In an event as shocking as the sun rising in the morning, Microsoft is preparing to send out yet another "critical" Internet Explorer security fix:

Microsoft has confirmed it plans to release a fix for a serious security bug in Internet Explorer next Tuesday (11 April). The fix for the "CreateTextRange" vulnerability - which has become the subject of hacker exploits over recent days - will be released as a cumulative update to Internet Explorer along with four other security bulletins (details here).

Please tell me you're not using Internet Explorer right now.  Pretty please?

at OpinionJournal: New Time, Same Katie:

What's more interesting about Ms. Couric's becoming managing editor of a major network news show is that it will mean the end of the anchor as political cipher. In days past, whatever we suspected about their leanings, anchorpersons felt compelled at least to pose as disinterested reporters of "the way it is." Ms. Couric dropped that veil long ago.

The list of her utterances and leading questions posted on the Media Research Center's fretful Web site (www.mrc.org/projects/couric/welcome.asp) may not fully represent the range of her opinions and peeves. Unless she's a total fake on camera, though, there's little doubt about where Katie stands across the great red-blue divide. Democrats and their pet causes get tender respect; Republican and "conservative" policies get introduced in terms of the alleged threat they represent to our great nation.

Sadly, my Snookums is among the Perky One's big fans . . .

Perhaps, just perhaps God is smarter and cleverer than Intelligent Design proponents . . .

Chaos=Order: Physicists Make Baffling Discovery

But then came the real surprise: When they introduced disorder – forces were applied at random to each oscillator – the system became ordered and synchronized.

"The thing that is counterintuitive is that when you introduce disorder into the system – when the [forces on the pendulums] act at random – the chaos that was present before disappears and there is order," said Sebastian F. Brandt, physics graduate student and lead author of the study which appeared in the January 2006 edition of Physical Review Letters.

Jackson County, Missouri voters approved the multimillion dollar rich guy welfare program, um, er, stadium renovation project, but narrowly voted down the related rolling roof project.

Jackson County political machine officials of all stripes vow to keep offering up the Truman Sports Complex Rolling Roof until the voters give in and approve it.

Yeah, I voted for both of them, but I didn't like it.  Well, actually, the rolling roof concept is still very neat from an engineering geek point of view.  It's just too bad that the people who'll make the money off of it (the politically connected cronies of the Jackson County machine plus the sports team owners) can't figure out a way to pay for it without taxing a bunch of people who won't benefit.

Or, perhaps red soyburger . . . Bush Prepares Historic Third Term

The Register article above quotes hitherto unknown "Constitutional Scholar" Bud Jamison:

"But," Jamison continued, "Bush is so accustomed to having his way, and he exists in such a weird bubble of manufactured reality, that I can picture him believing that his second term could be extended. Still, I'm confident that someone among the gaggle of boot-licking toadies he's surrounded himself with will muster the nerve to sit him down and explain the facts of life.

"This proposal will never see the light of day. It may take a while for reality to sink in, but once Bush appreciates the potential for grotesque public humiliation that he's courting, he'll kill it," Jamison concluded.

As for the inevitable political fallout from the leaked memos alone, Jamison sees little for Bush to worry about.

"It shows incredibly poor judgment and galling arrogance on the Administration's part, but that's nothing new. And you can be sure that Bush and Cheney have got complete deniability in this little caper," he said.

"And that goes for Gonzales, Miers, and Clement too. The five or six people involved will be sacked, and the press will be told that the affair was merely the unauthorized creation of a handful of over-zealous underlings acting on their own. The Republican-controlled Congress will decline to investigate, and the issue will soon be forgotten. A break in the Natalee Holloway investigation is all it takes for a story like that to be erased permanently from the news."

Honestly, the story reads more like an article from The Onion or Scrappleface than anything newsworthy. Actually, it sounds a lot like a lefty fever-dream.

UPDATE: Shhh, don't tell anybody leaning left, but the whole story is a pretty obvious parody. I'd have caught it a bit sooner if I were a Three Stooges fan.

UPDATE 2:  Heh.  I just now realize what the date is today. Heh.  Lord, I'm so slooooooow sometimes.

Due to some low-intensity but persistent spam, I've disabled trackbacks for the moment.

Abdul Rahman, the Afgani who was threatened with the death penalty for the crime of converting from Islam to Christianity, wants asylum.

Maybe Yale has an opening.

It will probably cost me my membership in the Libertarian Secret Decoder Ring Society, but I went ahead and voted for the stadium improvements and the new rolling roof to cover Kauffman and Arrowhead Stadiums in Kansas City.

The darn thing is just way too cool.



Images via kcchiefs.com.

I can't seem to get worked up over the Big Crisis Of The Week:  immigration/illegal aliens/border control/whatever you want to call it.

Maybe because several things just seem to me to be common sense:

1.  People who are in the country illegally have commited a crime for which the appropriate punishment is deportation to their source country.  If they have families here or there that will suffer, that's their fault, not mine, not the Federal Government's.  My fallback position is to build an enormous camp in the Arizona desert where we'll put all the illegals who can't or won't go back to their home countries, enter them into the legal immigration process, and have them wait their fair turn along with the people in those countries who are playing by the rules.

2.  If it's too easy to cross the border to become a person covered by #1 above, then let's put up a big ol' fence to make it harder.  It's our border.  We get to decide whether we want it to be a shallow river, or a Great Wall of America.

It seems to me that just following through on points 1 and 2 would pretty much clean up any problem we have with our immigration system.

Lara Logan, a CBS News "reporter" in Iraq, had a bad day during her appearance on CNN's Reliable Sources.

Gateway Pundit has most of the story. Click over there to get this party started, now . . .

But, one blog story isn't enough to fully document pretty Lara's bad day. The real punchline is in this exchange between pretty Lara and Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz, courtesy Newsbusters.org:

KURTZ: I want to play for you a piece of tape involving Laura Ingraham, the conservative radio talk show how who was on "The Today Show" earlier this week and criticized "The Today Show" for not doing more from Iraq.

Let's listen to what she had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LAURA INGRAHAM, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: To do a show from Iraq means to talk to the Iraqi military, to go out with the Iraqi military, to actually have a conversation with the people instead of reporting from hotel balconies about the latest IEDs going off.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: What do you make of that comment about reporting from hotel balconies?

LOGAN: Well, I think it's outrageous. I mean, Laura Ingraham should come to Iraq and not be talking about what journalists are doing from the comfort of her studio in the United States, the comfort and the safety.

I mean, I don't know any journalist that wants to just sit in a hotel room in Iraq. Does anybody understand that for us we used to be able to drive to Ramadi, we used to drive to Falluja, we used to drive to Najaf. We could travel all over this country without having to fly in military helicopters.

That's the only way we can move around here. So, it's when the military can accommodate us, if the military can accommodate us, then we can go out and see.

I have been out with Iraqi security forces over and over again. And you know what? When bob Woodruff was out with Iraqi security forces and he was injured, the first thing that people were asking was, oh, was he being responsible by placing himself in this position with Iraqi forces? And they started to question his responsibility and integrity as a journalist.

I mean, we just can't win. I think it's an outrage to point the finger at journalists and say that this is our fault. I really do. And I think it shows an abject lack of respect for any journalist that's prepared to come to this country and risk their lives.

KURTZ: All right. I do...

LOGAN: And that's not just me. That's the crews, that's all the people that make up our teams here.

KURTZ: I do want to point out that Laura Ingraham was in Iraq last month for eight days, and that was part of the reason for her appearance.

Hm. Maybe Lara wasn't hired for her looks, after all. Maybe it was her incisive knack for getting the facts right. Yeah, that must be it.

Update:  In re-reading pretty Lara's rant, she did say something I totally agree with:

I think it shows an abject lack of respect for any journalist that's prepared to come to this country and risk their lives.

Yes, Lara, it does show a lack of respect.  But you see, respect is not given.  It is earned.  Go out and earn it, like Michael Totten, Michael Yon, and so many other Internet reporters have.