I just love it when animals can’t make it from the food dish before they fall asleep.  It reminds me of this picture.

Yet another scathing commentary from Keith Olbermann regarding Bush.  Ouch!

Visit Friday Ark #109 throughout the weekend for a growing list of links to a variety of animal photos.

This is a very bad sign.  “NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists report this year’s ozone hole in the polar region of the Southern Hemisphere has broken records for area and depth. The ozone layer acts to protect life on Earth by blocking harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun. The ‘ozone hole’ is a severe depletion of the ozone layer high above Antarctica. It is primarily caused by human-produced compounds that release chlorine and bromine gases in the stratosphere. ‘From September 21 to 30, the average area of the ozone hole was the largest ever observed, at 10.6 million square miles,’ said Paul Newman, atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.”

Climate models now agree global weather is changing.  “Much of the world will face an enhanced risk of heat waves, intense precipitation, and other weather extremes, conclude scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Texas Tech University, and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre.”  Check out the article for the details.  For those of us in Texas, you’ll find the models now say the weather patterns causing our drought are just getting started.  Note the severity of the changes are tempered only by how much and how soon we reign in greenhouse gas emissions.  Even in the best scenario, all of the models concluded dangerous changes around the globe will be realized this century.

So electronic voting is safe, huh?  And Diebold can be trusted, huh?  Then perhaps someone would care to explain precisely how the operating code for their machines fell into the hands of an anonymous person who’s now sharing it with others.  Remember this is the same company whose code was posted to the internet in 2003, another little problem they couldn’t explain or stop.  Diebold is a menace to our democracy and traumatically harmed the last election.  The government needs to halt all of these companies and put significant regulations in place to ensure this kind of security breech cannot happen, that the machines are as infallible and untouchable as possible, and that every possible safeguard is in place to ensure the outcome of elections is guaranteed to the greatest extent possible.  Right now, it seems we’re relying on the companies to police themselves.  This disturbing event is yet another example of why that’s wholly insufficient.