Timothy, the farmer, was in the fertilized egg business.  He had several hundred young hens, which are also called pullets, and ten roosters whose job it was to fertilize the pullets' eggs.

Difficult as it was, Timothy kept exacting records – and any rooster that didn't do his daily duties was doomed to the soup pot.

This took a great deal of his time, so to make things easier he bought a set of tiny bells and attached them to his roosters.  Each bell made a different sound, so Timothy could simply tell from a distance which rooster was performing his duties.  Now he could sit on his front porch and fill out a report simply by listening to the bells.

Today's "Cheers & Jeers" featured a Poll on which one of the eight houses that John Sidney McCain III and Cindy Lou (Hensley) McCain own is our very favorite.

I poked around in "Cheers & Jeers" for awhile, but for the life of me I couldn't locate any photos on which to base my vote - which may be why "Not Sure/No Opinion" had a plurality.

But since inquiring minds want to know, I decided to do some short-notice digging on my own ... so come on along and let's take a look at how those "non-elite" McCains (courtesy of multi-millionaire Heiress and Sugar Momma Cindy) live.

While over 4,000 Americans have been killed in a senseless War in Iraq

I’m sure this will come as a shock to most of you, but Bush actually is a strong believer in Darwin’s  theory of Natural Selection.  Well, as long as he and his Republican cronies were able to modify – and codify – it (with just a tiny tweak) in their 2001 and 2003 tax cuts that showered the ultra-rich with gifts as far as their limos could stretch: "Survival of the Fittest Richest".

In yet another of their trademark efforts to deceive the public, the Republican tax cuts were packaged as "growth bills."  This prompted McSame (in one of his truly rare maverick moments) to deride this delusion on the Senate floor saying, "The only thing growing will be the tax breaks for the wealthiest citizens of this country."

Well, at least he got that one right back then.  But now McSame wants to permanently enshrine those same tax cuts that make the rich even richer - so maybe we, my friends, should take a closer look to see exactly what they’ve wrought: who gained, who lost and their overall impact.

Although I’m a real patriotic ‘Merkun, I have to admit that I usually don’t watch no boring politics on TV nor elsewhere.

As luck would have it (or, truth be told, the Good Lord), I just finished my last romance novel and left with nuthin’ to do ... so I wound up turning on the tube and I was right delightedly surprised at this debate thing you was airin’.

Finally, you boys asked the questions that folks like myself and many other true ‘Merkuns want answers too – no ifs ands or butts.

Please is the letter I faxed to ABC News, ABC World News and ABC Good Morning America.

(If you do try to FAX them, expect their lines to be so overloaded it will take multiple attempts.)

As the late, well-respected Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointedly observed: "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."

It would not surprise me if a fair number of you have recently received an email from some economic Luddite acquaintance or relative which clearly bears the imprimatur of a McCain backer, and is so patently packed full of disingenuous and dissembling deceit that it drove your blood pressure to new heights.

Well, me, too.

Reported by April Holliday (AP Newswire)

Kennedy Space Center -- NASA engineers and mathematicians in this high-tech community are stunned and infuriated after learning the Florida state legislature in Tallahassee overwhelmingly passed a law yesterday [March 30, 2008] redefining the value of pi (π), a mathematical constant used in the aerospace industry.

The bill to change the value of pi to what some contend is its "biblical" value of exactly three (3.00000) was introduced without fanfare by a John McCain supporter, Sen. Iza Lou Zerr (R-Sarasota).  It rapidly gained support after a letter-writing campaign spearheaded by Rep. Lance A. Boyle (R-Boca Raton) who is also a member of the Let’s Get Back to the Bible Society, a radical right-wing religious group who believes the 3.00000 value is based on scriptures.

While many of us may have had a bit of schadenfreude over Hillary’s getting caught "misspeaking" about her Tuzla, Bosnia junket in an effort to pad her foreign relations dossier by embellishing it with sniper bullets whizzing overhead, we’d do well to recall McCain’s current anniversaries marking a couple of his own major misspeaking moments beginning a year ago today when he tried to convince the American people that Baghdad’s largest open-air shopping district was "like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime."

And he would be telling the Gospel truth ... as long as normal outdoor summertime markets in Indiana come fully stocked with more than 100 rifle-ready soldiers in armored Humvees (that’s an entire company), three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships hovering overhead – and let’s not forget bulletproof vests for all those Hoosier customers

We've all come to learn that Fox News folks are rather savage, but cannibalism?!

Something even Julia Child would've agreed with: no matter what kind of a whiz you are in the kitchen or how many cookbooks you may have written, you can just never have too many recipes to cover all sorts of different types "food" preparation.

(Be sure to also look at the very bottom chyron of the screen-capture)

The Bickersons, a poor elderly couple living on Social Security who, despite being very devout, had more than their share of marital woes through the years, had saved every penny to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary with a trip to the Holy Land.

In spite of their surroundings on the tour, they stayed true to form and quibbled and fought all day and night on their trip.  Unfortunately, while in Jerusalem during one of their spats Mr. Bickerson suffered a massive and fatal heart attack.

Despite his sudden passing, Mrs. Bickerson seemed to take it very well.

The Kansas City Star reports that Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri (located in the KCMO Metro area) received good news last week when it learned that the 15-member Grand Jury panel had unanimously refused to issue any indictments against them which had been sought by Republican District Attorney Phill Kline and his minions.  The Grand Jury also told District Judge Kevin Moriarty that after examining all the medical information before it, they had voted unanimously to withdraw their earlier subpoena for any further medical records.

So exactly who is this anti-abortionist and religious zealot Phill (yes, he spells it with 2 l’s) Kline who has all reproductive rights healthcare providers in his crosshairs?  Here’s GQ (Gentleman’s Quarterly) magazine's take on him:

"The man will do anything to stop abortion.  ... [T]he most aggressive abortion litigator in the land, subpoenaing the medical records of abortion clinics and prying into our private sexual histories.  Meet the future of the pro-life movement."

If Dubya prevails in providing immunity to the Telecoms, he has a plan for them to use the millions they'll save that they had earmarked for legal defense funds.

Is it possible that his sinister suggestion to them will violate the "Establishment Clause" of the First Amendment?

Coming to your neighborhood soon ... below the fold are photos that raise serious concerns of what Dubya has proposed:

Ahhh, Spring ... that time of year when we all need to remember re-set our clocks and "spring" forward.

But what's this?  A chance to win a million bucks just by saving some sunshine?!

I'm getting me a big jar - 'cause I plan on winning.  (Details below the fold)

Last month, two Bay Area civil rights groups – Asian Law Caucus (ALC) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) – filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in U.S. District Court in San Francisco responding to growing complaints from travelers of excessive screenings at ports of entry involving seizure of laptops, cell phones and other electronic devices along with interrogation about personal matters.

Under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) the ALC and the EFF had asked the DHS to have its Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency share what its policies are regarding searching and copying data from electronic devices, as well as its questioning practices of travelers returning to the U.S. from trips abroad.  When the DHS failed to respond, the civil rights groups began seeking a remedy in the federal courts.

Over the past year the ALC says they have received more than 20 individuals’ complaints from Northern California alone who said they had been "grilled about their families, religious practices, volunteer activities, political beliefs, or associations" when passing through ports of entry on returning home.

To paraphrase Rush Limbaugh (who, with utter predictability, is now going after the messenger while ignoring the message), the "New York Times" story about McCain’s involvement with a telecom Washington lobbyist is not the story.  How the Republican conservative echo chamber spins it is the story.  

And what inspired the directory that follows is the claim posited February 20th on CNN’s "Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees" dealing with the breaking news about McCain by Republican conservative operative and Mitt Romney advisor, Bay Buchanan.

BUCHANAN: We expect our candidates to live up to those values, not just to talk about them.  [Snip]
This is not the Democratic Party.  This is the party of values.  And we assume that our candidates have been loyal to their families.  We assume that.  We don't ask them that question.  [Emphasis added]

[Update] Poll Added

While February 15th  is, indeed, Galileo’s Birthday (he’d be 444 years old), given recent pronouncements from the current papacy, I doubt he’d find any Hallmark cards bearing a "Vatican City" postmark in his mailbox today ... and here’s why:

Last month Pope Benedict XVI chose to cancel his speech at Rome’s most prestigious university (La Sapienza) following widespread protests as a result of his own words spoken there 17 years ago as Cardinal Ratzinger when he then declared that during the time of the Church’s Inquisition, its heresy trial and conviction of Galileo for asserting that the earth actually revolves around the sun (which the Inquisition judged "absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical, because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures") was, in Benedict’s humble opinion, a "rational and just" verdict.

Or to be more precise ...

Dog-whistle hearing christianist relatives send the darndest things, and below is a bulk email I got two days ago from one of mine.  And although I immediately penned my response, I took the late Ann Landers sage advice and waited a day to be sure it’s what I wanted to say.

This was sent to me by a teacher friend.....think about it!

Do you know that we have adult students at the school where I teach who are not US citizens and who get the PELL grant, which is a federal grant (no pay back required) plus other federal grants to go to school?  One student from the Dominican Republic told me that she didn't want me to find a job for her after she finished my program, because she was getting housing from our housing department and she was getting PELL grant which paid for her total tuition and books, plus money left over.