The Nightowl Newswrap - a roundup of news you might have missed

Historians see little chance for McCain A week into the general election and the polls say that the race is a dead heat, but presidential scholars see little chance for the republican candidate in November, and offer a litany of comparisons to base their prediction on. Several harken back to 1932, when Roosevelt mopped the floor with Hoover and think Obama has the best shot of any Democrat to run for the oval since that election.


Mark Warner puts VP rumors to rest. He wants to represent Virginia in the Senate. Democrats who want a 60-Democrat Senate heaved a sigh of relief heard cross the land.


Classy We have no patience for foam-flecked wingnuts but we manage to disagree without calling for the murder of those with whom we disagree. Not so Michael Reagan. The wingnut son of the faltering old fool went on a tirade on the June 10th edition of his nationally syndicated radio show and called Mark Dice and members of the "9/11 Truth" movement "traitors" - but that was just the warmup...“We ought to find the people who are doing this,” Reagan said, “take ‘em out, and shoot ‘em. Really. Just find the people who are sending those letters…to demoralize our troops…they are traitors to this country…and shoot them. You have a problem with that? Deal with it. But anybody who would do that doesn’t deserve to live. You call them traitors–that’s what they are–and you shoot ‘em dead. I’ll pay for the bullet. How about you take Mark Dice out,” Reagan continued, “and put him in the middle of the firing range? Tie him to a post, don’t blindfold him, and let it rip and have some fun with Mark Dice.” Reagan has reportedly apologized, but so what? Advocating political assassination on the public airwaves is a matter for the FCC and the FBI to look into. I don't care who says it or who they say it about.


So? I hate to be the buzzkill, and nothing good ever comes to pass when that damned AQ Khan is part of the mix - but plans for nuclear warheads are pretty much readily available. The U.S. government at one point had them posted on a government site - in Arabic! I would be far more concerned about detailed plans to make "suitcase dirty bombs" being discovered in the hands of terrorists and smugglers than I am about plans for a frickin' warhead they have no facilities or infrastructure to manufacture. Makes for good fearmongering among the sheeple, tho.


The Brits know how to roll out the red carpet for a war criminal! Hundreds of protesters filled Parliament Square shortly before that waste of skin aWol bu$h showed up for dinner at 10 Downing Street.

Um, Carly? We know your work - and we know how many people you put out of work running HP into the ground. But good luck with the whole courting women voters to the McCain camp thing anyway.

New proposal would increase access for disabled Finally, after almost eight years, we are seeing some compassion from the bu$h administration as they push for increased access to public facilities for the disabled. Of course, we have a few thousand more disabled people than we used to have, thanks to the bullheaded idiot in the oval, so yeah, his administration should be pushing this. And he should spend the rest of his life pushing wheelchairs at the VA.


Points for trying to get it right early on GM is going to great lengths to plan plug-in hybrids around American lifestyles to make the decision to go electric easier for consumers. "Most consumers wouldn't sacrifice a radio for more electric range," the president of GM told those in attendance at an electric car convention. "We're taking those needs into account as we develop the vehicle."


Karzai makes an empty threat Afghan president Hamid Karzai threatened to send soldiers into Pakistan and taunted Baitullah Mehsud and Mullah Omar, who has been operating from the tribal areas of Pakistan since 2001. Of course, this is the same president whose forces couldn't secure a prison and the Taliban overran it and freed hundreds of prisoners, many of them Taliban militants.


They call him "The Angel of Sangzao" after every single student in Sangzao Middle School survived last months devastating earthquake in Sichuan province. School principal Ye Zhiping was nervous about the shoddy construction of the structure and raised the money to shore up the building over the last three years, and it was sixty grand well spent. While every student in that school was spared, at least ten thousand others were not so lucky, and were crushed to death in their classrooms.


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