CARBONDALE, Ill. Southern Illinois University is rolling out a public-awareness campaign about the hazards deer pose to humans, and it apparently couldn't come at a better time. A year ago, deer threatened or injured at least seven people on the university's Carbondale campus during fawning season. Now with fawning season soon to reach its peak campus police say three people were injured by a female deer Tuesday.
Deer, why do they hate us?
The latest victims were pedestrians on a path along Campus Lake, near the school's law building. Police say they received minor injuries. A university worker sustained a gash on her forehead that required stitches. A student got a scratched jaw, while another worker escaped with a sprained wrist, cuts and bruises. Experts blame much of the problem on protective mother deer.
Posted by: Steve ||
05/24/2006 14:34 ||
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#1
Yeah, when the Flordia 'Gators year of poaching so far this year had racked up 3 humans the other week, someone pointed out the deer had hammered 14 since the beginning of the year. Bambi, Creature of Peace[tm]. Yeah, we've seen that before.
#2
Cervidae 'activists', Steve? Next you'll be labeling them 'militants', which is utter nonsense. They're really cervid freedom fighters, conducting legitimate resistance operations against the hominid oppressors. Some of them are even carrying the original keys to their occupied forest homes.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
05/24/2006 20:33 Comments ||
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#6
front grill of your pickup....
Posted by: Frank G ||
05/24/2006 20:42 Comments ||
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#7
A university worker sustained a gash on her forehead that required stitches. A student got a scratched jaw, while another worker escaped with a sprained wrist, cuts and bruises. Experts blame much of the problem on protective mother deer.
Despite his low approval numbers, the vice president attracts the party faithful to events across the state for three GOP House candidates. Impartiality . . . LA Times style
SAN DIEGO His former top aide is under indictment in the CIA leak probe. His poll ratings fall somewhere between bad and atrocious. Still, Dick Cheney can pack in the faithful like few others in the Republican Party.
And so the vice president came to California on Monday and Tuesday for a series of fundraisers aimed at bucking up three GOP House candidates facing unexpectedly tough fights in this political season of scandal. Democrats were delighted.
Touching down in Sacramento, Stockton and San Diego, Cheney flew as far below the figurative radar as Air Force Two would allow. His appearances were either closed to the media and public, or conducted in lightning-strike fashion.
On Monday night in Stockton, at the Bob Hope Theatre, Cheney materialized from behind a dark curtain, then swiftly disappeared after delivering 15 minutes of workmanlike remarks on behalf of Rep. Richard W. Pombo of Tracy.
On Tuesday in San Diego, Cheney ducked in and out of a Brian Bilbray fundraising lunch without ever sitting down, much less eating.
But the vice president's furtive movements didn't stop protesters from gathering outside each appearance, or keep the state Democratic Party from issuing a series of snarky bulletins tracking Cheney's "Culture of Corruption Tour."
"It's sort of a trifecta of Washington's biggest ethics problems coming together," said Bill Burton, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, referring to the Abramoff, Cunningham and Plame affairs, which served as the unheralded backdrop for Cheney's visit.
Pombo and Rep. John T. Doolittle of Roseville, the vice president's Sacramento host, each collected tens of thousands of dollars in contributions from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his associates. Bilbray is vying on June 6 to fill the congressional seat vacated by Randy "Duke" Cunningham, now serving an eight-year prison stretch for taking bribes. Although still uphill for Democrats, the three congressional seats are considered the most likely in California to slip from the GOP's grasp.
Not surprisingly, the names Abramoff and Cunningham never passed the vice president's lips, nor did Valerie Plame's. (The unmasking of the former CIA operative is at the heart of an ongoing criminal investigation that has implicated Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.)
Instead, Cheney stuck to his practiced role as administration cheerleader and stiletto-wielding partisan. He lauded the economy's performance under President Bush and said the country had become a safer and stronger place thanks to Bush's "sound decisions" over the last five years. He called the administration's warrantless wiretapping program "absolutely vital in saving American lives."
And he all but accused Democrats of lending aid and comfort to terrorists, saying advocates of "a sudden withdrawal from Iraq are counseling the very kind of retreat that Osama bin Laden has been predicting and counting on."
The response was strikingly subdued, given the loyalties of his audiences. In Stockton, there were cheers and whoops as Cheney reeled off a tickertape of upbeat economic statistics. But his lengthy defense of the war in Iraq, his insistence that "we are on the offensive" and "have a clear plan for victory," was met with nearly complete silence.
The response was identical at Tuesday's fundraiser in San Diego, though Cheney received a warmer reception earlier in the day when he addressed hundreds of sailors and Marines on the flight deck of the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard. "We are going to stay on the offensive and stay in the fight until the fight is done," the vice president told the cheering crowd.
Opinion polls place Cheney's approval rating from 34% in the last Gallup Poll to 20% in a CBS News survey the latter figure worse than President Nixon's showing when he quit the White House amid the Watergate scandal.
The numbers suggest more than Democratic discontent. Indeed, several of those who came out over the last two days said they did so mainly to support Pombo or Bilbray, who unlike Doolittle opened their fundraisers to reporters.
Asked his opinion of Cheney, Richard Solarz, a 58-year-old physicist who lives in Pombo's district, replied: "Ummm Uh " He gripped his chardonnay. He paused. "I wish we weren't in Iraq," he finally said.
But Cheney's popularity or lack thereof is largely immaterial to his own political fortunes. His name is nowhere on the November ballot, try as Democrats might to make the midterms a referendum on the Bush administration and he says he has run his last race.
Rather, cash was the main purpose of his trip, as even a local pastor said in Monday night's invocation.
"Lord, tonight's all about raising money," said Brent Randall Regnart of Stockton's Christian Life Center, as he sought Jesus' blessing for Bush, Cheney and Pombo and thanked the Lord for those paying upwards of $500 a head to glimpse the vice president.
Although Democrats took great glee in sniping at Cheney, "At the end of the day, each of these California candidates is going to sock a lot of money in the bank, which they'll be able to spend in the fall at a time when voters are really paying attention," said Scott Reed, a veteran GOP strategist in Washington.
According to spokesmen for the three congressional campaigns, Cheney's visit brought in well more than $800,000.
#1
But the vice president's furtive movements didn't stop protesters from gathering outside each appearance, or keep the state Democratic Party from issuing a series of snarky bulletins tracking Cheney's "Culture of Corruption Tour."
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) -- A mock evacuation that was supposed to be part of a two-day statewide hurricane preparedness drill was canceled after a misunderstanding about who had jurisdiction over a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer park. The two-day statewide drill that began Tuesday was aimed at avoiding the chaos that followed last year's deadly Hurricane Katrina, which hit the state Aug. 29 and killed more than 1,000 people. The drill is expected to continue Wednesday.
The mock evacuation was to take place in the state's largest FEMA trailer park in Baker, 10 miles from Baton Rouge. The park has more than 500 camper-style travel trailers that house about 1,500 people displaced by Katrina. Officials are concerned about the safety of travel trailer residents in rough winds. There are more than 200,000 people statewide living in unfinished homes and mobile trailers.
But the Baker evacuation was canceled because of an apparent communication breakdown, said JoAnne Moreau, director of the East Baton Rouge Parish Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. "We were unable to get any information from the state or federal government on what policies or procedures were for evacuating those sites - whose jurisdiction it was," Moreau said. "We're very disappointed we didn't get to work with the people who live on the trailer site."
After the parish canceled the drill, FEMA asked park management to drive around the park with bullhorns and simulate an evacuation notice, according to Tony Robinson, response and recovery director for FEMA Region 6, which includes Louisiana. Baker Police Chief Sid Gautreaux said that evacuating the people in the trailers is a problem because residents are not allowed to have land-based telephone lines, their cell phones do not have good signals and a majority of them do not have transportation.
In New Orleans, dozens of make-believe evacuees boarded evacuation buses while state and federal officials in Baton Rouge planned to reroute traffic and call up the National Guard as a fictitious "Hurricane Alicia" swirled in the Gulf of Mexico. As the drills got underway, "Alicia" was less than two days away after taking a somewhat erratic and unpredictable path in the Gulf of Mexico and building to dangerous Category 3 strength.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco threw officials at the state Office of Emergency Preparedness in Baton Rouge a curve - adding a scenario in which a nuclear power plant north of Baton Rouge caught fire, forcing the closure of U.S Highway 61 as an evacuation route. Bar-coded wrist bands and computers will help officials keep track of evacuees.
Last year, as Hurricane Katrina approached, thousands of New Orleans' poor were left behind because they had no transportation, could not afford to leave or did not know where to go. The Louisiana Superdome and the convention center became shelters of last resort where thousands sweltered for days, suffering through shortages of food and water. Mayor Ray Nagin has said there will be no shelters in the city this time.
Scientists predict the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season, which begins June 1 and runs through November, could produce 16 named storms, including six major hurricanes.
Posted by: Steve ||
05/24/2006 11:05 ||
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#1
A mock evacuation that was supposed to be part of a two-day statewide hurricane preparedness drill was canceled after a misunderstanding about who had jurisdiction over a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer park.
Sounds like a success to me. It points out where the problems are. That's the beauty of drills - you get do-overs.
#2
Yo, man! Can I borrow one of them National Guard trucks? I wanna practice gettin some...ummmmmmmmmmm...national security documents...outta my freezer.
Posted by: Rep. William Jefferson ||
05/24/2006 11:22 Comments ||
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#8
Must mean RUST-GATE, those 00's/hunnerts and zilnerts of FEMA trailers that went unused and allegedly "un-needed" or "not needed" post=KATRINIA by the City of NOLA and the great State of Louisiana.
Political rumors are nothing new, but one about a Muslim candidates chances among Jewish voters in District 19 is drawing fire from all sides. There are a lot of subterranean prejudices rolling through this campaign, Del. Henry B. Hank Heller (D-Dist. 19) of Leisure World said. That bothers me.
The anonymous rumor, or whisper campaign, as some describe it, speculates that Guled Kassim, a candidate for one of three District 19 delegate seats in the Democratic primary, will turn off Jewish vote because he is Muslim.
District candidates are lining up in opposition to what they describe as an offensive rumor that smacks of intolerance and fails to give voters credit. Im a member of a minority and I hate to hear that about anybody, said retiring Sen. Leonard H. Teitelbaum (D-Dist. 19), who is Jewish. It smacks of bigotry.
Kassim, 30, came to the United States from Somalia with his family in 1985. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps after becoming a naturalized United States citizen.
Refugee from Somalia who served in the Marines and wants to be part of the system? I like him already. Wonder if he'd like to be a Republican?
The rumor surfaced early on, Kassim said, when he was considering his candidacy. Instead of the whispers, I would love to get direct questions, he said. I would love to answer them directly.
The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, an umbrella group for regional Jewish communities and organizations, has denounced the rumor. I think the rumor is without any credibility whatsoever, executive director Ron Halber said. Its preposterous saying the Jewish community would not consider voting for a man simply because of his faith. The Jewish community has been at the forefront of strengthening relationships between groups, largely stemming from our own historical persecution.
Candidates say they do not know where the rumor started.
You might check with the managers of the other campaigns; just a guess on my part.
Wherever the rumor came from, it is an issue Kassim will have to deal with, said Del. Carol S. Petzold (D-Dist. 19) of Aspen Hill, who is running for Teitelbaums vacated Senate seat. It is something the people will look at, but I hope they can overcome it and base their judgment on his real qualifications, she said. I would expect folks in District 19 to be above that. Montgomery County rejoices in its diversity.
Accusations of another form of prejudice, ageism, surfaced last year in the District 19 race. John P. Mahoney, 37, while running against Teitelbaum before the incumbent senator announced his retirement, drew sharp reactions from district incumbents when he offered himself as an energetic, fresh alternative to the senator, who is twice his age. Hes been a sleeping senator, only to be awakened, after all these years, by a serious challenger, Mahoney had said.
The statement drew accusations of ageism from delegates Adrienne A. Mandel (D-Dist. 19) of Layhill and Heller.
"Because it's not fair to all the grandpas of the world to accuse them of nodding off during some boring speech!"
In Kassims case, whispers concerning the impact his faith may have on voters really questions his Americanism, he said. I think in the 21st century, as country, we have reached a point where we should look at a candidate on his or her merits, Kassim said.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
