The State Of Our Union In 2006....

DEMOCRATIC RESPONSE TO THE PRESIDENT'S WEEKLY RADIO ADDRESS

JANUARY 21, 2006

SPEAKER: U.S. SENATOR HARRY REID (D-NV), SENATE MAJORITY LEADER

REID: Good morning. I'm Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic Leader of the United States Senate.

I went to college in the 1960s and studied government. I remember discussing a quote by Lord Acton -- "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely."

It's been many years since I graduated college, but I finally understand what Lord Acton meant.

Republicans today control the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House. They have absolute power, and it has corrupted their Party and led to the culture of corruption that we now have in Washington, DC.

[The Huffington Post | Raw Feed]

Read the whole thing. History has taught us what happens when politicians reach for and gain absolute power. Millions die. Why in the world do conservatives, who have always been afraid of Big Government, sit still or actually cheer on the ower grabs. How can they stand the idea of a Unitary Executive? An efficient government is usually one that is totalitarian. beware when politicians yearn for efficiency. They usually gain it by destroying human rights.  11:14:08 PM    

Naval Ships' Sonar Killing Thousands Of Whales, Possibly Disoriented Thames Whale....

Secret sonar from naval ships is killing thousands of whales around the world and could have disoriented the two-ton mammal that died last night after becoming stranded in the Thames, an investigation by The Independent on Sunday has established.

The northern bottlenose whale died despite dramatic attempts at a rescue witnessed by thousands of people on the banks of the river, and millions on television. The whale was lifted on to a barge and carried down the river, in the hope that it could be taken to the open sea. But its condition deteriorated, it began to suffer muscle spasms, and it died before anything further could be done.

[The Huffington Post | Raw Feed]

ANd our government has political appointees who remove information connecting sonar and whale beachings from reports. See, removing the information makes the facts just disappear. Wish it was that easy! there are lots of things in the world I'd like to remove by just ignoring them. I guess this is just another example of the decline of America.  11:09:13 PM    

OA medical images. MedPix is a new OA database of medical images. For details see yesterday's press release:

MedPix is a free online Medical Image Database, provided by the Departments of Radiology and Biomedical Informatics, Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, MD. All public content is peer-reviewed by an Editorial Panel. All contributed content may be copyrighted by the original author/contributor. MedPix provides the indexing, storage service, and bandwidth as a public education service. Individuals as well as institutions may participate. Our primary target audience includes resident and practicing physicians, medical students, nurses and graduate nursing students and other post-graduate trainees. The material is organized by disease category, disease location (organ system), and by patient profiles. The database can be searched through multiple internal text search engines. In addition, search formulations can be sent directly to PubMed, or to other outside search engines with just ONE CLICK. Registered users may browse the image database through a "slide sorter" module. Contributed content may be copyrighted by the original author/contributor and is used with their permission.

By noemail@noemail.org (Peter Suber). [Open Access News]

Pretty cool teaching device, as well.  3:22:49 PM    

2005 set to be second hottest year on record. LONDON (Reuters) - 2005 will be the second or third warmest year on record globally, Britain's national weather service said on Friday, as climate concerns build among people in polar and low-lying areas and in the insurance and utility industries. [Reuters: Science]

Global warming is pretty well proven. Maybe some people could discuss just how much human influences are invilved but maybe we should start thinking what the long term effects will really be and start doing something to deal with the detrimental ones. The main reason to think that humans are a large part of global warming is that it implies that we may be able to remove that and ameliorate the effects. But, no matter what, the world is getting warmer. So deal with it.  3:21:22 PM