This is one powerful, stunning video. The anti-war segments equal ”Fixin’ to Die” by Country Joe & the Fish, the song that helped end the Vietnam War - and that’s the highest compliment I can give any protest song. Eminem has massive talent, this video has a strong message, and he’s taking big chances doing this.
 
You bet he can reach millions of voters and convince them to vote against Bush - and that’s precisely what he wants to do.

(If you think hip hop is only gangster rap or misogynistic or filled with no-talents, then you’ve not been listening. There’ s plenty of amazing and inspired hip hop out there - like this video.

Not that there’s anything wrong with gangster rap. “Heroin” by the Velvet Underground was a brilliant, epochal song, but that doesn’t mean those who listened to it ran out to score junk or the band advocated being a junkie. It was simply *about* their life. Just like gangster rap is about someone’s life too.)

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Iraq’s interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said today that “negligence” by US-led forces brought about the massacre of 49 Iraqi soldiers and warned of further “terrorist acts”.

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From Kos, writing in The Guardian

So a poll showing Bush leading 45-42 is headlined “Bush leads by three”, when the reality is that Bush is actually losing.

In US elections, any elected official garnering less than 50% of the vote in polls is considered vulnerable. As Democratic pollster Mark Blumenthal notes:

“In the campaign’s last hours, we tend to see ‘undecided’ voters ‘break’ for the challenger.”

Testing this theory, blogger Chris Bowers examined presidential poll results since 1976, and calculated that undecided voters broke for the challenger 86% of the time.

Kos has done a truly amazing job at blogging from a partisan liberal Democratic perspective, with his site now getting upwards of a million hits a day. He spearheaded the attack on Sinclair Broadcasting, and with that many readers, you know Sinclair felt serious pain because of it.

He once blogged that he is from El Salvador, was there during the worst of the madness, and that while US politics may get heated, it is peaceful compared to what he witnessed in El Salvador where there were death squads.

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Iran Backs Bush.

Because Democrats are such hard-asses about human rights. Never mind the axis-of-evil stuff and the pending sanctions and perhaps even invasion. Bush is the Ayatollah’s bitch….

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Thoughts from Miss Monica on the continuing sleaze and corruption in the financial world.

Illegal market timing is related to a mutual fund’s disclosure that it does *not* engage in excessive trading practices, such as market timing, while at the same time keeping secret that the traders in the mutual fund firm are actually able to and encouraged to make market timing trades to boost revenues (whether their own, a special client’s, or the firm’s overall).
 
Late trading is the practice of trading after the market closes at prices established before the market closed.  This often happens in funds earmarked for market timing, and in many cases, generates the bulk of illegal profits made in those funds.
 
Here is a good example:

Also, Franklin Resources just got whacked again for market timing … see LA Times today.

It depends on what you mean by ‘wrongdoing’

Securities regulator hits Franklin Resources with new charges, saying it’s shading the facts.

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Miss Monica is the proud grower of these giant pumpkins. The big one weighs about 300 pounds.

How the heck did we get them from the back yard to the front yard, you ask? Well, I asked the movers (yes, Miss Monica and I are an Item) if they could do it. While they’d never been asked to move giant pumpkins before, they happily did it and thought the whole process was fun.

Seasoned giant pumpkin growers advise putting each pumpkin on a pallet while it is still small, thus making the moving process much simpler, and that’s what we’ll do next year. They can easily reach 600-700 pounds, yes they can.

They are quite an attraction. People walk by, smile, and touch them. Drivers hop out of their cars to take a photo with their cell phone. Wheee… 

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