He made me laugh by mentioning one of my all time ‘stupid’ funny favorites.
“This is my BOOM stick!”
We had a place in New Orleans that sold all sorts of AOD/Evil Dead and Nightmare Before Christmas stuff you couldn’t find anyplace else on earth. We would always pick up Ebola a little souvenier ~ a “Bad Ash” bobblehead doll here, a DVD encased in squishy foam Book of the Dead there ~ as a thank you for not killing the dogs while we were gone.
::sigh:: From such small gestures are the cherished memories of childhood made.
Now’s NOT the time to consider a change in direction.
Bin Laden Warns of Attacks, Offers Truce
Man, what an ignorant sabre-rattler:
“The leaders of states who would use terrorist means against us, as well as those who would consider using in one way or another weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would lay themselves open to a firm and adapted response on our part… This response could be a conventional one. It could also be of a different kind.”
…(the President), who is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, said all of (their) nuclear forces had been configured with the new strategy in mind and the number of nuclear warheads on (their) nuclear submarines had been reduced to allow targeted strikes.
It was the first time he had so clearly linked the threat of a nuclear response to a terrorist attack.
My god. What the hell is Bush thinking?
Oh wait…it wasn’t Bush.
When it rains, it pours.
(Anderson) COOPER: Sean, thanks for that.
It was here on the program that we expected to speak with Mayor Nagin, even though getting the mayor to come on the program is only a little easier than herding cats. When we — when he last appeared on 360, which was about four months ago, shortly before Hurricane Rita, he promised he would be back.
Since then, we have put in dozens of requests for interviews. He’s always declined them. Twice, he has agreed to appear, then canceled shortly before airtime, as he did tonight.
This morning, he agreed to appear. And, then, around 6:00 p.m., he confirmed he would appear. Then, shortly after, his office told us the mayor had an emergency to deal with. They said he would not be showing up.
Now, they didn’t say what the emergency was. And we’re not here to judge a person’s emergencies. But, last we checked, the mayor was eating dinner at a restaurant called Bourbon House on the corner of Bourbon Street.
And Sean Callebs is actually standing outside the restaurant right now.
Sean, is the mayor still inside having dinner?
CALLEBS: Well, as best we can tell, Anderson, he is, indeed.
I can you how this evening played out. After we got the call that the mayor was going to cancel the interview, we had a crew out here. Somebody went upstairs to the second floor in a private dining area. They saw the mayor greeting members of the Commission to Bring Back New Orleans.
Now, we had people out here the entire time. There are still a number of city vehicles out here. We went up a short while ago to check once again to see if Mayor Nagin was upstairs on the second floor. This time, those doors were shut, and the mayor’s press officer is standing out in front — Anderson.
COOPER: Well, tell her I — I left her a message as well. I would love to talk to her, when she gets a chance.
To your knowledge, are there any emergencies happening in Bourbon House right now?
CALLEBS: No.
This guy is the gift that keeps on giving.
Big jelly fish:
“It’s a terrible problem. They’re like aliens,” Noriyuki Kani of the fisheries federation in Toyama, northwest of Tokyo, told Reuters ahead of the conference.
One Echizen kurage can be up to 2 meters (6 feet, 7 inches) in diameter and weigh up to 200 kilograms (440 pounds).
Looks like a helluva lot of sushi, though. Heck, the Japanese seem to eat everything else they find swimming…
…until it hits you in the wallet. THEN it’s not so funny anymore.
The impact of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s controversial comments on Martin Luther King Day landed squarely on the shoulders of local tourism officials Wednesday, one day after the mayor and his staff launched a major damage control effort to temper the firestorm.
As pundits and talk-show hosts parodied Nagin coast to coast, tourism officials tried to soothe angry, disillusioned clients while political observers weighed the potential impact in Washington.
…”A lot of people in Washington see Louisiana as a banana republic and New Orleans as a kind of zoo,” Cook said. “The mayor’s not helping the city when he says things like that. It just reinforces that negative stereotype and really does hurt your cause.”
Just in Washington? Actually, I’d say that’s pretty much the perception all over the country.
…but this veto seems like a particularly bad idea.
Gov. Haley Barbour vetoed a bill Wednesday that would phase out a state sales tax on groceries and increase the tax on cigarettes.
…The bill, which zipped through the Senate and House at the start of the 2006 session, would eliminate the 7 percent grocery tax by 2014.
Officials say Mississippi has the highest state grocery tax in the nation – but one of the lowest cigarette excise taxes, 18 cents a pack.
US poised for radical reform of foreign aid programme
The Bush administration is expected to announce on Thursday a controversial restructuring of its foreign aid system under Randall Tobias, a retired pharmaceuticals executive who currently heads the US global Aids programme.
…”In the 21st century, emerging nations like India and China, and Brazil and Egypt, and Indonesia and South Africa are increasingly shaping the course of history,” Ms Rice said.
The US global posture did not reflect these changes, she said, noting that the US had nearly the same number of diplomats in Germany, with a population of 82m, as in India, with 1bn people.
Someone’s not going to be happy. “Whaddayou mean I’ve ‘got to leave the Danube for Darfur/Bonn for Bangalore/Paris for Visakhapatnam’?”
“You don’t get whales coming to Berlin too often,” said Berlin police spokesman Bernhard Schodrowski.
Short memories there.
Damn.
Jobless claims fall 36,000, lowest since 2000
How many different sides of her mouth can Hillary talk out of? For years she damns Chimpy for being the cowboy and not engaging our allies, yaddayaddayadda, and now
U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton called for United Nations sanctions against Iran as it resumes its nuclear program and faulted the Bush administration for “downplaying” the threat.
In an address Wednesday evening at Princeton University, Clinton, D-N.Y., said it was a mistake for the United States to have Britain, France and Germany head up nuclear talks with Iran over the past 2 1/2 years. Last week, Iran resumed nuclear research in a move Tehran claims is for energy, not weapons.
“I believe that we lost critical time in dealing with Iran because the White House chose to downplay the threats and chose to outsource the negotiations,” Clinton said.
So she would have attacked them long ago? Is that what she’s saying?
…has ridden into the sunset.
Traditional Winchester rifles discontinued, factory to close
The traditional Winchester rifles carried by pioneers, movie stars and Wild West lawmen will be discontinued in March, a Belgian manufacturer said Wednesday, confirming the end of an American icon that became known as “The Gun that Won the West.”
Read more »
…pal?
After the longest independent counsel investigation in history, the prosecutor in the case of former Housing Secretary Henry G. Cisneros is finally closing his operation with a scathing report accusing Clinton administration officials of thwarting an inquiry into whether Mr. Cisneros evaded paying income taxes.
Circumventing justice, time and time again? It sounds like King Clinton & Co. were running some kind of plantation!
…REALLY “good intelligence”…
U.S. Strike Killed Al Qaeda Bomb Maker
Jan. 18, 2006 — ABC News has learned that al Qaeda’s master bomb maker and chemical weapons expert was one of the men killed in last week’s U.S. missile attack in eastern Pakistan.
…”This is extraordinarily important,” said former FBI agent Jack Cloonan, an ABC News consultant, who was the senior agent on the FBI’s al Qaeda squad. “He’s the man who trained the shoe bomber, Richard Reid and Zacharias Mousssaoui, as well as hundreds of others.”
…and REALLY good news.
Never give a Marine a can of spray paint and say:
“Camouflage that thing.”
Read more »
…have been recorded.
Tucked away in the basement of West Virginia’s gold-domed Capitol, state officials say, an office was secretly transformed into a taxpayer-funded studio that may have been used to pirate DVD videos and music CDs.
Administration Secretary Robert Ferguson said his staff stumbled across the office after finding evidence that government purchase cards were used to buy $88,000 worth of computers and related equipment over three years.
I guess “Capitol Records” really IS defunct now…
…EVER getting one of these cars. Fuggedaboudit, pal.
Woman Poses Naked on Car at Auto Show
DETROIT (AP) — City officials are trying to figure out how a woman sneaked into the North American International Auto Show after closing time to pose naked atop the new Dodge Challenger.
It happened around 2:30 a.m. Monday when only workers and security guards were supposed to be inside Cobo Center.
Guards found the woman and about a dozen gawkers taking photographs with camera phones, workers told The Detroit News.
“We heard they were all over the Challenger,” said Jason Vines, a spokesman for the Chrysler Group, which earlier had tried to give its cars more sex appeal by bringing in fully clothed “Desperate Housewives” star Eva Longoria to pose at its exhibit.
Cobo Director Glenn Blanton said disciplinary action will be taken if employees were involved in the security breach.
I’m not walking out to a scene like that first thing every morning.
…unlike the state next door.
Bill would end keg parties in Alabama
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) – Keg beer parties may soon come become illegal in Alabama because of problems with underage drinking, and it will be with the support of the beer industry.
The Alabama Senate voted 30-0 Tuesday for legislation that would ban the sale of draft beer in kegs of five gallons or more to individuals. The legislation would still permit draft beer to be sold in restaurants and bars in the 24 counties where it’s legal.
On this day in the…mid 1960’s…he first began scoffing at the world.
Little has changed since. Only now more people know about it.
Happy Birthday. Have a drink.
Reported on ABC World News Tonight this evening. They’re talking about the missile strike in Pakistan that left at least three Egyptians dead in the rubble.
…is half the battle.
Family and friends of deposed Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang gathered Tuesday to commemorate the one-year anniversary of his death, as authorities kept a close watch on dissidents seeking to further his legacy of political openness.
Visitors streamed into Zhao’s Beijing home, where he spent the last 15 years under house arrest after being purged from his position for sympathizing with pro-democracy protesters in 1989.
…According to Hu, a friend visiting Zhao’s home saw up to five busloads of people being taken away for questioning.
I think the Hollywood-types forget there are far scarier places in the world to live.
HH: Frank Gaffney, if in fact we struck Iran, in sort of an Operation Desert Fox, like Bill Clinton unleashed on Iraq for 96 hours of pummeling in 1998, and we leveled their facilities like Clinton did to Iraq’s facilities in 1998, what would follow in the world? We’ve got about a minute. Can you tell people what you think would happen?
Hugh Hewitt putting Frank Gaffney on the spot, courtesy of Radio Blogger.
Your answer, Swillers…? What would you do if you ran the zoo?
…“If Al Gore is going to be the voice of the Democrats on national security matters, we welcome it,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said…
…McClellan said the Clinton-Gore administration had engaged in warrantless physical searches, and he cited an FBI search of the home of CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames without permission from a judge. He said Clinton’s deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, had testified before Congress that the president had the inherent authority to engage in physical searches without warrants.
“I think his hypocrisy knows no bounds,” McClellan said of Gore.
This could be fun.
Fun | Mr. Bingley | 
January 19, 2006 12:01 pm | 
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