Whatever

Poll
6366 votes

Who do you think won the debate?

Joe Biden8%535 votes

Hillary Clinton16%1048 votes

Chris Dodd10%616 votes

John Edwards32%2059 votes

Dennis Kucinich8%537 votes

Barack Obama22%1384 votes

Bill Richardson3%188 votes
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NGRs = Not Gay Republicans
Unsolicited advice from TPM to closeted Republican politicians: if you offer to pay a guy $1000 to have sex with you, don't try to wriggle out of paying the thousand dollars.
More advice: if you get into a payment dispute with the guy you paid to have sex with you, contacting the authorities to get them involved to hassle the guy is a very bad idea.
Also, some metaphors just won't take you to a good place. From the Columbian's new article on Washington state legislator Richard Curtis (R) ...
Spokane Police Detective Tim Madsen wrote in his report that Curtis wanted to keep the whole incident quiet. At one point, Madsen told Curtis that “the toothpaste was already out of the tube.”
“Curtis told me he was just trying to put the cap back on the tube,” Madsen wrote. “I told Curtis that the suspect may victimize other people in the future, and Curtis acknowledged that part of his job was to protect people in the state of Washington. … Curtis said he wished he would have just paid the additional money to the suspect because he didn’t wish the case to be prosecuted. If the incident became public, it could cost him his marriage and career.”
Yes, paying the additional money may have been wise.
For more about the incident, see more here
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New Hampshire SEIU Endorses EdwardsThe New Hampshire chapter of the Service Employees International Union have endorsed the presidential campaign of John Edwards, First Read reports."The endorsement will help Edwards considerably, providing him with financial resources and volunteers in the Granite state. It will also prevent other state chapters from sending volunteers to New Hampshire to campaign for either Obama or Clinton.""This is the 12th state SEIU endorsement Edwards has won."
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Snow touts the White House’s ‘intellectual vigor’
Posted October 30th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
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Former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow spoke to the American Magazine Conference, sharing his perspective on the media. Nothing terribly exciting, but I couldn’t help but love the way Snow described the White House’s decision-making process. (via D. Froomkin)
“You don’t see it but there’s a process where everything gets discussed, and there are some raging arguments…. It’s not the case that something is always handed in a neat little bundle to the leader of the free world. He’s gotta make some choices….When people look back at this White House, they’re gonna find its one that had a lot of intellectual vigor.”
Um, Tony? When people look back at this White House, the very last thing anyone will think is that the Bush gang took “intellectual vigor” seriously. There’s a reason “Bush’s Bubble” became such a scrutinized phenomenon — the president surrounded himself with people who would tell him what he wants to hear, hoping to avoid anything even resembling “intellectual vigor.”
Tony Snow may have forgotten the examples — or, more likely, he hopes we have — but there’s no shortage of evidence to refute his argument. Consider this gem, for example.
It’s a standing joke among the president’s top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States…. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty.
An intellectually-vigorous environment is filled with debate. Snow neglected to mention that if you’re on the “wrong” side, the president doesn’t want to talk you anymore
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‘The Most Dangerous Dam in the World’
Posted October 30th, 2007 at 11:12 am
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It’s a genuine challenge to come up with adjectives, which haven’t been used thousands of times before, to describe the multitude of fiascos in Iraq. They each appear more painful than the last. Consider, for example, the story of the Mosul Dam.
The largest dam in Iraq is in serious danger of an imminent collapse that could unleash a trillion-gallon wave of water, possibly killing thousands of people and flooding two of the largest cities in the country, according to new assessments by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other U.S. officials.
Even in a country gripped by daily bloodshed, the possibility of a catastrophic failure of the Mosul Dam has alarmed American officials, who have concluded that it could lead to as many as 500,000 civilian deaths by drowning Mosul under 65 feet of water and parts of Baghdad under 15 feet, said Abdulkhalik Thanoon Ayoub, the dam manager. “The Mosul dam is judged to have an unacceptable annual failure probability,” in the dry wording of an Army Corps of Engineers draft report.
U.S. officials are aware of the disaster-waiting-to-happen, and initiated a $27 million reconstruction project to help shore up the dam. So what happened? “Incompetence and mismanagement” have marred the project.
The Army Corps of Engineers’ draft report describes this as “the most dangerous dam in the world,” adding, “If a small problem [at] Mosul Dam occurs, failure is likely.”
But wait, there’s more. Iraqi and U.S. officials realize how serious the situation is, but have decided not to tell Iraqis, for fear of scaring them.

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Jane Goodall Says Biofuel Crops Hurt Rain Forests By Timothy Gardner Reuters
Friday 28 September 2007
New York - Primate scientist Jane Goodall said on Wednesday the race to grow crops for vehicle fuels is damaging rain forests in Asia, Africa and South America and adding to the emissions blamed for global warming.
"We're cutting down forests now to grow sugarcane and palm oil for biofuels and our forests are being hacked into by so many interests that it makes them more and more important to save now," Goodall said on the sidelines of the Clinton Global Initiative, former US President Bill Clinton's annual philanthropic meeting.
As new oil supplies become harder to find, many countries such as Brazil and Indonesia are racing to grow domestic sources of vehicle fuels, such as ethanol from sugarcane and biodiesel from palm nuts.
The United Nations' climate program considers the fuels to be low in carbon because growing the crops takes in heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide.
But critics say demand for the fuels has led companies to cut down and burn forests in order to grow the crops, adding to heat-trapping emissions and leading to erosion and stress on ecosystems.

By the way, it takes 50 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of fuel from corn! Soon states like Iowa will run out of drinking water in thier rush to get on the biofuels harvest!