Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann won a narrow victory at the Ames Straw Poll, outpacing Texas Rep. Ron Paul and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty in a vote that cements Bachmann’s status as the Iowa frontrunner and is all but certain to force Pawlenty to reassess his candidacy.

The conservative congresswoman came out on top in the event with 4,823 votes. U.S. Rep. Ron Paul came in second place. Here’s a breakdown of the results:

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.): 4,823 votes
U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas): 4,671 votes
Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty: 2,293 votes
Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.): 1,657 votes
Former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain: 1,456 votes
Texas Governor Rick Perry: 718 votes
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney: 567 votes
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich: 385 votes
Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman: 69 votes
U.S. Rep Thad McCotter (R-Mich.): 35 votes

Canadian New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton said he will take a “temporary” leave of absence for health reasons.

Layton, speaking at times with a strained voice alongside his wife, NDP MP Olivia Chow, vowed to return to his position when Parliament resumes on Sept. 19.

“I’m going to fight this cancer now, so I can be back to fight for families when Parliament resumes,” on Sept. 19, he said at a press conference in Toronto Monday afternoon, and quickly sending out the same message on Twitter.

In a mid-afternoon statement, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he was “deeply saddened” to learn of Mr. Layton’s temporary leave of absence, sending his “heartfelt support to Jack, Olivia and their family.”

“I salute the courage Mr. Layton continues to show in his fight against cancer,” Mr. Harper said. “We are all heartened by Jack’s strength and tireless determination, which with Mr. Layton will never be in short supply.” 
 
Mr. Layton has been dogged by health problems in recent years.

In March, he underwent surgery for a hip fracture. His health problems didn’t keep him from the spring campaign trail, where he appeared at election events with a cane.

In February 2010, he publicly revealed that he was being treated for prostate cancer, the same illness that struck his father, former Conservative MP Robert Layton.

“I’m a fighter and I’m going to beat this,” he said at the time. My treatment plan is now under way and everything is under way. I’m feeling good.”

In 2006, he admitted to having surgery at the private Shouldice Hosptial for a hernia in the 1990s. He has also suffered from appendicitis.

A former Toronto city councillor, Mr. Layton was named party leader in 2003 and elected MP for Toronto-Danforth in 2004.

Congressman David Wu is facing calls for his resignation over a young woman’s reported accusation that she had an “unwanted sexual encounter” with the Democrat three weeks after his election victory in November.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi is asking for an ethics investigation of Rep. David Wu of Oregon, who has resisted calls to resign following a news report alleging he made sexual advances toward the daughter of a longtime campaign donor.

The allegations against Wu, a seven-term Democratic congressman, were published Friday by The Oregonian newspaper in Portland.

Wu, who became the first Chinese-American member of Congress when he was elected in 1998, disclosed earlier this year that he is on medication and getting treatment for mental health issues. He apologized for his erratic behavior, including e-mailing a photo of himself wearing a tiger costume.

David Wu

DOB: April 8, 1955   

Born in : Hsinchu, Taiwan;  Political: Democratic Party

Here’s some video of Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who is under fire for embellishing his war record, stating clearly in a high profile setting earlier this year: “I did not serve Vietnam.”

The video, which was sent over by the DSCC, will be central to Blumenthal’s damage control efforts in the wake of The New York Time’s stunning report saying Blumenthal never served in Vietnam despite repeatedly suggesting otherwise. The pushback from Blumenthal, the heavy favorite to win the Senate race, will be that Blumenthal did not intend to deceive.

To be clear, the video does not get Blumenthal off the hook for his previous claims to having served. But the video, which is from a debate in March, suggests that Blumenthal was not wedded in all settings to maintaining the fiction that he did active duty:

Blumenthal said:

“Although I did not serve in Vietnam, I have seen firsthand the effects of military action, and no one wants it to be the first resort, nor do we want to mortgage the country’s future with a deficit that is ballooning out of control.”

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed “credit” for the failed attack on the Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day, claiming that the attempted terrorist attack was retaliation for the December 17 airstrike against al Qaeda in Yemen.

Or in their words, “The oneness of our belief and brotherhood in Islam is what protected our young Nigerian man, the mujahid brother Omar Al Farouq to directly respond to his oppressive American enemy’s attack on the Arab Peninsula.”

A senior administration official rejects this entirely, pointing out that Omar Abdulmutallab was in the field long before that airstrike.

“He had been deployed before December 17,” the official said. “They’d like to make this seem like retaliation, but the reason they tried to blow up the plane is because they have a hateful, murderous agenda. And that’s why we’re on the forward lean against them.”

Almost two weeks ago if you searched for Michelle Obama in Google’s image search you would find a racist caricature depicting the first lady as a monkey. Last Thursday Google removed the image but the image has since returned and Google has purchased a search advert above the image results explaining “search engines
are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Internet.”

Google is apologizing over a racially offensive picture of Michelle Obama that pops up when users search for images of the First Lady — but refuses to take it down.

Here’s Google’s statement, which you can also read by click

Sometimes Google search results from the Internet can include disturbing content, even from innocuous queries. We assure you that the views expressed by such sites are not in any way endorsed by Google.

Search engines are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Internet. A site’s ranking in Google’s search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query.

The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results. Individual citizens and public interest groups do periodically urge us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Although Google reserves the right to address such requests individually, Google views the integrity of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it. We will, however, remove pages from our results if we believe the page (or its site) violates our Webmaster Guidelines, if we believe we are required to do so by law, or at the request of the webmaster who is responsible for the page.

We apologize if you’ve had an upsetting experience using Google. We hope you understand our position regarding offensive results.

According to SearchEngineLand, the racist image was previously removed by Google on the grounds that the site hosting the Michelle Obama picture “violated Google’s guidelines by serving malware to visitors.”

Now, however, the offensive photo has been posted to another site that does not violate Google rules.

“Unknown alleged Russian entity allegedly hacked into computers of a major center of ‘global warming’ hoax manufacturing (the Hadley Climate Research Unit of U. of East Anglia, England) obtained 1079 emails and 72 files containing nearly 4000 documents on ‘global warming,’ which if true – will prove that this is the greatest of all hoaxes ever posted and documentation on the internet. (Get this – the file name containing the allegedly hacked info was FOI2009 = ref to ‘freedom of information’ act …) That site/webpage has been shut down. The content of these emails is said to draw into question the validity of global warming and the claims that have been made by climate change researchers.

Some 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents from the Climate Research Unit, or CRU, at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia (where the “world’s leading climate scientists work”) have been leaked. The blogosphere is on fire – cover up, falsified studies, intimidation of skeptics. It’s all there.

There’s big news for climate change students. A hacker has gotten into the computers at Hadley CRU, Britain’s largest climate research institute and a proponent of global warming, and seems to have uncovered evidence of substantial fraud in reporting the “evidence” on global warming; the unlawful destruction of records to cover up this fraud ,conspiracy,and deceit in the entire operation.

The Washington Post (“Hackers steal electronic data from top climate research center”) quotes the “researchers” at the CRU saying “that the e-mails have been taken out of context.” No analysis of the “context” is provided.

The BBC assured its listeners that “the police have been informed” of the break-in. Just another hacker story. Ho hum. Just as the scientific method has suffered a reversion to dogma in the climate-change campaign, so too the “journalism” of the Old Media has degenerated into laughable propaganda.

SHANGHAI – President Barack Obama is walking a tightrope on his first trip to China, seeking to enlist help in tackling urgent global problems while weighing when and how — or if — he should raise traditional human rights concerns.

Obama arrived in Shanghai late at night, in a driving rain, hustling through a phalanx of umbrella-holding dignitaries to reach his limousine. On Monday, the president is holding talks with local politicians and, in one of the marquee events of his weeklong Asian trip, conducting an American-style town hall discussion with Chinese university students.

Thirty years after the start of diplomatic relations between the two countries, the ties are growing — but remain mixed on virtually every front.

The two nations are partnering more than ever on battling global warming, but they still differ deeply over hard targets for reductions in the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause it. China has supported sterner sanctions to halt North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, but it still balks at getting more aggressive about reining in Iran’s uranium enrichment.

U.S. President Barack Obama gestures as he delivers a speech at a dialogue with Chinese youth at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum during his four-day state visit to China, Nov. 16, 2009

Obama said here Monday the United States does not seek to contain China’s rise and he welcomes China as a “strong, prosperous and successful member of the community of nations.”

Obama made the remarks during a dialogue with Chinese youth at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum in China’s economic hub Shanghai.

In the event aired live on xinhuanet.com and Chinese and foreign television channels, Obama said the world is fundamentally interconnected and power in the 21st century is no longer a zero-sum game.

The dialogue, chaired by Fudan University President Yang Yuliang, attracted about 600 students from several universities in Shanghai.

“The jobs we do, the prosperity we build, the environment we protect and the security we seek are all shared,” he told the audience. “One country’s success does not come at the expense of another.”

In honor of Veterans Day 2009, here’s a list of 25 quotes to live by:

1. We make war that we may live in peace. -Aristotle

2. Nobody ever drowned in sweat. -US Marines

3. Those who cannot bravely face danger are the slaves of their attackers. -Aristotle

4. More powerful than the will to win is the courage to begin. -Unknown

5. Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him. -Dwight D. Eisenhower

6. Many become brave when brought to bay. -Norwegian proverb

7. Courage is fear holding on a minute longer. -George S. Patton

8. It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you. -Unknown

9. Either war is obsolete or men are. -Buckminster Fuller

10. There never was a good war or a bad peace. -Benjamin Franklin

11. Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself. -Jean Dubuffet

12. This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave. -Elmer Davis

13. Freedom is never free. -Author Unknown

14. Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul. -Michel de Montaigne

15. The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war. -Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

16. In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot. -Mark Twain

17. Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous. -George Bernard Shaw

18. It is not only the living who are killed in war. -Isaac Asimov

19. Life is 10 percent what you make it and 90 percent how you take it. -Irving Berlin

20. History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap. -Ronald Reagan

21. Soldiers generally win battles; generals get credit for them. -Napoleon Bonaparte

22. “Where there are too many policemen, there is no liberty. Where there are too many soldiers, there is no peace. Where there are too many lawyers, there is no justice.” -Lyn Yutang

23. Moral courage is the most valuable and usually the most absent characteristic in men. -George Patton

24. I think there is one higher office than president and I would call that patriot. -Gary Hart

25. Have the courage to act instead of react. -Earlene Larson Jenks

Republican candidate Christopher Christie has defeated incumbent Jon Corzine to become the first Republican Governor of New Jersey in 12 years.

Christie landed 49% of the vote vs 45% for Corzine with 98% of the precincts counted, in a race that surprised many political pundits. Christie, a former U.S. attorney campaigned on dissatisfaction with the Corzine’s performance during the recession.

According to some analysts, the poll was the first test of the popularity of the Obama administration.

Christie overcome negative coverage of his campaign due to the involvement of his brother, Todd Christie. Todd Christie was the CEO of Spear Leeds & Kellogg, one of the five biggest trading firms on Wall Street that was found by the SEC to have engaged in illegal trading practices from 1999-2003. When the SEC investigation became public in 2003, Todd Christie was forced out of his position.