When I read the latest news about professional football and chronic brain injuries, I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my father, probably going on forty years ago. This was in the late 1970s, when I was very young. My father was a scientist but a marine botanist – so not expertise that had any immediate relevance to these questions. In any case, he didn’t suggest that what he told me was based on anything more than experience, watching.
Last night I noted that an April inspection revealed security concerns about the management of high security inmates at the prison where convicted school shooter T.J. Lane pulled of his escape last night. It sounds like those concerns were warranted: prison officials reportedly learned of the escape plot days in advance but took no additional steps to secure the unit where Lane was housed.
Mayor Rob Ford officially withdraws from Mayor’s race, to be replaced on ticket by brother Doug Ford, city council member.
Silverstein is here submitting paperwork. Withdrawing Rob Ford’s name from the race and entering Doug. pic.twitter.com/iEFkWokg8n
— Jennifer Pagliaro (@jpags) September 12, 2014
Ford is currently hospitalized with an abdominal tumor – results of a biopsy will reportedly not be known for a week.
Back in May, Dylan Scott first brought you the story about a free clinic in Tacoma, Washington, that was closing because Obamacare had succeeded in providing all of the clinic’s would-be patients with health care coverage. It was one of the those small but telling examples of the ways the heath care reform law was working.
Now The Daily Show has done a segment on the clinic, putting on camera the doctor and nurse we initially interviewed, in a Colbert-style attempt to get them to admit that Obamacare has been TERRIBLE:
Palin Clan Reportedly Involved In Epic ‘Dog Pile’ Fistfight At Snowmobile Party
“It’s something to hear when Sarah screams, ‘Don’t you know who I am!’ And it was particularly wonderful when someone in the crowd screamed back, ‘This isn’t some damned Hillbilly reality show!'”
Meet Jeremy Heath Higgins (text from a Department of Justice news release) …
Jeremy Heath Higgins, 28, a resident of Quinton, Alabama, pleaded guilty today before U.S. District Judge Madeline Haikala to two counts of federal civil rights violations, announced the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Alabama.
As part of the plea proceedings, Higgins admitted that on June 14, 2013, he approached and threatened an African-American man at the Alabama Rose Steakhouse, a restaurant in Quinton, Alabama, because the man was present at the restaurant with a white woman.