Declarations

Flood Warning

“We can’t stop the rain, but we can and must do a better job at warning people of the potential for dangerous flooding. A few hours of warning could have saved lives and prevented millions of dollars in damage.”

—U.S. Rep Jim Cooper, D-Nashville, after reports that forecasters for the National Weather Service underestimated the flood level that the Cumberland River would reach during Nashville’s fatal May floods because they relied on inaccurate data from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Thus the weather service failed to warn of major flooding in Nashville until after it had already taken place. The flooding on May 1 and 2 killed 22 people and caused more than $2 billion in damage in Nashville alone.

Economic Development

The South Carolina Insurance Department “can and should be an economic development agency, and that the agency must be as customer friendly and as pro-business as possible.”

—Gov. Nikki Haley in naming Liberty Life Insurance executive David Black as the state’s new insurance commissioner.

Knee-Jerk Reaction

“We never thought from the start that everybody at UK was some sort of anti-religious bigot. However, what I do think this case disclosed is a kind of endemic, almost knee-jerk reaction in academia towards people, especially scientists, of a strong religious faith.”

—Frank Manion, attorney for University of Kentucky astronomy professor Martin Gaskell, who for $125,000 agreed to settle his suit with UK alleging that he lost out on a top job because of his Christian beliefs.