I put up a post last week about Able Danger and some concerns I had with the story. In the comments section, I received comments from an "Anon" who provided what looked like an insider's perspective on Able Danger. Some of his allegations were potentially explosive (such as briefing AD to senior DOD officials who then blew it off or failed to pass the into to FBI).

According to LTC Tony Shaffer, the individual who has come forward in the press with much of the Able Danger info we have now, he was our own "Anon" (hat tip: Laura Rozen, with an assist to Mickey Kaus). Captain V (aka Voice of the Taciturn) knows Shaffer and vouches for his credibility, and his public statements seem consistent with what I've seen in CT operations. Here's what he wrote:

Madonna, you may know, broke a collarbone and cracked three ribs last week in a fall from a horse.
You may not know that at the Mendocino Coast's Little River Inn, Mel McKinney is telling folks he sustained nearly identical injuries in a horse-riding accident that happened days before the Material Girl's.
And so? The significance to Mel, who helps his wife, Susan, and their partners run the Inn, is that as a convalescing equestrian he can hestly claim the title of pre-Madonna.

Only 27 families, most of them secular, built this settlement in 1986 from the sand dunes. They grew organic vegetables and flowers, most of which were exported to Europe, and they defended their settlement, which much of the world regarded as illegal, against regular attacks from Palestinian militants, and at least once from some of their own workers.

Earlier Tuesday, Elei Sinai residents locked the main gate to the community and barricaded it with an old Subaru. They also burned several tires adjacent to the gate so that the settlement's children could burn old Ariel Sharon–Likud election posters.

"It's a small protest gesture," resident Sa'ar Berger told the Post.
Berger said that on Monday a SELA representative came to Elei Sinai and offered its residents permanent homes as far away as the Dead Sea. Berger said that this was not an option since the settlement did not want to split up, adding that a few of the settlers had businesses in the area and could not run them from the Dead Sea.

Chanting the now-familiar line, "Jews don't expel Jews," a group of approximately 200 activists succeeded Wednesday morning not just to evade IDF checkpoints throughout the south but also to stop traffic on the Kissufim Route, about two kilometers east of the Kissufim checkpoint.
In the opening struggle of a day promising to be full of such scenes, teams of four and five police officers succeeded in removing the protesters from the main avenue of traffic into Gush Katif and Kfar Darom, allowing empty buses and moving vans to continue their journey towards the Jewish settlements in the southern half of the Gaza Strip.

Miami Herald"More than 400 delegates and observers crowded into a hotel meeting room, where Lutheran leaders invited comments about proposals on blessing same-sex unions and ordaining gays who are not celibate.
The Rev. Robert Goldstein, a gay minister at Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church in Chicago, wore a rainbow sash around his cleric's collar as he urged delegates to ''go beyond the justice of incrementalism'' and remove all limits on gay leadership in the denomination.
''I'm a gay pastor in this church. I serve faithfully. I love it,'' he said. ``Our church must go beyond institutionalizing fear.''

Turmoil over what the Bible says about gay sex has created rifts in Protestant denominations for years. The global Anglican Communion is struggling to stay together after its U.S. province, the Episcopal Church, confirmed its first openly gay bishop two years ago.

Affirm the church ban on ordaining sexually active gays and lesbians, but allow bishops and church districts called synods to seek an exception for a particular candidate if that person is in a committed relationship and meets other conditions.
Uphold the prohibition against same-sex blessings, but give bishops and pastors discretion on how to minister to gay couples.
Call for unity, even though congregants disagree on the issue.

. . . 11. The power plant's fuel bladder is not a "giant waterbed"
12. When asked about the location of any personnel or equipment, the proper answer is never "Dantooine... they're on Dantooine"

Saddam's germ war plot is traced back to one Oxford cow
By Dominic Kennedy
A BRITISH cow that died in an Oxfordshire field in 1937 has emerged as the source of Saddam Hussain’s “weapons of mass destruction” programme that led to the Iraq war.
An ear from the cow was sent to an English laboratory, where scientists discovered anthrax spores that were later used in secret biological warfare tests by Winston Churchill.
The culture was sent to the United States, which exported samples to Iraq during Saddam’s war against Iran in the 1980s. Inspectors have found that this batch of anthrax was the dictator’s choice in his attempts to create biological weapons.

supported by 126 MPs in the last Parliament, for a UN investigation into whether Washington broke a weapons control agreement. “It just makes them look more hypocritical than ever,” he said.

“Iraq declared researching different strains of B. anthracis, but settled on the American Type Culture Collection strain 14578 as the exclusive strain for use as a BW,” Mr Duelfer said.
A congressional investigation into Gulf War syndrome by Don Riegle had already uncovered invoices showing that this batch was shipped from the United States between 1986 and 1988.

Its catalogue shows that batch 14578 consists of “bovine anthrax”, isolated by R. L. Vollum, a professor of bacteriology at Oxford University during the 1930s. It is named after him.
Martin Hugh-Jones, who co-ordinates the World Health Organisation’s Working Group on Anthrax Research and Control, said: “We have traced it back and it would have come in on some contaminated bones from Southern Rhodesia.
“England was importing sun-dried bones from dead animals in the colonies. They would be shipped to London and used to make soap. When they got the fat out, (the bones) were meant to be sterilised and ground as bone meal and fed to cattle. The sterilisation was not always complete. It was the major cause of anthrax for almost 100 years.”

The Vollum anthrax was used in biological weapons tests on the Scottish island of Gruinard in 1942, which had to be quarantined for 48 years. “It killed any number of sheep in Gruinard,” Professor Hugh-Jones said.
“(Saddam) obviously at one point had a programme because he was buying the laboratory’s cultures to underwrite a programme. Why would he want peaceful research with Vollum? Come on!”

It took a hell of a lot of courage, but Andrew did it. He knew that there was nothing dirty or shameful about his body, and decided to start going to college classes in the nude! Since he was attending the University of California, Berkeley, at the time -- a very liberal school -- many people thought he would get away with it. And in our minds and hearts, he did.

But eventually Berkeley kicked him out, after passing a rule against going naked on campus -- a rule specifically aimed at him. Andrew continued hanging around Berkeley, was arrested for public nudity by the city of Berkeley, fought the charges -- and won! For many months, it was perfectly legal to walk around nude in Berkeley -- until that famously liberal city, too, passed a law against it.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) warned fellow Republicans yesterday not to ignore the implications of the party's narrow victory in Tuesday's special election in Ohio, saying the public mood heading into next year's midterm elections appears to helping Democrats and hurting Republicans.
"It should serve as a wake-up call to Republicans, and I certainly take it very seriously in analyzing how the public mood evidences itself," Gingrich said. "Who is willing to show up and vote is different than who answers a public opinion poll. Clearly, there's a pretty strong signal for Republicans thinking about 2006 that they need to do some very serious planning and not just assume that everything is going to be automatically okay."

"There does seem to be a sour mood among the electorate at both the state and national level," Mouk said.

So let’s dream. Instead of doing nothing or simply defending 20th century solutions, let’s imagine together what we could do to give every American a fighting chance in the 21st century.
What if we prepared every child in America with the education and skills they need to compete in the new economy? If we made sure that college was affordable for everyone who wanted to go? If we walked up to those Maytag workers and we said “Your old job is not coming back, but a new job will be there because we’re going to seriously retrain you and there’s life-long education that’s waiting for you—the sorts of opportunities that Knox has created with the Strong Futures scholarship program.
What if no matter where you worked or how many times you switched jobs, you had health care and a pension that stayed with you always, so you all had the flexibility to move to a better job or start a new business? What if instead of cutting budgets for research and development and science, we fueled the genius and the innovation that will lead to the new jobs and new industries of the future?