Category — Uncategorized

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.
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“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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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.

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?

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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Scout at First Draft notes that it’s the 217^th Birthday of the US Coast Guard, one of the few components of the DHS that knows what it’s doing and continues to do it.

The farmers in Britain are facing another crisis as foot-and-mouth disease has been discovered on a farm in southeast England. They have barely recovered from mad cow disease, and now the quarantines are going up over foot-and-mouth.

I was flying to Britain on a semi-regular basis on missions that either started or ended in Omaha, Nebraska in an earlier outbreak on the 1960s. The disinfectant baths that you had to walk through at both sites destroyed a lot of boots and socks. You had to walk through them as you got off the aircraft. Then they set off disinfectant bombs inside the aircraft, and you had to wait to unload your gear and clothing. People thought we worked in a hospital because we smelled of the bug spray for a week.

Unlike the US, most British farms are still family owned operations, and this can be devastating on top of the floods and other problems. For their sake, I hope they caught it early and it will be eliminated quickly.

Showing absolutely no regard for the fact that his carnival disrupts the lives of people who have experienced a major trauma, the Shrubbery brought the Clueless Twit Flying Circus to Minneapolis and said:

“Our message to the Twin Cities is we want to get this bridge rebuilt as quick as possible,” Bush said after visiting with rescue workers and people who watched the bridge crumble. “We understand that this is a main artery of life here.”

He pledged his support to cut through the paperwork and make Congress do its job.

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This is all about staying out of jail for breaking the law.

Laura Rozen at War and Piece has the official “excuse” for this law, Statement from the Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell:

The second item is the real reason –

Second, those who assist the Government in protecting us from harm must be protected from liability. This includes those who are alleged to have assisted the Government after September 11, 2001 and have helped keep the country safe. I understand the leadership in Congress is not able to address before the August recess the issue of liability protection for those who are alleged to have helped the country stay safe after September 11, 2001. However, I appreciate the commitment of the congressional leadership to address this particular issue immediately upon the return of Congress in September 2007.

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I really need to have someone explain why the GOP is supposedly the party of national security. Seriously, they have some people who really need some major help, and I don’t think they’re ready to admit they have a problem.

From the Ticker blog CNN Associate Producer Lauren Kornreich writes Tancredo: Threaten to bomb Muslim holy sites in retaliation

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo’s campaign stood by his assertion that bombing holy Muslim sites would serve as a good “deterrent” to prevent Islamic fundamentalists from attacking the United States, his spokeswoman said Friday.

“This shows that we mean business,” said Bay Buchanan, a senior Tancredo adviser. “There’s no more effective deterrent than that. But he is open-minded and willing to embrace other options. This is just a means to deter them from attacking us.”

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Rupert Murdock has purchased the Wall Street Journal so the obvious question based on his past practices, as on display at The Sun, is who will be the first Page 3 girl?

[Note: The Sun link is not “work safe,” nor frankly is the ?newspaper? in the US.]

As we used to say a long time ago, in what increasingly is becoming a distant country, the United States of America.

Fubar at Needlenose grabbed a line from a Walter Mondale op-ed piece in the Washington Post about the Carter administration: “we told the truth, obeyed the law, and kept the peace.”

Those concepts should be the main talking points of the Democratic Party. They should be on bumper stickers and literature. The GOP should be hammered with them.

Margie Kieper has been filling in at Dr. Jeff Masters for several days. At the end of today’s post she notes that she can see the site of the bridge collapse from her office window and then presents a possible scenario for what happened that involves a week of high temperatures, vibrations, and the method used to construct the bridge.

Her theory rings true to me because in the early pictures of the collapsed sections the bridge support that failed was showing under the roadbed sections. From what I saw I assumed the supports were a metal frame work, like a lot of railway bridges. But then later images showed what appeared to be concrete supports that were still standing. It was as if the support that failed had lost its concrete outer coat, before it collapsed.