Eideard

A man has pleaded guilty to … driving his pimped-up La-Z-Boy chair while drunk.

Dennis LeRoy Anderson, 62, attempted to travel home from a bar in Proctor, Minnesota, in the comfort of his motorised reclining seat after drinking several beers.

On the way he crashed the chair, which was powered by a lawnmower engine and had its own steering system, into a parked car….

The luxury chair, which could reach top speeds of between 15 and 20mph, was even customised with a stereo and cup holders.

Related Link: This coveted item is going up for auction.

While doing this post, I also ran across La-Z-Boy spas and La-Z-Boy races. This is indeed God’s Land-O-Plenty.

A fleet of old, rotting warships shedding toxic paint into the water near San Francisco Bay will be cleaned up and recycled under a new plan announced by federal officials.

Deputy Secretary of Transportation John Porcari said the government has already awarded contracts to dispose of two World War II-era cargo ships from the Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet.

The group of more than 70 mostly obsolete vessels in Suisun Bay has been at the center of a nearly three-year deadlock between state water regulators and the federal government, which manages the fleet.

Porcari said the ships will be cleaned in dry-dock — not in the bay — alleviating state officials’ concerns about additional water pollution…

California officials fought a Bush administration plan to clean the ships where they were anchored, arguing that the process would cause paint laden with heavy metals to flake off into the bay. They also filed suit against the federal government claiming the paint flaking off the ships as they idle put the fleet in violation of the federal Clean Water Act.

You know how much cooperation that got from the Compassionate Conservatives.

Of the 57 ships slated for the scrap heap, Porcari said the 25 most decrepit vessels would be disposed first. The process would take several years owing to the limited space in dry-dock facilities, he said…

The country’s three major reserve fleets, including one in Beaumont, Texas, and another near Newport News, Va., were once maintained to return to active duty in case of war or disaster. Over time, many ships fell into disrepair and became a financial and environmental burden.

In Suisun Bay, the aging hulks tied together in rows have become a landmark visible from a heavily traveled commuter bridge. They are known together as the “ghost fleet” or the “mothball fleet.”

It’s bloody depressing to reflect upon the fact that the several decades of my life have mostly been lived inside the belly of the beast that threatened as much of the world as it pretended to protect. Preparation for foreign war It has always been so important to our economic barons that we’ve maintained floating scrapheaps like this – “just in case” – of what?

Just in case our benevolent leaders decided we need to ship tens of thousands of our soldiers abroad to kill hundreds of thousands of people trying to live out their own lives in a land not so “enlightened”.

The Senate voted Thursday to extend new federal protections to people who are victims of violent crime because of their sex or sexual orientation, bringing the measure close to reality after years of fierce debate.

The 68-to-29 vote sends the legislation to President Obama, who has said he supports it.

The measure, attached to an essential military-spending bill, broadens the definition of federal hate crimes to include those committed because of a victim’s gender or gender identity, or sexual orientation. It gives victims the same federal safeguards already afforded to people who are victims of violent crimes because of their race, color, religion or national origin.

“Hate crimes instill fear in those who have no connection to the victim other than a shared characteristic such as race or sexual orientation,” Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said afterward. “For nearly 150 years, we have responded as a nation to deter and to punish violent denials of civil rights by enacting federal laws to protect the civil rights of all of our citizens.”

Ten Republicans voted for the hate-crimes measure.

A fitting memorial to Matthew Shepard – beaten and murdered by bigots.

From the early 1930′s, Republicans had a better voting record on civil rights than did the Dems. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 wouldn’t have made it through Congress without the participation of Everett Dirksen. There is no Republican in Congress, today, with that commitment to justice and the American people.

Staging raids in 19 states, the Justice Department struck this week at one of Mexico’s most ruthless drug-trafficking organizations, a cultlike group known as La Familia Michoacana and notorious for beheading its enemies.

Calling it the largest strike ever undertaken against a Mexican drug cartel, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced the arrests of 303 people in the past two days, the latest action in a four-year investigation.

Law enforcement officials said the arrests and indictments would deal a major blow to a distribution network that trucked methamphetamine and cocaine to major cities in the United States, then sent cash and arms in the other direction.

La Familia controls much of the drug traffic in central Mexico and terrorizes the population there, the authorities said, torturing and killing their enemies, including police officers, and leaving the bodies in public with cryptic religious messages saying the dead suffered divine retribution.

“The sheer level and depravity of violence that this cartel has exhibited far exceeds what we, unfortunately, have become accustomed to from other cartels,” Mr. Holder said. He added: “While this cartel may operate from Mexico, the toxic reach of its operations extends to nearly every state within our country…”

In addition, Mr. Holder said, the authorities have seized more than $32 million in American currency, 2,700 pounds of methamphetamine, 2,000 kilograms of cocaine, 16,000 pounds of marijuana and 29 pounds of heroin. More arrests are expected.

“More arrests are expected.” One would hope.

Love the movie. Love the clip.

Is anyone doing Balloon Boy costumes for Halloween?

Anders Wejryd (L), Lutheran archbishop leads press conference
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The Lutheran Church of Sweden – the country’s largest – is to conduct same-sex marriages from next month.

Around 70% of the church’s 250-strong synod, or church board, voted to back the move, making it one of few global churches to allow gay marriage.

Sweden’s government introduced a new law in May allowing gay couples the same marriage rights as heterosexuals.

Individual priests will not be “forced” to perform same sex ceremonies, though substitutes will have to be found if they refuse.

Sweden’s largest gay rights group, the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights (RFSL), welcomed the move: “[We] congratulate the Church of Sweden for its decision. [The church's] homosexual and bisexual members will finally be able to feel a little more welcome within society,” the group said in a statement.

Sweden was one of the first countries to give gay couples legal “partnership” rights, in the mid-1990s, and to allow gay couples to adopt children from 2002.

It become the fifth European country, after the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Norway, to recognise same-sex marriage.

My guess is that well over half the industrial, urbane, educated nations on Earth will recognize same-sex marriage ahead of the United States of America.

This judge wouldn’t allow a confession from the real killer

Two men are expected to be released after spending 12 years in prison for a murder they did not commit, the latest in a string of exonerations in Dallas County. Like most of the other wrongful convictions, these cases also hinged on faulty eyewitness identification.

Unlike most of the previous 20 Dallas County exonerations, however, these two were cleared without DNA evidence.

The most recent cases also are unusual because two student groups, the University of Texas at Arlington Innocence Network and the Actual Innocence Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin, championed the case for years before law enforcement officials re-examined the case.

Nothing unusual about that. Even for Texas. The history of American Justice is filled with prosecutors and judges who will admit to no mistakes or prejudice.

Two other men in custody, who were also originally investigated, are now suspects in the killing. Authorities say one of them gave a detailed confession to the crime after the case was reopened.

Claude Alvin Simmons Jr., 54, and Christopher Shun Scott, 39, were each sentenced to life in prison for the April 7, 1997, shooting death of Alfonso Aguilar during a home-invasion robbery. Their convictions were based primarily on the eyewitness testimony of Aguilar’s wife, Celia Escobedo, who was present in their Love Field area home when the killing occurred.

That identification was mistaken, said Mike Ware, head of the Dallas County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit.

“Procedures were used that we would now consider faulty,” he said, noting that when Escobedo went to the police department, “because of a series of mishaps she was taken past one of the individuals who ultimately was convicted in this case, who had been taken down for questioning.”

When Escobedo saw the man sitting in a room in handcuffs, she identified him as one of her husband’s assailants…

I guess I should be more positive about the apparent turnaround in police procedures in Dallas. Two things comes to mind: [1] How many more innocent people remain in jail and [2] given Texas politics, it’s entirely possible the good that has been done could be brought to a shuddering halt by any election.

I’m not certain what this says about the constitution of Windows 7 – but, it doesn’t lend much confidence about heart health in Japan.

The influenza-like illness that we track with our ILInet sentinel provider system is showing higher levels of illness than we saw last week. Again, these are unprecedented levels of illness. The national average is about 6.1% of doctors visits, for purposes of influenza-like illness that’s very high at any time particularly in October. We also track mortality around the country. Through something called the pneumonia and influenza mortality survey with 122 cities. And for the first week this fall, we’re seeing that the amount of influenza and pneumonia mortality is above the epidemic threshold. All of these things may suggest it’s a very busy and difficult flu season and we are seeing very high levels of activity around the country. We are also having updates on the pediatric deaths. Unfortunately those are going up as well…

We hope that the continuing deaths in children will be as few as possible but this is a very brisk number, usually in a whole season that lasts from going to September all the way to may, you would only have about 40 or 50 deaths so in just one month’s time we’ve had that many…

Overall, fewer than half of Americans (47%) say that they would get the swine flu vaccine if it was available to them; an identical percentage says they would not get the vaccine. A clear majority of Democrats (60%) say they would get the swine flu vaccine if it was available, compared with 41% of Republicans and the same percentage of independents.

It might seem like Democrats are more inclined to trust this government, and that the anti-Administration bent of right wing nutters is taking a toll. After all, there’s a partisan edge to this:

More than half of Republicans (54%) say news reports are overstating the swine flu’s danger, compared with 42% of independents and just 35% of Democrats…

Sometimes, it’s true, those concerns go beyond any appeal to reason. They grow out of a visceral mistrust of authority in general – and of government, regulatory agencies, medical researchers and multinational pharmaceutical companies, in particular. A sophisticated anti-vaccine movement has emerged that plays on this wariness, and helps to feed the conspiracy theories about the H1N1 vaccine that are circulating on the Internet and in viral e-mails…

If you’re still on the fence and are too lazy to check any of the peer-reviewed science, here’s a decent editorial piece about the myths and reality.

My own seat of the pants reckoning – just following the stats in New Mexico and Texas communities – is that the death rate among children is running 4 to 8 times higher than the usual flu season. Does killing your own kids qualify you for a Darwin Award?

Federal agents seized computers, papers, books and electronic equipment from the home of a former Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear scientist, who last year sought to work on a fusion project with Venezuela but believes the U.S. government is wrongly targeting him as a spy.

P. Leonardo Mascheroni told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his home that four FBI agents searched his home for 13 hours. The agents, he said, led him to believe they were investigating him for espionage.

“I am not a spy,” Mascheroni said. “If I were a spy, a long time ago I would have gone away from the United States with all my knowledge. Instead, I stay in my house all the time and am working all the time and presenting all the time to Congress. Is that what a spy does?”

FBI spokesman Darrin Jones confirmed the agency is pursuing an “ongoing investigation” in Los Alamos, but declined further comment Wednesday. No charges have been filed against Mascheroni.

Meanwhile, Mascheroni’s wife, Marjorie, a technical writer at the lab, was placed on administrative leave while the lab conducts an internal investigation, according to the lab.

P. Leonardo Mascheroni joined the Northern New Mexico lab in 1979, and worked in its X Division, which designs nuclear weapons, until 1987. He was laid off in 1988.

Lab spokeswoman Lisa Rosendorf said he lost his job during layoffs that were prompted by budget cuts, but his supporters at the time said he was blackballed by the lab.

Mascheroni’s pet project is using a hydrogen-fluoride laser to generate a fusion reaction. He’s followed a dogged path trying to convince US government agencies to get his method a trial.

That’s the sum total, folks.