The Federal Reserve boosted a key short-term interest rate by a one-quarter percentage point Wednesday, its first rate increase in four years, in an attempt to keep the economy and inflation on an even keel.

This was expected, so this really isn’t news right?

Official Washington and the entire press corps will be rocked when Hillary Rodham Clinton is picked as Kerry’s VP and a massive love fest will begin!

Tell me they used the words “love fest” so we would all picture Kerry speaking on the mall in Washington D.C. many, many years ago. Tell me the reason for this line of thought is because someone ate the “magic mushroom”.

Please. Someone. Anyone?

::thud::

It sounds like the brainchild of a mad scientist: Draw blood from the arm, heat it up, pump it with oxygen and bombard it with ultraviolet light and then re-inject it into the patient’s butt.

…

Immune modulation therapy, a patented therapy developed by Toronto-based Vasogen Inc., involves taking about 10 cubic centimetres of blood (two teaspoons), then putting it into a machine that “stresses” the blood by subjecting it to heat, oxidation, and UV light.

Those stresses are designed to induce apoptosis (cell death) in white blood cells, those that influence the body’s immune response.

They never say why the blood is re-injected into the patient’s butt.

The coalition officially transferred legal custody of Saddam Hussein and 11 other high-profile detainees to Iraq today.

Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi requested the transfer June 29, calling it an important step as Iraq takes control of its affairs after gaining sovereignty from the Coalition Provisional Authority June 28.

“We Iraqis believe that to truly be in control of our affairs and our own future, we must be in control of the destiny of the people we believe most responsible for so much of the suffering the Iraqi people endured over the past 35 years,” Allawi said.

I bet Saddam ain’t too happy havin’ his own people in control of his fate now. How much you wanna bet he is shaking in his boots prison issued sneakers?

It seems that sometime yesterday we passed 750,000 hits. It looks like our unique hits will hit 200,000 sometime in the next week too. That’s awesome! That might not sound like a lot to some of you “big bloggers” out there, but for Slobokan’s Site O’ Schtuff, it’s a pretty kewl thing.

July 10th will be the 7th anniversay of Slobokan’s Site O’ Schtuff. I can’t believe I have been doing this for seven years. The site sure has evolved. What started as an informative “repository” for links to the kewlest sites on the net, has now become a very kewl repository for links to the most informative sites on the net. haha.

Just where are some of the people coming from?

Top ten blog related referrers:

Movable Type (Ironic since I don’t use it anymore and my hits have tripled since I did)
Blogs For Bush
Stageleft
Citizen Smash
Insignificant Thoughts
Electric Venom
Wild-Heart
Useless Thoughts
Right Voices
Uptown Girl

Of course, there are numerous hits from Google, Yahoo and the like, with people looking for these top ten key words and phrases:

Alexandra Kerry
rotten stuff
kim sun-il
howdy dowdy
nascar weblogs
cnn
fauxpau
nadn
firefox update
lobster farming

Ninety percent of you use Windows, and 72 percent are using Internet Explorer. 31% of you spend more than 5 minutes here, which is kewl, it means some of you are actually reading the entries, and you read an average of 1.81 pages while you are here. This month you have burned through 4.65 GB of bandwidth, and you have chewed on 14.49 GB for the year so far. I wonder what I should do for my website’s birthday? Should I register somewhere? :???:

Last night, we sat in the #mixedwingnuts channel on IRC chatting about the Canadian elections. Vinny mentioned that the NDP leader Jack Layton looked liked the Video Professor. So… What do you think?

     

Jack Layton on the left, the Video Professor on the right. Separated at Birth?

“Including Turkey in the EU would prove that Europe is not the exclusive club of a single religion, and it would expose the ‘clash of civilizations’ as a passing myth of history,” Bush said.

Chirac said on Monday that Bush should not comment on Turkey’s EU entry hopes as EU affairs were none of his business.

“If President Bush really said that the way I read it, well, not only did he go too far but he went into a domain which is not his own,” Chirac told reporters at the summit.

“It is like me trying to tell the United States how it should manage its relations with Mexico,” he added.

Jacques Chirac has a lot of nerve telling President Bush that Turkey’s admission into the EU is “none of his business”, especially when, he himself did what he did back in February of 2003. He would never tell other countries how they should manage their relations with the United States, right?

The French president, in an unusually emotional outburst in Brussels after the European Union meeting Monday on Iraq, derided the Central and Eastern European countries that have signed letters expressing their support for the U.S. policy on Iraq for being “badly brought up” and having missed “an opportunity to keep quiet.”

All 13 candidates on Tuesday endorsed the joint declaration on Iraq issued on Monday by the 15 European leaders, warning Saddam Hussein that he had “one last chance” to disarm and vowing to “avoid new lines of division” over European policy on Iraq.

But divisions exist. The war of words highlighted not only disagreement over Iraq, but also France’s struggle for dominance in European affairs in the face of an enlarging European Union whose incoming members are historically beholden to the United States.

France has long been concerned that the former communist countries, indebted to the United States for liberation from Soviet domination in the Cold War, would turn out to be a sort of Trojan horse bringing America’s influence into the union.

France fears that expanding the European Union membership will erode its influence and weaken Europe’s position as a potential counterweight to American power.

Of course, Chirac went a step further in his rant of 2003, because he showed us all exactly why he does not want countries like Turkey (and others) to be admitted into the European Union. “France’s struggle for dominance in European affairs in the face of an enlarging European Union”. That says it all.

In his attempt to say “it’s none of your business”, Chirac has succeeded in saying, “I am a hypocritical worm”.

Iraqi militants killed an American soldier they have held hostage for nearly three months, saying the killing was because the U.S. government did not change its policy in Iraq, Al-Jazeera television said Tuesday.

The report of the killing of Spc. Keith M. Maupin, 20, of Batavia, Ohio, came hours after the United States returned sovereignty in Iraq to an interim government. The report did not say when Maupin was killed.

If we had changed policy, they would have killed him “because we changed our policy, but not to their liking”.

Note to AP reporters: Those persons who committed this crime are NOT militants. They are terrorists. They are animals. Start reporting the news, dagnammit.

Well, it looks like our neighbors to the north will have a liberal minority government. I wonder which party they will reach out too, to form their minority coalition?

On a bright note for me personally, my favorite candidate in this election, Ed Broadbent, won handily.

Congratulations, Ed.

Why does it say NPD?