Poor Mojo's Newswire

this is the trailer for the upcoming documentary about the 2008 presidential campaign.

All six Toyota veterans around the table agreed: The memo they were about to send to senior management could damage their careers. The workers had recognized a troubling trend. In recent years, the automaker had kicked into high gear to fill the booming U.S. demand for smaller, more gas-efficient vehicles. The union men had watched the company take what they believed were dangerous safety and manpower shortcuts to lower costs and boost production.... "They completely ignored us," recalled Tadao Wakatsuki, 62, a veteran assembly line worker who formed the union. "That's the Toyota way."

U.S. Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick is warning that she is shifting her support from commuter rail projects in Michigan, such as a proposed Ann Arbor-Detroit route, to the high-speed rail projects favored by the Obama administration. Kilpatrick made the shift public in recent comments to the Detroit City Council and in a letter she wrote last week after questions arose about comments critical of the region's transportation planning agency and a letter it sent her defending its performance. The Detroit-based Southeast Michigan Council of Governments, which acts as the required agency to program federal transit dollars for the region, faxed a letter to Kilpatrick on Feb. 26 saying it takes “great exception” to what the organization says are “disparaging and inaccurate comments.” Kilpatrick, a Detroit Democrat who is campaigning for an eighth term in Michigan's 13th District, earmarked $100 million for the rail project in 2005 and $6.5 million since then. Her support is seen as important because she sits on the powerful House Appropriations Committee and its subcommittee on transportation, housing and urban development. Kilpatrick told the Detroit City Council on Feb. 12 that “I'm sad to say SEMCOG ... has not done a good job with the $100 million. We should be much further than we are with that commuter rail. So I'm here to report to you because we have a new president who believes highly in high-speed rail, all of my efforts are going to high-speed rail instead of commuter rail.” In a March 2 letter to Crain's, written in response to questions about the SEMCOG letter, she tempered her vow — at least in the case of the Ann Arbor-Detroit line. “While I will continue to fight for this project, I have publicly stated my preference that Michigan begin the move toward high-speed rail, which is also President Barack Obama's preference,” she wrote.

On October 7, 2006, Steven Butler, by his own admission, was drunk and disorderly. He refused an order from a police officer in his hometown to get off a city bus. The officer used his Taser ECD (officially, an "Electronic Control Device") three times. According to doctors, Butler suffered immediate cardiac arrest. He was revived by emergency medical technicians who happened to be close by, but his attorneys say his brain was deprived of oxygen for as long as 18 minutes. He is now permanently disabled. Butler and his family have filed a lawsuit -- not against the police, but against the maker of the weapon, Taser International. John Burton, a lawyer based in Pasadena, California, says he can prove that when the weapons are fired directly over the chest, they can cause and have caused cardiac arrest. In addition, Burton says he can prove Taser knew about that danger.