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~Favorite Song's with Number's in it~ Arlo Guthrie - City of New Orleans The City of New Orleans by Steve Goodman Riding on the City of New Orleans, Illinois Central Monday morning rail Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders, Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail. All along the southbound odyssey The train pulls out at Kankakee Rolls along past houses, farms and fields. Passin' trains that have no names, Freight yards full of old black men And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles. CHORUS: Good morning America how are you? Don't you know me I'm your native son,...

Election 2012: The Obama campaign website has a feature that's supposed to show how his policies will help a fictional "Julia" during her life. What it really shows is Obama's vision of cradle-to-grave government dependency. The campaign's "Life of Julia" interactive feature tries to depict how Obama would help, and Romney would hurt, women in America. It's so ridiculously amateurish, you have to wonder who's in charge of the $170 million the campaign has spent. Still, it provides a window into Obama's warped worldview — one in which everything good that happens in America is due to some federal program...

By Abby Ellin May 3, 2012 Million Moms Rips JCPenney on Gay ‘Culture War’ When JCPenney last heard from One Million Moms, the “pro family advocacy” organization was threatening to boycott the national retail chain for refusing to fire openly gay spokeswoman Ellen DeGeneres. “By jumping on the pro-gay bandwagon, JC Penney is attempting to gain a new target market and in the process will lose customers with traditional values that have been faithful to them over all these years,” OMM, a division of the American Family Association wrote on its website. But JCP refused to budge, and the Moms,...

Media: NBC's presentation of "Rock Center with Brian Williams" last Wednesday night demonstrated that MSNBC's Chris Matthews isn't the only one who feels tingles up his leg when he talks with or about President Obama. President Obama's victory lap and shameless, media-assisted political exploitation of the Navy SEALs' triumph continued with the program opening with the photograph taken in the White House Situation Room, now apparently open to public tours. Administration bigwigs were shown watching the fruits of President George W. Bush's labors as Navy SEALs, acting on a trail of evidence gathered using enhanced interrogation techniques President Obama opposed,...

Leadership: The Obama administration's shoddy rebuff of a blind Chinese dissident seeking asylum underlines a sorry reality: The White House will sell out American interests for political advantage. Where is the courage? Chen Guangcheng, 40, a blind Chinese human rights advocate of extraordinary courage, made a daring escape from an illegal house arrest last week and made his way to Beijing to stagger into the U.S. Embassy to seek asylum. He was no ordinary applicant. The self-taught lawyer had been imprisoned for four years and continuously menaced by Chinese officials for the "crime" of standing up for the human dignity...

Enlarge Image Hot spots. Three mutations in or near hemagglutinin's binding site (yellow) and one on its stalk increased transmissibility. Credit: H.-L. Yen and J. S. M. Peiros, Nature, Adavanced Online Edition, (2012) One of two influenza papers at the center of an intense, 6-month international debate has finally seen the light of day. Today, Nature published a controversial study in ferrets that shows how scientists can engineer an avian influenza strain to transmit between mammals through respiratory droplets such as those created by coughing or sneezing. The 11-page study, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin,...

The last few years have revealed an ugly underbelly to the plaintiffs’ bar, and some of the biggest trial lawyers across the country have been brought down in criminal prosecutions for their sharp practices. Bill Lerach and Mel Weiss, two legal eagles who made a fortune in bringing security fraud class actions against publicly traded companies, pleaded guilty in October 2007 and April 2008, respectively, for their roles in an alleged decades-long conspiracy pursuant to which serial plaintiffs were paid kickbacks from their court-awarded attorneys’ fees in the cases. The Milberg Weiss firm at which both men once were partners...

Macrophages play a key role in the immune response, protecting organisms against infection and regulating the development of inflammation in tissue. Macrophages differ depending on where they are located and which tasks they perform. A scientist at TUM has been investigating whether these different types of cells have the same origin – and has come up with some surprising results. His findings reveal that there are two distinct macrophage cell lines that continue into adult life and that these two lineages have different origins. The research was recently published in Science magazine. The organs of vertebrates, including of course humans...

SANFORD -- The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a group closely associated with the birth of the civil rights movement, is bringing its annual convention to Sanford, in order to keep the spotlight on the Trayvon Martin case. SCLC Interim President C.T. Vivian says the group wants to speak to the overall issue of African-Americans "being seen as something they are not"' and "being killed for something they shouldn't be killed for." Vivian says the Martin shooting is an opportunity to engage young people and teach them about non-violent direct action, a cornerstone of the civil rights movement....

Mockery of religion in general and Catholicism in particular is commonplace in Hollywood– from Showtime’s “The Borgias” to the recent “Three Stooges” movie which features Kate Upton wearing a “nun-kini.” The latest installment of Catholic-bashing, “The Perfect Family,” is slated to come out May 4 – and predictably stereotypes Catholics who believe and practice what their Church teaches as unfeeling busybodies. The About section for the “The Perfect Family” declares: “Suburban supermom Eileen Cleary (Academy Award® nominee Kathleen Turner) is the ultimate Catholic.” And indeed, the trailer for the movie perfectly reflects Hollywood’s twisted conception of Catholicism. One quote from...

A surreal update to my item from yesterday, which posed two questions about the curious case of Elizabeth Warren, alleged "Native American."  The first: If Warren never, ever, ever would have exploited her possible heritage for career advancement, why did Warren classify herself as a Native American in 1986?  The second: Why did she remove that label nine years later -- after she'd achieved tenure at Harvard?  Yesterday evening, the candidate answered both curiosities.  I swear I am not making this up:   “I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be...

When Jonathan Frederick Will was born 40 years ago -- on May 4, 1972, his father's 31st birthday -- the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome was about 20 years. That is understandable. The day after Jon was born, a doctor told Jon's parents that the first question for them was whether they intended to take Jon home from the hospital. Nonplussed, they said they thought that is what parents do with newborns. Not doing so was, however, still considered an acceptable choice for parents who might prefer to institutionalize or put up for adoption children thought to have...

Today's buzz surrounds the rollout of yet another composite character from the imagination of Barack Obama, this one named "Julia" Julia represents the arc of a life under the beneficent care of Barack Obama's policies. Interestingly, at every stage of Julia's life, a government program exists to shield her from life's woes. And just as interestingly, Julia never gets the bill for all of this government hand-holding.Let's present a more realistic view of Julia's life: 3 years old --- Julia gets a new-and-improved Head Start, which a new HHS study shows won't do anything for her anyway.17 years old --...

Meet the recallers. They've developed a powerful antibody to shame. Over the next 29 days, state and local governments will pay $17 MILLION because the left didn’t get their way. It's a funny coincidence that some of the people that signed the recall petitions just happen to owe over $17 MILLION in back taxes and that's only part of the recall list! Have you ever had your lawn get away from you for a while? Maybe your kids have a dance recital or you have family coming into town and you just didn’t have the time to mow it? Eventually,...

NEW HAVEN— Two Miami men have been arrested in the dramatic theft of $80 million in pharmaceuticals from an Eli Lilly Co. warehouse in Enfield two years ago, federal authorities announced Thursday. Amaury Villa, 37, and his brother, Amed Villa, 46, both citizens of Cuba who live in Miami, were arrested Thursday in Miami on conspiracy and theft charges related to their alleged participation in the theft. The thieves gained access to the 70,000-square-foot warehouse on Freshwater Boulevard by cutting a hole through its roof, descending into the interior on ropes hung from the hole and disabling the security system.

Several emergency officials are responding to Elkins High School for a possible report of an officer being shot. A suspect reportedly is on scene and is on foot, but has not yet been captured. Emergency scanner traffic indicates the suspect is described as while male, possibly in his 50s, with a brown T-shirt and glasses. Police have locked down the school, blocked the Beverly 5-lane and are searching the area, including local stores. Police also are searching for a possible suspect in an attempted carjacking in the area behind Kmart, and it is unclear if it's the same person. Additional...

George Vujnovich, an American intelligence agent who led the largest air rescue of Americans behind enemy lines during World War II, died last week at the age of 96, according to media reports. In 1944, the Serbian-American officer in the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency) organized successful efforts to insert a team into what was then Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia and rescue more than 500 pilots and airmen who had been downed trying to cross the territory to bomb Hitler’s oil fields in Romania, according to an obituary in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The airmen had been hidden...

The boss of Spirit Airlines isn't about to cave in to a dying former Marine, and he doesn't lose sleep knowing his company leads the industry when it comes to customer complaints, he told FoxNews.com. “That’s an irrelevant statistic,” Spirit CEO Ben Baldanza said when told his airline generates gripes at two-and-a-half times the rate of the next most complained about carrier. Spirit racked up 8.27 complaints per 100,000 passengers in January, while United finished a distant second-worst, registering 3.5 complaints per 100,000 fliers, according to U.S. Department of Transportation statistics. By comparison, Southwest notched just 0.2 complaints per 100,000...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Junior Seau. Junior Seau's suicide. I met Junior Seau just one time. It was one year at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic Golf Tournament. Dean Spanos, the Chargers owner, was playing in the tournament and I was playing with Fuzzy Zoeller and his crew that year. And we all had dinner one night after that day's round. And Junior Seau was everything everybody is saying about him. He was uplifting, he was funny, he was in a great mood. He was kind of in my face humorously over politics. He was a big believer in the government...