Assorted unpleasantness

Or should it be 'unpleasantnesses'?

If you're feeling a bothersome pricking in your thumbs it's because Al Franken is coming to Washington.

The unanimous court wrote that "because the legislature established absentee voting as an optional method of voting, voters choosing to use that method are required to comply with the statutory provisions."

They went on to say that "because strict compliance with the statutory requirements for absentee voting is, and always has been required, there is no basis on which voters could have reasonably believed that anything less than strict compliance would suffice."

What can you say about voters who can't get the job done? Honestly, is it that hard to fill out a ballot?

But there's no doubt that Al will really elevate the tone of the joint.


A Congressional moment of silence for Michael Jackson nearly "nauseated" Rep. John Yarmuth:

YARMUTH: Um, I was close to nauseated by it. I thought it was outrageous. In my two and a half years, we’ve never done that for anybody else who’s a celebrity. We’ve done it for former members, and that’s about it, for former members who’ve passed away … I basically got up and walked back to the cloakroom and got off the floor, because I just thought it was totally uncalled for and over the top.

ZIEGLER: And were you alone in that feeling?

YARMUTH: Oh, no, the cloakroom was pretty well packed. I think there were a lot of people who were disgusted by it.

Someone close to me said he would have played his kazoo.

Remember that PKU test they performed on your newborn at the hospital? Someone may be using that blood for research. From the Washington Post's Health section, a story about state governments and hospitals retaining and using infant blood samples without parental permission. There are numerous reasons why parents and others are opposed to this:

. . . the states can still link each sample to an individual child -- and that worries some parents, patient groups, bioethicists and privacy advocates, especially with advances in genetics and electronic data banks linking medical information from different sources. [. . .]

"But you could use someone's DNA to make some inferences about their future health, about their future behavior, and if you got samples from their parents or a DNA databank, you can make inferences about family relationships." [. . .]

"Once learning the genetics of one child, you could see an insurance company seeing that possibility for the next child and making it clear that this is a preexisting condition that the company would not cover. Or perhaps an employer that found out about it wouldn't want to have us as an employee," said Twila Brase of the Citizens' Council on Health Care in St. Paul.

And so on. Read the rest. I'm out of time.

Comments welcome.

Linked by Michelle Malkin (buzzworthy)

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