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The guy in the "Oh, no!" photo.

The traitors in Congress January 13, 2009 On January 8, 2009, with no objection being raised, Congress — House and Senate — voted unanimously to certify the Electoral College. Not one legislator, Republican or Democrat, Senator or Representative, could or did refute even one of the undisputed facts concerning the eligibility of Barack Hussein Obama to the office of president under Article II, Section 1, United States Constitution. Not one! Those undisputed facts are as follows: Barack Hussein Obama has not been vetted or certified eligible to the office of president ... The Certification of Live Birth (COLB) that Obama...

On Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano, which rises more than 13,000 feet above sea level, there is a mid-level base facility where scientists can pretend they are on the moon. Hawaii's volcanic terrain, soil and remote environment provide an ideal environment for testing instruments and equipment that someday may be used by astronauts at a lunar base. Recently, a team of scientists working for the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (PISCES) demonstrated its first field test for NASA's In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) Project. Research Operations Manager John Hamilton supported the mission simulation to show how astronauts will be...

We've seen a lot of social conservatives upset over today's intemperate attack by Kathleen Parker (Note: she was unnecessarily contemptuous, but her point that "the Republican Party -- and conservatism with it -- eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one's heart where it belongs" is worth serious consideration).Well, I am a libertarian, so let's talk about the Kathleen Parker of the social conservative crowd: Mike Huckabee.This week, Huckabee called libertarians the "real threat" to the Republican Party... In a chapter titled "Faux-Cons: Worse than Liberalism," Huckabee identifies what he calls the "real threat" to...

MONROE – At first glance, it’s an unlikely combination. A black family seated under a tent facing a line of Civil War re-enactors, proudly holding Confederate flags and gripping their weapons. But what lies between these two groups is what brought them together: An unmarked grave about to get its due, belonging to a slave who fought for the Confederacy. Weary Clyburn was best friends with his master’s son, Frank. When Frank left the plantation to fight in the Civil War, Clyburn followed him. He fought alongside Frank and even saved his life on two occasions. On July 18, the...

PARIS (AFP) — A hundred years ago this week, a gigantic explosion ripped open the dawn sky above the swampy taiga forest of western Siberia, leaving a scientific riddle that endures to this day. A dazzling light pierced the heavens, preceding a shock wave with the power of a thousand atomic bombs which flattened 80 million trees in a swathe of more than 2,000 square kilometres (800 square miles). Evenki nomads recounted how the blast tossed homes and animals into the air. In Irkutsk, 1,500 kilometres (950 miles) away, seismic sensors registered what was initially deemed to be an earthquake....

Just Three Weeks Before Dallas, Feds Uncovered Plot to Kill JFK in Chicago, Says Ex-Secret Service Agent By CHUCK GOUDIE, WLS-TV Nov. 22, 2007 — A former Secret Service agent has told WLS-TV there was a plot to kill President Kennedy in Chicago three weeks before he was assassinated in Dallas. Kennedy was murdered on Nov. 22, 1963. Today is the 44th anniversary of JFK's assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald would never have had the chance to kill Kennedy in Dallas, had an assassination plot in Chicago succeeded three weeks earlier, a plot that has been mentioned over the years. Kennedy...

The chicken egg has been prepped for surgery – a pea-size hole cut in the shell and covered with sticky tape. And now Hans Larsson, a McGill University researcher, removes it from the incubator, places it under a microscope and prepares to operate. He gently peels off the tape and teases back the membranes that line the shell with tweezers. Through the eyepiece, he can see the tiny dot of a heart, steadily beating. He can also see the bud where he implants a milky bead doused in a protein. He hopes it will coax the embryo to grow a...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear arguments Monday whether there is merit to a lawsuit by the family of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old activist from Olympia killed by a bulldozer in the Gaza Strip in 2003. The defendant in the case is Caterpillar, which made the D9 bulldozer involved in her death. The case, Corrie et al. v. Caterpillar, was filed in Seattle in 2005, but a district court dismissed it. After this hearing, the appeals court will rule whether the suit should be dismissed or sent back to the lower court. Cindy and Craig...

PETERSBURG, United States (AFP) - Dinosaurs frolic with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and an animatronic Noah directs work on his Ark in a multimillion dollar creationism museum set to open next week in Kentucky. Designed by the creator of the King Kong and Jaws exhibits at the Universal Studios theme park, the stunning 60,000 square foot (5,400 square-metre) facility is built for a specific purpose: refuting evolution and expanding the flock of believers in a literal interpretation of the Bible. "You'll get people into a place like this that you can't get into a church with...

Evidence for punctuated equilibrium lies in the genetic sequences of many organisms, according to a study in this week's Science. Researchers report that about a third of reconstructed phylogenetic trees of animals, plants, and fungi reveal periods of rapid molecular evolution. "We've never really known to what extent punctuated equilibrium is a general phenomenon in speciation," said Douglas Erwin of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the study. Since its introduction by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in the 1970s, the theory of punctuated equilibrium -- that evolution usually proceeds slowly...

You don't have to be a biologist or an anthropologist to see how closely the great apes—gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans—resemble us. Even a child can see that their bodies are pretty much the same as ours, apart from some exaggerated proportions and extra body hair. Apes have dexterous hands much like ours but unlike those of any other creature. And, most striking of all, their faces are uncannily expressive, showing a range of emotions that are eerily familiar. That's why we delight in seeing chimps wearing tuxedos, playing the drums or riding bicycles. It's why a potbellied gorilla scratching...

The earliest known ancestor of modern-day birds took to the skies by gliding from trees using primitive feathered wings on their arms and legs, according to new research by a University of Calgary paleontologist. In a paper published in the journal Paleobiology, Department of Biological Sciences PhD student Nick Longrich challenges the idea that birds began flying by taking off from the ground while running and shows that the dinosaur-like bird Archaeopteryx soared using wing-like feathers on all of its limbs. "The discussions about the origins of avian flight have been dominated by the so-called 'ground up' and 'trees down'...

3.3 million years ago, a three year old girl died in present day Ethiopia, in an area called Dikika. Though a baby, she provides researchers with a unique account of our past, as would a grandmother. Her completeness, antiquity, and age at death combine make this find unprecedented in the history of paleoanthropology and open many new research avenues to investigate into the infancy of early human ancestors. The extraordinary discovery reported this week in the scientific journal Nature, was found in north-eastern Ethiopia, by a paleoanthropological research team led by Dr. Zeresenay Alemseged of the Max Planck Institute in...

Sydney: An Australian fossil find may mean living creatures left the world's oceans for the land much earlier than once thought, rewriting a small part of mankind's evolution. A study of rocks collected near Buchan, in Victoria state's East Gippsland, has yielded a lung fish fossil more than 20 million years older than earlier finds, Macquarie University researcher Zarena Johanson said yesterday. Her colleague, Prof John Talent, who found the rocks, said the fossilised lung fish - or coelacanth - sets back the timeline for when marine animals made their first excursions on to land. "It seems from experimental data...

The discovery of a bizarre species of fossil whale from Australia with huge eyes and flesh-ripping jaws provides valuable new insights into the evolution of whales, researchers say. The previously unknown species lived about 25 million years ago and was an early ancestor of modern baleen whales, which feed by filtering plankton from seawater. This group includes the blue whale, the largest animal ever to inhabit the planet. But the newfound predatory whale likely hunted sharks and other fish despite its relatively small size and suggests that baleen whales weren't always the toothless gentle giants we see in our oceans...

Molecular techniques confirm fin theory Performance on the dance floor may not always show it, but people are rarely born with two left feet. We have genes that instruct our arms and legs to grow in the right places and point in the right directions. They also provide for the spaces between our fingers and toes and every other formative detail of our limbs. Evolutionarily speaking, the genetic instructions used to construct and position our limbs were being perfected more than half a billion years ago in fishes, not along the sides of the body where the fins that preceded...

Darwin won. Moderate Kansas State Board of Education candidates pulled off a victory Tuesday, gathering enough might to topple the board’s 6-4 conservative majority. A victory by incumbent Janet Waugh, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Lawrence, and wins by Republican moderates in two districts previously represented by conservatives left the tables turned heading into the Nov. 7 general election. “If we change the board around, we’ll be able to make decisions that we think are right for our students,” Lawrence school board member Craig Grant said. Grant had worked to defeat the conservatives who attracted international attention and...

WASHINGTON, July 28, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In an op ed piece in the LA Times, David P. Barash, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, says that reproductive facilities should work towards creating a race of human/chimpanzee hybrids, but, he admits, only because it would offend Christians.   Some geneticists have postulated that their distant evolutionary ancestors may have interbred with those of chimps, and Barash argues that this means there is no moral difference between a human being and a chimpanzee, or indeed, between a human being and a sea sponge.   The psychology professor looks forward to...

The ability to spot venomous snakes may have played a major role in the evolution of monkeys, apes and humans, according to a new hypothesis by Lynne Isbell, professor of anthropology at UC Davis. The work is published in the July issue of the Journal of Human Evolution. Primates have good vision, enlarged brains, and grasping hands and feet, and use their vision to guide reaching and grasping. Scientists have thought that these characteristics evolved together as early primates used their hands and eyes to grab insects and other small prey, or to handle and examine fruit and other foods....

A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked "(S)" for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.

During the tumultuous final weeks in the life of Terri Schiavo, the young woman who died in a Florida hospice in April, press reports in the nation’s media typically focused on the bitter conflicts among members of her family over her treatment, disagreements among consultants over her state of consciousness, and the increasingly intense arguments in legislatures and the courts over her guardianship. Since her death, the case and the story of her death and dying have been mined for their bearing on our ongoing culture wars and for the debate over the place of “values” in our politics. In...

<p>The San Jose airport is looking at plans to add 18 bomb-detection machines and house them in tents to meet a Dec. 31 federal deadline to inspect every piece of checked luggage for explosives.</p> <p>Officials released no details Monday about how quickly the tents could be in place or exactly when the machines would be installed. The tents are needed because there is no room for the machines in the airport itself.</p>