"At this point we've clearly reached an impasse," Durbin told reporters at his Chicago office.

He said the Senate seat could remain vacant until Blagojevich is removed from office and the lieutenant governor takes over, making a fresh appointment.

He said the Senate cannot waive a 125-year-old rule requiring the signatures of both the governor and the secretary of state on any election or appointment.

"God", Warren says, "hates divorce"...Temporary separation combined with counseling [from the lay counseling ministries] is the only path he recommends, because it "has proven to provide healing in people's lives."

WASHINGTON -- A group of scientists at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday sent a letter to President-elect Barack Obama's transition team pleading with him to restructure the agency, saying managers have ordered, intimidated and coerced scientists to manipulate data in violation of the law.

The nine scientists, whose names have been provided to the transition team and to some members of Congress, say the FDA is a "fundamentally broken" agency and describe it as place where honest employees committed to integrity can't act without fear of reprisal.

"There is an atmosphere at FDA in which the honest employee fears the dishonest employee," according to the letter, addressed to John Podesta, head of Mr. Obama's transition team.

The letter will likely increase pressure on Tom Daschle, Mr. Obama's choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services, to make sweeping changes at the agency.

The scientists' main concerns are with the agency's scientific review process for medical devices, which they characterize as having been "corrupted and distorted by current FDA managers, thereby placing the American people at risk."

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I was quite struck by his calm, intelligence, and good humor.  I've seen much more prominent politicians wilt under half the pressure.

When last month's full Moon rose over Florida, onlooker Raquel Stanton of Cocoa Beach realized that something was up.

"The Moon was stunningly gorgeous--and it looked bigger than usual!" she says. "My whole family noticed and watched in awe."

Like millions of others around the world, she had witnessed the biggest full Moon of 2008--a "perigee Moon," 14% wider and 30% brighter than lesser Moons she had seen before. "I'll never forget it."

Alert: It's about to happen again.

This Saturday night, Jan. 10th, another perigee Moon is coming. It's the biggest full Moon of 2009, almost identical to the one that impressed onlookers in Dec. 2008.

OIRA was birthed in the 1980 Paperwork Reduction Act as part of the effort to streamline the federal government's regulatory processes... OIRA received relatively little notice until David Stockman, Reagan's young turk of a budget director, realized that, properly applied, OIRA could be used to shut down the government's regulatory functions by tying new regulations up in endless rounds of analysis and bureaucratic justification...

It's the chokepoint of the entire federal regulatory apparatus. If used wisely, it facilitates the flow, provides welcome analysis and judgment, and aids in implementation...

Sunstein has recently achieved great fame for Nudge, a book which basically argues that we need to apply the insights of behavioral economics to the construction of regulation. And Director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is the ultimate staging ground for those ideas...

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- A Saudi-owned supertanker held by pirates off the coast of Somalia for two months has been released for a ransom of $3 million, according to one of the pirates and residents of Xarardheere, a pirate town on the Somali coast near where the tanker was being held.

The supertanker, about the length of an American Nimitz class aircraft carrier, was the largest ship known to have been seized by pirates, and it was fully loaded with two million barrels of oil.

linky

Dixon, a Democrat, has been the target of a nearly three-year probe by State Prosecutor Robert A. Rohrbaugh into corruption at City Hall, an investigation that has centered on allegations that Dixon has used her office to award lucrative contracts to various people including her sister, her then-boyfriend and her former campaign chairman.