And More and More: Sarah Palin swimsuit; Sarah Palin wore a bikini.
I have to point out these are all different searches, conducted at different times. The same idiot can't keep clicking on my site thinking suddenly I'm going to have the bikini pics I didn't have the other three times.
So, I guess I'm going to keep getting hits for Sarah Palin swimsuit competition searches, with people searching for hot pictures of Sarah Palin in a bikini, or even hot totally gubernatorial pictures.
It's ridiculous. It's not like Governor Sarah Palin once posed for Victoria's Secret wearing noting but high heels and clown nose or something.
I'm just saying, whatever you do, if you want to avoid unwanted Google interlopers, don't post anything about Sarah Palin and her secret bikini pictures, Sarah Palin and the "Air Force Two," or homoerotic pillowfights between Governor Sarah Palin and Smurfette.
Democrats will kneel before the "Temple of Obama" tonight.
As if a Rocky Mountain coronation were not lofty enough, Barack Obama will aim for Mount Olympus when he accepts his party's nomination atop an enormous, Greek-columned stage - built by the same cheesy set team that put together Britney Spears' last tour.
It was a very different time, the Iraq war was just over a year old, and then-State Sen. Barack Obama was in a very different place.
In 2004, former "Nightline" anchor Ted Koppel interviewed the keynote speaker of the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
It never aired, though it will air tonight.
Some very interesting stuff.
Koppel asked Obama about comments he'd made to the Chicago Tribune about the convention focusing on the war.
"There were people who supported the war and people who opposed the war inside that convention hall," Obama said. "But what people are unified about is that, when we make a decision to go to war, that it should not be ideologically driven, that it should be driven by a set of facts and common sense with regards to how we mobilize our country and our national interest.
"And I think that there is a strong feeling that, even among those that supported George Bush’s decision initially to go in, that there was some fudging of the numbers and shading of the truth, and that, as a consequence of our inability to create a strong alliance around our actions, that we are now stuck in a quagmire that is going to cost us not only billions of dollars, but thousands of lives, and will require a much longer-term commitment than the American voters had intended when they rallied behind the president."
Virtually everyone believes Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili foolishly provoked a Russian invasion on August 7, 2008, when he sent troops into the breakaway district of South Ossetia. “The warfare began Aug. 7 when Georgia launched a barrage targeting South Ossetia,” the Associated Press reported over the weekend in typical fashion.
Virtually everyone is wrong. Georgia didn't start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war.
Regional expert, German native, and former European Commission official Patrick Worms was recently hired by the Georgian government as a media advisor, and he explained to me exactly what happened when I met him in downtown Tbilisi. You should always be careful with the version of events told by someone on government payroll even when the government is friendly as democratic as Georgia's. I was lucky, though, that another regional expert, author and academic Thomas Goltz, was present during Worms' briefing to me and signed off on it as completely accurate aside from one tiny quibble.
THOUSANDS of Chinese farmers face ruin because their water has been cut off to guarantee supplies to the Olympics in Beijing, and officials are now trying to cover up a grotesque scandal of blunders, lies and repression.
In the capital, foreign dignitaries have admired millions of flowers in bloom and lush, well-watered greens around its famous sights. But just 90 minutes south by train, peasants are hacking at the dry earth as their crops wilt, their money runs out and the work of generations gives way to despair, debt and, in a few cases, suicide.
In between these two Chinas stands a cordon of roadblocks and hundreds of security agents deployed to make sure that the one never sees the other.
The water scandal is a parable of what can happen when a demanding global event is awarded to a poor agricultural nation run by a dictatorship; and the irony is that none of it has turned out to be necessary.
Russia’s invasion of Georgia has unleashed a refugee crisis all over the country and especially in its capital. Every school here in Tbilisi is jammed with civilians who fled aerial bombardment and shootings by the Russian military—or massacres, looting, and arson by irregular Cossack paramilitary units swarming across the border. Russia has seized and effectively annexed two breakaway Georgian provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It has also invaded the region of Gori, which unlike them had been under Georgia’s control. Gori is in the center of the country, just an hour’s drive from Tbilisi; 90 percent of its citizens have fled, and the tiny remainder live amid a violent mayhem overseen by Russian occupation forces that, despite Moscow’s claims to the contrary, are not yet withdrawing.
When Dawei Liu was growing up in the coastal city of Tai'an during the 1990s, all of his classmates—95 percent of whom were only children—received plenty of doting parental support. One student, however, truly stood out from the rest. Every day, this boy went from class to class with an entourage of one: his mother, who had given up the income of her day job to monitor his studies full-time, sitting beside him constantly in order to ensure perfect attention. "The teacher was OK with it," Liu shrugs. "He might not focus as much on class if his parent wasn't there."
Across China, stories of parents going to incredible lengths to give their only children a competitive edge have become commonplace. Throughout Jing Zhang's youth in Beijing, her parents took her to weekly resumé-boosting painting classes, waiting outside the school building for two hours each time, even in winter. Yanming Lin enjoyed perfect silence in her family's one-room Shanghai apartment throughout her five-plus hours of nightly homework; besides nixing the television, her mother kept perpetual watch over her to make sure she stayed on task. "By high school, my parents knew I could control myself and only do homework," Lin says. "Because I knew the situation."
The situation for urban young people in today's China, from preschoolers on up, is this: Your entire future hinges on one test, the national college entrance exam—China's magnified version of the SAT. The Chinese call it gao kao, or "tall test," because it looms so large. If students do well, they win spots at China's top universities and an easy route to a middle-class lifestyle. If not, they must confront the kind of tough, blue-collar lives their parents faced. With such high stakes, families dedicate themselves to their child's test prep virtually from infancy. "Many people come home to have dinner and then study until bed," says Liu. "You have to do it to go to the best university and get a good job. You must do this to live."
A tiny woman and two children were laid to rest on a bed of flowers 5,000 years ago in what is now the barren Sahara Desert.Some 200 graves of humans were found during fieldwork at the site in 2005 and 2006, as well as remains of animals, large fish and crocodiles...Some 200 graves of humans
were found during fieldwork at the site in 2005 and 2006, as well as
remains of animals, large fish and crocodiles.
"Everywhere
The first group, known as the Kiffian, hunted wild animals and speared huge perch with harpoons. They colonized the region when the Sahara was at its wettest, between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago.
you turned, there were bones belonging to animals that don't live in
the desert," said Sereno. "I realized we were in the green Sahara."...
The researchers said the Kiffians were tall, sometimes reaching well over 6 feet.
If you're looking for good deals on housing, check out China. The country may be entering a period depressingly familiar to Americans
The sales hall at the Oasis housing development welcomes customers with multicolored streamers, water fountains and marble floors. Sales agents announce that only a few units are available from the first two phases of the project and that 70 of the 130 or more buildings are almost completed. But a few hundred feet behind the sales hall some of the "almost completed" buildings look like neglected, hulking shells. Construction workers idling nearby say they haven't been paid in five months. Prices have been slashed from $95 per square foot to $55. Market experts estimate that as few as 300 units have been sold out of the first 2,000 put up for sale.
Sounds like another sad-sack Florida condo development, yet this scene is in the northern Chinese industrial city of Shenyang. Over the last five years real estate prices in China, in dollar terms, doubled on average to $50 per square foot and the country added 20 billion square feet of new residential property. But the once seemingly limitless real estate boom is going into reverse.
Home sales dropped by half in June from a year earlier in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Chongqing and Chengdu, according to data compiled by jpmorgan. Conditions are worst in southern China, where undeveloped parcels are going unsold and home prices are expected to continue falling despite a drop of 40% from last autumn in some neighborhoods. Now the market malaise appears to be spreading northward. If not for an Olympic boost, Beijing's market would be weak, too. "We're entering a bust now," insists Andy Xie, an Asia economist and bear on Chinese property.
For forty-five years, Chelyabinsk province of Russia was closed to all foreigners.Only in January of 1992 did President Boris Yeltsin sign a decree changing that.Shortly afterwards, I made my first trip to this region, which later Western scientists declared to be the most polluted spot on earth.
In the late 1940's, about 80 kilometers north of the city of Chelyabinsk, an atomic weapons complex called "Mayak" was built. Its existence has only recently been acknowledged by Russian officials, though, in fact, the complex, bordered to the west by the Ural Mountains, and to the north by Siberia, was the goal of Gary Powers's surveillance flight in May of 1960.
The people of the area have suffered no less than three nuclear disasters: For over six years, the Mayak complex systematically dumped radioactive waste into the Techa River, the only source of water for the 24 villages which lined its banks.The four largest of those villages were never evacuated, and only recently have the authorities revealed to the population why they strung barbed wire along the banks of the river some 35 years ago.Russian doctors who study radiation sickness in the area estimate that those living along the Techa River received an average of four times more radiation than the Chernobyl victims.
In 1957, the area suffered its next calamity when the cooling system of a radioactive waste containment unit malfunctioned and exploded.The explosion spewed some 20 million curies of radioactivity into the atmosphere.About two million curies spread throughout the region, exposing 270,000 people to as much radiation as the Chernobyl victims.Less than half of one percent of these people were evacuated, and some of those only after years had passed.
The third disaster came ten years later.The Mayak complex had been using Lake Karachay as a dumping basin for its radioactive waste since 1951.In 1967, a drought reduced the water level of the lake, and gale-force winds spread the radioactive dust throughout twenty-five thousand square kilometers, further irradiating 436,000 people with five million curies, approximately the same as at Hiroshima.
In the past 45 years, about half a million people in the region have been irradiated in one or more of the incidents, exposing them to as much as 20 times the radiation suffered by the Chernobyl victims.
This article will highlight the most incredible shipwrecks around the world and maybe prompt a curious expedition or two. Go check them out while they still exist, daily battered by the wind and merciless waves.
What’s the best-selling car of all time? I took an informal poll recently and made it a point to ask some people who are real car buffs. I got some interesting answers. One person said 1957 Chevy. Two people guessed Ford Mustang. Another thought it was Volkswagen’s beloved and iconic Beetle. Still another guessed the best seller was the Model T Ford. Someone came up with yet another Ford product, the once ubiquitous Taurus. Two people guessed the best seller had to be the Toyota Camry, because, as one of them said, “You see’em all over the place.”
Well, the answer is none of the above.
Repossessing the U.S.A. ----A Message from John Cleese
To the citizens of the United States of America:
"In light of your failure to nominate competent candidates for President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately."
"Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths, and territories (except Kansas ,which she does not fancy)."
"Your new prime minister, Gordon Brown, will appoint a governor for America without the need for further elections. Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed."
"To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:
Todd Bentley’s announcement that his marriage is ending has thrown our movement into a tailspin—and questions need to be answered.
It was not supposed to end like this.
Evangelist Todd Bentley had heralded the Lakeland revival as the greatest Pentecostal outpouring since Azusa Street. From his stage in a gigantic tent in Florida, Bentley preached to thousands, bringing many of them to the stage for prayer. Many claimed to be healed of deafness, blindness, heart problems, depression and dozens of other conditions in the Lakeland services, which ran for more than 100 consecutive nights. Bentley announced confidently that dozens of people had been raised from the dead during the revival.
But this week, a few days after the Canadian preacher announced the end of his visits to Lakeland, he told his staff that his marriage is ending. Without blaming the pace of the revival for Bentley’s personal problems, his board released a public statement saying that he and his wife, Shonnah, are separating. The news shocked Bentley’s adoring fans and saddened those who have questioned his credibility since the Lakeland movement erupted in early April.
“Among those who jumped on the Lakeland bandwagon, discernment was discouraged. They were expected to swallow and follow. The message was clear: ‘This is God. Don’t question.’ ”
I’m sad. I’m disappointed. And I’m angry. Here are few of my many, many questions about this fiasco:
Why did so many people flock to Lakeland from around the world to rally behind an evangelist who had serious credibility issues from the beginning?
To put it bluntly, we’re just plain gullible.
China, the world’s most populous country, has an ironic problem: not enough people attending the Olympics. Not only do they have a plethora of empty seats at the event, the hotel business in Beijing is actually worse than usual during a time when rooms should be filled to capacity. Beijing has begun busing spectators and “cheer squads” into the events and begging their citizens to attend, but thus far have had little success:
Nikita Khrushchev said the Soviet Union would bury us, but these days, everybody seems to think that China is the one wielding the shovel. The People's Republic is on the march -- economically, militarily, even ideologically. Economists expect its GDP to surpass America's by 2025; its submarine fleet is reportedly growing five times faster than Washington's; even its capitalist authoritarianism is called a real alternative to the West's liberal democracy. China, the drumbeat goes, is poised to become the 800-pound gorilla of the international system, ready to dominate the 21st century the way the United States dominated the 20th.
Except that it's not.
Ever since I returned to the United States in 2004 from my last posting to China, as this newspaper's Beijing bureau chief, I've been struck by the breathless way we talk about that country. So often, our perceptions of the place have more to do with how we look at ourselves than with what's actually happening over there. Worried about the U.S. education system? China's becomes a model. Fretting about our military readiness? China's missiles pose a threat. Concerned about slipping U.S. global influence? China seems ready to take our place.
On the campaign trail, Sen. Barack Obama bashes President Bush for "reckless" economic policies that are "mortgaging our children's future on a mountain of debt." But the Democratic presidential candidate has adopted a key component of Bush's fiscal policy: A novel bookkeeping method that guarantees that the $9.5 trillion national debt will get much bigger.
In the middle of an armed robbery of a Tulsa, Okla., grocery store by a man wearing a Batman mask, one customer leaped into action, charging, wrestling and subduing the gunman until police arrived.
A surveillance video captured several minutes of the struggle as the customer, Craig Stutzman, single-handedly wrestled the robber across the store before finally pinning the phony Batman to the ground in the store's parking lot.
"To the king my lord and my sun: These are the words of your servant, Belit-nesheti [literally, "mistress of lions/lionesses"]. I fall at the king's feet seven times over. I must tell the king that this country is witnessing [acts of] hostility and that the land of the king, my lord, will be lost forever."
A Canaanite queen from one of the cities in Palestine's lowland sent this desperate request in the 14th century B.C.E. to Pharaoh, king of Egypt. The name of the city ruled by Belit-nesheti is not mentioned in this letter or in others that depict violent acts that aroused in her a justified feeling that she was facing a dire threat.
Six Million African Muslims Convert to Christianity Each Year
Synopsis from The American Thinker
This translation of a televised conversation on the Al-Jazeerah Website reveals a rare glimpse into the outlook of Muslim scholars who are concerned about Christianity's growth. The invited guest is Sheikh Ahmad Al Katani; the president of The Companions Lighthouse for the Science of Islamic Law in Libya, which is an institution specializing in graduating imams and Islamic preachers.
A mountain lion crept through an open door into a house outside Denver, snatched a Labrador retriever from a bedroom where two people were sleeping and left the dog's dead body outside, wildlife managers said Tuesday.
No one else was hurt in the home about 14 miles southwest of Denver.
Wildlife officials later trapped the 130-pound male cat using the dog's body as bait and fatally shot it.
Colorado Division of Wildlife spokesman Tyler Baskfield said the cat entered the house through open French doors early Monday and fled with the Labrador after the owners woke up.
"The people got up and looked around and saw the mountain lion's tail leaving the house," Baskfield said.
As Hector the Great Dane pup romped around in the garden, his owner Pamela Panting noticed that he suddenly lost all his energy.
She didn't worry unduly after he wolfed down his supper as normal.
But when he refused his breakfast, she took him to the vet... where an X-ray showed that he had swallowed a stick, two feet long and an inch wide, and it was lodged a foot down his throat.
The bottom line: liberal pundits — following months of analysis by their conservative counterparts — had figured out that despite the best possible terrain for the Democrats to recapture the White House, the Democrats (with a whole lot of cheerleading from the mainstream media) have chosen a thinly experienced, irresolute, underachieving and obnoxious standard bearer. And his excuse-mongering just makes it all the more irritating.
It is not clear what provoked the soul-searching or why reality didn’t dawn on the pundits sooner. After all, they knew all along that he had virtually no experience and that he often sounded bizarrely confident about his nonexistent credentials.
Some might conclude that they were so blinded by their bias against Hillary Clinton and eagerness to shove the Clintons off the national stage that they ignored any signs that The Chosen One was deeply flawed. And, indeed, many of the faults that are potentially so dangerous in Obama — his predilection to lie when the heat is on and his lack of core principles — were even greater liabilities for Clinton in the media’s eyes.
It is also true that the McCain camp has shamed the media into recognizing their infatuation with Obama. By mocking the press, the McCain camp has made the argument in convincing fashion that the mainstream media has been in the tank for Obama. The McCain camp’s message: “Your boosterism has become painfully obvious.” So it’s not surprising that there might be some course correction and recognition that they’ve gone too far in building up The Ego and concealing his flaws.
Starting in 2002, Spokane, Wash., journalist Sherry Jones toiled weekends on a racy historical novel about Aisha, the young wife of the prophet Muhammad. Ms. Jones learned Arabic, studied scholarly works about Aisha's life, and came to admire her protagonist as a woman of courage. When Random House bought her novel last year in a $100,000, two-book deal, she was ecstatic. This past spring, she began plans for an eight-city book tour after the Aug. 12 publication date of "The Jewel of Medina" -- a tale of lust, love and intrigue in the prophet's harem.
It's not going to happen: In May, Random House abruptly called off publication of the book. The series of events that torpedoed this novel are a window into how quickly fear stunts intelligent discourse about the Muslim world.
Barack Obama’s new campaign plane is nothing short of grand. Well, for the candidate that is.
Obama’s section of the plane rivals that of any first class. Recently the front cabin of the Boeing 757 was retrofitted to install four individual chairs that resemble La-Z-Boys. They are free-standing and made of plush leather with pockets on the sides. There is also a booth which seats four for a meeting or a meal.
His chair has his name and campaign logo embroidered on the back top -- “Obama ‘08” on one line and “President” underneath. To one side is a small table stacked with newspapers ready for the candidate’s arrival. The table of the booth is always covered in snacks and cheese and is where Obama spends most of his time during flights meeting with staff and sitting for the occasional interview.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the Democrats adjourned the House and turned off the lights and killed the microphones, but Republicans are still on the floor talking gas prices.
Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other GOP leaders opposed the motion to adjourn the House, arguing that Pelosi's refusal to schedule a vote allowing offshore drilling is hurting the American economy. They have refused to leave the floor after the adjournment motion passed at 11:23 a.m. and are busy bashing Pelosi and her fellow Democrats for leaving town for the August recess.
At one point, the lights went off in the House and the microphones were turned off in the chamber, meaning Republicans were talking in the dark. But as Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz..) was speaking, the lights went back on, and the microphones were turned on shortly afterward.
But C-SPAN, which has no control over the cameras in the chamber, has stopped broadcasting the House floor, meaning no one is witnessing this except the assembled Republicans, their aides, and one Democrat, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), who has now left.
Only about a half-dozen Republicans were on the floor when this began, but the crowd has grown to about 20 now, according to Patrick O'Connor.
"This is the people's House," Rep, Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.) said. "This is not Pelosi's politiburo."
Democratic aides were furious at the GOP stunt, and reporters were kicked out of the Speaker's Lobby, the space next to the House floor where they normally interview lawmakers.
"You're not covering this, are you?" complaing one senior Democratic aide. Another called the Republicans "morons" for staying on the floor.
Update - The Capitol Police are now trying to kick reporters out of the press gallery above the floor, meaning we can't watch the Republicans anymore. But Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) is now in the gallery talking to reporters, so the cops have held off for a minute. Clearly, Democrats don't want Republicans getting any press for this episode. GOP leaders are trying to find other Republicans to rotate in for Blunt so reporters aren't kicked out.
