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Senators have left town for the Thanksgiving holiday, but the Senate will technically stay in session — a move that keeps President Bush from making appointments while lawmakers are in recess.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, said he would schedule “pro forma” sessions during the two-week break, even though lawmakers will be absent and no business will be conducted.

The sessions are expected to last less than 30 seconds — the clerk will announce who the presiding officer is, and then that senator will gavel the session closed.

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Conservapedia is a Wiki-based encyclopedia coming from a conservative point of view,

Okay, fair enough, now explain this:

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Most viewed pages

1. Main Page‎ [1,904,888]
2. Homosexuality‎ [1,560,613]
3. Homosexuality and Hepatitis‎ [516,990]
4. Homosexuality and Promiscuity‎ [420,536]
5. Homosexuality and Parasites‎ [387,996]
6. Homosexuality and Domestic Violence‎ [359,988]
7. Gay Bowel Syndrome‎ [352,880]
8. Homosexuality and Gonorrhea‎ [331,514]
9. Homosexuality and Mental Health‎ [285,579]
10. Homosexuality and Syphilis‎ [265,272]

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Jeez, right after the main page, they jump right into gay this or gay that. I guess Wes Clark is right, “they want to smoke the hog”.

Atrios said that he found these statistics hilarious, but aren’t they a bit on the disturbing side? I’m a pretty liberal guy. I have gay friends and I never look at them and think of any of these subjects. What the fuck is wired into the conservative brain that makes them think of this shit?

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The Defense Department warned yesterday that as many as 200,000 contractors and civilian employees will begin receiving layoff warnings by Christmas unless Congress acts on President Bush’s $196 billion war request, but senior Democrats said no war funds will be approved until Bush accepts a shift in his Iraq policy.

About time. Let’s replace them with 200,000 teachers and doctors.

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Speaking in front of a press gaggle, Reps. David Obey, D-WI, and Jack Murtha, D-PA, reasserted that there was enough money to fund the war through February, and that if the President wanted the additional $50 billion passed by the House of Representatives, he merely had to tell Republican leadership — which filibustered the measure in the Senate — to change its stance.

“Let me repeat,” said Obey, “the money has already been provided by the House of Representatives. If the president wants that $50 billion released, all he has to do is to call the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, and ask him to stop blocking it. That phone number is (202) 224-2541, in case anybody’s interested.”

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Rudy Giuliani has a firefighter problem. Following up on earlier criticism, a group of 9/11 family members and firefighters met on Monday at Dartmouth College to launch a campaign against the former New York City mayor and current Republican presidential candidate for what they deem to be massive failures before, during and after the attacks of 9/11.

But at least one member of the FDNY continues to offer his support to the former mayor — and may be getting paid for it.

John R. Orlando, who serves with Engine 216 in Brooklyn, New York, has been cited prominently as a Giuliani supporter. Last June, in a New York Times article detailing the mixed reviews Giuliani has among the city’s 11,000-membered firefighting force, Orlando said he regularly saw Giuliani at fires despite suggestions otherwise.

Orlando was also quoted as saying the “bottom line is, I think he’s been more of a friend to firefighters than I’ve seen in the news. I don’t think all the criticism is warranted.”

Did those comments come with a reward? Three months after he praised Giuliani, Orlando found himself on the former mayor’s payroll. On September 28, 2007, the Giuliani campaign paid one John R. Orlando more than $1,580 for what they deemed on a campaign filing as “political strategy consulting.”

After the Hillary campaign planting questions, now this. If Hillary wins the D primary, and Giuliani the R primary, you might as well stay home for the real vote.

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Want an unlocked iPhone? Go to Germany. T-Mobile today said it would sell Apple’s handset without a contract for a whopping €999 ($1481/£720). It also said it will unlock already-purchased iPhones.

The network’s move was prompted by Vodafone’s success in the German court. The cellco claimed T-Mobile’s exclusive iPhone sales deal, tied to an airtime contract, was uncompetitive. It obtain a preliminary injunction banning T-Mobile from tying the iPhone’s SIM to the T-Mobile network.

Or, take a trip to the USA (from Amsterdam that should set you back about 450 euro) and buy one for 275 euro, unlock it yourself, and you’re STILL cheaper.

The only interesting thing is that T-Mobile will hand out unlock codes to people who already bought one in the first few days, and that may result in a KeyGen utility for all other phones…

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Once upon a time, a company named XVIVO put together a beautiful computer animation of molecular activity in the cell — you may have already seen it. I have some quibbles with it — there is no water shown, and the behavior of the molecules is too simplistic, without enough noise (molecular behavior at the scale shown ought to be rich with Brownian phenomena) — but it’s dramatic and spectacular, which was the intent. The whole thing was made to inspire and inform Harvard biology students, so it’s actually owned by Harvard and XVIVO.

Now for the curious and nefarious part of the story. Fellows of the Discovery
Institute love this video. It shows the complexity of the cell, and that there are all kinds of specific functions going on within it, so to them, ignorant as they are of the evolutionary history of any of the molecules involved, it seems to support their contention that cells are full of arcane molecular machines that must have been designed. Never mind that these are proteins and other molecules; never mind that we have identified gene families and patterns of descent within these molecules; never mind that complexity is a hallmark of evolutionary processes and products. This is a movie they can show the rubes and say “Wow! I don’t understand that (always true)! You don’t understand that (usually true)! Therefore, JEEEZUS!” That’s their goal.

So what would a group of good Christians with the aim of renewing American culture do? Simple. Steal the video. They’ve grabbed the video, retitled it, removed the biological explanations for the phenomena, dubbed in a really bad, unprofessional narration on top of it, and stripped off the credits. Now, in their various traveling patent medicine shows, they flaunt this unattributed, modified video ripped off from Harvard Biology, and use it in their generic argument from ignorance for anti-evolutionism.

They are shameless thieves.

When I make french fries, I use potatoes and oil. Here’s what McDonalds uses:

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Potatoes, vegetable oil (partially hydrogenated soybean oil, natural beef flavor (wheat and milk derivatives)*, citric acid (preservative), dextrose, sodium acid pyrophosphate (maintain color), dimethylpolysiloxane (antifoaming agent)), salt. Prepared in vegetable oil ((may contain one of the following: Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, partially hydrogenated corn oil with TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness), dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent). *CONTAINS: WHEAT AND MILK (Natural beef flavor contains hydrolyzed wheat and hydrolyzed milk as starting ingredients.)

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John McCain does a lot of town hall meetings, and he’s usually quite pleased to get questions from law enforcement officers, firefighters, and military personnel. Sunday evening at Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, NH, may have provided an exception.

It would be an understatement to observe that this was not the usual question: “I’ve served here in my state as a law enforcement officer for going on 9 years now, and after nine years working the street, I’ve come to the conclusion that the War on Drugs is a terrible failure… I have seen firsthand that the War on Drugs causes crime, it causes children to have access to drugs easier, and it does nothing to curb the problem of drug abuse. Just like Alcohol Prohibition after the the 18th Amendment passed, the country wised up and we passed the 21st Amendment which curbed the violence problem in this country greatly. What is it going to take for powerful politicians such as yourself to realize that the War on Drugs is a failure and we need to… we need to get smart about drugs, not tough. We need to be smart.”

McCain responded: “Thank you, sir. It’s going to take a lot before I adopt your viewpoint.”

This drew some laughs and scattered applause from the crowd. But it was only the beginning of a three minute answer.

[..]

McCain: I just want to ask one other thing. Do you think methamphetamine ought to be legal?

Jardis: I think what we need to look at is the drug policy.

McCain: Yeah, but you know, it’s one thing to talk about policy. It’s another thing to talk about specifics, and with all due respect, do you think methamphetamine ought to be made legal?

Jardis: I don’t think that if someone gets caught with methamphetamine, we should be putting them in prison, period. We should be helping them. We should help people who are addicted to drugs, not spend $69 billion a year to put people in jail. If you arrest somebody, it does not solve the problem. You just said that there are drug cartels. There would not be drug cartels if we were to regulate drugs. In Switzerland they have public heroin clinics where people can go and get help with clean needles to come off drugs There’s no doubt that drugs are dangerous, but our policy does not do anything to help people who are addicted. If you arrest a 16-year-old for possession of marijuana, and they get a criminal conviction, you can get over an addiction but you can never get over a conviction. They lose their funding to go to college, and no one could ever say that keeping a kid from going to college accomplishes something good. Not at all.

McCain: (interrupts) Thank you very much.

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The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments.

To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses up to $30,000 in some cases.

Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.

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While Congress’ new bill on education funding may not be as bad as some are making it out to be, it still seems quite questionable that Congress appears to be regulating the idea that universities need to do the kind of marketing and educational campaigns that the recording industry cannot. We’ve asked supporters of the bill to explain how it could possibly make sense to mandate such things, and the MPAA’s top lawyer, Fritz Attaway, has given his answer, claiming that it’s because the internet is “used primarily to allow college students to traffic in infringing content,” while being subsidized by gov’t funds. It would be nice if Attaway or someone else at the MPAA could actually back up the claim that the primary use of the internet by students is infringement. While I wouldn’t doubt that it’s a popular use, to say that it’s the primary use is hard to believe — unless you count things like visiting Facebook pages, using Google and sending emails as “infringement.” At the same time, this doesn’t seem to support the reasons for this bill. After all, many kids on college campuses own cars — and I’d imagine that most of those students break the speed limit frequently enough. Yet, we don’t see any bills being proposed in Congress that would prevent financial aid funding unless universities start handing out more speeding tickets and put in place plans to offer public transportation. So why should they do that for copyright infringement?

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Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes in a memoir that he unintentionally misled the public about the leak of a CIA operative’s name because of misinformation given to him by President George W. Bush, political adviser Karl Rove and other top officials.

A three-paragraph excerpt from the book released today by the publisher doesn’t give details of what the president told McClellan. The case eventually led to the indictment and conviction of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.

“I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby,” McClellan, 39, wrote. “There was one problem. It was not true.”

McClellan wrote that he “unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff, and the president himself.”

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Can you tell this photo was taken at 4:52pm, on either May 5^th or August 10^th?
Forensic Genealogy uses historical records and small clues in pictures learn as much as they can about old photographs of unknown provenance. Want to try it yourself? Check out their weekly quiz.

A full analysis of the horse photo is here.

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The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been very, very good for these private contractors. Here’s a list of the top 100 private contractors, as reported by The Center for Public Integrity’s “Windfalls of War II.”

Here’s an alphabetical list of the contractors with company bios, and here’s the list of the Top 100 contractors. (Via The day they tried to kill me)