Of course, Texas A&M QB Jerrod Johnson -- the overwhelming preseason favorite -- retains a strong lead in early polling, even after A&M's 46-19 humiliation last week at the hands of a mediocre Arkansas team.
The Greatest Round Ever Played!
No lesser authority than Pyongyang Golf Club's resident professional, Park Young Man, together with Kim's 17 armed bodyguards, can attest that Kim played the full eighteen, all holed out, off the back tees on a crisp autumn morning in October 1994. "He is an excellent golfer," said Mr. Park.
The Dear Leader, faithful to the national philosophy of 'Juche', or self-reliance, has never had a lesson. Indeed, his heroic 38 under par score was his first and only round of golf! When he learned that this was a full 25 strokes better than any other human had ever achieved, far from being tempted to take the game up seriously, he decided that there were greater challenges to his intellect and atheletic ability, and has not touched a club since.
In search of an 'official' comment, we went to US PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem. Seemingly embarrassed by our questions, Finchem finally, and grudgingly, broke the code of silence, putting a very different spin on the story. "Yes, it's an amazing achievement, but he's just too good. We don't want him over here. We're lucky he's got a day job as a ruthless tyrant and a fully paid up international terrorist. Otherwise this man could be really evil if he was let loose on the guys on tour - he'd nuke 'em for sure!"
Yet, even without revealing his secret to the world, the little man with bad hair from North Korea has done the golfing world a great service. For as the debate about the impact of technology on the modern game rages, as journeyman pros wonder if they can ever hope to compete with Tiger Woods, and as experts predict that Tiger himself may lose interest in the game because of the lack of serious competition, we can see that there is no need to worry. Until today's so-called 'Masters of the Game' can shave substantially more than a shot a hole off their best ever scores, the ultimate challenge of the lowest round will remain out there. Knocking Kim Jong-Il off the top of the Dear Leaderboard will not be easy.
(New York) Commissioner of Baseball Allan H. (Bud) Selig this morning shocked the sporting world by awarding the 2009 World Series Championship to the Grass Valley T-Bones, a slo-pitch softball team owned by little known political blogger Nickie Goomba."My daughter came into my bedroom and told me we had won the World Series. I guess that Kraut bastard Selig can now sleep at night without looking over his shoulder. Of course I'm surprised. I never expected this award, but it's not about me. It's about Nickie Goomba's team. There's no "I" in Nickie Goomba."
The team's star Pitcher, 63-year old Daisy "Pops" Cutter, best summed up the T-Bones' collective response by raising a withered liver-spotted finger and declaring "We're Number One!"
We want simple wisdom and we get the lightless Jack-o'-Lantern head of Dick Durbin, the brute stupidity of John Kerry, or the slobbering hackery of Tom Harkin or Arlen Specter. Add your names: the 10W-30 Chuck Schumer, the bug-eyed, blue-blazered Lindsey Graham, the silver-suited senile Robert Byrd, the post-mortem pallor with personality to match of John McCain, the sleazy, carpet-bagging old-money Rockefeller or the permanent Tiki head vapidity of Mitch McConnell. And when they aren't shameless, grunting swindlers like Rangel, or forehead-slappingly stupid like Maxine Waters, the best you can say is that they have the qualifications of warm doorstops.
Howling into your pillow is faint relief for your nausea and disgust. Every revolution is preceded by the desertion of the middle class - desertion not from the country but from the incompetence, guile and degradation of those who would steal from and rule you, rather than govern. That's where it starts. It doesn't matter if some of them are better than others. Get rid of all of them.
I am told quite reliably that in a meeting today on Capitol Hill, Republican Senators began to rapidly move toward concessions on health care because they are afraid they cannot hold their members. Some Republicans are now thinking of supporting a government program.
Go to the action center and start calling.
Already, Senate Democrats are looking to pass healthcare by attaching it to unrelated legislation — the back door Brian Darling has repeatedly warned us about.
Republicans are starting to waver on this.
Call now. Tell the GOP to stand firm in opposition to the Democrats’ health care plans.
h/t Ace of Spades HQMajority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is weighing a plan to bring the final health care bill to the floor without a public option -- making it much easier to get the 60 votes needed to prevent a Republican filibuster -- and then adding the provision later as an amendment.
The public option amendment would be there waiting, but the 60-vote test would technically be on a bill without the government plan. Then moderate Democrats could drop out for the vote on the public option, which requires just 51 votes for passage."It's brilliant," said a top Senate Republican aide. "It gets you your votes on cloture for a package that does not include a public option."
Reid has not revealed whether he will use this tactic, but he's considering it.
"We haven't made any decisions yet," his spokesman, Jim Manley, said. "We have different options -- that is one."Senate aides suggest that after passage in the upper chamber, the Senate bill -- public option included -- could then be sent to the House, allowing the lower chamber to simply pass Reid's legislation instead of taking up its own bill. That route would avoid a protracted and contentious battle to meld two different bills and might allow President Obama and Democrats to achieve their goal of passing health care reform by year's end.
Open-government proponents slammed the tactic, saying it would be a bait-and-switch gambit for the Senate to put forward a bill without a public insurance option, only to slip it in later.
A group of eight Democrats today asked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for the health care reform bill to be posted online for 72 hours before a vote on the measure and once again before a vote on the conference report that will meld the House and Senate versions.
The senators told Reid that health care reform should be more transparent and easier for their constituents to understand. A CBS poll released last month showed that two-thirds of Americans say the issue is confusing and just 31 percent say they have a clear understanding of what reform will mean for their own care.
The senators wrote, "At a time when trust in Congress and the U.S. government is unprecedentedly low, we can begin to rebuild the American people's faith in their federal government through transparency and by actively inviting Americans to participate in the legislative process."
When he introduced his idea, Bunning said, "Quite frankly, I think Americans are tired us us taking the easy way out, tired of us not reading or having the time to read the bills. They expect more from us and we should deliver it." The Democrats are asking Reid to deliver on all three of Bunning's suggestions.
When Bunning introduced his amendment last month, Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) accused him of trying to stall progress on health care reform and the committee rejected the amendment.
Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) crossed party lines to vote for it and took the lead on circulating the letter among her colleagues this week. Seven other moderate Democrats signed on: Evan Bayh of Indiana, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Joe Lieberman (independent Democrat) of Connecticut, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Jim Webb of Virginia.
"We believe the American public's participation in this process is critical to our overall success of creating a bill that lowers health care costs and offers access to quality and affordable health care for all Americans," the letter concluded. The Finance Committee has posted the final version of its bill online prior to the committee vote, but the bill has not yet been scored by the CBO and remains in conceptual, rather than legislative, language.
When the California city of Franklin Falls dug up a time capsule over the weekend, officials were amazed at how well the contents and the box that contained the artifacts had aged.
Pope John Paul II graced the Time cover of April 11, 2005. Inside was an advertisement for a new Ford F150 truck that listed for $21,835.
The "Four Years of Greatness" celebration in Cap McCrarey Park, which included a parade and fireworks, was attended by about 40 people, Maglie said.
A Training Event
Three Americans - two of them women - won the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine for work that used simple pond organisms to uncover a key part of the aging process in our own cells.
FIRE UP THE PHONES, MELT THE FAXES
Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, has been canvassing centrist Democrats to explore ways they might support a new government plan. "I have talked to every one of our conservative members, and they are open to some kind of public option," he told reporters recently.By Noam N. Levey and Janet Hook
And at a closed-door meeting of Senate Democrats last Tuesday, Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin, D-Ill., marshaled polling data that in dozens of districts represented by conservative Democrats, a majority said they would back a requirement that Americans get health insurance as long as there was a public option.
Among those regularly in the meetings are Obama's top health care adviser, Nancy-Ann DeParle, aides to Reid, and Senate finance and health committee staff, both of which developed health care bills.
It also marks a critical test of Obama's command of the inside game in Washington in which deals are struck behind closed doors and wavering lawmakers are cajoled and pressured into supporting major legislation.
We had them everywhere in Vietnam. Tiny ones, and even big ones, like the Westmoreland blunder known as Khe Sanh. Many of their brave occupants, of all branches, simply disappeared. Their bodies were never found and their horrid last moments imagined like a tongue probing a painful tooth.
Today, we are, at home, a nation petrified in our cultural defenses by liberal multiculturalism, political correctness and doubt. We send our beautiful young to die in a struggle against Islamists (anyone who protests that word can go to hell)in a place and for a people not worth a single American life. In that place, the people have dragged their hideous metaphysics unmodified from century to century, and now our blood is soaking their soil to either defend their choices or alter their path. Which one is it?
The general has responded with a series of candid interviews as well as the speech. He told Newsweek he was firmly against half measures in Afghanistan: "You can't hope to contain the fire by letting just half the building burn."Alex Spillius of The Telegraph
Asked if the president had told the general to tone down his remarks, he told CBS: "I wasn't there so I can't answer that question. But it was an opportunity for them to get to know each other a little bit better. I am sure they exchanged direct views."
Stage 1. When the process begins, and interested cities are to make known their intention to compete for the Olympic Games, those cities must bribe everybody in site. Effective bribes include vehicles, houses, jobs, cash, securities, girls, boys, and even political favors. This is the easiest and least demeaning stage of the process. Eventually, the list of 'most attractive' cities is whittled down to four. This is when Stage Two begins.
Stage 2. You begin bribing again. The amounts get larger, and the giving of these bribes must be accompanied by hollow flattery and energetic ass-kissing. These transactions are often made more difficult by the necessity of laughing at coarse jokes while humoring the greediest pack of assembled international prostitutes since Idi Amin's Annual Golf Tournament & Clambake. In the end, the city most skilled in bribery wins the Olympic nod.
Chicago was outbribed by Tokyo. Japan is a country only 25 miles long and 6 miles wide with a population of 430 million people. They can barely supply their citizens with raw fish and noodles but, still, even Tokyo made Chicago (and Obama) look like a schoolgirl nervously gripping a bouquet of daisies.
These guys used to bribe politicians and mucky-mucks as effectively as I clean a fried chicken drumstick. C'mon!! Obama shows up to this Copenhagen showdown with Oprah and his wife there to provide muscle.
