Welcome to your weekend open thread. I hope you’re having a wonderful weekend. I’m starting to give the house a long-overdue spring cleaning. What are your weekend plans?
Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher has died. He was 85 years old.
Warren M. Christopher, secretary of state in President Clinton’s first term and the chief negotiator for the 1981 release of American hostages in Iran, died Friday night in Los Angeles. He was 85 and had been ill with kidney and bladder cancer.
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Methodical and self-effacing, Mr. Christopher alternated for nearly five decades between top echelons of both the federal government and legal and political life in California. Among other things, he served as administration point man with Congress in winning ratification of Panama Canal treaties, presided over normalization of diplomatic relations with China and conducted repeated negotiations involving the Middle East and the Balkans.
At home, Mr. Christopher developed a reputation as a riot expert, investigating racial unrest in Detroit and in the Watts district of Los Angeles and later heading a 1991 commission that proposed major reforms of the Los Angeles Police Department following riots prompted by the beating of a black motorist, Rodney King.
He really had a varied and fascinating career. I urge you to go read the whole article. Goodbye, Secretary Christopher. Thank you for your service to the United States.
Ann Coulter is back. She had been dumped for younger, hotter mean girls but I guess Bill O’Reilly was feeling nostalgic. Here’s Ann Coulter telling Bill O’Reilly that radiation is good for you.
On The O’Reilly Factor last night, Coulter spoke about her recent column that cites a number of articles in the New York Times and “a stunning number of physicists” showing radiation has a positive effect on cancer patients.
A skeptical O’Reilly retorted Coulter’s evidence with this, “by your account we should all be heading for the nuclear reactor leaking and kind of sunbathing out there in front of — come on.”
Coulter responded by citing a study, mentioned by the Times , held in Canada finding that tuberculosis patients subjected to multiple chest X-rays had much lower rates of breast cancer than the general population. “There may be some doses of radiation in the human body can ward off infection,” she said.
Joking aside, O’Reilly wanted Coulter to be “responsible” and admit that “some radiation will kill you.” Coulter refused.
I’d love to see the studies of those “stunning number of physicists.” I did here last night that most workers exposed to radiation have not had long term problems. The casualties of Chernobyl were mostly from the initial explosion. After 25 years, they no longer have an increased cancer risk except for thyroid cancer. The people living in the contaminated area do have more cancers and birth defects – just look at post-war Japan.