The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House. ... In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need."

And now another result of the war in Iraq.

Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen? 'Times-Picayune' Had Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues

The FDA on Friday postponed indefinitely its decision on whether to allow the morning-after pill, called Plan B, to sell without a prescription. The agency said it was safe for adults to use without a doctor's guidance but that young teenagers still needed a prescription and it couldn't determine how to enforce an age limit — a decision contrary to the advice of its own scientific advisers.

Considering the science says there isn't a problem with people under 18 to use it, I guess the reason they say this is the Jesusnuts don't want to believe anyone has sex?

FDA Official Quits Over Plan B Pill Delay - Yahoo! News

Panic engulfed thousands of Shiites marching across a bridge in a religious procession Wednesday after rumors spread that a suicide bomber was about to attack, triggering a stampede that killed at least 695 people.

I see our efforts at providing security in Iraq are working. Yes, yes, sarcasm is not appreciated in times of tragedy. I feel horrible for the Iraqis, but will be surprised if they stop trying to blow us up during my lifetime.

This was the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons. The piper is only starting to warm up and we can look forward to payments in installments for a very long time to come.

695 Dead, 180 Hurt in Iraq Bridge Stampede

At a drug store on Canal Street just outside the French Quarter, two police officers with pump shotguns stood guard as workers from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel across the street loaded large laundry bins full of medications, snack foods and bottled water.

"This is for the sick," Officer Jeff Jacob said. "We can commandeer whatever we see fit, whatever is necessary to maintain law."

Another office, D.J. Butler, told the crowd standing around that they would be out of the way as soon as they got the necessities.

"I'm not saying you're welcome to it," the officer said. "This is the situation we're in. We have to make the best of it."

Wow. Even the cops are giving it a pass.

Looting Takes Place in View of La. Police

Okay nothing fancy, I just felt like starting a pool for what gas prices will be as on Labor Day. Taking Katrina into consideration, I'll guess $3.15.

No prizes or anything, I can't afford gas now, so I'm glad I bought that bicycle!

That means the reassigned project could take months longer at a time when delays already come at a high price. With the price of oil topping $60 a barrel, the Iraqi government is losing hundreds of millions of dollars in potential revenue from the dilapidated wells.

I disagree. Assuming the project EVER starts shipping oil again, it may be just in time to start sending it out at... $120 a barrel? More?

Iraqi State Company to Repair Oil Wells

As a known opponent of organized religion, it seems like a forgone conclusion that I should be opposed to intelligent design, and of course I am, but not because I think it is mixing science and religion, it is because science and religion are separate and mutually exclusive.

Science is the search for the explanation of the natural world. How do planets move in the universe, what causes earthquakes, how do you build an atomic bomb. Those are all areas for science, and exclusively science. Planets move in the universe based on (at the current understanding) gravity, earthquakes are a result of the stresses caused by plate tectonics and you build an atomic bomb by shoving too much uranium 235 or plutonium 239 into too small a space causing the atoms to fission into lighter elements.

Religion is the search for understanding beyond the natural world. What is the meaning of life? What happens to our souls after we die? For that matter, what is a soul anyway? Those are not questions science can answer because they are not things that have a demonstrable effect of the world that we can observe.

The intelligent design debate is a lie from start to finish. It says that what we see in the world is so complicated that there has to be an outside hand that has caused everything we see. That position is anti-science. Science is not about coming to a hard and fast proof, science is about the things that we have DISPROVEN.

Why do we say that the earth revolves about the sun instead of the other way around? Because everything we see with a better understanding of the universe tells us that it does. We launch satelites into space, we have sent people to the moon, and other objects off to the other planets in the solar system. All of that is based on the science that tells us the earth goes around the sun, therefore, the earth revolving around the sun is correct, because if it did not work that way, none of those other things would have worked.

Bringing this back to evolution and intelligent design, does this mean unequivically that evolution is correct? No, there are details of it that could be wrong. Traditional Darwinism thinks of evolution as a slow methodical progression from one thing to the next. Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium says that part is wrong, at least on a larger scale, yet the birds of polynesia with their varied tail lengths within populations of what appear to be the same or at least very similar species says that Darwin was also correct. All of this is about science. Why are those lengths different? What caused one version of the bird on one island to stabilize at a length of say 4 inches while one from a neighboring island to have a length of over a foot?

Where ID fails is that it doesn't ask about an explanation of this, it simply says, it is different, and God, or aliens, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster made it so. Well how do you disprove that? You can't. Now is it possib... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The default reaction to the Rave bust in Utah from a number of people has been of the form "blah, blah, Republicans, blah, blah, Bush, blah, blah, Police State." This is more then a little annoying. Raves have been targetted federally by a bipartisan coallition led by Democrats. Yes, Virginia, Democrats have jack boots too.

In 2002 Democratic senators Biden, Leahy, and Durbin along with Republicans Grassley and Hatch proposed the Rave Act of 2002. Biden was the primary sponsor.

This law included a findings section, essentially a list of justifications, which is basically a collection of paranoid rantings that have little or no connection to reality. For example:

Many rave promoters go to great lengths to try to portray their events as alcohol-free parties that are safe places for young adults to go to dance with friends, and some even go so far as to hire off-duty, uniformed police officers to patrol outside of the venue to give parents the impression that the event is safe.

There is no way they might actually have a legitimate interest in hiring security guards!

Because rave promoters know that Ecstasy causes the body temperature in a user to rise and as a result causes the user to become very thirsty, many rave promoters facilitate and profit from flagrant drug use at rave parties or events by selling over-priced bottles of water and charging entrance fees to 'chill-rooms' where users can cool down.

You'd think maybe people who were dancing at an all night party would, you know, not want to drink a lot of alcohol, need bottles of water, and want to chill out, irrespective of whether or not they were on drugs, wouldn't you? Furthermore, I've been to a LOT of raves and I have never ever seen a separate fee charged for access to a chill room!

Apparently Leahy and Durbin dropped their cosponsorship, possibly when they started getting angry faxes. But Biden pushed on. He was joined by Presidential hopeful Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) and everyone's favorite Democratic Senator, Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). The thing was rolled up into s.151, an omnibus protect the children law that, among many other things, calls for 2-4 year prison terms for anyone who puts sexually explicit material on a "misleading" internet domain name. It is now law.

Now, yeah, people do drugs at Raves. Some aspects of the rave culture are drug related. However, the same thing can be said of any pop culture in the past 50-80 years including Rock, Jazz, HipHop, etc... These laws don't target drugs specifically. They target Raves. They specifically target culture.

When I left Atlanta in the late 90s there was a vibrant rave culture in the city with a real community that corrdinated online and threw parties. Its completely gone. There is nothing left but a few high priced clubs that play similar music. This website stub is all thats left of a once vibrant mailing list of people who threw parties on a regular basis that I participated in for years. The police wiped it out. They wiped out a culture. They did it with strong support from the Democrats.

Yep, the left side of the fence is guilty on lots of things like this. People forget that the PMRC came out of Tipper Gore. They've done all sorts of other stupid things too. Political Correctness came from the left. Hillary is currently leading the screaming about GTA:SA. None of those was a good thing. No one is especially innocent when it comes to the culture fight.

FOXNews.com - Views - Straight Talk - Raving Lunacy

Phone lines were bombarded with electronically generated calls, jamming lines set up for voters seeking rides to the polls on Election Day. Two GOP operatives have pleaded guilty in the case and a third is scheduled for trial.

There are reasons I don't trust the GOP. Subverting the deomcratic process and deliberate disenfranchisement are two of the bigger ones.

Grand Jury to Reconvene in Phone Jam Case

Chronology

Events surrounding the White House's role in the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent:

This is a nice layout of events. The next question is, what else isn't in here?

A CIA Cover Blown, a White House Exposed