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Chief Justice William Rehnquist died Saturday at age 80. cnn reports renquists death
comment posted at 8:17 PM on Sep-3-05
comment posted at 8:20 PM on Sep-3-05

Dept. of Homeland Security: Emergencies and Disasters

Preparing America In the event of a terrorist attack, natural disaster or other large-scale emergency, the Department of Homeland Security will assume primary responsibility on March 1st for ensuring that emergency response professionals are prepared for any situation. This will entail providing a coordinated, comprehensive federal response to any large-scale crisis and mounting a swift and effective recovery effort. The new Department will also prioritize the important issue of citizen preparedness. Educating America's families on how best to prepare their homes for a disaster and tips for citizens on how to respond in a crisis will be given special attention at DHS.

Clearly, we are in good hands.
comment posted at 6:15 PM on Sep-3-05

The Red Cross has been ordered to stay out of New Orleans. Critical firefighting equipment is being left untouched. Chicago's offer of manpower and equipment is "snubbed" by FEMA, according to the Mayor. FEMA "forgets" to tell the military to airdrop food and water to the survivors. Northern Command has been ready for days, just waiting for the President to give the orders. Feds delayed paperwork giving permission for National Guard to act. Louisiana begged for federal help on Sunday in a formal request, but the Bush administration says they didn't know anything about problems until Wednesday. Meanwhile, reporters apparently grow weary of the spin doctors.
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comment posted at 7:42 PM on Sep-3-05

Kanye West gets twitchy on Red Cross Benefit Oh goodness. The young prankster in me loves this kind of thing. The boring matured realist version of me finds this divisive bumper-stickerism toxic to our modern political dialogue. And worse still I see the following scenario unfold: Kanye West: "George Bush doesn't care about black people". Cut to: My mother-in-law in front of the tv, slowly putting her checkbook back into her purse.
comment posted at 9:22 PM on Sep-2-05

They are feeding the public a line of bull, and they are spinning, and people are dying down here: A post with a link to MP3 of an explosive WWL radio interview in which New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has a message for politicians: "I don't want to see anybody do any more goddamned press conferences... put a moratorium on press conferences, don't do another press conference until the resources are in this city, and then come down to this city and stand with us... Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming here - they're not here; it's too doggoned late. Now get off your asses and let's do something..."
comment posted at 12:58 PM on Sep-2-05
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comment posted at 8:23 PM on Sep-2-05

Katrina targets New Orleans. Mandatory evacuations have been declared, and contraflow evacuation routes are in effect near New Orleans, as Hurricane Katrina, a very wet, drenching hurricane, approaches the city from the Gulf of Mexico, where it is gaining in size and strength, with an estimated 45% chance of making landfall as a category 4 or 5 hurricane. The computer models suggest that New Orleans will sustain a direct hit from Katrina, which could be "The Big One" warned about by experts, capable of flooding the city, polluting it with industrial waste, and even flooding the pump stations, leaving it incapable of pumping out the water. The hurricane is predicted to make landfall early Monday near Port Fourchon, which handles approximately 13% of U.S. oil imports, and 27% of U.S. domestic production.
comment posted at 11:05 AM on Aug-28-05

No mere slap on the wrist for Merck. Jury awards grieving widow $253.4 Mil in Vioxx suit. The first of thousands of cases like it. (washpost)
comment posted at 4:46 AM on Aug-20-05
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comment posted at 9:41 AM on Aug-21-05

Less scary than Cheney. Christopher Walken for President 2008.
(Walken Friday flash... or just do a little dance!)
comment posted at 7:52 PM on Aug-12-05

Should Catholic Justices recuse themselves from any case citing Roe v. Wade? Now that Catholic politicians have been threatened with having sacraments withheld for supporting Roe v. Wade, does this create an inherent conflict of interest for a Catholic Supreme Court justice (or any judge) in a case involving Roe? According to the American Bar Association's Code of Conduct for United States Judges, Canon 3, Section C 1 (c), a judge must disqualify himself when he has 'a financial interest . . . or any other interest that could be affected substantially by the outcome of the proceeding."
comment posted at 8:03 PM on Aug-12-05

Peter Jennings Dies of lung cancer at 67.
comment posted at 6:24 PM on Aug-8-05

Welcome to my Highspeed Photography Site. Not just cool photos, but insightful details of the technique required to take them. (some pages in german, most in english). via digg
comment posted at 10:30 AM on Aug-7-05

Is he going to pull it off again? That is The 40th televised Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon.First broadcast , 1966. that makes it 40 years. Hats off to Jerry Lewis. Buy that man a case fo Red Bull on August 30th.
comment posted at 5:22 PM on Jul-10-05

So it was Karl Rove The question now is if Novak testified or is a target of the investigation.
comment posted at 4:18 PM on Jul-10-05

New drug blocks HIV from entering cells and causes "almost" no side effects, reports Asahi Shinbun.
comment posted at 6:17 PM on Jul-8-05

Obese people are the target of awe and mockery, but they're also real. The Washington Post offers another terrifying, saddening, and inspiring portrait of a morbidly obese man trying to get moving. If you must comment about this, try not to fat-bash. It's just tacky and predictable...
comment posted at 10:58 AM on Jun-27-05

Pharmaceutical company seeks approval for controversial heart drug BiDil for blacks only, even though the connection of a nitric oxide deficiency to the genetic makeup of the African-American population is an unsubstantiated hunch, in the words of the drug's own developer — and the drug had already once been denied approval. Is the FDA doing good science or ignoring science under the pressure of big business wanting to sell BiDil to a US$1Bln demographic?
comment posted at 12:17 PM on Jun-17-05

The die is cast. The United States Senate votes for Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil drilling.
comment posted at 2:38 PM on Mar-16-05

The Salvador Option --sending Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, in imitation of our actions in El Salvador. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. More here, including this: In Iraq, in fact, as in many other places where the United States has tried to train ethical armies to fight dirty wars, the Iraqi troops are tacitly expected to do what American troops won’t. A fundamental purpose of the upcoming elections on January 30 is to create democratic legitimacy for whatever extreme measures the newly organized military decides to take.
comment posted at 8:52 PM on Jan-14-05

The Case Against Michael Jackson. The Smoking Gun plays prosecutor in what will surely be one of history's most disturbing public trials. Not safe for lunch.
comment posted at 3:12 PM on Jan-6-05
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comment posted at 6:04 PM on Jan-6-05

The automated signature machine would like to express it's sincerest condolences ..."Rather than personally signing letters of condolence to the families of service members killed in action, Rumsfeld has been letting office workers affix his signature with a stamping machine."
comment posted at 2:21 PM on Dec-21-04

Survey finds support for restricting Muslim-Americans' freedoms Nearly one in two Americans believe the U.S. government should restrict civil liberties for Muslim-Americans, according to a nationwide Cornell University poll on terrorism fears. The survey also found respondents who identified themselves as highly religious supported restrictions on Muslim-Americans more strongly than those less religious. Curtailing civil liberties for Muslim-Americans also was supported more by Republicans than Democrats, the survey found. The amount of attention paid to TV news also had a bearing on how strongly a respondent favored restrictions
comment posted at 11:53 AM on Dec-18-04

House Republicans Change Rules to Protect DeLay
"On a voice vote, the House Republican Conference changed a rule that required party leaders to step down if indicted for any crime that carries a prison sentence of two or more years."
comment posted at 5:52 PM on Nov-17-04

Kerry Concedes President Bush won a second term from a divided and anxious nation, his promise of steady, strong wartime leadership trumping John Kerry's fresh-start approach to Iraq and joblessness. After a long, tense night of vote counting, the Democrat called Bush to concede Ohio and the presidency, The Associated Press learned.
comment posted at 9:58 AM on Nov-3-04

Missed Opportunity A Florida motorist was arrested on Wednesday on charges of trying to run down U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris.
comment posted at 5:27 PM on Oct-27-04

IslamicArchitecture.org : Islamic architecture, Islamic patterns and Islamic calligraphy.
comment posted at 9:05 PM on Sep-5-04

Bush's missing service year and missing records? no worries. Bush wearing a medal he didn't earn? no problemos. Kerry's 5 Vietnam war medals? Pentagon inquiry. [reg maybe required: use mefi/mefi]
comment posted at 4:24 PM on Sep-5-04
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comment posted at 6:59 PM on Sep-5-04

Bush's National Guard File Missing Records Documents that should have been written to explain gaps in President Bush (news - web sites)'s Texas Air National Guard service are missing from the military records released about his service in 1972 and 1973, according to regulations and outside experts. For example, Air National Guard regulations at the time required commanders to write an investigative report for the Air Force when Bush missed his annual medical exam in 1972. The regulations also required commanders to confirm in writing that Bush received counseling after missing five months of drills. No such records have been made public...
comment posted at 9:25 PM on Sep-5-04

Doctors refuse laywers. So your last client managed to get restitution from that quack who left the clamp in her abdomen, just in time to pay for your daughter's delivery. Good luck finding an OB. Or perhaps your husband works for a law firm. Good luck with that nursing job. Maybe you're a neurosurgeon making less take-home than your insurance premiums. What are you going to say to the next ambulance chaser with migrane trouble? The war between the two solitudes could start racking up a real body-count.
comment posted at 5:56 PM on Jun-17-04

Becoming Evil : Boston WTKK-FM radio's Jay Severin advocates genocide of American-Muslims - this is the advocacy of domestic terrorism. And not the mere targeting of civilians but the murder of over three million men, women, and children. Why shouldn't Jay Severin be arrested and charged, under the Patriot Act, with aiding and abetting US domestic terrorist groups which advocate such violence? [Scroll down towards the bottom of the Globe story for a transcript of the quote in context.]
James Waller has studied the process by which individuals and society come to commit mass atrocities , and says of his theories: "...[the] explanation simply allows us to understand the conditions under which many of us could be transformed into killing machines. When we understand the ordinariness of extraordinary evil, we will be less surprised by evil, less likely to be unwitting contributors to evil, and perhaps better equipped to forestall evil." Hesiod Lists some of WTTK's advertisers : Purina, Hilton Resorts, 99 Restaurant and Pub, A.T. & T. Wireless. Still, Orcinus is my favorite "rise of extremist terrorist hate speech in America" news source. Germany has laws against such hate speech - which it believes to be so dangerous as to override free speech considerations - But we've got the USA PATRIOT Act, right?
comment posted at 6:26 PM on Apr-27-04

Pfix Pfizer: Pfizer, maker of several drugs including Lipitor used to lower cholesterol, has launched a lawsuit against Canadian web sites selling its drugs or knock-offs at a lower cost to Americans. They claim that it's a matter of safety for their users, and that costs are for the insurance companies to quibble. However many Minnesota seniors have fired back that it's a matter of sales, and are seeking to 'pfix pfizer' as they are unable to afford some of these life-saving medications. [more inside]
comment posted at 5:02 PM on Apr-13-04
comment posted at 7:17 PM on Apr-13-04