to cut off Cheney’s executive office’s funding ($4.75 million in 2008) in response to Cheney’s completely outrageous claim.

A preview of the sound of the new album, M.I.A. drops a new video for Boyz. The video is hot in that M.I.A. lo-fi style, but that hook is already borderline annoying.

The Colour Lovers Blog has a great post on the striking color palettes found naturally in butterflies. Simple and beautiful.

Alexis will be playing Galapagos in Brooklyn on Friday. Last year Spin.com wrote:

While you can’t judge an album by its cover, Alexis Gideon’s album artwork pretty much sums up its content. A lion’s body, with wings, boasts the head of an elephant and is depicted walking across water on the cover, and the music that waits inside is equally out of left field. Eccentrics like Animal Collective and Beck come to mind when spinning Gideon, who loops beats, warps guitars, and creates a carnival of schizophrenic sound morphing from dreamy folk to dancehall fodder.

he is not an “entity within the executive branch” and is therefore exempt from an executive order protecting classified information.

Yikes: “The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste - either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels.” I wonder if the logic on this was as simple as out of sight, out of mind. Follow the link and check out the picture of the dolphin that washed ashore in 1987 with wounds similar to mustard gas exposure.

The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life.

In Feb. 2006, NASA’s mission statement was “quietly altered” to remove the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet.”

Last week, NPR asked NASA administrator Michael Griffin said that while he was “aware that global warming exists,” he wasn’t sure whether it “is a longterm concern or not.” Griffin said he is “not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with.”

Griffin subsequently clarified his remarks, stating that protecting the earth against global warming is not in the agency’s mission statement:

[link]

Derek Powazek writes about how he and Heather, the founders of the hugely successful JPG Magazine, were forced out and erased from existence:

In one evening, Paul removed issues 1-6 from the JPG website, removed Heather from the About page, and deleted the “Letter from the Editors” that had lived on the site since day one. Paul informed me that we were inventing a new story about how JPG came to be that was all about 8020. He told me not to speak of that walk in Buena Vista, my wife, or anything that came before 8020.

Here’s where the whole “not lying” thing comes in. I just could not agree to this new story. It didn’t, and still doesn’t, make any business sense to me. Good publishing companies embrace their founding editors and community, not erase them. Besides, we’d published six issues with participation from thousands of people. There’s no good reason to be anything but proud of that.

Read the whole story of JPG Magazine here

Via ThinkProgress: “U.S. intelligence recently undertook a ’significant’ covert action without notifying Congress, as required by law, the House Intelligence Committee disclosed in a new report on the 2008 intelligence authorization bill,” Steve Aftergood reports.

“The Committee was dismayed at a recent incident wherein the Intelligence Community failed to inform the Congress of a significant covert action activity. This failure to notify Congress constitutes a violation of the National Security Act of 1947.”

“Despite agency explanations that the failure was inadvertent, the Committee is deeply troubled over the fact that such an oversight could occur, whether intentionally or inadvertently.” […]

In response to this lapse, the Committee adopted a provision in its authorization bill that would require the CIA Inspector General to audit each covert action program at least once every three years.

3 years?? A lot can happen in 3 years. That is not a solution.