The War Rolls on........

WASHINGTON – As public support for the war in Afghanistan erodes, President Barack Obama soon may face two equally unattractive choices: increase U.S. troops levels to beat back a resilient enemy, or stick with the 68,000 already committed and risk the political fallout if that's not enough. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, is completing an assessment of what he needs to win the fight there. That review, however, won't specifically address force levels, according to Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...Link

Weird ass Laser.........

M.I.T. FREE Open couses.........

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Unleashing The Power In Beer......

ScienceDaily (Aug. 22, 2009) — Wolfgang Bengel, the technical director at German biomass company BMP Biomasse Projekt, saw a business opportunity in solving the breweries’ grain waste headache. He reasoned that the leftover grain could be used to create steam and biogas, which would provide energy for the breweries, cheapening their energy costs as well as their costs of transporting grain to farms...Link

Blackwater questions are hard to answer.

Veteran reporter Helen Thomas has license to say what no other reporter in the White House Press Corps can. Today, she exercised it. "I want them to stop killing," she abruptly told White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. The statement came after Gibbs dodged a question as to whether the Obama administration will continue contracting the mercenary group formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide...Link

White House deficit estimate jumps......

US President Barack Obama’s administration will raise its 10-year budget deficit forecast to about nine trillion dollars, up about two trillion from the previous forecast, a US official said Friday. The 2010-2019 projection, due out in a report expected next week, will supercede the previous forecast of about 7.1 trillion dollars, according to an official with the White House’s Office of Management and Budget...Link

Rand Paul ‘money bomb’ news..............

After roughly three weeks of campaigning, the son of Texas Congressman Ron Paul has shown himself to be a viable challenger for the Republican nomination to Kentucky’s U.S. Senate seat. On Thursday, Rand Paul, an eye doctor with no professional history in politics, announced that his campaign had been given $433,509 in just 24 hours; Just an echo of the $6 million, one-day “money bomb” his father enjoyed during the 2008 presidential campaigns...Link

Obama Violating Law By Not Investigating.

WASHINGTON - Even as the issue of torture appears likely to burst back onto the public agenda next week -- thanks to the much anticipated release of an internal CIA report -- one of the most progressive voices in Congress is arguing that the Obama White House has a legal obligation to investigate the Bush torture legacy. New York Congressman Jerry Nadler, a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told the Huffington Post that he believed that President Obama would be breaking the law if he decided to oppose launching investigation into the authorization of torture...Link

Health Care or Prisons?.............

At a time when we Americans may abandon health care reform because it supposedly is “too expensive,” how is it that we can afford to imprison people like Curtis Wilkerson? Mr. Wilkerson is serving a life sentence in California — for stealing a $2.50 pair of socks. As The Economist noted recently, he already had two offenses on his record (both for abetting robbery at age 19), and so the “three strikes” law resulted in a life sentence...Link