When I Came Home (Quick Time required)
Note: When I Came Home is a documentary which follows the lives and struggles of several homeless veterans, including those who have recently returned home from the war in Iraq. The film examines the factors which led over 150,000 Vietnam veterans from the battlefield to the street and asks the question: Will what happened to Vietnam veterans happen to a new generation of soldiers?
When I Came Home is a work-in-progress.
photoshop phriday 
The kids over at Something Awful have some fun with Historical Inaccuracies. Yes, it's Photoshop Phriday.
Today’s NIV Bible Barred from LifeWay Christian Bookstores
The Rolling Stone Magazine reversed its decision not to air an advertisement for the Today’s New International Version (TNIV) of the Bible earlier this week, but the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)-affiliated Lifeway Christian Resources has not yet changed its decision to keep the edition out of its 122 bookstores because of the version’s gender-neutral translations.
Mad Rollin' Dolls
The Mad Rollin' Dolls flat track derby will begin its real season of roller derby madness on Sunday, January 30th at Fast Forward Skate Center in Madison, WI.
The Unholy Rollers will skate against the Psycho Kitties in the first bout. Then it's the Quad Squad vs. the Reservoir Dolls.
Sunday, January 30th. Doors open at 6:30, bout starts at 7:00. DJ Fearless will provide the tunes. Half-time entertainment provided by Awesome Car Funmaker.
Tickets are $8 in advance, $10 at the door.
Please check out the Mad Rollin' Dolls web site for more info.
support your local rollergirl
tags: roller derby, rollergirls, madison
The Minnesota RollerGirls debuted their four teams at an expo bout on January 16th.
Tony Nelson has a large photo album of the event.
Steven R. Wolf also has a large photo album.
The Minnesota RollerGirls will skate their first bout on Sunday, February 27th.
support your local rollergirl
tags: rollergirls, roller derby, minnesota
'Everybody-else-was-doing-it' defense is shot down again.
Lawyers representing Texans for a Republican Majority lost another attempt Monday to show that their clients, accused of breaking Texas election laws, were just doing what Democrats have always done.
After a morning hearing, state District Judge Joe Hart dismissed the Republican organization's request that the Texas Democratic Party, the Democratic National Committee and the Texas Partnership, a political action committee once headed by Democratic Speaker Pete Laney, provide documents about transfers of money within the party.
Texans for a Republican Majority and its treasurer, former state Rep. Bill Ceverha of Dallas, are accused in a civil lawsuit of collecting and spending hundreds of thousands of corporate dollars during the 2002 legislative elections.
Some of the 25th Annual Razzie Awards Nominees:
President George W. Bush as himself in Farenheit 9/11, for which performance he is also nominating as Worst Screen Couple paired with either Condoleeza Rice and/or His Pet Goat.
For their appearances in Farenheit, both Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld got Supporting nominations.
Britney Spears was also nominated in the worst supporting actress category for Farenheit 9/11
The flat track Kansas City Roller Warriors skated their first exhibition bout this past Saturday.
The Bionics and The Dogfightin' Dames skated to a sold out crowd of over 800 people at the Winnwood Skate Center.
Score Bunny writes about the expo bout (with photos).
Also check out Tony's KC photo essay.
support your local rollergirl
tags:
rollergirls
roller derby
kansas city
Police in Germany are hunting pranksters who have been sticking miniature US flags into piles of dog poo in public parks.
Josef Oettl, parks administrator for Bayreuth, said: "This has been going on for about a year now, and there must be 2,000 to 3,000 piles of excrement that have been claimed during that time."
The series of incidents was originally thought to be some sort of protest against the US-led invasion of Iraq.
And then when it continued it was thought to be a protest against President George W. Bush's campaign for re-election.
Rumsfeld has discarded the Constitution "hide-bound way of thinking" and "risk-averse mentalities" of previous Pentagon officials...
WaPo
The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA's historic bailiwick, has created a new espionage arm and is reinterpreting U.S. law to give Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine operations abroad, according to interviews with participants and documents obtained by The Washington Post.
The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support Branch, arose from Rumsfeld's written order to end his "near total dependence on CIA" for what is known as human intelligence. Designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary's direct control, the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special operations forces.
The defense secretary has a large responsibility to collect foreign intelligence, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin said. (Spec. Shawn Morris -- Fort Dix Public Affairs Office)
Military and civilian participants said in interviews that the new unit has been operating in secret for two years -- in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places they declined to name. According to an early planning memorandum to Rumsfeld from Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the focus of the intelligence initiative is on "emerging target countries such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, Philippines and Georgia." Myers and his staff declined to be interviewed.
The Strategic Support Branch was created to provide Rumsfeld with independent tools for the "full spectrum of humint operations," according to an internal account of its origin and mission. Human intelligence operations, a term used in counterpoint to technical means such as satellite photography, range from interrogation of prisoners and scouting of targets in wartime to the peacetime recruitment of foreign spies. A recent Pentagon memo states that recruited agents may include "notorious figures" whose links to the U.S. government would be embarrassing if disclosed.
[snip]
The Pentagon has a vast bureaucracy devoted to gathering and analyzing intelligence, often in concert with the CIA, and news reports over more than a year have described Rumsfeld's drive for more and better human intelligence. But the creation of the espionage branch, the scope of its clandestine operations and the breadth of Rumsfeld's asserted legal authority have not been detailed publicly before. Two longtime members of the House Intelligence Committee, a Democrat and a Republican, said they knew no details before being interviewed for this article.
[snip]
Under Title 10, for example, the Defense Department must report to Congress all "deployment orders," or formal instructions from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to position U.S. forces for combat. But guidelines issued this month by Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone state that special operations forces may "conduct clandestine HUMINT operations . . . before publication" of a deployment order, rendering notification unnecessary. Pentagon lawyers also define the "war on terror" as ongoing, indefinite and global in scope. That analysis effectively discards the limitation of the defense secretary's war powers to times and places of imminent combat.
Under Title 50, all departments of the executive branch are obliged to keep Congress "fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities." The law exempts "traditional . . . military activities" and their "routine support." Advisers said Rumsfeld, after requesting a fresh legal review by the Pentagon's general counsel, interprets "traditional" and "routine" more expansively than his predecessors.
"Operations the CIA runs have one set of restrictions and oversight, and the military has another," said a Republican member of Congress with a substantial role in national security oversight, declining to speak publicly against political allies. "It sounds like there's an angle here of, 'Let's get around having any oversight by having the military do something that normally the [CIA] does, and not tell anybody.' That immediately raises all kinds of red flags for me. Why aren't they telling us?"
