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Rep. Patrick Kennedy (news, bio, voting record) crashed his car near the Capitol early Thursday, and a police official said he appeared intoxicated. Kennedy said he had taken sleep medication and a prescription anti-nausea drug that can cause drowsiness. Kennedy, D-R.I., addressed the issue after a spate of news reports. His initial statement said: "I consumed no alcohol prior to the incident."'Later, however, he issued a longer statement saying the attending physician for Congress had prescribed Phenergan on Tuesday to treat Kennedy's gastroenteritis.Kennedy said he returned to his Capitol Hill home on Wednesday evening after a final series of votes...

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- A Chicago artist accused of stowing away on a plane out of St. Louis to attend a music festival in Texas faces a federal charge. 33-year-old Catherine "Cat" Chow was on the standby list for an American Airlines flight from St. Louis to Austin. When she found out the flight was full, Chow snuck onto the plane and hid in the bathroom. A flight attendant finally discovered that the woman didn't have a ticket, and Chow was arrested in Austin. She was trying to get to the city's annual South by Southwest Festival.

More than 2,200 people have been arrested in Texas bars in the six months since the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission announced a crackdown on public intoxication, primarily targeting bars. The arrests included people who were drunk in bars, who sold alcohol to a drunk person, or a drunk employee on the premises of a bar or restaurant with a license to sell alcohol, said Carolyn Beck, a spokeswoman for the TABC. The commission has been responsible for enforcing the state's alcoholic beverage code for the past 70 years. In August, 2005, the agency announced it was beginning a crackdown on...

In her opinion sustaining the use of race in admissions in the 2003 University of Michigan Law School case, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor spoke of the "deference" owed to institutions of higher education as they make "complex educational judgments." In the three years since the former justice wrote that opinion, the case for such deference has been seriously eroded by the discovery of educational judgments involving race and also sex that, however complex you might suppose them to be, are plainly against the law.Hundreds of colleges and universities, it turns out, maintained programs--summer internships, scholarships, and paid teaching fellowships--for which...

Before checking the box to identify her race on her college admissions application, Cecilia Vaughn hesitated for a moment, torn by conflicting emotions. It was an optional but important question that might increase her chances of being admitted if for no other reason than the fact she is black. Yet she believed her application was strong enough to stand on its own. She decided to answer the question. "I'm selling myself, and I want them to know as much about me as possible," said Ms. Vaughn, now a senior at Duquesne University. "I don't want anything to be a surprise."...

The ABA orders law schools to practice racial preference--even if they have to break the law. According to its mission statement, a primary goal of the American Bar Association is to "promote respect for the law." In the interest of mandating racial preferences in admissions, however, the ABA has just ordered law schools to do the opposite--in fact, to violate the law--and is resorting to blackmail to achieve its end. Meeting in Chicago this past weekend, the ABA's Council of the Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar voted in favor of "equal opportunity and diversity" standards. Under...

Ballot initiatives have been getting shot down like skeet lately in California, but that hasn't always been the case. This year marks the tenth anniversary of one that passed handily but needs to be revisited. In November 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI). The measure states: "The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting." This simple, reasonable, language derives from the civil-rights struggles of the...

Eighty percent of the respondents to a Dallas Business Journal online poll about the Wright Amendment said the amendment should remain in place with 19 percent saying it should be repealed. The remainder of respondents were undecided. More than 9,400 people responded to the unscientific poll, which ran on the DBJ Web site, dallas.bizjournals.com, from Dec. 5 to Dec. 18. The Wright Amendment, passed in 1979, is a federal law that limits long-haul flights from Dallas Love Field, home of discount carrier Southwest Airlines (NYSE: LUV - News), which is trying to get the law repealed. Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport...

About 30 UC San Diego admissions readers crowded around eight tables, debating the merits of a fat stack of college applications. It was their second day of training for what may be the most important decision in the young lives of thousands of college applicants. And it all came down to agreeing on the number of points to award each one. One lesson became clear quickly: There is plenty of gray in a system designed in black and white. [...] And then come the essays. Not a writing test The essay is not measured for its literary merit, intellectual expression...

FBI agents and Homeland Security officials spent the weekend investigating the report of a possible missile fired at an American Airlines plane taking off from Los Angeles International Airport. Sources tell ABC News the pilot of American Airlines Flight 621, en route to Chicago, radioed air traffic controllers after takeoff from LAX. He told them a missile had been fired at the aircraft and missed. The plane was over water when the pilot said he saw a smoke trail pass by the cockpit. FBI agents believe it was a flare or a bottle rocket, but say they may never know...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 2 (UPI) -- FBI agents and Homeland Security officials have been investigating the report of a possible missile fired at an American Airlines plane taking off from Los Angeles International Airport. Sources told ABC News in Los Angeles that the pilot of American Airlines Flight 621, en route to Chicago, radioed air traffic controllers after takeoff from LAX. He told them a missile had been fired at the aircraft and missed. The plane was over water when the pilot said he saw a smoke trail pass by the cockpit. FBI agents believe it was a flare or a...

Pilot Reports 'Missile' Fired at Jetliner Near LAX (11/28/05) FBI agents and Homeland Security officials spent the weekend investigating the report of a possible missile fired at an American Airlines plane taking off from Los Angeles International Airport. Sources tell ABC News the pilot of American Airlines Flight 621, en route to Chicago, radioed air traffic controllers after takeoff from LAX. He told them a missile had been fired at the aircraft and missed. The plane was over water when the pilot said he saw a smoke trail pass by the cockpit. FBI agents believe it was a flare or...

I heard on the radio this morning, that a pilot of a passenger jet departing LAX claimed to have narrowly avoided being hit by a missile. It was reported that the jet was about 6,000 feet in altitude & over the ocean when the event occurred. The news report further stated that authorities believe it was possibly a flare or a "bottle rocket." I googled but found nothing. Anyone else have some info on this? I dont recall whether it was CBS or NBC radio news.

Minorities can have their careers derailed by their tone of voice or hairstyle, a new study shows. During her years as an attorney for one of the top international law firms in the United States, Angela Williams looked forward to defending clients. But sometimes she was not given the chance. "When it came time for an opportunity to represent Fortune 500 companies on huge cases, even though I might have had trial experience over and above my white male colleagues, they were chosen," says Ms. Williams, who is African-American. In an age of diversity, when many companies point with pride...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Problem drinking may dampen both a man's sex life and his chances of having children, according to a new study. Researchers in India found that men being treated for alcoholism had lower testosterone levels and more sperm abnormalities than non-drinkers did. They also had a far higher rate of erectile dysfunction (ED) - 71 percent, versus 7 percent of abstainers. Some past studies have suggested that heavy drinking can take a toll on men's reproductive health. One recent study found that couples had a higher miscarriage risk if the man had consumed 10 or more...

Now consider what this Harvard student is called upon by his racial identity to argue in the year 2002. All that is creative and imaginative in him must be rallied to argue the essential weakness of his own people. Only their weakness justifies the racial preferences they receive decades after any trace of anti-black racism in college admissions. The young man must not show faith in the power of his people to overcome against any odds; he must show faith in their inability to overcome without help. As Mr. Connerly points to far less racism and far more freedom and...

American Airlines and Southwest Airlines have used advertising campaigns, catchy slogans and dueling consultant studies to settle a dispute over air service in North Texas, and now their eye-gouging fight has spilled over to an online encyclopedia. Someone using an Internet service provider registered to American edited online encyclopedia Wikipedia last week to describe Southwest Airlines Co. as "a notoriously litigious company constantly seeking to change laws to gain an advantage." For a time, the site also said Dallas-based Southwest is "known for its PR machine and litigious nature." Wikipedia's volunteer monitors deleted the phrases within hours and traced them...

Beginning this year, the University of Washington will no longer automatically admit top students based on their high-school grades and test scores. The university is ditching a statewide student-ranking system called the Admissions Index, which it relied on to admit about half its students. The university is also getting rid of an internal system called the "grid," which ranked remaining students on a combination of academic and personal factors. Instead, university staffers plan to read and review every one of the 16,000 annual freshmen applications to come up with a "holistic" assessment of each candidate. Besides academic performance, they will...

American Airlines plans to cancel 15 daily round-trip domestic flights from its two largest hub airports because of the skyrocketing price of jet fuel, the No. 1 U.S. air carrier said on Friday.

Whether or not you agreed with them, university presidents used to be dignified figures on the American scene. They often were distinguished scholars, capable of bringing their own brand of independent thinking to bear on the operation and reform of their institutions. Above all, they took seriously the university's mission to seek and transmit the Truth, and thereby to strengthen the free society that made such inquiry possible. But it has been a long time since Woodrow Wilson (at Princeton), Robert Hutchins (at Chicago) or James Bryant Conant (at Harvard) set the tone for American campuses. Over the past year,...

On the flight home this morning, I was unfortunate enough to have a bleeder sit next to me. By bleeder, I mean he was invading my space because he was large and his body was spilling over into my seat. I've seen worse cases than what I had today but let's hear your experiences.

But is the civil-rights revolution still working? For most black politicians, nearly all of whom (unlike Ms Rice) are connected with the left wing of the Democratic Party, this is still a heretically “racist” question, asked by people who want to turn back the clock to Jim Crow. That is a disgraceful canard. No respectable critic—least of all this newspaper—wants to reintroduce programmes that discriminate against blacks. What is at issue is the programmes that discriminate in their favour—and there are both principled and practical reasons for Americans of all colours to doubt that these still help. Many black leaders...

GEORGE TOWN, Cayman Islands -- An American Airlines Boeing 757 carrying nearly 200 people made an emergency landing in Grand Cayman Sunday after stopping in Miami, and two passengers suffered minor injuries, officials said. "The pilot declared an emergency after a problem with the de-icing equipment,'' airlines spokesman John Hotard said. ``As the plane was clearing 28,000 feet on its descent into Grand Cayman, the aircraft experienced moderate turbulence.''

Princeton University researchers have found that ignoring race in elite college admissions would result in sharp declines in the numbers of African Americans and Hispanics accepted with little gain for white students. In a study published in the June issue of Social Science Quarterly, authors Thomas Espenshade and Chang Chung examined the controversial notion that eliminating affirmative action would lead to the admission of more white students to college and found it to be false. The assertion that qualified white students are being displaced by less qualified minority students was a prime plaintiff argument in the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court...

Police departments must use race and sex preferences in hiring as a result of federal court consent decrees and political pressures. To meet these demands, many police departments have lowered, and in some cases eliminated, established standards for personal character and intellectual and physical capacity. Jan Golab writes about this in "How racial PC corrupted the LAPD" in the May 2005 issue of the American Enterprise. While most of Mr. Golab's article chronicles how Los Angeles damaged its police force in its quest for "diversity," where it has had to fire 100 police officers, identical damage has occurred in other...

A 54-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of public drunkenness and child endangerment after authorities found his 9-year-old son behind the wheel of his car in Clairemont, San Diego police said Tuesday. An officer spotted billowing smoke from an overheated car near the intersection of Balboa and Genesee avenues around 8:30 p.m. Sunday, police spokesman David Cohen said. Behind the wheel was a boy who appeared too young to be driving, Cohen said. The officer pulled the car over, but the siren apparently flustered the boy and he drove up on a curb and stopped just before hitting a telephone...

A Residential College class titled "Race and University Admissions" will be taking a closer look at two 2003 U.S. Supreme Court cases regarding the University's race-conscious admissions process this fall. The mini-course will concentrate on the plaintiffs' position that race-based admissions are unjust. Grutter v. Bollinger challenged the Law School's race-conscious admissions system, which was upheld, while Gratz v. Bollinger managed to strike down the point-based affirmative action system that the College of Literature, Science and Arts employed. Philosophy Prof. Carl Cohen, an outspoken critic of the University's race-conscious admissions policies and affirmative action in general, will be teaching the...

Bud Light Accused of Trivializing Alcoholism in New Ad Watchdog Groups Say Beer Ad Depicts Lying About Drinking WASHINGTON—-A new ad for Bud Light beer depicts men joking about lies they've told to cover up their daytime drinking, and two watchdog groups say the Federal Trade Commission should crack down and ask Anheuser-Busch to pull the ad. In a letter to FTC enforcement official Janet Evans, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) and the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (NCADD) say the ad irresponsibly makes light of alcoholic behavior. The ad in question features a...

http://x3.putfile.com/videos/6608573980.wmv Some safety instruction for our gun owner Freepers.

HAMPTON — A student dressed as Santa Claus was told to remove the suit and white beard when he arrived at a Hampton Academy Junior High School dance last Friday. SAU 21 Superintendent of Schools James Gaylord yesterday said, "This was not appropriate dress for this dance." Nancy Serpis, chairman of the Hampton School Board, echoed Gaylord, insisting the dance was a "holiday" event and that dressing as Santa Claus was "inappropriate." More, if you can stand it

Gottcha!! Oh, but it's a bitter pill we have to swallow to get on with it. :-) The horrible steps, and the awful people in the meetings I drank to get away from. Why Me? Why not me ? The answer is simple enough, Some people can handle it, I couldn't. Some are born to be alcoholics, Some drink themselves into it, others are not effected. I was. "Tough noogies", as they say. Genetic or learned really doesn't matter, the result is the same. I walked 5 miles into the woods, Then I had to walk, scrape, crawl, drag, and...

To Any Person Who Suspects They May Have a Drinking Problem, I have written this to describe my experiences of the past 14 months as I have worked to resolve my drinking problem. Everyone is different and I do not propose to be an expert on this topic, but I have my own personal experience and I am sharing it in the hope that it might help someone else to solve this problem and change their life. I have now been sober for 14 months without a drop of alcohol. This is not a long time as compared to over...

Due to the overwhelming response to an earlier thread, a resource is available as a "online email meeting" (email list)Feel free to check in or join up if you wish.One Day At a Time.... Click here

Battle-weary Marine Sgt. Juan Jimenez thought two weeks' combat leave meant no fighting for a while — but he discovered he was wrong when he landed in the clink at Newark Airport, all because his bag was missing. Exhausted and eager to get home to Orlando, the frustrated leatherneck said he "raised a ruckus" with American Airlines officials. Jimenez, 25, said Port Authority cops detained him for three hours, apparently hoping the problem would be resolved by the time he was sprung.[snip] Jimenez — whose battalion suffered four dead and 39 wounded in its house-to-house search for rebels in...

ATLANTA (AP) -- Bill Cosby said Thursday that there is an undercurrent of anger behind the problems facing black youth in America today, and that it is up the older generation to help turn things around. "Our children are angry. The profanity is out in the street. It's on the buses and in the subway. Our children are trying to tell us something, and we are not listening," Cosby said in a speech at Frederick Douglass High School, named for the 19th-century black man who became an abolitionist leader and an adviser to President Abraham Lincoln. The Atlanta visit was...

AMR Corp. disclosed Wednesday that it's in talks with banks to replace an $834 million credit line because its poor financial performance would violate terms of the deal. The parent of American Airlines Inc. also said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that August revenue fell short of expectations because of intense competition and hurricanes.

FORT WORTH A computer glitch grounded American Airlines flights from coast to coast for two hours this morning before the problem was corrected. The operating system that drives the airline's flight plans went down about 6 a-m Central time and was restored shortly after 8 a-m. The grounding affected about 150 flights. Despite the problem, American planned to run its full daily schedule of 24-hundred flights. But company spokesman John Hotard said flights could run up to two hours behind. A few incoming international flights were in the air at the time and continued to their U.S. destinations. Hotard said...

http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/07/13/beer.drinkers.license.ap/ Man loses license after telling doctor about drinkingTuesday, July 13, 2004 HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania (AP) -- A man who told his doctors that he drinks more than a six-pack of beer per day is now fighting to get his driver's license back because the physicians apparently reported him to the state. Keith Emerich, 44, said Tuesday that he disclosed his drinking habit in February to doctors who were treating him at a hospital for an irregular heartbeat. "I told them it was over a six-pack a day. It wasn't good for me -- I'm not going to lie," Emerich said...

Just saw this on the CNN scroll and haven't found a source on the web yet, but it's an inspiring story. If anyone has any more info, details, or a link, please post it. On an American Airlines flight to Chicago, several soldiers were aboard coming home for R&R. Some of the passengers in the first class cabin noticed this and offered their seats to the soldiers. What a noble and thoughtful gesture. Three cheers to some good American patriots.

March 30, 2004 To: All Flight Attendants – BOS/JFK/LGA/EWR/DCA As our competitive landscape intensifies, and the rapid growth and expansion of our low cost competitors, such as JetBlue, Southwest and Airtran threatens our survival, I thought it would be appropriate for me to share with you some “eye opening” feedback we’ve received from some of our corporate accounts. This feedback comes directly from customers through various focus group sessions we routinely host in various locations around the system, and from joint visits we conduct with our Sales Department to our largest revenue producing corporate accounts. By the way, what is...

Pilot, security experts compile manual for flying public Responding to the air-travel anxieties since 9-11, an airline pilot and two aviation security experts have compiled a book to help passengers and crew defend themselves in the case of a terrorist attack. "Never Again" is a "self-defense guide for the flying public'' with some 200 illustrations of hand-to-hand combat situations that could unfold in an airline cabin. "Unless law enforcement is aboard, passengers and flight attendants are the first line of defense," co-author Mark Bogosian told WorldNetDaily. An American Airlines captain, Bogosian notes that prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,...

Responding to the air-travel anxieties since 9-11, an American Airlines pilot and two aviation security experts have compiled a book to help passengers and crew defend themselves in the case of a terrorist attack. "Never Again" is a "self-defense guide for the flying public'' with some 200 illustrations of hand-to-hand combat situations that could unfold in an airline cabin. "Unless law enforcement is aboard, passengers and flight attendants are the first line of defense," co-author Mark Bogosian told WorldNetDaily. An American Airlines captain, Bogosian notes that prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, flight crews were trained to cooperate with...

COLUMBUS,OHIO - At a campaign stop in Ohio over the weekend, Sen. John Kerry continued his claims that the economic recovery wasn't truly creating new opportunities for Americans. Kerry also touched on Health Care even saying at one point that, "Senators and Congressmen, give themselves great health care, and they send you the bill." Kerry also stated at one point, "That there are more blacks in prison, than college." Critics are pointing out however that this statement is statistically false. According to the Department of Justice there are 884,500 African Americans in prison, and according to the U.S. Census 2,278,000...

A national coalition to defend affirmative action, known as By Any Means Necessary, is working to overturn Proposition 209 and bring affirmative action back to California. Proposition 209, which voters passed in 1996, banned affirmative action in the state. The coalition hopes to convince the University of California administration to begin using affirmative action in hope of bringing a lawsuit from a conservative group. "We're assuming that the right wing ... will sue and we'll get the chance to bring down (Proposition) 209 in court," said Luke Massie, the national co-chair of By Any Means Necessary. Fifty years after the...

BERKELEY, Calif. - Sometimes, Adia Harrison looks around her classes at the University of California, Berkeley and is slightly surprised at the reminder: Just about no one else looks like her. This fall, being black at Berkeley is likely to become even more of an anomaly that it already is. As of late spring, 98 black students had registered for fall enrollment out of an expected class of 3,821. AP Photo "This is supposed to be a public university and it's not really representing the public," Harrison said. Campus officials aren't sure what lies behind a nearly 30 percent decrease...

Report of a note saying there was a bomb in the bathroom...

Winning the war on drugs, losing the battles. On May 3, the Washington Post's David Von Drehle wrote a Style Section profile of Susan Cheever, biographer of Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson. In the article, we learn that as Wilson was dying of emphysema, he — the man who has inspired millions to kick the bottle — asked his caretakers for three shots of whiskey. Over his last days, he asked three more times for a drink. He was never given one. Cheever says she was "shocked and horrified" that Wilson would want whiskey on his deathbed, and confesses that...

This morning, just as I was considering brewing even more coffee as a way to get my tired, irritable bones into the gym, I received a very suspicious email from a girl wanting to interview me for a college term paper. The tone of the email and the questions that came along with it made me suspect that she was a Womyn’s Studies major or, at the very least, a person deeply under the sway of the sensitivity brigade. Dear Sir: I have just recently been introduced to the doctrines of "White Male Guilt", I am doing a research paper...

Apr 10, 2004 3:38 pm US/Central WASHINGTON (AP) American Airlines became the third U.S. airline to acknowledge giving passenger records to the government, sparking denunciations from privacy advocates. The world's largest airline said late Friday that in June 2002 it shared approximately 1.2 million passenger itineraries with the Transportation Security Administration and, inadvertently, four research companies vying for contracts with the agency. Fort Worth, Texas-based American said it agreed to provide the TSA with the information "because of the heightened interest in aviation security at the time and American's desire to ensure its passenger and crew safety" following the Sept....

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A contractor for American Airlines has admitted to sharing personal passenger information with the US government and other companies, thrusting the world's largest carrier into a bitter controversy over rights to privacy in the post-September 11 world. The disclosure, certain to alarm civil libertarians, made American the third leading US airline caught disseminating private data behind the back of its customers in the name of fighting terrorism. Airline Automation, a Tucson, Arizona-based data processing company, acknowledged Saturday that it had released American Airlines passenger records in 2002 to four companies that had been testing aviation security systems...