This is the only possible fly in the oatmeal. Neptune will be conjunct the Sun, suggesting Father Neptune may want to come in! Of course, this would be important to discover. Check the purity of the water, look at the roof for possible past leaks - you get the idea. Have an engineer check things out for you.

Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday he made the decision to charge the Christmas Day terrorism suspect in civilian court rather than the military system, with no objection from all the other relevant departments of the government.

In a letter to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, the attorney general wrote that the FBI told its partners in the intelligence community on Christmas Day and again the next day that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab would be charged criminally.

SNIP

Holder said that the possibility of detaining Abdulmutallab in the U.S. military system under the law of war was explicitly discussed in the days following the arrest, including at a Jan. 5 meeting that included President Obama and senior members of the national security team.

"No agency supported the use of law of war detention for Abdulmutallab, and no agency has since advised the Department of Justice that an alternative course of action should have been, or should now be, pursued," the attorney general wrote.

Holder said his decision was consistent with earlier practices followed uniformly in both the Obama and Bush administrations.

"The Bush administration used the criminal justice system to convict more than 300 individuals on terrorism-related charges," Holder wrote. The attorney general specifically mentioned the case of Richard Reid, who tried but failed to ignite a shoe bomb on a U.S.-bound trans-Atlantic jetliner.

"The practice of the U.S. government followed by prior and current administrations without a single exception, has been to arrest and detain under federal criminal law all terrorist suspects who are apprehended inside the United States," Holder added.

In January, the number of Americans identifying themselves as Democrats fell another tenth-of-a-percentage point. Now the number of Democrats is at the lowest level recorded in more than seven years of monthly tracking by Rasmussen Reports.

However, in January, the number of Republicans in the country dropped by nearly two percentage points.

Currently, 35.4% of American adults view themselves as Democrats. That's down from 35.5% a month ago and 36.0 two months ago. Prior to last month, the lowest total ever recorded for Democrats was 35.9%, a figure that was reached twice in 2005. See the History of Party Trends from January 2004 to the present.

The number of Republicans is now down to 32.3%. The number of Republicans in the country has stayed between 32.3% and 34.05% in every month for the past 18 months.

The number of adults not affiliated with either major party is now up to 32.3%. That's the highest number of unaffiliateds since the summer of 2007.

I'd be feeding the blanche's and the pacifists to the monsters.

Fueling the debate over the existence of internet addiction, and new study from researchers at the University of Leeds finds that people who compulsively browse, chat and play online have higher rates of moderate to severe depression than people who aren't compulsively driven to use the internet. Additionally, people with addictive tendencies toward internet use were more likely to spend proportionately more time on sites featuring sexually gratifying content, gaming or social networking. As with previous research on addictive internet and video game use, researchers said that it wasn't clear which came first in the apparent link between compulsive internet use and depression--that is, are people more likely to be depressed because they spend too much time on the internet, or is whiling away hours online a common hobby of people who are depressed?