(CNN) -- A Missouri VA hospital is under fire because it may have exposed more than 1,800 veterans to life-threatening diseases such as hepatitis and HIV.
John Cochran VA Medical Center in St. Louis has recently mailed letters to 1,812 veterans telling them they could contract hepatitis B, hepatitis C and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) after visiting the medical center for dental work, said Rep. Russ Carnahan.
This is a f'ing tragedy, but it's typical of any Government bureaucracy, ineptitude, mismanaged, hideously expensive failure making mistakes that have fatal consequences for the victims of Government sponsored neglect.
Very cool story with pictures about being recruited by Fender to bring his hotrod to the 2010 Crossroads Blues Festival, complete with backstage pass...
Obama has been in office roughly a year and a half. That’s long enough to get a handle on what motivates our president. He’s pretty binary. When he’s not partying with rock stars, he’s either apathetic or angry.
I've just returned from my annual pilgrimage to northern New Hampshire to fish with my friend John. Driving up on Wednesday I found John at the camp and we walked in on the FFO section of the Androscoggin River in Errol and fished. Quite honestly the fishing was atrocious, there was no insect activity, no fish were showing and I managed a couple of small salmon and a 8" brook trout.
Thursday we met our guide Ken in Colebrook, NH by mid morning and he took us on a 12 mile drift down the Connecticut River. Neither John nor I had much experience on the Connecticut and I was surprised to find that the river is mostly slow water fishing. There were some fish showing at the put in and we managed a couple of small rainbows on caddis emergers. As we headed down the river the weather kept changing from hot and humid to cold and rain and back again. It seemed like as soon as we were too hot and took off the rain jackets it'd cool off start to rain again. The weather was keeping the fish down. Ken worked his tail off changing out our flies and working the boat but the fish just weren't cooperating. About 6PM it started to rain quite hard and Ken switched me up to a small streamer and I had some fast action as long as the rain was heavy but didn't catch any large fish. Despite the unfavorable fishing the trip was enjoyable and I learned a good deal about the river.
Ken shows off a small trout
Wednesday evening John and I fished the Magalloway river just below the dam on Aziscohos Lake. The river there drops 250 feet in 2 miles and it's quite steep so fishing it required a bit of scampering about the rocks and boulders along the shoreline. There were mayflies, caddies, and stoneflies hatching in great numbers and John seemed to do well with an elk hair caddies but I didn't hook up at all. Still it was a great night to be out and fishing in such a beautiful location.
Anyone who thinks that Romney is a conservative needs to consider this; he's a Republican elected as Governor in one of the most liberal states in the US, Romney is about as conservative as your average centrist democrat.
Let this be a lesson in just how bad 'mandatory' insurance is
Two additional articles that sum up the fail that is Mitt.
The Republican contender was the governor of Massachusetts from January 2003 to January 2007. And during that time, according to the U.S. Labor Department, the state ranked 47th in the entire country in jobs growth. Fourth from last.
Mitt isn't a conservative and he might have been a great businessman but he's a lousy Government bureaucrat. Under his leadership Massachusetts economy didn't improve at all and he left them saddled with a failing health care experiment that's destroying coverage for those who had it.
God knows that the constant repaving of our roads has given reason to driver frustration and cynical comments like "repair season" which is apparently 8-9 months a year here in Maine. I agree with this guy that the current technology is antiquated. The useful lifetime of asphalt and the cost of repairs is certainly driving taxes ever upward.
I'd suspect that the paving industry will object to wide scale adoption of this type of technology since road repairs is a multi billion dollar industry; one that is likely rife with payoffs, ripoffs and fantastic profits for those on the inside.
I have reservations as to the reliability of the entire LED light scheme; the LED lights that I've purchased, flashlights, desk lighting etc. have all had failure rates that disappointed me. I don't understand how the LEDs in my appliances, TVs, guitar gear and so on can last for decades but an LED flashlight develops issues in less than a year. I had purchased some nice LED lights to go under the shelving on the hutch of my home office desk and almost every single one failed within 3-4 months and the replacements have also failed. I also note that Lowes no longer carries that light fixture anymore. Perhaps it's just cheap construction.
I also have questions about how well this road will respond to the winters of the north, will they buckle when the temps swing 50 degrees in a day? How will they withstand the salts, the snow plows, chains on tires, studded snows?
Still it's an off the grid idea and I think we need to encourage more of that type of thinking.
If you're a fan of Beck then this CD needs to find a place in your collection. Opening with the haunting Corpus Christi Carol Jeff provides the kind of unpredictable noodling that has made him one of the world's foremost guitarists. Joss Stone joins for an interesting version of I Put A Spell On You as well as Theres No Other Me.
Also joining in for vocals are Imelda May on Lilac Wine and Olivia Safe on Elegy For Dunkirk.
President Obama's choice to be the next director of national intelligence supported the view that Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq sent weapons and documents to Syria in the weeks before the 2003 U.S. invasion.
OMG! Someone who believes that Iraq had WMD, that they sent them to Syria before the war started. There's tons of other testimony to this fact.
The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.
The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, "Saddam's Secrets," released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun.
"There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands," Mr. Sada said. "I am confident they were taken over."
Mr. Sada's comments come just more than a month after Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam "transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria."
Other users noted that Syrian journalist and human rights activist Nizar Nayouf told the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf in 2004 that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein smuggled his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons into Syria just prior to the United States' invasion of Iraq in 2003.
It's been reported in the western media that an investigation showed that no such transfer took place yet that's not really what the reports said:
It seems to be commonly accepted that Iraq did not have WMDs at all. The intelligence was obviously flawed, but the book has not been closed on what actually happened. The media blasted the headline that Charles Duelfer, the head of the Iraq Survey Group tasked with finding out if Saddam had WMDs, concluded that a transfer did not occur. In reality, his reportsaid they were “unable to complete its investigation and is unable to rule out the possibility that WMD was evacuated to Syria before the war” due to the poor security situation.
Where there's smoke there's usually a fire. The left will continue to deride this story and shout "no blood for oil" but the facts are that Saddam once had WMDs. Not all were accounted for during the UN inspections. The question is still valid, where did they go? Did Saddam destroy them? Unlikely. Are they still buried in Iraq or were they moved to Syria?
Ernst Rhome is that you? What a great idea! Let's make our political opposition illegal and jail those who embrace those ideas. Democrats like Grayson do not believe in our political system and they're working to dismantle it. Is it any surprise that this guy is a strong supporter of this President and his administration full of incompetent thugs? Demogauges like Grayson are a clear danger to our republic.
It began with a bridge. On the morning of March 1, a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated on Tarnak River Bridge near Kandahar, Afghanistan, killing multiple civilians and one American soldier. While the destruction of a single bridge might ordinarily pose a mere inconvenience to the U.S. war machine, in the oppressive terrain of Afghanistan it became a logistical chokepoint, halting ground-based operations for days.
War correspondent Michael Yon sought the answer to an uncomfortable question: who was responsible for the security of that bridge?
Yon is no ordinary reporter. A former Green Beret with U.S. Army Special Forces, he has spent more time embedded in Iraq and Afghanistan than any other journalist. His dispatches have produced some of the most memorable combat narratives of the war, and a large share of its most iconic images. Make no mistake; Michael Yon is not a dispassionate observer of the Columbia J-School variety. When writing about U.S. forces, he says "we." When writing about insurgents, he calls them terrorists or Taliban. And when reporting failures in the war effort, he names names. This has earned him both the respect and ire of senior military staff. In the case of the Tarnak River Bridge, the name most repeatedly mentioned as responsible for its security was Daniel Menard, the Canadian brigadier general in charge of Task Force Kandahar. Yon went public with this information
I've long been a fan of Yon's coverage, he's the best, one of the sources I trust the most. This is a great article that explains much of how Yon came to lose his embed. I fear that Yon is correct and that we're about to throw the war in Afghanistan. Read the rest of this fine article here:
PORTLAND, Ore. -- Gary Pfleider II served his country for six years before he became a member of the new generation of disabled veterans.
Pfleider, a former Oregon National Guard soldier, was shot by a sniper while on patrol in Iraq in September 2007. He has only vague memories of the event, but now must live with a permanent reminder -- a brace he'll have to wear on his leg for the rest of his life.
"I remember grabbing a hold of my leg, and realizing I had blood on my hands," he said. "And from that point on until I got loaded onto the Stryker was just a big blur."
Three days after he was shot, Pfleider received a Purple Heart.
Almost two years later, he received a bill from the military for missing equipment.
The sum of the bill, which includes interest, is $3,175. It itemizes a list of gear the military issued to Pfleider that did not come back with his unit in 2008. The lists includes clothing items, canteens and grenades.
Steve Goddard over at Whats Up With That has a nice article about how the arctic sea ice has recovered to where it was about 10 years ago. It's well worth a look.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves. -
William Pitt 1783
Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort. - Robert Heinlein
Young Fish
If anyone knows what type of plane I was in please let me know!
I like beer, NO I LOVE BEER! I like wine too, and cranberry juice, and girls, and guitars and playing the blues. I'll stop before the list gets too long.
When I find a beer I like I'm going to review it here.
Now despite the fact that I LOVE BEER and the fact that I LOVE microbrews that are brewed in the wonderful State of Maine, not one of the Maine microbreweries has offered to pay me, or even send me a free six pack of beer to get a review. It approaches certainty that they don't know I and this blog exist.
Anyone who reads a review of beer posted here can be assured that I actually drank that beer, and if I liked it my review will say so; conversely if I didn't care for the beer, my review will also state that. I might even elaborate on either theme, as appropriate.
In closing I'd like to say to the FTC, go regulate someone else. My only compensation in reviewing beer is that I got to drink and it then pontificate about it to my heart's content.
Oh and one more thing, if I start talking about a guitar I like, all the above applies to that as well. In fact no one is paying me to say anything at this time. Should that change I'll update this notice.
