News – The Veep Showdown

US

Today’s the day for the Edwards/Cheney face off. Predications? Will Edwards expound upon his daddy working in a mill? Will Cheney cruse a blue streak and chant portents of fiery terrorist doom? Will it be as(to me) unremarkable as the last debate? Will the debate format give Cheney and advantage? These questions and many others to be answered soon.

I’d wager this year’s election will be one of the most watched in history. We’ll not only have the US people(more than most other election cycles I think), but 20 international observers from 15 countries(including Australia, Argentina, South Africa and Zambia), 60 domestic groups providing volunteers that include a group with tech experts to evaluate the performance of e-voting machines.

SpaceShipOne has won the Ansari X Prize, hurtled to a height of 367,442 feet surpassing its target altitude without the heart-stopping barrel rolls that vexed the craft’s qualifying flight on Wednesday. Marvelous. Brian Binnie, the 51-year-old former U.S. Navy pilot who was at the controls, said that as he became weightless he did pulled out a paper model of SpaceShipOne and let it free fall in the cockpit with him as he snapped pictures.

Kerry says often that he’ll fund stem cell research, but every year since 1996 congress has put an amendment into the Health and Human Services appropriations bill prohibiting the use of federal funds for any kind of research on human embryos. That, obviously, could put a kink in Kerry’s plans. Of course, Clinton’s administration found a way around it. Harriet Rabb, then general counsel to Health and Human Services, determined that researchers paid by the government could not perform research that destroys embryos, but if the embryo had already been destroyed, federally funded work using its stem cells would be acceptable.

Ralph Begleiter, a journalism professor at the University of Delaware, has filed a FOIA lawsuit challenging the 1991 Pentagon order that bans media coverage of the arrival of the remains of dead soldiers. He’s seeking photographs and video from Dover Air Force Base of arrival ceremonies honoring U.S. service personnel killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Pentagon’s spokeswoman maintains that the ban is to protect the privacy of the families. Begleiter considers the Pentagons’ claims of privacy don’t make sense, as the pics don’t identify any individual soldier. Personally, I wonder what he will do with the images and such. Is he doing this just to open access to them or does he have a specific reason for wanting them?

Rummy says he was misunderstood Tuesday when he said hours before that he knew of no “strong, hard evidence” linking Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda. “I have acknowledged since September 2002 that there were ties between al Qaeda and Iraq,” Rumsfeld said in a Web site statement issued following remarks he made to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York Monday. “Today at the Council, I even noted that ‘when I’m in Washington, I pull out a piece of paper and say “I don’t know, because I’m not in that business, but I’ll tell you what the CIA thinks” and I read it’.” Maybe Rummy’s age is finally showing. You never know. Either way, you can look at his full remarks and decide for yourself.

London based Privacy International opines that the US’s new US Visit biometric system of border controls violates civil rights without delivering security. Their director, Simon Davies, believes the program will likely generate errors and eventually collapse under its own weight.

Iraq

Paul Bremer speaks up to say that the US intervention in Iraq was hampered early on by inadequate forces and efforts to contain looting, which established an air of lawlessness. At the very least, I agree that didn’t help matters one bit.

A carbomb blows near a US convoy in Ramadi . Two civilians killed, four injured, the convoy undamaged.

After Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 hit the theaters, he received a flood of emails and letters from disillusioned and angry American soldiers. In an extract form his new book, here are some of them.

Israel/Palestine

In an uncharacteristic show of sanity it seems Israel and the Palestinian Authority are seeking a way to end the current Gaza fighting with words. WE can only hope that some deal is made and the PA can have the militants abide by it. I know, a faint hope, but let’s hope nonetheless.

70 people have died during this latest operation, Operation Days of Penitence, prompted by the death of two Israeli children, killed by a Hamas rocket attack. Among the reported damages are demolished homes, bulldozed agricultural land and destroyed infrastructure. Thousands are without power, though some has been sporadically restored and residents say the destruction of sewage systems had contaminated the water supplies in some areas. About 50,000 Palestinians are trapped within the area that has been seized by hundreds of Israeli troops backed by about 200 tanks and armored vehicles. The Israeli army says it’s clearing a six mile swath of land as a buffer zone to prevent further missile strikes. Which seems pointless to me, because the militants could just move to a new area and force Israel to act again if they feel it will help. Which it won’t as they’ll just move again and all the while Israel will continue to play right into the militants hands by seeding further deep anger among the general populace of Palestine. Israel’s military says they’ve destroyed a ‘small number’ of homes because either its soldiers had been attacked or to allow its tanks to avoid booby-trapped roads, but some estimates range from scores to hundreds. How many is a ‘small number’, I wonder. There remains some disagreement on whether militants are using UN ambulances to transport rockets. Israel has released footage is says shows this, but the UN says the footage shows a worker loading a stretcher into the vehicle.

Iran

Iran says it has a missile that can go 1,250 miles. Such a missile would be capable of hitting Israel or parts of southeastern Europe. The international circus just gets better and better.

Korea

North Korea’s government says that the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004, which just recently passed it’s last legislative hurdle Monday, makes the nuclear talks meaningless as it shows that the US is “hellbent” on toppling them. I dunno about that, but it does pretty much show that even if North Korea caves on nukes, the US won’t lay off of them. Of course, anyone with a lick of sense knows that Bush won’t be laying off North Korea while he’s in office.

Russia

Looking at an article about the EU concerned over Russian democracy, I’m wondering what might happen of Russia backslides heavily? Could they get isolated diplomatically?

Alu Alkhanov, the new pro-Kremlin leader of Chechnya,knows he’s a rebel target. “I understand that as the head of the Chechen republic, which is fighting … international terrorism, I also become target Number One for all sorts of extremists,” he said after his inauguration today. “I will continue the course of the late Chechen president … I swear to bring back law and order to Chechnya so that we can finally get rid of the nightmare of the past several years.”

Africa

Libya will be hosting a summit on Darfur with the leaders of Chad, Egypt and Nigeria with the Sudanese government and both rebel groups in the region(the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudan Liberation Movement) invited. The summit is said to be on ensuring a food supply for refugees and displaced peoples, security for the regional populace and a lasting solution for the whole affair.

General

The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to David Gross, David Politzer and Frank Wilczek who had shown how the attraction between quarks — the basic building blocks of nature — was strong when they were far apart and weak when they were close together. What the hell does that mean? Means they’ve made the first step toward “the theory of everything.” Any step toward that is a pretty big thing.

The atmosphere at an Apple Store is pretty easygoing. You can go in and hangout as long as you wish. Play with the machines, check email, surf the web and all that. Unless you decide to run an unofficial hardware test lab in one of their stores. That’ll get your ass banned. Webmaster Robert Morgan of Bare Feats was banned from using the Macs at his local Apple Store as a performance test lab after he published tests results for the iMac G5 that contradict Apple’s claims for the machine. He’s been doing this sort of thing for a while, since 1995 at various stores and since March 2003 at Apple Stores with the full knowledge and conscent of the staff.

The odd marionate based movie, Team America: World Police, is facing the box office death of an NC-17 rating due to a scene showing simulated oral sex between marionettes. One of the directors, Trey Parker, commented, “We blow Janeane Garofalo’s head clean off, [but for the MPAA] it’s all about the positions of the dolls having sex … It’s not funny – it’s tragic.”

Today’s Papers has the weapon inspection report on Iraq detailing how Saddam planned to undermine sanctions and produce illicit arms while within the story’s eighth paragraph notes that “officials said the document did not describe any specific plan by Mr. Hussein” to restart NBC weapons’ programs, a deputy commander at Guantanimo backing up earlier reports that most prisoners there are Taliban grunts at most, non-partisan polls showing a slight majority of respondents oppose the police and an increasing minority don’t seem to think they’ll be able to vote and more in the one page news.

Amusements

One of Mike Tyson’s bodyguards passes out while having sex in the hallway of a fancy NYC hotel

Suspect in drive-by shootings caps the night by accidentally shooting himself in the head

Tornado reveals child pornography in Maryland man’s home, sending him to OZ

List of things in lost and found at Germany’s Oktoberfest include secret government papers, a glass eye, prosthetic limbs, a set of false teeth with one tooth made of gold and Drew’s man purse

This week’s headline: Onlookers flock to Mt. St. Helens. Next week’s headline: Onlookers critical of government’s inability to rescue them from oncoming lava

Fark Photoshop Challenge: Theme: An actor meeting himself as two characters he’s played

Fark Photoshop Challenge: It’s that time of year again. Photoshop the ultimate Jack o’ Lantern

Fark Photoshop Challenge: Combine two normally unrelated pieces of sports equipment to create something new and useful.

Fark Photoshop Challenge: Photoshop what Bush and Kerry were writing/drawing in their notebooks during the debate