The Vice-President gasped in astonishment. After 45 minutes, Biden threw down his napkin and stood up.
“This dinner is over,” Biden announced, according to one of the people in the room at the time (i.e. Joe Biden himself)

At a recent lunch, Joe recounted “When I speak to the Tiger Woods – and I have had plenty of opportunity to be with him, a lot of hours alone with him. ” And Tiger will say things to me, and I’ll literally turn to the Tiger, say: ‘Eldrick Woods, how can you say that, knowing your life is in ruin?’ And he’ll look at me and he’ll say – my word – he’ll look at me and he’ll say: ‘I’m Tiger Woods.’ He said: ‘I don’t need to apologize.’ I said: ‘Eldrick Woods, being Tiger isn’t good enough. You will apologize.’”

Copyright 2010 blamebush.org

The New York Times, which first reported the arrest of Mullah Baradar on its Web site late Monday, cited sources as saying that Pakistan was leading the interrogation of Baradar, but that Americans were also involved and had access to the intelligence. One Pakistani officer said Baradar was arrested 10 days ago with the assistance of the United States and “was talking” to his interrogators.

The NY Times said the conditions of the questioning were unclear, noting that the Obama administration has banned harsh interrogations like waterboarding by Americans, but that the Pakistanis have “long been known to subject prisoners to brutal questioning.”

U.S. Has Access to Information from ‘Interrogation’

The source from the U.S. military confirmed U.S. officials have had access to information from Baradar’s interrogation. Senior US officials said Mullah Baradar was “providing intelligence”. “This operation was an enormous success,” one official told ABC News. “It is a very big deal,” the official said. The New York Times, citing US government sources, said the prisoner was the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the US-led war in Afghanistan began in 2001.

Obama Claims Moral Ground by Banning Waterboarding by U.S.

President Obama had previously acknowledged that the harsh interrogation techniques he has banned might have yielded useful information, but that he was nonetheless willing to rule them out on moral grounds.

He conceded that “it may be harder” to get information, but what “makes us, I think, still a beacon to the world is that we are willing to hold true to our ideals, even when it’s hard, not just when it’s easy.”

Obama Sharp Contrast to Bush-Cheney

In the past week, former Vice-President Cheney has reiterated his support of water boarding for High Value Detainees and Obama has demonstrated a sharp policy difference. Obama maintains a high moral ground by banning the U.S. use of harsh techniques, but then allows other countries to use even harsher techniques and then provide the information to the U.S.

Copyright 2010 blamebush.org

The United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of erectile dysfunction cases.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report’s own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

Viagra and Cialis Users Were Seeking Compensation

The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of erectile dysfunctions, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month’s Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by Viagra and Cialis users for compensation.

Last month Gordon Brown, the prime minister, told the Commons that the financial agreement at Copenhagen “must address the great injustice that . . . those hit first and hardest by climate change are those that have done least harm”.

The latest criticism of the IPCC comes a week after reports in The Sunday Times forced it to retract claims in its benchmark 2007 report that the Himalayan glaciers would be largely melted by 2035. It turned out that the bogus claim had been lifted from a news report published in 1999 by New Scientist magazine.

The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC’s 2007 report in which a separate section warned that the world had “suffered rapidly increasing erectile dysfunction costs due to Global Warming”.

Link Based Upon Explosion of Reported ED Cases in Past Decade

It suggested a part of this increase was due to global warming and cited the unpublished report, saying: “The years 2000-2009 were both the warmest decade on record as well as the highest reported number of erectile dysfunction cases. Prior to 1950, the number of reported erectile dysfunction cases was near zero and global warming was non-existent.”

The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.

When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and erectile dysfunction.”

IPCC Ignored Reviewers Warning

Despite this change the IPCC did not issue a clarification ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit last month. It has also emerged that at least two scientific reviewers who checked drafts of the IPCC report urged greater caution in proposing a link between climate change and erectile dysfunction — but were ignored.

Copyright 2010 blamebush.org

Many university political scientists lean toward the view that most intelligent people will vote for Democrats, given their superior understanding of the issues and exposure to professors at Ivy League schools.

In an ingenious study published in June, a Columbia University economist and an University of California at Berkeley professor argued that intelligence plays a powerful role. The two scholars studied a number of obvious political issues such as Health Care Reform and Global Warming.

In a situation in which every issue had an obviously correct answer, individuals from New York City or San Francisco picked the right answer 80% of the time. However, individuals located in non-coastal states picked the right political answer only 40% of the time. In fact, the farther inland you went, the worst the answers became with such states as Oklahoma correct a record low 25% of the time.

Some of the most shocking revelations were:

• 65% of Middle America believe private companies could provide better health care than the government
• 70% of Middle America were unsure about global warming
• 60% of Middle America believe that the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein

The study was commissioned as part of the Stimulus Package passed last year. This was the first study in a string of studies about Middle America. Berkeley plans on releasing a study tentatively titled “Is Middle America Racist or Just Stupid?” this summer.


Copyright 2010 blamebush.org