the things you believe you're seeing...

Note to Time magazine;

How disgusting...and the mother went along with the idea, no doubt it was her idea all along... Girl won Hannah Montana tickets with fake essay GARLAND, Texas (AP) — An essay that won a 6-year-old girl four tickets to a Hannah Montana concert began with the powerful line: "My daddy died this year in Iraq." While gripping, it was not true — and now the girl may lose her tickets after her mom acknowledged to contest organizers it was all a lie. The sponsor of the contest was Club Libby Lu, a Chicago-based store that sells clothes, accessories and games intended for young girls. The saga began Friday with company officials surprising the girl at a Club Libby Lu at a mall in suburban Garland, about 20 miles northeast of Dallas. The girl won a makeover that included a blonde Hannah Montana wig, as well as the grand prize: airfare for four to Albany, N.Y., and four tickets to the sold-out Hannah Montana concert on Jan. 9. The mother had told company officials that the girl's f...

Could this be what causes the media to turn against Huckabee? Huckabee's muzzle control problem by Jim Tankersley Republican Mike Huckabee took his presidential campaign for a quick pheasant-hunting expedition in Iowa on Wednesday, and at one point, a reporter asked why he hadn’t invited sporting enthusiast Dick Cheney along. "Because I want to survive all the way through this," Huckabee replied, in a chuckling dig at the vice president’s accidental shooting of a quail-hunting partner last year. Any good sportsman, though, couldn’t miss a distinctly Cheneyesque moment in the press accounts of the former Arkansas governor’s morning hunt: At one point, Huckabee’s party turned toward a cluster of reporters and cameramen and, when they kicked up a pheasant, fired shotgun blasts over the group’s heads. This, friends, is dangerously bad hunting form. Your Swamp correspondent, the son of a longtime hunter education instructor, grew up plying the corn rows and stream banks of rur...

I wonder if Mika's friend is the infamous "Tommy" of Harry Reid... BRZEZINSKI: I agree with you Joe. I actually hear the same thing among my circles that I've been talking to about the story. Having said that though, the one thing that does come to my mind, when you look at this campaign, and you look at all the different choices out there, and all the different visions in terms of what our place should be in the world, I just wonder if some voters will look back at post-9/11, and I have a friend who made a decision right after 9-11, holding her baby, in the polling booth, and she decided to vote for George W. Bush because she thought she would, quote, be safer. She now regrets that decision because she doesn't feel like America is safer and she feels like this President has brought us down a path which is leading us to this very moment right here, which is massive destabilization in Pakistan . Ah Mika, Bush was already president after 9/11 so are you talking ab...

I'm sure Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi had more important things to do, like maybe another non-binding resolution on Iraq... IRS: Late Tax Fix Delays Refunds By JESSE J. HOLLAND – 14 hours ago WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 3 million people will have to wait until February to get their tax refunds because of Congress' late fix to the alternative minimum tax, the IRS said Thursday. Congress put a one-year freeze on growth of the alternative minimum tax last week, shielding many middle- and upper-middle income taxpayers from first exposure to the tax. But Congress' late action means the Internal Revenue Service won't be able to start processing five AMT-related forms until February, delaying potential refunds for those people until that month. Between 3 million and 4 million people filed in January for their 2006 taxes using those forms, with many expecting a refund, the IRS said. The average refund was $2,324, the agency said. "We regret the inconvenience the delay will ...

Clinton's "don't ask" policy As she races through Iowa in the days before next week's caucuses, Hillary Clinton is taking few chances. She tells crowds that it’s their turn to “pick a president,’’ but over the last two days she has not invited them to ask her any questions. Before the brief Christmas break, the New York senator had been setting aside time after campaign speeches to hear from the audience. Now when she’s done speaking, her theme songs blare from loudspeakers, preventing any kind of public Q&A. She was no more inviting when a television reporter approached her after a rally on Thursday and asked if she was “moved’’ by Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Clinton turned away without answering. Her daughter, Chelsea, had the same reaction when a reporter approached her with a question. Hillary Clinton’s no-question policy didn’t sit well with some of the Iowans who came to see her speak. “I was a little bit underwhelmed,’’ said Doug Rohde, 46, as he le...

Has Huck joined the blame America first crowd? With about 150 supporters crowded around a podium set up on the tarmac of Orlando Executive airport (and about 20 Ron Paul supporters waving signs outside) Mike Huckabee strode out to the strains of “Right Now” by Van Halen and immediately addressed the Bhutto situation, expressing “our sincere concern and apologies for what has happened in Pakistan.”

From the Des Moines Register; Webster City, Ia. – Barack Obama told an audience here that, as president, he would use his position to promote higher education. “We’ve got a president who brags about ‘I was a C student, look at me. I got to be president and I can’t pronounce stupider.’ That’s not the message we want for the White House.” The crowd laughed. Are we now back to how the president pronounces words as a qualification?

NFL Network To Simulcast Pats-Giants On CBS, NBC Patriots To Go For Record In First 3-Network Simulcast In NFL History NEW YORK (CBS) ― The New England Patriots' shot at history Saturday night will be available for every household in the country with a television after months of wrangling. The game against the New York Giants, in which the Patriots could become the first NFL team to go 16-0 in the regular season, was originally scheduled to be shown only on the NFL Network, which is available in fewer than 40 percent of the nation's homes with TVs. But the league announced Wednesday that the NFL Network feed will be simulcast on NBC and CBS. It's a major concession by league officials, who repeatedly said they would not show the game anywhere but the NFL Network. The NFL had faced mounting pressure from politicians in recent weeks to make the game available to more viewers. This will be the first three-network simulcast in NFL history and the first simulcast of any kind of ...

Oh brother...Well first the economy is going quite well thank you very much. But the LA Times decides to kill two birds with one stone ...a bad economy is linked to the flow of illegal immigrants beginning to lessen. Of course! It can't have anything to do with stepped up enforcement and the passing of stricter laws against employers, could it? Nah! Tide of illegal immigrants ebbs By Marla Dickerson, Los Angeles Times MEXICO CITY - Lorenzo Martinez, an illegal immigrant who has lived in Los Angeles for six years, has a message for his kin in Mexico's Hidalgo state: Stay put. The steady construction work that allowed him to send home as much as $1,000 a month in recent years has disappeared. The 36-year-old father of four said desperation is growing among the day laborers with whom he competes for odd jobs. Sporadic employment isn't the half of it. Martinez said anxiety is also running high among undocumented workers about stepped-up workplace raids, deportations and i...

Miss France chief wants to strip queen of crown Fri Dec 21, 2007 7:08pm GMT PARIS (Reuters) - The president of the Miss France beauty pageant said on Friday she wanted the winner of the 2008 competition to hand back her crown after a magazine published suggestive photographs of the 22-year old model. "If she had some courage and a bit of dignity she would say 'I'm resigning because I'm not worthy to carry on as Miss France'," the head of the Miss France committee, Genevieve de Fontenay, told Europe 1 radio. Valerie Begue, who comes from the French-run, Indian Ocean island of Reunion, was elected Miss France 2008 on prime time television earlier this month. She has ruled out standing down, saying the pictures were published without her consent. The photos showed the bikini-clad brunette floating in a swimming pool on a wooden cross in a Christ-like pose. Another one showed her licking condensed milk in a provocative fashion. Anyone standing for the Miss France...

Based on the placement of the story in today's NY Times that assessment seems accurate... Hot Air » Blog Archive » Rudy’s security expenses scandal turns out to be mostly crap?

But will the media report it? .: U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works :: Minority Page :.

The Washington Post highlights the Dems failures ( and some successes ) during their first year back in control of Congress. Talking about Iraq, this last paragraph seems rather odd... Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the Senate Democratic whip tasked with trying to find 60 votes for a filibuster-proof majority, acknowledged this week that Democrats' biggest failure stemmed from expecting " more Republicans to take an independent stance" on Iraq. Instead, most of them stood with Bush. "Many of them will have to carry that with them into the election," Durbin said. Since the surge has produced a remarkable turnaround in Iraq and it appears that trend will contiue in 2008, I would think that Republicans that stood by Bush and his Iraq surge policy will be more than happy to trumpet that fact. Durbin's statement illustrates exactly what the problem the Democrats face is. They have so deeply invested themselves in defeat in Iraq that they are unable to admit t...

I thought Jamie Lynn would see the errors of her sister's ways and not take the same road...Well, not so fast; Jamie Lynn Spears says she's pregnant Wed Dec 19, 6:47 AM ET NEW YORK - Another Spears baby is reportedly on the way — and it's not Britney's. Jamie Lynn Spears, the 16-year-old "Zoey 101" star and sister of Britney, told OK! magazine that she's pregnant and that the father is her boyfriend, Casey Aldridge. "It was a shock for both of us, so unexpected," she said. "I was in complete and total shock and so was he." Spears is 12 weeks along and initially kept the news to herself when she learned of the pregnancy from an at-home test and subsequent doctor visit, she told the celebrity magazine, which hits stands in New York on Wednesday and the rest of the country by Friday. What message does she want to send to other teens about premarital sex? "I definitely don't think it's something you should do; it's better ...

Well thats rather strong; Wyoming's Democratic Party chairman says that Hillary Clinton will "completely reverse" progress the party has made in that state and that " most voters in Wyoming seem to hate Hillary Clinton ."

"I'm doctor not a writer!"

Notice how remarkably calm everyone else is...