• Health

    Medical Scans Can Set Off Airport Security Alarms

    Oooopsssss, you are not a terrorist, just someone with a recent medical scan. The BBC has the story.

    Over 18 million scans using radioactive versions of common elements are carried out in the UK each year.

    They include tests of the thyroid gland, bone, and blood flow to the heart muscle.

    Professor Richard Underwood, of London’s Royal Brompton Hospital, said the side effects should be made clear.

    Patient information cards could lessen the impact of such false alarms and avoid unnecessary interrogations by airport security personnel

    Professor Richard Underwood

    He called for patients to be issued with standard information cards about their scan if it made use of radioisotopes.

    The Lancet piece highlights the case of a 55-year-old commercial pilot referred for cardiac investigation.

    Doctors carried out a scan using a radioisotope of the element thallium.

    Two days after the scan the patient travelled to Moscow as a crew member.

    While passing through customs, the radiation detector alarms were triggered, and the patient was detained for questioning.

    After extensive interrogation, he was released, but experienced the same problem at the same airport four days later.

    Eventually the airport security officials gave him a card to carry while travelling that explained his scan was to blame.

    So, what are you waiting for……….GET the CARD.

  • Politics

    Move America Forward.org: “I LOVE AMERICA” ART EXHIBIT

    This coming Thursday the heated political debate surrounding an art exhibit co-sponsored by State Attorney General Bill Lockyer will intensify when conservative opponents of the Lockyer-sponsored exhibit put on their own, counter exhibit.

    The Sacramento-based pro-military non-profit group, Move America Forward, has announced it is teaming up with Sacramento talk show host, Mark Williams of KFBK 1530, to put on an “I Love America” art exhibit and rally.

    Organizers say they want to showcase a pro-American display of art because they feel the artwork hanging from the walls of the California Department of Justice is anti-American, anti-military, anti-Christian and anti-Semitic.

    About time!

    Read the Move America Forward.org news release here.

    Read it all!

    The “I LOVE AMERICA” art exhibit will be featured in front of the California Department of Justice building (located at 1300 I Street in Downtown Sacramento) from 3:30 PM to 10:00 PM this Thursday, July 28, 2005. The pro-American art exhibit will be directly in front of the offensive exhibit on display on the first floor of the California Department of Justice building.

    Additionally hundreds of people are expected for a pro-America rally that will take place simultaneous to the art exhibit.

    The rally will take place in front of the California Department of Justice building at 1300 I Street in Downtown Sacramento (corner of 13th and I streets).

    Participants are invited to bring American flags, and signs showcasing their support for our troops and America’s heritage of democracy and liberty.

    “We want to send a message heard round the world that Americans stand united with our troops and the fight against terrorism. And we want to make it very clear that those who constantly howl about how bad they think our nation is are but a very small minority,” Melanie Morgan said.

    The event will also be carried live on KFBK 1530 AM in Sacramento from 7:00 PM until 10:00 PM on Thursday, July 28.

  • Humour,  Politics

    Cashing in on Karl Rove: CafePress.com

    HT: Aaron’s CC

    Well, at least someone is making a go over Karl Rove.

    Michelle Malkin has it right,

    The Left may be overboard on the Plame thing. But I don’t want Karl Rove’s name or face on anything I wear or drink out of, you know what I mean?

    karlmug.jpg

    Nothing insidious here….. but it is quite funny.

    Aaron has CafePress Offically a Tool of the Democratic Party: Today’s CafePress Merchant Newsletter About Karl Rove.

    California Conservative has Is CafePress.com Politically Biased?

  • Media

    Los Angeles Times: Michael Kinsley is OUT

    Michael Kinsley, the Seattle based, but Los Angeles Times Editor of the paper’s editorial and opinion-pages is apparenly OUT. The Editor and Publisher has Kinsley Expected to Lose Top Edit Page Post, But Remain at ‘L.A. Times’.

    The Los Angeles Times’ Michael Kinsley is currently in negotiations to change jobs, a move that will likely end his brief but eventful tenure as the paper’s editorial and opinion-page editor. Although details of his new position have yet to be finalized, Kinsley is expected to remain at the paper as a columnist and may handle some Web site duties, according to a source at the Times and a report in Tuesday’s New York Times.

    The New York Times has Kinsley Plans to Change Jobs at The Los Angeles Times.

    Michael Kinsley, the provocative editorial and opinion-page editor of The Los Angeles Times, said yesterday that he would be changing jobs in the next few months and most likely would no longer be running the department. He will not necessarily leave the editorial page, he said, but his new role is still being worked out.

    “It’s a very complicated arrangement I have, and not all aspects are working as well as others,” Mr. Kinsley, 54, said in a telephone interview yesterday from Seattle, from which he commutes to Los Angeles every other week.

    “This living in Seattle and editing the editorial page is not an ideal arrangement,” he said. “It’s not ideal for me and it’s not ideal for the paper. I don’t think it’s terrible. I think I’m doing a pretty good job. But that’s the one thing that is not working out, so we’re going to try to fix it.”

    Mr. Kinsley, who was hired in April 2004 from the online magazine Slate, is in discussions with the new publisher of The Los Angeles Times, Jeffrey M. Johnson, about his future.

    Flap has enjoyed reading Kinsley’s columns and his television work for years. But, let’s be honest…. he SUCKED with the Los Angeles Times as an Editor.

    The Times deserves a full time California-based Editorial and Opinion editor.

    If Kinsley were to devote himself to upgrading the newspaper’s on-line presence and new media technologies he would not have to make the grueling commute to Los Angeles from Seattle every other week.

    Writing and the new media will probably be the best roles for him.

    Patterico has Michael Kinsley Leaving L.A. Times.

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  • Liberal Morons,  Media,  Morons,  Politics

    Paul Begala: “Republicans don’t want to kill us. They just want to lie about us”

    Cybercast News Service has a follow-up to this FLAP that was carried here (Paul Begala: Going Howard Dean), Begala Now Says Republicans Want to ‘Lie About Us’.

    Liberal television pundit and Democrat political strategist Paul Begala has used a liberal blog to try to refute a Cybercast News Service story that quoted him as saying Republicans wanted to kill him and his children to preserve tax cuts for the rich.

    Begala’s latest commentary appears on the “Campus Progress” blog.

    “Republicans don’t want to kill us. They just want to lie about us,” he wrote. The Campus Progress blog belongs to the group that sponsored his appearance at the July 13 first-ever Campus Progress National Student Conference in Washington, D.C.

    “Imagine my surprise in returning from taking my boys fishing with their grandfather in a remote mountain village in upstate New York to find I’d accused the Republicans of wanting to kill us,” Begala stated on the blog.

    “But, of course, the Republicans don’t want to kill us,” he said. “They just want to lie about us. In large ways and small, that’s what they do.”

    Liar! Liar! Pants on fire.

    It reminds me of the Bush T-shirt.

    I thought that the Moveon.org folks asked them to put away these shirts, so that they could look mainstream – like us.

    As Cybercast News Service previously reported, Begala’s remarks at the Campus Progress National Student Conference were designed to provide campus liberals with the tools necessary to fight the conservative movement.

    Writing on the Campus Progress blog, Begala explained that “when the matter of national security came up (at the conference), I repeated an argument I’d made scores of times on television and in speeches — that the terrorist threat is, in fact, very real.

    “I concluded with the observation that, perhaps if the terrorists killed me, the Republicans would want my children to take comfort in knowing they won’t have to pay any tax on the money they’ll inherit.”

    However, a transcript of Begala’s July 13 remarks indicate that he said the following:

    “I was driving past the Pentagon when that plane hit” on Sept. 11, 2001. “I had friends on that plane; this is deadly serious to me,” Begala said.

    “They want to kill me and my children if they can. But if they just kill me and not my children, they want my children to be comforted — that while they didn’t protect me because they cut my taxes, my children won’t have to pay any money on the money they inherit,” Begala said. “That is bulls*** national defense, and we should say that.”

    In the blog response to the Cybercast News Service story that quoted him, Begala explained: “Rather than clearly delineating between Republicans and terrorists, I’d referred to each as ‘they’ — in very different contexts.

    Begala conceded that, “I did use the pronoun ‘they’ without a clear antecedent.” He apologized to a former high school teacher, who Begala stated had taught him sufficiently for him not to make such a grammatical slip.

    “But no one — not one of the hundreds of people in the room had a hard time distinguishing between ‘they,’ the terrorists (who want to kill us) and ‘they,’ the Republicans (who’d rather cut taxes for the rich than do all we must do to defend America),” Begala added on the Campus Progress blog.

    Begala stated that he was “amused” to see his July 13 remarks get so much attention on the Internet.

    He wondered why the conservative bloggers who reacted to the Cybercast News Service article “could be such dunderheads — or so duplicitous” and “that they have such a low image of themselves that they would think that anyone would confuse them with terrorists.”

    David Thibault, editor-in-chief of Cybercast News Service, said readers “should not be fooled” by Begala’s attempt to clarify his remarks.

    “This is all about Begala trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube,” Thibault said. “There was nothing unclear about what Begala said, and he, as a pundit, should know that words matter. We quoted him accurately. We even ran the quote in its entirety as a video clip on our website.

    Indeed, toothpaste back in the tube.

    I guess the comments will continue from these morons.

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