Roaring winter storms have caused at least 19 people today, with the toll likely to go higher. It has been a brutal day, weathe-wise. Many of the dead are teenagers killed when a school roof collapsed in Alabama when a tornado ripped through the city of Enterprise.
ENTERPRISE, Ala. - Apparent tornadoes killed at least 18 people in Alabama on Thursday, including 15 at a high school where students were trapped under a collapsed roof, state officials said.
Two died elsewhere in Enterprise and one in rural Millers Ferry, where a separate apparent twister wrecked mobile homes, Alabama Emergency Management Agency spokeswoman Yasamie Richardson said.
"The number could very well increase as the search effort continues through the night," she said.
More than 50 people were hospitalized as the violent storm front crossed the state.
A very bad day indeed. The storm is now tearing through Ohio, Pennsylvania and beginning to reach New York. It's been bad today, with severe blowing and drifting. Not as bad as in Alabama, however.
Well, the scandal of the rats who like takeout food in New York has taken another new turn today. The parent company of KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut has temporarily closed still more franchises held by the same company that owned the original problem place.
The parent company of KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut said it had temporarily closed several New York City restaurants owned by the franchisee that operated a Manhattan eatery overrun last week by rats.
In a statement issued late Wednesday, Yum Brands Inc. said the restaurants would remain closed until they underwent new inspections by the city's health department.
"We will not compromise on our food and restaurant quality," said Emil Brolick, a Yum Brands executive.
The company's actions were aimed at the ADF Companies, a Fairfield, N.J.-based group that owns more than 350 fast food restaurants in several states. It is among the nation's largest operators of Pizza Huts.
The idea that the running of the rats would ever rival the running of the bulls in Pamplona is probably not going to take off anytime soon. This does point to a larger problem in New York City that the health department should be trying to resolve.
The Democrats are floating trial balloons so fast, they have actually set new speed records with them. Literally just hours after they tried to float one about possibly cutting some funds out of the military budget, they reversed course so fast that reporters got whiplash trying to follow them. They now say they have no intention whatsoever of cutting the funds.
WASHINGTON - Just hours after floating the idea of cutting $20 billion from President Bush's $142 billion request for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan next year, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad was overruled by fellow Democrats Thursday.
"It's nothing that any of us are considering," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (news, bio, voting record), D-Nev., told reporters.
Conrad's trial balloon to cut war funding would have affected the budget year beginning Oct. 1 and was separate from the ongoing debate over Bush's $100 billion request for immediate supplemental funding for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Their stance on Iraq has nothing - not one thing - to actually do with the war. They are playing politics with their eyes on 2008, it really isn't about the war or the troops at all. They are searching for a way to cause political damage to the administration without making themselves vulnerable to the fallout from that damage. The real problem here is the horrible message that is being sent to both allies and enemies.
We're in the middle of a raging winter storm right now. The schools are closed all over the area, my wife got partway to work and turned around , it was too awful even for a Subaru. We even had that meteorological rarity winter thunder this morning. At times visibility is literally zero - complete whiteout conditions.
I hate winter.
The push by unions to eliminate the requirements for a secret ballot in unionization votes is reaching high gear in the House of Representatives. This change would force companies to recognize unions based only on the so-called card check recognition. This is completely and utterly anti-democratic.
The House of Representatives has scheduled a vote as early as today on a bill that strips 140 million U.S. workers of the right to decide in private whether to unionize. Naturally, it's called the Employee Free Choice Act.
Big Labor has been agitating to ease union-formation requirements for more than a decade. And prior to last year's election, the AFL-CIO, AFSCME and their allies made it clear to Democrats that this vote would be the most important return they expected on their investment in a Nancy Pelosi Speakership. This is payback day.
The union claim is that employers are engaging in rampant unfair labor practices to prevent employees from exercising their right to organize. But data from the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees union elections, show no rise in such activities. The reality is that union membership has been in decline for decades, and labor leaders are desperate to rig the rules in order to reverse the trend. In the 1950s, 35% of private-sector workers were unionized. By the early 1980s the number had fallen to 20%, and today it stands at just 7.4%.
The reason for this decline isn't illegal management meddling in organizing efforts. The problem is that unions haven't been able to persuade the workers themselves. Our own, longstanding position is that when a company is organized it is almost always the company's fault. But workers of all classes and skills can also read the news and understand that unions no longer provide job security, if they ever did. The most heavily unionized industries–such as airlines and Detroit carmakers–are typically those that are financially beleaguered and shedding jobs. Workers know that unions often provide short-term wage gains at the cost of longer-term job insecurity.
I don't really care if workers want to organize into a union, provided they vote for it. But this card check scheme would make peer pressure and outright intimidation rampant and would take away the rights of workers to a real vote in the matter. The Democrats should really be ashamed of this.
The News Buckit provides a tabulation that counts up the number of uses the "seven deadly words" that George Carlin made famous in the blogosphere. Even with a somewhat larger sample of right-leaning blogs (22 to 18) the results are completely lopsided.
And this is what I found, using what I deemed — through a mix of TTLB and 2006's Weblog Award lists — to be the 18 biggest Lefty blogs, and 22 biggest Righty blogs. I couldn't account for the 6-month time period, and I even gave the Lefty blogs a 4 blog advantage. But it didn't make much of a difference.
So how much more does the Left use Carlin's "seven words" versus the Right? According to my calculations, try somewhere in the range of 18-to-1.
Yowsers.
How did I get this result? I searched Google using the following format and recorded the page results that were returned:
site:xyz.com "search term 1" OR "search term 2" OR "search term 3"…
Nine search terms total — the seven profanities as single words, and two of those as their own two-word variations. I then added the individual site results together and compared them.
I have a firm comment policy and won't let obscenity on the blog. Even profanity is severely limited. But when this site gets swarmed by the flocks from the artist formerly known as the Daou Report, many of the deposits contain the seven deadly words and more. Offenders take great umbrage that their comment gets nuked and that they are blacklisted (I love those automatic plugins for that). Incidentally, Patrick Ishmael, who tabulated these results, invites people to run their own tabulations. I'm guessing the results will be no different regardless of who does it.
The Animal Uprising™ has a new warrior. This beast can work in complete darkness and we here at Blue Crab Boulevard fear that it will be unleashed on unsuspecting sleeping humans in the near future. Fear the Enormous, blind, albino millipedes!
Two albino millipedes have come out of their cavernous hiding places to represent an entirely new genus of these leggy organisms.
Scientists spotted the millipedes in caves on opposite sides of the Grand Canyon. One species was found in a cave on the South Rim and the other in two caves on the North Rim.
"We knew the millipedes likely represented two distinct species because the two populations were separated by the Grand Canyon," said biologist J. Judson Wynne, a cave expert at Northern Arizona University who also works for the U.S. Geologic Survey. "The fact these two species belong to an entirely new genus was a great surprise to us."
Wynne made the discovery with Kyle Voyles, a cave expert with the Bureau of Land Management.
A genus is a major subdivision within a family of living things that typically includes more than one species.
Before they ever ended up in the caves, these millipedes were ready for a life of constant darkness, high humidity and scarce food. They lack functional eyes, which would be useless in the blackout conditions, and have no pigment since there is no need for protection from the sun's rays. Instead the cave critters have lots of legs and feelers for finding the rare speck of food washed into the cave from above.
Our incoherent informants tell us that this is actually an aerial shot of the monsters. If you look really, really closely in the lower left of the picture you can see the tiny people fleeing in terror. It's just like a bad Japanese horror movie! There is one bit of encouraging news, however. The beasts are very slow to get moving for an attack. It takes a long time to get its shoes on.
I have called my new, very old Linux computer a "Hot Rod Yugo" due to it's seriously old hardware and very slow speed by today's standards (Pentium II @ 333MHz, 384MB RAM). Thanks to Quilly Mammoth from Just Barking Mad, we now have photographical evidence of the original Hot Rod Yugo, now aptly known as a towbar special.
The same old song and dance. Democrats run in the elections using a meme about the "culture of corruption". Then once they are in office, Nancy Pelosi wants to appoint William "Cold Cash" Jefferson to the panel that oversees Homeland Security. The Republicans are going to try to force an on-the-record vote on the appointment, however.
House Republicans plan to force a floor vote on the appointment of Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.), who is the subject of a federal bribery investigation, to a seat on the Homeland Security Committee.
The decision to put Jefferson on the panel was made by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), and House Democrats endorsed the move at a private meeting Tuesday night, but his appointment must be confirmed by a vote on the House floor. Such an action would normally be a formality, but Republicans said yesterday that they would pursue a rarely used maneuver to force a recorded vote on the matter.
"This is a terrible mistake by the Democratic leadership, to take someone with serious ethical allegations against him and put him on one of the most sensitive and important committees in Congress," said Rep. Peter T. King (N.Y.), the ranking Republican on the committee.
Pelosi ousted Jefferson from his seat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee in June after federal investigators raided his Capitol Hill office. In an earlier search of his home, $90,000 was found in a freezer. The money allegedly was accepted in a bribery sting involving an African technology company. Jefferson, who has not been charged, has maintained his innocence and was elected to a ninth term in December after a runoff election.
Honestly, this man is an embarrassment to Congress, regardless of party affiliation. I honestly don't think Pelosi understands exactly how tin-eared politically this looks to the average voter. She's just confirmed that the new boss is no different than the old boss, despite the campaign rhetoric.
News | Gaius Thursday, 1 March , 2007 | 
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