Not surprisingly, research shows Bush’s abstinence-only initiative has no influence on any future decisions to have sex:

It’s been a central plank of George Bush’s social policy: to stop teenagers having sex. More than $1bn of federal money has been spent on promoting abstinence since 1998 - posters printed, television adverts broadcast and entire education programmes devised for hundreds of thousands of girls and boys.
The trouble is, new research suggests that it hasn’t worked. At all.

A survey of more than 2,000 teenagers carried out by a research company on behalf of Congress found that the half of the sample given abstinence-only education displayed exactly the same predilection for sex as those who had received conventional sex education in which contraception was discussed.

Bruce Schneier points to a Washington Post article that describes how private businesses such as rental and mortgage companies and car dealers are checking the names of customers against a list of suspected terrorists and drug traffickers made publicly available by the Treasury Department, sometimes denying services to ordinary people whose names are similar to those on the list.

Tom Kubbany is neither a terrorist nor a drug trafficker, has average credit and has owned homes in the past, so the Northern California mental-health worker was baffled when his mortgage broker said lenders were not interested in him. Reviewing his loan file, he discovered something shocking. At the top of his credit report was an OFAC alert provided by credit bureau TransUnion that showed that his middle name, Hassan, is an alias for Ali Saddam Hussein, purportedly a “son of Saddam Hussein.”

The record is not clear on whether Ali Saddam Hussein was a Hussein offspring, but the OFAC list stated he was born in 1980 or 1983. Kubbany was born in Detroit in 1949.

Climate models indicate region will be as dry as Dust Bowl for decades.

Credit Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally with saving the leader of the free world from self-immolation.

Mulally told journalists at the New York auto show that he intervened to prevent President Bush from plugging an electrical cord into the hydrogen tank of Ford’s hydrogen-electric plug-in hybrid at the White House last week. Ford wanted to give the Commander-in-Chief an actual demonstration of the innovative vehicle, so the automaker arranged for an electrical outlet to be installed on the South Lawn and ran a charging cord to the hybrid. However, as Mulally followed Bush out to the car, he noticed someone had left the cord lying at the rear of the vehicle, near the fuel tank.

“I just thought, ‘Oh my goodness!’ So, I started walking faster, and the President walked faster and he got to the cord before I did. I violated all the protocols. I touched the President. I grabbed his arm and I moved him up to the front,” Mulally said. “I wanted the president to make sure he plugged into the electricity, not into the hydrogen This is all off the record, right?”

You can’t make this stuff up.

US Home prices from 1890 to 2007, adjusted for inflation, and plotted as a roller coaster ride with Atari’s Roller Coaster Tycoon 3. The graph is here.

Geraldo and O’Reilly ‘debate’ illegal immigration’s role in the deaths of two girls in Virginia Beach in a drunk car crash. Watch their heads explode.

In an extended bonus scene from the new documentary ‘Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers’, Ben Carter, a former Halliburton/KBR water purification specialist, discusses discovering Halliburton was providing dangerously contaminated water to troops, and the serious long-term implications.

The Senate Democratic Policy Committee held hearings on the water contamination issue on January 23, 2006. Whistleblowers Ben Carter and Ken May testified that Halliburton subsidiary KBR knowingly exposes troops and civilians to contaminated water from Iraq’s Euphrates River. (Transcript of the hearing, Ben Carter’s testimony).

On March 16, 2006, the Associated Press released an internal 21-page Halliburton report which admits that KBR exposed U.S. troops to contaminated water throughout Iraq. The Defense Department pays Halliburton over $400 million each month for their work in Iraq.

I don’t know what’s scarier: Karl Rove or Karl Rove rapping.

A 117-page document obtained by Salon.com highlights a “secretive plan” by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to “gut” the Endangered Species Act.

The law, which is “credited with saving the American Bald Eagle from extinction,” would be changed to “limit the number of species that can be protected,” curtail preserved acres of wildlife habitat, and “dilute legal barriers that protect habitat from sprawl, logging or mining.”

– ThinkProgress

“Government scientists, armed with copies of heavily edited reports, charged Monday that the Bush administration and its political appointees had soft-pedaled their findings on climate change… The paper trail illustrated how officials with no scientific training shaped the administration’s climate change message and edited global warming reports, inserting doubt in the place of definitive statements and diminishing the role people play in the planet’s rising temperatures.” - Read the LA Times article