The past bites Bill Clinton on the arse with some advice for those who can’t decide between his wife and Barack Obama:
Cheney’s thoughts in 1994
What a dickhead. Just listen to this 1994 interview — and weep!
Weep for thousands of American soldiers killed in a futile battle, weep for hundreds of thousand of Iraqis killed for naught.
Wild Earth No More?
According to National Geographic, soon there will be no “road less traveled” to take.
As of 1995 only 17 percent of Earth’s land remained free of direct human influence, as seen in this map of the vast networks of shipping lanes and roads that crisscross the planet.
In the rush to stock food supplies, keep safe from predators and natural disasters, and improve trade and commerce, people have domesticated entire landscapes and ecosystems — often to their detriment, a new study says.
My trip to Brazil — by George W
Hi guys, thought I’d share some holiday snaps from my recent trip to Brazil. Very friendly folks they were … GWB
This fan was obviously trying to entice me … Better not let Laura see it.
No quite sure why they asked me for a specimen, but they all wanted a sniff …
This looks like another one of their crazy festivals celebrating some dictator from the past. Funny looking moustache he has though.
Got a few shots like this. The cops look like they were trying to practice their golf strokes. They need to follow through a bit more because look where the ball ended up in the top right …
Whoops by Jane Smiley
Sometimes you have to wonder about what makes the world go round? Take this scary piece by Jane Smiley at the Huffington Post:
In light of the Walter Reed scandal and the other evidence that American soldiers serving in Iraq are getting less that adequate (let’s call it “indifferent” care), it’s revealing to return to September 10, 2001, and a speech given by Donald Rumsfeld to Pentagon outsourcers at the Pentagon.
Flash! President Bush Says He Reads Papers
Is there hope for newspapers after all? Readers may be abandoning the printed versions, but over the last couple of years, at least one person seems to have started reading them, at least sometimes, according to the New York Times.
He lives in the White House.
President Bush declared in 2003 that he did not read newspapers, but at his final news conference of the year last week, he casually mentioned that he had seen something in the paper that very day.
Asked for his reaction to word that Vice President Cheney would be called to testify in the CIA leak case, the president allowed: “I read it in the newspaper today, and it’s an interesting piece of news.”
That was a marked contrast with his position in 2003, when he told Brit Hume on Fox News that he glanced at the headlines, but “I rarely read the stories,” because, he said, they mix opinion with fact.
He said he preferred to get his news from “objective sources” — like “people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.”
Dixie Chicks peck at Bush
Maverick US country group the Dixie Chicks is still sniping at President George W. Bush, especially after his Republican party was hammered in mid-term elections.
The Texas band, which has felt a backlash at home for criticizing Bush’s Iraq war policy, played a sold-out concert in Vancouver Wednesday night.
Lead singer Natalie Maines couldn’t resist taking a shot at the humbled Bush administration as she praised her Vancouver fans. “Either the beer is free or you’re happy that Donald Rumsfeld resigned today,” Maines said.
A stable of thieves and perverts
Writing in Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi, has produced a damning indictment of the current Bush administration in a writing style that takes no prisoners and evokes fond memories of Hunter S Thompson’s gonzo journalism … [Read more…]
Putting the finger on a cure for hiccups
While the predictable research heavies gain the honours as the annual Nobel Prizes are dished out, Cobbers needs to honour a few more worthy recipients — those who rose to the top of the heap from the more than 7000 entrants in this year’s Ig Nobel Awards at Harvard.
They certainly put things in perspective: While this year’s Nobel prize for physics went to two scientists who helped to prove that the universe began with a big bang, Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris won the Ig Nobel physics prize for tackling the conundrum of why dry spaghetti breaks into more than one piece when it is bent.
People’s Choice will no doubt go to Francis Fesmire, of the University of Tennessee, who was awarded the medicine Ig for his report Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage. [Read more…]
Noted
“They rediscover bin Laden every two years right before the election. If you had a business strategy that worked all the time that was premised on scaring the living daylights out of people, you just keep doing it.”
— Bill Clinton, in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s Political Capital with Al Hunt, about the Republican strategy for the midterm elections.