China Nuclear Sub Type 094 Jin-Class SSBN Spotted On Google Earth -

From WorldTribune.com

A satellite image of China's new nuclear ballistic missile submarine is available on the Google Earth Internet site.

A satellite image of China's new ballistic missile submarine. FAS.org
Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), spotted the images, photographed by the commercial Quickbird satellite in late 2006.

One photo is of what is apparently the new Type 094 Jin-class SSBN at the Xiaopingdao base near Dalian, FAS reported.

John Edwards and Hilary Clinton's Thousand Dollar Hairdos

Wow. I don't know what a $1,000 haircut or a $3,000 hairdo looks like, but I guess John Edwards and Hillary Clinton have them according to the Washington Post .

Scooter Libby's $250,000 Fine Paid - Here's The Receipt

According to Wonkette , Scooter Libby's $250,000 fine has been paid from a $6 millon legal defense fund. Thus, one more prong in his trfecta of punishment -- jail, fine, and disbarment -- has been removed.

Whereas he was originally looking at jail, a fine, and disbarment, now he's just looking at disbarment, and who says that's a guarantee, given the political nature of such decisions?

It helps to have powerful friends. I know Paris Hilton's chomping at the bit about this.

Cold-Blooded Crowd Fails To Help Stabbed Woman At Mall

You wonder just how many sick people are out there, here's a view into a social subset of them.

Kansas Shoppers Step Over Dying Woman
By ROXANA HEGEMAN,

AP
Posted: 2007-07-04 09:37:01
Filed Under: Crime News, Nation
WICHITA, Kan. (July 4) - As stabbing victim LaShanda Calloway lay dying on the floor of a convenience store, five shoppers, including one who stopped to take a picture of her with a cell phone, stepped over the woman, police said.

The June 23 situation, captured on the store's surveillance video, got scant news coverage until a columnist for The Wichita Eagle disclosed the existence of the video and its contents Tuesday.

Police have refused to release the video, saying it is part of their investigation.

"It was tragic to watch," police spokesman Gordon Bassham said Tuesday. "The fact that people were more interested in taking a picture with a cell phone and shopping for snacks rather than helping this innocent young woman is, frankly, revolting."

The woman was stabbed during an altercation that was not part of a robbery, Bassham said. It took about two minutes for someone to call 911, he said.

Calloway, 27, died later at a hospital.

Two suspects have been arrested. A 19-year-old woman was charged with first-degree murder. Another suspect who turned himself in had not been charged as of Tuesday, the Sedgwick County prosecutor's office said.

The district attorney's office will have to decide whether any of the shoppers could be charged, Bassham said.

It was uncertain what law, if any, would be applicable. A state statute for failure to render aid refers only to victims of a car accident.

Eagle columnist Mark McCormick told The Associated Press he learned about the video when he called Wichita Police Chief Norman Williams to inquire about a phone call he had received from a reader complaining about a Police Department policy that requires emergency medical personnel to wait until police secure a crime scene before rendering aid. McCormick said Williams then unloaded on him about the shoppers in the stabbing case.

"This is just appalling," Williams told the newspaper. "I could continue shopping and not render aid and then take time out to take a picture? That's crazy. What happened to our respect for life?"

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
2007-07-04 05:29:17

CNN Polling Linked To Clinton Donor Vinod Gupta

Now, I have the smoking gun reason behind CNN's apparent Anti-Obama bias in coverage and polling. I also have yet another window into how the Clinton campaign raises money, in addition to the campaign fraud lawsuit by Peter Paul . The photo shows Senator Clinton with the family of Vinod Gupta. Mr. Gupta's on the far right and the woman he's standing with is is wife Laurel. In the back are his sons Jess, Ben, and Alex. The man next to Senator Clinton is Mr. Gupta's dad.

I don't know if Vinod Gupta is related to CNN Analyst and Medical Expert Sanjah Gupta, but I can say that Vinod Gupta's polling firm is. According to various sources, like FreeRepublic.com , CNN Polls are tied to Vinod Gupta's firm Opinion Research Corporation. This calls into question the honesty of CNN's poll reporting.

Mr. Gupta is not just a donor to the Clinton's but a huge contributor. According to the Washington Post , he's given huge donations to the Democratic Party and allowed the Clintons to jet around to Switzerland, Hawaii, Jamaica, Mexico on his corporate plane -- $900,000 worth of travel. And President Clinton has secured a 3.3 million consulting deal with Gupta's technology firm, InfoUSA

According to the New York Sun , In 2000, Mr. Gupta gave $100,000 to support Mrs. Clinton's Senate bid and hosted a fund-raiser in his home that raised $100,000 more. "She was so good," he said of Mrs. Clinton's talk there, according to the Omaha World-Herald. "I think she is smarter than the president."

The matter of CNN polls being produced by a Clinton donor is an issues of extreme concern, especially in the wake of Senator Barack Obama's massive $32 million second quarter fundraising total, a record in campaign history and a take that includes no money from lobbyists or political action committees, and who've average donation was just $127.

The problem is that while Senator Obama's outraised Senator Clinton, the polls conducted by CNN and USA Today / Gallup, have not reflected this, except for a USA Today / Gallup Poll that reported Obama and Clinton as tied , but which they re-did to favor Clinton (I'm not kidding, read the link) and re-ran just seven days later -- a weird development which I assert results in polling that's fixed to favor Senator Clinton. This news backs my assertion.

According to the LibertyPost.com , "Opinion Research began conducting polls for CNN in April 2006, according to TheDeal.com. A month after InfoUSA closed on its purchase of the polling company in December, CNN and Opinion Research announced a 2-year partnership, with Opinion Research conducting political polling for CNN through next year’s election. In an e-mail statement, Opinion Research President Jeff Resnick defended the company’s work for CNN: "Each week, great care is taken to ensure the poll results are accurate and free from any bias. An examination of the poll results will support this statement.”

But Bruce Weinstein, who writes an ethics column for BusinessWeek.com, said just the perception of a potential conflict of interest could hurt a media organization’s credibility."

What to do? First, share this with as many people as you can, and second, call and email CNN and tell them to expose their bias.

CNN's ties with the Clintons are too many. There's Mr. Gupta, and then Paul Begala and James Carville, both of whom worked for the Clintons and are Clinton supporters. A YouTuber, "DougFromUpland" has made a great video which outlines another connection between CNN and the Clinton's and polling, Rick Kaplan in addition to Vinod Gupta. The video's here:

Hillary Clinton -Arianna Huffington Points To Senator's Problem With Hiding The Truth

This article is a must read as it distills the Carl Berstein book in a way that's not been done on CNN or any other news program. It also forms the perfect foundation to explain what I'm starting to call "The Peter Paul Affair."

Arianna Huffington: Hillary's disturbing secrecy problem
By Arianna Huffington
Tribune Media Services
Article Last Updated: 06/28/2007 06:01:56 PM MDT

I spent the weekend reading A Woman in Charge, Carl Bernstein's biography of Hillary Clinton (OK, I know I'm late) while being simultaneously bombarded with fresh evidence of the Bush/Cheney administration's pathological obsession with secrecy.
Historians will be debating for decades what the worst element of the Bush White House was - but at the root of the entire cancerous structure is George Bush and Dick Cheney's shared fixation on secrecy. Their mutual contempt for the public's right to know knows no bounds. Witness the VP's absurd attempt to escape oversight by claiming he's not part of the executive branch, or the endless legal maneuvering to keep the administration's abuse of detainees hidden from scrutiny.
As a result, it's pretty safe to say the central question facing Democratic voters in the presidential primaries is: Which candidate will be most effective at rolling back the Bush years? On issue after issue, the Democratic contenders are doing everything they can to highlight their differences with Bush.
But when it comes to the issue of secrecy and an administration operating in the shadows, there's an argument to be made that the candidate least likely to turn on the lights is Hillary Clinton. Her lifelong commitment to secrecy is one of the main themes of Bernstein's book.
"Hillary Rodham Clinton has always had a difficult relationship with the truth," writes
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Bernstein. "She has often chosen to obfuscate, omit and avoid. It is an understatement by now that she has been known to apprehend truths about herself and the events of her life that others do not exactly share."
Or, as Bernstein summed it up on the "Today Show," "This is a woman who led a camouflaged life and continues to."
It's not just that she's a private person. There are plenty of public servants who are zealous about guarding their personal lives and equally zealous about keeping their public lives - and public policies - transparent. But, like Bush and Cheney, Clinton seems devoted to secrecy for its own sake.
As Bernstein shows, what was most shocking about her handling of the health care fiasco during her husband's administration wasn't that she kept the plan secret from its critics, but that she kept it secret even from those who would have been champions of the plan had they known anything about it.
This passion for concealment is a pattern that, as Bernstein demonstrates, has been repeated throughout Clinton's life. It was there in the head-scratching decision to hide her college thesis from public view because it was about radical organizer Saul Alinsky. It was there in her refusal for 30 years to admit that she had failed the bar exam the first time she took it. It was there in the way she glossed over in her memoir her summer internship at the law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein - one of the most renowned left-wing law firms in the nation. It was there in the way she handled the Whitewater and Travelgate investigations, which, as Bernstein told me, "ended up unnecessarily prolonging them."
Bernstein quotes Clinton lawyer Mark Fabiani as saying of Hillary and Whitewater: "She would do anything to get out of the situation. And if that involved not being forthcoming (in releasing documents and other materials), she herself would say, 'I have a reason for not being forthcoming."' And he reports that then-White House adviser George Stephanopoulos described Hillary's responses to the various scandals of the Clinton presidency as "Jesuitical lying."
And it has been there in the way Hillary's camp has attacked Bernstein's book, saying, among other things, "Is it possible to be quoted yawning?" and deriding it as old news: "Nothing more than cash for rehash." This assessment stands in stark contrast to the majority of reviews, including the one in The Los Angeles Times by Ron Brownstein, who called it "a model of contemporary political biography . . . an excellent book: thorough, balanced, judicious and deeply reported."
"Hillary Clinton and her advisers apparently don't want people to know her real story," Carl Bernstein told me. "That is particularly sad because the authentic picture of her life is so much more compelling than the tired, airbrushed and sanitized version they keep serving up and refining. The campaign's official response to A Woman in Charge - even before they had seen the book - is the kind of thing I would have expected from the Nixon White House or the Bush White House, not a Clinton presidential campaign committed to a new openness and transparency."
I actually found Bernstein's book to be a very humanizing portrait of Clinton, which is why her camp's reaction struck me as excessive and misguided. It's as if Hillary and those around her have such an idealized view of her they feel the need to vanquish anything that contradicts the faultless fantasy. No imperfection is allowed.
On the campaign trail, Clinton talks a lot about her experience in the White House - clearly we're meant to factor those eight years in when evaluating her fitness to return. But reading the Bernstein book made me feel like she has taken away all the wrong lessons about being in power. Her tendency to hide and obfuscate appears to be a learned behavior.
So the question facing Democrats - and, indeed, the country - is whether we want another presidency cloaked in secrecy, deception and denial. ---

Dallas Cowboys New Stadium On Schedule - Roof Trusses Installed

The World's Largest Pro Football Stadium is on target for completion in 2009. Personally, I can't wait to see it. The photo was taken from the webcam set up to allow fans to see the structure as it's being built.

ARLINGTON, Texas (AP) - Construction officials say the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington is about 30% complete -- with a steel arch now being built.

Crews have put the first section of the arch truss in place, as a support for the retractable roof of the one billion dollar complex.

Arlington mayor Robert Cluck was on hand yesterday to give a thumbs-up to the process.

The new home for the Cowboys will open for the 2009 season.

The venue also will host the 2011 Super Bowl.

Swinger Loses Wife, Files Lawsuit, Wins $5,000

Yep. It happened. Check this out

Swinger wins lawsuit against man he let sleep with his wife

July 1, 2007
By Steve Patterson Special to the Daily Southtown
After 10 years of marriage, Arthur Friedman told his wife they needed to spice things up a bit, that their sex life was too boring, she said.

The Northbrook man wanted to begin having sex with other couples and wanted to watch his wife, Natalie, have sex with other men and women, she said.

But along the way, Natalie Friedman, 35, wound up falling for one of the men she had sex with in her effort to please her husband, also 35.

Arthur Friedman decided that was crossing the line. He sued German Blinov under the state's alienation-of-affection law, claiming that the Glenview man stole his wife's love away.

Illinois is one of only eight states where such a case can still be filed. They rarely are, and when they are, they're usually thrown out.

But last week, a Cook County jury heard Friedman's case and awarded him $4,802.87 -- derived from a formula that considered, in part, Natalie's contributions to the household for a period of time. The Friedmans are divorcing. German and his wife, Inessa, have divorced.

"This guy ruined my life; he backstabbed me," Arthur Friedman said. "What he did was wrong. And I did what I had to do to get my point across."

Arthur Friedman denied that he had sex with anyone else, though Natalie Friedman described their trysts in detail -- including four-way sex in a hot tub with Blinov and another woman.

"That's what he said would keep our marriage going," she said in an interview. "That was exciting to him. Then he cries about losing his love? When I'm having sex with another person?"

Blinov doesn't deny having a relationship with Natalie while she was married, but he was stunned to learn that he could be sued for that.

Natalie Friedman said it wasn't Blinov who caused her to stop loving her husband -- it was Arthur Friedman and the humiliating things he made her do in the name of love.

"German was not the cause of this," she said. "I stopped loving Arthur. He made me do all these things. How could he say he loved me? If he'd been such a great husband, wouldn't he protect me instead of making me do these things?"

But Friedman convinced jurors that Blinov was the cause, though jury foreman Eric Heisig, of Palatine, said jurors "way more than once" said "this is stupid."

"The statute is ridiculous," Heisig said.

Katharine K. Baker, an associate dean at Chicago Kent School of Law who has written extensively about family law, said few states allow such cases because the laws they're based on are archaic.

But even where allowed, they're rare because "they assume the main focus of the suit has no decision-making ability. And that's pretty insulting," Baker said.

Friedman had to prove there was love between him and his wife until Blinov took it away. Yet even his attorney, David Shults, conceded that "it's kind of remarkable" that the case wasn't dismissed earlier.

"Oftentimes, it's both people's fault when there's a breakdown in a marriage," Shults said. "There often isn't that one catalyst that we had here."

Blinov was no catalyst, his attorney, Enrico Mirabelli, said, and "this type of lawsuit is not designed to be a vehicle for vengeance or vindication. Sadly, in this case, it was used for both."

But Arthur Friedman said he had no idea his wife was unhappy in their relationship. And when Natalie began working out at the gym owned by Blinov and his now ex-wife, Arthur said, they all quickly became friends.

"German was not a pirate of her affections," Mirabelli said. "Her affections were already adrift."

Jurors disagreed, even though Heisig said many of them wanted to give Arthur Friedman nothing -- or $17.20, the amount they got for each day served.

"This case was never about the money," another of Arthur's attorneys, David Nemeroff, said. "This was about vindicating Arthur for what German did to him and to his family."

Natalie Friedman said hearing dollar values tossed about was humiliating.

"This law allowed him to put a price tag on me," she said. "That hurts more than anything."

Chicago Sun-Times

Marvel Comics' Head Stan Lee Says He Never Gave To Clinton

In this article, we learn that Senator Hillary Clinton had taken almost a million in contributions for her Senate run iilegally, and then denied knowing the person -- Peter Paul -- who gave it. Then she said she knew him, but never talked about his donating anything. Then Senator Clinton's campaign said that Marvel Comics Head Stan Lee, who worked with Paul, gave $100,000. He denies this on video. All of this is a big black eye for Senator Clinton as she runs for President. It sits in vast contrast to the campaign of Senator Barack Obama, who's taken no lobbyist or P.A.C. money and has managed to gain record contributions from a large group of donors giving $127, not several million.

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Hillary Clinton's Stock Going Down - Tom Bevan

In this blog post , Tom Bevan shows a trend where Senator Clinton's stock rating in the presidential campaign is going down, whereas Barack Obama's stock has trended up.

Instead Of PriceLine, Well, Don't Use PriceLine

PriceLine. You know. It's the online hotel and travel website best known for being represented by William Shatner of Star Trek. But I've had a bad experience with PriceLine and because of it I can just tell you I consider it to be a fraud, period.

It's better to use a firm like Hotel Reservations.com, which promises Cheap Hotelsbut without the bait-and switch that Priceline gives you. In a matter of time, maybe Shat will switch to Hotel Reservations.com.

Why not?

Don't you think it's better than going to PriceLine and signing up for a hotel you're supposed to get, only to have another one?

Geez!

Well that's what happened to me. I'll never forget it and it explains all of those websites that label PriceLine as a fraud. Watch out there!

Think I'm kidding?

Look at this:

Today I had some real fun and wrote formal complaints against priceline at

- The Federal Trade Commission(FTC)
- The FBI Internet Fraud Complaints Center (FICC)
- The National Fraud Center
- National Internet Fraud Watch (NFIC).
- The Better Business Bureau of Conneticut
- First National Bank of Omaha

So what happend? I just experienced fraud on the internet.

My frist mistake was that I decided to try something new by purchasing a hotel stay through priceline (confirmation number 63260917). However, I was also charged a $15 additional 'travel insurance' fee even when I did not requested it. I contacted priceline and was only verbally abused by a person who called himself agent 7399. After spending almost one hour on the phone (mostly on hold and in a maze of recorded messages), they refused to refund anything and was extremely abusive. The first 'agent' also refused to transfer me to a manager and stated that only a colleague was available. This person was equally rude and did not let me finish a single sentence and 'told me off' in no uncertain terms...

It quickly became clear that this was pure intimidation and fraud and the 45+ minutes on hold was clearly designed to discourage any requests for refunds.

Instead, agent #7399 claimed that I had selected to buy the travel insurance. I asked him how he could make such a claim, when I called him within 20 minutes after receiving an email confirmation about the overcharges. He simply told me that they had good systems and I should 'trust him'.

In short, I was taken subjected to a $15 theft and was being yelled at for simply protesting.

I am not an investor activist yet, but I will become one if needed...

Obama Donations: Raises $10.3 Million Online in Second Quarter

Obama Raises $10.3 Million Online in Second Quarter
by Jonathan Singer, Mon Jul 02, 2007 at 01:20:50 PM EST

You're reading these numbers first here at MyDD.

During the second quarter, Barack Obama brought in $10.3 million dollars online, or about a third of the $32.5 million he raised overall this quarter. This ups his total online haul for the year to $17.2 million. Both of these online fundraising numbers are very large and indeed are records for this point in the campaign.

Since the beginning of the campaign 110,000 people have given online to the Obama campaign, or more than 40 percent of his donors. For year year, 90 percent of the online donations to the Obama campaign have been in amounts of $100 dollars or less, and a half of the online donations have been in amounts of $25 or less.

We'll get you the numbers for other candidates as they're released, but if you're interested in reading a comparison between online fundraising numbers this cycle versus the previous one, Jerome has a very interesting take. Quickly, Howard Dean raised about $25 million online of the $50 million or so he raised over the course of 2003, so Obama appears to be on pace to top that online fundraising record by a fairly large margin (though Obama's offline contributions make up a larger proportion of his overall fundraising than did Dean's).