SCOTTSDALE - Police are searching for a man who shot and wounded a large dog in the 6800 block of East Almeria Street.

Police were called about 8 p.m. Friday by witnesses who said they heard a bang and the yelping of a dog.

The Rottweiler’s owner discovered the dog, blood streaming from its mouth, near his carport door shortly after the gun shot, Scottsdale police said.

A veterinarian confirmed that the Rottweiler was shot once in the head, with the bullet entering the side of the dog’s mouth and exiting though its tongue, police said.

The dog was unleashed and unattended when it was shot, police said.

Police said witnesses reported seeing a man in his mid-30s, 5-foot 8-inches tall, and 200 pounds with a dark mullet-style haircut running westbound on Almeria Street, away from the injured dog.

The dog is expected to survive, police said.

There were no April showers to bring any May flowers, but many Arizonans woke to snow, spotty rain and strong winds Tuesday morning during the typically warm month of May.

The low-pressure system that brought the wet weather had passed through the state just after noon, but a 30 percent chance of rain in the Valley still existed, according to the National Weather Service.

The Valley saw just trace amounts of rain throughout the morning along with wind gusts of up to 41 mph, according to the weather service. Meanwhile, the Flagstaff airport had about three inches of snow and around 11 inches of snow fell at Sunset Crater northeast of Flagstaff.

Climate Change, baby.  Man-made.  I drove my SUV to Starbucks today getting 15.6 MPG knowing that I am doing my part to cause Flagstaff snowfall.

Sanchez commanded the US military in Iraq from 2003-2004. The three-star general was relieved of his commander in 2004 following the Abu Ghraib scandal, and in 2005, was told his career was over and he wouldn’t be promoted to a fourth star.

The primary reason appears to be his involvement in authorizing harsh tactics for the treatment of Iraqi prisoners.

Bob doesn’t want to tell us that part of the story.  Gross incompetence accusations?  From the man behind Abu Ghraib?  The same Abu Ghraib that set us back a full year in the war due to the PR nightmare it caused?  Perhaps this wasn’t all Sanchez’s fault and perhaps he was scapegoated, but it certainly isn’t gross incompetence to fail to promote a general that presided over the disaster.

What this leaves open to question is whether the demotions, firings, lack of promotions, etc., went far enough up the food chain or went too far.  Most folks that hate the Bush Administration wanted to see Rummy punished.  It appears that Sanchez thinks he was punished unfairly and that the issue went too far up.  Some kind of Goldilocks effect.  It cost him a 4th Star but considering the damage it did to US international standing, I believe that the Bush Administration did the best that they could to hold people accountable.

And that is what is great about RBB.  He cuts and pastes a paragraph or two, but fails to ever tell the whole story.  Why not include the two paragraphs that I did?  Oh, if he did it wouldn’t be worth him posting because it wouldn’t paint the distorted picture of the Bush Administration and Republicans that suits his agenda.

HAVANA - Cubans are getting wired.

Computers went on sale to the general public on the communist island on Friday and potential consumers were lining up outside store windows to gawk and consider buying.

President Raul Castro’s government had authorized the sale of personal computers to average Cubans more than a month ago, but they were not made available until Friday.

Computer sales are the latest of a series of measures Castro has taken to make life easier for ordinary Cubans.

The new government also has erased bans on cell phones and luxury hotel room rentals, and has made it easier for state workers to own homes they once rented as part of their jobs. It also is letting more private farmers and cooperatives take a crack at putting fallow government land to better use.

Arizona State University may have less cheerful sidelines at sporting events next season.

After racy photos of members of the university’s cheerleading squad were spotted on a campus blog called “The Dirty,” the school cut the squad completely, MyFOXPhoenix reported.

The school’s athletic director, Lisa Love, made the decision Thursday evening.The pictures on the blog feature 6 of the cheerleaders posing in nothing but their bras and panties.

Although only six members of the squad are shown in the photographs, the entire 16-member squad will suffer the consequences, MyFOXPhoenix reported.

The cheerleaders told MyFOXPhoenix that the photographs were a result of college kids goofing off, and they believe the decision to disband the team has been in the works for a while. The photographs are two years old, and were taken at a “cheer party.”

First off, GO DEVILS!  Makes me proud to be a Sun Devil myself.  And since I have this weird male quirk of enjoying looking at scantily clad 20 year old cheerleaders, especially ASU Cheerleaders, I did a little research and got the link to the post at the Dirty that contains all the pics.

For practical purposes, the positive growth numbers are just a technicality. It feels like a recession to American workers, consumers and businesses. A period of significant weakness could persist for months to come, perhaps well into 2009.

What’s equally notable, however, is that this downturn is unfurling slowly and in a muted fashion despite the shocks of soaring energy and food costs and a plunge in real-estate wealth.

Some economists even raise the possibility of something unprecedented in records since World War II: that economic officials will declare a recession even as gross domestic product continues to rise.

In the current economic cycle, much of the direct impact of a consumer slowdown is being felt overseas rather than in the domestic economy.

“In some sense the recession has been outsourced,” as people postpone purchases of BMW cars and South Korean flat-screen TVs while still paying for rent or child care, says Mark Vitner, an economist at Wachovia Corp., a banking firm in Charlotte, N.C. “If you look at the composition of these numbers . . . it really begs the question of whether we’re going to see a decline of GDP at all in 2008.”

For a couple of years now, America’s hunger for imported goods has been cooling, generally rising but at a decelerating pace. In some recent quarters, the pace of imports has actually fallen.

One rule-of-thumb definition of a recession is two quarters when growth turns negative.

All recessions since at least the 1940s, for example, have seen some period of decline in the production of goods and services.

Some economists believe that this year will see such a decline. But they also add that, even without negative growth, a recession may exist based on other criteria such as jobs and income.

“It’s possible,” says Peter Kretzmer, an economist at the Bank of America in New York.

Recessions are officially declared by a committee of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private organization in Cambridge, Mass.

Moral of the story-even if we are not in a recession, economists in Cambridge can make shit up and declare one anyway.

Consumer spending is not declining here at home, but imports are slowing.  Why is that?  It is because the American Dollar is weakening and imports are becoming more expensive. 

This is more Clinton crap.  “I feel your pain” even if there is only a little bit of pain.  Dems and the media will create fake pain that does not exist.

How is this any different than Dems being vested in Global Warming to the point that they will ignore the fact that since 1998, the Earth has cooled?  Call it Climate Change not global warming.  How do they ignore the fact that they want a recession, but none exists?  Change how they define a recession.  How do they ignore the real and tangible progress being made in Iraq?  Move the goal posts and talk about political progress and reconciliation.

Dems want a recession, the Earth to boil, and troops to die.  It suits their political agenda and when there is cause for some optomism and when things are actually going well for the American people, they lie about what is going on.

Struggling with mounting debt and rising prices, faced with the toughest economic times since the early 1990s, Americans are selling prized possessions online and at flea markets at alarming rates.

To meet higher gas, food and prescription-drug bills, they are selling off grandmother’s dishes and their own belongings. Some of the household purging has been extremely painful - families forced to part with heirlooms.

“This is not about downsizing. It’s about needing gas money,” said Nancy Baughman, founder of eBizAuctions, an online-auction service she runs out of her garage in Raleigh, N.C. One formerly affluent customer is now unemployed and had to unload Hermes leather jackets and Versace jeans and silk shirts…

In Daleville, Ala., Ellona Bateman-Lee has turned to eBay and flea markets to empty her three-bedroom mobile home of DVDs, VCRs, stereos and televisions.

She said she needs the cash to help pay for soaring food and utility bills and mounting health-care expenses since her husband, Bob, suffered an electric shock on the job as a dump truck driver in 2006 and is now disabled.

Among her most painful sales: her grandmother’s teakettle. She sold it for $6 on eBay.

“My grandmother raised me, so it hurt,” she said. “We’ve had bouts here and there, but we always got by. This time it’s different.”

OK, so the economy was so good that one customer used to buy Versace jeans and Hermes leather jackets, then lost her job.  Now she has to sell them.  Or how about the economy being so good that another person living in a trailer home whose husband was a dump truck driver being able to collect DVDs, VCRs, stereos, and TVs.

It is a tough economy when people lose their jobs and have to sell their Versace jeans and DVD players.  These people need our help.  We need a government program to ensure that they get to live in total luxury.  Barack is going to save these people from the clutches of middle class living.

When GDP grows at .6% and the media is so deep in recession predictions that they look like fools, they start making shit up.  Just like they have tried to portray our military vets from Iraq as psychopaths despite clear evidence that they suffer from only slightly more cases of mental illness than the general population.

When Iraq stops being an issue and the economy is not in recession, the news must go on.

A daughter of a civil rights icon who served as a top lieutenant to Martin Luther King Jr. testified Monday that her father regularly molested her beginning when she was 6 years old.

The Rev. James L. Bevel pleaded not guilty to a charge of incest before jury selection began Monday. Prosecutors have said he had sex with a teenage daughter years ago, and told her the sex was part of religious training.

The daughter testified she grew up in a communal lifestyle in which she regularly saw her father having sex with women and she came to perceive her own molestation as normal…

Bevel, 71, was a leading figure in the civil rights movement and was with King when he was assassinated 40 years ago. He also is credited with helping to conceive and organize the Million Man March.

In the 1980s, Bevel became active in Republican Party politics and unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 1984.

Ran as an independent for the Presidency in 1992 as part of a nutjob conspiracy ticket but because he ran in 1984 as a Republican and molested someone, he was active in Republican politics.  I beat RBB to it.  Surprised that he didn’t see “Republican”, “incest”, and “molest” in some meta search that he does and already post it. 

It appears that the media works about as objectively as RBB.  If you can find a way to call someone a Republican and they commit a crime, do it.

It is rare that “professionals” in broadcasting or journalism would display such contempt towards bloggers and other writers on the internet as Walton and Johnson have shown to the readers and writers at Say Anything Blog.  They flat out plagarized a post by a contributor at SAB, but when it was pointed out, decided to double down and send out profane and rude e-mails to the folks that complained.

Simply having a show that is “on the edge” and “appeals to adult men” with whatever humor they profess to use is one thing.  Using other people’s work and passing it off as their own is another.

Clear Channel and this station have ethical standards as do most professionals in broadcasting.  These hosts apparently do not.  Consistently the webmaster as well as contributors at Say Anything Blog have tried to simply get an acknowledgement and an appology from the hosts and they have sent e-mails back that included statements as shockingly unprofessional as “fuck off”.

While the bloggers and readers of blogs out there may not be in your general area or folks that your advertisers are specifically targetting, the next step should the hosts fail to appologize and attribute the work to the appropriate author will be to begin contacting advertisers and contacting representatives of Clear Channel themselves.

Thank you for your prompt response and attention to this matter.

The W&J Radio Show is one of the most respected and universally imitated radio programs in the nation. No show has a more unique mix of “stream of consciousness,” opinionated and compelling talk, celebrity guest, musical elements, fictional characters and famous impersonations, great skit writing and production coupled with powerful interaction that radio audiences seem to appreciate.

They lift their jokes from the internet and then try to pass if off as their own.  Universally imitated?  That is because you steal the shit from other folks on the web, not because they want to be like you.

ASSHATS!