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January, 2006 |
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January 30, 2006 - Jim Hansen is disloyal. Some might call him a traitor. He is, after all, on the Federal payroll and should toe the Administration line when he speaks in public. He hasn’t been doing that. Indeed, he has been one of the few voices calling for a change in Administration policies. Candidly, he gives the White House fits. They want him to shut up. He doesn’t fit into the mission that the White House thinks is shared by all the employees of government. January 27, 2006 - There is someone you should get to know. Her name is Tammy Duckworth and she is running for Congress in She is Major Tammy Duckworth of the Illinois National Guard. She is a helicopter pilot. She chose that billet because it is one of the few combat roles open to women in the Army. She went to January 26, 2006 - 230 years ago come next summer Thomas Jefferson sat down to write and from his quill came the concepts and philosophy that were the foundation upon which eleven years later James Madison’s pen would build a nation. Yet the structure was imperfect and the people in whose name the nation was created were impelled to refine and strengthen it with Amendments, ten in number, created by their Congress and ratified by their State governments designed to protect the people in their self-evident rights from abuses by their own government. Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not the less self-evident rights today than were they 230 years ago. Freedom of Speech; Freedom of Conscience; Freedom of Assembly; and the Freedom to Petition for the redress of grievances are not the less vital to liberty at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century than were they as the end of the Eighteenth approached. The Right to Counsel; to a Speedy and Public trial in the place where the crime was alleged to have been committed is not now less essential to the protection of individual liberty than when George III’s officers arrested and detained citizens and shipped them across the Atlantic to be tried in secret courts. The right to be free of warrantless searches and seizures unsupported by probable cause shown by the evidence is not now less essential to a free people than it was when the People of the United States demanded that their liberty be protected from their own government and the Bill of Rights was adopted...click here for entire article. January 24, 2006 - “Who could have imagined?” That was the Bush response to the September 11th attack on New York and the Pentagon. It was also the excuse for the unreadiness of the Department of Homeland Security to cope with natures attack on New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Nobody could have predicted that the most vulnerable major population center in the United States would be struck by a hurricane of the magnitude of Katrina has been the excuse. When, in the days following the impact of the storm the deficiencies of the FEMA response became apparent many critics of the administration pointed out that some one did predict the storm in an emergency preparedness exercise to meet the simulated problems posed by the fictional Hurricane Pam two years before the real storm hit. Still, the administration argument ran, Hurricane Pam considered only the effects of a category 3 storm and Katrina made landfall as a category 4 hurricane. On September 1 President Bush led the way on ABC’s Good Morning America. “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levies. They did anticipate a serious storm.”....click here for entire article January 16, 2006 - If you have cable television you have seen the quack touting his book. His pitch is that he promised his sainted mother that he would discover the cause and cure of the disease that was killing her – diabetes. It is of course worthless. Neither he nor anybody else has discovered the cause – much less the cause of the condition that is wasting the lives of more and more Americans. We are that much closer today because a link between a genetic mutation and the condition has been identified. At long last medical science is able to quantitatively study the genetic component of the disease and to develop a simple test to identify those of our population whose genes destine them to develop Type II Diabetes. If he were peddling a concoction that he falsely claimed would cure diabetes he could be prosecuted for his medical fraud. But he is not peddling a medicine, at least not directly. He is peddling a book – his compilation of ideas and claims that are not subject to regulation. He is free to publish his ideas and claims and that is as it should be. There may be a nugget of truth buried in the gravel of his false claims....click here for entire article January 6, 2006 - The details are beginning to be pieced together. It appears that an explosion in a section of the Sago mine that had been worked out and sealed off killed one miner outright and trapped 12 others deep beneath the earth. The trapped miners retreated as they were trained to do. They sealed themselves up to preserve the quality of the air they had left and settled down to wait for the rescuers to come. While they waited and their air grew foul some of them wrote notes to their families. One by one they drifted away into that sleep from which there is no awakening. Finally, after 41 hours the rescue party reached them. January 5, 2006 - Jack Abramoff was working hard in the spring of 2003. He was representing the Coushatta Tribe of
January 4, 2006 - Recognizing that the Abramoff plea deal has made some members of Congress vulnerable Dennis Hastert proposes that Members of Congress undergo a course of training in ethical conduct. Speaker Hastert made his suggestion immediately after he announced that he would donate $69,000 to charity to cover the money the lobbyist gave to the Speaker and his PAC. I suppose that it is appropriate that our naïve Congressmen be instructed that acceptance of lobbyist’s largess might give the appearance of corrupt motivations for their official actions. I presume that the course will include a section on charitable donations as a means of purging the taint from their campaign funds. Speaker Hastert, Illinois’ own ex-wrestling coach was clearly surprised by Abramoff’s guilty plea. Until the Republican mover and shaker acknowledged his criminal conduct the Speaker was untroubled by the cash he had collected from Jack and his clients. Until the news broke that the source of the funds was now going to cooperate in the bribery investigation Dennis’ conscience was not pricked by the knowledge that so much Abramoff cash had found its way into Hastert’s political treasury....click here for entire article |
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