An American adventurer, he took flight from his girlfriend's back yard on July 2, 1982 in a homemade aircraft that he had fashioned out of a Sears patio chair and 45 helium-filled weather balloons.

The clip is here:

MONTPELIER -- The Vermont Senate this morning approved by a 16-9 margin a resolution calling on the U.S. House to launch impeachment proceedings of Pres. George W. Bush and Vice Pres. Dick Cheney.

The Vermont Senate is the first state legislative body in the country to call on Congress to begin impeachment proceedings. [...]The move comes just days after nearly 150 people from around Vermont converged on Montpelier to urge lawmakers to pass such a resolution out of the House and Senate. The emotionally-charged, 40-minute meeting left backers hopeful that something could happen this session.

[I was in Montpelier on Tuesday.] Senate Pres. Pro Tem Peter Shumlin and Sen. Jeannette White added Cheney's name to the bill. When the cats away, the mice will play! They seized the moment, considering that Republican Lt. Gov. Dubie was not there today, so Shumlin was presiding--thus able to avoid having to send it to a committee (as Dubie most likely would have done.)

It's a pretty forceful read.

"I think our current President should visit the real world once in a while."

"Saddam ... was a total control freak. To introduce a wild card like al Qaeda in any sense was just something he would not do. So I just didn't believe it for an instant."

Campaign Against Alleged Voter Fraud Fuels Political Tempest

 For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates.The administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush's popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.
[...]
Former department lawyers, public records and other documents show that since Bush took office, political appointees in the Civil Rights Division have:

-Approved Georgia and Arizona laws that tightened voter ID requirements. A federal judge tossed out the Georgia law as an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of poor voters, and a federal appeals court signaled its objections to the Arizona law on similar grounds last fall, but that litigation was delayed by the U.S. Supreme Court until after the election.
[...]
The administration's presence was felt last year in at least one state legislative battle over voter identification.

In Missouri, where Republican Sen. Jim Talent was fighting to hang onto his seat and hold the U.S. Senate for the GOP, a Republican-backed photo ID requirement cleared the state House of Representatives by one vote in May 2006 after an intense lobbying effort in which backers alleged voter fraud in heavily Democratic St. Louis and Kansas City.

"The White House was heavily involved" in the effort to win passage, state Rep. Bryan Stevenson, the Republican floor leader, said in a telephone interview.
[...]

It's Earth Day

Fined money for planting a seed. A seed that "God" put in our midst. But it's OK to use other plants for medicines.

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- The world faces increased hunger and water shortages in the poorest countries, massive floods and avalanches in Asia, and species extinction unless nations adapt to climate change and halt its progress, according to a report approved [April 06] by an international conference on global warming.
...
Without taking action to curb carbon emissions, man's livable habitat will shrink starkly, said Stanford scientist Stephen Schneider, one of the authors. "Don't be poor in a hot country, don't live in hurricane alley, watch out about being on the coasts or in the Arctic, and it's a bad idea to be on high mountains with glaciers melting," he said.

After an hour of bench-pressing a log weighing several hundred pounds during Army Special Forces selection training in February 2006, five soldiers lying on their backs at Fort Bragg, N.C., reacted quickly to the next order:

"Drop back!"

So quickly, in fact, that when they dropped the log, it landed on Spc. Paul Thurman's head.

"I shook for a moment, and then went limp," Thurman told Military Times. "I was unconscious for a minute or two, and then I went back to training."

An MRI later showed that Thurman had lesions on the right parietal lobe of his brain, a condition that led to a "don't deploy" order - which the Army violated, according to Thurman. Worse, rather than providing compassionate understanding of the symptoms associated with traumatic brain injury, he said leaders at Fort Carson, Colo., have harassed him, refused him medication and pushed for an Article 15.

Thurman stepped forward Friday as one of the 18 soldiers whose cases were cited by six senators in a letter to the Government Accountability Office requesting a review of alleged improper handling of traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder and ungrounded personality disorder discharges.

...the Office of Special Counsel is preparing to jump into one of the most sensitive and potentially explosive issues in Washington, launching a broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove.

First, the inquiry comes from inside the administration, not from Democrats in Congress. Second, unlike the splintered inquiries being pressed on Capitol Hill, it is expected to be a unified investigation covering many facets of the political operation in which Rove played a leading part.

"We will take the evidence where it leads us," Scott J. Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel and a presidential appointee, said in an interview Monday. "We will not leave any stone unturned."