Archive for
April, 2006
April 7th, 2006
Well, in case you thought that sexual perversion in government officials was isolated to Homeland Security…
A high-ranking Defense Department IT official has been arrested and indicted on child pornography charges.
Charles Lynch, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Internet Protocol version 6 transition program, was arrested March 8 and indicted in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia the next day on one count of possessing child pornography.
According to a statement by the DOD Inspector General’s Office, court
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Tags: Bill Clinton, NASA, Homeland Security, FBI, Defense Department, child predators, Charles Lynch
April 7th, 2006
Is there anyone left in this country who really truly believes that Bush hasn’t already authorized the NSA to spy on Americans using wiretaps on purely domestic calls?
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales left open the possibility yesterday that President Bush could order warrantless wiretaps on telephone calls occurring solely within the United States — a move that would dramatically expand the reach of a controversial National Security Agency surveillance program.
In response to a question from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) during an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, Gonzales suggested that the administration could decide it was legal to listen in
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Tags: Alberto Gonzales, George W. Bush, Senate, warrantless wiretapping, spying on Americans, Adam Schiff, House Judiciary Committee, NSA
April 7th, 2006
So, the good news for Dan Brown and Random House is that the judge in London’s High Court has ruled that Brown did not breach the copyright of Holy Blood and Holy Grail in his blockbuster The Da Vinci Code. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of the original nonfiction work must now pay Random House 85% of their almost £1.3m court costs.
the judge, Mr Justice Peter Smith, said The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail did not have a central theme.
“It was an artificial creation for the purposes of the litigation working back from the Da Vinci Code,”
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Tags: Da Vinci Code, lawsuit, BBC News, Conspiracy Theories, Dan Brown, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, Random House
April 7th, 2006
Oh. My. God.
I am so exhausted. I ache all over. Even my palms hurt. It’s all a good hurt, but still, I hurt.
We worked until 10:30pm last night and yet the kitchen is still not done. I’m beginning to think it’ll never be done. 
The cabinets above are done. They’re beautiful. I got rid of a few things, but not much. She made me whittle down my Corningware, made me pick a few choice pieces of the infamous white and blue set and get rid of the rest. I got
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Tags: personal organizer, Clean Sweep
April 6th, 2006
O.K. I know I’ve whined about this before and it’s probably not going to do any good to mention it again here, but I’ve been annoyed all day and I just want to spit it out and cleanse it from my mind so I can get on with my life.
Seriously, how do people get noticed out there in blogland? I don’t mean, how do I get more blog traffic? I’m not fishing for advice on how to become famous overnight or anything. Heck, I don’t know that I’d want to be a famous blogger anyway.
What I’m talking about is that
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Tags: blogs
April 6th, 2006
Well, last night I met with my Personal Organizer for the first time. We’ll just call her Sunny. She’s just fantastic. Definitely no judgement, full of energy, and lots of fun. She just kind of dived in, which is definitely what I needed.
We started with the kitchen which was horrible. I lost the kitchen about a month ago. I’ve been eating take out that long. One of the discussions of course is appliances and what I actually use.
There was a battle over the crockpots and I put my foot down and managed to
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Tags: personal organizer, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
April 5th, 2006
For those of you who haven’t been reading here that long, I moved to Maine from New Orleans two years ago. I arrived in Maine on a very dismal March 31rst and my first day of work was exactly two years ago today. I walked out of my hotel to discover that it was snowing.
So, it seems fitting that this is what it looks outside my back door tonight.
Tags: Maine
April 5th, 2006
Everyone who’s supposedly anyone in the blogsphere is reporting that there’s a second case of a Department of Homeland Security Sex Scandal today — this is the case of Frank Figueroa senior law enforcement official who used to run DHS’s Operation Predator and who was busted last October after exposing himself to a girl in a food court.
Obviously no one was paying attention to me when I reported earlier that there was a DHS federal agent arrested through Dateline’s child predator special program.
So there’s three.
Kind of lends itself to my theory
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Tags: Homeland Security, child predators, Frank Figueroa, Dateline
April 5th, 2006
So, PW is Catholic. Her first husband wasn’t. They were married by a Justice of the Peace is a Community Center and the Catholic Church was never involved or cared.
She’s divorced now of course.
The new fiance is also Catholic and they’ve kind of decided they might want to get married in a Catholic Church though she’s really not all that religious.
Here’s the catch, as I understand it.
If you are Catholic and you’ve been married before and the marriage wasn’t acknowledged by the Catholic Church, welll, then everything’s fine and dandy, and there’s no worries. Happily ever after.
However, if
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Tags: wedding, Catholics
April 5th, 2006
He is a former Lieutenant Colonel for the United States Air Force who flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam. He has received the Eisenhower Medal, the George F. Kennan Peace Prize, the President’s Medal of Veterans for Peace, the Society of Military Engineers Gold Medal (twice), six Air Medals, and dozens of other awards and honors. His Ph.D. is in Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering from Caltech. He chaired 8 major international conferences, and is one of the country’s foremost experts on National Security. Dr. Robert Bowman was the former head of the Star Wars program under Presidents Ford
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Tags: Conspiracy Theories, 9/11, Dick Cheney, Dr. Robert Bowman, Osama bin Laden
April 5th, 2006
Well, apparently, there’s a whole “nekid” website day out there; who knew? As the Naked Truth blogger, I couldn’t resist joining in when I found out; plus it’s got a geeky cause too!
Today (April 5th) is the first annual CSS Naked Day — in the spirit of promoting Web Standards along with good semantic markup and proper hirarchy structures, today will be a day of nekidness for all webmasters to remove their css style sheets from their website just for the day.
It’s kind of fun wandering about looking at all the sites that have stripped down to their
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Tags: CSS Naked Day, blogs
April 5th, 2006
I really got something out of my therapy group/class on Monday night. It was the first time I really understood that there really are people out there just like me. People who really do think just like me. Actually, I feel kind of bad for them really.
I related mostly to two in particular who had completed their “automatic thoughts” exercises using experiences similar to mine and who had pretty much had similar or exactly the same thought patterns. It’s comforting in some way to know that I’m not the only one who automatically thinks I’m going to be fired just
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Tags: therapy
April 5th, 2006
When I worked for the government, I was worried about using the office copier for personal business lest I get fired.
This guy was using his work computer and work cel phone paid for by taxpayer dollars to seduce a little girl. How gross and wrong and evil is that?
Oh, yeah and did I meantion, that he’s not just some underling like I was, he’s the Spokesperson for Homeland Security.
Do you feel safer now? How do you feel about your kids?
WASHINGTON (CNN) — A deputy press secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was arrested Tuesday at his
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Tags: child predators, pedophiles, Dateline, Homeland Security, Brian Doyle
April 5th, 2006
“Gay and lesbian couples should be able to marry and have access to the same rights, privileges and benefits that straight couples currently enjoy.” Feingold went on to add, “[This] kind of discrimination … has no place in our laws, especially in a progressive state like Wisconsin. The time has come to end this discrimination and the politics of divisiveness that has become part of this issue.”
– Russ Feingold [“Feingold announces support for full gay marriage rights” (The Raw Story)]
Tags: Quote of the Day, Gay Rights, Russ Feingold
April 4th, 2006
O.K. So, I’ve finally stopped dragging my feet about being old fashioned about internet surfing and tried the whole RSS/Atom feed thing through Bloglines. I set up all but one or two of my reads who apparently are even more stubborn than me. 
O.K. I’m addicted. How cool is it to be able to just go down the list and see what’s new every day? Plus, I’ve got Dilbert in the list and my news sites all right there! I’m still adding stuff, but you can view it here if you are actually interested. Feel free
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Tags: blogs, BlogExplosion, Bloglines
April 4th, 2006
Well, the bridesmaid’s dress is ordered and I sent an email off to PW to assure her it is so. Perhaps now she can relax. I did ask her if I need flats or heels. I’m hoping flats as she’s told me that the day’s activities will last 13 hours.
Now I have to find a suitable magic bra to hold everything in place for 13 hours — yeah right! At her last wedding, between dances, I kept having to run to the bathroom to pull up my strapless
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Tags: wedding, Alfred Angelo, strapless bra
April 4th, 2006
As some of you know, my cousin served in Operation Desert Storm, something I am extremely proud of, despite the fact that I am a self-proclaimed pacifist. He committed suicide several years later and though I’ve written that mental illness runs in my family, I do think that he was never quite right after returning from the Middle East. I don’t think he ever got the care he needed after coming home and maybe if he had, he’d still be at family “reunions” annoying the heck out of me.
It is a very brave thing our soldiers do
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Tags: Operation Desert Storm, American soldiers, PTSD, Iraq, Afghanistan, VA, Fox News
April 4th, 2006
I’m alway on alert for stories and reports about how things are going in Afghanistan. We hardly ever hear anything about how things are going over there since the invasion of Iraq started and, yet, supposedly, Afghanistan is really where all of this War on Terror stuff started. At the very least, Afghanistan is where the Taliban and Osama Bin Ladin was after 9-11. And we did a lot of bragging in the early days about how we were bringing them freedom and democracy and how we were going to rebuild the country. Remember all of that?
Now, Afghanistan hardly gets a mention in the news. Even when they had elections, it wasn’t even one of our top stories. Iraq has taken over our lives. Afghanistan is the forgotten bastard child. Kind of a shame really because apparently a lot has been happening while we weren’t looking.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Freedoms, Democracy, Taliban, Kandahar, Pakistan, al-Qaeda
April 4th, 2006
“The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.”
– Don Marquis
Tags: Quote of the Day
April 4th, 2006
“This is enormously frustrating to me,” said Sen. David Vitter, R-La. “I’ve been telling them since last November that they’ve sought way too little money for essential levee work.”[“L.A. Wants More Levee Money — And Quick (NOLA.com)]
Last week the Army Corps of Engineers announced new estimates of an additional $6 billion would be needed to raise and repair the levees to protect the New Orleans area from a major hurricane. According to this article in the Times-Picayune, while the east bank of Orleans Parish has financing for levees that would meet the necessary certification by
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Tags: Hurricane Katrina, David Vitter, New Orleans, Plaquenines, Louisiana, FEMA, Army Corps of Engineers, Times-Picayune, George W. Bush
