Sunday, September 12, 2010

Few See Terrorism as Top U.S. Problem.

PRINCETON, NJ -- Nine years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, 1% of Americans mention terrorism as the most important problem facing the country, down from 46% just after the attacks. Just before the attacks, in a Gallup poll conducted Sept. 7-10, 2001, less than one-half of 1% of Americans mentioned terrorism as the nation's most important problem. One month later, in October 2001, 46% named terrorism, the highest in Gallup's history. From that point on, terrorism slowly faded as a response to this question. At the one-year anniversary of the attacks, in September 2002, 19% of Americans mentioned terrorism as the country's top problem, already eclipsed by the economy at the top of the list. By the five-year anniversary of the attacks in September 2006, 11% of Americans mentioned terrorism. Terrorism continued to drop from that point, albeit with an uptick to 8% mentions in January of this year, reflecting the widespread news coverage of the "Christmas Day bomber" who allegedly attempted to detonate explosives on a Northwest Airlines plane headed for Detroit.Link

Doomsday warnings.

Economists peddling dire warnings that the world's number one economy is on the brink of collapse, amid high rates of unemployment and a spiraling public deficit, are flourishing here. The guru of this doomsday line of thinking may be economist Nouriel Roubini, thrust into the forefront after predicting the chaos wrought by the subprime mortgage crisis and the collapse of the housing bubble. "The US has run out of bullets," Roubini told an economic forum in Italy earlier this month. "Any shock at this point can tip you back into recession.".Link

‘Biggest leak of military intelligence ever’

Whistleblower website WikiLeaks is teaming up with news outlets to release a "massive cache" of classified US military field reports on the conflict in Iraq, Newsweek magazine reported recently. Newsweek quoted Iain Overton, editor of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a London-based journalism nonprofit, as saying the material constitutes the "biggest leak of military intelligence" ever. Newsweek said the stash of Iraq documents held by WikiLeaks is believed to be about three times as large as the number of US military field reports on Afghanistan released earlier this year by WikiLeaks.Link

FDA Has Gone Nuts.

Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food. Hippocrates. Since food is medicine, and medicine is food, the Food and Drug Administration, an agency of Health and Human Services, is requiring that claims of food health benefits by sellers, must have federal licensing and scientific proof of such claims. This is to harmonize with Codex Alimentarius, global food and drug control standards.Link

White House aides owe the IRS $831,000.

Over the years a lot of suspicion has built up across the country about Washington and its population of opportunistic transients coming to see themselves as a special kind of person, somehow above average working Americans who don't labor down in that monument-strewn former swamp.Link

Compilation of Reporters Getting Owned - Watch more Funny Videos