Anna Nicole Smith died of an overdose. Does that surprise anyone?

In other news: Saddam Hussein and Abu Musad Al Zarqawi are still dead and the fate of bin Laden is still not known.

D. Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, is set to testify before a Senate committee on Thursday.

Mr. Sampson resigned earlier this month and is testifying voluntarily.

The Senate Judiciary Committee hopes to learn more about what happened at the Justice Department leading up to the firing of eight federal prosecutors last year.

Mr. Sampson’s former boss, Mr. Gonzales, has said he knew little about the firings, and indicated that Mr. Sampson worked unilaterally within Justice, without notifying superiors of important details.

Mr. Gonzales has said this lack of communication caused inaccurate testimony to Congress by Justice officials.

Mr. Sampson will give his side of the story on Thursday.

Source.

This will only cause a feeding frenzy as we all know the democrats are not interested in any crime that was committed, as there was not crime.

But they are after bigger fish such as Gonzales and Rove. Gonzales seems inept but it would make the Senate Judiciary committee majority sooo happy to have to have confirmation hearings on a new AG.

If we didn’t already know it we know it now. Each major party is going to use the House vote from last week attaching ridiculous conditions on the military supplemental funding bill and plenty of pork to get the extra votes needed such as help for spinach growers, peanut storage help, dairy help etc. to the bill that was supposed to be about funding the troops.

The leadership chose not to use a plain up or down vote on whether or not to stop funding of the troops, but added so many restrictions to the bill it would do the same thing while sweetening the pot a bit for the Congressmen and women across the board who were having difficulty voting for the bill.

Let’s remember that bill passed by the barest majority of 118 which is exactly one more vote than half of the House. Two Republicans put it over the top.

Campaign staffers from both parties are using the vote on Democrats’ troop withdrawal plan to target vulnerable members of Congress in the 2008 races.

Within hours of the House’s 218-212 vote Friday, Republicans sent 50 campaign missives saying Democrats were “waving a white flag of surrender” by approving a war-funding bill that set a timetable for pulling troops from Iraq.

“It’s not a vote that’s going to be forgotten any time soon,” said Ken Spain, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).

Democrats plan to portray votes against the bill as rubber stamps for an unpopular president when they campaign against the Republicans who opposed it.

“We had two choices: more troops, more money, more time, more of the same, no strings attached,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the Democratic Caucus chairman. “That is what the president has had for four years, and he has asked for another year of exactly the same thing.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said a vote against the bill equated to renewing President Bush’s “blank check for an open-ended commitment to a war without end.”

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) echoed this theme, saying Democrats were bringing accountability and oversight “for the first time in six years.”

The NRCC’s campaign message hitting 50 members, mostly freshmen, said approval of the measure was akin to setting “a date certain for retreat and defeat in Iraq” and embracing a plan “to cut off funding for our troops.”

Many of the freshman congressmen and women who voted for this bill campaigned in conservative districts as conservatives. Let’s see how that goes over at home and if the voters remember it when the next election rolls around.

Source.

Here’s a list of the freshmen congressmen who voted for this bill, after many of them campaigned as conservatives in conservative districts:

AZ-5: Harry Mitchell
AZ-8: Gabrielle Giffords
CA-11: Jerry McNerney
CO-7: Ed Perlmutter
CT-2: Joe Courtney
CT-5: Christopher Murphy
FL-16: Tim Mahoney
FL-22: Ron Klein
IA-1: Bruce Braley
IN-2: Joe Donnelly
IN-8: Brad Ellsworth
IN-9: Baron Hill
KS-2: Nancy Boyda
KY-3: John Yarmuth
MN-1: Timothy Walz
NC-11: Heath Shuler
NH-1: Carol Shea-Porter
NH-2: Paul Hodes
NY-19: John Hall
NY-20: Kirsten Gillibrand
NY-24: Michael Arcuri
OH-18: Zachary Space
PA-4: Jason Atmire
PA-7: Joe Sestak
PA-8: Patrick Murphy
PA-10: Christopher Carney
TX-22: Nick Lampson
WI-8: Steve Kagen

The anonymity of the internet makes people behave in ways they wouldn’t if they were face to face to the person about whom they are talking.

We’ve all seen it on blogs and on news sites that have message boards. Incivility at its ugly worst.

Case in point:

When a California woman recently gave birth to a healthy baby just two days after learning she was pregnant, the sudden change to her life was challenging enough. What April Branum definitely didn’t need was a deluge of nasty Internet comments.

Postings on message boards made cracks about Miss Branum’s weight (about 400 pounds — one reason she says didn’t realize sooner she was pregnant). They also analyzed her housekeeping ability, based on a photo of her home. And they called her names. “A pig is a pig,” one person wrote. Another suggested that she “go on the show ‘The Biggest Loser.’ ”

“The thing that bothered me most was, people assumed because I am overweight, I’m going to be a bad mom,” Miss Branum says. “And that is not one little bit true.”

It was yet another example of how the Internet — and the anonymity it affords — has given a public stage to people’s basest thoughts, ones that in earlier eras likely never would have traveled past the watercooler, the kitchen table or the next barstool.

Such incidents — and there are countless examples across cyberspace — also raise the question: Is there anything to be done about it? Or is a decline in civil discourse simply the price we pay for the advance of technology?

If it isn’t acceptable in person or in polite conversation it isn’t acceptable on the internet.

We have a blogroll of favorite blogs and sites to visit. It is deliberately not long because if I put in 100 sites I could not honestly tell you I read every one of them every day, so I’ve chosen my favorites.

If you have any suggestions of some I’ve missed please let me know and if they are daily reads for me I’ll certainly put them on. If they are not daily reads I will check them out and see if they interest me enough to make them a daily read for me.

This blog is new and it’s up to you to tell us what you want on it. You are our customers and our customers come first.

You will also notice I have added at the bottom of the sidebar a Breitbart news headline service for news and for politics. Click the appropriate box and you will see the headlines.

I have asked Tonto to give me a list of the liberal newspapers he would like to have listed but so far he hasn’t come up with a list, but I must say most of the newspapers and news services listed are already pretty liberal even if he disagrees with me.

I won’t link to the far left blogs and I won’t link to the extreme right blogs. That includes my former blog. We want a blog where we are not preaching to the choir but are showing our open-mindedness and diversity to a variety of readers.

We also want a blog that encourages our readers to discuss among themselves rather than having every post a comment by one of the bloggers. I will respond with a welcome or a comment as I see the need to do so, but don’t get hurt feelings if we don’t always comment on your comment. I have seen that too much on my former blog and have heard people say it is nothing but the bloggers talking to each other. Lesson learned, but I can’t stay quiet so I’ll be on the threads talking with you too, at least until we get more people commenting.

Let us know what you think. Feel free to email me by using the contact link on the sidebar to give us your ideas. I will forward any of Tonto’s email to him, and I must say he has a good following.

We hear the peace protesters say they support the soldiers but not the war.

The following video puts the lie to that.

As they chant, “It’s not just Bush; it’s the soldiers too!” and burn a soldier in effigy I think we can see how “peaceful” these peace protesters in Portland, Oregon really are.

Caution: Foul language, but what else do you expect from people who dare not even show their faces while they show their “pacifism”?

Update: Please read this Portland Tribune editorial, which is in support of demonstrating against the war, but is horrified by what they witnessed. I won’t even tell you what the gross act was. You’ll have to read it for yourselves.

When I was a teen-ager growing up on an Indian Reservation in Maine our tribe started an annual Indian Day, which was similar to old-fashioned pow-wows in the West.

It was wonderful fun all day, but the thing I remember and cherish the most was when the older ladies of our tribe including Tonto’s and my grandmother, a friend called Medassin, an older woman called Susie and many others of our elders who just got together and decided on the spur of the moment to do a Penobscot Indian snake dance.

They moved so slowly and so gracefully while singing an old Penobscot song whose words I can’t recall. More and more ladies joined in and soon the entire street was participating in the snake dance.

What wonderful fun to see my heritage on display in such a magnificent way. They had drums, but most of the music was the elder women singing Ho Latta Geh or something that sounded like that.

I thought of this while looking for some Native American dances on YouTube tonight, and I was once again a care-free teenager watching Grammy and all the others entertain us with our own culture that died when they did.

It is my dream to go to the West and see and hear a real pow-wow before I die.

To a Native American the drums represent the heartbeat of Mother Earth.

The last time I heard the drum it was beating once every 30 seconds or so at the end of my mother’s funeral and then it stopped as a symbol of her heart stopping.

I hope you enjoy the selection I have made for you of these fine ladies doing a beautiful Native American dance. The wonderful dancer in white is named Claudia. Enjoy, but know this was not the type of singing our tribe did. This is Western.

Anyone who has been reading or watching the news since Friday knows fifteen British sailors and marines (including one woman) have been captured by the Revolutionary Guards of Iran for supposedly being in Iranian waters while on a patrol in Iraqi waters while searching for smugglers.

The Brits claim they were in Iraqi waters and the Iranians claim they were in Iranian waters. At any rate the sailors and marines are now in Tehran on an unexpected detour and Iran is claiming they will charge them with espionage, which carries the death penalty under Iranian Islamic law.

The Times Online reports:

FIFTEEN British sailors and marines arrested by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards off the coast of Iraq may be charged with spying.

A website run by associates of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, reported last night that the Britons would be put before a court and indicted.

Referring to them as “insurgents”, the site concluded: “If it is proven that they deliberately entered Iranian territory, they will be charged with espionage. If that is proven, they can expect a very serious penalty since according to Iranian law, espionage is one of the most serious offences.”

The warning followed claims by Iranian officials that the British navy personnel had been taken to Tehran, the capital, to explain their “aggressive action” in entering Iranian waters. British officials insist the servicemen were in Iraqi waters when they were held.

The penalty for espionage in Iran is death. However, similar accusations of spying were made when eight British servicemen were detained in the same area in 2004. They were paraded blindfolded on television but did not appear in court and were freed after three nights in detention.

Iranian student groups called yesterday for the 15 detainees to be held until US forces released five Revolutionary Guards captured in Iraq earlier this year.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat, a Saudi-owned newspaper based in London, quoted an Iranian military source as saying that the aim was to trade the Royal Marines and sailors for these Guards.

The claim was backed by other sources in Tehran. “As soon as the corps’s five members are released, the Britons can go home,” said one source close to the Guards.

He said the tactic had been approved by Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, who warned last week that Tehran would take “illegal actions” if necessary to maintain its right to develop a nuclear programme.

There are some missing Iranian agents from Iraq, so this demand makes some sense.

At the same time there have been a couple of defections of high-ranking Iranians the Iranians would love to get back and give them a dose of Islamic justice.

Subhi Sadek, the Guards’ weekly newspaper, warned last weekend that the force had “the ability to capture a bunch of blue-eyed blond-haired officers and feed them to our fighting cocks”.

Safavi is known to be furious about the recent defections to the West of three senior Guards officers, including a general, and the effect of UN sanctions on his own finances.

There are some Iraqi fishermen who have convinced an Iraqi general the Brits were in Iranian waters, but the British deny it, saying the last time this happened GPS devices proved they were in Iraqi waters and he is certain this will be the case also.

Meanwhile, this Fox News report states British Prime Minister is determined to get this situation solved as soon and as diplomatically as possible.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Sunday that the 15 British sailors and marines captured by Iran as they searched for smugglers off the Iraqi coast were not in Iranian waters and warned that Britain viewed their situation as “very serious.”

The group was seized at gunpoint on Friday, and the Foreign Office in London said British officials do not know where Iran is holding them.

Speaking at an EU summit in Berlin, Blair said Iran’s claim that the sailors had crossed into Iranian territorial waters “is simply not true.”

“I want to get [the situation] resolved in as easy and diplomatic a way as possible,” Blair said, but added he hoped the Iranians “understood how fundamental an issue this is for the British government.”

Britain said its diplomats met with Iranian officials in Tehran on Sunday where their demand for access to the group was denied after Iran refused to say where they were being held.

“This is a very serious situation,” Blair said.

We’ll soon see if it’s spies they want or if they really believe these sailors and marines breeched their waters.

Either way I pray for a peaceful solution to this mess.

Lousiania Governor Kathleen Blanco has announced she will not run for re-election, leaving the democrats in search of a candidate who can defeat the popular Bobby Jindal.

Former Senator John Breaux had said he would not run as long as Blanco was in the race, but now that she is out he is checking for legal opinions to see if it will be legal for him to run.

The problem is that the Lousiana constitution states a person must have been a resident of the state for the preceeding five years in order to run for Governor.

Mr. Breaux has declared Maryland to be his home state and has even registered to vote there.

He is now asking for a legal ruling as to whether or not he qualifies to be on the ballot.

According to this article:

Former U.S. Sen. John Breaux said he will run for Louisiana governor if the state attorney general determines he meets the legal requirements to enter the race.

…

Breaux said he would give up his lobbying job in Washington, D.C., and begin campaigning if the state attorney general determines he meets residency requirements to run.

“I could stay here and live a very good life, but this is my last opportunity to be helpful to our state through public service,” Breaux told The Associated Press on Friday by telephone from the Washington area.

Republicans have raised questions about whether Breaux can be a legal candidate in Louisiana. To be eligible to run for a statewide elected office, the state Constitution requires that a person be a “citizen” of the state for “at least the preceding five years.”

Breaux is registered to vote in Maryland and lists his primary address there, about 70 miles from Washington, where he works for Patton Boggs LLP, a lobbying firm. Republicans say that disqualifies him from running for Louisiana governor.

State Rep. Eric LaFleur, chairman of the Louisiana House Democratic Caucus, said he will ask for the legal opinion from Attorney General Charles Foti on whether Breaux could legally run for governor. Foti also is a Democrat.

As a private citizen, Breaux does not have standing to make the request for an attorney general’s opinion, but LaFleur can and said he will file his request with Foti’s office next week. It’s unclear how long it would take for Foti’s office to issue a ruling.

“I would hope they’ll have an opportunity to get a quick turnaround,” Breaux said. “I’m going to wait until we get that ruling, and I will plan accordingly.”

It does seem to be pretty cut and dried, but we never know what might happen in the world of politics. Stay tuned.

Jim Addison from Wizbang Politics is also blogging on this topic.

Captain Ed of Captain’s Quarters has an excellent column up about the US Attorney firings, titled WFB, The Documents, And The Gonzales Problem, WFB being William F. Buckley.

Here’s a taste of the first part of the post:

I had not planned to return to the topic of the firings of the eight federal prosecutors tonight, but a column by William F Buckley and a review of the document dump clarified certain issues in the story. Buckley, I believe, captures the essence of the massive failure seen in the Department of Justice in this instance. He notes the plenary authority of both the President to fire political appointees and of Congress to conduct investigations into the conduct of the executive branch. He warns conservatives to refrain from constraining the latter for momentary political benefit:

It is obvious that there are Democrats in Congress who want an opportunity to forage for crimes in the matter of the discharged U.S. attorneys. Nobody has come up with a description of exactly what crime might have been committed and should be investigated. What is being conjectured is that an industrious investigating committee armed with subpoena powers could come up with malfeasance of some kind.
On the other hand, the investigative function of the legislative branch is of plenary importance, and should not be aborted by hypothetical immunities of the chief executive. Woodrow Wilson wrote in his classic book “Congressional Government” that Congress’ investigative power was more important, even, than its legislative power. …

At present, the investigators want to focus on the question whether one or more U.S. attorneys were discharged simply because they were doing their duty, and that duty included refusing to speed up the prosecution of various Democrats. But in the matter of any one of the fired attorneys, guilt might be found to attach to the attorney himself — he abused his authority by protecting a friend, or by persecuting an enemy — or to the attorney’s superiors, reaching right up to the White House. …

Of one thing Mr. Bush is manifestly guilty. It is the criminal (in the metaphorical sense) mismanagement of the whole business of the U.S. attorneys. The fault is not personal; it was probably the attorney general and other advisers of the president who took so many clumsy steps. But Mr. Bush’s stress on his rights invites a coordinate stress on his responsibilities. “These attorneys,” he said, “serve at my pleasure.” Right. But presidential pleasures have to rest on defensible grounds.

Reading through the document dump from yesterday, Buckley’s analysis looks spot on. It seems clear from the tenor of the e-mails that the instigation for the terminations came from within Justice. Kyle Sampson writes in an e-mail (which I will reproduce farther down) that he had not informed Karl Rove of the plans as of November 15th, 2006. While the White House had started the conversation shortly after the start of the second term, when cleaning house made more sense, the document string seems to support the description of the actual terminations as a DoJ project.

I urge you to visit the Captain’s blog and see the entire article.

Yesterday I read this article in the New York Times titled A Year Without Toilet Paper.

It’s the story of a successful New York City couple who have gone green to the extreme. They make their own food from food grown within a 250 mile radius of New York City because that’s how far a farmer can go round-trip in a day.

They have a small child and have determined to not purchase anything, but did give in to get the baby a birthday gift at a second-hand store for $1.

They make compost from any waste they create and the article states it smells a bit sour in their home. There was a photo that showed their garbage has worms in it to process it.

They still have a maid but they finally made her give up her vacuum cleaner. They do still go to the basement of their apartment building and use the laundry facilities, but they refuse to take the elevator.

Here’s the explanation:

Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella’s parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.

To each his own. But here’s the kicker:

Nothing is a substitute for toilet paper, by the way; think of bowls of water and lots of air drying.

As my daughter would say, TMI.

In a way I admire this couple for doing what they believe. They are walking the walk and not just talking the talk, but I wonder how they will manage in the summer when the humidity gets high and the temperatures soar.

We had a hurricane blow through here unexpectedly about 20 years ago. I live in the muggy South. We were without power for two weeks at the end of September.

Living by candlelight was fun for the first night and then we had to start taking cold showers, cook our food on the gas grill, and finally heat our water on the gas grill to pour into the bathtub to get a lukewarm bath.

I was unable to vacuum the floors and when the power did come back on I was amazed at all the soot that had accumulated on the side of the tub from placing that heavy pan of water on the edge of the tub. This even though I had scrubbed the tub, but couldn’t see everything as it was mostly done at night since I was still working. We did buy a small generator (large ones were unavailable) and could plug in the refrigerator and a lamp or the microwave and lamp, but not anything big with the refrigerator. Even though I did vacuum the floors with the assistance of the generator I was amazed at how not clean they were when the power came back on.

I did not do well living that way. Other people at work had their power back in a short time but I was still without it. My husband worked at a nuclear power plant and was able to shower at work, but all I could do was take lukewarm baths.

My daughter went to her best friend’s house to bathe and basically spent a lot of time with them, while my son was in college.

So I wonder if they can survive a hot, humid summer in NY while trying to live green for a year. And if they do, will anyone want to stand near them?

As I said, to each his own.

I’m going to quote from a Friday editorial in the San Diego Tribune in reference to all the pork that was added to the supplemental military spending bill that was passed in the House today.

I don’t know if this newspaper is conservative or liberal, but being based in San Diego tells me it is most probably conservative.

Democrats wasted no time after their takeover of Congress in November in declaring a new era of responsible government. Party leaders said earmarks and massive, blithe pork-barrel spending would be a thing of the past. “We promise the most honest, most open, most ethical Congress in history,” declared House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Initially, Democrats seemed to live up to their grand talk. To the amazement of many, incoming Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd – the West Virginia Democrat who may be the biggest pork abuser of all – joined with incoming House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey to vow there would be no new earmarks until the next fiscal year began on Oct. 1.

This was all wonderful, welcome and overdue. Federal spending has been out of control since the final years of the Clinton administration. While earmarks and pork are only a relatively small part of the reason why, controlling them would be a welcome sign of a newly sober, adult attitude on Congress’ part.

Too bad it was all a charade.

…

Weeks ago, Pelosi proposed attaching a requirement that U.S. troops come home from Iraq before September 2008 to an emergency $100 billion military appropriations bill. When it became apparent she didn’t have enough votes, she responded by adding $24 billion in pork, often in the form of agricultural subsidies used to win over rural Democratic lawmakers who tend to be more deferential on war policy.

This is disgusting. That Pelosi insists this extra spending doesn’t qualify as pork is bad enough. But the idea that taxpayer funds are being doled out by the multibillion for unrelated domestic programs to influence a profoundly important vote on Iraq should offend everyone. What does it say for the dozens of House members that this tactic apparently swayed? That on any issue, there is a price at which their convictions are for sale?

In 2004, a unanimous House ethics committee voted to rebuke then-Majority Leader DeLay for his tactics in attempting to persuade Rep. Nick Smith, R-Mich., to support a 2003 bill adding prescription-drug benefits to Medicare. DeLay’s offense, according to the official panel report: “DeLay offered to endorse Rep. Smith’s son [to replace him after he retired] in exchange for Rep. Smith’s vote in favor of the Medicare bill.”

If that merits a formal rebuke, trying to use $24 billion in taxpayer money to sway a vote on war policy deserves a prison term.

I’ve quoted most of the editorial but urge you to follow the above link and read all of it.

We all pay for the pork contained in this bill to help in peanut storage, help spinach farmers and various other agricultural causes for huge farms owned by large companies.

This bill should have stood or fallen on its own. I doubt the Senate can pass it with the different rules in it, but if it is passed I hope the pork is stripped from the bill before it goes to conference for reconciliation.

The president has promised a veto on this bill and let’s be clear why. He’s promised a veto because it sets a date certain for us to pull out of Iraq and because it contains so much pork, which is really a different name for bribes for a congressman’s vote.

Congress has the power of the purse, namely the House of Representatives, and if it was the intent to defund the war so our troops would have to return home then that’s the way the bill should have been written, or not written. No supplemental should have been considered as we all know the real reason was to stop the war in Iraq.

The House should have stood on their principles and let the chips fall where they may and never mind every special interest in the country.

That’s why we need term limits and citizen-legislators. Hold congressional sessions for a couple of months a year, conduct the nation’s business and go back home to their real jobs. Oops, once they’re in Congress that is their real job.

Enjoy. Hat Tip: Sir Randall <):)

WASHINGTON (AP) - A sharply divided House voted Friday to order President Bush to bring combat troops home from Iraq next year, a victory for Democrats in an epic war-powers struggle and Congress’ boldest challenge yet to the administration’s policy.

Ignoring a White House veto threat, lawmakers voted 218-212, mostly along party lines, for a binding war spending bill requiring that combat operations cease before September 2008, or earlier if the Iraqi government does not meet certain requirements. Democrats said it was time to heed the mandate of their election sweep last November, which gave them control of Congress.

“The American people have lost faith in the president’s conduct of this war,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “The American people see the reality of the war, the president does not.”

The vote, echoing