Claude A. Allen, who resigned last month as President Bush's top domestic policy adviser, was arrested this week in Montgomery County for allegedly swindling Target and Hecht's stores out of more than $5,000 in a refund scheme, police said.
Birds of a feather…
ABC (via ThinkProgress):
After relying heavily on fixed — and thus vulnerable — Web sites until early 2002, al Qaeda quickly switched to hiding its online operations within more legitimate bulletin boards and Internet sites offering free upload services or connecting through such popular social network sites as Orkut and MySpace.
Since Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace… it could be said that he's directly providing aid to the terrorists.
Actually I'd be pretty curious to see one of these pages. Who's on their friend list, what templates they use, what they list as favorite music and movies…
I just found the most interesting thing on Truthout today. It's a NYT editorial written in 1944 by Henry Wallace.
A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.
Just read the whole thing. The prescience is amazing.
In fact, the scientists say men can drink as much as 24 ounces of beer a day — more than the 16 ounces of low-fat milk or soy drinks they suggest, and three times their recommended limit for fruit juice.
I'll drink to that.
CNN:
Contending that women have more options than they do in the event of an unintended pregnancy, men's rights activists are mounting a long shot legal campaign aimed at giving them the chance to opt out of financial responsibility for raising a child.
The National Center for Men has prepared a lawsuit — nicknamed Roe v. Wade for Men — to be filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Michigan on behalf of a 25-year-old computer programmer ordered to pay child support for his ex-girlfriend's daughter.
The suit addresses the issue of male reproductive rights, contending that lack of such rights violates the U.S. Constitution's equal protection clause.
The gist of the argument: If a pregnant woman can choose among abortion, adoption or raising a child, a man involved in an unintended pregnancy should have the choice of declining the financial responsibilities of fatherhood. The activists involved hope to spark discussion even if they lose.
Okay, so he's right: it's not fair.
But life ain't fair. It's not fair that women get pregnant and bear the brunt of the burden with regards to children, either. And frankly the notion that any father would be unwilling to support their child, even an unplanned one, makes them a douchebag in my mind.
The latest rumor is that Google is looking to buy Writely, a web based document editor. I'm not sure if this one makes a lot of sense though; most of Writely's functionality is already built into Gmail, Blogger, and Google Pages – I'm not sure why they'd buy rather than build their own.
Such an application would segway nicely with the rumored GDrive though, and obviously further fuels the notion that Google is indeed building a web-based version of Office.
Update: The rumor turned out to be true.
I've suspected as much for a while, but finally there's proof.
We now have a faith based department of homeland security. Just let that one sink in for a while.
One of every five calories in the American diet is liquid. The nation's single biggest “food” is soda, and nutrition experts have long demonized it.
Now they are escalating the fight.
In reports to be published in science journals this week, two groups of researchers hope to add evidence to the theory that soda and other sugar-sweetened drinks don't just go hand-in-hand with obesity, but actually cause it. Not that these drinks are the only cause — genetics, exercise and other factors are involved — but that they are one cause, perhaps the leading cause.
I came around a while ago to the fact thar Richard Nixon is largely responsible for the obesity epidemic now upon us, through corn subsidies that lead to the abundance of HFCS. It's good to see some traction on raising public awareness of just how bad soda is for you.
I'm not a fan of iTunes, but this is what I've been waiting for. Every other show I care about (there aren't many) can easily be bought on DVD – this was the only reason to have a cable subscription, but that's no longer an issue. Woot.
Archive of the Great Eric 