BitchNews Headline News

A TIME inquiry finds that at top positions in some vital government agencies, the Bush Administration is putting connections before experience.

……..there are more than 3,000 positions a President can fill without consideration for civil service rules. And Bush has gone further than most Presidents to put political stalwarts in some of the most important government jobs you’ve never heard of, and to give them genuine power over the bureaucracy……..

Examples:
…..Internal e-mail messages obtained by TIME show that scientists’ drug-safety decisions at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are being second-guessed by a 33-year-old doctor turned stock picker. At the Office of Management and Budget, an ex-lobbyist with minimal purchasing experience oversaw $300 billion in spending, until his arrest last week………
See this Time article for more info

Is this what Bush preaches that a democratic society should act like, serving as example? Or does it remind you more of a surrealistic Banana Republic? Just hope the people wake up soon and smell the coffee! The US is loosing credibility in many ways lately and we can just hope time for a turnaround is dawning!

Michael D. Brown, the ousted director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, appeared before a House panel this morning and blamed Louisiana officials for “serious problems” in the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,000 people and caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damages on the Gulf Coast.
See this Washington Post article for more info

If they really wanted answers and results they would have done an independent investigation and not a partisan whitewash as some Democrats called this show.

And get this: even do he resigned he is still on the FEMA payroll as consultant, wonder what he consults about , how not to do things???

A new phishing method is targeting Yahoo users by recording their user name and password while logging them into a legitimate area of the portal, according to Websense, a Web security software firm.
See this report from PC World for more info

Cindy Sheehan, the grieving California mother of a soldier slain in Iraq, was arrested today while protesting the Iraq war outside the White House.
See this short Washington Post article for more info

As Germany’s political parties appear further away than ever from coming up with a workable governing coalition, Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel engage in a rather undignified tug of war over who should lead the country. Or maybe they both should? Amazingly this option is now being seriously discussed.
Spiegel Online highlights some excerpts from the German press

John Roberts, certain to win confirmation as the nation’s 17th chief justice, was hailed by Republicans as the “brightest of the bright” as the Senate on Monday began its first Supreme Court confirmation debate in more than a decade.

President Bush indicated earlier in the day he was already working on his next pick for the high court, hinting that his next nominee would be a woman or a minority, saying that “diversity is one of the strengths of the country.”

See this Washington Post page for more info

So whats your take who will be next in line?

It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.

Experts who have studied the US navy’s cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying ‘toxic dart’ guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet’s smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.
for more see this observer.guardian.co.uk article

Now is that a hoax or reality???

I think they need to reinvent themselves if they want to stay ahead, just see those 2 articles I quote below, for one , the web is becoming more and more the platform where things happen and that delivers applications that can be used online. For the second why pay huge amounts of money for the MS office programs if ya can have open source software for free that does the same job.

See:
Microsoft’s nightmare inches closer to reality.

As early as May 1995, three months before Netscape Communications’ initial public offering sparked the dot-com boom, Microsoft executives were worried that the nascent World Wide Web could one day become a significant threat to the Windows franchise.

In an extensive memo called “The Web is the Next Platform” that was introduced as evidence in Microsoft’s antitrust trial five years ago, Microsoft engineer Ben Slivka described a “nightmare” scenario for the software giant.

“The Web…exists today as a collection of technologies that deliver some interesting solutions today, and will grow rapidly in the coming years into a full-fledged platform (underlined for emphasis in the original memo) that will rival–and even surpass–Microsoft’s Windows,” Slivka wrote.
more here from this News.com article

Massachusetts Finalizes Plans to Phase Out Microsoft Office

The state of Massachusetts has finalized a proposed move to an open, nonproprietary format for office documents, a plan that involves phasing out versions of Microsoft’s Office productivity suite deployed in the state’s executive branch agencies.

Microsoft Office and other productivity suites such as Lotus Notes and WordPerfect that Massachusetts government agencies currently use support proprietary document formats. Suites that support OpenDocument include OpenOffice, StarOffice, KOffice, and IBM Workplace.

more here in this article via Yahoo News

The quiz is based on national consumption averages and is meant to give you an idea of your Ecological Footprint relative to other people in the country you live in. It is not highly detailed, but should give most people an idea of where they stand.

Heck need to improve, my result came back as:
IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 3.7 PLANETS.

Take the Ecological Footprint Quiz here