CQ MoneyLine reports a 17 percentage point decline on average in donations by the top 10 corporate PACs to Republican candidates during the first 11 months of 2007 from the two years prior to the 2004 presidential election. During the previous election cycle, these PACs donated most of their money to Republican candidates. Despite the decline in funding to Republicans, the report indicates that concerns about business issues have prevented most of them from shifting their donations entirely to the Democrats. Only Bank of America Corp., Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc., and General Electric Co.'s PACs have made such a move.(www.cq.com)
This story appeared in a recent issue of Public Affairs News Monitor. Click here to read the entire issue.

REPS get less in '07 ...

A University of Tennessee coed had a terrifying encounter when she found a convicted rapist hiding under her bed.

Police charged 31-year-old Jason Paul Tims with aggravated burglary.

Investigators said Tims snuck into the apartment of a UT Martin student, and hid under her bed until she fell asleep.

Then, police said Tims sat with the girl and ignored her commands to leave. Police said she eventually got Tims outside the apartment.

Wednesday morning, Tims was being held without bond.

Monster Under Bed Has New Meaning For College Student

Israeli police are on the lookout for a thief with a super-sized chocolate craving.

The robbers broke into a factory in the northern Israeli city of Haifa late Monday and walked away with nearly 100 tons of chocolate spread.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said such a large heist indicated it may have been an inside job and police were searching the area of any traces of the sweet stuff.

Moshe Veidberg, one of the company's owners, told the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot it would require five large trucks to transport the stolen chocolate, which he valued at roughly $415,000.

He said the company's alarm system was deactivated and its surveillance footage stolen as well, leaving the fate of the creamy chocolate a mystery.

Police Searching For 100 Tons Of Stolen Chocolate

A woman accused of groping Santa Claus at a Connecticut mall won't have to serve any jail time if she stays out of trouble.

Sandrama Lamy has been sentenced under an accelerated rehabilitation program that will wipe her record clean if she completes two years of probation.

Danbury Superior Court Judge Susan Reynolds on Wednesday also ordered the 33-year-old to stay away from the Danbury Fair Mall.

In December, Lamy was charged with fourth-degree sexual assault and breach of peace for allegedly touching Santa inappropriately while sitting on his lap at the mall.

Woman Accused Of Groping Santa On Probation For Two Christmases

For the first time in the litigation over documents posted on the Wikileaks Web site, lawyers have appeared representing the owner of the Wikileaks.org Internet domain. He is John Shipton, “a citizen of Australia currently residing in Kenya,” according to a document filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco.

In the document, Mr. Shipton’s lawyers endorsed arguments made in briefs filed by various groups — including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press — contending that an order from Federal District Judge Jeffrey S. White hindering access to the Wikileaks Web site should be withdrawn and the lawsuit should be thrown out.

Freedom of information or just a bunch of crooks?

More Twists and Turns in Wikileaks Case

-- Amid a discussion of trade in 1973, Chinese leader Mao Zedong made what U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a novel proposition: sending tens of thousands, even 10 million, Chinese women to the United States.

Chinese leader Mao Zedong, here depicted in an Andy Warhol painting, offered women to the U.S.

"You know, China is a very poor country," Mao said, according to a document released by the State Department's historian office.

"We don't have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands."

A few minutes later, Mao circled back to the offer. "Do you want our Chinese women?" he asked. "We can give you 10 million."

After Kissinger noted Mao was "improving his offer," the chairman said, "We have too many women. ... They give birth to children and our children are too many."

"It is such a novel proposition," Kissinger replied in his discussion with Mao in Beijing. "We will have to study it.

Mao offered U.S. 10 million women ...

e appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computer-like thinking system that, although we have correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experimental information (knowledge, gnosis), and each of us possesses a somewhat different deposit from all the other life forms, there is a malfunction--a failure--of memory retrieval. There lies the trouble in our particular subcircuit. "Salvation" through gnosis - more properly anamnesis (the loss of amnesia)--although it has individual significance for each of us--a quantum leap in perception, identity, cognition, understanding, world--and self-experience, including immortality--it has further and more truly ultimate importance for the system (structure) as a whole, inasmuch as these memories (data) are needed or valuable to it, and to its overall functioning.

Therefore it is in the process of self-repair, which includes: rebuilding our subcircuit (world) via linear and orthogonal time changes (sequences of events), as well as continual signaling to us both en masse and individually (to us received subliminally by the right brain hemisphere, which gestalts the constituents of the messages into meaningful entities), to stimulate blocked neural (memory) banks within us to fire and hence retrieve what is there.

The adventitious information of gnosis, then, consists of disinhibiting messages (instructions), with the core (main) content actually intrinsic to us - that is, already there (first observed by Plato, that learning is a form of remembering).

The ancients possessed techniques (sacraments and rituals) used largely in the Greco-Roman mystery religions, including early Christianity, to induce firing and retrieval, mainly with a sense of its restorative (repairing) value to the individuals; the Gnostics, however, and Mani correctly saw the ontological value to what they called the Godhead Itself (i.e. the total entity).

(Note: While such "Enlightened" spiritual leaders as Zoroaster, Mani, Buddha, and Elijah can be regarded as receptors of the entity's total wisdom, Christ seems to have been an actual terminal of this computerlike entity, in which case he did not speak for it but was it. "Was," in this case, standing for "consisted of a microform of it.")

Outline in Abstract Form of a New Model of Reality

It’s an oft-quoted truism in books on learning and productivity that it takes 10,000 hours to achieve true mastery in any skill, from composing symphonies to playing tennis.

Is it true? I have absolutely no idea. It’s certainly an appealing concept, though. We’re used to thinking of genius as an elusive, magical thing that springs fully formed. Boiling down Mozart’s greatness to a regime of dozens of hours a week at the piano until he he’d hit the 10,000-hour mark (before his voice changed) makes the idea of learning to play the piano seem more approachable. It gives you a sense of the distance between point A and point B.

Still, at the rate of 20 or 30 minutes every week or two when you’re feeling restless won’t add up to even Yanni-level playing any time this decade.

Let’s take the baby steps approach.

Read on...

Master a Skill in Stages

....You might choose others, but here's my list:

1.

A 30% national sales tax is a workable substitute for all income and payroll taxes in the United States.

2.

Global warming is not primarily caused by human activity. In fact, global warming might not even exist.

3.

Intelligent design is a viable scientific theory that ought to be taught in biology classes.

4.

Even with marginal tax rates at current levels, reducing taxes will increase revenues.

5.

Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.

I would like to compile a similar list for liberals/Democrats. Items should be (a) reasonably consequential; (b) held by a nontrivial cross-section of actual politicians, think-tankers, and pundits, not just by a small lunatic fringe; and (c) not mere differences of opinion ("abortion is murder," "preventive war is bad"), but things that are demonstrably false. Leave your nominations in comments.

FIVE CONSERVATIVE MYTHS

A White House plan to broaden the National Security Agency’s wiretapping powers won a key procedural victory in the Senate on Thursday, as backers defeated a more restrictive plan by Senate Democrats that would have imposed more court oversight on government spying.

The vote moves the Bush administration a step closer toward the twin goals it has pursued for months: strengthening the N.S.A.’s ability to eavesdrop without court approval, while securing legal immunity for the phone companies that have helped the agency in its wiretapping operations.

At the same time, the White House agreed Thursday after months of resistance to give members of the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees access to internal documents on the N.S.A.’s wiretapping program and the legal foundation for it.

That access could ultimately help persuade skeptical lawmakers in the House, which so far has rejected the immunity idea, to sign on to the White House’s plan.

“I have pushed for eight months to review this material,” said Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “I don’t know why the White House refused to give us access. Now we will be able to view documents used to set up the president’s warrantless wiretapping program.”

As the Senate opened debate on the security agency issue, it agreed by a convincing vote of 60-to-36 to set aside a bill passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee that would have given a secret intelligence court a greater role in overseeing wiretaps on terrorism and espionage suspects. The defeated measure, while imposing more judicial restrictions, omitted immunity for the phone carriers that aided the agency in its wiretapping operations.

The Senate will instead consider a measure passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee that has the backing of the White House. It would give legal immunity to AT&T and the other phone companies against some 40 lawsuits growing out of their alleged roles in eavesdropping. It would also give the N.S.A. a freer hand to eavesdrop on foreign-based communications without judicial checks.

After the more restrictive measure was defeated, Caroline Fredrickson, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington office, said, “It appears the Senate is buckling under pressure from the White House.”

A final vote on the N.S.A. issue is not likely to come until next week. The Senate is trying to beat a Feb. 1 deadline for amending the wiretapping law. That is when a temporary six-month authorization approved last August expires.

Here we go giving more and more away to fear a mongering asshole...

In Senate, a White House Victory on Eavesdropping