Already speculation is building that this is a move to position herself for a run for the White House in 2012.

Details will be available after her 3 p.m. (ET) press conference.

UPDATE: Video of press conference

State agency’s new logo has an anarchist ring to it

Let us remember that it was also the Government Accountability Board that paid a company a million dollars to set up a website showing the skyline of Minneapolis Minnesota as the header.

I think a more approperate logo for this bunch of goofs would be…

EXCLUSIVE: Taliban buying children for suicide bombers

Pakistan’s top Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, is buying children as young as 7 to serve as suicide bombers in the growing spate of attacks against Pakistani, Afghan and U.S. targets, U.S. Defense Department and Pakistani officials say.

A Pakistani official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said the going price for child bombers was $7,000 to $14,000 - huge sums in Pakistan, where per-capita income is about $2,600 a year.

“[Mehsud] has turned suicide bombing into a production output, not unlike [the way] Toyota outputs cars,” a U.S. Defense Department official told reporters recently. He spoke on the condition that he not be named because of ongoing intelligence efforts to catch Mehsud, a prime target for a U.S. and Pakistani anti-Taliban campaign.

Temperatures in Milwaukee were in the mid-50s Wednesday morning. Cloud cover is supposed to remain in the area in the afternoon, according to forecasters, and if those clouds are heavy enough, Milwaukee could break the July 1 record for the lowest high temperature.

The July 1 record was set in 1876 at 62 degrees, according to the National Weather Service in Sullivan. That record was tied in 1986.

The temperature could approach the all-time record cold for a high temperature in July. That record of 57 degrees was set in 1982, according to weather service records.

“The legislation signed by President Obama as his first new law in effect eliminated the time period restriction on filing pay discrimination complaints.” The article goes on to say, “But there is also a likely effect of this legislation that the Congress did not foresee and hence did not intend. I wish I had thought of this looming unintended consequence myself, but I did not. I’m indebted for it to Michael Rosman, General Counsel of the Center for Individual Rights, whose email to me I quote with permission: ‘Now that President Obama has signed the Ledbetter bill into law, it might be an appropriate time to remind [your] readers that you do not need to be a minority or a woman to take advantage of its provisions. Specifically, anyone who was harmed in the 1970s or 1980s (or later) by a race-conscious affirmative action program can sue for damages if that person is still receiving a check (paycheck or pension) from the same employer that somehow reflects the injury.’ “

This gives the Liberals a 60 vote, filibuster-proof majority… Although with all of the RINO’s, did they really need it?

A report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday shows the four-county Milwaukee area shedding 5.2% of its jobs since May 2008, compared with 8% in the Detroit area.

I hope you enjoy paying for people that shouldn’t even be in the country, because, thanks to Jim Doyle and Wisconsin’s Democratic Party, you get the bill.

I feel badly for Michael. Had he known how wildly popular he’d become in death, he might have lived a slightly less-frugal lifestyle. That poor guy, he never did anything “just for Michael.” Hardly ever thought about himself.

Al Sharpton, commenting on Michael’s death earlier today at The Apollo:

“Michael Jackson represents to us, something that we understand, and understood when the whole world turned on Michael, but we never turned on Michael…

It always is funny to me, when people try and act like we are all the same, we are all of one kind of ‘kindred spirit,’ and we’ve got different ways we express ourselves; one way is no better than the other way, as long as we’re real to each other, and we didn’t care who didn’t like Michael’s style, he was real to us.”

Yes, Al. If I had to choose one artist who, over the past two decades, was just doing his best, every day to “keep it real,” clearly, it would be Michael Jackson.

Michael Jackson. Man of the people, pioneering co-sleeper.

I’ll leave the rest of the preaching to the usually camera-shy Reverend Al, who came out of his shell today to defend the honor of his special friend…

“My 84 year-old mother’s house will be sold out from under her today, and it’s breaking my heart.”

Or so the e-mail claims. Irene Leary, son of Daniel Leary (who later refers to himself as Dennis Leary, in the same e-mail) implores the reader to “sign the petition now” to help keep some faceless Leviabank from tossing his mother out onto the street.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” the writer continues. “My mother will lose her home today unless we can convince OneWest not to sell her house. Please help her. Please sign the letter now. Click here.”

Man, this sounds pretty serious.

Now, according to the mass e-mailing, who exactly is advocating on behalf of dear Mrs. Leary? None other than everyone’s favorite shadowy activist group, ACORN.

It’s ACORN’s logo on the e-mail. It’s ACORN’s e-mail address in the header. But who’s really benefiting from this e-mail decrying Mrs. Leary’s plight?

Embedded links in the e-mail direct to the website of an activist group, “WiredForChange,” an offshoot of DemocracyInAction’s web-based software suite, “Salsa,” and registered to the founder and Chief Technology Officer for the firm, Chris Lundberg.

DemocracyInAction, according to its staff bio page, was launched in 2003, and serves as a “mission-oriented company providing online engagement tools to political campaigns, PACs, the DSCC [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] and State Democratic parties.”

Their product, “Salsa,” is a software program which, according to the firm’s website, assists organizations in “building awareness and mobilizing donors, members and supporters”. And gathering that “mobilizing” data is exactly what they boast that their software is best at. Look no further than an entry on their SalsaCommons.org blog, promoting a name-gathering campaign for something called “WeWantThePublicOption.com”:

“Great stuff happens when you mix a tool kit like Salsa with a creative campaign concept. Case in point: WeWantThePublicOption.com. This custom-built petition page offers signers the prospect of their name appearing on an advertisement that will air in the D.C. area in favor of the public option. It’s a great way to show impact from an online petition as well as recognize the activists that sign it. And as you can see, it’s clearly all about the cause — not the sponsoring organization, which is practically invisible on the page.”

An “advertisement that will run in the D.C. area in favor of the public option?” Yikes, that sounds a little scary. All I wanted was to make sure Mrs. Leary didn’t have to sleep out in the rain tonight. Is Mrs. Leary simply a “creative campaign concept?” Who’d stoop so low? (The same people who claim that 76% of Americans are begging for socialization of the health care system? Perhaps.)

Are these the true pleadings of a loving son, desperately trying to help his mom from being tossed out of the house “she’s lived in for 34 years,” or the misleading manipulations of an activist group sniffing around for personal contact information which it can use in future marketing endeavors? Or both?

We may honestly never know. But ACORN’s scare tactics should be called into question, and anyone who submits their personal information to an off-site third party, in this case, DemocracyInAction, should ask themselves what will become of their personal information, and for what purpose it will be used.

We can only wonder if Mrs. Leary made it through the day without a Sheriff’s knock on her front door, and hope for the best outcome. But this e-mail reeks of psychological manipulation of the reader for the sole purpose of collecting data, the true intent of which, given ACORN’s dubious history, is highly suspect.

Perhaps a more effective ACORN tactic would have been a photograph of a kitten, shotgun to its head, with the caption: “Give us your personal information, to use in our future activism, or the fuzzy-wuzzy little kitten gets it. You WANT to save the cute kitten, right?”

Now that would be over the top, even for enlightened and compassionate liberal activists.

(Translation: There’s always next time.)