What in the world has become of this nation that meetings of Quakers are monitored by the U.S. military as a “threat”?
Isn’t this abuse of government power the kind of thing that so-called conservatives cared about once upon a time? I guess these days they’re too busy Christmas policing the retail stores to notice.

Heh. In defense of the Chicago Daily Tribune, it only had a few hours to fix its boo boo, not a few weeks.

A behind-the-scenes glimpse at our leader:

Take Social Security, for example. One House Republican, who asked not to be identified for fear of offending the White House, recalls a summertime meeting with congressmen in the Roosevelt Room at which Bush enthusiastically talked up his Social Security reform plan. But the plan was already dead–as everyone except the president had acknowledged. Bush seemed to have no idea. “I got the sense that his staff was not telling him the bad news,” says the lawmaker. “This was not a case of him thinking positive. He just didn’t have any idea of the political realities there. It was like he wasn’t briefed at all.”

That’s what we gets from this:

Bush generally prefers short conversations–long on conclusion, short on reasoning. He likes popular history and presidential biography (Theodore Roosevelt, George Washington), but by all accounts, he is not intellectually curious. Occasional outsiders brought into the Bush Bubble have observed that faith, not evidence, is the basis for decision making.

No need to worry about facts when you know you’re right.

Oh brother. Really, what’s the point of a “rocket-powered’ bicycle? If you’re going to incorporate artificial power, at least a motorcycle is pretty stable at high speeds. I don’t think most bicycle or bicycle tire manufacturers put a lot of research into how their products will hold up at 100+ mph.
As for the speed record, at least this resembles the act of you know, actually pedaling a bicycle.

I didn’t make it past the lede on this AP story before my head started spinning:

After a century of nearly uninterrupted medical improvements and longer lives, it looks like the baby boomers could screw things up. A new government study shows deaths from heart disease, cancer and stroke continue to drop, but it also shows that half of Americans ages 55 to 64 _ including the oldest of the baby boomers _ have high blood pressure, and two in five are obese.
This means that this large group of aging Americans is in worse shape in some respects than those born a decade earlier were when they were the same age.

I summoned the courage to read further, but it didn’t get any better. That’s a real piece of work; one a Comp 101 teacher could use as a case study in how not to write.