The Marines are suggesting that they should withdraw from Iraq and concentrate their efforts on Afghanistan while the Army remains in charge in Baghdad. Iraq is such a crappy place to be, the leathernecks would rather be hanging out in Afghanistan under U.N. command than stay in Mesopotamia. That's unreal.
The Washington Post detailed the White House's desire to target companies who employ illegal immigrants, and explained why the courts nixed that decision. It's good to see somebody in the other two branches of government actually CHECKING the power of the Executive branch for the first time in a long time.
The House resolution to recognize the genocide of the Armenians by the Turks during World War I has ruffled some feathers in the Turkish government. Now that the U.S. is nearly the last country on board regarding the state-sponsored campaign of murder that darkens Turkey's past, apparently Turkey will be the last to recognize the error of its (past) ways.
The general public might draw the conclusion that the media are prejudiced based upon Ann Coulter calling Christianity "perfected Judaism" and Fox News radio host John Gibson identifying the Cleveland school shooter as white based upon the premise, "I knew it as soon as he shot himself. Hip-hoppers don't do that. They shoot and move on to shoot again." It's too bad that purported news outlets would give these simpletons a soapbox to stand on, but you should expect nothing less than a quality product from Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch's operations.
Finally, the crazy story of the day has to be the New York pizza shop owner who is accused of manufacturing counterfeit money behind the pizza oven. I'll take a large pizza with green peppers, mushrooms and convincing counterfeit $100 bills (for research purposes only, of course).
Today is the day that Radiohead is attempting to turn the music industry on its head. The influential band is releasing their new album "In Rainbows" on the Web, allowing users to pay whatever they want for their latest release, and the song "Jigsaw Falling into Place" is making everybody who paid for Britney Spears' "Gimme More" feel stupid for doing so.
A debate has broken out in the White House over the Israeli response to policy regarding North Korea and Syria. Cheney is on one side, Rice is on another, and Rush Limbaugh is still a fuckwit.
The Los Angeles Police Department is under fire for another controversial bout of violence, this time involving journalists and immigration rights protesters. Why can't the LAPD beat somebody who deserves it (like Lindsay Lohan, Stephen Baldwin or Kwame Brown) rather than their arbitrary pattern of nightsticking the wrong people?
New York is up in arms about the noose found on the door of a professor at Columbia University. While NYC would like to believe that they are ahead of everybody in the world, this incident demonstrates that the city is in fact about one year behind Jena, Louisiana. If they are going to lynch somebody at Columbia, perhaps Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have been a more fitting target for this kind of misguided aggression.
The battle between the Western world and people who practice goofy folkloric religions is coming to a head in Holland, where Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an outspoken critic of gender discrimination in Islam, faces an uncertain future from extremists because of her comments about Dutch Muslims. When you need violence to prove your point, as is often the case with religious fundamentalists, you probably have no point at all. Hopefully a fundamentalist somewhere can focus their aggression against that tramp Ann Coulter and allow Hirsi Ali to demonstrate what life is like for a Muslim in the 21st century.
Finally, in off-beat news, on the heels of the Nobel Prizes being awarded, the Ig Nobel Awards are given to discoveries that make people laugh before they make them think. This year's winners include studies about the side effects of sword swallowing, Viagra as a cure for jet lag in hamsters, the "gay bomb," making vanilla scents from cow dung, and determining if rats can differentiate between languages spoken backward. Once again, science has proven that no avenue of research is too obscure to garner recognition
