High-school kids in France are fighting for their right to wear revealing clothing to school. Apparently some schools have new dress codes that ban things like short skirts, piercings, and low-slung pants. At one school last week, a chick managed to convince 300 of 2,100 students to come to school dressed in violation of the new code. This meant revealing shorts or minis for girls and board shorts for guys. Their new headmaster was trying to ban skirts above the knee and clothes with holes in them. The protest organizer got in trouble, obviously.

The mystery of an aircraft seized in Thailand with a cache of North Korean weapons deepened further yesterday when a senior Thai police officer said it was not headed to Iran as some reports have indicated.

Madagascar security forces on Tuesday fired tear gas at opposition leaders and supporters outside parliament.

And there is good reason to suspect that something utterly corrupt is going on at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. There are pointed allegations jointly made by progressive blogger Jane Hamsher and fiscal ultra-conservative Grover Norquist, who don’t see eye to eye on much of anything. But they have come together to urge that we allow the light of day to fall onto Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The allegations are detailed, and you can read them here. The center of the storm is the current White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel. A rejected FOIA request only makes these allegations more troubling.  The allegations are exacerbated by the fact that the Acting Inspector General was dismissed early this year through the effects of legislation pushed through by Rahm Emanuel. The fact that $800 Billion in taxpayer funds is at stake (more than $7,000 for each one of the 111,000,000 American households) makes this all the more surreal. To put this $800B number in perspective, the Defense Secretary just made a big announcement that we should set aside a “mere” two billion dollars for “nation building.”

Indonesian police on Thursday arrested the father-in-law of a leading Southeast Asian terrorist who was killed in shootout with police four months ago.

Republican candidates now have an eight-point lead over Democrats, their biggest lead of the year, in the latest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot.

Sorry, I’ve had a fairly serious server outage. There was really nothing I could do. It was only a few minutes ago that I actually had access to the account.There appears to be about three days of postings gone in the the recovery - rebuild.

It also appears that I have to upgrade ‘Expression Engine’ again. There’s a real good chance that I will lose the blog again for a while at that point.

I’m exhausted. Regular posting will resume in a while. —- so much has been happening that I would like to post on.

Sorry.