Elderbear's Den

Anderson Cooper Hello everyone, I'm Anderson Cooper. If I were any more charming, you wouldn't be able to stand it. Tonight we'll be airing the first of a special five-part series on the state of the global economy entitled, Everything's A Mess And We're All Going To Die, but before we begin, let's check in with Wolf Blitzer.

Wolf Blitzer Hi, I'm Wolf Blitzer and you're in the Conniption Room. Your can trust me, because I have a beard. Happening now: President Bush tried to calm fears about the ailing economy in a press conference earlier today.

George Bush See, the problem is...these folks, the economic folks...they don't have enough money. I mean, they need more money, to make the economy work, to work the economy...and we're going to give them that money, lend it to them. It's like a loan, like if you loaned your friend some money, so then they'd have money. So they could buy beer, and cheese. And most of the these Wall Street types are my friends, ya know? I'm talking about money...it's a money problem. It's a problem with money.

Wolf Blitzer The markets responded to this powerful new initiative almost immediately. The floor of the New York Stock Exchange has more or less become an opium den where the top stock traders are currently betting on a fight between a mongoose, a snake and a guy named Jimmy nobody likes very much. Back to you Anderson; I have to go home and dig up the front lawn to plant vegetables.

People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.
      - Dan Quayle

Fixing the problems with math education in this country will involve breaking a cycle that goes back decades at least. Until education professors face up to the elephant in the room, that poor students find an elementary education major an easy alternative, a million reports and recommendations like this one will be meaningless. All the experts in the world can make absolutely correct statements such as this:

Teachers and other educational leaders should consistently help students and parents to understand that an increased emphasis on the importance of effort is related to improved mathematics performance. This is a critical point because much of the public's self-evident resignation about mathematics education (together with the common tendencies to dismiss weak achievement and to give up early) seems rooted in the erroneous idea that success is largely a matter of inherent talent or ability, not effort.

In this [study], male subjects were given a personality survey, after which the testers would tell them their character was especially feminine or especially masculine. The results were bogus, chosen at random, to set the subjects up for the second part of the study in which they were asked their opinions on such things as same-sex marriage, the war in Iraq, and President Bush’s performance.

Men who were told that they had “feminine” personalities were much more supportive of President Bush and of the War, and much more opposed to same-sex marriage, than the men who were told they were very masculine. In essence, one group of men were called “sissies” and felt put upon to assert and thus prove their masculinity, while the other group felt unthreatened and thus more able to respond freely.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton said, "If John McCain hadn't said that 'the fundamentals of our economy are strong' on the day of one of our nation's worst financial crises, the claim that he invented the BlackBerry would have been the most preposterous thing said all week."

• If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."


• Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.


• If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.


• Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.


• Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.


• Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.


• If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.


• If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.


• If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.


• If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.


• If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.


• If , while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.


• If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America's.


• If your husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

OK, much clearer now?

Question 1
In Sarah Palin's Republican conference speech, she spoke with pride of son Track's deployment to Iraq next week. Where did his name come from?

A: Sarah and husband Todd met while tracking moose

B: She gave birth during the track and field season

C: Family name from Palin's side - her husband Todd has Yup'ik Eskimo ancestry

The answer was B
A keen runner, it's reported that she named Track for her love of athletics.

“Seriously, what are we getting out of this relationship? We grow our own oranges and avocados. We make our own movies. We’ve got burritos and the world’s 5th largest economy. Get the hell off our land so we can marry some gay people!

And stop cuttin’ down our damn trees!”

Outside a handful of majors -- engineering and some of the sciences -- a bachelor's degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance.

MOSCOW - A top Russian general said Friday that Poland's agreement to accept a U.S. missile interceptor base exposes the ex-communist nation to attack, possibly by nuclear weapons, the Interfax news agency reported.

The Patriot battery at Dhahran failed to track and intercept the Scud missile because of a software problem in the system's weapons control computer. This problem led to an inaccurate tracking calculation that became worse the longer the system operated. At the time of the incident, the battery had been operating continuously for over 100 hours. By then, the inaccuracy was serious enough to cause the system to look in the wrong place for the incoming Scud.GAO via GlobalSecurity.org

On September 21, 1997 while on maneuvers off the coast of Cape Charles, Virginia, a crew member entered a zero into a database field causing a divide by zero error in the ship's Remote Data Base Manager which brought down all the machines on the network, causing the ship's propulsion system to fail. Wikipedia

OKLAHOMA CITY -- An Oklahoma church canceled a controversial gun giveaway for teenagers at a weekend youth conference.Windsor Hills Baptist had planned to give away a semiautomatic assault rifle until one of the event's organizers was unable to attend.