in China. Nothing like this could happen in the US – right?

The good news for Lance Mackey is that he won $3000 in gold nuggets by being first to halfway point, the old mining town of Iditarod that gives the race its name. The best news was that the missing musher has been found well off the trail, but safe and still moving towards the next checkpoint.

Overall conditions on the trail have taken a heavy toll, with fourteen mushers out due to injuries or broken sleds. Not much snow, bitter cold, and high winds are making the race miserable for humans and dogs.

Let’s see, in addition to losing money in the stock market, Barack Obama received parking tickets while in college, and HE DIDN’T PAY THEM BEFORE HE LEFT TOWN AFTER GRADUATION!!!!

GOOOOOLLEEE!  I have never heard of such a thing, well, except for the huge pile of unpaid tickets that every city or town that with a college in it has.

Do the people who write these stories have any idea how stupid they appear to the rest of the world?

Today on the Daily Kitten they are featuring Madeleine, the Maine coon kitten of four legs good at Plush Life.

Maddie has pretty much taken over Plush Life, which is understandable once you see her.

I am not a disinterested party in this matter, and this is a rant about the nullification of the Emancipation Proclamation by high-tech companies with H-1B visas.

CNet reports: Gates calls for ‘infinite’ H-1Bs, better schools.

When asked by Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) how many visas Congress should approve, Gates repeated a suggestion he made years ago: that there should be an “infinite” number. “Even though it might not be realistic,” he said, “I don’t think there should be any limit.”

Gregg said he “agreed 100 percent” that there shouldn’t be a limit on the number of highly skilled people in the country, but he suggested Congress might not be able to do more than double the quota.

Support for bumping up the number of visas is hardly universal. Advocacy groups representing American computer programmers and scientists, such as the Programmers Guild, have fiercely resisted the idea. They argue that companies like Microsoft have not been making a good-faith effort to recruit qualified Americans and that the current structure of the H-1B program allows American companies to hire foreign workers at lower pay rates than American counterparts.

If you are foolish enough to remain loyal to a company long enough you will approach the $100K salary level and feel like you should be able to take a vacation occasionally, and not work more than 50 hours a week. You will be laid off and replaced with a couple of H-1Bs who are nominally working on a different project in a different part of the company. This is only in the case of core business products that are too critical to be outsourced.

There will be no effort to hire American, merely a statement by the company that no one applied for the positions which means they must have the indentured servitude of an H-1B visa holder who can be dumped without risk. While the government keeps saying there are jobs in the IT sector, they never look at the number of under- and unemployed programmers, especially over the age of forty.

Any member of Congress who is tempted to vote for anything based on the testimony of Bill Gates should read a Microsoft warranty¹. After reading that piece of legal prose and having it parsed to explain exactly what it says, the member of Congress should be able to understand how trustworthy Bill Gates isn’t.

1. Microsoft only guarantees the quality of the media [CD-ROM or DVD] that their products are shipped on. They don’t guarantee that anything will be on the media, and if there is something on the media, they don’t guarantee that it will do anything. If the media is defective, they’ll replace it.

The Anchorage Daily News reports on the Stormy fortunes. Ten mushers are out, and some still going are banged up:

Bryan Mills of Merengo, Wisc., did, however, decide to play cowboy after he broke the tibia — the small bone — in his left leg.

“If I lived in Alaska, then I would scratch,” Mills said. “(But) I didn’t come all the way from Wisconsin to scratch.”

“There was a root sticking up and it banged the outside of my leg,” Mills said. “I heard a snap and thought the sled was broken. Then everything went numb in my leg. It was the scariest moment of my life.”

Stan Watkins III, a heart doctor in Anchorage who was here to watch the race, advised the 42-year-old to scratch, but Mills refused.

“This is what the Iditarod’s all about,” he said.

Dr. Cole, in response to the confusion by many pundits as to what the Libby trial was about, provides a short presentation: Libby’s Lies, Cheney’s Lies.

Anticipating the problems some people seem to have with reading comprehension, he provides pictures.

The United States has no real idea what Iran is actually doing because the current White House destroyed our best source of human intelligence on WMD operations in Iran when it exposed Valery Plame and her network. It is highly likely that people were killed or imprisoned when it became known they were working with or for the CIA front company that Ms. Plame managed. The US ability to gather intelligence was seriously degraded by what Libby, Rove, and Cheney [at a minimum] did. The national security of the United States was put at risk to prevent the people of the United States from learning that the White House was distorting intelligence to justify the decision to go to war with Iraq.

I’ve seen this around the neighborhood, so I’ll post the link.

From The News Hole, the blog of Countdown – SHOCK: DRUDGE TAKES CLIP OUT OF CONTEXT! DEVELOPING…:

The audio clip Drudge used is out of context. Not included in his version is Hillary’s set up, which leads into her quoting from a well-known hymn by famed gospel composer Reverend James Cleveland.

The congregation immediately recognized the hymn and cheered her.

And she only affected that accent when citing that one refrain from the Cleveland hymn, a Baptist church standard.

The audio clip on Drudge is also somewhat altered – whether deliberately or because it is a dub – from the real-time version we have.

I’m not a fan of Mrs. Clinton, but nobody needs to put up with this kind of crap. There are substantial issues to argue about without dealing with the stupid. They have a longer clip so you can judge for yourself.

DeeDee Jonrowe second to scratch Iditarod 35.

Ms. Jonrowe is a cancer survivor who has been at the front multiple times, including runner-up twice. She took a spill and broke at least one bone in her hand.

The hand injuries are a major problem because it is nearly impossible to change the boots on the dogs with only one good hand.