. . . but it might be time to go to rehab, after all.

LONDON (Reuters) - Soul singer Amy Winehouse has developed the lung condition emphysema and has been warned by doctors that she will die if she continues smoking drugs, her father said in an interview on Sunday.

Mitch Winehouse said the incurable illness, which leaves sufferers struggling for breath, was diagnosed when his daughter had series of health checks in hospital.

“The doctors have told her if she goes back to smoking drugs it won’t just ruin her voice, it will kill her,” he was quoted as saying in the Sunday Mirror. “The doctors have said that if she had continued the way she was going she could have ended up an invalid — she wouldn’t have been able to breathe.”

He added: “She’s got emphysema. It’s in its early stages, but had it gone on for another month they painted a very vivid picture of her sitting there like an old person with a mask on her face struggling to breathe.

“With smoking the crack cocaine and the cigarettes, her lungs are all gunked up. There are nodules around the chest and dark marks. She’s got 70 percent lung capacity.”

The invasion of Iraq has destabilized Iraq and brought Shiite political parties with long and close ties to Iran into power in Iraq, while destroying the power of the Sunni and Baathist enemies of Iran. So all in all, it’s worked out pretty well for the mullahs, but was this awful result mere serendipity?

Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials?

WASHINGTON — Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have “been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service … to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government,” a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials’ activities after only a month, and the Defense Department’s top brass never followed up on the investigators’ recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.

Iran, which was a mortal enemy of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq during his reign, has been the primary beneficiary of U.S. policy in Iraq, where Iranian-backed groups now run much of the government and the security forces.

This follows the classic pattern of the Bush administration: the fuck-up (being the stooge of a foreign intel op) followed by the cover-up (killing the investigation into the matter).

Front and center as the witless conduits of foreign intelligence efforts are the familiar names of two of the leading dimbulb warpimps responsible for pushing the Iraq invasion:

According to the report, Ledeen, however, persisted, presenting then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith with a new 100-day plan to provide, among other things, evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly had been moved to Iran — Saddam Hussein’s archenemy.

Ledeen, who regularly receives foot massages from Trainwreck’s Roger Simon, was really on top of things, though:

When the CIA and the State Department discovered that Ledeen and Ghorbanifar were involved, they opposed any further contact with the two. Ledeen’s contacts, the Defense Human Intelligence Service concluded, were “nefarious and unreliable,” the Senate committee reported.

Bear this in mind the next time Ledeen advocates nuclear strikes on Iran.

The name Ahmed Chalabi should fit into this story. Chalabi was the Iraqi exile who was promoted by the Neocon numbnuts at the Project for a New American Century (Bill Kristol’s intellectual sewer) as Iraq’s George Washington. As I write today, I find the PNAC’s website reads:
“This Account Has Been Suspended
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible,”
but the site once contained the PNAC’s lengthy hagiography of Chalabi, and an homage to his integrity and the value of his intelligence apparatus.

Of course, this was before it was determined that the information Chalabi provided to gullible neocon warhawks was purposely false and misleading, based on unreliable (and often drunken) sources, before Chalabi was accused of spying for Iran, and before Chalabi’s most recent notoriety, when earlier this month he was fired from his government post due to “his murky ties to Iran, including leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the country’s internal security force.” An earlier Salon.com piece on “How Ahmed Chalabi Conned the Neocons” touched upon both Chalabi’s influence with the PNAC hawks who steered administration towards invading Iraq, and his ties with Iran’s leadership. A money quote: “”Ahmed Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat,” from former ally Marc Zell.

Bellicose, feckless and duped is no way to run our foreign policy.

Note location.

Fuming over a perceived lack of objectivity infused in the universally horrible reviews of Douglas (”the stupidest fucking guy on the Planet”) Feith’s book War and Decision by independent journalists, not-Assrocket of the Powerline blog offers what he believes is a more pristine and unbiased review from — get this — Douglas (”the stupidest fucking guy on the Planet”) Feith:

The Washington Post has run two hatchet jobs on the book. Thomas Ricks and Karen DeYoung looked through the book for newsworthy items they were able to find in the few hours after they obtained a leaked copy of the not-fully-edited typescript in which to glance at the book and interview Feith and Paul Bremer. A cynic might accuse them of “cherry-picking” the book to suit an agenda. The Ricks/DeYoung article elicited a brief response from the book’s publisher.

Dana Milbank attended the CSIS discussion of the book last Thursday. It’s clear from his article that Milbank hasn’t cracked the book open. That will have to do for readers of the Post, which has advised Mr. Feith that no review of the book is forthcoming in their pages because Ricks and DeYoung have already written about it.

We invited Mr. Feith to preview the book in his own words for our readers. He has graciously responded.

Naturally, what follows is mostly a monumental pile of bullshit from Feith contradicting years of reports and mountains sworn testimony from officials before Congress about the lack of planning for post-invasion Iraq. Accompanied by some kind words by not-Assrocket about the author of the book yet another critic called a “Creepy Polemic” intended to rationalize the Iraq War:

As the former U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, Feith was “inside the Pentagon at the dawn of the war on terrorism,” as the subtitle says. His book is billed as the first insider’s account of the decisions taken just after Sept. 11, 2001, and how they resulted in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

How candid is he? Put it this way: If Feith told me it was raining, I’d step outside and get wet before believing him.

From start to finish, this book seeks to revise what the author calls “the now-standard story” that depicts President George W. Bush and his advisers “as militaristic and reckless, closed-minded and ideological, thoughtless at best and even dishonest — and hell-bent on war with Iraq from the Administration’s inception.”

Like the president he served, Feith is arrogantly unwilling to question the wisdom of what the Bush administration has done. There’s no action, no matter how disastrous the consequence, that he isn’t prepared to defend.

We’d expect no less from the pack of clueless assholes who once opined that President Bush was “A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius” and waxed enthusiastically about the excellence of Michael “Brownie” Brown’s disastrous and pathetic appearance before a House subcommittee investigating Brown’s even more disastrous performance as head of FEMA responding to Katrina, explaining that, after all, “Michael Brown didn’t flood New Orleans” and so attempts to hold him accountable for FEMA’s response were absurd. For a witless group which can fluff Bush’s intellect and Brownie’s competence, clearly fluffing Feith’s veracity and integrity poses little challenge.

Man Installing Satellite TV Shoots, Kills Wife

SEDALIA, Mo. — Officials are trying to determine whether to file charges against a man who fatally shot his wife while trying to install a satellite television system in their home.

Patsy D. Long, 34, of Deep Water, was pronounced dead early Saturday evening after being shot in the chest with a .22-caliber handgun.

Patsy Long was standing outside the residence while her husband was installing a satellite television system.

According to sheriff’s department spokesman Maj. Robert Hills, Ronald Long fired a shot from the inside of their home after several unsuccessful efforts to punch a hole through the exterior wall using other means. Investigators said Ronald Long believed his family was inside the house.

He told authorities that he fired a second shot, then called out his wife’s name and the names of their two children. When he got no reply, he ran outside and found his wounded wife.

I dunno … maybe it’s not funny.

Okay … it isn’t funny.

But, I guess fatal stupidity never is all that funny.

ORANGE, Calif. Third time’s not the charm at St. Joseph Hospital in the city of Orange, where an operation took place on the wrong side of body the third time in 14 months.

An operation was “inadvertently performed on the right knee,” rather than the bad left knee, on Feb. 15, the hospital said in an email to the Los Angeles Times.

“No patient should have to go through this,” said hospital chief medical officer Dr. Raymond Casciari. “There is no room for error when it comes to patient care. One case is too many,” he told The Times.

A state investigation has been opened into the wrong knee surgery. Over the past 14 months or so, two patients had medical procedures done on the wrong side of their heads at St. Joseph.

Source

BERLIN (Reuters) - A 21-year-old German man has been convicted of sending a photograph of his penis to an unknown woman via mobile phone, authorities said on Wednesday.

“We all had a bit of a laugh when we saw the thing,” said Christian Kropp, presiding judge at the court in the eastern town of Sondershausen.

Talk about a backfire!

Source

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?

Allentown man charged in two homicides

By Brian Callaway | Of The Morning Call
10:29 PM EST, January 26, 2008

Allentown police had suspected William Torres of dealing drugs in the city. But an undercover narcotics investigation yielded much more, and resulted in Torres, 21, being charged early Saturday with two counts of homicide.

Police said Torres, whose last known address was 436 Turner St., Allentown, gunned down two men at Fourth and Allen streets last month. According to court documents, Torres admitted killing the men.

Torres was driving on Turner Street Friday afternoon when he was pulled over by police and arrested. He was wearing a hooded sweartshirt with a skull-head pattern on it, pajama bottoms and fuzzy lion-faced slippers at the time. He was still wearing the get-up when he was arraigned after midnight at Lehigh County prison.

Read the rest here.

Apparently won’t close down the casino, even if the casino itself is what’s burning:

A three-alarm fire is in progress on top of the Monte Carlo Resort and Casino at 3770 Las Vegas Blvd. S.

The blaze began shortly after 11 a.m. Friday.

Dark plumes of smoke can be seen, and fire crews are en route to the scene.

The blaze began at the top of the hotel and is spreading down. There are 32 floors and about 3,000 people staying at the hotel.

Here’s the best part:

The fire is burning in three different parts of the casino.

Guests were spotted looking out of hotel windows, and guests are gambling. There has been no evacuation.

Debris is falling from the blaze, and it is catching other parts of the hotel on fire.

Fucking Casino is on fire with multiple blazes, burning debris igniting other parts of the building, but the are open and the slots are still running. What burns in Vegas — it doesn’t matter, just keep those tables open!