Ten Post Round-Up: Totally Tubular Tuesday

Although I came across several posts about the fires in California, my early morning posts were mostly about other things. Keep our California bloggers in your thoughts, today.

From Brilliant at Breakfast:

So what does the Administration have on Michael Mukasey?:

Democrats noted how his tone changed between the first and second days of his appearance, which makes me wonder what information he didn’t want to get out that the Administration showed him they had between those two days.Is this how they’ve gotten away with it over the past six years? Compiling dossiers on everyone, including guys like Arlen Specter and John Warner, who look like they’re going to do the right thing and then cave at the last minute? And if that’s the case, then Washington is an even bigger cesspool than we imagined.

Maybe the next presidential candidate to emphasize “competence” won’t be laughed at:

I wouldn’t hold my breath, though. Still, considering that when George W. Bush took office, the prevailing wisdom ran the gamut of “Thank God the grownups are now in charge” and “Don’t worry, his father will be running everything anyway”, all that insistence on suits and ties and sexual restraint looks like just so much window-dressing now:

Yes, Virginia, now old SNL-alum movies are inspiring the CIA

Your tax dollars at work: Meet the CIA’s new “Terrorist Busters” logo:

(Dizzy sez: Maybe we are all characters in a really scary pre-Apocalypse novel. If not, will somebody please wake me up from this friggin’ nightmare cuz this story sucks!)

From The Huffington Post:

What Did Pelosi Know, and When Did She Know It?

Will House Speaker Nancy Pelosi come clean now that it is clear that the National Security Agency (NSA) was turned loose on American citizens well before 9/11? She has admitted knowing for several years about the Bush administration’s eavesdropping on Americans without a court warrant. She was briefed on it when she was ranking Democrat the House Intelligence Committee when Bush and Cheney took office.But was she told that within days of their taking office, the National Security Agency’s electronic vacuum cleaner had already begun to suck up information on Americans–criminal law and the Constitution be damned?

(Dizzy sez: Hmmm…good question…)

Report: State Dept Doesn’t Know “Specifically” What It Got For $1.2 Bn Private Security Contract

A pair of new reports have delivered scorching judgments about the State Department’s performance in overseeing work done by the private companies that the government relies on increasingly in Iraq and Afghanistan to carry out delicate security work and other missions

(Dizzy sez: Boy, am I glad the Republicans are so fiscally conservative, otherwise, this would be worse!)

From News Hounds:

Robert Novak Suggests Valerie Plame Part of Anti-Bush Cabal At CIA:

With the release of Valerie Plame’s book, FOX News did their best to discredit her on Hannity & Colmes last night (10/22/07). First, they re-aired Sean Hannity’s “investigation” into Plamegate (Hey, what happened to FNC’s claim that Hannity isn’t a journalist, so it’s no big deal that he raised money for Rudy Giuliani?). Then there was an interview with Robert Novak in which he said (amongst a slew of right-wing smears) that Plame is “very critical” of President Bush in her book. “She implies that he is deceitful and I think that she represents a substantial part, a substantial contingent of employees at the CIA who were very critical of their president. That’s a very difficult position to be in, to be critical of the president when you’re working at the CIA.” With video.

From DUCKPLOPS:

Halliburton Needs More Love:

“At their current rate, war appropriations could reach $1 trillion by the time Bush leaves office, a total that by some measures would exceed the cost of the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.”

Some posts on one of my favorite topics: Homeschooling

Home schoolers get creative en route to higher education:

Kate Cayley got into a Halifax university on the strength of an essay explaining her love for a 495-line poem. David Piechnik was accepted into art school in Vancouver after submitting a portfolio that included posters he designed for his church.The duo is among the nation’s growing number of home schoolers who have knocked on the doors of post-secondary institutions to convince them that kitchen-table classrooms are prime training grounds for higher education.

And the institutions are listening. Many schools that wouldn’t look twice at home-schooled applicants a decade ago are now crafting policies to accommodate them, ranging from the rigid to the welcoming. “I never really assumed I wouldn’t get in,” said Piechnik, a 22-year-old from Surrey who entered a formal classroom for the first time last year when he enrolled at the Art Institute of Vancouver. “But, I didn’t have transcripts, so I had to go meet with them.”

Why Homeschool?:

It was around this time that we attended a homeschool conference in Woodland Hills, California. I had heard a fair bit about the practice, but always assumed that it was mostly adopted by religiously orthodox families who didn’t want to expose their children to beliefs outside their own, or that it was something done by families in the most rural parts of the country who would otherwise have to walk four miles to get to school. Still, I went along with an open mind. We sat in on talks and picked up numerous books on the subject. But the one thing to emerge for me was this: homeschooling could certainly prove a successful alternative for families who felt that the system, for whatever reason, and at whatever level, had failed them. From preschool to high school, parents clearly wanted to take control of their children’s education.

Home-schooling guru keeps the focus on family not peers:

Q:What if you don’t know everything? How do you home-school effectively?I think when we have kids you make that commitment. It’s your ball, anyway. I’ve chosen to keep the ball in my court rather than hand it over to strangers in a peer group. When you don’t know something, you find it out. Or we find people in the community who can help us find the answers that we need. If you don’t know something there’s a way to find out… And that’s the beauty of home schooling. It’s not me sitting here telling my kids everything they need to know.

That’s enough for today, but, once again, I’d like to remind you all to keep our friends in California in your thoughts and/or prayers. Be safe and take care.

(In case you get lost, you can find this post at Dizzy Dayz and The Katrinacrat blog and The Sirens Chronicles)