Some cats and rats and elephants, but Lord, I'm so forlorn

Some days, the news is just too ridiculous to not comment about it. First up are some cool cats who might be a bit too cool for their own good:

More than 10 blinking electronic devices planted at bridges and other spots in Boston threw a scare into the city Wednesday in what turned out to be a publicity campaign for a late-night cable cartoon. The devices depict a character giving the finger...

Highways, bridges and a section of the Charles River were shut down and bomb squads were sent in before authorities declared the devices were harmless.

Turner Broadcasting, a division of Time Warner Inc. and parent of Cartoon Network, said the devices were part of a promotion for the TV show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," a surreal series about a talking milkshake, a box of fries and a meatball.

From the category of rats, we've got the kind screwing up the war we've been fighting in Iraq:

Tens of millions of U.S. dollars have been wasted in Iraq reconstruction aid, some of it on an Olympic-size swimming pool ordered up by Iraqi officials for a police academy that has yet to be used, investigators say. [ed. note: try hundreds of millions, not tens]...

According to the report, the State Department paid $43.8 million to contractor DynCorp International for the residential camp for police training personnel outside of Baghdad's Adnan Palace grounds that has stood empty for months. About $4.2 million of the money was improperly spent on 20 VIP trailers and an Olympic-size pool, all ordered by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior but never authorized by the U.S.

U.S. officials spent another $36.4 million for weapons such as armored vehicles, body armor and communications equipment that can't be accounted for. DynCorp also may have prematurely billed $18 million in other potentially unjustified costs, the report said.

Responding, the State Department said in the report that it was working to improve controls

Needless to say, next time perhaps they can try tracking how they spend BILLIONS of dollars before they just hand it out. Just suggesting...

Anyway, our other rats are those trying to get us into our next war:

Investigators say they believe that attackers who used American-style uniforms and weapons to infiltrate a secure compound and kill five American soldiers in Karbala on Jan. 20 may have been trained and financed by Iranian agents, according to American and Iraqi officials knowledgeable about the inquiry.

The officials said the sophistication of the attack astonished investigators, who doubt that Iraqis could have carried it out on their own — one reason a connection to Iran is being closely examined. Officials cautioned that no firm conclusions had been drawn and did not reveal any direct evidence of a connection.

You'll note that there is not a single shred of evidence that the Iranians were involved, except for the fact that the attackers were "sophisticated". So help me, if the attack had been "intricate", we might be at war already. WTF is wrong with people to believe this crap?

On to elephants. First the kind in the New York State Senate who truly have their priorities straight with regard to who needs to be looked out for in next year's state budget:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer will propose a budget of more than $120 billion Wednesday that would increase overall spending by more than 6.3 percent, a larger increase than his predecessor, George E. Pataki, proposed last year but significantly lower than the budget enacted by the Legislature, people briefed on the plan said.

After talking for months about the need to rein in spending, the governor had to reconcile his campaign promises to substantially increase funds for education and lower property taxes, while also moving to make health insurance available to all of the state’s children and increase aid to distressed municipalities.

The governor’s plan for property tax cuts is aimed at the middle class, adding $6 billion over three years to the existing School Tax Relief program, known by the acronym STAR. Benefits under the plan decrease for upstate households with incomes exceeding $60,000 and households in New York City and its suburbs with incomes exceeding $80,000.

Some Senate Republicans criticized his proposal for not doing enough to help constituents with higher incomes.

It's always a shame when politicians fail to look out for the interests of those with higher incomes. We may see riots all the way down Wall Street, if they weren't so busy taking advantage of all their federal tax cuts that Republicans in Washington have been handing out for the past few years.

Finally, the best news story of the day, about elephants...as in pachyderms. The military has blacklisted them, but with an important caveat. From Too Hot for TNR:

According to a recently-issued Special Forces manual, while certain pack animals are acceptable to use for spec-ops purposes (donkeys, mules), elephants "should not be used by U.S. military personnel." In the assessment of the manual's authors, "Elephants are not the easygoing, kind, loving creatures that people believe them to be. They are, of course, not evil either."

There you have it. The military has concluded that elephants aren't actually evil. Giraffes, on the other hand, are either with us or against us, and we must fight them there so we don't have to fight them here.