McPain volunteer made up robbery story

A McCain campaign volunteer made up a story of being robbed, pinned to the ground and having the letter "B" scratched on her face in what she had said was a politically inspired attack, police said Friday.

Ashley Todd, 20-year-old college student from College Station, Texas, admitted Friday that the story was false, said Maurita Bryant, the assistant chief of the police department's investigations division. Todd was charged with making a false report to police, and Bryant said police doubted her story from the start.

Dressed in an orange hooded sweat shirt, Todd left police headquarters in handcuffs late Friday and did not respond to questions from reporters. The mark on her face was faded and her left eye was slightly blackened when she arrived in district court.

Todd was awaiting arraignment Friday on the misdemeanor false-report charge, which is punishable by up to two years in prison. She will be housed in a mental health unit at the county jail for her safety and because of "her not insignificant mental health issues," prosecutor Mark Tranquilli said.

Todd initially told investigators she was attempting to use a bank branch ATM on Wednesday night when a 6-foot-4 black man approached her from behind, put a knife blade to her throat and demanded money. She told police she handed the assailant $60 and walked away.

Todd, who is white, told investigators she suspected the man then noticed a John McCain sticker on her car. She said the man punched her in the back of the head, knocked her to the ground and scratched a backward letter "B" into her face with a dull knife.

Police said Todd claimed the man told her that he was going to "teach her a lesson" for supporting the Republican presidential candidate, and that she was going to become a supporter of Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

Todd told police she didn't seek medical attention, but instead went to a friend's apartment nearby and called police about 45 minutes later.

Todd could provide no explanation for why she invented the story, police said. The woman told investigators she believes she cut the "B" onto her own cheek, but did not provide an explanation of how or why and said she doesn't remember doing so, police said.

Police said the woman reported suffering from "mental problems" in the past, and that they do not believe anyone put her up to the act.

Tranquilli said Todd will remain jailed over the weekend pending a psychiatric evaluation, which won't happen until Monday at the earliest.

Bryant said somebody charged with making a false report would typically be cited and sent a summons. But because police have concerns about Todd's mental health, they are consulting with the Allegheny County District Attorney.

Todd worked in New York for the College Republican National Committee before moving two weeks ago to Pennsylvania, where her duties included recruiting college students, the committee's executive director, Ethan Eilon, has said.

"We are as upset as anyone to learn of her deceit, Ashley must take full responsibility for her actions," College Republican National Committee spokeswoman Ashley Barbera said in a statement.

Police reported Todd's claims Thursday, as a photo of her injuries made it onto numerous blogs and news sites. By Friday, police said they had found inconsistencies in Todd's story. They gave her a lie-detector test, but wouldn't release the polygraph results.

Police interviewed Todd after she contacted police Wednesday night and again on Thursday, Bryant said. They asked her to come back Friday, ostensibly to help police put together a sketch of the man. Instead, detectives began interviewing her.

"They just started talking to her and she just opened up and said she wanted to tell the truth," Bryant said.

Police suspected all along that Todd might not be telling the truth, starting with the fact that the "B" was backward, Bryant said.

"We have robbers here in Pittsburgh, but they don't generally mutilate someone's face like that," Bryant said. "They just take the money and run."

*****

Why am I not surprised.

Former Bush Aide Backs Obama

Former Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said he will vote for Sen. Barack Obama in the presidential election.

Said McClellan: "From the very beginning I have said I am going to support the candidate that has the best chance for changing the way Washington works and getting things done and I will be voting for Barack Obama and clapping ...

Political Wire

Man charged with threatening Ohio elections chief

An Ohio man has been charged with making a death threat against the state's top elections official.

The State Highway Patrol says Dana McArtor was charged Friday with intimidation in a telephoned threat to the office of Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner.

Brunner spokesman Jeff Ortega says the call last Friday threatened to kill the secretary of state.

Her office says it has been inundated with threats during a busy season of voter lawsuits and alleged registration irregularities.

The 51-year-old Columbus man remains jailed. He is to be arraigned Saturday.

*****

More evidence of the affect and effect of the hate-mongering that the repugicans have been spewing and continue to spew.

The Stink in Farts Controls Blood Pressure

Who knew?!

A smelly rotten-egg gas in farts controls blood pressure in mice, a new study finds.

The unpleasant aroma of the gas, called hydrogen sulfide (H2S), can be a little too familiar, as it is expelled by bacteria living in the human colon and eventually makes its way, well, out.

The new research found that cells lining mice’s blood vessels naturally make the gas and this action can help keep the rodents’ blood pressure low by relaxing the blood vessels to prevent hypertension (high blood pressure). This gas is “no doubt” produced in cells lining human blood vessels too, the researchers said.

Read more from The Stink in Farts Controls Blood Pressure

Oui, on peut

Now, there's a party for ya. Them folks in Louisiana know how to have a good time.

For the rest of us:

是，我們能。
Ja, vi kanne.
ναι, εμείs μπορώ.
Igen, mi tud.
Já, við geta.
・, 朕 宜しい.
Sí, nosotros lata.
oo, tayo maaari.
Tak, my puszka metalowa.
Da, noi a putea.
그렇습니다, 우리는 할 수 있다.
Да, мы мочь.
Jest, nama moći.
o, mi moči.
はい、私達はできる。
Ja, vi kanna.
Do, allwn.
evet, biz -ebilmek.
Etiam, nos can.
是，我们能。

Si, se peude.
Ja, wir könnt.
SØ, noi inscatolare.
Sim, pode.
Sim, nós podemos.
Да, ние мога.
Da, mi može.
Ano, my pocínovat.
Ja, vi kunne.
Jawoord, wij annuleerteken.
Jaa-ääni, me kanisteri.
Oui, nous can.
Sí, cancelamos.

No matter how you say it ... Yes, we can!

Piglet Squid is a Cutie

Scientists at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium found a cute deep-water squid that looks like a fat little cartoon piggie:

Piglet Squid, Helicocranchia pfefferi: This funny looking squid is about the size of a small avocado and can be found most commonly in the deepwater (greater than 100 m or 320 ft) of virtually all oceans. Its habit of filling up with water and the funny location of its siphone with a wild-looking 'tuft' of eight arms and two tentacles had prompted scientists to name it the piglet squid.

Piglet Squid

Reagan Appointee and (Recent) McCain Adviser Charles Fried Supports Obama

Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School, has long been one of the most important conservative thinkers in the United States. Under President Reagan, he served, with great distinction, as Solicitor General of the United States. Since then, he has been prominently associated with several Republican leaders and candidates, most recently John McCain, for whom he expressed his enthusiastic support in January.

This week, Fried announced that he has voted for Obama-Biden by absentee ballot. In his letter to Trevor Potter, the General Counsel to the McCain-Palin campaign, he asked that his name be removed from the several campaign-related committees on which he serves. In that letter, he said that chief among the reasons for his decision "is the choice of Sarah Palin at a time of deep national crisis."

Fried is exceptionally thoughtful and principled; his vote for Obama is especially noteworthy.

Read the rest here.

Creationists declare war over the brain

From the "Give me a break!" Department:

The New Scientist has the 411 on the latest salvo in the war on Darwin: a resurrection of Cartesian dualism, with the idea that the brain is a physical object, but the mind that inhabits it is made from some kind of ghostly jesusite-235 that conclusively proves the existence of the Invisible Sky Daddy in a white robe and beard:

Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing "non-material neuroscience" movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism - the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial - in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. The two have signed the "Scientific dissent from Darwinism" petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution.

In August, the Discovery Institute ran its 2008 Insider's Briefing on Intelligent Design, at which Schwartz and Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon at Stony Brook University in New York, were invited to speak. When two of the five main speakers at an ID meeting are neuroscientists, something is up. Could the next battleground in the ID movement's war on science be the brain?

Well, the movement certainly seems to hope that the study of consciousness will turn out to be "Darwinism's grave", as Denyse O'Leary, co-author with Beauregard of The Spiritual Brain, put it. According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one.

Creationists declare war over the brain

The real tragedy here is that these idiots are still allowed to breed. These types are ever proving Albert Einstein correct when he observed ... "There only two things that are infinite: The universe and human stupidity and I am not sure about the former."

Current electoral vote projections

Current electoral vote projections: Obama 375 - McCain 157

The only way McCain can win is through theft.

Obama's Lead Keeps Growing

You Gotta See This ...

What will those Chimps think of next?!

Greek dig unearths Neolithic household gear

A 6,000 year-old set of household gear, including crockery and two wood-fired ovens, has been found in the buried ruins of a prehistoric farmhouse in northern Greece, officials said Thursday.

A Culture Ministry statement said the discovery "provides invaluable, unique information" on late Neolithic domestic architecture and household organization.
"This is a very rare case where the remains have stayed undisturbed by farming or other external intervention for about 6,000 years," the ministry statement said. "The household goods are in excellent condition."

The rectangular building, which covers some 624 square feet, was discovered during work to lay water pipes earlier this year at the village of Sosandra near Aridaia, some 360 miles north of Athens.

Archaeologists who excavated the site between March and July found a large number of clay vessels for cooking and eating, stone tools, mills for grinding cereals and two ovens.

The house was separated into three rooms.
It had walls made of branches and reeds covered with clay, supported by strong wooden posts.
The building was destroyed by fire, which baked the clay, preserving impressions of the wooden building elements, as well as the post holes.

Archaeologists believe the inhabitants managed to escape the fire, taking with them their valued stone blades and axes.
"They left behind the large stone tools which would have been difficult to move away," the ministry statement said.

Daily Funny

A Carolina farmer is overseeing his herd in remote mountain valley when suddenly a brand-new Dodge advances out of a fog bank towards him. The driver, a young man in a designer suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the farmer, 'If I tell you exactly how big your herd is, will you give me one of your calves?'

The farmer looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, 'Sure, why not?'

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The yuppie then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg , Germany .

Within seconds he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel Spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the farmer and says, 'You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.'

'That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,' says the farmer.

He watches as the yuppie selects one of the animals and looks on, amused, as the yuppie stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the farmer says to the young man, 'Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?'

The yuppie thinks about it for a second, smirks and then says, 'Okay, why not?'

'You work for the Federal Government', says the farmer.

'Wow! That's correct,' says the yuppie, 'but how did you guess that?'

'No guessing required,' answered the farmer. 'You showed up here even though nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used all kinds of expensive equipment that clearly somebody else paid for. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are even though you don't know a thing about cows - this is a herd of sheep. Now give me back my dog.

Something to do ...

Canned Heat from1968

Hippie Gold!

Bumpersticker Philosophy

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by!

Transylvania - 6 -5000

Bugs at his best.

Carolina Naturally is read in ...

Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Raleigh and Shelby, North Carolina

As well as

Prattsburgh, New York; Big Bear Lake, California;
Scottsdale, Arizona; Thibodaux, Louisiana; Highwood, Illinois;
Mountain Home, Arkansas; Mora, Minnesota;
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma;
Hays, Kansas; Providence, Rhode Island

Matt Damon 'honored' by Joe the Plumber's shout-out

Matt Damon is honored that the most recent celebrity of the presidential campaign - "Joe the Plumber" - dropped his name in an interview.

"That was a surprise. I hadn't heard that Joe the Plumber dropped my name," Damon said.
"I'm honored to be in the little passion play, to be an extra."

The plumber, whose real name is Samuel Wurzelbacher, became an overnight media sensation after he was referred to constantly in the final presidential debate.
When the press arrived at his Ohio home, Wurzelbacher, a Republican, said he hoped he wouldn't make a fool of himself with all the attention, "I don't have a lot of pull. It's not like I'm Matt Damon."

Damon - a hardcore Democrat who has spent as much time campaigning for Barack Obama recently than he has acting - was in San Francisco promoting a charity, OneXOne.

Along with hip-hop artist Wyclef Jean, Damon was promoting the group's work to end hunger and suffering for children in poverty in the U.S. and Africa.

The actor said he's headed to Florida this weekend to work with the Obama campaign on getting out the vote in a key battleground state.

After that, Damon is off to Morocco to finish shooting a movie, but he said he would stay engaged with the Obama campaign."I'm sure I'll be on the phone over there after filming every night," he said.
"I'll do telephone interviews or whatever they'll have me do. I want to sprint to the finish with the millions of us who really have been desperate for this change."

Damon previously had been openly critical of John McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, calling the campaign's pick for the vice presidency "a disaster."
On Thursday, Damon said he would not comment on the Republican ticket.
"The Obama campaign has decided to focus on the positive, and I should be a bigger man and be able to do that with them," Damon said.

Woman with 8-foot-long dreads hopes to set record

Asha Mandela has hair that could rival Rapunzel's.

The South Florida woman who started growing her hair 20 years ago now has locks longer than she is tall.

Mandela has submitted her hair, which measure 8-feet, 9-inches long, to the Guinness Book of World Records for the Longest Dreadlocks, the first entry in a new category.

It takes one bottle of shampoo and one bottle of conditioner every time she washes her hair and can sometimes take days to fully dry after she washes it.

Mandela, 46, said she "used to wash it three times a week. Now I do it once a week. It's very tiring. Sometimes I don't have the energy."

Woman gets into tussle with an aggressive deer

A 61-year-old woman got into a tussle with an aggressive deer after it attacked one of her poodles at her home on Monday.

Carol Lince said she let her three dogs outside, then heard one "screaming bloody murder." She went outside her home and saw a doe attacking her smallest dog.

Lince kicked at the deer's hind legs to try to get the animal off her dog, but she said the doe began to ram her with its head, pushing her into a fence.

Lince started walloping the deer's head with her fists until it eventually jumped the fence and ran off.

Lince said she sustained bruises after the deer rammed its head into her abdomen.

The dog was pronounced OK by a veterinarian.