Beware farmers and almanac wielders: On Christmas Eve, the FBI sent an alert out to 18,000 law enforcement officials warning them to keep an eye out for anyone possessing a Farmer's Almanac. The FBI's crack team wrote (apparently unaware of the internet as a research tool), "The practice of researching potential targets is consistent with known methods of al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations that seek to maximize the likelihood of operational success through careful planning."

Perspective: Roughly a third of Americans believe Bush should be impeached for misleading Congress and the public about Iraq's threat to our national security, according to a new poll posted on Blah3.com. As Atrios points out, that's about the same percentage as those who wanted to take Clinton down for a stained dress.

How free is the Free Republic? A poster on Kuro5hin visited the Free Republic website, "an online gathering place for independent, grass-roots conservatism on the web." When he respectfully pointed out factual errors on the site, multiple times, his entries were deleted by the moderator within minutes. "The result was a quick lesson in the right-wing view of free expression. The experiment left an open question - where do you go on the web to engage conservatives in open debate?"

Somatic SuperFund site: WiredNews writes on new studies in biomonitoring--testing human urine, breast milk, and blood to see what foreign toxins are present--and the findings are troubling: African American kids have twice the levels of cotinine than other children and Mexican-American children have three times the levels of a DDT-derived chemical. Other research they cite:

- In March, California researchers reported that San Francisco-area women have three to 10 times as much chemical flame retardant in their breast tissue as European or Japanese women.

- Indiana University researchers reported at the same time that levels in Indiana and California women and infants were 20 times higher than those in Sweden and Norway, which recently banned flame retardant.

- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this year released data from 2,500 volunteers tested for 116 pollutants and found such chemicals as mercury, uranium and cotinine, a chemical broken down from nicotine.