Vets in New York have reportedly diagnosed the first known case of H1N1 Swine Flu in a dog.

The LA Times reports…The virus has been found before in other pets, including at least three ferrets, several cats and pigs and a cheetah named Gijima at a wildlife preserve in Santa Rosa.

A couple of the cats died, but most of the animals recovered.

Full story here-http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-sci-swine-flu-dog23-2009dec23,0,2022503.story

They say we should not be alarmed by this alarming development. Reportedly it is a “rare” occurence.

What do you think? …how are we going to get the dogs and cats to wash their hands?

I am kind of concerned, lots of dogs around here!….

I think it was the goofy sweater that messed with the dog’s head.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Ana Langer, President of EngenderHealth and Adviser to the Maternal Health Task Force, blogs on The Huffington Post—and calls attention to the power of modern contraception methods to help families weather the uncertainties of climate change.

“As the global architects of a new treaty to combat climate change meet in Copenhagen this month, they continue to work from a conspicuously incomplete blueprint. Last Thursday morning, George Soros made it very clear that significantly greater resources must be allocated to mitigate the impact of climate change on the world’s poorest people, who are the most vulnerable to its affects. This is a welcome development. But still…”

Read the full post here.

Read Ana’s bio here.

No, that’s ok, Santa………I’ll just hand you my Christmas list…….of course, let me quickly scribble out my address and put on this surgical glove first!
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

JS strikes again! Keep it up. No one in this country has the ability to skewer and expose the political scare tactics and hypocrisy flying around this nation like Stewart can. And in only 4 minutes.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

This article tells you readers which blogs are at the top in the blogosphere.Sadly,mine is not in it.

1. The huffington Post

Top in:

• Sports,Politics
2. Gizmodo

Top in:

• Technology,Gadgets
3. Boing Boing

Top in:

• Culture,Technology
4. TechCrunch

Top in:

• Business,Technology,Infocomm,Gadgets
5. Gawker

Top in:

• Entertainment,Politics

That’s the end of the list,folks.Hope you enjoy it.Stay tuned for more articles.

Talk about speaking your mind!
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

I recently found this article in The Huffington Post. It’s a good guide to winter vegetables having both pictures and recipes.

Winter Veggies at the Farmers Market

The Huffington Post 12/13/09

It’s easy to get stuck in a cooking rut of using the same ingredients and the same recipes again and again. If you shop at your local farmers’ market, however, you have a great opportunity to try something new. Most people think farmer’s markets are only for summer, but there are many that are open year round and offer great winter produce. Buy some fresh, seasonal produce and discover delicious new flavors. Here, our some picks for wonderful winter vegetables, complete with recipes you can make tonight.

Current Top 3:

#1 Jon Stwart
#2 Craig Ferguson
#3 Stephen Colbert

Vote: The Huffington Post.

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama were in Oslo today to accept his Nobel Peace Prize award. President Obama stated that  he is humbled by the award and receives it with an ‘acute sense’ of the cost of war.

”To say that force  may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism …but an acknowledgement of history”…and as a head of state, he must defend our nation”…

I give it to the President , for I too hate war, but sometimes war comes too you, whether you like it or not.

Congratulations Mr.President, because I am sure that the truth hurts to hear, as well as it is to say….

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The liberal website The Huffington Post, using a press release from the even more liberal Media Matters organization, pounded Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky today, accusing him of hypocrisy. The Huffington Post captured a pair of screengrabs from McConnell’s own website. Here are the headlines that McConnell himself posted:

Sunday- “Cutting Medicare is not what Americans want”

Monday- “Expanding Medicare ‘a plan for financial ruin’”

HuffPo then ran this flattering picture of the Kentucky Senator:

SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL

With the Democrats moving closer to passing a health care bill maybe THIS picture of Senate Majority Harry Reid of Nevada would have been more appropriate:

SEN. HARRY REID

Today I woke up to the news that one of my African-American broadcasting heroes, Bryant Gumbel, is recovering from a bought with malignant lung cancer. Gumbel is 61 years young, and his presence in the broadcasting community has had a major impact for several years.

I call him a pioneer, because Bryant broke into the national media at a time when it was not too popular to have a black man in a leading position on the TV news, or even in Sports news, although more likely than not, African-Americans were dominating all of the popular American sports the moment we were allowed to compete against non-black athletes.

USA Today reports that…Gumbel was among the first announcers to cross over from sports to general entertainment. After working as a reporter and studio host for NBC Sports, he became an NBC Today show host. In recent years, he’s returned to TV sports including working as the NFL Network’s first play-by-play game announcer although he hadn’t previously called football games…

Bryant Gumbel defeated all of his competition to rise to the esteemed position as lead Host on the ”Today” show, on the NBC television network. He is credited with promoting Katie Couric and for mentoring current ”Today” show host Matt Lauer throughout their careers.

It is unclear to me if Bryant was a regular smoker of cigarettes, but he is known to enjoy a celebratory cigar from time to time, but there is no evidence that any of that is the cause of his cancer battle.

One does not have to be a smoker to develop lung cancer, but it is usually at cause for the disease.

Bryant Gumbel announced Tuesday morning that he had cancer surgery two months ago to remove a malignant tumor near his lung. The subject came up during a live taping of the  ”Live! with Regis and Kelly,” where Bryant is filling in this week for co-host Regis Philbin,who is undergoing hip replacement surgery, Gumbel brought it up to explain why he could not dance with co-host Kelly Ripa.

Needless to say, Kelly and the audience were stunned. Bryant said that he kept it away from his staff and close relationships, but he did tell his immediate family. The broadcaster is notoriously private.

The former ‘Today’ show anchor says he had a tumor and part of his lung removed two months ago.

He states that  he is seeing his surgeon next week.

“I’m hoping they greenlight me to play golf again,” he said.

http://wp.me/pEzT2-kk

Senator Harry Reid was correct to say that the Republican’s are resisting Health care reform much like the Democratic senator’s that were resisting the abolishment of slavery, prior to the Civil War.

They want us to not have health care, so that the majority of us will die off quickly and they are committed to our death from disease.

I applaud Senator Harry Reid, who is only speaking the truth, to those that already know that they hate us, as much as they loved slavery.

I am glad that Bryant has the financial ability to provide health care to his family and himself,and I encourage all men to go seek the highest level of medical care you are able to receive, even if you have to go to a free clinic.

Your family and future may depend on it.

Sources-

http://bossip.com/188206/bryant-gumbel-on-the-mend-after-cancer-surgery/

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/2009-12-08-bryant-gumbel-lung-cancer-surgery_N.htm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/08/bryant-gumbel-cancer-anno_n_383844.html

You betcha’ and it just SUCKS, doesn’t it?  True or not, it certainly feels as if NBC and CBS have been leading the charge to dismantle daytime, one show at a time.  Rather than invest in new blood in the writers’ room and retain beloved onscreen  faves, TPTB have favored daytime writers and EPs with histories of utter failure and disregard for the fans – shifting them from one show to the next.  “Cheaper” (and not necessarily better) on screen talent has been shifted from one show to the next  as well, and fans are stuck with the consequences of a host of bad decisions.  We’ll miss you ATWT.
ATWT’s last airdate is scheduled for Sept. 2010 (GL fans will remember that GL’s last airdate was Sept. 18, 2009).   Read more by clicking HERE.

Update:  RedStateCenterLeft commented with this bit of trivia regarding ATWT, as HuffPo:

ATWT was the program Walter Cronkite broke into to announce that JFK had been shot. Because of that AWTW will be forever linked to a day that changed history. So sad to see that bit of history fall.

I believe this emerging discussion about painkillers, etc., is the planting of the seeds of the end game of this scandal. I predict there will be, at some point, an “admission” on this issue, which will then be tied to other “improper behavior” (i.e. women). Then there will be the highly publicized “celebrity re-hab” announcement, which will eventually then lead to his “comeback”. Time will tell.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

What a perfectly timed scandal. With days until the Copenhagen summit, the ramifications resulting from the leaked emails of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia could be massive.

Every country who is going to the Copenhagen summit will be going there with their individual national agenda, and this latest controversy gives every sceptic a big fat get out clause.

The UN has now stepped in to investigate the claims that climate data has been exaggerated or ’suped up’ by academics to try and make the scale of global temperature change look more severe. It all began a couple of weeks ago when hackers leaked hundreds of emails that were sent between scientists at the CRU and their peers from around the globe. It has most recently seen the resignation of the centre’s director, Phil Jones, and claims that the CRU had thrown away raw data in the Sunday Times have caused global uproar in scientific and political spheres.

As an authority on climate change research,  the CRU has one of the most important and detailed datasets on charting global temperatures in modern history. However, these emails have cast doubt on the impact that human beings have had on temperature increases, allowing climate sceptics to say that the scientific case for climate change has been grossly undermined.

If it’s a scandal, whack ‘gate’ at the end, and hey presto ”ClimateGate’ is born. It looks set to cast a dark cloud over the Copenhagen Summit, as countries like Saudi Arabia who look to refuse to cut their carbon emissions at the Copenhagen summit, can now try to deny that human beings have had any impact on increased levels of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere.

It is argued that there is still plenty of other unequivocal evidence that humans are to blame for the dramatic rise in global temperatures since the industrial revolution. The Huffington Post has dissected this latest debacle blow by blow so you can see exactly what ‘claims’ there ‘are’ to deny any of it is actually happening.

The run up to the summit has certainly had its twists and turns, but could this be the final derailment?

This is from the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 from this morning, where John Humphreys interviewed Jonathan Porritt, the founder of the Forum for the Future and Philip Stott, Professor Emeritus of Biogeography at the University of London. Makes for a very informing listen.

I was perusing the offerings on The Huffington Post today and came across two articles, “Rupert Everett: Hollywood is Like Al-Qaeda” and “Critics of Obama’s Exit Strategy Have Argument Backwards,” both with different spellings of “al Qaeda”. I have no first-hand knowledge of Arabic so I cannot say with assurance how to spell it, but after some online research I came across WikiAnswers which claims the correct spelling is “Al Qaeda”. Any Arabic speakers who can second that?

In the first article it was spelled “Al-Qaeda”. In the second article there were two different spellings, “al Qaeda” and “al-Qaeda”. I think most Americans don’t know which spelling is correct (if one of them is correct), but for the sake of consistency, THP should choose one and use it wherever the word occurs.

In October I published a post about Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, Eating Animals, which I did finally buy and am about one-third of the way through.

I’ve just finished Chapter 3, called “Words/Meaning,” which is basically a glorified glossary of terms. (More about that later when I do my official review.) One “term” he cites is KFC, which most people will recognize as the shortened name for the fast food chain, Kentucky Fried Chicken. I remember my first trip west from New Jersey when I was a kid. We lived on buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken as we traversed the Great Plains, coastal highway 101, and the prairies of Canada. Today, I won’t step foot in a KFC.

As Safran Foer says in his book, “KFC is arguably the company that has increased the sum total of suffering in the world more than any other in history.” What he’s referring to is the nearly one billion chickens a year that are tortured by workers at slaughterhouses that supply KFC. This behavior doesn’t fit well with KFC’s commitment to “the well-being and humane treatment of chickens,” as quoted by Safran Foer. And he doesn’t even mention the health safety issues, which, if you don’t give a hoot about animal suffering, should at least matter if you eat factory-farmed chicken.

I had just read this part of the book when I saw Naomi Starkman’s post entitled “Two-Thirds of Chicken Tested Harbor Dangerous Bacteria” on The Huffington Post website. She reports that Consumer Reports tested fresh, whole broilers bought in 22 states and revealed that “two-thirds of birds tested harbored salmonella and/or campylobacter, the leading bacterial causes of food-borne disease. The report reveals that organic “air-chilled” broilers were among the cleanest and that Perdue was found to be the cleanest of the brand-name chicken. Tyson and Foster Farms chickens were found to be the most contaminated.”

The poultry industry is certainly a dirty one. To me, it only reinforces the importance of finding a local food source, getting to know your farmers, visiting the places your food is raised, and even participating in the hunting, gathering, growing, harvesting, feeding, and–yes–slaughtering of the food that you put on your table. (That last step is a tough one to stomach, I know. I’m still debating whether I can do it myself.)

The state of New York has netted over 3500 convicted sex fiends on Facebook and smaller dying competitive site MySpace, in a crackdown on internet predators.

80 per cent of the sexual deviants were on Facebook alone.

Attorney general Andrew Cuomo pushed aggressively for the law, the Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act ,E-stop, in 2008. This is the first time it has been used in this widespread sweep to help clean up the internet.

The names of the perverts have been sent to authorities who will determine if any of them violated the conditions of their parole terms, by using the sites to ”fish” for fresh victims.

The last time the state of New York did a sweep for sexual perverts,…they caught the now former governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who was client 9 for an escort service.

It was reported that he had spent over 60 thousand dollars on a prostitute, and that led to his downfall.

..I bet he got his account deleted,…check it out.

Check out these takes on this story, by clicking the links below…

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2009/12/01/2009-12-01_sex_fiends_from_facebook_myspace_get_boot_.html

http://gawker.com/5416329/facebook-absolutely-demolishing-myspace-in-the-sex-offender-demographic

Jennifer Hudson and Baby David

Jennifer Hudson,28, hasn’t stopped gushing over her son.

The Oscar winner and hit songstress showed off new photos of her nearly 4 month old son David, on Monday’s episode of the Oprah Winfrey show. Baby David was born on August 10th.

Hudson promises to make this first Christmas for baby David a memorable event,”…I’m going to go crazy”…He’s very aware but he is so young and it’s his first Christmas, so you have to go all out…”

She added….”I kind of want to get him his own Santa Claus and just have like a toy store in the house, full of thing”…

ABC has announced that Jennifer Hudson: I’ll Be Home For Christmas will air on Monday, December 14, 2009 at 8PM ET/PT.

Source…http://www.usmagazine.com/momsbabies/news/jennifer-hudson-shows-off-another-photo-of-newborn-son-1970241

http://realitytvmagazine.sheknows.com/blog/2009/11/10/abc-to-air-jennifer-hudson-christmas-special-on-december-14/