Someone mentioned elsewhere that they've been having a hard time finding breakdowns for last night's Iowa caucus voters.  

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My late dad never cared much for "Veterans Day."  Oh, he had only utmost respect for all of our veterans, living and dead, and instilled that ethic in all seven of his kids.  No, the reason he didn't like it was its name.  

HEY YOU PEOPLE!  What the heck is going on up there in Chicago?  Did you all forget your laptops??  There are 500,000 of us out here who want-- nay NEED! -- to know every single thing that's happening at yK2!!

Imagine a place where you can stand and watch every drop of groundwater from every stream and every snow capped mountain from the Continental Divide to the west, Canada to the North, and parts of Texas to the south, float right past you, just a few inches under your feet.  You can stand on the banks of the Missouri River, about a 1/2 mile from this keyboard and see that most every day.  Sometimes I do that, go down to the Big River and just gaze at it for awhile.   It's fun to stand down on the bank of the mighty MO and imagine where that water flowing past you right now was just a a few hours, few days, a few weeks, or even a few months ago.  Hi there, water from North Dakota!  Hey there,  little drops from Steamboat Springs, Colorado!  Oh, look -- there's some water that was way up in Montana a few weeks ago....and, oh sweet Jesus, is that some detritus from that awful tornado in Greensburg, Kansas the other day?  Hmmm, suddenly this is not all good and happy water, is it?  Yikes, there's someone's rain gutter ripped from a house in Topeka during their floods last week.  Geez, I hope they're okay...

A stinky cloud of foul smelling gas has been reported in many areas of Manahattan. I must note here that Cheers and Jeers is off on Monday and Bill in Portland Maine may or may not be visiting New York City this morning.

Now they're recycling "scary" tales about the next Speaker of the House and you can bet that in the next few days this stuff will be posted on every rightwing message board numerous times.  Here's one of the swiftboatish things that have been making the internets and email chains about Nancy Pelosi.  I could use some help coming up with ammo to counter this stuff.

Follow me after the flip...

As of last night, you cannot display images in your dKos diaries or comments, unless those images come from one of the "pre-approved" sites:
- imageshack.us
- photobucket.com
- flickr.com
- dailykos.com

As far as I know, only admins can host anything on dailykos.com so that leaves three commercial hosting sites for the average Kog to use.

Wild speculation and conspiracy theories on the flip side...

Why is this midwestener so interested in these fires?  They are all happening in many of the same places I rode through on my motorcycle trip home from Yearly Kos recently.  Several of those fires were already taking hold when I was there just a couple weeks ago.

More below the fold.

But I know why levees break.

Blew holes.

Here's how it works, and what may well happen to New Orleans, below the fold:

The Diane Rehm Show
Military Service and the War in Iraq

Diane talks about military service and the war in Iraq with Iraq veterans, a military spouse and the producer of a recent radio documentary about military families.

Major Hackett is not touting his recent candidacy or, indeed, anything having to do with his own political aspirations.  The discussion is focused entirely on the subject, including his insightful comments on benefits for war veterans.

It was a great show, and will be available for streaming via WAMU-FM's (the orginating station) website later today.

I once was a "suit" fairly high up at NPR, back in the 80's, a few careers ago.  A lot of things have changed there since then, but the basics are still the same.

Some tips about how you can affect things at NPR appear below the fold.  First, here's a one paragraph backgrounder.

National "Public" Radio is a bit of a misnomer.  NPR is a private non-profit membership organization made up of its affiliate "member" radio stations.  NPR gets almost no money directly from the feds anymore. Congress funds CPB (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) which gives most of its available money for radio directly to individual stations in the form of "Community Service Grants."  The largest portion of each station's Community Service Grant is a matching grant.  The CSG is enhanced by the amount of "non-federal financial support" that the station raises -- the biggest part of this for most stations is your donations, i.e., listener support.  In other words, the more they raise locally, the more they get from Uncle Sam. More...