MSNBC

DALLAS - A plane registered to a Waukesha company landed on top of another plane at an airport in Texas. The pictures are amazing. It happened at Northwest Regional Airport near Dallas Thursday afternoon. The red plane was taxiing into position for takeoff. That airport has only one runway. The white plane was coming in for a landing and landed right on top of it. Believe it or not, everyone walked away from the crash landing and everyone’s okay. The white plane is registered to a Waukesha company, RTJE Bach Enterprises. It was making a quick flight from Abilene, Texas when this accident happened.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said today he believes the Iraq war can be won by 2013, leaving a functioning democracy there and allowing most U.S. troops to come home.

It was the first time the Arizona senator has said when U.S. troops could be withdrawn from Iraq. His speech came as the House of Representatives voted to set a goal of withdrawing all troops by the end of next year and defeated legislation to fund the war.

“It’s not a timetable. It’s victory…”

It’s…MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

The California Supreme Court has ruled that same-sex couples should be permitted to marry, rejecting state marriage laws as discriminatory.

The state high court’s 4-3 ruling was unlikely to end the debate over gay matrimony in California. A group has circulated petitions for a November ballot initiative that would amend the state Constitution to block same-sex marriage, while the Legislature has twice passed bills to authorize gay marriage. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed both.

The long-awaited court decision stemmed from San Francisco’s highly publicized same-sex weddings, which in 2004 helped spur a conservative backlash in a presidential election year and a national dialogue over gay rights.

Overdue.

Of course, managing war news is an established tradition

In the only sociological study to date of the substantive content of media coverage during the first six weeks of the Iraq war, Andrew Lindner found that journalists embedded with American troops emphasized military successes more often than they covered the invasion’s consequences for Iraqi citizens.

“The embedded program proved to be a Pentagon victory because it kept reporters focused on the horrors facing the troops, not the horrors of the civilian war experience,” said Lindner. “The end result: a communications victory for an administration that hoped to build support for the war by depicting it as a successful mission with limited cost…”

“With the vast majority of embedded coverage citing U.S. military sources, as long as the soldiers stayed positive, the story stayed positive,” Lindner said…

While embedded reporters were most likely to tell the military’s story, and local consequences were well represented by Baghdad-stationed reporters, independent reporters produced the most balanced coverage depicting both sides of the story.

A PDF of the article is available here.

When Sen. John McCain was forced to distance himself from Pastor John Hagee earlier this year, he denounced the pastor’s attacks on Catholicism. But asked why he wouldn’t “repudiate” Hagee’s endorsement of him, McCain found something to praise.

“I’m grateful for his commitment to the support of the state of Israel, and I’m very grateful for many of his commitments around the world, including to the independence and freedom of the state of Israel,” he told CNN’s Campbell Brown on April 29. Hagee’s commitment to Israel, however, is itself controversial: It’s rooted in the belief that the Jewish state will — soon — be the site of Armageddon.

Hagee, who leads the evangelical group Christians United for Israel, is a proponent of U.S. aid and support for Israel, and he is a major ally of Israeli conservatives who reject any “land for peace” formula in dealing with the Palestinians. But Hagee is viewed with distrust by some Jews and Israelis because his brand of Christian Zionism closely links support for Israel to the end of the world and the conversion of the Jews to Christianity.

Seems that one person’s smut is another person’s morning latte. A Christian group out of San Diego has found grounds for outrage over the new logo for Starbucks Coffee.

The Resistance says the new image “has a naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute,” Mark Dice, founder of the group, said in a news release. “Need I say more? It’s extremely poor taste, and the company might as well call themselves Slutbucks.”

The group, which claims more than 3,000 members nationwide, is calling for a national boycott of the coffee-selling giant. Messages have been left with the company seeking reaction to the objections. The logo is a throw-back to what the chain used when it first opened in Seattle more than 35 years ago. The explanation for that initial log design is explained in the book “Pour Your Heart into It : How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time,” written by company founder Howard Schultz: “[Creative partner Terry Heckler] poured [sic] over old marine books until he came up with a logo based on an old sixteenth-century Norse woodcut: a two-tailed mermaid, or siren, encircled by the store’s original name, Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice. That early siren, bare-breasted and Rubenesque, was supposed to be as seductive as coffee itself.”

Seriously? Should I have put up a NSFW in the headline? I hope no one loses their job over this…..

CBS Corp., playing the white knight in a Web-publishing proxy fight, has agreed to buy CNET Networks Inc., the Internet news and entertainment company, for $11.50 per share, or about $1.8-billion in cash.

The price is a 45% premium over CNET’s $7.95-per-share closing price on Wednesday. CNET, in a joint press release with CBS, said its board unanimously voted to accept the offer.

The deal, expected to be completed in the third quarter, would vault CBS into the top 10 Internet companies in the United States, with a combined 54 million unique visitors monthly, and about 200 million visitors worldwide.

CNET, of San Francisco, owns the technology-oriented news sites CNET and ZDNet as well as GameSpot.com, TV.com, mp3.com, UrbanBaby, CHOW, MySimon and TechRepublic.

Always a wee bit surprising when rumors and gossip come true.

The Vatican’s chief astronomer says there is no conflict between believing in God and in the possibility of “extraterrestrial brothers” perhaps more evolved than humans. Asked if he was referring to beings similar to humans or even more evolved than humans, he said: “Certainly, in a universe this big you can’t exclude this hypothesis”.

“Why can’t we speak of a ‘brother extraterrestrial‘? It would still be part of creation,” he said.

“As an astronomer, I continue to believe that God is the creator of the universe and that we are not the product of something casual but children of a good father who has a project of love in mind for us,” he said.

Stephen Hawking’s answer to the possibility is “probably not“.

“Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare.” He adds: “Some would say it has yet to occur on earth.”

Apple failed in the 90’s selling someone else’s rebranded console. That was then, now Apple has the financial resources to buy or contract with what it doesn’t have in house (eg, games developers, etc). Should it? Is this already in the pipeline? The Apple TV with a few extra chips would be a good start. What about handhelds? Downloadable games sold through iTunes?

Apple’s games strategy looks beyond consoles and the iMac

It’s no secret that Apple Inc. has been on a hardware tear. In the last year alone, there has been a flurry of developments: The company branched into the mobile phone arena with the iPhone. It reinvented the mp3 player with the introduction of the iPod Touch. It worked its way into living rooms with an updated Apple TV.

But Apple is now exploring another hardware technology that has the potential to realign a multibillion dollar industry.

Apple has once again got an itch for gaming.
[…]
A trademark extension filed last February with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is one of the strategy’s biggest tells. The filing extends Apple’s trademark in regards to:

“Toys, games and playthings, namely, hand-held units for playing electronic games; hand-held units for playing video games; stand alone video game machines; electronic games other than those adapted for use with television receivers only; LCD game machines; electronic educational game machines; toys, namely battery-powered computer games.”

And here’s the really sneaky part – the iPod Touch and the iPhone are already fully capable of playing games.

Click image to see Cranky Geeks.

Today’s Guests:

• Sebastian Rupley, Co-Crank, PCMagCast.com
• Om Malik, Founder, GigaOm.com, GigaOm Network
• Cade Metz, Internet Editor, The Register

The Topics:

• Are a 3G iPhone and a Game Console Coming Up from Apple?
• Another Day, Another Lawsuit for Facebook
• Carl Icahn: Does He Have Plans for Yahoo!?
• FBI Worries About Counterfeit Cisco Gear
• Google Extends its Lead in Online Video–What Next?