The distraught father of a missing 9-year-old Florida girl told his daughter Monday that he was doing the best he could to find her.

"I just want to say to Jessie that I love you and I'm trying," a tearful Mark Lunsford told his little girl, Jessica Marie Lunsford, who disappeared last week from her bedroom seemingly without a trace.

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For five straight days, police were joined by hundreds of volunteers who braved fog, torrential rain and a tornado watch to scour thick forests and marshlands in a five-mile circle around the girl's house.

But late Monday afternoon, Citrus County Sheriff Jeff Dawsy told reporters he had suspended the full-scale search, expressing frustration it uncovered little evidence.

The sheriff said the girl's disappearance is not a confirmed abduction, and he hasn't ruled anything out. Deputies were even taking in tips from psychics.

"We're all trying to find that little piece to the puzzle," said Dawsy, who said 20 experts were arriving from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to help crack the case.

You can read more at FoxNews. If you would like to leave a message for Jessica's family, please visit their forum, here, here, or here.

Notice anything about the TSA's new ruling which bans all lighters on flights? (HINT: I added the bold style to make it easy on you)

Airline passengers will have to ditch their lighters or lose them to airport security screeners when a new ban on lighters takes effect in April.

The ban reflects Congress' fear that lighters could be used to ignite bombs on planes or otherwise damage or destroy them. The Transportation Security Administration until now had banned all but butane lighters and said each passenger could carry no more than two.

TSA's new ruling extends the ban to all butane lighters, effective April 14.

Proponents of the ban, including Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., cited the case of convicted "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, who tried but failed to light explosives in his shoes with matches. Had Reid been using a lighter, he might have brought down the plane, Dorgan said. Reid was sentenced to life in prison in 2003.

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Passengers can continue to carry up to four books of matches, but that, too, is under reconsideration, said TSA spokeswoman Amy Von Walter.

Four books of matches? Is that all? Why, you can hardly light a cigarette, let alone light a shoe bomb with four books of matches.

Great job, morons.

The record-setting SpaceShipOne is due to arrive in its final resting place, the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum (NASM) in Washington DC.

The suborbital rocket plane, designed by Burt Rutan and his Scaled Composites team, made two piloted trips into space to snag the $10 million Ansari X-Prize.

SpaceShipOne is to be displayed in the museum's Milestones of Flight Gallery, according to a NASM spokesman.

Oh sure, yet another reason to return to the Smithsonian.

Wanna waste some time too?

Up until now I have not posted about Ward Churchill because I honestly don't think the guy deserves any more attention than he has already taken. So I will not post about him.

I will however, point you to a post by Stephen Green, aka Vodkapundit, who makes a great analogy involving the now infamous professor.

As he would say, it's required reading.