‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.’ Matthew 25:40

Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it. Hebrews 13:2

COLUMBUS – In a scene reminiscent of non-violent civil rights confrontations from the 1960s, Ohio Tea Partiers quickly turned ugly when facing off with health care advocates in front of Ohio Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy’s office Tuesday.

In shocking video taken by a Columbus Dispatch reporter Doral Chenowith yesterday, Tea Party protestors mock a seated counter-protestor with a sign indicating he has Parkinson’s disease. They then proceed to hurl wadded up bills at him shouting, “I’ll decide when to give you money!”

On March 17th outside of Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy’s (D-OH15) district office teabaggers mocked and scorned a man who had a sign stating that he had Parkinson’s. They told him “he’s in the wrong end of town to ask for handouts”, called him a communist and threw dollar bills at him to “pay for his health care”.

SOURCE

TOKYO — Toyota on Tuesday announced another global recall — this time, more than 400,000 Prius and other hybrid cars with braking problems, as a quality crisis continues to curse the carmaker that built its global reputation on quality.

Toyota President Akio Toyoda used extraordinary language at a press conference here to apologize for quality and safety issues that have led to the recall of more than 7 million vehicles in recent months.

He repeated three times that Toyota was neither failure-proof nor “omnipotent,” and he said that his company would now “redouble our commitment to quality as the lifeline of our company.”

The recall will fix a software glitch in the brakes of the Prius and three other hybrid models. It has caused brief and sometimes frightening delays in perceived braking capacity on icy or bumpy roads.

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Woo Hoo

I won’t even go into how ignorant kids seem to be about sex, or how foul the language is from many of them……my point here is about cancer awareness.

On any given day, I get numerous questions about whether or not something could be cancer. “I have a bump on my arm that looks like a pimple, could it be cancer?” Or, “I’m constipated, could it be cancer?” “It burns when I pee, could it be cancer?”

Most of these questions presumably come from teenagers…and often young teenagers at that.

Have we gone too far with this whole cancer awareness thing? Are we raising a generation of children who are neurotic and fearful that every little thing could be cancer? Is all of the awareness raising too much of a good thing? I think so and I think we need to consider a better way of dealing with cancer awareness than scaring kids to death with it.

I was talking to my mom yesterday and a friend of hers was talking about her 4 year old granddaughter. The granddaughter was upset and crying and told her grandmother she needed to buy her some Cymbalta.
The child brought it up a number of times, asking for the pill that would make her happy. And we wonder why kids turn to drugs? Seriously? Every time you turn on the TV you get bombarded with drug commercials…ask YOUR doctor for the little blue, pink, purple, magic pill and then we tell kids not to do drugs.

What are we doing to our kids?

NBC screwed up with the 10:00 p.m. Jay Leno show and now they are making Conan O’Brien pay for their mistake.  Sure, they can do what they want with their own network, but I for one won’t be watching Jay in the future.

Conan O’Brien released a statement Tuesday saying that he no longer wanted to be the host of “The Tonight Show” on NBC if it appeared at 12:05 a.m.

Mr. O’Brien’s brief run as host at 11:35 p.m. is to be cut short next month, as NBC decided to restore his predecessor, Jay Leno, to that time period. Mr. O’Brien has been growing increasingly upset in recent days about how he believes he was treated by NBC’s management.

A representative for Mr. O’Brien said Tuesday that the issue came to a head for the host on Monday and that he had “sat up all night drafting the statement.” NBC, whose “Tonight Show” has been broadcast at 11:35 p.m. for decades, declined to comment. Mr. O’Brien was scheduled to do “The Tonight Show” on Tuesday night.

In a statement Tuesday afternoon, Mr. O’Brien said, “I sincerely believe that delaying the ‘Tonight Show’ into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. ‘The Tonight Show’ at 12:05 simply isn’t the ‘Tonight Show.’”

Mr. O’Brien’s comments came two days after NBC formally outlined a plan to move “The Jay Leno Show” to 11:35 p.m. in March, elbowing Mr. O’Brien’s “Tonight Show” back half an hour. Mr. Leno seems supportive of the plan. In his statement, Mr. O’Brien rejects it outright.

TO READ HIS STATEMENT CLICK HERE

Top 10 List

Dixie Sommers, assistant commissioner for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, recites a list of the 10 occupations that the BLS expects will provide the greatest number of new jobs over the next decade. These include:

1. Registered nurses

2. Home health aides

3. Customer service representatives

4. Food preparation and serving workers

5. Personal and home care aides

6. Retail salespersons

7. Office clerks

8. Accountants

9. Nursing aides, orderlies and attendants

10. Postsecondary teachers

Six of the top seven fastest-growing occupations are low-skill, low-wage jobs.

Katz says the challenge is to move those jobs up the skills ladder. There’s no reason, he says, that home health care workers couldn’t be better educated to provide patients with greater value and, as a result, command higher wages to improve their own living standards.

“So [by] professionalizing those types of jobs, we could have a very optimistic vision of an economy,” Katz says.

How that might square the goal of spending less on health care isn’t clear.

Katz argues it wouldn’t necessarily require spending more on education, but rather changing what’s taught to focus more on different skills like problem solving, interpersonal relations and teamwork.

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The nation’s banks will be bombarding customers with new fees and products in 2010 as they try to replace more than $50 billion in revenue wiped out by new rules that clamp down on certain business practices.

So far, the changes are mostly concentrated in checking accounts and credit cards. In addition to attaching new fees to old products, banks are introducing new types of accounts that they hope will reel in new customers and reduce their funding costs.

For plastic, the new rules go into effect in February as part of the Credit Card Act of 2009. The rules will limit some interest-rate increases, require more disclosure to customers and prohibit banks from raising interest rates on current balances unless a customer is at least 60 days behind in a payment.

Credit-card issuers collected $22.9 billion in penalty fees—such as those assessed for late payments—in 2009, up from $19 billion in 2008, said , who runs a credit-card consulting firm in Thousand Oaks, Calif.

Credit-card companies already have been racing to slip new fees and practices into customer contracts ahead of the law. Issuers are closing accounts, switching cards with fixed interest rates to variable rates and introducing cards that have an annual fee.

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Photo Source Washington City Paper Blogs City Desk

During Washington’s record-breaking snowstorm on Saturday, a massive snowball fight was taking place at the corner of 14th and U streets that had grown men and women laughing and hurling fresh-fallen snow at one another in the middle of the street. Good-natured, wintertime fun, according to participants.

Then a D.C. police officer happened by, and the event — filmed by amateurs and a local television station — suddenly became more serious.

Videos and photos show a D.C. police detective unholstering his gun (and admitting to it) during a confrontation with a group of snowball fighters. The video is making the rounds on the Internet and national TV stations. The detective, who authorities have not identified, on one such video says: “Yes I did,” apparently referring to the fact that he drew his gun, “because I got hit with snowballs.”

D.C. police have said they are investigating the incident. Assistant Chief Pete Newsham, who leads the department’s investigative services bureau, has said the detective in question “was armed but never pulls his weapon.” Photos and videos posted online appear to contradict that, though none show the detective pointing his gun at anyone.

The incident occurred Saturday afternoon near the intersection of 14th and U streets NW. That’s where a large group of people were engaged in a snowball fight, which was organized and has now spawned a big debate on Twitter.

According to witnesses and Washington Post editorial aide Stephen Lowman, at about 3:15 the detective’s burgundy hummer got stuck in snow at the intersection, the battleground for the snowball fight. The detective got out of the vehicle, Lowman said, and he and the Hummer faced a mini-barrage of snowballs. That’s when he “kind of shows he has a gun,” Lowman said.

Another witness, 31-year-old Lacy MacAuley, said she was standing “having fun with all the other revelers” when a friend of hers suddenly yelled, “Oh my god, that guy has a gun!” She turned to see a man she later learned was a detective standing near a Hummer with a gun drawn at his side. SOURCE

Scientists have proved for the first time that a cheap form of sugar used in thousands of food products and soft drinks can damage human metabolism and is fuelling the obesity crisis.

Fructose, a sweetener derived from corn, can cause dangerous growths of fat cells around vital organs and is able to trigger the early stages of diabetes and heart disease.

It has increasingly been used as a substitute for more expensive types of sugar in yoghurts, cakes, salad dressing and cereals. Even some fruit drinks that sound healthy contain fructose.

Experts believe that the sweetener — which is found naturally in small quantities in fruit — could be a factor in the emergence of diabetes among children. This week, a new report is expected to claim that about one in 10 children in England will be obese by 2015.

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