David Drake

"You should wash your hands often and cover your mouth when you cough."

The government agency that bungled the Hurricane Katrina response has yanked a kiddie coloring book from its site called "A Scary Thing Happened" that depicts the burning twin towers on the cover - with a plane heading straight for one of them.

On page 12, the stomach-churning 9/11 image is repeated not once but three times, complete with flames - for kids to color.

"You might hear about it again and again on the T.V. or radio or read about it in the newspaper," it says on the page.

The Federal Emergency Management Association pulled the downloadable coloring book from its site last week — before a White House genius gave New York a 9/11 flashback by buzzing the city with one of the presidential planes and an F-16 jet.

"FEMA is currently reviewing all web content designed and posted by the previous administration," said FEMA spokesman Clark Stevens.

Meanwhile, New Yorkers who were shown the book saw just one color - red.

"I feel disrespected," said Jason Owens, 20, of Manhattan, who was with his 3-year-old son. "I feel like I should punch the person who did this in the face."

Standing with her goddaughter, 43-year-old Risat Jabeen of Brooklyn, said she was shocked FEMA would find it inoffensive.

"Kids color for fun so these things shouldn't be in coloring books," she said. "So many people died that day."

Vanessa Bell, 38, of Bronx, said there's no way she'd let her 5-year-old daughter color in that book. "It just makes kids feel depressed," she said.

...one page has parents taking the colors away. It’s an illustration of the World Trade Center Towers in New York. One of the towers has smoke coming out of it while a plane looks to be heading towards the other.

“They like to color happy pictures not pictures like that I don’t think I would like to give my child these kids of pictures to color,said parent Brandy Greer.

A Rasmussen poll released last Saturday reveals that 58 percent of U.S. voters do not want investigations into how the Bush administration treated terrorism suspects. President Barack Obama said he opposes such an investigation, but some high-ranking Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are pushing for it.

Only 28 percent think there should be further investigating of how suspected terrorists were questioned during the Bush years, and 13 percent are not sure, according to the Rasmussen national telephone survey.

Politically, only the left wing of the Democratic Party believes more investigating is warranted. Fifty-eight percent of liberals support a wider probe, while 78 percent of conservatives disagree.

Mainstream Democrats are evenly divided over whether further investigation is necessary. Seventy-seven percent of Republicans and 62 percent of unaffiliated voters are against more investigating.

[...]

Fifty-eight percent of all voters believe the Obama White House’s recent release of CIA memos about the harsh interrogation methods used on terrorism suspects endangers the national security of the United States.

A furious President Barack Obama ordered an internal review of Monday's low-flying photo op over the Statue of Liberty.

CBS 2 HD has discovered the feds will have plenty to question.

Federal officials knew that sending two fighter jets and Air Force One to buzz ground zero and Lady Liberty might set off nightmarish fears of a 9/11 replay, but they still ordered the photo-op kept secret from the public.

In a memo obtained by CBS 2 HD the Federal Aviation Administration's James Johnston said the agency was aware of "the possibility of public concern regarding DOD (Department of Defense) aircraft flying at low altitudes" in an around New York City. But they demanded total secrecy from the NYPD, the Secret Service, the FBI and even the mayor's office and threatened federal sanctions if the secret got out.

[...]

The flyover -- apparently ordered by the White House Office of Military Affairs so it would have souvenir photos of Air Force One with the Statue of Liberty in the background -- had President Obama seeing red. He ordered a probe and apologized.

"It was a mistake. It will never happen again," President Obama said.

The NYPD was so upset about the demand for secrecy that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly vowed never to follow such a directive again and he accused the feds of inciting fears of a 9/11 replay.

"Did it show any insensitivity to the psychic wounds New York City has after 9/11? Absolutely. No questions about it. It was quite insensitive."

The cost of the frivolous flight was about $60,000 an hour and that was just for Air Force One. That doesn't include the cost of the two F-16s that came along.

In a publicity stunt it would seem, Artist Michael D'Antuono plans to show his "crowned" messiah President Barack Obama at New York City's Union Square. The painting called "The Truth" is a symbol of worship of Obama, in an over-the-top depiction of Obama looking like The Holy Bible's Jesus when he hung on the cross.

A unionist politician from Northern Ireland has launched an extraordinary attack on Senator Ted Kennedy, telling the British parliament that awarding the Senator an honorary knighthood was in “extremely poor taste.”

Sammy Wilson, a member of the Democratic Unionist Party, and Northern Ireland’s Minister for the Environment, accused Kennedy of being an IRA sympathizer.

He said that “a cloud still hangs over” Kennedy, for having been expelled from Harvard and for having fled the scene of a crash at Chappaquiddick, in which a 29-year-old woman died.

Wilson said that Kennedy opposed the sale of U.S. arms to the old Northern Ireland police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and that he had called on Protestants to “go back to Britain.”

“Senator Kennedy has consistently supported the political wing of the IRA which for many decades killed a great number of innocent civilians,” Wilson said in a motion calling on the British Government to drop the knighthood plans.

“Senator Kennedy is being awarded a knighthood for services to the U.K-U.S. relationship and services to Northern Ireland despite the fact that he has for many years supported the break-up of the United Kingdom and has explicitly sought to deny the wishes of the majority of people in Northern Ireland by supporting calls for Northern Ireland to cease to exist and become part of the Republic of Ireland.”

Wilson’s motion was supported by his party colleagues.

A number of politicians from the Conservative Party have also questioned the decision to award Kennedy the knighthood. Members of Parliament, Ann and Nicholas Winterton, supported Wilson’s motion.

Lord Tebbit, a former minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government, whose wife was confined to a wheelchair after the IRA bombed a party conference in 1984, told the Daily Mail that the knighthood was “wholly inappropriate.”

Senator Specter became a Democrat. Like gays coming out of the closet, Senator Specter came out of his.

In a Rasmussen Reports poll out this morning, [Arlen Specter] the Pennsylvania Republican lags behind GOP primary challenger Pat Toomey by more than 20%. Just 30% of Republican voters in the Keystone State say they would vote for the incumbent, while 51% are throwing their support behind Toomey.

Furthermore, 55% of voters have an unfavorable view of the incumbent senator, according to the poll. Rasmussen Reports calls those stats "stunningly poor" for a veteran such as Specter, who's spent nearly 30 years in Congress' upper chamber.

Specter squeaked out a primary victory over Toomey in 2004, and next year's rematch is already gearing up to be one of the nastier battles in 2010.

A jumbo jet being chased by a F-16 fighter jets buzzed Lower Manhattan this morning, panicking New Yorkers, many of whom were forced to evacuate their office buildings.

It was not a terrorist attack, however, but a photo opportunity for Air Force One, sources told the Post.

President Obama was in Washington at the time, but the low-flying 747 circling the Statue of Liberty was one of the planes used as Air Force One, sources said.

The NYPD and the city were notified of the planned flight, but did not share that information with Mayor Bloomberg and other New Yorkers, many of whom said they were terrified.

Hours after the incident, a furious Bloomberg called the photo-op "insensitive."

"First thing is I'm annoyed - furious is a better word - that I wasn't told," he said. "Why the Defense Department wanted to do a photo op right around the site of the World Trade Center catastrophe defies imagination. Poor judgment would be a nice ways to phrase."

Bloomberg said federal officials notified the NYPD and another city official, whom he declined to identify, of the flight plan.

"Had I known about it I would have called them right away and asked them not to," he said. "The good news is it was nothing more than an ill considered, badly conceived, insensitive photo op - with the taxpayers' money."

Dominick Caglioti, who works at the Mercantile Exchange, thought the worst as he saw the jets hurtle toward his window just after 10:30 a.m. After learning it was all a photo op, he was furious.

"It's so stupid because they tell you about every fire drill, but they didn't tell us about this," he said.

The planes flew over the Verrazano Bridge, buzzed the left ear Lady Liberty and then continued up the Hudson past Jersey City and then circling back toward Staten Island, federal sources told the Post.

Thousands flooded the streets downtown as buildings called evacuations.

"There is situation outside. We don't have any further information," went one announcement at the Embassy Suites downtown.

After hearing it was all planned, many of those in the streets complained New Yorkers should have been warned.

"You don't do this to people down here after all we have been to," said Jillian Pizzarello, who also works at the Mercantile Exchange.

According to many callers who flooded CBS 2 HD with their concerns, at about 10 a.m. the aircraft were seen flying at low altitudes over the Statue of Liberty and parts of lower Manhattan.

[...]

Many residents and workers who saw the aircraft evacuated their buildings as a result, but officials say there is no reason for a panic.

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

"Maybe Larry Craig's wife sticks by him because she doesn't want to go out and get a job."

"Maybe [Mrs. Craig] goes along with this because she's looking forward to the retirement."

"She's a fool to go along with this."

"[Mrs. Craig] is an idiot for staying with him. She's dumb."

Minneapolis-area supporters of a high-speed rail line connecting the Twin Cities with Chicago -- and points in Wisconsin in between -- unveiled a new Web site and marketing campaign Monday to champion the idea.

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum (DFL-St. Paul) and Ramsey County Commissioner Jim McDonough helped launch the campaign at a press conference at the Union Depot in downtown St. Paul.

[...]

...the economic-stimulus benefits of the line, [say] it would create an estimated 1,570 permanent jobs in Minnesota in addition to hundreds of construction jobs. [BUT WILL IT PAY FOR ITSELF? - DRAKE] It also would reduce travel times between the cities along the route and decrease energy consumption and reduce air pollution compared to current modes of travel. [BUT WILL IT PAY FOR ITSELF? - DRAKE]

The St. Paul-to-Chicago rail project, which has been studied for more than a decade, will face stiff competition around the country for a slice of the $8 billion in federal stimulus funds that were allocated for transportation. [BUT WILL IT PAY FOR ITSELF? - WHAT...AM I ON DRUGS EVEN ASKING THIS? - DRAKE]

Islamabad police prevented federal government from another deadly blow from terrorists on 20th April as police arrested one suicide bomber along with one of his supporter. A suicide explosive jacket and weapons were also recovered from arrested terrorists.

Plaintiffs say they paid $50 a year for access to credit - which they never used - then Citibank decided their home value had fallen too low, and refused to let them refinance unless they paid $482 to "release the lien." Plaintiffs say "thousands" of Citibank customers were subjected to this, though they "like plaintiffs, had a $0 balance."

Smoking is now at the top of the Senate health committee’s agenda. With discussion of living wills concluded, it is the turn of a bipartisan bill that, among other things, requires manufacturers to include in cigarette packets an information leaflet listing currently undeclared cancer-causing substances.

A 24-year-old man on his way to a Hitler birthday celebration on Sunday was attacked and beaten by four masked men, described by witnesses as wearing the clothes of left-wing radicals.

"I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that's how I was raised."

Her comments were criticized by Keith Lewis, who runs the Miss California competition, who said he was "saddened" by them.

President Obama used recent flooding in Fargo, North Dakota to push his misguided belief in global warming. His comment, “If you look at the flooding that’s going on right now in North Dakota and you say to yourself, ‘If you see an increase of two degrees, what does that do, in terms of the situation there?’”

A two-degree warmer North Dakota would mean less snowfall, therefore less flooding. Spring flooding along the Red River of the north is due to snow melt and the geography of the region.

A clothing optional dude ranch offered by a Florida lottery winner is out of compliance with an anti-nudity county ordinance, officials say.

Tim Clement, 50, a one-time hairdresser from Ormond Beach, Fla., who won a $3.3 million lottery prize, set up a 10-acre dude ranch in Brooksville, Fla., without getting proper Hernando County approval, including his offer to allow nudity[.]

After winning the lottery, he closed his day spa and found the remote parcel. He says his friends started asking him when they could come to visit, and the idea for the dude ranch was born.

While other cities grapple with traffic or pollution problems, the Finnish capital of Helsinki is taking aim at the humble rabbit.

"Rabbits have caused severe damage... We are talking about costs of hundreds of thousands of euros," said Antti J. Rautiainen, a construction project manager with the city authorities.

The floppy-eared fiends have been nibbling their way through some of Helsinki's most-prized city gardens, damaging footpaths as they build their burrows underground, and eating into €200 000 from the parks' €12,5-million annual budget in the process.

The rabbits have proved to be more than a match for authorities in Helsinki, who have tried and failed to keep the population under control.

[...]

"We have also used guns, bows, nets and traps," Rautiainen explained.

Those efforts appear to have failed.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation earlier this year launched a nationwide operation targeting white supremacists and "militia/sovereign-citizen extremist groups," including a focus on veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, according to memos sent from bureau headquarters to field offices.

The initiative, dubbed Operation Vigilant Eagle, was outlined in February, two months before a memo giving a similar warning was issued on April 7 by the Department of Homeland Security.

Disclosure of the DHS memo this week has sparked controversy among some conservatives and veterans groups.

[...]

A Feb. 23 draft memo from FBI domestic counterterrorism leaders, obtained by The Wall Street Journal, cited an "increase in recruitment, threatening communications and weapons procurement by white supremacy extremist and militia/sovereign-citizen extremist groups."

[...]

[The] Vigilant Eagle program, is to "share information regarding Iraqi and Afghanistan war veterans whose involvement in white supremacy and/or militia sovereign citizen extremist groups poses a domestic terrorism threat," according to the Feb. 23 FBI memo.

* The dog's original name is Charlie.

* Bo Charlie is a purebred, from a Texas dog breeder. [So much for getting a "mutt" rescue or shelter dog, huh Barry? Another lie. - Drake]

* His price was $1,600.

Apparently President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle were trying to keep the whole Presidential dog thing under wraps -- and then we came along...

[...]

-- the pup was coming from a Texas kennel
-- the kennel had sold Senator Ted Kennedy 3 Portuguese Water Dogs in the past, all from the same lineage
-- the dog the Obama's were getting is also from the same lineage as the Kennedy dogs
-- the Obama dog was originally sold to a private owner, who returned it
-- the dog was named Charlie, but the Obamas planned to rename it
-- the dog was going to be "re-homed" to the Obamas from the kennel, and presented to the Obamas by the Kennedy family
-- the reason it's important that the dog was "re-homed" is because the Obamas could not accept the dog as a gift, and re-homing averts the problem.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez stood, walked over to him, and presented him with a copy of "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent" by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano.

Obama politely posed for a photograph with Chavez, shook his hand, and accepted the gift.

The book, first published in Spanish in 1971, offers a critique of the consequences of 500 years of European and U.S. colonization of Latin America.

A suicide bombing in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province Wednesday killed at least 15 people, including at least nine police officers, officials said.

Police in the Charrsadah district of the NWFP said a suicide bomber rammed his explosive-laden truck into a security check post in the Charrsadah district. Police said nearly 20 people were killed and over two dozen others wounded, but District Coordinating Officer Muhammad Shah told KUNA, the Kuwaiti news agency, that about 15 people, including nine policemen, were confirmed dead.

Shah feared the death toll would go higher as several critically wounded people had been rushed to the hospital.

An airstrike by NATO forces early Monday in mountainous eastern Afghanistan killed six civilians, including two children, a local Afghan official said, the latest accusation of civilian casualties leveled against NATO and American forces.

[...]

In addition to the 6 civilians killed, he said, 14 were wounded. Four of the wounded were hospitalized, he said.

[...]

A reporter for Agence France-Presse said the wounded at a nearby hospital included two men, a woman and a 14-year-old boy who said he had been told that four members of his family had been killed.

“We were asleep, and all of a sudden the roof collapsed,” the boy, who gave his name only as Zakirullah, told the news agency. “I don’t remember anything. I got to know here that my father, my mother, my brother and my younger sister have all been killed, and I am wounded.”

Is Bo a rescued dog or not? Did President Barack Obama break a campaign promise in picking the purebred as the family’s new pet? Obama said during the presidential race that the family wanted a rescued dog. But their search was complicated by daughter Malia’s allergies. Their final choice, Bo, a 6-month-old Portuguese water dog given up by his first owner, was a gift to the Obamas from Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.). Because Bo never spent time in a shelter or with a rescue group, he is a “quasi-rescue dog,” said Wayne Pacelle, chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States.

Count Dr. Jana Kohl in the not-happy group. She and many other animal welfare activists feel betrayed by President Obama’s decision to renege on a campaign promise to adopt a dog from a shelter or rescue center.

But to Kohl it’s personal, because she featured the president in a book to promote adoption rather than the purchase of dogs through breeders.

[...]

... this weekend’s announcement that the president opted to accept a puppy as a gift from Senator Ted Kennedy (via a breeder) and not to go to a shelter or rescue center has left Kohl upset.

“I feel like he’s made a mockery out of the book and the things I wrote about him,” Kohl told the Vote Blog. “I read what I said about him and it makes me cringe.”

Kohl said that his decision is not only heartbreaking for her, but destructive because of what she sees as the domino effect.

[...]

What about the fact that the president will donate to the DC Humane Society to make up for it?

“That’s baloney,” Kohl said. “It’s farcical. They’re donating money to urge people not to do what they did.”

Cooper: "It's hard to talk when you're teabagging."

A young Guantanamo prisoner from Chad was given permission to telephone a relative but instead called the al-Jazeera television network and said he was being beaten and abused at the U.S. detention camp.

Transcripts of the recorded interview with Guantanamo captive Mohammad el Gharani were posted on the Qatar-based television network's English-language Website on Tuesday.

[...]

He told al-Jazeera he had been beaten with batons and teargassed by a group of six soldiers wearing protective gear and helmets after refusing to leave his cell.

"This treatment started about 20 days before Obama came into power, and since then I've been subjected to it almost every day," he told Al Jazeera.

"Since Obama took charge he has not shown us that anything will change."

As hockey goes, Jacques Lemaire is practically a one-man dream team. While a player with the Montreal Canadiens, he helped win eight Stanley Cups, two of them with his own game-winning goals.

After retiring as a player, Lemaire took up coaching and led the New Jersey Devils to yet another Cup.

In 2000, he started a franchise from scratch when the Minnesota Wild took the ice for their inaugural season. But Lemaire has decided he's had enough.

"The team needs this," he said at a news conference in St. Paul today.

Lemaire talked about his departure just days after his final game as coach in Columbus, Ohio, where his team beat the Blue Jackets, 6-3.

"It's not that I cannot go back and work with them, and try to push them again," said Lemaire. "That's not the case. The case is I know this thing will be better with another guy."

Lemaire's record with the Wild was 291-256, with 107 ties, including winning records in his last six seasons.

A strong skater and creative playmaker, “Coco”, as he was known to his teammates, also had a booming shot that he used to great effect. He scored 22 goals and assisted on 20 others, posting respectable if unspectacular numbers for a rookie.

[...]

...Lemaire didn’t take a backseat to anyone. One of the NHL’s all-time greatest “money players”, he has three overtime goals to his credit, among them the Cup winner in 1977.

Lemaire’s last NHL goal was the 1979 Stanley Cup winner. Only five others have scored more than one.

[...]

His playoff numbers are even more impressive. Lemaire is seventh in both goals and assists and his 139 career playoff points are second only to Jean Béliveau on the all-time list.

One of the game’s top strategists, Lemaire began his coaching career behind the Canadiens bench before moving to New Jersey where he had his name engraved on the Stanley Cup in the spring of 1995, this time as head coach. In 2000, Lemaire was hired as the first-ever head coach of the expansion Minnesota Wild.

Jacques Lemaire was inducted to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1984.