ABC News' Jonathan Karl reports:
What does it take to get a wavering senator to vote for health care reform?
Here's a case study.
On page 432 of the Reid bill, there is a section increasing federal Medicaid subsidies for "certain states recovering from a major disaster."
The section spends two pages defining which "states" would qualify, saying, among other things, that it would be states that "during the preceding 7 fiscal years" have been declared a "major disaster area."
I am told the section applies to exactly one state: Louisiana, the home of moderate Democrat Mary Landrieu, who has been playing hard to get on the health care bill.
THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. (AP) - A 39-year-old Southern California man has been arrested for misdemeanor child annoyance after allegedly paying a teenager $31 to spit in his face. The Ventura County Sheriff's Department says Charles Hersel was arrested Wednesday in a sting operation at a mall in Thousand Oaks. He's free from jail pending a court hearing.
A sheriff's statement says Westlake High School students claimed Hersel paid them to yell profanities, spit and slap him in the face. Several also claimed he offered them cash to urinate and defecate on him.
A motive wasn't clear. Read more
Irvin Rosenfeld, a 56-year-old stockbroker from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. will smoke his 115,000th marijuana cigarette Friday, a possible world record, and he can thank the U.S. government for his supply. Read more
A bloc of African American House Democrats, angry and worried that not enough is being done about high unemployment by the administration, forced the postponement of a much-anticipated vote Thursday on comprehensive financial regulation reform. Read more
I received this little gem by email. My reply follows: Traffic was moving slowly, and a car in front of us had an Obama bumper sticker on it. It read, PRAY FOR OBAMA: PSALM 109:8. My friend's bible was lying on the dashboard. He got it, opened it to the scripture, and read. He started laughing. Then he read it to me. I couldn't believe what it said. We both laughed. PSALM 109:8 reads "Let his days be few and let another take his office."
My reply was: Perhaps Obama should respond with PSALM 109:1-3:
"Hold not thy peace; O God of my praise;
for the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful are opened against me: they have spoken against me with a lying tongue.
They compassed me about also with words of hatred; and fought against me without cause."
And then I said...
If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. Read more
If you have a frequent flyer arrangement with virtually any of the airlines (who doesn't), you have received notification of the new program. The new requirements may not seem like much of a change, but this is only because of the incrementalism of the approach used by the TSA.
The actual legal history of fighting the TSA is actually very interesting. The analysis describes actual laws being broken by the strengthening TSA requirements. This is July, 2008, before any Secure Flight procedures. Read more
Climate sceptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists
Hundreds of emails and documents exchanged between world's leading climate scientists stolen by hackers and leaked online Read more
A Vatican researcher claims a nearly invisible text on the Shroud of Turin proves the authenticity of the artifact revered as Jesus' burial cloth. Read more
WASHINGTON -- For late-19th-century anarchists, terrorism was the "propaganda of the deed." And the most successful propaganda-by-deed in history was 9/11 -- not just the most destructive, but the most spectacular and telegenic.
And now its self-proclaimed architect, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, has been given by the Obama administration a civilian trial in New York. Just as the memory fades, 9/11 has been granted a second life -- and KSM, a second act: "9/11, The Director's Cut," narration by KSM.
That would be Tax Cheat of the United States.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is coming under new pressure from conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats to resign.
Reps. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) and Kevin Brady (R-Texas) this week joined a small group of lawmakers publicly calling for Geithner to step down. Former Republican Rep. Rob Simmons, who is challenging Sen. Chris Dodd (D) for Senate in Connecticut, has made Geithner's resignation a campaign issue.
In May 2008, Chicago Public Radio teamed up with National Public Radio (NPR) to produce an episode of the show This American Life called "The Giant Pool of Money." The episode garnered widespread praise and won several awards for explaining the subprime-mortgage crisis with clarity and concision. It was such a success that NPR created a podcast, Planet Money, featuring the same team of reporters and producers. Planet Money covered the financial collapse last fall and continues to file jargon-free reports on the economy three times a week.
Cosmic rayscharged particles that hurtle through space at nearly the speed of lighthave long baffled scientists. How do they acquire such tremendous velocities? Two new astronomical resultsone in this week's issue of Science and the other published online this month in Naturesuggest that the physicist Enrico Fermi nailed the answer 60 years ago: They get their oomph from exploding stars. Read more
"[Glenn Beck is] a lying sack of dog mess."
- Whoopi Goldberg
"Glenn Beck is a vampirea death lover' NEC-TECH-bot/bought!"
- Roseanne Barr
"Glenn Beck likes arguing, but has a deep-seated hatred for logic."
- Stephen Colbert
"Only in his wildest dreams could an actual suicide bomber hope to do as much damage to this country as Glenn Beck does every day."
- Keith Olbermann
"Glenn Beck is a half-informed radio blowhard."
- Vanity Fair
"Glenn Beck is an idiot."
- Discover Magazine
One of the worst abuses of the private health insurance industry is its practice of denying claims to pay for necessary care for patients. This practice has become so rampant in the industry that a recent study by the California Nurses Association found that a whopping 21 percent of all insurance claims filed in the first half of 2009 in the state of California were denied by insurers. Read more
It goes without saying that there's no smoking in class. But there is a good deal of sniffing of leaves, discussion of the finer points of inhaling and debate over which plant gives the biggest hit.
Welcome to Detroit's cannabis college, recently opened with courses on how to grow marijuana and harvest, cook and sell it too after Michigan legalised the drug as a medicine.
Students get instruction from horticulturalists, doctors and lawyers as well as hands-on experience cultivating plants and guidance on how to protect their stash from the criminal element. Read more
