It only took a week to finally let these guys do their job: Navy And FBI Join Bridge Collapse Search.

The Navy dive teams are on stand by in case they are needed anywhere in the world. They load their equipment into an airplane and can be on their way in hours, not days. They train to work in ship wrecks, and are familiar with working around jagged metal and debris.

The FBI has apparently brought along a submersible to use in charting some of the more dangerous areas, but the Navy divers train in currents, so they will be able to make rapid progress.

I just don’t understand why it took a week for this to happen.

I don’t see how Rupert Murdock can ever reduce that standards of the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page when it already publishes dreck like Propaganda Redux.

The author is one Ion Mihai Pacepa, who is identified by an enterprising headline writer with the phrase: “Take it from this old KGB hand: The left is abetting America’s enemies with its intemperate attacks on President Bush.”

First off, the author was a Lieutenant General with the Romanian security apparatus, not the KGB, and the Romanians were not major players during the Cold War. The Romanians were not favored in the Eastern Bloc, not simply because they were non-Slavs, although that played a part to the xenophobic Soviets, it was mostly because they were allied with Hitler and invaded the Soviet Union from the South.

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You don’t want to attempt impeachment because you can’t get a two-thirds vote in the Senate, so why do you believe you can pass an amended version of the carte blanche you handed to the Shrubbery over the weekend? You don’t honestly think he’s going to sign a bill that reduces his power to tap your telephones do you?

Unless you can come up with two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate to pass realistic legislation, you would be better off working on impeachment, because the Hedgemony has no intention of engaging in negotiations or in compromise.

You may as well get used to fact that you aren’t going to get anything done while he’s in the White House.

Y’all might be interested in this post by Susan S., a Florida progressive, My confrontation today with Sen. Bill Nelson on FISA.

Then they are more concerned than Mother Teresa.

MSNBC reports FEMA suspends use, sales of ‘toxic’ trailers

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has done an about-face and will immediately stop using, buying and selling disaster-relief trailers because they could be contaminated with formaldehyde.

The order, which went into effect July 31, is an interim measure while the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Health Affairs test the air quality in the estimated 120,000 travel trailers FEMA provided to victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005.
…

“Nothing is as important to FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security as ensuring that disaster victims have a safe and healthy place to reside during their recovery,” the agency said in a statement.
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When I miss the obvious. Too many things going on, and too busy trying to convince congresscritters not to be stupid, and too much outrage over what was being done. I didn’t think it through.

The hypothetical used to justify the latest power grab was: two terrorists in foreign countries talking to each other, but you need a warrant to intercept their conversation through a switch in the US. That isn’t true. That has never been true. We have been doing the equivalent of that for decades with nary a warrant in sight. As long as the the conversation originates and terminates outside the US, it is irrelevant where the tap takes place.

If one side of the connection is Pakistan and the other side is Egypt, a US court has no authority to approve or disapprove a tap. It doesn’t make any difference if it is voice, text messaging, or e-mail – it originates and terminates outside the jurisdiction of US courts.

Think about it.

As of 1:00PM CDT

… Heat advisory remains in effect until 7 PM CDT Wednesday…

The combination of high humidity and hot temperatures will produce
heat index values between 108 and 113 degrees across most of inland
southeast Mississippi… southwest Alabama and the west Florida
Panhandle this afternoon and from late morning to late afternoon on
Wednesday.

Here we get the heat and the humidity so that sweating is a total waste of time and t-shirts.

From CNN/Money: Publix Super Market to offer free antibiotics

Publix, which is based in Lakeland, Florida, said it would give out amoxicillin, ampicillin, cephalexin, ciprofloxacin (excluding ciprofloxacin XR), erythromycin (excluding Ery-Tab), sulfamethoxazole/trimethoprim (or SMZ-TMP) and penicillin VK. Customers must bring in a prescription to get up to a 14-day supply for free.

This is a good move by Publix, and great news for low income people.