Is fifth-grader Kenton Stufflebeam smarter than the Smithsonian? On a winter break trip with his family to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, the 11-year-old southwestern Michigan boy noticed that a notation, in bold lettering, mistakenly identified the Precambrian as an era.

Since it opened in 1981, millions of people have paraded past the museum’s Tower of Time, a display involving prehistoric time. Kenton was the first to point out the error.

More at Yahoo News

Coven - One Tin Soldier

Talk about incompetence. That we can’t even help our own after one of the largest natural disasters of all-time is just so wrong. No wonder Paulison is quitting.

Almost three years after Hurricane Katrina, nearly 40,000 families still are living in vulnerable mobile homes and trailers across the U.S. Gulf Coast with another hurricane season just two months away, the top U.S. disaster official said on Wednesday.

The number is down from about 100,000 families, or some 300,000 people, in April 2006. At one point following the devastating 2005 hurricane season, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency was housing 143,000 families in mobile homes and trailers.

FEMA Administrator David Paulison said the agency, which was heavily criticized for its hapless response when Katrina swamped New Orleans, is moving about 800 families a week into hotels, motels or apartments.

The families are either living at group sites or in trailers in the driveways of their homes as they rebuild.

The six-month Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1. Forecasters are expecting above-average storm activity.

“As far as rebuilding, I did expect it to take this long,” Paulison told a small group of reporters at the National Hurricane Conference in Orlando. “But as far as housing people, I did not foresee that they would be there almost three years later.”

More at Yahoo News

From the New York Times:

The classified budget of the Defense Department, concealed from the public in all but outline, has nearly doubled in the Bush years, to $32 billion. That is more than the combined budgets of the Food and Drug Administration, the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Just great!

Per McClatchy:

Paltry results of Iraqi offensive silence U.S. withdrawal talk

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration was caught off-guard by the first Iraqi-led military offensive since the fall of Saddam Hussein, a weeklong thrust in southern Iraq whose paltry results have silenced talk at the Pentagon of further U.S. troop withdrawals any time soon.

President Bush last week declared the offensive, which ended Sunday, “a defining moment” in Iraq’s history.

That may prove to be true, but in recent days senior U.S. officials have backed away from the operation, which ended with Shiite militias still in place in Basra, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki possibly weakened and a de facto cease-fire brokered by an Iranian general.

“There is no empirical evidence that the Iraqi forces can stand up” on their own, a senior U.S. military official in Washington said, reflecting the frustration of some at the Pentagon. He and other military officials requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak for the record.

(HT: John Cole, Balloon-Juice)

THIS BOMBSHELL TOOK A YEAR IN FALLING

BAILING OUT THE REAGANITES

SAUDI ARABIA MAIN SOURCE OF TERRORIST FUNDS

BUSH TRIES TO SALVAGE LEGACY ON WORLD STAGE (good luck with that one)

HEAVY TROOPS DEPLOYMENTS CALLED MAJOR RISK

THE TORTURE MEMO TO TOP ALL TORTURE MEMOS

WHY AMERICAN VOTERS NEVER VOTE FOR WHAT THEY REALLY WANT

A SUBMARINE TO FIGHT AL QAIDA’S NAVY

IRAN TORPEDOES U.S. PLANS FOR IRAQI OIL

SENATE NEWS FROM SENATUS

CALL IT A SHRINKING ECONOMY, BUT DON’T SAY THE R WORD!

SKILLING HAS SHOT AT OVERTURNING CONVICTIONS

HEAD OF FEMA TO RESIGN

RED-FACED CLINTON TIRADE SHOCKS SUPERDELEGATES IN MEETING

At least, that’s how The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel sees it.

John McCain, unlike his Democratic rivals, seems indifferent to the problems of struggling Americans. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich captured McCain’s stance when –on ABC’s “This Week” roundtable–he called the Republican nominee the “let them eat cake” candidate.

In these days, when as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman points out, ” even free-market enthusiasts are talking about increased regulation of securities firms now that the fed has shown that it will rush to their rescue if they get in trouble…Mr. McCain is selling the same old snake oil, claiming that deregulation and tax cuts cure all ills.”

Great! Give securities firms even more reason to run amuck. A McCain presidency truly would be four more years of the same crap.

“Where’s the outrage?“, the author of this article asks. I say check their bank accounts.

An Unreported Scandal

A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, and soon you’re talking real money. But when it comes to reporting on what the Bush war legacy has cost American taxpayers, the media have been shockingly indifferent to the highest run-up in military spending since World War II. Even the devastating defense spending audit released Monday by the Government Accountability Office documenting the enormous waste in every single US advanced weapons system failed to provoke the outrage it, and five equally scathing previous annual audits, deserved. [...]

The Iraq War may end someday, but rest assured that major weapons systems, once commissioned, have a life’support system unmatched in any other sector of public spending. Rarely does the plug get pulled on even the most irrelevant and expensive war toy. Not while both Democratic and Republican politicians feed at the same trough, and when so much is at stake in the way of jobs and profit.

Memo: Laws Didn’t Apply to Interrogators

The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda captives because the president’s ultimate authority as commander in chief overrode such statutes.

The 81-page memo, which was declassified and released publicly yesterday, argues that poking, slapping or shoving detainees would not give rise to criminal liability. The document also appears to defend the use of mind-altering drugs that do not produce “an extreme effect” calculated to “cause a profound disruption of the senses or personality.” [...]

Sent to the Pentagon’s general counsel on March 14, 2003, by John C. Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the memo provides an expansive argument for nearly unfettered presidential power in a time of war. It contends that numerous laws and treaties forbidding torture or cruel treatment should not apply to U.S. interrogations in foreign lands because of the president’s inherent wartime powers.