Here it is, Rants! & Raves!, your weekly chance to sound off about the week past. Remember the rules:

1. A Rave! is something that happened during the past week that you’re pleased about and is signified by the word “Rave!” and/or an appropriately peppy emoticon.

2 A Rant! is something that happened during the past week that you’re ticked about and is signified by the word “Rant!” and/or an appropriately grumpy emoticon.

3. You may Rant! about something a person said, did or wrote, but you may not Rant! about generally disliking a person.

Have fun!

Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You lie” outburst has spurred House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., to release a revised edition of House decorum rules. The Politico highlights an especially useful section regarding the proper way to insult the executive branch in the chamber:

Under section 370 of the House Rules and Manual it has been held that a Member could:

• refer to the government as “something hated, something oppressive.”
• refer to the President as “using legislative or judicial pork.”
• refer to a Presidential message as a “disgrace to the country.”
• refer to unnamed officials as “our half-baked nitwits handling foreign affairs.”

Likewise, it has been held that a member could not:

• call the President a “liar.”
• call the President a “hypocrite.”
• describe the President’s veto of a bill as “cowardly.”
• charge that the President has been “intellectually dishonest.”
• refer to the President as “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.”
• refer to alleged “sexual misconduct on the President’s part.”

Meanwhile, the House formally rebuked Wilson on Tuesday, marking the first time in the House’s 220-year history that a member has been admonished for speaking out during a presidential address.

An elderly Texas couple that was forced into state custody and a nursing home may be a step closer to regaining their freedom–and dignity–now that a new lawyer has been assigned to their case. The nightmare began last November when Michael Kidd broke his hip and required surgery. State Adult Protective Services was called in after his wife Jean had been in the waiting room for days and wasn’t eating.

Caseworkers paint a picture of two incompetent old people, age 67 and 70, suffering from dementia. Reports say the Kidds have mismanaged their finances and used poor judgment, that Michael is verbally abusive and even attempted to assault Jean. Michael says Jean has memory trouble but denies everything else. A judge determined the Kidds were incapacitated and unable to care for themselves. The state took over the Kidds lives, sent them to the Countryside Nursing Home in Pilot Point, and is now burning through their money to pay for their care.

But when the Kidds asked for an accounting of how their assets were being spent, the state refused. Instead, the couple only receives $60 a month of their own money to spend as they please.

 They have no personal belongings in their room other than the television. All of their remaining possessions sit in their house in Richardson.

Bob Graham lived across the street from the Kidds for 21 years. He is furious about what the state is allowing to happen to their home. The yard has been neglected. The power was shut-off last spring and food left spoiling in the kitchen. Graham says the state even left the doors unlocked. “What irritates me is the gross negligence in handling their financial affairs,” Graham told Oliver. “There has got to be a better way of handling this than just coming in, in a totalitarian fashion, and taking over people’s lives against their will with no advocate to speak for them,” Graham continued.

Meanwhile, Jean has lost 20 pounds and two teeth during their “imprisonment,” and Michael says the experience is taking a toll on him as well: “Now, I am deteriorating instead of getting better.” They say their situation should serve as a warning to others:

“How could this happen in a country that talks about and brags about freedom,” says Michael Kidd. “And yet this is how we treat our old people. This can happen to any of you.”

The Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoes at former President George W. Bush was released from prison today. An unrepentant Muntadhar al-Zeidi, who alleges that Iraqi officials tortured him after he was arrested, says he now fears for his life: “These fearsome services, the U.S. intelligence services and its affiliated services, will spare no efforts to track me as an insurgent revolutionary … in a bid to kill me.” Those fears have reportedly spurred him to leave Iraq later this week.

If you’re a science news junkie, you may have noticed that many news outlets have cut back on their coverage of science news in recent years. The trend sparked concern among scientists who worried about how they would share their research with the public. One resulting solution was the creation of a new website, Futurity, which features research news from 35 universities in the United States and Canada.

The goal of the Web site is not to compete with Science and Nature, but rather to reach interested members of the general public, said Bill Murphy, one of the co-founders and vice president for communications at the University of Rochester. Imagining the intended reader, Murphy said, the founders saw as the typical reader “a person who is not a scientist, but the person who used to read a news magazine or newspaper and look forward to finding the science section.”

You can check out the website here.

Dirty Dancing star Patrick Swayze has died. The AP reports that Swayze, 57, died yesterday in Los Angeles after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., says one apology is enough for yelling “You lie!” during President Obama’s healthcare speech, but some Democratic leaders think he also needs to apologize on the House floor. If Wilson declines to issue a public apology, Democrats have indicated that they plan to propose a resolution of disapproval, which would put lawmakers on the record condemning Wilson’s outburst.

Meanwhile, the whole fiasco has been a boon to the fundraising coffers of Wilson and his Democratic challenger, Rob Miller. The Politico reports that both men have passed the $1 million mark.

What’s your take: Does Wilson owe a public apology to all of Congress or was his private apology to President Obama sufficient?

Just days before a former adviser for Rod Blagojevich was due to report to jail to begin serving a three-year sentence for tax fraud, he died Saturday at a Chicago hospital from a suspected overdose. Christopher Kelly, a 51-year-old former chief fundraiser for the ousted Illinois governor, reportedly told a police officer before he died that he had overdosed on a prescription drug.

Kelly, who was also sentenced last week to five years in prison on another fraud charge, had pleaded not guilty to charges stemming from a federal indictment that alleged Blagojevich sought to sell or trade President Obama’s former U.S. Senate seat.

Here it is, Rants! & Raves!, your weekly chance to sound off about the week past. Remember the rules:

1. A Rave! is something that happened during the past week that you’re pleased about and is signified by the word “Rave!” and/or an appropriately peppy emoticon.

2 A Rant! is something that happened during the past week that you’re ticked about and is signified by the word “Rant!” and/or an appropriately grumpy emoticon.

3. You may Rant! about something a person said, did or wrote, but you may not Rant! about generally disliking a person.

Have fun!

To read CNN’s Sept. 10 Political Ticker headline “Double-digit post-speech jump for Obama plan,” one could easily assume that the president’s Wednesday evening speech was a wild success. In the first two paragraphs, CNN reports:

Two out of three Americans who watched President Barack Obama’s health care reform speech Wednesday night favor his health care plans — a 14-point gain among speech-watchers, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation national poll of people who tuned into Obama’s address Wednesday night to a joint session of Congress.

Sixty-seven percent of people questioned in the survey say they support Obama’s health care reform proposals that the president outlined in his address, with 29 percent opposed.

Oh, but wait–there’s this little detail at the very end of the piece:

The sample of speech-watchers in this poll was 45 percent Democratic and 18 percent Republican. Our best estimate of the number of Democrats in the voting age population as a whole indicates that the sample is about 8-10 points more Democratic than the population as a whole.

To read the full results of CNN’s poll, click here.