Scientists have found that the aluminium content of breast tissue and breast tissue fat was significantly higher in the outer regions of the breast, in close proximity to the area where there would be the highest density of antiperspirant
Tancredo Calls For End To Katrina Aid
Wow. Tom Tancredo took the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina as an opportunity to blast federal aid to the Gulf Coast today. The presidential candidate said it is "time the taxpayer gravy train left the New Orleans station" and also, "The mentality that people can wait around indefinitely for the federal taxpayer to solve all their worldly problems has got to come to an end."
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In an attempt to raise the nation's historically low rate of breast-feeding, federal health officials commissioned an attention-grabbing advertising campaign a few years ago to convince mothers that their babies faced real health risks if they did not breast-feed. It featured striking photos of insulin syringes and asthma inhalers topped with rubber nipples.
Plans to run these blunt ads infuriated the politically powerful infant formula industry, which hired a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former top regulatory official to lobby the Health and Human Services Department. Not long afterward, department political appointees toned down the campaign.
So let's take stock. Pretty much everyone has lost confidence in Nouri al-Maliki, though there's no replacement in sight who seems like a better bet. The police force is so corrupt that the best advice the Jones commission can offer is to disband it completely and start over from scratch. And the Iraqi army, after three years of intensive training designed by one Gen. David Petraeus, has a grand total of six battalions capable of operating on their own.
In other words, except for the fact that Iraq has a disfunctional government, a disfunctional police force, and a barely functional army, things are going great. I can't wait to see how Crocker and Petraeus spin this into an argument for staying another four years.
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Craig said in a statement issued by his office that he was not involved in any inappropriate conduct.& if you believe that bullshit, well, I have lots of stuff to sell.
"At the time of this incident, I complained to the police that they were misconstruing my actions," he said. "I should have had the advice of counsel in resolving this matter. In hindsight, I should not have pled guilty. I was trying to handle this matter myself quickly and expeditiously."
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Over the past two years since Hurricane Katrina, I've seen waves of hardworking volunteers from nonprofits, faith-based groups and college campuses descend on New Orleans, full of compassion and hope.
They arrive in the city's Ninth Ward to painstakingly gut houses one by one. Their jaws drop as they wander around afflicted zones, gazing at the towering mounds of debris and uprooted infrastructure.
After weeks of grueling labor, they realize that they are running in place, toiling in a surreal vacuum.
Two full years after the hurricane, the Big Easy is barely limping along, unable to make truly meaningful reconstruction progress. The most important issues concerning the city's long-term survival are still up in the air. Why is no Herculean clean-up effort underway? Why hasn't President Bush named a high-profile czar such as Colin Powell or James Baker to oversee the ongoing disaster? Where is the U.S. government's participation in the rebuilding?
And why are volunteers practically the only ones working to reconstruct homes in communities that may never again have sewage service, garbage collection or electricity?
Eventually, the volunteers' altruism turns to bewilderment and finally to outrage. They've been hoodwinked. The stalled recovery can't be blamed on bureaucratic inertia or red tape alone. Many volunteers come to understand what I've concluded is the heartless reality: The Bush administration actually wants these neighborhoods below sea level to die on the vine.
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1 Tim 2:8-11 � I will therefore that men pray every where, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting. In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array; But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works. Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.
Desperate presidents resort to desperate rhetoric -- which then calls new attention to their desperation. President Bush joined the club this week by citing the U.S. failure in Vietnam to justify staying on in Iraq.
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That is, the administration has constantly shifted its goals in Iraq to avoid accepting failure and blame -- only to see the new goals drift beyond reach each time. Liberation of Iraqis became occupation by Americans, democracy became an unattainable centralized "national unity" government and this year's military surge has become a device for achieving political reconciliation among people who do not want to reconcile.
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Such maneuvering is ultimately self-defeating, as was Bush's desperate bid this week to mobilize on his side the old resentments and fears of the political battles fought over Vietnam. Bush's speech fits Talleyrand's definition of something worse than a crime: It was a blunder.
The president's portrayal of the conflict "is not revisionist history. It is fantasy history," Lichtman said.
A US Blackhawk helicopter crashed yesterday, killing all 14 troops on board, and a powerful truck bomb in north-central Iraq killed at least 51 Iraqis.
& here's from the article on expanding the non-human kill zone.The Bush administration is set to issue a regulation on Friday that would enshrine the coal mining practice of mountaintop removal. The technique involves blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the rubble into valleys and streams.
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A spokesman for the National Mining Association, Luke Popovich, said that unless mine owners were allowed to dump mine waste in streams and valleys it would be impossible to operate in mountainous regions like West Virginia....
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“This is a parting gift to the coal industry from this administration,” said Joe Lovett, executive director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment in Lewisburg, W.Va. “What is at stake is the future of Appalachia. This is an attempt to make legal what has long been illegal.”
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From 1985 to 2001, 724 miles of streams were buried under mining waste, according to the environmental impact statement accompanying the new rule. If current practices continue, another 724 river miles will be buried by 2018, the report says.
"Clearly, he's catering to a constituency, because there's no biological or ecological justification," said Jamie Rappaport Clarke, executive vice president of Defenders of Wildlife. Clarke directed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the administration of former President Bill Clinton.
"It's selecting a group of species, only those that are hunted and fished, to give White House attention to," she said. "I would have expected some executive leadership on things like global warming and conservation of all biological diversity."
My emphasis.
NOTE: I am a hunter. I hunt upland birds, migratory waterfowl, & whitetail deer. I'm all for making more public land available for hunting, but coming from that asshole Bu$hCo, who governed a state with this much public land?
In the U.S., as a whole, it breaks down this way:According to a Sunset Commission report,in the year 2000, approximately 23 million acres of the state's approximate 176 million acres (includes 4 million acres of submerged coastal lands) was owned or managed by a public entity....
Over 60 percent of the land in the United States is privately owned (table 10). The Federal Government is the next largest landowner with more than 28 percent, mostly in the West. State and local governments own nearly 9 percent and Indian trust land accounts for over 2 percent.
Officials unexpectedly revoked the singer's visa Aug. 5 due to concerns about her arrest in London earlier this summer stemming from a dustup with a paparazzo.
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"Just because I hate George Bush doesn't mean I hate America," she wrote Monday. "I am really sad I can't be there for my commitments scheduled for the near future."
The “new” strategy of surging troops in Baghdad has simply wasted more lives and bought some time for the president. His strategy boils down to keeping as many of our soldiers engaged as possible, in order to stave off definitive defeat in Iraq before January 2009.
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As we watched the pressure build on President Bush, looked toward the additional challenges we expect him to face over the next 18 months, and pondered his tendency to disregard the law and the Constitution, we felt very much in need of professional help in trying to estimate what kinds of decisions he is likely to make.
Dr. Frank, it turned out, had been thinking along the same lines,....
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Parental discretion advised. The outlook is not only somber but potentially violent—and includes all manner of threats born of George W. Bush’s mental state (as well as the unusual relationship he has with his vice president).
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George W. Bush is without conscience....
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George W. Bush seems also to be without shame.
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He lies—not just to us, but to himself as well. What makes lying so easy for Bush is his contempt—for language, for law, and for anybody who dares question him.
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What gets lost in this process is growth—the George W. Bush of 2007 is exactly the same as the one of 2001. Helen Thomas has said that of all the presidents she has covered over the years, Bush is the least changed by his job, by his experience. This is why there is no possibility of dialogue or reasoning with him.
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He has always had a sadistic streak: from blowing up frogs, to shooting his siblings with a b-b-gun, to branding fraternity pledges with white-hot coat hangers.
Consider, for example, the daring recruitment in mid-2002 of Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, who was "turned" into working for the CIA and quickly established his credibility. Sabri told us there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.(This seems to be an overly positive spin on the dickwad Rove, ed.)
My former colleagues, perhaps a bit naively, were quite sure this would come as a vast relief to President George W. Bush and his advisers. Instead, they were told that the White House had no further interest in reporting from Sabri; rather, that the issue was not really WMD, it was "regime change."
(Don't feel embarrassed if you did not know this; our corporate-owned, war-profiteering media has largely suppressed all this.)
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In short, it seems a good bet that Rove, who is no one's dummy and would not want to have to "spin" an unnecessary war on Iran, lost the battle with Cheney over the merits of a military strike on Iran, and only then decided to spend more time with his family.
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Despite the administration's warlike record, many Americans may still cling to the belief that attacking Iran won't happen because it would be crazy; that Bush is a lame-duck president who wouldn't dare undertake a new reckless adventure when the last one went so badly.
For several experts contacted by U.S. News, how President Bush received his honorable discharge from the Guard remains a mystery. Lawrence Korb, a former Assistant Secretary for Defense for Manpower and Reserve Affairs during the Reagan Administration, said it was apparent that President Bush "had not fulfilled his obligation."
"'What is Bush suggesting? That we didn't fight hard enough, stay long enough? That's nonsense. It's a distortion,' he continued. 'We've been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It's a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out.'"
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"While difficult for inveterate hawks to admit, the victory for normalcy in Vietnam, celebrated by Bush last week, came about not despite the US withdrawal but because of it."
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As seven soldiers wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Sunday: "What soldiers call the 'battle space' remains the same . . . It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers' expense."
So how's one more going to change anything?
The national director of the Anti-Defamation League bowed to pressure from both the Jewish and Armenian-American communities yesterday and officially acknowledged the genocide of Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turks more than 90 years ago.
In doing so, Abraham H. Foxman reversed years of ADL policy and a position he had reaffirmed as recently as Friday when he fired the ADL's New England regional director, Andrew H. Tarsy, for defying the national organization and acknowledging the genocide.
The abortion leads to breast cancer stupidity ought to have been enough to fire her. Allowing her to resign is a slap in the face to all of the cancer victims on the Iron Range.
Midler is set to replace Celine Dion as a headline performer at Las Vegas's renovated Caesars Palace next year.
My emphasis.The claim that President Bush took his eyes off the ball in Afghanistan so he could rush into disaster in Iraq has been repeated so many times that it is almost a cliche. A true cliche. But something like a cliche nonetheless. It becomes shocking again, however, when you look at it up close. The most charged issue in the US -- at least at the headline level -- is the failure to bag bin Laden. But that's not the only issue, in some ways not even the most important one because actually transforming Afghanistan (if that was possible, which I won't pretend to know the answer to) would at least arguably have been of more consequence that killing or capturing this one man.
And as long as we're on the subject, let's track back to our earlier discussion of President Bush's bogus 'democracy promotion agenda.' Remember, US policy makers have always been happy to push democracy on enemy states or among friends where there were no potential adverse policy consequences. The rub is always balancing support for democracy and the rule of law with more immediate policy needs.
So who are our main allied states in the War on Terror and the Muslim Middle East generally? The answer? Unquestionably, I think, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia -- one military dictatorship (if one with semi-constitutional and parliamentary attributes), with a military with a long history of ties to radical Islamists and another hereditary despotism riddled with sympathizers with radical Islamists.
Previously unknown islands are appearing as Arctic summer sea ice shrinks to record lows, raising questions about whether global warming is outpacing U.N. projections, experts said.
Polar bears and seals have also suffered this year on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard because the sea ice they rely on for hunts melted far earlier than normal.
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"There may well be an ice-free Arctic by the middle of the century," Christopher Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, told the seminar, accusing the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of underestimating the melt.
The thaw of glaciers that stretch out to sea around Svalbard has revealed several islands that are not on any maps.
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As a class, the old and sick are already luckier than the young and healthy. Again, for individuals within that class--those with desperate congenital conditions, for example--this is not the case. But I'm not sure it's terribly compelling to argue that we should massively disadvantage a large group of people in order to massively advantage another, equally large group of people, all to help out the few who are needy, or deserving, or unlucky.I did run across this at Alicublog & followed up by learning what an arguendo is, in relation to an argument over at Mr. Doghouse Riley's place in Indiana. I've always hated Indiana, partly because my best friend moved there, & of course Notre Dame is there, as was Bobby Knight & Lou Holtz, but I digress. Back to how it's my fault that I have had a heart attack, that I have arthritis, & other various & sundry ailments. I once read Atlas Shrugged, no link since it was the part of a burning party in my 20's, yes, I woke the fuck up, & felt all tall & blonde & Aryan & feeling how cool it would be to be on top of the mountain while all the dumbasses starved, had bad sex & ugly children, enjoyed Ray Coniff while sipping Rhinelander beer, & believed that their condition was the result of inferior genes & bank accounts. I wrote long letters to a girl I loved, they were long because I copied long sections of Shrugged. When I saw her later that summer, she played Rubber Soul for me on the hifi & I realized my error. A few years later, after dancing on McCarthy's grave, I planned & executed a book burning. Since I didn't tear each page out, it took a case of beer & two bottles of Zippo lighter fluid. I'll admit I was satisfied with the result. I suppose drinking that case of beer over many hours as I watched the trash burn may have caused some of my present health issues, I frankly don't know. I do know that I smoked for 40 years & enjoyed it. My heart attack, however, was a cheeseburger heart attack. Nonetheless, I know that the choices I made have impacted my current life. I fly fish & bird hunt. I gather mushroom & plant fiber for making paper. I read. I watch teevee. I drink coffee & gin & beer. I have changed over the years, I don't eat as much fried fish as I used to. I buy most of the books I read. I buy a lot of music online. I visit the doctor at least twice a year, same goes for my dentist, & I have an eye exam every three years. I pet my dogs more often & lately have done more with my horses. None of this matters, however, because I ought to be dragged off the the swamp with a pickaroon, or so I've claimed. & apparently Ms. Galt agrees with me, after all swamps make great filters & they wouldn't allow all of my poor health choices to pollute the earth.
After learning of the new policy, some state officials said yesterday that it could cripple their efforts to cover more children and would impose standards that could not be met.
“We are horrified at the new federal policy,” said Ann Clemency Kohler, deputy commissioner of human services in New Jersey. “It will cause havoc with our program and could jeopardize coverage for thousands of children.
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Our policies need to consider the additional causes of our widening wealth gap, including tax breaks for the mega-wealthy; the lack of strong U.S. employment strategies; and the decline of unions, which were essential to building 20th-century America's middle class.
The question, really, comes down to this: What kind of society do Americans want to create in this century?
The avoiders will continue to try to weakly dispute whether inequality is growing.
Americans earned a smaller average income in 2005 than in 2000, the fifth consecutive year that they had to make ends meet with less money than at the peak of the last economic expansion, new government data shows.
While incomes have been on the rise since 2002, the average income in 2005 was $55,238, still nearly 1 percent less than the $55,714 in 2000, after adjusting for inflation, analysis of new tax statistics show.
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I would be sick to my stomach over this, but I've lost the capacity to be shocked. Bush is willing to talk peace with the Taliban in order to get security for an American company to build an oil and gas pipeline. That about says it all for the Bush administration's priorities in its self declared War on Terror. I'd like to see how the right wing media megaphone and blogs will spin this. Provided they ever mention it at all, of course. See no evil, hear no evil ....
But at least three internal documents suggest that money was a consideration.
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Midwestern freeways are notorious for their poor design. I-95 halts every single weekday thanks to a slightly too sharp bend where St. Paul meets Minneapolis, and every day about 3 p.m. traffic grinds to a halt as too many cars tap their brakes in the same spot. So it's not like Midwestern states' DOTs have the greatest track record, but still — this is being handled badly. MnDot has NEVER understood where to place signs and you never know if a sign means "down the road a ways" or "NOW!"
This is a hard time being made harder thanks to an overburdened state agency that's been starved for funding and confused by zealously cheap political administrators.
Welcome to the next ten years of our lives as we struggle to get past our neglected infrastructure courtesy of frightened shitheads who freak out at the mention of a penny tax on anything, but then vote in creeps who shovel out the money for illegal wars and corporate giveaways.
When the rich have ALL the money, everyone else suffers, even if they're not broke. Personally, given his vast fortune, I think Carl Pohlad should pick up the tab for the new I-35 bridge, or at least pay as much of the bill as Hennepin County residents are picking up for his baseball stadium.
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Critics say this position is hypocritical. Foxman "should understand that the truth of any genocide is not conditional upon political relationships," said Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America in Washington, D.C. Rather, he said, it should be dictated by "truth" and "history."Amen to that.
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President Bush is getting the kind of break most Americans can only dream of -- nearly five weeks away from the office, loaded with vacation time.
The president departed Tuesday for his longest stretch yet away from the White House, arriving at his Crawford ranch in the evening for a stretch of clearing brush, visiting with family and friends, and tending to some outside-the-Beltway politics. By historical standards, it is the longest presidential retreat in at least 36 years.
The August getaway is Bush's 49th trip to his cherished ranch since taking office and the 319th day that Bush has spent, entirely or partially, in Crawford -- nearly 20 percent of his presidency to date, according to Mark Knoller, a CBS Radio reporter known for keeping better records of the president's travel than the White House itself. Weekends and holidays at Camp David or at his parents' compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, bump up the proportion of Bush's time away from Washington even further.
"President Bush is on a five-week vacation. How many folks get five weeks off a year? You know, if I want five weeks off I have to have open heart surgery, for God's sake." --David LettermanHere's another.
"President Bush still having his five-week vacation. Today President Bush announced he is going to leave his ranch in Texas to visit Idaho for two days. However, Bush told his supporters, 'Don't worry, I won't do any work there either.'" --Conan O'BrienMore here.
Last week, in gruesome irony, “pro-life” activists held an event in Milwaukee celebrating the murder of Dr. John Britton and his bodyguard, James Barrett, by anti-abortion stalker Paul Hill.More on this bullshit here. The question is, of course, will J.B. Van Hollen repudiate what an organization who endorsed & financially supported him is doing? I'll never hold my breath for a ReThug to do the right thing. He really ought to return the contribution, after all, he apparently doesn't need it since he donated over $700,000 of his own money to his campaign. Maybe the Ashland County, WI, D.A. Sean Duffy could make this suggestion to his fellow traveler. It would be a wonderful gesture, even more, it would be the correct thing to do. After all, it is one thing to be pro-life (I mean, who isn't?), but it's a whole other thing to be pro-murder.
According to media reports, the “highlight” of the event was “the re-enactment of Hill’s murders,” culminating in a chorus of “Hallelujah” after the man playing Hill pulled his shotgun’s trigger.
A small South Carolina parts supplier collected about $20.5 million over six years from the Pentagon for fraudulent shipping costs, including $998,798 for sending two 19-cent washers to an Army base in Texas, U.S. officials said.
The company also billed and was paid $455,009 to ship three machine screws costing $1.31 each to Marines in Habbaniyah, Iraq, and $293,451 to ship an 89-cent split washer to Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Pentagon records show.
Top Commerce and Treasury Departments officials appeared with Republican candidates and doled out millions in federal money in battleground congressional districts and states after receiving White House political briefings detailing GOP election strategy.
Political appointees in the Treasury Department received at least 10 political briefings from July 2001 to August 2006, officials familiar with the meetings said. Their counterparts at the Commerce Department received at least four briefings — all in the election years of 2002, 2004 and 2006.
But in a sign that the investigations are broadening, National Science Foundation spokesman Dana W. Cruikshank confirmed Anchorage Daily News reports Thursday that the FBI was looking into $170 million in contracts VECO won beginning in 1999 to support foundation polar research programs. When the first contract was awarded, Stevens was an influential member of the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the foundation.
For it is becoming increasingly clear that the real-estate bubble of recent years, like the stock bubble of the late 1990s, both caused and was fed by widespread malfeasance. Rating agencies like Moody’s Investors Service, which get paid a lot of money for rating mortgage-backed securities, seem to have played a similar role to that played by complaisant accountants in the corporate scandals of a few years ago. In the ’90s, accountants certified dubious earning statements; in this decade, rating agencies declared dubious mortgage-backed securities to be highest-quality, AAA assets.
More from Kevin Drum here.
"Judge Feikens' ruling is a victory for the Great Lakes," Steven E. Chester, director of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, said in a prepared statement after the ruling. "Invasive species have already caused horrendous damage to Michigan's ecology, as well as our economy, and we must make every effort to stop these invaders before more reach our waters."
Now step back, watch who gives him shit for this perfectly reasonable demand, and know your political enemy. Dodd will be called a turtle, a Sinophobe, a racial demagogue, an invoker of the Yellow Peril, a protectionist, etc., and the loudest voices saying such things won’t come from the wingnuts (though they’ll certainly have their share in the cacophony). No, it’ll be the Sensible Liberals — *cough*BradDeLong NickPistof TomFriedman SebastianMallabyetal*cough* — who claim to share your values.The problem here is the 21st Century version of The Jungle, with the Chinese government in the place of the meat packers, the Chinese people being the Lithuanian immigrant workers, and the American public… is still the American public, being poisoned by Corporatist pigs defended, now as then, by a complacent and complicit intellectual class (back then, stodgy laissez-faire men; and now, neoliberal economists and globalization cheerleaders) whose anger is only aroused by the muckrakers and dissenters whose position Dodd, to his immense credit, echoes.
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Despite U.S. claims that violence is down in the Iraqi capital, U.S. military officers are offering a bleak picture of Iraq’s future, saying they’ve yet to see any signs of reconciliation between Sunni and Shiite Muslims despite the drop in violence.Go read the whole thing. My emphasis.
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That downbeat assessment comes despite a buildup of U.S. troops that began five months ago Wednesday and has seen U.S. casualties reach the highest sustained levels since the United States invaded Iraq nearly four and a half years ago.
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And while top U.S. officials insist that 50 percent of the capital is now under effective U.S. or government control, compared with 8 percent in February, statistics indicate that the improvement in violence is at best mixed.
U.S. officials say the number of civilian casualties in the Iraqi capital is down 50 percent. But U.S. officials declined to provide specific numbers, and statistics gathered by McClatchy Newspapers don't support the claim.
The number of car bombings in July actually was 5 percent higher than the number recorded last December, according to the McClatchy statistics, and the number of civilians killed in explosions is about the same.
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In the meantime, the most touted success of the campaign — an alliance between U.S. forces and some Sunni insurgent groups against al Qaida in Iraq — has angered many in the Maliki government, who accuse the United States of supporting groups that could ultimately turn against the government.
Former Sunni insurgents and tribal leaders will expect some kind of payoff for having turned on al Qaida, said Lt. Col. Richard Welch, who works primarily with Sunni tribal leaders and has negotiated with insurgents. Maliki’s government, however, has been hesitant to grant concessions, he said.
(Surprise, surprise, editor.)
