Month: June 2008

Supreme Court Strikes Down D.C. Gun Ban, Upholds Individual Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Associated Press
From: http://www.FoxNews.com

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices’ first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.

The court’s 5-4 ruling struck down the District of Columbia’s 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment. The decision went further than even the Bush administration wanted, but probably leaves most firearms laws intact.

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Honoring the Man Who Designed the Pringles Can

Friday, June 06, 2008

By Greg Gutfeld

So last week, a true American hero passed away and the press barely said a word.

I am talking about Fredric J. Baur, the man who created the potato crisp packaging system for Pringles — otherwise known as “a can with a lid.”

This is the greatest single invention in the snacking world, but our mainstream media cared more about the death of famed French designer Yves St. Laurent.

Baur patented the can in 1966 and it quickly changed the way fat people like me became fatter, elevating itself beyond snacking also-rans like Funyuns, Bugles and the repulsive Munchos.

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Navy Shoots Down Ballistic Missile in Test Off Hawaii

HONOLULU (AP–From FoxNews) — The U.S. military intercepted a ballistic missile Thursday in the first such sea-based test since a Navy cruiser shot down an errant satellite earlier this year.

The military fired the target, a Scud-like missile with a range of a few hundred miles, from a decommissioned amphibious assault ship near Hawaii’s island of Kauai.

The USS Lake Erie, based at Pearl Harbor, fired two interceptor missiles that shot down the target in its final seconds of flight about 12 miles above the Pacific Ocean.

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This N’ That

Steve Williams-Opinion Page Editor,

Victorville Daily Press

The U.S. Commerce Department predicted that the Gross National Product for the first quarter of the year would grow by .6 percent, but it didn’t; it grew by .9 percent.

Why is that noteworthy? Because the department underestimated the strength of the American economic system, and because it also belies the assumption by a whole raft of economists that we’re either on the verge of a recession, or more commonly, that we’re already in one. Recessions are defined as beginning when, for two straight quarters, the economy shows negative growth.

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Happy Birthday to All Those Born in June

One of the birthstones for June is the Moonstone.

Moonstone almost seems magical with a ghostly shimmering glow floating in a crystalline material. The Romans thought that moonstone was formed out of moonlight. Moonstone is a variety of feldspar, and the shimmer which is called “schiller” or “adularescence”, is caused by the inter-growth of two different types of feldspar, with different refractive indexes.

In Europe, Moonstone is considered the birthstone for June, although in the United States it shares that distinction with alexandrite and Pearl.

Moonstones come in a variety of colors. The body color can range from colorless to gray, brown, yellow, green, or pink. The clarity ranges from transparent to translucent. The best moonstone has a blue sheen, perfect clarity, and a colorless body color.

Sometimes moonstone will have an eye as well as a sheen. Another related feldspar variety is known as rainbow moonstone. In this variety of labradorite feldspar, the sheen is a variety of rainbow hues.

Fine moonstone is quite rare and becoming rarer. It is mined in Sri Lanka and Southern India. The rainbow variety can also be found in Madagascar.