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White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan announces resignation. Visit CNN for the latest.

Oh, the Hugh Manatee!

A certain superhero is clearly slacking.

The Daily Trojan has an interesting story about, essentially, homeless students, who sometimes sleep in Leavey Library.

I spent quite a few nights at Leavey during my four years at ‘SC, but that was just because I had a paper due the next day. (Once, I was awakened during a nap in a study room by a custodian opening the door. She was apologetic for waking me, which is kinda funny, considering she was just doing her job, and I was sleeping on the floor of the library, which isn’t really its main purpose. Heh.)

Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday. From the sparse reports I can find, it’s hard to figure out exactly what the agenda of their meeting was, but it’s certainly interesting that they met.

Lieberman may want to come back home and meet with New Britain Democrats, though. Unfortunately, he may find them a more hostile audience…

AFP reports:

A case of bubonic plague has been reported in the second largest US city of Los Angeles for the first time in 22 years, health officials said.

An unidentified woman came down last week with symptoms of the disease, known as the Black Death when it devastatingly swept across Europe in the 14th century.

Health officials said they believed the infected woman, who remains hospitalised, was exposed to fleas in the area around her house and stressed that the likelihood of a spread of the rare disease was very unlikely.

“Bubonic plague is not usually transmissible from person to person,” said Jonathan Fielding, head of Los Angeles County public health.

Fielding explained that the disease is not uncommon among animals such as squirrels but seldom spreads to humans.

“Fortunately, human plague infection is rare in urban environments, and this single case should not be a cause for alarm in the area where this occurred,” he said.

In the interest of blatant scaremongering, here is About.com’s page on “Plague as a Bioterrorism Threat.” Actually, it’s not that scary when you consider that “the Yersinia pestis bacteria is easily destroyed by drying, heat, and ultraviolet light making direct weaponization difficult.” However:

During World War II the Japanese bred infected fleas by the billions and released them over northern Chinese cities causing numerous epidemics. Plague has been endemic in those areas ever since. In the past, the United States dismissed plague as a potential bioterror threat because the disease persists in the area and could cause casualties on both sides long after an attack. However, reports that the former Soviet Union’s biological warfare program developed a dry, antibiotic-resistant, environmentally stable form of the plague organism has led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to categorize plague as a Category A agent.

The page notes that “the United States averages approximately 13 cases of plague each year with a 15% fatality rate.”

Middle Arm, Newfoundland is apparently having some serious flooding problems. Cleanup efforts have been hampered because “many of the local firefighters — including the fire chief — are involved in the East Coast seal hunt and have been out of town.”

In a development that may delay his plan to devour the human race, Tom Cruise is now a father — Katie Holmes gave birth to their baby girl, Suri, earlier today. “The child weighed 7 pounds, 7 ounces and was 20 inches in length. Both mother and daughter are doing well,” according to Cruise’s publicist, who added that the name Suri means “princess” in Hebrew, “red rose” in Persian, and “daughter of the weirdest man in the world” in Korean. (Please note: I may have made one of those up.)

Another beautiful spring day in South Bend.

100 years ago today, The Great Quake struck San Francisco.

The resulting destruction of much of the city is on par with only two other American disasters since 1900: the Great Galveston Hurricane and Hurricane Katrina.

Someday, it will happen again, and the devastation will be even worse. As I’ve noted before, FEMA in early 2001 ranked the three likeliest, most castastrophic disasters potentially facing the U.S. as a terrorist attack in New York, a major hurricane hitting New Orleans, and a 1906-style earthquake striking the Bay Area.

With apologies to Meat Loaf, in this particular case, two out of three is pretty bad. I’m sure President Bush is hoping not to have the “hat trick” happen on his watch.

Proving that there is no longer anything Tom Cruise can possibly say that is too bizarre for people to believe he actually meant it, a joking comment about eating his baby’s placenta is spreading around the Web like wildfire, being reported as serious news and setting the media and the blogosphere buzzing. Drudge is headlining it pretty high up on his page:

Admittedly, it was a pretty weird joke.

Anyway, since apparently nobody fact-checks anything when it comes to Tom Cruise, and nothing is too weird to believe, I’m going to try my hand at this:

Tom Cruise said Tuesday that he plans to eat the entire human race, and have five unicorns for dessert. “Unicorns are yummy,” Cruise said. After admitting his cannibalistic tendencies, Cruise proceeded to strip naked, bark like a dog several times, and jump into a vat of mayonnaise.

See, that’s totally believable, isn’t it?

[/just kidding, please don’t sue me]

P.S. More confirmation that Cruise was just kidding about the placenta thing here. Not sure if that comment was made before or after he dived into the vat of mayonnaise, though.

A Purdue graduate student in industrial engineering has been arrested and charged with allegedly threatening to kill President Bush, Laura Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld:

Vikram Buddhi allegedly posted the detailed and threatening messages on an online message board. … Buddhi urged the Web site’s readers to bomb the United States and for them to rape American and British women and mutilate them, according to court documents. Other messages called for the killing of all Republicans. …

Buddhi allegedly posted his messages on a Yahoo finance board dedicated to Sirius Satellite radio, a site that receives 2 million to 3 million hits a day, Martin said. A concerned citizen contacted the Secret Service office in Dallas to report that a subject was posting threatening messages about Bush, according to the criminal complaint filed in Hammond’s federal court and unsealed Monday.

Buddhi, a native of India who has been in this country for 10 years on a student visa, was named one of Purdue’s outstanding T.A.s in 2002-2003. (Hat tip: RightWinged.)

Here’s the message board in question. There are lots of posts along the lines of “Re: SIRI BOARD POSTER ARRESTED!!” According to this post, the threats happened 6-8 weeks ago.

The student’s defense appears to be “free speech.” I can’t state an opinion, one way or the other, without knowing what he actually said. If it was a “true threat,” then the First Amendment won’t save him. If not, then it should.

Either way, he’s clearly an idiot.

If you have any travel plans for May 1, you may want to rethink them.

You gotta love the Left’s unparalleled ability to make itself look bad. First of all, planning a major protest on the date of a well-known socialist/communist holiday? Yeah, that’ll win you a lot of public sympathy from the average American. Secondly, shutting down airports and whole cities on a Monday, when people are trying to get around, get to work, earn their paychecks, etc.? Brilliant! People love to be massively inconvenienced! That’ll win their hearts, minds and votes for sure! And third, they’re making the classic mistake of combining multiple irrelevant causes into one undifferentiated, incoherent mass of anger:

Support the Fight for Immigrant Workers’ Rights
Justice for Hurricane Katrina Survivors
The People United Will Never Be Defeated!

Huh?!? What does “Justice for Hurricane Katrina Survivors” have to do with “Immigrant Workers’ Rights”? Why on earth should they be part of the same protest? (Indeed, as Andrew has pointed out, the two things are arguably in opposition to one another, in some instances at least.) Let me guess, there will also be “NO BLOOD FOR OIL” and “FREE MUMIA” signs at the protests. It’s all just about as relevant to the central cause (immigrants’ rights) as that “FIRE TY” sign was to the 2005 Notre Dame-USC game.

Memo to the Left: if you want people to pay attention, stick to one issue at a time. Otherwise, you invite satire along the lines of the Hartford Courant editorial cartoon that I remember from the late 1990s, which showed protesters marching on Washington with a series of increasingly non-specific signs, ultimately ending with “WE’RE AGAINST STUFF.” Looking on, a pair of aging ex-hippies lamented, “Protests aren’t what they used to be.”

(Hat tip: Michelle Malkin. A.N.S.W.E.R. has more. News articles here.)

P.S. Let me guess: When Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh & co. point out that these protests are taking place on a major communist/socialist holiday — and that some of the protest organizers are in fact unreconstructed Stalinists — liberals will complain that conservatives are “questioning their patriotism” again.