Tuesday, February 28, 2006
TWO OUT OF THREE AMERICANS AGREE: DUBYA SUCKS LIZARD DICK
Bush job rating falls to all-time low: poll
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's job rating has fallen to an all-time low of 34 percent, amid strong opposition to the Dubai Ports World deal and increasing pessimism over the war in Iraq, according to a CBS News poll released on Monday.
Bush's overall job approval fell eight points from 42 percent last month. Fifty-nine percent of respondents said they disapproved of Bush's performance on the job, the poll found.
Bush's previous low job approval rating of 35 percent came last October, a month after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to the Gulf Coast and shortly after the U.S. death toll in Iraq reached the 2,000 mark, CBS said.
Long among his strongest suits, ratings for Bush's handling of Iraq fell to a new low of 30 percent, down from 37 percent in January, the poll found.
In addition, 62 percent of Americans said they think U.S. efforts to bring stability and order to Iraq were going badly compared with 36 percent who said things were going well.
In recent days, the Bush administration has faced increasing sectarian violence and fears of civil war in Iraq as well as strong bipartisan congressional opposition to a deal allowing an Arab state-owned company to operate six key U.S. ports.
According to the poll, 70 percent believe the Dubai Ports World transaction should not be allowed to go through while only 21 percent did not see the ports deal as a problem.
One surprising bright spot for the administration in the polls was that Americans appeared ready to move on after Vice President Dick Cheney's hunting accident. Seventy-six percent said it was understandable that the accident could happen.
However media coverage of the accident may have made the public's generally negative view of Cheney a bit more so, CBS said. The poll found that 46 percent hold a negative view of Cheney and 18 percent hold a favorable view, down from a 23 percent favorable rating in January.
The telephone poll of 1,018 adults was conducted February 22-26 and had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.Tuesday, February 28, 2006
PROFITEERS-R-US
Army to Pay Halliburton Unit Most Costs Disputed by Audit
Questioned Charges, Still Reimbursed
Auditors Find Widespread Waste and Unfinished Work in Iraqi Rebuilding Contracts (January 31, 2006)
The New York Times - The Army has decided to reimburse a Halliburton subsidiary for nearly all of its disputed costs on a $2.41 billion no-bid contract to deliver fuel and repair oil equipment in Iraq, even though the Pentagon's own auditors had identified more than $250 million in charges as potentially excessive or unjustified.
The Army said in response to questions on Friday that questionable business practices by the subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, had in some cases driven up the company's costs. But in the haste and peril of war, it had largely done as well as could be expected, the Army said, and aside from a few penalties, the government was compelled to reimburse the company for its costs.
Under the type of contract awarded to the company, "the contractor is not required to perform perfectly to be entitled to reimbursement," said Rhonda James, a spokeswoman for the southwestern division of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, based in Dallas, where the contract is administered.
The contract has been the subject of intense scrutiny after disclosures in 2003 that it had been awarded without competitive bidding. That produced criticism from Congressional Democrats and others that the company had benefited from its connection with Dick Cheney, who was Halliburton's chief executive before becoming vice president.
Later that year auditors began focusing on the fuel deliveries under the contract, finding that the fuel transportation costs that the company was charging the Army were in some cases nearly triple what others were charging to do the same job. But Kellogg Brown & Root, which has consistently maintained that its costs were justified, characterized the Army's decision as an official repudiation of those criticisms.
"Once all the facts were fully examined, it is clear, and now confirmed, that KBR performed this work appropriately per the client's direction and within the contract terms," said Cathy Mann, a company spokeswoman, in a written statement on the decision. The company's charges, she said, "were deemed properly incurred."
The Pentagon's Defense Contract Audit Agency had questioned $263 million in costs for fuel deliveries, pipeline repairs and other tasks that auditors said were potentially inflated or unsupported by documentation. But the Army decided to pay all but $10.1 million of those contested costs, which were mostly for trucking fuel from Kuwait and Turkey.
That means the Army is withholding payment on just 3.8 percent of the charges questioned by the Pentagon audit agency, which is far below the rate at which the agency's recommendation is usually followed or sustained by the military — the so-called "sustention rate."
Figures provided by the Pentagon audit agency on thousands of military contracts over the past three years show how far the Halliburton decision lies outside the norm.
In 2003, the agency's figures show, the military withheld an average of 66.4 percent of what the auditors had recommended, while in 2004 the figure was 75.2 percent and in 2005 it was 56.4 percent.
Rick Barton, co-director of the postconflict reconstruction project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said despite the difficulties of doing business in a war zone, the low rate of recovery on such huge and widely disputed charges was hard to understand. "To think that it's near zero is ridiculous when you're talking these kinds of numbers," he said.
The Halliburton contract is referred to as a "cost-plus" agreement, meaning that after the company recovers its costs, it also receives various markups and award fees. Although the markups and fees are difficult to calculate exactly using the Army figures, they appear to be about $100 million.
One of Halliburton's most persistent critics, Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform, said in a written statement about the Army's decision, "Halliburton gouged the taxpayer, government auditors caught the company red-handed, yet the Pentagon ignored the auditors and paid Halliburton hundreds of millions of dollars and a huge bonus."
About $208 million of the disputed charges was mostly related to the cost of importing fuel, which was at the heart of the controversy surrounding the contract. Kellogg Brown & Root hired a little-known Kuwaiti company, Altanmia, to transport fuel in enormous truck convoys. The Pentagon auditors found that in part because of the transportation fees that Kellogg Brown & Root agreed to pay Altanmia, the cost for a gallon of gasoline was roughly 40 percent higher than what the American military paid when it did the job itself — under a separate contract it had negotiated with Altanmia.
The Army said in a written statement that it had largely accepted Kellogg Brown & Root's assertions that costs had been driven up by factors beyond its control — the exigencies of war and the hard-line negotiating stance of the state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation. The Army said the Kuwaiti fuel company blocked attempts by Kellogg Brown & Root to renegotiate its transportation contract with Altanmia. In the end, the Army decided to pay the Halliburton subsidiary all but $3.81 million of the $208 million in fuel-related costs questioned by auditors.
The Kellogg Brown & Root contract, called Restore Iraqi Oil, or RIO, will be paid with about $900 million of American taxpayer money and $1.5 billion of Iraqi oil proceeds and money seized from Saddam Hussein's government. Official criticism of the work became so intense that in November, an auditing board sponsored by the United Nations recommended that the United States repay some or all of the $208 million related to the alleged fuel overcharges — an allegation Halliburton says has never been justified.
In fact, Ms. Mann said, the Army's decision clearly showed that "any claims that the figures contained in these audit reports are 'overcharges' are uninformed and flat wrong." She said that the fuel charges themselves had been 100 percent reimbursed and that the reductions all came from adjustments on administrative costs associated with that mission.
Still, the Army conceded that some of the criticisms of the company's business practices were legitimate. As a result, the Army said, it would exclude about half of the auditors' questioned charges from the amount used to derive the markups and fees, which are calculated as a sliding percentage of the costs. That decision could cost the company a maximum of about $7 million.
Ms. James, the Corps of Engineers spokeswoman, said that in addition to the other modest penalties that Kellogg Brown & Root had been assessed by the Army's contracting officers, the sliding percentages on some of the fees had been lowered by unspecified amounts to reflect shortcomings in the company's dealings in Iraq. "All fees were awarded in accordance with the award fee plan set out in the contract, which placed more emphasis on timely mission accomplishment than on cost control and paperwork," Ms. James said.
Mr. Barton, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that with the relatively small penalties paid by the company for falling short in its performance in Iraq, it was hard to see what the Army's scrutiny of the company's practices had amounted to in the end.
"When they say, 'We questioned their business model or their business decisions' — well, yeah, so what?" Mr. Barton said. "You questioned it but there was no result."
In answer to written questions, a spokesman for the Defense Contract Audit Agency, Lt. Col. Brian Maka, said the settlement of the disputed charges was based on "broader business case considerations" beyond just Pentagon audits.
But when asked whether the Army's decision reflected on the quality of the audits, Colonel Maka said only that the agency "has no indication of problems with the audit process," and he referred questions on the settlement itself to the Army.
A former senior Defense Department manager knowledgeable about the audits and the related contracting issues said, "That's as close as D.C.A.A. can get to saying, 'We're not happy with it either.' "
Because of the size of the contract and the contention surrounding Halliburton's dealings with the government, the RIO audits were carried out by the agency's top personnel and were subjected to extraordinarily thorough reviews, the former manager said.
This is unlikely to be the last time the Army and Halliburton meet over negotiated costs. On a separate contract in Iraq, for logistics support to the United States military, more than $11 billion had been disbursed to Kellogg Brown & Root by mid-January, according to the Army Field Support Command, based in Rock Island, Ill. Pentagon auditors have begun scrutinizing that contract as well.Monday, February 27, 2006
COAST GUARD ON PORT DEAL: 'NOT SECURE'. WHITE HOUSE: 'NU-HUH!'
Coast Guard Warned of Port Deal Intel Gaps
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Citing broad gaps in U.S. intelligence, the Coast Guard raised concerns weeks ago that it could not determine whether a United Arab Emirates-based company seeking a stake in some U.S. port operations might support terrorist operations.
The disclosure came during a hearing Monday on Dubai-owned DP World's plans to assume significant operations at six leading U.S. ports. It also clouded whether the Bush administration's agreement to conduct an unusual investigation into the pending takeover's security risks would allay lawmakers' concerns.
The administration said the Coast Guard's concerns were raised during its review of the deal, which it approved Jan. 17, and that all those questions were resolved. London-based Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co. now handles the port operations.
"There are many intelligence gaps, concerning the potential for DPW or P&O assets to support terrorist operations, that precludes an overall threat assessment" of the potential merger, an unclassified Coast Guard intelligence assessment said.
"The breadth of the intelligence gaps also infer potential unknown threats against a large number of potential vulnerabilities," said the half-page assessment. Officials said it was an unclassified excerpt from a larger document.
In a statement, the Coast Guard said the concerns reflected in the excerpt ultimately were addressed and that other U.S. intelligence agencies answered the questions raised.
The Coast Guard assessment raised questions about the security of the companies' operations, the backgrounds of people working for the companies, and whether other foreign countries influenced operations that affect security.
"We were never told about this and have no information about it," Michael Moore, DP World's senior vice president, said of the excerpt. However, he said it shows "serious and probing" questions were asked and that the initial approval of the deal indicates those questions were answered.
Sen. Susan Collins (news, bio, voting record), chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, released the excerpt at a briefing Monday. The Bush administration agreed Sunday to DP World's request for a 45-day investigation of the potential security risks related to the deal. The government did not do such an investigation before approving the deal, even though critics say the law required it.
"I am more convinced than ever that the process was truly flawed," Collins, R-Maine, said after the classified portion of the briefing. "I can only conclude that there was a rush to judgment, that there wasn't the kind of painstaking, thorough analysis that needed to be done, despite serious questions being raised and despite the involvement of a wide variety of agencies."
Congressional leaders who brokered the arrangement for the investigation hoped it would defuse a bipartisan political uproar over port security and scuttle any push for legislation this week that would force such an investigation and could embarrass President Bush.
Senators introduced several bills Monday anyway, even though Frist told reporters in Detroit, "I don't think it's necessary to legislate."
Criticism persisted from both Republicans and Democrats.
"This report suggests there were significant and troubling intelligence gaps," said Collins, R-Maine. "That language is very troubling to me."
Appearing before the Collins committee, administration officials defended their decision not to trigger a 45-day review of national security implications of the business transaction following their initial review.
"In this case, the concerns that you're citing were addressed and resolved," Clay Lowery, the Treasury Department's assistant secretary for international affairs, told Collins. "There were no national security concerns that were not addressed."
The Coast Guard indicated to The Associated Press that it did not have serious reservations about the ports deal on Feb. 10, when the news organization first inquired about potential security concerns.
Stewart Baker, an assistant secretary for the Homeland Security Department, told lawmakers that the excerpt was from an internal Coast Guard document that he did not see. However, Baker said the Coast Guard had indicated to the inter-agency panel that reviews such transactions that the security concerns it had ultimately had been resolved.
"It communicated to us that it had no further concerns about the transaction," Baker said.
"I think it's a little unfair to judge this report by one paragraph that happens not to be classified," Baker said. "This paragraph is not really representative of the entire report."
"I think the paragraph speaks for itself," Collins responded before adjourning the public hearing for a closed session to explore the issue further.
The Bush administration defended its plans to conduct a highly unusual second review of a business deal it has already approved. It acknowledged that in some cases, the same officials who previously judged the agreement will serve on the new investigation by the multi-agency Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States.
The White House said Bush remains unconvinced the outcome will be any different. "The president has made his views very clear and they remain unchanged," spokesman Scott McClellan said.
At the Treasury Department, which manages the committee, spokesman Tony Fratto said the broader 45-day investigation will result in a report submitted to the president, who will have 15 days to decide whether to approve the deal. Fratto said Treasury Secretary John Snow and other Cabinet secretaries will be directly involved.
"This is a new review and we will look at it with open eyes in terms of the national security implications," Fratto said.
Also Monday, a bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill that would delay the deal and give Congress an opportunity to block the takeover. The group did not plan to push for a vote yet.
Sen. Charles Schumer (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y., said the Coast Guard assessment reinforces the need for a thorough review of security issues. "If this isn't a smoking gun, it shows that there may be one undetected" by the interagency panel that did the initial review, Schumer said.
Other Democrats introduced legislation to ban companies owned by foreign governments from controlling operations at U.S. ports. At the White House, governors from across the country met privately with Bush, and several participants said the ports issue was brought up.
The Justice Department said the Bush administration's decision to investigate potential security risks in the DP World deal renders irrelevant the state of New Jersey's federal lawsuit aimed at blocking the company from assuming operations at the Port Newark container terminal.
___Monday, February 27, 2006
GOODNIGHT, McCLOUD
'Gunsmoke' Actor Dennis Weaver Dies
LOS ANGELES, Associated Press - Dennis Weaver, the diffident deputy Chester Goode in the TV classic western "Gunsmoke" and the canny New Mexico deputy solving New York City crime in "McCloud," has died. The actor was 81.
Weaver died of complications from cancer Friday at his home in Ridgway, in southwestern Colorado, his publicist, Julian Myers, announced Monday.
"He was a wonderful man and a fine actor and we will all miss him," Burt Reynolds, who played alongside Weaver in "Gunsmoke," said Monday.
Weaver was a struggling actor in Hollywood in 1955, earning $60 a week delivering flowers when he was offered $300 a week for a role in a new CBS television series, "Gunsmoke." After nine years as Chester, who he played with a stiff-legged gait, he was earning $9,000 a week.
When Weaver first auditioned for the series, he found the character of Chester "inane." He wrote in his 2001 autobiography, "All the World's a Stage," that he said to himself: "With all my Actors Studio training, I'll correct this character by using my own experiences and drawing from myself."
The result was a well-rounded character that appealed to audiences, especially with his drawling, "Mis-ter Dil-lon."
At the end of seven hit seasons, Weaver sought other horizons. He announced his departure, but the failures of pilots for his own series caused him to return to "Gunsmoke" on a limited basis for two more years. The role brought him an Emmy in the 1958-59 season.
In 1966, Weaver starred with a 600-pound black bear in "Gentle Ben," about a family that adopts a bear as a pet. The series was well-received, but after two seasons, CBS decided it needed more adult entertainment and canceled it.
Next came the character Sam McCloud, which Weaver called "the most satisfying role of my career."
The "McCloud" series, 1970-1977, put the no-nonsense lawman from Taos, N.M., onto the crime-ridden streets of New York City. His wild-west tactics, such as riding his horse through Manhattan traffic, drove local policemen crazy, but he always solved the case.
Weaver appeared in several movies, including "Touch of Evil," "Ten Wanted Men," "Gentle Giant," "Seven Angry Men," "Dragnet," "Way ... Way Out" and "The Bridges at Toko-Ri."
Weaver also was an activist for protecting the environment and combating world hunger.
He served as president of Love Is Feeding Everyone (LIFE), which fed 150,000 needy people a week in Los Angeles County. He founded the Institute of Ecolonomics, which sought solutions to economic and environmental problems. He spoke at the United Nations and Congress, as well as to college students and school children about fighting pollution and starvation.
"Earthship" was the most visible of Weaver's crusades. He and his wife, Gerry, built a solar-powered Colorado home out of recycled tires and cans. The thick walls helped keep the inside temperature even year around.
"When the garbage man comes," Jay Leno once quipped, "how does he know where the garbage begins and the house ends?"
Weaver responded: "If we get into the mind-set of saving rather than wasting and utilizing other materials, we can save the Earth."
The tall, slender actor came by his Midwestern twang naturally. He was born June 4, 1924, in Joplin, Mo., where he excelled in high-school drama and athletics. After Navy service in World War II, he enrolled at the University of Oklahoma and nearly qualified for the Olympic decathlon.
He studied at the Actors Studio in New York and appeared in "A Streetcar Named Desire" opposite Shelley Winters and toured in "Come Back, Little Sheba" with Shirley Booth.
Universal Studio signed Weaver to a contract in 1952 but found little work for him. He freelanced in features and television until he landed "Gunsmoke."
Weaver appeared in dozens of TV movies, the most notable being the 1971 "Duel." It was a bravura performance for both fledgling director Steven Spielberg and Weaver, who played a driver menaced by a large truck that followed him down a mountain road. The film was released in theaters in 1983, after Spielberg had directed some box-office smashes.
Weaver's other TV series include "Kentucky Jones," "Emerald Point N.A.S.," "Stone" and "Buck James." From 1973 to 1975, he served as president of the Screen Actors Guild.
Most recently, Weaver starred last year in ABC Family's "Wildfire" as the eccentric owner of a thoroughbred racing ranch.
Weaver is survived by his wife; sons Rick, Robby and Rusty; and three grandchildren.Monday, February 27, 2006
CASA DE JDOE IS LOOKING FOR ME...
New home sales hit slowest pace in a year
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sales of new U.S. homes fell 5 percent in January to their slowest pace in a year while the number of homes on the market hit a record high, according to a government report on Monday that signaled further cooling in the housing market.
Sales of new single-family homes declined to a 1.233 million unit annual pace from an upwardly revised 1.298 million unit rate in December, the Commerce Department said.
January's sales pace was slower than expected. Economists had forecast new homes sales would ease to a 1.260 million unit rate from the originally reported 1.269 million unit pace in December.
The number of new homes available for sale at the end of January rose to a record 528,000. At the current sales pace, that represented 5.2 months' supply -- the largest inventory since November 1996, the government data showed.
"The report illustrates the fact that housing is not defying gravity and is not likely to do so this year," said Anthony Chan, chief economist at JPMorgan Private Client Services. "We're going to see chipping away of housing."
Chan said the moderation in housing shows the Federal Reserve's campaign of interest-rate hikes is working.
"So although it's not particularly good news for the housing market, the fact that you're seeing weakness here shows that monetary policy is working and the Fed would not have to blunt the economy with more hikes than the market has been anticipating."
The U.S. housing market has begun to show signs of cooling after a five-year rally that shattered sales and construction records, and sent prices soaring more than 50 percent on average nationwide.
Home prices, however, have been more resilient, and economists chalk that up to stubborn sellers trying to cash out at the market's highs. For January, Commerce Department data show the median home sales price rose 4 percent to $238,100, for example.
New home sales fell in all U.S. regions but the West, which posted an 11.3 percent gain. Sales dropped 14.9 percent in the Northeast, 10.8 percent in the Midwest and 10.3 percent in the South.
The homes sales data is subjected to major revision as the statistics are estimated from sample surveys.
The National Association of Realtors is due to release data on January home resales on Tuesday.Sunday, February 26, 2006
SUPERGRANNY TO THE RESCUE!
Grandmother honoured for wrestling crocodile
SYDNEY (AFP) - An Australian grandmother was honoured with a bravery award for wrestling a giant saltwater crocodile as it dragged her friend from a tent.
Alicia Sorohan, 61, was awoken in the early hours of the morning of October 11, 2004 by the screams of family friend Andrew Kerr in a nearby tent at their campsite on the northern Cape York peninsular.
Seeing her friend in the jaws of a 4.2 metre (14-foot), 300 kilogram (660 pound) crocodile, Sorohan "did what anyone would do" and jumped on its back.
The man-eater then turned on her, breaking her nose and almost ripping her arm off before her son Jason shot it.
"It was pretty scary. But it's one of those things -- if you see someone in trouble you've got to help them," Sorohan said. "He was a big one. But I would do the same thing again."
She still does not have full movement in her arm, which was "hanging by a thread".
"I almost lost it. I've got two permanent plates and 12 screws in my arm. But I can do all I could do before -- where there's a will there's a way."
The family returned to the same campsite last October.
"Why not keep going back? There's risk everywhere. You could get run over by a bus if you walk across the road."
But, she added, "I was told to behave myself and protect the wildlife this time."
Sorohan was one of three people awarded Australia's Star of Courage, which recognises citizens for acts of outstanding bravery.Sunday, February 26, 2006
GOODNIGHT, BARNEY
Don Knotts, TV's Barney Fife, Dies at 81
LOS ANGELES, Associated Press - Don Knotts, who won TV immortality and five Emmys for playing the bumbling Deputy Barney Fife on "The Andy Griffith Show" with self-deprecating humor, was remembered by his friend and co-star as a comedic genius who wrote some of the show's best scenes.
"Don was a small man ... but everything else about him was large: his mind, his expressions," Griffith told The Associated Press on Saturday. "Don was special. There's nobody like him."
Knotts, 81, died Friday of pulmonary and respiratory complications at the University of California, Los Angeles Medical Center, said Sherwin Bash, his friend and manager.
His half-century career included more than 25 films and seven TV series, most notably playing the bug-eyed deputy who carried in his shirt pocket the one bullet he was allowed after shooting himself in the foot. The constant fumbling, a recurring sight gag, was typical of his self-deprecating humor.
The show ran from 1960-68, and was in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings each season, including a No. 1 ranking its final year. It is one of only three series in TV history to bow out at the top: The others are "I Love Lucy" and "Seinfeld." The 249 episodes have appeared frequently in reruns and spawned a large, active network of fan clubs.
Knotts, whose shy, soft-spoken manner was unlike his high-strung characters, once said he was most proud of the Fife character and didn't mind being remembered that way.
He also played the would-be swinger landlord Ralph Furley on "Three's Company," which he joined in 1979, and was an original cast member of "The Steve Allen Show," the comedy-variety show that ran from 1956-61.
Knotts' G-rated films were family fun, not box-office blockbusters. In most, he ends up the hero and gets the girl — a girl who can see through his nervousness to the heart of gold.
In the part-animated 1964 film "The Incredible Mr. Limpet," Knotts played a meek clerk who turns into a fish after he is rejected by the Navy.
In 1998, he had a key role in the back-to-the-past movie "Pleasantville," playing a folksy television repairman whose supercharged remote control sends a teen boy and his sister into a TV sitcom past.
The West Virginia native began his show biz career even before he graduated from high school, performing as a ventriloquist at local clubs and churches. He majored in speech at West Virginia University, then took off for the big city.
"I went to New York cold. On a $100 bill. Bummed a ride," he recalled in a visit to his hometown of Morgantown, where city officials renamed a street for him in 1998.
Within six months, Knotts had taken a job on a radio Western called "Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders," playing a wisecracking, know-it-all handyman. He stayed with it for five years before making his series TV debut on "The Steve Allen Show."
He married Kay Metz in 1948, the year he graduated from college. The couple had two children before divorcing in 1969. Knotts later married, then divorced Lara Lee Szuchna.
Knotts is survived by his wife of three years, Francey Yarborough, and two children, Karen and Thomas, from his first marriage.
___Friday, February 24, 2006
YOU MIGHT BE A FUNDIE IF...
Top Ten Signs You're a Fundamentalist Christian
10 - You vigorously deny the existence of thousands of gods claimed by other religions, but feel outraged when someone denies the existence of yours.
9 - You feel insulted and "dehumanized" when scientists say that people evolved from other life forms, but you have no problem with the Biblical claim that we were created from dirt.
8 - You laugh at polytheists, but you have no problem believing in a Triune God.
7 - Your face turns purple when you hear of the "atrocities" attributed to Allah, but you don't even flinch when hearing about how God/Jehovah slaughtered all the babies of Egypt in "Exodus" and ordered the elimination of entire ethnic groups in "Joshua" including women, children, and trees!
6 - You laugh at Hindu beliefs that deify humans, and Greek claims about gods sleeping with women, but you have no problem believing that the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary, who then gave birth to a man-god who got killed, came back to life and then ascended into the sky.
5 - You are willing to spend your life looking for little loopholes in the scientifically established age of Earth (few billion years), but you find nothing wrong with believing dates recorded by Bronze Age tribesmen sitting in their tents and guessing that Earth is a few generations old.
4 - You believe that the entire population of this planet with the exception of those who share your beliefs -- though excluding those in all rival sects - will spend Eternity in an infinite Hell of Suffering. And yet consider your religion the most "tolerant" and "loving."
3 - While modern science, history, geology, biology, and physics have failed to convince you otherwise, some idiot rolling around on the floor speaking in "tongues" may be all the evidence you need to "prove" Christianity.
2 - You define 0.01% as a "high success rate" when it comes to answered prayers. You consider that to be evidence that prayer works. And you think that the remaining 99.99% FAILURE was simply the will of God.
1 - You actually know a lot less than many atheists and agnostics do about the Bible, Christianity, and church history - but still call yourself a Christian.Thursday, February 23, 2006
SEQUOIA IS OWNED BY REPUBLICANS, LARGE CONTRIBUTORS TO GWB... WHAT A COINKY-DINK
Watchdog Group Questions 2004 Fla. Vote
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla., Associated Press - An examination of Palm Beach County's electronic voting machine records from the 2004 election found possible tampering and tens of thousands of malfunctions and errors, a watchdog group said Thursday.
Bev Harris, founder of BlackBoxVoting.org, said the findings call into question the outcome of the presidential race. But county officials and the maker of the electronic voting machines strongly disputed that and took issue with the findings.
Voting problems would have had to have been widespread across the state to make a difference. President Bush won Florida — and its 27 electoral votes — by 381,000 votes in 2004. Overall, he defeated John Kerry by 286 to 252 electoral votes, with 270 needed for victory.
BlackBoxVoting.org, which describes itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit citizens group, said it found 70,000 instances in Palm Beach County of cards getting stuck in the paperless ATM-like machines and that the computers logged about 100,000 errors, including memory failures.
Also, the hard drives crashed on some of the machines made by Oakland, Calif.-based Sequoia Voting Systems, some machines apparently had to be rebooted over and over, and 1,475 re-calibrations were performed on Election Day on more than 4,300 units, Harris said. Re-calibrations are done when a machine is malfunctioning, she said.
"I actually think there's enough votes in play in Florida that it's anybody's guess who actually won the presidential race," Harris added. "But with that said, there's no way to tell who the votes should have gone to."
Palm Beach County and other parts of the country switched to electronic equipment after the turbulent 2000 presidential election, when the county's butterfly ballot confused some voters and led them to cast their votes for third-party candidate Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore. The Supreme Court halted a recount after 36 days and handed a 537-vote victory to Bush.
Palm Beach County election officials said the BlackBoxVoting.com findings are flawed, and they blamed most of the errors on voters not following proper procedures.
"Their results are noteworthy for consideration, but in a majority of instances they can be explained," said Arthur Anderson, the county's elections supervisor. "All of these circumstances are valid reasons for concern, but they do not on face value substantiate that the machines are not reliable."
Sequoia spokeswoman Michelle Shafer disputed the findings, saying the company's machines worked properly. Sequoia's machines are used in five Florida counties and in 21 states.
"There was a fine election in November 2004," Shafer said.
She said many of the errors in the computer logs could have resulted from voters improperly inserting their user cards into the machines. The remaining errors would not affect the vote results because each unit has a backup system, she said.
Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of State, which oversees elections, said she was not aware of the report and had no comment.
Harris said one machine showed that 112 votes were cast on Oct. 16, two days before the start of early voting, a possible sign of tampering. She said the group found evidence of tampering on more than 30 machines in the county.
However, Harris said it was impossible to determine what information was altered or if votes were shifted among candidates.Thursday, February 23, 2006
LUV THAT KINKY FRIEDMAN
I swear, does anyone else hear South Park's Cartman in their head?
They Ain't Makin Jews Like Jesus
by Kinky Friedman
Well, a redneck nerd in a bowling shirt was a-guzzlin’ Lone Star beer
Talking religion and-uh politics for all the world to hear.
“They oughta send you back to Russia, boy, or New York City one,
You just want to doodle a Christian girl and you killed God’s only son.”
I said, “Has it occurred to you, you nerd, that that’s not very nice,
We Jews believe it was Santa Claus that killed Jesus Christ!”
“You know, you don’t look Jewish,” he said, “near as I could figger
I had you lamped for a slightly anemic, well-dressed country nigger.”
No, they ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore,
They don’t turn the other cheek the way they done before.
He started in to shoutin’ and spittin’ on the floor,
Lord, they ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore.
He says, “I ain’t a racist but Aristitle Onassis is one Greek we don’t need,
And them niggers, Jews and Sigma Nus, all they ever do is breed.
And wops ‘n micks ‘n slopes ‘n spics ‘n spooks are on my list —
And there’s one little hebe from the heart of Texas — is there anyone I missed ?”
Well, I hits him with everything I had right square between the eyes.
I says, “I’m gonna gitcha, you son of a bitch ya, for spoutin’ that pack of lies.
If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s an ethnocentric racist;
Now you take back that thing you said ’bout Aristitle Onassis.”
No, they ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore,
We don’t turn the other cheek the way we done before.
You could hear that honky holler as he hit that hardwood floor,
Lord, they ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore.
Wichita!
No, they ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore,
They ain’t making carpenters who know what nails are for.
Well, the whole damn place was singin’ as I strolled right out the door
Lord ..........
They ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore.
Thank you very much.
------------
Kinky Friedman for Governor of Texas!Thursday, February 23, 2006
START PUMMELING
Dubious About Dubai: Cutting to the Heart of Bush's National Security Hypocrisy
by Arianna Huffington
Getting dressed this morning with C-SPAN in the background, I heard -- only half-paying attention -- someone vehemently criticizing the White House's approval of the ports deal and vowing to return to Washington to demand accountability from the administration.
Glancing up, I was stunned to see that the man doing the talking was Rep. Vito Fossella (news, bio, voting record) of New York, with an (R) next to his name.
Indeed, the more I've watched and read about this jaw-droppingly bad decision, the more (R)s I've seen taking on the president.
"In regards to selling American ports to the United Arab Emirates," wrote Rep. Sue Myrick in a letter to the president, "not just NO -- but HELL NO."
"I will fight harder than ever for this legislation [to stop the port deal]," promised Rep. Pete King, chairman of the
Homeland Security Committee, "and if it is vetoed I will fight as hard as I can to override it."
Among the GOP officeholders joining King and Myrick at the port deal barricades are Bill Frist, Dennis Hastert, George Pataki, Michael Bloomberg, Susan Collins, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and Tom Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Campaign Committee -- who clearly knows a losing issue when he sees one. Conservative commentators John Kasich, Cal Thomas, Hugh Hewitt, and conservative national security analysts Michael Ledeen and Frank Gaffney have also denounced the deal.
It's been getting harder and harder to tell the (R)s from the (D)s on a growing number of issues, including
Iraq, the drug war, and the fight to cut pork-barrel spending. But the dubious Dubai deal has the potential to be the most division-blurring of all -- and the most damaging to Karl Rove's dreams of turning 2006 into a replay of 2004.
Bush's reputation as the Great Protector who will do anything -- anything! -- to keep us safe, even if it means torturing, spying, and trashing the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, is his one remaining political asset. And putting six of our major ports under the control of the United Arab Emirates threatens to undermine this rep in an irreparable way.
You don't need to be a member of the Council on Foreign Relations to grasp that a country that embraced the Taliban, was a financial hub for the 9/11 attackers, and whose own ports were used by notorious Pakistani scientist A.Q. Kahn to smuggle nuclear components to Iran, Libya, and North Korea, probably shouldn't be handed the keys to shipping operations in New York, New Jersey, Miami, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New Orleans (I mean, c'mon, haven't Bush and Chertoff done enough damage to the Big Easy?).
This deal is a nonstarter and a no-brainer. A Harriet Miers debacle to the hundredth- power. Next thing you know, the president will be assuring us that he knows what's in the heart of Dubai Ports World, Inc.
But instead of pulling back from the deal and hurriedly looking for the port operations equivalent of Sam Alito, the president stomped his feet, held his breath, and stuck out his veto.
Bush hasn't vetoed a single bill in five years. Turns out his line in the sand can be found in the deserts of the UAE.
Here are just some of the questions that need to be answered: Why was it approved in little more than half the 45-days mandated by Congress? Why didn't the president find out about the deal until it was already done? Why wasn't Congress briefed about the transaction before it was approved? What role did the corporate connections of Treasury Secretary Snow and newly appointed Maritime Administration head David Sanborn play in winning the White House's backing? Was the deal tied to the pending trade agreement the administration is negotiating with the UAE?
The most significant aspect of the port controversy is the spotlight it turns on the White House's hypocrisy on national security. Just look at what Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had to say: "We have to balance the paramount urgency of security against the fact that we still want to have a robust global trading system."
That says all you need to know about the perverted priorities of the Bush White House. Four and a half years after 9/11, our ports remain shockingly vulnerable to terrorist attacks, with about five percent of cargo given security screenings. Our chemical and nuclear plants are similarly susceptible. And the guy in charge of Homeland Security is more worried about chilling the international business climate than keeping us safe. So fighting the global war on terror needs to be "balanced" with a robust bottom line?
Is the business of America still business -- even for those touting their "post-9/11 worldview"?
For a long time now, I've been urging Democrats to relentlessly take on the president on national security. Well, he's just handed them the Mother of All National Security Cudgels.
Start pummeling ... before the GOP rebellion beats you to the punch.Thursday, February 23, 2006
THE VANISHING MIDDLE CLASS
Average American Family Income Declines
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The average income of American families, after adjusting for inflation, declined by 2.3 percent in 2004 compared to 2001 while their net worth rose but at a slower pace.
ADVERTISEMENT
The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that the drop in inflation-adjusted incomes left the average family income at $70,700 in 2004. The median, or point where half the families earned more and half less, did rise slightly in 2004 after adjusting for inflation to $43,200, up 1.6 percent from the 2001 level.
The median, or midpoint for net worth rose by 1.5 percent to $93,100 from 2001 to 2004. That growth was far below the 10.3 percent gain in median net worth from 1998 to 2001, a period when the stock market reached record highs before starting to decline in early 2000.
The Fed's results were published in the 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances, a document which provides a comprehensive view of how Americans are faring on such pocketbook issues as incomes and net worth.Wednesday, February 22, 2006
YOUR LIFE IS NOT YOUR OWN
'Big Brother' watching e-mail, computer data: US report
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Fast-evolving Internet and communications technology is outpacing privacy laws and leaving a treasure trove of personal data prey to government surveillance, a new report warned.
The survey by the non-profit Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) appeared as debate rages over a domestic wiretap program in the United States and government lawyers demand search records held by firms like Google.
"The gap between law and technology is widening every day, and privacy is eroding," said Jim Dempsey, the CDT policy director who authored the report.
"What makes this even more troubling is that most users of these new technologies don't realize they are putting their privacy in jeopardy."
Modern consumers live in an age when web based e-mails pileup on services like Microsoft's Hotmail and Google's Gmail, and all kinds of files from personal photos to bank, medical and travel records are stored online.
Few computer users realise however, that web based e-mail is subject to much weaker protections than messages stored on home computers.
While the government needs a warrant, issued by a judge, to search someone's home computer, it can access a person's webmail account with only a subpoena, issued without judicial review.
In another example, the ubiquitous cellphone makes communication on the move easy -- but it has a downside, in that it can be used theoretically by government agencies to pinpoint an individual's location.
There are no existing laws laying out explicit standards for government location tracking, so official use of such technology is only controlled by an inadequate patchwork of laws and precedents, the report said.
Few people realise that privacy laws drafted before, or in the early days of the technological revolution, do not adequately cover new vaults of online data, the report warns.
"The government complains that new technology makes its job more difficult, but the fact is that digital technology has vastly augmented the government's powers," the report cautions.
"More information is more readily available to government investigators than ever before," the report said.
And it is not just the pace of change that raises new privacy questions, the report added, citing new government powers enshrined in the Patriot Act, designed to combat terrorism which provide wider government powers.Wednesday, February 22, 2006
KEEP PISSING OFF YOUR BUDDIES
Bush Port Defiance Fuels Bipartisan Anger
WASHINGTON, Associated Press -
President Bush's marquee issue, the war on terror, is being turned against him by Democrats and rebelling members of his own party in an election-year dustup over a deal that allows an Arab company to manage major U.S. ports.
People in both parties are suggesting it's another case of Bush seeming to be tone deaf to controversy — on top of government eavesdropping, Katrina recovery and Vice President Dick Cheney's hunting accident.
The storm is forcing the president to choose between losing face with the Arab world and embarking on what would be his first veto battle with the GOP-led Congress. And it has enabled Democrats to seemingly outflank him on a key GOP issue: national security.
Has Bush lost his way politically — or at least his touch?
"In regards to selling American ports to the United Arab Emirates, not just NO — but HELL NO," conservative Rep. Sue Myrick (news, bio, voting record), R-N.C., wrote Bush in a terse letter on Wednesday that she also posted on her Web site.
No matter that no American port is actually being sold, Bush faces a spreading rebellion among Republicans, Democrats and port-state governors.
"I think somebody dropped the ball. Information should have flowed more freely and more quickly up into the White House. I think it has been mishandled in terms of coming forward with adequate information," said Rep. Vito Fossella (news, bio, voting record), R-N.Y.
At issue: Bush's strong defense of an arrangement that would put a government-owned United Arab Emirates company in charge of major shipping operations in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.
The deal transferring port management from a British firm to Dubai Ports World has already been approved by both companies and an administration review panel.
Despite Bush's assertion that UAE has been one of the most helpful Arab countries in the war on terror, both Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee and House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois threatened legislation to put the deal on hold. Bush, in turn, vowed to cast his first veto — if necessary — to stop any such attempt.
"It's a strange thing for Bush to have slipped into, given the savvy you expected from this administration, with a vice president who spent over a decade on Capitol Hill," said Princeton University political scientist Fred Greenstein. "It seems as if his people would have seen that there was potential for trouble, and at least done their homework on the Hill."
Although a veto showdown could still be avoided, port-deal opponents were optimistic they could muster the two-thirds majorities needed to override one. "This deal doesn't pass the national security test. I think it is a mistake," said Rep. Jim Saxton (news, bio, voting record), R-N.J., chairman of a House subcommittee on terrorism threats.
Bush learned about the arrangement himself only in recent days amid increasing news coverage, said presidential spokesman Scott McClellan.
While Bush had struck a defiant tone on Tuesday in back-to-back sessions with reporters on Air Force One and outside the White House, McClellan on Wednesday acknowledged Congress should have been briefed earlier "given all the attention that has been focused on this and given the fact that it has been mischaracterized."
The phrase "tone deaf" to describe Bush's interaction with Congress was uttered by lawmakers as politically different as Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joseph Biden, D-Del.
The Dubai Ports deal "is not a national security issue," suggested GOP consultant Rich Galen. "It is an issue of this administration having a continuing problem with understanding how these things will play in the public's mind and not taking steps to set the stage so these things don't come as a shock and are presented in their worst possible light."
With Bush's ratings stuck at about 40 percent, the incident is one more major distraction to his efforts to focus on his second-term domestic agenda.
Syndicated radio host Laura Ingraham was among the conservatives criticizing the deal, asking on her Wednesday program, "How do we know people they're hiring are passing background checks?"
The dispute brought to mind a 1999 flap when conservatives admonished the Clinton administration for acquiescing on Panama's awarding of a contract to a China company, Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa Ltd., to run ports at both ends of the Panama Canal.
But then, almost all the criticism was from Republicans. Now, it's bipartisan.
"I think there are certain things you have to be really worried about. And one of them is port safety," said Robert O. Boorstein, a senior national security aide in the Clinton White House.
"You have to call it an incredible tin ear that this administration could do that, with nobody stopping and saying, `excuse me?' said Boorstein, now with the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.Wednesday, February 22, 2006
WHO THE HELL IS DRIVING THIS GODDAMN BUS?
Arab Co., White House Had Secret Agreement
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The Bush administration secretly required a company in the United Arab Emirates to cooperate with future U.S. investigations before approving its takeover of operations at six American ports, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. It chose not to impose other, routine restrictions.
As part of the $6.8 billion purchase, state-owned Dubai Ports World agreed to reveal records on demand about "foreign operational direction" of its business at U.S. ports, the documents said. Those records broadly include details about the design, maintenance or operation of ports and equipment.
The administration did not require Dubai Ports to keep copies of business records on U.S. soil, where they would be subject to court orders. It also did not require the company to designate an American citizen to accommodate U.S. government requests. Outside legal experts said such obligations are routinely attached to U.S. approvals of foreign sales in other industries.
"They're not lax but they're not draconian," said James Lewis, a former U.S. official who worked on such agreements. If officials had predicted the firestorm of criticism over the deal, Lewis said, "they might have made them sound harder."
The conditions involving the sale of London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. were detailed in U.S. documents marked "confidential." Such records are regularly guarded as trade secrets, and it is highly unusual for them to be made public.
The concessions — described previously by the Homeland Security Department as unprecedented among maritime companies — reflect the close relationship between the United States and the United Arab Emirates.
The revelations about the negotiated conditions came as the White House acknowledged President Bush was unaware of the pending sale until the deal had already been approved by his administration.
Bush on Tuesday brushed aside objections by leaders in the Senate and House. He pledged to veto any bill Congress might approve to block the agreement, but some lawmakers said they still were determined to capsize it.
Dubai Port's top American executive, chief operating officer Edward H. Bilkey, said the company will do whatever the Bush administration asks to enhance shipping security and ensure the sale goes through. Bilkey said Wednesday he will work in Washington to persuade skeptical lawmakers they should endorse the deal; Senate oversight hearings already are scheduled.
"We're disappointed," Bilkey told the AP in an interview. "We're going to do our best to persuade them that they jumped the gun. The UAE is a very solid friend, as President Bush has said."
Under the deal, the government asked Dubai Ports to operate American seaports with existing U.S. managers "to the extent possible." It promised to take "all reasonable steps" to assist the Homeland Security Department, and it pledged to continue participating in security programs to stop smuggling and detect illegal shipments of nuclear materials.
The administration required Dubai Ports to designate an executive to handle requests from the U.S. government, but it did not specify this person's citizenship.
It said Dubai Ports must retain paperwork "in the normal course of business" but did not specify a time period or require corporate records to be housed in the United States. Outside experts familiar with such agreements said such provisions are routine in other cases.
Bush faces a potential rebellion from leaders of his own party, as well as a fight from Democrats, over the sale. It puts Dubai Ports in charge of major terminal operations in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.
Senate and House leaders urged the president to delay the takeover, which is set to be finalized in early March. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee said the deal raised "serious questions regarding the safety and security of our homeland." House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., asked the president for a moratorium on the sale until it could be studied further.
In Saudi Arabia, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the agreement was thoroughly vetted. "We have to maintain a principle that it doesn't matter where in the world one of these purchases is coming from," Rice said Wednesday. She described the United Arab Emirates as "a good partner in the war on terrorism."
Bush personally defended the agreement on Tuesday, but the White House said he did not know about it until recently. The AP first reported the U.S. approval of the sale to Dubai Ports on Feb. 11, and many members of Congress have said they learned about it from the AP.
"I think somebody dropped the ball," said Rep. Vito Fossella (news, bio, voting record), R-N.Y. "Information should have flowed more freely and more quickly up into the White House. I think it has been mishandled in terms of coming forward with adequate information."
At the White House, spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush learned about the deal "over the last several days," as congressional criticism escalated. McClellan said it did not rise to the presidential level, but went through a government review and was determined not to pose a threat.
McClellan said Bush afterward asked the head of every U.S. department involved in approving the sale whether there were security concerns. "Each and every one expressed that they were comfortable with this transaction going forward," he said.
Commerce Secretary Carlos Guiterrez told the AP the administration was being thoughtful and deliberate approving the sale.
"We are not reacting emotionally," Guiterrez said in an interview Wednesday. "That's what I believe our partners from around the world would like to see from us is that we be thoughtful. That we be deliberate. That we understand issues before we make a decision."Wednesday, February 22, 2006
NATIONAL SECURITY, UNCLE AL-SAUD, AND NONE THE WISER
Bush Didn't Learn of Port Deal Until After Approval
Feb. 22 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush didn't learn about the sale of six major U.S. port facilities to a Dubai company until after the deal was completed and a federal review was finished.
Bush was made aware of the $6.8 billion sale of London- based Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co. to DP World, a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates in the past few days, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. By that time congressional opposition already was bubbling up.
``This didn't rise to the presidential level,'' McClellan said today at the White House.
The president checked with his Cabinet secretaries to see if there were any concerns, and there were none, McClellan said. The president yesterday defended the deal in the face of opposition from Democrats and Republicans and threatened to exercise his first veto on any legislation that would block the transfer.
McClellan also acknowledged that the administration erred in not informing lawmakers about details of the transaction.
``We should have, despite the significant number of transactions that go through this process each year, this is one where we probably should have consulted with, or briefed Congress on, sooner,'' he said.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
SO... WHAT CAUSES DYKES?
Moms' Genetics Might Help Produce Gay Sons
TUESDAY, Feb. 21 (HealthDay News) -- New research adds a twist to the debate on the origins of sexual orientation, suggesting that the genetics of mothers of multiple gay sons act differently than those of other women.
Scientists found that almost one fourth of the mothers who had more than one gay son processed X chromosomes in their bodies in the same way. Normally, women randomly process the chromosomes in one of two ways -- half go one way, half go the other.
The research "confirms that there is a strong genetic basis for sexual orientation, and that for some gay men, genes on the X chromosome are involved," said study co-author Sven Bocklandt, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles.
The link between genetics and sexual orientation has been a hot topic for more than a decade as a few scientists have tried to find genes that might make people gay or straight. In the new study, Bocklandt and colleagues examined a phenomenon called "X-chromosome inactivation."
While females have two X chromosomes, they actually require only one and routinely inactivate the other, Bocklandt said. "That way, both men and women have basically one functional X chromosome," he added. Men have both an X and Y chromosome, but the Y chromosome plays a much smaller role, he said.
Women typically inactivate one of their two X chromosomes at random. "It's like flipping a coin," Bocklandt said. "If you look at a woman in any given (bodily) tissue, you'd expect about half of the cells to inactivate one X, and half would inactivate the other."
In the new study, researchers looked at 97 mothers of gay sons and 103 mothers without gay sons to see if there was any difference in how they handled their X chromosomes. The findings appear in the February issue of the journal Human Genetics.
"When we looked at women who have gay kids, in those with more than one gay son, we saw a quarter of them inactivate the same X in virtually every cell we checked," Bocklandt said. "That's extremely unusual."
Forty-four of the women had more than one gay son.
In contrast, 4 percent of mothers with no gay sons activated the chromosome and 13 percent of those with just one gay son did.
The phenomenon of being more likely to inactivate one X chromosome -- known as "extreme skewing" -- is typically seen only in families that have major genetic irregularities, Bocklandt said.
What does this all mean? The researchers aren't sure, but Bocklandt thinks he and his colleagues are moving closer to understanding the origins of sexual orientation.
"What's really remarkable and very novel about this is that you see something in the bodies of women that is linked to a behavioral trait in their sons," he said. "That's new, that's unheard of."
Still, there are caveats. Dr. Ionel Sandovici, a genetics researcher at The Babraham Institute in Cambridge, England, pointed out that most of the mothers of multiple gay sons didn't share the unusual X-chromosome trait. And the study itself is small, which means more research will need to be done to confirm its findings, Sandovici said.
Ultimately, Sandovici added, the origins of sexual orientation remain "rather a complicated biological puzzle."
And this line of research does have its critics. Some have worried that, in the future, manipulation of a "gay gene" or genes might be used as a method of preventing homosexuality in utero, or perhaps even after. But Bocklandt said these kinds of fears shouldn't stand in the way of legitimate scientific research.
"We're trying to understand one of the most critical human traits: the ability to love and be attracted to others. Without sexual reproduction we would not exist, and sexual selection played an essential role in evolution," he said. "Yet, we have no idea how it works, and that's what we're trying to find out. As with any research, the knowledge you acquire could be used for benefit or harm. But if [scientists] would have avoided research because we were afraid of what we were going to find, then we would still be living in the stone age."
-------
More information
Learn about the debate over a "gay gene" from the PBS' Frontline.Tuesday, February 21, 2006
THE LYING LIAR ENERGY DOG-N-PONY SHOW
Bush Blames Cuts at Energy Lab on Mix-Up
GOLDEN, Colo., Associated Press - President Bush on Tuesday acknowledged that Washington has sent "mixed signals" to one of the nation's premiere labs studying renewable energies — by first laying off, then reinstating, 32 workers just before his visit.
The president blamed the conflicting message on an appropriations mix-up in funding the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is developing the very renewable energy technologies the president is promoting.
"I recognize that there has been some interesting — let me say — mixed signals when it comes to funding," Bush said. "The issue, of course, is whether good intentions are met with actual dollars spent.
"Part of the issue we face, unfortunately, is that sometimes decisions made as the result of the appropriations process, may not end going to where it was supposed to have gone.
"We want you to know how important your work is," he said. "We appreciate what you're doing."
Two weeks ago, 32 workers, including eight researchers, were laid off at the lab.
Then, over the weekend, just before Bush's planned visit, the government restored the jobs.
His trip to the renewable energy laboratory is part of a two-day, three-state trip to promote the energy proposals Bush outlined in his State of the Union address.
At the direction of Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, $5 million was transferred to the Midwest Research Institute, the operating contractor for the lab, to get the workers back on the job, the Energy Department announced Monday.
Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, said the decision restores only $5 million of the $28 million budget shortfall at the lab that forced the layoffs.
"The $5 million stopped the bodies from going out the door, but it doesn't provide the money for the (renewable energy) programs," Clapp said.
At the lab, where Bush was holding a panel discussion of his energy initiatives, the president saw tanks where agricultural waste is fermented into ethanol. He was shown samples of polar, switchgrass and corn stalks — material the lab is studying in hopes of developing a cost-effective way to use it to make ethanol.
"You're doing great work here," said Bush, who picked up a bottle of clear-colored ethanol and smelled it.
The president has proposed a 22 percent increase in funding for clean-energy technology research at the Energy Department. He wants to change the way the nation fuels its vehicles and powers homes and businesses by focusing on nuclear, solar and wind power as well as better batteries to power hybrid-electric autos.
In 1985, three-quarters of the crude oil used in U.S. refineries came from America, Bush said Monday at a stop in Milwaukee at Johnson Controls, which is developing advanced batteries for hybrid-electric autos. Today, less than half the crude oil used in U.S. refineries is produced in America, while 60 percent comes from foreign countries, he said.
"Some of the nations we rely on for oil have unstable governments, or fundamental differences with the United States," Bush said. "These countries know we need their oil and that reduces influence. It creates a national security issue when we're held hostage for energy by foreign nations that may not like us."
Lab employee Tina Larney said that even though the jobs are being reinstated, she still questions the government's resolve in finding alternative energy sources.
"There is technology available now, there is the know-how now," Larney said. "What is lacking is leadership on the large scale at the national level."
The White House says Bush is providing that leadership. They say he wants to invest more in zero-emission, coal-fired plants, as well as support solar and wind research, promote cars that run on hydrogen, encourage more nuclear power plant construction and fund work to produce ethanol — not just from corn, but from wood chips and switch grass.
Critics of the Bush administration are skeptical of Bush's energy proposals.
Rep. Mark Udall (news, bio, voting record), D-Colo., co-chairman of the House Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus, said the government has funded only one-third of the money the 2005 energy bill authorized for renewable energy and energy efficiency.
Clapp claims the president is promoting renewables because polls show his job approval numbers are being weighed down by Americans' concerns about high utility bills this winter and the cost of gasoline at the pump.Monday, February 20, 2006
WITH AS MUCH HOT AIR AS THIS GASBAG PUTS OUT, YOU COULD HEAT THE EASTERN SEABOARD
Bush: U.S. on Verge of Energy Breakthrough
MILWAUKEE, Associated Press - Saying the nation is on the verge of technological breakthroughs that would "startle" most Americans, President Bush on Monday outlined his energy proposals to help wean the country off foreign oil.
Less than half the crude oil used by refineries is produced in the United States, while 60 percent comes from foreign nations, Bush said during the first stop on a two-day trip to talk about energy.
Some of these foreign suppliers have "unstable" governments that have fundamental differences with America, he said.
"It creates a national security issue and we're held hostage for energy by foreign nations that may not like us," Bush said.
Bush is focusing on energy at a time when Americans are paying high power bills to heat their homes this winter and have only recently seen a decrease in gasoline prices.
One of Bush's proposals would expand research into smaller, longer-lasting batteries for electric-gas hybrid cars, including plug-ins. He highlighted that initiative with a visit Monday to the battery center at Milwaukee-based auto-parts supplier Johnson Controls Inc.
During his trip, Bush is also focusing on a proposal to increase investment in development of clean electric power sources, and proposals to speed the development of biofuels such as "cellulosic" ethanol made from wood chips or sawgrass.
Energy conservation groups and environmentalists say they're pleased that the president, a former oil man in Texas, is stressing alternative sources of energy, but they contend his proposals don't go far enough. They say the administration must consider greater fuel-efficiency standards for cars, and some economists believe it's best to increase the gas tax to force consumers to change their driving habits.
During his visit to Johnson Controls' new hybrid battery laboratory, Bush checked out two Ford Escapes — one with a nickel-metal-hybrid battery, the kind that powers most hybrid-electric vehicles, and one with a lithium-ion battery, which Johnson Controls believes are the wave of the future. The lithium-ion battery was about half the size of the older-model battery. In 2004, Johnson Controls received a government contract to develop the lithium-ion batteries.
On Tuesday, Bush plans to visit the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., to talk about speeding the development of biofuels.
The lab, with a looming $28 million budget shortfall, had announced it was cutting its staff by 32 people, including eight researchers. But in advance of Bush's visit, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman over the weekend directed the transfer of $5 million to the private contractor that runs the lab, so the jobs can be saved.
The department "has been informed that the NREL lab director will use these funds to immediately restore all of the jobs that were cut earlier this month due to budget shortfalls," the department said in a statement Monday.
"Our nation is on the threshold of new energy technology that I think will startle the American people," Bush said. "We're on the edge of some amazing breakthroughs — breakthroughs all aimed at enhancing our national security and our economic security and the quality of life of the folks who live here in the United States."
Later Monday, Bush visited the United Solar Ovonic plant, which makes solar panels, in Auburn Hills, Mich., outside Detroit. "This technology right here is going to help us change the way we live in our homes," Bush told reporters.
Bush said he was impressed with the growing commercial uses of solar energy.
"Roof makers will one day be able to make a solar roof that protects you from the elements and at the same time, powers your house," Bush said. "The vision is this — that technology will become so efficient that you'll become a little power generator in your home, and if you don't use the energy you generate you'll be able to feed it back into the electricity grid."
Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., questioned Bush's energy policies Monday, saying the administration also supports subsidies for luxury SUVs.
"This single tax subsidy dwarfs anything being done for hybrid batteries," Markey said in a news release.
As a complement to Bush's travels, six Cabinet officials are crisscrossing the nation this week, appearing at more than two dozen energy events in more than a dozen states.Sunday, February 19, 2006
SHOULD HAVE LEFT IT ALL VEGGIES AND COWS
Posting this now so that when it happens, nobody can say "no one could have foreseen that"...
Scientists say California quake could cause Katrina II
ST LOUIS, Missouri (AFP) - Many densely populated US regions face the threat of flooding as disastrous as after Hurricane Katrina, due to urban spread into river floodplains, scientists warn.
An earthquake or even a moderate flood could destroy the levee system protecting towns and cities along the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers in northern California, said Jeffrey Mount of the University of California.
"The probability of a catastrophic levee failure in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in the next 50 years is two in three," Mount said on the sidelines of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual conference.
Mount gave a worrying presentation to the conference entitled "The Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta: the next New Orleans?"
He said one of the frequent earthquakes in California could destroy the levee system that has been built up since the middle of the 19th century, sending flood water over a wide area.
Mount said it could have a similar impact to the Asian tsunami in 2004.
The Sacramento-San Joaquin delta takes more than 40 percent of California's rainfall and covers some 280,000 hectares (700,000 acres). It is the main source of water for about 23 million people, of California's 34 million population.
But most of the land is below sea level and is protected by more than 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) of levees.
Another 5,600 hectare (14,000 acre) zone around St. Louis in Missouri faces a similar threat from the Mississippi river, according to Adolphus Busch, head of the Great Rivers Habitat Alliances.
Busch, a member of the Anheuser-Busch brewing family, said there had been excessive urbanisation in the zone despite major floods in 1993.
He said the housing and development had drastically reduced alluvial grounds that normally sponge up flood waters.
Nicholas Pinter of the University of Southern Illinois said that efforts to protect St Louis against flooding ultimately had increased the risks.
Eighty-five percent of the Mississippi is now held back by levees and the level of the river has risen by four metres (13 feet) since the start of the century, he said.
The situation is now similar to New Orleans, which was devastated last year after Hurricane Katrina smashed it water defences, and in the Sacramento region.
"In spite of 70 years of federal flood control efforts and nearly 40 years of federal flood insurance, the costs of flooding continue to rise and there is no federal policy to provide direction for future actions," said Gerald Galloway, an engineering professor at the University of Maryland.
Galloway said that development had to be restricted in risk zones and water defences had to be strengthened as the authorities in the Netherlands have done since disastrous flooding there.
"If we knew about Katrina 200 years ago, would we have done the same thing again in New Orleans?" Mount asked. "Well, in California we are reinventing our own Katrina as we speak."
Developers want to build 130,000 new homes near the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in the Central Valley, Mount said. Further north, Sacramento stands as one of the most at-risk for flooding among large metropolitan areas in the United States because of its location near rivers and the condition of its levees, he said.
Greater rainfall linked to global warming will only increase the risk of catastrophic flooding, according to Anthony Arquez, an expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.Sunday, February 19, 2006
PHONING E.T.
Looking for other Earths? Here’s a list
Astronomer provides top prospects for planet-hunters and SETI search
(NASA/DSS - Tau Ceti, seen here in an image from the Digital Sky Survey, is considered among the top prospects in the planet search. It's also a frequent setting for science-fiction tales.)
ST. LOUIS - An astronomer involved in a NASA mission to look for Earthlike planets beyond our solar system has winnowed through thousands of stars to come up with a top-10 list that includes some of the favorite haunts for science-fiction aliens.
Actually, the lineup from Margaret Turnbull at the Carnegie Institute of Washington is broken down into two top-five lists: one for the radio-based search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, and the other for the NASA mission, known as the Terrestrial Planet Finder.
The SETI stars will be on the list of targets for the privately funded Allen Telescope Array in California, which is due to begin limited operation with 42 linked radio dishes this spring. But the top prospects for the Terrestrial Planet Finder are currently in limbo, because NASA has put the mission on indefinite hold.
"It's all but shelved at this point ... pretty much all the research we've talked about is in peril," Turnbull said Saturday during a news briefing on astrobiology, conducted in St. Louis at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Jill Tarter of the California-based SETI Institute said NASA's budget proposal, released this month, would cut funding for astrobiology research by 50 percent. She and the other astronomers at Saturday's session called on Congress to restore funding.
Tarter and her colleagues were particularly concerned about the fate of the Terrestrial Planet Finder, or TPF, and a precursor planet-hunting mission called SIM PlanetQuest. This month's budget proposal would delay SIM's launch until 2015 at the earliest. TPF, which had been set for launch around 2016, has been deferred indefinitely.
"We are facing an increasingly difficult financial threat," Tarter said. Although NASA's official view is that research is being deferred rather than canceled, she said "we are all finite in our lives and our careers. ... Significant delay is in fact cancellation."
Crowd-pleasing corner
Although the search for other Earths and other civilizations is a small and highly speculative corner of astronomical research, it's also arguably the most crowd-pleasing corner. Tarter herself served as the model for the main character in the late astronomer Carl Sagan's best-selling novel "Contact," which was made into a movie starring Jodie Foster. If astrobiologists had a nickel for every time aliens cropped up in popular culture ... well, they wouldn't need to depend on NASA funding.
Turnbull's list serves as a device for targeting the search as well as focusing the imagination. She started out with a database of 19,000 stars surrounded by "habitable zones" where life could conceivably survive. Then she zeroed in on stable stars that were at least 3 billion years old, with masses no more than 1.5 times that of our own sun.
The stars also had to have at least 50 percent of the sun's iron content, because astronomers believe that stellar systems need a minimum of heavy elements in order for planets to form.
"These are places I'd want to live if God were to put our planet around another star," she explained. The list for the SETI search includes:
* Beta Canum Venaticorum, Turnbull's top prospect. It's a sunlike star about 26 light-years away in the northern constellation Canes Venatici. Astronomers have been looking for planets around the star but have found none to date.
* HD 10307, another sunlike star about 42 light-years away. It has nearly the same mass, temperature and metal content as our sun — plus a companion star.
* HD 211415, which has about half the metal content of the sun and is a bit cooler.
* 18 Scorpii, a popular target for proposed planet searches. The star is almost an identical twin of the sun, Turnbull says.
* 51 Pegasus, which was the first normal star beyond our solar system known to have a planet. The Jupiterlike planet was detected in 1995, and Turnbull believes 51 Pegasus could harbor Earthlike planets as well.
Tarter said her institute's Project Phoenix had already made an initial check of all five stars, and found nothing. However, when the Allen Telescope Array is on the case, it will be able to look for signals over "three times the frequency range that we looked at before," she said.
Not too dim, not too bright
Turnbull said the top five prospects for the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission were chosen a bit differently, because the TPF's instruments would look for the signature of planets circling around the target stars. The star couldn't be too bright — otherwise the planets themselves would be lost in the star's glare. It couldn't be too dim — otherwise there wouldn't be enough energy to sustain life as we know it. Here are the TPF prospects she came up with:
* Epsilon Indi A, about 11.8 light-years from Earth, leads Turnbull's list. It's a star somewhat cooler and smaller than our sun, and was recently found to have a brown-dwarf companion. "Star Trek" fans consider it the home of the Andorian race. In the original "Star Trek" series, it was the base of operations for an evil entity called "Gorkon."
* Epsilon Eridani, 10.5 light-years away, is a star somewhat smaller and cooler than our sun, and is already known to have at least one planet. By some science-fiction accounts, Epsilon Eridani is the parent star for Vulcan, Mr. Spock's home planet on "Star Trek." However, Trekkers have come to favor another star in the same constellation....
* Omicron 2 Eridani, also known as 40 Eridani, is now cited in most "Star Trek" literature as Mr. Spock's home turf. It's a yellow-orange star about 16 light-years away, and is roughly the same age as our sun.
* Alpha Centauri B is part of the triple-star system closest to our own sun, just 4.35 light-years away. It's long been considered one of the places in the Milky Way that might offer terrestrial conditions — and it's often cited in science-fiction tales, including Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.
* Tau Ceti is in the same brightness category as our sun. It's metal-poor, compared to the sun, but long-lived enough for life forms to evolve. It has also served as a locale for science-fiction works ranging from Ursula Le Guin's "The Dispossessed" to the TV show "Earth: Final Conflict."
"If TPF is not canceled, these are the places where we will search," Turnbull said. Assuming that the TPF is eventually funded, the instrument should be able to check as few as 10 or as many as 150 stars in the course of its mission, depending on how extensively NASA wants to study each star, she said.
And if TPF is canceled, it still may be possible to do the search with a different kind of space interferometer called Darwin, which is due to be launched by the European Space Agency in 2015 or later. If it came to that, Turnbull said her criteria could be adjusted to fit Darwin's specifications instead of TPF's.Sunday, February 19, 2006
THIS IS WHAT DECADES OF UNITED STATES IMPERIALISM ACTUALLY ACOMPLISHES
Danish cartoons is the excuse. Hearts and minds, anyone?
Muslims Assault U.S. Embassy in Indonesia
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Associated Press - Hundreds of Muslims protesting caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad tried to storm the U.S. Embassy on Sunday, smashing the windows of a guard post but failing to push through the gates. Several people were injured.
Pakistani security forces, meanwhile, sealed off the capital of Islamabad to block a planned mass demonstration and fired tear gas and gunshots to chase off protesters. In Turkey, tens of thousands gathered in Istanbul chanting slogans against Denmark, Israel and the United States.
Protests over the cartoons, which first appeared in a Danish newspaper in September and have been republished in other European publications and elsewhere, have swept across the Muslim world, growing into mass outlets for rage against the West in general, and Israel and the United States in particular.
Christians also have become targets. Pakistani Muslims protesting in the southern city of Sukkur ransacked and burned a church Sunday after hearing accusations that a Christian man had burned pages of the Quran, Islam's holy book.
That incident came a day after Muslims protesting in the Nigerian city of Maiduguri attacked Christians and burned 15 churches in a three-hour rampage that killed at least 15 people. Some 30 other people have died during protests over the cartoons that erupted about three weeks ago.
In Jakarta, about 400 people marched to the heavily fortified U.S. mission in the center of the city, behind a banner reading "We are ready to attack the enemies of the Prophet."
Protesters throwing stones and brandishing wooden staves tried to break through the gates. They set fire to U.S. flags and a poster of President Bush and smashed the windows of a guard outpost before dispersing after a few minutes.
The U.S. Embassy called the attacks deplorable, describing them as acts of "thuggery."
A protest organizer said the West, and particularly the United States, is attacking Islam.
"They want to destroy Islam through the issue of terrorism ... and all those things are engineered by the United States," said Maksuni, who only uses one name.
"We are fighting America fiercely this time," he said. "And we also are fighting Denmark."
In Pakistan, where protests last week left five people dead, police put up roadblocks around Islamabad to keep people from entering the capital for a planned mass protest called by a coalition of six hard-line Islamic parties, the Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal — United Action Forum.
Authorities also detained several lawmakers and Islamic leaders during raids in three cities and announced they would arrest anyone joining a gathering of more than five people to prevent the demonstration.
Opposition leader Maulana Fazlur Rahman, a senior figure in the Islamic coalition, was eventually given permission to lead a small rally through a square in the city center. The protesters chanted "God is great!" and "Any friend of America is a traitor."
But when about 100 other protesters tried to reach the square, officers fired tear gas and at least one gunshot to chase them off. More gunshots were heard later in the city, but it wasn't clear who fired them. At least two policemen were injured, one bleeding from the head. Several demonstrators also were hurt.
A crowd of 700 people, some throwing stones at police, tried to march toward Islamabad's heavily guarded diplomatic enclave about 1.3 miles from the square but with blocked by troops in armored personnel carriers.
Police also blocked about 1,500 protesters from reaching Islamabad from the city of Peshawar by putting shipping containers and sandbags on a bridge along a highway leading to the capital, said Mohammed Iqbal, a key member of the religious alliance.
Elsewhere in Pakistan, about 600 people staged a protest in Chaman, a town near the Afghan border, burning Danish flags and an effigy of the Danish prime minister.
Such protests prompted Denmark on Sunday to temporarily recall its ambassador to Pakistan, Bent Wigotski, because it was impossible for him "to perform his job duties during the present circumstances," the Danish Foreign Ministry said in a statement.Saturday, February 18, 2006
RELIGIOUS NUTS GO COMPLETELY CRAZY
These crazy fuckers have gone completely nuts... outlaw all organized religion.
Cartoon Protests Leave 15 Dead in Nigeria
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria, Associated Press - Nigerian Muslims protesting caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad attacked Christians and burned churches on Saturday, killing at least 15 people in the deadliest confrontation yet in the whirlwind of Muslim anger over the drawings.
It was the first major protest to erupt over the issue in Africa's most populous nation. An Associated Press reporter saw mobs of Muslim protesters swarm through the city center with machetes, sticks and iron rods. One group threw a tire around a man, poured gas on him and set him ablaze.
In Libya, the parliament suspended the interior minister after at least 11 people died when his security forces attacked rioters who torched the Italian consulate in Benghazi.
Right-wing Italian Reforms Minister Roberto Calderoli resigned under pressure, accused of fueling the fury in Benghazi by wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with one of the offending cartoons, first published nearly five months ago in a Danish newspaper.
Danish church officials met with a top Muslim cleric in Cairo, meanwhile, but made no significant headway in defusing the conflict.
And in what has become a daily event, tens of thousands of Muslims protested — this time in Britain, Pakistan and Austria — to denounce the perceived insult.
But it was in Nigeria, where mutual suspicions between Christians and Muslims have led to thousands of deaths in recent years, that tensions boiled over into sectarian violence.
Thousands of rioters burned 15 churches in Maiduguri in a three-hour rampage before troops and police reinforcements restored order, Nigerian police spokesman Haz Iwendi said. Iwendi said security forces arrested dozens of people in the city about 1,000 miles northeast of the capital, Lagos.
Chima Ezeoke, a Christian Maiduguri resident, said protesters attacked and looted shops owned by minority Christians, most of them with origins in the country's south.
"Most of the dead were Christians beaten to death on the streets by the rioters," Ezeoke said. Witnesses said three children and a priest were among those killed.
Nigeria, with a population of more than 130 million, is roughly divided between a predominantly Muslim north and a mainly Christian south.
Thousands of people have died in this West African country since 2000 in religious violence fueled by the adoption of the strict Islamic legal code by a dozen states in the north, seen by most Christians as a move to impose religious hegemony on non-Muslims.
The Danish cartoons, including one showing Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban with an ignited fuse, have set off sometimes violent protests around the world.
After the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten printed the caricatures in September, other Western newspapers, mostly in Europe, followed suit, asserting their news value and the right to freedom of expression.
But Nigeria has been spared much of the violence seen elsewhere in the world, though lawmakers in the heavily Muslim state of Kano burned Danish and Norwegian flags and barred Danish companies from bidding on a major construction project. Kano lawmakers also called on the state's 5 million people to boycott Danish goods.
With Saturday's deaths, at least 45 people have been killed in protests across the Muslim world, according to a count by The Associated Press.
In the violence in Libya, Seif el-Islam Gadhafi, the son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, said four of the 11 dead were believed to have been Egyptians or Palestinians.
"Setting the consulate on fire was a mistake, but using excessive force was the most tragic response," the younger Gadhafi said, explaining the suspension of Interior Minister Nasr al-Mabrouk.
Gadhafi expressed pride, however, that the demonstrators were behind Calderoli's resignation when "other Arab states refused or lagged behind in taking revenge for insults to their religion."
Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi blamed the riots in Libya, Italy's former colony, on "thoughtless action by our minister," the Italian news agency ANSA quoted him as saying.
Calderoli said he wore the shirt to show "solidarity to all those who were hit by the blind violence of religious fanaticism." He said he did not intend "to offend the Muslim religion nor to be the pretext for yesterday's violence."
In Cairo, Bishop Karsten Nissen, of Denmark's Evangelical Lutheran Church, met with Grand Imam Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi of al-Azhar University, the world's highest Sunni Muslim seat of learning.
Tantawi said the Danish prime minister must apologize for the drawings and further demanded that the world's religious leaders, including him and Pope Benedict XVI, should meet to write a law that "condemns insulting any religion, including the Holy Scriptures and the prophets." He said the United Nations should then impose the law on all countries.
In response, Nissen did not address the issue of a global law but said it was impossible for Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen to apologize for what a newspaper had published.
"I have brought to his excellency (Tantawi) the apology of the newspaper, but our prime minister did not draw these cartoons. Our prime minister is not the editor of this newspaper. He cannot apologize for something he did not do," Nissen said.
So far the West and Islamic nations remain at loggerheads over fundamental, but conflicting cultural imperatives — the Western democratic assertion of a right to free speech and press freedom, versus the Islamic dictum against any representation of the Prophet Muhammad. Muslims say such depictions could encourage idolatry.Saturday, February 18, 2006
THEY EVEN LIE WHEN THEY DON'T HAVE TO LIE
VP Accident Tale Filled With Discrepancies
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Vice President Dick Cheney said he didn't immediately disclose his hunting accident because he wanted the confusing details to come out right. Instead, authorized accounts came out slowly — and often still wrong.
The result: a week of shifting blame, belatedly acknowledged beer consumption (not "zero" drinking after all) and evolving discrepancies in how the shooting happened, its aftermath and the way it was told to the nation.
"There's a reason they call this crisis management," said corporate damage-control specialist Eric Dezenhall, "and that's because it's a mess."
___
BLAME
In the first days after the vice president wounded attorney Harry Whittington while shooting at quail last Saturday in Texas, blame was placed on the victim for not announcing his presence to fellow hunter Cheney.
"The vice president did everything right," Katharine Armstrong, the ranch owner approved by Cheney to disclose the accident, said Monday. Whittington, 78, should have shouted that he was rejoining the hunting group after drifting off to retrieve a downed bird. "The mistake exposed him to getting shot," she said. "It's incumbent on him. He did not do that."
The White House picked up on that theme the same day in attempting to deflect any responsibility from the vice president. "If I recall," Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said of Armstrong, "she pointed out that the protocol was not followed by Mr. Whittington, when it came to notifying the others that he was there."
The about-face came Wednesday when Cheney made his first public comment on the accident.
"It was not Harry's fault," he said. "You can't blame anybody else. I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend."
___
DRINKING
Although there is no evidence that beer impaired Cheney's judgment, initial denials that he had consumed alcohol were wrong.
"No one was drinking," Armstrong said at the outset. "No, zero, zippo." She said the hunters washed down lunch with Dr Pepper. Later, she qualified her comments and said beer might have been in the cooler but she did not think anyone drank any.
The investigating officer from the Kenedy County sheriff's department, after interviewing Whittington in the hospital, reported that the victim "explained foremost there was no alcohol during the hunt."
Authorities did not investigate the accident until the next day. The Texas Parks and Wildlife accident report, dated two days after the shooting, checked "No" on the question of whether Cheney appeared under the influence of intoxicants. It did not address whether the hunters had been drinking at all. (The report also included a diagram depicting Whittington's wounds on the wrong side of his body.)
Cheney acknowledged Wednesday, "I had a beer at lunch" several hours before the group's afternoon hunt, asserting "nobody was under the influence."
___
VICTIM'S CONDITION
In the rush to assure everyone Whittington was "just fine," some important details were left out.
Initial reports had him treated at the scene, then taken by ambulance to the hospital, where in no time he was cracking jokes with the nurses. It turned out that after being taken to the emergency room of a local, small hospital, he was flown by helicopter to the intensive care unit of the larger hospital in Corpus Christi.
According to Armstrong's initial account of the accident scene: "He was talking. His eyes were open." Later, Cheney said that when he rushed up to the stricken man and talked to him, Whittington had one eye open and did not respond. He was, however, conscious.
Doctors said Tuesday that Whittington suffered a mild heart attack while in the hospital when one of the pellets migrated to his heart. He was released Friday.
___
LICENSE
Cheney did not have all his hunting papers in order, as suggested by the White House and initially stated by Texas authorities.
On Sunday, a spokesman for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department said Cheney was legally hunting with a license he bought in November. While that was true, the department's accident report the next day stated that he was in violation of a law requiring him to have an upland game bird stamp.
___
DISCLOSURE
The accident raised questions about the flow of information into and out of the White House communications apparatus.
Asked why no one released news of the shooting on Saturday night, McClellan said "the vice president's office was working to make sure information got out" but that details were slow to reach Washington that evening.
Armstrong, for her part, said no one at the ranch even discussed releasing the news on Saturday.
She said her family realized Sunday morning that it would be a story and decided to call the local newspaper, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. She said she then discussed news coverage with Cheney for the first time.
"I said, 'Mr. Vice President, this is going to be public, and I'm comfortable going to the hometown newspaper,'" she told The Associated Press. "And he said, 'You go ahead and do whatever you are comfortable doing.'"
___
TELLING WASHINGTON
McClellan said
President Bush was told shortly before 8 p.m. EST Saturday that Cheney had shot Whittington, less than half an hour after Bush first heard there had a been an accident of some sort involving Cheney's hunting party. Confirmation that Cheney was the shooter was obtained when deputy chief of staff Karl Rove called Armstrong, McClellan said.
However, McClellan said he didn't personally know Cheney was the shooter until the next morning, about 6 a.m. EST Sunday, when he was awakened with the news.
He said he only knew the previous evening that someone in Cheney's party had been involved in a hunting accident.Thursday, February 16, 2006
THE REST OF THE WORLD CALLS BULLSHIT ON US
Whatever pretense of moral high ground we may have still held is gone.
U.N. Calls Guantanamo a U.S. Torture Camp
GENEVA, Associated Press - The United States must close its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay because it is effectively a torture camp where prisoners have no access to justice, a U.N. report released Thursday concluded.
The White House rejected the recommendation.
The 54-page report summarizing an investigation by five U.N. experts accused the United States of practices that "amount to torture" and demanded detainees be allowed a fair trial or freed. The investigators did not visit the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"Those people should be released or brought before an independent court," Manfred Nowak, the U.N. investigator for torture, told The Associated Press. "That should not be done in Guantanamo Bay, but before ordinary U.S. courts, or courts in their countries of origin or perhaps an international tribunal."
The United States should allow "a full and independent investigation" at Guantanamo and also give the United Nations access to other detention centers, including secret ones, in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, Nowak said by telephone from his office in Vienna, Austria.
"We want to have all information about secret places of detention because whenever there is a secret place of detention, there is also a higher risk that people are subjected to torture," he said.
The United States is holding about 490 men at the military detention center. They are accused of links to Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime or to al-Qaida, but only a handful have been charged.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan rejected the call to shut the camp, saying the military treats all detainees humanely and "these are dangerous terrorists that we're talking about."
The U.N. investigators said photographic evidence — corroborated by testimony of former prisoners — showed detainees shackled, chained and hooded. Prisoners were beaten, stripped and shaved if they resisted, they said.
The report's findings were based on interviews with former detainees, public documents, media reports, lawyers and questions answered by the U.S. government, which detailed the number of prisoners held but did not give their names or the status of charges against them.
Some of the interrogation techniques — particularly the use of dogs, exposure to extreme temperatures, sleep deprivation and prolonged isolation — caused extreme suffering.
"Such treatment amounts to torture, as it inflicts severe pain or suffering on the victims for the purpose of intimidation and/or punishment," the report said.
The U.N. experts who wrote the report had sought access to Guantanamo Bay since 2002. Three were invited last year, but refused in November after being told they could not interview detainees.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the U.N. report "clearly suffers from their unwillingness to take us up on our offer to go down to Guantanamo to observe first-hand the operations."
The International Committee of the Red Cross is the only independent monitoring body allowed to visit Guantanamo's detainees, but it reports its findings solely to U.S. authorities.
Legislators and journalists have been allowed in on guided tours but few are permitted to see interrogations.
The U.S. ambassador to U.N. offices in Geneva, Kevin Moley, wrote in a response that the investigation had taken little account of evidence provided by the United States.
"We categorically object to most of the unedited report's content and conclusions as largely without merit and not based clearly in the facts," Moley said.
Although his statement did not address specific allegations, the Pentagon has acknowledged 10 cases of abuse or mistreatment at Guantanamo, including a female interrogator climbing onto a detainee's lap and a detainee whose knees were bruised from being forced to kneel repeatedly.
In Strasbourg, France, the European Parliament condemned the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and renewed its calls for the detention center to be closed.
Human rights activists also supported the investigators' findings.
Amnesty International said the report was only the "tip of the iceberg."
"The United States also operates detention facilities at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq and has been implicated in the use of secret detention facilities in other countries," an Amnesty statement said.
Many of the allegations in the report have been made before. But the document represented the first inquiry launched by the 53-nation U.N. Human Rights Commission, the world body's top rights watchdog.
U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric stressed it was compiled by independent experts. Asked whether Secretary General Kofi Annan endorsed the panel's findings, Dujarric said: "The secretary-general has often said, and repeatedly said, that there is a need for proper understanding and effective balance between action against terrorism and the protection of civil liberties and human rights."
Thursday, February 16, 2006
KILL THE MESSENGERS
A surge in whistle-blowing ... and reprisals
WASHINGTON, Christian Science Monitor - Dissent often carries a price in official Washington, especially in the war years of the Bush presidency.
ADVERTISEMENT
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the number of insiders alleging wrongdoing in government - either through whistle-blower channels or directly to the press - has surged, as have reprisals against them.
That's the message from this week's congressional hearing on protections for national security whistle-blowers - the first in more than a decade. "The system is broken," says Rep. Christopher Shays (news, bio, voting record) (R) of Connecticut, who chaired the House Government Affairs subcommittee hearing.
Disclosures of flawed prewar intelligence, secret prisons and prisoner abuse, and warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency have launched a debate on the conduct of the war on terror within Congress and the American public. Critics say some of those disclosures also compromised national security.
"At the Central Intelligence Agency, we are more than holding our own in the global war on terrorism, but we are at risk of losing a key battle: the battle to protect our classified information," wrote CIA director Porter Goss in The New York Times last Friday.
The struggle over dissent in dangerous times is not confined to national security matters, however. It appears to be settling deeper into the federal bureaucracy, where government scientists and even analysts at the scholarly Congressional Research Service - who are not actually blowing any whistles but who are staking out positions that deviate from the administration's - report efforts to control their contact with the press and public.
If whistle-blowers and others "do not see an option for dissent within the system, then the system is in bad shape," says Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. "Secrecy has become a growth industry.... It makes it harder for ordinary citizens ... to ask questions ... and to hold officials accountable."
The lips-stay-sealed climate is felt most acutely, at least these days, by those in national-security fields. Indeed, a Justice Department investigation is under way to discover who divulged the existence of warrantless eavesdropping by the NSA - a probe that may yield criminal charges against the individuals responsible.
Richard Levernier is one who went public with his security concerns - and feels he's paid a heavy price. He first reported security breaches at the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons sites to management. Seeing no changes, he released an unclassified report to the media. While government investigators found his concerns credible, he lost his security clearance. Four years later, he's unemployed and, he says, unemployable.
"I spent my whole life in the nuclear security business. And you can't get a key to the men's room without a clearance," says Mr. Levernier, one of five whistle-blowers who spoke Tuesday before the Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations.
Army Spc. Samuel Provance was demoted after disobeying an order not to speak to the press about prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. "Young soldiers were scapegoated, while superiors misrepresented what had happened.... I was ashamed and embarrassed to be associated with it," he told the House panel.
Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer lost his security clearance after testifying to the 9/11 Commission and Congress about Operation Able Danger, a program that he says tagged four 9/11 hijackers before the attacks.
Former FBI special agent Michael German and former intelligence officer Russell Tice also testified that they felt they'd been retaliated against for speaking out about problems, and both lost their security clearances.
"Security clearance revocation is the new harassment of choice against national security workers," says Thomas Devine, legal director for the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit public-interest law firm in Washington that assists whistle-blowers.
While federal workers have had whistle-blower protection since 1989, a 1999 US court ruling requires these workers to have irrefutable evidence of waste, fraud, or abuse to be eligible for protection. Last year, House and Senate committees each passed bills that strengthened protections for whistle-blowers, but neither bill has come to the floor for a vote. Only the Senate version includes national security whistle-blowers.
Outside the realm of national security, James Hansen, the top climate scientist at NASA, spoke out about efforts by the NASA press office to screen his speeches and limit his contact with the press.
In response, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (news, bio, voting record) (R) of New York, chairman of the House Science Committee, backed Dr. Hansen. "Good science cannot long persist in an atmosphere of intimidation," he wrote to NASA administrator Michael Griffin. Mr. Griffin e-mailed all NASA employees, affirming that staff should not alter, filter, or adjust scientific work.
But Hansen says the issue is not yet resolved, citing a pending investigation by the House Energy and Commerce Committee challenging the scholarship of other scientists working on global warming.
When lawmakers on the House panel asked what other issues they should heed, watchdog groups cited the case of Louis Fisher, a senior analyst at Congressional Research Service.
His office door is papered with book jackets from his works, many of them on congressional-executive relations. When Mr. Fisher spoke publicly about a report he wrote on national security whistle-blowers, CRS managers warned him not to take positions on issues before Congress.
"CRS researchers are instructed from the time they're hired that their role is an educative one, not an advocative one," Daniel Mulhollan, CRS director, wrote in an e-mail statement. "If CRS is to serve all members of Congress ... it must be understood to be equally valuable to those on competing sides of an issue."
The warning set off protests from political scientists and public-interest groups. "The CRS has been severely compromised," says William Weaver, a political scientist at the University of Texas in El Paso and a founder of the National Security Whistle-blowers Coalition.
Says Fisher himself: "For the last 33 years my job was to defend legislative prerogative and constitutional government, and suddenly that's a bad thing to do. There are mixed signals inside this [CRS] house. People are hunkered down."Wednesday, February 15, 2006
SEEMS PRETTY CLEAR WHO THE REAL DEMON IS HERE
Pastor Says Mental Illness Is 'Demons'
McKINNEY, Texas , Associated Press - The church pastor of a woman accused of cutting off the arms of her 10-month-old daughter told jurors Wednesday that mental illness is actually demon possession and cannot be cured with medication.
Dena Schlosser, 37, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in the November 2004 death of her baby, Margaret. She was not taking her anti-psychotic medication at the time of the slaying.
"I do not believe that any mental illness exists other than demons, and no medication can straighten it out, other than the power of God," said Doyle Davidson, the 73-year-old minister of the Water of Life Church, which the Schlosser family attended several times a week.
Dena Schlosser's attorneys have faulted her husband and the church's beliefs for discouraging medical treatment. Schlosser's husband, John Schlosser, testified Tuesday that he did not seek medical help when his wife told him she wanted to "give the baby to God" the day before their daughter's death.
Davidson said he hardly knew the family, although John Schlosser testified that Davidson was the first person he called after his wife told him what she had done.
Davidson, who has a cable TV show in the Dallas area and in several states, also testified that he has cast demons out of parishioners and seen evil spirits.
The prosecution, which has argued that Dena Schlosser knew what she was doing, concluded its case Tuesday with photos of the dead baby. They are not pursuing the death penalty.
She was arrested after police responding to a 911 call found her in the living room, covered in blood, holding a knife and listening to a church hymn.
In the months after the baby's birth, a psychiatrist diagnosed postpartum psychosis. The woman was found after her arrest to have manic depression.
She was accused of parental neglect many months before the death, but a state investigation found she did not pose a risk to the baby or her other two daughters.
Dena Schlosser would face life in prison if convicted. If found not guilty she would be hospitalized.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
SO LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT - CHENEY IS CLEARED FOR TREASON?
Cheney Says He Has OK to Declassify Info
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Vice President Dick Cheney disclosed Wednesday that he has the power to declassify sensitive government information, authority that could set up a criminal defense for his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Cheney's disclosure comes a week after reports that Libby testified under oath he was authorized by superiors in 2003 to disclose highly sensitive prewar information to reporters. The information, about Iraq and alleged weapons of mass destruction, was used by the Bush administration to bolster its case for invading Iraq.
At the time of Libby's contacts with reporters in June and July 2003, the administration including Cheney, who was among the war's most ardent proponents, faced growing criticism. No weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, and Bush supporters were anxious to show that the White House had relied on prewar intelligence projecting a strong threat from such weapons.
When Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald revealed Libby's assertions to a grand jury that he had been authorized by his superiors to spread sensitive information, the prosecutor did not specify which superiors.
But in an interview on Fox News Channel, Cheney said there is an executive order that gives the vice president, along with the president, the authority to declassify information.
"I have certainly advocated declassification. I have participated in declassification decisions," Cheney said, while refusing to elaborate.
A legal expert said Cheney's TV appearance could foreshadow a Libby defense.
Former Whitewater independent counsel Robert Ray said Cheney's ex-chief of staff could point to authorization from his superiors as part of his strategy at trial.
"If it turns out that Cheney was actively involved in decisions related to the disclosure of a CIA officer's identity and if the truth of it is that he was orchestrating the disclosure of information to the media, it seems to me that's a fundamentally different case than one centered around the activities of Libby," said Ray.
On Oct. 28 of last year, Libby was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI about how he learned of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame and what he told reporters about it.
In July 2003, Plame's CIA identity was published by columnist Robert Novak eight days after Plame's husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. Wilson concluded that it was highly doubtful that a purported sale of uranium yellowcake by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990s had ever taken place.
A defense that Libby was authorized by superiors to leak sensitive data about Iraq would not appear to provide any help to the former Cheney aide for making false statements.
But some lawyers point out that setting up defenses before a jury involves more than simply constructing legal arguments.
"You're trying to present a persuasive case that your client should not be found guilty," said Ray, the former Whitewater prosecutor. "You're saying that even if my client did it, this is not a case that warrants conviction."
An authorization defense in the CIA leak case would mean that "much of what Libby was trying to do was aid and protect his boss Cheney," Ray suggested. The downside to employing such a approach is that it "almost comes with a defense that I did it."Wednesday, February 15, 2006
WAYYYY DAWGGIES! RECKON IT'S OKAY, IF WILLIE SINGS ABOUT IT
Willie Nelson Releases Gay Cowboy Song
NASHVILLE, Tenn., Associated Press - Country music outlaw Willie Nelson sang "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys" and "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys" more than 25 years ago. He released a very different sort of cowboy anthem this Valentine's Day.
"Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly (Fond of Each Other)" may be the first gay cowboy song by a major recording artist. But it was written long before this year's Oscar-nominated "Brokeback Mountain" made gay cowboys a hot topic.
Available exclusively through iTunes, the song features choppy Tex-Mex style guitar runs and Nelson's deadpan delivery of lines like, "What did you think all them saddles and boots was about?" and "Inside every cowboy there's a lady who'd love to slip out."
The song, which debuted Tuesday on Howard Stern's satellite radio show, was written by Texas-born singer-songwriter Ned Sublette in 1981. Sublette said he wrote it during the "Urban Cowboy" craze and always imagined Nelson singing it.
Someone passed a copy of the song to Nelson back in the late 1980s and, according to Nelson's record label, Lost Highway, he recorded it last year at his Pedernales studio in Texas.
Nelson has appeared in several Western movies and sings "He Was a Friend of Mine" on the "Brokeback Mountain" soundtrack.
-------
"Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly (Fond of Each Other)"
There's many a strange impulse out on the plains of West Texas;
There's many a young boy who feels things he don't comprehend.
Well small town don't like it when somebody falls between sexes,
No, small town don't like it when a cowboy has feelings for men.
Well I believe in my soul that inside every man there's a feminine,
And inside every lady there's a deep manly voice loud and clear.
Well, a cowboy may brag about things that he does with his women,
But the ones who brag loudest are the ones that are most likely queer.
Cowboys are frequently secretly fond of each other,
What did you think those saddles and boots was about?
There's many a cowboy who don't understand the way that he feels towards his brother,
Inside every cowboy there's a lady who'd love to slip out.
Ten men for each woman was the rule way back when on the prairie,
And somehow those cowboys must have kept themselves warm late at night.
Cowboys are famous for getting riled up about fairies,
But I'll tell you the reason a big strong man gets so uptight:
Cowboys are frequently secretly fond of each other,
That's why they wear leather, and Levi's and belts buckled tight.
There's many a cowboy who don't understand the way that he feels towards his brother;
There's many a cowboy who's more like a lady at night.
Well there's always somebody who says what the others just whisper,
And mostly that someone's the first one to get shot down dead:
When you talk to a cowboy don't treat him like he was a sister
Don't mess with the lady that's sleepin' in each cowboy's head.
Cowboys are frequently secretly fond of each other,
Even though they take speed and drive pickups and shoot their big guns;
There's many a cowboy who don't understand the way that he feels towards his brother;
There's many a cowboy who keeps quiet about things he's done.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
FREE TAXPAYER MONEY FOR OIL COMPANIES WITH RECORD PROFITS
Oil companies posted record-breaking profits last year, the government is slashing medicare and foodstamps and the environment, citing a need for billions extra for Iraq.... file this under WHAT THE FUCK?!:
Government may waive near $7 bln in oil, gas royalties: report
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The government may waive up to $7 billion in royalty payments from companies pumping oil and natural gas on federal territory in the next five years, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing administration officials and budget documents.
The royalty relief would amount to one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in U.S. history, even though the administration assumes oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period, the Times report said.
The report cited estimates in the Interior Department's recent budget plan that would allow companies to pump about $65 billion in oil and natural gas without paying royalties.
Administration officials cited by the report said the benefit stems from regulations dating back to 1996, when energy prices were relatively low and lawmakers wanted to encourage exploration in higher cost areas such as the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Much of the oil and gas from such leases is just beginning to be pumped due to the time required to explore deep waters and build large offshore platforms.
"We need to remember the primary reason that incentives are given," said Johnnie M. Burton, director of the federal Minerals Management Service, according to the report. "It's not to make more money, necessarily. It's to make more oil, more gas, because production of fuel for our nation is essential to our economy and essential to our people."
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
GOD FORBID THAT EVERYONE SHOULD GET FREEDOM AND EQUALITY AND STUFF
This assclown is like the Soup Nazi - "no amendments for you!"
Scalia Dismisses 'Living Constitution'
PONCE, Puerto Rico, Associated Press - People who believe the Constitution would break if it didn't change with society are "idiots," U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says.
In a speech Monday sponsored by the conservative Federalist Society, Scalia defended his long-held belief in sticking to the plain text of the Constitution "as it was originally written and intended."
"Scalia does have a philosophy, it's called originalism," he said. "That's what prevents him from doing the things he would like to do," he told more than 100 politicians and lawyers from this U.S. island territory.
According to his judicial philosophy, he said, there can be no room for personal, political or religious beliefs.
Scalia criticized those who believe in what he called the "living Constitution."
"That's the argument of flexibility and it goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break."
"But you would have to be an idiot to believe that," Scalia said. "The Constitution is not a living organism, it is a legal document. It says something and doesn't say other things."
Proponents of the living constitution want matters to be decided "not by the people, but by the justices of the Supreme Court."
"They are not looking for legal flexibility, they are looking for rigidity, whether it's the right to abortion or the right to homosexual activity, they want that right to be embedded from coast to coast and to be unchangeable," he said.
Scalia was invited to Puerto Rico by the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. The organization was founded in 1982 as a debating society by students who believed professors at the top law schools were too liberal. Conservatives and libertarians mainly make up the 35,000 members.Tuesday, February 14, 2006
THE TIDE CONTINUES TO SWELL
At Last, The Conservatives Stand Up To Be Counted
WASHINGTON, Christian Science Monitor - It's taken awhile, a little more than five years to be precise, but we may be witnessing the return of a respected and important political ideology in this town: conservatism. And its apparent ride back onto the political scene comes not a moment too soon.
Last week, when the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Democrats asked a lot of combative questions, as one might expect. But the real news was that some of the senators on the right side of the dais wondered aloud about whether the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program went too far in the way of expanding executive power.
Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina called some of the legal justifications the Bush administration used for the program (like its assertion that it didn't need Congress's or the judiciary's OK) "dangerous." Over in the House, Heather Wilson, a Republican from New Mexico, is calling for an investigation.
Why was this significant? Because conservatism, real conservatism with its distrust of government and radical change, has been in short supply in our nation's capital since 2001. Oh, there are Republicans, and they have controlled the political landscape here since then. But there is a difference between Republicanism and conservatism.
Republicans are a party, concerned ultimately, as all parties are, with maintaining and growing power. And the GOP in particular is disciplined about doing whatever it takes to help their president. Conservatism is a political outlook, one that questions what the state is doing and is skeptical of power. It owes nothing to no one - not the president, nor the Congress. And it is crucial as a counterbalance to liberalism in the proper functioning of the government. It is the arched eyebrow in a room full of ideas.
Other than its belief in tax cuts (a cornerstone of the conservative philosophy), the current administration has hardly been conservative. On everything from fiscal responsibility to rebuilding Iraq, the administration is sure of itself despite what the data say. It is skeptical of others, but never of itself or its own policies. Counter facts and contrary opinions are ignored or dismissed. And the administration's wiretapping without seeking warrants is based on the idea that other branches of government can't really challenge the executive branch during a time of war. If that's not a bald political power grab, what is?
Yet many conservatives in Congress and elsewhere have not only looked the other way, they've urged the president on.
Even the National Review, the publication that once helped bring the conservative movement back to the front of American politics, supported the president's move. "[T]he evidence is also abundant that the Administration was scrupulous in limiting the FISA exceptions. They applied only to calls involving al Qaeda suspects or those with terrorist ties," wrote the magazine's editors in December.
Of course, that evidence of scrupulousness came from those running the program. No one else could talk about it. And the terms "al Qaeda suspects" and "those with terrorist ties" seem to be fairly broad definitions. But more to the point, the warrantless wiretapping issue isn't really about the taps themselves.
The administration is proposing what is essentially an unchecked power for the president (not just this president, but all presidents) during the "war on terror." And despite all the comparisons to World War II or World War I or the Revolutionary War - yes, we did hear Attorney General Gonzales cite George Washington as a precedent last week - the "war on terror" is a lot more like the cold war. It is likely to go on for decades, which means any expansion of powers the executive branch claims will not be a temporary measure ended by an armistice. It will be an indefinite expansion, perhaps even permanent. When will the time come when no terrorist wants to target the United States?
And since when have conservatives been eager to give the president extra powers?
They haven't. Back in the 1990s, when a president named Bill Clinton was seeking to have his sexual harassment case put off until he left office, it was the conservatives who rose up and declared that the president is not a king and is not above the law.
Was it all just politics? Sure, and some of this is now. It's a lot easier for Republicans to stand up to a president whose approval rating is hovering around 40 percent than it was when it was over 50 percent - and it's especially easy for those facing tough reelection fights.
But there is a principle at stake here as well, and it only makes sense that the party that distrusts and dislikes federal power assert itself in the argument.
If we're lucky it means the conservatives are ready to make themselves a serious part of the political discussion in Washington again. Who knows, maybe it'll even wake up the liberals.
Monday, February 13, 2006
ANYONE ELSE WANNA QUESTION PRESIDENTIAL POWER?
Dickhead Cheney mistakes hunting buddy in bright orange vest and cap for a quail. The White House told the cops to come back the next day- rumor says they sat on the story so that Dickie could sober up first. Gwacious!
Monday, February 13, 2006
THE RATS ARE FINALLY JUMPING SHIP
Bush in the GOP Crosshairs: the White House Gets Hit with Friendly Fire
by Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post
Dick Cheney wasn't the only Republican taking shots at his friends this weekend.
President Bush and the White House have suddenly found themselves getting "peppered" with a fusillade of friendly fire on a wide range of issues, including NSA wiretaps, Iraq, Katrina, Plamegate leaks, the budget, the Abramoff scandal, and immigration.
Let's CSI the internecine firefights:
Warrantless Wiretapping. First came Arlen Specter's reaction to Alberto Gonzales' "very strained and unrealistic" defense of the program. Then Rep. Heather Wilson (news, bio, voting record) turned on the president, and her "serious concerns" about the warrantless wiretaps immediately emboldened other Republican lawmakers to speak out. According to the New York Times, "a growing number of Republicans say the program appears to violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" and are "openly skeptical about Mr. Bush's assertion that he has the authority to order the wiretaps." Among those Republicans breaking rank with the White House over the issue are Sen. Susan Collins (news, bio, voting record), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (news, bio, voting record), and Sen. Lindsay Graham, who described Bush's claims of presidential authority "very dangerous."
And it looks like Bush's internal bleeding on this issue is only going to get worse. Newsweek says that three Senate Republicans -- Chuck Hagel, Olymia Snowe, and Mike DeWine -- are going to side with Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee and vote to launch its own investigation into the secret eavesdropping program.
Katrina. A new 600-plus page report put together by an 11-member all-GOP committee is unexpectedly critical of the Bush administration's handling of the response to Katrina. The report, due Wednesday, is described by the Washington Post as "an unusual compendium of criticism by the House GOP, which generally has not been aggressive in its oversight of the administration." According to the paper, "Regarding Bush, the report found that 'earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response' because he alone could have cut through all bureaucratic resistance." The Republican-penned report specifically chides the president's infamous "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees" remark since, more than two days before Katrina hit, the
National Hurricane Center had warned there was an "extremely high probability" that New Orleans would be flooded, leading to catastrophic loss of life.
Iraq. Chuck Hagel, appearing on CNN's Late Edition Sunday, opened fire on Bush's contention that things are going well in Iraq: "In my opinion, three years in Iraq, things haven't gone the way the administration said and others said it was going to go. In fact, I think we're in more trouble today than we've ever been in Iraq." And Bill Frist, as chronicled in Bob Novak's latest column, is doing his best to distance himself from Bush, including claiming, "I would have probably put more troops in [Iraq] if the decision had been up to me." At the state level, Joseph Bruno, the majority leader of the New York State Senate, called on Bush to "get the troops out of [Iraq] and bring them home". Bruno, usually a party loyalist, joins a growing chorus of Republican voices speaking out against the White House's Iraq strategy, including Rep. Walter Jones, Brent Scowcroft, Richard Mellon Scaife, and Colin Powel's former chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson.
Classified Leaks. GOP Senator George Allen appeared on Fox News Sunday yesterday and called for a full investigation into whether Cheney and other Bush administration officials authorized Scooter Libby to leak classified information to reporters to try to justify the invasion of Iraq. "I don't think anybody," said Allen, "should be releasing classified information -- period -- whether in the Congress, executive branch, or some underling in the bureaucracy."
Immigration. Speakers at last week's Conservative Political Action conference repeatedly went after the president on this hotter-than-hot button issue. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, wielding the issue like a cudgel, drew a link between immigration and national security: "How can we fight this war on foreign fronts while leaving the front door to our nation vulnerable?" Phyllis Schlafly called Bush's immigration stance "a bad mistake." And Rep. Tom Tancredo slammed Bush as "out of step with his party."
Budget. A number of Republicans have offered pointed reactions to Bush's proposed budget. Sen. Charles Grassley (news, bio, voting record), in fact, put Bush squarely in his cross-hairs: "I can't see how ending a pittance for widows and widowers, and modest benefits for kids who have lost a parent would be good policy decisions." Specter called the proposed cuts to healthcare and education "scandalous." Snowe said she was "disappointed and even surprised" by the budget. Frist said: "We are spending too much in Washington, D.C." And Jonah Goldberg wrote that Bush "is spending money like a pimp with a week to live."
Even punchline figures Michael Brown and Jack Abramoff have seen fit to go after the president. Brown opened up with both barrels during his Senate testimony on Friday, lambasting the White House's woeful response to Katrina (claiming the administration didn't react quickly because the hurricane wasn't a terrorist act) and saying bitterly of Bush, "He called me Brownie at the wrong time. Thanks a lot, sir." For his part, Abramoff, facing a very stiff prison sentence, has none-the-less seen fit to directly contradict the president's emphatic "I don't know him" stance -- in effect, branding Bush a liar.
When you've got Republican lackeys like Brownie and true-believers-truly-in-trouble like Abramoff taking shots at you, you know things are not going well.
Indeed, with so many Republicans trying to distance themselves from the president, it's clear the wheels are coming off the White House wagon. Just in time for 2006.
If the GOP barrage keeps up, the president will soon find himself in the political ICU.Monday, February 13, 2006
YOUR TAXPAYER DOLLARS AT WORK
Report: 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Cost $363 Million Dollars
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Discharging troops under the Pentagon's policy on gays cost $363.8 million over 10 years, almost double what the government concluded a year ago, a private report says.
The report, to be released Tuesday by a University of California Blue Ribbon Commission, questioned the methodology the Government Accountability Office used when it estimated that the financial impact of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy was at least $190.5 million.
"It builds on the previous findings and paints a more complete picture of the costs," said Rep. Marty Meehan (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., who has proposed legislation that would repeal the policy.
Congress approved the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy in 1993 during the Clinton administration. It allows gays and lesbians to serve in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps as long as they abstain from homosexual activity and do not disclose their sexual orientation.
The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which has represented service members who left the military under the policy, estimates the Pentagon has discharged more than 10,000 service members for homosexuality since "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" went into effect in 1994. The number of discharges has gone down in recent years.
In February 2005, the GAO said the financial impact could not be completely estimated because the government does not collect financial information specific to each individual's case.
Cautioning that the figures may be too low, the GAO said the federal government spent at least $95.4 million to recruit and $95.1 million to train replacements from 1994 through 2003 for the 9,488 troops discharged during that period because of the policy.
The university study said the GAO erred by emphasizing the expense of replacing those who were discharged because of the policy without taking into account the value the military lost from the departures.
So, the commission focused on the estimated value the military lost from each person discharged. The report detailed costs of $79.3 million for recruiting enlisted service members, $252.4 million for training them, $17.8 million for training officers and $14.3 million for "separation travel" once a service member is discharged.
Commission members include former Defense Secretary William Perry, a member of the Clinton administration, and Lawrence Korb, a former assistant defense secretary during the Reagan administration, as well as professors from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
___
On the Net:
Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military: http://www.gaymilitary.ucsb.edu/Monday, February 13, 2006
WHEN PEOPLE ARE ABOVE THE LAW, LAWYERS ARE OUT OF A JOB
Lawyers group slams Bush on eavesdropping
CHICAGO (Reuters) - The American Bar Association told President George W. Bush on Monday to either stop domestic eavesdropping without a warrant or get the law changed to make it legal.
"We hope the President will listen," association president Michael Grecco told reporters after the more than 500 members of its policy-setting body passed a resolution saying that both national security and constitutional freedoms needed to be protected.
"We do not say surveillance should be stopped, only that it comply with the law," said Neal Sonnett, a Miami lawyer who headed the task force formed to look at the issue not long after the spying program came to light in December.
Authorized by Bush in 2001, the program allows the National Security Agency to monitor the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens to track people with ties to al Qaeda and other militant groups.
The White House has said warrantless eavesdropping is legal under Bush's constitutional powers as commander-in-chief and a congressional authorization for the use of military force adopted days after the September 11 attacks.
The program bypassed secret courts created under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, that grant warrants.
"We are not trying to limit the President's ability to go after terrorists," Sonnett told the group's House of Delegates before it passed his task force's resolution with relatively little debate.
"Nobody wants to hamstring the President," he added, "But we cannot allow the U.S. Constitution and our rights to become a victim of terrorism," he added.
Grecco told the group the issue is not whether the President can conduct surveillance but whether he can do it unilaterally.
The association's resolution calls on Bush "to abide by the limitations which the Constitution imposes on a President" to make sure national security is protected in a way that is consistent with constitutional guarantees.
It opposes "any future electronic surveillance inside the United States by any U.S. government agency for foreign intelligence purposes that does not comply with provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act."
If Bush believes that law is inadequate, then he should ask Congress to change it or enact new legislation, it added.
The resolution also called on the U.S. Congress to affirm that the post September 11 law on the authorization of military force did not give the White House an exemption from the requirements of the 1978 law.Monday, February 13, 2006
JEEBUS GOT JACKED
What has happened to America's Jesus?
By Rob Borsellino, USA Today
I remember when Jesus Christ was about religion.
That goes back to when he was caring and compassionate all the time, not just during the political campaign season.
He used to bring people together and give them hope. He wouldn't have his people get in your face and tell you to fight gay rights or you'll burn in hell. That's not what he was about. That's not the Jesus who made folks such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson rich and famous. He was a different guy from the 21st-century American Jesus Christ.
When I recently visited Sicily, Italy, the old Jesus was all over the place. His statue was on the counter at the restaurant and the coffee house. His image was on the wall at the clothing store and in the hotel lobby. And there was a huge painting of him on the side of an apartment building.
Sometimes he was with his mom and dad, and sometimes he was sitting with his pals - the apostles. Mostly he was hanging from the cross. Whatever he was up to, it was all about religion.
It was interesting because I didn't go to Sicily looking for a religious experience. I went looking for what's left of my family. My grandfather and his brother came to the United States in 1904 and left behind their parents and two sisters. The sisters had kids, grandkids, great grandkids.
I never met any of those people, and I knew nothing about Sicily except the obvious - pizza and the Mafia. My wife thought it was time to connect. She made some calls and let the family know we were coming.
We landed in Palermo, got our bags and were met by my cousin Peppino Rizzuti, who was holding a handwritten sign with my name on it.
He was there with three other cousins. They hooked us up with more family and spent the next seven days driving us all over the island and stuffing us with mozzarella, prosciutto, olives and about 50 kinds of pasta.
My cousin Maria made the sign of the cross before she ate. My cousin Antonio's car had a figurine of a saint on the dashboard. My cousin Gian Marco had a beautiful cross hanging from his neck.
But nobody was going on about God, Jesus and religion. It didn't come up. I saw all that and was reminded that you can be a decent person - a good son, husband and father - and still oppose the war in Iraq. You can be a caring, thoughtful member of your community and still question whether Justice Samuel Alito should have been confirmed. Jesus won't get mad at you.
Several times during the week, I thought about telling my family what's happened to Jesus in the United States - how he's been kidnapped by politicians and preachers who decide what he does and doesn't think. They speak for him, and it doesn't always make sense.
They say Jesus is "pro life," but he doesn't seem to have a problem with the death penalty. And he thinks stem cell research - something that would save lives - is no different from murdering babies. They say he's the embodiment of kindness, love, decency and compassion. But he hates gays, lesbians and Muslims. And he's not too crazy about Buddhists, Hindus and the rest. Jews? He can put up with them if he has to.
The Rev. Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka claims to speak for Jesus and goes around the country talking about how " AIDS cures fags." Pat Robertson says it would be a good idea if the United States killed the president of Venezuela. It would be a lot cheaper than starting another war.
All week I went over that stuff in my head and decided not to mention any of it to the family.
It would make America look ridiculous.
------
Rob Borsellino is a columnist for The Des Moines Register and author of 'So I'm talkin' to this guy ... 'Monday, February 13, 2006
THE GOVERNMENT IS AN INCOMPETENT, WASTEFUL BUREAUCRACY? GOSH, WHAT A SHOCKER
Audits Show Millions in Katrina Aid Wasted
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - In its rush to provide Katrina disaster aid, the Federal Emergency Management Agency wasted millions of dollars and overpaid for hotel rooms, including $438-a-day lodging in New York City, government investigators said Monday.
Two reports released by the Government Accountability Office and the Homeland Security Department's office of inspector general detail a series of accounting flaws, fraud or mismanagement in their initial review of how $85 billion in federal aid is being spent.
The two audits found that up to 900,000 of the 2.5 million applicants who received aid under FEMA's emergency cash assistance program — which included the $2,000 debit cards given to evacuees — were based on duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers, or false addresses and names.
Separately, the Justice Department said Monday that federal prosecutors have filed fraud, theft and other charges against 212 people accused of scams related to Gulf Coast hurricanes. Forty people have pleaded guilty so far, the latest report by the Hurricane Katrina Fraud Task Force said. Many defendants were accused of trying to obtain emergency aid, typically a $2,000 debit card, issued to hurricane victims by FEMA and the
American Red Cross.
Thousands of additional dollars appear to have been squandered on hotel rooms for evacuees that were paid at retail rather than the contractor's lower estimated cost. They included $438 rooms in New York City and beachfront condominiums in Panama City, Fla., at $375 a night, according to the audits.
The two audits were released by the Senate Homeland Security Committee as the panel wrapped up its investigation into the federal government's preparation and response to the disaster.
Sen. Susan Collins (news, bio, voting record), who chairs the committee, decried the findings, noting that a series of audits and hearings after hurricanes in Florida in 2004 highlighted similar accounting problems and had called on then-FEMA director Michael Brown to make immediate changes.
"The problem, once again, is that FEMA failed to prepare for the very type of disaster that happens every year," said Collins, R-Maine. "This 'pay first, ask questions later' approach has been an invitation to unscrupulous behavior."
The audits do not try to estimate a total dollar figure on abuse, but GAO auditor Gregory Kutz told senators it was "certainly millions of dollars; it could be tens or hundreds of millions of dollars."
"FEMA has a substantial challenge in balancing the need to get the money out quickly to those who are actually in need and sustaining public confidence in disaster programs by taking all possible steps to minimize fraud and abuse," he said.
FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews said Monday the audits were still preliminary. The agency is working closely with auditors to make sure money is wisely spent and is committed to helping disaster victims, she said.
Offering the $2,000 emergency aid "was a calculated risk taken in a catastrophic situation where many people were forced from their homes, often without any identification or basic necessities," she said. "It was the right thing to do."
On the plus side, an initial review by Homeland Security inspector general Richard Skinner found that FEMA's decision to sign a contract with Carnival Cruise Lines for Hurricane Katrina housing shortly after the Aug. 29 storm "was reasonable under the urgent circumstances."
The six-month, $236 million deal with Carnival for three full-service cruise ships — which initially sat half empty for several weeks on the Gulf Coast — had been criticized by lawmakers of both parties as a prime example of wasted spending in Hurricane Katrina-related contracts.
However, Skinner said the decision to use cruise ships appeared to be a wise economical choice "in a high-cost area such as New Orleans so long as occupancy remains high." A review of the contract's specific terms was continuing.
"While we have found many instances where contractors performed their work efficiently and in good faith, we have also found instances where there were problems," Skinner said. "In some cases, the government will have little legal recourse to recoup payments to contractors for payments under questionable contracts."
In the Justice Department probe, the largest investigation centered on a Red Cross call center in Bakersfield, Calif., in which some employees schemed to steal the emergency money for themselves and others, prosecutors said. Fifty-three people have been charged in this probe.
The prosecutions and a public education campaign appear to have persuaded some people to return money to which they may not have been entitled, the Justice Department report said. FEMA and the Red Cross reported receiving more than $8 million in returned funds, along with letters confessing to fraud or seeking to arrange installment plans to pay back the money, the report said.
Five dozen Web sites that either asked for money or sought to harvest personal information for identity theft also have been shut down, the report said.
A separate GAO report released Monday also found a handful of instances in which hurricane victims improperly sold free military foodstuffs known as Meals-Ready-to-Eat on eBay. In a one-day "snapshot" investigation, eight of 12 eBay sellers GAO investigated were selling MREs.
"If military MREs are sold to the general public on eBay, then they are clearly not reaching their intended recipients and represent a waste of taxpayer dollars and possible criminal activity," the audit stated.Sunday, February 12, 2006
HOW LONG CAN YOU HOLD YOUR BREATH WHILE YOUR HEAD IS IN THE SAND?
Politics vs. Climate Reality
USA Today - Would that the rise and fall of George C. Deutsch, 24, a NASA political appointee, could become a metaphor - one taken all the way to its logical conclusion - for the Bush administration's policies on global warming. Deutsch has for months embodied the White House's earth-is-flat take on why the earth is warming, with consequences from melting glaciers to freak weather.
Working in NASA's public relations, he tried to muzzle a renowned climate scientist who - like serious scientists the world over - warns that global warming is a threat requiring government intervention to curb emissions from cars, factories and more.
This furthered the business-friendly Bush administration's increasingly lonely mantra that the science isn't solid enough for more than voluntary measures. But scientific consensus long ago moved on. The issue now is not whether global warming is happening, but how severe the effects will be.
This week, evangelical Christians, normally among President Bush's most loyal supporters, broke with him on the issue and urged action: 86 prominent figures released a statement warning that "millions of people could die" because of global warming.
One casualty of all this was Deutsch, who resigned when it was discovered his résumé was longer on political loyalty - work on Bush's re-election campaign - than on education. Texas A&M University said he never received the journalism degree he claimed.
But that merely removed the symptom, not the underlying problem.
That a low-level bureaucrat could overrule a prestigious scientist says worlds about how the administration balances politics against science. Further evidence can be found at the Food and Drug Administration, which has stifled overwhelming evidence that the "morning-after pill" is safe and effective. It blocked over-the-counter sales - a transparent payoff to abortion opponents.
Global warming is a good place to begin altering that facts-be-damned approach. The administration has a ready-made environmental bandwagon to jump back onto. The world agreed in 1992 to prevent dangerous climate change. Countries have since worked on mandatory emissions curbs in what is known as the Kyoto Protocol, but Bush, as soon as he took office, turned his back on it.
Ignoring the impact of climate change is getting difficult: Federal officials are considering declaring the polar bear a threatened species because rising Arctic temperatures are melting the ice pack that's their home.
Now that scientific fact has spoken louder than ideology at NASA, perhaps the same can happen at the White House.Sunday, February 12, 2006
THINK MOONSHINING IS ILLEGAL NOW? WAIT 'TILL EXXON GETS IN THE GAME!
Bugs Could Be Key to Kicking Oil Addiction
By PAUL ELIAS, AP Biotechnology Writer
SAN FRANCISCO - The key to kicking what President Bush calls the nation's oil addiction could very well lie in termite guts, canvas-eating jungle bugs and other microbes genetically engineered to spew enzymes that turn waste into fuel.
It may seem hard to believe that microscopic bugs usually viewed as destructive pests can be so productive. But scientists and several companies are working with the creatures to convert wood, corn stalks and other plant waste into sugars that are easily brewed into ethanol — essentially 199-proof moonshine that can be used to power automobiles.
Thanks to biotechnology breakthroughs, supporters of alternative energy sources say that after decades of unfulfilled promise and billions in government corn subsidies, energy companies may be able to produce ethanol easily and inexpensively.
"The process is like making grain alcohol, or brewing beer, but on a much bigger scale," said Nathanael Greene, an analyst with the environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. "The technologies are out there to do this, but we need to convince the public this is real and not just a science project."
Using microbes may even solve a growing dilemma over the current ethanol manufacturing process, which relies almost exclusively on corn kernels and yielded only 4 billion gallons of ethanol last year (compared to the 140 billion gallons of gasoline used in the U.S.). There's growing concern throughout the Midwestern corn belt that the 95 U.S. ethanol plants are increasingly poaching corn meant for the dinner table or livestock feed.
The idea mentioned by Bush during his State of the Union speech — called "cellulosic ethanol" — skirts that problem because it makes fuel from farm waste such as straw, corn stalks and other inedible agricultural leftovers. Cellulose is the woody stuff found in branches and stems that makes plants hard.
Breaking cellulose into sugar to spin straw into ethanol has been studied for at least 50 years. But the technological hurdles and costs have been so daunting that most ethanol producers have relied on heavy government subsidies to squeeze fuel from corn.
Researchers are now exploring various ways to exploit microbes, the one-cell creatures that serve as the first link of life's food chain. One company uses the microbe itself to make ethanol. Others are taking the genes that make the waste-to-fuel enzymes and splicing them into common bacteria. What's more, a new breed of "synthetic biologists" are trying to produce the necessary enzymes by creating entirely new life forms through DNA.
Bush's endorsement of the waste-to-energy technology has renewed interest in actually supplanting fossil fuels as a dominant energy source — a goal long dismissed as pipe dream.
"We have been at this for 25 years and we had hoped to be in commercial production by now," said Jeff Passmore, an executive vice president at ethanol-maker Iogen Inc. "What the president has done is — perhaps — put some wind in the sails."
Ottawa-based Iogen is already producing ethanol by exploiting the destructive nature of the fungus Trichoderma reesei, which caused the "jungle rot" of tents and uniforms in the Pacific theater during World War II.
Through a genetic modification known as directed evolution, Iogen has souped up fungus microbes so they spew copious amounts of digestive enzymes to break down straw into sugars. From there, a simple fermentation — which brewers have been doing for centuries — turns sugar into alcohol.
Iogen opened a small, $40 million factory in 2004 to show it can produce cellulosic ethanol in commercial quantities. In the last two years, it has produced 65,000 gallons of ethanol that is blended with 85 percent gasoline to fuel about three dozen company and Canadian government vehicles. Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell PLC has invested $40 million for a 30 percent ownership stake in Iogen; Petro-Canada and the Canadian government are also investors.
Now the company is ready to build a $350 million, commercial-scale factory in Canada or Idaho Falls, Idaho, next year if it can secure financing — long one of the biggest stumbling blocks to bringing the stuff to gas pumps.
While conventional lenders are wary of investing in a new technology, the company is banking on winning a loan from the U.S. Department of Energy. Even under a best-case scenario, Passmore said Iogen won't be producing commercial quantities until 2009.
Other significant hurdles include how to widely distribute the fuel; getting auto manufacturers to make engines that will use it; and persuading gas stations to install ethanol pumps. There's hope that funding shortfalls and the remaining technological problems such as how to ship large amounts of ethanol will be overcome in the next few years.
Despite the challenges, Bush's endorsement and advancements in the field have re-energized alternative energy types.
While no commercial interest has advanced as far as Iogen, other biotech companies are engineering bacteria to spit out similar sugar-converting enzymes, and academics are pursuing more far-out sources.
At the California Institute of Technology, Jared Leadbetter is mining the guts of termites for possible tools to turn wood chips into ethanol. Leadbetter said there are some 200 microbes that live in termite bellies that help the household pest convert wood to energy.
Those microbes or their genetic material can be used to produce ethanol-making enzymes. So scientists at the Energy Department's Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., are now sequencing the microbe genes in hopes of finding a key to ethanol production.
"We have this idea that microbes are pests," said Leadbetter, who has been studying termite guts for 15 years. "But most microbes are beneficial."Sunday, February 12, 2006
SAUDIS IN CHARGE OF HOMELAND SECURITY? BRILLIANT!
Stop me if you've heard this, but weren't 19 of the 20 9/11 hijackers Saudi nationals? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?
ARAB BIZ MAY RUN NYC PORT
New York Post - The city's ports, considered a major target of terrorists, are about to be taken over by a firm based in the United Arab Emirates, a country with financial links to the Sept. 11 hijackers.
Dubai Ports World is set to complete a $6.8 billion deal to purchase Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., a London company that already runs commercial port operations in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans and Miami.
If shareholders approve the deal tomorrow, it will give control of various dock operations at some of the country's busiest points of entry to UAE-headquartered DP World.
The FBI has said most of the money for the 2001 terror attacks was funneled to hijackers through UAE banks, and much of the planning took place in the small but rich nation east of Saudi Arabia.
Steven Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority, said the deal is still under review but noted it only involved the management of one port terminal in New Jersey.
Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer (news, bio, voting record) urged the Bush administration to reconsider the sale.
"We should be very careful before we outsource such sensitive homeland security duties," Schumer said.
Despite these concerns, the move has been given the stamp of approval by the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an arm of the Treasury Department.
The CFI "thoroughly reviewed the potential transaction and concluded they had no objection," said a DP World official.
The committee earlier agreed to consider concerns about the deal expressed by Miami-based Eller & Co., according to Eller's lawyer, Michael Kreitzer. Eller is a business partner with the British shipping giant.
"When you have a foreign government involved, you are injecting foreign national interests," Kreitzer said. "A country that may be a friend of ours today may not be on the same side tomorrow."Sunday, February 12, 2006
NEVER HEARD OF THE BUM, EH? LYING LIARS CAUGHT IN MORE LIES
Jack Abramoff in red circle over GWB left shoulder, Karl Rove far right
Photo shows Bush with disgraced lobbyist
WASHINGTON (AFP) - A US newsmagazine published a photo of President George W. Bush with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, but said the White House continued to assert Bush did not recall having met him.
Time's online edition, at www.time.com, said it was the first published photo showing Bush with Abramoff, at a meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House on May 9, 2001.
The publication of the photo came amid a mushrooming scandal of influence-peddling in Washington, and threatened to raise fresh questions about Abramoff's link to the Republican administration.
The once-powerful lobbyist on January 3 pleaded guilty to conspiracy, fraud, and tax evasion linked to his Washington lobbying activities.
The photo shows Abramoff in the background as Bush greets one of Abramoff's clients, Time said.
The magazine in January revealed the existence of photos showing the president with Abramoff, but did not publish them.
"We were only allowed to view the photos before. As soon as we could publish, we did," Time spokesman Ty Trippet told AFP.
In its online edition Saturday, Time reported: "The White House, however, has continued to assert that the president had no recollection of ever meeting Abramoff."
Shown the photograph, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the White House had "found no record of Abramoff's presence but confirmed that it is Abramoff in the picture," Time said.
Asked to comment on the report, a White House spokeswoman told AFP: "The photo is not relevant to the Justice Department investigation" of Abramoff.
"The president dropped by a meeting of some two dozen state legislators in 2001 to thank them for passing resolutions supporting tax relief, as we have previously pointed out," spokeswoman Maria Tamburri said. "We now know that Mr. Abramoff attended the meeting.
"The president has taken countless tens of thousands of pictures. It does not mean he has a personal relationship with those in the pictures."
Abramoff, a major fund-raiser for Bush's re-election campaign, has entered a plea deal with the government and agreed to cooperate in ongoing investigations of lawmakers who may be implicated in his web of influence-peddling.Friday, February 10, 2006
THE NEOCON AGENDA: SLASH-N-BURN CONSERVATION
EPA Budget Cuts Trouble Environment Groups
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Grants to state and local governments for land and water conservation would be cut 40 percent, and money for the Environmental Protection Agency's network of libraries for scientists would be slashed severely under President Bush's proposed budget.
By contrast, Bush next year would spend $322 million for "cooperative conservation" — up from $312 million the Congress approved last year — to encourage more private landowners to protect endangered species, conserve wildlife habitats and do other nature work traditionally done by government.
Other proposed increases are $50 million more for cleaner-burning diesel engines and $5 million more for drinking water improvements.
Cuts and proposals to sell some of the government's vast land holdings have upset environmentalists.
Early in his presidency, Bush called for restoring the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund to the full $900 million authorized by Congress. Last year, it was approved at $142 million. For 2007, he wants just $85 million in grants for creating and preserving non-federal parks, forest land and wildlife refuges, a 40 percent cut.
"This is the most troubling budget we've seen from this White House," said Heather Taylor, deputy legislative director for Natural Resources Defense Council.
The proposal sent to Congress this week would trim EPA's budget by nearly 5 percent, down to $7.2 billion, and the Interior Department's budget by 2.4 percent, to $9.1 billion.
Sen. James Jeffords, I-Vt., said it shows the environment isn't a Bush administration priority. "We cannot allow this dangerous trend to continue," said Jeffords, a senior member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Interior Secretary Gale Norton and EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson said their budgets represent, within the context of reducing the federal deficit, a responsible allocation of resources that will still lead to environmental improvements.
One potential hole in the Interior budget is $312 million for an Office of Surface Mining program to reclaim abandoned mines. The money comes from coal mining fees set to expire in June. The Bush administration is asking Congress to reauthorize the fees.
"Nobody wants to see the program come to a halt," Norton said.
The budget also would cut $89 million from the National Park Service's nearly $2.6 billion budget.
Environmentalists contend a bigger danger is the administration's plan to raise $250 million over five years by selling 125,000 acres of the Bureau of Land Management's 261 million acres.
The lands are typically part of a "checkerboard" pattern of small parcels surrounded by suburban or urban areas, Interior officials say, and have been identified as holding little natural, historic, cultural or energy value.
The administration anticipates selling them for $2,000 an acre. The Forest Service plans to sell 170,000-200,000 acres in 41 states, according to The Wilderness Society.
Another proposal affects EPA's electronic catalog that keeps track of tens of thousands of agency documents and research studies, according to EPA internal memos. The agency would cut four-fifths of its library budget — from $2.5 million to $500,000. It pays for a network of dozens of libraries and reading rooms nationally.
"How are EPA scientists supposed to engage in cutting edge research when they cannot find what the agency has already done?" said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which obtained the EPA memos.
EPA spokeswoman Eryn Witcher said materials will still be available.
"EPA is working to modernize our antiquated system by streamlining our physical collections and making them available online to provide more information to a wider group of people, including scientists," she said.
Low-interest loans to states for treating wastewater, cutting other water pollution and managing watersheds would be cut by 22 percent, to $688 million.
Bush has requested $184 million for EPA's homeland security programs — including monitoring water supplies against terrorists and decontaminating buildings after chemical or biological attacks — and more than $100 million for its energy-related programs.
___
On the Net:
White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/environment
Natural Resources Defense Council: http://www.nrdc.org/media/pressreleases/060208a.aspFriday, February 10, 2006
THOSE FUCKERS KNEW AND DID NOT CARE
Kanye West was 100% right: Bush doesn't care about black people.
Documents: White House Knew About Levees
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The earliest official report of a New Orleans levee breach came at 8:30 a.m., hours after Hurricane Katrina roared ashore. Word of the possible breach surfaced at the White House less than three hours later, at 11:13 a.m.
In all, 28 federal, state and local agencies reported levee failures on Aug. 29, according to a timeline of e-mails, situation updates and weather reports — a litany at odds with the Bush administration's contention that it didn't know the extent of the problem until much later. At the time, President Bush said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
After the levees gave way, thousands of people were left stranded on rooftops and hundreds died of the flooding and its aftermath.
Democrats say the new documents raise questions about whether the government moved quickly enough to rescue storm victims from massive flooding.
The material was released in advance of a Senate hearing Friday at which Michael Brown, the former head of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency, was set to testify.
Brown is widely considered the public face of the government's sluggish response to Katrina. But he signaled earlier this week that he was prepared to discuss his storm communications with President Bush and other top White House officials — a possible signal that his testimony would assign blame elsewhere.
The White House has barred some top advisers and staffers from answering Senate investigators' questions about the administration's response, saying that certain discussions and documents must remain confidential. But Brown, who quit FEMA shortly after the storm and left the federal payroll Nov. 2, is no longer covered by that confidentiality protection.
White House spokesman Trent Duffy said the president and his top aides were fully aware of the massive flooding — and less concerned whether it was caused by levee breaches, overtoppings or failed pumps, all three of which were being reported at the time.
"We knew there was flooding and that's why the No. 1 effort in those early hours was on search and rescue, and saving life and limb," Duffy said.
The Bush administration has said it knew definitively early Tuesday, Aug. 30, the day after the storm, that the levees had been breached, based on an Army Corps of Engineers assessment.
Democrats said the documents showed there was little excuse for the tardy federal response.
"The first communication came at 8:30 a.m.," said Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., top Democrat on the Senate
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. "So it is inexplicable to me how those responsible for the federal response could have woken up Tuesday morning unaware of this obviously catastrophic situation."
The first internal White House communication about levee failures came at 11:13 a.m. on Aug. 29 in a "Katrina Spot Report" by the White House Homeland Security Council.
"Flooding is significant throughout the region and a levee in New Orleans has reportedly been breached sending 6-8 feet of water throughout the 9th ward area of the city," the internal report said.
___
On the Net:
Federal Emergency Management Agency: http://www.fema.govThursday, February 09, 2006
THE SPAWN OF SATAN ACTUALLY MAKES A LITTLE SENSE FOR ONCE
This bitch is still a rabid flaming lunatic nazi who should be put out of everyone's misery, but on this one rant I (gasp!) mostly agree with her:
CALVIN AND HOBBES -- AND MUHAMMAD
By Ann Coulter
As my regular readers know, I've long been skeptical of the "Religion of Peace" moniker for Muslims -- for at least 3,000 reasons right off the top of my head. I think the evidence is going my way this week.
The culture editor of a newspaper in Denmark suspected writers and cartoonists were engaging in self-censorship when it came to the Religion of Peace. It was subtle things, like a Danish comedian's statement, paraphrased by The New York Times, "that he had no problem urinating on the Bible but that he would not dare do the same to the Quran."
So, after verifying that his life insurance premiums were paid up, the editor expressly requested cartoons of Muhammad from every cartoonist with a Danish cartoon syndicate. Out of 40 cartoonists, only 10 accepted the invitation, most of them submitting utterly neutral drawings with no political content whatsoever.
But three cartoons made political points.
One showed Muhammad turning away suicide bombers from the gates of heaven, saying "Stop, stop -- we ran out of virgins!" -- which I believe was a commentary on Muslims' predilection for violence. Another was a cartoon of Muhammad with horns, which I believe was a commentary on Muslims' predilection for violence. The third showed Muhammad with a turban in the shape of a bomb, which I believe was an expression of post-industrial ennui in a secular -- oops, no, wait: It was more of a commentary on Muslims' predilection for violence.
In order to express their displeasure with the idea that Muslims are violent, thousands of Muslims around the world engaged in rioting, arson, mob savagery, flag-burning, murder and mayhem, among other peaceful acts of nonviolence.
Muslims are the only people who make feminists seem laid-back.
The little darlings brandish placards with typical Religion of Peace slogans, such as: "Behead Those Who Insult Islam," "Europe, you will pay, extermination is on the way" and "Butcher those who mock Islam." They warn Europe of their own impending 9/11 with signs that say: "Europe: Your 9/11 will come" -- which is ironic, because they almost had me convinced the Jews were behind the 9/11 attack.
The rioting Muslims claim they are upset because Islam prohibits any depictions of Muhammad -- though the text is ambiguous on beheadings, suicide bombings and flying planes into skyscrapers.
The belief that Islam forbids portrayals of Muhammad is recently acquired. Back when Muslims created things, rather than blowing them up, they made paintings, frescoes, miniatures and prints of Muhammad.
But apparently the Quran is like the Constitution: It's a "living document," capable of sprouting all-new provisions at will. Muslims ought to start claiming the Quran also prohibits indoor plumbing, to explain their lack of it.
Other interpretations of the Quran forbid images of humans or animals, which makes even a child's coloring book blasphemous. That's why the Taliban blew up those priceless Buddhist statues, bless their innocent, peace-loving little hearts.
Largely unnoticed in this spectacle is the blinding fact that one nation is missing from the long list of Muslim countries (by which I mean France and England) with hundreds of crazy Muslims experiencing bipolar rage over some cartoons:
Iraq. Hey -- maybe this democracy thing does work! The barbaric behavior of Europe's Muslims suggests that the European welfare state may not be attracting your top-notch Muslims.
Making the rash assumption for purposes of discussion that Islam is a religion and not a car-burning cult, even a real religion can't go bossing around other people like this.
Catholics aren't short on rules, but they couldn't care less if non-Catholics use birth control. Conservative Jews have no interest in forbidding other people from mixing meat and dairy. Protestants don't make a peep about other people eating food off one another's plates. (Just stay away from our plates -- that's disgusting.)
But Muslims think they can issue decrees about what images can appear in newspaper cartoons. Who do they think they are, liberals?Thursday, February 09, 2006
UNCLE DICKIE OKAYED TREASON
Libby: White House 'Superiors' OK'd Leaks
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - A former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney told a federal grand jury that his superiors authorized him to give secret information to reporters as part of the Bush administration's defense of intelligence used to justify invading Iraq, according to court papers.
Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said in documents filed last month that he plans to introduce evidence that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, disclosed to reporters the contents of a classified National Intelligence Estimate in the summer of 2003.
The NIE is a report prepared by the head of the nation's intelligence operations for high-level government officials, up to and including the president. Portions of NIEs are sometimes declassified and made public. It is unclear whether that happened in this instance.
In a Jan. 23 letter to Libby's lawyers, Fitzgerald said Libby also testified before the grand jury that he caused at least one other government official to discuss an intelligence estimate with reporters in July 2003.
"We also note that it is our understanding that Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to disclose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors," Fitzgerald wrote.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan refused to comment. "Our policy is that we are not going to discuss this when it's an ongoing legal proceeding," he said.
William Jeffress, Libby's lawyer, said, "There is no truth at all" to suggestions that Libby would try to shift blame to his superiors as a defense against the charges.
Libby, 55, was indicted late last year on charges that he lied to FBI agents and the grand jury about how he learned
CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity and when he subsequently told reporters. He is not charged with leaking classified information from an intelligence estimate report.
Plame's identity was published in July 2003 by columnist Robert Novak after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium in Niger. The year before, the CIA had sent Wilson to Niger to determine the accuracy of the uranium reports.
Wilson's revelations cast doubt on President Bush's claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Niger had sold uranium to Iraq to develop a nuclear weapon as one of the administration's key justifications for going to war in Iraq.
On Thursday, Sen. Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., said Cheney should take responsibility if he authorized Libby to share classified information with reporters.
"These charges, if true, represent a new low in the already sordid case of partisan interests being placed above national security," Kennedy said. "The vice president's vindictiveness in defending the misguided war in Iraq is obvious. If he used classified information to defend it, he should be prepared to take full responsibility."
In the summer of 2003, White House officials — including Libby — were frustrated that the media were incorrectly reporting that Cheney had sent Wilson to Niger and had received a report of his findings in Africa before the war in Iraq had begun.
In an effort to counter those reports, Libby and other White House officials sought information from the CIA regarding Wilson and how his trip to Niger came about, according to court records.
Fitzgerald, in his letter to Libby's lawyers, said he plans to use Libby's grand jury testimony to support evidence pertaining to the White House aide's meeting with former New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
During the meeting with Miller on July 8, Libby also discussed Plame, Fitzgerald said. "Our anticipated basis for offering such evidence is that such facts are inextricably intertwined with the narrative of the events of spring 2003, as Libby's testimony itself makes plain," the prosecutor wrote.
Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to discuss her source.
(TGH Editorial Comment: Miller is a skankwad who did it for publicity reasons only)Wednesday, February 08, 2006
ENOUGH OF THIS RELIGIOUS BULLSHIT!
Shameful appeasement
By Kathleen Parker, USA Today
"Barbarism begins her reign by banishing the Muses."
- Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, 1749
The past several days of mayhem throughout the Muslim world - all thanks to a handful of mild cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed - have provided a clarifying moment for those still uncertain about what the West faces from radical disciples of the Islamic faith.
What's clear is that East and West are not just cultures apart, but centuries, and that certain elements of the Muslim world would like to drag us back into the Dark Ages.
What is also clear is that the West's own leaders, both in Europe and the USA, as well as many of our own journalists, have been weak-spined when it comes to defending the principles of free expression that the artists in Denmark were exploring.
Instead of stepping up to passionately defend freedoms won through centuries of bloody sacrifice, most have bowed to ayatollahs of sensitivity, rebuking the higher calling of enlightenment and sending the cartoonists into hiding under threat of death.
Many U.S. newspapers have declined to reproduce the cartoons out of respect for Muslims, setting up the absurd implication that an open airing of the debate's content constitutes disrespect. Both the U.S. State Department and the
Vatican have declared that Muslims were justified in being offended, while former president Bill Clinton, speaking in Qatar last month, called the cartoons "appalling."
Mob rule
Of course, one can always justify being offended because taking offense is always a subjective act of volition. What is appalling, meanwhile, is appeasing crazed radicals in betrayal of moderate Muslims courageously trying to speak truth to insanity. Appalling is our official genuflection to an irrational horde that has no interest in compromise or reason but only in submission. Ours.
While our government is issuing sanctimonious sympathy notes to the hysterical mobs, a Jordanian editor is arrested for publishing three of the cartoons and urging Muslims to "be reasonable." While President Bush and Clinton were feeling the pain of religious fanatics, marauders were burning Danish government buildings in Beirut, and Damascus, Syria, and promising Londoners a 9/11 of their own.
Such are the fruits of appeasement.
The controversy that should have been a "Digest" item on a slow news day - rather than heralded as a clash of two civilizations - surrounds 12 cartoons that Danish artists drew to illustrate a newspaper article in September in the center-right daily Jyllands-Posten.
The cartoons, more prosaic than provocative, are deemed blasphemous to the Muslim world for reasons that aren't clear. Some believers of Islam forbid any depictions of the prophet, while others tolerate certain images. If lampooning Mohammed is forbidden, then certainly devout Muslims should refrain from drawing images of Mohammed. But exactly what does this have to do with the rest of us? One does not have to be Islamophobic to resist submitting to the vicissitudes of Islamic law.
By Western standards, the cartoons fall short of wildly controversial. One shows Mohammed wearing a bomb-shaped turban. Another has Mohammed telling suicide bombers he has run out of virgins with which to reward them. Non-literalists understand the sentiment at play. The cartoonists' art highlights how fanatics have hijacked religion and used Mohammed to advance nefarious ends. Surely, modern Islam has no stake in defending bombers who praise Allah while killing innocents.
The history of political cartooning is a history of satire and outrage. We arrived at this level of fragile tolerance not by caving to the demands of every sensitive soul, but by struggling with principles - ideas rather than emotions.
The French master Honoré Daumier, for instance, was jailed for his caricatures of King Louis-Phillippe. Boss Tweed, the 19th-century political boss of Tammany Hall, offered Thomas Nast, the father of American cartooning, a bribe to cease and desist what Tweed famously referred to as "them damned pictures." Hitler reportedly put British caricaturist David Low on a death list.
Thanks to this heritage of healthy irreverence, today self-deprecation and parody are favorite ingredients in the volatile, spicy stew we call freedom. That's why we roast our most powerful in tribute - and why politicians collect, frame and display cartoons that lampoon them. The ability to laugh at oneself, or to shrug off insult, is a sign both of a mature ego and a mature society.
Unfortunately, much of the Arab/Muslim world enjoys no such legacy, much to its cultural impoverishment and to our potential peril. It might help us to win this war of ideas if we properly understand our own.
Those defending Muslim outrage insist that Christians or Jews would be equally outraged were their religious leaders caricatured. Indeed, they often are.
Political cartoonist Doug Marlette remembers when Jewish leaders came to his editor's office and used pica rulers to measure the noses on his drawings of Menachem Begin. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker called him a "tool of Satan" when he highlighted the hypocrisies of their "Praise the Lord" scam, or as they later changed the name without irony or grammar, "People That Love." So it goes.
Two common apologist arguments beg rebuttal. One of them compares printing inflammatory cartoons to crying "fire" in a crowded theater, implying that one shouldn't express things certain to offend others. Never mind that all political commentary would cease by such a standard, but the reason crying "fire" is forbidden is practical. People panic and stampede when they hear it, and it is false. It is imperative to cry "fire" when there really is a fire. It is also imperative to cry foul when cartoonists face death threats for doodling.
An inapt comparison
The other argument, also based on a logical fallacy, is that the Danish cartoons are comparable to racist caricatures of Jews in Nazi Germany and blacks in the segregationist South. The Boston Globe, which saw fit in the past to defend "Piss Christ" (a photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass of urine) as well as a depiction of the Virgin Mary covered in feces as worthy of government subsidy, made such a case recently.
There are at least two reasons why The Globe's comparison is bogus: gas chambers and lynchings. Both the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan were officially sanctioned enforcers of immoral social orders that used caricature to further degrade and dehumanize beleaguered minorities they ultimately murdered.
There is no equivalence between organized murder on behalf of a malignant social system and a half-dozen nerdy artists, speaking only for themselves, lampooning a fanatical religious sect whose members, by the way, specifically advance the delightful goal of exterminating millions of "infidels."
The correct comparison, in fact, for Nazi and Klan terrorists are their brothers under the hoods - the jihadists who issued a death sentence on writer Salman Rushdie, who beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl and businessman Nick Berg, and who kidnapped an innocent American female journalist and showed videos of her sobbing and terrified among armed men holding guns to her head.
These are the fascist thugs, not the artists who draw cartoons in the service of democracy and truth. And those who out of a misguided sense of cultural sensitivity and niceness try to justify Muslim outrage over a cartoon are, frankly, lending aid and comfort to the enemies of civilization.
Monday, February 06, 2006
JIMMY CALLS BULLSHIT
Ex-President Carter: Eavesdropping Illegal
HENDERSON, Nev., Associated Press - Former President Jimmy Carter criticized the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping program Monday and said he believes the president has broken the law.
"Under the Bush administration, there's been a disgraceful and illegal decision — we're not going to the let the judges or the Congress or anyone else know that we're spying on the American people," Carter told reporters. "And no one knows how many innocent Americans have had their privacy violated under this secret act."
Carter made the remarks at a union hall near Las Vegas, where his oldest son, Jack Carter, announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate.
The former president also rebuked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for telling Congress that the spying program is authorized under Article 2 of the Constitution and does not violate the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act passed during Carter's administration. Gonzales made the assertions in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which began investigating the eavesdropping program Monday.
"It's a ridiculous argument, not only bad, it's ridiculous. Obviously, the attorney general who said it's all right to torture prisoners and so forth is going to support the person who put him in office. But he's a very partisan attorney general and there's no doubt that he would say that," Carter said. "I hope that eventually the case will go to the Supreme Court. I have no doubt that when it's over, the Supreme Court will rule that Bush has violated the law."
The former president said he would testify before the Judiciary Committee if asked.
"If my voice is important to point of the intent of the law that was passed when I was president, I know all about that because it was one of the most important decisions I had to make."Monday, February 06, 2006
IT'S OKAY, BECAUSE *WE* ARE DOING IT. SO STFU MOTHERFUCKERS
Gonzales Defends Legality of Surveillance
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales insisted Monday that President Bush is fully empowered to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants as part of the war on terror. He exhorted Congress not to end or tinker with the program.
Gonzales' strong defense of Bush's program was challenged by Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and committee Democrats during sometimes contentious questioning.
Specter told Gonzales that even the Supreme Court had ruled that "the president does not have a blank check." Specter suggested that the program's legality be reviewed by a special federal court set up by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
"There are a lot of people who think you're wrong. What do you have to lose if you're right?" Specter, R-Pa., asked Gonzales.
The attorney general sidestepped the question directly, just saying, "Obviously, we would consider and are always considering methods of fighting the war effectively against Al Qaida."
However, he said that court was already quite familiar with the program. He also said he did not think the 1978 law needed to be modified.
And, said Gonzales, "To end the program now would afford our enemy dangerous and potential deadly new room for operation within our borders."
Specter told Gonzales that federal law "has a forceful and blanket prohibition against any electronic surveillance without a court order."
While the president claims he has the authority to order such surveillance, Specter said, "I am skeptical of that interpretation."
A former Texas judge, Gonzales played an important role as White House counsel in developing the legal justification for the spy program. He served in that post from January 2001 to February 2005.
Committee Democrats, who have generally contended that Bush is acting illegally in permitting domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency, sharply grilled Gonzales.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (news, bio, voting record), D-Vt., asked if the authorization Bush claims to have would also enable the government to open mail — in addition to monitoring voice and electronic communications.
"There is all kinds of wild speculation out there about what the president has authorized and what we're actually doing," Gonzales said.
"You're not answering my question," Leahy retorted. "Does this law authorize the opening of first class mail of U.S. citizens? Yes or no."
"That's not what's going on," Gonzales said. "We are only focusing on international communications, where one part of the conversation is al-Qaida."
Gonzales said the fact that the nation is at war gives the president more powers than during peacetime. "The president is acting with authority both by the Constitution and by statute," he said.
Gonzales called the eavesdropping program "reasonable" and "lawful," and said much of the published criticism about it was "misinformed, confused or wrong."
Monday's hearing got off to a rocky start when Republicans and Democrats disagreed over whether Gonzales should be sworn in. Democrats said he should, but Specter said it wasn't necessary.
He wasn't. "My answers would be the same whether I was under oath or not," Gonzales told the panel.
Gonzales reiterated the administration's contention that Bush was authorized to allow the NSA to eavesdrop, without first obtaining warrants, on people inside the United States whose calls or e-mails may be linked to terrorism.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., told Gonzales the administration broke with the time-honored system of checks and balances by not seeking greater congressional cooperation.
Kennedy said the eavesdropping program could actually weaken national security, raising the prospect that terror suspects could go free if courts rule evidence collected from such surveillance to be tainted.
"We're taking a risk with national security which I think is unwise," Kennedy said.
"We don't believe prosecutions are going to be jeopardized because of this program," Gonzales told Kennedy.
Gonzales declined to discuss details of the operation, as skeptics of the program have demanded. "An open discussion of the operational details of this program would put the lives of Americans at risk," he said.
The program has sparked a heated debate about presidential powers in the war on terror since it was first disclosed in December.
Gonzales argued that Congress did, in fact, authorize the president in September 2001 to use military force in the war on terror.
The Judiciary Committee's Democrats want Specter to call more administration officials for questioning, including former Attorney General John Ashcroft and ex-Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey, who reportedly objected to parts of the program.
Specter said such appearances were possible.Saturday, February 04, 2006
G'NIGHT BETTY, AND THANKS
Feminist Author Betty Friedan Dies at 85
WASHINGTON - Betty Friedan, whose manifesto "The Feminine Mystique" became a best seller in the 1960s and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday, her birthday. She was 85.
Friedan died at her home of congestive heart failure, according to a cousin, Emily Bazelon.
Friedan's assertion in her 1963 best seller that having a husband and babies was not everything and that women should aspire to separate identities as individuals, was highly unusual, if not revolutionary, just after the baby and suburban booms of the Eisenhower era.
The feminine mystique, she said, was a phony bill of goods society sold to women that left them unfulfilled, suffering from "the problem that has no name" and seeking a solution in tranquilizers and psychoanalysis.
"A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, `Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children," Friedan said.
"That book changed women's lives," Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, which Friedan co-founded, said Saturday. "It opened women's minds to the idea that there actually might be something more. And for the women who secretly harbored such unpopular thoughts, it told them that there were other women out there like them who thought there might be something more to life."
In the racial, political and sexual conflicts of the 1960s and '70s, Friedan's was one of the most commanding voices and recognizable presences in the women's movement.
As the first president of NOW in 1966, she staked out positions that seemed extreme at the time on such issues as abortion, sex-neutral help-wanted ads, equal pay, promotion opportunities and maternity leave.
But at the same time, Friedan insisted that the women's movement had to remain in the American mainstream, that men had to be accepted as allies and that the family should not be rejected.
"Don't get into the bra-burning, anti-man, politics-of-orgasm school," Friedan told a college audience in 1970.
To more radical and lesbian feminists, Friedan was "hopelessly bourgeois," Susan Brownmiller wrote at the time.
Friedan, deeply opposed to "equating feminism with lesbianism," conceded later that she had been "very square" and uncomfortable about homosexuality.
"I wrote a whole book objecting to the definition of women only in sexual relation to men. I would not exchange that for a definition of women only in sexual relation to women," she said.
Nonetheless she was a seconder for a resolution on protecting lesbian rights at the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977.
"For a great many women, choosing motherhood makes motherhood itself a liberating choice," she told an interviewer two decades later. But she added that this should not be a reason for conflict with "other feminists who are maybe more austere, or choose to seek their partners among other women."
By then in her 70s, Friedan had moved on to the issue of how society views and treats its elderly.
She said that while researching her last book, "The Fountain of Age," published in 1993, she found those who dealt with old people "talk about the aged with the same patronizing, `compassionate' denial of their personhood that was heard when the experts talked about women 20 years ago."
She had not stopped being a feminist, she said, "but women as a special separate interest group are not my concern any more."
Friedan, born Feb. 4, 1921, in Peoria, Ill., was a high achieving Jewish outsider growing up in middle America. Her father, Harry Goldstein, owned a jewelry store; her mother, Miriam, quit a job as a newspaper women's page editor to become a housewife.
As a girl, Friedan watched her mother "cut down my father because she had no place to channel her terrific energies, a typical female disorder that I call impotent rage," she said.
From high school valedictorian in 1938 to summa cum laude graduate of Smith College in 1942, "I was that girl with all A's and I wanted boys worse than anything," she said.
She won a fellowship in psychology to the University of California, Berkeley, but turned down a bigger fellowship there so as not to outdo a boyfriend.
The romance broke up anyway and Friedan moved to Greenwich Village in New York and became a labor reporter.
She lost one job to a returning World War II veteran but found another before marrying Carl Friedan, a summer-stock producer and later an advertising executive, in 1947. The marriage, which produced three children, ended in divorce 22 years later.
Friedan got a maternity leave to have her first child in 1949, but was fired and replaced by a man when she asked for another leave to have the second child five years later.
The family had moved to a big Victorian house in the suburban Rockland County village of randview-on-the-Hudson, N.Y., where Friedan cranked out freelance magazine articles while bringing up her brood.
Hoping to get a magazine piece out of a Smith College 15-year reunion, Friedan prepared an in-depth survey of her classmates.
What she found was that these well-educated women of the class of 1942, now largely suburban housewives, were asking, in effect, "Is this all?"
Friedan couldn't get the article published in a magazine, but five years of more research and writing turned it into "The Feminine Mystique."
If some women read it as a call to arms, others were outraged, Friedan recalled. Dinner invitations stopped; she was out of the school car pool.
But the first printing of 3,000 eventually grew to 600,000 copies hardcover and more than 2 million in paperback. The book was listed at No. 37 on a 1999 New York University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century.
In 1964, the family moved back to Manhattan in 1964 and Friedan began working to have the federal government enforce the Civil Rights Act as it applied to sex and not only to race, religion and national origin.
Founding NOW was a response to federal inaction. The finale of Friedan's presidency was the national women's strike of August 1970, which brought women out across the country on the 50th anniversary of women's suffrage.
She also was a founder in 1968 of the National Conference for Repeal of Abortion Laws, which became the National Abortion Rights Action League, and of the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971.
During the following decade she taught and lectured, and her 1981 book, "The Second Stage," was seen by many as a public break with the feminist leadership that had succeeded her. She said they had pursued "sexual politics that distorted the sense of priorities of the women's movement during the 1970s," and had opened the way for conservatives and reactionaries to occupy the center on family issues.
In "The Second Stage," Friedan also appeared to accept criticism from some women that "The Feminine Mystique" was too dismissive of domestic life. "Our failure was our blind spot about the family," she wrote.
Friedan taught on both coasts, at New York University and the University of Southern California, lecturing widely and traveling to women's conferences around the globe.
She helped persuade the Democratic Party to give women half the delegate strength at its nominating convention and was herself a delegate when Geraldine Ferraro was nominated for vice president in 1984.
She lived in New York City and Washington, D.C., and had a summer house in Sag Harbor, N.Y.
Survivors include her sons, Daniel Friedan of Princeton, N.J., and Jonathan Friedan of Philadelphia, and daughter Emily Friedan of Buffalo, N.Y.; nine grandchildren; a sister, Amy Adams of New York; and a brother, Harry Goldstein of Palm Springs, Calif.
Carl Friedan died in December, according to Bazelon.
She said the funeral will be Monday at Riverside Memorial Chapel in New York.Saturday, February 04, 2006
TERRORISM, AND THE FEAR OF IT: THE NEW OPIATE OF THE MASSES
Terrorism's Little Secret
by Deepak Chopra, Huffington Post
The one thing that terrorist leaders don't want their followers to know is that they have nothing to gain. Suicide bombers are only the most obvious example, since they won't survive to gain anything even if terrorism ever "wins." but no follower is going to gain, because the deeper secret is that Islamic terrorism helps the rich and powerful.
Osama bin Laden is himself a wealthy man from a prodigally wealthy family. He is a outcast from his clan in Saudi Arabia, but only because he crossed a certain line. The other wealthy people in Saudi Arabia fund and support jihadist Islam for obvious reasons: it keeps them in power. Terrorism has become the new opiate of the masses. An opiate keeps you drowsy; it makes you believe in fantasies instead of reality.
Terrorism is now doing that as effectively as religion. Millions of Islamic children are going to private Islamic schools, or madrasas, only to come out almost as unfit for modern life as the day they entered. Fundamentalist clerics, such as those in Iran, have become billionaires while the flocks they preach to fall lower and lower economically. Corrupt princes stay in power by funding these clerics, both serving the same reactionary politics that will never grant power, money, or a chance to rise in society to ordinary citizens.
Terrorism wears a revolutionary mask, but the revolution doesn't exist except as a fantasy of returning to a pre-modern age when the Muslim world had greater prestige. Without America and Israel to hate, terrorism would be socially and politically bankrupt, so why is it succeeding? Because it stands symbolically for the dispossessed. Al-Qaeda is perceived as the only chance for people who have nothing.
This is another way that terrorism has morphed into a pseudo-religion. But at the same time, this is terrorism's Achilles heel, since every society could help its dispossessed. Certainly the G-8 countries and the Arab sheikdoms could long ago have subsidized a good life for every Palestinian refugee, for example. That we keep the dispossessed in a state of wretched misery gives terrorism its opening, which will never close until we become a global force for progress and expose terrorism for the reactionary fraud that it is.
Friday, February 03, 2006
READ BETWEEN MY LIP LINES
Arianna Huffington: Bush: Addicted to Empty Rhetoric
Huffington Post - There is nothing more infuriating than hearing something you passionately believe in -- and indeed have been advocating for years -- cynically co-opted by someone who clearly doesn't mean it.
That's why the smoke started pouring out of my ears Tuesday night when President Bush announced: "America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world."
How much the president didn't mean anything by his bold statement became crystal clear the day after the State of the Union when his own Energy Secretary, Samuel Bodman, said that the president's call "to make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past" should not be taken literally. Trust me, Sam, I didn't.
Hearing this presidential diagnosis from an oilman starting the sixth year of an administration that has unwaveringly turned the White House into a veritable full-service fueling station for Big Oil -- allowing oil refinery merger after oil refinery merger, doling out billions in tax breaks to energy interests, deriding conservation, and steadfastly refusing to increase fuel-efficiency standards for cars -- was like hearing the makers of the "Girls Gone Wild" videos denounce the coarsening of our culture.
I also wondered if I and my cofounders in the Detroit Project -- Lawrence Bender, Laurie David, and Ari Emanuel -- should ask the White House for a royalty check.
Three years ago, we produced a series of TV ads urging American consumers to connect the dots between the cars we drive, our addiction to oil, and our national security.
The ads were a satiric response to the outrageous drug war ads the Bush administration had flooded the airwaves with, linking drug use to terrorism. We decided to turn the tables and point out the much more credible link between our SUVs, our oil addiction, and our national security.
Here are two of the ads:
Even before they were released, the ads caused a sensation -- getting a lot of free media attention while being rejected by stations in Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles as too controversial.
What's more, many of the president's supporters accused us of being unpatriotic, of attacking all that was good about America -- which apparently included an insatiable demand for oil. And now the president has adopted many of our talking points (maybe he finally got around to reading this State of the Union speech I wrote for him in 2003).
If only he meant it. But the sincerity of Bush's Road to Damascus moment is belied by his utter refusal to actually champion the steps needed for us to break our addiction.
Besides repeatedly opposing higher fuel-mileage standards, the White House also successfully fought to remove a provision in the recent energy bill that called for a one-million-barrel-a-day cut in oil consumption by 2015. The bill, supported and signed by Bush, also eliminated a provision requiring utility companies to "generate at least 10 percent of their electricity through renewable fuels by 2020." As Think Progress points out, Bush has long given lip service to making America less dependent on foreign oil, while increasing our reliance on foreign oil from 58 percent in 2000 to 66 percent today.
His words say break the oil addiction, but his policies keep mainlining the stuff into the body politic.
If the president were really serious about helping us break the habit, his headline-grabbing rhetoric would have been accompanied by concrete proposals that would have an immediate effect on reducing our reliance on foreign oil.
Developing ethanol from "wood chips" and "switch grass" is all well and good -- but nowhere near as good as upping CAFE standards. An improvement of just 3 mpg nationwide would save 1 million barrels of oil per day. The president could also close the outrageous loophole that allows buyers of extra-large gas-guzzling SUVs to take extra-large deductions on their taxes. And he could flip the tax equation by providing incentives and deductions to those who purchase more fuel-efficient cars.
And if he really wanted to put his policies where his mouth is, he could get behind the Apollo Alliance's ten-year, ten-point plan for achieving energy independence.
But he won't. He'd rather talk the talk, while defending the obscene oil company profits his policies have enabled.
"I meant what I said [Tuesday] night," Bush insisted yesterday, "that America's addiction for oil is bad for this country."
The question, Mr. President, is not whether our oil addiction is bad -- clearly it is. The question is, what are you going to do about it?Thursday, February 02, 2006
REPUBLICANS GET A BOEHNER
Rep. Boehner Elected House Majority Leader
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - House Republicans elected Rep. John Boehner (news, bio, voting record) of Ohio as their new majority leader Thursday, choosing a self-proclaimed reform candidate to replace indicted Rep.
Tom DeLay as the party struggles with an ethics scandal.
Boehner, flanked by Speaker Dennis Hastert and other members of the leadership, said Republicans will "rededicate ourselves to dealing with big issues that the American people expect us to deal with" — such as pocketbook and national security issues.
Boehner, a 56-year-old veteran of 15 years in Congress, defeated the front-runner, Rep. Roy Blunt (news, bio, voting record) of Missouri, 122-109, after lagging behind his rival in a first, inconclusive vote.
A third contender — John Shadegg of Arizona — withdrew after trailing his two rivals in the initial round of voting.
While Boehner has had feuds with DeLay, Blunt was close to the former majority leader and had served as his top deputy.
Blunt remains the GOP whip. "Believe me, the world goes on," he said.
"We have a great leadership team," Blunt said. "We're going to work to make the Congress better; more importantly we're going to work to make the country better, and I look forward to working with John Boehner as majority leader to make that happen."
Boehner campaigned as a candidate of reform, and said his experience as chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee had demonstrated his ability to pass major legislation.
Blunt had been a temporary stand-in for DeLay, who is charged with campaign finance violations in Texas.
After the vote, Rep. Jeff Flake (news, bio, voting record), R-Ariz., called Boehner "a fresh face."
"It wouldn't be credible for the same leaders to be advocating change," Flake said, adding he hoped Blunt would stay on as whip, third-ranking in the leadership.
Republicans are at a political crossroads as they work to avoid the taint of scandal from investigations that have already led to the conviction and resignation of Rep. Randy Cunningham (news, bio, voting record), R-Calif. In addition, Rep. Bob Ney (news, bio, voting record), R-Ohio, faces scrutiny in a wide-ranging congressional corruption investigation symbolized by lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
The election was marked by confusion for a time when it appeared that the number of ballots cast exceeded the number of eligible voters by one. It turned out that clerks had left Luis Fortuno, the resident commissioner of Puerto Rico, off their list. He is not allowed to vote on the House floor, but does have voting rights in the GOP's internal deliberations.
The party breakdown of the 435-member House is 231 Republicans, 201 Democrats and one independent with two seats vacant. One Republican did not vote in the leadership election.
Blunt's position in leadership had made him the front-runner, but he ended seven votes short of the necessary majority on a first-round secret ballot. He had 110 votes and Boehner had 79. Shadegg received 40 and Rep. Jim Ryun (news, bio, voting record) of Kansas, who was not an announced candidate, got two votes.
After Shadegg and Ryun dropped out, Boehner won his second-ballot victory.
It was the most-contested election among House Republicans since the upheaval that followed ethics allegations and election losses in 1998. Eight years later, the GOP hopes to avoid political reversals in midterm elections as it contends with ethics problems anew.
The secret-ballot election capped a 24-day campaign in which Blunt sought to convert his experience as majority whip and DeLay's temporary stand-in into a permanent promotion.
"This is not a party stuck in neutral," he said as the race began, dismissing a claim made by Boehner. "This is an opportunity for reform."
Boehner and Shadegg both cast themselves as outsiders, better positioned to revive Republican spirits and political fortunes in the wake of the Abramoff lobbying scandal.
Democrats watched with interest, ready to pounce on the winner.
"No matter who Republicans elect, it's easy to show they're supporting more of the same ... part of the same pay-to-play system that's made Washington the mess that it is right now," said Bill Burton, a spokesman for the House Democratic campaign organization.
The three Republican rivals, all 56, have carved out different careers in the House.
Blunt, who represents a district in southwestern Missouri, had just won his second term in 1998 when DeLay, R-Texas, tapped him to take a place at the leadership table as chief deputy whip.
The two men each moved up one rung on the leadership ladder in 2003 and have worked closely together for years. Jim Ellis, a consultant who was indicted with DeLay last year on campaign fundraising charges, also works for Blunt's political action committee. He has denied all wrongdoing.
Unlike either of his rivals, Boehner came to Congress when Democrats held a majority, and he joined the Gang of Seven, a group of energetic young lawmakers eager to draw attention to a scandal involving the House bank and Democrats.
Boehner won a place in leadership when Republicans gained a majority in 1994, a position that kept him in frequent contact with lobbyists.
But he and DeLay soon clashed, and Boehner lost his leadership post four years later. Boehner became chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee in 2001, and he helped shepherd
President Bush's No Child Left Behind education bill through the House.
Shadegg came to Congress from the Phoenix area in 1994, part of the large contingent of newcomers who cemented the first Republican majority in 40 years. He showed an interest in health care and other policy issues, and won election in 2000 as head of an organization of House conservatives, now known as the Republican Study Committee. He later was elected to a junior leadership post.
DeLay, who has denied any wrongdoing, is awaiting trial in his home state on the campaign finance charges he has repeatedly denounced as politically inspired.Wednesday, February 01, 2006
BUSH: A NO-FREE-SPEECH ZONE
Police Remove Sheehan From Bush Speech
By LAURIE KELLMANWriter 45 minutes ago
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Cindy Sheehan, mother of a fallen soldier in Iraq, wasn't the only one ejected from the House gallery during the State of the Union address for wearing a T-shirt with a war-related slogan that violated the rules. The wife of a powerful Republican congressman was also asked to leave.
Beverly Young, wife of Rep. C.W. Bill Young (news, bio, voting record) of Florida — chairman of the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee — was removed from the gallery because she was wearing a T-shirt that read, "Support the Troops — Defending Our Freedom."
"Because she had on a shirt that someone didn't like that said support our troops, she was kicked out of this gallery," Young said on the House floor Wednesday morning, holding up the gray shirt.
"Shame, shame," he scolded.
Mrs. Young was sitting about six rows from first lady Laura Bush and asked to leave. She argued with police in the hallway outside the House chamber.
"They said I was protesting," she told the St. Petersburg Times. "I said, "Read my shirt, it is not a protest.' They said, 'We consider that a protest.' I said, 'Then you are an idiot.'"
They told her she was being treated the same as Sheehan, a protester ejected before the speech Tuesday night for wearing a T-shirt with an antiwar slogan. Sheehan wrote in her blog Wednesday that she intends to file a First Amendment lawsuit.
"I don't want to live in a country that prohibits any person, whether he/she has paid the ultimate price for that country, from wearing, saying, writing, or telephoning any negative statements about the government," Sheehan wrote.
Capitol Police took Sheehan, invited as a guest of Rep. Lynn Woolsey (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., away in handcuffs and charged her with unlawful conduct, a misdemeanor. She later was released on her own recognizance.
Capitol Police Sgt. Kimberly Schneider said police warned her that such displays were not allowed in the House chamber, but Sheehan did not respond.
Woolsey gave Sheehan her only ticket earlier in the day — Gallery 5, seat 7, row A — while Sheehan was attending an "alternative state of the union" news conference by CODEPINK, a group pushing for an end to the Iraq war.
In her blog, Sheehan wrote that her T-shirt said, "2245 Dead. How many more?" — a reference to the number of soldiers killed in Iraq.
She said she felt uncomfortable about attending the speech.
"I knew George Bush would say things that would hurt me and anger me and I knew that I couldn't disrupt the address because Lynn had given me the ticket," Sheehan wrote. "I didn't want to be disruptive out of respect for her."
She said she had one arm out of her coat when an officer yelled, "Protestor."
"He then ran over to me, hauled me out of my seat and roughly (with my hands behind my back) shoved me up the stairs," she wrote. She was then cuffed and driven to police headquarters a few blocks away.
"I was never told that I couldn't wear that shirt into the Congress," Sheehan wrote. "I was never asked to take it off or zip my jacket back up. If I had been asked to do any of those things...I would have, and written about the suppression of my freedom of speech later."
Sheehan was arrested in September with about 300 other anti-war activists in front of the White House after a weekend of protests against the war in Iraq. In August, she spent 26 days camped near Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, where he was spending a working vacation.