Where it's at

This is a typical crime report from my neighborhood:

1) A woman took her clothes off up near First and Rhode Island NW and was shot.
2) A resident opened a door to a hallway in a home and saw a pair of his pants being pulled through a hole in the ceiling. A two-foot-square hole had been cut in the roof to enter.
3) A man entered a home and fled with a bottle of liquor when a resident investigated the noise.

Why can't these folks just smoke some crack and be done with it?

Rummy comes clean

During his surprise Christmas Eve trip to Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld referred to flight 93 being shot down – long a suspicion because of the danger the flight posed to Washington landmarks and population centers.

Was it a slip of the tongue? Was it an error? Or was it the truth, finally being dropped on the public more than three years after the tragedy of the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000?

From CNN’s transcript:

DONALD RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: And to change that way of living, would strike at the very essence of our country.

And I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples’ heads on television to intimidate, to frighten – indeed the word “terrorized” is just that. Its purpose is to terrorize, to alter behavior, to make people be something other than that which they want to be.

From the 9-11 Commission report:

Vice President: There’s been at least three instances here where we’ve had reports of aircraft approaching Washington—a couple were confirmed hijack. And, pursuant to the President’s instructions I gave authorization for them to be taken out. Hello?
SecDef:Yes, I understand.Who did you give that direction to?
Vice President: It was passed from here through the [operations] center at the White House, from the [shelter].
SecDef: OK,let me ask the question here. Has that directive been transmitted to the aircraft?
Vice President:Yes, it has.
SecDef: So we’ve got a couple of aircraft up there that have those instructions at this present time?
Vice President: That is correct. And it’s my understanding they’ve already taken a couple of aircraft out.
SecDef:We can’t confirm that.We’re told that one aircraft is down but we do not have a pilot report that did it.

After 3+ years, it seems the SecDef has confirmed that.

You pissa me off, I double swipa ya card!

MIDVALE, Utah (AP) - Talk about upsizing. Travis Dominguez, 20, has been accused of double-swiping the credit cards of what he considered to be irritating customers at a Taco Bell drive-through.

"The customers he did it to annoyed him somehow, and he did it for revenge," said Midvale police Detective Scott Nesbitt.

Dominguez didn't indicate how the customers annoyed him, Nesbitt said.

That's why I always pay cash for my Mexican Pizza....

The drinking game from hell

Man hospitalized by lethal beer bong

"A 21-year-old Perth man is lucky to be alive after having his stomach ripped open during a beer-skolling game using a home-made device powered by an electric pump... It is believed to have consisted of a helmet fitted with a jug from which a hose was attached to a pump that was powered by a power drill... 'I knew something wasn't right soon after I drank from it. I started spewing up red stuff and was in a lot of pain.' ... Surgeon David Cooke said the split in the wall of the man's stomach had pushed food and beer into his abdominal cavity, making him septic. His insides had to be 'washed out' twice and he was put on heavy-duty antibiotics."

Man who criticized CIA commits suicide several times

Gary Webb is dead. You remember, he broke the story called Dark Alliance about the CIA's involvement in crack cocaine traffic, essentially the conclusion also reached by John Kerry. And now he's dead of an 'apparent suicide' which involved multiple gunshots wounds to the face. OK, we believed it when they told us that Cobain pulled that shotgun trigger with 3 times the lethal dosage of heroin coursing thorugh his veins, but really, how many suicides involve MULTIPLE gunshots?

President honors disgraced cabinet member

Bizarro spin world established a new province of oxymoron today when Subcommandante Bush awarded Tenet the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Yes, that same George Tenet who convinced W that the evidence to go into Iraq was "a slam dunk case". We can let Franks and Bremer off the hook for now I suppose, but isn't it just a tad early to honor the architects of the Iraq debacle by putting them in the same class of heros as Dave Thomas, Fred Rogers and Edward Teller?

Menace to the elementary

Girl, 10, Cuffed for Scissors in School
Sunday December 12, 2004 5:24pm

PHILADELPHIA (AP) - A 10-year-old girl was placed in handcuffs and taken to a police station because she took a pair of scissors to her elementary school.

School district officials said the fourth-grade student did not threaten anyone with the 8-inch shears, but violated a rule that considers scissors to be potential weapons.

Very, Very Dirty Pictures

The possible outcomes for the war in Iraq have now become "bad or worse" according to Ivo H. Daalder, an ardent supporter of the Bush doctrine. Four more years! Four more years!

On the even less bright side, the photos bring it all all home.

It's almost as if the millions of marchers who opposed this war before it even began have forgotten how to say "We told you so".

Take me out to the library

Turns out businesses were having to cough up too much funding for the already publicly financed DC baseball stadium, so they had to cut the $45 million for the library system. If there's one thing we know in DC, it's priorities!

"Even when I first heard that there might be this one-time windfall for the library, I felt that I just entered the twilight zone," said Philip Pannell, a member of the D.C. Public Library's board of trustees since 1996. "The fact that it has not become a reality doesn't really surprise me."