moderate to heavy snowfall is expected this afternoon ocean effect snow bands may persist through 1 am strong north winds with gusts up to 60 mph are expected late today and into this evening likely yielding near whiteout conditions.
"While pregnant, Bristol often appeared with her mother as she campaigned across America during the elections.
Johnston's mother Sherry made headlines earlier this month when she was arrested and charged six felony drugs offenses.
Tripp joins a host of strange-named Palins. Alaska governor Sarah Palin's youngest son is called Trigg, and her eldest son is called Track.
The governor's office said the birth was a private family matter."
"This was not a case of spousal abuse, which has been defined by the United States Government as "beating your wife with a stick wider than her thumb". [?] Generally, one would have to be pretty well off; in a strong position, to have the luxury of living without support from one's husband. [?]Well, well. That settles that.
Also, one must have legitimate reason for the divorce. Life is not an all-you-can-eat buffet. You may not take food and throw it away when you get tired of the flavor, then get another plate of something else. [no vomiting?] Even at buffets you are encouraged not to take more than you can eat.
You wouldn't go into a candy store, chew up candy and regurgitate it back into the container with the other candy, would you? When you do that with food, it's considered to be vandalism, and it's considered to be sick. When you do it with people, you're actually rewarded for it with money.
But woman's eyes were bigger than her stomach, and now she is left with neither. Her body will rot to ashes in the ground and will be consumed by maggots. Mr. Pardo just helped to accelerate the process, and give her an attractive aroma which is pleasing to insect life. After all, we need to be considerate of the insects. [and why not]
Let that be a lesson to anyone thinking about getting divorced, or anyone for that matter, who is thinking about getting married. [marriage as punishment? death as punishment for having gotten married?]
There are a few people left in this country who care about the truth, and if you should have the honor; the privilege, of ever meeting one, or marrying them for that matter, please don't show your gratitude by divorcing them, or you may find yourself six feet under ground and burnt to a crisp. [misunderstanding of karma cause and effect?]
This woman made the decision to divorce Bruce Pardo, most likely without ever consulting her family [what no Saudi Arabian influence?], and considering no abuse was involved -- no legitimate reason for divorce -- no family in their right mind would advise divorce [no because Pardo is such a charmer?]. What this woman did was kill her family. [oh] The 8-year-old girl they talked about was killed by the woman, not Bruce Pardo. Her entire family was killed by her poor decision-making. She deprived them of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. She is the criminal."
"A husband knows that his wife loves him first and foremost by her willingness to give her body to him."
"Every man who is sexually faithful to his wife already engages in daily heroic self-control. He has married knowing he will have to deny his sexual nature's desire for variety for the rest of his life."
"But, to repeat the key point, [a wife's] rejection of sex should happen infrequently. And it should almost never be dependent on mood — see Part II next week."Ah yes. 'Lil woman as vibrator equivalent. 'Lil man as braindead wanker.
"In the end, [stopping additional US torture] may be more important than punishing those who acted wrongly in pursuit of what they thought was right."
Groucho Marx was interviewing a woman who had 18 children.
Groucho said, 'That's a big responsibility. Why so many children?'
The woman replied, 'Well, I just love my husband.'
Said, Groucho: 'Well, I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth every once in a while.'
According to a story on TheAtlantic.com, journalist Patrick Tyler’s forthcoming book, A World of Trouble, includes a scene where Tenet is drinking copious amounts of scotch in the pool of a Saudi prince. Drunk and on sleeping pills, Tenet allegedly proceeds to rave about the Bush administrations attempts to pin Iraq’s missing weapons of mass destruction on him.
The December 16 story includes two passages from Tyler’s book.
A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes.
“They’re setting me up. The bastards are setting me up,” Tenet said, but “I am not going to take the hit.”
" U.S. law enforcement agencies have arrested 61 people and rescued 11 children as part of the larger takedown of a far-reaching global child pornography ring, Attorney General Michael Mukasey announced Friday.
Mukasey said the international law enforcement effort started after a "horrible" discovery in 2006: Australian authorities discovered a child abuse video depicting a father who had been "sexually abusing his young daughters and producing images of that abuse."
The video had been widely distributed online in closed Internet forums and servers that authorities discovered.
Authorities arrested the father, identified only as a Belgian national, about a month after the discovery of the video.
The man allegedly had large amounts of child pornography in his possession, and had allegedly enlisted the services of an Italian photographer whom officials said documented the sexual abuse and added the documentation to as many as seven Web sites.
"Every time Obama takes even more counsel from wingnuts, don't you feel the earth move in the scintillating "Team of Rivals" way that's got the Village all a-twitter?
Ooh, ahhh, just a little more to the right. OOOOOHHHH! YES! YES! YES!"
On a scorching morning earlier this year, Talib Mohammed Farkhan, who had been imprisoned for 15 months, shuffled into Hearing Room 3 to hear his U.S. captors explain the allegations against him for the first time.
Farkhan, a Shiite Muslim, appeared to follow along as the American officers said he had been detained for membership in the Mahdi Army, the anti-American Shiite militia. But he looked totally baffled when they also accused him of working with al-Qaeda in Iraq, the extremist Sunni Muslim group that kills Americans and Shiites.
"I don't understand how that could be possible," said a visibly flustered Farkhan, a welder from the southern city of Iskandariyah, who denied all the accusations. "They are Sunni. I am Shia."
Yet the three U.S. servicemen before him, a panel of non-lawyers convened as part of a new quasi-judicial process to review each detainee's case every six months, did not need to decide whether Farkhan had violated the law. Their task was to decide whether he posed an "imperative security threat" to the U.S.-led coalition or the Iraqi people. And they concluded that credible evidence, which they would not describe to Farkhan or a Washington Post correspondent allowed to view the 19-minute hearing, suggested that he probably did.
"I'm not looking at whether they are guilty or innocent," said Air Force Maj. Jeff Ghiglieri, the president of the review board that convened in May. "We're trying to determine as best we can whether they will do bad things if we release them."
THE main Indian airports were on high alert last night after intelligence warnings that India may be the target of a fresh airborne terrorist attack following the assault on Mumbai last week.
India's Bureau of Civil Aviation issued hijack warnings for Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai airports and deployed hundreds of extra airport security personnel.
The Indian Air Force chief, Fali Homi Major, confirmed the threat of a possible airborne attack. "This is based on a warning, which has been received and we are prepared as usual," he told the Press Trust of India news agency. . .
Times of India:
Intel Sources Say Pakistan Military Involved in Terror Attack, Not Civilian Government
The names of trainers and the places where meticulous training took place are also known to the government, the sources said.
The United States is believed to have even more evidence, some of which it has shared with India, they said.
Chairman of US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, who was in Pakistan on Wednesday, is believed to have told his Pakistani interlocutors that Washington had enough evidence to show a Pakistani hand in the attack, the sources said.. .
"A husband and wife have been charged with torture after a bruised, terrified 17-year-old showed up at a gym with a chain locked to his ankle, claiming he had just fled his captors, US authorities said Tuesday.
Kelly Layne Lau, 30, and Michael Schumacher, 34, were arrested late Monday, said Matt Robinson, a spokesman for police in Tracy, 60 miles east of San Francisco.
They had been taken into custody for questioning earlier in the day at their home in Tracy, where the emaciated boy was allegedly held against his will. A search of the home turned up evidence implicating the couple, Robinson said.
They were charged with torture, kidnapping and child abuse, and were set to appear in court Thursday, officials said. Bail was set at $1.2 million for Michael Schumacher but his wife's bail had not been set, authorities said.
Police said they were searching for a third suspect but wouldn't give details.
The boy turned up half-naked Monday at the In-Shape Sports Club, near the couple's home. It's not clear how he ended up in Tracy; authorities said he ran away last year from a foster home in Sacramento, about 70 miles to the north.
Robinson said the boy was confused when approached by detectives Monday, unsure where he had come from and how long he had been held against his will. He was taken to a hospital.
"The wounds he had and his physical condition as well as having a chain around his leg corroborated his basic statement that he was being held against his will," Robinson said.
Chuck Ellis, a manager of the In-Shape Sports Club, said the boy came into the fitness centre Monday afternoon wearing only boxer briefs, covered with what appeared to be soot. Ellis says the teen was scared someone was going to come after him and asked to be hidden.
'He said 'Don't let them get me, don't let them get me,'" Ellis said. 'He was totally terrified.'"
----
Oh, and for all you rabid fans of random parenthood, don't miss: TEEN MOM SMOTHERS INFANT SON WITH TEDDY BEAR.
(More suitable subjects for tonglen, it would seem.)
"THERE is something about Hillary Clinton. She is not very tall, she is a conservative dresser, but when she enters a room she fills the space, even when she shares it with the president-elect.
On Monday, when Barack Obama and his choice as vice-president, Joe Biden, stood before eight American flags crowned with gilded eagles and revealed the names of the six top members of his national security team, it was the petite woman in the inky navy pantsuit who was the centre of attention. [will they ever stop talking about her clothes?]
No matter that on one side stood the first African-American attorney-general of the US, Eric Holder, and the long-standing Bush Administration official Robert Gates, who has agreed to stay on to end the Iraq war he has been running for two years.
Or that on the other side she was dwarfed by Jim Jones, a former supreme allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, a physically imposing former marine who makes Mr Obama look puny. . .
Mr Obama said he preferred to have strong-minded people with strong opinions around him.
He chided the media, saying the far bigger risk in the White House was the tendency towards "group think"."
"The handwriting and character of the Mumbai events demonstrates that they were not ordinary terrorists," said Vladimir Klyukin, an Afghan war veteran.
"Behind this terrorist attack there are 'Green Flag' special operations forces, which were created by the Americans in Pakistan, just an year before the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and in the initial period were under full US control," stressed Klyukin, a veteran of the special "Vympel" commando group of the former Soviet KGB.
He said for such guerrilla operations at least two-three years of preparatory work with the involvement of experienced instructors is required.
Klyukin did not rule out that the Mumbai attackers could have taken part in similar attacks in other regions.
"People from the streets, without any planning and training are simply not able to hold four big complexes in a city so long," Soviet special services veteran was quoted as saying by largest Russian Interfax news agency.
He also presumed that there were at least 50 attackers given the geography and scale of the strikes.
Doing no evil whatsoever
Practice virtue perfectly
Tame your mind completely
This is the teaching of the buddha
Incest [predator] Josef Fritzl says he's turned to Buddhism - and wants doctors to help cure him so he can be reunited with his wife Rosemarie.
Evil Fritzl spends much of his 23 hours a day in his cell studying the peaceful Far Eastern philosophy and is considering formally changing his religion in prison.
Speaking through his lawyer Rudolf Mayer, Fritzl said that he has found a lot of comfort in reading Buddhist literature and finds the religion "fascinating".
Fritzl first discovered Buddhism on a family holiday in Thailand but has only started studying the religion in depth while behind bars.
Prosecution sources remain suspicious of his Buddhist conversion.
"It's a bit late in his life to present himself as a man of peace. If he ever gets reincarnated, what would he come back as? Even making him a worm would be an insult to worms," said one.
Fritzl's facing the rest of his life in jail after imprisoning his daughter Elisabeth as a sex slave in a home-made cell under the family home in Amstetten, Austria. She was locked up for 24 years where she gave birth to seven of his children. An eighth child was miscarried.
But the dungeon demon has astonished medics by asking them to cure him so he can start a new life with his family.
"I realise now that I am not normal, and I see that somebody who did what I did cannot be regarded as normal.
"With the help of therapists I want to know what the real reasons are for why I behaved like I did and I want to get treatment, I want to be healthy again at some point," he told his lawyer.
And the deluded demon says he hopes therapy will lead to a reunion with wife Rosemarie and their children.
"I hope one day that we will be able to live together again," he said.
Fritzl, 73, has dismissed psychological reports that his cold, emotionless upbringing turned him into an incest monster.
"I don't want to blame my mother for the way I am. There's been enough bad things said about her. I don't know what the answer is and there is no solution in simply saying she is responsible for everything," he said.
Towards the end of her life cold-hearted Fritzl kept his mother locked up.
"She was not a bad woman although she had psychological problems that led her to be aggressive right up until she died - something which got worse in old age when she suffered from dementia as well.
"I forgave her a long time ago for what she did for me because I know she had a very hard life. At the end she always wanted to dress herself in rich clothes and it was one of the saddest days of my life when I went to her funeral and saw how few people had bothered to turn up," he explained.
Fritzl has also begun studying law behind bars to help him beat the charges he faces - murder, rape, slavery, incest, imprisonment and abuse.
Now it has emerged that Fritzl has been pouring over legal books about Austrian law looking for loopholes to save his neck.
While he will admit four charges which would put him in prison for a maximum of 10 years - he rejects the two more serious allegations that could see him locked up for life.
He claims that the charges of murder and slavery have been manufactured to make sure he is never free again.
Fritzl told his lawyer Rudolf Mayer: "I am guilty, but only to the first four charges, not to slavery and not to murder. The truth is that I am not a murderer either by accident or deliberately.
"I can understand how Elisabeth feels. I know that she hates me and that she is terrified I might one day again see freedom. But the fact is that many of the things she has said are just not true."
Astonishingly he admits to threatening to kill his cellar family with gas or electric shocks - but claims he never intended to go through with it.
"It is true that when they were underground I threatened them with murder, and led them to believe they would die from electricity shock or be gassed if they tried to escape. But I am not a murderer," he told his legal team."
"Fighting room-by-room through two luxury hotels, over dozens of bodies and through darkened corridors slick with blood, the commandos came up against well-trained and determined gunmen.
Explosions and gunfire continued intermittently at the Taj Mahal hotel Friday afternoon, two days after a chain of militant attacks across India's financial center left [153] people dead and the city in panic. . . .
It was a game of cat and mouse through the hotels' hundreds of rooms, and in many cases the gunmen had the advantage.
"These people were very, very familiar with the hotel layouts and it appears they had carried out a survey before," the commando said.
The gunmen used their knowledge to move skillfully from place to place, thwarting efforts to pin them down. To further confuse the commandos, they switched off lights and plunged the rooms into darkness. . . .
The gunmen showed "no remorse to anybody, whoever came in front of them they fired," said the commando.
They were armed with assault rifles and hand grenades and knew how to use them.
'It's obvious they were trained somewhere ... not everyone can handle the AK series of weapons or throw grenades like that,' the commando said."
"Television footage showed the assailants carrying automatic rifles and backpacks filled with ammunition and grenades. Analysts said the fact that the gunmen quickly fanned across the city and were able to hold off Indian security forces over three days suggested that they had received training at organized camps.
"What is striking about this is a fair amount of planning had to go into this type of attack," said Roger W. Cressey, a former White House counterterrorism official in the Clinton and Bush administrations. "This is not a seat-of-the-pants operation. This group had to receive some training or support from professionals in the terrorism business." "
The only people . . ."he sees [are] the camp guards who bring his meals. He has had no other human contact. The glaring lights in his cell are on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When we left the cell, we could hear Saber shouting -- brief, truncated cries. We could not understand what he was saying."
Some beings go from dark to dark.
Some from dark to light.
And some from light to dark.
May you go from light to light.
Results
We think http://nobloodforhubris.blogspot.com is written by a man (74%).
"Legal problems
The legal problems involved in trying terrorist suspects have not yet been resolved. Some say that the prisoners should simply be brought before normal US courts. It is thought there are about 50 or so prisoners who might face trial, out of the 255 or so in the camp.
A new system would also come under the close scrutiny of the US courts and a case against it would probably go right up to the Supreme Court to test its constitutionality
The problem is that evidence against them might have obtained either through coercion, or even torture, or from foreign agencies which have used similar methods.
Some of this evidence might be admitted in a trial before a military tribunal. So might hearsay evidence, in which someone relates what he or she was told, if the military judge decides that it would have "probative value to a reasonable person".
But neither would be acceptable under the normal rules of US courts.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for example, charged at Guantanamo with responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, was subject to waterboarding. It is true that he has expressed a wish to die but a civilian court in the US might not admit evidence against him gathered at Guantanamo Bay. Then what happens? It is hard to see him simply being released.
There is also the problem of whether the source of some evidence should be withheld from the prisoner."
"OLBERMANN: Wow. I mean, to what degree is that the other prominent Republican governors who got some passing mention during this campaign, with an eye towards 2012—Jindal, Pawlenty, Crist? Is there any sense that any of them are forming a power base behind Palin? Or are they intending to, you know, cut her up like a Roman dictator and smuggle her out under their robes?
CARLSON: Ha, ha. Well, they only say that quietly, Keith."
Sorry, but that’s very strange. A few months ago, Olbermann apologized for picturing Hillary Clinton getting beaten up by a bunch of goons behind locked doors. This week, he was picturing Sarah Palin getting cut up into pieces.
Within moments, he mockingly compared her to Lindsay Lohan—then, to Dizzy Dean.
It’s always surprising to see the way such fellows discuss the women they hate. They seem to find it hard to do so without picturing violence or turning to overt, gender-based derision. In our view, Palin is a remarkably underwhelming figure, in ways which are quite easy to define. You don’t have to compare her to Lohan, or picture her being killed—unless your skills are remarkably weak, or you simply enjoy hating women. But MSNBC has trafficked, for many years, in weird, remarkable woman-loathing. And when it comes to their new uber-star, it seems he’s gotta have it.
But then, [t]here’s Archie Bunker—sorry, Josh Marshall—letting us know, just yesterday, who the latest “dingbat” is. Without even bothering to report what this new “dingbat” actually said!
But so it goes as progressive intellectual standards spiral steadily downward. Olbermann’s performance on Wednesday’s show was an unfortunate case in point. He performed in ways which used to define the woeful standards of pseudo-con talk. . . .
What can you say about a guy who can’t lay out Palin’s obvious weaknesses without resorting to gender-based trashing? But most strikingly, Olbermann’s instinct for violent imagery doesn’t seem to want to quit. This is bad for progressive interests, and it’s bad for young men and young women. We’d have to say it’s just plain bad for the world in which we all live.
Can someone explain why “progressive” leaders can’t seem to quit this kind of talk?
Perhaps more to the point, why don't we have more men like Bob Somerby unflinchingly calling out the misogyny of people like Olbermann?
New details are coming out about the mother and teenager arrested in a horrific case of alleged child abuse in Pahrump that left a 2 - year - old boy in critical condition.
28 - year - old Michaele Griffin is facing felony child abuse charges.
Her 16 - year - old boyfriend, Danny Linville, was booked on attempted murder. Linville is being charged as an adult.
A day care provider in Rugby is accused of striking, kicking or throwing six children in her care.
KABUL (Reuters) - A victim of an acid attack on schoolgirls in Afghanistan said Saturday she was determined to stay in school and finish her education even if that meant risking death.
The girl, who gave her name as just Shamsia, was the most seriously injured of a group of girls attacked outside their school by unidentified men in the southern city of Kandahar on Wednesday.
"I'll continue my schooling even if they try to kill me. I won't stop going to school," Shamsia said from her bed at Afghanistan's main military hospital in Kabul.
"Sarah Palin is sorting through her luggage working out what clothes belong to her and what do not, her spokesman said yesterday. [hey shouldn't that be "spokeswoman"? Or "spokesmodel"?]
Meg Stapleton added that the Alaskan governor was coming under unfair attack from a 'firing squad' of anonymous John McCain staffers in a frenzy of finger-pointing.
'It’s a circling firing squad,' said Ms Stapleton.
In a string of damaging briefings, it was claimed that Mrs Palin had spent 'tens of thousands' more on her clothes than budgeted for, that she once met McCain aides dressed in nothing but a towel and that she did not know Africa was a continent.
She was also unable to name the nations in the vitally important North American Free Trade Agreement. There are only three - her own, its northern neighbour Canada and its southern neighbour Mexico. "
Via the Sydney Morning Herald:
"The Republican Party must abandon its 'stringently right wing' positions on gay marriage, abortion and immigration or it could be banished to the political wilderness by the American people for decades, says the deputy director of a conservative think tank.
As the recriminations over the Republicans' defeat in last week's elections continued, the deputy director of the Hoover Institution, David Brady, said the party had moved too far to the right, leaving behind a significant proportion of its supporter base, and that more would leave unless the party returned to the centre.
"In order for the Republicans to win again they have to drop the anti-gay, anti-immigrant, strict pro-life, no-abortion social positions they have taken," said Professor Brady, who is in Australia as a visiting fellow at the United States Studies Centre at Sydney University.
"They have to drop those things and move to the centre where the American voters are. Look at gay marriage - support for gay marriage in America is going up; it's not going down. It's a similar situation if you're pro-life. The majority in America has been pro-choice for a while, and it's not moving anywhere."
Using a series of internet surveys to determine voter preferences, the Hoover Institution found that 8 per cent of the Republican base had [already] shifted towards the Democratic Party since 2004."
May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May all beings never be apart from the great happiness that is free from suffering.
May all beings remain in the great evenness of mind free from passion, aggression,and ignorance.
"Americans, frightened and frustrated, have rejected the party of George Bush and have made a leap of faith with Barack Obama, writes the Herald's Political Editor Peter Hartcher. . .
Today, the US has voted to reject the nightmare of George Bush's America and has elected . . .[the] fairy tale.
Americans are more pessimistic today than at the time of any election in four decades. . . .
The economy was the dominant issue for 63 per cent of voters, according to exit polls.
The Bush Administration has given the US two recessions now, and two unfinished wars.
Of a panel of 100 US presidential historians, 61 have voted Bush as the worst president in 2¼ centuries.
He is the most unpopular in the history of US opinion polling.
Americans have rejected the party of Bush and embraced a candidate who, in many ways, is his exact opposite.
He is not only youthful and black, articulate and cosmopolitan, he's also well to the left of Bush on many key issues.
'Bush and the economy were the fundamental dynamics of this election," observed the commentator E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post.'"
UPDATE (4:05 p.m.): Heather Smith of Rock the Vote reports that youth voters have received the following deceptive text message:
Due to long lines today, all Obama voters are asked to vote on Wednesday. Thank you for your cooperation.
