HAMILTON, N.J. (AP) — A civilian New Jersey State Police employee is accused of sneaking into a church to look at pornography on a nun’s computer. Police arrested Thomas G. Findler Wednesday and charged him with burglary and theft. Authorities say Findler had been sneaking into Grace St. Paul Episcopal Church in the night over the last three weeks to look at pornography. Wednesday morning, a church custodian found Findler, who worships at the church, on a nun’s computer. The custodian chased him out, right into a police officer who happened to be nearby.

DAYTON, Ohio (AP) — A woman accused of killing her month-old daughter by burning her in a microwave confessed to the crime, saying the baby “fit right in” the oven, a prosecutor said Thursday.

If she hadn’t, would she still be alive? Or would she have just put her in a larger appliance?

Very punny.

BERLIN, Germany (AP) — German police have charged a robbery suspect after matching his DNA to that found on a piece of salami spat out at a crime scene.

The bitten-off chunk of the telltale sausage was discovered at a building that had been broken in to in the southern city of Darmstadt in April, police said Thursday.

The 37-year-old man was taken into custody in early January after police ran his name through their computers at a highway spot-check and found he was wanted for several other crimes.

Once in custody, he was linked to the Darmstadt break-and-enter through the DNA sample on the salami and charged.

But it seems the rejected meat was not the robber’s only slip up: he has been charged with a total of 19 break-ins after other links were found.

The man, whose name was not released, remains in custody while police investigate.

I wonder how many other links were actually found.

From Ken Silverstein’s Washington Babylon Column:

Rudy Giuliani’s campaign released its 4th quarter fundraising figures today, which show that Mr. 9/11 spent $48.9 million through last December 31. In light of that figure (which of course does not include millions of dollars more that Giuliani spent during the past month), let’s review the collapse of Rudy’s campaign, which ranks as one of the most spectacular political humiliations in recent American history.

Now let’s summarize:

* Rudy won exactly one delegate (in Nevada).
* Rudy’s average share of the vote in the seven states he competed in was 5.14 percent.
* Rudy won a total of 342,357 votes, roughly the population of Arlington, Texas. If Florida is excluded, just for fun, that number falls to 60,602–and that six-state total is about equal to the number of students who attend Arizona State University.

Rudy spent $142.83 for every vote he received. And again, that is based on campaign spending only through December 31. The real number will go higher when 2008 spending figures are released.

Two examples of Bill Kristol’s unbounded ability to be wrong about everything.

First, there’s this splendid example of fertile imbecility from 5 years ago:

“There’s been a certain amount of pop sociology in America … that the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq’s always been very secular.”

Of course, subsequent events proved Kristol to be a blathering ignoramus, as years of sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia have taken tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, at its peak as many as 2,000 to 3,000 dying per month as ethnic cleansing of mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods was prosecuted without pity.

And from this week’s Kristol-spoor in the Weakly Standard, A Bush Rally Can he close strong in 2008? :

Crittenden’s response was the right one: to mock the effort [to point out Bush's failures and inadequacies], and to adduce the easily adduce-able evidence that Bush has been a pretty decent president.

Perhaps someone should point out to Mr. Kristol that “evidence” does not mean “whatever half-baked opinion a neocon fucktwit warmonger pulls out of his ass.”

Or maybe not. . . . Spencer Ackerman in the Washington Independent:

It was the crescendo of an otherwise flat State of the Union address. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” President George W. Bush declared Monday night, “some may deny the surge is working, but among terrorists there is no doubt.” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), The Hill reported, rose in applause.

~~~

It used to be that surge enthusiasts would at least hint at the unachieved strategic objective of the surge. As Bush himself put it, the surge was meant to provide the Iraqi government “the breathing space it needs to make progress” on sectarian reconciliation. But reconciliation hasn’t happened, and, in important respects, sectarianism has deepened over the past year. So surgeniks are now simply declaring victory by the sheer fact of reduced violence itself, unmoored to any strategic goal.

But even accepting that lowered standard, there are growing signs of backsliding in Iraq—even before the surge brigades depart in July.

~~~

Iraq security statistics over the past 13 weeks, obtained exclusively by The Washington Independent, tell the tale. In Baghdad, improvised-explosive device (IED) detonations explosions in Baghdad have ticked up slightly to 131 in January from 129 in December—and the last week of January is not included in these latest figures. Countrywide, there was an increase in IED explosions to 2,291 in December from 1,394 in November, followed by a dip to 1,270 in the first three weeks of January. But the week ending on January 25 saw seven suicide explosions Iraq-wide, the most since the week ending Dec. 21, 2007.

It is too early to conclude that the security gains of the surge are unwinding. But they’re being put under stress in a manner not seen since the so-called “Surge of Operations” began in mid-June. Some speculate that the insurgency, knocked on its heels by the changing tactics of U.S. forces in mid-2007, is beginning to adjust, a few months before the surge draws to a close. “I think there’s some credibility to that argument,” said Brian Katulis, a national-security expert at the liberal Center for American Progress. “It all begs the question of what’s the grand endgame.”

Catholics criticize risque health club ad

An advertisement appearing in Boston magazine this month that depicts a group of nuns sketching a naked male model is spurring outrage in the Catholic community in the area.

Terry Donilon, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Boston, called the Equinox Fitness Club ad “disrespectful and degrading” to women who have committed themselves to serving the church and their communities. “It’s offensive,” Donilon said. “I hope they make the decision not to run it again and perhaps offer an apology to the religious community.”

The ad wasn’t in the article, but a google search reveals something the article didn’t mention: it’s an Ellen von Unwerth ad, and look:

Source

Tibby Rothman in the LA Weekly has the definitive No on S article in their (still current edition).

THE WRITERS GUILD ISN’T the only Los Angeles institution thinking about the financial implications of the digital realm. Downtown, in City Hall, there’s been discussion of cashing in on the Internet too. And if Proposition S, the result of that discussion, passes when Angelenos hit the polls on February 5, the revolution, as they say, will be taxed.

Dubbed the Communications Users Tax, Prop. S extends the tax the city collects from end users of land lines and wireless (a tax that’s noted on every phone bill Los Angeles residents pay) to other “like communications” carried over the Internet and through emerging technologies.

But finding out from city officials exactly what will be taxed is in some cases as hard to grasp as the airwaves themselves.

According to the city’s chief legislative analyst, Gerry Miller, e-mails won’t be taxed, downloads — “no”, text messages — well, “yes,” and Skype, the downloadable software that allows free computer-to-computer long-distance calls — that was too techno-geek for Miller, who didn’t know what it was.

(Given that Prop. S states that the tax will cover classifications including Voice-Over-Internet Protocol, or VoIP, Skype users will indeed be taxed by City Hall under Prop. S.)

“This issue is a little complex and nuanced,” concedes a press deputy for the City Attorney’s Office.

So Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the Los Angeles City Council placed a measure on the ballot and don’t even know what they’re taxing? “My personal position is that it’s not well-defined,” says 87-year-old DeDe Audet, a longtime community activist and user of things digital. “For instance, I put a text message on my phone, send it via cable to my computer — do I get charged twice?”

Responsibility for designating exactly what can be taxed under the new law will lie with the city’s decidedly un-Wired-sounding Office of Finance. That office did not respond to the Weekly’s questions asking for specifics of what Prop. S would cover. Villaraigosa, available to meet with neighborhood council members about the consequences of Prop. S not passing, was unavailable to explain what his perplexing tax encompasses. A Villaraigosa deputy said he could not explain the tax either, because he could not “serve as a spokesperson” for a ballot measure.

As previously reported in L.A. Weekly, the existing city phone tax on residents’ bills is under fire from multiple groups who have made headway in California courts. In May 2007, a state appeals court left standing a ruling that the city’s tax on cell-phone usage was illegal — because it was pushed through City Hall without a vote of taxpayers.

If the city’s appeal of that court decision fails, as many legal observers predict, Los Angeles residents will save $162 million a year — money that will no longer go into the city treasury, according to Karen Sisson. If other related lawsuits succeed, the city could be out $270 million annually in revenue that taxpayers would keep.

Villaraigosa has pushed hard to get the new tax approved by voters before the appeals court strikes down the old tax, so that he and city leaders can claim the new tax is a “reduction” to 9 percent — from the existing 10 percent.

In October 2007, the City Council voted to waive the legal waiting time required to put a new tax on the ballot — normally they would have had to await the next regular municipal election, way off in April of 2009 — by calling it a fiscal “emergency,” and arguing that without the money, they’d face shortages for hiring police and financing other services.

Just read the whole article at the Weekly’s site.

From the Times post-mortem on the Giuliani campaign: For Giuliani, a Dizzying Free-Fall

A curious new vulnerability also arose. As mayor, Mr. Giuliani took much joy in crawling through the weeds of policy debate, flashing his issue mastery. But as a presidential candidate, he as often seemed ill at ease.

Mr. Giuliani once embraced gun control, gay rights and abortion rights; he knew that all of these issues would be a tough sell to Republicans. While he never shifted positions as sharply as Mr. Romney — who renounced his former support of abortion and gay rights — he as often occupied a muddled middle ground that pleased no one.

This became most evident in the first Republican debate. Asked about repealing Roe v. Wade, he was equivocal. “It would be O.K. to repeal,” he said. “Or it would be O.K. also if a strict constructionist judge viewed it as precedent, and I think a judge has to make that decision.”

Later, he said that the decision on abortion should be left to women — but that he would appoint strict constructionist judges of the type who had favored overturning Roe v. Wade.

A strong, decisive leader who pushed a mobbed-up grifter like Kerik for the head of homeland security; the forceful protector against terrorism who sited his command center in an obvious target zone which was instantly decapitated; “America’s Mayor” — but only as proclaimed by the propagandists at FoxNoise; the champion of a women’s Constitutional right to choose who would appoint a hardline ideologue who would abolish that right at the first opportunity. The front-runner without a lead:

Only weeks ago, Mr. DuHaime spoke in a call about the former mayor’s strong lead in those states. “Some of these leads are momentum-proof at this point,” he said.

Mr. Giuliani now trails or is at best tied in polls in all of those states. And soon after that phone call, reporters received a memorable e-mail rebuttal from Mr. Romney’s spokesman, Kevin Madden.

“Mayor Giuliani’s momentum-proof national polling lead, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny all walk into a bar,” it began. “You’re right. None of them exist.”

Rudy Giuliani, the presidential candidate, didn’t really exist either.

It was always a fake, a cardboard cut-out.

The Decider, decidin’ who won the Lebanese conflict back in 2006:

Bush: Israel won

President Bush said Monday that Israel defeated Hezbollah’s guerrillas in the monthlong Mideast war and that the Islamic militants were to blame for the deaths of hundreds of Lebanese civilians.

~~~

“Hezbollah attacked Israel. Hezbollah started the crisis, and Hezbollah suffered a defeat in this crisis,” the president said at the State Department after a day of meetings with his top defense, diplomatic and national security advisers.

Followed by the ever present optimism bordering on miasma:

“There’s going to be a new power in the south of Lebanon, and that’s going to be a Lebanese force with a robust international force to help them seize control of the country — that part of the country,” Bush said.

A more sober, Reality-based assessment from an Israeli panel reviewing the conflict, released today:

The head of the panel investigating Israel’s 2006 Lebanon conflict said Wednesday that the war ended without victory and the army did not provide an effective response to Hezbollah rocket fire.

~~~

“We found serious failures and shortcomings in the highest level of the military command, especially in the ground forces, the quality of deployment, preparedness, launching and implementation of decisions and orders,” Winograd said.

Based on Iraq, Bush must think failures and shortcomings in the highest level of military command is a sure recipe for victory.