A man believed to be wielding a gun and carrying explosives is holed up at Discovery Channel Headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland.

An employee told a local TV station, “We heard, pop, pop, pop, pop pop.”

A day care center in the building — with 100 kids — has been evacuated.

The SWAT team is on scene . . . developing

How can a person fall more than 400 feet and survive? What are the odds of hitting a car perfectly enough to live through a fall like that? Rosary beads or not, God didn’t want this guy yet. JD

Read AP Article Here

So this is Obama’s big plan to fix the economy? You have to be kidding me. With all the problems facing Americans today, this is what Obama and his cohorts come up with . . . that’s embarrassing!

In order for a car to achieve an A+, the car would have to get 117 miles per gallon or MPG. I guess only bicycles will get an A+ for the first 100 years.

Are the people at the EPA and Obama out of their minds? How can these dullards even justify suggesting this kind of nonsense when after 2 years in office, the American economy is still in the toilet.

It doesn’t matter if its the economy that Obama inherited from GW Bush. Obama had all these great ideas during the 2008 campaign and has followed through on only one, Health Care Reform, which will in all eventuality bankrupt America. Now after two years in office, Obama wants to deflect blame back on Bush? WTF???

The malaise and stagnation of the American economy is a direct result of blunders and policy coming directly from the Obama Administration. Other world economies are growing. India had 8 percent growth this year. Germany, who is pulling back from their socialist past and CUTTING SPENDING AND TAXES grew 7.6 percent. Even the Russian economy grew at 4 percent.

Meanwhile here in America, we have a president in Obama, who has done exactly the wrong thing at precisely the right time. It so reminds me and everyone old enough to remember of Jimmy Carter. In fact there are many economists that call Obama’s presidency the second term of Jimmy Carter.

Reforming health care, raising taxes, letting tax breaks run out, all of these actions by Obama and the democrats take money out of the economy. They cause an economy to falter.

It has not gotten to the point that even the liberal media that helped elect Obama have begun to ask the questions that should have been asked during the campaign. Mainly, what is Obama going to do to fix the economy.

Amazingly enough, the silence from Obama and the idiots he calls advisers has been deafening, with the exception of the usual platitudes like, “The fed stands at the ready to throw more money at the situation” and “Blame the republicans for stonewalling what doesn’t work anyway.”

For the ardent defenders of the messiah, cutting taxes gives people more money to spend and more importantly, pay off debt. Throwing money at the recession that isn’t even worth the paper that its printed on solves nothing and this has been proven in the last two and a half years.

That’s right, for those of you to loaded from bong hits to remember, GW Bush sent the first stimulus package through. All of these stimulus packages have done little or nothing to help the economy.

So America will continue along moving sideways. Our taxes will go up. We will all sit back and watch the house and senate go back to the republicans like it did in 1994 ala Bill Clinton and his own ineptness that sent us into an economic tailspin. Its going to be a long two years. JD

The badly decomposed body of a woman found in a chimney flue has been identified as a local doctor, authorities said Monday.

Dr. Jacquelyn Kotarac had been missing since last week, a day after she went to the house of a man whom she had been dating, Bakersfield police Sgt. Mary DeGeare said. Kotarac went to the man’s house in the 4300 block of La Mirada Drive Wednesday evening and was reported missing by her office staff Thursday morning, DeGeare said.

DeGeare said she wasn’t sure what the status of the relationship was — whether they had been broken up or not — when Kotarac went to the house. The man, however, didn’t want to see her and left the home unnoticed to avoid a confrontation as she tried to force her way inside.

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At least 18 mushroom-lovers have been killed in accidents while hunting for their favorite fungi in the mountains and forests of northern Italy.

Mountain rescuers say eager mushroom seekers are abandoning safety procedures as they don camouflage and hunt in darkness to protect coveted troves, la Repubblica newspaper reported on Sunday.

“There is too much carelessness. Too many people don’t give a darn about the right rules and unfortunately this is the result,” Gino Comelli, head of the Alpine rescue service in northwest Italy’s Valle di Fassa, told the newspaper.

Seventeen people have died in nine days — six in 48 hours alone — mostly from sliding off steep, damp slopes in the northern mountains, la Repubblica said in a story headlined “the massacre of the mushroom hunters.”

Another person has been missing for more than a week, it said.

Ansa news agency said a man who had been hunting mushrooms was found dead on Sunday in the Alpine region of Valtellina.

A combination of August thunderstorms and hot weather has led to a bumper mushroom crop that has drawn the first hunters of what is expected to be a boom season.

WTF? What the hell is Julia Roberts doing here? If she’s running, she’s running like a spaz. Maybe its a still from a new movie where she plays a retard. Don’t know but nice rack Julia . . .

I found this on the Drudge Report from Time Magazine. I found it rather interesting. There is much to be said about mortality and drinking. Most people tend to believe the hyperbole and disregard the facts. Global warming would be a perfect example of this behavior.

However, there is a thing we call the French paradox. Most people seem to have never heard of the French paradox, but it does deserve a bit more attention.

Here in America, we are told that eating fatty foods, drinking and smoking will kill us. But then there are the French. They eat fatty foods, drink all the time and smoke three packs of cigarettes a day, but live long lives. Read about it on the link above. Anyway, here is the article on this new study about drinking.

One of the most contentious issues in the vast literature about alcohol consumption has been the consistent finding that those who don’t drink actually tend to die sooner than those who do. The standard Alcoholics Anonymous explanation for this finding is that many of those who show up as abstainers in such research are actually former hard-core drunks who had already incurred health problems associated with drinking.

But a new paper in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research suggests that – for reasons that aren’t entirely clear – abstaining from alcohol does actually tend to increase one’s risk of dying even when you exclude former drinkers. The most shocking part? Abstainers’ mortality rates are higher than those of heavy drinkers. (See pictures of booze under a microscope.)

Moderate drinking, which is defined as one to three drinks per day, is associated with the lowest mortality rates in alcohol studies. Moderate alcohol use (especially when the beverage of choice is red wine) is thought to improve heart health, circulation and sociability, which can be important because people who are isolated don’t have as many family members and friends who can notice and help treat health problems.

But why would abstaining from alcohol lead to a shorter life? It’s true that those who abstain from alcohol tend to be from lower socioeconomic classes, since drinking can be expensive. And people of lower socioeconomic status have more life stressors – job and child-care worries that might not only keep them from the bottle but also cause stress-related illnesses over long periods. (They also don’t get the stress-reducing benefits of a drink or two after work.)

But even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables – socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on – the researchers (a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin) found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who had never been drinkers, second-highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers. (Watch TIME’s Video “Taste Test: Beer With Extra Buzz.”)

The sample of those who were studied included individuals between ages 55 and 65 who had had any kind of outpatient care in the previous three years. The 1,824 participants were followed for 20 years. One drawback of the sample: a disproportionate number, 63%, were men. Just over 69% of the never-drinkers died during the 20 years, 60% of the heavy drinkers died and only 41% of moderate drinkers died.

These are remarkable statistics. Even though heavy drinking is associated with higher risk for cirrhosis and several types of cancer (particularly cancers in the mouth and esophagus), heavy drinkers are less likely to die than people who have never drunk. One important reason is that alcohol lubricates so many social interactions, and social interactions are vital for maintaining mental and physical health. As I pointed out last year, nondrinkers show greater signs of depression than those who allow themselves to join the party.

The authors of the new paper are careful to note that even if drinking is associated with longer life, it can be dangerous: it can impair your memory severely and it can lead to nonlethal falls and other mishaps (like, say, cheating on your spouse in a drunken haze) that can screw up your life. There’s also the dependency issue: if you become addicted to alcohol, you may spend a long time trying to get off the bottle. (Comment on this story.)

That said, the new study provides the strongest evidence yet that moderate drinking is not only fun but good for you. So make mine a double.