Firefighters and equipment from Idaho are traveling to Texas to help battle the ongoing fires there. I think that is a pretty cool thing and hope they can make a difference.

Firefighters from Idaho left Monday knowing their mission will take them to the front lines of the fire.

Flames in Texas keep burning and their manpower is maxed out.

Officials reached out for help from around the country and a request came through the Boise Interagency Dispatch Center.

The Boise National Forest sent ten of its firefighters and two of its engines.

"Our engines are designed to operate off roads and they carry specialized equipment to deal with the wildland fires," said Bob Shindelar of the Boise National Forest.

The Idaho firefighters are going to Bastrop County, Texas. It’s an area in which hundreds of homes have been destroyed and evacuations are ongoing.

Unfortunately, it appears that other volunteers are being sent packing. I think that is extraordinarily uncool. At a time when all hands should be on deck to help, bureaucratic red tape is preventing that from happening.

Amazing how much can be missed even when looking for changes. Can you spot the 21 things that change in this video?

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkbrcFY6w6s)

Over at Every Day, No Days Off blog I saw this post about instant art by way of 840 simultaneous paintball guns firing.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmo16nPKVbg&feature=player_embedded)

It reminded me a lot of a demonstration by Adam and Jamie of the Mythbusters who demonstrated the difference between a CPU and GPU in similar fashion.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwDPb3T8bOQ)

Pretty cool!

After only 2^1/2 years keeping it hidden for some unknown reason, the White House has finally released the long form version of President Obama's Hawaii birth cert.

Other questions remain unanswered. Why did it take so long? Why try to hard and spend, well, any amount of money to keep it secret? The biggest one for me... why on earth would the document released have editing layers?

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgVIei87oFo&feature=player_embedded)

Not sure how to classify this one. Maybe I should create a "ridiculous" tag. Moonbattery:

One of the many frightening aspects of George Orwell's 1984 is the way bureaucrats limit human thought by eliminating words from the language. Once again, liberals are using the book not as a warning, but as a Tyranny for Dummies guide:

Fired former Speaker of the House and current Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi, is going on record as saying that she wants to use censorship to ban one, particular word that she does not like. The word? "Hate." To hear Pelosi tell it, she really hates it when other Americans use the word "hate" in a political context. Pelosi's overreaction is in response to the Bill O'Reilly Superbowl interview with Barack Obama, in which the host asked the president about the number of people who hate him. Pelosi's reply to the O'Reilly question was swift and confident: Simply stop using the word, and everything will be fine.

A couple of MySQL database tables had become corrupted and caused the site to report access denied or simply return a blank page.  The tables have been repaired (and a fresh backup taken - whew!) and everything should hopefully be back to normal now.

After the governor of Hawaii last spoke, I expected to finally be presented with the official, long-form version of the President's birth certificate. Alas, it is not to be.

Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie suggested in an interview published today that a long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate for Barack Obama may not exist within the vital records maintained by the Hawaii Department of Health.

Abercrombie told the Honolulu Star Advertiser he was searching within the Hawaii Department of Health to find definitive vital records that would prove Obama was born in Hawaii, because the continuing eligibility controversy could hurt the president's chances of re-election in 2012.

Donalyn Dela Cruz, Abercrombie's spokeswoman in Honolulu, ignored again today another in a series of repeated requests made by WND for an interview with the governor.

Toward the end of the interview, the newspaper asked Abercrombie: "You stirred up quite a controversy with your comments regarding birthers and your plan to release more information regarding President Barack Obama's birth certificate. How is that coming?"

In his response, Abercrombie acknowledged the birth certificate issue will have "political implications" for the next presidential election "that we simply cannot have."

Get the free, in-depth special report on eligibility that could bring an end to Obama's presidency