August 4: Bad Stimuli, Obama's Bad Birthday News, and the Italian Prime Minister's Romps

• sure, build something hereSenators McCain and Coburn Release List of “100 Worst Stimulus Projects.”  Encompasses such vital necessities as a $71,263 study of monkeys on cocaine…$500,000-and-change for new windows in a vacant building at Mount St. Helens hoping “that some purpose is found for the location in the future”…and $762,372 for an interactive dance program at the University of North Carolina.  Critics note absence of administration’s highly touted “shovel ready” projects – unless you include equipment needed to clean up the B.S. represented here.
• Family’s ‘Focus’ Shrinks – Again. Lord slams brakes on American evangelical tax-exempt non-profit, Focus on the Family, by also making it “non-income.” Donations fall off a cliff. Organization cuts workforce by another 110 after laying off 385 previously…thus allowing more of the faithful to “serve the poor” – themselves. Not what they had in mind.
• Why President Obama may put on Groucho glasses, slip out a side door, and just let Michelle and Rahm handle it: New Gallup poll has overall approval rating slumping to 41%, the lowest yet.  Health-care bill he signed into law hits all-time low in Rasmussen poll, and nearly 6-in-10 say “repeal it”…and Arizonans, by 71%, not only oppose Obama position on illegal immigration – but also say the Feds should build a fence – like yesterday – from San Diego to Brownsville.  On the wrong side of history? We report. You decide.
• She May Have Lost Her Seat – But Not Her Platform.  Veteran, and ex White House correspondent, Helen Thomas, to be immortalized by Arab American National Museum.  After ending her career by saying Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine and go home to Poland and Germany,” Ms. Thomas will get a statue in her honor at the Dearborn, Michigan facility.  Not known, at this point, whether Ms. Thomas will pose for the statue herself or artist will simply look at a garden gnome.
• It depends on what your definition of ‘pile’ is. Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi today finds himself in the center – no pun intended – of allegations that he took part in four-in-a-bed sex romps.  “Escort” Terry De Nicolo reveals story to investigators saying she was in the sack last year, in southern Italian town of Bari, with the really “Prime” minister and a couple of party-girls out of Rome…not discussing a crisis in Euro exchange rate mechanisms.
• “Alcohol Was Involved.”  Two 34-year-old men in Horsham, Australia underwent emergency surgery for gunshot wounds as a result of a plan born out of a drinking bout.  They wondered if it hurt to get shot and obliged each other.  It did.  “Guns don’t kill people, drunks with guns kill people.”
• Indonesian rainforest yields more new species: Among remote area’s most unusual – a male tree frog whose bulbous nose inflates when calling females. Creature may share some ancient DNA connection to mammals, scientists say, citing obvious physical and behavioral similarities with Bill Clinton.