Many of you have already met Sparkles the Tweeking Mastodon...

...but do you know his/her back story?

Sparkles was born of a DNA recovery project completed in the late 1990s on the remains of a mastodon that emerged like tons of global heating-seduced methane from an area of Siberian permafrost not far from the mysterious Tunguska explosion of 1908.

Continued...

Here's a lovely little vignette:

Before beginning the drive, Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family's hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon's roof rack. He'd built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog.

Via Atrios and the Cox woman.  

There's more...

Our friend Rep. Henry Waxman has written another letter today, this time to Presidential counsel Fred Fielding (ahhh, memories of Watergate), and this time about the lax security that permeates the entire West Wing, not just Richard Bruce Cheney's curiously misplaced office.

Here are some highlights:

[Ms. Perino's] statements do not appear to be accurate.  After the Committee’s hearing in March into the disclosure of the identity of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, several former and current employees of the White House Security Office informed my staff of multiple White House violations of the rules for safeguarding classified information. If their statements are true, the White House has repeatedly disregarded basic requirements for protecting our national security secrets.

In 2004, the Office of the Vice President blocked inspectors from the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) of the National Archives from conducting an on-site inspection of the VP's White House office, although the ISOO was required to do under Executive Order 12958, signed by President Bush.

In explaining why they were blocking these inspectors, the Vice President's office, according to Henry Waxman, "asserted that the Office of the Vice President is not an 'entity within the executive branch' and hence is not subject to presidential executive orders."

Via Atrios.

I mean, I feel like I kinda sorta know the guy, but still Albert's frankness surprised me:

I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society.

The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate.

All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life.

Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

More...

December 5, 2006
Indictments Sought in Alleged Kidnapping
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:40 a.m. ET

MILAN, Italy (AP) -- A prosecutor Tuesday asked for the indictment of 26 Americans and Italian secret service officials on a charge of kidnapping an Egyptian cleric in Milan in 2003.

[snip]

All but one of the Americans have been identified by the prosecution as CIA agents, including former station chiefs in Rome and Milan, and the 26th as a U.S. Air Force officer stationed at the time at Aviano air base near Venice.

The request also names the former head of the Italian military intelligence agency SISMI Nicolo Pollari, his former deputy Marco Mancini, and three other secret service officials.

Suddenly I've seen the trailer on cable news three times tonight. I don't like this fucking movie one little bit.  It opens tomorrow, and it looks to me like the only thing that could possibly generate any sympathy at this late stage for our failed and still-failing Republican leaders.

As much as anything has smelled over the last six years -- and just about everything has -- this to me stinks to high heaven.

This isn't a Chicken Little diary, so I don't think a SYFP response is warranted (but that's up to you).  This isn't the end of the world.  

I just want to explore what our response should be to the release of a movie, eleven days before the 2006 election, graphically depicting the assassination of President George W. Bush.

On Scarborough Country they've got a "BREAKING NEWS" chyron across the bottom of the screen with NBC NEWS: GOP LEADER DEMANDS PROBE INTO ALLEGED FOLEY DRUNK DORM VISIT in smaller type underneath.

Here's how Scarborough opened his show tonight (I've transcribed it using TiVo):

"Hey good evening, thank you so much Keith, and we have some breaking news in this Mark Foley sex scandal, just moments ago we learned that a House Republican leader is calling for an investigation into alleged reports that Mark Foley visited page dorm room while drunk, had to be led away by police officers."

Scarborough then introduces NBC reporter Mike Viqueira .

More...

This evening the United States House of Representatives voted that, if you don't carry proof of citizenship to your polling place, you can't vote, beginning in November 2010.

Your driver's license will not count except in rare cases, because driver's licenses are issued to non-citizens in almost every state.

If you don't have a passport -- that is, I guess, if you're not wealthy enough to travel to foreign countries -- you'll have to get an Election ID from your state.

But by federal law, your Election ID won't be usable for anything but voting.

This is all in H.R. 4844, which passed the full United States House of Representatives tonight, by a partisan vote of 228-196.

[Update: Updated (how do you get that nifty Update: timestamp?) to strike all references to "birth certificates," which upon review do not qualify as "a photo ID proving citizenship" because... duh... they don't have photos. Is there anything other than a passport that qualifies?]

You did it.

Of course, it wasn't really you that did it -- your not being a leader and all -- it was more like all the people who listen to you, and all the people that listen to them, that did it.  

And then all the others, yeah yeah yeah...

But "My goodness," as Donald Rumsfeld would, and recently did, say.

My goodness.

You needed listening to from early on, young man.  I'm proud to be one who did.  And after all the near-misses and heartbreaks over the four years since the last midterm, I just wanted to say:

You won the big one.  The one that mattered.

You're in the Majors now.  And you've earned it.

As has everybody here.

(And I hope this thingie accepts an intro without body, because that's all I had to say.)

There's been a lot of bad blood around here recently, and I've already made most of the ancillary puns in the tags, so let me get right to my little story of freshly shed blood:

I gave again tonight, like many times before (i.e., I was stroked by the fact I couldn't give blood after 9/11 because I already had less than a month before), but tonight the fun was, I tried red cell apheresis for the first time.

Apparently, they've got two kinds of apheresis:  platelet and red cell.  (That short sentence is probably wrong a hundred ways, so I invite experts to revise and extend.)  

In apheresis, they take the really good parts out of your blood and put the rest back.

I'd heard about platelet apheresis, which takes a couple of hours and requires they put a needle in each arm, presumably labeled "IN" and "OUT" in Latin, and show you a movie... but I'd never heard of red cell apheresis, which only takes a little longer that giving the ol' pedestrian pint, but gets you hooked up to a literally cool machine, and earns you an extra-special button to wear...

According to CNN, the Army has confirmed an AP report that two U.S. soldiers initially announced as killed by enemy fire in June 2004 were in fact killed by Iraqi civil-defense officers patrolling with them.

The investigators found that one or more of the Iraqis attached to the American soldiers on patrol fired at them, a military official said Tuesday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the military did not plan to release the report until Wednesday.

[snip]

More...

Back during the Roberts confirmation I received about as many downratings as I've ever gotten, for suggesting that one of Roberts's greater strengths as a nominee was his gleaming whiteness.  The guy's face looks to me like it could have come right off of Third Reich poster (forgive me), and he's got the blonde wife and adopted blond kids to back it up (forgive me again).  My thesis was that this would make it harder for Democrats to oppose him.

It was a couple of weeks after Roberts was confirmed before I could do an analysis of our Democratic Senators' votes in relation to the whiteness of their state's populations, to see if I was right.  Because by then Roberts was already sworn in -- and because this issue stimulates very negative reactions and I didn't want to just stir up trouble for its own sake -- I never diaried what I found.

Because -- and only because-- there's now been an open invitation to discuss racial matters here on dKos, I'm gonna go ahead and put up my results, below the fold.

Just saw the story cross the AP, via the Times.   Nancy Reagan is again urging liberalization (pun intended) of Bush's stem cell edicts, and it looks like Billy Frist is going to take her up on it, and finally allow the Senate to debate the slightly merciful bill that passed the House last year.

Soon as I saw the story I went to Google News to check how old it was... and came upon the Baptist Press's coverage, which seems to have pre-dated the AP's.  

Odd.  Anyway, quotes from both below the fold...

I'm gonna keep this short, because... well, that's what us old-timers do.  If we say anything at all.

But I've noticed recently, in perusing the lists of recommenders -- at least I think I have -- the return of names not long seen here, that light many distant Happy Bulbs in my ever-darkening memory of the early days of Daily Kos.

(I recently stumbled across an e-mail I sent to Markos on some arcane and now quite forgotten topic in early February of 2003... that's what got me going...)

I know the story's already well-broken, and this is perhaps a bit thin as a diary subject, but I want to be sure this aspect is out here.

Through the magic of TiVo and my patience in replaying and transcribing that distasteful network, here's an original source telling us How Secure Our Homeland Really Is:  Polk County Florida Sheriff Grady Judd, as interviewed by CNN's Heidi Collins, commencing at 10:34 EST tonight, 4/4:

(Gotta put it below the fold to make this a diary... but it's worth it, I think)

If you're somehow not convinced yet that up is down, black is white, and dogs are cats, this should do it:

In the world we now inhabit, it is not John Kerry who is suing Carlton Sherwood, producer of "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal" (that hatchet job "documentary" that Sinclair Broadcasting wanted to show just before the election).

It is Carlton Sherwood suing John Kerry.

See below.

President Bush today is announcing a formal update to our nation's National Security Strategy.  The WaPo writes about it here.

Buried in that WaPo article is this single sentence about the President's responsibility to update our National Security Strategy:  

"Although a 1986 law requires that the strategy be revised annually, this is the first new version since 2002."

Below the fold, a clip from that law...