More Lost Data, Rummy Blames Data, Congress Showboats, Flag Burning, Baghdad's Rocking, Zarqawi Still a Tool, Bird Flu Blip and Funny FoxNews.

We all know that the Bush Administration has been blowing off the Fourth Amendment to spy on our banking records and any other personal information that they can get. Besides the fact that it's just down right un-American, here's another good reason not to like it. They can't keep up with it after they have it.

Now the Navy and the USDA have lost personal data on their personnel.

Not only do they lose data, they don't seem to be able to make proper use of it when they have it.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld relied on potentially faulty data when he
saved Lockheed Martin Corp.'s C-130J Hercules from cancellation last
year, the Pentagon inspector general said in a report yesterday that partly
blamed a poorly written contract for keeping the transport plane alive.

Face it, the Bush Bunch are just wankers in way over their heads.

Over in Congress, the Republicans are putting on a bunch of show votes in an attempt to rally their FoxNews watching base.

Coming up is the GOP's effort to chip away at the First Amendment, flag burning.

Our understandable outrage at flag burning shouldn’t turn our brains to mush. “I
feel the same sense of outrage, but I would not amend that great shield of
democracy [the Constitution] to hammer a few miscreants,” Colin Powell said when
the issue last came up (his position has not changed). “The flag will be flying
proudly long after they have slunk away.” Powell argues that a constitutional
ban on flag burning is a sign of weakness and fear. Note: The other countries
that have banned flag burning include Cuba, China, Iran and Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq.

Aside from street fighting all over the city, the security clamp down in Baghdad is doing great.

The fighting in the heart of Baghdad came despite a crackdown launched 10
days ago that put tens of thousands of U.S.-backed Iraqi troops on the streets
as the new prime minister sought to restore a modicum of safety for the
capital's more than 5 million people.

Iraqi and U.S. military forces clashed with heavily armed attackers
throughout the morning Friday within earshot of the Green Zone, which houses the
U.S. and British embassies and Iraqi government headquarters.

Poor Zarqawi, first he's an American propaganda tool, then he's dead, and now he's a recruitment tool for Al Queda. He might turn out to be more dangerous dead than alive.

CAIRO, June 23 -- Al-Qaeda's No. 2 leader paid tribute to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
in a video Friday, extolling him as "the prince of martyrs" despite the rocky
relationship between the terrorist leader in Iraq and the al-Qaeda command.

The first case of human to human transmission of avian flu has been documented. After infecting one family it came to a dead end, so this falls in the category of almost news.

JAKARTA, Indonesia, June 23 -- The World Health Organization has detailed
the first evidence that a person probably caught the bird flu virus from a
human, then passed a slightly mutated version to another person. But experts
said Friday that the genetic change does not increase the threat of a
pandemic.

Uyeki, who was part of the investigating team, stressed that viruses are
always slightly changing and that there was no reason for this mutation to raise
alarm because the virus has not developed the ability to spread easily among
people.

The rumor is that FoxNews is going to do a knock-off of The Daily Show with Laura Ingraham playing the part of Jon Stewart. And that's funnier than anything that will ever be on the show.

TVNewser is reporting scuttlebutt that the Fox News Channel is prepping a
satiric news show to compete with Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show, with Jon
Stewart.” According to the TV
news blog on the Media Bistro website, the host of the show is radio talk
show host and professional Clinton-hater, Laura Ingraham: