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The Villains of 2005

by Jeralyn Merritt, Huffington Post

As I reflect on 2005, very few heroes come to mind but I have no trouble conjuring up the villains. Skipping over the most obvious, George W. Bush and his War in Iraq, here are my top ten:

10. Tom Tancredo: The xenophobic Colorado Congressman whose hatred of undocumented residents is gaining national MSM attention. Next he'll want to deport the Statue of Liberty.

9. James Sensenbrenner: The Wisconsin menace responsible for the introduction of the five years for passing a joint and snitch or go to jail bills and the ugliest immigration bill in history.

8. The cable news networks, for force-feeding us a steady diet of missing, dead or comatose white women along with their mothers and other supporting cast members.

7. The Evangelical Right and its never-ending crusade to overturn Roe v. Wade and ban gay marriage.

6. The sell-out by the Gang of 14 centrists and the judicial extremists we got stuck with, Priscillia Owen and Janice Rogers Brown

5. Dick Cheney, the Veep Who Would Be King and the Torturer in Chief.

4. The CIA, secret prisons, Afghan prisons, Ghost Air and extraordinary renditions. America, prison nation. Repeat after me: the U.S. does not engage in torture.

3. Guantanamo and the indefinite detention of so-called enemy combatants for four years without charges or access to counsel. Executive Tyranny and injustice run amok.

2. The Patriot Act and our spying FBI.

1. Abu Ghraib, more Torturers- in-Chief and the torturers-in-the ranks. And yes, the abuse began at Guantanamo.

Now that I've gotten the grinch out of my system, I realize there are a few who deserve praise. In Congress, Sen. Dick Durbin tops my list, with Sens. Harry Reid and Russ Feingold and Rep. John Conyers (news, bio, voting record) close on his heels.

The Last Prophecy

(Mother Shipton - 15th/16th century Yorkshire seer)

In nineteen hundred and twenty-six

build houses light of straw and sticks.

For then shall mighty wars be planned

and fire and swords shall sweep the land.

When pictures seem alive with movements free,

when boats like fishes swim beneath the sea.

When men like birds shall scour the sky.

Then half the world, deep drenched in blood shall die.

For those who live the century through

in fear and trembling this shall do.

Flee to the mountains and the dens

to bog and forest and wild fens.

For storms will rage and oceans roar

when Gabriel stands on sea and shore,

and as he blows his wondrous horn

old worlds die and new be born.

A fiery dragon will cross the sky

six times before the earth shall die.

Mankind will tremble and frightened be

for the six heralds in this prophecy.

For seven days and seven nights

man will watch this awesome sight.

The tides will rise beyond their ken.

To bite away the shores and then

the mountains will begin to roar

and earthquakes split the plain to shore.

And flooding waters rushing in,

will flood the lands with such a din

that mankind cowers in muddy fen

and snarls about his fellow men.

He bares his teeth and fights and kills

and secrets food in secret hill

and ugly in his fear, he lies

to kill marauders, thieves and spies.

Man flees in terror from the floods

and kills, and rapes and lies in blood

and spilling blood by mankind's hand

will stain and bitter many lands.

And when the dragon's tail is gone

man forgets and smiles and carries on.

To apply himself - too late, too late

for mankind has earned deserved fate.

His masked smile, his false grandeur,

will serve the gods their anger stir

and they will send the dragon back

to light the sky -- his tail will crack.

Upon the earth and rend the earth

and man shall flee, king, lord and serf.

But slowly they are routed out

to seek diminishing water spout

and men will die of thirst before

the oceans rise to mount to the shore.

And lands will crack and rend anew

do you think it strange, it will come true.

And in some far -- off distant land

some men -- oh such a tiny band

will have to leave their solid mount

and span the earth, those few to count.

Who survives this (unreadable) and then

begin the human race again.

But not on land already there,

but on ocean beds, stark, dry and bare.

Not every soul on earth will die,

as the dragon's tail goes sweeping by,

not every land on earth will sink,

but these will wallow in stench and stink,

of rotting bodies of beast and man,

of vegetation crisped on land.

But the land that rises from the sea

will be dry and clean and soft and free.

Of mankinds dirt and therefore be,

the source of man's new dynasty.

and those that live will ever fear

the dragon's tail for many year

but time erases memory

You think it strange. but it will be.

And before the race is built anew,

a silver serpent comes to view

and spew out men of like unknown

to mingle with the earth now grown

cold from its heat and these men can

enlighten the minds of future man

to intermingle and show them how

to live and love and thus endow.

the children with the second sight.

a natural thing so that they might

grow graceful, humble and when they do

the golden age will start anew.

The dragon's tail is but a sign

for mankind's fall and man's decline.

and before this prophecy is done

I shall be burned at the stake, at l

My body cinged and my soul set free

You think I utter blasphemy

you're wrong. These things have come to me

President Bush's "Brownie" quote wins award

Dubya does a heckuva job cleaning off Brownie's nose

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Call it the wrong phrase at the wrong time but "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job" was named on Thursday as U.S. President George W. Bush's most memorable phrase of 2005.

The ill-timed praise of a now disgraced agency head became a national punch line for countless jokes and pointed comments about the administration's handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster and added to the president's reputation for verbal gaffes and clumsy turns of phrase.

Paul JJ Payack, president of Global Language Monitor, a nonprofit group that monitors language use, says Bush's statement in support of the then-director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency may be remembered for years to come.

"The 'Brownie' quote leads our 2005 list of Bushisms -- memorable phrases or new words coined by the president," Payack said, adding that Bush may be the foremost White House creator of new words, citing such past efforts as "misunderestimate" (to seriously underestimate) and "embetter" (to make emotionally better).

Ten days after Bush verbally patted Michael Brown on the back before the TV cameras, Brown resigned amid a public uproar over his qualifications and the administration's failure to get aid to New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Although the president did not originate any new words this year, he had several notable statements, Payack said, citing the following:

-- "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda," Bush said in explaining his communications strategy last May.

-- "I think I may need a bathroom break. Is this possible?" Bush asked in a note to Secretary of State

Condoleezza Rice during a U.N. Security Council meeting in September.

-- "This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table," Bush said in Brussels last February.

-- "In terms of timetables, as quickly as possible - whatever that means," the president said of his timeframe for passing Social Security legislation in March.

-- "Those who enter the country illegally violate the law," Bush said in describing illegal immigrants in Tucson, Arizona, last month.

As I recall, when Clinton left office, there was a surplus in the coffers... what was that about fiscally conservative Republicans again? Oh yeah, urban myth...

US government warns it's running out of cash

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Treasury Secretary John Snow has warned that unless Congress raises the national debt limit, the US government will run out of cash to finance its daily work in two months.

In a letter to Senate leaders Thursday, Snow said the statutory debt limit imposed by Congress of 8.184 trillion dollars would be reached in mid-February and the government would then lose its borrowing power.

"At that time, unless the debt limit is raised or the Treasury Department takes authorized extraordinary actions, we will be unable to continue to finance government operations," said the letter, seen by AFP.

Snow warned that even if the Treasury took "all available prudent and legal actions" to avoid breaching the ceiling, "we anticipate that we can finance government operations no longer than mid-March".

"Accordingly, I am writing to request that Congress raise the statutory debt limit as soon as possible."

The Republican-led Congress last voted to increase the debt limit in mid-November 2004, despite opposition from Democrats who demanded the free-spending federal government tighten its belt instead.

The US debt limit sparked bitter partisan battles in the mid-1990s between a Republican-dominated Congress and the Democratic administration of president Bill Clinton, leading to shutdowns of the federal government.

Once the US government hits the ceiling, it comes under threat of defaulting on its debts and can lose the ability to raise future credit on the capital markets.

Snow underlined that the "full faith and credit of the United States" was a unique selling point on the markets.

Justice Dept. Probing Domestic Spying Leak

Top fox Alberto Gonzales will get to the bottom of this snitching business, you betcha.

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the leak of classified information about President Bush's secret domestic spying program, Justice officials said Friday.

The officials, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the probe, said the inquiry will focus on disclosures to The New York Times about warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The Times revealed the existence of the program two weeks ago in a front-page story that acknowledged the news had been withheld from publication for a year, partly at the request of the administration and partly because the newspaper wanted more time to confirm various aspects of the program.

Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman for The Times, said the paper will not comment on the investigation.

Revelation of the secret spying program unleashed a firestorm of criticism of the administration. Some critics accused the president of breaking the law by authorizing intercepts of conversations — without prior court approval or oversight — of people inside the United States and abroad who had suspected ties to al-Qaida or its affiliates.

The surveillance program, which Bush acknowledged authorizing, bypassed a nearly 30-year-old secret court established to oversee highly sensitive investigations involving espionage and terrorism.

Administration officials insisted that Bush has the power to conduct the warrantless surveillance under the Constitution's war powers provision. They also argued that Congress gave Bush the power to conduct such a secret program when it authorized the use of military force against terrorism in a resolution adopted within days of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The Justice Department's investigation was being initiated after the agency received a request for the probe from the NSA.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has been conducting a separate leak investigation to determine who in the administration leaked

CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to the media in 2003.

Several reporters have been called to testify before a grand jury or to give depositions. New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent 85 days in jail, refusing to reveal her source, before testifying in the probe.

The administration's legal interpretation of the president's powers allowed the government to avoid requirements under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in conducting the warrantless surveillance.

The act established procedures that an 11-member court used in 2004 to oversee nearly 1,800 government applications for secret surveillance or searches of foreigners and U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism or espionage.

Congressional leaders have said they were not briefed four years ago, when the secret program began, as thoroughly as the administration has since contended.

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said in an article printed last week on the op-ed page of The Washington Post that Congress explicitly denied a White House request for war-making authority in the United States.

"This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas ... but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens," Daschle wrote.

Daschle was Senate Democratic leader at the time of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington. He is now a fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank.

The administration formally defended its domestic spying program in a letter to Congress last week, saying the nation's security outweighs privacy concerns of individuals who are monitored.

In a letter to the chairs of the House and Senate intelligence committees, the Justice Department said Bush authorized conducting electronic surveillance without first obtaining a warrant in an effort to thwart terrorist acts against the United States.

Teens Accused of Being Lesbians Sue School

RIVERSIDE, Calif., Associated Press - Two 16-year-olds who were expelled from a Lutheran high school because they were suspected of being lesbians have sued the school for invasion of privacy and discrimination.

The lawsuit, filed last week in Riverside County Superior Court, seeks the girls' re-enrollment at the small California Lutheran High School, unspecified damages and an injunction barring the school from excluding gays and lesbians.

Kirk D. Hanson, an attorney for the girls, said the expulsion traumatized and humiliated them.

"Their entire support network was pulled out from under them because of suspicions about their sexual orientation," said Hanson, who declined to say whether his clients are lesbians.

The school is on Christmas break until next week, and messages left for school officials Thursday were not immediately returned.

The lawsuit alleges that the school's principal, Gregory Bork, called the girls into his office, grilled them on their sexual orientation and "coerced" one girl into saying she loved the other.

The next day, the lawsuit says, Bork told the girls' parents they could not stay at the school with "those feelings." In a Sept. 12 letter to the parents, Bork acknowledged that officials had seen no physical contact between the girls but said their friendship was "uncharacteristic of normal girl relationships and more characteristic of a lesbian one."

"Such a relationship violates our Christian Code of Conduct," Bork wrote in his letter, which was included as an exhibit in the lawsuit. He called the girls' behavior "scandalous" and "immoral."

Hanson said the 142-student school in Wildomar, Calif., must comply with state civil rights laws because it functions as a business by collecting tuition.

Who's laughing now, ya smug jackasses?

Tropical Storm Zeta Forms in Atlantic

MIAMI, Associated Press - Tropical Storm Zeta formed Friday in the eastern Atlantic Ocean, another installment in a record-breaking hurricane season that officially ended last month.

Zeta, the 27th storm of the season, formed Friday about 1,000 miles south-southwest of the Azores islands, according to an advisory posted on the National Hurricane Center's Web site. It posed no immediate threat to land.

The center said it would send out a full advisory later Friday. Tropical storms have winds of at least 39 mph.

It was not immediately known if Dec. 30 was the latest date for the formation of a tropical storm in the Atlantic. But earlier this month, Hurricane Epsilon became only the fifth hurricane to form in December in 154 years of record-keeping. Hurricanes form when their winds exceed 74 mph.

Zeta is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet, which forecasters turned to after they used up — for the first time — their list of 21 proper names for storms. The record for tropical storms and hurricanes in a season had been 21, set in 1933 before such storms were regularly named.

The 2005 Atlantic storm season, which officially ended Nov. 30, included 14 hurricanes, including Epsilon.

One of the hurricanes, Katrina, destroyed large portions of Louisiana and Mississippi last August in the most costly disaster in U.S. history. Hurricanes Dennis, Rita and Wilma also caused significant damage in the U.S.

Pentagon Shakes Up Emergency Hierarchy

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Heading a military service isn't quite the position of power it used to be. In a Bush administration revision of plans for Pentagon succession in a doomsday scenario, three of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's most loyal advisers moved ahead of the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force.

A little-noticed holiday week executive order from President Bush moved the Pentagon's intelligence chief to the No. 3 spot in the succession hierarchy behind Rumsfeld. The second spot would be the deputy secretary of defense, but that position currently is vacant. The Army secretary, which long held the No. 3 spot, was dropped to sixth.

The changes, announced last week, are the second in six months and reflect the administration's new emphasis on intelligence gathering versus combat in 21st century war fighting.

Technically, the line of succession is assigned to specific positions, rather than the current individuals holding those jobs.

But in its current incarnation, the doomsday plan moves to near the top three undersecretaries who are Rumsfeld loyalists and who previously worked for Vice President Dick Cheney when he was defense secretary.

The changes were recommended, said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, because the three undersecretaries have "a broad knowledge and perspective of overall Defense Department operations." The service leaders are more focused on training, equipping and leading a particular military service, said Whitman.

Thomas Donnelly, a defense expert with the American Enterprise Institute, said the changes make it easier for the administration to assert political control and could lead to more narrow-minded decisions.

"It continues to devalue the services as institutions," said Donnelly, saying it will centralize power and shift it away from the services, where there is generally more military expertise.

Under the new plan, Rumsfeld ally Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary for intelligence, moved up to the third spot. Former Ambassador Eric Edelman, the policy undersecretary, and Kenneth Krieg, the undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, hold the fourth and fifth positions.

The first to succeed Rumsfeld remains the deputy secretary, a position currently vacant because the Senate has not confirmed Bush's nominee — current Navy Secretary Gordon England.

Senators have already approved Donald Winter to be England's replacement as Navy chief, and it is expected that Bush will eventually move England into the No. 2 Pentagon job without congressional approval through a recess appointment.

The new succession order bumps the Navy secretary to near the bottom of the line of succession — eighth behind the deputy, the three Pentagon undersecretaries and the Army and Air Force secretaries.

The Army secretary historically has been third in line, right behind the deputy secretary.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, intelligence gathering has taken center stage. Earlier this year, Bush named former ambassador John Negroponte as the country's first director of national intelligence, charged with overseeing the government's 15 highly competitive spy agencies.

Economy not all that sunny

Seattle Times - At least there's the economy. That's what Republicans are saying as their poll numbers tank over deficits, corruption and the hard slogging in Iraq. America saw strong economic growth in the third quarter, they sing, and a good jobs number for November.

All true, but all temporary. And, by the way, the tax cuts had little to do with it.

President Bush was recently in North Carolina, urging factory workers to give thanks for the tax cuts. In folksy mode, Bush criticized "some of those people up in Washington" who doubted that the tax cuts would make the economy golden.

It happens that some of those folks up on Wall Street are also doubters. They think the economy is about to turn really crummy. And though they are genuinely grateful for the tax cuts on a personal level — after all, they're rich — on an economic level, they see them as a problem. Lower tax revenues and a spending spree have set off an explosion of federal borrowing, which pushes up interest rates.

And this brings us to the housing bubble. Rising house prices, fed by low interest rates, have helped keep this economy going. That party's closing down.

Merrill Lynch economist David Rosenberg regards the splattering bubble with some alarm. He notes that activity related to housing (construction, furniture and appliances) now accounts for 22 percent of the gross domestic product. A significant drop in that demand is going to hurt.

Low interest rates were the gin in the punch bowl. They empowered people to take out enormous mortgages — giving them the wherewithal to bid up house prices. Household real-estate assets have now risen to a record-smashing 150 percent of GDP. As Rosenberg put it, "Caveat emptor (buyer beware) whenever anything approaches 150 percent of GDP."

You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to see the steam already fizzing out of the housing market. The shares of home-building companies have taken a dive in recent weeks. House prices in previously hot markets are flat or falling. In the Boston area, for example, asking prices are coming down in $100,000 chunks.

One statistic Bush forgot to share with the workers was the personal savings rate. In September, it fell to an extraordinary minus-1.5 percent. That means Americans were spending more money than they had coming in. Where did they get the bucks? By borrowing off the equity in their houses. Homeowners have thus obtained $160 billion in cash this year.

In a recent paper titled "Spendthrift Nation," Kevin Lansing, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, largely blamed the housing bubble for this orgy of borrowing. Rising house and stock prices, he wryly noted, are something that "households apparently view as a substitute for the quaint practice of putting aside money each month from their paychecks." As a result, household debt relative to income has smashed records, which is not healthy.

Lower house values will make people less willing or able to take more money out of their homes. That means they'll have less cash to leave with the merchants. And that's not good for a country in which consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the economy.

Another thing that scares economists is the proliferation of risky mortgages. These are the loans that require little or no down payment — and ask few pointed questions about the borrower's finances.

Many new mortgages are the adjustable-rate type, in which the interest charges rise when certain other rates do. As a come-on, lenders offer super-low payments for the first few months. When these fantasy rates expire, borrowers will face real-world interest charges that could hike their monthly payments by a third or more. Add on higher energy costs, and a lot of these Americans will have no choice but to unload the house in a falling market.

Oh yes, there's another economic indicator the president failed to mention: the price of gold. It recently hit its highest levels in a quarter-century. Gold goes up when investors feel queasy about economic stability.

Some Republicans are nonetheless advising Bush to talk more about the recent sunny numbers for growth and jobs. He had better work fast. Winter is coming on.

Providence Journal columnist Froma Harrop's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is fharrop@projo.com

Martial Law?

by Martin Grossman

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

That’s it: the fourth amendment to the United States Constitution, complete and entire: One, single, gloriously clear, and grammatically explicit sentence. If some enterprising entrepreneur will put it on a tee-shirt, I’ll wear it proudly.

In my naiveté I thought a few of us wearing those tee-shirts would be enough to put an end to the inane discussion of whether or not the President has the right to order the NSA to sustain a vast, warrantless, data-mining operation aimed at the international telephone and e-mail communication of Americans. On my stupid reading, the fourth amendment says no twice: no search or seizure without a sworn warrant and no warrant without specifying the places, persons or things sought.

But wait. On the Op Ed page of this morning’s New York Times, a couple of strict constructionists from the Reagan and H. W. Bush Justice Departments are out to set me straight. These guys are lawyers. I’m just a guy who makes his living reading and understanding the English language. According to David B. Rivkin and Lee A. Casey what the President did is ok. Here’s why: “The president has the constitutional authority to acquire foreign intelligence without a warrant or any other type of judicial blessing. The courts have acknowledged this authority, and numerous administrations, both Republican and Democrat have espoused the same view. [Because?] The purpose here is not to detect crime, or to build criminal prosecutions—areas where the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirements are applicable….” (I presumed to insert that because on the assumption that the last sentence in the passage wasn’t supposed to be a non–sequitor.) However, when I go back, as people like me do, to the text itself, I can’t find any language about “criminal prosecutions.” I suppose the fourth amendment has been a central test in case law about due process, but, I cannot, even imaginatively, construct any limitation to criminal process in the amendment itself, which speaks of “search and seizure.” Does the President have the right to order soldiers to come to my house and take my television or my stereo or the contents of my refrigerator? Apparently Rivkin and Casey say yes, if he does not plan to charge me with a crime, and he sincerely believes, for example, that the forgotten potato, rotting in the back of the vegetable bin, is a threat to national security.

The basis of this extraordinary authority, according to Rivkin and Casey, is that “the Constitution designates the president as commander in chief.” Do I detect a strange elision here? Commander in chief of what? Article II sec 2 of the Constitution says: “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.” So, as the Commander in Chief, the President can order the military to do things. But does that imply that he or she can command it to do anything? Or that his or her military command extends over the civilian population and the civilian organs of government?

It appears that to Rivkin and Casey Article 2 sec2’s guarantee of civilian control of the military is reversible. In his guise as commander of the military, the president in wartime may place us all under military discipline. What had previously ensured civilian control of the military is now understood to authorize military control of the civilian population. This is an interesting, if perverse, bit of reading. Fortunately those clever folks who wrote the constitution went on to say, in Article II sec 3 that the president: “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Presumably, among those laws, one finds the fourth amendment’s proscription of warrantless search and seizure—in the Bill of Rights, where it cannot be overturned, even by an act of Congress.

Impeachment is Now Real

by Martin Garbus

An hour after the New York Times described Bush’s illegal surveillance program, I wrote on the Huffington Post that Bush had committed a crime, a “High Crime,” and should be impeached.

Was there then enough evidence to justify the beginning of an attempt to impeach the President?

No.

Did the President have a good defense that he relied on Gonzalez, Ashcroft and the best lawyers in the country (in the Solicitor General’s and

Department of Justice’s offices)?

Yes.

Would any significant number of Americans of Congressmen then support such a process?

No.

Given all that, would the turmoil and consequential turmoil have justified the start of that brutal process?

No.

But that has all changed.

Because we shall soon see the consequences of those warrantless searches, the consequences of the government’s five years of secrecy, and even the citizens of the “Red States” will be outraged. Firstly, the warrantless taps will infect hundreds of “terrorist” and criminal cases throughout the country. Not only future cases, but past and present cases, even if there were convictions or plea bargains after the survellance started.

The defendants in “terrorist” and other infected criminal cases, the Court must find, must get access to everything, or very close to everything to make sure they were never improperly surveilled.

The Bush Administration, in these cases will refuse, as did the Nixon administration, to divulge information on national security grounds. Many alleged critical cases must then be dismissed. It will include Organized Crime and drug cases.

The entire criminal process will be brought to a standstill. Cases that should take six months to a year, will take three times as long, as motions go up and down the appellate ladder – as federal judges trial disagree with each other. Appellate Courts will disagree on issues so novel and so important that the Supreme Court will look at them.

Secondly, there will be an endless amounts of civil suits, that we can see will result in substantial damage awards. Commentators claimed there cannot be suits because no one has standing to challenge the surveillance. They are wrong. They do not remember the history of the Palmer Raids in the 1920’s, the surveillance in the Sixties and Seventies. The future will show both the enormous information the new technology has gathered but also the dishonest minimization of the extent of the surveillance.

That minimization is standard operating procedure for governments, whether they be run by Democrats or Republicans.

Thirdly, and most importantly, it is safe to preduct there will be coverups. This administration is not known for its candor.

The coverup starts by trying to get away with the vauge and meaningless defenses. Both Nixon and Clinton tried that.

When that doesn’t work, the coverup will be based on a foundation of small lies. Both Nixon and Clinton tried that.

We do not yet know what the FISA judges already fear – that they have been not just ignored by the executive but misused. The public shall also learn about the FISA judges’ misuse of the FISA courts and their warrants. The courts were created to permit eavesdropping and electronic surveillance, not physical break-ins.

But the facts will show that the Bush administration, with the knowledge, and at times, the consent of, the FISA judges, conducted illegal physical break-ins - break-ins that to this day, the involved person, is unaware of.

Were the results of these “terrorist” break-ins then given to criminal authorities to start unrelated prosecutions? Of course.

The American public will also learn what this Administration has thus far successfully hidden. When Bush came into office, he signed an Exeutive Order making all of his, and his father’s, papers privileged. The order, extending 12 years out, also says if the President is incapacitated, then a third person can execute the privilege. This means anybody – a wife, a family lawyer, a child. The order also says the Vice President’s papers are privileged. It is an extraordinary Executive Order – this has never been anything like this. No one ever suggested a Vice President has executive privilege. If we do not find out what they are hiding, we will see witholding on a scale never before seen. He will no longer be able to use 9/11 and the war on terror as an excuse. It will confirm the fact that illegality and secrecy existed long before 9/11, that it started as soon as Bush-Cheney-Rumsfield got into office. It will show deliberate attempts to avoid any judicial or legislative oversight of the illegal use of executive privilege.

Impeachment procedures will come not because of wrongdoing but because of the discovery of lies.

Both Nixon and Cliton faced impeachments because they lied.

It was inconceivable before the Nixon and Clinton impeachment procedures began that there could be, or would be a country or Senate that would be responsive to it.

In the Nixon case, it spiraled from a petty break-in – in Clinton’s case from a petty sexual act.

The Republicans: Winners or Perpetrators?

by Jane Smiley

I was thinking that the spy scandal was being expertly taken care of without my input, what with Martin Garbus, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, and Barron's magazine hot on the "president's" tail. My plan was to continue reading Les Rougons-Macquart in peace, but then I read RJ Eskow's blog about the Democrats, and while I thought it was insightful and well-argued, there was one thing I disagree with, and that is that the point of the whole spy scandal, now that Bush has been caught and has admitted breaking the law, is not whether the Democrats can find a way to be electable, it is whether the Republican Party is a criminal enterprise, and whether average Republicans, both in and out of the government, are going to countenance and support unnecessary and shamelessly unlawful behavior. Let's not shift the focus to Losers and Victims, but rather, keep it firmly on Winners and Perpetrators.

Let's talk about the "winner" aspect first. I clearly remember back in 2000, when Bush cheated to

"win" the Presidential election with the help of Justices Scalia and Thomas, who dishonored themselves in perpetuity by voting to stop the Florida recount, the Republicans gloated and gloried in the "win". They acted like a nasty Little League team, who wins on a technicality and then goes on to rub the faces of the other team in the dirt, as if winning at the cost of the integrity of the game were actually a thing worth celebrating. Clearly, the Republicans had learned their sportsmanship on the football fields of America's colleges and universities, by observing the hiring practices of successful coaches, the educational careers of cheating athletes, and the fund-raising efforts of testosterone-poisoned alumni. It was not how you play the game, but whether you win or lose! What a terrific model of traditional values that is! The Bush team thereafter went on to exemplify "winning through intimidation"-- "You're with us or against us." "If you disagree with the President, you are supporting the terrorists". Blah blah blah--we know the whole litany, and it is nauseating. We also know where it came from--the corporate boardroom as well as the athletic stadium and the middle school and the frat house, where bullies are king and "the common good" is a joke. By 2004, the Republicans had refined their election stealing techniques, and anyway, they were benefiting from continued disbelief on the part of the Democrats, who didn't seem to be able to imagine that the Republicans could be so brazen as to do it again, even though when Texas redistricting came up, Tom Delay gave them a taste of the corruption in store. What does it matter, the Republicans seemed to be saying in 2004, fair elections? The whole idea was a joke to them and they hardly bothered to conceal their thousands of little cheats and obstacles to an honest vote.

You had to wonder at the so-called moderates who were going along for the ride, all those diversity figures who were trotted out at the Republican convention, just for show, then packed away again for next time. Schwarzenegger and McCain were the most disgusting, but there were plenty of others, dupes or knaves, in whose name an illegal war had been perpetrated, in whose name an election was going to be stolen, in whose name war crimes were going to be committed in Fallujah right after the election, in whose name detainees and captives were going to be rendered and tortured. What kind of person, you had to wonder, would associate him or herself with winning at any cost, but there were plenty of them, and lots of them worked in the MSM and actually allowed their very own names to appear as by-lines! So they won. I'm sure they felt good about it. Supposedly, winning is the only thing and winners are always happy. Fair enough.

Back then, I was willing to admit that maybe some people didn't see these issues in quite the black and white way that I did. The conservative caste of mind is different from the liberal caste of mind, and much of what we believe is dictated by temperament. For example, I've noticed that for most liberals, the greatest sin is murder. Liberals recoil at harming others. The fact that the

Iraq war has physically harmed tens of thousands of Iraqis, not to mention many thousands of American soldiers, is the red letter immorality that defines that misadventure for liberals. If they reluctantly supported the war, those deaths and injuries are the hardest sticking point; if they never supported the war, those deaths are the most unforgivable horror.

Conservatives, though, don't really mind doing harm to others, even murder, especially if they add the phrase, "for your own good." After all, people get harmed all the time--the world, to a natural conservative, is a harmful place and a vale of tears. To a conservative, the greatest crime is betrayal of the tribe, and if worst comes to worst, better that those outside the tribe (often not even defined as human) come to grief (get injured, get raped, lose everything, get killed, let's be honest) in preference to oneself or one's allies. To a true conservative, it doesn't matter that Jesus's number one rule was to do unto others as you would have them do unto you--they somehow read this as do unto others before they do unto you. Conservatives, I think, have a stronger flight/fight response than liberals. They are both more fearful and more aggressive. It shows in their religion (God is someone to fear), it shows in their child-rearing techniques (beatings,whippings, spankings are to be administered, not avoided), it shows in their attitude toward marriage and sexuality (conforming to one's own strict moral standards isn't enough--others must conform, also, or the whole society is in danger). To the conservative mind, harm may be justifiably done to others who do not conform. Doing harm to others is a relative evil, not an absolute one. It is, you might say, an aspect of winning.

We can argue about these temperamentally-based political differences and never resolve them, I admit that. In the US, especially, conservatives have never, until now, at any rate, brought upon themselves the sort of destruction and humiliation that conservatives in other countries have brought upon themselves. They are still naive, and think that they can do harm with impunity. We shall see if they can.

At any rate, for a long time, American culture provided one area, negotiable though it has been, where conservatives and liberals could more or less agree that right and wrong is located, and that is the area of the law. While flouting the law is almost a national pastime in the US, the flouting is always done away from the public eye. Everyone pays lip service to the concept of the law-abiding citizen--even Tony Soprano presents himself as an average guy when he's at his daughter's soccer game. There's a good reason for this--we all know that, gripe as we will about certain laws, the law stands between us and actual chaos. Most people adhere even to laws that they don't agree with.

The I-Word is Gaining Ground

BY Katrina vanden Heuvel , The Nation -- In 1998, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, currently under indictment on corruption charges, proclaimed: "This nation sits at a crossroads. One direction points to the higher road of the rule of law...The other road is the path of least resistance" in which "we pitch the law completely overboard when the mood fits us...[and] close our eyes to the potential lawbreaking...and tear an unfixable hole in our legal system." That arbiter of moral politics was incensed about the possibility of Bill Clinton escaping unpunished for his "crimes."

Fast forward to December 2005. Not one official in the entire Bush Administration has been fired or indicted, not to mention impeached, for the shedding of American blood in Iraq or for the shredding of our Constitution at home. As Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter put it--hours after the New York Times reported that Bush had authorized NSA wiretapping of US citizens without judicial warrants--this President has committed a real transgression that "goes beyond sex, corruption and political intrigue to big issues like security versus liberty and the reasonable bounds of presidential power."

In the last months, several organizations, including AfterDowningStreet, Impeach Central and ImpeachPAC.org, have formed to urge Bush's impeachment. But until very recently, their views were virtually absent in the so-called "liberal" MSM, and could only be found on the Internet and in street protests.

But the times they are a' changin'. The I-word has moved from the marginal to the mainstream--although columnists like Charles "torture-is-fine-by-me" Krauthammer would like us to believe that "only the most brazen and reckless and partisan" could support the idea. In fact, as Michelle Goldberg reports in Salon, "in the past few days, impeachment "has become a topic of considered discussion among constitutional scholars and experts (including a few Republicans), former intelligence officers, and even a few politicians." Even a moderately liberal columnist like Newsweek's Alter sounds like The Nation, observing: "We're seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator."

As Editor & Publisher recently reported, the idea of impeaching Bush has entered the mainstream media's circulatory system--with each day producing more op-eds and articles on the subject. Joining the chorus on Christmas Eve, conservative business magazine Barron's published a lengthy editorial excoriating the president for committing a potentially impeachable offense. "If we don't discuss the program and lack of authority of it," wrote Barron's editorial page editor Thomas Donlan, "we are meeting the enemy--in the mirror."

Public opinion is also growing more comfortable with the idea of impeaching this president. A Zogby International poll conducted this summer found that 42 percent of Americans felt that impeaching Bush would be justified if it was shown that he had manipulated intelligence in going to war in Iraq. (John Zogby admitted that "it was much higher than I expected.") By November, the number of those who favored impeaching Bush stood at 53 percent--if it was in fact proven that Bush had lied about the basis for invading Iraq. (And these polls were taken before the revelations of Bush's domestic spying.)

For those interested in some of the most compelling charges against the president, I offer a brief summary:

* Former Nixon White House counsel John Dean argued in his aptly-named book Worse than Watergate that Bush's false statements about WMDs in Iraq--used to drum up support for an invasion--deceived the American people and Congress. This constituted "an impeachable offense," Dean told PBS' Bill Moyers in 2004. "I think the case is overwhelming that these people presented false information to the Congress and to the American people." Bush's actions were actually far worse than Watergate, Dean contends, because "no one died for Nixon's so-called Watergate abuses."

Lending credence to Dean's arguments, the Downing Street Memo revealed that Britain's MI-6 Director Richard Dearlove had told Tony Blair that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" by the Bush Administration. John Bonifaz, a Boston-based attorney and constitutional law expert, said that Bush seemingly "concealed important intelligence which he ought to have communicated," and "must certainly be punished for giving false information to the Senate." Bush deceived "the American people as to the basis for taking the nation into war against Iraq," Bonifaz argued--an impeachable offense.

* Rep. John Conyers (news, bio, voting record) argued as well that the president committed impeachable offenses" because he and senior administration officials "countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in Iraq" at Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere, including Guantanamo Bay and the now-notorious "black sites" around the world.

* The most compelling evidence of Bush's high crimes and misdemeanors is the revelation that he repeatedly authorized NSA spying on US citizens without obtaining the required warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court. Constitutional experts, politicians and ex-intelligence experts agree that Bush "committed a federal crime by wiretapping Americans." Rep. John Lewis (news, bio, voting record)--"the first major House figure to suggest impeaching Bush," said the AP--argued that the president "deliberately, systematically violated the law" in authorizing the wiretapping. Lewis added: "He is not King, he is president."

Meanwhile, Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University School of Law--a specialist in surveillance law--told Knight Ridder that Bush's actions "violated federal law" and raised "serious constitutional questions of high crimes and misdemeanors." It is worth remembering that an abuse of power similar to Bush's NSA wiretapping decision was part of the impeachment charge brought against

Richard Nixon in 1974. [This comparison was brought home in the ACLU's powerful full page ad in the NYT of December 22nd.]

The war on terror should not supersede the laws of the land

WASHINGTON, Christian Science Monitor - In the process of declaring war on terrorism and terrorists and, of course, terror in general, the Bush administration has, inadvertently or not, declared war on the other two branches of government and they are not amused. So expect a contentious and argumentative 2006.

The revelation that the administration, without the court's approval, ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) to tap phone calls and monitor e-mails going in and out of the country has led to a revolt by the judiciary and the Congress.

The most vexing fallout for the White House at the moment is the extremely short-term renewal of the Patriot Act in the Congress. The law will be open for discussion again in five weeks, which is when the Hill will begin to debate the NSA phone-tapping, and the mood will almost certainly grow sourer as the revelations continue to drip out.

But another potentially bigger issue arose last week in Richmond, Va. There, a three-judge panel smacked down a legal maneuver by the Bush administration.

The case stems from the detainment of Jose Padilla, the alleged would-be dirty bomber from Chicago. Mr. Padilla was being held without a trial as an enemy combatant, a move his lawyers said was unconstitutional. Padilla's case has made it all the way to the Supreme Court and, just as the case was about to be heard, the White House suddenly changed gears and decided they wanted Padilla charged as a civilian - hoping such a move would mean the high court would no longer be involved.

But the Richmond court not only denied the administration's request to move the case, it said the request to move him after demanding he be held without trial came at "substantial cost to the government's credibility."

If that wasn't enough of a rebuke, consider that it came from the same Richmond court that sided with the administration in September, when it agreed Padilla could be held without a trial. Want more? How about the fact that the Richmond court's opinion was written by Michael Luttig, the judge Bush recently considered to fill an empty seat on the Supreme Court.

In other words, a lot of people in Congress and the courts aren't exactly celebrating the White House's prosecution of the "war on terror."

None of this should be unexpected. There are, according to the Constitution, three coequal branches of government in the United States and when one of them starts stepping on the others' toes, there are going to be problems.

Immediately after 9/11 a lot of concessions were made to the executive branch, but times change, the norm reasserts itself and people begin to have second thoughts - in both parties there's nothing saying the next president will be a Republican and that is almost certainly weighing on GOP minds.

Of course, it is a time of war, and in times of war the executive branch usually cites the need for special powers to keep the country safe. The inevitable parallels have already been drawn between the "war on terror" and other conflicts - World War I, World War II, the Civil War - but there are some notable differences in this war and they mean the usual claims of special powers, and particularly extraordinary ones, will be a hard sell.

The US is at war with no country or government this time around. There is no "front" in the traditional sense. There will be no peace treaty signed when the battle is done. And it is unclear whether we'll even know when the battle is actually done. The "war on terror" will go on for years, likely decades.

And all of that means the extension of any special powers could become largely permanent if they are not challenged. Congress and the courts aren't happy about signing over powers for any amount of time, but indefinitely? Not likely.

On top of all this, there's the substance of the administration's moves, particularly where the NSA eavesdropping is concerned. There was already a system and a court in place to handle the requests for domestic surveillance. In emergency cases, agents can eavesdrop for 72 hours before getting a warrant retroactively. And when they need a warrant, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has been more than compliant.

The FISC has received about 19,000 eavesdropping requests since it was created in 1978. It has denied a handful. In 2004, there were more than 1,700 requests. How many were denied? None.

Still, the White House says it's not enough. The executive branch needs superspecial powers for this on-going war. The FISC and the system around it aren't good enough because they come from pre-9/11 thinking.

That's true, of course, but that argument can easily become a slippery slope. Speed limits, fuel- efficiency standards, Miranda rules, - probably 99 percent of the laws in this country - are the result of what we have come to call pre-9/11 thinking.

Study: Climate Change May Melt Permafrost

Mon Dec 26, 4:50 AM ET

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Associated Press - Climate change could melt the top 11 feet of Alaska permafrost by the end of the century, according to a new study.

The federal study applied one supercomputer climate models to the future of permafrost.

Under the most extreme scenario outlined, warming temperatures could thaw the top 11 feet of permafrost near the ground surface in most areas of the Northern Hemisphere by 2100, altering ecosystems across Alaska, Canada and Russia.

"If that much near-surface permafrost thaws, it could release considerable amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and that could amplify global warming," said lead author David Lawrence, with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "We could be underestimating the rate of global temperature increase."

A permafrost researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, however, disagrees that the thaw could be so large. Alaska's permafrost won't melt that fast or deep, said Vladimir Romanovsky, who monitors a network of permafrost observatories for the Geophysical Institute.

If air temperatures increase 2 to 4 degrees over the next century, permafrost would begin thawing south of the Brooks Range and start degrading in some places on Alaska's Arctic slope, he said. But a prediction that melting will reach deeply over the entire region goes too far, he said.

The computer climate model didn't consider some natural factors that tend to keep the permafrost cold, Romanovsky said. For example, deeper permafrost, largely untouched by recent warming at the surface, would have an influence.

Lawrence said he hopes to collaborate with Romanovsky to fine-tune future studies to deal with those deeper layers.

Permafrost — earth that remains frozen year-round — lies under much of Alaska, Canada and Siberia. It can be more than 1,000 feet deep on the Arctic slope.

Ground melting is only one clue that Arctic climate change may be speeding up. In September, the polar ice cap shrank to its smallest extent in 25 years of monitoring by satellite. Tundra has been greening up.

NASA recently reported that 2005 may top 1998 as the Earth's warmest year on record.

The permafrost simulations came from some of the most detailed climate models ever made, Lawrence said. Using supercomputers in the United States and Japan, it calculated how frozen soil would interact with air temperatures, snow, sea ice changes and other processes.

The study was published Dec. 17 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and presented earlier in the month at a science conference in San Francisco.

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Spying Said to Be Broader Than Reported

NEW YORK, Associated Press - The National Security Agency has conducted much broader surveillance of e-mails and phone calls — without court orders — than the Bush administration has acknowledged, The New York Times reported on its Web site.

The NSA, with help from American telecommunications companies, obtained access to streams of domestic and international communications, said the Times in the report late Friday, citing unidentified current and former government officials.

The story did not name the companies.

Since the Times disclosed the domestic spying program last week, President Bush has stressed that his executive order allowing the eavesdropping was limited to people with known links to al-Qaida.

But the Times said that NSA technicians have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might lead to terrorists.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunications data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the paper said, quoting an unnamed official.

Origins of Christmas

by Sheldon Drobny

The context in which Christianity, and thus Christmas, was formed was the Roman Empire. The Romans honored Saturn, the ancient god of agriculture, each year beginning on December 17. In a festival called Saturnalia, they glorified past days when the god Saturn ruled. This festival lasted for seven days and included the winter solstice which by the Julian calendar fell on December 25. During Saturnalia the Romans feasted, postponed all business and warfare, exchanged gifts, and temporarily freed their slaves. Such traditions resemble those of Christmas and are used to establish a link between the two holidays. These and other winter festivities continued through January 1, the festival of Kalends, when Romans marked the day of the new moon and the first day of the month and the beginning of the religious year.

Each year as the days got shorter, early cvilizations feared that the sun would disappear completely. They celebrated the 25th of December each year because the days began to become longer 4 days after the winter soltice. Science has now clearly explained the seasons as a phenomenum caused by the movement of the earth around the sun and the tilt of the earth at 23 degrees relative to the sun. As Isaac Asimov comments in his Guide to the Bible, “Converts could join Christianity without giving up their Saturnalian happiness. It was only necessary for them to joyfully greet the birth of the Son rather than the Sun."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas

I recently posted an article called “Organized Religion and God.” The post was actually meant to be a commentary about the early belief systems of civilizations before science had advanced enough to explain unexplained phenomena. Modern science has explained and swept away many of the fears of the past including the imminent disappearance of the sun. Many of these fears have been adopted by religion as a means to explain what has not yet been understood by humans and someday may be explained by observation and science. The most prominent fears that religion tries do deal with are death and the meaning of life. Both are not yet understood in tangible scientific terms.

The recent debate about whether it is appropriate to say “merry Christmas” or “happy holidays” is yet another argument made by thoughtless religious people. It is yet another means to create a debate about the nature of Christmas in America. Those who advocate saying “merry Christmas” to a Jew or a Muslim are inconsiderate, thoughtless, and are advocating the superiority of their religious beliefs. Many of these people believe that the Founding Fathers were religious Christians. They were not. Most of them were Deists and abhorred the very teachings of Christian fundamentalists. A Deist is one who believes in the existence of a God or a supreme being but denies revealed religion, basing his belief on the light of nature and reason. Christmas was not even a national holiday until 1885.

Fog Fact of the Year

by Larry Beinhart, Huffington Post

President Bush gave a radio address on December 17 in which he explained why he had to use illegal wiretaps.

As usual, he returned to the events of 9/11. He said:

Pentagon, Nawaf al Hamzi and Khalid al Mihdhar, communicated while they were in the United States to other members of al Qaeda who were overseas. But we didn't know they were here, until it was too late. "... The activities I have authorized make it more likely that killers like these 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time."

To the contrary. It was secrecy -- and incompetence -- that let al Hazmi board that plane on 9/11:

The tragedy of 9/11 was a result of the failure to see the facts that were in front of us. On April 1st, 2001 Oklahoma State Trooper C. L. Parkins stopped one of the future hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi, for speeding. Al Hazmi had been photographed at an Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia. He was known to the CIA as a terrorist. They suspected that he might be in the US illegally. The CIA was, theoretically, looking for al Hazmi. Parkins ran al Hazmi's California license through the computer and checked for warrants. Nothing came back. The CIA had not distributed the information.

Trooper Parkins wrote al Hazmi two tickets totaling $138 and let him continue his journey.

--Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin, Larry Beinhart. Nation Books, 2005, page one.

That was neither the first nor the last time that al Hazmi and al Mihdhar could have been stopped:

Nawaf al Hazmi set off the alarms for both the first and second metal detectors and was then hand-wanded before being passed [to board the plane they were about to hijack] ... Khalid al Mihdhar, and Majed Moqed were flagged by CAPPS.The Hazmi brothers were also selected for extra scrutiny by the airline's customer service representative at the check-in counter. He did so because one of the brothers did not have photo identification nor could he understand English, and because the agent found both of the passengers to be suspicious. ...

Mihdhar and Moqed placed their carry-on bags on the belt of the X-ray machine and proceeded through the first metal detector. Both set off the alarm, and they were directed to a second metal detector. Mihdhar did not trigger the alarm and was permitted through the checkpoint.

... We asked a screening expert to review the videotape of the hand-wanding, and he found the qual- ity of the screener's work to have been "marginal at best." The screener should have "resolved" what set off the alarm; and in the case of both Moqed and Hazmi, it was clear that he did not.

The 9/11 Commission Final Report

The 9/11 Commission even produced a boxed set of missed opportunities to have grabbed the terrorists based on information that was known but not shared.

Operational Opportunities 1. January 2000: the CIA does not watchlist Khalid al Mihdhar or notify the

FBI when it learned Mihdhar possessed a valid U.S. visa.

2. January 2000: the CIA does not develop a transnational plan for tracking Mihdhar and his associates so that they could be followed to Bangkok and onward, including the United States.

3. March 2000: the CIA does not watchlist Nawaf al Hazmi or notify the FBI when it learned that he possessed a U.S. visa and had flown to Los Angeles on January 15, 2000.

4. January 2001: the CIA does not inform the FBI that a source had identified Khallad, or Tawfiq bin Attash, a major figure in the October 2000 bombing of the

USS Cole, as having attended the meeting in Kuala Lumpur with Khalid al Mihdhar.

5. May 2001: a CIA official does not notify the FBI about Mihdhar's U.S. visa, Hazmi's U.S. travel, or Khallad's having attended the Kuala Lumpur meeting (identified when he reviewed all of the relevant traffic because of the high level of threats).

6. June 2001: FBI and CIA officials do not ensure that all relevant information regarding the Kuala Lumpur meeting was shared with the Cole investigators at the June 11 meeting.

7. August 2001: the FBI does not recognize the significance of the information regarding Mihdhar and Hazmi's possible arrival in the United States and thus does not take adequate action to share information, assign resources, and give sufficient priority to the search.

8. August 2001: FBI headquarters does not recognize the significance of the information regarding Moussaoui's training and beliefs and thus does not take adequate action to share information, involve higher-level officials across agencies, obtain information regarding Moussaoui's ties to al Qaeda, and give sufficient priority to determining what Moussaoui might be planning.

9. August 2001: the CIA does not focus on information that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a key al Qaeda lieutenant or connect information identifying KSM as the "Mukhtar" mentioned in other reports to the analysis that could have linked "Mukhtar" with Ramzi Binalshibh and Moussaoui.

10. August 2001: the CIA and FBI do not connect the presence of Mihdhar, Hazmi, and Moussaoui to the general threat reporting about imminent attacks.

The 9/11 Commission drew the logical conclusion -- less secrecy, not more secrecy.

What all these stories have in common is a system that requires a demonstrated "need to know" before sharing. This approach assumes it is possible to know, in advance,who will need to use the information. Such a system implicitly assumes that the risk of inadvertent disclosure outweighs the benefits of wider sharing. Those Cold War assumptions are no longer appropriate.

What the 9/11 Commission would not do, for political reasons, was make the point that the leaders of the country in the months prior to 9/11 adamantly refused to focus on Al Qaeda,

Osama bin Laden and potential terrorist attacks on the United States. When information was put in front of them, they ignored it, brushed it off, or rebuffed it. They were adamantly focused on finding an opportunity to invade

Iraq. They let their subordinates know both positions. Which presumably had a trickle down effect that said, in effect, "don't tell me about Al Qaeda, no one wants to know! Bring me the head of

Saddam Hussein!"

The facts -- that we knew about Nawaf al Hamzi and Khalid al Mihdhar, that we knew that they were international villains, that we knew enough to have stopped them -- have not only been published, they have been published in the official record of the events. Yet nobody appears to have checked the record and then challenged the president on his claim.

New Home Sales Fall More Than Expected

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Sales of new homes plunged in November by the largest amount in nearly 12 years, the most dramatic evidence yet that the booming housing market is starting to cool off.

The Commerce Department reported Friday that sales of new single-family homes fell by 11.3 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.245 million units.

Analysts had been expecting a drop of around 8.7 percent given that sales in October had jumped unexpectedly to an all-time high. But many said the size of the decline was a clear indication that the five-year boom in housing has peaked.

In addition to the big plunge in sales, the median price of a new home dropped by 4.1 percent from the October level to $225,200. That was up only 0.3 percent from November 2004, representing a marked slowdown from what been double-digit price gains.

Analysts said they still expect sales of both new and existing homes to set records for a fifth consecutive year in 2005, but they are forecasting sales declines of around 6 percent in 2006 as demand falters under the impact of rising mortgage rates.

The Federal Reserve pushed interest rates up for a 13th time this month with two more rate hikes expected in January and March as the central bank tries to slow the economy to keep inflation under control.

The fear is that the Fed's credit tightening could cause a steep falloff in housing demand that would send home prices plunging and send a shock through the economy similar to the 2000 bursting of the stock market bubble.

Most analysts said this remained a remote possibility in housing.

"There are plenty of bubbles around the country that are losing air rapidly and more are likely to follow. But so far there is no generalized collapse in the market," said Joel Naroff, chief economist at Naroff Economic Advisors in Holland, Pa.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average edged down 6.17 points Friday to finish the week at 10,883.27.

In a second economic report, the Commerce Department said that orders to U.S. factories for big-ticket manufactured goods jumped to a record $223 billion in November, a 4.4 percent increase from October that was the biggest percentage gain in six months.

However, the overall figure was heavily influenced by a 133.8 percent surge in demand for commercial aircraft. Analysts had expected a big gain in aircraft orders because of the success Boeing Co. had at the Dubai air show. For November, Boeing booked 148 new plane orders compared to 36 orders in October.

But excluding all transportation, orders fell by 0.6 percent, the third consecutive decline outside of transportation.

Some analysts blamed this weakness on the surge in energy prices following this year's hurricanes.

"Higher energy prices stemming from the hurricane season and fundamental energy supply shortages are clearly having a negative impact on the economy," said David Huether, chief economist for the

National Association of Manufacturers. "We are likely to see subdued economic growth until Gulf energy production is fully back on line sometime in the first half of next year."

Home sales were down in all parts of the country except the Northeast, where they staged a 13.4 percent surge, the biggest percentage increase in this region since January 1994.

Sales were down 22.1 percent in the West, the biggest decline since February 1994, while sales fell 18.3 percent in the Midwest and 5.5 percent in the South.

The stockpile of unsold homes rose to a record of 503,000 homes in November.

This rising inventory is one reason economists believe price gains will be less in coming months.

Demand is also being hurt by falling affordability, reflecting the gains in home prices in recent years and rising mortgage rates. The National Association of Realtors said this week that its affordability index is at its lowest level in 14 years.

While rates on 30-year mortgages dipped slightly to 6.26 percent this week, they are still a full percentage point above the four-decade low of 5.21 percent set in mid-2003.

Builders are apparently rushing to complete homes and sell them before mortgage rates rise further. The government reported earlier this week that construction was started on 5.3 percent more homes and apartments in November than in October.

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On the Net:

New home sales: http://www.census.gov/newhomesales

Where does Santa live?

OSLO (Reuters) - Father Christmas may live in Iceland -- at least if the efficiency of his helpers is a guide -- in what may help the island's drive to win hearts and tourism from Arctic rivals claiming Santa and his reindeer.

Only Reykjavik got a reply when Reuters bureaux in all eight nations with Arctic territory wrote to Father Christmas or local gift bringers -- ranging from Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) in Russia to Julenissen in Norway -- asking: 'Where do you live?'

"Let's all be good and kind to each other," he replied in Icelandic, with a link to "www.santaworld.is" which says "from time immemorial Santa Claus has lived at Dimmuborgir," a remote area of northern Iceland.

The reply, aided by the efficiency of a Nordic postal service and Santa's helpers, might aid Iceland in a battle for hearts and tourist dollars with rival nations claiming Santa.

Father Christmas' home is a source of seasonal tension, especially in the Nordic region where Finland attracts about 500,000 visitors a year to Rovaniemi on the Arctic Circle to visit a jovial white-bearded, red-clad Santa.

Finland's winter success means other Santas feel left out in the cold -- at least economically.

From Rovaniemi, Santa Claus said the Reuters letter must be among a deluge of 30,000 he received every day. The letters -- from Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Canada, the United States and Russia -- were all mailed in mid-November.

"I live here in Lapland and anybody who doesn't believe, I wish a warm welcome to come and meet me and see how it is here," he told Reuters in English, with a faint Finnish accent.

"Of course this is the homeland of reindeer, and everyone knows I travel with reindeer," he said by telephone.

In a rare grumble, he said children never doubted that Lapland was his home. "It's always the media that brings this question up. I have never met a five-year-old who comes here and asks: 'Am I in the right place?'," he said.

SEASONAL CYNICS

Seasonal cynics might suggest that Iceland, with just 250,000 people, has better chances of replying to letters than other countries around the Arctic.

"Santa Claus is no longer Norwegian. He's Finnish," Norway's independent TV2 concluded glumly in a recent report. It said the "hordes of tourists" flying in charter planes to Rovaniemi sometimes disrupted air traffic over neighboring Norway.

Copenhagen, where many believe Santa lives in the Danish territory of Greenland, has won an extra argument that Father Christmas is Danish by saying last year that it plans to claim the North Pole as part of Danish territory.

Many Americans reckon Santa lives at the pole.

Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja raised few laughs among his counterparts from the Nordic region and Russia last month when he invited them to a meeting in northern Finland with a joke that it was "close to where Father Christmas lives."

Tuomioja's joke, at a dinner in the Norwegian Arctic port of Harstad, rubbed in how far Finland has gone in cornering the lucrative Santa market.

Santa Claus is derived from St. Nicholas, the patron saint of children who lived in what is now Turkey in the third century A.D. Reuters did not write to him there, reckoning that Santa is too closely associated with reindeer and snow.

Report: Spying Broader Than Acknowledged

NEW YORK, Associated Press - The National Security Agency has conducted much broader surveillance of e-mails and phone calls — without court orders — than the Bush administration has acknowledged, The New York Times reported on its Web site.

The NSA, with help from American telecommunications companies, obtained access to streams of domestic and international communications, said the Times in the report late Friday, citing unidentified current and former government officials.

The story did not name the companies.

Since the Times disclosed the domestic spying program last week, President Bush has stressed that his executive order allowing the eavesdropping was limited to people with known links to al-Qaida.

But the Times said that NSA technicians have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might lead to terrorists.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunications data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the paper said, quoting an unnamed official.

Evolution breakthroughs lead top 2005 science stories: magazine

WASHINGTON (AFP) - New breakthroughs in the workings of Darwinist evolution, in flu genes, in chimpanzees and in stickleback fish led the top ten discoveries in the science world in 2005, according to a US magazine.

In a year in which scientists and religious groups fought furiously over a pseudo-scientific challenge to accepted explanations of evolution, the weekly magazine Science chose to lead its top ten with discoveries that "piled up new insights about evolution at the genetic level and the birth of species."

The breakthroughs included "information that could help us lead healthier lives in the future."

The magazine's top ten list came out two days after a US court ruled that it was unconstitutional for a Pennsylvania school to teach the 'intelligent design' concept as an alternative to Darwin's theory of natural selection as the driving force of evolution.

Advanced by religious conservatives and a handful of scientists, intelligent design postulates that nature and biological structures are so complicated that they must have been designed by an unidentified intelligent being, rather than evolving by chance.

"Evolution has been the foundation and guiding theory of biology ever since Darwin gave the theory its proper scientific debut in 1859," Science said.

At the top of the magazine's ten breakthroughs was the mapping of the chimpanzee genome unveiled by researchers in October.

Scientists are using that map, alongside parts of the human genetic sequence, for a better understanding of the evolution of the human species.

The magazine also honored the sequencing of the virus which caused the 1918 global flu pandemic, using in part influenza genes found preserved in permafrost.

That development is particularly important, the magazine said, because the 1918 virus is believed to have started as purely a bird virus. Scientists and health officials around the world are currently studying the rapid spread of another bird flu strain which they fear could jump to humans.

A third genetic discovery noted by Science is the way the Alaskan stickleback fish lost its armor as it evolved from an oceanic, salt-water fish to a freshwater lake-dweller.

In astronomy for the year, Science gave a nod to the landing of the European spacecraft Huygens on the largest moon of Saturn, Titan, which revealed a world shaped by heavy rains of liquid methane.

The magazine named to the top ten list a group of studies on "faulty wiring" in the brain. The studies suggest that conditions like schizophrenia, Tourette syndrome and dyslexia arise from faulty wiring of the brain's neural circuits during fetal development.

Among other big stories of the year, the magazine singled out increasing evidence of global warming, including melting of Arctic ice and altered bird migrations. As "scientific evidence for climate change built up in 2005," the magazine said, "non-scientists seem to have listened."

It also made note of the decision to site the world's first fusion reactor, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, in France, chosen over Japan; and setbacks in experimental particle collider projects in the United States.

Intelligence Abuse Déjà Vu

Gary Hart, Huffington Post

Three weeks after I took the oath of office in the Senate in 1975, then-Majority Leader Mike Mansfield appointed me to a newly created committee — the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, which soon came to be known as the "Church Committee," after its chairman, the late Sen. Frank Church of Idaho. Out of 11 members, I was by far the youngest.

The Senate had impaneled the committee because of increasing reports of abuse of authority by the country's myriad intelligence agencies under the Nixon administration as well as previous administrations. For two years, the committee investigated broadly — the CIA, FBI, DIA and NSA were all within its purview — and finally, in 1976, it issued a series of recommendations designed to prevent future abuses.

Today, one has only to consider the behavior of the Bush administration during the Iraq war to appreciate how soon we forget, how little we learn and how pervasive is the tendency to violate civil and constitutional liberties in the name of war. Virtually all of the reforms recommended by the Church Committee — many of which were passed into law — have been evaded, ignored or violated in the name of the "war on terrorism."

It is often said that the first victim of war is the truth. In fact, the first victim of American war is the liberty of Americans.

During our investigations of intelligence abuse, we discovered that the government had engaged in widespread surveillance of a very large number of American citizens. Civil rights leaders were monitored. Antiwar groups were under surveillance. Domestic phones were tapped. Mail was opened. The FBI conducted warrantless "black bag" break-ins of private residences and offices. We wrote an entire report on warrantless electronic surveillance by the FBI — exactly what the NSA has now been authorized to do by the president.

One particularly egregious program, code-named COINTELPRO, went beyond the mere collection of intelligence on domestic groups to actually trying to "disrupt" or "neutralize" target groups. The excuse given by the FBI and others was, "We are at war, and we need to do everything we can to defeat our enemy." Sound familiar?

In some cases, the intelligence services even turned violent. The CIA, for instance, conducted the infamous Phoenix program that resulted in the systematic assassination of thousands of Vietnamese villagers accused of collaborating with the Viet Cong. This was the 1970s version of Abu Ghraib. During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations we tried (with obsessive insistence in the case of Fidel Castro) to assassinate at least six foreign leaders. Too bad we didn't have the Predator then. It would have been much simpler.

Our committee's work resulted in many reforms. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 required special intelligence courts to approve national security wiretaps. The Bush administration, however, has found that statute inconvenient and, predictably, has ignored it.

Our committee also recommended presidential "findings" before extraordinary covert operations were undertaken. This was not designed to undermine the CIA but to protect it; until then it had been left dangling in the wind when misused by presidents who wished to claim "plausible deniability."

That reform surfaced during another period of political abuse — the infamous Iran-Contra affair, involving Bible-shaped cakes, trading with the enemy, lying to Congress and avoidance of accountability. It turns out that President Reagan, contrary to his own memory, had signed a "finding" authorizing the whole bizarre episode.

Again to support the CIA, our panel laid the groundwork for the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act that prevented identification of CIA operatives. This was the act that now appears to have been violated by at least half of the Bush White House in its demented efforts to punish Ambassador Joe Wilson by "outing" his undercover wife.

So what goes around, comes around. Here we are again, 30 years later, in yet another unwise war, no wiser and once again willing to sacrifice constitutional liberties for security expediency. If there was one lesson all of us who served on the Church Committee learned, it was that there are no secrets, that everything comes out and that the sacrifice of liberty is almost never justified by improved security.

The strange arm of the law: offbeat escapades from 2005

PARIS (AFP) - Alongside tragedies, wars and natural disasters the year just ending brought its share of unusual, outrageous, tragi-comic and just downright silly news items.

As usual, a lot of them concerned judicial scrapes, prison mix-ups, strange regulations and the like. A selection:

- In Denmark, a 43-year-old man was sentenced to two months in prison for passing himself off as a bona fide prisoner and thereby spending a night voluntarily behind bars. Per Thorbjoern Lonka said he carried out the prank in order to prove that rich people could easily pay someone else to serve their prison terms. The prison guards who locked him up failed to ask for his identity papers.

- A canny youth serving a sentence for assault in a Scottish jail escaped by virtue of the fact that his identical twin was also incarcerated there, but was due for release. When the brother's name was called, his twin presented himself, and was duly let out. The authorities then had little choice but to free the brother as well.

- A court in the Swiss city of Zurich ruled that owners of very short cars could pay only half a parking fine, provided that two of them could really fit into one space. A couple who owned two tiny city runabouts had done just that, but needless to say the parking attendant had stuck a fine on both their vehicles.

- Tired of hearing reports of visitors paying grossly inflated prices for taxi rides in his city, the mayor of Prague disguised himself as an Italian visitor -- and promptly unmasked a driver whose meter ran at over six times the normal rate. "Disguised the way I was, I was certainly expecting to be charged a higher price, but not to such an outrageous extent," he said.

- Local lawmakers in the US state of Virginia threw out a bill that would have banned young people from wearing baggy falling-down trousers, which are currently all the rage. "Underwear is called underwear for a reason" said the congressman who sought the measure.

- Forty-six students in Thailand were banned from the military for life after they tried to cheat their way through the army entrance exam via mobile phones concealed in their shoes.

- A woman in the US city of Norwalk, Connecticut filed a lawsuit against the local authorities for exposing her to colleagues' perfumes and colognes in her job as a municipal clerk. She cited a serious allergy.

- A couple in California pleaded guilty to trying to extort money from a major hamburger restaurant chain after claiming to have found a human fingertip in a bowl of chili. The court found that the fingertip was placed there on purpose, and had been purchased for 100 dollars from a construction worker who lost it in an industrial accident.

- The local council in the northern English resort town of Blackpool enacted an employment rights charter for the donkeys that carry tourists along the beach. The animals won regulated working hours and a day off each week.

- A German woman who was mistakenly recorded as being dead by her local pensions office was asked to provide documentary proof that she was, in fact, alive.

- When World Trade Organisation negotiators rolled into Hong Kong for a major summit, digital piracy figured prominently on their busy agenda. Strange to relate, many of the bustling outlets that usually sell music CDs, DVDs and software in the city decided to shut down for the duration of the talks.

- In a inversion of the familiar Third World call centre set-up, a British man was fined for advertising his "sex chat" phone line as offering "Filipina girls," when the women in question were in fact working from central England. He was unmasked when clients found the alleged "Filipinas" had strangely familiar accents.

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Science on a lighter note: offbeat tales of 2005

PARIS (AFP) - Alongside tragedies, wars and natural disasters, 2005 has brought its share of unusual, outrageous, tragi-comic and just downright silly news items.

Among the oddities served up by the world of science:

- A Swiss woman sees colours and experiences tastes when she hears music, scientists at the University of Zurich in Switzerland reported. The rare phenomenon, known as synaesthesia, was confirmed in a 27-year-old professional musician, who saw violet on hearing an F sharp and red on a middle C.

- Researchers at National University in La Jolla, California, threw a dinner party and then analyzed the leftovers to see if their guests left significant DNA samples on them. Complete profiles were recovered from 43 percent of the sample, and partial ones from 33 percent. Such work could be useful in catching burglars, who often like tucking into the food found in their victims' kitchens.

- African elephants have at least one thing in common with parrots: they imitate sounds they hear around them, said scientists in the United States and Norway. A captive female jumbo in Kenya was found to imitate the noise of trucks on a nearby road, while a male kept with Asian elephants at a zoo in Switzerland mimicked their chirping noises.

- Enterprising students at Brown University in the United States invented an alarm clock that monitors its user's brainwaves and works out the best time to wake him or her up. The only drawback: the sleeper must wear a headband equipped with electrodes.

- Alexis Lemaire, a 24-year-old student in Reims, France, claimed a world record for working out the 13th root of a 200-digit number by mental arithmetic. The feat, checked by a notary, took him 48 minutes and 51 seconds.

- Also in the maths department, Akira Haraguchi, a 59-year-old psychiatric counselor in Japan, recited from memory the value of "pi," a constant which consists of an infinite string of digits, to 83,431 decimal places. It took him 13 hours to beat the previous record, also set by a Japanese, of a mere 54,000 digits.

- The guardians of animal nomenclature had mixed feelings over a proposal to name three newly-discovered species of slime-mould beetle after US President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A pair of insect experts reserved the names Agathidium bushi, Agathidium cheneyi and Agathidium rumsfeldi for their latest creepy-crawlies.

- An odd-looking rodent spotted on sale for meat in a Laotian food market turned out to be not only a new species but also the first member of a new family of mammals to be identified in more than three decades. An alert member of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society noticed the creature, which was baptised a stone-dwelling puzzle-mouse -- or, more simply, "rock rat".

- Cane toads, reptiles imported into Australia in the erroneous belief that they would eliminate pests from sugar-cane fields, are attracted by disco-style flashing lights, said researchers in the Northern Territory who are desperate to find a way of eliminating the fast-spreading creatures. "The old toads are definitely a disco animal," said a member of a group called Frogwatch.

- The fashion for television detective series which focus on forensic science may be unwittingly providing tips to real-world criminals, a study by British researchers said. Some forensic scientists were even becoming unwilling to cooperate with the media for precisely that reason.

Chertoff: FEMA Changes Could Be Radical

Head Homeland 'Security' Stooge Michael Chertoff lies through his ass.

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Meeting notes, released Tuesday by a union representative for federal emergency workers, stated that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told employees that many changes planned after Hurricane Katrina were for publicity purposes.

Chertoff's spokesman firmly denied he ever made such comments.

The typed notes, purportedly taken by an unidentified official, said Chertoff told the employees the retooling of the Federal Emergency Management Agency "is partially a perception ploy to make outsiders feel like we've actually made changes for the better."

The notes were released by Leo Bosner, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees local that represents FEMA headquarters workers.

Bosner said he obtained the notes from another FEMA official, who he would not identify.

Russ Knocke, spokesman for Chertoff, said it was "categorically not the case" that Chertoff made those remarks.

Knocke said that improving disaster response "is one of the highest priorities we have," and added that Chertoff has repeatedly provided that message to Congress and other audiences. Knocke said he had not seen the notes.

Bosner, the union representative, said he was told the remarks were made in the past week. The union official said he understood the notes were not taken at the meeting where Chertoff spoke. Rather, they were taken at a second meeting, in which a FEMA official who heard Chertoff relayed those comments to another FEMA audience.

Other points in the notes:

_Chertoff believes that FEMA is not a response agency for disasters. "We essentially should be only doing recovery," the notes said.

_The Homeland Security agency has drafted a proposal to place a senior federal official or Coast Guard admiral in 17 major cities to handle disaster responses. "This position essentially pre-empts our relationship with the states and locals in terms of response and recovery," the notes said.

_"A question came up ... on whether FEMA could take over a state's functions if that state isn't able to provide basic functions like evacuation. The biggest issue that came up apparently was the legality question."

Meanwhile, Chertoff said Tuesday in a speech that the government may have to radically change FEMA.

Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, which battered Gulf Coast states over an eight-week period, stretched the agency "beyond the breaking point," Chertoff said in a public review of his department's 2005 performance.

"We will retool FEMA, maybe even radically, to increase our ability to deal with catastrophic events," he said in a 35-minute speech at George Washington University.

Chertoff offered no specifics for changing the Federal Emergency Management Agency but said FEMA employees must be given authority to cut through bureaucracy to assist disaster victims quickly.

His aides said changes will come early next year.

It was unclear whether any of the changes will require legislative action, or if Chertoff will move before Congress returns to Washington in late January. A special House inquiry of the government's response to Katrina, chaired by Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., is expected to issue its findings by Feb. 15.

Additionally, the White House is completing its own review of federal preparations and response to Katrina, an extraordinarily powerful storm that hit Aug. 29. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said that "certainly, some of the recommendations will be related to FEMA."

Homeland Security and FEMA were widely blamed for the government's sluggish response to Katrina, which left some victims without food, water and safe shelter for days. The criticism led to the resignation of FEMA Director Michael Brown, who had limited disaster response experience.

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On the Net:

Homeland Security Department: http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/

For years, Bush said court orders required for spying

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US President George W. Bush, caught up in a domestic spying controversy, for the past two years has assured Americans worried about expanded government anti-terrorism powers that court orders were needed to tap telephones.

Bush has drawn fire over a 2002 order enabling the National Security Agency to monitor, without a judge's go-ahead, the telephone and electronic mail of US citizens suspected of Al-Qaeda ties when they are in touch with someone abroad.

Critics have charged that the unprecedented move is an abuse of power and a violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which requires court approval of wiretaps and electronic surveillance.

The White House has fired back that Bush's move is legal under the US Constitution and a congressional resolution, after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, that authorized the use of force in

Afghanistan.

In 2004 and 2005, Bush repeatedly argued that the controversial Patriot Act package of anti-terrorism laws safeguards civil liberties because US authorities still need a warrant to tap telephones in the United States.

"Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order," he said on April 20, 2004 in Buffalo, New York.

"Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so," he added.

On April 19, 2004, Bush said the Patriot Act enabled law-enforcement officials to use "roving wiretaps," which are not fixed to a particular telephone, against terrorism, as they had been against organized crime.

"You see, what that meant is if you got a wiretap by court order -- and by the way, everything you hear about requires court order, requires there to be permission from a FISA court, for example," he said in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

But under Bush's super-secret order, first revealed Friday by the New York Times and details of which have been confirmed by Bush and other top US officials, the National Security Agency does not need that court's approval.

"A couple of things that are very important for you to understand about the Patriot Act. First of all, any action that takes place by law enforcement requires a court order," he said July 14, 2004 in Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin.

"In other words, the government can't move on wiretaps or roving wiretaps without getting a court order," he said. "What the Patriot Act said is let's give our law enforcement the tools necessary, without abridging the Constitution of the United States, the tools necessary to defend America."

The president has also repeatedly said that the need to seek such warrants means "the judicial branch has a strong oversight role."

"Law enforcement officers need a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone, a federal judge's permission to track his calls, or a federal judge's permission to search his property," he said in June.

"Officers must meet strict standards to use any of these tools. And these standards are fully consistent with the Constitution of the United States," he added in remarks at the Ohio State Highway Patrol Academy.

He made similar comments in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 20 2005.

Vice President Dick Cheney offered similar reassurances at a Patriot Act event in June 2004, saying that "all of the investigative tools" under the law "require the approval of a judge before they can be carried out."

"And similar statutes have been on the book for years, and tested in the courts, and found to be constitutional," he said in Kansas City, Missouri.

Bill Would Allow Arrests For No Reason In Public Place

A bill on Gov. Bob Taft's desk right now is drawing a lot of criticism, NewsChannel5 reported.

One state representative said it resembles Gestapo-style tactics of government, and there could be changes coming on the streets of Ohio's small towns and big cities.

The Ohio Patriot Act has made it to the Taft's desk, and with the stroke of a pen, it would most likely become the toughest terrorism bill in the country. The lengthy piece of legislation would let police arrest people in public places who will not give their names, address and birth dates, even if they are not doing anything wrong.

WEWS reported it would also pave the way for everyone entering critical transportation sites such as, train stations, airports and bus stations to show ID.

"It brings us frighteningly close to a show me your papers society," said Carrie Davis of the ACLU, which opposes the Ohio Patriot Act.

There are many others who oppose the bill as well.

"The variety of people who opposed to this is not just a group of the usual suspects. We have people far right to the left opposing the bill who think it is a bad idea," said Al McGinty, NewsChannel5?s terrorism expert.

McGinty said he isn't sure the law would do what it's intended to do.

"I think anything we do to enhance security and give power to protect the public to police officers is a good idea," he said. "It is a good law in the wrong direction."

Gov. Bob Taft will make the ultimate decision on whether to sign the bill.

Researchers Find Barbie Is Often Mutilated

LONDON, Associated Press - Barbie, beware. The iconic plastic doll is often mutilated at the hands of young girls, according to research published Monday by British academics.

"The girls we spoke to see Barbie torture as a legitimate play activity, and see the torture as a 'cool' activity," said Agnes Nairn, one of the University of Bath researchers. "The types of mutilation are varied and creative, and range from removing the hair to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving."

Researchers from the university's marketing and psychology departments questioned 100 children about their attitudes to a range of products as part of a study on branding. They found Barbie provoked the strongest reaction, with youngsters reporting "rejection, hatred and violence," Nairn said.

"The meaning of 'Barbie' went beyond an expressed antipathy; actual physical violence and torture towards the doll was repeatedly reported, quite gleefully, across age, school and gender," she said.

While boys often expressed nostalgia and affection toward Action Man — the British equivalent of GI Joe — renouncing Barbie appeared to be a rite of passage for many girls, Nairn said.

"The most readily expressed reason for rejecting Barbie was that she was babyish, and girls saw her as representing their younger childhood out of which they felt they had now grown," she said.

Nairn said many girls saw Barbie as an inanimate object rather than a treasured toy.

"Whilst for an adult the delight the child felt in breaking, mutilating and torturing their dolls is deeply disturbing, from the child's point of view they were simply being imaginative in disposing of an excessive commodity in the same way as one might crush cans for recycling," she said.

Manufacturer Mattel, which sells 94 million Barbies a year worldwide, said the doll remained the "No. 1 fashion doll brand."

President puts emphasis on the wrong war

by Dewayne Wickham, USA TODAY

Am I the only one who remembers it wasn't that long ago that George W. Bush said this nation couldn't win the war on terror?

Back in August 2004 - in what must have been a moment of great honesty or frightening ignorance -

President Bush told Today co-host Matt Lauer that he didn't believe the United States would prevail in the war on terrorism.

"Do you really think we can win this war on terror? For example, in the next four years?" Lauer asked Bush.

"I have never said we can win it in four years," the president responded.

So Lauer put the question to Bush more broadly. "No, I'm just saying, can we win it? Do you say that?" he asked Bush.

"I don't. I don't think we can win it," the president answered. "But I think you can create conditions so that ... those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world, let's put it that way."

The president quickly reversed himself amid howls of protests from Democrats and Republicans who apparently assumed that the president was talking about the Iraq war, which they had backed, as much as the broader war against terror. But Bush has never offered a clear explanation of his flip-flop on this issue.

Democrats raise ire

So why do you think Bush and his supporters went ballistic recently when one leading Democrat said the Iraq war can't be won and another urged the president to quickly pull U.S. troops out? It's because, except for his brief diversion off the script, Bush has tried mightily to convince the nation that the war on terror and the war in Iraq are synonymous.

That's why the White House responded so harshly when Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said earlier this month, "The idea that we're going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain wrong." And it's the reason this administration's initial reaction to Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record)'s characterization of the Iraq war as "a flawed policy wrapped in illusion" was so shrill.

Having committed massive amounts of this nation's troops and money to the ouster of Saddam Hussein - and the political and physical reconstruction of Iraq - Bush justifies this strategic detour with the non-sequitur argument that Iraq is the pivotal battle in the war on terror.

Misguided strategy

That's flawed thinking because it wasn't the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his ilk that sparked the war in Iraq. It was the Bush administration's desire to settle old scores with Saddam. And it's an illusion because it masks the president's failure to pursue the man who ordered the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on this country as aggressively as he does the fight in Iraq.

Think about it.

When was the last time you heard Bush speak more than fleetingly about other fronts in the broader war? Virtually all of the troops and resources devoted to the war on terror have been sent to Iraq. If you listen closely to what Bush has been saying recently as he has stumped the country trying to reignite support for the war in Iraq, it sounds as though he thinks the war on terror will end when the U.S. declares victory in Iraq.

"These terrorists view the world as a giant battlefield - and they seek to attack us wherever they can. This has attracted al-Qaeda to Iraq, where they are attempting to frighten and intimidate America into a policy of retreat," the president said Sunday night in an Oval Office address to the nation.

That's the new "domino theory." It's born of the Bush administration's warped war policies - a jingoism that used the war on terror as an excuse to topple Saddam's brutal regime. Unlike the broader war on terror that Bush once said we couldn't win, the president is certain we will prevail in Iraq.

I worry that he is obsessing on the wrong fight.

Donors Underwrite DeLay's Luxury Lifestyle

Buffoon on the links: with all that donation scratch, you'd think Tom (left) would buy some decent golf togs. The clown shoes seem to be some kind of fraternity prank, as King George (right) is also sporting them.

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - As Tom DeLay became a king of campaign fundraising, he lived like one too. He visited cliff-top Caribbean resorts, golf courses designed by PGA champions and four-star restaurants — all courtesy of donors who bankrolled his political money empire.

Over the past six years, the former House majority leader and his associates have visited places of luxury most Americans have never seen, often getting there aboard corporate jets arranged by lobbyists and other special interests.

Public documents reviewed by The Associated Press tell the story: at least 48 visits to golf clubs and resorts with lush fairways; 100 flights aboard company planes; 200 stays at hotels, many world-class; and 500 meals at restaurants, some averaging nearly $200 for a dinner for two.

Instead of his personal expense, the meals and trips for DeLay and his associates were paid with donations collected by the campaign committees, political action committees and children's charity the Texas Republican created during his rise to the top of Congress.

Put them together and an opulent lifestyle emerges.

"A life to enjoy. The excuse to escape," Palmas del Mar, an oceanside Puerto Rican resort visited by DeLay, promised in a summer ad on its Web site as a golf ball bounced into a hole and an image of a sunset appeared.

The Caribbean vacation spot has casino gambling, horseback riding, snorkeling, deep-sea fishing and private beaches.

"He was very friendly. We always see the relaxed side of politicians," said Daniel Vassi, owner of the French bistro Chez Daniel at Palmas del Mar. Vassi said DeLay has eaten at his restaurant every year for the last three, and was last there in April with about 20 other people, including the resort's owners.

The restaurant is a cozy and popular place on the yacht-lined marina at Palmas del Mar. Dishes include bouillabaisse for about $35.50, Dover sole for $37.50 and filet mignon for $28.50. Palmas del Mar is also a DeLay donor, giving $5,000 to DeLay's Americans for a Republican Majority PAC in 2000.

Since he joined the House leadership as majority whip in 1995, DeLay has raised at least $35 million for his campaign, PACs, foundation and legal defense fund. He hasn't faced a serious re-election threat in recent years, giving him more leeway than candidates in close races to spend campaign money.

AP's review found DeLay's various organizations spent at least $1 million over the last six years on top hotels, restaurants, golf resorts and corporate jet flights for their boss and his associates.

The spending shows how political power can buy access to the lifestyles of the rich and famous. While it's illegal for a lawmaker to tap political donations for a family vacation, it is perfectly legal to spend it in luxury if the stated purpose is raising more money or talking politics.

Until his recent indictment in Texas on political money laundering charges, DeLay was the second most powerful lawmaker in the House and as such, could command an audience of donors wherever he went.

DeLay attorney Don McGahn declined to identify which trips listed in the reports were taken by DeLay and which by his associates. But he said all the travel was legal and not done for DeLay's benefit. "Raising political money costs money," he said.

"Mr. DeLay has done extensive fundraising, and traveled far and wide to do so, but you would be hard-pressed to find someone who has raised more for others, whether for candidates or political parties," McGahn said.

Special interests routinely make donations and attend fundraisers to gain access to government decisionmakers. And while other congressional leaders accepted trips and used political money to cover travel, none compares with DeLay:

_Campaign and PAC reports filed by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., show several payments to companies for travel, including Cracker Barrel, Union Pacific, Schering-Plough and Home Depot. But there were few visits to golf courses, and those were mostly close to home.

_Reports from Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., show expenses at resorts in South Carolina, New Mexico and Puerto Rico. But he too holds most events closer to home, like Las Vegas casinos and Lake Tahoe resorts.

_House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has held events at ritzy hotels such as The Mark in New York and the Four Seasons in Atlanta, but had few corporate flights or visits to resorts, her reports show.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., comes closest to rivaling DeLay's travels, reporting fundraisers at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts in Florida, the Ritz-Carlton in Kapalua, Hawaii, the Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale, Ariz., and the Waterfall Resort in Alaska. Hastert's groups also paid for dozens of corporate jet flights and restaurant meals.

Some say DeLay pushes the limits, and risks alienating donors.

"I don't think the people that contributed to me would believe it was a good expenditure of their hard-earned dollars for me to go and play golf and enjoy life anywhere," said former Rep. Charlie Stenholm, a fiscally conservative Texas Democrat who lost his House seat following DeLay-led redistricting.

DeLay's travels with recently indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff are now under criminal investigation. But those trips were paid by special interests directly under the banner of congressional fact-finding.

DeLay's own political empire has underwritten far more travel.

The destinations for DeLay or his political team include a Ritz-Carlton hotel in Jamaica; the Prince Hotel in Hapuna Beach, Hawaii; the Michelangelo Hotel in New York; the Wyndham El Conquistador Resort & Golden Door Spa in Fajardo, Puerto Rico; and the Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale, Ariz., built by Charles Keating before he became the most public face of the savings and loan scandal in the early 1990s.

There's also the Ritz-Carlton in Naples, Fla., offering "dazzling views of the Gulf of Mexico, warm golden sunsets and three miles of pristine beach" plus golf, a spa, goose-down comforters, marble bathrooms and private, ocean-view balconies. Rooms run from about $389 to more than $3,000 a night in December, the month DeLay's PAC spent $4,570 on lodging there in 2004.

"He liked to talk to people," said Pedro Muriel, a waiter at Puerto Rico's El Conquistador Resort. Muriel recalled DeLay staying in an enclave of privately owned red tile-roofed villas.

The villas have up to three bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms and French doors that open onto terraces or balconies facing the Caribbean. A moon-shape pool hugs the edge of a steep cliff, its waters spilling over and appearing to blend into the sea. Villa prices average about $1,300 a night.

Guests get their own butlers. The resort offers six swimming pools and an 18-hole championship golf course. Its casino served as the setting for the last scene in the James Bond movie "Goldfinger."

DeLay's donors have also financed visits to country clubs and tournament-quality golf courses, including the exclusive Baltusrol Golf Club in Springfield, N.J., site of this summer's PGA Championship; Nemacolin Woodlands Resort in Farmington, Pa., home of another PGA event; and Harbour Town Golf Links, a Jack Nicklaus-designed course on Hilton Head Island, S.C.

"World class. Dynamic. Luxury resort. Spend a day, spend a week, spend a lifetime," another DeLay fundraising spot, the ChampionsGate golf resort near Orlando, Fla., invites on its Web site.

The resort, where a round of golf typically costs $70 to $80 per player, has two championship courses designed by pro golfer Greg Norman and offers players a Global Positioning Satellite system it boasts "acts as a professional caddie."

Dining at fine restaurants also is routine. The stops for DeLay and his associates include Morton's of Chicago, where the average dinner for two goes for about $170 before tax and tip, and "21" in Manhattan, a longtime glamour spot where American caviar goes for $38 for a taste.

When DeLay wants to head somewhere without the hassle of commercial travel, he often asks a company for its jet and uses donations to pay for it.

Dozens of businesses have loaned DeLay their planes, from tobacco giants UST, RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris to energy companies like El Paso, Panda, Reliant and Dynegy.

R.J. Reynolds let DeLay use a company plane at least nine times since 1999, once joining Philip Morris in making jets available for a DeLay PAC fundraiser at a Puerto Rican resort in winter 2002. R.J. Reynolds spokesman David Howard said planes are loaned usually at lawmakers' request and are only done if jets aren't needed for company business.

"It's much more convenient as opposed to your regular commercial travel," Howard said, noting there is no need to go through airport security.

On R.J. Reynolds' planes, smoking is allowed and there are usually beverages and deli-style food. There's more leg room and the convenience of phones.

The smoking rule suits DeLay, who likes to chomp on cigars while golfing and reported spending at least $1,930 in PAC money on cigar-shop purchases. The cigars were reported to the Federal Election Commission as donor gifts.

Spending Cuts May Require Cheney Tiebreaker

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - A Senate vote on a deficit-reduction bill looks to be so tight that Vice President Dick Cheney was rushing home from an overseas diplomatic mission to be the tiebreaker for saving one of the Bush administration's top priorities.

The showdown vote loomed on the bill, which would cut some federal benefits and trim budget deficits by $40 billion through the end of the decade.

Cheney was in Pakistan Tuesday to check on U.S. aid to victims of an October earthquake that killed as estimated 75,000 people. He also met with President Pervez Musharraf.

The budget vote is expected to be a close one — last month the bill squeaked through the Senate in a 52-47 tally. Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson (news, bio, voting record) was one of two Democrats voting for the bill then, but said Tuesday he will vote against the bill, in large part because provisions on Medicaid and welfare reform would shift costs to state and local governments.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (news, bio, voting record) of Louisiana, the other Democrat to support the budget last month, is set to switch her vote since the bill no longer contains aid for Katrina victims, which has been attached to another measure. Sen. Jon Corzine (news, bio, voting record), a Democrat elected governor of New Jersey, was absent last month but hopes to return to the Capitol for the final vote.

Five Republicans are also expected to oppose the bill; one Republican who opposed the bill last month is expected to switch his vote.

The vote shifts set up a 50-50 deadlock assuming all senators vote, requiring Cheney's return to Washington to salvage the budget plan with a tie-breaking vote.

Cheney spokesman Steve Schmidt told reporters traveling with Cheney in Pakistan that the vice president was "returning to Washington to be on hand in the Senate to fulfill his constitutional duties as president of the Senate and cast tie-breaking votes, if necessary."

Presiding over the Senate is among Cheney's constitutional duties, although vice presidents historically have not routinely attended such sessions. Cheney's change in plans meant that he would have to forego visits to both Saudi Arabia and Egypt on this trip.

A tight vote was also expected as Senate Republicans waged a Christmas week battle with Democrats and GOP moderates over allowing oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Sen. Ted Stevens (news, bio, voting record), R-Alaska, attached the drilling plan to a wartime Pentagon spending bill that also included $29 billion in new aid for Gulf Coast hurricane victims and as well as new money for border security and winter heating subsidies in an attempt to crack a threatened filibuster. Both the defense and budget bills were passed by the House on Monday before it adjourned for the year.

On the budget bill, five Republicans are expected to vote against it: Mike DeWine of Ohio; Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine; Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island; and Gordon Smith of Oregon. Smith voted for the bill last month but is a "nay" vote now, largely because of cuts to Medicaid benefits.

But Norm Coleman, R-Minn., who opposed the bill last month over provisions allowing Arctic drilling, has switched to "yea" since the drilling plan was dropped.

The partisan fighting over the budget seemed to outweigh the measure's likely impact. The $40 billion in deficit savings blends $10 billion in new revenues from anticipated auctions of television airwaves to wireless companies with fairly small cuts to benefit programs like Medicare, Medicaid and student loan subsidies.

Opinions varied on whether Stevens, the powerful patron of the Arctic refuge drilling plan, would prevail in overcoming a filibuster threatened by Sen. Maria Cantwell (news, bio, voting record), D-Wash., and others.

Overall, the deficit reduction bill claimed savings of $39.7 billion over five years. That's just 2.5 percent of the $1.6 trillion in total red ink that congressional officials estimate will pile up during the same period. The slender results nonetheless pleased GOP conservatives.

The savings included $4.8 billion from Medicaid, the health care program for the poor. One provision would make it harder for beneficiaries to transfer assets to their children in order to qualify for government-paid nursing home care, which has raised the ire of the AARP, the powerful lobby for seniors.

Drug companies won a last-minute break against cuts to their Medicaid payments at the expense of beneficiaries, who face higher co-payments that advocates for the poor say will drive people out of the program. Regional health insurance companies, another powerful lobby, stopped a Senate bid to cut a subsidy fund designed to entice them into the Medicare market.

Moderate Republicans in the Senate also were angry over a last-minute deal to extend the 1996 welfare reform law. They complained it didn't provide enough child care help as more parents will have to meet work requirements to obtain benefits.

Among the Medicare changes was a one-year freeze in home health care payments. A second provision accelerates a previously scheduled increase for better-off beneficiaries in the cost of premiums for Part B, which covers physician services.

Cheney Defends Presidential Powers

ABOARD AIR FORCE II , Associated Press - Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday vigorously defended the Bush administration's use of secret domestic spying and efforts to expand presidential powers, saying "it's not an accident that we haven't been hit in four years."

Talking to reporters aboard his government plane as he flew from Islamabad, Pakistan to Muscat, Oman on an overseas mission, Cheney said a contraction in the power of the presidency since the Vietnam and Watergate era must be reversed.

"I believe in a strong, robust executive authority and I think that the world we live in demands it. And to some extent, that we have an obligation as the administration to pass on the offices we hold to our successors in as good of shape as we found them," he said.

Cheney spoke from his plane's private cabin as he was making a trip aimed at boosting the United States' image abroad and its relationships with its war-on-terror partners. But after visiting Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, he was cutting his travels short, skipping planned stops in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to return to Washington to be on hand for session-ending Senate activity that could require his tie-breaking votes.

Cheney said he believes the American people support President Bush's terror-fighting strategy. "If there's a backlash pending," because of reports of National Security Agency surveillance of calls originating within the United States, he said, "I think the backlash is going to be against those who are suggesting somehow that we shouldn't take these steps to defend the country."

Cheney talked about terrorism and national security amid a burgeoning controversy at home over Bush's acknowledgment of a four-year-old administration program to eavesdrop — without court-approved warrants — on international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the United States with suspected ties to the terrorist network al-Qaida.

Some legal experts described the program as groundbreaking. And until the highly classified program was disclosed last week, those in Congress with concerns about the National Security Agency spying on Americans raised them only privately.

Since the program's existence was revealed, lawmakers from both parties have objected and begun discussing a congressional investigation. Cheney said the opposition is politically unwise.

"Either we're serious about fighting the war on terror or we're not," the vice president said. "The president and I believe very deeply that there is a hell of a threat."

The vice president also told reporters that in his view, presidential authority has been eroded since the 1970s through laws such as the War Powers Act and anti-impoundment laws.

"Watergate and a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam both during the '70s served, I think, to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area," Cheney said. But he also said the administration has been able to restore some of "the legitimate authority of the presidency."

Cheney said the White House helped protect presidential power by fighting to keep secret the list of people who were a part of his 2001 energy task force. The task force's activities attracted complaints from environmentalists, who said they were shut out of discussions on developing a national energy policy while corporate interests were present. A protracted lawsuit ensued.

"I believe that the president is entitled and needs to have unfiltered advice in formulating policy," Cheney said. "He ought to be able to seek the opinion of anybody he wants to and that he should not have to reveal, for example, who he talked to that morning. That issue was litigated all the way up to the Supreme Court and we won."

Cheney said that "many people believe" the War Powers Act, enhancing the power of Congress to share in executive branch decision-making on war, is unconstitutional and said "it will be tested at some point. I am one of those who believe that was an infringement on the authority of the president."

Cheney noted he had served in the House for 10 years and said he has "enormous regard" for the legislative branch.

"But I do believe that especially in the day and age we live in, the nature of the threats of we face — and this is true during the Cold War as well as I think is true now — the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy," the vice president said.

Cheney conceded that arguments over eavesdropping won't likely pass any time soon, saying, "It's an important subject."

"I would argue that the actions that we've taken there are totally appropriate and consistent with the constitutional authority of the president," he added.

"You know, it's not an accident that we haven't been hit in four years," Cheney said. "I think there's a temptation for people to sit around and say, 'Well, gee that was just a one-of affair, they didn't really mean it.' "

Democrats Say They Didn't Back Wiretapping

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Some Democrats say they never approved a domestic wiretapping program, undermining suggestions by President Bush and his senior advisers that the plan was fully vetted in a series of congressional briefings.

"I feel unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse, these activities," West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the Senate Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, said in a handwritten letter to Vice President Dick Cheney in July 2003. "As you know, I am neither a technician nor an attorney."

Rockefeller is among a small group of congressional leaders who have received briefings on the administration's four-year-old program to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the United States with suspected ties to al-Qaida.

The government still would seek court approval to snoop on purely domestic communications, such as calls between New York and Los Angeles.

The White House brushed aside Democrats' contention that they weren't provided enough information on the program. "They were briefed and informed," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said, repeatedly refusing to address Democrats' specific complaints. "Congress has an important oversight role."

Some legal experts described the program as groundbreaking. And until the highly classified program was disclosed last week, those in Congress with concerns about the National Security Agency spying on Americans raised them only privately.

In a statement Tuesday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, said Rockefeller had tools to wield influence if he had concerns about the program, such as requesting committee or legislative action.

Flying Tuesday from Pakistan to Oman on an overseas trip, Vice President Dick Cheney said it's no accident the United States has gone four years without a terror attack. "I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it," Cheney said.

Accused of acting above the law, Bush on Monday issued a forceful defense of the program he first authorized shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. His senior aides have stressed the program was narrowly targeted at individuals with a suspected link to al-Qaida or affiliated extremist groups. And Bush said it was "a shameful act" for someone to have leaked details to the media.

He bristled at the suggestion at a White House news conference that he was assuming unlimited powers.

"To say 'unchecked power' basically is ascribing some kind of dictatorial position to the president, which I strongly reject," he said angrily. "I am doing what you expect me to do, and at the same time, safeguarding the civil liberties of the country."

Despite the defense, there was a growing storm of criticism in Congress and calls for investigations, from Democrats and Republicans alike. Until the past several days, the White House had only informed Congress' top political and intelligence committee leadership about the program that Bush has reauthorized more than three dozen times.

The spying uproar was the latest controversy about Bush's handling of the war on terror. It follows allegations of secret prisons in Eastern Europe and of torture and other mistreatment of detainees, and an American death toll in Iraq that has exceeded 2,150.

The eavesdropping program was operated out of the NSA, the nation's largest and perhaps most secretive spy operation. Employees there appreciate their nicknames: No Such Agency or Never Say Anything.

Decisions on what conversations to monitor are made at the Fort Meade, Md., headquarters, approved by an NSA shift supervisor and carefully recorded, said Gen. Michael Hayden, the principal deputy director of intelligence.

"The reason I emphasize that this is done at the operational level is to remove any question in your mind that this is in any way politically influenced," said Hayden, who was NSA director when the program began.

Since the program was disclosed last week by The New York Times, current and former Congress members have been liberated to weigh in.

Former Sen. Bob Graham (news, bio, voting record), D-Fla., who was part of the Intelligence Committee's leadership after the 9/11 attacks, recalled a briefing about changes in international electronic surveillance, but does not remember being told of a program snooping on individuals in the United States.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., received several briefings and raised concerns, including in a classified letter, her spokeswoman Jennifer Crider said.

Former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle said he, too, was briefed by the White House between 2002 and 2004 but was not told key details about the scope of the program.

Daschle's successor, Sen. Harry Reid (news, bio, voting record), D-Nev., said he received a single briefing earlier this year and that important details were withheld. "We need to investigate this program and the president's legal authority to carry it out," Reid said.

Republicans, too, were skeptical.

The Most Important Question of All in Bush's Domestic Spying Scandal

by David Sirota, Huffington Post

In the last 72 hours since the revelation that President Bush ordered illegal domestic surveillance operations, we have seen how the Republican spin machine has mastered the art of turning any and all controversies into questions of national security. You know the drill: those who are criticizing Bush's orders are billed as weak, soft on national security, or against domestic efforts to stop terrorism. Meanwhile, Bush is portrayed as the tough fighter of terrorism, willing to make the tough choices to defend America's national security. In short, his crimes are portrayed as badges of honor.

There's just one problem: this isn't a question of whether America supports domestic surveillance operations against terrorists or not. This is a question of whether America supports those operations without requiring a warrant.

The truth is, domestic surveillance operations happen all the time. They are such a part of our culture, they are a regular topic of television shows and movies (think Serpico or Stakeout). But they are also governed by the U.S. Constitution's 4th Amendment, which explicitly protects citizens against "unreasonable search and seizures" and requires the executive branch to obtain a warrant from the objective judiciary branch in order to do surveillance operations.

So the question reporters should be asking the White House isn't why the president thinks there should be domestic efforts to track and stop terrorists. The vast majority of Americans think that. The question reporters should be asking is "Why did the President order domestic surveillance operations without obtaining constitutionally-required warrants?" That is behavior that most Americans who believe in the Constitution likely do not support at all.

Make no mistake about it - this is an especially poignant question considering that, under the Patriot Act's weakened standards, the government can now circumvent the traditional (and more rigorous) judicial system and obtain a warrant directly from a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. Remember, this is a court almost completely skewed in favor of the government. As Slate Magazine correctly noted, getting a warrant from that judge requires "no need for evidence or probable cause" and the judge has almost no authority to reject the government's request for a warrant, unless the government's request are extraordinarily outlandish. It is why, as Josh Marshall reports, the government's own data shows that "in a quarter century, the FISA Court has rejected four government applications for warrants." It is also why Members of Congress of both parties have tried to repeal the Patriot Act sections that allow the administration to use FISA warrants for domestic surveillance.

In his defense, the President has tried to deflect attention by repeatedly saying he needed to order these operations to protect Americans. Fine – but it still doesn't answer the real question. If the surveillance operations he ordered were so crucial and so important to protecting our country, how come he didn't get a warrant? Surely something so critical to our security would have easily elicited a warrant from a FISA court already inclined to issue warrants in the first place, right?

And that gets us right back to the most important question: why would the President deliberately circumvent a court that was already wholly inclined to grant him domestic surveillance warrants? The answer is obvious, though as yet largely unstated in the mainstream media: because the President was likely ordering surveillance operations that were so outrageous, so unrelated to the War on Terror, and, to put it in Constitutional terms, so "unreasonable" that even a FISA court would not have granted them.

This is no conspiracy theory - all the signs point right to this conclusion. In fact, it would be a conspiracy theory to say otherwise, because it would be ignoring the cold, hard facts that we already know.

Two years ago, the New York Times reported that the administration is using the FBI to "collect extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators." Then, just a few months ago, the Times reported that the FBI "has collected at least 3,500 pages of internal documents in the last several years on a handful of civil rights and antiwar protest groups." And just this past week, NBC News obtained a 400-page Pentagon document outlining the Bush administration's surveillance of anti-war peace groups. The report noted that the administration had monitored 1,500 different events (aka. anti-war protests) in just a 10-month period.

These are exactly the kind of surveillance operations even a government-tilted FISA court would reject, and it raises yet more questions: Are these anti-war peace groups the targets of Bush's warrantless, illegal surveillance operations? Who else has the President been targeting? Has it been his partisan political enemies a la Richard Nixon? Or has he been invading the privacy of unsuspecting citizens in broad sweeps with no probable cause at all?

Spying and Lying

by Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation

"This shocking revelation ought to send a chill down the spine of every American." - Senator Russell Feingold, December 17, 2005

As reported by the New York Times on Friday, "Months after the September 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying."

A senior intelligence officer says Bush personally and repeatedly gave the NSA permission for these taps--more than three dozen times since October 2001. Each time, the White House counsel and the Attorney General--whose job it is to guard and defend our civil liberties and freedoms--certified the lawfulness of the program. (It is useful here to note "The Yoo Factor": The domestic spying program was justified by a "classified legal opinion" written by former Justice Department official John Yoo, the same official who wrote a memo arguing that interrogation techniques only constitute torture if they are "equivalent in intensity to...organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.")

Illegally spying on Americans is chilling--even for this Administration. Moreover, as Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, told the Times, "the secret order may amount to the president authorizing criminal activity." Some officials at the NSA agree. According to the Times, "Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with the program, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation." Others were "worried that the program might come under scrutiny by Congressional or criminal investigators if Senator

John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was elected President."

It's always a fight to find out what the government doesn't want us to know, and this Administration and its footsoldiers have used every means available to undermine journalists' ability to exercise their First Amendment function of holding power accountable. But compounding the Administration's double-dealing, the media has been largely complicit in the face of White House mendacity. David Sirota puts it more bluntly in a recent entry from his blog: "We are watching the media being used as a tool of state power in overriding the very laws that are supposed to confine state power and protect American citizens."

Consider this: the New York Times says it "delayed publication" of the NSA spying story for a year. The paper says it acceded to White House arguments that publishing the article "could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be-terrorists that they might be under scrutiny."

Despite Administration demands though, it was reported in yesterday's Washington Post that the decision by Times editor Bill Keller to withhold the article caused friction within the Times' Washington bureau, according to people close to the paper. Some reporters and editors in New York and in the paper's DC bureau had apparently pushed for earlier publication. In an explanatory statement, Keller issued the excuse that, "Officials also assured senior editors of the Times that a variety of legal checks had been imposed that satisfied everyone involved that the program raised no legal questions." This from a paper, which as First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus pointed out in a letter to editor "rejected similar arguments when it courageously published the Pentagon Papers over the government's false objections that it would endanger our foreign policy as well as the lives of individuals." The Times, Garbus went on to argue, "owes its readers more. The Bush Administration's record for truthfulness is not such that one should rely on its often meaningless and vague assertions."

Readers and citizens deserve to know why the New York Times capitulated to the White House's request? It is true that Friday's revelations of this previously unknown, illegal domestic spying program helped stop the Patriot Act reauthorization. But what if the Times had published its story before the election? And what other stories have been held up due to Adminsitration cajoling, pressure, threats and intimidation?

The question of how this Administration threatens the workings of a free press, a cornerstone of democracy, remains a central one. Every week brings new evidence of White House attempts to delegitimize the press's role as a watchdog of government abuse, an effective counter to virtually unchecked executive power.

Last month, for example, the Washington Post published Dana Priest's extraordinary report about the

CIA's network of prisons in Eastern Europe for suspected terrorists. Priest's reporting helped push passage of a ban on the metastasizing use of torture. But, as with the New York Times, the Post acknowledged that it had acceded to government requests to withhold the names of the countries in which the black site prisons exist.

How many other cases are there of news outlets choosing to honor government requests for secrecy over the journalistic duty of informing the public about government abuse and wrongdoing?

Never has the need for an independent press been greater. Never has the need to know what is being done in our name been greater. As Bill Moyers said in an important speech delivered on the 20th anniversary of the National Security Archive, a dedicated band of truth-tellers, "...There has been nothing in our time like the Bush Administration's obsession with secrecy." Moyers added. "It's an old story: the greater the secrecy, the deeper the corruption."

Federation of American Scientists secrecy specialist Steven Aftergood bluntly says, "an even more aggressive form of government information control has gone unenumerated and often unrecognized in the Bush era, as government agencies have restricted access to unclassified information in libraries, archives, websites and official databases." This practice, Aftergood adds, "also accords neatly with the Bush Administration's preference for unchecked executive authority."

U.S. Ran Afghan Torture Prison, Group Says

KABUL, Afghanistan, Associated Press - The United States operated a secret prison in Afghanistan as recently as last year, torturing detainees with sleep deprivation, chaining them to the walls and forcing them to listen to loud music in total darkness for days, a human rights group alleged Monday.

The prison was run near Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report based on the accounts of several detainees at the U.S. prison for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

CIA officials have not commented on various allegations of torture, but Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday denied that the United States engaged in torture.

"I can say that we, in fact, are consistent with the commitments of the United States that we don't engage in torture, and we don't," Cheney said in an interview to be broadcast Monday on ABC News "Nightline." Cheney was not responding directly to the Human Rights Watch report, but to questions about anti-torture legislation before Congress.

According to the report by the rights group, the detainees were kept in total darkness — they called the facility "Dark Prison" — and were tortured and mistreated by American and Afghan guards in civilian clothes, an indication the facility may have been operated by the CIA.

"They were chained to walls, deprived of food and drinking water, and kept in total darkness with loud rap, heavy metal music, or other sounds blared for weeks at a time," the report said.

"Some detainees said they were shackled in a manner that made it impossible to lie down or sleep, with restraints that caused their hands and wrists to swell up or bruise."

Human Rights Watch did not speak with the detainees directly because the United States has not allowed rights organizations to visit detainees at Guantanamo or other overseas detention sites.

Instead, the detainees' accounts were given to their lawyers, who passed them on to the rights group. The group said the allegations were credible enough to warrant an official investigation.

"We're not talking about torture in the abstract, but the real thing," said John Sifton, terrorism and counterterrorism researcher at Human Rights Watch. "U.S. personnel and officials may be criminally liable, and a special prosecutor is needed to investigate."

The report said Benyam Mohammad, an Ethiopian-born Guantanamo detainee who grew up in Britain, claimed he was held at the facility in 2004.

"It was pitch black, no lights on in the rooms for most of the time," he was quoted as telling his lawyer. "They hung me up. I was allowed a few hours of sleep on the second day, then hung up again, this time for two days."

Mohammad went on to say that he was forced to listen to Eminem and Dr. Dre for 20 days before the music was replaced by "horrible ghost laughter and Halloween sounds."

"The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night," he was quoted as saying. "Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off."

The report said the prison was closed after several detainees were transferred to a U.S. military detention center near Bagram, just north of Kabul, late last year.

The United States' handling of detainees has come under increasing scrutiny in recent weeks.

Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, is suing the CIA for wrongful imprisonment and torture, saying he was seized in Macedonia on Dec. 31, 2003, and taken by CIA agents to Afghanistan, where he was allegedly abused before being released in Albania in May 2004.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said the United States acts within the law and argued that Europeans are safer because of tough U.S. tactics, but she refused to discuss intelligence operations or address questions about clandestine CIA detention centers.

Sen. Reid calls US Congress 'most corrupt in history'

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid called the Republican-led Congress "the most corrupt in history" on Sunday, and distanced himself from lobbyist Jack Abramoff, at the center of an escalating probe.

The Justice Department is investigating whether Jack Abramoff directed illegal payoffs to lawmakers, including Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, who was forced to step down as House Republican leader in September after indicted in his home state of Texas on unrelated charges.

"Don't lump me in with Jack Abramoff. This is a Republican scandal," Reid told Fox News Sunday, saying he never received any money from Abramoff.

Reid, like many members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, has received campaign contributions from Abramoff clients. Some lawmakers have returned those donations, but Reid gave no indication he would do so.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has been examining stock sales by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican, and last month Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a California Republican, resigned from the House after pleading guilty of taking more than $2.4 million in bribes involving defense contracts.

Democrats have accused Republicans of "a culture of corruption," and plan to make it an issue in next year's congressional elections.

"America can do better than what we've done," said Reid. "The most corrupt Congress in the history of the country. We have such significant problems with what's going on in this country."

Most of the federal investigative focus is now on Abramoff, whose lobbying activities, particularly on behalf of Indian tribal clients, are also being examined by Congress.

Appearing on Fox TV, Reid said, "Abramoff gave me no money. His firm gave me no money. He may have worked (at) a firm where people have given me money."

A Reid aide later explained that the senator received money from a political action committee affiliated with a firm where Abramoff had worked, but Abramoff did not contribute to it.

Analysis: Bush Drops Rosy Iraq Scenarios

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - No more rosy scenarios. After watching his credibility and approval ratings crumble over the course of 2005, President Bush completed a rhetorical shift Sunday night by abandoning his everything-is-OK pitch to Americans and coming clean: He was wrong about the rationale for going to war in Iraq; he underestimated the dangers; the country has suffered "terrible loss"; and the bad news isn't over.

Even with his high-profile display of candor — a step anxious Republican leaders had been demanding for weeks — Bush remained unyielding.

"To retreat before victory would be an act of recklessness and dishonor and I will not allow it," he said in a prime-time address, capping a series of five speeches designed to reverse a stunning political free-fall.

There is some evidence that the rhetorical shift has worked. Recent polls suggest that while a majority of Americans disapprove of Bush's performance, his job rating has increased a bit. Nearly six of every 10 Americans said the U.S. military should stay until Iraq is stabilized, which is Bush's position.

A year ago, more than 70 percent held that view, and Bush insisted the Iraq war was on a steady path to victory. "Month by month, Iraqis are assuming more responsibility for their own security and for their own security," Bush said during his re-election campaign.

Vice President Dick Cheney, the administration's chief cheerleader, went so far as to say last May that Iraqi insurgents were in the "last throes."

The happy talk didn't ring true to many Americans, who watched in horror as the U.S. death toll climbed above 2,000 and wondered why Bush refused to take time off from his summer vacation to meet with the mother of a slain soldier. Cindy Sheehan became the grim face of a budding anti-war movement.

Bush seemed out of touch, unable to grasp the concerns of people opposed to the war or even those who were starting to wonder about it.

While standing firm on his main principle — that the war in Iraq is key to American security — Bush reached out Sunday to those who disagree.

"I also want to speak to those of you who did not support my decision to send troops to Iraq: I have heard your disagreement, and I know how deeply it is felt," Bush said. "I do not expect you to support everything I do, but tonight I have a request: Do not give in to despair, and do not give up on this fight for freedom."

At his political best in 2004, Bush acknowledged that people would disagree with him and used that tension to burnish his credibility. "Even when we don't agree," he said at his nominating convention in New York, "you know what I believe and where I stand."

His credibility now in tatters, Bush injected a dose of reality into his rhetoric. He used some form of the word "sacrifice" four times, spoke three times of the "loss" caused by war and braced Americans for more to come: "There is more testing and sacrifice before us."

He said Iraq has been more difficult than expected, a rare admission of error. This is exactly what many senior Republicans had urged Bush to do — speak bluntly about war as Franklin Roosevelt did during World War II and eloquently about the cause and sacrifice as Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War.

"Tonight was a high water mark in his acknowledgment that mistakes have been made and that he has to accept his share of the blame," said Republican Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record) of Virginia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

Did it work? That's for Americans to judge, but even with a softening of his rhetoric Bush is still giving doubters little leeway. People are still either with him — or for defeat.

A Ten-Step Program

by Jane Smiley, Huffington Post

Is Bush in a bubble? Is Bush a dry drunk? Is Bush a drunk drunk? Is Bush a narcissist? Is Bush an idiot? Is Bush a madman? Does Bush have an “Authority Problem”? Theories abound about why Bush does the things he does, but most of them assume that he is making mistakes that he could or would correct if he understood how misguided he was. On Monday, there was an editorial in the New York Times lamenting the apparent indifference of the Bush administration to the rebuilding of New Orleans, the levees in particular. On Tuesday, there was another editorial, excoriating the shameful behavior of the Bush negotiators at the Montreal conference on global warming. The gist of both editorials was that without national leadership, two chances are about to be lost--the chance to rebuild the city of New Orleans and the chance to mitigate the effects of global warming. Then at the end of the week, we learned that Bush has been wiretapping the phones of his own citizens--an impeachable offense. The Times writes as if it is possible still to alter the direction of Bush administration policy, but obviously it is not. The Bushies have a pattern and they stick to it in spite of every apparent reason to change course. It’s not as if we don’t know what pattern it is, and it’s not as if they haven’t advertised what the pattern will be--it is to break down the government so completely that it can’t be put back together again. Let’s take a look at the “mistakes” the Bush administration is said to have made, and, instead, ask ourselves if they are actually realized intentions:

1. Hobbling the government with debt by combining an expensive, prolonged war with perennial rounds of tax cuts.

2. Destroying the bureaucracy by making it impossible for neutral, expert, or objective bureaucrats to keep their jobs, replacing them with incompetents.

3. Destroying the integrity of the election system, state by state, beginning with Florida and Ohio.

4: Defanging the media by paying fake reporters, co-opting members of the MSM (why did the New York Times refrain from publishing stories unfavorable to the Bush administration before the 2004 election?) and allowing (or encouraging) huge mergers and the buying up of independent media operations by known conservative media conglomerates.

5. Destroying the middle class by changing the bankruptcy laws and the tax laws.

6. Destroying the National Guard and the Army by deploying them over and over in a futile war, while at the same time failing to provide them with armor and equipment.

7. Precipitating

Iraq into a civil war by invading it.

8. Accelerating the effects of global warming by putting roadblocks in the way of mitigating its effects.

9. Denying healthcare and prescription medication to an increasing number of Americans, most specifically by ramming the prescription drug legislation through Congress, but also by manipulating Medicare and Medicaid so that fewer and fewer citizens are covered.

10. Encouraging the people in the rest of the world to associate the US with torture, military incursion, and fear, by a preemptive attack on a sovereign nation, by vociferously maintaining the right of the US to do whatever it wants whenever it wants, and by refusing to accept international laws.

Or, to put it another way, the Bush administration apparently wishes for and is working toward a chaotic Iraq, a corrupt American election structure with openly corrupt influence-peddlers like Delay and Abramoff in charge of policy, a world in which people suffer and die from weather-related catastrophes, a two-tiered economic structure in the US (with most people in the lower tier), and the isolation of the US as a rogue state from the other nations of the world.

How else are we going to interpret the satisfaction the President continually expresses in the results of his policies so far? As an example, when Bush said, “Heckuva job, Brownie”, outsiders generally assumed he was making a mistake--that he didn’t know what a bad job Brownie was doing. But let’s say that he knew perfectly well that Brownie had abandoned new Orleans to the forces of nature, and that THAT was the essence of the heckuva job he was doing. In the same way, many people assume that the administration is embarrassed that the extent of the American rendition gulag or the techniques of torture used at

Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have gotten into the news along with the use of white phosphorus in Falluja, as if torture and rendition and white phosphorus were something that Bush does not want to do. But let’s say that torture and rendition are something that the Bush administration is happy to do, and doesn’t mind others knowing about. Likewise, many observers, let’s say Jack Murtha, for one, assume that the president does not want to destroy the army. But if the army is destroyed, then the services that the army provides at a relatively moderate expense to the taxpayer can be farmed out to companies like Halliburton. Let’s say that Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush have cast their lot not with the draft, or even the volunteer army, but with the mercenary army, which is more profitable, less subject to Congressional and public oversight, and, really, the appropriate army for a rogue state. And, with a mercenary army, there is no problem when a fallen soldier is sent home as a piece of freight. It is only citizen-soldiers who make the ultimate sacrifice out of patriotism. When we get rid of citizen soldiers, then we don’t have to respect them.

When Grover Norquist said he wanted to strangle the shrunken government in the bathtub, he was not kidding. He meant that the taxpayers and and voters would not be able to look to the government for any services whatsoever, but also that they would not have any control over the government does. The drowned and strangled government, having ceased to exist, would not only offer no benefits to citizens, it would offer no obstacle to those who wished to break the laws (for example against internal spying), because there would be no law to break. It is for this reason that the Bush administration pays absolutely no attention to the polls--they have already discounted the preferences of the citizens. When the government has been shrunk to nothing and drowned in the bathtub, the citizenry will be entirely powerless--that is the real goal, not an unintended consequence. Norquist and his fellow theorists understand perfectly that in a modern democracy, there are two competing modes of voting: there is “one person, one vote” and there is “one dollar, one vote”. They not only prefer “one dollar, one vote”, they want to entirely get rid of “one person, one vote”.

The outcome of such policies will be a dictatorship or a tyranny. Such policies cannot be reconciled with the US as we know it, or with the vision of the Founding Fathers. It is true that rogue elements have stolen elections before, as the slave interest stole the election in Kansas in 1856 by openly ferrying fraudulent voters across the river from Missouri, and then bullying the Congress into certifying the election in spite of plenty of evidence that the election was corrupt. It is also true that the public has been fed lies in the past so that they would support a questionable war (remember the Maine!). Corrupt administrations probably outnumber clean ones in US history. But the ten “successes” I cite above come together to present, I think, the greatest threat to the US since the Civil War. The US is not like much of the rest of theworld: France has always been France, and England has been England for many centuries, and Russia defined itself during the reign of Ivan the Terrible as Russia in contrast to the Tartars and Europe. Chinese history is, supposedly, the longest continual history of any people in the world, but the US is based on an abstraction--a certain set of ideas that divide up and share out power so that it does not become concentrated in the hands of a single tyrannical entity, either party or person. We are expected to participate as citizens in our government at the local, state, and national level, and our government has been expected, from the beginning, to be a shared enterprise, not an engine of power and wealth for a single oligarchic group. Our government was devised as a set of ideas about how to avoid kings, aristocracies, and tyrannies. If it fails at that, or is manipulated into producing tyranny, then we are no longer living in the US, we are living in a no man’s land, without an actual identity. This set of ideas, political techniques, and beliefs that holds together immigrants from every continent and every culture.

I began considering the possibility that what we see around us might indeed constitute success, as far as the Bushies are concerned, when I read in a post by Karen Kwiatkowski that three witnesses had confirmed that Bush referred to the Constitution as a “just a god damned piece of paper.” Then there was the article in The Guardian in which six American pundits were invited to reflect upon the meaning of the last five years of the Bush administration. Two commentators said interesting things. Howell Raines pointed out that four generations of Bushes and Walkers (since 1850) have shown a willingness to do anything for money and power, but no interest of any kind in the common good. R. Emmett Tyrell implied more than he stated when he maintained that the anger that people like me feel toward Bush is mere psychological projection, expressing “the need of the passing Old Order to have enemies.” What was striking in Tyrell’s section is his assumption that the Old Order (legal elections, citizen soldiers, healthy middle class, commonly agreed upon morality, laws, and regulations, useful beaurocracy) IS passing. He must know something I don’t know, because I had been thinking the country we used to have was still salvageable. In addition to these signs, though, we have several others, among them the fact that Bush and Cheney attempt to communicate only with their base (and remember, in “Farenheit 911”, Bush told a group of wealthy contributors that they WERE his base). Their base is fairly small and getting smaller, but they seem to have no desire, even when campaigning, to enlarge their base. It’s as if they know that the voters don’t matter, and, of course, according to the president of the Diebold Company, the voters don’t matter (see Avi Rubin’s post about voting machine certifcation).

In the face of the administration’s successes, it seems that it is the responsibility of the Democrats to save the republic, and to prevent the government from being shrunken and drowned, but they have been very lax about stepping up to the plate. With the nation beginning to wake up to the injustice and futility of bringing chaos to the Middle East, the most prominent Democrats choose to distance themselves from the citizens and to link themselves more tightly to the administration.

Hillary Clinton, for example, refuses to denounce the war and takes up the issue of flag burning!

John Kerry refuses to confront the probability that his honor was besmirched and his own election was stolen. The DNC takes the time to denounce the peace movement, even though the peace movement was right about the futility of the war.

Bill Clinton seems to be of two minds. He’s willing to speak out about global warming, which is a plus, but every time he takes a stand about any other issue, he soon backpedals. How to understand this? Democrats outside of Washington widely infer that Democrats in Washington are simply cowardly or deluded, but it is also a possibility that they are in on the shift from what Tyrell calls the “Old Order” (democracy) to the “New Order” (what shall we call that?).

We normally think of American political thought running along a single continuum, from right to left, from, let’s say from the Ku Klux Klan to the American Communist Party. Most Americans fall in the middle. Moderate Republicans live next door to moderate Democrats, and the way moderation expresses itself shifts, and is expected to shift, from region to region. In an ethnically diverse country where ideas, and ideology, are important, Americans generally understand, almost without realizing it, that moderation is what holds things together. But American political thought runs along another continuum, too, not a continuum of ideas but a continuum of power. What differentiates various groups on this continuum from one another is their embrace or rejection of power as a goal in itself. Essentially ideological thought seeks power in order to achieve certain ideas; power-oriented groups use ideas in order to achieve power. In the conservative movement today, this split is evident--old-line conservatives distrust the Bush administration because small government, low debt, and isolationism are about circumscribing the power of government. Bush is about enhancing the power of--well, I almost said government. But any government is essentially a smoothly-operating bureaucracy. Bush is about enhancing the power of himself and his cronies and dismantling any countervailing entity. The Bushies are not shy about acting on their craving for power (as in the K Street Project) or about talking about it--”Permanent Republican control of the three branches of government.” In addition, Bush himself tends to express his desire for power when he’s joking about how it’s easier to be a dictator than a president, or how the Chinese sure know how to treat journalists. The only reason the Bushies are called “conservative”, as many conservatives will themselves tell you, is that the theorists of Bushism managed to graft themselves onto the Republican Party in the 1970s and 80s, when the Republican party was the party of disgruntled racists, fundamentalists, workers, and farmers left behind by Civil Rights, feminism, the sexual revolution, the end of the manufacturing sector, and the abandonment of a rural way of life. Many of the neo-cons are former leftist student radicals because when they were student radicals, power was what they wanted. They needed to be converted from one ideology (Marxism) to another (capitalism), but the essential goal--gaining power--remained the same.

If we add the power continuum, then, the American political scene starts looking like a coordinate plane. There is the x-axis, from left to right, and the y-axis, from bottom (power dispersing) to top (power consolidating). Institutions and entities that are power dispersing would be the Libertarian Party, the Novel, the blogosphere, and democracy itself. If we plot the Bush administration point, it would be at the top of the y-axis, but not necessarily very far right, in terms of small government, low debt, and isolationism. In fact, it is this apparent moderation in expressed Bush ideas that makes him seem relatively harmless to many Americans. But the ruthless drive for power of Bush and his cronies is really not about ideas, and in fact views ideas as a kind of trash, even, according to witnesses, the ideas expressed in the Constitution. the reason I never support any Bush policy, no matter how “moderate” on the surface is that every Bush policy is designed to enhance thepower of Bush and his cronies. The grab for absolute power must be resisted absolutely. No doubt the Democrats who are in sympathy with the Bush crowd are high on the power axis, too, at least in their own minds.

My point is not to psychoanalyze Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. How they came to think as they do, and how things look to them are not actually very interesting. What is important is that average Americans come to comprehend how dangerous they are, and how destructive their plans are. Do they actually plan to disenfranchise everyone but their reliable base? Well, yes they do. Can they? If they have control of the electronic voting machines, they can. Do they actually plan for their associates and cronies to skim off vast quantities of the taxpayers’ money? Well, yes they do. Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Ag, and the major war industries already are doing so, and they have taken plenty from the Indian tribes and foreigners, too Do they actually plan to let New Orleans, that blue spot in a red state, slip away? Looks like it. Do they actually plan to destroy the middle class? They are making good progress--poverty was up twelve percent last year, and the “booming economy” is strangely low on job growth, at least for Americans. The catalogue of their “successes”, or, as average Americans might term it, their “failures”, is pretty long. Given the sympathy the Democrats afford them, we can stop them in only a few ways, it seems--by constantly bearing witness to their crimes, and prosecuting them if and when we can, by never underestimating the ruthlessness of their motives and the enormity of their goal, by being immune to their habitual public relations tools: fear, accusations of betrayal, false patriotism, appeals to populist and religious resentments, use of political red herrings like gay marriage. Most important, we must make every effort to oversee and guarantee the credibility of our elections.

Lawmakers Demand Domestic Spying Probe

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Democrats and Republicans called separately Sunday for congressional investigations into President Bush's decision after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to allow domestic eavesdropping without court approval.

"The president has, I think, made up a law that we never passed," said Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis.

Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record), R-Penn., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he intends to hold hearings.

"They talk about constitutional authority," Specter said. "There are limits as to what the president can do."

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada also called for an investigation, and House Democratic leaders asked Speaker Dennis Hastert to create a bipartisan panel to do the same.

Bush acknowledged Saturday that since October 2001 he has authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on international phone calls and e-mails of people within the United States without seeking warrants from courts.

The New York Times disclosed the existence of the program last week. Bush and other administration officials initially refused to discuss the surveillance or their legal authority, citing security concerns.

Administration officials said congressional leaders had been briefed regularly on the program. Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), R-Ariz., said there were no objections raised by lawmakers who were told about it.

"That's a legitimate part of the equation," McCain said on ABC's "This Week." But he said Bush still needs to explain why he chose to ignore the law that requires approval of a special court for domestic wiretaps.

Reid acknowledged he had been briefed on the four-year-old domestic spy program "a couple months ago" but insisted the administration bears full responsibility. Reid became Democratic leader in January.

"The president can't pass the buck on this one. This is his program," Reid said on "Fox News Sunday." "He's commander in chief. But commander in chief does not trump the Bill of Rights."

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement Saturday that she had been told on several occasions about unspecified activities by the NSA. Pelosi said she expressed strong concerns at the time.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on "Fox News Sunday" that Bush "has gone to great lengths to make certain that he is both living under his obligations to protect Americans from another attack but also to protect their civil liberties."

Several lawmakers weren't so sure. They pointed to a 1978 federal law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which provides for domestic surveillance under extreme situations, but only with court approval.

Specter said he wants Bush's advisers to cite their specific legal authority for bypassing the courts. Bush said the attorney general and White House counsel's office had affirmed the legality of his actions.

Appearing with Specter on CNN's "Late Edition," Feingold said Bush is accountable for the program regardless of whether congressional leaders were notified.

"It doesn't matter if you tell everybody in the whole country if it's against the law," said Feingold, a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Bush said the program was narrowly designed and used in a manner "consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution." He said it targets only international communications of people inside the U.S. with "a clear link" to al-Qaida or related terrorist organizations.

Government officials have refused to define the standards they're using to establish such a link or to say how many people are being monitored.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (news, bio, voting record), R-S.C., called that troubling. If Bush is allowed to decide unilaterally who the potential terrorists are, he becomes the court," Graham said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

"We are at war, and I applaud the president for being aggressive," said Graham, who also called for a congressional review. "But we cannot set aside the rule of law in a time of war."

The existence of the NSA program surfaced as Bush was fighting to save the expiring provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the domestic anti-terrorism law enacted after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Renewal of the law has stalled over some its most contentious provisions, including powers granted law enforcement to gain secret access to library and medical records and other personal data during investigations of suspected terrorist activity.

Bush Acknowledges Approving Eavesdropping

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - President Bush said Saturday he has no intention of stopping his personal authorizations of a post-Sept. 11 secret eavesdropping program in the U.S., lashing out at those involved in revealing it while defending it as crucial to preventing future attacks.

"This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security," he said in a radio address delivered live from the White House's Roosevelt Room.

"This authorization is a vital tool in our war against the terrorists. It is critical to saving American lives. The American people expect me to do everything in my power, under our laws and Constitution, to protect them and their civil liberties and that is exactly what I will continue to do as long as I am president of the United States," Bush said.

Angry members of Congress have demanded an explanation of the program, first revealed in Friday's New York Times and whether the monitoring by the National Security Agency without obtaining warrants from a court violates civil liberties. One Democrat said in response to Bush's remarks on the radio that Bush was acting more like a king than the elected president of a democracy.

Bush said the program was narrowly designed and used "consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution." He said it is used only to intercept the international communications of people inside the United States who have been determined to have "a clear link" to al-Qaida or related terrorist organizations.

The program is reviewed every 45 days, using fresh threat assessments, legal reviews by the Justice Department, White House counsel and others, and information from previous activities under the program, the president said.

Without identifying specific lawmakers, Bush said congressional leaders have been briefed more than a dozen times on the program's activities.

The president also said the intelligence officials involved in the monitoring receive extensive training to make sure civil liberties are not violated.

Appearing angry at points during his eight-minute address, Bush said he had reauthorized the program more than 30 times since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and plans to continue doing so.

"I intend to do so for as long as our nation faces a continuing threat from al-Qaida and related groups," he said.

The president contended the program has helped "detect and prevent possible terrorist attacks in the U.S. and abroad," but did not provide specific examples.

He said it is designed in part to fix problems raised by the Sept. 11 commission, which found that two of the suicide hijackers were communicating from San Diego with al-Qaida operatives overseas.

"The activities I have authorized make it more likely that killers like these 9-11 hijackers will be identified and located in time," he said.

In an effort by the administration that appeared coordinated to stem criticism, Bush's remarks echoed — in many cases word-for-word — those issued Friday night by a senior intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity. The president's highly unusual discussion of classified activities showed the sensitive nature of the program, whose existence was revealed as Congress was trying to renew the terrorism-fighting Patriot Act and complicated that effort, a top priority of Bush's.

Senate Democrats joined with a handful of Republicans on Friday to stall the bill. Those opposing the renewal of key provisions of the act that are expiring say they threaten constitutional liberties.

Reacting to Bush's defense of the NSA program, Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., said the president's remarks were "breathtaking in how extreme they were."

Feingold said it was "absurd" that Bush said he relied on his inherent power as president to authorize the wiretaps.

"If that's true, he doesn't need the Patriot Act because he can just make it up as he goes along. I tell you, he's President George Bush, not King George Bush. This is not the system of government we have and that we fought for," Feingold told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

The president had harsh words for those who talked about the program to the media, saying their actions were illegal and improper.

A Manifesto

by Larry Beinhart, Huffington Post

As I blog along I get to hear critiques from the Right. One of the standard plaints is that the Democrats – and the liberals – don't have a platform. We don't have ideas. We don't have programs.

They're right. John Kerry made only one thing clear in the 2004 election campaign: that there was nothing he, or the party, was clear about. I get emails from him still. I begin to read them, just in case he's finally hired a writer who can write clear, unvacillating prose. Alas, he has not. Senator Clinton continues to give straddling a bad name. No other leader has yet come forth. Howard Dean is not afraid to take a discernable position, but the DNC has yet to produce a clear set of program notes for their party.

Which leaves it for regular people to do. Perhaps that's how it should be. Trickle up politics.

Here's my shot at it.

Some Basic Principles

I was riding in a taxi in Washington, DC yesterday. The cabs in DC are friendly jalopies and the drivers are all from faraway places. This one was from Somalia. His accent was quite thick. I asked him how he liked it here. He said, "You have to eat and you need law and order," and he went on, "If you have a warlord on every corner and they are going to shoot you, you have to leave," making it clear why he was here instead of Somalia.

That's a pretty good place to start.

Safety.

That means National Security. We don't want angry foreigners flying planes into the World Trade Center.

That means law and order. We don't want home grown wackos blowing up federal buildings. We want our homes to be safe, our streets to be safe, our schools to be safe.

Work.

Everybody should be able to get some kind of job. Anybody who works deserves a living wage. And appropriate benefits.

Those who can't work – because they're children or too old or ill or disabled or because there are no jobs available – still need to eat. And live in tolerable conditions. We need to continue to make sure that happens.

Those who have worked and have earned social security, health care and pensions, deserve to get what they have earned. We need to protect that.

Business.

The Democratic Party is the party of business.

Here's a really bizarre statistic for you. The Dow Jones average today is almost exactly where it was the day

George Bush came into office. If you take inflation into account that means over the course of five years it's gone down about 8%. From the time

Bill Clinton came into office and the time he left, the Dow went up 320%.

The Republican Party is good for Enron types. It's good for people who want short term windfall profits – oil, pharmaceuticals and big government contractors like Halliburton. It's good for people who don't work but inherit money and live off of dividends and capital gains while they sip daquiris in Palm Beach. But it's not good for business.

Government.

Government is necessary. It's good for a lot of things. Indeed it does many things better than business can: defend the country, wage war, reinforce the levees when the hurricanes are coming, rebuild countries, provide infrastructure and education, save business from its own excesses and much, much more.

We believe in doing those things well. The Republicans believe in only doing them some way that someone profits from them. Which is why they do them so badly.

Religion.

We believe in religion. Faith. Spirituality.

This country was founded in large part by people who wanted freedom to worship their own way. We know from them – and from current events - that when religion and government mix, the first thing that happens is that someone else's right to worship is oppressed.

The best thing that government can do for religion is stay out of it.

Platform

1. The War on Terror:

Osama bin Laden has been at large for longer than it took us to defeat Hitler and Hirohito put together. That's a disgrace. Let's do what's necessary to get him and his gang and put them on trial. Preferably in New York.

As we have learned in

Iraq, just killing people and throwing people in prisons, often the wrong people, does not stop terrorists. It increases them.

There are no terrorists who are trying to create a world that's a better place for terrorists.

There are a variety of different groups who employ terror. It's time to figure out who they are and why they're fighting. Then we can develop a variety of strategies to change the conditions that cause them to kill, subvert them if that will work, arrest and try them, and if it is necessary to go to war to stop them, to do it in a way that works.

2. Simple Good Government.

We will appoint qualified people. The kind of people who will reinforce the levees when the hurricanes are coming. The kind of people who will make sure our troops have enough armor when they go to war. The kind of people who will stop Enron when they're artificially stopping the production of electricity in order to jack up the price.

3. Save Social Security.

Fortunately, it won't take much.

Here's one way. Right now, people and their employers both stop paying in after the first $90,000 in earnings. So someone who makes $10,000,000 a year makes no contributions on $9,910,000 of their income. If we eliminate the cap social security is saved. Billionaires will weep, but how many Lamborghinis can anyone drive at once?

4. Balance the Budget.

When conservatives were conservatives they always wanted to balance the budget. Now that they're in office they want to loot the future by running up debts.

Anyone who has ever paid credit card interest knows that the higher your interest payments are the less you can actually buy. That's true of government too. If we owe less, we pay less interest and we get more goods and services for our tax dollars. Only liberals understand this.

5. Invest in Infrastructure.

That's the better way to stimulate the economy.

Every business operates on invisible subsidies: roads, railways, airports, security, communications, an educated work force, civil and criminal justice systems, breathable air, potable water, sensible regulations, objective information, regulated banking, uniform accounting standards, trustworthy stock, bond and commodity markets.

Investment in infrastructure has a multiplier effect. If you build a road the workers and the builders go spend their money. That employs more people. Who spend their money. The businesses who use the road get their goods to market quicker and cheaper. Each time the money goes around, taxes are collected.

Investment in infrastructure stays in America. Invest in giving a tax break to a billionaire and he's as likely to stick his money in company that hides its money offshore as one that uses it here.

6. Create a real energy policy.

Invading Iraq is not a sound energy policy. All the oil in Alaska's Artic National Wildlife Refuge will supply the US for less than a year and a half. That's not much help.

It's time for real investment in alternative energy and conservation.

7. Save General Motors.

General Motors can't compete with foreign automakers because of health care costs.

Americans spend more than twice what other industrialized countries spend, per capita, and get a lot less for it.

We're #1 in spending, #37 in overall health care performance.

Only 40% of Americans like their health care system. Everything we thought we would dislike about any form of national health, we got with HMOs and insurance companies. It's time to try something new.

8. Save Medicare.

Unlike Social Security, Medicare really is in trouble. Cynical people even think that the last Medicare bill was designed to enrich the pharmaceutical companies and bankrupt the system, all with just one bill.

A national health system would save Medicare. Along with General Motors and many other companies and the health benefits of millions of workers and retirees.

9. Build America.

It's time to rethink unlimited free trade and globalization.

Do we want a country of millionaire lawyers and entertainers and everyone else works at Wal-Mart and Burger King? Or do we want a country full of good jobs where people make a good living creating things we need and can afford to invest in their retirement and their children?

10. Education.

Every dollar we spend making sure kids can read is ten dollars we won't spend ten years later on prisons.

Every dollar we spend making sure kids can read and write, do math and science, is of benefit to American business and American society as a whole.

Sports, art and music should be available to every student in grade school and high school.

A college education should be available and affordable to anyone who will work at it.

America actually spends quite a lot on education as compared to other countries, but, as with health care, we get less for it. We have to figure out why. And try a thousand experiments, if need be, to do better.

11. The Environment.

I want to breath clean air. I want to drink pure water. I bet you do too.

I want to preserve the wild places and as many species as possible. I bet you do too.

12. End George Bush's War.

Americans don't cut and run.

But when we have been misled and conned into a war that was never actually authorized, we know how to take responsibility for what went wrong, change our own government and then try to make things right.

The Terrorists are Coming, The Terrorists are Coming

by Bob Burnett, Huffington Post

Imagine if Massachusetts' residents weren't paying attention when Paul Revere made his famous ride that chilly evening in 1775. Consider where we would be if citizens hadn't heard his cry, "The British are coming! The British are coming!" Or, if they assumed that someone else would take care of it. Revere's warning is comparable to that issued last week by the 9/11 Commission. They're bellowing, "The terrorists are coming!" Yet, most Americans are unaware of the Administration's failure to protect them.

On December 5th, the "9/11 Public Discourse Project," issued a report [PDF] on the efforts of the Bush Administration and Congress to prevent another attack on the homeland. The original 9/11 commission, five Republicans and five Democrats, went out of business last year, after it delivered its final report. In an unusual move, they garnered private funding and reconstituted themselves as the Public Discourse Project, so they could track progress enacting their recommendations.

The Project concluded, "We are not as safe as we need to be... there is so much more to be done." "Many obvious steps that the American people assume have been completed, have not been... Some of these failures are shocking."

The group's Republican chair, Thomas Kean, observed, "We believe that the terrorists will strike again. So does every responsible expert that we have talked to... If they do, and these reforms that might have prevented such an attack have not been implemented, what will our excuses be?"

Of the 41 grades given, there were 17 D's or F's. The government's overall grade was a C-. There were two particularly disturbing findings: One was the "Administration's woeful record in strengthening global counterproliferation efforts to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists." The other was the failure to adequately fund first responders. Particularly those police, fire, and public health departments in high-risk locales. The 9/11 Project observed that the response to Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that the first-responders were not ready for another attack. There has been no progress providing a system "that allows emergency response personnel to communicate reliably and effectively in a crisis." Similarly there has been inadequate progress establishing a "unified incident command center." Amazingly, the first-responder funding has become a mechanism for dispensing pork to small states. Rather than allocate funds based upon potential risk, Congress has relied on a formula that does not send money where it's needed. Thus, Wyoming receives $27.80 per resident in homeland security funds, while California receives $8.05 per resident.

A glaring example of ineptitude is Washington DC. According to "Washington Post" columnist Steve Pearlstein, the region has no credible plan "to respond to an attack or a natural disaster, or even an agreement of who will be in charge." (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/15/AR2005091502333.html)

Four years after terrorists attacked America, we have not learned our lesson. Despite claims that we have the strongest defense in the world, we remain startlingly vulnerable. Whose fault is this?

Many blame the Bush Administration. The 9/11 Project observed, "Our leadership is distracted." The Administration decided that an invasion of Iraq was the answer to the threat of a domestic terrorist attack. Despite bipartisan warnings that this is disastrously wrong-headed, that remains their focus.

Congress must also take responsibility. The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs sets the formula for allocation of first-responder money to the states. The Committee – headed by Maine Republican Susan Collins and Connecticut "Democrat" Joe Lieberman – has been satisfied with a formula based on pork rather than risk. Further, the Senate has buckled to the chemical industry and refused to pass reasonable standards that would help secure chemical plants from attack. (http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Business/071305_chemical.html)

Finally, the media must take responsibility. The day after the 9/11 Project issued their alarming report, most American newspapers and TV news programs buried this item. Writing in "Editor and Publisher," Greg Mitchell characterized the media response as "underwhelming." (http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001615506)

Only six of the forty major US newspapers carried the 9/11 report on their front pages. That day the Houston Chronicle led with, "Concerns Over Face Transplant Grows."

Thomas Jefferson famously cautioned Americans, ""The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." Recently, Jimmy Carter warned about the devastating impact of fundamentalist Christianity on our society. This has impacted preparation for a terrorist attack. Many fundamentalists -- about 36 per cent of Americans according to Bill Moyers -- believe that America's problems, such as terrorism, are irrelevant, as we are in the final stages of the "end times."

President Bush is a fundamentalist Christian. Perhaps this explains why his Administration isn't protecting America. For George, it's not the terrorists but the end times that are coming.

Chronology of News Events in 2005

By The Associated Press

Jan. 1

Aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln starts distributing tsunami aid on Sumatra island in Indonesia.

Jan. 2

Indonesia's president says Indian Ocean nations will work on tsunami warning system.

Jan. 3

President Bush taps former Presidents Clinton and the elder Bush to raise tsunami relief funds.

Energy Department says average retail gas price is $1.78 a gallon nationwide.

Jan. 6

Former Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen is arrested 41 years after three civil rights workers were slain in Mississippi.

Jan. 9

Palestinians elect Mahmoud Abbas as president and successor to late Yasser Arafat.

Jan. 10

CBS fires three news executives and a producer for rushing to air a discredited report on Bush's National Guard service.

A mudslide in La Conchita, Calif., crushes homes and kills 10 residents.

Jan. 12

Deep Impact spacecraft blasts off, starts 268 million-mile journey to smash into comet.

Jan. 13

Major League Baseball adopts steroid-testing program that will suspend first-time offenders for 10 days and randomly test players year-round.

Jan. 14

Army Spc. Charles Graner Jr. is convicted of abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and later is sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Jan. 16

Golden Globes are awarded to "The Aviator" as best drama and "Sideways" as best musical or comedy.

Jan. 18

The world's largest commercial jet, an Airbus A380 that can carry 800 passengers, is unveiled.

Jan. 19

Cancer passes heart disease as top killer of Americans age 85 and younger.

Jan. 20

President Bush is inaugurated for second term. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, ill with thyroid cancer, delivers oath of office.

Jan. 23

Former "Tonight Show" host Johnny Carson dies.

Jan. 26

Helicopter crash in Iraq kills 31 U.S. Marines.

Jan. 30

Iraqis vote in the country's first free election in a half-century.

Jan. 31

Vietnam says 12 people have died of bird flu in last month.

Jury selection begins in Michael Jackson's child molestation trial.

FEBRUARY

Feb. 1

Pope John Paul II is hospitalized for breathing problems and the flu.

Feb. 3

Investigation of the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq finds gross mismanagement.

Senate confirms Alberto Gonzales as attorney general.

Feb. 6

New England Patriots win third Super Bowl in four years.

Feb. 10

North Korea boasts publicly for the first time that it has nuclear weapons.

Feb. 11

"Death of a Salesman" playwright Arthur Miller dies.

Feb. 13

Ray Charles' final album, "Genius Loves Company," wins eight Grammys.

Feb. 14

Former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri is assassinated and suspicions focus on Syria.

A gas explosion inside a Chinese mine kills 214 people, the worst reported mining disaster since the 1949 communist revolution.

Feb. 16

National Hockey League cancels entire season after prolonged lockout.

Kyoto Protocol environmental treaty takes effect.

Feb. 17

Certified election results show a Shiite alliance won the majority of seats in Iraq's National Assembly.

Feb. 23

The New York medical examiner stops trying to identify victims of the 2001 terror attack on the World Trade Center, leaving more than 1,000 victims unidentified.

Feb. 24

Pope John Paul II receives a tracheotomy to help him breathe.

Feb. 25

Municipal employee and church leader Dennis Rader is arrested for the BTK serial killings that terrorized Wichita, Kan. He later pleads guilty and is sentenced to 10 life prison terms.

Feb. 27

Academy Awards go to "Million Dollar Baby," its director Clint Eastwood, star Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman.

Feb. 28

Suicide bombing targeted at security recruits kills 125 people in Hillah, Iraq.

MARCH

March 1

Supreme Court strikes down the death penalty for juvenile killers.

March 2

U.S. military deaths in Iraq reach 1,500.

Woman who accused NBA star Kobe Bryant of rape settles lawsuit against him, ending case.

March 4

Martha Stewart leaves prison, starts five months of home confinement.

March 7

Bush nominates John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, then bypasses Senate opposition with recess appointment five months later.

March 8

Mount St. Helens releases towering ash plume, its most significant emission in months.

March 9

Dan Rather anchors his final "CBS Evening News."

March 10

Former President Clinton has surgery to remove scar tissue and fluid from his chest.

Michael Jackson, clad in pajamas and walking gingerly, arrives one hour late to trial after the judge threatens to arrest him for tardiness. A back injury is blamed.

March 11

A judge, court reporter and sheriff's deputy are shot and killed at an Atlanta courthouse. The suspect, Brian Nichols, surrenders a day later.

March 15

Former WorldCom chief Bernard Ebbers is convicted of engineering the largest corporate fraud in U.S. history. Later, he's sentenced to 25 years in prison.

March 16

Actor Robert Blake is cleared in 2001 slaying of his wife. A civil court jury later orders him to pay $30 million to her four children.

March 17

Baseball players tell Congress that steroids are a problem in the sport, and stars Rafael Palmeiro and Sammy Sosa testify they haven't used them. Mark McGwire refuses to answer.

Rapper Lil' Kim is convicted for lying to a grand jury about a shootout outside a New York radio station. She starts serving her 366-day sentence just before her fourth album is released in September.

March 18

Feeding tube keeping Terri Schiavo alive is removed after unprecedented fight over the brain-damaged woman's care.

March 20

First lady Laura Bush visits Afghanistan, talks with women in Kabul and urges greater rights.

March 22

A woman claims she found a fingertip while eating Wendy's chili, costing the fast-food chain millions in lost sales before she admitted it was a hoax.

March 23

Explosion at BP oil refinery in Texas City, Texas, kills 14 people.

March 27

Pope delivers Easter blessing at Vatican but is unable to speak.

March 31

Terri Schiavo dies 13 days after feeding tube was removed.

APRIL

April 1

President Bush authorizes quarantines if needed to prevent spread of particularly deadly flu outbreaks, a worry raised by bird flu cases in Asia.

Former national security adviser Sandy Berger pleads guilty to sneaking classified documents out of the National Archives. Later, he's sentenced to two years of probation.

FBI says explosives materials found in Terry Nichols' former home were related to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and were missed during earlier searches.

April 2

Pope John Paul II dies.

April 5

ABC News says anchor Peter Jennings has lung cancer.

April 6

Monaco's Prince Rainier dies. Son Prince Albert II later ascends to throne.

April 7

Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite, is named Iraq's interim prime minister. Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani is sworn in as interim president.

The blockbuster painkiller Bextra is taken off the market, and the FDA says all similar prescription drugs should strongly warn about possible risk of heart attacks and strokes.

April 9

Prince Charles marries longtime love Camilla Parker Bowles, who takes the title Duchess of Cornwall.

April 10

Tiger Woods wins his fourth Masters.

April 13

Eric Rudolph pleads guilty to the 1996 Olympics bombing; he is later sentenced to life in prison for that and other bombings.

April 19

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is elected pope and takes the name Benedict XVI.

April 20

Bush signs legislation making it harder for people to wipe out debts by declaring bankruptcy.

April 22

Zacarias Moussaoui pleads guilty to conspiring with the Sept. 11 hijackers.

April 26

Last Syrian soldiers leave Lebanon, ending 29-year military dominance.

April 29

NASA again delays first space shuttle launch since Columbia disaster, worrying that ice falling off fuel tank could doom Discovery.

Vietnam marks 30th anniversary of war's end.

April 30

Missing Georgia woman Jennifer Wilbanks turns up in New Mexico, claiming to have been abducted but later admitting she was a "runaway bride."

MAY

May 4

Judge throws out Pfc. Lynndie England's guilty plea to abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, saying he was not convinced the Army reservist knew her actions were wrong at the time.

May 5

Tony Blair wins third term as British prime minister.

"Precious Doe," a slain girl mourned but unknown for four years in Kansas City, Mo., is identified as Erica Michelle Marie Green, and her mother and stepfather are charged with murder.

May 7

Giacomo, a 50-1 long shot, wins Kentucky Derby.

May 10

Bankruptcy judge approves United Airlines' plan to terminate its employees' pension plans, clearing the way for the largest corporate-pension default in American history.

May 13

Government troops in Uzbekistan put down an uprising they blame on Islamic militants. Opponents say the troops fired into crowds and killed hundreds of people.

May 15

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice makes surprise visit to Iraq to support its new government.

May 18

Antonio Villaraigosa is elected first Hispanic mayor of Los Angeles in 133 years.

May 19

"Revenge of the Sith" opens, showing Anakin Skywalker's transformation to evil Darth Vader and completing "Star Wars" epic.

May 21

Favorite Afleet Alex wins the Preakness Stakes.

May 25

Country sweetheart Carrie Underwood wins "American Idol."

May 29

French voters soundly reject European Union constitution, which is defeated by the Dutch days later.

May 31

Former FBI official Mark Felt acknowledges he was "Deep Throat," the secret source who helped Washington Post reporters uncover Watergate.

JUNE

June 6

Judge upholds Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire's victory — by 129 votes — in Washington state's 2004 election.

Rejection of planned Manhattan stadium effectively dooms New York City's bid for 2012 Olympics.

Actor Russell Crowe is arrested for throwing a phone that hit a hotel employee in New York. He later pleads guilty to third-degree assault.

June 7

President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair embrace tentative plan to forgive debt of poor African nations.

June 11

First tropical storm of the season, Arlene, sloshes ashore in Florida Panhandle.

Afleet Alex wins the Belmont Stakes by seven lengths.

June 13

Senate apologizes for blocking anti-lynching legislation in early 20th century, when mob violence against blacks was commonplace.

Jury acquits Michael Jackson of molesting a 13-year-old boy.

June 14

U.S. Army deserter Charles Jenkins, who crossed into North Korea in 1965, arrives in the United States for his first visit in 40 years.

June 21

Former Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen is convicted of manslaughter in 1964 civil rights killings.

June 23

San Antonio Spurs win thrilling Game 7 over Detroit Pistons.

June 24

Tests confirm the second case of mad cow disease in the United States.

June 25

Hardline Tehran mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wins Iran's presidential election.

NAACP selects retired Verizon executive Bruce S. Gordon as its new president.

June 26

Six months after Indian Ocean tsunami, death toll stands at 178,000 in 11 countries with another 50,000 missing and presumed dead.

June 27

Oil prices settle at record high above $60 a barrel.

U.S. Supreme Court rules Ten Commandments displays are acceptable sometimes on government property.

Wal-Mart heir John Walton dies in a plane crash.

June 29

Investigator of Columbia disaster says he's fine with NASA resuming shuttle launches in just two weeks, even though some safety recommendations weren't made.

June 30

Federal Reserve raises key interest rate ninth straight time, noting rising energy prices.

Spain becomes third country to legalize gay marriage.

JULY

July 1

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court, says she'll retire.

July 2

Shasta Groene, an 8-year-old girl kidnapped six weeks earlier, is rescued at a restaurant in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. The man with her is arrested and accused of kidnapping and murder.

Marathon Live 8 concert rocks the globe and the Internet, focusing attention on African poverty.

July 4

Deep Impact probe collides with Tempel 1 comet, leaving a crater and kicking up dust to be studied for clues to the solar system.

July 6

New York Times reporter Judith Miller is jailed after refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating the leak of an undercover CIA operative's name. She stays in jail 85 days before agreeing to testify.

London is selected as host of the 2012 Olympics.

July 7

Terrorist bombings in three Underground stations and a double-decker bus kill 56 people in the worst attack on London since World War II.

July 8

World leaders at Group of Eight summit unveil $50 billion package to help lift Africa from poverty.

July 9

A panda cub is born at the National Zoo in Washington.

July 10

Hurricane Dennis strikes Florida's Gulf Coast.

July 11

A top al-Qaida lieutenant and three other terror suspects escape a U.S. military jail in Afghanistan. The identity of Omar al-Farouq isn't acknowledged until November.

July 16

Millions of readers start "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," long awaited sixth book in J.K. Rowling's fantasy series.

July 19

Bush nominates judge John G. Roberts Jr. to Supreme Court to replace O'Connor.

July 21

A repeat attack on London's transit system fails. Four suspected would-be bombers are detained later.

China stops pegging its currency to the U.S. dollar.

July 22

Labor agreement ends lockout that canceled the last hockey season.

July 24

Lance Armstrong retires after winning his seventh straight Tour de France.

July 25

AFL-CIO splinters in division over how to reverse the unions' declining membership.

July 26

Six nations resume nuclear disarmament talks that North Korea boycotted for 13 months, but little progress is made.

Discovery blasts off on first space shuttle flight in 2 1/2 years.

July 28

Pictures taken by the space station crew show Discovery wasn't damaged by debris during liftoff.

AUGUST

Aug. 1

Baseball star Rafael Palmeiro receives a 10-day suspension for steroid use.

Aug. 3

Fourteen Marines from a Reserve unit in Ohio are killed in the deadliest roadside bombing suffered by American forces in the Iraq war.

A South Korean cloning pioneer announces the world's first cloned dog, an Afghan hound named Snuppy.

Aug. 6

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, whose soldier-son was killed in Iraq, starts a weekslong protest outside Bush's ranch in Texas.

Aug. 8

Iran resumes work at a uranium conversion facility after suspending nuclear work for nine months to avoid U.N. sanctions.

Aug. 9

Discovery lands safely.

Aug. 10

A Tennessee inmate and his wife are captured in Ohio days after she allegedly ambushed two prison guards, killing one of them, to help her husband escape.

Aug. 18

Ohio Gov. Bob Taft apologizes after pleading no contest to ethics violations and insists he won't resign.

Aug. 19

Drugmaker Merck & Co. is ordered to pay millions for death of man who took painkiller Vioxx in first damage award from thousands of pending lawsuits.

Aug. 22

Last Jewish settlers leave the Gaza Strip, soon to be turned over to the Palestinian government.

Aug. 25

Hurricane Katrina hits Florida with 80 mph winds and heads into the Gulf of Mexico.

Aug. 28

Mayor orders everyone in New Orleans to evacuate after Katrina grows to monster storm.

Aug. 29

Category 4 Katrina strikes Louisiana, and the first levee breaks in New Orleans.

Aug. 30

Floods cover 80 percent of New Orleans, and residents are rescued from rooftops.

SEPTEMBER

Sept. 1

New Orleans convention center and Superdome swell with thousands of desperate people stranded by Katrina.

Sept. 2

President Bush tours Gulf Coast, acknowledges failure so far of government relief efforts.

Labor Department says unemployment rate for August was 4.9 percent, a four-year low.

At live-TV benefit concert, rapper Kanye West goes off-script to sharply criticize Bush.

Sept. 3

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist dies.

Sept. 4

Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt says thousands of people died due to Katrina and its aftermath. Official toll later stands at more than 1,300.

Sept. 5

President Bush nominates John Roberts as chief justice and says he will choose an associate justice in a timely manner.

Jerry Rice ends NFL career that included three Super Bowls and records for most career receptions, receiving yards and receiving touchdowns.

Sept. 6

California Legislature becomes first in nation to approve same-sex marriages, but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger later vetoes bill.

Energy Department says retail gas prices skyrocketed to average $3.069, a new record.

Sept. 7

U.S. troops rescue American Roy Hallums, held hostage 10 months in Iraq.

Sept. 12

FEMA Director Michael Brown resigns.

Sept. 14

Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines file for bankruptcy.

Coordinated bombings kill at least 160 in Baghdad, the deadliest attack since Iraq's new government took office in April.

Sept. 15

Bush endorses military base closings, including Army's Walter Reed hospital.

Sept. 18

"Everybody Loves Raymond" wins Emmy for best comedy in final season; first-year hit "Lost" is named best drama.

Sept. 19

North Korea pledges to drop its nuclear weapons development and rejoin international arms treaties, but leaders quickly backpedal and disarmament talks stall.

Sept. 23

Bus full of Hurricane Rita evacuees catches fire, killing 23 nursing-home residents.

Sept. 24

Category 3 Rita strikes in eastern Texas and causes more flooding in New Orleans.

Sept. 26

Army Pfc. Lynndie England is convicted of abusing prisoners in Iraq. She's later sentenced to three years in prison.

Sept. 28

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay leaves post after indictment alleges he illegally funneled corporate donations to help Texas legislative campaigns.

Sept. 29

John Roberts takes oath of office as chief justice of the United States.

OCTOBER

Oct. 2

Tour boat capsizes on N.Y.'s Lake George, killing 20 people.

Oct. 3

President Bush nominates White House counsel Harriet Miers to Supreme Court, but she withdraws three weeks later after conservative criticism.

Oct. 5

Heavy rain falls in Central America for fourth straight day. More than 1,600 people are killed, most in Guatemala, where landslides destroyed towns.

Golfer Michelle Wie, six days before she turns 16, says she's turning professional.

Oct. 7

Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to International Atomic Energy Agency and its chief, Mohamed ElBaradei.

Oct. 8

Major earthquake flattens villages on Pakistan-India border, kills estimated 86,000 people and leaves 3.5 million homeless.

Delphi Corp., the largest U.S. auto supplier, files for bankruptcy.

Oct. 11

Engineers finish pumping floodwaters out of New Orleans six weeks after Katrina.

China launches its second manned space flight, with two astronauts orbiting Earth for five days.

Oct. 12

A strain of bird flu that has killed humans in Asia spreads to Europe as a case is confirmed in Turkey.

Apple Computer introduces iPod that can play videos, television shows.

Oct. 14

The 2005 deficit is $319 billion, dropping from previous year but still third highest.

Blond, blue-eyed British actor Daniel Craig is named as new James Bond.

Oct. 15

Iraqis vote to approve a constitution.

Oct. 19

At start of his trial for a 1982 massacre of Shiites, defiant Saddam Hussein insists he is still Iraq's president, quarrels with judges and scuffles with guards.

Oct. 21

Hurricane Wilma strikes Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, then three days later speeds across Florida.

Oct. 24

Civil rights icon Rosa Parks dies.

Bush nominates economic adviser Ben Bernanke to succeed Alan Greenspan as Federal Reserve chairman.

Oct. 25

U.S. military deaths in Iraq reach 2,000.

Oct. 26

Chicago White Sox sweep Houston Astros to win first World Series since 1917.

Oct. 28

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's top adviser, is indicted on charges alleging he lied about disclosing CIA operative's name.

Oct. 31

Bush nominates judge Samuel Alito to Supreme Court.

NOVEMBER

Nov. 1

Federal Reserve increases a key interest rate to the highest level in more than four years.

Nov. 3

European Union says it will investigate reports the CIA set up secret jails in Eastern Europe to interrogate terror suspects.

Drugmaker Merck & Co. wins for first time in court over painkiller Vioxx.

Nov. 5

Pirates attack a cruise ship off the coast of Somalia, but ship changes course and speeds away to escape.

Unrest and arsons that started in France's immigrant suburbs reach Paris. Violence diminishes two weeks later, after curfews and state of emergency are imposed.

Nov. 6

Overnight tornado kills 22 in Indiana.

Nov. 7

President Bush says the United States will aggressively pursue terrorists but "we do not torture."

Nov. 8

Kansas Board of Education approves science standards for public schools that cast doubt on evolution.

Virginia voters elect Democrat Tim Kaine as governor, and Democratic Sen. Jon Corzine (news, bio, voting record) wins governor's race in New Jersey. A slate of ballot proposals promoted by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger fails in California.

Nov. 9

Oil executives testify to Congress that their huge profits are justified, even as consumers struggle to cope with soaring gasoline and winter heating costs.

Suicide bombers strike three hotels in Amman, Jordan, killing 60 people. An Iraqi woman is arrested after her own explosive belt failed.

Nov. 11

Germany's Christian Democrats seal deal with Social Democrats to form coalition government, allowing Angela Merkel to become first female chancellor.

Nov. 13

A plant explosion in Jilin, China, spills toxic chemicals into the Songhua River, the water source for major cities downstream in China and Russia.

Nov. 15

Baseball players, owners agree on tougher steroids-testing policy that increases suspension for first-time violators from 10 games to 50 games and imposes lifetime ban for third offense.

Nov. 17

Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record) of Pennsylvania calls for immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, saying troops have done their duty and "It's time to bring them home."

Nov. 21

General Motors says it will close 12 facilities, lay off 30,000 workers in North America.

Nov. 22

U.S. citizen Jose Padilla is charged with supporting terrorism, but indictment does not mention the alleged "dirty bomb" plot that prompted his three-year detention.

Ted Koppel airs final broadcast of ABC News' "Nightline."

Nov. 28

Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham of California pleads guilty to taking $2.4 million in bribes.

Nov. 29

Doctors in France perform world's first partial face transplant, attaching a donor's nose, lips and chin to a woman disfigured by a dog bite.

DECEMBER

Dec. 1

Roadside bomb kills 10 U.S. Marines near Fallujah, Iraq.

Dec. 2

N.C. inmate Kenneth Lee Boyd becomes 1,000th person executed since nation resumed capital punishment 28 years ago.

Dec. 5

ABC News names Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff as co-anchors of "World News Tonight," replacing late Peter Jennings.

Dec. 7

Federal air marshals shoot and kill airline passenger at Miami International Airport after he falsely claims to have a bomb.

Dec. 8

Southwest Airlines jet slides off runway and onto busy street during snowstorm in Chicago, killing one boy in a car.

Dec. 10

Former Sen. Eugene McCarthy, whose antiwar presidential campaign divided Democrats in 1968, dies.

2005 Offers Fresh Tales of the Bizarre

NEW YORK Associated Press - The Easter Bunny was hopping mad but kept his cool after being socked by a boy, a Wal-Mart greeter was sacked for showing a lot more than customers cared to see and a prep football coach was reprimanded for some eccentric licking.

2005 offered fresh tales of bizarre lust, quirky cuisine, multiple marriages and other foibles of human existence.

SAY WHAT TO ME, DUDE?

Like most everybody, LaChania Govan of Chicago got bounced around when she called her cable company to complain. She made dozens of calls and was even transferred to a person who spoke Spanish — a language she doesn't understand. But when she got her August bill from Comcast she had no trouble understanding she'd made somebody mad. It was addressed to "Bitch Dog." "I was like you got to be freaking kidding me," said Govan, 25, of her reaction when she saw the bill. "I was so mad I couldn't even cuss." Two employees were fired after company officials went through records and identified them as being involved in the incident.

JUST WHAT WAS IN THAT RECIPE?

How about the Idaho high school boy who fed a batch of semen-frosted brownies to a fellow student and his friends? It seems the teenager was more than a bit ticked when his classmate put peanut butter in his cheese sandwich days before. As a police report said, the prankster, who has since agreed to admit to three counts of disturbing the peace, "hated peanut butter and it made him more mad than he could explain."

GAVE A LICKING AND KEPT ON TICKING

An Oregon education board reprimanded a Central Linn High School football coach for licking the wounds of several student athletes. Coach Scott Reed admitted licking blood from the knee of one student and the arm of another. It was not clear why he did it. Linn County Sheriff Dave Burright called the licking "bizarre" but not criminal because contact wasn't forced. Three students said it appeared the coach was "just joking around."

SO EASY. EVEN A CHILD CAN DO IT

An Anderson County, S.C., sheriff's deputy was temporarily sidelined by his boss after the officer's pistol went off during a gun safety class at a middle school. It seems the weapon discharged when a student pulled the trigger as the deputy was showing the kids how hard it was to take a gun from an officer's holster. The bullet fired into the floor, and debris cut two students.

ONE WIFE AT A TIME

Another South Carolina deputy had a lapse of judgment, too, but his was of the matrimonial variety. Sumter County sheriff's deputy Jay Follin was fired for being married to two women at the same time. Follin, 27, was separated from his first wife when he married his second, according to a department investigation. His second wife, the investigation revealed, was already married to another man at the time. Everything became known when the husband of Follin's second wife filed a complaint with the sheriff's department. The couple was separated at the time.

PSST! TRADE YA SOME GOAT FOR A ROCK

Four Connellsville, Pa., men ended up behind bars after they allegedly stole and butchered a goat so they could trade it for crack cocaine. Two of the men, police said, stole and killed the 4-year-old pygmy goat and then took it to another residence where two more men skinned and butchered the animal.

40 GOATS FOR CHELSEA CLINTON. DO I HEAR 50?

Kenyan councilman Godwin Kipkemoi Chepkurgor says he offered

Bill Clinton 40 goats and 20 cows for his daughter's hand in marriage five years ago. He's still awaiting an answer.

HEY! WHATCHA LOOKING AT?

A Pittston, Maine, man arrested after he was found peering at a teenage girl from the business end of a New Hampshire rest-stop privy has pleaded no contest to criminal trespass. Gary J. Moody was given a 30-day sentence that will be suspended if he maintains good behavior for two years. The judge cited Moody's public humiliation from the ensuing publicity in not jailing him.

HOOD? WHAT HOOD? WE DON'T SEE NOTHING

Two Cedar Rapids, Iowa, men landed in jail after they continued driving on Interstate 380 when the hood of their car popped open and covered their windshield. Instead of stopping to fix the problem, the men stuck their heads out the windows so they could see and kept going. Two Linn County deputies took note and pulled them over.

ANOTHER STORY ABOUT THE DANGERS OF SMOKING

A man riding in a car on Arkansas 234 near the Oklahoma border didn't go to jail following a long night of drinking. But he did go to a hospital after jumping from the vehicle in an effort to retrieve his lit cigarette. Jeff Foran was recovering after leaping from the car and landing hard on the roadway in a failed bid to grab the butt, state police said. "If anything could make him stop smoking, this should be it," said Trooper Jamie Graver.

MAMA MIA! ALL SHE WANTED WAS SOME PIZZA

An 86-year-old Charlotte, N.C., woman spent two nights in the city lockup after police said she called 911 dispatchers 20 times in a little more than 30 minutes to complain about service at a pizza parlor. Dorothy Densmore told dispatchers the shop refused to deliver a pie to her apartment. Densmore wanted the workers arrested. Instead, police arrested her.

NEVER WHEN MARRIED

Authorities in Wisconsin pinched a 63-year-old man who allegedly had a fondness for calves.

Harold G. Hart, of Neillsville, reportedly told police he stopped at a Greenwood farm "at least 50 times" to have sex with calves there. The man, however, told police he never had sex with animals while maintaining a relationship with a girlfriend or his wife.

HONEY, I'M HOT FOR YOU

A 38-year-old Oregon man wearing a gasoline-soaked cape set himself on fire before getting down on one knee and asking his longtime girlfriend to marry him. About 100 people gathered to watch Todd Grannis perform the flaming stunt for Malissa Kusiek, who said "yes."

SHOOT. HE WAS JUST TRYING TO BE FRIENDLY

In Muscatine, Iowa, Dean L. Wooten was fired for greeting Wal-Mart customers with a computer-generated photo in which he appeared to be naked — except for a carefully placed Wal-Mart bag. Wooten reportedly told customers the store was cutting costs and the bag was the company's new uniform. A supervisor told him to stop showing the photo after customers complained. He was canned when he displayed the photo again.

AIN'T FUNNY TO THIS BUNNY

The Easter Bunny wasn't laughing this year. Bryan Johnson, who portrayed the holiday rabbit at a mall in Bay City, Mich., says he was pummeled in an unprovoked attack by a 12-year-old boy.

Plight of the world's 'invisible' children

by Elvira van Noort, UK Mail & Guardian

Johannesburg, South Africa - She struggles to hold back the flood of tears that threatens to ruin her neatly pressed coveralls. Soon the floodgates open as she recounts the details of the past five-and-a-half years spent in jail.

Nkeiruka became pregnant while unmarried, which is considered a taboo among the Igbo community in Nigeria to which she belongs. In December 1999, the then 15-year-old Nkeiruka gave birth unassisted at home, and her child died as a result of complications. Her uncle accused her of killing her newborn, and Nkeiruka and her mother, Monica, were arrested and taken to prison in Anambra state.

Now 21, Nkeiruka faces an uncertain future. She was one of the world's "invisible" children, millions of whom die every year, despite efforts to provide them with the necessary services that could save their lives.

These "invisible" children are highlighted in a new United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) report, The State of the World's Children 2006: Excluded and Invisible, released on Wednesday.

The agency said millions of children disappear from view when trafficked or forced to work in domestic servitude, which makes them invisible.

Other children, such as street children, live in plain sight but are excluded from fundamental services and protections. Not only do these children endure abuse, but most are also shut out from schools, health care and other vital services they so desperately need to grow and thrive.

The Unicef report marks the 60th year of the organisation's existence. It is a sweeping assessment of the world's most vulnerable children, the ones who are invisible in everything: from public debate and legislation to statistics and news stories. These are the children that are the most difficult to protect.

Millennium goals

Apart from shocking statistics -- including the fact that an estimated 171-million children around the world are working in hazardous conditions with dangerous machinery -- the report also deals with meeting the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

"Meeting the Millennium Development Goals depends on reaching vulnerable children throughout the developing world," said Unicef executive director Ann M Veneman, launching the report in London. "There cannot be lasting progress if we continue to overlook the children most in need -- the poorest and most vulnerable, the exploited and the abused."

The world has agreed on a road map to a better future in the form of the MDGs, which stem from the Millennium Declaration, adopted in 2000 by 189 countries. The goals set quantitative targets to address extreme poverty and hunger, child and maternal mortality, HIV/Aids and other diseases, while promoting universal primary education, gender equality, environmental sustainability and a global partnership for development by 2015.

The MDGs for 2015 are to:

* eradicate extreme hunger and poverty;

* achieve universal primary education;

* promote gender equality and empower women;

* reduce child mortality;

* improve maternal health;

* combat HIV/Aids, malaria and other diseases

* ensure environmental stability; and

* develop a global partnership for development: develop further an open trading and financial system that is rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory.

The stakes are high: if the above MDGs are met, an estimated 500-million people will escape poverty by 2015; 250-million will be spared from hunger; and 30-million children, who would not have lived past their fifth birthday, will survive. Meeting the goals is, therefore, a matter of life or death -- of progress or a step backward -- for millions of children.

Unless many more of these invisible children are reached, several of the MDGs -- particularly the goal on universal primary education -- will simply not be met on time or in full.

Governments bear primary responsibility for reaching out to these children, and must step up their efforts in four key areas:

* Research, monitoring and reporting: Systems to record and report on the nature and extent of abuses against children are essential to reaching excluded and invisible children.

* Legislation: National laws must match international commitments to children, and legislation that fosters discrimination must be changed or abolished. Laws to prosecute those who harm children must be consistently enforced.

* Financing and capacity-building: Child-focused budgets and the strengthening of institutions that serve children must complement laws and research.

* Programmes: Reform is urgently required in many countries and communities to remove entry barriers for children who are excluded from essential services, for example, eliminating the requirement of a birth certificate to attend school.

The report also outlines concrete actions that can be taken by civil society, the private sector, donors and the media to help prevent children from falling between the cracks.

It finds that children who lack vital services are more vulnerable to exploitation because they have less information on how to protect themselves, and fewer economic alternatives. Children who are caught in armed conflict, for example, are routinely subjected to rape and other forms of sexual violence. It is these children -- alone and defenseless -- who are being ignored.

Circumstances

The report argues that children in four types of circumstances are most likely to become invisible and forgotten: those without a formal identity, those without parental care, those in adult roles and those who are exploited.

Every year, more than half of all births in the developing world (excluding China) go unregistered, denying more than 50-million children a basic birthright: recognition as a citizen. Children who are not registered at birth do not appear in official statistics and are not acknowledged as members of their society. Simply put: children who do not have a formal identity are not counted, and they are not taken into account.

Millions of orphans, street children and children in detention are growing up without the loving care and protection of their parents or a family environment. Children caught in these circumstances are often not treated as children at all. For example: globally, tens of millions of children spend a large portion of their lives on the streets, where they are exposed to all forms of abuse and exploitation.

More than a million children live in detention, the vast majority awaiting trial for minor offenses. Many of these children suffer gross neglect, violence, and trauma.

The report argues that children who are forced into adult roles too early miss crucial stages of childhood development. Hundreds of thousands of children are caught up in armed conflict as combatants, messengers, porters, cooks and sex slaves for armed groups. In many cases, they have been forcibly abducted. And in spite of laws against early marriage in many countries, more than 80-million girls across the developing world will be married before they turn 18.

Exploitation

Among the most invisible are children who are exploited. They are shut away by their abusers and held back from school and essential services. Their lives and numbers are virtually impossible to track.

About 8,4-million children work in the worst forms of child labour, including prostitution and debt bondage, where children are exploited in slave-like conditions to pay off a debt. Nearly two million children are used in the commercial sex trade, where they routinely face sexual and physical violence. And a vast but unknown number of children are exploited as domestic servants in private homes.

So-called "fragile states" are also inhabited by millions of invisible children. Children in fragile states -- countries that are unable or unwilling to provide basic services for their children -- encounter discrimination on the basis of gender, ethnicity or disability.

New document suggests Pentagon spying on peace activists

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US Department of Defense may be routinely spying on US anti-war organizations to determine whether their planned activities could endanger military bases or recruitment drives, according to a document.

The eight-page Pentagon calendar, first obtained by NBC News and then released to the public, lists demonstrations, vigils and sit-ins planned by American peace activists outside military installations around the country.

But while peace groups usually release such information well in advance of their events, remarks on the margin of the document, which covers a period from November 2004 to May 2005, indicate the Pentagon may be relying on confidential sources within the movement to assess the threat to its interests.

The most recent event listed in the calendar was an antiwar rally scheduled for May 7 at the Pentagon's recruitment station in San Francisco.

Having learned about the protest two days in advance, an intelligence analyst qualified it as "a threat," but deemed the source of the information "not credible."

"No additional info received," said a brief anonymous remark in the margins, adding that the upcoming event would be "probably peaceful."

In early April, the military apparently got wind of two counter-recruitment groups from the state of Georgia studying two new models for conducting protests.

This time, the document classified the source of information as "credible" and said the training session was a "threat."

"This information is from the same source as previous Internet-based articles regarding counter-recruitment activity," said a mysterious note on the calendar's margin.

The Department of Defense (DoD) learned from yet another "credible" source one day in advance that a meeting of anti-war activists slated for November 14, 2004, in Lake Worth, Florida, would feature a "discussion of surveillance against DoD recruiters."

A different entry chastises the source for providing "wrong" timing in a report about a peace rally scheduled for March 19 of this year in Hollywood.

The released document, however, represented only a tiny portion of the classified 400-page manuscript obtained by NBC News, which the network said listed more than 1,500 "suspicious incidents" that took place across the country over a 10-month period.

Asked to comment on the disclosure, the Pentagon issued no formal denial.

Instead, a DoD spokesperson, who insisted on anonymity, told AFP that the department "uses counterintelligence and law enforcement information properly collected by law enforcement agencies."

"The use of this information is subject to strict limitations - particularly the information must be related to missions relating to protection of DoD installations, interests and personnel," the spokesperson said.

The official also said the Pentagon's internal directives, as well as federal law, strictly limit its "collection, use and storage of this information."

The disclosure follows reports of increased intelligence activity by the Pentagon in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that beside the World Trade Center in New York City struck the Pentagon building outside Washington.

In February 2002, the Defense Department launched the Counterintelligence Field Activity project authorizing its personnel to collect and process information necessary to protect "critical infrastructure, economic security, and US interests against foreign influence and manipulation."

The highly-classified program now employs more than 400 civilian and military personnel worldwide, according to defense officials.

Journalism's Slo-Mo Suicide

by Marty Kaplan, Huffington Post

Dan Froomkin’s “White House Briefing” column, which appears on washingtonpost.com, is a sparkling daily anthology of the deceit, disingenuousness, evasiveness, hypocrisy and lack of accountability of the W administration. What Froomkin does is artfully compile links to journalists who cover our leaders for MSM outlets, and he glues them together with the kind of snark familiar to any watcher of “The Daily Show.”

But now comes the new ombudsman of the Post’s print edition, bemoaning how Froomkin’s column poses a truth-in-labeling problem. Deborah Howell calls his column “highly opinioned and liberal.” She says political reporters in the Post newsroom don’t like it. “They're afraid that some readers think that Froomkin is a Post White House reporter.” She quotes John Harris, national political editor at the print Post, who says, "The title invites confusion. It dilutes our only asset -- our credibility." And she says that the Web site’s executive editor, Jim Brady, “is considering changing the column title and supplementing it with a conservative blogger.”

If the Post’s ombudsman has swallowed the right-wing canard that telling the truth is “liberal,” then journalism might as well check into the hospice. If Deborah Howell were right, then all the Republicans in Congress who pointed out

Bill Clinton’s disingenousness, evasiveness and hypocrisy about fellatio were also liberals, as were the reporters and columnists who were no less inclined to cry deceit. We have reached the point where instead of assessing the objectivity and accuracy of statements in public discourse, we are told by journalistic traffic cops to treat them merely as theological observations that flow from one’s political religion. It’s a symptom of the same disease that already causes spineless editors to force apparently defenseless reporters to pair every truthful “he said” in an article with a bogus “she said” in service of some nihilistic postmodern notion of balance.

Froomkin put it this way in his response on the Post’s blog: “My agenda, such as it is, is accountability and transparency. I believe that the president of the United States, no matter what his party, should be subject to the most intense journalistic scrutiny imaginable… This column’s advocacy is in defense of the public’s right to know what its leader is doing and why. To that end, it calls attention to times when reasonable, important questions are ducked; when disingenuous talking points are substituted for honest explanations; and when the president won’t confront his critics -- or their criticisms -- head on. The journalists who cover Washington and the White House should be holding the president accountable. When they do, I bear witness to their work. And the answer is for more of them to do so -- not for me to be dismissed as highly opinionated and liberal because I do.”

Froomkin’s boss’s idea – add a conservative blogger to the mix – is the journalistic equivalent of tattooing “Just Shoot Me” on his forehead. The “intelligent design” guerrillas want to subvert the credibility of evolution by forcing science classes to “teach the controversy” – that is, to put science and theology on morally equivalent footing. Instead of inviting readers to take seriously the troubling information that Froomkin assembles from some of the nation’s most highly-credentialed journalists, Brady wants to turn Froomkin’s content into infotainment: Dancing Bear Left, to be enjoyed alongside some Dancing Bear Right. (Josh Marshall nominates Post columnist Jim Hoagland for the latter job.)

Harris says that people in the newsroom worry that readers might mistakenly think that Froomkin works for the newspaper, when actually his paycheck comes from Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive, which is also owned by the Washington Post Company.

It’s possible that once upon a time, American newspaper readers really did understand that reporters are different from editorial writers, who are different from the paper’s columnists, who are different from the syndicated columnists they run, who are different from the op-ed writers they carry.

If ever that were true, that day has passed. It’s partly a function of a lack of readership understanding. But it’s also a consequence of Fox News, The Washington Times, the Manchester Union-Leader and other outlets whose cheering for their team has broken down the news/editorial wall. It’s a consequence of journalism become a profit center in big media conglomerates, which means that decisions about what to cover and how to invest journalistic resources are driven by entertainment values, not by news values. It’s a consequence of relentless pressure from conservatives, which has pulled what used to be the center way over to the right, and which has made editors and producers scared of their own shadow. It’s a consequence of brazen government propaganda, from a Republican White House and a Republican Congress, which is so breathtaking in its Orwellian disinformation that none dare call it Stalinist, and which is so vindictive and pugnacious in its push-back that none dare call it McCarthyite (except, of course, as flattery).

And yes, it’s also a consequence of the Web. But it’s not because the Web is some bizarre parallel universe of disinformation and opinion-mongering. Sure, there’s plenty of that. But just as the Web has made falsehood universally accessible, so it has also made the fruits of hard-nosed journalism universally available. In that marketplace, brand name means something, and I can see why the Post wants to protect theirs. But just as in the consumer marketplace, brand isn’t everything. Quality, performance, reliability: these mean something, too. Like never before in history, people can now compare countless competing claims, innumerable different news accounts, a virtually infinite number of varying interpretations, for themselves. Sometimes, Post stories are brave: gold-standard journalism. Sometimes, they’re craven stenography. It’s kind of pathetic to blame the range that the Post brand already stands for on a blogger.

Bush: Race Not a Factor in Katrina Response

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - President Bush said Monday the federal government's reaction to Hurricane Katrina was appalling, but was not the result of racial indifference to blacks hard-hit by the storm. "You can call me anything you want, but do not call me a racist," Bush said.

In an interview with "NBC Nightly News," Bush said he saw televised pictures showing the government's faltering response to Katrina, and that his first thought was that there was a breakdown of communications between all levels of government after the Aug. 29 hurricane.

"I heard, you know, a couple of people say ... `Bush didn't respond because of race_ because he's a racist,' or alleged that," Bush said. "That is absolutely wrong. And I — I reject that.'

"You can call me anything you want, but do not call me a racist. Secondly, this storm hit — all up and down (the Gulf). It hit New Orleans. It hit Mississippi, too."

Bush spoke with Brian Williams, anchor of "NBC Nightly News," in the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One en route to Pennsylvania and backstage at the World Affairs Council in Philadelphia, where Bush was making a speech on Iraq.

On U.S. troop levels, Bush said that despite an ongoing debate, he is satisfied that the United States initially sent enough military force to Iraq.

"I felt then and I felt now that we had the troop levels that we needed," Bush said. "History will make that determination."

Bush defended Vice President Dick Cheney's pre-war assertion that the United States would be welcomed in Iraq as liberators.

"I think we are welcomed," he said. "But it was not a peaceful welcome."

He said terrorists, supporters of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and others who reject democratic change were determined to prevent a new government from emerging. "But I — I think a lot of people are glad — I know a lot of people are glad that we're there," he said. "And they're glad we're helping them train their troops so they can take the fight."

Bush said he was confident that the White House could reach a compromise with Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), R-Ariz., on a proposal to ban the use of torture in gaining information from suspected terrorists.

McCain is insisting on his language that no person in U.S. custody should be subject to "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment." The administration says the U.S. does not torture and follows international conventions on the treatment of prisoners. But the White House is wary of restrictions that might prevent interrogators from gaining information vital to the nation's security.

Study: Arctic Killer Whales High in Toxins

Man-made toxins, such as PCBs, build up in animal fat and become more concentrated in moving up the food chain. Most toxins, often from household products, are carried to Arctic waters by ocean currents, winds, or in migratory fish and animals.

"Killer whales can be regarded as indicators of the health of our marine environment," Hans Wolkers, a researcher at the Norwegian Polar Institute in the Arctic city of Tromsoe, which carried out the study.

The high levels of contaminants "show that the Arctic seas are not as clean as they should be, which, in particular, affects animals at the top of the food chain," he added in a statement.

Killer whales, a type of dolphin also called orca, migrate to western Norway's fjords to feed on herring during the winter. The herring have elevated toxin levels, which then build up in the orca's blubber, according to the study, funded by the global conservation organization WWF.

The study was based on blubber samples taken from 10 male killer whales in 2002 and will continue with new samples taken in November.

Researchers say PCBs and other man-made toxins can cause hormonal imbalances in Arctic wildlife. One result was female bears with vestigial male sexual organs discovered in 1997 on Norway's Svalbard Archipelago and the surrounding Barents Sea region.

The study said the levels found in Norwegian coastal killer whales exceed those of Svalbard polar bears, which are also at the top of the food chain and fond of fat.

PCBs — polychlorinated biphenyls — are chemical compounds, now largely banned in the West, that were widely used in plastics and electrical insulation and can take decades to break down.

___

On the Net:

http://www.wwf.org

No such thing as 'temporary workers'

WASHINGTON, Christian Science Monitor - President Bush has recently been promoting his proposals for a large temporary worker program as a way to effectively enforce immigration laws. As Mr. Bush presents it, such a program to address growing concerns over the flow of illegal workers would rest securely on a "win-win" basis in the following ways:

• The willingness of temporary workers and employers to participate in the program would allow both to "win."

• The US economy would benefit from higher productivity without increasing tax burdens for existing public services.

• US politicians would gain support from employer groups or sympathetic ethnic or religious lobby groups pushing for such policies.

• Mexico would "win" by exporting surplus workers who send back hard currency to their relatives.

Yet these win-win scenarios do not reflect likely realities. Decades of experience with such temporary worker programs in high-wage liberal democracies worldwide show that neither the programs nor the migrants turned out to be genuinely "temporary."

Mexico is unlikely to realize sustained benefits from exporting workers. Migrants' payments sent back to relatives wane over time, and such payments can stimulate land price inflation, conspicuous consumption of imported goods, and rising inequalities of wealth rather than stay-at-home development.

In the past, proponents have declared that such migrants would require very little in public expenditures. Yet universally, some temporary workers find ways to bring their families to join them, and then become substantial beneficiaries of existing government-financed programs such as public education, healthcare, and safety-net services for low-income residents. Politicians have also discovered - too late - that temporary worker programs really are labor subsidies to low-wage sectors such as garments, labor-intensive agriculture, and in-home personal services, retarding efforts to raise the level of national wages and productivity.

Temporary-worker programs are often portrayed as a legal and humane alternative to unauthorized migration. But they fail to acknowledge that the last major Mexico-US temporary worker program, the so-called bracero program, actually was the initiator and accelerator of today's large-scale unauthorized migration. The same is true across Western Europe, where "guest worker" programs based on similar claims were embraced during the economic booms of 30 to 40 years ago. Their "guests" for temporary work were transformed into millions of permanently resident "foreigners," who today have very high rates of unemployment and welfare dependency.

Most current proposals involve some form of "legalization" to "clear the slate" of about 11 million unauthorized residents, usually via a gradual process by which unlawful residents can earn legal immigrant status by doing farm or other work. Here, too, the record is more than clear: Such policies have a dismal recent history. In 1987-88, 2.8 million unauthorized migrants obtained US legal status. Yet despite this massive legalization, the farm labor market in California again is dominated by unauthorized workers.

Given this history, one might wonder why some US politicians are now proposing yet another guest-worker program. The subject is driven by odd coalitions of long-antagonistic regional, ideological, economic, and ethnic interest groups. Both conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats see the potential to gain large numbers of additional political and financial supporters. How? Conservatives expect to draw voters who favor their traditional social and cultural values. Liberal advocates expect to swell their political constituencies by favoring income redistribution policies, organized labor, affirmative action, and so on.

Of course both expectations cannot both be right. In politics, if someone gains, someone else loses. In addition, while guest worker and legalization proposals are being promoted as panaceas to reduce unauthorized migration, all contain the very seeds of their own failure. The most likely outcomes actually would be to increase unlawful flows across the borders.

Why is a guest-worker program being pushed? Because some employer and ethnic lobbies expect to benefit substantially and rapidly. There would be costs, but these would be slower to appear, and would be paid for by the federal and local governments rather than by the interest groups that benefit. The result is politics driven by small, concentrated, and well-financed interest groups that expect to profit significantly in the short term.

People, as economist Adam Smith once observed, are "the most difficult baggage to transport over borders." Among those who have carefully studied recent experience, there is an overwhelming and concise consensus: There is nothing more permanent than temporary workers.

Young Adults Admire Boomers - Sometimes

CHICAGO, Associated Press - Abby Lovett's friends would die laughing if they heard her. Here she is in her office at a Chicago ad agency, the place she spends many a night and weekend, loudly proclaiming that her generation needs to work less than their baby boomer parents have.

Sure, she's putting in more than 50 hours a week to establish her career. But in her heart of hearts, Lovett knows she'll end up miserable if she doesn't eventually find a little balance.

Forget the three-car garage and all the trappings those high-flying boomers hold so dear.

To her and many other young adults, "having it all" is fast becoming a myth, not the mantra it was for boomers who left behind their protest signs and tie-dye to climb the corporate ladder. And now, she says, many boomer parents are pressuring their kids to achieve even more.

"No one is happy. Everyone is overworked, over-stressed. No one's spending the kind of time that they want with their kids or their spouses or partners. And I think part of that can be attributed to the boomers," says Lovett, who's 27. "I wish they would've paid more attention to our lifestyles.

"I feel like it's tougher now because of that."

You could call it "boomer backlash," or just high anxiety. But as the first of the baby boomers approach age 60 next year, it's one of many ways that young adults are feeling conflicted about their graying elders.

They both love boomers — and love to hate them. They see a talented, successful and outspoken generation that also can be hopelessly dismissive and self-absorbed.

They are awed and sometimes intimidated by baby boomers' accomplishments and a generation so larger-than-life that some of its most famous members are known by only one name — Madonna, Oprah, Bono — or nicknames such as "W" and "The Donald."

But at times, they also see boomers as a bunch of hypocrites who were challenged to "ask what you can do for your country" and ended up focusing on what was in it for them.

"There's a disconnect between the younger generation and anyone over 45 or so," says Steve Rubens, a 29-year-old businessman from Palo Alto, Calif. "Something happened; I don't know when.

"But they don't really listen as much as they think they do. They just go with their agenda."

It's an agenda that leaves him and other young adults — members of generations known as X and Y — wondering what will be left for them, especially as the cost of living rises, national debt increases, and as the huge population of aging boomers begins to devour Social Security and company pensions.

"A lot of people are disappointed with big corporate America and just how ineffective it is and the fact that the decision-makers — a lot of them are baby boomers who can't even get you a raise that's going to match inflation these days," says Geoff Persell, a 26-year-old construction manager in Tampa, Fla.

He and others his age are ready to revamp the system, to create a new workplace that embraces both flexible hours and new technology — improving efficiency and giving workers more time for life off the job.

That restlessness isn't limited to the corporate world.

Young adults also are ready to wrestle away their piece of the pie from boomer politicians, from "helicopter parents" who hover over their adult kids, and even from aging rockers who have yet to give up the stage.

The question is: will boomers let them — and recognize they can't rule forever?

"I feel like that whole generation is coming into that space where you'd think that they would be getting ready to give up. But it doesn't feel that way at all," says Marcos Najera, a 33-year-old former teacher in Phoenix who now works as station manager and host for the city's youth and education cable television network.

He wishes more boomers were willing to be mentors — to collaborate and inspire a group of young adults that he worries have become apathetic, partly because they feel powerless. Others, he says, have simply gotten used to boomers speaking for them.

"They have no idea that they've left us in their dust," says Najera, who's also an actor, playwright and director in his off hours. "So we're either going to have to run and catch up and poke them on the shoulder and say, 'Hey, you guys, don't forget us!' or it's not going to happen."

Boomers' life experience, he says, is invaluable. They were at the forefront of the women's and civil rights movements. They questioned authority, and produced art and music about their protests.

It's a legacy that can be difficult to live up to — and one that has left some unwilling to try.

"We can change the world, rearrange the world," Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sang to young boomers, who came of age amid passionate Vietnam war protests, free love and more casual drug use.

Najera and other Gen Xers, meanwhile, grew up in the final chill of the Cold War, witnessed the start of the

AIDS epidemic and were told to "just say no" to drugs.

Skeptical of boomer idealism, they were pegged as "slackers," and represented by darker icons such as suicidal rocker Kurt Cobain, who declared bleakly: "Here we are now, entertain us. / I feel stupid, and contagious."

Now some young adults are embracing a more conservative political agenda as a direct reaction to the boomers' more raucous youthful legacy.

"We've had a large undermining of our traditional values in this country. And I think that was a repercussion of the hippies in the '60s and their 'anything goes' attitude," says Patrick McHenry, a North Carolina Republican who, at age 30, is the youngest member of Congress. "Our generation has a realistic approach. We're not sort of pie-in-the-sky people."

Others admire the young boomers' daring — but wonder what happened to it.

"Now it's like 'Women shouldn't have the right to choose' and 'Gays shouldn't be allowed to marry.' Where did all that freedom of individuality and freedom of expression go? Now that they're older, we can't have that?" asks Elizabeth King, a 26-year-old graduate student at Northwestern University.

She says many boomers who've achieved material success have just become fixated on helping their children do the same.

"I definitely think they want you to achieve and they're not going to put up — like my parents would not put up with nonsense like with being lazy, with not trying hard enough, with second best," King says. "That's not OK."

Many other young adults also talk about feeling that pressure to achieve and wish boomers would lighten up.

"I think baby boomers have this fear that if we don't take the traditional steps, we're going to mess up," says Jessica Coen, the 25-year-old coeditor of Gawker.com, a media and pop culture blog, based in Manhattan. After graduation from college, she worked in a Hollywood studio, taught school in a tough Los Angeles neighborhood and then, rather than going to Columbia University for graduate school, became a blogger.

At first, it wasn't a popular decision with parents, with whom she is very close. But her success has shown them and other boomers that there could just be a new way to do things.

Coen is among young adults who also want to forge a new take on family life — and how material success fits into it.

"Obviously, I someday want to raise a family and do those traditionally important things," she says. "But also I don't have some image in my head that it's going to be this perfect, green-mowed lawn — because that doesn't work. And we've seen that it doesn't work. You can have it all on the outside, but that doesn't mean your family is going to be healthy or happy."

For her part, Lovett, in Chicago, competed in a triathlon this past summer and has taken up oil painting — steps aimed at achieving that balance she's looking for.

It's something she learned, in part, by watching her boomer father, who worked 14-hour days much of his life only to collapse from a stroke in a board room at age 50.

He survived. "But suddenly, it turned our lives upside down," says Lovett, whose parents still live in Denver where she grew up. "Sure, they moved into a smaller house, and they're probably not having the same middle adulthood that they thought they would.

"But they're together and they're alive and they're now enjoying the things that are the essential life qualities," including the pending arrival of their first grandchild.

Lovett, too, plans to put a new spin on the notion of having it all.

"It's a different sort of investment," she says. "It may cost me a lot of money. But ultimately, when I'm 80 years old, hopefully I'll have some kids coming to play shuffleboard with me, you know?

Smoking lowers chances of surviving throat cancer

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - For people with cancer of the larynx or lower pharynx, continuing to smoke or drink alcohol make it less likely that they'll survive, while eating a diet rich in vegetables and vitamin C improves their survival, a new study shows.

"One might think, now I that have cancer, what's the point of stopping smoking? But there is clearly a benefit in doing that; it will improve your survival," Dr. Rajesh P. Dikshit commented to Reuters Health.

Tobacco smoking, alcohol drinking, and diet have all been linked to the development of cancer in the larynx, or voicebox, and the area immediately above it at the back of the throat, the hypopharynx. However, little was known about the role of these risk factors on the survival of patients with these cancers.

Dikshit, working for the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, and his colleagues conducted a study to analyze the survival of patients with laryngeal and hypopharyngeal cancer. They followed 931 patients who had enrolled in a previous cancer study that had started in the early 80s, and analyzed the role of tobacco, alcohol and diet on cancer outcome in these patients for up to 21 years.

As they report in the International Journal of Cancer, the investigators found that smoking was the most important factor adversely affecting the patient's survival, particularly in those patients with tumors in the larynx.

"This is a very important finding," Dikshit told Reuters Health. "We knew that smoking is a cause of laryngeal and hypopharyngeal cancer, but now it's clear that it affects survival as well." Alcohol consumption also had a negative effect on survival, but to a lesser extent than tobacco.

But the most important result, Dikshit remarked, was the protective effect of some diet components. "We found that a high intake of vitamin C significantly improved the patients' survival."

The investigators also found a strong protective effect of a diet rich in vegetables, but not of the individual components found in those vegetables. Only vitamin C was protective on its own.

"The message here is that it is very important to stop smoking even after developing laryngeal and hypopharyngeal cancer," Dikshit said.

Eating vegetables and vitamin C is also something cancer patients should consider. "Doctors are prescribing this already, but now we have demonstrated that these diet components improve the patient's survival, and perhaps make the treatment more effective."

AP Poll: Lawmakers' Standing Drops

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Indictments, investigations and a congressman's guilty plea for taking millions in bribes have left most Americans convinced that political corruption is a deeply rooted problem, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll.

Missteps and misconduct that have reached into all levels of government — from the White House and Congress to governors' offices in Connecticut and Ohio — have helped drive 88 percent of those surveyed to say the problem is a serious one.

Scandal has touched all politicians. President Bush's approval rating was 42 percent, slightly better than his standing in the previous AP-Ipsos poll, due in part to improvements in the economy. Still, 57 percent of those surveyed disapproved of Bush's handling of the presidency.

More ominous as the 2006 elections loom was the public's opinion of the Republican-controlled Congress.

Sixty-five percent of respondents disapproved of lawmakers' work in Washington and only 31 percent approved, the worst numbers since AP-Ipsos began asking the question in January.

Several of those interviewed said corruption was endemic to a political system awash in colossal amounts of lobbying money and beset by an insatiable demand for campaign cash.

"It's kind of the nature of politics, working with money and finance, things happen every day that are questionable," said David Innerebner, a conservative-leaning missionary from Hayward, Wis.

In 2004, federal lobbyists spent $2.1 billion — the equivalent of the gross domestic product of the Republic of Congo or the amount the U.S. government spends annually on energy assistance for low-income Americans. In that same year, candidates pursuing the presidency and seats in Congress spent more than $3 billion.

"It seems like everything seems to be corrupted," said Sylvia Kind, a dietitian from Akron, Ohio.

Some of the experts who make their careers focused on government ethics and reform were struck by the strong public perception of politicians.

"From the local mayor or sheriff all the way up to the president, it means people have a real distrust of their government," said Larry Noble, head of the Center for Responsive Politics campaign watchdog group.

Added Jan Baran, a Washington lawyer who specializes in ethics rules and campaign finance: "The message to politicians is to get their house in order."

People questioned in the survey had no trouble reciting the names associated with offenses and inquiries:

_Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, faces money laundering charges.

_Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., is under a federal investigation for a well-timed stock sale.

_I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, has been indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI in the outing of a CIA officer.

DeLay, Frist and Libby have said they have done nothing wrong.

_Last month, Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., resigned after pleading guilty to taking $2.4 million in bribes in exchange for steering government work to defense contractors. His list of excess included money for a Rolls-Royce, antique furniture and two Laser Shot shooting simulators.

_A Justice Department investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff threatens to ensnare at least a half dozen Republicans and Democrats and Bush administration officials.

"They're so power hungry they'd do anything to stay in power," said Renee Becher, a 51-year-old homemaker from Dahlonega, Ga. "They've made our country become like Rome."

The AP-Ipsos survey found that 91 percent of women consider corruption a serious problem, compared with 84 percent of men. Overall, 67 percent said the number of people involved in corruption ranges from moderate to a lot.

Democrats were considered more ethical by 36 percent, while 33 percent cited Republicans. That difference is within the poll's margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Some 40 percent of women said Democrats were more ethical than Republicans, while 32 percent of men offered a similar view.

"I think there are those in the Republican Party that have their problems and I think it's politically motivated that they bring these to the limelight," said Paul Deshaies, a retired prison chaplain from Lancaster, Ohio.

The scandals could cost incumbents in next year's election. The low regard for Congress nearly mirrors the numbers recorded in polls conducted in December 1993, several months before the Republican tidal wave that ended 40 years of Democratic control of the House.

Worldwide, the United States gets higher marks. The 2005 index on corruption perceptions ranked the U.S. at 17, not far behind Germany, Hong Kong and Canada, according to Transparency International, a nongovernment global watchdog on corruption.

Corruption on increase worldwide, survey shows

LONDON (Reuters) - Corruption is on the increase in most countries and poor people are often the hardest hit, according to a global survey released on Friday.

The poll, published on United Nations Anti-Corruption Day, found a majority of people in 48 out of 69 countries surveyed thought the problem had got worse over the past three years.

"Today's survey shows that people believe corruption is deeply embedded in their countries," said Huguette Labelle, chairwoman of anti-graft group Transparency International, which commissioned the Global Corruption Barometer research.

"When a poor young mother believes that her government places its own interests above her child's, or that securing services like that child's basic health requires a hand under the table, her hope for the future is dampened."

Overall, people rated political parties as the most corrupt institutions. But customs officials were seen as the most corrupt in many Central and Eastern European states while the police and legal systems often came top of the poll in Africa.

The survey also showed paying bribes was not confined to specific regions but was particularly prevalent in Central and Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America.

More than 30 percent of households in Cameroon, Paraguay, Cambodia and Mexico had paid a bribe in the past year.

Between 11 and 30 percent of households had done the same in a further 22 countries, many of them developing nations but also including European states such as Greece and the Czech Republic.

People in Africa -- the poorest continent -- appeared to pay the highest proportion of their income in bribes, the campaigning group said.

Top of that list were Cameroon, Ghana and Nigeria, where households paid more than 20 percent of national per capita income in bribes.

Transparency International, a non-governmental group based in Berlin with branches in more than 90 countries, said leaders could combat corruption if they made a determined effort.

A U.N. Convention against Corruption, signed by 137 nations, enters into force on December 14 and the group said systems must be put in place to ensure governments stick to their commitments.

"Signing the document and taking part in the photo opportunity is not enough," said chief executive David Nussbaum.

The Torture Administration

Anthony Lewis, The Nation -- When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933 and proceeded to carry out their savagery, many in the outside world asked how this could have happened in the land of Goethe and Beethoven. Would the people of other societies as readily accept tyranny? Sinclair Lewis, in 1935, imagined Americans turning to dictatorship under the pressures of economic distress in the Depression. He called his novel, ironically, "It Can't Happen Here".

Hannah Arendt and many others have stripped us, since then, of confidence that people will resist evil in times of fear. When Serbs and Rwandan Hutus were told that they were threatened, they slaughtered their neighbors. Lately Philip Roth was plausible enough when he imagined anti-Semitism surging after an isolationist America elected Charles Lindbergh as President in 1940.

But it still comes as a shock to discover that American leaders will open the way for the torture of prisoners, that lawyers will invent justifications for it, that the President of the United States will strenuously resist legislation prohibiting cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners--and that much of the American public will be indifferent to what is being done in its name.

The pictures from Abu Ghraib, first shown to the public on April 28, 2004, evoked a powerful reaction. Americans were outraged when they saw grinning US soldiers tormenting Iraqi prisoners. But it was seeing the mistreatment that produced the outrage, or so we must now conclude. Since then the Bush Administration and its lawyers have prevented the release of any more photographs or videotapes. And the public has not reacted similarly to the disclosure, without pictures, of worse actions, including murder.

The American Civil Liberties Union released documents on forty-four deaths of prisoners in US custody, twenty-one of them officially classified as homicides. For example, an Iraqi prisoner died while being interrogated in 2004. He had been deprived of sleep, exposed to extreme temperatures, doused with cold water and kept hooded. The official report said hypothermia may have contributed to his death.

Writing recently in The New Yorker, Jane Mayer described the killing of an Iraqi prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi, in Abu Ghraib in 2003. His head was covered with a plastic bag, and he was shackled in a position that led to his asphyxiation. The death was classified as a homicide. But so far no charges have been brought by the Justice Department against the man who had custody of the prisoner, a CIA officer named Mark Swanner.

In addition to murder and torture, humiliation and indignity have been widely used as aids to interrogation. Time quoted at length earlier this year from the official log of how one prisoner in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was interrogated. Over a period of weeks he was questioned for as long as twenty hours at a stretch, forbidden to urinate until finally he "went" on himself, made to bark like a dog. His treatment was an exercise in humiliation. Other reports have described prisoners chained hand and foot to the floor for twenty-four hours, until they urinated and defecated on themselves.

Several provisions of law forbid not only torture but humiliation of prisoners. The Geneva Conventions prohibit "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating or degrading treatment" of war captives. The UN Convention Against Torture condemns "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment"--and Congress enforced the provisions of the convention in a criminal statute. The Uniform Code of Military Justice makes cruelty, oppression or "maltreatment" of prisoners by US forces a crime.

Then how can it be that hundreds of Americans, at a modest estimate, have been involved in the tormenting of prisoners, using the "waterboard" technique to bring them to the brink of drowning, beating them or worse? The answer is that the cue for these outrages came from the top of the American government.

Soon after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Justice Department--then under Attorney General

John Ashcroft--began producing memorandums that opened the way to torture and mistreatment of prisoners. The memos gave an extremely narrow definition of torture: producing pain equivalent to that from "serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." They argued that the President, in his constitutional role as Commander in Chief, had the power to order the use of torture no matter what treaties or US statutes said. And they said the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the prisoners at Guantánamo.

It is important to note that these legal opinions came almost entirely from political appointees, not longtime Justice Department lawyers. Similarly, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his aides overrode objections from most military lawyers and other officers. Secretary of State Colin Powell, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was a notable opponent of the memos.

The very purpose of these radical legal opinions was to override objections to torture from those in the services and the law who wanted to carry on the American tradition of humane treatment of prisoners. And there was a further, crucial purpose: to immunize those who actually carried out torture or inhumane treatment from criminal prosecution. If charged, they could maintain that their actions were authorized from above.

One more legal interpretation by the Bush lawyers, especially clever, should be mentioned: It concluded that the Convention Against Torture (and its enforcement by criminal statute) did not apply to actions taken against non-Americans outside the United States--for example, the torture of Jamadi in Abu Ghraib under CIA auspices. A soldier who tortured would still be subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. But under this legal theory no criminal law would apply to a CIA torturer. It was to preserve this impunity that Vice President Cheney fought to exempt the CIA from the ban on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment proposed by Senator John McCain and passed, 90 to 9, by the Senate.

When George W. Bush was asked about torture in early November, he said: "Any activity we conduct is within the law. We do not torture." How could he say that after the hundreds of convincing reports of torture and maltreatment? One possible answer is that he has not allowed himself to know the truth. Another is that his lawyers have so gutted the law governing these matters that not much, in their view, is unlawful.

But there is another explanation for Bush's words: confidence that words can overcome reality. Just as a large part of the American people could be led to believe in nonexistent links between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 bombers, so it could be persuaded--in the teeth of the evidence--that "we do not torture." And there is reason for that confidence.

Congress has shown no great zeal for tracking down responsibility for the abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. It has reacted with the equivalent of a yawn to the disclosure of "extraordinary rendition," the shipment of prisoners to Egypt, Syria and other places where torture is common practice. The Senate, moved by the power of John McCain's example, voted for his ban on prisoner abuse. But then it approved a devastating prohibition on the use of habeas corpus by Guantánamo prisoners to test the lawfulness of their imprisonment.

The truth is that most members of Congress are scared to do anything that could be portrayed, in a campaign, as being soft on terrorists. They worry that if there is another terrorist strike in this country, any vote to hold true to the law of war or even to investigate what has happened could be held against them.

Playing cat's-paw to the Administration, Congress has turned aside all demands for an independent investigation of Abu Ghraib and the other horrors--and of the policies that led to them. When Dana Priest of the Washington Post uncovered the chain of secret CIA prisons around the world, the reaction of Republican leaders of the House and Senate was not to look into the agency's doings but to demand an investigation of the leak.

The press has provided flickering light on the torture scandal, with some notable stories but not the sustained, relentless attention of Watergate. In the daily papers the outstanding performer has been Priest, who uncovered the Justice Department memos that took such a permissive view of torture. Seymour Hersh told us about Abu Ghraib and much else in The New Yorker.

The public, as I have indicated, seemed to lose its sense of outrage once the visual evidence from Abu Ghraib faded. As in every war through American history, it looked primarily to the President to ease its anxiety. The fear aroused by September 11 did not easily dissipate.

Not one of the major actors in the torture story has been effectively called to account: not Rumsfeld, who loosened the rules on interrogation of prisoners; not Alberto Gonzales, now Attorney General, who as White House Counsel approved the torture memorandums; and not the Justice Department lawyers who wrote them.

Among those officials there is no sign of repentance. One of them has indeed become a kind of preacher of the legitimacy of using pressure on suspected terrorists. He is John Yoo, who was a lawyer in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003 and is now a professor at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. In frequent television appearances and public forums he argues a theme of those torture memos: that President Bush as Commander in Chief is empowered by the Constitution to order what treatment he wishes for detainees in the "war on terror." His constitutional argument, that the Framers of the Constitution intended to clothe the President with the war powers of a king, conflicts with the near universal understanding of the constitutional text, with its careful balancing of executive, legislative and judicial power.

A New York lawyer who has contributed greatly to exposure of the torture phenomenon, Scott Horton, has suggested that Yoo's views echo those of a German legal thinker of the period between the world wars, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt argued that when it came to degraded enemies like the Soviet Union, the idea of complying with international law was a romantic delusion. The enemy, rather, must be seen as absolute--stripped of all legal rights.

Those who want to relax the laws against torture often make the "ticking bomb" argument: that if a prisoner may know the location of a bomb set to go off shortly, torturing him is justified to save lives. If captors believe that, they may well resort to forceful interrogation. But to write such an exception into the rules invites the systematic use of torture. I had a lesson in the danger of the ticking-bomb argument years ago in Israel. I was interviewing Jacobo Timerman, the Argentine publisher who was imprisoned and tortured by the military regime that for a time took over Argentina. (Intervention by the Carter Administration saved Timerman's life; on release from prison he immigrated to Israel.) Timerman turned the interview around and asked me questions about torture, positing the ticking-bomb situation. I tried to avoid the question, but he pressed me to answer. Finally, I said that I might authorize torture in such a situation. "No!" he shouted. "You must never start down that road."

Americans are not immune from evil; no people are. We know now that American soldiers, improperly led, can beat to death prisoners they have in their minds dehumanized. What can we do to limit the evil?

Investigation is one idea, widely endorsed. An independent body like the one that carried out the 9/11 investigation could tell us much that we do not know: not just an authoritative account of the wrongs done but a timeline of the official opinions and actions that opened the way for them. But I think a more effective solution would be the appointment of a special prosecutor. He or she would have the power not just to find the facts but to prosecute the wrongdoers. For we must not forget that not only treaties but criminal laws forbid the torture, mistreatment and humiliation of those we take in conflict.

It is unimaginable that President Bush would agree to a special prosecutor for war crimes if ever the public and Congress grew exercised enough to demand one. But you never know about history. The other day, on the sixtieth anniversary of the Nuremberg prosecution of Nazi officials, Scott Horton recalled that Nuremberg established the principle of command responsibility for abuse--and punished those who wrote legal memorandums counseling German officials to ignore the conventions protecting prisoners.

The chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, Justice Robert H. Jackson of the Supreme Court, warned that "the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our lips as well."

Scientists: Greenland Glaciers Retreating

SAN FRANCISCO, Associated Press - Two of Greenland's largest glaciers are retreating at an alarming pace, most likely because of climate warming, scientists said Wednesday.

One of the glaciers, Kangerdlugssuaq, is currently moving about 9 miles a year compared to 3 miles a year in 2001, said Gordon Hamilton of the University of Maine's Climate Change Institute.

The other glacier, Helheim, is retreating at about 7 miles a year — up from 4 miles a year during the same period.

"It's quite a staggering rate of increase," Hamilton said at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting.

Glaciers play a major role in discharging water into oceans. Sea levels have swelled globally an estimated 4 inches to 8 inches during the past century due to melting glaciers and polar ice — enough to cause some places to be awash at high tide or during severe storms.

Melting of Greenland ice and calving of icebergs from glaciers is responsible for about 7 percent of the annual rise in global sea level.

Global warming is frequently blamed for retreating glaciers around the world. The rapid retreat of Greenland glaciers suggest that climate change is a factor, Hamilton said.

Meanwhile, one of the fastest melting glaciers in North America has reached the halfway point of disintegration and will continue retreat for another two decades.

Alaska's Columbia Glacier — about the size of Los Angeles — has shrunk 9 miles since the 1980s. It is expected to lose an additional 9 miles in the next 15 to 20 years before the bed of the glacier rises above sea level.

The glacier, which moves about 80 feet a day, currently releases about 2 cubic miles of ice every year into the Prince William Sound on the south coast of Alaska.

Understanding what happens during Alaskan glacier retreat could help explain the phenomenon in Greenland, said Tad Pfeffer, associate director of the University of Colorado's Institute of Arctic and Alpine.

Pfeffer said climate change warming trends do not directly explain the shrinking Columbia Glacier and other tidewater glaciers. Instead, scientists think the retreat is triggered by a slow warming trend that began five centuries ago.

Significant thinning of the Columbia Glacier is thought to be caused by huge chunks of iceberg that break off into the sound as a result of seawater pressure rather than climate change, Pfeffer said.

The glacier, which is up to 3,000 feet thick, has thinned up to 1,300 feet in some places in the last two decades.

___

On the Net:

American Geophysical Union: http://www.agu.org

Mortgage Stress Seen for '06

Delinquencies on Subprime Loans Likely to Spike, Report Says

Washington Post - Mortgage delinquencies among homeowners with high-cost loans will rise by 10 to 15 percent in 2006, as borrowers struggle with higher interest rates, high debt levels and higher energy costs amid flattening home prices, a new report from investment analyst Fitch Ratings predicts. Consequently, overall mortgage delinquencies are likely to rise next year, as well, according to the report's authors.

"We think borrowers will be under more stress and have more propensity to be delinquent," said Glenn Costello, managing director of Fitch, which follows the market for bonds backed by residential mortgages. Recently, prices of such bonds have been falling, particularly those with lower-credit-quality loans.

Homeowners with adjustable-rate mortgages may be pinched by rate hikes and energy costs next year, analysts say.

Most high-rate mortgages, known as subprime loans, have adjustable interest rates, Fitch said. That means borrowers are more sensitive to fluctuations in rates, because rising rates mean their mortgages payments rise as well. About 19 percent of home loans nationwide are subprime, up from about 5 percent a decade ago, as homeowners take on heavy debt burdens. Many people have used the equity in their homes to pay off high-interest credit cards, reducing their monthly obligations, but those with poor credit have done so by shifting to subprime loans. Prime loans, those at the best rates, are given to only borrowers with good credit.

Costello said the increase in subprime lending meant more people could "come under financial pressure" than in the recent past, when home values were rising.

About 4.3 percent of all loans were delinquent in the second quarter of 2005, and about 1 percent of loans had passed the overdue category and were actually in foreclosure, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. But the rate for subprime loans was much higher -- about 10.3 percent of such loans were in default, and about 3.5 percent were in foreclosure. Most borrowers find ways to catch up on their payments, refinance or sell their homes before they go into foreclosure.

"Some of that is these are inherently riskier borrowers," said Keith Ernst, senior policy counsel with the Center for Responsible Lending in Durham, N.C. "Research also shows that the loan terms increase the likelihood they'll go into foreclosure."

Many subprime loans, for example, feature prepayment penalties that make it too costly for borrowers to refinance, even after they have mended their credit. A study by researchers at the University of North Carolina found that 20 percent of subprime loans went into foreclosure within four years, Ernst said.

A recent government analysis of which borrowers have subprime loans found that they were disproportionately black and Hispanic. Whites and Asians were less likely to hold subprime loans.

Investors in the mortgage-backed securities that own the borrowers' loans will be only slightly affected by an increase in delinquencies, in that the returns may not be quite as good as they were, Costello said.

"Actual losses from foreclosures would have to happen before investors are adversely affected," said Arthur Frank, director of mortgage research at Nomura Securities International Inc.

He said that higher-rated mortgage-backed securities, such as AAA, AA and A-rated, usually are well-insulated from losses but that investors in lower-rated securities, the BBB-rated and below, could be more adversely affected. In addition, delinquencies may or may not lead to foreclosures, and only foreclosure losses hurt investors. But rising delinquencies means that the performance of the pool of mortgages is declining.

Housing Slowdown May Claim 800,000 Jobs

LOS ANGELES, Associated Press - A sustained decline will hit the U.S. housing market next year, costing the nation as many as 800,000 jobs, according to a new economic report released Wednesday.

The slowdown is likely to last several years, with as many as 500,000 construction jobs and 300,000 financial sector positions lost, the quarterly Anderson Forecast predicted.

"We expect housing to start slowing the economy this quarter or the next," said Edward Leamer, director of the study done at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"Some jobs in manufacturing might well disappear as a result of weakness in housing, but this may be offset by jobs brought home or not lost to foreign competition," he wrote.

The forecast said eight of the last 10 economic recessions were started by housing market slowdowns. Though the coming cooldown will cause a drag on the nation's economy, it will fall short of triggering a recession, the forecast said.

The report cited several signs that the decline could be under way:

• New construction of housing in October was down 5.6 percent from the previous month, with new construction of single-family housing accounting for a 3.7 percent dip.

• New home sales have declined.

• Applications for home mortgages have trended downward since late September as rates increased.

• In some regions, homes are remaining unsold longer and the pace of housing construction is outpacing population growth, which could spell a decline in demand.

"On all these grounds, we believe housing is due for a sustained decline," economist Michael Bazdarich wrote in the forecast. "The remaining questions are how hard the fall will be and when it will begin."

The forecast for California, where housing prices lead the nation and housing-related jobs have been driving economic growth, resembles the national outlook.

Economist Ryan Ratcliff said the state's housing market will see a slowdown in spending along with job losses in construction and related sectors.

He expects California home prices to plateau while sales and new construction see moderate decreases during two years of weak growth.

"If the housing market slows more than we are expecting, a recession is not out of the question," Ratcliff wrote.

Counties showing signs of a cooldown include San Francisco, where housing sales have been off 20 percent since peaking in June, 2004. San Diego County has seen sales slow about 13 percent, while monthly price gains have plummeted to low single digits.

California's job picture has been lackluster in recent months. The rate of employment growth has slowed after a significant number of jobs were added in July and August.

2005 to Be Warmest, Stormiest on Record

MONTREAL, Associated Press - This year is likely to go down as the hottest, stormiest and driest ever on Planet Earth, making a strong case for the urgent need to combat global warming, said a report released Tuesday at the U.N. Climate Change Conference.

The report by the international environmental group WWF said 2005 is shaping up as the worst ever for extreme weather, with the hottest temperatures, most Arctic melting, worst Atlantic hurricane season and warmest Caribbean waters. It's also been the driest year for many decades in the Amazon, where a drought may surpass anything in the past century.

The report used data from U.S. government sources and the World Meteorological Organization. It was released on the sidelines of the U.N. conference reviewing and upgrading the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty that commits 35 industrialized nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions more than 5 percent by 2012.

Kyoto targets carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases blamed for rising global temperatures and disrupted weather patterns. Many scientists believe that if the temperatures continue to rise, deadly extreme weather will continue to kill humans, disrupt lifestyles and render some animal species extinct.

In October this year, the report noted, NASA reported that the global average temperature was already 0.1 Fahrenheit warmer than in 1998, the record year.

Lara Hansen, chief scientist for WWF's Climate Change Program, said there was more at play than the cyclical patterns explaining the number of hurricanes this year.

"There is a cyclical signature to hurricanes, but what were seeing now is even beyond what that cyclical nature would lead us to believe has happened," Hansen told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Washington. She pointed to the failure of the National Hurricane Center to predict how many hurricanes there would be in 2005.

Last year, the hurricane center predicted 18 to 21 storms, but so many were recorded that the official naming of them exceeded the Roman alphabet and had to be supplemented with letters of the Greek alphabet.

Waters in the Caribbean were also hotter for a longer period of time than previously measured, causing extensive bleaching from Colombia to the Florida Keys, she said.

Consequences also are being felt up North, where the smallest area of Arctic sea ice ever was recorded in September — 500,000 square miles (1295,000 square kilometers) smaller than the historic average — and a 9.8 percent decline, per decade, of perennial sea ice cover, the report said.

The numbers echo concerns of Canada's Inuit, who in their own report issued last week observed eroding shorelines, thinning ice and losses of hunting and polar bears, all having a major impact on their lives.

Hansen said some predictions indicate that the Arctic North could become ice-free by the end of the century, even possibly by mid-century.

"The rate at which we are losing sea ice goes beyond the normal models of what we would think would be happening," she said.

With so many environmental flash points, Hansen said the world must accept the urgency of preventing global warming, despite the lack of leadership from Washington.

"The most impact, the most quickly, with the longest guarantee of success is reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuel," she said.

The United States, which produces one-fourth of the world's pollution, has refused to join the Kyoto Protocol, resisting any binding commitments to curb global warming by capping industrial emissions of greenhouse gases, saying it would harm the U.S economy.

U.S. President George W. Bush instead has called for an 18 percent reduction in the U.S. growth rate of greenhouse gases by 2012 and commits about US$5 billion (euro4.3 billion) a year to global warming science and technology.

_____

On the Net:

U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change: http://www.unfccc.int

Some Megachurches Closing for Christmas

Associated Press - This Christmas, no prayers will be said in several megachurches around the country. Even though the holiday falls this year on a Sunday, when churches normally host thousands for worship, pastors are canceling services, anticipating low attendance on what they call a family day.

Critics within the evangelical community, more accustomed to doing battle with department stores and public schools over keeping religion in Christmas, are stunned by the shutdown.

It is almost unheard of for a Christian church to cancel services on a Sunday, and opponents of the closures are accusing these congregations of bowing to secular culture.

"This is a consumer mentality at work: `Let's not impose the church on people. Let's not make church in any way inconvenient,'" said David Wells, professor of history and systematic theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, a leading evangelical school in Hamilton, Mass. "I think what this does is feed into the individualism that is found throughout American culture, where everyone does their own thing."

The churches closing on Christmas plan multiple services in the days leading up to the holiday, including on Christmas Eve. Most normally do not hold Christmas Day services, preferring instead to mark the holiday in the days and night before. However, Sunday worship has been a Christian practice since ancient times.

Cally Parkinson, a spokeswoman for Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., said church leaders decided that organizing services on a Christmas Sunday would not be the most effective use of staff and volunteer resources. The last time Christmas fell on a Sunday was 1994, and only a small number of people showed up to pray, she said.

"If our target and our mission is to reach the unchurched, basically the people who don't go to church, how likely is it that they'll be going to church on Christmas morning?" she said.

Among the other megachurches closing on Christmas Day are Southland Christian Church in Nicholasville, Ky., near Lexington, and Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, outside of Dallas. North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga., outside of Atlanta, said on its Web site that no services will be held on Christmas Day or New Year's Day, which also falls on a Sunday. A spokesman for North Point did not respond to requests for comment.

The closures stand in stark contrast to Roman Catholic parishes, which will see some of their largest crowds of the year on Christmas, and mainline Protestant congregations such as the Episcopal, Methodist and Lutheran churches, where Sunday services are rarely if ever canceled.

Cindy Willison, a spokeswoman for the evangelical Southland Christian Church, said at least 500 volunteers are needed, along with staff, to run Sunday services for the estimated 8,000 people who usually attend. She said many of the volunteers appreciate the chance to spend Christmas with their families instead of working, although she said a few church members complained.

"If we weren't having services at all, I would probably tend to feel that we were too accommodating to the secular viewpoint, but we're having multiple services on Saturday and an additional service Friday night," Willison said. "We believe that you worship every day of the week, not just on a weekend, and you don't have to be in a church building to worship."

Troy Page, a spokesman for Fellowship Church, said the congregation was hardly shirking its religious obligations. Fellowship will hold 21 services in four locations in the days leading up to the holiday. Last year, more than 30,000 worshippers participated. "Doing them early allows you to reach people who may be leaving town Friday," Page said.

These megachurches are not alone in adjusting Sunday worship to accommodate families on Christmas. But most other congregations are scaling back services instead of closing their doors.

Bush loses poetic tribute in Pakistan schoolbooks

ISLAMABAD (AFP) - Education officials in Pakistan have dropped a poem from a school textbook after discovering that it secretly contained the name of US President George W. Bush.

At first sight the anonymous 20-line ode entitled "The Leader", which was taught to Pakistani students aged between 15 and 18, appears merely to list the qualities of the ideal statesman.

But closer inspection reveals that the first letter of each line spells out the American president's title and name.

Bush's surname appears in the following lines: "Bracing for war, but praying for peace / Using his power so evil will cease. / So much a leader and worthy of trust, / Here stands a man who will do what he must."

"The poem triggered controversy. It has been deleted from the book," senior education ministry official Tariq Qureshi told AFP.

He said the ministry was investigating how the poem slipped by the officials who monitor textbooks, but added that it had been downloaded from the Internet by a committee of subject specialists while revising the syllabus in 2004.

The decision to cut the poem was taken at a high-level meeting chaired by Education Minister Javed Ashraf Qazi and curriculum experts here on Monday.

"The matter is over now," Qureshi said.

But the incident has raised eyebrows in this conservative Islamic country, where military ruler President Pervez Musharraf is often accused of slavishly supporting the US-led "war on terror".

Qureshi said the education minister had warned all those involved against further negligence and said that a new English language textbook will be included in next year's syllabus.

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The poem in full:

Patient and steady with all he must bear,

Ready to meet every challenge with care,

Easy in manner, yet solid as steel,

Strong in his faith, refreshingly real.

Isn't afraid to propose what is bold,

Doesn't conform to the usual mould,

Eyes that have foresight, for hindsight won't do,

Never backs down when he sees what is true,

Tells it all straight, and means it all too.

Going forward and knowing he's right,

Even when doubted for why he would fight,

Over and over he makes his case clear,

Reaching to touch the ones who won't hear.

Growing in strength he won't be unnerved,

Ever assuring he'll stand by his word.

Wanting the world to join his firm stand,

Bracing for war, but praying for peace,

Using his power so evil will cease,

So much a leader and worthy of trust,

This year, he predicted 11, and we had 26. Next year he predicts 17 - brace yourself for 40.

Calmer 2006 Hurricane Season Predicted

FORT COLLINS, Colo.Associated Press - Next year's hurricane season is likely to be busier than average but not up to this year's ruinous, record-setting pace, one of the nation's top hurricane forecasters said Tuesday.

William Gray of Colorado State University predicted 17 named storms in 2006, almost double the long-term average, and said nine of them could become hurricanes — five of them major hurricanes, with winds of at least 111 mph.

Gray's research team estimated there is an 81 percent chance that at least one major hurricane would strike the U.S. coast.

"Enhanced major hurricane activity is likely to continue in the Atlantic basin for the next 15 to 20 years," Gray said in his first extended forecast for 2006.

Gray has been forecasting hurricane activity for 22 years. One year ago, he predicted that 2005 would have 11 named storms, including six hurricanes, three of them major.

Instead, 2005 had a record 26 named storms, 14 of which were hurricanes and seven of which were intense hurricanes. Dennis, Katrina, Rita and Wilma combined to make it the costliest hurricane season on record.

The team's forecasts are based global oceanic and atmospheric conditions.

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On the Net:

Panel Doesn't Want Junk Food Aimed at Kids

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - SpongeBob SquarePants, Shrek and other characters kids love should promote only healthy food, a panel of scientists recommended.

In a report released Tuesday, the Institute of Medicine said television advertising strongly influences what children under 12 eat.

The report said the food industry should spend its marketing dollars on nutritious food and drinks. That means SpongeBob, the popular animated star of the Nickelodeon cable TV network, and other characters should endorse only good-for-you food, the panel concluded.

"The foods advertised are predominantly high in calories and low in nutrition — the sort of diet that puts children's long-term health at risk," said J. Michael McGinnis, a senior scholar at the institute and chairman of the report committee.

The report said evidence is limited on whether TV advertising leads to obesity in children. A study hasn't been done that would demonstrate a direct cause and effect.

Still, the panel found the evidence compelling enough to call for a concerted effort to change the nature of foods being marketed to children, said panel member Ellen A. Wartella, psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside.

The growth in new food products targeted to kids has been huge, from 52 introduced in 1994 to nearly 500 introduced last year, the report said.

"Overwhelmingly, those foods are high-calorie, low-nutrient foods, not the kind of foods that are recommended for children to eat," Wartella said.

The findings were no surprise to Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin (news, bio, voting record), who requested the report.

"We like to think that SpongeBob SquarePants and Shrek and the pretty little princesses are likable, kid-friendly characters, but they're being used to manipulate vulnerable children to make unhealthy choices," said Harkin, the senior Democrat on the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee.

"The industry must stop pushing junk food on our kids," Harkin said.

Nickelodeon in October announced a campaign aimed at persuading kids to eat healthy foods and to get up off the couch and move. The campaign features former President Clinton, SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora the Explorer.

Among children and adolescents from ages 6 through 19, obesity rates have tripled over the past 40 years. Obesity increases the risks of type 2 diabetes and many other diseases and health conditions.

In adults, a person who is obese has a Body Mass Index, or BMI, of 30 or more. Children are defined as obese according to a formula placing their BMI at or above the 95th percentile on government charts specifying age and gender. BMI shows body weight adjusted for height.

The food and beverage industries argue that they already are taking steps recommended in the report, making products healthier, shrinking package sizes and touting healthy lifestyles.

"The growth in the food and beverage industry is in healthier foods," said Richard Martin, spokesman for the Grocery Manufacturers Association. "There's been a sea change in the last couple of years, and I don't think that's very well reflected in this report."

An advertising industry spokesman called the findings frustrating, because many companies have been reformulating products to make them healthier or reporting calorie and fat content on menu boards or packaging.

"There's a long way to go, but the industry is responding, and it doesn't seem like there's any recognition of that in this report," said Wally Snyder, president and CEO of the American Advertising Federation.

"Lack of physical activity is a major problem here on childhood obesity. And, in fact, the industry is heavily involved in special programs to educate parents and children about the need for good nutrition and physical activity," Snyder said.

The panel assessed hundreds of studies, then reviewed evidence from 123 of them and completed the most comprehensive review to date on the scientific evidence of how food marketing affects kids' diets.

While the research focused on TV advertising, the panel noted advertising is one facet of a marketing environment vastly different from the 1970s. It now includes Internet games, cartoon character endorsements, coupons and store events, product placement in supermarkets and organized word-of-mouth campaigns.

Advertising accounts for about one-quarter of what companies spend on marketing, the report said.

Besides telling food and beverage companies to promote healthier food, the panel urged the industry to create standards that enforce healthy diets for kids. The panel also encouraged the media and entertainment industry, the government and school authorities to campaign for healthy diets for kids.

The panel said the government should use tax breaks and other incentives to encourage the shift away from junk food and said if it doesn't happen, Congress should mandate it.

An arm of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine is congressionally chartered to advise the government on medical issues.

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On the Net:

Cafe Stirs Debate Over Kids' Behavior

CHICAGO, Associated Press - Dan McCauley had seen one too many kids at his cafe lying on the floor in front of the counter, careening off the glass pastry case, coming perilously close to getting their fingers pinched in the front door. So he posted a sign: "Children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices."

To him, it was a simple reminder to parents to keep an eye on their children and set some limits. But to some parents in his North Side Chicago neighborhood, the sign may as well have read, "If you have kids, you're not welcome."

That one little notice, adorned with pastel hand prints, has become a lightning rod in a larger debate over parenting and misbehaving children.

"It's not about the kids," says McCauley, the 44-year-old owner of A Taste of Heaven cafe, who has no children but claims to like them a lot. "It's about the parents who are with them. Are they supervising and guiding them?

"I'm just asking that they are considerate to people around them."

While he has created some enemies in his neighborhood, McCauley has received hundreds of calls and more than 600 letters, the overwhelming majority of them supportive. One letter-writer from Alabama typed out in bold letters: "In my opinion, you're a hero! Keep it up."

It is a sentiment that people feel increasingly comfortable expressing. Online bloggers regularly make impassioned pleas for child-free zones in public, while e-mailers have been forwarding a photograph of a sign in an unidentified business that reads, "Unattended Children Will Be Given an Espresso and a Puppy."

While it is common policy for upscale restaurants to bar children, owners of other types of businesses also are setting limits on kids.

The Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, for instance, does not allow visitors who aren't guests to have strollers; hotel officials say it is to prevent crashes with other pedestrians. The Bellagio Hotel does not take guests younger than 18 without special permission.

Some parents are fine with the limit-setting and complain that too many of their peers take their kids to places traditionally meant for adults, such as late-night movies and rock concerts.

Robin Piccini, a 42-year-old mom in Bridgewater, Mass., gets annoyed when she has hired a baby sitter for her daughter, only to end up seated at a restaurant next to unruly kids.

"I am paying the same price so that I can have a relaxing dinner, but because there are lazy parents out there, my dinner has to be stressful and tense," she says. "How fair is that?"

Still, while they agree that some parents push the boundaries too far, other weary parents feel under siege — and misunderstood.

"Don't get me wrong. As a parent, I have an arsenal that includes the deadly stare, loss of privileges and `We're going back to the car, RIGHT NOW!'" says Angela Toda, a 38-year-old mother of two small children in College Park, Md. "But the bottom line is, there are certain moments that all kids and parents have — and sometimes your kid is going to lose it in a public place."

She says she does not usually respond well to other people's interference, "unless it is a sympathetic look."

Parents in Port Melbourne, Australia, also were upset last year when a sign appeared on the restaurant door at the Clare Castle Hotel stating that children were welcome only if they stayed in their seats. The establishment has since changed hands and dropped the policy, which new owner Michael Farrant says makes no sense in a neighborhood filled with young families.

"I like the kids running about," says Farrant, a father of three, including a 2-year-old. "I know what it's like with a little one. Sometimes, there's no controlling them."

Still other business owners are creating separate spaces for kids and families, in an attempt to accommodate as many generations as possible.

All Booked Up in Suffolk, Va., is among bookstores that have separate sections where kids can play and rest. Many ballparks have alcohol-free "family sections." And a few restaurants have added separate dining areas for parents with children.

Zulema Suarez, a professor who studies parenting, applauds attempts to strike a balance.

"There needs to be a give and take," says Suarez, an associate professor of social work at Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y. "Children don't need to be allowed to run wild and free, but they do need to be allowed to express themselves."

Too often, though, our cultural emphasis on freedom and individual rights gets taken to the extreme, becoming "a kind of selfish entitlement that undermines our ability to function as a civil community," says George Scarlett, a professor of child development at Tufts University in Boston.

"The rights of any one individual — whether he or she be a parent, child or stranger — do not negate the rights of others."

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Bird Flu Hype Infecting Biotech Industry

SAN FRANCISCO, Associated Press - Two years ago, as fears of a SARS pandemic spread, a San Diego biotech company aided by federal dollars speeded a promising vaccine out of the lab and into human testing.

But when Vical Inc. and the government wrap up the 15-person test next year, the drug is expected to end up on the shelf because the dreaded global epidemic never panned out. Bird flu has now overtaken SARS as the No. 1 feared global death threat.

As biotechnology companies suddenly refocus their profit mission to the new threat — and investors drive stock prices to new highs — some analysts wonder if these endeavors could face the same fate Vical met with its rapid response to severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

"There are so many unknowables and a lot of hype," said AG Edwards analyst Al Goldman. "The avian flu potential is something that you can't get your arms around because no one knows if — or when — a pandemic is going to happen."

The particular bird flu strain that now worries health officials has been around since 1997 and has killed 62 people worldwide since 2003, yet it hasn't acquired the genetic changes it needs to start spreading easily from person to person.

What's more, leading scientists now discount the notion that flu pandemics happen in regular intervals and that the world is overdue for a new one.

They don't even agree on how bad it is that bird flu has spread to more types of birds. Instead of an appetite for people, the germ is showing a growing fondness for birds, some say.

Still, there is scientific consensus that vaccine and drug stockpiles should be created in the United States just in case.

To that end, the Bush administration wants $7.1 billion in emergency spending to improve vaccine production systems and to detect and contain a potential pandemic flu strain before it reaches the United States.

So far, the U.S. government has awarded a little more than $162 million this year to drug companies developing bird flu vaccines.

The promise of billions more in government support and continued fears that the country is ill-equipped to deal with an impending pandemic have a slew of biotechnology companies jumping into the flu business.

Vical chief executive officer Vijay Samant says his company is among those pursuing a novel flu vaccine despite its SARS experience, which he said has yielded some benefit.

Samant said federal regulators are now better prepared to handle new viral threats like SARS and that Vical has the ability to restart the SARS project almost immediately if that bug emerges again. Most of the SARS vaccine research costs at Vical were covered by the National Institutes of Health, which reported in September that the experimental vaccine appeared safe — but little other data about its effectiveness has been produced.

"Don't underestimate the value of learning how to deal with that emerging threat," Samant said.

Still, Samant did joke that the "first slide of everybody's" Powerpoint presentation to investors promises to profit from flu fears.

"My single-minded focus is to drive the vaccine program for bird flu," Novavax Inc. chief executive Rahul Singhvi said during a conference call with analysts in November discussing the Malvern, Pa.-based company's new aim at influenza.

The company, like many of its competitors in the new flu market, is developing a faster and less expensive way to manufacture flu vaccine than current methods by using pieces of the flu's genetic material rather than the entire virus to provoke an immune response in people.

But the company is at least two years, and probably even more, from getting its experimental vaccine on the market.

In the meantime, the lion's share of government funding has flowed to the established vaccine makers Sanofi-Aventis and Chiron Corp. The government awarded Sanofi $100 million contract to crank out a bird flu vaccine and Chiron received $62.5 million, even as the Emeryville-based Chiron attempts to overcome manufacturing woes.

Still, Novavax's stock, which dropped below $1 a share in August, soared to a 52-week high of $6.01 a share in October immediately following reports that birds infected with the bird flu were found in Turkey, Romania and Russia and a dead parrot exported from South America was found in Britain with the virus.

Novavax's stock has fallen off nearly 50 percent in the last month, but other companies pursuing novel flu remedies are enjoying heady days on Wall Street.

BioCryst Pharmaceuticals of Birmingham, Ala., soared to a five-year high of $18.42 a share in October on the same news that drove up Novavax's stock. BioCryst is developing a drug that slows the replication of the flu virus, but showed such poor results in human trials that one-time partner Johnson & Johnson abandoned the project and left BioCryst (whose stock was trading around $15 on Friday) to go it alone.

Greenspan: U.S. Deficit May Hurt Economy

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Outgoing Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan warned Friday that America's exploding budget deficit and a protectionist backlash against soaring trade deficits could disrupt the global economy.

On a day when he was being honored in London for his nearly two decades in the world's highest profile economic job, Greenspan restated some familiar worries.

He said U.S. deficits are set to soar with the pending retirement of 78 million baby boomers and he suggested that Congress consider trimming Social Security and Medicare benefits because the government probably has promised more than it can afford, especially in health benefits.

If something isn't done to trim benefit costs, the resulting budget deficits would "cast an ever-larger shadow" over the future living standards of Americans, Greenspan said in a taped speech delivered to a conference sponsored by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank.

Greenspan repeated his belief that the country's record trade deficits can be addressed through market forces without any harm to the economy.

But he said this benign outcome would be jeopardized if the United States and other nations did not get their budget deficits under control and if they made the mistake of making their economies less flexible by erecting trade barriers.

"If, however, the pernicious drift toward fiscal instability in the United States and elsewhere is not arrested and is compounded by a protectionist reversal of globalization, the adjustment process could be quite painful for the world economy," Greenspan said in a second speech, which he delivered to a conference in London.

In contrast to Greenspan's worries about future threats to the economy, President Bush on Friday went to the White House Rose Garden to highlight a new report showing that the labor market was rebounding strongly from the impact of recent hurricanes, creating 215,000 jobs last month.

"We have every reason to be optimistic about our future," Bush said.

Greenspan was in London to attend his final meeting of finance ministers and central bank presidents of the Group of Seven wealthy industrial countries. The two-day meeting was planned in part as a farewell party for Greenspan, who is retiring from the Fed at the end of January.

Before the G-7 discussions started, Greenspan was awarded the Freedom of the City of London by Britain's Treasury chief, Gordon Brown. The award is a symbolic honor dating to medieval times and bestows the rights to drive sheep across London Bridge and to be hanged with a silken cord if sentenced to death.

Brown said that Greenspan's 18 1/2 years at the Fed had been "the most successful in history" and had been distinguished by Greenspan's "strength in both good times and in testing times."

In his Philadelphia speech, Greenspan did not outline what benefit cuts should be considered for American retirees, but in the past he has endorsed proposals such as raising the age at which retirees can draw full Social Security benefits.

"In the end," he warned, "the consequences for the U.S. economy of doing nothing could be severe."

Historians: Bush the Worst President Ever? C'mon!

by Donnie Fowler, Huffington Post

Well, the historians have gone and done it. Risking the creation of a White House Commission on Historical Quality to refute their findings with real science, an overwhelming 338 of 415 historians polled by George Mason University said Friday that George W. Bush is failing as a president. And fifty of them rated Bush as the worst president ever, ranking him above (below?) any other past president -- even those you've never heard of who were also really awful.

Why do these misguided, obviously-socialist, ivy-smoking, and (of course) American-hating intellectuals feel that Bush isn't doing his best?

Well, they look at the record ...

# He has taken the country into an unwinnable war and alienated friend and foe alike in the process;

# He is bankrupting the country with a combination of aggressive military spending and reduced taxation of the rich;

# He has deliberately and dangerously attacked separation of church and state;

# He has repeatedly "misled," to use a kind word, the American people on affairs domestic and foreign;

# He has proved to be incompetent in affairs domestic (New Orleans) and foreign (Iraq and the battle against al-Qaida);

# He has sacrificed American employment (including the toleration of pension and benefit elimination) to increase overall productivity;

# He is ignorantly hostile to science and technological progress;

# He has tolerated or ignored one of the republic's oldest problems, corporate cheating in supplying the military in wartime.

The Missing Democratic Agenda

by Bob Burnett, Huffington Post

Last month, Washington DC’s “Roll Call” newspaper predicted that Democrats would release their 2006 agenda “sooner rather than later.” Saturday, DNC chair, Howard Dean, stated that the Dems would not win unless they produced this agenda. Nonetheless, the document remains a work in progress. Early glimpses of the draft indicate that it has major problems.

Management guru Peter Drucker died last month. Drucker was an advocate of the K.I.S.S. principle - “keep it simple stupid.” He counseled executives to focus on doing a few things very well. Drucker often observed, “Concentration is the key to [satisfactory] results. No other principle of effectiveness is violated as constantly today as the basic principle of concentration.” Democratic leaders need a dose of Drucker wisdom.

There are two problems with the draft agenda: The first is the title, “Together, We Can Do Better,” which is wimpy. The second is that the agenda abandons the principle of concentration. It attempts to be all things to all people.

“Roll call” provided some agenda details. “Among the proposals are: real security for America through stronger investments in U.S. armed forces and benchmarks for determining when to bring troops home from Iraq; affordable health insurance for all Americans; energy independence in 10 years; an economic package that includes an increase in the minimum wage and budget restrictions to end deficit spending; and universal college education through scholarships and grants as well as funding for the No Child Left Behind act. Democrats will also promise to return ethical standards to Washington through bipartisan ethics oversight and tighter lobbying restrictions, increase assistance to Katrina disaster victims through Medicaid and housing vouchers, save

Social Security from privatization and tighten pension laws.” We’re told the agenda will also include a new national institute for science and technology as well as a healthcare plan for working Americans and a bipartisan summit on the budget.

When Morgan Freeman received his Oscar he quipped, “I want to thank everyone I ever met.” Imagine if he had then named each of them. That’s the crux of the Democrats problem - they love all of these ideas and feel compelled to highlight each. If Drucker were with us, he’d ask, “Where’s the concentration?”

Howard Dean restated the obvious: Democrats must say something definitive about withdrawal from

Iraq. “Benchmarks for determining when to bring troops home” won’t cut it. Rumor has it that publication of the agenda is stalled while top Dems grapple over Iraq. One group believes it’s okay to have no position. They argue that the public should focus solely on Bush failures. The obvious problem with this stance is that it does not demonstrate leadership. Voters want a plan that they can have confidence in.

The Democratic Party might look to Frank Rich for sage advice. In the November 20th New York Times, “One War Lost, Another to Go,” (http://select.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/opinion/20rich.html) Rich pointed out that the real problem with deteriorating public support for the occupation of Iraq “is that the public, having rejected one [war], automatically rejects the other… The percentage of Americans who now regard fighting terrorism as a top national priority is either in the single or low double digits in every poll.”

Democrats can make a compelling case that Republicans are not defending America. That because of Bush ineptitude, we are fighting the wrong war. Dems should argue that the policies of the Bush Administration have weakened the US: The War on Terror is failing. George’s invasion of Iraq has strengthened the hand of terrorists. Republicans have ignored vital aspects of Homeland Security while favoring cronies with no-bid contracts.

Rather than the tepid motto, “Together, We Can Do Better,” Democrats should consider a substitute such as, “Protecting America.” This has the virtue of simplicity. Conceivably, Protecting American would link together several themes.

Democrats should attack Republicans for shamelessly pandering to the rich and powerful while leaving the rest of us behind. Protecting America suggests strengthening the social safety net. Providing security for all citizens not just the wealthy.

Protecting America can also mean caring for the environment. It can represent shepherding our natural resources and moving towards energy independence. Restoring environmental safeguards and recognizing the threat of global climate change.

If Peter Drucker were advising the Democratic leadership he would tell them to keep their agenda simple. Use a basic theme and link it to a handful of major points: Protect America. Fight the real war on terrorism. Watch over all our citizens. Guard the environment.

American voters believe they know what Republicans stand for: cutting taxes, strengthening national defense, reducing the role of government, and guarding the traditional family. They aren’t clear what the Democrats represent.

Epsilon Strengthens Into Hurricane Again

MIAMI, Associated Press - Epsilon unexpectedly strengthened again into a rare December hurricane on Sunday in the open Atlantic, where it posed no threat to land.

The 26th named storm of the record-breaking hurricane season had top sustained winds near 85 mph, despite earlier predictions that it would weaken, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami. Epsilon had sustained winds of 70 mph earlier in the day; hurricanes have winds of at least 74 mph.

"There are no clear reasons and I am not going to make one up to explain the recent strengthening of Epsilon," said hurricane specialist Lixion Avila.

But he said cooler waters, higher wind shear and drier air should cause Epsilon to gradually weaken later in the day. Epsilon first reached hurricane strength on Friday and is the 14th hurricane of the season.

At 10 a.m. EST, Epsilon was centered about 725 miles west-southwest of the Azores and moving east near 12 mph.

The Atlantic hurricane season began June 1 and officially ended on Wednesday.

Epsilon was only the fifth hurricane to form in December in more than 150 years of records, hurricane specialist Stacy Stewart said. The latest that a hurricane has formed in the Caribbean was Dec. 30, in 1954.

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On the Net:

Paging Frank Rich! GAO confirms - 2004 Election Was Stolen

Lyn Davis Lear, Huffington Post

I had a chance to talk to my hero, Frank Rich, a few months ago about election fraud and he claimed he didn't know much about it. Perhaps he has his plate full unraveling the administration's lies about

Iraq, but with the midterm elections coming up someone has to take this issue on. I was listening to NPR yesterday and they had some young computer hackers on bragging about how easy, embarrassingly easy, it is to switch votes on the Diebold machines.

Bill Clinton once mentioned that India has flawless electronic voting while ours is mired in unaccountability. I hope Frank and other journalists and bloggers of his caliber read this article by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman about the GAO report on the 2004 election. Paul Krugman and the NYTimes editorial board have been good on this issue in the past, but it has been a while since anyone has raised the subject.

The Government Accountability Office is the only government office we have left that is ethical, non-partisan and incorruptible. They investigate and tell it like it is. Thank God for them. This report is very serious and must get more attention. It has taken years for the mainstream press and Congress to finally understand what we in the blogisphere have known since 2000. This administration will distort and cheat about anything and everything to get its way. If this report got the attention it deserves and broke through the static of our 500-channel universe, it could be the coup de grace of the Bush White House.

Powerful Government Accountability Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman October 26, 2005

As a legal noose appears to be tightening around the Bush/Cheney/Rove inner circle, a shocking government report shows the floor under the legitimacy of their alleged election to the White House is crumbling.

The latest critical confirmation of key indicators that the election of 2004 was stolen comes in an extremely powerful, penetrating report from the Government Accountability Office that has gotten virtually no mainstream media coverage.

The government's lead investigative agency is known for its general incorruptibility and its thorough, in-depth analyses. Its concurrence with assertions widely dismissed as "conspiracy theories" adds crucial new weight to the case that Team Bush has no legitimate business being in the White House.

Nearly a year ago, senior Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers (D-MI) asked the GAO to investigate electronic voting machines as they were used during the November 2, 2004 presidential election. The request came amidst widespread complaints in Ohio and elsewhere that often shocking irregularities defined their performance.

According to CNN, the U.S.

House Judiciary Committee received "more than 57,000 complaints" following Bush's alleged re-election. Many such concerns were memorialized under oath in a series of sworn statements and affidavits in public hearings and investigations conducted in Ohio by the Free Press and other election protection organizations.

The non-partisan GAO report has now found that, "some of [the] concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes."

The United States is the only major democracy that allows private partisan corporations to secretly count and tabulate the votes with proprietary non-transparent software. Rev.

Jesse Jackson, among others, has asserted that "public elections must not be conducted on privately-owned machines." The CEO of one of the most crucial suppliers of electronic voting machines, Warren O'Dell of Diebold, pledged before the 2004 campaign to deliver Ohio and thus the presidency to George W. Bush.

Bush's official margin of victory in Ohio was just 118,775 votes out of more than 5.6 million cast. Election protection advocates argue that O'Dell's statement still stands as a clear sign of an effort, apparently successful, to steal the White House.

Among other things, the GAO confirms that:

1. Some electronic voting machines "did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected." In other words, the GAO now confirms that electronic voting machines provided an open door to flip an entire vote count. More than 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio on electronic voting machines, some seven times Bush's official margin of victory.

2. "It was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate." Numerous sworn statements and affidavits assert that this did happen in Ohio 2004.

3. "Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level." 3. Falsifying election results without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards can easily be done, according to the GAO.

4. The GAO also confirms that access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network. This critical finding confirms that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a "widespread conspiracy" but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines and thus change large numbers of votes at will. With 800,000 votes cast on electronic machines in Ohio, flipping the number needed to give Bush 118,775 could be easily done by just one programmer.

5. Access to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords. So even relatively amateur hackers could have gained access to and altered the Ohio vote tallies.

6. The locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy, meaning, again, getting into the system was an easy matter.

7. One DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail, re-emphasizing the fragility of the system on which the Presidency of the United States was decided.

8. GAO identified further problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vendor personnel, confirming still more easy access to the system.

In essence, the GAO study makes it clear that no bank, grocery store or mom & pop chop shop would dare operate its business on a computer system as flimsy, fragile and easily manipulated as the one on which the 2004 election turned.

The GAO findings are particularly damning when set in the context of an election run in Ohio by a Secretary of State simultaneously working as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Far from what election theft skeptics have long asserted, the GAO findings confirm that the electronic network on which 800,000 Ohio votes were cast was vulnerable enough to allow a a tiny handful of operatives -- or less -- to turn the whole vote count using personal computers operating on relatively simple software.

The GAO documentation flows alongside other crucial realities surrounding the 2004 vote count. For example:

The exit polls showed Kerry winning in Ohio, until an unexplained last minute shift gave the election to Bush. Similar definitive shifts also occurred in Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico, a virtual statistical impossibility.

A few weeks prior to the election, an unauthorized former ES&S voting machine company employee, was caught on the ballot-making machine in Auglaize County

Election officials in Mahoning County now concede that at least 18 machines visibly transferred votes for Kerry to Bush. Voters who pushed Kerry's name saw Bush's name light up, again and again, all day long. Officials claim the problems were quickly solved, but sworn statements and affidavits say otherwise. They confirm similar problems inFranklin County (Columbus). Kerry's margins in both counties were suspiciously low.

A voting machine in Mahoning County recorded a negative 25 million votes for Kerry. The problem was allegedly fixed.

In Gahanna Ward 1B, at a fundamentalist church, a so-called "electronic transfer glitch" gave Bush nearly 4000 extra votes when only 638 people voted at that polling place. The tally was allegedly corrected, but remains infamous as the "loaves and fishes" vote count.

In Franklin County, dozens of voters swore under oath that their vote for Kerry faded away on the DRE without a paper trail.

In Miami County, at 1:43am after Election Day, with the county's central tabulator reporting 100% of the vote - 19,000 more votes mysteriously arrived; 13,000 were for Bush at the same percentage as prior to the additional votes, a virtual statistical impossibility.

In Cleveland, large, entirely implausible vote totals turned up for obscure third party candidates in traditional Democratic African-American wards. Vote counts in neighboring wards showed virtually no votes for those candidates, with 90% going instead for Kerry.

Prior to one of Blackwell's illegitimate "show recounts," technicians from Triad voting machine company showed up unannounced at the Hocking County Board of Elections and removed the computer hard drive.

In response to official information requests, Shelby and other counties admit to having discarded key records and equipment before any recount could take place.

In a conference call with Rev. Jackson, Attorney Cliff Arnebeck, Attorney Bob Fitrakis and others,

John Kerry confirmed that he lost every precinct in New Mexico that had a touchscreen voting machine. The losses had no correlation with ethnicity, social class or traditional party affiliation---only with the fact that touchscreen machines were used.

In a public letter, Rep. Conyers has stated that "by and large, when it comes to a voting machine, the average voter is getting a lemon - the Ford Pinto of voting technology. We must demand better."

But the GAO report now confirms that electronic voting machines as deployed in 2004 were in fact perfectly engineered to allow a very small number of partisans with minimal computer skills and equipment to shift enough votes to put George W. Bush back in the White House.

Given the growing body of evidence, it appears increasingly clear

that's exactly what happened.

GAO Report

Revised 10/27/05

IS GEORGE BUSH THE WORST PRESIDENT -- EVER?

By Richard Reeves, New York Times

PARIS -- President John F. Kennedy was considered a historian because of his book "Profiles in Courage," so he received periodic requests to rate the presidents, those lists that usually begin "1. Lincoln, 2. Washington ..."

But after he actually became president himself, he stopped filling them out.

"No one knows what it's like in this office," he said after being in the job. "Even with poor James Buchanan, you can't understand what he did and why without sitting in his place, looking at the papers that passed on his desk, knowing the people he talked with."

Poor James Buchanan, the 15th president, is generally considered the worst president in history. Ironically, the Pennsylvania Democrat, elected in 1856, was one of the most qualified of the 43 men who have served in the highest office. A lawyer, a self-made man, Buchanan served with some distinction in the House, served as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and secretary of state under President James K. Polk. He had a great deal to do with the United States becoming a continental nation -- "Manifest Destiny," war with Mexico, and all that. He was also ambassador to Great Britain and was offered a seat on the Supreme Court three separate times.

But he was a confused, indecisive president, who may have made the Civil War inevitable by trying to appease or negotiate with the South. His most recent biographer, Jean Clark, writing for the prestigious American Presidents Series, concluded this year that his actions probably constituted treason. It also did not help that his administration was as corrupt as any in history, and he was widely believed to be homosexual.

Whatever his sexual preferences, his real failures were in refusing to move after South Carolina announced secession from the Union and attacked Fort Sumter, and in supporting both the legality of the pro-slavery constitution of Kansas and the Supreme Court ruling in the Dred Scott class declaring that escaped slaves were not people but property.

He was the guy who in 1861 passed on the mess to the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. Buchanan set the standard, a tough record to beat. But there are serious people who believe that George W. Bush will prove to do that, be worse than Buchanan. I have talked with three significant historians in the past few months who would not say it in public, but who are saying privately that Bush will be remembered as the worst of the presidents.

There are some numbers. The History News Network at George Mason University has just polled historians informally on the Bush record. Four hundred and fifteen, about a third of those contacted, answered -- maybe they were all crazed liberals -- making the project as unofficial as it was interesting. These were the results: 338 said they believed Bush was failing, while 77 said he was succeeding. Fifty said they thought he was the worst president ever. Worse than Buchanan.

This is what those historians said -- and it should be noted that some of the criticism about deficit spending and misuse of the military came from self-identified conservatives -- about the Bush record:

# He has taken the country into an unwinnable war and alienated friend and foe alike in the process;

# He is bankrupting the country with a combination of aggressive military spending and reduced taxation of the rich;

# He has deliberately and dangerously attacked separation of church and state;

# He has repeatedly "misled," to use a kind word, the American people on affairs domestic and foreign;

# He has proved to be incompetent in affairs domestic (New Orleans) and foreign (

Iraq and the battle against al-Qaida);

# He has sacrificed American employment (including the toleration of pension and benefit elimination) to increase overall productivity;

# He is ignorantly hostile to science and technological progress;

# He has tolerated or ignored one of the republic's oldest problems, corporate cheating in supplying the military in wartime.

Quite an indictment. It is, of course, too early to evaluate a president. That, historically, takes decades, and views change over times as results and impact become more obvious. Besides, many of the historians note that however bad Bush seems, they have indeed since worse men around the White House. Some say Buchanan. Many say Vice President

Hurricane Epsilon defies cool Atlantic waters

MIAMI (Reuters) - Hurricane Epsilon, the 14th hurricane of a record-breaking Atlantic storm season, defied expectations that it would weaken over cool Atlantic waters on Saturday and continued to churn slowly eastward.

Epsilon's maximum sustained winds at 10 a.m. EST (1500 GMT) remained at 75 mph (120 kph), just over the threshold for a tropical storm to be categorized as a hurricane, but the cyclone posed no threat to land, the U.S.

National Hurricane Center said.

The storm was about 1,000 miles west of Portugal's Azores islands and moving to the east at 12 mph (19 kph).

"Epsilon is a tenacious tropical cyclone which has maintained hurricane intensity over cool waters and apparent unfavorable atmospheric conditions," the Miami-based hurricane center said. But it reiterated its expectation that the storm would steadily weaken over the next few days.

Hurricanes are normally spawned over warmer Atlantic waters further south. They need warm water to gain power and higher than normal sea surface temperatures this year have helped the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, which formally ended on Wednesday, enter the record books in a multitude of ways.

Epsilon, the sixth hurricane to occur in December since records began in 1851, was named like its four predecessors for a letter in the Greek alphabet after the official list of storm names for 2005 was exhausted.

This season has witnessed the most tropical storms on record -- 26. It has seen the most hurricanes, with 14. The highest number of hurricanes previously on record was 12, in 1969, and the highest number of named storms was 21, in 1933.

The long-term average is 10 storms per season, six of which become hurricanes.

This year also set a record of three Category 5 storms -- the top rank on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity -- including Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and killed more than 1,200 in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Hurricane Wilma in October briefly became the most powerful hurricane ever observed in the Atlantic.

Rumsfeld's growing stake in Tamiflu

Defense Secretary, ex-chairman of flu treatment rights holder, sees portfolio value growing.

NEW YORK (Fortune) - The prospect of a bird flu outbreak may be panicking people around the globe, but it's proving to be very good news for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other politically connected investors in Gilead Sciences, the California biotech company that owns the rights to Tamiflu, the influenza remedy that's now the most-sought after drug in the world.

Rumsfeld served as Gilead (Research)'s chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to federal financial disclosures filed by Rumsfeld.

The forms don't reveal the exact number of shares Rumsfeld owns, but in the past six months fears of a pandemic and the ensuing scramble for Tamiflu have sent Gilead's stock from $35 to $47. That's made the Pentagon chief, already one of the wealthiest members of the Bush cabinet, at least $1 million richer.

Rumsfeld isn't the only political heavyweight benefiting from demand for Tamiflu, which is manufactured and marketed by Swiss pharma giant Roche. (Gilead receives a royalty from Roche equaling about 10% of sales.) Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is on Gilead's board, has sold more than $7 million worth of Gilead since the beginning of 2005.

Another board member is the wife of former California Gov. Pete Wilson.

"I don't know of any biotech company that's so politically well-connected," says analyst Andrew McDonald of Think Equity Partners in San Francisco.

What's more, the federal government is emerging as one of the world's biggest customers for Tamiflu. In July, the Pentagon ordered $58 million worth of the treatment for U.S. troops around the world, and Congress is considering a multi-billion dollar purchase. Roche expects 2005 sales for Tamiflu to be about $1 billion, compared with $258 million in 2004.

Rumsfeld recused himself from any decisions involving Gilead when he left Gilead and became Secretary of Defense in early 2001. And late last month, notes a senior Pentagon official, Rumsfeld went even further and had the Pentagon's general counsel issue additional instructions outlining what he could and could not be involved in if there were an avian flu pandemic and the Pentagon had to respond.

As the flu issue heated up early this year, according to the Pentagon official, Rumsfeld considered unloading his entire Gilead stake and sought the advice of the Department of Justice, the SEC and the federal Office of Government Ethics.

Wasps Could Replace Bomb, Drug Dogs

TIFTON, Ga., Associated Press - Trained wasps could someday replace dogs for sniffing out drugs, bombs and bodies. No kidding.

Scientists say a species of non-stinging wasps can be trained in only five minutes and are just as sensitive to odors as man's best friend, which can require up to six months of training at a cost of about $15,000 per dog.

With the use of a handheld device that contains the wasps but allows them to do their work, researchers have been able to use the insects to detect target odors such as a toxin that grows on corn and peanuts, and a chemical used in certain explosives.

"There's a tremendous need for a very flexible and mobile chemical detector," said U.S. Department of Agriculture entomologist Joe Lewis, who has been studying wasps since the 1960s. "Our best devices that we have currently are very cumbersome, expensive and highly fragile."

The "Wasp Hound" research by Lewis and University of Georgia agricultural engineer Glen Rains is part of a larger government project to determine if insects and even reptiles or crustaceans could be recruited for defense work. That project has already resulted in scientists refining the use of bees as land-mine detectors.

Through the years, Lewis and a USDA colleague, J.H. Tumlinson, discovered that a tiny, predatory wasp known as microplitis croceipes had relied on odors to locate nectar for food and hosts for its eggs — caterpillars that damage crops.

While they don't sting humans, the female wasps use their stingers to deposit eggs inside caterpillars, producing larvae that eventually kill the caterpillars.

The scientists also discovered that plants being attacked by the caterpillars give off SOS scents to attract the all-black wasps and that the quarter-inch-long insects could be trained to associate other odors with food and prey.

"They have to be good detectors because their whole survival depends on it," Lewis said.

Rains said the wasps can be trained to detect a specific odor very quickly. The researchers expose hungry wasps to the target odor, then let them feed on sugar water for 10 seconds and then give them a one-minute break. After three repetitions of sniffing and feeding, the wasps associate the odor with feeding.

Since the scientists couldn't put leashes on their trained wasps, they needed a way to contain them while monitoring their reactions to odors.

Enter the Wasp Hound — a 10-inch-long plastic cylinder made of PVC pipe with a hole in one end and a small fan on the other. Inside is a Web camera that connects to a laptop computer for monitoring the behavior of five wasps housed in a transparent, ventilated capsule.

When the wasps detect a target odor, they converge around the vent, creating a mass of dark pixels on the computer screen. Otherwise, they just hang out inside the capsule.

They can work for as long as 48 hours, then they're released to live out their remainder of their two-to three-week life span.

"What we have ... is a technology-free organism that you can quickly program and use in a highly mobile way," said Lewis, who believes the Wasp Hound could be used to search for explosives at airports, locate bodies, monitor crops for toxins and detect diseases such as cancer from the odors in a person's breath.

"They're very cheap to produce and very sensitive," Rains said of the wasps. "Dogs take months to train and they need a specific handler. Wasps can be trained on the spot."

Rains believes the Wasp Hound could be available for sale in three to five years. He and Lewis are still exploring ways to breed more wasps and to train hundreds simultaneously.

"We've done enough on it to know it's technically feasible to do that," Lewis said. "It's just a matter of completing and refining the methodology."

Lewis believes many other types of invertebrates — bees, other types of parasitic insects, even water bugs — can be trained to sniff out trouble.

"It's opened a whole new resource for invertebrates as biological sensors," he said.

Other scientists also are working to harness the sniffing power of insects.

In 2002, the Pentagon considered fitting sniffer bees with transmitters the size of a grain of salt to locate explosives and relay that information wirelessly to laptop computers.

A British firm, Inscentinel Ltd., sells trained bees and mini-hives where the insects' response to scents from natural and man-made chemicals can be monitored. The company says the system can be used to screen for explosives, drugs, chemical weapons, land mines and for food quality control.

Jerry Bromenshenk, a research professor at Montana State University, is using bees for mine detection. The bees congregate over mines or other explosives and their locations are mapped using laser-sensing technology.

"Insects and their antennae have an olfactory system that is pretty much on a par with a dog," Bromenshenk said. "They're a whole lot more plentiful and a lot less expensive to come by."

Bromenshenk said bees may be more appropriate for open areas, while the Wasp Hound may be better in buildings.

"The difference is that we let our bees free fly," he said. "That's not good in confined areas like an airport."

___

On the Net:

Bee Alert Technology Inc.: http://www.mea-mft.org/hiednews8.htm

Baby, you make my "love molecule" soar!

ROME (Reuters) - Your heartbeat accelerates, you have butterflies in the stomach, you feel euphoric and a bit silly. It's all part of falling passionately in love -- and scientists now tell us the feeling won't last more than a year.

The powerful emotions that bowl over new lovers are triggered by a molecule known as nerve growth factor (NGF), according to Pavia University researchers.

The Italian scientists found far higher levels of NGF in the blood of 58 people who had recently fallen madly in love than in that of a group of singles and people in long-term relationships.

But after a year with the same lover, the quantity of the 'love molecule' in their blood had fallen to the same level as that of the other groups.

This NASA handout satellite image obtained shows the minimum concentration of Arctic sea ice that occurred in September 2005, when the sea ice extent dropped to 2.05 million sq. miles. Global warming is melting the Arctic ice so fast that a new sea route is opening up between the Atlantic and the Pacific and with it the risk of a territorial dispute between Canada and the United States.(AFP/NASA/File)

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Melting Arctic ice risks Canada-US territorial dispute

MONTREAL (AFP) - Global warming is melting the Arctic ice so fast that a new sea route is opening up between the Atlantic and the Pacific -- and with it the risk of a territorial dispute between Canada and the United States.

Temperatures around the North Pole are rising twice as fast as in the rest of the planet, according to UN and Canadian government experts.

By 2050, they warn, ships will be able to sail around northern Canada for most of the summer.

This could reduce the sea trip from London to Tokyo to 16,000 kilometers (9,950 miles), against 21,000 kilometers (13,000 miles) via the Suez Canal or 23,000 kilometers (14,300 miles) going through the Panama Canal.

The search for a Northwest Passage to Asia inspired explorers from the 15th to the 17th centuries. Many died. But now greenhouse gases are opening up the passage for them.

"There are now more and more ice-free portions of Arctic maritime territory," said Frederic Lasserre, a geographer and specialist on the Arctic, at Laval University in Quebec.

If a ship has a reinforced hull, and the winds and currents are in the right direction, it is already "relatively easy" to take the route around the small islands and straights around Canada's Arctic territory, Lasserre added.

Arctic temperatures are expected to rise significantly by the end of the century, according to experts, which will melt even more glaciers.

"What we are seeing in the Arctic, and what we are seeing further south with the hurricanes, are the most pessimistic models of global warming," said Louis Fortier, an oceanographer who has just returned from an expedition to the region on the Canadian research vessel Amundsen.

Lasserre predicted that within 30 years it would probably be possible for ships not normally equipped for the Arctic to tackle the Northwest passage.

About 20-30 ships currently take it each summer now.

In a territorial dispute now linked to the global warming problem, Canada criticizes the United States,

European Union and even Japan for not recognising its 1986 claim of sovereignty to waters around the Arctic archipelago. The United States insists that these are international waters.

An American ice-breaker went through the archipelago in 1985 causing a diplomatic dispute with Canada, which reaffirmed its claim to the territorial waters.

Canada, which is also arguing with Denmark over a small island off Greenland, based its territorial sovereignty on the ice that then linked all of the Arctic islands. But cracks are quickly forming in the claim.

If sovereignty of the Northwest passage ever came before a court, Canada could lose its ability to impose navigational rules in the region.

There are huge environmental issues at stake. Canada would be unable to deny passage to any vessel that meets international standards for environmental protection, crew training and safety procedures.

The United States argues that all waters between two open seas should be open to all shipping.

Lasserre emphasized how the maritime and continental plateau frontier between the United States and Canada has never been formally agreed -- and this will become another looming dispute.

The commercial stakes are also high as the Beaufort Sea, which touches the Yukon in Canada and the US state of Alaska, has huge reserves of oil and natural gas.

Experts have highlighted how access to these reserves will become a lot easier as global warming increases.

Arab nations deeply suspicious of US motives: poll

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Arab nations are acutely suspicious of the Bush administration's "democracy" agenda in the Middle East and believe the U.S. invasion of Iraq has made the region less secure, said a poll released on Friday.

The poll, conducted in six Arab countries in October, found 78 percent of respondents thought there was more terrorism because of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, with four out of five saying the war had brought less peace to the region.

Asked which countries posed the biggest threat to their nations, a majority chose Israel and the United States.

"The one fascinating outcome of this study is that the respondents view the United States and its policies through the prism of Iraq and Israel," said Professor Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland, who conducted the poll with Zogby International in Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.

Rather than being a model to inspire Arab nations to adopt democratic goals, Telhami said respondents felt the opposite was true of the United States, whose human rights image has been tarnished by scandals involving abuse by U.S. forces of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and at a U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Bush administration has made spreading democracy in the Middle East a centerpiece of its foreign policy. The State Department in July appointed a special envoy, Karen Hughes, to improve the U.S. image abroad, especially in Islamic nations. However, during her trips to the Middle East, Hughes has come face to face with Muslim anger over the U.S.-led invasion in Iraq.

In the new poll, 69 percent of those surveyed doubted that spreading democracy was the real U.S. objective. Oil, protecting Israel, dominating the region and weakening the Muslim world were seen as U.S. goals.

"America's presence in Iraq is seen as a negative. It is scaring people about American intentions and having the opposite intended impact on Arab public opinion," Telhami told Reuters.

Asked what their biggest concerns were about Iraq, a third feared the country would split up because of sectarian divisions, while 23 percent worried the United States would dominate the country after the transfer of power and 27 percent fretted that instability would spill over into the region.

FRANCE AS SUPERPOWER

More than half -- 58 percent -- said Iraq was less democratic than before the war and three of four said Iraqis were worse off.

Asked which countries they would like to be the superpower, the most popular choice was France with 21 percent, followed by China with 13 percent, Pakistan and Germany tied with 10 percent, Britain with 7 percent, the United States with 6 percent and finally Russia with 5 percent,

France, which opposed the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, was also seen as the country where people had the most freedom and its President Jacques Chirac, was the leader most admired by respondents. Others included, by late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

The poll was taken before an outbreak of riots in France by disaffected youths, many of them Muslims of North African ethnicity, which provoked Muslim criticism of conditions for minorities in France.

Israeli President Ariel Sharon, U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were the most disliked by those polled.

On Iran, most of the respondents said the U.S. adversary should have the right to a nuclear program and international pressure should cease while 21 percent said it should be pressured to stop its nuclear ambitions.

The most popular television network for international news was Al Jazeera, favored by 45 percent.

Interviewers polled 800 people each from Egypt, Morocco and Saudi Arabia; 500 each were questioned in Jordan and Lebanon and 217 were interviewed in the United Arab Emirates.

Storm Epsilon Reaches Hurricane Strength

MIAMI, Associated Press - Epsilon strengthened into a record 14th hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday — two days after the 2005 season officially ended. Forecasters said it posed no threat to land.

Epsilon had maximum sustained winds of 75 mph at 10 a.m. EST, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami. Its top sustained winds had been near 65 mph earlier in the day.

The storm continued to turn away from Bermuda but could still cause dangerous surf conditions, forecasters said.

It was centered about 955 miles east of Bermuda. Forecasters said Epsilon was moving northeast near 14 mph.

The Atlantic hurricane season began June 1 and officially ended Wednesday.

Epsilon was only the fifth December hurricane recorded in more than 120 years, National Weather Service Hurricane Specialist Stacy Stewart said.

By December, upper-atmosphere winds are normally strong enough to keep storms in check, Stewart said, "but about every 20 years or so, the atmosphere allows it to happen."

The latest that a hurricane formed in the Caribbean was Dec. 30, which happened in 1954, he said.

No other major storms have appeared on the horizon, he said.

Forecasters say 2006 could be another brutal hurricane year because the Atlantic is in a period of frenzied activity that began in 1995 and could last at least another decade.

Government hurricane experts blame the increase on a natural cycle of higher sea temperatures, lower wind shear and other factors, though some scientists cite global warming.

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On the Net:

US government lied to escalate Vietnam War

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A top US spy agency declassified data showing agents skewed intelligence to back claims of a communist attack on a US destroyer in 1964, an incident which led to the escalation of the Vietnam War.

The National Security Agency (NSA) admitted defeat in a long battle to keep the controversial article, printed in 2001 in its in-house journal, secret.

Senior NSA officers had apparently feared the explosive findings could prompt comparisons to claims the Bush administration twisted intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The article, by NSA historian Robert Hanyok, based on signals intelligence or SIGINT, concludes what historians have long suspected -- there was no second attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on US destroyers on August 4, 1964.

President Lyndon B. Johnson used the supposed second attack, two days after an initial strike confirmed by Hanyok's article, to argue for retaliatory air strikes and to ask Congress for authority to act with a free hand in Vietnam.

But Hanyok's article concludes that neither Johnson, nor his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara were personally involved in manipulating intelligence on the incident, and believed it authentic.

The article concludes mid-level National Security Agency officials provided military and political leaders with "skewed" intelligence over the alleged attack.

"Two startling findings emerged from the new research. First, it is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night," the article said.

"SIGINT intelligence was presented in such a manner as to preclude responsible decisionmakers in the Johnson administration from having the complete and objective narrative of events on August 4, 1964.

"Instead, only SIGINT that supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers was given to administration officials."

Independent historian Matthew Aid told AFP on November 2, that he believed the NSA's deputy director blocked release of the internal history in August because of a possibly embarassing parallel with the controversy over Iraq war intelligence.

"I am told that he rejected the request ... because of the sensitivity of the material for a political reason," Aid said.

Hanyok's article concludes that the reason why the intelligence was "skewed" will likely never be known, but that the idea that agents were bending to administration pressure was not tenable.