here is a thing about being poor
and here is a different thing about being really poor.

i want america to be more fair, but it's a lot better than the third world.

in other news, barack obama is doing well in Iowa.

in other other news, the City of Provo is going to keep everyone from parking on the street south of campus.

waterboarding

sure sounds like a fun sport.

The guy that wants to be nominated Attorney General thinks so, too.

Mukasey isn't sure that it is torture. Or illegal. I read that interrogators in WWII felt bad about giving expensive dinners to Nazi prisoners and tricking them into giving up information.

the california fires were a little boy's fault

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Officials blamed a wildfire that consumed more than 38,000 acres and destroyed 21 homes last week on a boy playing with matches, and said they would ask a prosecutor to consider the case.

The boy admitted to sparking the fire on Oct. 21, Los Angeles County sheriff's Sgt. Diane Hecht said Tuesday. Ferocious winds helped it quickly spread.

"He admitted to playing with matches and accidentally starting the fire," Hecht said in a statement.

Police did not release the boy's name. Los Angeles County fire Capt. Michael Brown only would say Wednesday that he was younger than 13.

The boy was released to his parents, and the case will be presented to the district attorney's office, Hecht said. It was not clear if he had been arrested or cited by detectives.

Arson investigators first talked to the boy's parents on Oct. 22 after determining the blaze began the day before in the back yard of their Agua Dulce home, Brown said.

The home was not damaged in the fire, Brown said.

the navy accidentally dropped a practice bomb. luckily it wasn't the air force who accidentally toted around nuclear missiles when they were supposed to have practice bombs.

the fake news

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/29/AR2007102901904.html?nav=rss_print/asection

The Federal Emergency Management Agency's director of external communications was denied a post as senior spokesman for Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell yesterday, becoming the highest-ranking casualty of a fake news conference staged by FEMA last week to publicize its response to California's devastating wildfires.

The flap is not the first time FEMA or its parent Department of Homeland Security has been on the wrong end of a public relations move that backfired. Rather, it fits a pattern in which domestic security officials have mismanaged the public presentation of their efforts, whether those efforts are going well or poorly.

Public relations is an obsession of senior department leaders, who say that public safety and counterterrorism efforts depend on their credibility. But DHS has repeatedly stumbled, most devastatingly when its leaders' reassuring words clashed with chaotic television images of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.