For our "everybody's suing everbody over everything" files:
For our "everybody's suing everbody over everything" files:
The fall from grace in Washington of one of Indiana's own raises an interesting issue:
It's one thing for presidents to lie, but when the culture of deceit starts filtering down to dentists, we need to start being worried:
Last election, I forgot about the fact that they were putting multiple precincts in the same location and didn't get around to voting until I got off work. A lot of other people had put it off, too, so I was stuck in line for almost an hour. Today, I stopped on the way to work, and I was in and out in a couple of minutes. So do yourself a favor and vote early. Go now, in fact, to beat the lunch crowd. Hurry, hurry!
Another sign of the blazing speed of the information superhighway: 240 million years ago, a giant star exploded,
Astronomers identified the star as SN 2006gy. They estimated its size at more than 100 solar masses, which makes it one of the largest stars ever observed. The Milky Way, with a population of 400 billion stars, has only a few known to be as big.
You probably think the world should be made safe for children. Sill you -- the world should be made safe from children:
HAVING large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanour in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a big car and failing to reuse plastic bags, says a report to be published today by a green think tank.
For your next dinner party, you might want to duplicate this experience:
The menu and entertainment were designed as a showcase of America
The simultaneous existence of two separate sets of circumstances does not prove a correlation, so we should want to see a lot more evidence before we accept this possible link:
I don't want to hear any more answering-machine captures of celebrities calling their young daughters pigs. I don't want to see any more videos of celebrities crawling on the floor in a drunken stupor. When the Alec Baldwin tape surfaced, I didn't think too much about it. He's not one of my favorite movie personalities, and his angry outburst merely reinforced what I already thought about him. But then the video of David Hasselhoff surfaced, and it was such a creepy invasion of privacy that it made me think some more about Baldwin, too.
The Indianapolis Star's Dan Carpenter tries to push about every guilt button there is to make us understand what bad people we are for resenting illegal immigration (based, he says, "less on a purist reverence for the rule of law than on peculiarities of the people breaking it" -- so take that, all you racist nativists):
The Evansville Courier & Press has an interesting editorial about capital punishment that wonders, as I have, whether relatives of the victims really get "closure" when someone is executed after two decades on death row. The editorial focus on Nicholas Harbison, accused of killing three people in a corn field, who has agreed to plead guilty in return for not facing the death penalty:
If a doctor specialized in treating children's feet, would you call him a podiatrician or a pediatrist?
What? A poor, defenseless butterfly that the brutish federal government won't protect?
A butterfly found only at a popular Nevada recreation area is thriving and new efforts to protect its habitat are enough to keep it off the threatened or endangered species list, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said.
When it comes to smug, holier-than-thou liberals, nobody can hold a candle to Bill Moyers. But smugness has a blind spot, or at least a little willful amnesia:
In his public television special Buying the War, Bill Moyers decries the tendency of the media to help the White House sell war to the public.
Moyers should know. He was quite a salesman in his day.
Some sore losers at Oxford put forth this question for debate: "This House regrets the Founding of America." Relax -- you don't have to pack; the motion was soundly defeated. And, in this coverage, a British correspondent covering the U.S. for the folks back home comes up with one of the more eloquent defenses of the American idea I've read lately:
I swear to God Stonehenge, this is getting ridiculous:
For the second day in a row, a Hanover Central High School freshman came to school with pagan symbols sketched on her face and was sent home by school officials.
Hanover Superintendent Michael Livovich said the symbols on the girl's face are disruptive to the educational process, and she will be sent home each day if she refuses to wash them off.
[. . .]
We've just come off one of the biggest nanny-state sessions of the General Assembly in recent memory (buckle up!), and the Indianapolis Star clearly wants more:
No bringing your best friend as a date at this school:
Marian High School student Amanda Howe, 18, planned to bring Justine Werley, a 2006 graduate of the Catholic school, but was informed by school officials that she could not bring a same-sex friend to the formal event.
''We're not trying to go as a couple or anything,'' Howe said. ''So I don't see why they're having a problem with this.''
It's good for you. No, it's bad. Wait, it's good again:
Drinking coffee can help ward off type 2 diabetes and may even help prevent certain cancers, according to panelists discussing the benefits -- and risks -- of the beverage at a scientific meeting.
No matter what they finally decide, if they ever do, it's too late for me to think about giving it up. If nothing else, it's helps you pay attention to everything happening to your body, good and bad.
I still think this is a big mistake:
Indiana lawmakers are leading the way in a renewed push for a federal shield law that would protect journalists and their confidential sources.
In twin bills introduced Wednesday, Sen. Richard Lugar, R
