WASHINGTON, May 19 – The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said on Wednesday that the Bush administration had violated federal law by producing and disseminating television news segments that portray the new Medicare law as a boon to the elderly. Very interesting. They actually call it a form of covert propaganda. It’s about time somebody called them on this kind of thing.
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Okay, this was funny. Not only did the Onion spoof science fiction fan conventioneers, they used Farscape as the example, and they spelled the character names right (and got the episode titles and numbers right, too) BURBANK, CA—Paulette Osley, 24, a moderately attractive fan of the Sci-Fi Channel series Farscape, had her self-image inflated to dangerous levels during the three-day ScaperCon 2004, according to Pepperdine University professor of psychology Wes Martin. It’s not real, of course – there’s not a Scapercon 2004 this year. But it’s affectionate. Gotta give the Onion props.
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It was the 17th perfect game in major league history, the 15th since the modern era began in 1900 and the first since the New York Yankees’ David Cone against Montreal on July 18, 1999. “It didn’t faze me,” Johnson said. “The bottom line was we needed to win the game. Winning the game was the biggest, most important thing.” Cy Young, then 37, had been the oldest to throw a perfect game, doing it in 1904. Johnson sure didn’t act his age, getting stronger as the game went along on a pleasantly warm night in Atlanta. “Not bad for…
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There are times when I think people are capable of not being so bad after all — times when it’s impossible to keep the grin from spreading, and you wonder if you’re really worthy of all this spontaneous stranger-loving goodwill, and maybe they should save it for the elderly ladies who must’ve been through so much more. I feel like a kid — a 28-year-old who’s lucky and ahead of the game, even though my straight peers all seem already married and property-owning, but they’re in such a different world, these guys are closer, really, and even the straight cheerleaders…
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I’ve been hearing about Terry Gross’ interview with Bill O’Reilly for months and months, and now Boing Boing reports that O’Reilly may be trying to bury the interview. A lot of the interview concerned Al Franken’s book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, which satirized O’Reilly and other neoconservatives. The link from the Fresh Aire site includes a swaggering, bullying clip from O’Reilly’s show the next day.
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But the woman’s family are insisting that the militiamen will continue to occupy the hospital until they are compensated for the removal of her womb. The family is demanding 50 camels, which is the traditional Somali compensation offered for the death of a woman. The woman’s family say she is as good as dead because she can no longer bear children. This has been bothering me all day. I realize that this woman comes from a traditional culture, in a place where survival is everything. She would have died had a doctor at a free clinic in Mogadishu not removed…
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CBS has finally put a teaser page up for
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Joi Itoquotes Lauren Weinstein: Greetings. Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker, who exposed so many aspects of the Iraqi prisoner abuse story, now reports that U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice secretly approved the expansion of a clandestine program that encouraged physical coercion, sexual humiliation, and blackmail of Iraqi prisoners, setting the stage for the abuses that these same officials have recently been condemning so publicly. According to the report, President Bush was kept informed regarding this program. The Department of Defense called the accusations in the story “outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and…
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We wants the extended version of The Return of the King, but this version is tempting, too.
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As you’ve probably guessed, dear robots and spiders and lurkers (oh my)… we’re home. We pulled into the driveway at about 430pm today, after putting a little over 3800 miles on the nice Silver Beast we rented. David did all the driving and deserves about a month of back rubs. And more. Our last wild-ass guess on pictures uploaded: approximately 1.3 GIG of images. I’ll be doing a lot of re-sizing of the ones I already used in posts – I didn’t have a lot of time to fool with them, but they will be a more manageable size soon.…