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With Randy Scheunemann running her campaign, I'm afraid she'd find China and go to war with it.Matthews has good reason to fear Scheunemann obtaining significant power. Scheunemann played a major role in the brinkmanship between Russia and Georgia. This guy is a war waiting to happen.
Despite having zero religious authority, Lybian leader Moammar Gadhafi called for a jihad on Thursday against Switzerland. For those of you that haven't been following along, the Swiss pissed Gadhafi off royally back in 2008, when they detained Gadhafi's son and his wife for a few days when they were accused of beating up their servants.
Gadhafi's son's name? Hannibal. So, not only do the Swiss have to look out for Gadhafi's call that "the masses of Muslims must go to all airports in the Islamic world and prevent any Swiss plane landing, to all harbors and prevent any Swiss ships docking, inspect all shops and markets to stop any Swiss goods being sold," they also have to look out for Carthaginian war elephants coming over the Alps.Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
According to scientists, there are a lot more bad ass winters to come.Cyclical patterns of heating and cooling—as opposed to long-term global warming—could herald a coming period of harsher U.S. winters, [Meteorologist Joe] Bastardi told National Geographic News.Staudt went on to say, "I think there's overwhelming evidence that global warming is happening and that human activity is responsible for it."
"We know that Earth's cycles are changing," he said. "The Pacific is cooling. The Atlantic will join it in several years. When you get an El Niño with a cold Pacific, you get crazy winters in the East."
Still, other scientists say global warming is the main culprit behind this month's eastern-U.S. snowstorms—and it could cause more heavy snowfalls in future winters.
Attributing snowstorms to warmer weather seems contradictory, but climate scientist Amanda Staudt says relatively warmer weather causes more water to be evaporated from the oceans and thus creates more moisture for winter storms, as long as temperatures remain below freezing.
I'm listening to a podcast of NPR host Terry Gross's interview writer Ken Gormley, who has a new book out called The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr. Gormley is a very engaging guest and when the price drops significantly, I will buy a copy of the book, which offers several new revelations into a highly annoying time in our history. One such revelation is Gormley's tale of finding a copy of the draft indictment of Hillary Clinton.The foiled attack came during Mr Clinton's visit to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in the city in 1996.Can you imagine that alternate reality? I won't even go into it. it does add a new veneer of credibility to Clinton's post 9/11 claim that he ordered Bin Laden's death in 1998. I'm surprised he waited that long.
At one point during his stay, he was scheduled to visit a local politician, his route taking him across a bridge in central Manila.
But as the presidential motorcade was about to set off, secret service officers received a "crackly message in one earpiece" saying intelligence agents had picked up a message suggesting an attack was imminent.
The transmission used the words "bridge" and "wedding" – a terrorists code word for assassination.
The motorcade was quickly re-routed and American agents later discovered a bomb had been planted under the bridge.
The subsequent US investigation into the plot "revealed that it had been masterminded by a Saudi terrorist living in Afghanistan – a man named Osama bin Laden".
Although al Qaeda members have admitted targeting Mr Clinton in the 1990s, no evidence has previously emerged suggesting the group's leader was involved or that the terrorists came close to succeeding.
Ken Gormley, an American law professor, said he was told by Louis Merletti, the former director of the Secret Service, of the bomb plot.
In The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs Starr, Prof Gormley wrote: "The thwarted assassination attempt was never made public.
"It remained top secret except to select members of the US intelligence community."
You were just too beautiful for this world. And while I will miss this service, I am waaaaaaay too cheap to pay for the commenting system that HS has evolved into. At present, I am trying to communicate with HS via email in order to explore the possibility of them exporting my comments to Blogger's (ahem! clunky) commenting system. If it doesn't work out, then, perhaps, we can consider this an important life exercise in letting go. At least blogger didn't indiscriminately delete my blog--yet.Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
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Due to a nice jolt administered to the publishing world by the proliferation of e-book readers, suddenly, deserving writers have a real opportunity to reach their audience. Novelist (and former lawyer) David Derrico, a good friend of mine for many years, wrote two excellent science fiction novels--Right Ascension and it's sequel, Declination--back in the early part of the decade. Like many other quality works, Dave's novels did not find a niche in the marketplace, and by the middle of the decade, they were languishing on the shelf.
These works recently were given new life by the popularity of Amazon's Kindle. With the obstacle of having to be anointed by a publishing company out of the way, Dave's novels are now competing with with some of the biggest names in science fiction on their own merits. It is with a great deal of satisfaction that I can report his e-book sales are skyrocketing; it's currently ranked in the top ten in war, adventure and techno-thrillers.| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | ||||||||||||||||||
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Trust me, after taxes, a million dollars is not a lot of money.See, rich people, I'm not asking that much. Just make your checks for $1 million dollars payable to Jay Allbritton. Send them to Ice Station Tango, South Pole, Antarctica. No worries, I'll pay the taxes on it.
Obviously she didn't steal it from me, although I did consider the possibility, but this does make me feel like a total hack for coming up with a term that she would use in her speeches. Frankly, her attack made me want to defend the media, but they are sooooooo effing lame.In a speech that was often pointed but rarely substantive, Palin touched on many of the socially and political divisive topics that have impassioned the Tea Party movement and turned it into a significant factor in the upcoming midterm elections.
She took digs at Obama for using teleprompters and blaming George W. Bush for the problems he inherited. She lambasted the "lamestream media" for their biases against conservative candidates and lashed out even harder at those who want to paint the Tea Party crowd as "ideologically extreme" and consider "a candidate's children fair game."
As soon as the 41st Republican was sworn in, Alabama Republican Senator Richard Shelby, who is pissed at the White House because a $35 billion deal with Northrop Grumman wound up being voided, issued a blanket hold on all Obama nominees. I fully expect a fierce strikeback from the Democrats any minute now. It's going to be crushing. Just watch. Harry Reid will not stand for this kind of thing. They messed with the wrong political party this time.| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
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After watching the season premier of Lost, in which we learned that Jack's nuclear bomb gambit worked in one reality, and did not work in another reality, I'm once again reminded of my long held theory that a similar divergence happened in 2000, when George W. Bush was named the winner of that year's presidential election. Iin 2006, SNL depicted the reality from which we diverged. Family Guy took a shot at it as well.Reporting from Washington - In a stark reminder of growing costs, the government has released a new estimate that healthcare spending grew to a record 17.3% of the U.S. economy last year, marking the largest one-year jump in its share of the economy since the government started keeping such records half a century ago.I'm warning you now, prepare for plenty of gratuitous Lost references for the next sixteen weeks or so.
The almost $2.5 trillion spent in 2009 was $134 billion more than the previous year, when healthcare consumed 16.2% of the gross domestic product, according to an annual report by independent actuaries at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, scheduled for release Thursday.
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For whatever reason, I had a hard time getting Fox News clips to embed on this blog, but you can head on over to Huffington Post to check out Jon Stewart's spirited appearance on the O'Reilly Factor. There's really nothing new here, but it's always amusing to me to see these guys spar over the con game that is Fox News.
When I was a working man I didn't want to go to a concert for some bastard to talk down to me that I should be thinking of some kid in Africa. I'm sorry mate, do it yourself, spend some of your own money and get it done. It just makes me angry. I become all tyrannical... Do a charity gig, fair enough, but not on worldwide television... I do it myself, I don't tell everybody I'm doing it. I don't tell everybody they should give money - they can't afford it.Brian Johnson, dude, I really dug the "Back in Black" thing, but man, you're out of your element. You are masking the worst kind of elitism with a working class smoke screen. Yes, Bono is way over the top. You know what, Brian? He needs to be. You know why, Brian? Because most people--almost everybody--doesn't do the following thing: Ever think about Africa.
NEW YORK-- Exxon Mobil reported a 23% drop in quarterly profit Monday as economic conditions remain challenging, but the energy giant's earnings beat Wall Street's expectations.Maybe they can get Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein to help them out. He's no oilman, just a mere banker, but he's so goddamned talented that he's on the verge of what could be a $$$100 million bonus for the work he did in 2009. One or two days at Exxon and this genius will have them back to peak profits for peak oil. If not, Blankfein can just buy everyone in the company an NHL franchise or a cable news outlet. That'll make everyone happy!~
The world's largest publicly traded oil company said it earned $6.05 billion in the last three months of 2009, down 23% from $7.82 billion a year earlier. On a per share basis, Exxon said it earned $1.27, a decline of 18% from the fourth quarter of last year.
