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Holloway vs. DSM

Subject: girl getting 10 times the coverage of Downing Street memo.
Alternate subject line: Maybe if the Downing Street memo was blond and missing?
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To the unaware, having exhausted our infatuation with the runaway bride Jennifer Wilbank and getting all the mileage out of Supermodel Tsunami Survivor Petra Nemcova (who recently received an hour on "Larry King Live"), the cable channels are currently showcasing the story of Natalee Holloway, a blonde Alabama high school senior vacationing in Aruba who has been missing for a week now.

Squeaming readers may want to stop reading here. Really.

A quick Nexis search this morning of news transcripts for the past week shows that Natalee Holloway has been featured in 231 stories, while the Downing Street memo only 20. Yes, It's even crept into the refreshingly informative CNN International Hour.

- rob 6:05 PM - [PermaLink] -

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The Real Cause of Increases in Health Care Cost

Yes, malpractice insurance is a main driver. It turns out, though, that tort case costs are a minimal cause of this increase, comprising only about 3% of increased cost. (No surprise here if you've been paying attention.) Over the last several years, health care cost due to malpractice suits has actually gone down.

Bottom line: Think twice before blaming "lawyers" or "the broken criminal justice system" for this problem. Think instead of your doctor, notably silent about the vastly increased profit being made by his or her insurer.

A partial list of references:

1. A study of Texas malpractice costs, and their causes: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22197-2005Mar9.html

2. The Seven Most Important Things To Know About Medical Malpractice: http://www.makethemaccountable.com/myth/RisingCostOfMedicalMalpracticeInsurance.htm

3. A page FactCheck.org, a year old but with sources well cited: http://www.factcheck.org/article133.html

(entire post from Doug - thanks!)

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Howard Dean freaks people out with facts

AMERICAblog: Oops. The GOP really is all white, study proves it

But a new book about America's political divisions notes that the 99 percent of all Republican legislators across the country and in Congress are white. The national Republican Party, whose base is in the South, the Plains and the Mountain states, looks to white men as its power base and source of leadership. Even when Republican states have significant minority populations, the elected Republican representatives rarely are drawn from those communities.
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Of 3,643 Republicans serving in the state legislatures, only 44 are minorities, or 1.2 percent. In the Congress, with 274 of the 535 elected senators and representatives Republican, only five are minorities - three Cuban Americans from Florida, a Mexican American from Texas and a Native American senator originally elected as a Democrat.

- rob 5:51 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Is Bush's New Nominee A Bigot?

I don't know, but this excellent post notes some quotes from Henrietta Fore that certainly could make you go "hmmmmm"

The trustee, Henrietta Holsman, a 1970 graduate of Wellesley who runs a manufacturing concern in Los Angeles, resigned from the board last weekend after apologizing for her comments, which also cast aspersions on the work ethic of Hispanic and white employees. But in a letter to the college newspaper, Ms. Holsman reiterated her statement that she had trouble keeping black assembly-line workers from going ‘’back to the street to earn more money'’ selling drugs…

In her lecture, Ms. Holsman also said she had found Hispanic workers to be lazy, white workers resentful of having to work with machines, and Asians, while very productive, likely to move on to professional or management jobs.

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Why? I don't know - because there are days when there is more accurate information to be found in extremist wacked out blog sites with names like This Century Sucks then in the Washington Post.

Gallup: Public Confidence in Papers, TV News Falls to All-Time Low

NEW YORK Public trust in newspapers and television news continued to decline in Gallup's annual survey of "public confidence in major institutions" in the United States, reaching an all-time low this year.

Those having a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in newspapers dipped from 30% to 28% in one year, the same total for television. The previous low for newspapers was 29% in 1994. Since 2000, confidence in newspapers has declined from 37% to 28%, and TV from 36% to 28%, according to the poll.
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Confidence in the presidency plunged from 52% to 44%, with Congress and the criminal-justice system also suffering 8% drops. Confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court fell from 46% to 41%. The 22% confidence rating for Congress is its lowest in eight years, and self-identified Republicans have only a slightly more positive view of the institution than do Democrats.

Sometimes it seem like the general public doesn't get it. But they do. They know they are being lied to.

Slowly but surely when the weather man keeps saying it is sunny and you are soaked from the rain your are going to have doubts about the weatherman.

Oh - but the weatherman just said more sun is "just around the corner"!

- rob 5:46 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Krugman: Losing Our Country

Working families have seen little if any progress over the past 30 years. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the median family doubled between 1947 and 1973. But it rose only 22 percent from 1973 to 2003, and much of that gain was the result of wives' entering the paid labor force or working longer hours, not rising wages.

Meanwhile, economic security is a thing of the past: year-to-year fluctuations in the incomes of working families are far larger than they were a generation ago. All it takes is a bit of bad luck in employment or health to plunge a family that seems solidly middle-class into poverty.

But the wealthy have done very well indeed. Since 1973 the average income of the top 1 percent of Americans has doubled, and the income of the top 0.1 percent has tripled.
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Since 1980 in particular, U.S. government policies have consistently favored the wealthy at the expense of working families - and under the current administration, that favoritism has become extreme and relentless. From tax cuts that favor the rich to bankruptcy "reform" that punishes the unlucky, almost every domestic policy seems intended to accelerate our march back to the robber baron era.

It's not a pretty picture - which is why right-wing partisans try so hard to discredit anyone who tries to explain to the public what's going on.

- rob 5:41 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Here's Atrios page at the DNC for donations.

The point of using this link is to demonstrate specific support of Howard Dean and annoyance at those whimpy Democrats who don't want to say anything "bad" about the Republicans.

DNC: Raise Money

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Earlier this week in was Monday: The Top Ten Conservative Idiots, No. 200 - Democratic Underground

7. Carey Lee Cramer
Back in 2000, Carey Lee Cramer hit the headlines with an anti-Al Gore campaign ad which echoed the famous 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson "Daisy" ad. Cramer's remake featured his then 9-year-old stepdaughter picking daisy petals, and ended with a nuclear explosion. The ad attempted to demonstrate the moral depravity of Al Gore by spreading a rumor that he sold nuclear technology to China in return for campaign contributions.

But it turns out that Cramer's stepdaughter had more immediate problems to worry about than being blown up by a Chinese nuke marked "property of Al Gore." Last week Cramer was "charged in Hidalgo County with multiple counts of molesting the girl and another young relative," according to The Monitor. His ex-wife (the girl's mother) thinks that he even molested her daughter during the making of the commercial.

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Man With Chain Saw, Sword Is Let Into U.S.

BOSTON - On April 25, Gregory Despres arrived at the U.S.-Canadian border crossing at Calais, Maine, carrying a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, brass knuckles and a chain saw stained with what appeared to be blood. U.S. customs agents confiscated the weapons and fingerprinted Despres. Then they let him into the United States. [emphasis mine]

The following day, a gruesome scene was discovered in Despres' hometown of Minto, New Brunswick: The decapitated body of a 74-year-old country musician named Frederick Fulton was found on Fulton's kitchen floor. His head was in a pillowcase under a kitchen table. His common-law wife was discovered stabbed to death in a bedroom.

Now you may see this as a failing of our commitment of keeping our borders safe. But a picture of Despres will make you understand why even though he was carrying a blood stained chainsaw he was let in to the States:


See, he doesn't look a thing like an Arab.

- rob 12:31 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Hey CNN - Americans are actually smart. They actually think.

Give them news - they will come

CNN.com - Michael Jackson: Does anyone care?
Media brings circus to town, but audience yawns

Unfortunately I bet the meeting at CNN goes like this:

Idiot Executive One: Hmm no one seems to be paying attention to our Michael Jackson coverage.

Idiot Executive Two: We're thinking of having a ten part expose of Michael Jackson's fashions during the trial.

Idiot Executive Three: No - I really think we're not concentrating enough on the boys in the bed angle

Idiot Executive One: It is more then that - I think the story isn't working for us, we need to rethink how and what we cover.

Idiot Executive Four: Hey this just came over the wire! A pretty blond 17 year old cheerleader in Kansas was raising funds for more bibles for Iraqi orphans when she broke her leg!

Idiot Executive One: That's it! Human interest! Family values in the heartland! I want six hours on this today, and then we can build on it through the week.

- rob 10:28 AM - [PermaLink] -

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Family Values

War swells US army divorce rate

The number of US army officers getting divorced has soared in the past few years, the Pentagon says, a trend blamed on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2004 the rate of divorce was more than three times as high as in 2002, figures showed.

The cost of this war is staggering. Billions of dollars, thousands of lives, broken men and women, and broken homes. Children without dads or moms.

It is all about the sanctity of marriage. It is all about family values.

They preach it, they were elected on it, but they don't believe it.

How about some human values?

- rob 9:45 AM - [PermaLink] -

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Jeez... I never thought I'd say..."but we need the CIA"

TIME.com: Sidelining the CIA
A new White House memo excludes CIA director Porter Goss from National Security Council meetings

Sidelining the CIA A new White House memo excludes CIA director Porter Goss from National Security Council meetings The biggest changes in Washington often come about with just a few strokes of the pen. And so a dry, one-page internal memo quietly issued by the White House is being viewed as a kind of eulogy for the once mighty Central Intelligence Agency. After nearly 60 years at the pinnacle of American intelligence—and at the elbow of Presidents—the CIA director is no longer automatically welcome at the President's National Security Council (NSC) meetings. John Negroponte, the new director of National Intelligence, has taken his chair.

It's the latest evidence that Negroponte is consolidating his power as the nation's intelligence czar. The May 2 memo, obtained by TIME and also reported late last week by GovWatch.com, states that "effective immediately," Negroponte will participate in meetings of the NSC and its domestic counterpart, the Homeland Security Council (HSC). Meanwhile, CIA Director Porter Goss "will attend NSC and HSC meetings at the direction of the President."

It's the CIA's own fault, I hear once last year they even brought ups so facts... that was just going to far.

It is a sad day when the CIA was the last voice of (semi)sanity.

- rob 5:29 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Oh why the hell not.

They haven't even caught the Anthrax mailer yet. Maybe if they can just arrest people at random... maybe next year... if they still haven't caught anybody.

Senate Gives FBI More Patriot Act Power

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It's Christmas in June!!!

If you sell products that kill, that is.

Tobacco Escapes Huge Penalty

After eight months of courtroom argument, Justice Department lawyers abruptly upset a landmark civil racketeering case against the tobacco industry yesterday by asking for less than 8 percent of the expected penalty.

As he concluded closing arguments in the six-year-old lawsuit, Justice Department lawyer Stephen D. Brody shocked tobacco company representatives and anti-tobacco activists by announcing that the government will not seek the $130 billion that a government expert had testified was necessary to fund smoking-cessation programs. Instead, Brody said, the Justice Department will ask tobacco companies to pay $10 billion over five years to help millions of Americans quit smoking.

Stephen Brody then let the tabacco companies know who to make their checks out to when giving funds to the RNC.

Its all about service in today's inJustice Department.

- rob 5:24 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Does Pat Robertson, Jerry Fallwell, and the lot think God is a Lawyer?

To believe in Revelations is to believe God loves his loopholes

First God sets up a contract with man: Genesis 9 - Bible (King James Version)

8 And God spake unto Noah, and to his sons with him, saying, 9 And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you; 10 And with every living creature that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth with you; from all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the earth. 11 And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.

Got that? No more killing by floods (let's not talk about the Tsunami). That's the contract. Legally binding I'm sure.

So what happens in Revelations? Well pretty much everything:

• 2The first angel went and poured out his bowl on the land, and ugly and painful sores broke out on the people
• The second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, and it turned into blood like that of a dead man, and every living thing in the sea died. [note: not a flood]
• The third angel poured out his bowl on the rivers and springs of water, and they became blood.
• The fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and the sun was given power to scorch people with fire.
• The fifth angel poured out his bowl on the throne of the beast, and his kingdom was plunged into darkness. Men gnawed their tongues in agony 11and cursed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, but they refused to repent of what they had done.
• The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up to prepare the way for the kings from the East.
• The seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air, and out of the temple came a loud voice from the throne, saying, "It is done!" Then there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder and a severe earthquake. No earthquake like it has ever occurred since man has been on earth, so tremendous was the quake.

So we have a contract that says: "no more killing by flood" and then God kills man by pretty much doing everything else.

Sounds like a loophole to me.

- rob 1:44 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Warship Fires on America

Navy destroyer opens fire leaving port

NORFOLK, Va. -- A .50-caliber machine gun on the deck of a guided missile destroyer fired a bullet as it left port, striking a barge on a neighboring pier but causing no injuries.

Oh, it was us. Never mind.

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Downing Street Memo

Yell it to the skies, make sure you neighbors understand. Write letters to the local papers.

Read up on it:

The Downing Street Memo :: What is it?

and

After Downing Street.org

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Your tax dollars at work

The Republican Party" Its you money - we just lose it

Ohio is indeed vying for the title "The New Florida"

Workers' comp bureau concealed $215M loss; Taft, Petro knew about fund's woes many months ago

COLUMBUS — Democrats were screaming “cover-up” yesterday after state officials admitted that a high-risk hedge fund that the embattled Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation had invested in had lost $215 million in just a few months last year.
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Although the bureau has known about the losses since September, it wasn’t revealed until yesterday, a day after The Blade began making calls upon learning that state investigators had uncovered huge losses at the bureau.
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For the first time in weeks, the talk out of the bureau wasn’t about rare coins and Tom Noe. Instead it focused on hedge funds and MDL, a Pittsburgh firm with clients across the country.

The investments with MDL are unrelated to the bureau’s coin funds managed by Mr. Noe, a prominent Toledo-area coin dealer. But the news of the MDL losses were revealed just a day after the Ohio Ethics Commission reported expanding its probe into whether bureau employees complied with state ethics laws. Earlier yesterday, before news of the MDL losses were reported, Inspector General Tom Charles confirmed that his office was investigating other bureau investments.

- rob 10:48 AM - [PermaLink] -

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Gee the popular war time President is unpopular

It must be the liberal media's fault - why just last week they published a fact!

Lowest approval ratings in 75 polls

This just in: The new ABC News/Washington Post poll, here, shows 52 percent of Americans disapprove of the job President Bush is doing overall, reports ABC News' Polling director Gary Langer — the most in more than 75 ABC/Post polls since his presidency began. His approval rating is 48 percent.
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George W. Bush’s approval rating is now a full twenty points lower than Bill Clinton’s was on the day he was impeached. Dear media, that means you gotta stop referring to him as a “popular president,” and no less important, stop treating him like one. If you want to be wimps about everything, fine, just don’t blame it on his ‘popularity.’ Blame it on yourselves.

- rob 10:34 AM - [PermaLink] -

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Man is Good
Man destroys Nature
Ergo Nature is Bad

Facts are bad
Truth misleads
Ergo Bush is President

Bush Aide Softened Greenhouse Gas Links to Global Warming

A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties," tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust.

Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues.

Before going to the White House in 2001, he was the "climate team leader" and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics, he has no scientific training.

But the science on global warming is shaky don't you know - my MBA friend told me so.

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Let us hope someone in Maryland is having fun toying with us


Seen on Marc Trains:

Ride Mass Transit for the Father Land!

- rob 9:48 AM - [PermaLink] -

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Yes, please don't die

The Downing Street Memo Story Won't Die

More than a month after its publication, the so-called Downing Street Memo remains among the top 10 most viewed articles on The Times of London site.
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Dearlove had just retuned from a visit with Bush administration officials eight months before the war in Iraq began.

"Military action was now seen as inevitable," Dearlove told Blair and his senior defense policy advisers. "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

A separate secret briefing paper for the meeting said Britain and the United States had to "create" conditions to justify a war.

Why isn't this getting more coverage? Oh yeah, Michael Jackson... well yes of course, that is more important then lying to a nation about why they should go to war.

- rob 5:23 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Impeach Bush, and help Hillary sleep at night

Seeking re-election, Sen. Clinton pans Bush agenda

"I stay awake at night thinking about all the mistakes and the wrong direction and all the bad decisions being made in Washington," Clinton said at the fund-raiser. "It's very hard to stop people who have no shame about what they're doing. It's very hard to stop people who have never been acquainted with the truth.

"We cannot give them (Republicans) another two years of majority. We cannot give them another four years after that," she said.

She characterized the Bush administration's financial priorities as tax cuts for the wealthy and funding the war in Iraq, rather than the needs of Americans who lack health insurance, affordable housing and good schools.

"We can't ever, ever give in to the Republican agenda," she said. "It is not good for New York, and it is not good for America.

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It is like the circle of Life: You donate to our campaigns, we give you the money we take from the tax payers, you donate to our campaigns, we giver you the money....


E-Mails Detail Air Force Push for Boeing Deal

For the past three years, the Air Force has described its $30 billion proposal to convert passenger planes into military refueling tankers and lease them from Boeing Co. as an efficient way to obtain aircraft the military urgently needs.

But a very different account of the deal is shown in an August 2002 internal e-mail exchange among four senior Pentagon officials.

"We all know that this is a bailout for Boeing," Ronald G. Garant, an official of the Pentagon comptroller's office, said in a message to two others in his office and then-Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Wayne A. Schroeder.
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In the copy of the report obtained by The Washington Post, 45 sections were deleted by the White House counsel's office to obscure what several sources described as references to White House involvement in the lease negotiations and its interaction with Boeing. The Pentagon separately blacked out 64 names and many e-mails. It also omitted the names of members of Congress, including some who pressured the Pentagon to back the deal.

Yeah, I bolded that whole last paragraph... you got a problem with that?

you do?

Oh, okay, sorry.

- rob 5:15 PM - [PermaLink] -

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With organized crime being a more and more difficult place to have steady employment... thugs have moved on to the government

Los Alamos Lab Whistleblower Beaten

SANTA FE, N.M. -- A Los Alamos lab whistleblower scheduled to testify before Congress about alleged financial irregularities was badly beaten outside a bar _ an attack his wife and lawyer believe was designed to silence him.
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Hook's wife, Susan, alleged the assailants told her husband during the attack: "If you know what's good for you, you'll keep your mouth shut."

Tommy Hook and another whistleblower sued the University of California in March, alleging that after they uncovered management failures, university and lab managers tried to make their jobs miserable so they would quit.

Hook, a former internal auditor who now works at another job at the lab, had been scheduled to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee later this month.

According to Susan Hook, her husband received a call late Saturday from someone wanting to meet with him at a bar. She said her husband told her the man never showed up, but that as he was leaving the parking lot, a group of men pulled him from his car and beat him.

"They left him in the parking lot for dead," said Tommy Hook's lawyer, Robert Rothstein.

- rob 5:09 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Jeb Bush: In 2008 I can reproduce the "Florida Miracle" for the whole nation

Daily Kos :: Slavery in Florida on Jeb's Watch: Ignoring Published Reports, He Permits it to Continue

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1 Guess as to which state this happened in:

Babysitter's Mom Says Sex Charges Exaggerated

Patricia Sato said the charges against her daughter are exaggerated.
Charity Lynn Sato, 20, isn't capable of committing sexual acts with the 11-year-old boy she was babysitting, she said.

But she acknowledged her daughter isn't so sure.

``I'm not saying all of it didn't happen,'' Patricia Sato said. ``I asked Charity what happened, and she said, `Mommy, I was drunk. I don't remember.' ''
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The affidavits indicate Sato touched the boy inappropriately, then punched and squeezed his genitals ``to hurt the victim'' while two other children watched. She also was charged with tricking the boy and the other two children into drinking soda spiked with Southern Comfort liqueur.

Patricia Sato said her daughter had lived in the alleged victims' Brandon apartment for at least two months, where she served as a full-time babysitter.

She blames the Brandon family for providing her underage daughter a six-pack of Bud Light and a six-pack of Miller Light. She said her daughter did not have a history of drinking alcohol.

``Why would a parent buy a babysitter alcohol?'' she said. ``What person in their right mind would do that?''

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I used to watch A-Team and say to myself "gee willickers this isn't realistic... how could the bad guys be such bad shots." The rest of the show, of course, is widely heralded for its realism.

marksmanship out of a Hollywood film: Police shootout leaves none hurt

Two undercover policemen and a shooting suspect fired at least 103 rounds during an early morning shootout Saturday that jolted residents of a Homewood housing complex, but resulted in no injuries.

"All I heard was 'Pow! Pow! Bing! Bing!' Then you started hearing the police," said Homewood resident Tracey Taylor, who was in bed when the shooting started. "We thought they were at war up here -- shooting out car windows. It was crazy."

[emphasis mine]

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Perils of Penelope
or
Pretty White Girls in Danger!

The message is clear: If your life is worth saving you need to be pretty, white, young, and female.

Now I hope Natalee Holloway is found soon, and that she is safe, but the coverage of this story is another repeat of disturbing fact that the media only takes interest in your case if the lost child, teen, or bride-to-be is white, female, and photogenic.

Save your daughter: take as many cute all American photos of her as you can. Pray you never have to use them.

Though If I was the Halloway’s I too would demand and be appreciative of all the help this attention has generated, and I am glad for them, and hope to hear a happy result. But does America send FBI agents to foreign lands every time a teen goes missing? Do the Dutch Marines scramble to find every missing tourist?

On May 11 Omar Ducasse a 35 year old, 230 pound Hispanic Male disappeared in Anchorage, Alaska. He is a father. Children have lost a father. Did we send in the marines? Did we send in the FBI? I’m not saying make it a media circus, but some attention to the incident could lead to tips. It looks like the local station covered this story, to their credit. That’s how I could find out about it. How many scores of cases could I not find? How many cases never eat made one line , one mention, among the billions of words that appear on the internet everyday.

The prurient interest in the white girl missing stories is clear. “white slavery” “sex slave” Sex sells, and though they don’t admit it Matt Lauer, Joe Scarborough, and everyone of them is feeding off of the natural horror of a rape story. A missing child is horrible, but the story could soon become (and let’s hope not) appalling and horrendous. That would be great for ratings. That is beyond vampirism.

Yes, a reporter can apologize, defend, and excuse himself by saying “the publicity will help in the search.” And yes that is true. KTUU’s coverage may have helped the case of Omar Ducasse. Lets hope it did.

But are the ratings spike in Dallas helping find a missing teen in Aruba?

Meanwhile coverage of the continuing war might wake people up and realize that war isn’t an option because a foreign leader once tried to kill George’s daddy. The shock of the coverage of Vietnam so shocked America that it took America 15 years before it could go to war again on a whim. That may not sound like much, but without the coverage of the true horror of war during Vietnam we probably would have gone into Nicaragua.

War does have to happen sometimes – but it is horrible, awful, and destroys more then just buildings and lives. So everyone needs to be conscious of its horror, so we demand that it only be used when it is absolutely necessary. These soldiers who survive will forever be injured. Their dreams, thoughts, and emotions will never be the same, and already the message is clear. America doesn’t seem to care.

The war is still going on, but we’re too wrapped up in the Michael Jackson trial to notice. Which, and let’s be frank, is a ratings grabber because it involves allegations of sexual abuse. Murder just wouldn’t be the same. America supports its troops but doesn’t even want to hear about them now. How will we treat them ten years from now when they still need our help and support?

On June first, Phillip Edmundson, Virgil Case, and Louis Niedermeier were killed in Iraq. Would you have already known that if they were pretty white girls?

- rob 11:02 AM - [PermaLink] -

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"I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man's ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves."
- John F. Kennedy



"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are [a] few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

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"There's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed by what's right with America." - Bill Clinton.