August 21, 2012

Parrot stabbed to death; Everett man arrested

VERETT -- An Everett man was arrested Sunday night for allegedly stabbing his girlfriend's parrot to death with a serving fork.

Everett police found the parrot's body and the fork at the couple's home after the girlfriend called 911, court papers show.

The woman reportedly told police that the man, 63, had been upset with her about a plan for them to have dinner with friends.

She said she went to the store, and returned to find the house trashed and the parrot dead on the floor.

When police arrived they found the parrot and a large pool of blood on the floor.

"Upon inspection of the parrot, it appeared to have been stabbed," officers wrote in their report. "A serving fork with apparent blood stains was discovered on the living room floor. It appeared that the serving fork was used to stab the parrot to death."



http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20120820/NEWS01/708209867

August 20, 2012

Bill Kristol: ‘Kinda weird’ Romney pays taxes lower than the middle class

Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol on Monday admitted that it was “kinda weird” that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s tax rate was only around 13 percent when most middle-class people paid significantly more.

“The custom over the last 20-30 years, I suppose, has been to release at least a couple years of tax returns,” the neoconservative pundit told C-SPAN. “If you know you’re running for president anyway, I think it’s just part of the price of running. … Obama did so Romney probably should do it.”

“Look, it’s an interesting debate about what tax rates people should pay, how progressive the tax code should be,” he continued. “I personally, if I were designing the tax code, would have a tax code in which Mitt Romney paid more than 13 percent, I would say, given what I know about the kind of investments he made money from.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/20/bill-kristol-kinda-weird-romney-pays-lower-tax-rate-than-middle-class-people/

August 20, 2012

TPM-Breaking: Akin Advisers Make Preparations For Withdrawal Tomorrow

Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin's advisers are making preparations to withdraw from the race Tuesday, GOP operative Richard Grenell and RedState.com editor Erick Erickson report. Grenell cited "GOP sources" in his tweet announcing the withdrawal, which has yet to be confirmed by Akin. Akin has been under fire since saying women have biological defenses to fend off pregnancy after a "legitimate rape.


"http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/reports-akin-advisors-make-preparations-for-withdrawal-tomorrow

August 20, 2012

WikiLeaks Embarrasses Sweden

In Sweden, WikiLeaks created a problem for that nation’s authorities by revealing a 2008 cable disclosing that its executive branch asked American officials to keep intelligence-gathering “informal” to avoid required Parliamentary scrutiny. That secret was among the 251,000 U.S. cables obtained by WikiLeaks and relayed to the New York Times and four other media partners. They have so far reported about 1,300 of the secret cables after trying for months to vet them through U.S. authorities.

Rove himself says on his Karl Rove and Company website that he has been advising Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. It’s well-known in Sweden how Rove has helped Reinfeldt lead the nation’s Moderate Party to election success over liberal competitors who previously dominated the nation’s leadership.

Swedish political blogger Martin Moberg reported Nov. 5, for example, that Rove was visiting Sweden for unknown purposes. But Moberg warned his readers, according to a translation by Google’s automatic toolbar, that their country has “been spared the vulgar way” political campaigns are conducted in the U.S. “but the question is for how long?”

Going further, the Swedish web-tabloid daily News 24 published on Dec. 26 an article, “Karl Rove helps Reinfeldt to manage Julian Assange.” News 24, which says it’s the ninth best-read online news site in Sweden, cited as evidence my Huffington Post column and a similar blog by Alabama-based legal commentator Roger Shuler. News 24’s Swedish readers helped flesh out the story in their comments. Shuler today wrote on his Legal Schnauzer blog, Daily Kos and elsewhere, “The Rove/Assange Story Hits the International Press in Sweden.” Shuler provided a translation of the Swedish story and links to other materials.


http://www.swedishwire.com/opinion/8165-karl-rove-key-player-in-swedish-wikileaks-probe

August 20, 2012

Borowitz-REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN PROPOSES NATIONAL SECURITY ROLE FOR UTERUS

REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN PROPOSES NATIONAL SECURITY ROLE FOR UTERUS
by Andy Borowitz

ST. LOUIS (The Borowitz Report)—Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin doubled down on his controversial remarks about the female body today, proposing a prominent national security role for the uterus.

“From what I understand, there’s nothing that the uterus doesn’t know,” Rep. Akin told a reporter on KTVI-TV. “It’s almost like Spiderman’s spidey sense, if you will, except the tingling goes on down in the lady parts.”

Rep. Akin said that given the uterus’s extraordinary powers of detection, the female reproductive system should be America’s secret weapon in the war on terror.

“If we posted a uterus at every airport and a bunch of them along the border, I would just love to see an evildoer get past defenses like that,” he said. “Not gonna happen, folks. Nothing fools a uterus.”

Rep. Akin closed his interview with what he called “the highest praise and respect” for the female reproductive system.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I was as smart as a uterus,” he said.




Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2012/08/republican-congressman-proposes-national-security-role-for-uterus.html#ixzz2462aaQP6

August 20, 2012

Rep. Akin-Fertilization and Embryology perceptions in the Middle Ages

Medieval individuals believed a woman's seed lingered in the medium of sexual fluid (Riddle, Contraception 96). This notion differs from the contemporary biological understanding that eggs are produced in the ovaries and released during menstruation. If medieval peoples believed that the egg was a product of secretions during intercourse, what, then was menstruation's perceived purpose? Lore reveals that, like intercourse, menstruation served to purge the woman of her dangerous seed, and in the absence of either of these events, masturbation was encouraged as a means of staving off complications--most notably respiratory and mental in nature--that could arise from seed accumulation. Because the female seed was supposedly located within the sexual fluid, female orgasm was believed to be necessary for conception and, thus, pregnancy. Accordingly, rape victims, prostitutes who no longer enjoyed sexual relations, and women with less-than-gifted partners could not conceive children.


Bibliography

Jacquart, Danielle and Claude Thomasset. Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton

UP, 1988.

Riddle, John. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance. Cambridge: Harvard

UP, 1992.

---. Eve's Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.

Thomasset, Claude. "The Nature of Woman." A History of Women. Ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. 43-69.



Representative Akin - sits on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee..."

August 19, 2012

Assange FULL SPEECH- from the Embassy Balcony

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Julian Assange makes his first public appearance in two months, ever since he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The WikiLeaks founder was granted political asylum on Thursday -- a decision that ignited a wave of international responses, with the UK and Sweden opposing the verdict and Latin American countries strongly supporting Ecuador's move.

August 19, 2012

Curiosity is firing its vaporizing laser today

Curiosity is firing its vaporizing laser on mars for the first time today. Will this be seen as an act of war against the martians?







NASA's Mars rover Curiosity is slated to fire its rock-vaporizing laser for the first time this weekend, shortly before the 1-ton robot's maiden drive on the Red Planet.

Scientists plan to blast a Martian rock called N165 with Curiosity's laser, which is part of the rover's remote-sampling ChemCam instrument. The 3-inch-wide (7.6 centimeters) stone sits just 9 feet (2.7 meters) from Curiosity, well within ChemCam's 25-foot (7.6 m) range, scientists said.

"Our team has waited eight long years to get to this date, and we're happy that everything is looking good so far," ChemCam principal investigator Roger Wiens, of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, told reporters today (Aug. 17). "Hopefully we'll be back early next week and be able to talk about how Curiosity's first laser shots went."


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Photo of the helpless martian, itss almost dead center and looks like a pyramid.

http://www.livescience.com/22507-mars-rover-curiosity-laser-big-drive.html

August 19, 2012

Julian Assange & Wikileaks: Timeline of Events

Julian Assange & Wikileaks: Timeline of Events


December 2006: Julian Assange, a former Australian computer hacker, founds Wikileaks.org. The website aims to provide a platform for whistleblowers to post sensitive and secret political documents while keeping their identity anonymous.

February 2008: Wikileaks exposes Swiss Bank, Julius Baer, for involvement in money laundering. It publishes internal documents to show that the bank was helping clients launder funds via the Cayman Islands. This leads to the first of many legal charges against Wikileaks.

November 2009: Wikileaks releases a comprehensive archive of text pager messages recorded in the US on September 11,2001, the day when hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.


April 2010: Wikileaks releases a video of a 2007 US military helicopter strike on Baghdad, Iraq, and the casualties that resulted from this. Bradley Manning, an American soldier, is charged and arrested for leaking the information.

July 2010: Wikileaks releases classified US military documents on the war in Afghanistan revealing details of civilian victims and alleged links between Pakistan and the Taliban.

August 2010: A Swedish court issues an arrest warrant for Assange on charges of rape made by two Swedish women, who were also former employees of Wikileaks but then decides to postpone the warrant until November.

October 2010: Wikileaks releases some 400,000 accounts written by American soldiers from 2004 to 2009 revealing that the US decided to ignore cases of torture by Iraqi authorities on civilians.

November 2010: Swedish prosecutor re-issues European arrest warrant for Assange. Ten days later, Wikileaks releases classified US diplomatic cables, revealing assessments of American officials on a range of issues together with views of other governments.


More:

http://www.euronews.com/2012/08/16/julian-assange-and-wikileaks-timeline-of-events/

August 18, 2012

Toon: I wonder who holds the leash?

Some may not like this toon but at least Obama doesn't seemed pleased like Romney.