| "Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast" -Oscar Wilde |
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"The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself." -- Proverbs 11:25 |
Oldies radio is dead in New York City.
After more than three decades as the top oldies station in the country, WCBS-FM (101.1 FM) abruptly scrapped its format yesterday for a concept called Jack.
As Frank Sinatra's "Summer Wind" trailed off at 5 p.m., a voice intoned: "Why don't we play what we want? There's a whole world of songs out there."
The first song under the new format was the Beastie Boys' "Fight for Your Right." Soon after, CBS played Bruce Springsteen's "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" and James Brown's "I Got You (I Feel Good)."
The station had been home to some of the most famous names of New York radio, including Cousin Bruce Morrow, Harry Harrison, Dan Ingram and Ron Lundy, many of whom shifted from WABC-AM when it went from music to talk.
"I've expected something like this," Morrow said yesterday. "They have every right to try what they want to try. My audience won't be without me for long."
The move stunned longtime listeners.
Curvy women are more likely to live longer than their slimmer counterparts, researchers have found.
Institute of Preventative Medicine in Copenhagen researchers found those with wider hips also appeared to be protected against heart conditions.
Women with a hip measurement smaller than 40 inches, or a size 14 would not have this protection, they said.
The researchers say hip fat contains a beneficial natural anti-inflammatory.
Now, we read that Mark Felt's family and Mark Felt put out their story solely to make money off it. So, this makes the family's karma even more unnerving. The father, patriarch, Mark, took out his anger and frustration for being passed over at the FBI, by ruining the career of the peacemaker, Richard Nixon. So, he condemned a whole subcontinent to genocide and slavery and poverty to please his own wounded vanity. (Maybe his nickname should be "sour grapes" and not "deep throat" because he has as much in common with that fox as with a porn star.) And, blood will tell, as the old saying goes: his posterity is now dragging out his old body and putting it on display to make money. (Have you noticed how Mark Felt looks like one of those old Nazi war criminals they find in Bolivia or Paraguay? That same, haunted, hunted look combined with a glee at what he has managed to get away with so far?)










Good Counsel is a family for those in need, serving God who is the Father of the orphan, defender of the widow, and who gives the lonely a home to live in (Psalm 68). Our Lord’s call to serve the disadvantaged compels us to advocate on behalf of single mothers and their children and to offer love, shelter, and the opportunity to grow in self-respect and independence. We invoke the patronage of Mary, the Lady of Good Counsel, to help us protect mothers in need and to love their children from the moment of conception.
Amember of my church gave to me a copy of the Ohio Restoration Project. This project is led by so-called Christians who have a plan for Ohio. The project will target 2,000 pastors throughout the state to become "patriot pastors." These patriot pastors will be briefed on a specific political agenda and asked to submit names of their parishioners in order to increase a database to 300,000 names. These pastors will be asked to place voter guides in their church pews.
Ken Blackwell, Ohio's secretary of state and a governor hopeful, is named throughout the document. Blackwell will be featured on 30-second radio ads promoting this group's agenda and supporting the "Ohio for Jesus" rally set for the spring of 2006. At the end of the document are the words, "America has a mission to share a living savior with a dying world."
This is not America's mission. This is frightening, diabolical stuff for non-Christians and Christians alike. It is blasphemous to claim that any earthly kingdom is God's kingdom. The theological foundations of this movement are vacuous. They are set on the sands of opportunism, self-righteousness and greed.
He just wanted his colleagues in the government's legislative arm to discuss the possibility of conducting a study into the feasibility of reversing the ban on women drivers — the only prohibition of its kind in the world.
But Consultative Council member Mohammad al-Zulfa's proposal has unleashed a storm in this conservative country where the subject of women drivers remains taboo.
Al-Zulfa's cell phone now constantly rings with furious Saudis accusing him of encouraging women to commit the double sins of discarding their veils and mixing with men. He gets phone text messages calling on Allah to freeze his blood. Chat rooms bristle with insulting accusations that al-Zulfa is "driven by carnal instincts with 454 horsepower."
There even have been calls to kick al-Zulfa from the council and strip him of his Saudi nationality.
The uproar may be astounding to outsiders. But in Saudi Arabia, where the religious establishment has the upper hand in defining women's freedoms, the issue touches on the kingdom's strict Islamic lifestyle.
Conservatives, who believe women should be shielded from strange men, say driving will allow a woman to leave home whenever she pleases and go wherever she wishes. Some say it will present her with opportunities to violate Islamic law, such as exposing her eyes while driving or interacting with strange men, like police officers or mechanics.
"Driving by women leads to evil," Munir al-Shahrani wrote in a letter to the editor of the Al-Watan daily. "Can you imagine what it will be like if her car broke down? She would have to seek help from men."
As of November 3, the statewide vote margin on Amendment 4 never exceeded 10,000 – ranging from a 6,500-vote edge against allowing slots in South Florida to a margin of 10,000 or so more citizens voting against slot machines.
The amendment looked headed to a razor-thin defeat. Not only that, the 0.1% total state margin would have required a recount of the vote tallies for the constitutional Amendment. (Anything less than 0.5%.) So the vote was 50-50 with 99% of the votes counted, a squeaker.
But a week later, the Amendment was ahead by 93,000 votes. How so?
Well, Broward County found 78,000 absentee votes that had not been counted (absentee votes in Broward are opti-scanned; only the in-precinct Election Day votes are touchscreen). The vendor for Broward is ES&S. Part of the problem was that the ES&S tabulator model used for absentees in Broward could not breach its limit of 32,000 votes without generating a massive numerical error, a newly discovered "counting-backward glitch" (that affected also some North Carolina counties and God knows where else, and that ES&S now has to fix and reprogram for future elections).
Amazingly, in this 50-50 election a miraculous 74,000 of 78,000 new Broward absentee voters voted "Yes" on slot machines. So most voters in the state were split right down the middle, but 95% of the newfound absentee voters were strongly in favor of betting.
Truly, a miracle for betting afficionados and the state Dept. of Education which wanted a dedicated share of the gambling revenues.
Now who was suspicious of these new counts? Well, Paul Seago, executive director of Orlando-based No Casinos, Inc. Also, state rep Randy Johnson (R-Celebration) who was chairman of No Casinos. They maintained doubts about the final approval margin, 119,000 votes, for the pro-slots measure.
[snip]
Johnson checked with statistical experts and he came away believing the disparate vote pattern could not have strayed so far from 50-50 merely by chance, that it would be a 1-in-a-million possibility.
The second aberration was Pinellas County, where a 17,000 vote reversal was recorded and sent off to Tallahassee for final inclusion and certification. The flipped vote-margin remains in the state certified count to this day, even though all parties acknowledge the error. [Translation – Glenda Hood leaned on "regulations" and "deadlines" to forbid the correction of the state number.] The error was not by machine so much as by a paper and pencil reversal by a worker. Staff of Elections supervisor Deborah Clark, a Jeb Bush appointee, learned of the flip on November 4, but 8 days later Clark still sent Tallahassee the wrong results (supposedly approved by 17,000 Pinellas voters instead of rejected by a 17,000 vote margin in Pinellas). "Pinellas elections office knew [Nov. 4] soon after Election Day of a discrepancy in vote totals on a statewide slot machine initiative, but they didn't fully investigate for two weeks." So the false vote totals were maintained knowingly for weeks, until state certification was past.
...these people were at the White House. AT THE WHITE HOUSE, at the invitation of the president. The president wanted this to be THE MODEL for the country - religious-based (and who knows, race-based?) discrimination as the model for the entire country.
President Bush Says He Fears for Americans in Iraq and for His Twin Daughters
President Bush said Wednesday that he doesn't spend much of his time worrying but that he does fear for Americans and others in insurgency-wracked Iraq and for the safety of his 23-year-old twin daughters.
"I spend most of my time worrying about people losing their lives in Iraq, both Americans and Iraqis," Bush told The Associated Press and other broadcasters in an interview.
He suggested he has some concerns about the implications of his high-profile position for his daughters, Jenna and Barbara.
"I worry about letting these little girls get into a situation where something unpleasant could happen to them," Bush said. "We're pretty much over the anger not anger, the frustrations of living in a fishbowl."
The Pentagon on Wednesday postponed by more than a week the release of military recruiting figures for May, as the Army and Marine Corps struggle to attract new troops amid the Iraq war.
The military services had routinely provided most recruiting statistics for a given month on the first business day of the next month.
Air Force Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said the May numbers for the active-duty and reserve components of the all-volunteer military will be released on June 10.
"Military recruiting is instrumental to our readiness and merits the earliest release of data. But at the same time, this information must be reasonably scrutinized and explained to the public, which deserves the fullest insight into military performance in this important area," Krenke said.
Asked whether the move would simply delay the release of bad news, Krenke said, "That's not necessarily true," noting that "we expect the numbers to improve during the summer months."
Military recruiters have said potential recruits and their parents were expressing wariness about enlisting during the Iraq war. They said improving civilian job opportunities also were affecting recruiting.
The regular Army missed its recruiting goals for three straight months entering May, falling short by a whopping 42 percent in April. The Army was 16 percent behind its year-to-date target entering May, with a goal of signing up 80,000 recruits in fiscal 2005, which ends Sept. 30.
A British government memo that critics say proves the Bush administration manipulated evidence about weapons of mass destruction in order to carry out a plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein (search) has received little attention in the mainstream media, frustrating opponents of the Iraq war.
The "Downing Street Memo" — first published by The Sunday Times of London on May 1 — summarizes a high-level meeting between Prime Minister Tony Blair (search) and his senior national security team on July 23, 2002, months before the March 2003 coalition invasion of Iraq.
The memo suggests that British intelligence analysts were concerned that the Bush administration was marching to war on wobbly evidence that Saddam posed a serious threat to the world.
The memo, which received sporadic reporting in major newspapers in the United States throughout May, has sparked an outcry from more than 88 Democratic members of Congress who have signed two letters to President Bush demanding a response.
Led by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the signatories are mostly representatives who opposed the war in Iraq and make up the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Conyers says the mainstream media have ignored the story and let President Bush off the hook. He noted that liberal blogs and alternative media have been keeping the story alive. "But these voices are too few and too diffuse to overcome the blatant biases of our cable channels and the negligence and neglect of our major newspapers," Conyers said in a recent statement.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan has said there is "no need" to respond to the memos, the authenticity of which has not been denied.
Dante Zappala does not agree. For Zappala, the Downing Street Memo strikes a critical and personal chord. His brother, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, 30, a soldier in the Pennsylvania National Guard, was killed in Baghdad 13 months ago on what Zappala said was a mission to find weapons there.
"My family knows the consequences of the decision they made to go to war," said Zappala, 29, of Philadelphia. He is a member of Military Families Speak Out, a group that opposes the war and, according to Zappala, now has more than 2,000 members.
"I can't speak for what the TV news decides to focus their attention on," Zappala said. "They seem to have a willful deference to all relevant information. I think they've really just dropped the ball on this."
But not everyone believes the Downing Street Memo represents a "smoking gun" and deserves more attention.
"As a smoking gun it leaves a lot to be desired," said Kevin Aylward, a northern Virginia-based technology consultant who runs the conservative-leaning blog, Wizbangblog.com. "It's interesting, but it's probably fourth- or fifth-hand information."
Aylward added: "I suspect the more interesting story at this point, seeing it three weeks later, is who is behind the letter-writing campaign to push it in the media."
Two suicide bombers blew themselves up Monday in a crowd of police officers south of Baghdad, killing up to 30 people and wounding dozens, and an Iraqi aircraft with four Americans and an Iraqi on board crashed in eastern Iraq.
Also Monday, U.S. forces mistakenly detained a Sunni political leader on the second day of an Iraqi-led security sweep in the capital.
The Iraqi aircraft carrying four U.S. personnel and one Iraqi crashed sometime before noon during an operational mission, the military said in a statement, but it did not say what type of aircraft was involved or whether those on board had died.
U.S.-led coalition forces had secured the area where the aircraft when down in the eastern province of Diyala and the crash was "under investigation," the military said. It also said the crash was reported to a joint communication center in the town of Khanaqin, near the border with Iran.
Mohsen Abdul-Hamid, head of Iraq's largest Sunni Arab political party and short-time president of the now-dissolved U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council, was taken from his home in western Baghdad at about 6 a.m. by military forces, party officials said.
The U.S. military later confirmed it had mistakenly arrested Abdul-Hamid, questioned him and released him shortly after.
As we look across these acres, we begin to tally the cost of our freedom, and we count it a privilege to be citizens of the country served by so many brave men and women. (Applause.) And we must honor them by completing the mission for which they gave their lives, by defeating the terrorists, advancing the cause of liberty, and building a safer world.