The truth be told

The U.S. isn't turning into Greece

Greece is turning into us. Turning its back on its citizenry in order to make the banksters fat and happy...

As the head of Greece largest oncology department, Dr. Kostas Syrigos thought he had seen everything. But nothing prepared him for Elena, an unemployed woman whose breast cancer had been diagnosed a year before she came to him.

By that time, her cancer had grown to the size of an orange and broken through the skin, leaving a wound that she was draining with paper napkins. “When we saw her we were speechless,” said Dr. Syrigos, the chief of oncology at Sotiria general hospital in central Athens. “Everyone was crying. things like that are described in textbooks, but you never see them because until now, anybody who got sick in this country could always get help.” - nytimes

Unusual and Fascinating Coins and Currency

In a continuing series on coins and currency, Dark Roasted Blend has a roundup of weird designs and stories about money. When the USSR was formed, and again when it crumbled, new money was designed for various areas that you may never have heard of. For example, Transnistria is a strip of land bordering Ukraine that is not recognized as a country, but it issues its own currency anyway. The former Yugoslavia has such inflation between 1988 and 1994 that the Dinara unit was issued in bills of 500 billion! And then there's the weird coins of Somalia that you just have to see. More

Man Gets Back £51,000 He Stole

Apparently being a thief pays. 19 years ago bank manager Otto Neuman stole £150,000 in cash, gold bars, and gold coins from his own branch. When he was caught there was only about £51,000 left in cash and the gold recovered. In a bureaucratic twist of events the bank did not claim the money because their insurance company covered their losses. The insurance company also did not claim the money because the gold they recovered had increased enough in value (since it was stolen) that it covered their money spent covering the bank.
Herbert Eichenseder, Neuman's lawyer, has confirmed that an Austrian court has now ordered, some 19 years after the events, that Neuman is to be returned the £51,000 he stole.
Mr. Eichenseder said: "I really didn't believe what the court were telling me but I checked it and it was correct. I had to go into the archives in our cellar to find the details of the case as it was already 19 years old - and I managed to track down the man's details and contacted him to tell him the news. To say that he was surprised was an understatement, but he provided his bank account details and the money has now been transferred."

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The Classics

Ford Pick Up Woodie

Introducing World's Strongest Beer

Meet the World's new strongest beer- a beer called Armageddon. With 65% alcohol, this drink is 130 proof. The beer is the creation of the Scottish brewery Brewmeister.
A spokesman said: "Despite being 65%, the beer has a lot of flavour - malty, hoppy, slightly sweet and lots of yeast still in the beer... ...Be careful though, smelling it is probably enough to put you over the limit!"
That 65 percent alcohol by volume trumps the previous champion, a beer made by BrewDog, which was at 55 percent. They were able to achieve such a high percentage by freezing the beer, removing some of the ice that forms, while leaving much of the unfrozen alcohol (because water and alcohol freeze at vastly different temperatures).
The beer is for sale in 330ml bottles at £40.00, but there is a two week back order due to high demand.

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The Interesting Origins Of Some Of Our Favorite Foods And Drinks

In the world today, you can have anything from a snack right up to a banquet-style feast delivered to your door by simply picking up the phone or clicking your mouse.

For many, this choice of food and drink and this type of advice can trigger questions such as 'where does such come from?' or 'how do they actually make this or that?.' Everybody knows that milk comes from cows and eggs from hens, but where does some of our favorite food and drink actually originate from?

Simulated Mars mission to study space food

In March 2013, six people will spend four months on Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano simulating a Mars mission. Funded by the NASA Human Research Program, HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) is focused on what future astronauts might eat during long space adventures like a trip to the red planet. More than 700 people with a variety of science/tech/space/health backgrounds applied to participate in the study. Science journalist Kate Greene, a former editor at Technology Review, was one of those selected to be an astronaut "analog." Kate says, "In particular, we are examining the hypothesis that astronauts cannot live by rehydrated foods alone: we will be cooking and baking with shelf-stable ingredients as astronauts on future Mars missions might." Kate will be writing about her experience in various places, including her blog. "Simulated Mars Mission"

Unique Water Towers From Around The World

A water tower is an elevated structure supporting a watertank constructed at a height sufficient to pressurize a water supply system for the distribution of potable water. Many water towers were constructed during the Industrial Revolution; some are now considered architectural landmarks and monuments, and may not be demolished. Some are converted to apartments or exclusive penthouses.

Awesome Pictures

Halloween in Charlotte, North Carolina

Although it is unclear whether Charlotte, North Carolina, is any more obsessed with Halloween than other cities, there are some interesting people there who take Halloween very seriously. Creative Loafing featured four of those people and the ways they celebrate the holiday. Drew Badger, pictured, is a haunted house consultant who also organizes the local Zombie Walk, among other ghoulish activities.

Drew Badger was only 10 when he inadvertently gave his first haunted house consultation, in 1977. His elementary school was holding its annual Halloween carnival, which included the "Tunnel of Terror." The "really lame attraction," Badger recalls, was comprised of taped-together refrigerator boxes and witches and ghosts made by first- and second-graders. So, Badger and his friend decided to fix it up.

"I cut a hole in one of the boxes, and my buddy got a bowl of ketchup," Badger says. "We smeared it on our arms and when the next group — a group of fifth-grade girls — got to the hole, we reached through and screamed and yelled. They screamed and yelled and got outta there. Within five minutes, we had a line out the door. Something must have clicked in me at that point."

Also meet a man who makes giant monster costumes, a guy who drives a spooky hearse for fun, and a woman who had a Halloween "shotgun" wedding. More

Woman stole coffins from undertaker for Halloween party

A woman who stole three coffins from an undertaker for her Halloween party is facing jail in Kielce, Poland.

Baffled funeral director Tadeusz Prusek said: "We've been neighbors for years.

"I was going to the party anyway and if she'd just asked I would have let her borrow them."

Michalina Illakowicz, 28, denies theft.

More here.

The White House of Horrors

The White House has plenty of history, and plenty of former residents. Some are said to still be there, despite having died long ago.

After moving into the White House in 1945, Harry Truman wrote to his wife Bess about their spooky new abode: “I sit here in this old house … all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway and even right in here in the study. The floors pop and the drapes move back and forth—I can just imagine old Andy [Jackson] and Teddy [Roosevelt] having an argument over Franklin [Roosevelt].”

Some White House ghosts stand head and shoulders above others. Read the reports of the most common specters haunting the president's home.

Could Your Stuff Be Haunted?

Ghostbusting The Creepiest Antiques

You can buy practically anything on the Internet, so why not ghosts? For shipping convenience, the ghosts have attached themselves to objects - often dolls, clowns, and idol figurines, or Ouija boards.

But wearables like clothes and jewelry, art like paintings and photographs, as well as household objects like wooden boxes, furniture, and musical instruments seem to be popular places for lost souls to take up residence. Really, if you believe a spirit, or 'energy,' can attach itself to an object, then any antique could be haunted.

Horror Films You Didn’t Realize Were Based on True Stories

More horror films than you know were based on, or inspired by, real life events. Wes Craven himself told the story of what inspired Nightmare on Elm Street: a series of Southeast Asian men who died while having nightmares. One of them was a 21-year-old who refused to sleep.

Everybody in his family said almost exactly these lines: ‘You must sleep.’ He said, ‘No, you don’t understand; I’ve had nightmares before — this is different.’ He was given sleeping pills and told to take them and supposedly did, but he stayed up. I forget what the total days he stayed up was, but it was a phenomenal amount — something like six, seven days. Finally, he was watching television with the family, fell asleep on the couch, and everybody said, ‘Thank god.’ They literally carried him upstairs to bed; he was completely exhausted. Everybody went to bed, thinking it was all over. In the middle of the night, they heard screams and crashing. They ran into the room, and by the time they got to him he was dead. They had an autopsy performed, and there was no heart attack; he just had died for unexplained reasons.

But that's just one of ten horror stories behind the movies you'll find at Flavorwire.

Ghost Photography of the 19th Century

The spiritualist movement rose at about the same time photography was invented. Therefore, it was no wonder that the earliest use of trick photography was to show evidence of spirits that one could communicate with -for a small fee. Buzzfeed has a collection of quite a few of these "spirit" pictures. More

Real Live Apeman 1937

This is a photo of an apeman captured in the jungles of Brazil in 1937.  

Or not.

Dog saves choking owner's life by slapping her on back

A dog is supposed to be a man’s best friend but a woman from Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, has an extra special relationship with her beloved pet after it saved her from choking to death. Aysha Perry was settling down to watch some evening TV with a plate of chicken while Sheba, a Japanese Akita, was asleep in the kitchen. The 18-year-old then began choking with a piece of chicken stuck in her throat. Aysha helplessly tried to reach for her phone but was struggling to breathe and thought she was going to die.
Sheba’s protective instincts kicked in and the bitch bounded into the living room to aid her struggling owner. Aysha said: “She whacked me on the back with one of her huge front paws and the piece of chicken flew out. I was at home on my own and genuinely thought I was going to die. I’ve only had her for two weeks, she must have heard me choking and came running in. My flat mate wasn’t home so there was no one else around to help me.

“I was on the floor trying to get to my phone when she came running in. It’s a good job she has such big paws otherwise I don’t think it would have dislodged the chicken.” Aysha wasn’t aware of four-year-old Sheba’s life-saving skills but has done some research into the Akita breed. She added: “They are quite an unpredictable breed and were used for bringing down bears. She could obviously sense I was in distress.”

Aysha said she has since repaid the favor after four-and-a-half year old Sheba got her paw stuck in a fence. “I don’t think we are quite even yet but have definitely got a special relationship. After she helped get the chicken out of my throat she began licking my face to make sure I was okay. I think she deserves some recognition because it was a very heroic act. I don’t know anyone else whose dog would do something like that.” Japanese Akitas are known for their ‘fierce protectiveness towards their human companions’.  Enthusiasts claim mothers in Japan, in ancient times, relied heavily on their pet Akitas to take care of their very young children. In 1931, the Akita was officially declared one of Japan’s national treasures.

Fox with a conscience returns stolen handbag

The hunt is on for a ‘thief’ who stole a handbag from a woman. The suspect is described as 1.25 ft high, with pointed ears, hairy and red. Jeremy Clark, 38, has told how he was at home in Maple Drive, Burgess Hill, West Sussex, when he spotted a fox making off with his wife's handbag - then return it to her.
He was preparing to go to hospital with his wife, Anna, 35, when the cunning carnivore made his move. He said: “We were in the [estate's] car park and he looked at me for a few seconds before letting out this feeble yelp. “Next thing I knew he had my wife’s handbag in his mouth and was running towards the bushes.”

Jeremy screamed at the fox to drop the bag but he scuttled off out of sight. He added: “Anna had everything in there: her phone, money, purse, keys and letters. I couldn’t believe the fox had just taken it – it was mad. I thought that was it.”

But a few minutes later the guilty looking fox crept back into the car park with his bushy tail between his legs. In his mouth was Anna’s bag which he dropped at her feet before running off.  Jeremy added: “I have no idea why, we couldn’t believe it. We see the fox around quite a bit. I think people feed it.”

Bird of Fire

Let me introduce you to the most interesting bird in the world, the ʻĀkohekohe (Palmeria dolei). This critically endangered bird is only found on the island of Maui in Hawaii. There are about 3,800 individuals in two separate populations on Maui. It has distinctive calls from the "whee-o, whee-o" to the "tjook, tjook, chouroup" and even a rarely heard "hur-hur-hur-gluk-gluk-gluk".
The bird, sadly, is on the decline. Deforestation of the ʻĀkohekohe's natural habitat is one factor. Another is due to the bird's unique colors, it is very desirable to collectors and poachers. Competition from nonnative species that have been introduced to the ecosystem has also hurt the ʻĀkohekohe. Finally, in the 1900s mosquitoes were introduced to the Hawaiian Islands and the diseases they carry have been deadly to these magnificent birds.
Conservation efforts are under way and the species is under the protection of the Federal Endangered Species Act.

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Today in History

1774		The first Continental Congress, which protested British measures and called for civil disobedience, concludes in Philadelphia.
1795		When General Paul Barras resigns his commission as head of France's Army of the Interior to become head of the Directory, his second-in-command becomes the army's commander-Napoleon Bonaparte.
1825		The first boat on the Erie Canal leaves Buffalo, N.Y.
1881		Three Earp brothers and Doc Holliday have a shootout with the Clantons and McLaurys at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona Territory.
1905		Norway signs a treaty of separation with Sweden. Norway chooses Prince Charles of Denmark as the new king; he becomes King Haakon VII.
1918		Germany's supreme commander, General Erich Ludendorff, resigns, protesting the terms to which the German Government has agreed in negotiating the armistice. This sets the stage for his later support for Hitler and the Nazis, who claim that Germany did not lose the war on the battlefield but were "stabbed in the back" by politicians.
1942		Japanese attack Guadalcanal, sinking two U.S. carriers.
1942		U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Hornet is sunk in the Battle of Santa Cruz Island, in the South Pacific.
1950		A reconnaissance platoon for a South Korean division reaches the Yalu River. They are the only elements of the U.N. force to reach the river before the Chinese offensive pushes the whole army down into South Korea.
1955		The Village Voice is first published, backed in part by Norman Mailer.
1957		The Russian government announces that Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the nation's most prominent military hero, has been relieved of his duties as Minister of Defense. Khrushchev accused Zhukov as promoting his own "cult of personality" and saw him as a threat to his own popularity.
1958		The first New York – Paris transatlantic jet passenger service is inaugurated by Pan Am, while the first New York – London transatlantic jet passenger service is inaugurated by BOAC.
1970		Gary Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury first appears.

Non Sequitur

Plotting against America

That's what the a good number of repugican leaders, including Paul Ryan, did. 

On January 20, 2009 repugican leaders in congress literally plotted to sabotage and undermine U.S. economy during president Obama's inauguration. - daily kos

Isn't plotting against your own government, treason?

Pro-Romney firm buys voting machine company, raises alarms

This news may raise alarms, but it shouldn’t surprise … it’s what these guys do. Dan Froomkin at the Huffington Post:

A private equity company run by fervent supporters of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney bought the third-largest voting machine company in the country last July, raising concerns about the appearance of impropriety, if not the possibility of impropriety itself. Apprehension that Romney supporters could be literally buying votes has been burbling on left-wing blogs since Freepress.org, an alternative website based in Columbus, Ohio, reported late last month about H.I.G Capital’s purchase of Hart Intercivic [sic].
H.I.G. Capital is a Miami-based private equity fund that manages $8.5 billion in capital. Hart Intercivic is a company exclusively in the business of manufacturing and programming voting systems.

Because the names are so similar, here’s a scorecard. Hart InterCivic is a manufacturing company; it’s all they do. H.I.G Capital is a private equity fund that purchases companies; it’s all they do. (Hm, a buyer of companies and a maker of things. Guess who’s king in that world?)
After the expected (and totally necessary) disclaimer from the H.I.G. ”crisis communications consultant” — already? think they’re gearing up for a fight over this? — that H.I.G. is not up to no good, Froomkin tells why they might be (up to no good):

H.I.G. Capital’s co-founder, Anthony Tamer, previously worked at Bain & Company…. Eight of the company’s managing directors came from Bain as well. Tamer and his wife are major Romney donors … And Tamer has plenty of company at H.I.G. Although it isn’t a particularly big firm, H.I.G.’s directors have collectively given so much money to Romney that their company is the sixth biggest contributor to all Romney committees, as calculated by opensecrets.org.

Why does this matter? Aside from the obvious reasons, Ohio:

One of the jurisdictions with Hart Intercivic equipment is Hamilton County — which includes Cincinnati, the third-largest city in the hotly contested swing state of Ohio.

There’s plenty more; do read on. A number of experts are interviews for this rather complete article.

How to think about this? Of course, this could just be your innocent dinosaur-eats-dinosaur deal, corp-on-corp feeding, in which the only motive is the feast (i.e., making more money). And there are a number of sources in the article that do raise the “don’t jump to conclusions” flag.
Still, others are quite suspicious. Think about it — repugicans. Voting machines. Bain. Ohio. Cause for concern? Many say yes.
Me, I start wondering — at what tipping point will the toxic combo of repugican cheating, a narrow Romney win, and much suspicion, cause the real left to be told by our faux-left Democratic friends, “Don’t you dare think of Romney as not the rightful president”? Not that I don’t think the election isn’t still in the bag; it’s just that the bag has gotten smaller.
About this last point, more later. For now, watch the Hamilton County (Cincinnati) vote total on election night. And if Obama’s vote count is low enough to pull his state-wide total into the loss column, watch the media say a whole lot of nothing about the possibility of a ballot-box fix.

Mitt Romney’s mortal enemy: Arithmetic

Politico’s Playbook observes that for all of the repugican bluster about an imminent Romney victory, the numbers just don’t add up:

MORNING MINDMELD : As an antidote to the (perhaps) irrational repugican exuberance that seems to have seized D.C., we pause for the following public-service announcement. To be President, you have to win states, not debates. And Mitt Romney has a problem. Despite a great debate and what The Wall Street Journal’s Neil King Jr. on Sunday called a polling “surge,” Romney has not put away a single one of the must-have states. President Obama remains the favorite because he only needs to win a couple of the toss-ups. Mitt needs to win most of them. A cold shower for the repugican cabal: Most polling shows Romney trailing in Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire and Iowa – by MORE than Obama trails in North Carolina. Glenn Thrush and Jonathan Martin reminded of us of the 2008 primary analogy: Whatever else Hillary Clinton had, Barack Obama had the math. And math, not momentum, gets you the big house, the bulletproof car, the cool plane. We now resume our regularly scheduled Playbook.

And Nate Silver’s latest tally over at FiveThirtyEight backs this up.
Nate shows Romney with 48.9% of the popular vote, to Obama’s 50.0%, but once you factor in the electoral vote, which is how you actually win a presidential election, Romney has a 31.9% chance of
winning and Obama a 68.1% chance.

By looking at the graphs on Nate’s site, you can see that Romney’s “surge” stopped around October 13 or 14, a few days after the VP debate, and a few days before the second presidential debate. From that date on, for the past ten days, Obama and Romney have remained stagnant in the popular vote, each retaining their share of the vote, while Obama’s chances of winning have steadily risen from 61% to 68%.
Jonathan Chait argues in NYMag that Romney’s “I’m winning, I’m winning!” is all a bluff. And let’s face it, it’s not like it would be the first time that Mitt Romney tried to convince folks that the truth has a liberal bias.
Also, this might explain why Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck freaked out after the third presidential debate the other night.

@glennbeck: I am glad to know that mitt agrees with Obama so much. No, really. Why vote?
@AnnCoulter: I highly approve of Romney’s decision to be kind and gentle to the retard.

I quote them because they’re both egotistical enough to not care if they’re spilling the beans, and hurting their own party, by telling the truth.  And both said things you don’t generally say if you think you’re winning the election.
Also, I’m intrigued that Romney surrogate Marco Rubio, the new darling of the repugican cabal, disagreed publicly the other day with Mitt Romney over his China policy, suggesting that Romney would “hurt American businesses.”

Appearing on CBS’ Face The Nation Sunday, Rubio told Schieffer regarding labeling China a currency manipulator: “A trade war is not the right way to approach it and I think that if you label them a currency manipulator, that’s what it may result in, it would hurt American businesses.”

That’s not the kind of thing you say, two weeks before the election, when you think your guy has a chance at winning. It’s especially not the kind of thing you say, criticizing the business acumen of your party’s candidate whose main argument for the presidency is his business acumen.
It’s the kind of thing you say when you think your guy has already lost, and your setting yourself up as Not-Mitt-Romney for the 2016 presidential elections.

Source confirms Romney using orange spray-on tan

Even Romney’s Tan Isn’t Sincere

Buzzfeed confirms what most of us already knew, but now they have a source: In spite of denials from the Romney campaign, Mitt is in fact using a spray-on tan before big events like television appearances.
So, yes, the Romney campaign even lied about Mitt’s tan.

A knowledgeable source tells BuzzFeed the answer is in a bit of cosmetic technology used commonly by celebrities: spray tanning. The repugican nominee has made a habit of spray tanning before major speeches, debates, interviews, and other events that have a chance of getting wide TV coverage, the source said. He pays for the process out of pocket — sparing his campaign the expense, and the task of masking it on public campaign finance reports — and steers clear of public salons where he could be recognized. Instead, he gets misted down in the comfort of his own home or hotel suite.
The Romney campaign flatly denied that the candidate spray tans: “Not true,” spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in response to an inquiry….
But Romney’s darker-than-usual complexion at the forum was actually the product of an exceptionally fresh spray tan, the source said.

Buzzfeed goes on to say that for tanning professionals, the fake-tan was obvious.

Violet Beauregarde wants her gum back.

“Oh, for sure he had a spray tan,” Jimmy Coco, a celebrity tanner from Los Angeles, told BuzzFeed while looking at pictures of the candidate. “I just see the sort of red hue that you get from some of the spray tanning places… The ears are white. That is a giveaway. If you look at Obama, he’s all one tone. A lot of times, what they do when they’re giving a spray tan, they’ll put a cap on and their cap will cover the ears.”

It was also obvious to our own in-house tanning expert, Gabe Ortíz, who noted: ”even his tan isn’t sincere.”
That’ll be the last time Mitt tries any of Mr. Wonka’s experimental three-course-meal chewing gum.

Did you know ...

There are hints of a post-debate Obama bounce

The U.S. tax burden lowest since the 1950's

That if Italian corruption were its own country, it would would be the world's 76th largest economy

A dinosaur thief arrested

The call to bring the Robin Hood tax to the U.S.!

That Nevada early voting favors Obama

You can love long and prosper: the Trekkie dating site

That Disney decides the Jungle Book will no longer destroy the jungle to be made

An Open Letter to Ann Coulter

John Franklin Stephens

The following is a guest post in the form of an open letter from Special Olympics athlete and global messenger John Franklin Stephens to Ann Coulter after this tweet during the last Presidential debate.
Dear Ann Coulter,
Come on Ms. Coulter, you aren’t dumb and you aren’t shallow.  So why are you continually using a word like the R-word as an insult?
I’m a 30 year old man with Down syndrome who has struggled with the public’s perception that an intellectual disability means that I am dumb and shallow.  I am not either of those things, but I do process information more slowly than the rest of you.  In fact it has taken me all day to figure out how to respond to your use of the R-word last night.
I thought first of asking whether you meant to describe the President as someone who was bullied as a child by people like you, but rose above it to find a way to succeed in life as many of my fellow Special Olympians have.
Then I wondered if you meant to describe him as someone who has to struggle to be thoughtful about everything he says, as everyone else races from one snarkey sound bite to the next.
Finally, I wondered if you meant to degrade him as someone who is likely to receive bad health care, live in low grade housing with very little income and still manages to see life as a wonderful gift.
Because, Ms. Coulter, that is who we are – and much, much more.
After I saw your tweet, I realized you just wanted to belittle the President by linking him to people like me.  You assumed that people would understand and accept that being linked to someone like me is an insult and you assumed you could get away with it and still appear on TV.
I have to wonder if you considered other hateful words but recoiled from the backlash.
Well, Ms. Coulter, you, and society, need to learn that being compared to people like me should be considered a badge of honor.
No one overcomes more than we do and still loves life so much.
Come join us someday at Special Olympics.  See if you can walk away with your heart unchanged.
A friend you haven’t made yet,
John Franklin Stephens
Global Messenger
Special Olympics Virginia
EDITOR’S NOTE: John has previously written powerful opinion pieces on the R-word. Read one here.

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Today in History

1415		An English army under Henry V defeats the French at Agincourt, France. The French had out numbered Henry's troops 60,000 to 12,000 but British longbows turned the tide of the battle.
1760		George III of England crowned.
1854		During the Crimean War, a brigade of British light infantry is destroyed by Russian artillery as they charge down a narrow corridor in full view of the Russians.
1916		German pilot Rudolf von Eschwege shoots down his first enemy plane, a Nieuport 12 of the Royal Naval Air Service over Bulgaria.
1923		The Teapot Dome scandal comes to public attention as Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana, subcommittee chairman, reveals the findings of the past 18 months of investigation. His case will result in the conviction of Harry F. Sinclair of Mammoth Oil, and later Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, the first cabinet member in American history to go to jail. The scandal, named for the Teapot Dome oil reserves in Wyoming, involved Fall secretly leasing naval oil reserve lands to private companies.
1940		German troops capture Kharkov and launch a new drive toward Moscow.
1944		The Japanese are defeated in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the world's largest sea engagement. From this point on, the depleted Japanese Navy increasingly resorts to the suicidal attacks of Kamikaze fighters.
1950		Chinese Communist Forces launch their first-phase offensive across the Yalu River into North Korea.
1951		In a general election, England's Labour Party loses to Conservatives. Winston Churchill becomes prime minister, and Anthony Eden becomes foreign secretary.
1954		President Eisenhower conducts the first televised Cabinet meeting.
1958		The last U.S. troops leave Beirut.
1960		Martin Luther King, Jr., is sentenced to four months in prison for a sit-in.
1983		1,800 U.S. troops and 300 Caribbean troops land on Grenada. U.S. forces soon turn up evidence of a strong Cuban and Soviet presence–large stores of arms and documents suggesting close links to Cuba.

If Great Literary Works Had Been Written by Lawyers

Legal humorist Kevin Underhill imagined a horrifying world in which the greatest works of Western literature were composed by attorneys. At the link, you can read selections from Shakespeare's  A Midsummer Night's Hearing Before the U.S. Patent Examiner and Herman Melville's Moby Dick, or, The "Whale" (A Narrative About, But Not Necessarily Limited to, the Species Enumerated at 50 C.F.R. sec. 224.101(b)(xiv).
Here's the beginning of John Milton's Paradise Lost, New Business Found:

Of Mankind's first inconvenient slip and Fall
Upon the ice, and the party whose petition
Brought the hourly bill into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of joy, till a Judgeship may
Sustain us, and inspire more blissful work,
Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top
Of downtown's height, didst inspire
That Partner who first sowed the holy seed
Of business and brought forth the fabled green
From out of Chaos; or, if oral argument
Delight thee more, and thy advocate that holdeth
Fast unto the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my most friv'lous brief,
That with no better voice will never soar
Above appellate mount, though it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or headnote.

More

Drug dealer called police to arrest him

A drug dealer called the police and gave them his own description before handing himself in, a court has heard. Alexander Lafferty, 19, rang Central Scotland Police and described a drug dealer operating near the Raploch Community Campus. Stirling Sheriff Court heard that when officers arrived Lafferty was there waiting for them. He later told police he wanted to be jailed due to stress. Sheriff Wyllie Robertson remanded him in custody for reports.
Prosecutor Ann Orr said an operator at the force's Stirling headquarters received the call from a man who said he wanted to report a drug dealer, who turned out to be himself. The depute fiscal said: "He said he wanted to report that there was a male near the Raploch Community Campus with a bag of 500 Valium tablets and was selling them. He gave a description of a male wearing a grey jumper and a blue top." The court was told that officers went to the campus on Drip Road in Stirling, and found Lafferty standing in a doorway, wearing a grey jumper and blue Adidas T-shirt and holding a bag containing 15 blue tablets.

Mrs Orr said he was searched and police found 33 smaller bags on his person, containing another 485 tablets. The court heard the tablets were later tested and confirmed to be 500 Valium tablets with an estimated street value of £500. Miss Orr said that during a police interview Lafferty had confirmed he had called the police, saying he wanted them to come and search him, and that he had done so with the intention of "getting the jail or a remand at least". He said he wanted to be jailed due to stress, and when he was asked what was causing that he said "hunners of different things". Appearing from custody, Lafferty from Raploch in Stirling, pleaded guilty to being concerned in the supply of a controlled drug.

Frazer McCready, defending, said: "He phoned the police and told them about a drug dealer, and it was him. It is probably the easiest case that Central Scotland Police have ever had to solve." Mr McCready told Sheriff Wyllie Robertson: "He tells me he wanted to be sent to Polmont (Young Offenders' Institution) and I told him your Lordship would be glad to oblige." Sheriff Robertson deferred sentence for a criminal justice report and psychiatric reports. He told Lafferty he would be remanded in custody until 19 November. Lafferty replied "Excellent. Thank you Sir", before being led to the cells.

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Soundtrack to history: 1878 Edison audio unveiled

 
It's scratchy, lasts only 78 seconds and features the world's first recorded blooper.
The modern masses can now listen to what experts say is the oldest playable recording of an American voice and the first-ever capturing of a musical performance, thanks to digital advances that allowed the sound to be transferred from flimsy tinfoil to computer.
The recording was originally made on a Thomas Edison-invented phonograph in St. Louis in 1878.
At a time when music lovers can carry thousands of digital songs on a player the size of a pack of gum, Edison's tinfoil playback seems prehistoric. But that dinosaur opens a key window into the development of recorded sound.
"In the history of recorded sound that's still playable, this is about as far back as we can go," said John Schneiter, a trustee at the Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady, where it was played Thursday night in the city where Edison helped found the General Electric Co.
The recording opens with a 23-second cornet solo of an unidentified song, followed by a man's voice reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "Old Mother Hubbard." The man laughs at two spots during the recording, including at the end, when he recites the wrong words in the second nursery rhyme.
"Look at me; I don't know the song," he says.
When the recording was played using modern technology during a presentation Thursday at a nearby theater, it was likely the first time it had been played at a public event since it was created during an Edison phonograph demonstration held June 22, 1878, in St. Louis, museum officials said.
The recording was made on a sheet of tinfoil, 5 inches wide by 15 inches long, placed on the cylinder of the phonograph Edison invented in 1877 and began selling the following year.
A hand crank turned the cylinder under a stylus that would move up and down over the foil, recording the sound waves created by the operator's voice. The stylus would eventually tear the foil after just a few playbacks, and the person demonstrating the technology would typically tear up the tinfoil and hand the pieces out as souvenirs, according to museum curator Chris Hunter.
Popping noises heard on this recording are likely from scars left from where the foil was folded up for more than a century.
"Realistically, once you played it a couple of times, the stylus would tear through it and destroy it," he said.
Only a handful of the tinfoil recording sheets are known to known to survive, and of those, only two are playable: the Schenectady museum's and an 1880 recording owned by The Henry Ford museum in Michigan.
Hunter said he was able to determine just this week that the man's voice on the museum's 1878 tinfoil recording is believed to be that of Thomas Mason, a St. Louis newspaper political writer who also went by the pen name I.X. Peck.
Edison company records show that one of his newly invented tinfoil phonographs, serial No. 8, was sold to Mason for $95.50 in April 1878, and a search of old newspapers revealed a listing for a public phonograph program being offered by Peck on June 22, 1878, in St. Louis, the curator said.
A woman's voice says the words "Old Mother Hubbard," but her identity remains a mystery, he said. Three weeks after making the recording, Mason died of sunstroke, Hunter said.
A Connecticut woman donated the tinfoil to the Schenectady museum in 1978 for an exhibit on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Edison company that later merged with another to form GE. The woman's father had been an antiques dealer in the Midwest and counted the item among his favorites, Hunter said.
In July, Hunter brought the Edison tinfoil recording to California's Berkeley Lab, where researchers such as Carl Haber have had success in recent years restoring some of the earliest audio recordings.
Haber's projects include recovering a snippet of a folk song recorded a capella in 1860 on paper by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, a French printer credited with inventing the earliest known sound recording device.
Haber and his team used optical scanning technology to replicate the action of the phonograph's stylus, reading the grooves in the foil and creating a 3D image, which was then analyzed by a computer program that recovered the original recorded sound.
The achievement restores a vital link in the evolution of recorded sound, Haber said. The artifact represents Edison's first step in his efforts to record sound and have the capability to play it back, even if it was just once or twice, he said.
"It really completes a technology story," Haber said. "He was on the right track from the get-go to record and play it back."

On The Table With One of History’s Most Infamous Surgeons

Before the use of ether revolutionized surgery in 1846, Dr. Robert Liston was the premiere surgeon at his teaching hospital in London. In those days, surgery was a last resort, patients had to be restrained, and speed was essential. Liston was very good at what he did.

Richard Gordon, a surgeon and medical historian, calls Liston the “fastest knife in the West End.” His style may have seemed careless, but in the age before anesthesia, speed was essential to minimizing the patient’s pain and improving their odds of surviving surgery. Slower surgeons sometimes had pain-wracked and panicked patients wrestle free from their assistants and flee from the operating room, leaving a trail of blood behind them. Only about one of every 10 of Liston’s patients died on his operating table at London’s University College Hospital. The surgeons at nearby St. Bartholomew’s, meanwhile, lost about one in every four.

Liston’s quick hands were so sought after that patients sometimes had to camp out in his waiting room for days waiting for their turn to see him. Liston tried to see every last one of these patients, no matter their condition. He especially loved treating those cases that his fellow surgeons had dismissed as beyond help, which earned him a reputation among colleagues as showy.

Read more about Dr. Liston and the way surgery was done in the 19th century. More

Who Were The Most Dangerous Scientists In History?

The recent Italian court ruling that respected seismologists are guilty of manslaughter and should serve six years in prison for failing to predict the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake has sent shockwaves through the scientific community. The decision has been widely decried by the scientific community as poorly thought out bordering on ridiculous.

Science has more than its fair share of detractors and enemies who feel threatened or maligned by it. Much of what science has achieved has been used for ill or had negative consequences over the centuries, so can we now expect others to be condemned for failing to anticipate the future?

How Scientists Recreated Neanderthal Man

A team of scientists has created what it believes is the first really accurate reconstruction of Neanderthal man, from a skeleton that was discovered in France over a century ago. In 1909, excavations at the La Ferrassie cave in the Dordogne unearthed the remains of a group of Neanderthals.

One of the skeletons in that group was that of an adult male, given the name La Ferrassie 1. These remains have helped scientists create a detailed reconstruction of our closest prehistoric relative.

Animal Pictures

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Today in History

439		Carthage, the leading Roman city in North Africa, falls to Genseric and the Vandals.
1531		Bavaria, despite being a Catholic region, joins the League of Schmalkalden, a Protestant group which opposes Charles V.
1648		The signing of the Treaty of Westphalia ends the German Thirty Years' War.
1755		A British expedition against the French held Fort Niagara in Canada ends in failure.
1836		The match is patented.
1861		Western Union completes the first transcontinental telegraph line, putting the Pony Express out of business.
1863		General Ulysses S. Grant arrives in Chattanooga, Tennessee to find the Union Army there starving.
1897		The first comic strip appears in the Sunday color supplement of the New York Journal called the 'Yellow Kid.'
1901		Anna Edson Taylor, 43, is the first woman to go safely over Niagara Falls in a barrel. She made the attempt for the cash award offered, which she put toward the loan on her Texas ranch.
1916		Henry Ford awards equal pay to women.
1917		The Austro-German army routs the Italian army at Caporetto, Italy.
1929		Black Thursday–the first day of the stock market crash which began the Great Depression.
1930		John Wayne debuts in his first starring role in The Big Trail .
1931		Al (Alphonse) Capone, the prohibition-era Chicago gangster, is sent to prison for tax evasion.
1934		Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, called Mahatma or "Great Soul," resigns from Congress in India.
1938		The Fair Labor Standards Act becomes law, establishing the 40-hour work week.
1944		The aircraft carrier USS Princeton is sunk by a single Japanese plane during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
1945		The United Nations comes into existence with the ratification of its charter by the first 29 nations.
1945		Vidkun Quisling, Norway's wartime minister president, is executed by firing squad for collaboration with the Nazis.
1952		Presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower announces that if elected, he will go to Korea.
1970		Leftist Salvador Allende elected president of Chile.
2003		The supersonic Concorde jet made its last commercial passenger flight from New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport to London's Heathrow Airport, traveling at twice the speed of sound.

Non Sequitur

Romney lied about the number of ships in 1917

Number of Ships 

Obama: 285

the shrub: 278

1916 (Romney, of course, made a mistake in quoting the lie, it’s 1916): 245

As you may all now know, Mitt Romney raised an odd complaint during last night’s debate: He claimed – falsely – that America’s Navy has fewer ships today than since 1917.

ROMNEY: Our Navy is old — excuse me, our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917. The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission. We’re now at under 285. We’re headed down to the low 200s if we go through a sequestration. That’s unacceptable to me.

Mitt Romney, keeping America

safe from Kaiser Wilhelm. 

Except he’s wrong.
America has more ships now than in 1917.  From Politifact (Politifact notes that Romney also got his year wrong – the lie, traditionally told by repugicans on this point, claims 1916 as the year, not 1917):

We looked up the original data, and the Heritage report does reflect the trend line correctly (though Romney said 1917 rather than 1916, something we won’t quibble with). In 1916, the U.S. Navy had 245 active ships, a number that eventually peaked during World War II, then fell, then peaked again more modestly during the Korean War, followed by a slow, consistent decline over the next five decades.
In recent years, the number of active ships has fallen low enough to approach its 1916 level. In both 2009 (the most recent year of the Heritage report) and 2011, the number was 285.

And guess who had fewer ships than us today?  George W. Bush.

The same data set shows that during the years 2005 to 2008, the number of active ships was 282, 281, 278 and 282, respectively — each of which were below the levels of 2009, 2010 and 2011. In other words, each of the final four years under George W. Bush saw lower levels of active ships than any of the three years under Obama. The number of surface warships also bottomed out in 2005 under Bush, later rising by about 10 percent under Obama.
Such figures undercut Romney’s use of the statistic as a weapon against Obama.

Politifact goes on to explain that the number of ships doesn’t matter, it’s not an indication of relative military power, especially when comparing two different centuries.

But what do those numbers mean? Not much, a variety of experts told us.
Counting the number of ships or aircraft is not a good measurement of defense strength because their capabilities have increased dramatically in recent decades. Romney’s comparison “doesn’t pass ‘the giggle test,’ ” said William W. Stueck, a historian at the University of Georgia.
Consider what types of naval ships were used in 1916 and 2011. The types of ships active in both years, such as cruisers and destroyers, are outfitted today with far more advanced technology than what was available during World War I. More importantly, the U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft carriers (plus the jets to launch from them), 31 amphibious ships, 14 submarines capable of launching nuclear ballistic missiles and four specialized submarines for launching Cruise missiles — all categories of vessels that didn’t exist in 1916.

When will the media start asking Mitt Romney whether he’s incredibly sloppy or an incredible liar? Either way, it hardly passes the commander-in-chief test.

The truth be told

Nine Romney Advisers You Need to Know About

Want to know what a Romney presidency would look like? 

Check out these guys' records.

By Dana Liebelson and Adam Serwer

One way to understand what a presidential candidate might do if elected is to look at his advisers. Here are nine advisers who are shaping Mitt Romney's views—and could end up shaping his presidency. You may not have heard of them, but you should know about them.

Cofer "head on dry ice" Black

Position: Foreign Policy Adviser
His Qualifications: Black was head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center when Al Qaeda brought down the towers and is a former executive for the "private security" company Blackwater.
What You Need to Know: Black has long been associated with the shrub cabal’s "dark side," including torture and extraordinary rendition. He's also a fan of colorful speech, having said that he wanted to "Capture Bin Laden, kill him, and bring his head back in a box on dry ice." That didn't happen, but a 2005 CIA inspector general's report did chastise the CTC for not sharing information with other agencies that could have lead to the discovery of the 9/11 plot before it occurred.

Walid "LEbanese warlord advisEr" Phares

Position: Foreign Policy Adviser
His Qualifications: Phares has worked as a professor, counterterrorism adviser, author, and pundit for Fox News.
What You Need to Know: As Mother Jones first reported last year, Phares "was a high ranking political official in a sectarian religious militia responsible for massacres during Lebanon's brutal, 15-year civil war." Phares has tried to downplay his involvement in this messy war (which resulted in more than 100,000 fatalities) but according to Régina Sneifer, who served in the Lebenese Forces' Fifth Bureau, "Mr. Phares was aware of the crimes of Samir Geagea [a ruthless militia leader] and he was still close to him."

Robert "saturday night massacre" Bork

Position: Judicial Adviser
His Qualifications:  Bork was a failed Supreme Court nominee under President Ronald Reagan and played a controversial role in the Watergate scandal.
What You Need to Know: Bork, then solicitor general, agreed to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was close to cracking open Watergate. (Bork's colleagues, Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, had refused to fire Cox and resigned on principle.) Ted Kennedy later said that "Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids [and] schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution." Bork has also proposed reducing the scope of the 14th Amendment, and says it's "silly" to think: "Gee, [women are] discriminated against and we need to do something about it."

Kris "birther flirter" Kobach

Position: Immigration Adviser
His Qualifications: Kobach is the secretary of state for Kansas.
What You Need to Know: Kobach is the intellectual architect behind harsh Arizona-style immigration laws all over the country. Kobach has flirted with birtherism and even sought to abolish birthright citizenship. But illegal immigration isn't Kobach's only hobby horse: At the repugican convention, he dipped his toe into Shariah panic by urging the adoption of an anti-Shariah plank to the repugican platform.

Paul "you're a taker" Ryan

Position: Domestic Policy Adviser/Vice Presidential Candidate
His Qualifications: Ryan is a repugican congressman from Wisconsin and the chairman of the House Budget Committee.
What You Need to Know: Technically he's the veep pick, but in choosing Ryan, Romney tied himself to Ryan's policy agenda. In the past, that agenda has included turning Medicare into a voucher system so that seniors have to pay more for their health care, slashing Medicaid so that states have less money to cover medical services for the poor, old, and disabled, and all while cutting taxes on the wealthy. Where does Ryan's plan make up that extra revenue? In part by raising taxes on the poor. There's no one on Romney's team who embodies the "half the country are moochers" mindset expressed by Romney on that 47 percent video more than Ryan does.

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John "it's never a bad day to bomb Iran" Bolton

Position: Foreign Policy Adviser

His Qualifications: Bolton is a lawyer and diplomat who served under George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush.

What You Need to Know: It's never a bad day to bomb Iran if you're John Bolton, the walrus-mustachioed Bush-era ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton has been pushing for an Iran strike for years, he recently said he thought the Israelis should have bombed Iran "three and a half years ago." A favorite of anti-Muslim activists like Pamela Geller, Bolton likes a good conspiracy theory himself, recently warning that a UN small arms treaty could take Americans' guns away.

General Tommy "where's bin Laden?" Franks

Position: Military Adviser

His Qualifications: Franks, a retired commander of the US Central Command, led the 2003 invasion of Iraq…and came in at No. 4 on Foreign Policy's "worst general in American history" list. 

What You Need to Know: It's hard to know where to start with Franks: He didn't tell the American public he was planning on invading Iraq and then he helped spread the big fat lie that there were actually weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Once the war was over, he had no plan to deal with the aftermath. Oh, and he lost Osama bin Laden.  

Harold "drill baby drill" Hamm

Position: Energy Adviser

His Qualifications: He's a self-made American oilman worth $9.7 billion, as of September 2012.  

What You Need to Know: Hamm would end federal control of drilling on government land, a policy Theodore Roosevelt ushered in to help protect wildlife and America's most beautiful places. Instead, states would have the authority to frack and mine government lands. The New York Times calls this "a radical shift from decades of policies under both Democrat and Republican presidents." According to Rolling Stone, Hamm has also given nearly $1 million to Romney's super-PAC. 

Kevin "Dow 36,000" Hassett

His Position: Economic Adviser
His Qualifications: Hassett was a senior economist for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
What You Need To Know: Hassett is your typical right-wing economist: He favors stimulus when repugican presidents are in office and austerity when Democrats are in office, and in that sense he's kind of a perfect adviser for Mitt Romney, who is known for changing his mind on big issues when it's convenient. Hassett is most infamous, though, for writing (with James K. Glassman) the 1999 book Dow 36,000, in which he predicted an ever-rising stock market. "Stocks are now in the midst of a one-time-only rise to much higher ground," Hassett and Glassman wrote, which is true if you ignore subsequent downturns including the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. With a track record like that, how can Hassett's assertion that Romney's jobs plan will create "millions of jobs" possibly be wrong?

An Avalanche of repugican Voter Suppression and Fraud is Threatening the Election

Human beings are programmed with a need to control their environment whether it is in their place of abode, their job, or their community. There are countries in the world where government is chosen by military might, religious institutions, or by royal birth, but the people have little control of their own lives. America’s founders did not believe every resident had a right to choose their representatives, and it has taken over two hundred years to give every citizen a voice in choosing their representatives in government. When America invaded Iraq, one of the first tasks the military accomplished was providing Iraqi citizens with free and fair elections for the first time in decades, and it was a watershed moment for the people who suffered under the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein. It is ironic then, that in America, the prospect of free and fair elections is being threatened by an avalanche of reports of voter suppression and fraud by the repugican cabal.
The repugicans are notorious for projecting their beliefs and practices on their opponents, and for the past two years their state legislative arm, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) passed restrictive and harsh voter ID laws to combat what they claimed was massive voter fraud. Over the past few months, reports of voter suppression and registration fraud have built up to the point that, like Iraq, this country’s election will be monitored by an international group to stop fraud and intimidation. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is a United Nations affiliate that will deploy 44 observers around the country on Election Day and an additional 80 to 90 members of parliament from nearly 30 countries to monitor American elections. The OSCE election monitors are from its human rights office that focuses on democratization, and they will be looking for voter suppression activities by conservative groups.
Americans should be embarrassed the country best known for promoting democracy around the world requires human rights monitors to ensure free and fair elections at home. The founder and leader of True the Vote, a conservative group seeking to crack down on election fraud was outraged and said, “activist groups sought assistance not from American sources, but from the United Nations,” but after months of reporting fraud, and repugican leaders refusing to follow court orders, there was little choice but to appeal to an outside source. The Justice Department cannot possibly keep up with the overwhelming number of cases committed exclusively by repugican groups who claimed voter fraud had reached epidemic proportions, but as usual, it is repugicans committing fraud.
OSCE is monitoring the elections after reports of “coordinated political effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans — particularly traditionally disenfranchised groups like minorities” that makes it a civil rights as well as an election issue. It has been widely reported (in liberal blogs) that the RNC hired a known repugican strategist with a reputation of voter registration fraud and attempts to suppress Democratic voter turnout for $3.1 million. Reports of destroying voter registration forms in Virginia last week drew minor attention from local media, and on Friday in Ohio, a repugican election official blamed a computer glitch for sending out notices to three precincts with improper polling places and news the election was Thursday, November 8 instead of Tuesday, November 6. There are myriad reports of voter suppression and fraud that one expects in young democracies like Iraq, and over the weekend two Iraq combat veterans noticed a parallel between elections in America and Iraq.
The young men served in Iraq leading up to the nation’s first free and fair elections, and it was their only source of pride at having served in Iraq. Although they felt betrayed and deceived at being sent to war over a lie, they said it was worth it to see Iraqis participating in their first fair election. Both men felt betrayed that after fighting to give Iraqis the right to participate in a fair election, their party was guilty of suppressing the vote and wondered if they should be deployed to protect Americans’ right to vote. They had heard a World War II veteran was purged from voter rolls in Florida, and opined that the President should send a squad of Rangers to guarantee the veteran was allowed to vote.
Americans should be outraged at repugican attempts to suppress votes, but the media has been negligent by not reporting the rampant voter suppression. In a large newspaper in Central California, there has not been one article or story reporting voter registration fraud or suppression efforts throughout the campaign. The paper said it was not “that big of a deal” and that it would cast unfair aspersion on repugicans so close to the election, so they would not report on it. Recently, it was brought to their attention the repugican chair of the Committee on Legislative Ethics committed voter fraud and faces removal from the ballot, but they demurred again because “it was a Southern California senator and not that big of a deal.”
Therein is the problem, and why repugicans continue flaunting the law, suppressing votes, and committing fraud; because “it’s not that big of a deal.” However, it is a big deal to the American people who lose their right to vote, and it is a big deal to an international human rights organization or they would not send monitors to stop “a coordinated political effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans — particularly traditionally disenfranchised groups like minorities.”
It is a sad commentary when America needs an international organization to monitor a general election, but it is crucial to save our democracy from repugican malfeasance.  The founders believed only wealthy land owners deserved the right to vote, and after valiant struggles and Constitutional amendments, instead of celebrating every American’s right to vote, repugicans are suppressing voting rights. Hopefully with international monitors in place, every American who wants to vote will get the opportunity, but at the rate the repugican cabal has suppressed the vote, it does not look very likely. It is a shame that the country that sent its soldiers to protect Iraqis right to vote cannot deliver that assurance to its own people; maybe the United Nations will do the job and save America’s democracy.

This is fraud....election fraud

And it is done on purpose.

 It is un-American. people need to go to jail for this crap.

2,300 voters in the northern Ohio county of Ottawa received the notice informing them the election was November 8 and that their precinct was relocated to a different building. the deputy director called it a “costly mistake,” and said they were reissuing the mailer with the correct information. President Obama won Ottawa county in 2008 with 52 percent of the vote.

More

Did you know ...

The 9 most racist moments of the 2012 election

That you don't have to worry about the huge fines Wall Street banks have to pay: the banks can write them off

That's no primate, that's a fish

That the FBI had a file on Hunter S. Thompson

And rest in peace Native American activist turned actor Russell Means

Ann Coulter's backward use of the 'r-word'

Wingnut talking head Ann Coulter lit up the Twitterverse after last night's presidential foreign policy debate with the comment that she approved of "Romney's decision to be kind and gentle to the retard," in an apparent response to critiques of Mitt Romney's performance.

  More

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What can one say when a retard gets it backward? The shrill shrew has never been correct about anything and neither is she (it?) now.