My boyfriend is in trouble again,
He got into a fight and got stoned on something,
I am sick of him and so I told him, get out of here,
And now I want a man like Putin.
The craze for a cheap beer made out of sea water and raw malt is denting Japan's brewing industry.Hot dang! Cheap brew! Who's got the church key?
The country's biggest brewer Asahi said it was seeing a continuing slide in sales as more and more Japanese turned to the drink called happoshu.
Asahi makes Japan's best-selling beer but in the past three months the company's operating profit has fallen more than 20%.
The popularity of happoshu is hurting the sales of all Japan's big brewers.
According to one columnist at a Japanese website - Captain Japan - the only thing the success of happoshu proves, is that if a drink is cheap enough, it will sell, even if it tastes like medicine.The low price is due to a loophole in Japan's tax laws that the politicians are eager to close, but for now everyone is having a good time except the traditional beer brands. Captain Japan explains it all in his story on happoshu.
As the California gubernatorial race thankfully enters its waning days, Gray Davis and Bill Simon are scurrying around the state trying (unsuccessfully) to convince voters that each has the answer to our myriad social and economic woes.This isn't new news, but bears repeating when your local Greenie starts talking about an end to "sprawl" and "Smart Growth".
Among the multiple problems that the incumbent and his challenger claim to have the solution to are overcrowded schools, an overburdened health care system, energy and water shortages, excessive taxes, urban sprawl, traffic gridlock and environmental degradation.
Interestingly, neither Davis nor Simon has the slightest appetite to mention the common denominator in that laundry list of concerns: overpopulation.
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Consider the facts: in 1960, California's population was 15.9 million; today, more than 35 million reside in California. Conservative estimates project 45 million people by 2020.
In 2001, California's population increased by 652,000 or nearly 1,700 people a day. All will need schooling, housing and roads. Some of the unlucky ones will also need public assistance.
As pointed out by Oberlink, these statistics represent an annual growth rate of 1.9% or 50% higher than Bangladesh.
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In the final analysis, politicians don't talk about population because the word has become a euphemism for immigration. And immigration - as I do not need to tell you - is the most unmentionable word in the American political lexicon.
Davis and Simon have apparently entered into an informal agreement wherein if one doesn't mention immigration, neither will the other.
Their pact is made all the more amazing when you consider U.S. Census Bureau statistics: more than 96% of California's population growth is driven by immigration (legal and illegal immigrants and their children), most Californians are barely replacing themselves by having less than two children per year while immigrant families average more than 3.3 children per household.
Arizona taxpayers may be stuck next year with paying the full tab of jailing thousands of illegal immigrants convicted of crimes.A billion here, a billion there. Pretty soon we'll be talking about real money!
Members of Congress left town last month to campaign for Tuesday's elections without reaching an agreement with the Bush administration on funding a Justice Department program that provided $546 million last year to states.
All 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, including Guam, have shared in the federal dollars distributed through the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program since 1995.
Arizona, California, New York, Texas and New Jersey got the bulk of the federal money.
California received $220 million, about 40 percent of the total. Arizona got more than $24 million.
Congress and the administration are far apart on a compromise. The administration wants to kill the program. Lawmakers want the funding increased to $750 million for fiscal 2003, which began Oct. 1.
Lawmakers, especially those from border states, have long argued that it is the federal government's responsibility to reimburse states because it is charged with securing the nation's borders.
"When the federal government falls short in its efforts to control illegal immigration, it must bear the responsibility for the financial and human consequences of this failure," said Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.
But Bush administration officials argue that the program is not directly related to fighting crime and doesn't "advance the core mission of the Justice Department."
Kyl and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who are leading the Senate fight to increase funding, said states are spending $1.6 billion to keep criminal illegal immigrants behind bars.
A Henrico County resident has been charged with shooting a Powhatan County man on the Powhite Parkway last month as the victim was on his way to a fishing tournament.Tsk, that's what happens when you are judgmental and not properly sensitive to cultural differences.
Chesterfield County police this week charged Suth Som, 33, of the 8500 block of Mark Lawn Drive, with one count each of malicious wounding, shooting into an occupied vehicle and using a firearm in the commission of a felony. Two other suspects are being sought.
Som is accused of shooting a 48-year-old Powhatan man as he was towing his bass boat during the early morning hours of Oct. 20.
Police said the shooting stemmed from an earlier encounter between the victim, a man and two of his friends at a Sheetz gas station on U.S. 60 in Powhatan.
The victim had stopped at the station for gas about 4:30 a.m., and as he did, one of three men in the car next to him got out and began urinating on the gas pumps, said Sgt. Dave Pritchard.
"Our victim advised the person that what he was doing was inappropriate, and he shouldn't be doing it," Pritchard said. The men "basically told him to get lost."
The victim finished pumping his gas and drove away. The men followed him east on U.S. 60 to Old Hundred Road, and then onto the Powhite Parkway. As he drove past state Route 288, the men pulled alongside his car and opened fire with a .45-caliber pistol.
"They shot twice - one apparently hits the bass boat and one hits the guy in the side," Pritchard said.
The man managed to pull over at a nearby toll plaza and alert police. He suffered a grazing wound to the left side of his chest and a puncture wound to his left arm. The latter wound was caused by a metal shard knocked from the passenger's side door as the bullet ripped through.
As police were responding to the shooting, they discovered a car that had run off the road and into a nearby embankment. It was a 1993 Nissan, the same car the three men were in.
"They totaled the car," Pritchard said. The men fled on foot.
Investigators eventually tracked down Som, who they believe was the driver.
Two dozen San Diego State University Muslim and Asian students seized several thousand copies of the student-run newspaper The Daily Aztec in a protest over political cartoons, it was reported Friday.Omar must be "cognitively challenged" - the camels were labeled as Saddam and the baby wipe billionaire, no "Middle Easterners" were labeled as anything.
The protesters piled the newspapers in front of the student center Thursday in an area known as the Free Speech Steps and taped some to the ground to spell out the word "racist," the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
The students were upset over two political cartoons published in The Daily Aztec, the newspaper reported.
One cartoon, published Sept. 25, depicted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as camels with President George W. Bush in the middle, thinking, "Definitely time for a regime change."
The second cartoon ran Oct. 22 and showed an overweight man labeled China speaking in broken English in reaction to the North Korea Nuclear Program, the newspaper reported.
The two cartoons generated several letters and demands for apologies, the newspaper reported.
"It makes my blood boil to hear someone label Middle Easterners camels," Omar Behnawa, president of the Muslim Students Association and one of the protest organizers, told the Union-Tribune.
ST. PAUL, Minn. ? All the Senate candidates met here last night for a prime-time TV debate ? except former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, who said he couldn't make it.I'm not holding my breath after having heard Fritzy's "acceptance speech". He never was a firebrand speaker, but now he sounds like he just got up from his afternoon nap.
Three days after Mr. Mondale agreed to replace Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone on the ballot, Mr. Mondale, the 1984 Democratic presidential nominee, still had not agreed to a time and place to debate his Republican opponent, former St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman.
Mr. Mondale's absence ? from a debate that Mr. Wellstone agreed to many weeks ago ? angered Republican state officials, who charged that he was trying to avoid a debate and "play out the clock" with only three more days remaining in a race that both sides said was too close to call.
The Pentagon press corps has received a call-up for a military boot camp to prepare its members to cover a war in Iraq.Why bother? I'm sure most of the press would prefer to cover it from the hotel bar, like they did in Vietnam.
The call comes after United States troops in Afghanistan complained of having to wait for flabby, unfit journalists to keep up with them.
The training sessions, the first of their kind, will begin at a string of bases in the eastern US in the middle of this month.
If Annie Sprinkle provides one sort of counter-cultural entertainment, The New York Times’s op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd provides another, less sexual but not necessarily less obscene. Dispassionate readers, encountering Dowd’s hysterical outbursts, might be forgiven for wondering if she were quite sane. (They might also, we suppose, wonder about the sanity of her employers.) Dowd was already out of control in the Clinton years, when she first came to prominence. But since George W. Bush took office, she has left mere stridency for a form of editorial hectoring that is partly irresponsible, partly surreal. We would not presume to say which of Maureen Dowd’s recent effusions is the absolute worst—the competition for that award would be too gruesome to adjudicate. But “The Soufflé Doctrine,” published on Sunday, October 20, does represent a new level of rhetorical incontinence.More by following the link.