This photo shows the battleship USS Arizona sinking.
Photo shows unimpressed West Point cadets during Obama’s speech.As Senator John McCain says in an interview, Barack Obama got it right on Afghanistan apart from one potentially ruinous error – setting a date for beginning to withdraw US troops.
Since that controversial speech, Defense Secretary Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have been scrambling to say what Mr. Obama meant to say.
On Sunday’s talk shows Hillary Clinton said “we are not talking about an exit strategy and a drop-dead deadline”.
Robert Gates said the date was firm but admitted the number of withdrawals could be miniscule.
This is not the first time others in the administration have needed to follow Mr. Obama around with a broom and mop.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs is often forced to stammer around trying to alibi for Mr. Obama.
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Oxford senior lexicographer Christine Lindberg said the word had both currency and potential longevity.
In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year.
She said most prefixed words beginning with 'un' were adjectives, such as 'unacceptable' or 'unpleasant'.
"There are certainly some familiar 'un-' verbs (uncap, unpack), but 'unfriend' is different from the norm.
Facebook users often accept dozens, or even hundreds, of other users as “friends.”
Facebook users are also given the option of removing a Facebook friend. Removing a friend is call unfriending.
In fact, unfriending is easier than making a friend on Facebook. When making a friend, both members must agree to the “friendship.” However you can unfriend someone on Facebook without anyone else’s knowledge.
It can be done anonymously. No one else would know and the only way the unfriend would know is to look at their list of friends and see who’s name is no longer there.
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A quick search of the Senate health bill will bring up "secretary" 2,500 times.
That's because Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (pictured) would be awarded unprecedented new powers under the proposal, including the authority to decide what medical care should be covered by insurers as well as the terms and conditions of coverage and who should receive it.
"The legislation lists 1,697 times where the secretary of health and humans services is given the authority to create, determine or define things in the bill," said Devon Herrick, a health care expert at the National Center for Policy Analysis.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius would also have the power to decide where abortion is allowed under a government-run plan, which has drawn opposition from Republicans and a few moderate Democrats.
And the bill even empowers the department to establish a Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation that would have the authority to make cost-saving cuts without having to get the approval of Congress first.
More here.
Cooper has seen his numbers slip significantly through the past year. His 10 p.m. (8 p.m. central time) show, "Anderson Cooper 360," has declined 62% in total viewers and 70% in adults 25-54 from November 2008, according to Nielsen figures.
Last month, in Cooper's time slot, Fox News' "On the Record" attracted an average viewership of 1.9 million while "360" averaged 672,000.
Re-runs of "Countdown" on MSNBC and the Nancy Grace show on Headline News averaged 655,000 and 458,000, respectively. One wonders how long before Anderson Cooper will be at the very bottom of the Cable News race.
Maybe if Cooper wouldn’t stammer around so much ....
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This portrayal of Obama offering Santa cash for his sleigh was a winner in a recent cartoon caption contest by Indianapolis Star cartoonist Gary Varvel.
Not so, say researchers from the University of Texas at Austin.
Instead of using Facebook to create rose-tinted portraits of themselves, more often people's Facebook profiles reflect their authentic personalities, with all of the quirks, funny faces and moodiness they entail.
What it basically boils down to is: most people will be themselves. Nice people will portray that on Facebook. If they’re a jerk in real life, they'll be one on Facebook too.
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Police said a man wearing a ski mask entered the first set of doors at 5:36 p.m. with a gun, apparently not realizing the bank was closed.
The robber could have planned poorly or possibly had another reason, like getting tied up in traffic.
Tied up in traffic? Wonder if he was the first masked man ever to be held up for his hold up?
On report wondered if the robber needed the money to replace a defective watch.
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Police arrested 45-year-old William C. Caldwell III (pictured), who was being held without bond. Police say Caldwell got in line Wednesday evening to have his picture taken with Santa Claus. Police say when Caldwell reached the front of the line, he told Santa he had dynamite in his bag. Santa called mall security and Caldwell was arrested.
He was dressed as an elf but was not part of the mall's Christmas staff.
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Citing AARP's past opposition to proposed cuts in Medicare, McCain expressed dismay Thursday that the senior group has suddenly changed its position to support $460 billion in cuts to the program proposed by Democrats to help pay for health care legislation.
Democrats throughout Thursday's Senate debate used AARP's endorsement of their bill to blunt Republican charges that they are gutting Medicare.
AARP rode to the rescue of Democrats on Wednesday, announcing its support for billions in Medicare cuts to help fund the legislation.
McCain’s anger is understandable.
We have known for a long time that one of the major planks in ObamaCare was the slashing of billions of dollars from Medicare. Now, AARP has betrayed it’s members by backing the those huge Medicare cuts.
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The fight over global warming science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding release of the same kind of climate data that has landed a leading British center in hot water over charges it skewed its data.
Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.
Witholding the data makes NASA appear guilty of a major cover-up.
More of the story here and here.
More than 3,000 Danes have purchased tickets at DKK 5,999, which includes drinks and a light snack.
The scientific consensus that mankind has caused climate change was rocked yesterday as a leading academic called it a “load of hot air underpinned by fraud”.
Professor Plimer - author of Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, The Missing Science - says “Climates always change. They always have and they always will. They are driven by a number of factors that are random and cyclical.”
Ian Plimer condemned the climate change lobby as “climate comrades” keeping the “gravy train” going.
In a controversial talk just days before the start of a climate summit attended by world leaders in Copenhagen, Prof Plimer said Governments were treating the public like “fools” and using climate change to increase taxes.
In America it’s more than just about carbon taxes - it’s also about control.
LinkPlimer cited periods of warming during the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages – when Vikings grew crops on Greenland – and cooler phases such as the Dark Ages and the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850.
And he predicted that the next phase would cool the planet.
The tree in Copenhagen's City Hall Square will be powered by people. That’s right, people. People pedaling bicycles.
Last January Dixon was indicted by a Maryland grand jury on 12 criminal counts, including theft and perjury, for alleged official misconduct beginning when she was a councilwoman as we reported here.
Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America's new strategy for Afghanistan.
It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric -- and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.
One can hardly blame the West Point leadership. The academy commanders did their best to ensure that Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama's speech would be well-received.
Before the speech the cadets were asked to respond "enthusiastically" to the speech but the reception by the cadets was cool.
It was the least truthful address that he has ever held.
He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics.
He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly.
An additional 30,000 US soldiers are to march into Afghanistan -- and then they will march right back out again.
From various Lucianne commenters:
He was telling the troops: here's some more men, some bullets and new boots and I'll get back with you in 18 months.
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He used the cadets like the Styrofoam Greek Columns at the Democratic convention to give his circle-talk speech.
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One wonders how Obama felt when real Americans, in a place he could never qualify to attend, sat in stony silence instead of cheering, chanting and fainting like the mobs at his speeches to inner-city admirers.
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Giving our scheduled “pull out” date is very convenient for the Taliban. Even though the 18-month date was intended to be a target date, the Taliban will make good use of that information. It proved once again that Mr. Obama has little concept of what it takes to fight a war.
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Interesting timing. The 18-month end of the war is timed just right so the pull out will be in plenty of time for him to take credit during his re-election campaign.
The pull out will not be a victory, but that doesn’t matter. Did he talk about victory in his West Point speech? No, he is not interested in victory. He wants a pull out of Afghanistan a few months before his next presidential campaign.
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He used the word “I” over 30 times.
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The original request was for 80,000 troops. That got pared down to 30,000 after a several month wait.
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In the meanwhile, elitists in the mainstream media will be trying their best to somehow put a positive face to the Obama speech at West Point.
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One can’t argue with the looks on most of the faces of the cadets. A couple of them were obviously sleeping. Most looked bored. Many looked down as if to study the shine on their boots.
The looks on the faces of the veteran officers must have been a combination of disbelief and bewilderment.
Is the Obama magic gone?
Link to the Der Spiegel report here.
Fess up, Tiger. If you don’t, the tabloids are gonna kill ya.
Kudlow’s open letter to Tiger Woods reads in part:
The storyline so far is that for some reason your apparently furious wife Elin teed you up inside your Florida mansion with one of your Nike golf clubs, and that you sought escape by hot-footing it outside at two-thirty in the morning to your Cadillac Escalade in the driveway.
But Elin kept coming at you. So you tried to slam the SUV down the driveway in racecar fashion, something you’ve probably done hundreds of times before. Only this time, for some reason, you hit a fireplug and wrapped the car around a tree.
But Elin still kept coming at you, slammin’ the club into the rear windshield. She must have had a long iron in her hand.
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Americans are far less approving of President Obama's handling of the situation in Afghanistan than they have been in recent months, with 35% currently approving, down from 49% in September and 56% in July.
The growth of cell phones with global-positioning technology is making life uncertain for the makers of personal navigational devices that help drivers figure out where they are and where to go.
Manufacturers of standalone GPS products will have to move quickly and smartly to transform their dumb map readers into intelligent devices that can provide a host of services such as traffic avoidance.
The photo shows Verizon’s VZ Navigator on a Blackberry.
We have been using VZ Navigator for nearly three years. We don’t use it often but it has never let us down.
As a test I compared VZ Navigator to Sprint Navigation. We entered the same address in our phones. I used the voice recognition feature, which works great and is much faster than using my qwerty keypad.
Both VZ Navigator and Sprint Navigation took us to the right place. Only problem was, Sprint Navigation took us on a couple of side streets. VZ Navigator had us stay on arterial streets.
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Britain's University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.
The scientist involved is Phil Jones who will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.
The allegations were made after more than a decade of correspondence between leading British and U.S. scientists were posted to the Web following the security breach last month.
The e-mails were seized upon by some skeptics of man-made climate change as proof that scientists are manipulating the data about its extent.
It turns out that artherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, isn't an entirely modern condition. In fact, evidence published in today's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that, as long as 3,500 years ago, well-to-do Egyptians suffered from the disease.
Twenty mummies were analyzed last February using CT scans.
Of the 16 mummies in whom the researchers could clearly identify blood vessels, and whose hearts were left in their bodies during the mummification process, nine showed clear evidence of hardened arteries.
By analyzing the skeletal structures of the mummies, researchers determined that eight mummies lived to be older than 45. Of those, seven exhibited signs of artherosclerosis. In contrast, among the eight who died younger—few Egyptians lived past 40 in those days (King Tut died at age 18, for example)—only two exhibited signs of hardened arteries.
After months of what some critics called overexposure, President Obama has of late avoided questions from the White House press corps at large, closing the Oval Office to traditionally informal question-and-answer sessions with reporters and pulling back from the fast pace of news conferences he established when taking office.
Mr. Obama’s teleprompter is of little or no use when answering reporters questions during a press conference.
The president, whose job-approval ratings have been on a steady slide, hasn't held a formal news conference in 19 weeks, since July 22.
That one ended badly, when Mr. Obama waded into a racial controversy by saying a white police officer "acted stupidly" when he arrested a black Harvard professor.
"It can't be a total coincidence that the last time he faced the press corps, we ended with beers in the Rose Garden with Henry Louis Gates and James Crowley, when the focus was supposed to be health care," said Julie Mason, a White House reporter for the Washington Examiner who also covered the Bush administration for the Houston Chronicle.
"It does seem like they are responding to the overexposure argument and trying to exert more control over his appearances," she said.
Clusters of plug-in cars will tax local power grids.
If plug-in electric cars become popular in your neighborhood, you may face an electricity supply crunch when it comes to charging.
There have been a number of studies measuring whether the national power grid can fuel large numbers of electric vehicles. But the biggest concern regarding the impact of plug-ins is at the local level, where adding just a few vehicles could strain a local circuit.
More of the story here.
A picture of my cave
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