. . . to a dial tone:

The internal [Republican party] conflict, fueled largely by recent passage of the $78 billion Iraq reconstruction effort and the $400 billion prescription-drug benefit for senior citizens that squeaked through the House on Nov. 22, came to a head last week when President Bush abruptly terminated a phone conversation with a Florida Republican who refused his plea to vote for the landmark bill.
Well-placed sources said Bush hung up on freshman Rep. Tom Feeney after Feeney said he couldn�t support the Medicare bill. The House passed it by only two votes after Hastert kept the roll-call vote open for an unprecedented stretch of nearly three hours in the middle of the night.
Feeney, a former Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives whom many see as a rising star in the party, reportedly told Bush: “I came here to cut entitlements, not grow them.”
Sources said Bush shot back, “Me too, pal,” and hung up the phone.

Often it’s difficult to understand a controversy until both sides of the story have been flushed out, but this sounds disturbing:

A seventh-grade social studies teacher in Presque Isle who said he was barred from teaching about non-Christian civilizations has sued his school district, claiming it violated his First Amendment right of free expression.
Gary Cole of Washburn, a teacher at Skyway Middle School, sued School Administrative District 1 in U.S. District Court in Bangor.
Cole alleged that complaints by “a small group of fundamentalist Christian individuals” led to the creation of a curriculum “which never mentions religions other than Christianity and never teaches the history of civilizations other than Christian civilizations.”
. . .
“How can you explain the evolution of democracy in the Western world without talking about ancient Greece? He can’t talk about all the influences of the Indian, Japanese or Chinese cultures.”
Superintendent Gehrig Johnson said on Tuesday that he had not seen the lawsuit, but he noted that the curriculum has been “developed by teachers across the district and adopted by the SAD 1 School Committee.”
“Teachers are expected to follow the curriculum,” he added.
Cole’s lawsuit alleges that the curriculum infringes on “his students’ First Amendment rights to the free flow of information within the classroom” and that it “constitutes an illegal establishment of religion in violation of the First Amendment.”
. . .
Greif [Cole’s attorney] said Cole wasn’t trying to teach anything unusual or anything that wasn’t being taught in most seventh grades across the state. His lawsuit seeks injunctive relief to allow him to teach “the history of the entire Eastern Hemisphere, as appropriate.”
Patrick Phillips, deputy commissioner of the Maine Department of Education, declined to comment on the specifics of the case but said school boards set the curriculum for each district and Maine’s Learning Results “allow districts some degree of flexibility.”

If the restrictions are as Cole alleges, this is ridiculous. It’s as important now as ever for students to have a sense of Eastern and Middle-Eastern history and culture.
Via The Right Christians.

Not only was Bush photographed with a decorative bird during his Thanksgiving photo op, but it was also a Halliburton turkey:

Holiday Turns Iraq into Test Kitchen
Here�s something for culinary conspiracy buffs to feast on: President Bush�s surprise Thanksgiving dinner in Baghdad was provided by Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), a division of Halliburton, the Houston oil conglomerate once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.
Aside from doing infrastructure repairs in Iraq, KBR is also contracted to feed U.S. Army troops there, and on Thanksgiving that included the commander in chief.
Visitors to Iraq who have sampled KBR�s menu at the Baghdad airport base, where the president dined, give it a modified thumbs up.
�It was good,� said Larry Korb of the Center for American Progress, who ate at the airport a month ago. �I broke my plastic knife on the meat once, but the food was good.�
So good apparently that it�s been reported Air Force personnel in Iraq are sneaking into Army mess tents to dine on KBR meals. The Air Force does its own catering.
Somewhat overshadowed by Bush�s Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad was the arrival the next day of Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.). News photos of the two separate visits couldn�t have provided a better contrast in gastro-political styles.
There was Bush dressed in an Army jacket serving GIs turkey with all the trimmings. Clinton showed up in a power pantsuit and toured U.S. military facilities carrying a styrofoam cup of coffee.

Bizarre, twisted, insert your own description:

In one of the most extraordinary trials in German criminal history, the self-confessed cannibal [Armin Meiwes] admitted that he had met a 43-year-old Berlin engineer, Bernd Brandes, after advertising on the internet, and had chopped him up and eaten him.
. . .
n March 2001 Meiwes advertised on the internet for a “young well-built man, who wanted to be eaten”. Brandes replied.
On the evening of March 9, the two men went up to the bedroom in Meiwes’ rambling timbered farmhouse. Mr Brandes swallowed 20 sleeping tablets and half a bottle of schnapps before Meiwes cut off Brandes’ penis, with his agreement, and fried it for both of them to eat.
Brandes – by this stage bleeding heavily – then took a bath, while Meiwes read a Star Trek novel.
In the early hours of the morning, he finished off his victim by stabbing him in the neck with a large kitchen knife, kissing him first.
The cannibal then chopped Mr Brandes into pieces and put several bits of him in his freezer, next to a takeaway pizza, and buried the skull in his garden.
Over the next few weeks, he defrosted and cooked parts of Mr Brandes in olive oil and garlic, eventually consuming 20kg of human flesh before police finally turned up at his door.

Meiwes has two things going for him in the current trial: (1) there’s no law in Germany prohibiting cannibalism, and (2) there’s evidence of consent:

The accused, however, has a unique defence: that his victim actually agreed to be killed and eaten.
Crucial to the case is a gruesome videotape made by Meiwes of the entire evening, during which Brandes apparently makes clear his consent.

That being the case, Chris at Crooked Timber raises an interesting question: Do libertarian principles allow for state prosecution against this type of act?

Atrios links to this charming letter to the editor:

Executions Would Halt Killings
We can stop the murders of American soldiers in Iraq by those who seek revenge or to regain their power. Whenever there is an assassination or another atrocity we should proceed to the closest mosque and execute five of the first Muslims we encounter.
After all this is a “Holy War” and although such a procedure is not fair or just, it might end the horror.
Machiavelli was correct. In war it is more effective to be feared than loved and the end result would be a more equitable solution for both giving us a chance to build a better Iraq for the Iraqis.
– EMORY METZ WRIGHT JR., M.D.

Lovely sentiment by a supposed “M.D.” Or was this more Bush astroturf?
At any rate, I’ve even heard this idiocy on national radio. The other night I caught a few minutes of Michael Savage. His message, as I understood it, is that if any Middle East nation fails to heed our terrorism policies, we should start leveling its cities, World War II-style.
The scary thing is that there are people who actually believe that such mass murder would make the world safer.