A Stitch in Haste

Some hasty stitches regarding calls to use TARP money to bail out the Big Three automakers:

General Motors is not "the U.S. auto industry." The Big Three are not "the U.S. auto industry." There are many different metrics (vehicle production, revenue, employment, etc.) but a good benchmark is that the Big Three represent only about one-half [...]

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…and T. Boone Pickens has taken a flying Jedi leap right over it:
Roberts County, Texas, sits atop the Ogallala Aquifer, a huge underground reservoir that stretches all the way to South Dakota. It's in Roberts County that T. Boone Pickens set aside eight acres from his ranch for drilling deep into the aquifer.
Then he turned [...]

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So which is the worst aspect of a plan by the Middletown, Rhode Island, school district to tag students with RFID chips in their backpacks?
1. The lack of necessity. (ACLU: "We are not questioning the school district's ability to use GPS to monitor school buses. But it's a quantitative leap to monitor children themselves.")
2. The [...]

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To review: The pharmaceutical company Merck bought an executive order from Texas governor Rick Perry mandating that all pre-pubescent schoolgirls be vaccinated against HPV, via Merck's expensive and not entirely effective Gardasil vaccine. This despite the fact that HPV, unlike the infamous childhood diseases of generations past, is not casually communicable in a classroom setting [...]

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Texas governor Rick Perry has mandated compulsory vaccination against human papillomavirus (HPV) among prepubescent girls:
By issuing an executive order, Perry apparently sidesteps opposition in the Legislature from conservatives and parents' rights groups who fear such a requirement would condone premarital sex and interfere with the way parents raise their children.
Beginning in September 2008, girls entering [...]

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