WANTED: OBAMA'S COLLEGE TRANSCRIPTS

President Obama's detractors have tried to smear him as a Kenya-born interloper. Failing that, they've now turned their sights on what they think is another weak front: Obama's college transcripts.

According to The Los Angeles Times:

Last week, a website that already had offered a $10,000 reward for Obama's transcripts from Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law School, increased the bounty to $20,000.

About a year ago, Donald Trump, among the highest-profile "birthers," helped get the mini-movement started. After the president released his long-form birth certificate, Trump abruptly changed subjects: 

"The word is, according to what I’ve read," said Trump, "that he was a terrible student when he went to Occidental. He then gets into Columbia; he then gets to Harvard. ... How do you get into Harvard if you’re not a good student? Now maybe that's right or maybe it’s wrong, but I don't know why he doesn’t release his records."

Of course, he was editor of the Harvard Law Review. Not bad for a guy who allegedly faked his way through school.

GHOSTS FROM BACK THERE

Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah wants everyone to donate $7 to stop Sen. Barack Obama from becoming president. Being the unimaginative sort, Hatch begs for bucks in a fundraising letter that epitomizes the problem with today's GOP -- it can't stop living in the past.

Writes Hatch:

You'd think it was the 1970s all over again.

Barack Obama is resurrecting Jimmy Carter's failed tax, energy and economic plans.

Iran is saber-rattling against the West.

And, Hanoi Jane Fonda is stumping for liberal Senate candidates.

That's right, tonight Jane Fonda and all of her far-left Hollywood liberal friends are expected to raise $1 million for Democrat Senate candidates with one goal in mind -- to break our Senate firewall and seize total control of our government!

"Everything now is 'Obama, Obama, Obama,' but we're also concerned about the Senate, which is critically important no matter who wins the White House. We need to give the Democrats a majority totaling at least 60 senators."

These Hollywood liberals understand the stakes. A 60-seat filibuster-proof super majority means conservatives would be powerless to stop the liberal agenda in the Senate.

Hollywood may not be on our side, but we have you.

Reds under Hollywood's beds, all that. Dusty bluster. No new ideas.

FEAR AND LESBIAN LOATHING

The strokers at Fox News are consistent, give them that. They toe the conservative line and decry the baser parts of the world while filling your phiz with lurid images and stories about sex.

This week's big Fox News push: Why is America tolerating a song about lesbians?

We suspect they're hyping about "I Kissed A Girl" by Katy Perry, a slip of a song with an insanely catchy chorus:

I kissed a girl and I liked it
The taste of her cherry chap stick
I kissed a girl just to try it
I hope my boyfriend don't mind it
It felt so wrong
It felt so right
Don't mean I'm in love tonight

Fox insinuates the song will make straight girls rush off and join the lesbian brigade -- further proof that today's world is debauched beyond belief.

Yep. Thank God the black-and-white days were only filled with songs about straight, missionary-position sex (done in the dark, of course, 'cause with the lights out, it's less dangerous). No one sang about disgusting things like masturbation, right? Just ask Leo Sayer:

Miles and miles of empty space in between us
The telephone can't take the place of your smile.
But you know I won't be travelling for ever.
It's cold out
But hold out
And do like I do.
When I need love
I hold out my hands
And I touch love. I never knew there was so much love
Keeping me warm night and day.

So much love. No one could ever accuse Sayer of being modest. And let's not even get into Devo.

SPEAK IN MANY TONGUES

Sen. Barack Obama said this week that Americans need to make sure their kids know how to speak Spanish. Jingoists reared up and said Obama has it wrong -- Americans need to make sure immigrants know how to speak English.

Pollster Rasmussen has it this way:

A national telephone survey conducted last month by Rasmussen Reports found ... 83% place a higher priority on encouraging immigrants to speak English as their primary language. Just 13% take the opposite view and say it is more important for Americans to learn other languages.

It's not an either/or debate -- it shouldn't be, at least -- but it's startling to see how fury over illegal immigration has created devolution among many formerly high-functioning humans. Their offspring will curse their stubborn bones.

Pissed about immigrants not knowing English? Volunteer in an ESL class. While you're at it, learn Standard Mandarin. It's the skill of the future.

FEAR AND CLOTHING

Michelle Malkin, the blogger, has gotten her way. Dunkin' Donuts is now safe from terrorism, Rachael Ray is a left-wing apologist, and anyone wearing a black-and-white silk scarf is Against Us.

Dunkin' Donuts ran an ad featuring Ray wearing a scarf with a paisley design, "selected by her stylist for the advertising shoot," according to DD (mmm, double-Ds).

Malkin started ranting and said the scarf looked like a keffiyeh: "The keffiyeh, for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad ... the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant and not-so-ignorant fashion designers, celebrities, and left-wing icons."

According to the Boston Globe:

[Dunkin' Donuts] at first pooh-poohed the complaints, claiming the black-and-white wrap was not a keffiyeh. But the right-wing drumbeat on the blogosphere continued and by yesterday, Dunkin’ Donuts decided it’d be easier just to yank the ad.

Said the suits in a statement: "In a recent online ad, Rachael Ray is wearing a black-and-white silk scarf with a paisley design. ... Absolutely no symbolism was intended. However, given the possibility of misperception, we are no longer using the commercial."

Dunkin' Donuts caves, Malkin crows, idiocy reigns. Soon the clock will strike 13.

DIVINE 69

A little soixante-neuf never hurt anyone, height differences notwithstanding. But slap the number 69 on a T-shirt and all hell breaks loose in Billerica, Mass.

A 14-year-old was suspended from middle school for wearing a shirt that said "SOPHOMORE 69." WCVB reports:

Christina Morrison, an eighth-grader at the Marshall Middle School, was sent to the office Tuesday when she arrived at school wearing the shirt. The assistant principal told Morrison and her stepfather that the shirt was "sexually explicit," and that she was being suspended for the day, the Lowell Sun reported.

The teen said she felt like crying because she only wore the shirt she'd recently purchased from a store called Urban Behavior because she liked it.

The school principal, Roland Boucher, said he wouldn't talk about the specific incident, but added that the school's dress code prohibits "any clothing that displays offensive language or images or suggests inappropriate or illegal behavior is not allowed in school."

The teen's mother, Kimberly Cifelli, wants an apology. Cifelli says she doesn't understand why the school says the shirt is sexually explicit. C'mon, Mom.

WIKIPEDIA MONKEY BUSINESS

Someone within the Department of Justice wants to mess with our heads. A typist using an IP address belonging to DoJ made edits to an article about the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, also known as CAMERA.

The scrubbed info: How CAMERA was trying to "cooperate with prominent Wikipedia editors to promote a Zionist viewpoint and oppose pro-Arab viewpoints on Wikipedia."

The Wikimedia Foundation has been all over the story. According to this report from mister-info:

After the IP address belonging to the DOJ was blocked, Wikipedia editors informed the Wikimedia Foundation's Communications committee about the incident. Both Wikinews and Wikipedia are projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. In addition to the DOJ IP address, several Wikipedia users determined to be cooperating with the CAMERA campaign to influence Wikipedia had also previously been blocked by Wikipedia administrators.

Wikinews requested a statement from the Department of Justice on the edits to Wikipedia, but as of this article's publication had not received a response.

The (for now) anonymous DoJer also made edits to articles about Tracy Jordan, Roger Ebert and James E. Akins.

The DoJ address was blocked for "repeated vandalism," but someone else in D.C. is also making the same edits to the CAMERA article. Nice to know CAMERA is a government front, and we always suspected there was something odd about Roger Ebert. But Tracy Jordan? Maybe the Black Crusaders are real.

TWO DAYS, TWO DOOZIES

Reading opinion letters in the local paper can be a dangerous mission. Sometimes the missives are so hilarious that one suspects they were created by spoofbots cranked to the "ridiculous" setting. This would be much better than the reality -- that living, breathing people actually harbor such thoughts.

A Saturday letter from Edith Kaiser, an associate professor of Bible at Global University in Springfield, claims -- without much logic -- that "the Earth is not billions of years old." Kaiser tees off on writer Bill Fuenfhausen for invoking science to stand up for evolution:

You talked about the evidence from various scientific fields. Where and what are they? Did you know that scientists came up with the age of the Earth based on tests done on meteorites? They tested them four ways and came up with four different answers and just arbitrarily took one number! If my students came up with four answers to a question, I would mark it incorrect! Also if the fact that the magnetic force around the Earth is deteriorating is figured in the equation, the mathematical equation is changed and the dating is in thousands and not billions! In fact, modern scientific investigation is challenging all carbon dating methods.

Such blatant dishonesty by an alleged academic would be funny, if Kaiser wasn't filling minds with her nonsense. One can only hope her students wake up, realize their instructor is duping them, and do some outside reading. Maybe then they'll see that Kaiser's exclamation points only prove she'd rather shout than think.

Sunday, Nancy Harmon of Springfield opined that moving to the city was a huge mistake:

My husband and I moved here from South Dakota a little over two years ago. What a mistake! Missouri has higher taxes, higher insurance and higher utilities. South Dakota also has no state income tax or personal property tax. We traded in a car this year also and had to pay 7 percent tax on the difference here in Missouri rather than 3 percent on the difference in South Dakota.

A shame that Harmon and her husband apparently did no research about state-by-state taxation before moving from South Dakota. No shame the Harmons will soon be leaving the Ozarks.

HATING MUSLIMS

Every now and then you run across someone or something that affirms your faith in the lowest common denominator.

Witness the latest example -- this enlightened motorist and his/her collection of bumper stickers. The only thing missing is an I slam, you slam, we all slam for Islam sticker.

YOU CAN NEVER LOOK BACK

The little voice inside your head? Maybe it's not all your imagination, or a Don Henley riff. The Pentagon has spent at least the last decade sussing out ways to put voices inside your noggin.

A report recently released by the Pentagon under a Freedom Of Information Act request shows us the way. PhysOrg reports:

"The phenomenon is tunable in that the characteristic sounds and intensities of those sounds depend on the characteristics of the RF energy as delivered," the report explains. "Because the frequency of the sound heard is dependent on the pulse characteristics of the RF energy, it seems possible that this technology could be developed to the point where words could be transmitted to be heard like the spoken word, except that it could only be heard within a person´s head. In one experiment, communication of the words from one to ten using ´speech modulated´ microwave energy was successfully demonstrated. Microphones next to the person experiencing the voice could not pick up these sounds. Additional development of this would open up a wide range of possibilities."

The report predicts that communicating at longer distances would be possible with larger equipment, while shorter range signals could be generated with portable equipment. Putting voices in people´s heads could cause what the report calls "psychologically devastating" effects.

Here's a link to the report, via Wired. Enjoy. Don't listen.

SPY SATELLITE SHOOTDOWN THURSDAY

So claims a report on CNN's blog:

The U.S. Navy will likely attempt to shoot down a faulty spy satellite on Thursday, the day after the space shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to land, two officials familiar with the planning told CNN Monday.

The officials — who spoke on condition of anonymity because much of the planning remains classified — said the idea is to leave as much time as possible so that a second attempt could be made in the event of a failure.

Does anyone believe the government's cover story that this whole shootdown is because of worries over rocket fuel, and its risk to humans on the ground?

MISCHIEF MAKING?

Who cut the 'net? A storm, a quake, a sub? Al Bawaba reports:

Internet connectivity still remains slow in several Middle East countries due to the cable damage near Egypt, Iran and Dubai. An improvement is not expected soon as operators claim there are many complexities involved in fixing the problem. In addition, all voice calls, corporate data and video traffic were also affected.

The first two cables, off Alexandria in Egypt, were cut on January 23. ...

A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each. These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also near Alexandria.

Something interesting is about to happen in the Middle East.

SUMMER BUMMER

In South Carolina, the Pickens County Library System has shuttered its summer program, after callers claimed the classes promoted "witchcraft."

The School Library Journal reports:

The astrology program was labeled as "witchcraft" by callers, while the Zen garden and yoga programs were objected to as "promoting other religions." The t-shirts workshop? "Promotes the hippie culture and drug use," callers said.

Some complainers said they would "get" the library system. A reporter traced some of the menacing calls and e-mails to members of a Baptist church. Jesus must be proud.

RFID CHIPS AHOY!

Who needs privacy when you can get a tracking tattoo? Computer Weekly has the story:

A US company has launched a chipless RFID (radio-frequency identification) Ink that can be used to track both animals and humans.

Visible or invisible Ink "Tattoos" can be applied to the skin and tracked by RFID readers positioned a few feet away.

The company, Somark, said it had successfully tested its Biocompatible Chipless RFID Ink product.

Most troubling is the fact that some people will think we need this.

MASSIVE DUCK DEATHS IN IDAHO

Thousands of mallard ducks, dead. Authorities don't think it's bird flu -- they're leaning to a bacterial infection -- but according to Reuters, the Department of Homeland Security has been brought in to investigate:

"We think the possibility of avian flu is very remote but we're not ruling anything out at this point in time," said Dave Parish, regional supervisor for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. "We want to make sure all the bases are covered."

Wildlife officials are calling the massive die-off alarming, with the number of dead mallards rising from 1,000 on Tuesday to more than 2,000 by Wednesday afternoon. "We've never seen anything like this -- ever," Parrish said.

A hunter alerted state conservation officials after finding a handful of dead ducks along a creek near Burley, about 150 miles southeast of Boise, on Friday.

By Wednesday, dead and dying birds clogged sections of the stream and littered its banks. Officials have posted signs warning hunters and others not to touch or eat the birds until a cause of death has been identified.

Duck for dinner? Thanks, but no.

MAY 10, 2807 B.C.

An environmental archaeologist thinks that's when something big fell from the sky and created a flood that became legend.

Bruce Masse works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. What he thinks is becoming more important right now, because some scientists believe they've uncovered evidence pointing to a massive cosmic impact in the Indian Ocean. Massive, and recent -- about 4,800 years ago.

This report in The New York Times has a killer lede:

At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high.

On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction — toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface.

The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world's population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land.

Most astronomers doubt that any large comets or asteroids have crashed into the Earth in the last 10,000 years. But the self-described "band of misfits" that make up the two-year-old Holocene Impact Working Group say that astronomers simply have not known how or where to look for evidence of such impacts along the world's shorelines and in the deep ocean.

Scientists in the working group say the evidence for such impacts during the last 10,000 years, known as the Holocene epoch, is strong enough to overturn current estimates of how often the Earth suffers a violent impact on the order of a 10-megaton explosion. Instead of once in 500,000 to one million years, as astronomers now calculate, catastrophic impacts could happen every 1,000 years. ...

Dr. Masse analyzed 175 flood myths from around the world, and tried to relate them to known and accurately dated natural events like solar eclipses and volcanic eruptions. Among other evidence, he said, 14 flood myths specifically mention a full solar eclipse, which could have been the one that occurred in May 2807 B.C.

More recent are two possible craters north of Australia, "the likely source of megastsunami waves responsible for the Holocene aged chevron dunes" found four miles inland, near Carpentaria. Those are estimated to be about 1,200 years old.

BACK FROM THE LIVING DEAD

Where in hell are we, anyway? Last we glanced up it was Thursday and Freddy Fender was still alive but we really thought he'd already died, so news of his passing, while sad, was not unexpected.

We've been past our eyeballs in hockey and politics, not necessarily in that order. Sorry for the slim pickings of the past few days. Soon we will catch up on postings. And sleep. At least the former.

For now we leave you with this: As Halloween approaches and the inner egg-thrower in you yearns to be free of the yoke, keep this image in mind.

WOBBLE ON THIS

The Daily Mail makes Thursday ever so much gloomier with this little ray of sunshine. Doomsayers, rejoice:

Scientists have found that on average mammal species enjoy only 2.5 million years of life before being wiped out because of the Earth's "wobble."

They say when the tilt and orbit reach key points it can spark dramatic global cooling - and the last time this happened was 2.6 million years ago.

This suggests we are overdue a wave of extinction.

However, before you panic, scientists say our planet has changed beyond all recognition in the last 3 million years.

The new research published in the journal Nature (must keep) however sheds new light on just why individual mammal species seem to come and go with mysterious regularity.

The study, conducted by researchers at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, involved looking at 22 million years of data on rodent species to see which ones appeared and died out at key points.

They then studied the pattern of the Earth's wobble, which is caused by two factors, our orbit around the sun and the tilt of the planet.

Both of these can be slightly altered by the gravitational pull of other planets, in the case of the tilt it can adjust by as much as two degrees, and the orbit can vary from a circle to an ellipse.

Lead researcher Dr Jan van Dam said when the tilt reaches a certain point and the orbit is almost a perfect circle it can trigger ice sheet expansion.

This could then lead to colder summers, changes in humidity and significant climate cooling.

He found a clear pattern between the Earth's wobble and mammal species dying out.

There were two distinct cycles of species turnover, one with peaks every 2. 5 million years and the other every million years.

Dr van Dam said the last peak was 2. 6 million years ago.

Van Dam him.

THEY 'LOOK LIKE THEY'RE BOMBERS'

But what does a bomber look like?

The Daily Mail reports on how easily paranoia strikes deep:

The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic.

Passengers told cabin crew they feared for their safety and demanded police action. Some stormed off the Monarch Airlines Airbus A320 minutes before it was due to leave the Costa del Sol at 3am. Others waiting for Flight ZB 613 in the departure lounge refused to board it.

The incident fuels the row over airport security following the arrest of more than 20 people allegedly planning the suicide-bombing of transatlantic jets from the UK to America. It comes amid growing demands for passenger-profiling and selective security checks.

It also raised fears that more travellers will take the law into their own hands - effectively conducting their own 'passenger profiles'. ...

The trouble in Malaga flared last Wednesday as two British citizens in their 20s waited in the departure lounge to board the pre-dawn flight and were heard talking what passengers took to be Arabic. Worries spread after a female passenger said she had heard something that alarmed her.

Passengers noticed that, despite the heat, the pair were wearing leather jackets and thick jumpers and were regularly checking their watches.

Initially, six passengers refused to board the flight. On board the aircraft, word reached one family. To the astonishment of cabin crew, they stood up and walked off, followed quickly by others.

The Monarch pilot - a highly experienced captain - accompanied by armed Civil Guard police and airport security staff, approached the two men and took their passports.

Half an hour later, police returned and escorted the two Asian passengers off the jet.

Soon afterwards, the aircraft was cleared while police did a thorough security sweep. Nothing was found and the plane took off - three hours late and without the two men on board.

Monarch arranged for them to spend the rest of the night in an airport hotel and flew them back to Manchester later on Wednesday.

College lecturer Jo Schofield, her husband Heath and daughters Emily, 15, and Isabel, 12, were caught up in the passenger mutiny.

Mrs Schofield, 38, said: "The plane was not yet full and it became apparent that people were refusing to board. In the gate waiting area, people had been talking about these two, who looked really suspicious with their heavy clothing, scruffy, rough, appearance and long hair.

"Some of the older children, who had seen the terror alert on television, were starting to mutter things like, 'Those two look like they're bombers.'

Unlike Don Stewart-Whyte and Brian Young, two of the 24 men arrested for the alleged UK terror plot. Looks indeed deceive.

BOOBY TRAP

Yes, this is a real item, courtesy of the blog at ABC News:

U.S. authorities are advising women not to wear gel bras on airplanes as information developed in the foiled London plot points to an expanding role for women in smuggling explosives on to an aircraft.

Authorities at Scotland Yard are questioning a husband and wife, suspects in the London terror plot, about allegations that they were planning to use their baby's bottle to hide a liquid bomb.

Police in the U.K. have recovered baby bottles containing peroxide, including some with false bottoms, from a recycling center close to the homes of some of the arrested suspects.

They should also watch out for men packing zucchini.