mjh's blog

The Sun Stands Still (but not for long)

It’s minutes until sunset and already 8 hours past the moment of the solstice. Think of the sun at the top of a 47 degree arc, sliding now towards the bottom in mid-Winter.

It is interesting to read that this is mid-summer’s eve and, in some cultures, the *last* day of summer. A special day, any way you look at it. Darkness and cold loom — seeming a long way off, like death to a teenager. And then, light and heat again — a resurrection we witness but are denied. A cycle so long it seems never-ending, though even it will someday. mjh

Snake Handlers

Our neighbors called yesterday early evening to say a snake was on their porch. We ran across the street to find J using a push-broom to sweep a 3+ foot long brown and yellow snake away from the house. It moved like a wave in front of the broom. J & S hate snakes; S wouldn’t come out of the house. I heard fear more than hatred in J’s voice. I took a couple of photos that turned out blurrier than a hummingbird’s wing. Then I used the broom to sweep the snake away from J & S and towards the street. Certain it wasn’t a rattler, I grabbed it from behind as close to the head as I could. It was strong as it coiled up tight against my arm. But it stopped struggling and stayed like that for the next half hour as we discussed what was best for it. The irony was I had a great photographic subject wrapped around my picture-takin’ arm. So Mer took a few. (J & S will never look at us the same after this.)

In all likelihood, it was a bull snake (or gopher snake). However, it never hissed or struck at anything, so I suspect it might have been an escaped pet — especially since we’ve never seen a snake in our mid-town neighborhood. We have experience handling a python, so we weren’t afraid. (Though I was less comfortable when someone said bull snakes have a strong bite.)

We decided we should release the snake in the foothills, but by then it was too dark. We put the snake in a pillowcase sealed with a couple of clothespins. Then we put the pillowcase in a plastic tub 6 inches deep. This morning, I looked in to see the snake coiled and still quite calm. About a half hour later, I heard a plastic cup fall over on the counter. The snake had moved — pillowcase and all — out of the tub and onto the counter, knocking over the cup. I put it back in the tub.

We drove to the foothills and walked a less-used trail a ways before striking off cross-country a short distance. Mer picked a spot near a big fractured rock with shrubs — lots of places to hide and hunt. My turn to take pictures of Mer with the snake and the city stretching away in the background. She put it on the ground and it moved magically under a shrub and vanished. Perhaps it will starve. Perhaps it will feed that roadrunner with the heavy beak we saw — or an owl, or another snake. With a 20 year lifespan, perhaps it will outlive us. I hope it remembers us, as we will it. Happy 1st day of summer to us all. mjh

PPS: I’m struck by the synchronicity of this incident from a few days before our snake encounter. I was spinning the dial and paused briefly to watch Franklin Graham eulogize his mother. He said that as a boy, he and his brothers loved to kill snakes — rattlers, any kind of snake. One particularly good summer, they killed over 70 snakes. He spoke with pride to an appreciative audience that smiled and chuckled. I wondered what kind of religion produces such a man. God bless the atheists.

See Merri’s Save A Snake for Humanity

http://merridancing.com/wp/2007/06/save-a-snake-for-the-universe/

[mjh: With the help of a friend, I heard from UNM biologist Howard Snell. This is an excerpt from his email.]

It isn’t a good idea to move [snakes] very far as they then encounter areas that they don’t know and often die as a result of not “knowing” where to find water, shelter, and prey.

If you think the snake has been in captivity it is important not to release it in the wild. Snakes in captivity can come down with diseases & parasites (often caught from other individuals in captivity) that can then be transferred to wild snakes upon release of the previous captive.

Sunday Christians and Pretend Hunters

Sunday Drivers – Los Angeles Times, by Dan Neil

The pre-race activities of the Indy 500 and Coca-Cola 600 were all about the troops. In addition to the usual F-22 flyovers and color guard presentations, Lowe’s track director “Humpy” Wheeler arranged for the U.S. Army to “secure” the front stretch of the racetrack, with troops in full battle rattle, armored personnel carriers, helicopters and a Howitzer. Eight Nextel Cup race teams surrendered $8 million in advertising when they repainted their cars with military-themed graphics as part of an “American Heroes” program. In the money-obsessed world of NASCAR, this was no empty gesture.

Perhaps I was the only one made uncomfortable by this welding of sport and militarism, but it seemed at times I might have been watching the German Grand Prix of 1938. It also seemed to me more than a touch neurotic. It’s possible that, given the fool’s errand on which we have sent our military in Iraq, we feel we can’t say thank you enough, nor can we bring ourselves to say the obvious and more appropriate thing: We’re sorry.

And yet, for all the troop-honoring and American hero worship, the U.S. public is astonishingly illiterate about Memorial Day, which is officially observed on the last Monday in May. ….

The United States wrestled with Sabbatarianism through the latter half of the 19th century and well into the 20th century, but by the 1950s, the Puritan Sunday had given way to enormous pressures for leisure, entertainment, commerce and sports. Particularly sports. Harline begins and ends his book [Sunday: A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl] with Super Bowl Sunday, an event that in its rituals, prayer breakfasts, helmeted heads bowed during the invocation, represents the sacralization of the secular. NASCAR too has its showy effusions of pre-race piety that innoculate it from charges of sacrilege. Thank God and Goodyear.

According to a 2006 Pew Forum survey, 60% of white evangelicals—an audience not unknown to NASCAR—believe the Bible should have more influence on U.S. laws than the will of the people. But are they willing to live by that? If they check their Deuteronomy, they’ll see racing on Sunday is not allowed. The same goes for football, baseball and golf.

It is a curious corner of the American character that allows people who neglect the simplest conventions of patriotism to wrap themselves in the biggest flag imaginable, that permits people who couldn’t name the Ten Commandments at gunpoint to swear they are the divine law of the land.

We’re a deeply patriotic and religious people. Just don’t bother us with the details.

[read it all (free LATimes account may be required)]

[mjh: Cleanse your palate before you read this bonus Neil.]

A Nation Wallows – Los Angeles Times
Dan Neil
June 17, 2007

There once was a pig named Fred who came to a very bad end in Alabama, as I suppose all pigs in Alabama do. Fred was 6 weeks old when he was purchased by farmer Phil Blissitt in 2004 and given as a Christmas gift to his wife, Rhonda. This brings us to the first of this story’s many truisms: Christmas sucks in Alabama.

For 2 1/2 years, Fred was a happy pig. He would play with the Blissitts’ grandchildren and the family Chihuahua. Fred liked sweet potatoes, according to an AP story, and that may have been his undoing. For Fred grew large, more than 1,000 pounds and perhaps 9 feet long, with huge tusks jutting like Ka-Bar knives from his endlessly rooting maw. Dear, sweet, saber-toothed Fred started to worry the Blissitts, so one spring day, Phil sold him to the Lost Creek Plantation, a private, fenced-in reserve where he would be free to gambol and play, until he was shot.

Which, only days later, he was, and with extreme prejudice too. On May 3, 11-year-old Jamison Stone, hunting with his father and three rifle-toting “guides,” killed Fred with a .50-caliber handgun, shooting the erstwhile pet half a dozen times and chasing it for three hours around a 150-acre enclosure surrounded by a low fence. The trophy picture—of young Jamison posed with his apparently VW-sized quarry—exploded across the Internet, while the story made headlines around the world. “Jurassic Pork,” the New York Post slyly offered.

I smelled a large dead pig the moment I saw the picture. First, the now-famous picture of Fred and Jamison —one chubby and overfed, and the other a pig—used a common trophy-picture trick of having the animal much closer to the camera than the hunter, thus making the animal appear larger. I used to edit a hook-and-bullet magazine and, believe me, hunters and fishermen use the forced perspective gambit more than Roger Corman.

Second, no foraging wild boar gets to be 1,000 pounds. Only a domestic pig—and one fed generously with agricultural feed, table scraps and fast-food leftovers—can pack on that kind of weight. Domestic pigs do frequently get loose and, in the wild, revert to a lean and feral state. The most frightening thing about Fred is that he might be the half-ton, hormone-laced canary in America’s dietary coal mine.

The Stones claimed they thought they were hunting a feral hog, but come on. Fred might as well have been wearing a rhinestone collar. …

[A]s the Fred episode fairly illustrates, hunting today is a sick satire of the sport as it was in the days when Teddy Roosevelt took to the field. The number of hunters is declining rapidly, for all the reasons you’d expect. Increasingly, hunting is confined to private game “reserves” that cater to well-to-do sportsmen, a reversion to the royal game lands of England. In these confined areas, the principle of fair chase is a joke. …

And so at the intersection of our reckless meat-based food system, our swinish media obsessions, our weird nostalgia for tradition-affirming blood lust, there lies an enormous dead pig. What a country.

[read it all (free LATimes account may be required)]

Criminally Stupid

Lucky Jason Daskalos has been exonerated of charges of drunken and reckless driving. When cops and rich people fight, I’m inclined to cheer them both on from the sidelines.

I recognize that a jury hears more than I do as a casual newspaper reader and, further, has a duty to deal with the charges at hand, so I don’t second guess them. Still, let us now imagine how the evening Lucky Daskalos was arrested would have gone if the cops hadn’t nabbed him. By his own testimony, Daskalos, a self-professed wanna-be racecar driver, may have sped ‘a little’ and rolled through a stop sign in his powerful Porsche to a friend’s house to play poker. Upon arriving, he admits in his own defense that he chugged two vodkas in 20 minutes, having had wine earlier that evening. Now, let’s dream that he would have stopped right there and had not another drop (ha!). In the real world, he was legally drunk hours later. In this dream world, what would have happened? Would he have jumped into his Porsche and driven home legally drunk? Oh, I know! His good friend, who got him drunk, would have called a cab for him. Yeah, right.

Mind you, jurors should not convict people for alternate scenarios. However, Daskalos was a drunk with a killing machine that night. After the trial, I’m sure he celebrated “justice” with at least one vodka. He’ll be in the news again. I hope he’s the only one he kills. mjh

ABQjournal: Daskalos Cleared of DWI Charge By Lloyd Jojola And Jeff Proctor, Journal Staff Writers

“I feel great,” Daskalos said after a round of exuberant hugs with family members in the courtroom. “I feel wonderful. I never had any doubt. … I feel like the truth came out today.”

Daskalos took the stand in his defense Friday …

He wasn’t traveling at the high speed the officer said he was, Daskalos said. He wasn’t chased through the neighborhood, he said, and he didn’t speed through a stop sign.

“I did roll the stop sign,” he admitted.

Daskalos told jurors he had a glass of wine with dinner three or more hours before, but no other alcoholic drinks until having two vodka and cranberry drinks after arriving at an acquaintance’s Vista del Norte home for poker night. …

Assistant District Attorney Allison Michael pointed out that Daskalos told two officers that he had not been drinking, even though that was not the case even by his own testimony. He was, as she charged, trying to stick with that story at that point.

She got him to admit that he could have been exceeding the speed limit in the subdivision.

The day included testimony from Jason P. Gross, the resident of the home where Daskalos was arrested. He, among other things, said Daskalos had two drinks at his house before the alarm to his car sounded, and Daskalos was confronted by police.

http://www.abqjournal.com/news/metro/571443metro06-16-07.htm

mjh’s blog — Idiot on Board

“In the past 18 years, Daskalos, who also is an amateur race car driver, has been issued 36 other traffic citations, 20 of which were dismissed.”

http://www.edgewiseblog.com/mjh/loco/idiot-on-board/

Alibi Short Fiction Contest

I didn’t submit anything to the Alibi’s short fiction contest this year, so I feel particularly free to say they made terrible choices for 1st and 3rd place (which is a ripoff of a well-known Twilight Zone). My selections are from the Honorable Mentions. mjh

mjh’s 1st: “Second Impulse”

If only the dog hadn’t died. But there was the new neighbor, digging frantically in the secluded corner behind his shed, trying to bury Fido before the family returned to wail over his act of vehicular homicide.

Any minute he would unearth the human skeleton. There would be no wallet, no clothing, no dentures to find; but the bones would reveal the congenital limp. That was always the worst of an impulsive murder. It was so hard to dispose of all the evidence permanently.

Now there was no choice. The unlucky neighbor would have to disappear. An offer to help, a blow from a second shovel. Nothing could be easier.

Only, where would she hide the body?

—Thayla Wright

mjh’s 2nd: “Small Print”

Unceremoniously, the Build-a-Universe kit arrived, crammed into my mailbox, displacing my cat Schrödinger from her favorite sleeping place.

The super-stringed box, labeled with my assumed name Ima Godd, magically unfolded itself at my first touch.

Astoundingly revealed were quantum baggies full of pin-wheeling plastic galaxies, fuzzy balled proto-stars, shrink-wrapped neutron stars, and a dark, sucking bundle of black holes.

Following the instruction book, I Hawking-blended all those ingredients into a cosmic soup.

But time stood still when I read the manual’s last line that froze everything at T minus zero entropy–“Big Bang not included.”

—John Orman

mjh’s 3rd: “Dreams”

The little girl dreamed of having a cat, ballet shoes, flawless skin, and her first school dance. As a collegian she dreamed of straight hair, iambic pentameter, and roaring lions on the steps of the White House. Then came the dream of the perfect soufflé and a baby supported by Ken, the perfect man. (This led to fantasies involving the mailman.) Following were visions of saving polar bears, going vegan, and educating the masses. World peace was in there somewhere.

Now she keeps it simple. She dreams of dancing the tango. And sex—coming out of nowhere sex—unexpected, intense, dripping, and hot—with a stranger. Saving the polar bears is still in there somewhere.

—Judy Garner

mjh’s Honorable Mention: “Not Art”

Dru catches fairies and bakes them into cakes. It’s not an art, she says, it’s a science. She wakes up early and stalks through the garden. The best fairies come out early. Who would want to eat those lazy fairies that only wake up at noon, to drag themselves out and slouch from tulip petal to tulip petal? No. That’s like buying Hershey’s chocolate when you know you could drive downtown and get the good German stuff for just a few dollars more. Only 2 a.m. fairies are cake-worthy. She grinds them into the batter, juices them into the frosting, decorates the top with their crunchy little bones. “Delicious.” She licks her fingers. “Science,” she says. “Not art.”

—Sara Cordova

alibi . june 14 – 20, 2007

http://www.alibi.com/index.php?story=19383&scn=feature

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[mjh: Until next year, I leave you with my entries from yesteryears:]

2006: mjh’s blog — I Submit

http://www.edgewiseblog.com/mjh/uncategorized/i-submit/

2004: mjh’s blog — Ridiculously Short Fiction

http://www.edgewiseblog.com/mjh/mine/ridiculously-short-fiction/

Welcome to Denver, er, Dallas, er, who cares?

We need to get our act together NOW to restrict skyscrapers to specific areas. I can live with downtown as a sacrifice zone, but monster-buildings outside of that basin are a sharp stick in everyone’s eye. The vista is doomed. Someone is going to get rich ruining Albuquerque. mjh

Proposed 30-story Albuquerque high-rise would be tallest in N.M. By Erik Siemers

In what could be the first significant change to Albuquerque’s skyline since 1990, a developer is proposing a 30-story high-rise condominium development on the west end of Downtown.

The estimated $175 million project, called the Residences at Packard Place, would be the tallest building in New Mexico, eclipsing the 22-story Albuquerque Plaza office building Downtown. …

The Downtown project isn’t the only high-rise being conceptualized in the city.

Local commercial development company Chant Associates is working on a project that could bring a 25- to 30-story mixed-use high-rise to the corner of Jefferson Street and I-25, where Johnny Carino’s Italian restaurant used to be.

http://www.abqtrib.com/news/2007/jun/15/proposed-30-story-albuquerque-high-rise-would-be-t/

How long before Lucky Jason Daskalos gives into penis envy and builds something even bigger. He’ll put a bar at the top so he can get higher than anyone in New Mexico. And a ramp for his Porsche. mjh

Oops. Oh, Hell, Everyone Makes Mistakes.

We’re not “playing god” with DNA. We’re playing “not-too-bright kindergartener with razor blades.” All around the globe, people are actively manipulating genes just as top scientists say, “hey, who knew? ”

My hope is that one of our inevitable blunders in genetic manipulation wipes out humankind. My respect for irony makes me fear we’ll wipe out everything else. Buy more guns today! mjh

Intricate Toiling Found In Nooks of DNA Once Believed to Stand Idle By Rick Weiss, Washington Post Staff Writer

The first concerted effort to understand all the inner workings of the DNA molecule is overturning a host of long-held assumptions about the nature of genes and their role in human health and evolution, scientists reported yesterday.

The new perspective reveals DNA to be not just a string of biological code but a dauntingly complex operating system that processes many more kinds of information than previously appreciated.

The findings, from a project involving hundreds of scientists in 11 countries and detailed in 29 papers being published today, confirm growing suspicions that the stretches of “junk DNA” flanking hardworking genes are not junk at all. But the study goes further, indicating for the first time that the vast majority of the 3 billion “letters” of the human genetic code are busily toiling at an array of previously invisible tasks. …

Complicating the picture, it turns out that genes and the DNA sequences that regulate their activity are often far apart along the six-foot-long strands of DNA intricately packaged inside each cell. How they communicate is still largely a mystery. …

“There’s a lot more going on than we thought,” said Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, the part of the National Institutes of Health that financed most of the $42 million project.

“It’s like trying to read and understand a very complicated Chinese novel,” said Eric Green, the institute’s scientific director. “The take-home message is, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is really complicated.’ “

Makes You Wonder

Here are two headlines that really need to be seen together. mjh

FBI Finds It Frequently Overstepped in Collecting Data

FBI SEEKING TO CREATE CONTROVERSIAL SIX-BILLION RECORD DATABASE

In the name of fighting terrorism, the FBI is seeking to create a new $12-million data-mining program that “bears a striking resemblance” to the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program. Documents predict that this new program “will include six billion records by FY2012. This amounts to 20 separate ‘records’ for each man, woman and child in the United States.” Citing the FBI’s “track record of improperly — even illegally — gathering personal information on Americans,” House Science and Technology Committee members Brad Miller (D-NC) and James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) requested last week that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigate the proposal. In 2005, the GAO found that the FBI’s Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force did not comply with all privacy and security laws. Earlier this year, an Inspector General’s report found that the FBI had repeatedly violated regulations while using National Security Letters to “obtain the personal records of U.S. residents or visitors.” In addition, an internal FBI audit published today by the Washington Post found “that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years.” “[T]wo dozen of the newly-discovered violations involved agents’ requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have.” These repeated violations of federal law are made worse in light of the fact that such data mining techniques have yet to be proven effective in counter-terrorism operations. A recent Cato Institute study found that programs similar to this new FBI program are likely do little but “flood the national security system with false positives — suspects who are truly innocent.”

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/progressreport/2007/06/worst_fears.html

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FBI Finds It Frequently Overstepped in Collecting Data, By John Solomon, Washington Post Staff Writer

An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.

The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau’s national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI’s domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.

The Paragon of Animals

He was so very old, having outlived family and friends. How many miles he’d traveled, no one could know. He had seen so much change — for the worst. Whether or not it was really “his time to go,” he was slaughtered by a gang of heartless, mindless killers. In a world soaked in blood, blinded by a spectrum of cruelty and violence, choked with the nausea from limitless abuse and inhumanity, his death breaks my heart — again.

If there ever was a god, he killed himself or walked away in disgust. mjh

Whale found with 19th-century weapon in neck, By Erin Conroy, Associated Press

BOSTON — A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago. Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale’s age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old. …

“It probably hurt the whale, or annoyed him, but it hit him in a non-lethal place,” he said. “He couldn’t have been that bothered if he lived for another 100 years.” …

The 49-foot male whale died when it was shot with a similar projectile last month, and the older device was found buried beneath its blubber as hunters carved it with a chain saw for harvesting. …

“We didn’t make anything of it at the time, and no one had any idea about their lifespan, or speculated that a bowhead could be that old,” [some idiot] said.

It is a measure of our indifference that the tone of this article is of amazement, not guilt. Look! We finally got him! Hey, he couldn’t have been hurt so bad — he lived another century. For all we know, he ached every day of that 100 plus years. Regardless, it’s over now. Someone got a museum piece, a moment in the news, a bowel movement. mjh

“What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!”

– Hamlet (II, ii, 115-117)

Remembering Duhbya (spit on the ground)

Eugene Robinson – Fleeting Glory in Albania

The report was done for the Council of Europe by Swiss legislator Dick Marty, and its opening paragraph is worth quoting at length:

“What was previously just a set of allegations is now proven: large numbers of people have been abducted from various locations across the world and transferred to countries where they have been persecuted and where it is known that torture is common practice. Others have been held in arbitrary detention, without any precise charges leveled against them and without any judicial oversight. . . . Still others have simply disappeared for indefinite periods and have been held in secret prisons, including in member states of the Council of Europe.”

…

This, I am convinced, is how future generations will remember George W. Bush: as the president who abandoned our traditional concepts of justice and human rights, choosing instead a program of state-sponsored kidnapping, arbitrary detention and abusive interrogation techniques such as “waterboarding.” …

We will remember this whole misguided administration for deciding to wage the fight against terrorism in a manner that not only mocks our nation’s values but also draws new recruits to the anti-American cause. We will remember this White House for unwittingly helping the terrorist cause perpetuate itself.

Judges Preserve the Constitution

Judges Rule Against U.S. On Detained ‘Combatant’ By Carol D. Leonnig, Washington Post Staff Writer

“The President cannot eliminate constitutional protections with the stroke of a pen by proclaiming a civilian, even a criminal civilian, an enemy combatant subject to indefinite military detention,” the panel found. …

The 4th Circuit, based in Richmond, is considered one of the most conservative in the country, but the three-judge panel that heard the case was not. Two judges known as moderates, both appointed by President Bill Clinton, made up the majority in the decision. … U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson, a Bush appointee, dissented from the opinion. Hudson contended that Bush had the power to detain enemy combatants ….

The panel found that the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which prohibits enemy combatants from challenging the basis for their imprisonment in U.S. courts, does not apply to a person living legally in the United States. The judges also doubted the legality of classifying someone as an enemy combatant who was not caught on the battlefield or was not carrying arms.

Civil libertarians who championed Marri’s case had warned that if the administration prevailed in its argument, the military could next round up U.S. citizens and jail them without trial. The court appeared to agree.

“To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians . . . would have disastrous consequences for the constitution — and the country,” U.S. Circuit Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote for the majority.

The World is Dying to Congratulate the Groom

So, all our expensive, intrusive security efforts are for naught, not to mention the “greatest health care system in the world.” Truth be told, I understand. Human endeavors are inevitably fraught with human failings. No system is foolproof.

But what a fool Patient Zero — Mr. Speaker — is. Or thinks we are. Look at the steps he took to make sure he got his honeymoon no matter what. I can’t think of someone who zigzags like he did, even driving across the border, rather than fly, as a mere innocent. He’s a selfish fool who is now doing a great job of making himself sound like the victim in the process. He sincerely hopes procedures are improved thanks to this. Like arresting TB patients? Not that I’d wish TB on him for his selfishness. I just wish he’d say, “hey, I thought I deserved a last fling before treatment.” Selfishness is human; lying makes it worse.

I recommend you rent Twelve Monkeys, a brilliant movie with a very interesting intersection with this story. mjh

CDC: Staffer focused initially on public health, not jet, By ALISON YOUNG, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Speaker has said that he never would have left the United States for his long-planned wedding in Greece and honeymoon around Europe if he had been told he was a threat to anyone. He said Fulton County health officials, who had been overseeing his TB case since January, told him he was not contagious.

http://www.ajc.com/health/content/health/stories/2007/06/05/0605meshcdc.html

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TB Patient Denies Running From CDC

The globe-trotting tuberculosis patient now in quarantine insisted to Congress on Wednesday that doctors told him he wasn’t contagious and didn’t order him to stay in the United States for treatment — even as health officials painted a picture of a man on the run.

“I didn’t go running off or hide from people. It’s a complete fallacy, it’s a lie,” Andrew Speaker, a 31-year-old Atlanta lawyer, said by telephone from the Denver hospital room where he remains in government-ordered isolation.

But in testimony to a Senate subcommittee, federal and local health officials said Speaker took an international flight two days earlier than planned after he had been told he had a drug-resistant form of TB and should not travel.

Fulton County health officials told Speaker, “No you should not travel,” said Dr. Steven R. Katkowsky, the health department’s director. “Was he ordered not to travel? The answer to that was no. The local health department does not have the authority to prohibit or order somebody not to travel.”

Speaker’s European wedding and honeymoon travel caused an international health scare. But Speaker told senators that in face-to-face meetings to discuss his treatment options days before he left, no doctors even wore masks.

“I was repeatedly told I was not contagious, that I was not a threat to anyone,” Speaker said.

His medical chart says he was told that “he was not highly contagious,” Katkowsky countered.”

http://www.11alive.com/news/article_news.aspx?storyid=98145&provider=top

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Letting Speaker back into the country wasn’t the only slip: He shouldn’t have been allowed out, either, said the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But after talking with local health officials on May 10, Speaker changed his flight reservations to leave the country two days earlier than originally planned, said CDC chief Dr. Julie Gerberding — a step ahead of doctors who, under Georgia law, couldn’t detain him until it was demonstrated that he was a danger.

“The whole issue of quarantine has been devoted to keeping people out. It is the first time have had to address keeping people in our country,” she said.

That was among a series of gaps Gerberding identified in the Senate subcommittee hearing in the nation’s public health security. Another: Once the CDC tracked Speaker down in Italy to tell him he had the worst TB form — a rare type resistant to most drugs — officials didn’t immediately ask Italian authorities to detain him, but asked him to voluntarily turn himself in.

“We gave the patient the benefit of the doubt, and in retrospect we made a mistake,” Gerberding said.

Instead, Speaker flew to Canada on May 24 — potentially exposing other passengers sitting near him on the plane — and then drove across the border into the U.S., despite a lookout alert issued to all border posts.

Paranoid, Trigger-happy Christian Cowboys

Haven’t we had enough bravado and “bring ‘em on!”? Doesn’t a willingness to start a nuclear war disqualify someone from election? Why not? mjh

Nuking Iran: The Republican Agenda?, William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security

Rep. Duncan Hunter of California was the starkest: “I would authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons if there was no other way to preempt those particular centrifuges,” he said. Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said he believed that the job “could be done with conventional weapons,” but he added that “you can’t rule out anything and you shouldn’t take any option off the table.” Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore also left “all options are on the table” with regard to Iranian nuclear weapons. Said former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney: “I wouldn’t take any options off the table.”

After the debate, former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee, who did not particpate, added his name to the list of candidates who would consider a preemptive attack against Iran.

Only Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, the “Dennis the Menace” of his party, said he opposed a nuclear strike on moral grounds and because he believed Iran “has done no harm to us directly and is no threat to our national security.”

The Iraq war and the war against terrorism are the central battles of our time, these candidates say. They all profess their faith in God and the United States, and speak of a moral struggle between good and evil, between the United States and “radical Islam.” Yet they are not willing to say that nuclear weapons have no place in modern confrontations.

I am not arguing that Iran’s effort to develop nuclear weapons is justified. It isn’t. I am saying, however, that the U.S. should not use its nuclear weapons to threaten Iran. And not just from a moral standpoint, but from a practical one: When we brandish our own nuclear arsenal, we only play into the hands of supporters of Tehran’s plans to develop its own.

Oh, god, Not Another Actor in the White House

I think we all know who is going to win the Republican nomination: another goddamn actor. How much more evidence does the nation need that the GOP is out-of-touch? mjh

McCain Sets Self Apart in Debate By Dan Balz and Michael D. Shear, Washington Post Staff Writers

Actor and former senator Fred D. Thompson (Tenn.), who is exploring a presidential bid, did not participate in the debate but used the moment to launch his campaign Web site.

Immediately after the debate, he appeared on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes.” Thompson said he would support a preemptive strike against Iran to knock out its nuclear capability and accused Democratic candidates of speaking in decade-old “cliches” about the challenges facing the country.

Asked about his previous statements that he had never hungered to run for president, Thompson said, “More and more, I wish that I had the opportunity to do the things that only a president can do.” [mjh: yeah, like nuke any country you want. No actor has ever gotten to do that, though Raygun came close.]
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Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) remains on top, but his support has slipped to 23%. That’s down two points from a week ago and is his lowest level of support all year. Earlier, Giuliani had consistently enjoyed support in the mid-30s. That was before Thompson’s name was added to the mix and before Giuliani stumbled on the abortion issue in the first GOP debate of the season.

Thompson, who just formed an exploratory committee and is the newest face in the race, immediately moved into second place. With 17% support, he is within six points of the frontrunner. That’s closer than anybody has been to Giuliani in 20 consecutive weekly polls. Thompson is also competitive in a variety of general election match-ups with potential Democratic nominees.

Among men, Thompson earns 21% support while Giuliani attracts 20%.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/2008_republican_presidential_primary