Judge: Blogger not covered by NJ press shield laws

Judge Louis Locascio rejected that late Thursday, saying her posts were nothing more than the rants of "private person with unexplained motives for her postings"

Sooooo... Pretty much like the New Jersey Legislature then?

Baaad news? Global warming now shrinking sheep - Yahoo! News

Like the wool sweater that emerges from the dryer a size too small, global warming seems to be shrinking sheep.

If this is true all over the region, there'll be a plus side: smaller sheep will be easier for Irishmen to handle in bed.

FDA Advisers Urge Smaller Doses of Acetaminophen

"The 1,000 milligram pill should never be at the patient's discretion. It should only be prescribed by a physician," Teperman said. "If you took an entire bottle of Tylenol Extra Strength, three days later you would be in a coma and needing a liver transplant."

The Associated Press: FDA panel to vote on painkiller restrictions

Despite years of educational campaigns and other federal actions, acetaminophen remains the leading cause of liver failure in the U.S., sending 56,000 people to the emergency room annually, according to the FDA. There are about 200 acetaminophen-related deaths each year.

"It can happen to anybody, but it's very rare," said Dr. Lee Simon, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, who attended Monday's meeting. "Obviously it's important that we improve the communication about these products because they are ubiquitous, and we still see people inadvertently overdosing."

But wait, there's more!

The numbers the AP parrots are for total deaths and injuries, including deliberate overdoses.

According to the FDA's report, the figures it is relying on are from the Consumer Product Safety Commission's National Electronic Injury Surveillance System in the year 2000 and the Center for Disease Control's National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey taken from 1993 to 1999.

So, the data the FDA uses (and passes out to news organizations) seems to be at least nine years old.

How this data reflects the impact of the FDA's awareness campaign concerning the "dangers" of acetaminophen "and other federal actions" is unknown. Was any campaign even in effect during the years the data is taken from?

Also, when intentional overdoses are removed from the data (according to the data used by the FDA and the AP), the number of deaths drop from 460 to 100, hospitalizations drop  from 26,000 to 2,100 and hospital visits drop from 56, 700 to 13,000.

Keep in mind that there are about 280,000,000 people in this country.

Out of that number, 100 unintentionally overdose and die on acetaminophen each year.

For a comparison, in 2003, 17,229 people in the US died from falling.

I really don't think we need the FDA to save us from acetaminophen.

David Carradine

Ed McMahon

Farrah Fawcett

Michael Jackson

Billy Mays

WTF is going on here?

Why doesn't Perez Hilton get ravaged my lemurs? Or Bill O'Reilly fall down a well? Or Dr. Phil spontaneously combust?

Yeah, Billy Mays was annoying but not on the same scale as Perez Hilton.

And Michael Jackson was a pervert but he never wanted to rub falafel on someone and he never made a dime from the stupidity of the average American like O'Reilly does.

They say life is not fair. And so now there's the proof.

Today in the news comes a story from the Philippines, a place near and dear to my heart. Those crazy Cebu prisoners who lurched their way to Internet Fame by staging a 1500-inmate version of Michael Jackson's Thriller video performed it once again for the public as a tribute to the Thing of Pop.

In other news the Figurehead of Iran, Moehoward Ahmadeawad, threatened to deliver a "crushing" response to America for telling him that, in spite of its own fondness for cracking the skulls of protesters, it's pretty much wrong to shoot people in the street for speaking their minds.

"The response of the Iranian nation will be crushing," Figurehead Ahmadeawad said after several Muslim clerics told him to.

Yeah well you little ass puppet, we wrote the BOOK on crushing responses!