mostly for fizit...

Ani doing a new song on Conan O'Brien's show...


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(also trying out embedding of video clips...)

boingy boingy boingy boingy boingy boingy boingy boingy

And now I just need ALLL THE SUGAR IN THE WORLD. ALL OF IT. IT WILL BE MINE.

(no subject)

Not the Onion. Really. This guy is serious here:

I want to congratulate the attorneys who work with me at Landmark Legal Foundation for tenaciously pursuing the untold story of the systematic abuse of American MPs by the al-Qaeda terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. It took us a full year to bring this stunning information to light, but the truth is now out.

I'm not quite sure what to call this, though...

Despite the strains of the Iraq war, the Army today is "vastly better" and more capable now than it was two to eight years ago, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday.

"It has much more equipment, much better equipment, and it's better trained and more experienced, and it is a better Army," Rumsfeld said, at a briefing at the Pentagon. "Notwithstanding the fact that it is possible to look at some charts and show that something has changed."

Rumsfeld's remarks came just one day after Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said that more than two-thirds of the Army National Guard's brigades are not combat-ready primarily because of a $21 billion shortfall in equipment - most of it lost in the war.

Democrats in Congress are also sounding the alarm, accusing the Bush administration of not providing the Army with enough funds to cover operational demands and equipment losses. The Democrats say that a Bush administration cut of $4.9 billion from the Army's fiscal year 2006 supplemental request seriously undermines the Army's ability to replace equipment lost in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A letter released by Senate Democrats Tuesday from a national security group headed by William J. Perry, a defense secretary in the Clinton administration, said that none of the Army's available combat brigades are ready to deploy because of equipment shortages.

"The bottom line is that our army currently has no ready, strategic reserve," the group said. "Not since the Vietnam era and its aftermath has the Army's readiness been so degraded."

Separately, one defense analyst said Rumsfeld's comments gloss over how badly the war has affected the Army.

"Rumsfeld's assertion that this army is in a high state of readiness is yet another reflection of how detached he is from the realities of his own policies," said Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a policy research group in Arlington, Va. "Who can believe that this army is ready to take on additional responsibilities in Iran or Korea or any other place where it might be needed?

But Rumsfeld suggested that the problem was all a matter of perception.

Finally, Vanity Fair got hold of the actual tapes from NORAD on 9/11, and put together what actually happened. Suprise, suprise, Cheney lied about it. I know, I was shocked, too.

In his bunker under the White House, Vice President Cheney was not notified about United 93 until 10:02—only one minute before the airliner impacted the ground. Yet it was with dark bravado that the vice president and others in the Bush administration would later recount sober deliberations about the prospect of shooting down United 93. "Very, very tough decision, and the president understood the magnitude of that decision," Bush's then chief of staff, Andrew Card, told ABC News.

The whole long piece is worth reading to - it's really quite sobering.