Tuesday, September 30, 2008


The Nightowl Newswrap

MOMocrats hosted a very special guest blogger today Michelle Obama!

Call Brokaw out for the lying hack he is Sunday on Meet the Press, Brokaw not only gave himself the last word, but he made up the bit he cited in doing so. He's a shameless hack, and you can click the link and get all the details, then send along a complaint about his shameless hackery.

Manufactured outrage of the day: "An Obama aid took a swipe at McCain's age!" Horseshit. And even if he did, so fuckin' what? At the same time Sarah Palin was taking shots at Biden for being in the Senate since she was eight years old.

Michael Bloomberg really wants to keep his Mayor gig The position is term limited, and Bloomberg is serving his second term right now, but he wants to keep the job so he has decided to try to reverse the term-limits law he has long supported.


Mitch McConnell Turning Down Debates Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (KY), who has found himself in some uncomfortably close polls against Dem businessman Bruce Lunsford, is refusing to debate. The campaign has rejected an invitation from the League of Women Voters and has not responded to one from Kentucky Educational Television, saying only that they'll hold a debate with the Paducah Sun in late October. A little background on the Paducah Sun...it is infamously and without rival the most fanatically wingnut republican rag in the Commonwealth. That Mitch is hiding under their petticoats is a good indication that he is scared shitless.

Pirates tell NY Times they just want the ransom They didn't know the Ukrainian vessel was carrying tanks and armaments, they seized it for ransom. Now they are blockaded by U.S. Navy ships and in a standoff that they aren't going to win.

AFL-CIO hits McCain on health care The mailer, which will go to over a million union members nationwide hits McCain hard and does so by drawing vivid contrasts.

MI6 secrets sold on eBay for £17 A second-hand Nikon Coolpix camera sold on eBay contained pictures, fingerprints and confidential documents relating to suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists on the memory card. The buyer discovered the material when he uploaded his holiday photos and immediately called the police, who at first treated it like a joke, then had a change of heart and swooped in on his house and seized his computer.

It's friend against friend in Alaska--not that case! The Stevens case!A longtime friend of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens crossed the powerful lawmaker Tuesday and testified that he gave the Republican senator thousands of dollars in gifts. The fiercely loyal Stevens gave no indication he even saw former fishing and drinking buddy Bill Allen enter the courtroom, and the two men barely looked at each other as Allen testified about the expensive gifts he gave Stevens during their 26-year friendship. You can't blame the old bastards. They don't want to go to jail.

Do you think there's a fucking problem in China? Anglo-Dutch food giant Unilever is recalling its Lipton-brand milk tea powder in Hong Kong and Macau after they were found to contain traces of a banned industrial chemical, the company said Tuesday. The recall of four batches of Lipton's 3-in-1 milk tea powder came after the company's internal quality check found melamine, used to make plastics and fertilizers, in the products, Unilever Hong Kong Ltd. said in a statement. The contaminated products used Chinese-made milk powder as raw material, said marketing director Sharon Hwang for Unilever Hong Kong. She declined to reveal which brand the company had used.

One of America's only currently service professional diplomats has a tough road ahead: US negotiator Christopher Hill on Tuesday predicted tough negotiations with North Korea as he prepared to leave for Pyongyang to try to save a crumbling nuclear disarmament deal. "I would say we are in a difficult and very tough phase of negotiations," he told reporters after talks with his South Korean counterpart Kim Sook.

It's not easy not being able to buy gas: Motorists are rising before dawn so they can be at the filling station when the delivery truck arrives. Some are skipping work or telecommuting. Others are taking the extreme step - for Atlanta - of switching to public transportation. Across a section of the South, a hurricane-induced gasoline shortage that was expected to last only a few days is dragging into its third week, and experts say it could persist into mid-October. The Atlanta area has been hit particularly hard, along with Nashville and western North Carolina.