In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

I seem to remember saying something like this was going to happen a while back. If people thought the current recession hurt, wait until this gets stacked on.

The demise of the dollar - Business News, Business - The Independent

Law enforcement officials identified the suspect as James Wenneker von Brunn, born in 1920, from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, NBC News reported. NBC said he may have had connections to hate groups or anti-government groups.

For those who started something when the terror book came out about right wing groups, this and the Tiller murder are the sort of thing it was talking about. How many lefty attacks have there been? Oh that's right, none.

Reality does have a liberal bias, and it's because of people like these guys.

Gunman, guard shot at Holocaust museum - Crime & courts- msnbc.com

Newsweek is set to publish a highly embarrassing report on Sen. John McCain, revealing that the McCains have failed to pay taxes on their beach-front condo in La Jolla, California, for the last four years and are currently in default, The Huffington Post has learned.

Oops!

McCains Defaulted On Home Taxes For Last Four Years, Newsweek To Report - Politics on The Huffington Post

In this chilling BBC clip, a newsteam ventures to one of LA's new shantytowns made up of people who've lost their homes in the subprime meltdown and now live in tents, improvised shacks or RVs on abandoned land. It's the contemporary Hooverville...

Nearly 80 years later and we're moving right back to the same disaster we were looking at then. There are differences. We don't yet have the midwestern drought that destroyed agriculture for years, we have a southern one where Atlanta is in danger of turning into Las Vegas, and may get that midwestern one, but no one is sure. We don't have brokers jumping from the ledges is New York, many of those buildings were torn down and replaced with buildings that don't have ledges, or windows that open. We don't have 25% unemployment, we don't know what it actually is because the "new unemployment" doesn't count people who, after months of trying, gave up searching for work.

When the BBC is showing us the new Hoovervilles but our own media isn't. When they're also talking about the possibility that we're looking at 1929, but our media isn't. When CNNI is showing the real on the ground cost of the Iraq war across the world, but not here. Our government and our media is giving us a bill of goods.

America's new subprime shanty-towns - Boing Boing

Well, the legislation Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed.

What's particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month, the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week, a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with Hunt Oil of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.

Now here's the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Bush. More than that, Hunt is a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.

Okay, that's comment one from Paul Krugman. I'd like to combine that with this quote from Executive Order issued July 17, 2007

(i) to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:

(A) threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq; or

(B) undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people;

(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or

(iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.

(b) The prohibitions in subsection (a) of this section include, but are not limited to, (i) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order, and (ii) the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.

Now by my interpretation of this, it seems that Hunt Oil's move to create a separate plan with the Kurdish provincial government clearly undermines the efforts to create a unified Iraqi government. That would appear to be in violation of the executive order. Of course since Ray Hunt is a good buddy of W, and part of his Advisory Board, there's no way in hell that's going to go anywhere.

What I can say with 100% certainty however is whether or not any law was broken, this is a HUGE conflict of interest for Hunt to be involved in both sides of this.

San Jose Mercury News - Bush ally's Kurdish oil deal proves the surge has failed

A Polk County judge on Thursday struck down Iowa's law banning gay marriage.

The ruling by Judge Robert Hanson concluded that the state's prohibition on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional and he ordered the Polk County recorder to issue marriage licenses to six gay couples.

That's ain't them damn liberals in Massachewsetts doin' this. It's pig raisin' country!

Update Having now read the opinion, the following line really stands out.

"So far as this court can tell, (symbol thingy I don't have a key for)595.2(1) operates only to harm same-sex couples and their children."

(underline in the original p.55)

That sounds pretty damning to me...

Gay Marriage in Iowa? Yep! - DesMoinesRegister.com

At every stage since his capture, in a taxi bound for the Afghan-Pakistan border, Hicks had crossed a legal landscape that Cheney did more than anyone to reshape. He was Detainee 002 at Guantanamo Bay, arriving on opening day at an asserted no man's land beyond the reach of sovereign law. Interrogators questioned him under guidelines that gave legal cover to the infliction of pain and fear -- and, according to an affidavit filed by British lawyer Steven Grosz, Hicks was subjected to beatings, sodomy with a foreign object, sensory deprivation, disorienting drugs and prolonged shackling in painful positions.

The U.S. government denied those claims, and before accepting Hicks's guilty plea it required him to affirm that he had "never been illegally treated."

Part 2 of the Washington Post's piece on Cheney and where we are now. Required reading.

Pushing the Envelope on Presidential Power | Cheney | washingtonpost.com

Since the mass firings were carried out three months ago, Justice Department officials have consistently portrayed them as personnel decisions based on the prosecutors' "performance-related" problems. But, yesterday, officials acknowledged that the ousters were based primarily on the administration's unhappiness with the prosecutors' policy decisions and revealed the White House's role in the matter.

I think this has been expected by some of us for quite some time.

White House Backed U.S. Attorney Firings, Officials Say - washingtonpost.com

Nine black children attending schools in northwestern Louisiana's Red River Parish were directed last week to the back of a school bus by a white driver who designated the front seats for white children, the mother of one of the children said.

"All nine children were assigned to two seats in the back of the bus and the older ones had to hold the smaller ones in their laps," Iva Richmond, mother of two of the children, told The Associated Press on Thursday.

No, never heard a no Rosa Parks. Nope.

*headdesk*
*sigh*
speechless
i want Rosa Parks to rest in peace and not spin in her grave
back of the bus wtf
even sarcasm eludes me
for shame America

Louisiana mom: School bus driver ordered blacks to back of bus

And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women and if people aren’t involved in helping godly men in getting elected than we’re going to have a nation of secular laws. That’s not what our founding fathers intended and that’s certainly isn’t what God intended.

Actually, that is exactly what they intended. The majority of the founding fathers are best described as deists, but more to the point, they were already fully aware of the issues of sectional fighting with the wars between England and France being in great part about religion, and they were all "Christian" of one sort or another. In Revolutionary America there were already multiple groups, and the only way they could see the government operating was if it were secular.

She does get one point right though, it does look like "Florida is the forerunner state." It was the first recent state where the actual election results were tossed out, and led the way for places like Ohio.

There's a God, and he's looking at what this nut job is doing, and wondering how He can arrange to have a ship fall on her. Like, ark size...

the only way they could see the government operating was if it were secular.

they knew their English and European history and its catalogue of religious warfare, suppression of religious minorities and intolerance
the architecture of the United States body politic was the radical application of individual liberty and reason
i don't think people like the quoted understand how radical the constitution was or its wider historical context specifically the religious turmoil of 17th and 18th centuries note the Spanish Inquisition, the English Civil War - John Locke - 1688 the Glorious Revolution and conflicts within England regarding the Established Church and the issue of Catholic Emancipation, the 30 years war

Katherine Harris