On September 13, 2006, a lawyer for the Vice President demanded that Dick Cheney’s visitor logs be destroyed. The demand was sent to the Secret Service after the Washington Post made a Freedom of Information Act request to find out who had been visiting Darth Cheney’s official residence.

Even though logs have unlawfully been destroyed, copies have surfaced! And so, here’s the…

Top 10 Surprises in Cheney’s Visitor Logs:

10. Adolf Hitler is still alive and kicking at 118, and often drops by to give Cheney advice and a blood transfusion.

9. The logs contain hundreds of entries with no names, simply signed “hookers, hookers, and more hookers!”

8. Fidel Castro made several clandestine visits late last August, but only stayed long enough to sober up frequent traveling companions Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

7. On more than one occasion Cheney rode home with Paris Hilton, who often drove Cheney’s Jaguar XKR to ensure the VP avoided a third DUI.

6. Cheney left the residence every first and third Friday night of the month — the same nights wife Lynne scheduled strip-poker parties with Al and Tipper Gore.

5. Logs reveal only one shotgun salesperson visited during the entire year, compared with 126 traveling bra and garter set representatives.

4. For an incredible 11-day stretch in 2006, every single visitor was bald.

3. Hundreds of entries with no names, simply signed “another bucket of KFC drumsticks and Jim Beam.”

2. Compared with other Federal residences, a highly disproportionate number of visitors complained of point-blank birdshot wounds to the face.

1. Cheney regularly denied President Bush entrance unless he brought a no-bid contract for Halliburton, his own defibrillator, and promised to nuke Iran by 2008.

Read More: Dick Cheney, Naval Observatory, visitor logs

Here’s how the President is bought and paid for in the USA:

The filthy rich pharmaceutical lobby pumps over $100 million a year into the U.S. Government in the form of campaign contributions and lobbying expenses.

Then our soft-witted — but so very concerned for our health — leader (?! Dear God help us…he’s still in the White House…), the despised-by-72-percent corporate puppet, trots out to his podium and blows this hot cloud of prescription vapor up our rears:

What I don’t want is somebody to say, oh, gosh, I’ll be able to buy a cheaper drug from Canada, and that drug ends up coming from another country, without proper inspection and proper safety. I believe…government has an obligation to make sure…that that which somebody buys is…safe. We have an obligation to do that.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Beef Lobby pumps millions upon millions of dollars into Washington. And, on Tuesday, our Chimp in Chief said he will fight to keep any meatpacker from — voluntarily and at their own expense — testing every single one of their cows for mad cow disease so some of us don’t die a horrible death.

So much for BushCo caring about our safety…

Exporting Mad Cow Disease

Because U.S. beef comes from U.S. cows, and 99 percent of U.S. cows go untested for mad cow disease, China isn’t buying it. And Bush isn’t happy that China isn’t buying U.S. beef:

One area where I’ve been disappointed is beef. They need to be eating U.S. beef. It’s good for them. They’ll like it. And so we’re working hard to get that beef market opened up.

Before 2003, Japan and South Korea imported 2 billion dollars worth of U.S. beef a year. Now they aren’t buying it, either, and South Korea gets its beef from Australia instead of the United States.

So, why are U.S. beef farmers paying so much money to keep from testing every cow? The costs of the additional tests would be expensive, but not as expensive as losing 3 billion dollars in exports to the 36 countries that have banned U.S. beef.

“The bottom line,” says author John Stauber, “is that the U.S. government is afraid of putting in real food-safety testing because it would certainly find additional cases.”

And additional cases would REALLY kill beef profits. But, if there were additional cases slipping by undetected, wouldn’t we already be seeing people get sick from the infected beef?

Maybe, and maybe not…

Mad Cow and Alzheimer’s

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) is a fatal degenerative brain disease that naturally occurs in about one out of every one million people. CJD can also be caused by mad cow disease.

To make matters worse, CJD is often misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease. Doctors need a brain biopsy to conclusively diagnose which disease a victim has. And, over the last 20 years, the rate of Alzheimer’s disease in the U.S. has skyrocketed…

Nobel Laureate D. Carleton Gajdusek estimates that 1 percent of people we think are suffering from Alzheimer’s may actually have CJD instead. From Yale to the University of Pennsylvania, several studies of Alzheimer autopsies have revealed the misdiagnosis of CJD is at least 3 to 5 percent.

When those percentages are extrapolated to the entire population, it means that hundreds of thousands of dementia-related deaths each year are likely CJD deaths. Since this would be way above the one-in-a-million normal rate of CJD occurrence, thousands of those cases may actually be coming from infected meat…meat from the 99 percent of U.S. cows that still aren’t tested.

In light of what we know — and especially because the incubation period for CJD can be decades — the U.S. should immediately begin testing every single cow whose beef is being raised for human consumption. At the least, we Americans should have the freedom to buy our beef from a company that’s willing to test every single cow they process, whether the government requires them to or not.

Read More: mad cow, BSE, CJD, beef, bush, george w. bush

While you’re busy getting to those Six Sights to See Before They’re Gone, you can start planning future vacations to see some sights that aren’t quite here yet, but promise to be spectacular when they arrive…

Burj Dubai

In February 2007, the United Arab Emirates’ Burj Dubai passed the USA’s Sears Tower as the building with the most floors. By September, it will likely pass Taiwan’s Taipei 101 Tower as the tallest building in the world.

Currently, construction on Burj Dubai has reached over 1,500 feet and 130 floors. But, due to competition, the final height is being kept secret.

At a minimum, plans call for the structure to reach 2,651 feet with 162 floors. But, several inside sources have placed the final height between 3,000 and 3,300 feet, with over 216 floors.

When completed in 2008, a hotel decorated by Giorgio Armani will occupy the bottom 37 floors. The next 64 floors will contain 700 private apartments (which sold out within 8 hours of going on sale), and the rest of the floors will house corporate offices.

Add an indoor/outdoor observation deck on the 124th floor, an outdoor swimming pool on the 78th floor, and the world’s fastest elevator (a double-decker that can go 40 mph), and you’ve got a fun skyscraper!

Intercontinental Bering Strait Link

The continents of Asia and North America haven’t been connected since the end of the last ice age. That’s when the Bering Land Bridge disappeared beneath an ocean rising with glacial melt off — about 11,000 years ago. But soon, the continents may get joined again…

Engineers and architects have dreamed about connecting earth’s two largest landmasses for over a century. But, the Bering Strait has some of the worst weather on Earth. And in addition to strong winds and arctic temperatures, some very large icebergs float through the region. So, the challenges of building a 55-mile Bering Straight Bridge are formidable.

That’s why some are suggesting a Bering Strait Tunnel instead of a bridge.

The proposed 64-mile tunnel would be twice as long as Europe’s Chunnel, and it would take 10-15 years to complete. In addition to a transportation link, the tunnel would double as a pipeline for supplying the U.S. with oil, natural gas, and electricity from Siberia.

Although the cost of the total project would be $65 billion, it would save North America and Russia $20 billion a year in electricity costs, in part due to Hydro OGK’s plans to build two 10-gigawatt tidal plants in the Okhotsk Sea by 2020.

London Array Offshore Wind Farm

The London Array is expected to become the world’s largest offshore wind farm when it’s complete in 2010.

A consortium of energy companies is building the farm about 12 miles from the Kent and Essex coasts in the outer Thames Estuary. Up to 271 turbines are planned, arranged in a grid covering 94 square miles. Undersea cables will connect the wind farm with an onshore substation on the North Kent Coast.

The wind farm will provide enough energy to power a quarter of the homes in Greater London. By comparison, a fossil fuelled power station would expel an extra 1.9 million tonnes of CO2 per year to produce the same electricity.

The World Archipelago

Off the shore of Dubai, another construction project is taking shape: The World. The project is a man-made archipelago of 300 islands in the shape of a world map.

The World is the brainchild of Sheikh Mohammed, Dubai’s ruler. Mohammed, no stranger to building islands, has already commissioned the Palm Islands…the three largest artificial islands in the world.

Each of The World’s 300 islands ranges in size from 5 to 21 acres, and is being built with sand dredged from the sea. The entire World project will cover an area of about 20 square miles.

As of March 2007, The World was about 90 percent complete. Average price for an island? $25 million.

Aeroscraft Flying Luxury Cruise Ship

It’s not a Blimp, and it’s not a plane. It’s the Aeroscraft — a flying 650-foot-long cruise ship that’s kept in the air with lift from an aerodynamic body, huge rear propellers, and 14 million cubic feet of helium.

With an acre-sized cabin, passengers will have roomy staterooms and plenty of room to stroll around the deck. And with a top speed of 174 miles per hour, and a flight ceiling of 8000 feet, they’ll find their spot in the sky perfect for sight seeing as they sail around the world.

Unlike conventional aircraft, the Aeroscraft doesn’t need a runway. The ship can take off and land vertically, so it can fly to areas lacking extensive transportation facilities or large ground crews.

The Aeroscraft can also be configured as a freight ship. Using less fuel than a plane, and flying much more quietly, it will be able to haul 400 tons of cargo from Japan to California in a day and a half.

A prototype, built by California’s Worldwide Aeros Corporation, should be complete by 2010.

Space Hotels

Las Vegas company Bigelow Aerospace may be the first company to put a private space hotel in orbit. Pioneering work in expandable space station modules with flexible outer shells (conserving space while being launched), the space technology startup company has tentative plans to launch an orbital resort.

The working name is CSS (Commercial Space Station) Skywalker, and the expected price for a night’s stay will be around $1 million. But it could be in orbit by 2015.

And if you want to travel even further, plans for hotels on the moon are already taking shape. But, completion date is 2050, so you’ve still got a little time to pack and save for the trip…

Read More: Burj Dubai, London Array, Bering Strait Bridge, The World Islands, Aeroscraft, CSS Skywalker, Bigelow Aerospace

As taxpayers fork over $1.9 billion dollars a week to continue the Iraq War…

As the Iraqi parliament plans to take off July and August for vacation…

As soldiers on their third tour continue patrolling the civil-war hell hole that used to be a country…

As flag-draped casket number 3,441 comes home to a young U.S. widow and a toddler that never knew his dad…

As Iraq’s oil revenues are criminally mismanaged and armed private security contractors take home millions in war profits…

Senator Hillary Clinton wants you to help her answer a tough question…

A tough question that she’s been debating and agonizing over for months…

Which song should she use for her freakin’ campaign theme?

Read More: iraq war, Hillary Clinton, out of touch

Scientists have confirmed that a virgin hammerhead shark gave birth to a pup in 2001.

Three sexually immature, female hammerhead sharks were captured and put in an aquarium at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo. Three years later, on December 14, 2001, one of the virgin sharks gave birth to a pup.

Recently, teams of scientists from Belfast, Nebraska, and Florida concluded DNA tests that failed to detect paternal DNA. These genetic tests proved the unbelievable, but obvious: the baby shark had no daddy.

Unfortunately, the baby shark was soon killed by a stingray before it could be removed from the tank.

The lead Belfast scientist, Dr Paulo Prodöhl, had this to say about the shark’s virgin birth:

The findings were really surprising because as far as anyone knew, all sharks reproduced only sexually by a male and female mating, requiring the embryo to get DNA from both parents for full development, just like in mammals.

The discovery that sharks can reproduce asexually by parthenogenesis now changes this paradigm, leaving mammals as the only major vertebrate (backboned creatures) group where this form of reproduction has not been seen.

That we know of ;-)

Parthenogenesis, the process of giving birth without male fertilization, has been observed mostly in lower plants, invertebrates (bees, aphids, ants…), and a few reptiles. Recently Komodo Dragons — and sharks — have been added to the list of species capable of parthenogenesis.

Read more Amazing, Orgasmic, and Fantastic Facts: Amasnic Fact Off Archive.

Read More: shark, virgin birth, bonnethead, hammerhead, parthenogenesis