Israel flattens Hamas ministry in Gaza Strip

Yahoo! News reported Israel bombed the Hamas-run Interior Ministry in Gaza and closed border crossings with the strip on Friday, sharply escalating what it called a campaign to halt Palestinian rocket attacks.

The four-storey ministry complex in Gaza City was empty at the time

Why not bomb it when it is full? An empty building was not firing rockets into Israel.

but one woman was killed and at least 30 others nearby were wounded in the air strike, medical officials said. "It felt like an earthquake," said Umm Fahmi, a woman who lives across from the blast site. "My house did not only shake, it jumped from its foundations and back down. How could they drop such a bomb in a residential area on top of people's heads?"

What sort of bomb should they have dropped, and how could a bomb not be on people's heads? While they are looking for a bomb to hit feet, and avoid heads, maybe you should stop the idiots firing rockets into Israel, and they could stop any bombing,

she said, peering through the dust at the concrete and steel remains of the security complex.

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Nuts blowing up other nuts

Yahoo! News reported A senior Hamas leader on Saturday said the Islamist group had foiled a plot by Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah party to assassinate dismissed Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya.

I thought they only used those on Jews.

Hamas-run police had arrested a would-be suicide bomber, who was a member of Fatah, former interior minister Said Siam told a press conference in Gaza City. Siam said the Fatah plotters had planned to kill Haniya at Friday prayers.

Go for it. Maybe they will kill each other off.

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Human Error, Not Machine

WMUR Manchester reported New Hampshire... is recounting the Democratic votes at the request of candidate Dennis Kucinich. He said that online reports of dramatic differences between communities that hand-counted ballots and those that machine-counted them led to his request.... In many of the towns and wards, the vote counts have been identical. Some minor changes have been made when voters didn't follow directions and marked ballots that were impossible for the machines to read.

The one major exception has been Ward 5 in Manchester, where votes for all the major candidates dropped significantly after the recount. Clinton's total went from 683 to 619, Obama's went from 404 to 365, and other candidates saw similar drops. But state officials said the problem wasn't with the machine that did the counting. The disparity appeared when the ward clerk filling out the official tally sheet accidentally added vice presidential votes to the presidential votes.

The New Hampshire ballot allows voters to also vote for a vice president,

Isn’t that what the 12th Amendment corrected?

and some wrote in a presidential candidate's name in that spot. When the clerk was carrying the totals over from the columns, the votes were accidentally added to the presidential votes. It was a human error, and the machine count was right,

We need to get those unreliable humans out of the loop. The Cylons and the Borg were right.

but that hasn't stopped hundreds of people from e-mailing the secretary of state calling him a "liar," calling the process a "sham," and threatening to have Gardner arrested by federal officials for rigging the outcome.... WMUR attempted to contact Kucinich to get more clarity about what exactly he's looking for

Kucinich is looking for publicity, and he figures it was worth $27,000; he knows he does not stand a chance of getting the nomination.

and whether continue the recount through the entire state, but no one from the Kucinich campaign returned the calls.

Don Surber blogged Diebold 1, Kos 0.... I know, the truth is just a conspiracy to make the left look loony.

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Universal health care plans up against U.S. law

USATODAY.com reported Several states and communities are moving to provide universal health coverage for their residents, but a federal law is blocking their efforts.

Good.

Many of the proposals require employers either to offer health coverage themselves or pay into a public fund to help cover the uninsured. Some employers say that conflicts with a federal law that bars states from requiring or regulating employer-provided benefits such as health coverage. The law, which protects private-sector companies from having to meet a patchwork of state and local demands, is supported by businesses. The dispute has set off a legal battle pitting lawmakers against employers. Its resolution could determine how far state and local lawmakers can go with their plans to cover the uninsured.

By making someone else pay for it.

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National Health Service

Daily Mail reported More than seven million patients have been unable to see an NHS dentist for almost two years.

Attention Democrats wanting to take over our Health Care here. We don't want this.

Most of those denied access have paid for private care instead, says Citizens Advice. But almost three million have gone without treatment altogether, claims the charity. The figure includes thousands of children and is much higher than Government estimates. The charity is calling today for Primary Care Trusts, the bodies responsible for dentistry in England and Wales, to step up funding to improve care for NHS patients.

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Bill Clinton Gets Riled Over Nevada Strip Caucuses

SFGate Former President Bill Clinton got positively riled -- as in steely-eyed -- today when pressed by a local TV reporter on the issue of lawsuits filed by Sen. Hillary Clinton's Nevada supporters to challenge the Jan. 19 Democratic "at large'' caucus locations that will serve workers on the Las Vegas strip. Many of those workers are members of the 60,000-strong Culinary Workers Union -- which has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama.... But it got fiery indeed when San Francisco's ABC 7 News bulldog politics reporter Mark Matthews grabbed him afterwards and pressed him on the Nevada lawsuits. Matthews asked politely why the ''at-large'' caucus locations have been challenged by members of the teachers union -- many of them Hillary supporters. (The critics say the Strip location caucuses will give culinary union members an unfair advantage, one other workers don't have, to participate in the Nevada caucuses during their work hours.)

The caucus is held during the day on Saturday. Most people, and most teachers do not work on Saturday. The culinary workers do work on Saturday.

Matthews asked Clinton about the perception that the challenges were filed only after the culinary union's recent Obama endorsement.

Clinton, just inches from his face, fired back. ''There were teachers who filed the lawsuit.

Teachers who want to be able to dominate the caucuses and not worry about culinary workers who are supporting a different candidate.

You have asked the question in an accusatory way, so I will ask you back,'' the former president said. ''Do you really believe that all the Democrats understood that they had agreed to give people who worked in the casino a vote worth five times as much as people who voted in their own precinct?''

Can all of the culinary workers take time off for the entire caucus? Maybe only 20% of them will be able to take time off work, so one worker must represent four others who are still working.

''Did you know that? Their votes will be counted five times more powerfully, in terms of delegates to the state convention, compared to delegates to the national convention.''

If the culinary workers union had backed Clinton, and the teachers union had backed Obama, do you think Bill Clinton's opinion would be different?

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Maureen Dowd

Michael Abramowitz wrote in WaPo Having made a living for years skewering President Bush, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is almost certainly not one of the White House's favorite columnists.

That is the understatement of the year.

She refers to the president dismissively, by his middle initial, and has been vastly less than impressed by his efforts in the Middle East. "After subverting diplomacy in his first term," Dowd wrote recently of Bush's latest efforts to mediate between the Israelis and Palestinians, "now W. does drive-by diplomacy, taking a playboy approach to peace." This kind of language did not, however, dissuade White House aides and medical staff from leaping to help Dowd when she fell ill during Bush's eight-day swing through the Middle East.

She certainly did not express her appreciation for it in the column she wrote:

Faith, Freedom and Bling in the Middle East - New York Times Puddle jumping through Arabia, the president saw his share of falcons in little leather hoods — presumably not a Gitmo reference —

She just had to throw that jab in.

and Arabian stallions, including one retired stud from Texas — presumably not a W. reference.

And that one. Disagreeing with the man is one thing, but this is uncalled for.

But there was a distinct dearth of wives and dissidents.... Though W. has made the issue of the progress of women in the Middle East a central part of “the freedom agenda” — he had a roundtable over the weekend with Kuwaiti women on democracy and development — he doesn’t seem bothered that 17 years after his father protected the Saudis when Saddam invaded Kuwait, Saudi women still can’t drive or publicly display hair or skin and still get beheaded and lashed because of archaic laws.

Maybe he thinks there are more important things to worry about than trying to change things related to their culture AND religion.

Neither does the female secretary of state of the United States.

Was she beheaded or lashed?

“It’s not allowed for ladies to use the gym,” the Marriott desk clerk told me, an American woman in an American franchise traveling with an American president.

In a foreign country which is the home of the two most holy place in their religion.

... Asked by ABC’s Terry Moran what he was thinking when he stood on the site where Jesus performed miracles at the Sea of Galilee, W. replied: “I reflected on the story in the New Testament about the calm and the rough seas, because it was on those very seas that the Lord was in the boat with the disciples, and they were worried about the waves and the wind, and the sea calmed. That’s what I reflected on: the calm you can find in putting your faith in a higher power.” Clearly, the man believes in miracles.

And clearly Maureen Dowd just believes in Maureen Dowd.

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Potentially troubling news for Clinton in Michigan ‘win’

CNN Political Ticker reported Hillary Clinton faced a grim statistic in Michigan tonight, despite her primary "win" there: results revealed that she may have reason to worry about her grasp on the African-American vote.

Clinton will respond by pandering so much for the black vote that it will turn off other Democrats, and I suspect even the blacks will realize what she is doing, and realize the Democrats have been playing them for suckers for a long time, promising a lot, and delivering very little. The will vote for Obama this time, but in 2012 if the Republicans are smart they will capture a lot of the black vote by showing how many middle and upper class blacks have actually been empowered by Republican policies,rather than being held down by Democratic policies.

The Michigan primary vote was essentially meaningless: the national party stripped the state of its delegates because it held its contest too early in the election season, and Clinton was the only major Democratic contender whose name appeared on the ballot. Even so, roughly 70 percent of Michigan’s African-American voters — a group that makes up a quarter of Michigan’s Democratic electorate — did not cast their votes for Clinton, choosing the “uncommitted” option instead. Yet these voters weren’t uncommitted at all: in fact, according to CNN exit polls, they overwhelmingly favored Barack Obama, whose name did not appear on the ballot.

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Patton Speech, Revisited

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Killing Non-Muslim Civilians is Legitimate

Hat tip to Muslims Against Sharia for pointing out this video whereMullah Anjum Chaudri says "Killing Non-Muslim Civilians is Legitimate"

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Legless athlete banned

AdelaideNow reported South African double amputee Oscar Pistorius, who runs with carbon fibre blades attached to his legs, will not be allowed to compete in Beijing. A report commissioned by the International Association of Athletics Federations says the prosthetics used by Pistorius gave him an advantage over other runners.

Are they afraid other runners would ask to have their legs chopped off???

Last year, the IAAF amended its rules to ban the use of any technical device incorporating springs, wheels "or any other element that provides the user with an advantage over another athlete not using such a device".

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Hillary Clinton likens White House to prison

Los Angeles Times reported Not that it's going to diminish her ambition to live there again, but Hillary Clinton says she views the White House as something of a prison.

Only the rest of the country will be punished if she gets there.

She also thinks that when she gets there, she'll have to have some kind of national contest to decide what to call her husband since First Lady wouldn't be appropriate.

How about Philanderer in Chief

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Organs to be taken without consent

In Britian Telegraph Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to allow hospitals to take organs from dead patients without explicit consent.

And with the other problems in Britian's universal health care system, they should have even more "donors."

The proposals would mean consent for organ donation after death would be automatically presumed, unless individuals had opted out of the national register or family members objected.

And with the complaints here in the US about the pain involved with our leathal injection form of execution, how amout putting condemned prisoners under anesthetic, and then just harvesting all of their organs. (Just kidding, of course)

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TulsaHighTech

I suspect most of my readers are not from Tulsa, but for those that are in the local area, I recently started a tabloid newspaper Tulsa High Tech covering information for the novice computer users, end users, small business owners, developers, and IT Professionals. The premier issue is available here, at stores, library branches, coffee houses, and other locations around town. Michael Bates was kind enough to blog about it, and to take copies to the Coffee House on Cherry Street, DoubleShot Coffee Company, and Shades of Brown.

If you are a member of any local computer, graphic, amateur radion, robotics, or other high technology group, email donsingleton@cox.net

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DRM Is Dead, But Watermarks Rise From Its Ashes

Wired reported With all of the Big Four record labels now jettisoning digital rights management, music fans have every reason to rejoice. But consumer advocates are singing a note of caution, as the music industry experiments with digital-watermarking technology as a DRM substitute. Watermarking offers copyright protection by letting a company track music that finds its way to illegal peer-to-peer networks.

So what.

At its most precise, a watermark could encode a unique serial number that a music company could match to the original purchaser. So far, though, labels say they won't do that: Warner and EMI have not embraced watermarking at all, while Sony's and Universal's DRM-free lineups contain "anonymous" watermarks that won't trace to an individual.

Who cares if they can trace it to an individual. At least if you buy a CD or just one song, you can copy it to any mp3 player you have. I don't mind them shutting down peer to peer exchange of music, although I doubt they could track a song to the particular purchaser.

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Another Major Stem Cell Advance

Popular Science Blog reported Scientists at Advanced Cell Technology announced yesterday that they've derived colonies of stem cells from human embryos without doing any damage to those original embryos. The work is significant because it may meet the ethical guidelines of the Bush Administration, which insist that no harm be done to the embryos in pursuing this brand of stem cell research. At the same time, it might not be that clear cut, since the definition of "harm" is a bit tricky in this space, as this Washington Post article points out. The work differs from this past summer's big advance, in which scientists dodged the ethical issue altogether, and derived embyonic stem cells from mature cells.

I am more excited by this past summer's big advance, since the stem cells could be produced from the patient needing treatment, but at least they are not destroying embryos.

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Ms. Magazine Blocks Ad on Israeli Women

American Jewish Congress reported Ms. Magazine has long been in the forefront of the fight for equal rights and equal opportunities for women.

As long as they are not Jewish women of power.

Apparently that is not the case if the women happen to be Israeli. The magazine has turned down an AJCongress advertisement that did nothing more controversial than call attention to the fact that women currently occupy three of the most significant positions of power in Israeli public life. The proposed ad included a text that merely said, "This is Israel," under photographs of President of the Supreme Court Dorit Beinish, Vice Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Tzipi Livni and Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik. "What other conclusion can we reach," asked Richard Gordon, President of AJCongress, "except that the publishers − and if the publishers are right, a significant number of Ms. Magazine readers − are so hostile to Israel that they do not even want to see an ad that says something positive about Israel?"

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John Edwards Is A Loser

Lawrence O'Donnell wrote on The Huffington Post John Edwards is a loser. He has won exactly two elections in his life and lost 31. Only one of his wins and all of his losses were in presidential primaries and caucuses. He remains perfectly positioned to continue to lose with a Kucinich-like consistency. Nothing but egomania keeps Edwards in the race now. All presidential candidates are egomaniacs but some of them have party status worth preserving that forces them to drop out when they hit the wall. A loser like Edwards has no status or dignity to lose. Campaigning and losing is his life.

I'm just guessing here, but I don't think Lawrence is an Edwards supporter.

So, he will continue his simple-minded, losing campaign and deny Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton the one-on-one contest they deserve.

What about a candidate the country deserves? Any one with any experience to ever be a President has already dropped out of the Democratic race, and truthfully there never was anyone in either party really qualified to be President.

If John Edwards stays in the race, he might, in the end, become nothing other than the Southern white man who stood in the way of the black man. And for that, he would deserve a lifetime of liberal condemnation. Maybe Edwards is already not a factor in the campaign because Edwards voters would split evenly between Senators Obama and Clinton if Edwards dropped out. But we'll never know unless Edwards does the right thing and gets out of the way of the only two candidates who have a chance to get the nomination. The white male monopoly on the Democratic nomination has finally come to an end. Someone has to tell John Edwards.

I am pretty sure Lawrence is not an Edwards supporter. But what he needs to understand is Edwards is in it until the Convention. There is always a chance that Obama wil stumble, and fall flat on his face, and someone needs to be the Not Hillary candidate. They certainly don't want leave that job to Dennis Kucinich.

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Cast off a cliff

Adnkronos international reported Iran's supreme court has confirmed that two youths, found guilty of rape will receive 100 lashes each before being cast off a cliff

How civilized of them.

an ancient Islamic punishment - local media reported. The reports named the youths as Tayeb and Yazdan. "This is a chilling sentence," said Iranian human rights activist and lawyer Mohammad Ali Dadkhah. "Iranian jurisprudence allows alternative punishments to those prescribed by Islamic law, but many judges ignore them, " Dadhkhah said.

The sane ones???

Iranian magistrates in recent weeks sentenced several people to punishments that had been in abeyance, he said. As recently as last week in Iranian Balochistan, five minority Sunnis had their hands and feet amputated, he noted. All five Sunnis were found guilty of the crime of 'moharebeh' or enmity towards Allah.

Why not let Allah deal with them.

The highly vague definition of 'enemy of God' ranges from homosexuals and drug traffickers to supporters or members of armed groups opposed to the regime.

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Where is the humor?

Is it funny to suggest lynching a black man in a back alley?

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