First Door on the Left

The search for the killer of JonBenet Ramsey will continue…

Report: Karr’s DNA doesn’t match; No charges to be filed

BOULDER, Colorado (CNN) — The DNA sample taken from suspect John Mark Karr does not match DNA found on JonBenet Ramsey’s body and no charges will be filed against the schoolteacher who claimed he was with the child when she died, CNN affiliate KUSA reported.

KUSA, based in Denver, Colorado, quoted two sources in a bulletin on its Web site:

“9NEWS has confirmed from two sources that the DNA sample taken from John Mark Karr is not a match with the foreign DNA found on JonBenet Ramsey’s body when she was murdered in 1996. 9NEWS has also learned the Boulder County District Attorney’s office will not file charges against Karr in connection with the Ramsey case.”

KUSA says other sources also confirm that no charges will be filed against Karr in connection with the Ramsey case by the Boulder County District Attorney’s office.

Update: People’s Motion to Quash Arrest Warrant…

Krazy Katherine Harris has received a lot of flack for some rather stupid things she said in an interview with the Florida Baptist Witness. If you are interested, and you have the stomach for it, you can read the entire interview here.

Two other candidates vying for the same nomination from the Republican party for a seat in the U.S. Senate were also interviewed by the Witness. All three candidates were asked the same questions. The other two candidates are Will McBride and LeRoy Collins. Their interviews my be accessed here and here, respectively. (There are actually three candidates running against Ms. Harris, but the fourth candidate, Peter Monroe, declined the interview.)

I found their answers to one question in particular quite revealing. There were all asked:

Do you support civil rights protections on the basis of sexual preference?

Katherine Harris:

Civil rights have to do with individual rights and I don’t think they apply to the gay issues. I have not supported gay marriage and I do not support any civil rights actions with regard to homosexuality.

Will McBride:

No, I do not. I believe in traditional marriage between one man and one woman and I believe that is foundational to our society.

LeRoy Collins:

I support civil rights of all throughout the whole spectrum of humanity and I think that it has nothing to do with sexual preference as far as I’m concerned. Are you talking about gay marriage or something like that? Yes, I do.

The first two answers are to be expected. They are typical radical right wing Republican answers. Mr. Collins, however, surprised me. That is not answer you would expect from a Republican. You should go read the rest of his interview. I am not 100% convinced that he is a Republican.

Allow me to give you one more example. His answer to the question about abortion most definitely does not come out of the Republican playbook…

My position on abortion goes like this. My advice is always, to a young woman, to carry her baby to full term. And that’s the advice I’d give to my own daughter. I do, however, recognize that we’re always going to have, whether you and I want that or not, we’re always going to have young women who make mistakes and get pregnant by mistake. And many of those are going to be quite young and just frightened by the whole process and maybe the first time or whatever, and they are just frightened or embarrassed or whatever. I don’t want young, frail women like that who are so impressionable, to be classed as criminals. So, I think they are going to make those mistakes. They shouldn’t make them, but they will and so I don’t want young women like that going to jail. So my feeling is that we must provide a way for them to come to a dignified resolution or acceptance of whatever decision they make. I do not want them going to back-alley practitioners which will threaten their own lives because it is illegal. Now having said that, when we get to the third trimester, I think that’s murder. So, that may be a mixed answer for you, but that’s where I am and I think I’m there for a good reason and I think it’s a pragmatic reason, although it goes contrary to my faith. So, I don’t know if that’s something you can identify with it, if you understand what I’m saying, but that’s where I am.

See what I’m saying?

leroy-collins.jpeg

If I absolutely had to vote for a Republican… if I absolutely had no choice other than to vote for a Republican… if someone were holding a gun to my head and threatening to kill me unless I voted for a Republican… I could probably vote for LeRoy Collins.

I have a very bad feeling about this…

Ernesto Aims at Jamaica, May Hit Gulf

KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP) – Tropical Storm Ernesto gathered strength as it steamed through the central Caribbean toward Jamaica on Saturday and threatened to enter the Gulf of Mexico as the first hurricane of the 2006 Atlantic season.

Ernesto could grow into a Category 3 hurricane by Thursday, menacing a broad swath of the Gulf Coast including hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami forecast. Category 3 hurricane Katrina struck the city a year ago Tuesday.

“It looks likely that it will hit (the U.S.), but it’s way too soon to say where” or how much impact it would have, said John Cangialosi, a meteorologist with the hurricane center. “At this point, keep a close eye, anyone in the Gulf Coast, and just keep monitoring this.”

I believe if I lived in New Orleans, I’d be heading north about now. It’s kind of ridiculous for anybody to think another hit isn’t coming. If it isn’t Ernesto, it’ll be the next one.

Please do not sit there thinking the government is going to save you. We’ve seen how that works out.

Update: It’s beginning to look like this one may miss New Orleans, aiming instead for the west coast of Florida…

Someone at the Republican National Committee is actually getting paid to write comedy…

Click on the image above to access the .pdf file.

By the way, RNC, it’s the Democratic Party, not the Democrat Party. A Democrat is a member of the Democratic Party. We know you think it’s all cool and everything to call it the Democrat Party because that’s what George W. Bush called it the other day, but seriously… we thought you were smarter than him. Perhaps not.

(h/t: The not hateful and somewhat delusional Dean Esmay.)

Students told ‘Yale Shmale’

Consider it a weapon of mass attraction.

Lakehead University is poking fun at U.S. President George W. Bush and his Ivy League alma mater in an edgy new guerrilla marketing campaign intended to lure students to its Thunder Bay campus.

Dubbed “Yale Shmale,” the $100,000 promotion features an image of Bush — Yale University, Class of 1968 — on posters that will be plastered on construction sites and other outdoor locations across the Greater Toronto Area.

“Graduating from an Ivy League university doesn’t necessarily mean you’re smart,” reads the second of two posters set for release, “Choosing Lakehead does.”

The posters will be supplemented by university ambassadors cruising by teen hangouts in Smart Cars sporting the campaign logo to encourage students to check out http://www.yaleshmale.com.

That website, which links to the one for Lakehead, makes a more detailed pitch to consider the school.

“We believe the person you become after you graduate is even more important than the person you were when you enrolled,” it reads in reference to Bush, whose policies have made him one of the world’s most controversial figures.

“Go to a university that cares how well you do after you leave.”

Priceless.

James Joyner links to Justin Logan who asks “What Would You Rather Have: The War in Iraq, or $1,075?”

Kind of a stupid question, really, but if those are my two choices I’ll take the $1,075 and thank you very much.

The figure of $1,075 comes from this UPI article published in The Washington Times:

Cost of Iraq war: $1,075 each

The National Priorities Project has calculated the cost of the Iraq war by congressional district, city, state and even household.

You owe $1,075.

The NPP bills itself as a non-partisan, non-profit organization that uses government data to illustrate the impact of federal policies on local communities. It targets large ticket government programs and tax breaks — mostly dear to Republicans — for scrutiny, including tax breaks for the top 1 percent of earners, the cost of missile defense, maintaining a massive nuclear weapon arsenal, and the Iraq war.

NPP bases its Iraq war calculations on a Congressional Research Service report from June, which totaled the war at $318.5 billion.

“That is $2,844 for every American household or $1,075 for every American. The money (already spent or allocated) is being spent at a rate $10 million per hour and $244 million per day,” according to NPP.

Actually, though this is not listed as a choice by either James or Justin, I’d rather that the 2,621 (as of yesterday) American soldiers who have been killed in Iraq have their lives back. I’d rather that the lives of the thousands and thousands of young men and women who have been maimed in Iraq be put back together. I’d rather that the suffering of all those families somehow be made to stop. That’s what I’d rather.

For those things I would gladly pay $1,075. Somehow, though, I don’t believe you can really put a price tag on those things. And even if you could, $1,075 seems mighty low.

Click on ‘em to view ‘em full size.

Then there’s this one from right wing cartoonists Cox and Forkum. I don’t know what your feelings are about profiling, but this one kind of bothers me. Like every American citizen of Arab decent is going to be flying airplanes into buildings. Where do we finally draw the line?

Wow. Are we absolutely sure that this lady is a Republican? Isn’t there some kind of blood test we can do or something?

GOP candidate says 9/11 attacks were a hoax

A Republican candidate for this area’s congressional seat said Wednesday that the U.S. government was complicit in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In an editorial board interview with The Telegraph on Wednesday, the candidate, Mary Maxwell, said the U.S. government had a role in killing nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center and Pentagon, so it could make Americans hate Arabs and allow the military to bomb Muslim nations such as Iraq.

Maxwell, 59, seeks the 2nd District congressional seat. The Concord resident opposes the incumbent, Charles Bass of Peterborough, and Berlin Mayor Bob Danderson in the Republican primary Sept. 12.

Maxwell would not specify if she holds the opinion that the government stood by while terrorists hijacked four domestic airliners and used them as weapons, or if it had a larger role by sanctioning and carrying out the attacks.

But she implicated the government by saying the Sept. 11 attacks were meant “to soften us up . . . to make us more willing to have more stringent laws here, which are totally against the Bill of Rights . . . to make us particularly focus on Arabs and Muslims . . . and those strange persons who spend all their time creating little bombs,” giving Americans a reason “to hate them and fear them and, therefore, bomb them in Iraq for other reasons.”

She said this strategy “would be normal” for governments, citing her belief that the British government – and not the Germany military – sank the Lusitania ocean liner in 1915. The deaths of Americans on the cruise liner helped galvanize U.S. support to enter World War I, and benefited England, she said.

In turn, the Sept. 11 attacks “made the ground fertile” for more stringent laws, such as the Patriot Act, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, Maxwell said.

Read the rest, if you dare. Remember, though, Cheney might be watching your every keystroke!

At least this time you can’t say you weren’t warned. We tried to warn you last time, but would you listen? Nooooo. You were still naive back then, thinking that your leaders would never lie to you. Hopefully you have learned something over the past few years…

Wanted: Scarier Intelligence

The last thing this country needs as it heads into this election season is another attempt to push the intelligence agencies to hype their conclusions about the threat from a Middle Eastern state.

That’s what happened in 2002, when the administration engineered a deeply flawed document on Iraq that reshaped intelligence to fit President Bush’s policy. And history appeared to be repeating itself this week, when the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, released a garishly illustrated and luridly written document that is ostensibly dedicated to “helping the American people understand” that Iran’s fundamentalist regime and its nuclear ambitions pose a strategic threat to the United States.

It’s hard to imagine that Mr. Hoekstra believes there is someone left in this country who does not already know that. But the report obviously has different aims. It is partly a campaign document, a product of the Republican strategy of scaring Americans into allowing the G.O.P. to retain control of Congress this fall. It fits with the fearmongering we’ve heard lately — like President Bush’s attempt the other day to link the Iraq war to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

But even more worrisome, the report seems intended to signal the intelligence community that the Republican leadership wants scarier assessments that would justify a more confrontational approach to Tehran. It was not the work of any intelligence agency, or the full intelligence panel, or even the subcommittee that ostensibly drafted it. The Washington Post reported that it was written primarily by a former C.I.A. official known for his view that the assessments on Iran are not sufficiently dire.

While the report contains no new information, it does dish up dire-sounding innuendo, mostly to leave the impression that Iran is developing nuclear weapons a lot faster than intelligence agencies have the guts to admit. It also tosses in a few conspiracy theories, like the unsupported assertion that Iran engineered the warfare between Israel and Hezbollah. And it complains that America’s spy agencies are too cautious, that they “shy away from provocative conclusions.”

Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, put it even more bluntly in explaining some Republicans’ dissatisfaction with the C.I.A. reporting on Iran: “The intelligence community is dedicated to predicting the least dangerous world possible.”

All in all, this is a chilling reminder of what happened when intelligence analysts told Vice President Dick Cheney they could not prove that Iraq was building a nuclear weapon or had ties with Al Qaeda. He kept asking if they really meant it — until the C.I.A. took the hint.

It’s obvious that Iran wants nuclear weapons, has lied about its program and views America as an enemy. We enthusiastically agree that the United States needs every scrap of intelligence it can get on Iran. But the reason American intelligence is not certain when Iran might have a nuclear bomb is because the situation is so murky — not because the agencies are too wimpy to tell the scary truth.

If the Republicans who control Congress really wanted a full-scale assessment on the state of Iran’s weapons programs, they would have asked for one, rather than producing this brochure.

The nation cannot afford to pay the price again for politicians’ bending intelligence or bullying the intelligence agencies to suit their ideology.

Well, did you read it? Did you understand it? I did not tell you up top that it’s an editorial from The New York Times because if I had, and you are a wingnut, you would not have read it. Congratulations. Notice your eyeballs did not spontaneously combust.

Now contact your Republican leaders and let them know that you are not going to fall for the same crap you fell for back in ’02 and ’03. Please.

Dinky Pluto Loses Its Status As Planet

PRAGUE, Czech Republic — Pluto, beloved by some as a cosmic underdog but scorned by astronomers who considered it too dinky and distant, was unceremoniously stripped of its status as a planet Thursday.

Say it isn’t so!

I don’t know about you, but my world (solar system?) will never be the same.

Update: While we’re on the topic of “dinky and distant”…

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