Burgers linked to asthma in global study

Why does asthma hate America?

Children who eat a Mediterranean diet have a lower risk of developing asthma, but eating three or more burgers a week is linked to a higher risk, research suggests.

Researchers looked at 50,000 children from 20 countries.

Writing in the journal Thorax, they said eating fruit, vegetables and fish appeared to protect against asthma.

But they said eating burgers could be linked to other unhealthy habits, which may be the real trigger factor.

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3 states make it illegal to film a cop (lest you catch him breaking the rules/law)

That's outrageous:

In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.

Even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists.

The legal justification for arresting the "shooter" rests on existing wiretapping or eavesdropping laws, with statutes against obstructing law enforcement sometimes cited. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the 12 states in which all parties must consent for a recording to be legal unless, as with TV news crews, it is obvious to all that recording is underway. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested. Most all-party-consent states also include an exception for recording in public places where "no expectation of privacy exists" (Illinois does not) but in practice this exception is not being recognized.

I remember hearing of an attempt to do this in Europe - I want to say France - a few years back. Does anyone remember the details? Read More......

Meet Leroy Stick, the person behind BPGlobalPR

The photo is of course of BPGlobalPR's friend Terry in New Orleans as a banner flies by in the background. You really have to read the entire story including the asinine ideas by the PR spin doctors to somehow bring BPGlobalPR into the BP fold. After reading, find your own Leroy stick and speak up. Even after weeks of failure BP continues to call the shots and that needs to change. It's our environment, not BP's environment. Read More......

GOP Senate candidate in IL, Mark Kirk, exaggerated Desert Storm service in constituent letter

From Markos:

It never ends with this guy. Here's Mark Kirk, writing a constituent:

It is time to break the boom and bust cycle of high gas prices and the need to deploy three separate armies to the Middle East (Desert Storm, Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom). As you may know, I am a veteran of the Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom missions.

Wow, Kirk served in Desert Storm? He's proud enough of that letter that he posted it on his official House site. But, it's not technically true.

He completed three tours of duty aboard the USS Stennis, four tours of duty supporting counter-narcotics operations in Panama, and worked at the Office of Naval Intelligence during Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

The Office of Naval Intelligence is right outside of Washington DC.

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Haley Barbour on oil hitting Mississippi beaches: 'We're told that it's not toxic'

Is that what his lobbyist friends from BP are telling him? Good luck with that strategy. If the beaches are open and safe, maybe he can take friends and family for a beach party and show us more. It certainly would give everyone comfort to know that he is taking the lead on disproving claims of toxic sickness from others. Maybe he can join Rush and talk about how natural the oil is.

"This is the first significant amount of oil residue to hit Mississippi since the Deepwater Horizon explosion six weeks ago," Gov. Haley Barbour said. "While it's the first, it won't be the last."

During a news conference in Jackson on Tuesday, Barbour said this is no reason for "anybody to panic." The state's beaches and ports remain open, and Barbour said, "We're told that it's not toxic."

"But it is a reason for everybody to remember that there is a likelihood that there is going to be more intrusion of some form of depleted oil, tar balls, tar mats, emulsified oil, that's going to reach the barrier islands," Barbour said.

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Vicious crime in SC: Black man shot, 'body was dragged for several miles'

I was just IMing with Pam Spaulding when she sent me an article about a vicious "possible hate crime" in South Carolina. It sounds like the James Byrd murder. Her post is here:

We must weep at how the sickness of hate still flows freely. How can we, as human beings, do such things to one another?

The shooting death of a black man whose body was dragged for several miles is being investigated as a possible hate crime after the arrest of a white man he worked with, South Carolina's state police chief said.

Gregory Collins, 19, is charged with murder and made his first court appearance Thursday. No bond was set and he did not yet have an attorney, Newberry County Magistrate Ron Halfacre said.

...Newberry County Sheriff Lee Foster said Collins and Hill spent most of Tuesday together and were at Collins' mobile home late Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning when Hill was shot.

Foster said Collins then attached a nylon rope around Hill's body and began dragging it behind his truck, apparently until the rope snapped several miles later.

It's horrible. Just horrible. Read More......

Film director James Cameron offers underwater help

My first reaction was "why do we need a Hollywood director involved in an underwater project?" but now recall that Cameron is highly experienced underwater. Because of previous projects at extreme depths he also knows a number of people who have extensive engineering knowledge in depths beyond the current well leak. Looking for assistance beyond the halls of BP increasingly makes sense as this drags on. The problem now turns to the White House and whether they will allow outside views or if they will remain as stubborn and arrogant as BP. Let's hope they're open minded.

While acknowledging that his contacts in the deep-sea industry do not drill for oil, Cameron said that they are accustomed to operating various underwater vehicles and electronic optical fiber systems.

"Most importantly," he added, "they know the engineering that it requires to get something done at that depth."

Among the key issues that Cameron said he is interested in helping the government with are methods of monitoring the oil leak and investigating it.

"The government really needs to have its own independent ability to go down there and image the site, survey the site and do its own investigation," he said.

"Because if you're not monitoring it independently, you're asking the perpetrator to give you the video of the crime scene," Cameron added.

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More BP foot-dragging on payments, again

So besides a loss of normal work income and a damaged boat, fishing guides are still waiting for BP to honor the terms of their agreement. In situations such as this, a company with any conscience would make extra efforts to pay in a timely manner. As with other industries such as Wall Street we all know that if the tables were turned the reaction would be much more aggressive. That the White House has allowed BP to control this issue is beyond silly. Sick cleanup workers have faced similar problems with BP funding mobile health care stations so it's not as though this is a new issue. Read More......

Is BP going to let more workers die to save face or will they allow safety masks?

This gets more ridiculous by the day. Why should workers have to suffer only because BP doesn't want workers wearing safety masks? Is anyone in Washington planning to step up and push BP aside to save more lives or will BP continue to decide what the rules are going to be? BP has zero credibility so how about we focus on protecting workers who are helping to protect others?

For days now, Dr. Damon Dietrich has seen patients come through his emergency room at West Jefferson Medical Center with similar symptoms: respiratory problems, headaches and nausea.

In the past week, 11 workers who have been out on the water cleaning up oil from BP's blown-out well have been treated for what Dietrich calls "a pattern of symptoms" that could have been caused by the burning of crude oil, noxious fumes from the oil or the dispersants dumped in the Gulf to break it up. All workers were treated and released.

"One person comes in, it could be multiple things," he said. "Eleven people come in with these symptoms, it makes it incredibly suspicious."

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Mark Kirk still claiming bogus Navy award on his campaign Web site

Just wow. After this much attention to the scandal, after this much damage, the first thing Kirk would have done is told someone to go through his campaign site and make sure the award isn't mentioned. How does Ben Smith find this, but Kirk's own staff couldn't? Not very Senatorial. Read More......

Warren Buffet's reputation takes another hit

This time it's his defense of the credit rating agencies. Again, Buffet owned a substantial portion of Moody's which is one of the leading agencies and also one of many who over-rated products that lead to the economic crisis. Buffet has enough money and claims to want to give it away before he dies. He also always has talked about investing in what you know, so it can be argued that he should have known. Wouldn't it be nice if he could one day admit he was wrong and played a role in this painful crisis? Yesterday he sounded like Alan Greenspan.

"The entire American public was caught up in a belief that housing prices could not fall dramatically," said Mr Buffett.

He added that if he had known how far the US housing market would collapse, he would have sold his investment firm's stake in Moody's, which currently stands at 13%.

Moody's chief executive Raymond McDaniel admitted to the commission that his company "is certainly not satisfied" with the performance of the ratings it gave the mortgage-linked debt.

In this critical piece by The Independent, you can see how the system worked. (How much change today is still debatable.) It's much like the infamous big accounting firms that we heard so much about during the Enron and other "cooking the books" scandals. The deals with businesses become "too big to fail" so nobody wants to rock the boat. Whatever the client wants, the client gets or else the deal is canceled and given to another business that will agree to anything. If none of this had any impact on others -such as retirement accounts or even keeping the economy afloat- this would not matter nearly as much. Unfortunately, this is a critical issue that impacts us all.

He said analysts had growing suspicions that Wall Street was packing CDOs full of increasingly dubious mortgages, but in ways that were difficult for Moody's to detect. Gary Witt, another ex-managing director, said he argued repeatedly for more resources to properly investigate the underlying mortgages and to test more of the assumptions that went into the company's models. He quit when his requests were repeatedly denied.

Both men said Wall Street bankers would exercise their power as the rating agencies' clients. Mr Kolchinsky said they were granted requests to bar unsympathetic analysts from particular projects, though this was denied in later testimony by the company's chief executive, Raymond McDaniel. Mr Witt said bankers would go over analysts' heads to appeal to their superiors to improve ratings. "They would pull any lever they could," he said.

Mr Kolchinsky called it "a chess game which we kept losing", and he said the balance of power shifted even further in the bankers' favour after they stepped up the pace of CDO creation in 2006, using derivatives of derivatives.

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BP continues to stifle media access, disallows photos of dead animals

Is there a valid reason at this point why BP is still calling the shots on anything? What kind of democracy allows BP to decide who can go where and what can be photographed? We're well past the point of another speech full of tough talk. Action, please.

Here's what President Obama didn't see when he visited the Gulf Coast: a dead dolphin rotting in the shore weeds.

"When we found this dolphin it was filled with oil. Oil was just pouring out of it. It was the saddest darn thing to look at," said a BP contract worker who took the Daily News on a surreptitious tour of the wildlife disaster unfolding in Louisiana.

His motive: simple outrage.

"There is a lot of coverup for BP. They specifically informed us that they don't want these pictures of the dead animals. They know the ocean will wipe away most of the evidence. It's important to me that people know the truth about what's going on here," the contractor said.

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Thursday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

The President has a meeting with Arizona's Governor Jan Brewer today. Yes, she's become quite the national figure given the hateful "papers please" law she signed. Brewer became Governor when Janet Napolitano left that job to become Secretary of Homeland Security. So, Obama did help Brewer get the job.

Yesterday, in Pittsburgh, Obama gave a pretty tough speech about the economy and energy. And, he actually said he was going to find the votes to pass the energy bill. That's got to be one of the first times I've heard him actually talk about getting votes for one of his signature issues. Imagine where we'd be if he did that on health care. The standard line from the White House is that Congress has to pass legislation, as if the President has no role. Let's hope this is a signal that Obama intends to become more engaged.

Oil is still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. Congress is still in recess. And, it's going to be 90 again in DC... Read More......

Saudi religious police pursuing MTV sinners

Sometimes it's hard to tell if it's Saudi Arabia or the American Christian right. They're both nuts. So much for modernization in Saudi Arabia. Even if they don't prosecute, the fact that it's even an issue tells you how extreme the situation is with our "friends" in the Middle East.

In the programme - called Resist the Power! Saudi Arabia - a girl named only as Fatimah told how she disguised herself as a boy to ride a bicycle in the streets of Jeddah.

The 20-year-old also railed against the traditional women's dress - a black robe known as an abaya.

She said she made her own abayas in bright colours, which she sold to friends.

A young man, Aziz, talked about his attempts to break the strict segregation of the sexes in Saudi life - to meet his girlfriend for a date.

"We are not free to live as we like," said the 24-year-old.

The four part documentary, which was screened in the US, also followed a Saudi heavy metal band who struggled to find venues that would allow them to play.

An official at a court in Jeddah said the films were being investigated for the crimes of "openly declaring sin" and a decision would be made on whether to prosecute in the next few days, Reuters reported.

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German prosecutors targeting Bishop who allegedly re-appointed child rapist

Finally someone is taking this seriously. Knowingly re-appointing such a rapist and putting people in harms way should be a criminal offense. BBC:

Prosecutors say they are investigating the leader of Germany's Roman Catholic bishops on suspicion of aiding and abetting the sexual abuse of children.

Archbishop Robert Zollitsch of Freiburg is suspected of allowing the re-appointment of a priest accused of child abuse in 1987.

Archbishop Zollitsch was in charge of personnel in Freiburg at the time.

The archdiocese rejected the charge, accusing prosecutors and the media of "sensationalism".

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Would Orrin Hatch's latest stunt punish GOP Senate candidate Mark Kirk?

From Steve Benen:

If you're just joining us, Kirk, a U.S. Naval Reserve officer, really has served honorably, but he's also made several claims about his service record that proved to be false. First, Kirk claimed to be "the only member of Congress to serve in Operation Iraqi Freedom." That turned out to be untrue -- Kirk served during the conflict, not in it. Second, Kirk claimed to "command the war room in the Pentagon," which also turned out to be untrue. Over the weekend we learned that Kirk repeatedly claimed to have received the U.S. Navy's Intelligence Officer of the Year award, which was also wildly misleading.

This comes on the heels of Hatch's proposal to make it a crime for someone to knowingly make "a fraudulent statement or representation" regarding his or her record of military service "for the purposes of gaining recognition, honorarium, official office, or other position of authority, employment or other benefit."

The point, it seemed, was Hatch targeting Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (D), who misspoke about his service record in a speech eight years ago.

I think Hatch meant to say that the law would only apply to Democrats, and forgot to include the language in his proposal.

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