As one final coda to a warrantless career, Alberto Gonzales said Monday he has lived the American Dream. Torture, spying, and partisan conspiracy were once the province of the elite few. Now anyone can grow up to be a puppet, apologist, and laughingstock. Print
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A Republican senator confirmed on Monday that he
pleaded guilty earlier this month to a charge of disorderly conduct
after he was arrested at a Minnesota airport….
According to the police report, Craig entered a bathroom stall next to
the investigator, placed his bag against the front of the door and
tapped his foot in a signal commonly used to try to pick up men in
public toilets….
“Up tight” is beginning to take on a whole new dimension for the ‘Pubs.
Idaho senator pleads guilty to disorderly conduct | Politics | Reuters
In an exclusive survey of 1,011 people 50 and over, AARP The Magazine sought to learn just what Americans in the second half of life think about life after death. Life After Death
The report, based on a large survey of New York City adults, shows that two thirds of the city’s smokers almost 800,000 adults tried to quit in the past year, but only 17% of those succeeded. Data from the survey identify emotional distress and binge drinking as possible obstacles to quitting, and finds that less than a fifth of New York City smokers are using nicotine replacement therapy , even though it doubles the chances of success
“If every head of every household was as willing to eavesdrop on his own family as my man Alberto is, we wouldn’t need a Homeland Security Department,” Mr. Bush chuckled.
SYDNEY, Australia, Aug. 24 — Calcium supplementation, alone or with vitamin D, reduced osteoporotic fractures in individuals 50 or older by 12%, researchers here reported.
However, poor compliance was a major obstacle to obtaining the full benefit of supplementation… More…
WHETHER WE LIKE IT or not, contemporary ideas of courage are not really forged in philosophical explorations and debates. The media, politics, and of course popular culture take the lead in defining what courage is and what it is not. Dominated by discussions of heroes and heroism, the public sphere is not particularly interested in complex, contradictory and non-telegenic forms of courage.
Ideas of courage are subsumed in the heroic. This unproblematic conflation of heroism and courage would not be such an issue (after all, the line between the two is far from self-evident), if only popular ideas about heroism were not so lazy and confused.
NEW YORK — A new poll, the result of a partnership between the Associated Press and MTV, seems to dispel the popular notion of the perpetually unhappy or rebellious youth.
This unique survey of Americans 13 to 24 finds, surprisingly, that a vast majority say that they are very or somewhat “happy” overall and in many specific areas of their lives — 64% say they “wake up happy.” Almost half consider a mother or father a “hero” in their lives.
Disgruntled Youth? Survey by AP and MTV Finds Them Generally Happy — With Favorable View of Parents
How can you tell when a democracy is dead? When concentration camps spring up and everyone shivers in fear? Or is it when concentration camps spring up and no one shivers in fear because everyone knows they’re not for “people like us” (in Woody Allen’s marvelous phrase) but for the others, the troublemakers, the ones you can tell are guilty merely by the color of their skin, the shape of their nose or their social class?
Questions like these are unavoidable in the face of America’s homegrown gulag archipelago, a vast network of jails, prisons and “supermax” tombs for the living dead that, without anyone quite noticing, has metastasized into the largest detention system in the advanced industrial world. The proportion of the US population languishing in such facilities now stands at 737 per 100,000, the highest rate on earth and some five to twelve times that of Britain, France and other Western European countries or Japan. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has close to a quarter of the world’s prisoners… Read more…
A change in tropical weather patterns called the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation during the mid-1990s has created the conditions for a more active hurricane cycle that may last for 30 years. Climate change is likely also playing a role, but more research needs to be done.
However, such research is in serious jeopardy as NASA has cancelled or delayed the launch of satellites that look back at the Earth and provide invaluable information about hurricanes, track the melting of glaciers and droughts, deforestation and much more.
A US soldier is to return home from Iraq under a military proviso known as the “sole survivor” rule after losing both of his brothers in the war.
Jason Hubbard, 33, will be re-united with his family in Clovis, California after his brother Nathan, 21, died in a helicopter crash in Iraq on Wednesday.
His other sibling Jared Hubbard was killed by a roadside bomb in 2004.
Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh is making a United States tour, with a couple of stops at Catholic universities in California.
California Catholic Daily – Not much difference between Buddhism and Christianity, if…
They see dead people on Spook Hill. They’re walking around the grounds, sitting in the dining hall and in the pews at the abandoned church. Kids, heard by visitors but usually only seen by those trained to see into the spirit world, play outside the rustic and run-down cabins.
“Oh yeah, they’re all over the place,” says Judy Ulch, a jovial 60-year-old who claims not only to see dead people but also receive messages from them that she passes on to their loved ones who pay $40 per half hour for her services. Read more…
The Orlando Sentinel has confirmed that one of three men found dead in
an east Orange County home in an apparent double murder-suicide is a
prominent political consultant….
Orange County Sheriff’s Office deputies have released the names of the
other victims, who were found in a room at the three-bedroom house.
They are Gonzalez’s roommate David Abrami and friend Robert Drake….
Prominent Republican party consultant one of three men found dead — OrlandoSentinel.com
