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sillyTopic: Lib Loser Stories
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CINDY SHEEHAN CALLS FOR U.S TO 'PULL OUR TROOPS OUT OF OCCUPIED NEW ORLEANS'
Celebrity anti-war protester, fresh off inking a lucrative deal with Speaker's Bureau, has demanded at the HUFFINGTON POST and MICHAEL MOORE'S website that the United States military must immediately leave 'occupied' New Orleans.
"I don't care if a human being is black, brown, white, yellow or pink. I don't care if a human being is Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, or pagan. I don't care what flag a person salutes: if a human being is hungry, then it is up to another human being to feed him/her. George Bush needs to stop talking, admit the mistakes of his all around failed administration, pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq, and excuse his self from power. The only way America will become more secure is if we have a new administration that cares about Americans even if they don't fall into the top two percent of the wealthiest."
Sheehan is in the middle of a bus trip across America in support of her cause.
Drudge Report ** Cindy Sheehan calls for U.S to "pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans"
Posted by uhyw
at 2:06 AM EDT
Updated: Saturday, September 17, 2005 2:23 AM EDT
Dems Woo Bill Clinton To Oppose Arnold
Enticed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plunging approval ratings, California Democrats are courting some heavy hitters to run against him next year - including Bill Clinton.
"We hear that major donors are reaching out to former President Clinton, once governor of Arkansas, to run," Paul Bedard writes in his U.S. News & World Report column, Washington Whispers.
A Democratic strategist quoted by Bedard says: "On first blush, it might sound nuts. But he'd be governor of the fourth-largest economy in the world and have the ability to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for Hillary" if she ran for president.
Other potential candidates being considered include ex-Lakers star Magic Johnson, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and activist actor Rob Reiner, aka "Meathead" of "All in the Family" fame.
Says Bedard: "Imagine a 'Meathead vs. Terminator' race in 2006."
spacey
Air America Hosts: Farrakhan Not Wrong on Levees
Two hosts at the liberal radio network Air America are defending Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan - saying he's not wrong to suspect that white people deliberately blew up the levees in New Orleans.
"You cannot blame people for coming up with conspiracy theories," Air America host Chuck D. (right) said, after he was asked Thursday about the paranoid pronouncement by MSNBC's Tucker Carlson.
"They look on television and see that the government is four days late in saving people [who are] supposed to be their citizens," Chuck D. explained.
Carlson gave him a second chance to denounce Farrakhan's lunatic declaration, saying, "You're a smart guy. You know that white people didn't blow up the levees to kill black people. You've gotta know that didn't happen."
But the Air America host refused to budge, insisting instead that there was a chance Farrakhan could be right.
"I can't say unless I know for sure what's the actual facts and what's actually false," the rapper-turned-talk host said.
Carlson tried a third time, telling Chuck D.: "Look, I can say for certain that it was not a white conspiracy. White people did not blow up the levee to kill black people."
Still, the radio lefty wouldn't denounce Farrakhan's poisonous rant, saying only, "I don't think it's a person at fault but I think the system needs revamping."
After failing to persuade Chuck D., the MSNBC host turned to panelist Rachel Maddow, who also hosts a show on Air America.
Asked if she believed that white people deliberately destroyed the levees, Maddow declined to render a personal judgment - and instead defended the sentiment behind the toxic hypothesis.
"Conspiracy theories don't necessarily help but you have to understand where they come from," she told Carlson. "They come from people feeling like this disaster had a real racial component. I mean, it was a majority-black city that was absolutely abandoned by the country."
On Monday, Farrakhan uncorked his ugly theory, telling a North Carolina audience: "I heard from a very reliable source who saw a 25 foot deep crater under the levee breach. It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry."
Seinfeld Who? NBC Pursuing the Heartland
By 
In advance of the new prime-time television season, NBC sent more than 7,000 DVD's of the show's first episode to ministers and other clergy members, along with a recorded message to their congregants from Ms. Grant. ("At its core, 'Three Wishes' is faith in action," she tells them.) The network has also booked Ms. Grant - a pop singer who vaulted to fame singing Christian songs, crossed over to mainstream radio and recently released an album of hymns titled "Rock of Ages" - for interviews on Christian radio and taken out advertising in small-town newspapers.
And, perhaps most seductively, NBC has been stuffing cash registers at stores here like Goody's and others in or around Nashville, Salt Lake City, Des Moines and Milwaukee with tens of thousands of $1 bills used for groceries and other basics. The dollars are affixed with yellow stickers (removable, consistent with Treasury Department guidelines) that ask, "What's your wish?," and implore people to watch the show. All told, the network expects to give away 150,000 of those dollar bills in 15 cities and towns.
Though NBC hopes the show will have broad appeal - it also took its dollar bill campaign to New York and Los Angeles - Barbara Blangiardi, the network's vice president of marketing and special projects, said that "absolutely the Christian community was a target audience."
Indeed, Ms. Grant brings an established following to NBC, instantly making her one of its biggest stars. Her show is consistent with other efforts the network has made to reach viewers outside major cities, including its telecasts of Nascar races and periodic visits by the "NBC Nightly News" anchor, Brian Williams, beyond the Northeast.
Though NBC is using more conventional tactics to promote much of its lineup - advertisements for "My Name Is Earl," a comedy about a ne'er-do-well who wins a lottery, have appeared in stadiums and movie theaters - it is taking a grass-roots approach to "Earl" and several other shows in addition to "Three Wishes." These include "The Biggest Loser," a returning reality series about weight loss. Last week, the network sponsored parties for "Loser" in 1,000 homes.
Here in Kennesaw, a suburb of Atlanta with 22,000 residents and a Civil War battlefield, NBC had little difficulty finding people who had tuned out its prime-time lineup since its glory days.
"I loved 'Seinfeld,' " said Ms. Smith, 40, who works at a Hobby Lobby store. "I watched 'Cheers' and 'Friends,' " said her boyfriend, Paul Perry, 34, who is out of work while recuperating from shoulder surgery.
But when asked to name a show on the network's prime-time schedule last year, neither could.
Instead, they, along with nearly a dozen other recipients of NBC's largess, cited shows they liked on other networks, including "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" (which "Three Wishes" resembles) and "Desperate Housewives" on ABC; the "C.S.I." shows on CBS; and "American Chopper," a Discovery Channel series about motorcycles.
NBC executives refused to say how much they were spending to raise the network's profile this fall, other than that it was roughly a third more than what they spent last year at this time. (The popularity of "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost" on ABC last fall has been attributed in part to the network's targeted marketing, including dry-cleaning bags with the "Desperate" logo.)
One of the architects of NBC's strategy, John D. Miller, chief marketing officer of the NBC Universal Television Group, said the network had organized its priorities this year into two tiers. The first includes "Earl"; "E-Ring," a Pentagon drama; and "Surface," about organisms rising from the deep, which are each receiving more marketing support than any show last year. The second tier, also the beneficiary of heavy promotion, includes "Three Wishes," "Biggest Loser" and the Martha Stewart "Apprentice" offshoot.
Mr. Miller said he expected that "Three Wishes" (to be broadcast on Fridays at 9 p.m., Eastern and Pacific times; 8 p.m., Central time) would play a "sleeper" role in helping improve the network's fortunes. But he also said he wanted to help the show because of his emotional reaction to it. Set in Sonora, Calif., the first episode shows Ms. Grant helping a young girl recovering from a car accident, a boy seeking to thank the man filling the void left by his late father and a high school trying to replace its waterlogged football field. And yes, Ms. Grant sings - twice.
"This show makes me feel good," Mr. Miller said.
At the root of NBC's strategy for "Three Wishes" is raising its visibility in smaller counties.
It has bought advertising for the series in Sunday magazine inserts like American Profile, which appears in weekly and biweekly newspapers. The DVD copies of the pilot were distributed to churches, as well as some synagogues and mosques, through a California public relations firm, Grace Hill Media, that specializes in religious audiences. The $1 bill promotion was conceived by another California firm, this one an advocate of promotional stunts, called Impact.
Though the "Wishes" campaign has been in the works for months, the hurricane that displaced tens of thousands of people has put the network in a bit of a bind: will the wishes the show is trying to fulfill pale in comparison? NBC figures that the hurricane, by touching off a national spirit of charity, could actually draw viewers. (One wish will now concern a family devastated by the storm.)
As luck would have it, one of the people randomly picked to have her Goody's order paid by NBC - at an even $80 - was a woman who said she had promised to help about 100 children relocated to Georgia after the storm. She was Catherine Love, 36, a hairstylist, who said she was struggling to fulfill that pledge.
"I would watch 'Three Wishes' because there's so much bad going on in the world," said Ms. Love, who works at a salon, Kids Kuts, in nearby Marietta. "It's refreshing to see good things happen to people who deserve it."
chatty
U.S. troops find chemical weapon in Tal Afar stronghold
U.S. commander derides enemy's 'unscrupulous' actions
ARLINGTON, Va. - While taking down the insurgent stronghold of Tal Afar, U.S. troops discovered a crude chemical weapon, the commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment said Tuesday.
The troops had just entered a building when their ears and throats started to burn, said Army Col. H.R. McMaster in a briefing to reporters.
U.S. forces determined insurgents had rigged the chemicals to explosives, McMaster said, though he did not identify the type of chemical.
"We evacuated the civilians from the area and we demolished that building without a hazard to the people," McMaster said.
He said several families were living near the building, suggesting insurgents intended to detonate the chemical weapon to harm them and blame it on coalition forces, he said.
McMaster hailed operations in Tal Afar as a major success against an "unscrupulous" enemy.
"They are some of the worst human beings on the face of the Earth, and there is no real greater pleasure for us than to kill or capture these individuals," he said.
In recent operations in the Tal Afar area, U.S. forces killed and captured hundreds of terrorists who had taken over the city and ruled by terror, McMaster said.
McMaster called the insurgents "unscrupulous." In one incident, insurgents killed a boy and then put a bomb inside his body and detonated it when his parents came along, he said.
Tal Afar's residents recognized the insurgents for the thugs they are and provided U.S. and Iraqi forces with critical intelligence, McMaster said.
"The people are sick and tired of this violence, of this enemy, and they are very grateful for our efforts and the Iraqi efforts particularly to rid them of this enemy," he said.
Another element in the successful operation was the Iraqi security forces, which served as a capable backup for U.S. troops, McMaster said.
"These Iraqi soldiers are brave, they're courageous, they're building capabilities every day and we are drawing strength from their example," he said.
Still, the Iraqi security forces are not yet able to conduct operations on their own, and coalition forces do not have enough troops to secure Tal Afar, McMaster said.
Kim Jong Il: We Want Clinton Nuke Deal
Negotiators for North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il insisted on Wednesday that the U.S. honor ex-President Clinton's promise to give them a nuclear reactor in exchange for giving up their nuclear weapons program.
But the Bush administration quickly nixed the idea.
After his first one-on-one meeting with the North Korean delegation during talks on their nuclear program, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill told reporters: "We did not make a lot of progress."
The North Korean regime is demanding the kind of light-water nuclear reactor promised by Clinton under a 1994 deal dubbed the "Agreed Framework" - and pledged they won't use it to make nuclear weapons.
But Hill noted that North Korea has pursued a nuclear program for 25 years and used it solely to make weapons-grade plutonium for atomic bombs - not for generating electricity.
The North was slated to get two such reactors under the Clinton plan. Other assistance promised by the U.S. at the time would have turned Pyongyang into the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the Pacific rim.
The Agreed Framework collapsed, however, in late 2002, when Kim Jong Il's government admitted it was making nuclear bombs. "As it turns out, they were cheating," Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright later explained.
Under the Bush administration's proposal, North Korea would receive economic aid and security guarantees from Washington along with free electricity from South Korea in exchange for dismantling its nuclear weapons program.
Mother and Anti-War Hero Cindy Sheehan Signs with Speaking Matters LLC for Public Speaking Tour
Sheehan's activism has not ended with the president returning to Washington after his vacation. She is now involved in 
energetic
Apollo 12 mission Commander Charles P. "Pete" Conrad is shown on the moon's surface in this Nov. 1969 file photo. >>>>>
NASA to unveil plans for 2018 moon mission
WASHINGTON - NASA briefed senior White House officials Wednesday on its plan to spend $100 billion and the next 12 years building the spacecraft and rockets it needs to put humans back on the moon by 2018.
The U.S. space agency now expects to roll out its lunar exploration plan to key Congressional committees on Friday and to the broader public through a news conference on Monday, Washington sources tell Space.com.
President George W. Bush called in January 2004 for the United States to return to the moon by 2020 as the first major step in a broader space exploration vision aimed at extending the human presence throughout the solar system.
NASA has been working intensely since April on an exploration plan that entails building an 18-foot (5.5-meter) blunt body crew capsule and launchers built from major space shuttle components, including the main engines, solid rocket boosters and massive external fuel tanks.
That plan, called the Exploration Systems Architecture Study, was presented by NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, his space operations chief Bill Gerstenmaier and several other senior agency officials Wednesday afternoon to senior White House policy officials, including an advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney and the president's Deputy National Security Advisor J.D. Crouch.
NASA's plan, according to briefing charts obtained by Space.com, envisions beginning a sustained lunar exploration campaign in 2018 by landing four astronauts on the moon for a seven-day stay.
The expedition would begin, these charts show, by launching the lunar lander and Earth departure stage (essentially a giant propulsion module) on a heavy-lift launch vehicle that would be lifted into orbit by five space shuttle main engines and a pair of five-segment shuttle solid rocket boosters.
Once the Earth departure stage and lunar lander are safely in orbit, NASA would launch the Crew Exploration Vehicle capsule atop a new launcher built from a four-segment shuttle solid rocket booster and an upper stage powered by a single space shuttle main engine.
The CEV would then dock with the lunar lander and Earth departure stage and begin its several day journey to the moon.
NASA's plan envisions being able to land four-person human crews anywhere on the moon's surface and to eventually use the system to transport crew members to and from a lunar outpost that it would consider building on the lunar south pole, according to the charts, because of the regions elevated quantities of hydrogen and possibly water ice.
One of NASA's reasons for going back to the moon is to demonstrate that astronauts can essentially "live off the land" by using lunar resources to produce potable water, fuel and other valuable commodities. Such capabilities are considered extremely important to human expeditions to Mars which, because of the distances involved, would be much longer missions entailing a minimum of 500 days spent on the planet's surface.
NASA's Crew Exploration Vehicle is expected to cost $5.5 billion to develop, according to government and industry sources, and the Crew Launch Vehicle another $4.5 billion. The heavy-lift launcher, which would be capable of lofting 125 metric tons of payload, is expected to cost more than $5 billion but less than $10 billion to develop, according to these sources.
NASA's plan also calls for using the Crew Exploration Vehicle, equipped with as many as six seats, to transport astronauts to and from the international space station. An unmanned version of the Crew Exploration Vehicle could be used to deliver a limited amount of cargo to the space station.
NASA would like to field the Crew Exploration Vehicle by 2011, or within a year of when it plans to fly the space shuttle for the last time. Development of the heavy lift launcher, lunar lander and Earth departure stage would begin in 2011. By that time, according to NASA's charts, the space agency would expect to be spending $7 billion a year on its exploration efforts, a figure projected to grow to more than $15 billion a year by 2018, that date NASA has targeted for its first human lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972.
Senate approves $16.4 billion budget
The U.S. Senate approved a $200 million budget increase for NASA Thursday.
The NASA funding was approved as part of a $48.9 billion spending bill that also funds the Justice and Commerce Departments. Of that amount, NASA would receive $16.4 billion for 2006, about $60 million less than the agency requested but $200 million more than it had to spend this year.
The House of Representatives approved NASA's budget in July, providing $15 million more for NASA than it requested but the House bill also would require NASA to spend $110 million more on aeronautics research than it would like, or $952 million.
Similarly, the Senate bill would require NASA to spend $250 million in the year ahead preparing for a space shuttle mission to refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA requested only a fraction of that amount for the proposed mission.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, issued a press release Thursday afternoon highlighting, among other things, the extra money added funds for the Hubble Space Telescope. Her press release also states that the $16.4 billion approved by the Senate "fully funds all major space science and earth science programs, the space shuttle, space station, the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) and the Moon-Mars initiative."
The Senate passed the spending bill by a vote of 91-4.
The House and Senate now must work out the differences between the two bills before sending the spending legislation to the White House for the president to sign into law.
flirty
Sexual Behavior and Selected Health Measures: Men and Women 15-44 Years of Age, United States, 2002
Advance Data 362. Sexual Behavior and Selected Health Measures: Men and Women 15-44 Years of Age, United States, 2002. 56 pp. (PHS) 2003-1250.
Highlights of findings
Teens
Selected health measures
More Women Experimenting with Bisexuality
Survey: Females in late teens and 20s report increasing same-sex contact
More women - particularly those in their late teens and 20s - are experimenting with bisexuality or at least feel more comfortable reporting same-sex encounters, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The survey, released Thursday by the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, found that 11.5 percent of women, ages 18 to 44, said they've had at least one sexual experience with another women in their lifetimes, compared with about 4 percent of women, ages 18 to 59, who said the same in a comparable survey a decade earlier.
For women in their late teens and 20s, the percentage rose to 14 percent in the more recent survey. About 6 percent of men in their teens and 20s said they'd had at least one same-sex encounter.
While those who conducted the survey took measures to protect respondents' privacy, researchers say it's unclear whether the figure for men was lower because they're are more likely to avoid same-sex experiences or whether they're not reporting them.
It wouldn't surprise Kat Fowler, a 27-year-old art student who dates both women and men, if men were less likely to talk about their experiences.
"There?s a certain higher level of discrimination (for men). It's a lot easier for women to have these kinds of experiences and be open about it because it's more accepted," said Fowler, who attends the University of Florida.
Hitchens vs. Galloway ~ The Grapple In The Apple
I must say I missed it. Having only now heard the pre-debate bullshit from the peacenik pacifist libtards, then Hitchens' opening kick-ass statement. Here is a repost of