Posts from — August 2007

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.

There has been some reporting about the political preferences of the minor child of a candidate. That child chooses not to be involved in the campaign and has given no interviews. It is totally out of bounds to pursue this. This is tabloid journalism at its worse. It makes no difference what party is involved or what office.

Private people are just that, and it is not the business of the media to force them into the public arena. If they indicate they want to be left alone by not appearing in public, they should be left alone. It is hard enough to have anything approaching a normal childhood when one or both of your parents is famous, and these kids don’t need press harassment.

Rick Outzen of the local weekly, Independent News, has expanded the site to include more breaking news as well as the paper’s features.

In his blog he notes Fewer voters in Florida: “In 2005, the state legislature passed a bill requiring that in odd-numbered years, voter rolls be purged of people who have skipped two straight statewide elections.”

This is probably going to be a lot of people, especially progressives in the Panhandle. The problem is that a lot of races up here are won and lost in the Repub primary, and while everyone is supposed to be allowed to vote if the choice is down to two people, the local party runs a bogus write-in candidate for the general election to prevent it from happening. There are also too many incumbents who run unopposed. This means there are a lot of meaningless elections, especially on the odd years, making it easy to miss two in a row.

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If you read the Associated Press article, A Union For Bloggers?, understand that the quote from Susie Madrak are her words, but not necessarily in that order, or with that intent.

What Susie is looking for is a way of using the numbers of bloggers to try and get some help with specific issue, paramount among them, health insurance.

This would be more of a professional organization than a traditional labor union, because almost everyone is doing this on their own dime. If you limit to political/issue bloggers it is easier to find similarities that would benefit from cooperation, i.e. health care, media credentials, legal issues, etc. It would be possible to have an umbrella organization that would benefit from sheer numbers, as in the insurance quest, with subordinate units for interest areas. There really are economies of scale.

PSoTD posted his concerns at Susie’s when he was blog-sitting, and when he got home he asked his blogroll to post about Joe LIEberman [Likud-CT] and his choice for President in 2008.

Since Benjamin Netanyahu can’t run for US President, LIEberman will announce support for the Republican candidate most likely to fulfill the goals of AIPAC. The one Repub he wouldn’t support would be Ron Paul, because Paul doesn’t want to start any new wars, and wants to get out of Iraq. He is probably hoping that Tancredo will catch fire, because TT is the wingnut most likely to trigger Armageddon.

Of course, LIEberman may just introduce a Constitutional amendment to make the Shrubbery President-for-Life, but will probably be forced to select among the GOP’s sorry cluster of rich old white guys, in the interest of bipartisanship.

People are wondering why there wasn’t more diversity at Yearly Kos?

Money.

You have to be able to afford transportation to Chicago, hotel rooms, restaurant meals, and $4.50 beers. You also have to have a job that provides vacation time. There is a notable lack of these things in liberal/progressive blogtopia™, because there is no source of financing for these types of extravaganzas.

If they were going to spend money, why not New Orleans? It needs business more than Chicago. Why not check with a college or university? My first university, Colgate, rented out facilities to groups in the summer, and I’m sure many would love to do it. They do tend to have Internet connectivity these days.

YK was a meeting of people who could afford to go, not a representative sample of anything else.

Things Happen:

• 1538 – Bogotá, Colombia, is founded by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada.
• 1777 – Revolutionary War: Battle of Oriskany.
• 1890 – At Auburn Prison in New York, murderer William Kemmler becomes the first person to be executed by electric chair.
• 1909 – Alice Ramsey and three friends become the first women to complete a transcontinental auto trip.
• 1923 – Henry Sullivan swims the English Channel.
• 1926 – Gertrude Ederle becomes first woman to swim across the English Channel.
• 1945 – World War II: Hiroshima is devastated when an atomic bomb, “Little Boy”, is dropped by the United States B-29 Enola Gay. Around 90,000 people were killed instantly.

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Scout at First Draft is apparently holding down the fort while people are in milling around in Chicago.

She notes two references on the White House site to a need to address the the liability issue for those who “are alleged to assisted” in the government’s invasion of privacy…er…efforts to protect the Homeland.

Let’s see if Congress can at least allow the wronged customers and stockholders of these corporations to get a little justice, even if no one else does.

In several different places I’ve seen headlines that indicate that the House passed a bill that increased taxes on the oil companies by $16 billion. Then I found the Reuters version on CNet: House shifts $16 billion toward renewable energy.

What they have done is take $16 billion dollars in tax incentives that have given to the oil, gas, and coal industries, and shifted the incentives to the renewable energy industry. The government isn’t getting more money, and the fossil fuel industry isn’t paying a higher rate. Big oil just lost a tax deduction.

Welcome to the club. I remember when Reagan eliminated the deduction for all interest except a home mortgage. It’s the loss of a deduction, not a tax increase. Are you questioning the logic of Ronald Reagan, Repub congresscritter?

skippy the bush kangaroo has reposted the inaction alert to deny all requests for money from the the Democratic Party until they start upholding their sworn oath to support and defend the Constitution.

I’m going to take it a step further and am not only, not going to support anyone in the Presidential primary, I’m not going to vote for anyone in the primary. If they are not going to act like a real party and defend my interests, I see no reason to vote in their party process.

There has to be a price, or they won’t change. They weren’t sent to Congress in 2006 to stay the course; they were sent to change things. If they don’t want to be called names, they should find another line of work.

When all you have is the word of the Hedgemony that something must be changed, you ignore it. How many of their liars have to appear before how many Congressional panels, before the reality sinks in that they lie about everything?

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Scout of First Draft has been busy as the second anniversary of Katrina approaches. She found an important and extensive Time magazine article by Michael Grunwald, The Threatening Storm:

The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn’t a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics. Katrina was not the Category 5 killer the Big Easy had always feared; it was a Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans, where it was at worst a weak 2.

It is a long article that looks at the reasons behind the disaster and the failure to adequately address it.

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