Some Scumball killed a Tasmanian Devil in the Albuquerque Zoo

Albuquerque police are investigating a murder mystery at the New Mexico city’s zoo after an endangered Tasmanian devil, one of four on loan from Australia, was found dead in its exhibit.

Horrified zookeepers at the Albuquerque BioPark Zoo told police they found “Jasper” in his enclosure Wednesday morning lying in a pool of blood. He was last seen alive Tuesday afternoon.

Police think someone threw a thick chunk of asphalt at Jasper, striking him in the head and fracturing his skull.

“It looks like there was a malicious intent and essentially our poor Tasmanian devil was killed, intentionally, by what seems to be blunt force trauma to the head,” Gilbert Montano, Mayor Richard Berry’s Chief of Staff, told KRQE-TV Friday.

more

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/10/18/albuquerque-zoos-tasmanian-devil-is-victim-foul-play/

Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.

The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon

By Jordan Michael Smith | OCTOBER 19, 2014


THE VOTERS WHO put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.

But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.

Why did the face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same? Critics tend to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted with politics to take a harder line. But Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon has a more pessimistic answer: Obama couldn’t have changed policies much even if he tried.

Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.

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http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/10/18/vote-all-you-want-the-secret-government-won-change/jVSkXrENQlu8vNcBfMn9sL/story.html

Toon: Happy Halloween

Sunday's Non Sequitur- Insanity Defined

Sunday's Doonesbury- Failure Factory

Toon: Robot Surgeon General

Zilpha Keatley Snyder dies at 87; wrote fantastical children's books

Zilpha Keatley Snyder, the author of dozens of children's and young-adult novels centered on lonely kids with rich but chilling fantasy lives, has died. She was 87.

Snyder, who lived in a Marin County retirement community, died Oct. 7 in San Francisco of a stroke, according to her publisher, Simon & Schuster.

With more than 40 books to her credit, Snyder won the Newbery Honor – one of the top awards in children's literature – three times. Her winning novels were "The Headless Cupid," "The Witches of Worm" and "The Egypt Game" – a 1967 story involving preteens who secretly re-create ancient Egyptian rituals at a makeshift shrine as a child killer lurks in the neighborhood.

For Snyder, it was, like many of her books, drawn from bits and pieces of her own life. As a girl in rural Ventura County, she was entranced with Egypt and, for a time, walked to school each morning as an incarnation of the elegant and mysterious queen Nefertiti.

Conjuring images of gargoyles, witches, sinister cats and harpies whose faces "were those of lovely young maidens except for their wild cruel eyes and the blood that continually smeared their mouths and dripped from their small, sharp teeth," Snyder frequently was asked where she got her ideas.

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http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-zilpha-keatley-snyder-20141019-story.html

Weekend Toon roundup!

Ebola










2014









Florida


NJ



Penn




Texas



China





Education



Economy





Pope



Race



Gitmo

Friday Rant: History Regurgitates Itself edition

By Tom Toles

I guess we’re in store for some comedy. If history repeats, and the second go-round is farce, then brace yourself for some grim laughs. The voters are sending the wingnuts back to DC for more of the same.

How this is happening is anybody’s guess, but a government of absolute acrimony, gridlock and shutdown is gearing up for another act. Everybody says they don’t like it, but we’re about to re-elect it.

Things are quiet now. Too quiet, as they say. Everybody has been behaving so as to cause the memory-impaired American voter to forget just how awful it had gotten. But nothing has changed. We are setting the table for a second course of Armageddon.

Yes, the Constitution rigged the Senate to be anti-democratic, and the state legislatures have rigged the district boundaries to be anti-democratic on the House side, and the courts have rigged the process to restrict (certain) voters and facilitate runaway campaign politician-buying. All true, and yet.

And yet center left voters, if they in fact actually exist, “aren’t motivated” enough to bother to vote. And if all of the above doesn’t motivate them, then they are just asking for it. Ask and you shall indeed receive.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/10/17/friday-rant-history-regurgitates-itself-edition/

The top candidate on the Black Conservatives Fund website is a white guy

"The Black Conservatives Fund," according to the Black Conservatives Fund, "is committed to helping fund and elect black conservatives who are dedicated to spreading the message of true limited government and traditional values across our great land."

Naturally, the top candidate on their list is a white man.

What's particularly striking here is that it's not just any white man. It's Chris McDaniel, a tea partier whose primary challenge to Thad Cochran was narrowly defeated by Cochran's mobilization of the state's African-American voters.

more

http://www.vox.com/2014/10/17/6993981/the-top-candidate-on-the-black-conservatives-fund-website-is-a-white