Title Goes Here(tm)

Going To Hell In A Handbasket, and Doing It In Style!

links:
Tom Paine
The Nation
Bush or Chimp?
Landover Baptist Church
The White House
The Onion
Ernie's House of Whoop Ass
Project for the New American Century
Project for the Old American Century
Project for the New American Empire
All Hat, No Cattle
Unfairly Balanced
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we've had this many folks visit so far:

"El diablo sabes mas por viejo que por diablo" - old Mexican proverb

Achtung! Das machine ist nicht fur gerfingerpoken und mittengraben. Ist easy schnappen der pringenwerk, blowenfusen, und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fur gewerken by das dumkopfen, das rubbernecken sightseeren keepen hands in der pockets, relaxen und watchen der blinkenlights.

Movies I would take to a desert island with me:

- Alien
- Ferris Bueller's Day Off
- Legally Blonde
- Tomb Raider
- Blazing Saddles
- Rozencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
- The Emperor's New Groove
- Hunt For Red October
- Silence Of The Lambs

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Congress moves to bar states from making food safer

USA Today - When people in Oregon and Washington got sick recently from drinking unpasteurized milk, lawmakers in Florida took notice. They banned sale of the product.

This is a common sort of occurrence. When a state sees national food safety standards falling short, it imposes tougher ones. Michigan, for example, requires that consumers be informed when bulk foods contain sulfites, which can cause allergic reactions. California is trying now to force Mexican candy-makers to reduce lead levels because lead can severely harm children.

When this happens, safety gaps are plugged. The public is protected. And the food industry gets very annoyed by the inconvenience.

Problem is that after a decade of frustration - and $31 million of investments in political campaigns - the industry may finally have found a Congress compliant enough to indulge its whims.

Earlier this month, the House of Representatives, with a bipartisan majority, passed a bill that would require uniform labeling of products. It prohibits states from having standards that are "not identical" to the federal government's.

This, according to industry spin, would spare the public confusion and save companies - and ultimately consumers - the cost of making 50 different labels. If tougher rules are needed, the industry says, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will impose them.

Trouble is, not one of those arguments holds up. There is no proliferation of labels. Top industry lobbyist Cal Dooley, head of the Food Products Association, was unable to cite a single instance in which manufacturers have to put two different labels on a product, let alone 50.

Further, the idea that states cause confusion is a ruse. They fill a void. While the federal government bans interstate shipments of unpasteurized milk, for example, it leaves judgments on sales to the states. Lead in candies? The FDA issues "guidance" only on the amount allowed.

As for the FDA adopting stricter standards, don't bet on it. The process, as outlined in the new bill, could take years. It would cost the FDA, already pressed for money and staff, $100 million over six years, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

What the food industry wants - and what several other industries are seeking - is one-stop shopping. It wants to make sure that once its lobbying and campaign cash win favors in Washington, states can't get in the way.

States often move far more quickly to protect consumers. Florida, for instance, banned some food supplements containing ephedra in 1996 after a college student using one of the products died there on spring break. For eight more years, the clout of the $20-billion diet-supplement industry in Congress kept the FDA at bay. In 2004, the agency finally put in place a national ban. By then ephedra had been linked to 164 deaths.

Despite the stakes for consumers - or more likely because of them - the issue has received little public attention. The House held no public hearings. It quietly voted for the change during the week Washington was consumed by the Dubai ports deal.

Bush Blames Saddam for Iraq Instability

"Dude! Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?"

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - President Bush said Wednesday that Saddam Hussein, not continued U.S. involvement in Iraq, is responsible for ongoing sectarian violence that is threatening the formation of a democratic government.

In his third speech this month to bolster public support for the war, Bush worked to counter critics who say the U.S. presence in the wartorn nation is fueling the insurgency. Bush said that Saddam was a tyrant and used violence to exacerbate sectarian divisions to keep himself in power, and that as a result, deep tensions persist to this day.

"The enemies of a free Iraq are employing the same tactics Saddam used, killing and terrorizing the Iraqi people in an effort to foment sectarian division," Bush said.

The president also pushed Iraq to speed up the formation of a unity government, seen as the best option to subdue the violence gripping several Iraqi cities

"I want the Iraqi people to hear I've got great confidence in their capacity to self govern," Bush said. "I also want the Iraqi people to hear — it's about time you get a unity government going. In other words, Americans understand you're newcomers to the political arena. But pretty soon its time to shut her down and get governing."

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid accused Bush of sending "mixed messages" on Iraq that are hurting Iraq's chances for success.

"The president can give all the speeches he wants, but nothing will change the fact that his Iraq policy is wrong," said Reid, D-Nev. "Two weeks ago, he told the American people that Iraqis would control their country by the end of the year. But last week, he told us our troops would be there until at least 2009."

Hundreds of Iraqis have been killed in sectarian violence and by death squads operating inside the Shiite-dominated ministry since the Feb. 22 bombing of an important Shiite shrine in Samarra set off a wave of revenge attacks. On Wednesday, gunmen lined up 14 employees of an electronics trading company in Baghdad and shot them all, killing eight and wounding six.

"Iraq is a nation that is physically and emotionally scarred by three decades of Saddam's tyranny," Bush said in a speech to Freedom House, a more than 60-year-old independent organization that supports the expansion of freedom in the world.

Bush said Iraq's instability "is the legacy of Saddam — a tyrant who exacerbated ethnic divisions to keep himself in power."

Bush said it's vital to the security of Iraq that its police force not be infiltrated with Saddam loyalists or members of illegal militias. The violence has raised the urgency for forming a government representing all ethnic groups, he said.

The United States has been pushing Iraq to speed up the formation of a unity government, seen as the best option to subdue the violence gripping several Iraqi cities — and to allow for the start of a U.S. troop withdrawal this summer.

But the talks are fragile in a country with deep sectarian differences between Shiites and Sunnis and daily violent death tolls in the dozens. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has asked one of Iraq's most prominent Shiite politicians to seek the withdrawal of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari's contentious nomination for a second term.

"I know that the work in Iraq is really difficult," Bush said, adding that a free Iraq in the Middle East is important to the security of America.

He criticized lawmakers calling for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq — a move that Bush said would have disastrous consequences for American security. If troops were withdrawn now, Iraq would turn into a safe haven for terrorists, who could arm themselves with weapons of mass destruction and could attack moderate governments in the Middle East, he said.

Judges Back Court Review of Eavesdropping

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Five federal judges gave a boost Tuesday to legislation that would bring court scrutiny to the Bush administration's domestic spying program.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing chaired by Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record), R-Pa., the judges reacted favorably to his proposal that would require the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to conduct regular reviews of the four-year-old program.

The existence of the warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency was revealed by The New York Times three months ago.

The judges stressed that they were not offering their views on the NSA operation, which they said they knew nothing about.

But they said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has operated capably for 28 years and is fully able to protect civil liberties and give the administration all the speed and flexibility it needs to execute the war on terror.

The administration contends the president has inherent war powers under the Constitution to order eavesdropping without warrants.

"I am very wary of inherent authority" claimed by presidents, testified U.S. Magistrate Judge Allan Kornblum. "It sounds very much like King George."

Before word of the warrantless surveillance leaked publicly, the Bush administration revealed it to just eight members of Congress and to the presiding judge on the surveillance court.

The hearing Tuesday focused on Specter's bill. A rival approach, drafted by Senate Judiciary Committee member Mike DeWine of Ohio and three other Republicans, would allow the government to conduct warrantless surveillance for up to 45 days before seeking court or congressional approval.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., expressed interest in handling legislation on the NSA effort. But the Senate Parliamentarian gave Specter jurisdiction over his bill and DeWine's.

Senate Judiciary Committee member Russ Feingold, D-Wis., has urged censure of the president for authorizing the warrantless surveillance.

Under it, the NSA can monitor international calls — when one party is inside the United States — without first getting court approval. The NSA has been conducting the surveillance when calls and e-mails are thought to involve al-Qaida.

The others testifying before Specter's panel were U.S. District Judges Harold Baker of Urbana, Ill.; Stanley Brotman of Camden, N.J.; John Keenan of the southern district of New York City; and William Stafford of Pensacola, Fla.

The careers of all five judges have been steeped in the work of the secret surveillance court.

No-bid contracts given to White House cronies, Pentagon happily paying hundreds of millions extra for substandard work, the senate in bed with lobbyists, but wait, there's more...

Halliburton overcharged for Iraq oil work: report

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Halliburton Co., the world's second largest oil services company, repeatedly overcharged taxpayers and provided substandard cost reports under a $1.2 billion contract to restore

Iraq's southern oil fields, according to a new report by U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record).

Waxman, a California Democrat, said Democratic staff members of the House Committee on Government Reform examined a series of previously undisclosed government audits and correspondence that criticized Halliburton's performance under the "Restore Iraqi Oil 2" (RIO2) contract.

The documents, which cover the period from January 2004 to July 2005, painted "an absolutely abysmal picture of Halliburton's RIO2 work" and cited profound systemic problems, misleading and distorted cost reports, he said.

Halliburton, a Texas-based company formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney, dismissed the committee report as partisan and said it focused on old issues with the two-year contract that have been resolved.

"After two years and from thousands of miles away, it is easy to criticize decisions and actions that were based on urgent mission requirements and severe time constraints," the company said in a statement.

Halliburton, the largest private contractor in Iraq, said the contract went through "countless changes" and review by at least 15 different government contracting officials.

Waxman, who has introduced legislation to limit sole-source contracts in the future, said lawmakers did not know much about what had happened with the contract since July 2005, adding: "From what we can see, major problems remain."

Halliburton said its engineering and construction arm KBR, which is gearing up for an initial public stock offering, had received 30 task orders under the contract to date, for a total current value of nearly $750 million and work was ongoing.

The Democratic report said that, in addition to the RIO 2 contract, Halliburton was also paid $13.5 billion for providing troop support under a logistics contract with the U.S. Army, and $2.4 billion under the original RIO contract to import fuel into Iraq and rebuild Iraq oil infrastructure.

The Pentagon's Project and Contracting Office (PCO) found that Halliburton repeatedly overcharged the government, Waxman said, citing the documents.

PCO put KBR on notice in January 2005 that it could cancel the contract for cause. It lifted the notice six months later, saying KBR demonstrated "adequate" compliance. In January, it exercised one of three one-year options to extend the deal.

In one case, the agency said Halliburton tried to inflate cost estimates by $26 million. In another, it said Halliburton claimed costs for laying concrete pads and footings that the Iraqi Oil Ministry had already installed.

The report said the same agency reported Halliburton was "accruing exorbitant indirect costs at a rapid rate," while the Defense Contract Audit Agency challenged $45 million of $365 million in costs as unreasonable or unsupported.

The PCO also cited "profound systemic problems" with Halliburton's cost reporting and said some documents were stripped of information that would allow tracking of details.

It said Halliburton's work under RIO 2 was 50 percent late and officials refused to cooperate with oversight officials.

So, how did we go from $400 million surplus to 8 TRILLION deficit in six years?

My name is Dorian Tribble. I'm prematurely middle aged, mostly decent, and have enough personal demons not to need to battle others. I'd love to be King Of The World, if only the job came with less responsibility, more vacation time, and a tighter body.

Today is like most days - filled with promise and no direction, or rather, too many directions for effective action. I gave up coffee, but I found a great tea substitute, this stuff they drink in South America called maté, you say it 'mah-tay'. Great stuff, great stuff - half the caffeine and none of the jitters. I highly recommend it.

Considering that several weeks ago, State Farm and other major carriers canceled all hurricane insurance for residents in the northeast, I'd say this prediction is a safe bet to happen...

Forecasts: Northeast Due for Big Hurricane

DOVER, N.H., Associated Press - New England could be in for a big one. Meteorologists say conditions — including warmer temperatures in the Atlantic Basin and cooler temperatures in the Pacific Ocean — are ripe for the Northeast coast to be hit by a whopper of a hurricane this season.

Ken Reeves, a senior meteorologist at the AccuWeather Center in State College, Pa., said that when the Pacific is cooler, it "essentially drives the storm track further to the east in the Atlantic Ocean basin."

He predicts the East Coast north of the Mid-Atlantic states could see a Category 3 hurricane, a storm that could resemble the devastating systems that hit New England between the 1930s and 1950s.

"There are some eerie similarities to the pattern of the 1938 hurricane," he said.

A 1938 storm known as the "The Long Island Express" remains the region's worst hurricane. Its 121 mph winds gusted to 183 mph and caused massive flooding, power outages and wind damage throughout the region, leaving 600 people dead.

During recent decades, New Englanders mostly have experienced only the remnants of storms that hit other parts of the country, such as Hurricane Gloria in 1985 and Hurricane Bob in 1991, which brought heavy rains, localized flooding and power outages.

If a big storm did hit, the New Hampshire coast might be spared the worst of the damage because it is sheltered compared to areas like Cape Cod, Portland, Maine, and Long Island, N.Y., Reeves said.

Lourdes Aviles, a Plymouth State University assistant meteorology professor, said Reeves' forecast sounds right. That New England hasn't had a strong hurricane in 50 years could signal the region's luck is running out, she said.

John Jensenius, a meteorologist with the

National Weather Service in Gray, Maine, said his group has been concerned for years that a strong hurricane could strike New England's coast.

Hurricane activity tends to be cyclical, he said. Every 50 years, a pattern develops that increases the potential for a major storm. But that doesn't mean a storm is imminent.

"The chances of one happening this year is no greater than it was last year," Jensenius said.

___

Gee Dumbya's new boy was responsible for letting him take the country from a $400 billion surplus to a trillion dollar deficit - this is his "expert on the budget and our economy".

Bolten to Replace Card As Chief of Staff

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - White House chief of staff Andy Card has resigned and will be replaced by budget director Joshua Bolten, President Bush announced Tuesday amid growing calls for a White House shakeup and Republican concern about Bush's tumbling poll ratings.

Bush announced the changes in a nationally broadcast appearance in the Oval Office.

"I have relied on Andy's wise counsel, his calm in crisis, his absolute integrity and his tireless commitment to public service," Bush said. "The next three years will demand much of those who serve our country. We have a global war to fight and win."

Card, 58, stood stoically with his hands by his sides as Bush lauded his years of service through the Sept. 11 attacks, war and legislative and economic challenges. Gripping the podium, Card said in his farewell: "You're a good man, Mr. President." Card's eyes were watery. Card said he looks forward to just being Bush's friend. Bush then gave him five quick slaps on the back and the two walked out of the Oval Office together.

The president called Bolten, 51, a man with broad experience, both on Wall Street and in Washington, including the last three years as director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Alarmed by Bush's declining approval ratings and unhappiness about the war in Iraq, Republicans have been urging the president to bring in new advisers with fresh ideas and energy. Bolten has been with Bush since his first campaign for the White House. There was no immediate indication of other changes afoot.

"The good news is the administration has finally realized it needs to change its ways, but the problems go far deeper than one staffer," said Sen. Charles Schumer (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y. "Simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic by replacing Andy Card with Josh Bolten without a dramatic change in policy will not right this ship."

Bush gathered with members of his Cabinet in the Rose Garden at mid-morning after discussions about the war on terror. He ignored shouted questions from reporters about why he made the staff changes. Bush said he would deliver a speech on Wednesday about Iraq.

"We had a chance to honor two members of my Cabinet who won't be with us much longer — Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, Chief of Staff Andy Card," Bush said. "These two folks have served our country with distinction and honor. I'm proud to work side-by-side with them, and I'm proud to call them friend."

To the public, Card may be best known as the aide who calmly walked into a Florida school room and whispered into Bush's ear that America was under attack on Sept. 11, 2001. He was known for keeping his cool under pressure. When Bush's father, then President George H.W. Bush, got sick at a banquet in Tokyo, aides and security officials ran toward the president. Card ran in the opposite direction, out the door to make sure the motorcade was ready to rush Bush away.

"Josh is a creative policy thinker," Bush said. "He is an expert on the budget and our economy. He is a man of candor and humor and directness. No person is better prepared for this important position."

"I'm deeply honored now by the opportunity to succeed Andy Card as White House chief of staff," Bolten responded. "I said, 'Succeed Andy Card, not replace him,' because he cannot be replaced."

The move comes as Bush is buffeted by increasing criticism of the drawn-out war in Iraq and as fellow Republicans have suggested pointedly that the president bring in new aides with fresh ideas and new energy.

Card came to Bush recently and suggested that he should step down from the job that he has held from the first day of Bush's presidency, said an administration official earlier.

Bush decided during a weekend stay at Camp David, Md., to accept Card's resignation and to name Bolten as his replacement, said the source who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to pre-empt the president.

Bolten is widely experienced in Washington, both on Capitol Hill as well as at the White House, where he was deputy chief of staff before becoming director of the Office of Management and Budget.

At a White House news conference last week, Bush was asked about rumors that a shake up in the White House staff was in the works. Bush said he was "satisfied with the people I've surrounded myself with."

"I've got a staff of people that have, first of all, placed their country above their self-interests," he said at the time. "These are good, hard- working, decent people. And we've dealt with a lot. We've dealt with a lot. We've dealt with war. We've dealt with recession. We've dealt with scandal. We've dealt with Katrina.

"I mean, they've had a lot on their plate. And I appreciate their performance and their hard work and they've got my confidence," he said.

Bush said, "I'm satisfied with the people I've surrounded myself with. We've been a remarkably stable administration, and I think that's good for the country."

A veteran of the administrations of both President Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush, Card was widely respected by his colleagues in the Bush White House. They fondly called him "chief."

He usually arrived at work in the West Wing by around 5:30 a.m. and frequently did not leave until 9 or 10 p.m.

Card plans to stay on the job until April 14, when the switch with Bolten takes place.

Associates said that Card, who was secretary of Transportation and deputy chief of staff for the first President Bush, had wanted to establish himself as the longest serving White House chief of staff. James Steelman, who was President Harry S. Truman's chief of staff, had served for six years and Card's tenure will have gone not much longer than five years.

A recent AP-Ipsos Poll found that Bush's job approval has dipped to 37 percent, his lowest rating in that poll. Nearly 70 percent of people say the U.S. is on the wrong track, a six-point jump since February. Bush's job approval among Republicans plummeted from 82 percent in February to 74 percent, a troubling sign for the White House in an election year.

Card did not immediately disclose his plans. His resignation immediately prompted questions about whether he would return to Massachusetts to run for governor or perhaps challenge Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., who currently faces no major GOP challenge for re-election this fall, or Sen.

John Kerry, D-Mass., whom he helped defeat as the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee and who faces re-election in 2008.

Today's wars are less about ideas than extreme tribalism

By David Ronfeldt, Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON - Western strategists and policymakers should stop talking about a clash of civilizations and focus on the real problem: extreme tribalism. Recent events - riots in many nations protesting cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, Sunni-Shiite warring in Iraq, the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan - confirm that the West is not in a clash with Islam. Instead, Islam, which is a civilizing force, has fallen under the sway of Islamists who are a tribalizing force.

Unfortunately, the tribalism theme has difficulty gaining traction. After the end of the cold war, many American strategists preferred the optimistic "end of history" idea that democracy would triumph around the world, advanced by Francis Fukuyama in 1989. A contrary notion - reversion to tribalism - made better sense to other strategists, such as France's Jacques Attali in 1992. Indeed, the emergence of ethnic warring in the Balkans and elsewhere confirmed that when societies crumble, people revert to tribal and clan behaviors that repudiate liberal ideals.

Perhaps partly because the idea of "tribalism" sounds too anthropological for modern strategists, it has not taken hold. American thinking has shifted to revolve around a more high-minded but less accurate concept: "the clash of civilizations" articulated by Samuel Huntington in 1993.

But what troubles the world is far more a travail of tribalisms than a clash of civilizations. The major clashes are not between civilizations per se, but between antagonistic segments that are fighting across fringe border zones (like Christian Serbs vs. Muslim Kosovars), or feuding within the same civilization, such as Sunnis vs. Shiites in Iraq.

Most antagonists, no matter how high-mindedly they proclaim their ideals, are operating in terribly tribal and clannish ways. Some, such as Al Qaeda terrorists, are extreme tribalists who dream of making the West start over at a razed, tribal level.

This travail is sure to persist, fueling terrorism, ethnonationalism, religious strife, sectarian feuds, and clannish gang violence and crime. Thus, the cartoon protest riots pose an effort to mobilize an Islamic global tribe, not a civilization. Al Qaeda and its affiliates comprise an information age network, but they, too, operate like a global tribe: decentralized, segmental, lacking in central hierarchy, egalitarian toward kith and kin, ruthless toward others.

What are tribes like? The tribe was the first major form of social organization. The hierarchy, market, and network forms developed ages later. Classic tribes are ruled by kinship principles about blood and brotherhood that fix one's sense of identity and belonging. Tribes are also egalitarian and segmental. Everyone is deemed equal and must share. Each part, such as a clan, is structured similarly, aiming for self-sufficiency. And there is no formal chief, though a "big man" may arise. Democracy may appear in tribal councils, but it is not liberal, since it does not tolerate minority rights and dissident views once a consensus emerges.

What maintains order in a tribe is not hierarchy and law - it is too early a form for that - but kinship principles stressing mutual respect, dignity, pride, and honor. Reciprocal gift giving is essential. Humiliating insults upset peace more than anything else, for an insult to one is seen as an insult to everyone of that lineage. And there are only two ways to restore honor: compensation or revenge. Finally, a tribe may view itself as a realm of virtue, but see outsiders as a different realm that may be treated differently, even brutally, especially if they are "different."

Much of the world is still like this. Of particular concern to strategists, a dense arc of tribal and clan systems runs across North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, up into the "stans" of Central Asia. Even modern societies still have tribal cores and impulses. That shows in their cultures, nationalisms, identity politics, kindred glues like sports clubs and social fads, and in cronyism, nepotism, and gang life. Tribalism, for good and ill, is alive everywhere, all the time. We just don't think about it much, and use other terms.

So let's shift away from the civilization paradigm. The tribalism paradigm is better for illuminating the crucial problem: the tribalization of religion. The more that extremists create divisions between "us" and "them," vainly claim sacredness solely for their own ends, demonize others, revel in codes of revenge, crave territorial and spiritual conquests, and suppress moderates who disagree - all the while claiming to act on behalf of a deity - the more their religious orientation becomes utterly tribal and prone to wreaking violence of the darkest kind. They can only pretend to represent a civilization.

The "war of ideas" should be rethought. Western leaders keep pressing Muslim leaders everywhere to denounce terrorism as uncivilized. But this approach, plus counterpressures from sectarian Islamists, has put moderate Muslims on the defensive, stymieing them from speaking out. An approach that focuses on questioning extreme tribalism may be more effective at freeing up dialogue and inviting a search for common, ecumenical ground.

Shifting to a travail-of-tribalisms perspective would have to be carefully thought out. The point is not to condemn all tribal ways. Many people around the world appreciate (indeed, prefer) this communal way of life and will defend it from insult. It is not always uncivilized to be tribal. The point is to strike at the awful effects that extreme tribalization can have - to oppose not a terrorist's or insurgent's religion, but the reduction of that religion to raw tribalist tenets.

Former top judge says US risks edging near to dictatorship

· Sandra Day O'Connor warns of rightwing attacks

· Lawyers 'must speak up' to protect judiciary

Julian Borger in Washington

Monday March 13, 2006

The Guardian, UK

Sandra Day O'Connor, a Republican-appointed judge who retired last month after 24 years on the supreme court, has said the US is in danger of edging towards dictatorship if the party's rightwingers continue to attack the judiciary.

In a strongly worded speech at Georgetown University, reported by National Public Radio and the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, Ms O'Connor took aim at Republican leaders whose repeated denunciations of the courts for alleged liberal bias could, she said, be contributing to a climate of violence against judges.

Ms O'Connor, nominated by Ronald Reagan as the first woman supreme court justice, declared: "We must be ever-vigilant against those who would strong-arm the judiciary."

She pointed to autocracies in the developing world and former Communist countries as lessons on where interference with the judiciary might lead. "It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."

In her address to an audience of corporate lawyers on Thursday, Ms O'Connor singled out a warning to the judiciary issued last year by Tom DeLay, the former Republican leader in the House of Representatives, over a court ruling in a controversial "right to die" case.

After the decision last March that ordered a brain-dead woman in Florida, Terri Schiavo, removed from life support, Mr DeLay said: "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behaviour."

Mr DeLay later called for the impeachment of judges involved in the Schiavo case, and called for more scrutiny of "an arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable judiciary that thumbed their nose at Congress and the president".

Such threats, Ms O'Connor said, "pose a direct threat to our constitutional freedom", and she told the lawyers in her audience: "I want you to tune your ears to these attacks ... You have an obligation to speak up.

"Statutes and constitutions do not protect judicial independence - people do," the retired supreme court justice said.

She noted death threats against judges were on the rise and added that the situation was not helped by a senior senator's suggestion that there might be a connection between the violence against judges and the decisions they make.

The senator she was referring to was John Cornyn, a Bush loyalist from Texas, who made his remarks last April, soon after a judge was shot dead in an Atlanta courtroom and the family of a federal judge was murdered in Illinois.

Senator Cornyn said: "I don't know if there is a cause and effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country ... And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence."

Although appointed by a Republican, Ms O'Connor voted with the supreme court's liberals on some divisive issues, including abortion, making her a frequent target for criticism from the right. After announcing that she intended to retire last year at the age of 75, she was replaced in February this year by Samuel Alito, who is generally regarded as being more consistently conservative.

In her speech, Ms O'Connor said that if the courts did not occasionally make politicians mad they would not be doing their jobs, and their effectiveness "is premised on the notion that we won't be subject to retaliation for our judicial acts".

Florida County Supervisor Draws Criticism

TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Associated Press - Elections controversies just seem to stick to Florida. With the memory of a botched 2000 presidential election still etched in the minds of most elections supervisors in the state, Leon County's Ion Sancho is now finding he can't get the equipment he says he needs to guarantee an honest election.

Vendors of the ATM-like electronic voting machines, tired of Sancho's criticisms over the level of security in their software, no longer want to do business with him or the county. All three companies certified to do business in Florida — Diebold Inc., Election Systems & Software Inc. and Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. — have said "no."

Sancho's insistence on quality also has angered several Florida officials, including Gov. Jeb Bush, and has already cost his county more than a half million dollars.

Nonetheless, the feisty 55-year-old has his share of supporters, with the Tallahassee Democrat dubbing him "a zealous soldier in election reform battles."

"Ion is one of the few to ask the questions," said Herbert Thompson, chief security strategist for Boston-based firm Security Innovation. "Like, what is this thing actually doing to my vote? How is it processing my vote?"

Thompson said most elections officials use the new equipment blindly.

"Nowadays, with the electronic voting systems, you don't know what even looks suspicious if you're an elections official," Thompson said. "You need people who understand software and software security to understand what the risks are."

The 2000 vote recount in Florida that settled the U.S. presidential race exposed myriad problems in the state and led to widespread voter skepticism across the nation.

More problems surfaced during the 2002 election cycle in Broward and Miami-Dade counties in heavily populated southeastern Florida, helping to spur Congress to pass a law that led more counties to adopt the high-tech, e-voting equipment.

Nearly a quarter of Americans who voted in 2004 used an electronic ballot, almost doubling the percentage from the 2002 election, according to the political consulting firm, Election Data Services.

But a September report from Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, pointed to significant security and reliability problems long the subject of complaints from computer scientists and security experts.

A separate review of voting machine logs used in Palm Beach County in the 2002 election revealed thousands of errors — just two years after it was forced to manually recount votes when Florida's massive elections problems surfaced while a presidential election was being settled.

Sancho wants to make sure such problems don't occur in Leon County.

"Florida is one example of how partisan politics interfere with having folks' votes being counted accurately," Sancho said in his office overlooking a series of mildew-stained white government buildings near the state Capitol. "Americans have taken elections for granted for far too long."

A major concern in Florida is around computerized ballots — their frequent inability to produce a written receipt of a vote. Beginning with Nevada, some 25 states now have requirements for e-voting machines with attached printers producing voter-verified paper audit trails while others, like Florida, rely on the audit capabilities of the equipment.

"If you make a system that can be manipulated, unfortunately in our current political environment, it probably will be," Sancho said. "Why take that chance?"

He likes the optical scanners used in his county the past several election cycles, but if a county is going to use electronic machines, he believes there ought to be a paper trail. To underscore the system's vulnerabilities, he even had his own system hacked into in December.

And that has ruffled some of his colleagues around the state.

"He kind of has his own drummer," said Susan Gill, the Citrus County elections supervisor who also serves as president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections. "He doesn't object to being viewed as someone standing out there by himself."

A 1986 Florida State law school graduate of Puerto Rican and French descent, Sancho worries that his demands for security guarantees have led vendors to boycott Leon County, home to Florida's capital in Tallahassee.

He recently ran into trouble with his commissioners over the loss of $564,421 in federal grant money because the county missed a Jan. 1 deadline for meeting a federal requirement to provide voting systems for disabled people. Now, it's up to the Legislature to decide whether to reinstate the money.

Sancho, who got into the elections business after losing a 1986 bid for a county commission seat in a disputed election, had tried to buy touchscreen machines for the disabled from ES&S, but they refused to fill his order.

"We did not believe that we would have the kind of working relationship that is key to providing smooth running, reliable and accurate elections," ES&S spokesman Ken Fields said.

Sequioa and Diebold also refused.

A Sequoia spokeswoman said it was simply a business decision.

"Due to the timing and everything our plate is full," Michelle Shafer said. "We haven't been taking on new customers that haven't already signed contracts."

Diebold, which currently supplies Leon's optical scanners, did not immediately return a message for comment. Leon has a legal dispute with Diebold over software upgrades for the optical scanners.

For the disabled, Sancho now prefers to use a vote-by-phone system from Louisville-based IVS LLC, saying it's cheaper, more reliable and more user-friendly, but it's not one of the three companies certified in Florida.

The three vendors' refusal to work with Sancho led to a complaint from the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition on Wednesday, asking Attorney General Charlie Crist to investigate if those companies were violating antitrust laws.

"It's of concern," Crist said Thursday. "We want to make sure we have free, fair and open elections."

Sancho met March 13 for the first time with Florida Secretary of State Sue Cobb in hopes of getting equipment put in place by May 1.

"What he's done has put the entire state of Florida in jeopardy," Cobb's spokeswoman Jenny Nash said, explaining that the U.S.

Department of Justice will declare the entire state noncompliant just because one county isn't.

While unpopular in some halls of government and even among some of his supervisors, Sancho is supported by voters in his county. First elected in 1988, he's been sent back four times since.

Sancho said the first elections supervisors conference he ever attended inspired his long pursuit of seeking perfection in the voting process. And he's still wary of the politics in that process.

Humans spur worst extinctions since dinosaurs

OSLO (Reuters) - Humans are responsible for the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs and must make unprecedented extra efforts to reach a goal of slowing losses by 2010, a U.N. report said on Monday.

Habitats ranging from coral reefs to tropical rainforests face mounting threats, the Secretariat of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity said in the report, issued at the start of a March 20-31 U.N. meeting in Curitiba, Brazil.

"In effect, we are currently responsible for the sixth major extinction event in the history of earth, and the greatest since the dinosaurs disappeared, 65 million years ago," said the 92-page Global Biodiversity Outlook 2 report.

Apart from the disappearance of the dinosaurs, the other "Big Five" extinctions were about 205, 250, 375 and 440 million years ago. Scientists suspect that asteroid strikes, volcanic eruptions or sudden climate shifts may explain the five.

A rising human population of 6.5 billion was undermining the environment for animals and plants via pollution, expanding cities, deforestation, introduction of "alien species" and global warming, it said.

It estimated the current pace of extinctions was 1,000 times faster than historical rates, jeopardizing a global goal set at a 2002 U.N. summit in Johannesburg "to achieve, by 2010, a significant reduction in the current rate of biodiversity loss."

"Unprecedented additional efforts' will be needed to achieve the 2010 biodiversity target at national, regional and global levels," it said. The report was bleaker than a first U.N. review of the diversity of life issued in 2001.

NOT ABATING

According to a "Red List" compiled by the World Conservation Union, 844 animals and plants are known to have gone extinct in the last 500 years, ranging from the dodo to the Golden Toad in Costa Rica. It says the figures are probably a big underestimate.

"The direct causes of biodiversity loss -- habitat change, over-exploitation, the introduction of invasive alien species, nutrient loading and climate change -- show no sign of abating," the report said.

Despite the threats, it said the 2010 goal was "by no means an impossible one."

It urged better efforts to safeguard habitats ranging from deserts to jungles and better management of resources from fresh water to timber. About 12 percent of the earth's land surface is in protected areas, against just 0.6 percent of the oceans.

It also recommended more work to curb pollution and to rein in industrial emissions of gases released by burning fossil fuels and widely blamed for global warming.

The report said, for instance, that the annual net loss of forests was 7.3 million hectares (18 million acres) -- an area the size of Panama or Ireland -- from 2000-2005. Still, the figure was slightly less than 8.9 million hectares a year from 1990-2000.

And it said that annual environmental losses from introduced pests in the United States, Australia, Britain, South Africa, India and Brazil had been estimated at more than $100 billion.

About 300 "invasive species" -- molluscs, crustaceans and fish -- have been introduced to the Mediterranean from the Red Sea since the late 19th century when the Suez Canal opened.

It gave mixed overall marks for progress on four key goals.

It said there was "reasonable progress" toward global cooperation but "limited" advances in ensuring enough cash and research. It estimated that annual aid to help slow biodiversity losses sank to $750 million from $1 billion since 1998.

Little time to avoid big thaw, scientists warn

The Christian Science Monitor - Global warming appears to be pushing vast reservoirs of ice on Greenland and Antarctica toward a significant, long-term meltdown. The world may have as little as a decade to take the steps to avoid this scenario.

Those are the implications of new studies that looked to climate history for clues about how the planet's major ice sheets might respond to human-triggered climate change.

Already, temperatures in the Arctic are close to those that thawed much of Greenland's ice cap some 130,000 years ago, when the planet last enjoyed a balmy respite from continent-covering glaciers, say the studies' authors.

By 2100, spring and summer temperatures in the Arctic could reach levels that trigger an unstoppable repeat performance, they say. Over several centuries, the melt could raise sea levels by as much as 20 feet, submerging major cities worldwide as well as chains of islands, such as the present-day Bahamas.

The US would lose the lower quarter of Florida, southern Louisiana up to Baton Rouge, and North Carolina's Outer Banks. The ocean would even flood a significant patch of California's Central Valley, lapping at the front porches of Sacramento.

These estimates may understate the potential rise. The teams say their studies provide the first hints that during the last interglacial period, ice sheets in both hemispheres worked together to raise sea levels, rather than the Northern Hemisphere's ice alone. This raises concerns that Antarctic melting might be more severe this time, because additional melt mechanisms may be at work.

"It sounds bad," acknowledges Jonathan Overpeck, a University of Arizona researcher who led one of the two studies. He notes that rising temperatures are approaching a threshold. But "we know about it far enough in advance to avoid crossing it." The challenge, he and others say, is to take advantage of the remaining window by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases substantially.

The two studies were published in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Ice on Greenland and Antarctica is already thinning faster than it's being replaced - and faster than scientists thought it would, notes Richard Alley, a paleoclimatologist at Penn State University and member of one of the research teams. Only five years ago, he notes, climate scientists expected the ice sheets to gain mass through 2100, then begin to melt. "We're now 100 years ahead of schedule," he says.

The new results aren't the end of the story. The researchers will refine the models, improve the measurements, and find other sources of data to verify the modeling. Coral data pointing to sea-level changes in the last warm period remain controversial, the team acknowledges. And the team's assumption that the amount of carbon dioxide would triple by 2100, although moderate among climate forecasts, is not a done deal. It depends on how quickly industrial and developing countries adopt low-emission technologies and take long-term steps to reduce greenhouse gases.

But the window for action is relatively short, Dr. Overpeck says. CO2 remains in the atmosphere for more than a century after it's first emitted. And it takes time to implement policies and adopt technologies. Thus for all practical purposes, the tipping point may come sooner than atmospheric chemistry would suggest.

The studies required some in-depth sleuthing. Researchers realized that changes in Earth's tilt and orbit intensified the sunlight reaching the Arctic during interglacial periods, notes Bette Otto- Bliesner, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. But when it came to the effect on the Arctic's ice, "no one knew how big the response would be."

So she and her colleagues first tested the center's newest climate model against temperature information gleaned from pollen, insects, ocean plankton, and other remnants of the period. The results matched closely.

Confident that they could reproduce the period's climate by computer, they linked the results to a second model with a reputation for accurately simulating ice sheets. Using ice-core samples and other evidence as a reality check, they concluded that within 1,000 to 2,000 years of the warming's onset, Greenland's ice sheet dwindled to a steep lump covering the island's central and northern parts. The melt water raised sea levels by seven to 11 feet.

But coral records from geologically stable parts of the ocean suggested that sea levels during that time rose 16 to 20 feet - a level that held for roughly 11,000 years. Overpeck, who had been working with Dr. Otto-Bliesner on the initial modeling exercise, says several lines of evidence led him to suspect that the balance came from Antarctica.

Let's see how loud those crackers are laughing when they have to swim to work...

Melting ice sheets could spur oceans' rise: study

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Miami would be a memory, Bangkok a soggy shadow of its former self and the Maldive Islands would vanish if melting polar ice keeps fueling a faster-than-expected rise in sea levels, scientists reported on Thursday.

In an issue of the journal Science focusing on global warming, climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona reported that if global trends continue, Earth could ultimately see sea levels 20 feet higher than they are now.

By the end of this century, Earth would be at least 4 degrees F (2.3 degrees C) warmer than now, or about as hot as it was nearly 130,000 years ago.

Back then, significant portions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melted, pushing the global sea levels to about 20 feet higher than current levels.

A similarly dramatic, and in some cases catastrophic, rise in ocean levels could happen by the year 2500, Overpeck said in a telephone interview, but he noted it could come sooner.

"We know when the sea level was that high in the past, and we know how much warming is necessary to get that amount of sea level rise from both Greenland and Antarctica," Overpeck said.

The Earth will get that hot sometime early in the second half of this century, he said, and once it does, the big ice sheets will start melting "in a more dramatic manner" than they currently are.

A conservative estimate would call for sea level rises of 3 feet (1 meter) per century, he said.

He cautioned, however, that this estimate assumes the Earth will get only as hot as it did 130,000 years ago when the ice sheets melted.

"If we decide to keep on the track we're on now and just keep on warming, because of greenhouse gas pollution, then we could easily cook those ice sheets more rapidly," Overpeck said.

The earlier ice melt was concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere in the summer months, and was due largely to changes in Earth's orbit, he said.

"The climate warming we're in now is global and it's year-round and it's due to human influences on the climate system," he said. "That will be more damaging to the ice sheets than the that warming we had 130,000 years ago."

The ice sheets are already melting, accelerated by relatively warm water that eats away at them, said

NASA glacier expert Bob Bindschadler.

"It's not really a debate any more about whether sea level is rising or not. I think the debate has shifted to, how rapidly is sea level rising," Bindschadler said in a telephone briefing.

New Home Sales Down by Most in 9 Years

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Sales of new homes plunged by the largest amount in nearly nine years in February while the median price of a new home dropped for the fourth straight month, providing fresh evidence that the nation's once-booming housing market is cooling off.

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The

Commerce Department reported that sales of new single-family homes dropped by 10.5 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual sales pace of 1.08 million homes. It was the second straight monthly decline and was much bigger than the small 2 percent dip that Wall Street was expecting.

The drop in new home sales followed news Thursday that sales of previously owned homes actually rose by a stronger-than-expected 5.2 percent last month following five straight monthly declines. Analysts said the trend in both reports pointed to a slowing housing market after five record-setting years.

The slowdown in sales was putting pressure on prices. The median price of a new home sold last month dropped to $230,400, down by 1.6 percent from January and off 2.9 percent from February 2005. The median is the mid-point where half the homes sold for more and half for less.

In other economic news, orders to U.S. factories for big-ticket manufactured goods rose by 2.6 percent last month, the biggest gain since November, reflected a surge in demand for commercial aircraft. Outside of the volatile transportation sector, orders actually fell by 1.3 percent, but economists said the underlying trend for manufacturing remained strong.

The 10.5 percent drop in new home sales in February followed a 5.3 percent decline in January and was the biggest drop since a similar 10.5 percent fall in April 1997.

Sales of new homes have fallen in four of the past five months with the sales rate of 1.08 million units the slowest pace since May 2003.

While sales of both new and existing homes climbed to new all-time highs in 2005, the fifth consecutive annual records, analysts believe sales will decline this year as the housing boom slows under the impact of rising mortgage rates.

By sector of the country, sales fell by the largest amount last month in the West, a drop of 29.4 percent. Sales were also down in the South, dropping 6.4 percent. Sales rose in the Northeast by 12.7 percent while sales in the Midwest were up by 5.2 percent.

The slowdown in sales pushed the inventory of unsold homes up to a record of 548,000 at the end of February. At the February sales pace it would take 6.3 months to sell all of the homes on the market, up from 5.3 months in January.

Analysts believe that the growing backlog of unsold homes will start to put more pressure on home sellers to reduce prices in the months ahead.

Economists still believe that housing is likely to see a moderate slowdown this year rather than anything as severe as the bursting of the speculative bubble in stock prices at the beginning of this decade. That decline was severe enough, wiping out trillions of dollars in wealth, that it helped pushed the economy into a recession.

The report on orders for durable goods showed that the strength came from a 52.5 percent surge in demand for commercial aircraft, a rebound after a 70.1 percent drop in January aircraft orders.

Excluding transportation, orders fell by 1.3 percent last month, the weakest showing in this category since last July. But analysts noted that this drop followed strong gains in the non-transportation area in the previous two months, a good signal for future growth.

"The bottom line here is that industry is doing well," said Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist for High Frequency Economics.

While total transportation orders rose by 13.4 percent, that reflected the 52.5 percent rise in civilian aircraft. Demand for military aircraft fell by 16.7 percent.

Orders for motor vehicles dropped by 3.3 percent in February after a 3.2 percent decline in January. American automakers have been struggling with increased foreign competition and sagging demand for sport utility vehicles in the face of rising gasoline prices.

General Motors Corp. earlier this week announced one of the largest buyouts in corporate history in an effort to cut costs by trimming payrolls.

Adoption Institute Supports Gay Parents

NEW YORK, Associated Press - As debate over the issue flares in several states, a major adoption institute says in a new report that it strongly supports the rights of gays and lesbians to adopt, and urges that remaining obstacles be removed.

"Laws and policies that preclude adoption by gay or lesbian parents disadvantage the tens of thousands of children mired in the foster care system who need permanent, loving homes," the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute says in the report to be issued Friday.

It advises agencies and officials to make firm statements in support of such adoptions, forsaking a "don't ask, don't tell" approach which prompts some gays to feel their chances of adopting hinge on being discreet about their sexual orientation.

Adoption agencies should energetically recruit gays and lesbians, including them in outreach programs and parenting panels, the institute said.

The report arrives on the heels of a nationwide poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that found public approval of gay adoption is increasing. In 1999, 57 percent of Americans opposed the practice and 38 percent approved, while the new poll found 48 percent opposed and 46 percent in favor with a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

The divided sentiment has been reflected recently in Massachusetts, where Catholic Charities is ending its century-old adoption program rather than comply with a state law barring discrimination against gays.

Florida is the only state with an outright ban on gay adoption. Mississippi bans gay couples, but not single gays, from adopting; Utah requires adopting parents to be married.

Some Florida legislators have been working — unsuccessfully thus far — to modify the state's ban and allow gay foster parents to adopt children already in their care.

Measures have surfaced in a few other states that gay-rights advocates fear would restrict gay adoption or undermine gay families.

_In Arizona, the Senate is considering a House-passed bill that would give married couples priority over single people in adopting children who are in state custody. Family Pride, a national group representing gay and lesbian families, says the bill is discriminatory because gays cannot legally marry in any state but Massachusetts.

_In Utah, Gov. Jon Huntsman this week vetoed a bill — vigorously opposed by gay-rights groups — that would have allowed biological parents to terminate their child's relationship with third parties, such as same-sex partners. The bill stemmed from a custody dispute between two lesbians; the biological mother sought to prohibit her ex-partner from visiting her daughter.

_In Ohio, conservative lawmakers introduced a bill to ban placement of an adoptive child in a household where anyone is gay. House Speaker Jon Husted does not intend to let the bill advance to a vote, spokeswoman Tasha Hamilton said.

The bill's chief sponsor, Rep. Ron Hood, contends that children raised by gay parents face increased risk of physical and emotional problems. His concerns are shared by many conservative groups which argue that same-sex partnerships are less stable than heterosexual marriages.

The Donaldson study, written by Illinois State University adoption expert Jeanne Howard, acknowledges that research on gay parenting remains relatively scant.

"Still, virtually every valid study reaches the same conclusion: The children of gays and lesbians adjust positively and their families function well," the report says.

The report was funded by the Gill Foundation and the Human Rights Campaign, both active in gay-rights causes. The Donaldson Institute's executive director, Adam Pertman, said the financial sponsorship did not influence the report's findings.

It concluded by suggesting that gay parents could play a major role in reducing the backlog of more than 110,000 children in foster care awaiting adoption.

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Famous for wanting to be famous, notoriously empty-headed bimbo heiress Parisite Hilton is becoming a Saturday morning cartoon.

Smoking increases risk of impotence: study

LONDON (Reuters) - Forget the Marlboro man -- new research shows that smoking, often marketed as a symbol of virility, increases the risk of impotence.

"Men who smoke are up to 40 percent more likely to suffer from impotence than those who don't," said Dr Christopher Millett, of Imperial College London, who worked on the research.

He added that the more cigarettes smoked, the greater the risk of suffering from a sexual performance problem. But even men who smoked less than 20 cigarettes a day, had a 24 percent raised risk of impotence.

"It is not just older men who suffer from impotence, younger men are also affected as well," Millett added in an interview.

The findings, reported on Thursday in the journal Tobacco Control, are based on a survey of 8,000 men in Australia aged between 16 and 59 who took part in a study of health and relationships.

Almost one in 10 reported an impotence problem lasting more than a month during the previous year.

About a quarter were smokers and more than 6 percent said they got through over 20 cigarettes a day.

Men who smoked more than a pack or more a day were 39 percent more likely to report sexual problems, according to the study.

"For decades, cigarettes were marketed as symbol of virility, as in the macho Marlboro Man ads," said Deborah Arnott, of the anti-smoking group ASH (Action on Smoking and Health).

"Yet the reality is that smoking is a primary cause of impotence which may also be an early indicator of coronary heart disease," she added in a statement.

Research has shown that smoking is a leading cause of preventable death. It increases the risk of heart attack and stroke, respiratory problems, lung and other types of cancer.

Millett said if young men want to avoid the embarrassment and distress of impotence they should not smoke.

Even though he's a Regan-lover, the author makes sense here:

An effective weapon against terrorists: Ridicule

By Peter Schweizer

Is America taking terrorists too seriously? In the wake of continued threats, that might seem like a ridiculous question. But in terms of the psychology of the war on terrorism, it's a question that needs to be asked.

In a brilliant new white paper on public diplomacy, Michael Waller, the Walter and Leonore Annenberg chair in International Communication at The Institute of World Politics, makes a strong case for America's employing a new powerful weapon against the terrorists: ridicule.

"Ridicule raises morale at home. Ridicule strips the enemy/adversary of his mystique and prestige. Ridicule erodes the enemy's claim to justice. Ridicule eliminates the enemy's image of invincibility. Directed properly at an enemy, ridicule can be a fate worse than death," writes Waller.

History teaches that ridicule weakens the moral and political capital of our enemies. Ronald Reagan employed it with great effect during the Cold War. We all remember the "evil empire" speech, but what about the jokes? Two guys were standing in line at the vodka store. They were there for half an hour, then an hour, then an hour and a half. "I'm sick of this," one finally said. "I'm going over to the Kremlin to shoot (Mikhail) Gorbachev." The man left and returned about an hour later. "Well, did you shoot him?" "Heck no," he responded. "The line up there is a lot longer than this one."

Reagan a good model

Many of Reagan's comments reached the underground press in the Soviet Union, no doubt encouraging dissenters against communism. Reagan understood that sowing fear in the West was a potent weapon for Moscow. By laughing at communism, the spell of fear was broken. It was the same during World War II. A cartoon of Donald Duck mocking Hitler and Mein Kampf no doubt was demeaning to the Führer.

Thus far, the Bush administration's approach to fighting terrorists has been to demonize them. "Their vision of the world is dark and dim," President Bush said in January at Kansas State University. "They have got desires to spread a totalitarian empire." During his March 11 radio address, he said: "The enemy we face has proved to be brutal and relentless."

Certainly, their actions and goals warrant such treatment. But that alone is a tough strategy to maintain psychologically because it can be exhausting. As Waller writes: "Incessant, morbid portrayals of an individual, movement or mortal enemy might rally support for the American side, but they have a shelf-life that gets tired over time. Constant specters of unrelenting dangers risk sowing defeatism and chipping away at our own morale. Abroad, they risk making the U.S. look like a bully in some places and surrender the propaganda advantage to the other side."

Demonizing doesn't work

By continuing to demonize our enemies, we elevate their political status in the eyes of those disaffected souls in the developing world who dislike the United States.

I'm not suggesting that Bush start cracking Osama bin Laden jokes. And we should not mock Islam. Reagan joked about communist leaders but never about the Russian people. What the Bush administration can do is mock the terrorists.

For example, we should note that these self-professed warriors hide while they pay impoverished young men and women to become human bombs. We should play up Osama's privileged background. We should highlight the terrorists' ridiculous failures. The reality is that much like Soviet officials, terrorists are full of grand illusions about themselves and their mission.

The war on terror has military, political and economic dimensions. But it also has a critical psychological component. The terrorists are not 10 feet tall. We should engage in a psychological war that brings these thugs down to size.

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Melting Ice Threatens Sea-Level Rise

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The Earth is already shaking beneath melting ice as rising temperatures threaten to shrink polar glaciers and raise sea levels around the world.

By the end of this century, Arctic readings could rise to levels not seen in 130,000 years — when the oceans were several feet higher than now, according to new research appearing in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Even now, giant glaciers lubricated by melting water have begun causing earthquakes in Greenland as they lurch toward the ocean, other scientists report in the same journal.

In principal findings:

• At the current warming rate, Earth's temperature by 2100 will probably be at least 4 degrees warmer than now, with the Arctic at least as warm as it was 130,000 years ago, reports a research group led by Jonathan T. Overpeck of the University of Arizona.

• Computer models indicate that warming could raise the average temperature in parts of Greenland above freezing for multiple months and could have a substantial impact on melting of the polar ice sheets, says a second paper by researchers led by Bette Otto-Bliesner of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Melting could raise sea level one to three feet over the next 100 to 150 years, she said.

• And a team led by Goeran Ekstroem of Harvard University reported an increase in "glacial earthquakes," which occur when giant rivers of ice — some as big as Manhattan — move suddenly as meltwater eases their path. That sudden movement causes the ground to tremble.

Otto-Bliesner and Overpeck wrote separate papers and also worked together, studying ancient climate and whether modern computer climate models correctly reflect those earlier times. That allowed them to use the models to look at possible future conditions. The researchers studied ancient coral reefs, ice cores and other natural climate records.

"Although the focus of our work is polar, the implications are global," Otto-Bliesner said. "These ice sheets have melted before and sea levels rose. The warmth needed isn't that much above present conditions."

According to the studies, increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the next century could raise Arctic temperatures as much as 5 to 8 degrees.

The warming could raise global sea levels by up to three feet this century through a combination of thermal expansion of the water and melting of polar ice, Overpeck and Otto-Bliesner said.

Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University, who was not part of the research teams, said, "One point stands out above all others and that is that a modest global warming may put Earth in the danger zone for a major sea level rise due to deglaciation of one or both ice sheets."

Ekstroem and colleagues reported that glacial earthquakes in Greenland occur most often in July and August and have more than doubled since 2002.

"People often think of glaciers as inert and slow-moving, but in fact they can also move rather quickly," Ekstroem said. "Some of Greenland's glaciers, as large as Manhattan and as tall as the Empire State Building, can move 10 meters in less than a minute, a jolt that is sufficient to generate moderate seismic waves."

Melting water from the surface gradually seeps down, accumulating at the base of a glacier where it can serve as a lubricant allowing the ice to suddenly move downhill, the researchers said.

"Our results suggest that these major outlet glaciers can respond to changes in climate conditions much more quickly than we had thought," said team member Meredith Nettles of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

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Meatpacker Sparks Mad Cow Testing Fight

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - A Kansas meatpacker has sparked an industry fight by proposing testing all the company's cattle for mad cow disease.

Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to look for the disease in every animal it processes. The Agriculture Department has said no. Creekstone says it intends to sue the department.

"Our customers, particularly our Asian customers, have requested it over and over again," chief executive John Stewart said in an interview Wednesday. "We feel strongly that if customers are asking for tested beef, we should be allowed to provide that."

Creekstone planned a news conference Thursday in Washington to discuss the lawsuit.

The department and larger meat companies oppose comprehensive testing, saying it cannot assure food safety. Testing rarely detects the disease in younger animals, the source of most meat.

"There isn't any nation in the world that requires 100 percent testing," department spokesman Ed Loyd said Wednesday.

Larger companies worry that Japanese buyers would insist on costly testing and that a suspect result might scare consumers away from eating beef.

Japan was the most lucrative foreign market for American beef until the first U.S. case of mad cow disease prompted a ban in 2003. The ban cost Creekstone nearly one-third of its sales and led the company to slash production and lay off about 150 people, Stewart said.

When Japan reopened its market late last year, Creekstone resumed shipments. Japan has halted shipments again, after finding American veal cuts with backbone. These cuts are eaten in the U.S. but are banned in Japan.

Stewart said that when trade resumes with Japan, Creekstone is in a position to rehire the laid-off workers and then some.

Creekstone would need government certification for its plan to test each animal at its Arkansas City, Kan., plant. The department refused the license request in 2004.

The U.S. has been testing around 1 percent of the 35 million head of cattle slaughtered each year, although officials have been planning to scale back that level of testing.

An industry official said the U.S. testing program should reassure customers inside and outside the United States.

"The U.S. risk of BSE is miniscule and declining, our proactive prevention strategies have worked and the safety of American beef is assured," said J. Patrick Boyle, president of the American Meat Institute.

He was referring to the formal name for mad cow disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE.

While individual companies in Japan may want comprehensive testing, Japan's government is not asking for it.

Japan does have lingering questions about the shipment of prohibited veal, even after the U.S. sent a lengthy report to Tokyo explaining the mistake was an isolated incident. The report blamed the company, Brooklyn-based Atlantic Veal & Lamb, and a government inspector for misunderstanding new rules for selling beef to Japan.

Japan's agriculture minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, said Wednesday that further talks are needed.

"We do want to keep going back and forth with the U.S. over this issue," he said. "We want the U.S. side to squarely answer our questions."

The Agriculture Department announced Wednesday evening it will send a team led by Acting Under Secretary Chuck Lambert to Tokyo next week for talks.

The U.S. has had three cases of mad cow disease. The first appeared in December 2003 in a Washington state cow that had been imported from Canada. The second was confirmed last June in a Texas-born cow, and the third was confirmed last week in an Alabama cow.

Japan has had two dozen cases of BSE.

Mad cow disease is a brain-wasting ailment in cattle. In people, eating meat products contaminated with BSE is linked to more than 150 deaths worldwide, mostly in Britain, from a deadly human nerve disorder, variant

Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

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Wrath of God behind Israel bird flu?

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - An outbreak of deadly bird flu in Israel is God's punishment for calls in election ads to legalize gay marriages, according to Rabbi David Basri, a prominent sage preaching Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism.

"The Bible says that God punishes depravity first through plagues against animals and then in people," Basri said in a religious edict quoted by his son.

Basri said he hoped the deaths of hundreds of thousands of turkeys and chickens would help atone for what he called the sins of left-wing Israeli political parties, the son, Rabbi Yitzhak Basri, told Reuters, a week before a national election.

The bird flu outbreak stemmed from far-left political parties "strengthening and encouraging homosexuality," Rabbi Basri's son quoted him as saying.

One of the parties aired an election commercial depicting two brides kissing. Some campaign advertisements also called for homosexual marriages to be legalized in Israel.

Bush Defends Decisions on Iraq War

WASHINGTON, AP White House - President Bush said Tuesday the decision about when to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq will fall to future presidents and Iraqi leaders, suggesting that U.S. involvement will continue at least through 2008.

Acknowledging the public's growing unease with the war — and election-year skittishness among fellow Republicans — the president nonetheless vowed to keep U.S. soldiers in the fight.

"If I didn't believe we could succeed, I wouldn't be there. I wouldn't put those kids there," Bush declared.

He also stood by embattled Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

"I don't believe he should resign. He's done a fine job. Every war plan looks good on paper until you meet the enemy," he said.

In his second full-blown news conference of the year, Bush sought to ease his political problems by addressing them directly.

"Nobody likes war. It creates a sense of uncertainty in the country," he said. "War creates trauma." He acknowledged that Republicans are worried about their political standing in November.

"There's a certain unease as you head into an election year," Bush told a wide-ranging news conference that lasted nearly an hour.

More than 2,300 Americans have died in three years of war in Iraq. Polls show the public's support of the war and Bush himself have dramatically declined in recent months, jeopardizing the political goodwill he carried out of the 2004 re-election victory.

"I'd say I'm spending that capital on the war," Bush quipped.

When asked about his failed Social Security plan, he simply said: "It didn't get done." But the president defiantly defended his warrantless eavesdropping program, and baited Democrats who suggest that he broke the law.

Calling a censure resolution "needless partisanship," Bush challenged Democrats to go into the November midterm elections in opposition to eavesdropping on suspected terrorists. "They ought to stand up and say, `The tools we're using to protect the American people should not be used,'" Bush said.

The news conference marked a new push by Bush to confront doubts about his strategy in Iraq. A day earlier, he acknowledged to a sometimes skeptical audience that there was dwindling support for his Iraq policy and that he understood why people were disheartened.

"The terrorists haven't given up. They're tough-minded. They like to kill," he said Tuesday. "There will be more tough fighting ahead."

Later in the news conference, Bush was asked whether there would come a day when no U.S. forces are in Iraq.

"That, of course, is an objective. And that will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq," he said.

Asked if that meant it won't happen on his watch, the president said, "You mean a complete withdrawal? That's a timetable. I can only tell you that I will make decisions on force levels based upon what the commanders on the ground say."

The president said he did not agree with former interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, who told the British Broadcasting Corporation Sunday, "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."

Bush said others inside and outside Iraq think the nation has stopped short of civil war. "There are other voices coming out of Iraq, by the way, other than Mr. Allawi, who I know by the way — like. A good fellow."

"We all recognized that there is violence, that there is sectarian violence. But the way I look at the situation is, the Iraqis looked and decided not to go into civil war."

Nearly four out of five Americans, including 70 percent of Republicans, believe civil war will break out in Iraq, according to a recent AP-Ipsos poll.

Bush said he's confident of victory in Iraq. "I'm optimistic we'll succeed. If not, I'd pull our troops out," he said, warning that abandoning the nation would be a dangerous mistake.

"So failure in Iraq, which isn't going to happen, would send all kinds of terrible signals to an enemy that wants to hurt us and people who are desperate to change the condition in the broader Middle East," Bush said.

He said he agreed to U.S. talks with Iran to underscore his point that Tehran's attempts to spread sectarian violence or provide support to Iraqi insurgents was unacceptable to the United States.

His opening remarks were designed to steel Americans for more fighting in Iraq and put an optimistic spin on the state of the U.S. economy.

"Productivity is strong. Inflation is contained. Household net worth is at an all-time high," Bush said, crediting his administration's policies.

On Iraq, Bush bristled at a suggestion that he had wanted to wage war against that country since early in his presidency.

"I didn't want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong ... with all due respect," he told a reporter. "No president wants war." To those who say otherwise, "it's simply not true," Bush said.

Asked about former supporters who now oppose him and the war, Bush said he's trying to win them over by "talking realistically to people" about the war and its importance to the nation.

"I can understand how Americans are worried about whether or not we can win," Bush said, adding that most Americans want victory "but they're concerned about whether or not we can win."

Bush scoffed at a question suggesting he should reshuffle or shake up his White House staff to help raise his sagging poll standings. But he did hint that he might bring in an experienced Washington insider to work with a disgruntled Congress.

N. Korea Suggests It Can Strike U.S. First

Kim jong-Il looking spiffy

SEOUL, South Korea, Associated Press - North Korea suggested Tuesday it had the ability to launch a pre-emptive attack on the United States, according to the North's official news agency. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the North had built atomic weapons to counter the U.S. nuclear threat.

"As we declared, our strong revolutionary might put in place all measures to counter possible U.S. pre-emptive strike," the spokesman said, according to the Korean Central News Agency. "Pre-emptive strike is not the monopoly of the United States."

Last week, the communist country warned that it had the right to launch a pre-emptive strike, saying it would strengthen its war footing before joint South Korea-U.S. military exercises scheduled for this weekend.

The spokesman also said it would be a "wise" step for the United States to cooperate on nuclear issues with North Korea in the same way it does with India.

Earlier this month, President Bush signed an accord in India that would open some of its atomic reactors to international inspections in exchange for U.S. nuclear know-how and atomic fuel.

The accord was reached even though New Delhi has not signed the international Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. North Korea has withdrawn from the treaty and condemned the United States for giving India "preferential" treatment.

"If the U.S. is truly interested in finding a realistic way of resolving the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, it would be wise for it to come out on the path of nuclear cooperation with us," he said.

The North's announcement that it has a nuclear arsenal risked escalating tensions in the prolonged standoff over its program and threatened the prospect of resuming six-nation talks on the dispute.

"We have built nuclear weapons for no other purpose than to counter U.S. nuclear threats," the Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

It is rare for North Korea to mention its nuclear capabilities in such an explicit manner. The communist state usually refers to its "nuclear deterrent force."

North Korea first declared last year that it has nuclear weapons, although the claim could not be confirmed independently. Experts believe the North has extracted enough plutonium from its main nuclear reactor for at least a half-dozen weapons.

Six-nation talks have been stalled since November over a dispute surrounding financial restrictions the United States imposed on North Korea for its alleged currency counterfeiting and money laundering. Those talks involve the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia.

Pyongyang says it will not return to the negotiating table unless the restrictions are lifted. But Washington demands that the North come to the talks without preconditions, saying the two issues are separate.

The North's spokesman said his country had shown "maximum flexibility" in trying to resolve the financial dispute, proposing possible solutions during a meeting in New York earlier this month. The meeting produced no breakthrough.

"The Bush administration talks about six-party talks, but it actually is paying no attention to the talks," the spokesman said, according to KCNA.

The spokesman also disputed last week's U.S. national security report that, among other things, said North Korea posed a serious nuclear proliferation challenge.

Iraqi Shiite Muslims flagellate themselves during a procession, in Karbala, 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, March 20, 2006. A million Shiite Muslim pilgrims descended on the holy city of Karbala to mark the 40th and final day of mourning for Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad's grandson on Monday, who was killed in Karbala in 680 A.D.,as thousands of Iraqi security forces braced for possible sectarian attacks. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

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AIDS leaves 9 million African children without mothers

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Some 9 million children in Africa have lost a mother to AIDS, British charity Save the Children said Monday, calling on donors to sharply increase aid to meet their needs.

"Incredibly, the impact of HIV and AIDS on children is still being ignored," Save the Children Chief Executive Jasmine Whitbread said in a statement.

The charity said in a report that a lack of testing facilities meant that many mothers, especially in the poorest countries, did not know their HIV status until they were ill and unable to fight off even the simplest infections.

"The AIDS pandemic robs millions of children of their childhoods as well as their mothers," Whitbread said. "Children are caring for their mothers, missing school, and having to work because their mothers are too sick to look after them."

The charity called for a focus on children orphaned by AIDS as well as sick parents, adding red tape was slowing aid flows.

"Donors must spend 12 percent of their AIDS funding on proper support for children," it said, adding this would amount to $6.4 billion over a three-year period.

In 2006, if Britain, the United States and Ireland met all their pledges, there would be $412 million committed for children -- or about one quarter of the $2.1 billion needed per year.

"This is best case scenario and it's not yet clear whether all of the donors will meet their commitments," a spokeswoman for Save the Children told Reuters by telephone from London.

The charity addressed its appeal to the G8 wealthy nations, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the World Bank and the European Commission.

Sub-Saharan Africa has about 10 percent of the world's population but 60 percent of the people living with HIV/AIDS.

More than 3 million Africans were infected with HIV in 2005, representing 64 percent of all new infections globally and more than in any previous year for the impoverished continent, according to UNAIDS, the lead U.N. agency against AIDS.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, an estimated 4.6 percent of young women aged 15 to 24 are infected with HIV, compared to 1.7 percent of young men, according to U.N. data.

Save the Children said most of the 19.2 million women living with HIV around the globe were already mothers.

"To truly make a difference we must also support children whose mothers are HIV positive," it said.

Mayan underworld proves researchers' dream

TULUM, Mexico (Reuters) - The ancient Maya once believed that Mexico's jungle sinkholes containing crystalline waters were the gateway to the underworld and the lair of a surly rain god who had to be appeased with human sacrifices.

Now, the "cenotes," deep sinkholes in limestone that have pools at the bottom, are yielding scientific discoveries including possible life-saving cancer treatments.

Divers are dipping into the cenotes, which stud the Yucatan peninsula, to explore a vast underground river system.

Hefting air tanks, guidelines and waterproof lamps, they have so far mapped 405 miles of channels that form part of a huge subterranean river delta flowing into the Caribbean sea, and they are only just starting.

Scientists investigating the network of caverns and galleries, formed by rainwater passing through porous limestone, have found a wealth of early archeological relics and prehistoric animal bones.

They also have identified dozens of new aquatic species specially adapted to extreme environmental conditions which could have medical applications.

In the Riviera Maya, a strip of Caribbean tourist resorts including the world-famous archeological site of Tulum, there are more than 500 cenotes. Some are open to the jungle, while others have tiny eye-like holes letting in sunlight and jungle roots.

Their waters have filtered through sponge-like limestone which leaves them so transparent that divers say they feel like they are floating in space. The pools range in depth from a few feet (a meter) to an abyss where explorers have still not touched bottom at over 500 feet.

"It is proving to be a totally unique environment," said marine biologist Tom Iliffe of Texas A&M University. "We are finding things down there including forms of life that no one had ever guessed existed, and there is a lot more work to be done."

BLIND FISH AND MAMMOTHS

The Yucatan sits on a limestone plateau where rainwater percolates down to nonporous rock below ground. Over millions of years, underground river systems have formed that flow out to the sea through caves.

The region's 7,000 to 8,000 cenotes were formed when caves collapsed in on themselves. The resulting sinkholes became a vital water source and a focus for Mayan sacrifices to honor Chac, the volatile, crocodile-like rain deity.

In recent years, biologists delving into the underlying river systems, which unlike the sinkholes are jet-black because of the lack of sunlight, have identified 40 entirely new species, mostly blind shrimps and fish which have adapted to life in the system's harsh conditions, where dissolved oxygen and food are scarce.

Among the startling discoveries are microorganisms that live in the transitional zone where the fresh water rivers flow out into the Caribbean, and salt-water sponges which may contain anti-tumor compounds.

"Research is at an early stage, but it is quite possible that the bacteria and sponges may have potential biomedical applications including cures for cancer," Iliffe told Reuters in a telephone interview. "There is a great deal of scientific excitement about it."

Other finds made by divers roaming the deep, dark corridors include the bones of giant jungle sloths, rabbits and even mammoths dating back beyond the last Ice Age.

"When you come up and tell people there are elephants down there they really think you've gone crazy," said Sam Meacham, an underwater explorer and conservationist.

THREATENED BY DEVELOPMENT

In the past three decades the population of the Riviera Maya has soared 10-fold to close to 1 million people, as tourists from the United States, Europe and Mexico flock to the palm-fringed strip to soak up the sun.

Environmentalists say that the explosive development has been only patchily regulated and warn that waste produced by resort hotels and service towns in the area is already polluting the complex underground oasis.

"It's totally the Wild West, when what is needed is carefully planned, sustainable development," said Meacham, who runs the Quintana Roo Water Systems Research Center, a local non-profit group that raises consciousness about water issues in schools.

Water conservation will be a key issue when ministers, hydrologists and environmentalists from around the world meet at the World Water Forum in Mexico City from March 16-22.

Meacham says human sewage is pumped deep underground, and that at least one water system in the Yucatan has been polluted with fecal matter. The impact of 250 tonnes of trash dumped in landfills each day has yet to be evaluated.

The hundreds of tourists who dive and snorkel each day in any of a dozen cenotes and caves open to the public are also unwittingly destroying the ecosystems before they can be properly understood, Iliffe says.

"Fish are following the divers into the caves and they gobble up all the life, and they (the caves) are left biologically sterile," he said.

Bush Using Straw-Man Arguments in Speeches

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - "Some look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost and not worth another dime or another day," President Bush said recently.

Another time he said, "Some say that if you're Muslim you can't be free."

"There are some really decent people," the president said earlier this year, "who believe that the federal government ought to be the decider of health care ... for all people."

Of course, hardly anyone in mainstream political debate has made such assertions.

When the president starts a sentence with "some say" or offers up what "some in Washington" believe, as he is doing more often these days, a rhetorical retort almost assuredly follows.

The device usually is code for Democrats or other White House opponents. In describing what they advocate, Bush often omits an important nuance or substitutes an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual position.

He typically then says he "strongly disagrees" — conveniently knocking down a straw man of his own making.

Bush routinely is criticized for dressing up events with a too-rosy glow. But experts in political speech say the straw man device, in which the president makes himself appear entirely reasonable by contrast to supposed "critics," is just as problematic.

Because the "some" often go unnamed, Bush can argue that his statements are true in an era of blogs and talk radio. Even so, "'some' suggests a number much larger than is actually out there," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

A specialist in presidential rhetoric, Wayne Fields of Washington University in St. Louis, views it as "a bizarre kind of double talk" that abuses the rules of legitimate discussion.

"It's such a phenomenal hole in the national debate that you can have arguments with nonexistent people," Fields said. "All politicians try to get away with this to a certain extent. What's striking here is how much this administration rests on a foundation of this kind of stuff."

Bush has caricatured the other side for years, trying to tilt legislative debates in his favor or score election-season points with voters.

Not long after taking office in 2001, Bush pushed for a new education testing law and began portraying skeptics as opposed to holding schools accountable.

The chief opposition, however, had nothing to do with the merits of measuring performance, but rather the cost and intrusiveness of the proposal.

Campaigning for Republican candidates in the 2002 midterm elections, the president sought to use the congressional debate over a new Homeland Security Department against Democrats.

He told at least two audiences that some senators opposing him were "not interested in the security of the American people." In reality, Democrats balked not at creating the department, which Bush himself first opposed, but at letting agency workers go without the usual civil service protections.

Running for re-election against Sen. John Kerry in 2004, Bush frequently used some version of this line to paint his Democratic opponent as weaker in the fight against terrorism: "My opponent and others believe this matter is a matter of intelligence and law enforcement."

The assertion was called a mischaracterization of Kerry's views even by a Republican, Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record) of Arizona.

Straw men have made more frequent appearances in recent months, often on national security — once Bush's strong suit with the public but at the center of some of his difficulties today. Under fire for a domestic eavesdropping program, a ports-management deal and the rising violence in Iraq, Bush now sees his approval ratings hovering around the lowest of his presidency.

Said Jamieson, "You would expect people to do that as they feel more threatened."

Last fall, the rhetorical tool became popular with Bush when the debate heated up over when troops would return from Iraq. "Some say perhaps we ought to just pull out of Iraq," he told GOP supporters in October, echoing similar lines from other speeches. "That is foolhardy policy."

Yet even the speediest plan, as advocated by only a few Democrats, suggested not an immediate drawdown, but one over six months. Most Democrats were not even arguing for a specific troop withdrawal timetable.

Recently defending his decision to allow the National Security Agency to monitor without subpoenas the international communications of Americans suspected of terrorist ties, Bush has suggested that those who question the program underestimate the terrorist threat.

"There's some in America who say, 'Well, this can't be true there are still people willing to attack,'" Bush said during a January visit to the NSA.

The president has relied on straw men, too, on the topics of taxes and trade, issues he hopes will work against Democrats in this fall's congressional elections.

Usually without targeting Democrats specifically, Bush has suggested they are big-spenders who want to raise taxes, because most oppose extending some of his earlier tax cuts, and protectionists who do not want to open global markets to American goods, when most oppose free-trade deals that lack protections for labor and the environment.

Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albaquerqe etcetera etcetera...

Protesters Say Water Wars Turning Deadly

MEXICO CITY, Associated Press - Water is worth fighting for — even to the death, activists holding an "alternate" forum outside the world water summit said Friday. That attitude might seem strange in developed countries, where water flows at the touch of a faucet. But it isn't nearly as accessible in the developing world.

And water wars aren't an apocalyptic vision of the future. They're already starting to happen, the protesters say.

"We've been beaten, we've been jailed, some of us have even been killed, but we're not going to give up," said Marco Suastegui, who marched alongside about 10,000 protesters Thursday outside a convention center where the international Fourth World Water Forum is being held.

Suastegui is leading the battle against a dam being built to supply water for the Pacific coastal resort of Acapulco. Opponents fear the dam will dry up the nearby Papagayo River.

"We will defend the water of the Papagayo River with our lives, if need be," Suastegui said.

Protesters on Friday organized an alternate forum in Mexico City, miles from the convention site, in which they accused the official summit of serving as cover for companies that want to privatize water services.

"The Fourth World Water Forum doesn't represent us," said Audora Dominguez of the nongovernmental Mexican Committee for the Defense of Water Rights. "It's a forum where you have to pay to speak. It's a forum where the poor aren't included."

On Thursday, youths in ski masks attacked journalists and fought with police, smashing a patrol car and hurling rocks during largely peaceful water forum protests involving about 10,000 marchers. The disturbances appeared to be carried out by mostly radical youths not directly involved with the groups demonstrating against the forum.

Many of the battles over water in Mexico don't involve people who would otherwise be considered radicals. Those on the front lines are residents of low-income neighborhoods in Mexico City who get in fistfights over water-truck deliveries, or housewives who can no longer stand the stink of untreated sewage flowing beside their homes.

And then there are the Indian families whose crops are ruined by the diversion of water to feed a nearby city, while their children go without safe drinking water.

For farmers and fishermen whose river is about to be dammed, or a rural resident who sees his town overrun by tens of thousands of new housing units in the space of a few years, water is a fighting issue.

"We will fight for the rest of our lives. For us, fear doesn't exist," said Victoria Martinez Arriaga, a 33-year-old Mazahua Indian woman who led a militant protest in 2004 to demand safe drinking water for local families. The demonstration temporarily cut off part of Mexico City's water supply.

Martinez stressed, however, that the last thing her community wants is violence.

"Our wooden rifles are symbolic," she said, referring to the props the Indians carry in their protests. "They're symbols of the idea that we still can stop the wars for water from breaking out. We still have time to solve things through dialogue and understanding."

Local Mexico City legislator Aleida Alavez Ruiz says the conflicts may intensify, especially in the capital, whose combination of floods and water shortages, urban sprawl, pollution and wasteful practices make it a sort of poster child for the world's water woes.

"It's getting critical, and if we don't recognize the problem now, when the dry season comes, the conflicts will get worse," Alavez Ruiz said of her district, where residents have fought over water trucks that make deliveries when tap water runs out.

Residents have to line up for hours to sign up for such a delivery, and tempers sometimes boil over when a neighbor tries to get water out of turn.

The concept of battles breaking out in the future over shrinking water supplies is gaining credence. Loic Fauchon, president of the nongovernmental World Water Council, and a co-chair of the official water forum, has proposed the creation of a peacekeeping force to solve water conflicts as they erupt around the world. The force would be modeled after the U.N.'s "blue helmets."

"We don't want to override national governments," Fauchon said. "We just need a force that will take over in cases of water conflicts."

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California Home Sales Decline In February

(AP) Home sales declined statewide in February and the rate of price increases slowed, a reflection of growing pressure on sellers to dial back prices to lure increasingly tentative buyers.

In all, 37,900 new and resale houses and condominiums were sold last month, a 9.3 percent decline from 41,800 in February 2005 and a drop of 1 percent from January's sales, real estate research firm DataQuick Information Systems reported Thursday.

The state has seen annual home sales decline for five straight months. Last month's sales were the lowest since 32,454 homes were sold in February 2001, the report said.

February is traditionally a slow month, and comparisons to last year could be misleading because it was such a strong year.

"It appears that today's market is probably as close to what we would call normal as we've had in a long time," said John Karevoll, a DataQuick analyst.

Still, the slowdown in sales also reflects the tussle between buyers and sellers as the housing market continues to level off from a five-year climb.

"What I'm seeing is both buyers and sellers digging their heels in, buyers saying 'I'm not ready to buy' and sellers going 'I'm not going to lower the price,'" said David Kerr, a Realtor with Emeryville-based ZipRealty Inc.

"A lot of sellers are still pricing to the higher-end and their properties are still sitting there, and they're not considering realistic offers," said Kerr, whose territory includes Oakland and Berkeley.

The median home price in California last month hit $457,000, up 1.1 percent from January and up 12.3 percent from $407,000 in the same period a year ago. It marks the lowest annual increase since 10.7 percent in December 2001, DataQuick said.

Statewide home price increases peaked in June 2004 at 23.2 percent and that rate has gradually declined ever since. DataQuick released figures Thursday for the nine-county region surrounding San Francisco Bay. Sales in the area were down 16.8 percent in February compared to the same month last year but up 3.4 percent from January, according to DataQuick.

The median price of a home in the region in February was $616,000, up 12.2 percent from $549,000 a year ago and up 1.5 percent compared to January.

In a six-county area of Southern California, the number of homes sold last month also fell, DataQuick said earlier this week.

In all, 19,905 homes were sold during the month, a 7 percent drop from the same period a year ago and down nearly 1 percent from January.

The median home price in the region hit $480,000 last month, up 12.9 percent from February 2005 and up 2.3 percent from January, DataQuick said.

One factor behind the apparent disconnect between buyers and sellers involves the standard practice of using sales of comparable homes to set an asking price.

Such comparisons are typically made with homes sold within a six-month period. But in many cases, the prices that homes fetched a half-year ago don't square with many buyers' perceptions of where the market is headed.

"Sellers do not recognize what's going on in terms of the market transitioning," Kerr said. "They still think that because the house across the street sold for like $50,000 to $100,000 more than theirs, that theirs should be worth that, plus some. And what's happening is, it's not happening."

Dale Hansen, a computer technician in Fairfield, listed his four-bedroom, two and a half-bath home for $665,000 in early January but took it off the market last month after only receiving offers well-below his asking price.

As a result, Hansen and his wife fell out of escrow on a condominium they were looking to buy after selling their home.

"We had a lot of traffic, a lot of interest," said Hansen, 31. "A lot of people are coming in $20,000 to $25,000 right off less than what we're asking for."

The couple asked their real estate agent to hold firm on the price. They plan to relist the home next month.

"We went into this whole thing knowing it's not the best time of year to sell, but we wanted to go ahead and give it a shot," Hansen said. "We'll cross our fingers and hope it goes well."

Despite the market's cooldown in recent months, some buyers say it's still tough to find the right property in their price range.

Mathew Moses, an environmental engineer from Berkeley, has been searching for a home in the $500,000 to $600,000 range since December but hasn't found anything to compel him to make an offer.

"The stuff that I'm looking at is way overpriced," said Moses, 31.

Still, Moses says as long as interest rates don't rise too high, he can wait for the right deal.

Warmer Seas Creating Stronger Hurricane, Study Confirms

LiveScience - A rise in the world's sea surface temperatures was the primary contributor to the formation of stronger hurricanes since 1970, a new study reports.

While the question of what role, if any, humans have had in all this is still a matter of intense debate, most scientists agree that stronger storms are likely to be the norm in future hurricane seasons.

The study is detailed in the March 17 issue of the journal Science.

An alarming trend

In the 1970s, the average number of intense Category 4 and 5 hurricanes occurring globally was about 10 per year. Since 1990, that number has nearly doubled, averaging about 18 a year.

Category 4 hurricanes have sustained winds from 131 to 155 mph. Category 5 systems, such as Hurricane Katrina at its peak, feature winds of 156 mph or more. Wilma last year set a record as the most intense hurricane on record with winds of 175 mph.

While some scientists believe this trend is just part of natural ocean and atmospheric cycles, others argue that rising sea surface temperatures as a side effect of global warming is the primary culprit.

According to this scenario, warming temperatures heat up the surface of the oceans, increasing evaporation and putting more water vapor into the atmosphere. This in turn provides added fuel for storms as they travel over open oceans.

Other factors less important

The researchers used statistical models and techniques from a field of mathematics called information theory to determine factors contributing to hurricane strength from 1970 to 2004 in six of the world's ocean basins, including the North Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans.

They looked at four factors that are known to affect hurricane intensity:

* Humidity in the troposphere—the part of the atmosphere stretching from surface of the Earth to about 6 miles up

* Wind shear that can throttle storm formation

* Rising sea-surface temperatures

* Large-scale air circulation patterns known as "zonal stretching deformations"

Of these factors, only rising sea surface temperatures was found to influence hurricane intensity in a statistically significant way over a long-term basis. The other factors affected hurricane activity on short time scales only.

"We found no long-term trend in things like wind shear," said study team member Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology. "There's a lot of year to year variability but there's no global trend. In any given year, it's different for each ocean."

An answer for the critics

The new study potentially addresses one major criticism leveled by scientists skeptical of any strong link between sea surface temperatures and hurricane strength, said Kerry Emanuel, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the study.

Last year, Emanuel published a study correlating the documented increase in hurricane duration and intensity in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans since the 1970s to rises in sea surface temperatures over the same time period.

"We were criticized by the seasonal forecasters for not including the other environmental factors, like wind shear, in our analysis," Emanuel said in an email. "[We didn't do so] because on time scales longer than 2-3 years, these do not seem to matter very much. This paper more or less proves this point."

Kevin Trenberth, the head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), believes the new study's main finding is accurate but thinks the effects of some of the environmental factors on hurricane intensity might have been underestimated.

"The reason is they're covering a period from 1970 to 2004. 1979 is the year when satellites were introduced into the [NCEP/NCAR] Reanalysis. The quality of the analysis prior to 1979 is simply nowhere near as good," said Trenberth, who also was not involved in the study.

The NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis is the database the researchers drew upon for information about the effects of troposphere humidity, wind shear and zonal stretching deformation on hurricane intensity; sea surface temperature data came from a different database.

Curry acknowledged that reanalysis data prior to 1979 is of slightly lower quality than more recent data but believes this doesn't substantially change the study's main finding. Trenberth agreed: "I suspect they may well have gotten the right answer anyway," he told LiveScience.

Natural cycles?

Some scientists have explained the rising strength of hurricanes as being part of natural weather cycles in the world's oceans.

In the North Atlantic, this cycle is called the Atlantic multi-decadal mode. Every 20 to 40 years, Atlantic Ocean and atmospheric conditions conspire to produce just the right conditions to cause increased storm and hurricane activity.

The Atlantic Ocean is currently going through an active period of hurricane activity that began in 1995 and which has continued to the present. The previous active cycle lasted from the late 1920's to 1970, and peaked around 1950.

These cycles definitely do influence hurricane intensity, but they can't be the whole story, Curry said.

While scientists expect stronger hurricanes based on natural cycles alone, the researchers suspect other contributing factors, since current hurricanes are even stronger than natural cycles predict.

"We're not even at the peak of current cycle, we're only halfway up and already we're seeing activity in the North Atlantic that's 50 percent worse than what we saw during the last peak in 1950," Curry said.

Some scientists still think it's too premature to make any definitive links between sea surface temperatures and hurricane intensity.

"We simply don't have enough data yet," said Thomas Huntington in of the

U.S. Geological Survey. "Category 5 hurricanes don't come around very often, so you need the benefit of a much longer time series to look back and say 'Yup, there has been an increase.'"

Huntington is the author of a recent review of more than 100 peer-reviewed studies showing that although many aspects of the global water cycle—including precipitation, evaporation and sea surface temperatures—have increased or risen, the trend cannot be consistently correlated with increases in the frequency or intensity of storms or floods over the past century. Huntington's study was announced this week and is published in the current issue of the Journal of Hydrology.

Brace yourselves

Whatever the underlying cause, most scientists agree that people will need to brace themselves for stronger hurricanes and typhoons in the coming years and decades.

However, most regions around the world will not experience more storms. The only exception to this is the North Atlantic, where hurricanes have become both more numerous and longer-lasting in recent years, especially since 1995. The reasons for this regional disparity are still unclear.

The team's findings are controversial because they draw a connection between stronger hurricanes and rising sea surface temperatures—a phenomenon that has itself already been linked to human-induced global warming.

The study by Curry and her colleagues therefore raises the frightening possibility that humans have inadvertently boosted the destructive power of one of Nature's most devastating and feared storms.

Stop paying for Dumbya's vanity war! Stop spending our future and our childrens' futures! STOP IT!

Senate Passes $2.8 Trillion 2007 Budget

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - A $2.8 trillion election-year budget blueprint that narrowly passed the Senate forsakes President Bush's tax cuts and Medicare curbs and smashes his cap on spending, disappointing GOP loyalists anxious to see their party stem the flow of federal red ink.

The Senate on Thursday adopted the spending plan on a 51-49 vote, but with little enthusiasm since it anticipates deficits greater than $350 billion for both this year and next.

The measure little resembles Bush's proposal last month for the budget year that begins Oct. 1., and its passage sets up a confrontation with the House, which is certain to oppose the Senate's call for additional spending.

"House conservatives are going to look at this budget and say, 'Whoa, what happened to fiscal conservatism?'" said Sen. Kent Conrad (news, bio, voting record) of North Dakota, the Senate Budget Committee's top Democrat.

Action on the budget plan came hours after Congress pushed the ceiling on the national debt to nearly $9 trillion. The House then promptly approved $92 billion in new money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for relief along the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast. The Senate added billions of dollars for education.

To the dismay of budget hawks, the Senate's budget measure would break Bush's proposed caps on spending for programs such as low-income heating subsidies and health research, as well as education. All told, senators endorsed more than $16 billion in increases above Bush's proposed $873 billion cap on spending appropriated by Congress each year.

Vice President Dick Cheney was on hand for a possible tie-breaking vote on the budget. But the spending blueprint advanced without need of Cheney's vote in the Republican-led Senate when Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu (news, bio, voting record) supported the plan after winning concessions to help her hurricane-damaged state of Louisiana and rest of the Gulf Coast.

She won inclusion of a proposal that could provide up $2 billion a year for levee and coastal restoration projects. The money would come from auctioning television airwaves to wireless companies and from potential oil lease revenues from exploration in an Alaskan wildlife refuge.

Among the specific votes to increase spending above Bush's tightfisted budget were:

_$3 billion more for heating subsidies for the poor. It passed 51-49.

_$7 billion more for education, health and worker safety accounts. It passed 73-27.

_$3.7 billion more for military personnel costs.

_$1.2 billion more for aviation security and stopping Bush's proposed increase in airline ticket taxes. They advanced by voice vote.

_$1 billion more for benefits for military survivors.

Given the mood in the House, the Senate's action Thursday appears to make it less likely that Congress will settle on a final budget plan this spring. House Republicans will not release their budget until after next week's congressional recess.

The votes dismayed deficit hawks such as Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, R-N.H. He already had decided to drop Bush's proposals to cut the growth of Medicare, strengthen tax-free health savings accounts and advance legislation to make permanent his 2001 tax cuts.

The White House issued a tepid statement supporting the plan despite the numerous setbacks experienced on the floor.

"While the administration will continue to seek entitlement reforms and the elimination of additional discretionary spending ... we recognize that this is an important first step in the congressional process," Budget Director Joshua B. Bolten said.

Republicans are eager to show their conservative supporters they are getting serious about cracking down on spending. Last weekend, GOP presidential aspirants at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Memphis, Tenn., promised to be more thrifty.

But GOP moderates such as Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record) of Pennsylvania apparently did not get the message. His amendment to add $7 billion for education, health and labor programs won support from most Republicans, including Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, who has criticized Congress for embarking "down a wayward path of wasteful Washington spending."

"All the talk in Memphis just doesn't comport with the realities of these important items" such as education and health research, Specter said.

The debt limit increase, needed to prevent an unprecedented default on Treasury notes, was the fourth of Bush's presidency, totaling $3 trillion. With the budget deficit near record levels, an additional increase in the debt limit almost certainly will be required next year.

The House avoided an election-year vote on raising the debt limit by automatically sending the bill to the Senate when it passed a budget last year.

Treasury Secretary John Snow applauded Congress for "protecting the full faith and credit of the United States." He said it ensures that the government "can deliver on promises already made, such as Social Security and Medicare payments and aid for the victims of the 2005 hurricanes."

The present limit on the debt is $8.2 trillion.

New Mannequin Technology Finds Perfect Fit for Today's Woman

Fashion Wire Daily - New York - How many times have you tried on a pair of gorgeous jeans only to discover that they hug your body in all of the wrong places? AlvaProducts, a leading fit model manufacturer, is helping to resolve some of the dressing room drama by offering the fashion industry a line of customized "true body shape" forms.

"We are a global fit and size expert," explained Janice Wang, CEO of AlvaProducts, to Fashion Wire Daily. "We partnered with North Carolina State University to help major retailers and apparel manufacturers create a model of their ideal customer by using 3D body scanners."

To translate, the process begins by scanning a (live) fit model to obtain a 3D digital form. AlvaProducts specialists than tweak this raw data to perfect body altitude, posture and symmetry. Once the digital form gets approved by a brand or company, it is materialized into a full size polyfoam form using a CNC Rapid Prototyping Milling machine. Last minute adjustments are made to the polyfoam version before the form goes through its final transformation using fiberglass. The finished form is then shipped to China where it is covered with top quality cotton and linen and undergoes mass production.

The thought of putting so much work, time and money into making a fit model may seem ridiculous, but the advantages of having a standardized - and realistic - size is priceless for any fashion company that can afford AlvaProducts' services.

"We discovered that 95% of our clients were producing clothes based on an hourglass shape that account for less than 8% of the consumer population - most of whom are a size 8 or less," said Wang. "This misconception of the human body not only yields a higher product return rate due to customer dissatisfaction, but also creates countless problems in the garment manufacturing process. This was a major reason for which we decided to reinvent the industry standard by using real bodies instead of idealized proportions."

For smaller retailers that can't afford an "haute couture" fit model, AlvaProducts also offers a standard line of four body forms that were developed by reducing various body types into basic shapes. For example, did you ever consider

Gwen Stefani's body as a rectangle? Other shapes include a spoon (bottom heavy) or an inverted triangle (top heavy).

The difficult and inevitable question that remains with such products geared towards "real" people is what happens to those individuals who continue to be marginalized and feel abnormal because their body types fall outside of these "real" standards?

"It's impossible for any retailer or designer to satisfy the entire population," said Wang. "But we want our products to help each client better understand their customer and develop a form that can account for 80% of their target audience."

Citizen trust relies on open government

What people are saying about government secrecy:

Bennington (Vt.) Banner, in an editorial: "Happy Sunshine Week, everyone. It's the special week out of the year when we all get to celebrate open government and your right to know what elected officials are doing in your name. ... It is (the) opaque veil draped over public information by officials - who often deem themselves as the gatekeepers of what the public should know - which Sunshine Week stands to obliterate. Many of these officials do things that they don't want you to know about. They do things they know are wrong. ... If you, the taxpayers, don't want the government - local and national - spending your hard-earned tax dollars on whatever they wish, then Sunshine Week is for you."

Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald, in an editorial: "A Douglas County (Minn.) official tried ... to force a local newspaper to submit stories for approval before publishing them. Instead, his move ignited a firestorm of public opposition, and the policy was scrapped. ... When the news broke, the public was infuriated. ... By Friday, he was apologizing ... in the paper. 'Ironically, Sunshine Week started this Sunday, a time to celebrate First Amendment rights,' the paper said in an editorial. ... 'We're happy to report that the First Amendment is not taken lightly in Douglas County.' "

Beloit (Wis.) Daily News, in an editorial: "The idea behind the Founders' experiment in self-governance hinged on the engagement of an informed citizenry. They believed that if citizens had access to the facts, they would be capable of making sound decisions about public practice and policy. Many things may have changed since (Thomas) Jefferson's day, including how people access information. ... But one thing has not changed. The people still need to know, and can be trusted to know. Self-government cannot properly function if the people are kept in the dark. Eventually, an uninformed people will become a disengaged people, and government will become the master, not the servant, of the people."

Muskogee (Okla.) Daily Phoenix, in an editorial: "There is no question this (Bush) administration has exercised a higher degree of secrecy and claims of executive privilege. ... Government and public ... officials serve the public. They should not be allowed to conceal incompetence, irresponsibility and illegalities by claims of special privilege or special conditions."

Meredith Oakley, associate editor, in a column in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: "I learned long ago that some folks will go along with just about anything as long as they believe they will have a substantive hand in the outcome. Which, of course, they do. ... I'm not necessarily against compromising. I've done it myself on occasion. But the point at which principle is the only thing standing between victory and defeat is where I draw the line. ... Personally, I prefer stands such as the one taken last year by Gov. Bill Richardson and Attorney General Patricia Madrid of New Mexico (who wrote), 'Freedom of information may be the greatest anti-terrorist weapon in the United States' hands, because it allows everyone to think about potential terrorist threats and design anti-terrorism safeguards. In effect, we can create a marketplace of awareness and ideas.' "

The Truth, Elkhart, Ind., in an editorial: "Either out of ignorance or on purpose, some agencies and officials still err on the side of shutting out the public. Such moves take us down the path of creating distrust. We believe being more open enables the public to trust that government agencies are really doing the best they can for the taxpayers."

Congress Raises Debt Cap, Fourth Increase Under Bush (Update4)

(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Congress approved a $781 billion increase in the federal government's debt limit, the fourth time lawmakers have raised the cap since President George W. Bush took office.

The Senate voted 52-48 to increase the legal limit on federal borrowing to $8.97 trillion, up from $8.18 trillion. The House approved the measure last year, meaning the legislation now goes to the president for his signature.

Treasury Secretary John Snow warned Congress in increasingly dire terms that the government couldn't keep paying its bills, and risked defaulting on its debt, without an immediate increase in the cap. The ceiling was lifted about 30 minutes after the Treasury postponed the scheduled announcement of the sale of three-month and six-month Treasury bills. An hour later Treasury said it would sell $37 billion in bills.

After the vote, Snow said lawmakers had protected ``the full faith and credit of the United States'' and ensured the government ``can deliver on promises already made, such as Social Security and Medicare payments and aid for the victims of the 2005 hurricanes.''

The increase in the debt limit will bring more borrowing and ``possibly a new round of spending,'' said Richard Schlanger, who manages about $4 billion of fixed-income assets, including Treasury bonds, at Pioneer Asset Management in Boston. ``As long as foreigners are willing to finance us, bring it on.''

Lambasting Bush

While the vote was never in doubt, Democrats used the occasion to lambaste the administration's fiscal policies.

Minority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, accused Republicans of pushing ``reckless'' policies that had created ``an explosion of debt'' over the course of the past five years. Republicans said the vote was needed to protect the nation's credit.

No Democrats voted for the debt-limit increase. Three Republicans voted against it: Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, John Ensign of Nevada and Conrad Burns of Montana.

Lawmakers also rejected, 55-44, a Democratic proposal that would have required the Treasury Department to study the economic and security implications of the nation's foreign-held debt.

Overseas Investors

``We're funding a war, we're trying to fund certain programs,'' said Kevin Giddis, head of fixed-income trading at brokerage firm Morgan Keegan Inc. in Memphis, Tennessee. ``We need'' foreign investors. ``We're going to continue to need them because if they go away we're going to have an inflationary situation.''

The government will spend $217 billion on interest on the debt this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. By contrast, federal spending for the Department of Education is $83 billion.

The Bush administration is leading the country down ``a reckless course of crushing debt, deficit-financed tax cuts and increasing the burden on the middle class,'' Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, a New York Democrat, said.

Shifting Money

For the last month the Treasury has been moving money between government accounts to stay below the debt limit and keep the government running. Snow last week authorized the government to use the $15 billion available in the exchange stabilization fund and issued a ``debt issuance suspension period'' to stop temporarily investments in the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund. The Treasury also redeemed some of the fund's current investments.

Last month Snow stopped investing money from the Government Securities Investment Fund in Treasuries, which requires the issuing of notes, and suspended sales of state and local government securities.

The Treasury said in January it plans to borrow $188 billion from January to March, the most ever for a single quarter.

``The Fed Chairman's been concerned about the deficit,'' Giddis said, referring to Federal Reserve chief Ben S. Bernanke. ``If the Fed's concerned about anything, we as traders and investors should be concerned as well.''

Fourth Debt Increase

This is the fourth time the administration of President George W. Bush has asked lawmakers to raise the debt limit and it brings the ceiling to 70.3 percent of gross domestic product, the highest since the 1997 increase. The four debt-limit increases in the 1990s pushed the ceiling above 70 percent of GDP, though it fell below that level by 2002.

Congress complied with the last request, in November 2004, only after the Treasury was forced to delay auctioning bills and notes and move money among government pension funds.

Since Bush took office in 2001, the federal budget has gone from four years of surpluses, the longest such run since before the Great Depression, to deficits brought on by a recession, tax cuts, the Sept. 11 attacks, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Gulf Coast hurricane damage.

Bush last month sent Congress a $2.77 trillion budget request for fiscal 2007 that calls for a deficit of $354 billion, compared with a record $423 billion forecast for this year. The Bush administration says it expects to shave the deficit to less than 2 percent of gross domestic product by 2009, from 3.2 percent this year.

The Treasury estimates it will borrow $427 billion in fiscal 2006 and $373 billion in fiscal 2007 to fund government operations, the budget showed. The government borrowed $297 billion in 2005, according to the documents.

Bush Reaffirms Pre-Emptive Use of Force

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Undaunted by the difficult war in Iraq, President Bush reaffirmed his strike-first policy against terrorists and enemy nations on Thursday and said Iran may pose the biggest challenge for America.

In a 49-page national security report, the president said diplomacy is the U.S. preference in halting the spread of nuclear and other heinous weapons.

"The president believes that we must remember the clearest lesson of Sept. 11: that the United States of America must confront threats before they fully materialize," national security adviser Stephen Hadley said.

"The president's strategy affirms that the doctrine of preemption remains sound and must remain an integral part of our national security strategy," Hadley said. "If necessary, the strategy states, under longstanding principles of self defense, we do not rule out the use of force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack."

Titled "National Security Strategy," the report summarizes Bush's plan for protecting America and directing U.S. relations with other nations. It is an updated version of a report Bush issued in 2002.

In the earlier report a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush underscored his administration's adoption of a pre-emptive policy, marking the end of a deterrent military strategy that dominated the Cold War.

The latest report makes it clear Bush hasn't changed his mind, even though no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq.

"When the consequences of an attack with weapons of mass destruction are potentially so devastating, we cannot afford to stand idly by as grave dangers materialize. ... The place of pre-emption in our national security strategy remains the same," Bush wrote.

The report had harsh words for Iran. It accused the regime of supporting terrorists, threatening Israel and disrupting democratic reform in Iraq. Bush said diplomacy to halt Tehran's suspected nuclear weapons work must prevail to avert a conflict.

"This diplomatic effort must succeed if confrontation is to be avoided," Bush said.

He did not say what would happen if international negotiations with Iran failed. The Bush administration currently is working to persuade Russia and China to support a proposed U.N. Security Council resolution demanding that Iran end its uranium enrichment program.

A top Iranian official said Thursday that his country was ready to open direct talks with the United States over Iraq, marking a major shift in Tehran's foreign policy a day after an Iraqi leader called for such talks. Ali Larijani, Iran's top nuclear negotiator and secretary of the country's Supreme National Security Council, told reporters that any talks between the United States and Iran would deal only with Iraqi issues.

But any direct dialogue between Tehran and Washington — were it to happen — also could be a beginning for negotiations between the two foes over Iran's suspect nuclear program.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the United States was ready to talk with Iran about Iraq. But he also said that any discussions must be restricted to that topic and not include other contentious subjects like Tehran's suspected nuclear weapons program.

Bush also had tough words for North Korea, which he said poses a serious nuclear proliferation challenge, counterfeits U.S. currency, traffics in narcotics, threatens its neighbors and starves its people.

"The North Korean regime needs to change these polices, open up its political system and afford freedom to its people," Bush said. "In the interim, we will continue to take all necessary measures to protect our national and economic security against the adverse effects of their bad conduct."

Bush issued rebukes to Russia and China and called Syria a tyranny that harbors terrorists and sponsors terrorist activity.

On Russia, Bush said recent trends show a waning commitment to democratic freedoms and institutions. "Strengthening our relationship will depend on the policies, foreign and domestic, that Russia adopts," he said.

The United States also is nudging China down a road of reform and openness.

"China's leaders must realize, however, that they cannot stay on this peaceful path while holding on to old ways of thinking and acting that exacerbate concerns throughout the region and the world," Bush wrote.

He said these "old ways" include enlarging China's military in a non-transparent way, expanding trade, yet seeking to direct markets rather than opening them up, and supporting energy-rich nations without regard to their misrule or misbehavior at home or abroad.

In 2002, when he sent his first report to Congress, Bush was struggling to persuade U.S. allies to join an offensive to topple Saddam Hussein.

Since then, the oppressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan was replaced by a freely elected government. In Iraq, citizens voted in the nation's first free election, a constitution was passed by referendum and nearly 12 million Iraqis elected a permanent government.

Challenges remain in Iraq, where sectarian violence threatens the fragile government and the U.S. death toll has topped 2,300. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said Iraq's political transition will take a couple of years. Earlier this week, the Pentagon announced it was moving about 700 additional U.S. troops into Iraq from Kuwait because of the escalating killings there and fears that a Shiite holiday would spark even more violence.

"When the Iraqi government, supported by the coalition, defeats the terrorists, terrorism will be dealt a critical blow," Bush said, acknowledging that the fight against terrorism was far from over.

The report is laden with strategies for advancing democracy across the globe, a theme of Bush's second inaugural address.

The president said his administration was advancing this goal by holding high-level meetings at the White House with democratic reformers in repressive nations; using foreign aid to support fair elections, women's rights and religious freedom; and pushing to abolish human trafficking.

Countering suggestions that he favors a go-it-alone approach to foreign policy, Bush emphasized multilateral problem-solving.

"Many of the problems we face — from the threat of pandemic disease to proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, to terrorism, to human trafficking, to natural disasters — reach across borders," he said.

"Effective multinational efforts are essential to solve these problems. Yet history has shown that only when we do our part will others do theirs. America must continue to lead."

___

On the Web:

3 years into war, U.S. envoy cuts to the truth in Iraq

Three years after the United States invaded Iraq - the anniversary is this weekend - some healthy realism appears to be creeping into the American assessment of the war, if not yet into the rhetoric from Washington.

In three speeches this week, President Bush is again casting Iraq as a glass half-full. Yes, there is violence and the threat of civil war, he said in his first speech Monday, but Iraqi forces are gaining the strength to deal with it as U.S. troops prepare to draw down. Bush is trying to build much-needed support for a war that, in a new poll, 57% say was a mistake.

But in Iraq, the U.S. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, is telling the story in more somber tones that reflect the broader reality. The Iraq invasion, Khalilzad says, opened up a "Pandora's box" of sectarian conflicts, which could lead to a regional war and the rise of religious extremists who "would make Taliban Afghanistan look like child's play." All it would take would be another devastating attack on a holy site.

Khalilzad's view should carry weight. He is a Muslim who speaks local languages and has broad contacts among Iraq's feuding factions. He also has the perspective of having previously overseen the U.S. effort in Afghanistan, and he was an early Iraq war supporter, giving his current reservations credibility.

On a practical level, he is the man who has the unenviable job of trying to cajole and prod Iraq's groups into a national unity government. Though the parliament is supposed to meet for the first time Thursday, squabbling is deepening with rising violence.

By giving little emphasis to Khalilzad's interpretation, at least publicly, the administration is missing a pivotal opportunity - perhaps even its last - to halt Iraq's slide into civil war, which would all but end chances that the U.S. mission will succeed.

The need is to get the international community involved in pressuring Iraq's groups with every tool available. Khalilzad favors a conference, which has not been given a serious push.

This would differ from trying to get other countries to send troops - as only a few did, amid anger at the war. Surrounding countries and the wider world have potent self-interest in averting regional war, which would stoke Muslim rage and disrupt oil supplies.

Political control is fast breaking down. More than 80 bodies, mostly Sunni, have been found in the past couple of days - revenge killings for a weekend attack on a Shiite market, though Shiite clerics ordered no retaliation. Each feuding group has been abandoning words of respect for Khalilzad for accusations that he supports the others.

The warmed-over ideas Bush has put forward this week aren't bad, but they haven't worked. New reports are exposing in more detail a litany of war mistakes. Among them: freezing Khalilzad out early on when a diplomat with no Middle East experience took charge and committed such blunders as disbanding the Iraqi military.

Carbon Dioxide Hit Record in 2005

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere climbed to a record 381 parts per million last year, an increase sure to spark further debate on global warming.

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The reading was up 2.6 parts per million, according to preliminary calculations, David J. Hofmann of the Office of Atmospheric Research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Tuesday.

Final calculations from reporting stations around the world won't be available until later in the spring, Hofmann said, but the preliminary numbers are usually quite close.

Carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas. Those are chemicals that have been increasing in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, raising fears of altering the planet's climate by trapping heat from the sun.

In Geneva, Switzerland, meanwhile, the World Meteorological Organization issued its own report for 2004, in which Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said, "Global observations coordinated by WMO show that levels of carbon dioxide, the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, continue to increase steadily and show no signs of leveling off."

While the total of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere goes up every year the amount of increase varies from year to year, Hofmann said.

The ocean absorbs carbon dioxide at a fairly steady rate, he explained, but some years plants are more active in taking it up as they grow while other years they use less. And years when there are large forest fires can release increased amounts of the gas into the air, he said.

"The real question is how long will the earth continue to adjust itself to take up the additional carbon dioxide," he said. "That's one of the major questions."

In addition to carbon dioxide, the 2004 data from WMO calculated that nitrous oxide, which has been rising steadily since 1988, totaled 318.6 parts per billion. Methane has risen the most dramatically over the past two centuries, with the total amount in 2004 at 1,783 parts per billion, but its growth has been slowing, WMO said.

Hans Verolme, director of climate change for the World Wildlife Fund in the United States, welcomed the report as providing an authoritative measurement of the change.

"Unfortunately it confirms the other data that we've seen from NOAA and NASA and also it confirms with the trends we've seen in emissions from countries like the United States that still have not taken any real action to reduce carbon pollution," Verolme said.

Leonard Barrie, chief of atmospheric research at WMO, said: "If you have that much more energy being trapped, where does it go? That's the question everybody wants to know. Is it increasing the average surface temperature? Is it increasing storm frequency?"

In September researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology reported that the number of more powerful hurricanes, category 4 and 5, has increased over the last 20 years, a period when average sea-surface temperature has risen. It's the warm water vapor from the oceans that provides energy for these massive storms.

According to NASA, 2005 had the highest annual average surface temperature worldwide since instrument recordings began in the late 1800s.

Nevertheless, the question of dealing with global climate change has proven a political stumbling block in recent years with the Bush administration rejecting the Kyoto protocol, which seeks to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

Scientists worry that overall warming will melt glaciers and the polar ice caps, raising sea levels enough to damage many low-lying islands and cities around the world. In addition, a warmer climate could lead to changes in weather patterns, agriculture and even allow some diseases to expand into new areas.

Coast Guard to Study 'Cargo Sweepings'

MUSKEGON, Mich., Associated Press - For more than 75 years, shipping companies that haul iron ore, coal, salt and limestone have dumped their "cargo sweepings" — residual materials and wash water left on freighters after they are unloaded — into the Great Lakes to avoid contaminating future loads.

Despite federal laws and an international treaty that prohibit the practice, U.S. and Canadian freighters empty about 2 million pounds of cargo sweepings into the lakes each year, according to federal data.

Ships unload anywhere from a few pounds to a few thousand pounds of leftover cargo materials, but because the dumping usually takes place several miles offshore, few people outside the shipping industry know about it.

Regulators have turned a blind eye toward cargo sweeping because shipping industry officials and some scientists claim it is environmentally harmless and contend there are no viable disposal alternatives.

The Coast Guard is about to begin what is believed to be the first scientific study to determine whether the practice is harming the Great Lakes, The Muskegon Chronicle reported Tuesday.

The study could determine whether government agencies restrict the practice or ban it outright. At this time, the Coast Guard wants to permit cargo sweeping.

The shipping industry is opposed to any restrictions.

"Banning cargo sweeping would be catastrophic to the shipping industry. It would shut down power production, steel production and all kinds of construction activities in the region," said James Weakley, president of the Lake Carriers Association, a Cleveland-based trade group.

He said cargo sweepings don't contain hazardous substances.

"It's the equivalent of sweeping out my garage," Weakley said.

But Mark Coscarelli, a Lansing environmental consultant, questioned why government agencies that strive to keep pollutants out of surface waters would allow freighters to dump iron ore, coal, salt and cement dust into the world's largest source of fresh surface water.

"We have to ask ourselves if this is good public policy," said Coscarelli, who worked in Michigan's Office of the Great Lakes for more than a decade.

The federal Clean Water Act prohibits dumping waste into lakes Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario and Superior. So does an international shipping treaty, called MARPOL Annex V, that Congress adopted in 1990.

U.S. officials who approved MARPOL V, which banned trash dumping at sea, apparently were unaware that the treaty effectively outlawed cargo sweeping in the lakes.

Instead of banning the practice, the Coast Guard in 1993 adopted an interim exemption policy that allows it to continue virtually unregulated. The Coast Guard now wants to make that interim policy a permanent rule.

U.S. and Canadian freighters dumped 432,242 pounds of cargo sweepings in Lake Michigan in 2001, according to federal data. The biggest load that year, 680,300 pounds, was dumped in Lake Huron.

The cargo sweepings discarded in Lake Michigan in 2001 included 187,530 pounds of iron ore, 80,132 pounds of coal and 138,548 pounds of stone.

They're drunk on profits and power and they won't be giving up either very soon. Capitalism run amuck.

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Big Oil faces U.S. Congress on profits, mergers

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. oil company executives went to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to defend their companies' billions in record profits that have sparked public outrage and to answer concerns about what they plan to do to ease high gasoline costs for consumers.

The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the effects that mergers of oil and natural gas companies have had on energy supplies and related prices.

Executives from oil giants Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp.,, ConocoPhillips, the U.S. units of BP Plc and Royal Dutch Shell Plc and major oil refiner Valero Energy Corp. will testify.

Tuesday's hearing is the second time in less than four months that Congress has called Big Oil executives on the carpet to explain high prices. Executives testified last fall on record gasoline prices and tight supplies after Hurricane Katrina affected markets.

Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record), the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is using the hearing to focus on his proposed legislation that would give the government more power to stop oil and natural gas company mergers if such deals reduce available energy supplies and raise prices.

Under the bill, the government could go after companies that purposely withhold energy supplies from the market to make a bigger profit.

The legislation would also permit the government to take legal action against the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or

OPEC, for restricting oil supplies and fixing prices.

"One of the biggest causes of high crude oil prices is the illegal price-fixing of the OPEC cartel," said Ohio Republican Mike DeWine, a sponsor of the so-called NOPEC provisions.

The hearing comes as gasoline prices are on the rise again as motor fuel demand picks up with the busy U.S. spring driving season getting under way.

The national retail price for regular unleaded gasoline has jumped 11.2 cents over the past two weeks to $2.37 a gallon, the highest level since early November, the Energy Department reported on Monday.

Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California said oil and gas mergers in recent years have boosted energy prices.

"This dramatic consolidation of the oil and gas industry has gone largely unchecked by the federal government," Feinstein said.

Executives said in their written statements that mergers have actually benefited consumers by making it easier for the bigger companies to find oil and natural gas supplies and ship them to needed markets around the globe.

"With these mergers, (consumers) have been able to rely on dependable, and increasing, supplies of energy," said Chevron Chairman David O'Reilly.

"We need U.S. companies that have the scale and financial strength to make the investments, undertake the risks and develop the new technologies necessary to provide Americans with greater energy access and greater energy security," said new Exxon Chairman Rex Tillerson.

Exxon alone earned more than $36 billion last year, the biggest profit ever for a U.S. company.

In a standing-room-only event, suited oil lobbyists and young activists wearing "Exxpose Exxon" T-shirts were elbow-to-elbow in the rear of the hearing room.

Oil company executives also told lawmakers that if they want lower energy prices, they need to open restricted U.S. federal lands and offshore waters to more oil and natural gas drilling. Legislation to open some tracts off Florida's western coastline is moving through the Senate now.

Shell Oil Co. President John Hofmeister said the restricted onshore and offshore federal areas hold more than 100 billion barrels of oil and 635 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Secrecy hides accountability

USA Today - In the movies, government confidentiality is typically depicted by documents stamped "Top Secret." In real life, much of what's kept under wraps has little or nothing to do with national security or the war on terror.

Instead, it can involve muzzling critics, covering up corruption and incompetence, or simply mindless bureaucracy. Phone numbers, policy papers, contracting details, historical documents, whistle-blower allegations - they're all disappearing from public view. By one estimate, government papers are being classified at the rate of 125 a minute.

To those in power, keeping facts hidden makes life easier; the probability of oversight drops. But those who believe the sunshine of disclosure makes democracy stronger are denied the tools of accountability.

Examples abound:

Environmental secrecy Like virtually all top climate experts, NASA's James Hansen thinks global warming is an urgent problem.

But Hansen's view doesn't line up with the White House's wait-and-see position. Recently, NASA's public affairs officials leaned on him to curtail media contacts and speeches. His message is one they'd rather not hear discussed.

Fortunately for Hansen, his high profile insulated him from dismissal or other retribution. "We live in a free country and work for the taxpayer," he told The New York Times last month. "We should provide useful information, not propaganda." For scientists with a lower profile, though, speaking out against the party line can endanger their job security.

Another environmental secrecy debate has emerged over the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. It's likely that federal officials downplayed the impact of toxic gases, a federal judge concluded recently as she allowed a lawsuit to proceed against former

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Whitman. Residents moved back into the lower Manhattan area after the EPA assured them there was no risk from pollutants such as asbestos dust.

Many of the federal advisory committees - established to provide unvarnished scientific and technical advice to government - meet in secret. Nearly two-thirds of the more than 7,000 meetings in 2004 were closed to the public. It's hard to see special interests at work when the doors are closed.

Contracting secrecy Each year, the government hands out about $300 billion in contracts. Yet there's no requirement that it collect and publish information on criminal, civil and administrative actions involving contractors. Industry lobbyists for the largest contractors have no trouble foiling efforts by shoestring-budget public interest groups to force the government to reveal those details.

What doesn't get published doesn't get reviewed. For instance, important details about reconstruction contracts in

Iraq and the Gulf Coast never make it into public view.

Companies winning work despite having skeletons in their closets need not worry about exposure. The "administrative agreements" and waivers that government agencies routinely issue to contractors neatly cover those up: They're secret.

Secrecy for the sake of secrecy. This is the most perplexing and insidious of all the secrecy excesses. Recently, scholars researching history lessons involving the Korean and Vietnam wars noticed that documents once available had disappeared. Half-century-old intelligence analysis from the Korean War, for example, went from open files to closed ones.

A program to reclassify declassified documents at the National Archives began nearly seven years ago - the result of a backlash from intelligence officials who believed the declassifying had gone too far. But much of that program, involving as many as 55,000 pages, appears to involve documents of interest only to historians.

The irony of secrecy for the sake of secrecy is that it can make the nation less safe. Thomas Kean, the former New Jersey governor who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission, said lack of communication among government agencies, which ranged from senseless turf wars to legal impediments, hindered efforts to uncover the 9/11 plots.

As a symbolic gesture, the commission suggested, the government should start releasing the budgets of the nation's intelligence agencies. Terrorists aren't likely to care whether the number is $20 billion or $30 billion. But taxpayers deserve to find out whether their money is being well-spent.

The liberal baby bust

By Phillip Longman

What's the difference between Seattle and Salt Lake City? There are many differences, of course, but here's one you might not know. In Seattle, there are nearly 45% more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19% more kids than dogs.

This curious fact might at first seem trivial, but it reflects a much broader and little-noticed demographic trend that has deep implications for the future of global culture and politics. It's not that people in a progressive city such as Seattle are so much fonder of dogs than are people in a conservative city such as Salt Lake City. It's that progressives are so much less likely to have children.

It's a pattern found throughout the world, and it augers a far more conservative future - one in which patriarchy and other traditional values make a comeback, if only by default. Childlessness and small families are increasingly the norm today among progressive secularists. As a consequence, an increasing share of all children born into the world are descended from a share of the population whose conservative values have led them to raise large families.

Today, fertility correlates strongly with a wide range of political, cultural and religious attitudes. In the USA, for example, 47% of people who attend church weekly say their ideal family size is three or more children. By contrast, 27% of those who seldom attend church want that many kids.

In Utah, where more than two-thirds of residents are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 92 children are born each year for every 1,000 women, the highest fertility rate in the nation. By contrast Vermont - the first to embrace gay unions - has the nation's lowest rate, producing 51 children per 1,000 women.

Similarly, in Europe today, the people least likely to have children are those most likely to hold progressive views of the world. For instance, do you distrust the army and other institutions and are you prone to demonstrate against them? Then, according to polling data assembled by demographers Ron Lesthaeghe and Johan Surkyn, you are less likely to be married and have kids or ever to get married and have kids. Do you find soft drugs, homosexuality and euthanasia acceptable? Do you seldom, if ever, attend church? Europeans who answer affirmatively to such questions are far more likely to live alone or be in childless, cohabiting unions than are those who answer negatively.

This correlation between secularism, individualism and low fertility portends a vast change in modern societies. In the USA, for example, nearly 20% of women born in the late 1950s are reaching the end of their reproductive lives without having children. The greatly expanded childless segment of contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and '70s, will leave no genetic legacy. Nor will their emotional or psychological influence on the next generation compare with that of people who did raise children.

Single-child factor

Meanwhile, single-child families are prone to extinction. A single child replaces one of his or her parents, but not both. Consequently, a segment of society in which single-child families are the norm will decline in population by at least 50% per generation and quite quickly disappear. In the USA, the 17.4% of baby boomer women who had one child account for a mere 9.2% of kids produced by their generation. But among children of the baby boom, nearly a quarter descend from the mere 10% of baby boomer women who had four or more kids.

This dynamic helps explain the gradual drift of American culture toward religious fundamentalism and social conservatism. Among states that voted for President Bush in 2004, the average fertility rate is more than 11% higher than the rate of states for Sen.

John Kerry.

It might also help to explain the popular resistance among rank-and-file Europeans to such crown jewels of secular liberalism as the European Union. It turns out that Europeans who are most likely to identify themselves as "world citizens" are also less likely to have children.

Rewriting history?

Why couldn't tomorrow's Americans and Europeans, even if they are disproportionately raised in patriarchal, religiously minded households, turn out to be another generation of '68? The key difference is that during the post-World War II era, nearly all segments of society married and had children. Some had more than others, but there was much more conformity in family size between the religious and the secular. Meanwhile, thanks mostly to improvements in social conditions, there is no longer much difference in survival rates for children born into large families and those who have few if any siblings.

Tomorrow's children, therefore, unlike members of the postwar baby boom generation, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively narrow and culturally conservative segment of society. To be sure, some members of the rising generation may reject their parents' values, as often happens. But when they look for fellow secularists with whom to make common cause, they will find that most of their would-be fellow travelers were quite literally never born.

Many will celebrate these developments. Others will view them as the death of the Enlightenment. Either way, they will find themselves living through another great cycle of history.

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She was wonderful as the robot grandma in Ray Bradbury's "I Sing the Body Electric".

Actress Maureen Stapleton Dies at 80

NEW YORK, Associated Press - Maureen Stapleton, the Oscar-winning character actress whose subtle vulnerability and down-to-earth toughness earned her dramatic and comedic roles on stage, screen, and television, died Monday. She was 80.

Her son, Daniel Allentuck, said she died of natural causes.

Stapleton, whose unremarkable, matronly appearance belied her star personality and talent, won an Academy Award in 1981 for her supporting role as anarchist-writer Emma Goldman in Warren Beatty's "Reds," about a left-wing American journalist who journeys to Russia to cover the Bolshevik Revolution.

To prepare for the role, Stapleton said she tried reading Goldman's autobiography, but soon chucked it out of boredom.

"There are many roads to good acting," Stapleton, known for her straightforwardness, said in her 1995 autobiography, "Hell of a Life." "I've been asked repeatedly what the 'key' to acting is, and as far as I'm concerned, the main thing is to keep the audience awake."

Stapleton was nominated several times for a supporting actress Oscar, including for her first film role in 1958's "Lonelyhearts"; "Airport" in 1970; and Woody Allen's "Interiors" in 1978.

Her other film credits include the 1963 musical "Bye Bye Birdie" opposite Ann-Margret and Dick Van Dyke, "Johnny Dangerously," "Cocoon," "The Money Pit" and "Addicted to Love."

Meanwhile, the opium trade flourishes and the warlords grow fat and all is business as usual. Oh, and about those pipelines to the Gulf of Persia, well, let's just let our NATO buddies watch the Carlysle Group's back...

U.S. to Hand Over Afghan Mission to NATO

KABUL, Afghanistan, Associated Press - The American mission to bring order to this unruly country is being handed to a multinational force led by the NATO alliance, a move that will subordinate U.S. troops under foreign command in a combat situation for the first time since World War II.

NATO's ambitious mission could inject the flagging European-North American alliance with a sense of purpose and also might take the heat off Washington, seen in this region as too eager to fight Muslims. But there are questions whether NATO will engage in the type of offensive operations the U.S.-led coalition has.

"NATO needs to grab hold of this mission for NATO's sake," U.S. Central Command chief Gen. John Abizaid said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. Jumping outside European boundaries is "where the alliance needs to go to stay relevant for the future."

Abizaid and others have said the Afghanistan mission marks a historic expansion for NATO that could see the alliance taking further missions in Africa or elsewhere. Even after the takeover, however, the U.S. is expected to maintain a separate counterinsurgency force in Afghanistan to hunt Taliban and al-Qaida holdouts.

British Army Lt. Gen. David Richards is to take command in Afghanistan this summer, the first time U.S. ground troops at war would be placed under foreign leadership in more than 50 years.

"That's a first — since World War II," U.S. Brig. Gen. Douglas Raaberg told the AP on Sunday.

Americans won't be far from the top, however. Richards' deputy will be Maj. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, now commander of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division.

"It has always been a contentious issue. Americans don't like to be under command of other nations," said Amyas Godfrey, a military analyst with the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies in London.

But in this case, he added: "I don't think it'll be a problem. Brits and Americans have been working hand in hand for over three years."

U.S. troops have been under foreign command before — in a U.N. force in Macedonia in the 1990s and under NATO in Kosovo, where they continue to serve since 1999. But both missions were peacekeeping operations after hostilities had largely ended. U.S. troops haven't been under foreign command in a theater where fighting continues — like Afghanistan — since serving with British Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery in some campaigns of World War II.

Some 5,000 to 6,000 Americans will join the NATO force in Afghanistan, which will more than double in size by November, from its current 10,000 troops to around 21,000 troops.

NATO is already moving into Afghanistan's rebellious southern provinces with 6,000 troops, mainly from Britain, Canada and the Netherlands. That deployment is expected to be completed in the summer and will quickly be followed by the alliance moving into the east, considered Afghanistan's most dangerous sector.

"NATO is going from the north and west that were relatively quiet to areas where there's going to be challenges," Abizaid told the AP. "Tackling these things is going to be important for the alliance."

Yet questions remain over the NATO forces' mandate as they start moving into the south amid rising militant attacks and suicide bombings.

One Western diplomat based in Islamabad said it remains unclear whether NATO will be willing to take and inflict casualties. NATO's limits are likely to be quickly tested by militants, the diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to journalists on the record.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said the 19,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan will be reduced to about 16,000 by the summer. About 5,000 to 6,000 of them will go under the NATO command, aimed at maintaining stability and security. The rest will be in the separate U.S. counterinsurgency force to hunt Taliban and al-Qaida holdouts, which will remain under U.S. military command, in close liaison with NATO.

U.S. B-52 bombers and A-10 ground-attack jets will remain in Afghanistan to back up both NATO and the separate U.S. force, said Raaberg, Centcom's deputy chief of operations.

Whether U.S. military control of Afghanistan's airspace gets transferred to NATO has yet to be decided, he said.

Not all NATO forces will be as "robustly engaged" as others, Abizaid said. Some are restricted by national rules, or caveats, from engaging in combat, crowd control and other confrontations.

"There will be a whole range of national capabilities displayed here and willingness to engage in tasks," Abizaid said. "We look to minimize as many of those caveats as possible."

In contrast to Afghanistan, NATO has refused to take a large role in Iraq, agreeing only to handle limited training of Iraqi troops in a U.S.-led war unpopular in most NATO countries. U.S. intervention in Afghanistan is viewed as a more justified conflict.

Godfrey, a former British intelligence officer in Iraq, said the "internationalization" of the Afghan counterinsurgency duties takes the heat off Washington's stretched troops and battered image.

"America needs NATO in this situation," Godfrey said. "It will take pressure off America and the idea that America is perpetuating a war against Muslim nations, and that it's always America on the front lines."

Major contributors to the NATO forces include more than 3,000 British troops, more than 2,000 Canadians, as well as around 1,000 Italians, Germans, French, Spanish, Dutch and others. Non-NATO members include Australia, New Zealand and Albania.

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On the Net:

More ancient war goddess statues found in Egypt

CAIRO (AFP) - A team of German archeologists has unearthed 17 statues of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet during restoration work at an ancient temple in the southern city of Luxor, Culture Minister Faruq Hosni announced.

The team found the statues of the war goddess near the same site where six similar statues were unearthed last week, on the location of the 18th dynasty (1580-1314 BC) temple of pharaoh Amenhotep III on the west bank of the Nile, Hosni added in a statement received by AFP.

The black granite statues were life-size, measure between 1.7 metres and 1.8 metres and show Sekhmet sitting on a throne holding the Ankh, a hieroglyphic sign that represented life for the ancient Egyptians, said Zahi Hawas, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Hawas said there were inscriptions on either side of the seat indicating the various names of the pharaoh Amenhotep III.

The team, he explained, was currently in the process of raising the statues, which were found in three metre-deep holes and measuring eight metres in diameter, for restoration.

Last week, Egyptian and German archeologists found six statues for Sekhmet near the courtyard of the same temple.

The goddess Sekhmet was associated with war and retribution and represented the destructive force of the sun. Part of her destructive side was disease and plague, but she could also cure ailments.

Polls: Public Worried About Gov't Secrecy

By The Associated Press

Two new polls gauging Americans' views on government openness found a majority believe the federal government leans more toward secrecy than openness, while eight in 10 are convinced that an open government is necessary for an effective democracy.

The polls released Sunday also found, however, that the public believed government should keep some information private, particularly if it was necessary to combat terrorism.

One poll, by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University, found that 64 percent of respondents thought the federal government is somewhat or very secretive, while more than a third think their local and state governments lean more toward secrecy. Fifty-five percent said state and local governments were somewhat or very open.

But Americans were more closely divided on when government information should be made public, according to the telephone poll of 1,007 adults.

Forty-six percent said government records should be considered public and their release should only be blocked when it "would do harm"; 42 percent said the government should protect its information and only release it if there is a "sound legal case" for it to be public.

A separate poll released Sunday found respondents were supportive of open government and access to public records — though solid majorities also said that government officials should keep records secret if "necessary", or to help in the war on terrorism.

The poll by the AccessNorthwest research and outreach project at the Edward R. Murrow School of Communication at Washington State University in Pullman found that 81 percent said democracy requires government to operate openly.

Nearly seven in 10, or 69 percent, told researchers that open public records and meetings keep government honest. Nearly as many, 63 percent, said it was OK for government officials to keep records secret if they deem it necessary, and almost three-quarters, 73 percent, believe the president should "make some public records secret if it might help with the war on terrorism."

The Scripps poll was conducted from Feb. 19 to March 3. There is a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

The Washington State University poll, conducted from Feb. 19 through March 4, surveyed 403 adults nationwide. It has an error margin of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

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On the Net:

"Those that would give up liberty to obtain security deserve neither liberty nor security." - Ben Franklin

States Steadily Restrict Public Info

Associated Press - States have steadily limited the public's access to government information since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a new Associated Press analysis of laws in all 50 states has found. Legislatures have passed more than 1,000 laws changing access to information, approving more than twice as many measures that restrict information as laws that open government books.

Some things your government doesn't have to tell you about:

• The safety plan at your child's school, if you live in Iowa.

• Medication errors at your grandparent's nursing home in North Carolina.

• Disciplinary actions against Indiana state employees.

The horror of the attacks spurred a wholesale re-examination of information that could put the country in danger, and the state actions roughly mirror those on the federal level. Federal agencies responded by shutting down Web sites, pulling telephone directories and rethinking everything from dam blueprints to historical records.

In statehouse battles, the issue has pitted advocates of government openness — including journalists and civil liberties groups — against lawmakers and others who worry that public information could be misused, whether it's by terrorists or by computer hackers hoping to use your credit cards. Security concerns typically won out.

The AP discovered a clear trend from the Sept. 11 attacks through legislative work that ended last year: States passed 616 laws that restricted access — to government records, databases, meetings and more — and 284 laws that loosened access. Another 123 laws had either a neutral or mixed effect, the AP found.

"What these open government laws do is break down that wall of government secrecy so that everybody knows what's going on," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "A democracy can only function if we have information. You can only have oversight of government if you have information."

Associated Press reporters in every state, often with help from their local press associations, tracked the government access bills introduced since the World Trade Center towers and Pentagon were hit by hijacked planes.

In every state, reporters tallied bills that were proposed each year, and then examined the laws that passed. They assessed the impact of each new measure and rated it as loosening existing limits on public access to government information, restricting the limits, or neutral.

While fear of another terrorist attack drove many new proposals, it wasn't the only motivator. Concerns about identity theft, medical privacy and the vulnerability of computerized records have sparked many pieces of legislation, too.

Lawmakers say they are recalibrating the balance between information that could be used against society and what society at large needs to know.

"Since Sept. 11, we're looking at information like plans for our nuclear plants, the records of our bridges and transportation systems. All of the critical information that is out there that we don't necessarily want to put in the hands of a terrorist," said New York state Sen. Nick Spano, a Republican who had proposed tightening legislation soon after the attacks.

"It's a very difficult balance between the public's right to know and the public's right to security," Spano said. A different security measure ultimately became law, limiting access to information about infrastructure from airports to cellular phone systems. Last year, Spano authored a law that strengthened public access by setting a strict deadline for state agencies to respond to requests for information.

The give and take of a legislature usually forces changes to such bills — like a measure proposed last year in Oklahoma, where freshman state Sen. Charles Wyrick, a Democrat, sought to completely exempt the state's new Department of Homeland Security from the Open Meetings Act and Open Records Act.

"I don't know why all of a sudden the holy grail of security and safety is now closing records," Mark Thomas, head of the Oklahoma Press Association, said after the bill was introduced. "It seems to me we would be more secure if we knew what was going on around us. ... Apparently there are those in government who want to close all these records and say, 'We'll keep you safe, trust us.'"

Negotiations brought a compromise. The law that passed allowed the department to keep communications between the agency and the federal government confidential, along with security plans for private businesses.

"We had to fight that out, and basically it ended up being an equal distribution of unhappiness," Thomas said.

Still, the numerical data shows which side got more out of negotiations overall: The AP analysis of 1,023 new laws dealing with public access to government information found that more than 60 percent closed access. Just over a quarter created new avenues of access. The rest had a neutral effect, often through technical changes to existing laws.

Those laws emerged from just over 3,500 bills. Often, several legislators interested in a topic will each introduce a bill knowing that only one is likely to pass. In some states, the same legislation is introduced in both House and Senate chambers to speed action and build support.

Across more than four years, 36 states passed more restrictive laws than laws that loosened access; seven states passed more laws that eased barriers to access; seven states passed equal numbers. The analysis did not attempt to quantify the impact of larger, sweeping laws versus smaller modifications.

The AP analysis also did not study legislation prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, though observers say the changes have been obvious.

"What we see nationwide is states really backing away from their open access laws," said Fred H. Cate, an Indiana University law professor who studies privacy and technology. Security threats are real — but some lawmakers are just "taking advantage of the public security tide," he said.

The law in Iowa requires that schools draft emergency response plans, but bars them from the public. In Indiana, legislators agreed to keep disciplinary actions against state employees secret — except when they are suspended, demoted or discharged.

In North Carolina, new advisory committees set up to examine medication errors in nursing homes keep their meetings and records confidential, though the medication error rates found in separate home inspections that exceed a higher, federal standard can be accessed through the federal government.

North Carolina, like other places, also took steps to open access, requiring local and state governments to more quickly provide details about government incentive packages to lure business.

Elsewhere, Oregon opened records on child abuse in cases involving a child who is killed or seriously hurt; South Carolina lawmakers required the governor to open his cabinet meetings; California voters approved an amendment to the state constitution requiring that the state's laws on open meetings and open records be broadly interpreted. After the amendment passed, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made public his appointment calendar and those of two of his top aides.

Lately, privacy worries are starting to trump security fears.

"The great trend out there — that sweeps across any record — is privacy," said Charles Davis at the Freedom of Information Center in Missouri. "There's a push by government that every time Joe Citizen's name is mentioned in a government document, it's an inherent threat to Joe Citizen's privacy if that document is released."

Just this month, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty announced a new government-wide effort to target identity theft, barring access to driver's licenses, phone records and Social Security numbers. No longer, the governor said, should there be a presumption that government information is public. "That's backwards," he said.

Open government advocates disagree. The way they see it, if Pawlenty is successful, information that used to be public in Minnesota will soon be unnecessarily locked away.

Why the fuck would the Dubai company back out of a huge gazillion-dollar deal when the pResident had already vowed to pull another Bolton and push it through regardless? They wouldn't - it was easy money, no reason not to just sit and wait it out, nothing to lose by letting the process happen and everything to gain. But they would back out this precise way, if this was all just a fast easy way to let all the Republicans up for election this year distance themselves from what has become a failed republican presidency...

The port deal theatrics is all about bamboozling the public into retaining the republican-controlled congress.

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Bush: Port Deal Collapse Sends Bad Message

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - President Bush said Friday he was troubled by the political storm that forced the reversal of a deal allowing a company in Dubai to take over take over operations of six American ports, saying it sent a bad message to U.S. allies in the Middle East.

Bush said the United States needs moderate allies in the Arab world, like the United Arab Emirates, to win the global war on terrorism.

The president said he had been satisfied that security would be sound at the ports if the Dubai deal had taken effect. "Nevertheless, Congress was still very much opposed to it," Bush said. He made his remarks to a conference of the National Newspaper Association, which represents owners, publishers and editors of community newspapers.

"I'm concerned about a broader message this issue could send to our friends and allies around the world, particularly in the Middle East," the president said. "In order to win the war on terror we have got to strengthen our friendships and relationships with moderate Arab countries in the Middle East."

"UAE is a committed ally in the war on terror," Bush added. "They are a key partner for our military in a critical region, and outside of our own country, Dubai services more of our military, military ships, than any country in the world.

"They're sharing intelligence so we can hunt down the terrorists," Bush added. "They helped us shut down a world wide proliferation network run by A.Q. Khan" — the Pakistani scientist who sold nuclear technology to

Iran, North Korea and Libya, he said.

"UAE is a valued and strategic partner," he said. "I'm committed to strengthening our relationship with the UAE."

After a storm of protest in the Republican-controlled Congress, DP World announced Thursday that it would transfer six U.S. port operations to a U.S. entity. The moved spared Bush from a veto showdown with GOP lawmakers. Yet the larger issue highlighted by the DP world controversy — U.S. port security — shows no signs of going away.

"The problem of the political moment has passed, but the problem of adequate port security still looms large," Sen. Lindsey Graham (news, bio, voting record), R-S.C., said.

Republicans and Democrats alike welcomed DP World's decision to give up its aspirations to manage significant operations at the six ports, but they warned that the move doesn't negate the urgent need for broad legislation aimed at protecting America's ports.

"I'm sure that the decision by DP World was a difficult decision to hand over port operations that they had purchased from another company," Bush said.

"There are gaping holes in cargo and port security that need to be plugged," Sen. Patty Murray (news, bio, voting record), D-Wash., said.

The Bush administration also announced Friday that free trade talks with the United Arab Emirates were being postponed.

The talks, which were supposed to begin Monday, were postponed because both sides need more time to prepare, according to an announcement from the office of U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman (news, bio, voting record). USTR spokeswoman Neena Moorjani refused to say whether the postponement was related to the controversy over the port operations.

Legislation on the issue has piled up in both the House and the Senate in the weeks since the flap over DP World erupted and divided Bush from the Republican-led Congress.

Before the United Arab Emirates-based company's announcement, the House and Senate appeared all but certain to block DP World's U.S. plan despite Bush's veto threats — a message that GOP congressional leaders delivered personally to the White House.

Facing a disapproving public in an election year, a House committee overwhelmingly voted against the plan Wednesday. And House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., warned the president in a private meeting Thursday that the Senate inevitably would follow suit.

Within hours, Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record), R-Va., one of the few members of Congress to back the administration's position on the issue, went to the Senate floor to read a statement from the company.

"DP World will transfer fully the U.S. operations ... to a United States entity," H. Edward Bilkey, the company's top executive, said in the statement. It was unclear which American business might get the port operations.

The White House expressed satisfaction with the company's decision.

"It does provide a way forward and resolve the matter," said Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary "We have a strong relationship with the UAE and a good partnership in the global war on terrorism, and I think their decision reflects the importance of our broader relationship."

The company's decision gives the president an out. He now doesn't have to back down from his staunch support of the company or further divide his party on a terrorism-related issue with a veto.

It was unclear how the company would manage its planned divestiture, and Bilkey's statement said its announcement was "based on an understanding that DP World will not suffer economic loss."

"This should make the issue go away," Frist said.

Even critics of the deal expressed cautious optimism that DP World's move would quell the controversy surrounding that company's plan to take over some U.S. terminal leases held by the London-based company it was purchasing.

"The devil is in the details," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said, echoing sentiments expressed by other lawmakers.

DP World on Thursday finalized its $6.8 billion purchase of Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co., the British company that through a U.S. subsidiary runs important port operations in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia. It also plays a lesser role in dockside activities at 16 other American ports.

The plan was disclosed last month, setting off a political firestorm in the United States even though the company's U.S. operations were only a small part of the global transaction.

Republicans were furious that they learned of it from news reports instead of from the Bush administration. They cited concerns over a company run by a foreign government overseeing operations at U.S. ports already deemed vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

Democrats also pledged to halt the takeover and clamored for a vote in the Senate. They sought political advantage from the issue by trying to narrow a polling gap with the GOP on issues of national security.

Bush's Approval Rating Falls to New Low

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - More and more people, particularly Republicans, disapprove of

President Bush's performance, question his character and no longer consider him a strong leader against terrorism, according to an AP-Ipsos poll documenting one of the bleakest points of his presidency.

Nearly four out of five Americans, including 70 percent of Republicans, believe civil war will break out in

Iraq — the bloody hot spot upon which Bush has staked his presidency. Nearly 70 percent of people say the U.S. is on the wrong track, a 6-point jump since February.

"Obviously, it's the winter of our discontent," said Rep. Tom Cole (news, bio, voting record), R-Okla.

Republican Party leaders said the survey explains why GOP lawmakers are rushing to distance themselves from Bush on a range of issues — port security, immigration, spending, warrantless eavesdropping and trade, for example.

The positioning is most intense among Republicans facing election in November and those considering 2008 presidential campaigns.

"You're in the position of this cycle now that is difficult anyway. In second term off-year elections, there gets to be a familiarity factor," said Sen. Sam Brownback (news, bio, voting record), R-Kan., a potential presidential candidate.

"People have seen and heard (Bush's) ideas long enough and that enters into their thinking. People are kind of, `Well, I wonder what other people can do,'" he said.

The poll suggests that most Americans wonder whether Bush is up to the job. The survey, conducted Monday through Wednesday of 1,000 people, found that just 37 percent approve of his overall performance. That is the lowest of his presidency.

Bush's job approval among Republicans plummeted from 82 percent in February to 74 percent, a dangerous sign in a midterm election year when parties rely on enthusiasm from their most loyal voters. The biggest losses were among white males.

On issues, Bush's approval rating declined from 39 percent to 36 percent for his handling of domestic affairs and from 47 percent to 43 percent on foreign policy and terrorism. His approval ratings for dealing with the economy and Iraq held steady, but still hovered around 40 percent.

Personally, far fewer Americans consider Bush likable, honest, strong and dependable than they did just after his re-election campaign.

By comparison, Presidents Clinton and Reagan had public approval in the mid 60s at this stage of their second terms in office, while Eisenhower was close to 60 percent, according to Gallup polls. Nixon, who was increasingly tangled up in the Watergate scandal, was in the high 20s in early 1974.

The AP-Ipsos poll, which has a margin of error of 3 percentage points, gives Republicans reason to worry that they may inherit Bush's political woes. Two-thirds of the public disapproves of how the GOP-led Congress is handling its job and a surprising 53 percent of Republicans give Congress poor marks.

By a 47-36 margin, people favor Democrats over Republicans when they are asked who should control Congress.

While the gap worries Republicans, it does not automatically translate into GOP defeats in November, when voters will face a choice between local candidates rather than considering Congress as a whole.

In addition, strategists in both parties agree that a divided and undisciplined Democratic Party has failed to seize full advantage of Republican troubles.

"While I don't dispute the fact that we have challenges in the current environment politically, I also believe 2006 as a choice election offers Republicans an opportunity if we make sure the election is framed in a way that will keep our majorities in the House and the Senate," said Ken Mehlman, chairman of the

Republican National Committee.

Stung by criticism, senior officials at the White House and the RNC are reminding GOP members of Congress that Bush's approval ratings may be low, but theirs is lower and have declined at the same pace as Bush's. The message to GOP lawmakers is that criticizing the president weakens him — and them — politically.

"When issue like the internal Republican debate over the ports dominates the news it puts us another day away from all of us figuring out what policies we need to win," said Terry Nelson, a Republican consultant and political director for Bush's re-election campaign in 2004.

Bowing to ferocious opposition in Congress, a Dubai-owned company on Thursday abandoned its quest to take over operations at several U.S. ports. Bush had pledged to veto any attempt to block the transaction, pitting him against Republicans in Congress and most voters.

All this has Republican voters like Walter Wright of Fairfax Station, Va., worried for their party.

Trade gap widens in January to record $68.5 bln

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. trade deficit swelled to a record $68.5 billion in January, as the world's largest economy's ravenous appetite for foreign goods hit new heights and overpowered record exports, a government report showed on Thursday.

The monthly trade gap widened 5.3 percent from a revised estimate of $65.1 billion in December and surprised Wall Street analysts who had forecast less of a surge.

It prompted renewed calls for government action -- ranging from tougher enforcement of U.S. trade laws to a surcharge on imports of manufactured goods -- to narrow the gap.

The January trade gap followed last year's record annual trade deficit of $723.6 billion.

Another full-year record of more than $800 billion would be set in 2006 if the trade gap continued to run at the pace set in the first month of the year.

"The trade deficit, if you can still use the term deficit to describe the GDP of a small country, just keeps getting wider. This is the Energizer bunny on steroids as it keeps growing and growing and growing," said Joel Naroff, president and chief economist of Naroff Economic Advisors.

The January gap was "little short of a disaster" that could trim U.S. economic growth in the first quarter if it remains as large in coming months, said Paul Ashworth, senior international economist at Capital Economics.

Economists estimated economic growth could be trimmed up to 1 percentage point if the trade gap does not narrow.

Major financial markets shrugged off the trade data, instead focusing on monetary policy changes in Japan and looking ahead to Friday's U.S. employment report.

Sen. Byron Dorgan (news, bio, voting record), a North Dakota Democrat, linked the enormous shortfall to the Bush administration's controversial decision to allow a state-owned Dubai-based company to take over some terminal operations at U.S. ports.

"The only way for the United States to keep financing $2 billion a day in trade deficits is to sell off U.S. assets and now that apparently includes our security assets," he said.

Dubai Ports World acquired the rights to manage the ports as part of its acquisition of British company P&O. But the company on Thursday pledged to transfer the operation of six U.S. port terminals to a U.S. entity in a move the White House hoped would quell the controversy.

IMPORTS SURGE

U.S. imports rose 3.5 percent in January to a new high of $182.9 billion, as American companies and consumers took in record volumes of foreign goods in categories ranging from food, animal feed and beverages to autos and auto parts.

High prices for imported oil, which increased more than 4 percent in January to an average of $51.93 per barrel, helped push the trade gap to a new high. The United States ran an $8.4 billion deficit with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, growing 11.6 percent from December.

Many analysts, however, focused on the trade gap for non-petroleum goods, which posted a record $49.6 billion.

"You can't blame it all on energy because the trade deficit excluding petroleum rose faster than the overall deficit. The main culprit once again continues to be that imports are growing faster than exports," said Michael Sheldon, chief market strategist at Spencer Clarke in New York.

The monthly trade gap with China widened 9.9 percent to $17.9 billion in January as U.S exports to the booming East Asian country slipped while imports grew.

The persistent deficit with China, the largest U.S. gap with any single country, has fueled charges in Congress that China is an unfair trade partner that manipulates its currency to gain a competitive advantage.

Manufacturers and politicians have persistently demanded that Beijing revalue its yuan currency .

In a sign of improved economic growth overseas, U.S. exports increased in January to a record $114.4 billion, up 2.5 percent from the previous month. The export rise was led by record shipments of industrial supplies and materials, capital goods and auto and auto parts.

Although exports have risen steadily in recent years, they have not been able to match the growth in imports, keeping the trade deficit on an ever-widening path.

"Since imports start from a much larger base, we need more sharply positive export growth rates to stabilize or reduce the deficit," said Frank Vargo, vice president for international economic affairs at the National Association of Manufacturers.

Bombs, guns, knives, kites...

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Flying a kite in Pakistan is a dangerous pastime.

Already it's banned for all but 15 days of the year but a provincial minister warned kite-flyers this week that any who cause injury or death with string made from metal or coated with glass could be tried under anti-terrorism laws.

The Punjabi chief minister's unprecedented threat came just ahead of the start of an annual kite-flying festival in the provincial capital, Lahore, Sunday.

Kite-flying in Pakistan and neighboring India often involves aerial duels in which participants try to bring down each other's kites using string coated in a sticky paste of ground-up glass or metal.

Every year, Pakistani media report dozens of deaths and injuries caused by kite flying, mainly of children and motorcyclists whose throats are sometimes cut by metal or glass-coated string.

"It is a matter of concern that a healthy sport is being turned into a game of death," the official APP news agency quoted Punjab Chief Minister Pervez Elahi as saying Tuesday.

Elahi said a crackdown had been launched against the sale of sharp kite string and threatened a permanent ban on kite-flying if deaths continued.

"Action under the Anti-Terrorism Act would be taken in case of deaths due to ... dangerous kite-flying string," he was quoted as saying.

Pakistan's Supreme Court banned kite-flying nationwide last year in response to an outcry over injuries and deaths. The ban was lifted for a 15-day period to allow the holding of this month's traditional kite-flying festival of Basant.

For once, blame the student

By Patrick Welsh, USA Today

Failure in the classroom is often tied to lack of funding, poor teachers or other ills. Here's a thought: Maybe it's the failed work ethic of todays kids. That's what I'm seeing in my school. Until reformers see this reality, little will change.

Last month, as I averaged the second-quarter grades for my senior English classes at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., the same familiar pattern leapt out at me.

Kids who had emigrated from foreign countries - such as Shewit Giovanni from Ethiopia, Farah Ali from Guyana and Edgar Awumey from Ghana - often aced every test, while many of their U.S.-born classmates from upper-class homes with highly educated parents had a string of C's and D's.

As one would expect, the middle-class American kids usually had higher SAT verbal scores than did their immigrant classmates, many of whom had only been speaking English for a few years.

What many of the American kids I taught did not have was the motivation, self-discipline or work ethic of the foreign-born kids.

Politicians and education bureaucrats can talk all they want about reform, but until the work ethic of U.S. students changes, until they are willing to put in the time and effort to master their subjects, little will change.

A study released in December by University of Pennsylvania researchers Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman suggests that the reason so many U.S. students are "falling short of their intellectual potential" is not "inadequate teachers, boring textbooks and large class sizes" and the rest of the usual litany cited by the so-called reformers - but "their failure to exercise self-discipline."

The sad fact is that in the USA, hard work on the part of students is no longer seen as a key factor in academic success. The groundbreaking work of Harold Stevenson and a multinational team at the University of Michigan comparing attitudes of Asian and American students sounded the alarm more than a decade ago.

Asian vs. U.S. students

When asked to identify the most important factors in their performance in math, the percentage of Japanese and Taiwanese students who answered "studying hard" was twice that of American students.

American students named native intelligence, and some said the home environment. But a clear majority of U.S. students put the responsibility on their teachers. A good teacher, they said, was the determining factor in how well they did in math.

"Kids have convinced parents that it is the teacher or the system that is the problem, not their own lack of effort," says Dave Roscher, a chemistry teacher at T.C. Williams in this Washington suburb. "In my day, parents didn't listen when kids complained about teachers. We are supposed to miraculously make kids learn even though they are not working."

As my colleague Ed Cannon puts it: "Today, the teacher is supposed to be responsible for motivating the kid. If they don't learn it is supposed to be our problem, not theirs."

And, of course, busy parents guilt-ridden over the little time they spend with their kids are big subscribers to this theory.

Maybe every generation of kids has wanted to take it easy, but until the past few decades students were not allowed to get away with it. "Nowadays, it's the kids who have the power. When they don't do the work and get lower grades, they scream and yell. Parents side with the kids who pressure teachers to lower standards," says Joel Kaplan, another chemistry teacher at T.C. Williams.

Every year, I have had parents come in to argue about the grades I have given in my AP English classes. To me, my grades are far too generous; to middle-class parents, they are often an affront to their sense of entitlement. If their kids do a modicum of work, many parents expect them to get at least a B. When I have given C's or D's to bright middle-class kids who have done poor or mediocre work, some parents have accused me of destroying their children's futures.

It is not only parents, however, who are siding with students in their attempts to get out of hard work.

Blame schools, too

"Schools play into it," says psychiatrist Lawrence Brain, who counsels affluent teenagers throughout the Washington metropolitan area. "I've been amazed to see how easy it is for kids in public schools to manipulate guidance counselors to get them out of classes they don't like. They have been sent a message that they don't have to struggle to achieve if things are not perfect."

Neither the high-stakes state exams, such as Virginia's Standards of Learning, nor the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act have succeeded in changing that message; both have turned into minimum-competency requirements aimed at the lowest in our school.

Colleges keep complaining that students are coming to them unprepared. Instead of raising admissions standards, however, they keep accepting mediocre students lest cuts have to be made in faculty and administration.

As a teacher, I don't object to the heightened standards required of educators in the No Child Left Behind law. Who among us would say we couldn't do a little better? Nonetheless, teachers have no control over student motivation and ambition, which have to come from the home - and from within each student.

Perhaps the best lesson I can pass along to my upper- and middle-class students is to merely point them in the direction of their foreign-born classmates, who can remind us all that education in America is still more a privilege than a right.

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Bush Touts Women's Role in Democracy

WASHINGTON, Associated Press -President Bush said Tuesday that democracies only reach their potential when women are allowed to fully participate in society, singling out Iran, North Korea and Myanmar as nations that are suppressing women's basic rights.

"America will help women stand up for their freedom, no matter where they live," Bush said at a White House celebration of Women's History Month and International Women's Day.

Bush, joined at the event by women leaders from Iraq and Afghanistan, pointed to several spots around the globe where women are assuming higher profiles.

Liberia recently elected its first woman president — the first woman to lead an African nation — and women head the governments of Germany, Chile and the Philippines, for instance. Bush noted that nearly half of the members of Rwanda's parliament are women and that women hold increasing numbers of parliamentary seats in places such as Morocco, Jordan and Tunisia.

Housing Slowdown Ripples Through Economy

DALLAS, Associated Press - The five-year housing boom is indeed over, judging from growing statistical evidence and the performance of some of the nation's leading builders, and the slowdown is already rippling through the economy.

In the last week, the Commerce Department reported that January sales of new single-family homes fell 5 percent — the fourth decline in seven months — and the backlog of unsold new homes hit a record. And the National Association of Realtors said used home sales slipped 2.8 percent in January, the fourth straight drop and 5 percent below January 2005.

Builders also reported a few hiccups. Upscale Toll Brothers Inc. said signed contracts in the November-January period fell 21 percent from a year ago, and KB Home reported more buyers backing out of contracts.

Still, the prospect of a housing slowdown appears less frightening than it did a few months ago, according to those who track the industry. There seems to be little concern that a much-touted housing bubble will lead to a collapse in sales and prices.

New

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said last month housing would enter a moderate slowdown but not a crash.

William Mack, a housing analyst for Standard & Poor's, predicted "a soft landing. The overall market is just taking a step back."

Explanations for the recent cooling-off vary. Many people bought homes during the past five years and are staying put. Some analysts blame a decline in consumer confidence. And interest rates have been rising, especially for adjustable mortgages that allowed people to buy more expensive homes than they could have afforded with a 30-year loan.

"We started to see the strain in July and August, and by the fourth quarter the market definitely had slowed," said Layne Marceau, president of the Northern California region for Shea Homes, one of the nation's largest private builders.

Rising prices and interest rates pushed more buyers out of the market. When prices finally did cool, sellers couldn't command a high enough price on their old house to buy the new one, said Marceau, who believes the slowdown is temporary.

Builders don't like to cut prices — it angers customers who paid more — but last week, Centex Corp. advertised $25,000 off on select homes in the Dallas area after making a successful similar offer in California. Around the country, builders are throwing in incentives ranging from financing help to free upgrades like swimming pools and granite countertops. Some equal 10 percent of the home's list price.

The median price of an existing single-family home has declined since peaking at $219,700 in July to $210,500 in January, according to the National Association of Realtors. Few analysts expect a sharp drop in national averages, although they say there could be further declines in some areas that have been among the hottest markets in recent years.

David Seiders, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders, said California, Las Vegas, Florida and the Washington, D.C., area "have the largest potential for a price slowdown."

The rising prices in those markets were fed by speculators who bought homes intending to "flip" or sell them for a quick profit, Seiders said. "The biggest fear I have is investor-owned units coming back on the market in large numbers," he said.

Analysts said markets in Florida and the Carolinas seemed to be holding up well. Hovnanian Enterprises Inc. reported last week that home contracts jumped 61 percent in the Southeast but fell nearly 11 percent in the Southwest and 37 percent in the West during the November-January period. The builder's profit was flat with a year earlier.

The slowdown that is showing up in national statistics hasn't reached all parts of the country.

"I've never seen a market as good as this," Mike Mishler said as he took a break from making finishing touches on a $1.6 million lakeside home near Dallas. "Maybe it will slow down in a couple years, but right now we have lots of California folks coming in, and empty-nest people looking for new homes."

Mishler, president of the local builders association, says Texas markets are holding up because they are affordable — the median price in Dallas is $145,000 compared to the national average of $213,000. But even in Dallas, the inventory of unsold homes rose to a record in the fourth quarter.

By price, the middle and upper ends of the new-home market did best in 2005, with solid increases in everything above $200,000, reflecting strongest markets were in high-priced areas along both coasts. That pattern mostly continued in January, although there was a dip in the $400,000 to $750,000 segment compared to January 2005.

Housing has played a major role in the economic recovery since 2001, so even slower growth in home sales and prices could have major repercussions.

Asha Bangalore, an economist for The Northern Trust Co. in Chicago, estimates housing created 43 percent of all new jobs from late 2001 until mid-2005. That included the obvious, such as jobs in construction and mortgage services, but also retail and service jobs that were created because consumers tapped their rising home equity to buy more things.

"The housing slowdown that we are seeing is very modest, not alarming, but I think the ripple effects are going to be enormous because of the employment factor," she said.

For now, home builders are busy finishing the houses that customers ordered last year. In a sense, their 2006 results are already on the books, and they expect another good year.

"This will either be our most profitable or our second-most profitable year in the company's history," Joel Rassman, chief financial officer of Horsham, Penn.-based Toll Brothers, told investors this week. Its profits rose about 50 percent in 2004 and nearly doubled last year.

Investors, however, have been bidding down the stocks of home builders since July, prompting executives to complain that their companies are undervalued despite record earnings. The nine largest publicly traded builders have seen their shares fall 14 to 44 percent since their peaks, with Toll Brothers and Hovnanian the biggest losers.

Alex Barron, an analyst in San Francisco for JMP Securities, said builder stocks have been trading at relatively low multiples of their earnings since the late 1990s because investors always believed the strong housing market was too good to last.

"Investors kept saying, 'Next year housing will go down,'" Barron said. "I guess they're finally right."

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On the Net:

National Association of Realtors: http://www.realtor.org

Researchers Identify Extinction Hotspots

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - From frigid northern Canada and Alaska to tropical Asian islands, lands where wildlife seems safe today may pose some of the greatest extinction dangers in the future.

In particular peril are animals with a relatively small geographic range and those that have a large body mass and reproduce slowly.

Researchers identified regions where they felt there was a high "latent extinction risk" for nonmarine mammals, often areas that have had little human impact so far.

Latent risk is low in parts of the world already heavily populated by people, where species likely to succumb to the pressure have already done so.

The findings are reported in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Latent risk can be thought of as a measure of the potential for a species to decline rapidly toward extinction given exposure to levels of human impact" that have been felt elsewhere, said the team led by Marcel Cardillo of Imperial College in London.

The area with the most potentially endangered species, 284, is Sumatra and peninsular Malaysia, the report said.

Next, with 224 species, is Borneo, followed by New Guinea, 205 species, western Java, 131 species and Sulawesi, 130 species.

Other areas of high threat are Maluku, Indonesia, 99 species; Northern Canada and Alaska, 96 species; Melanesian Islands, 96 species; Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, 86 species; East Indian highlands, 70 species;

Also Eastern Canadian forests, 57 species; Tasmania and Bass Strait, 49 species; Siberian tundra, 35 species; Patagonian Coast of South America, 26 species; Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 20 species;

Plus the Lesser Antilles, 16 species; Indian Ocean islands, 10 species; Greenland, 9 species; Bahamas, 8 species and Southern Polynesia, 3 species.

___

On the Net:

How many billions have we wasted on this motherfucking stupid vanity war of Bush's so far? Looks like protecting Halliburton's profits is far more important than protecting the people or the planet. Oh, wait, that's not news anymore, just a fact...

Budgets Imperil Environmental Satellites

Associated press - Budget cuts and poor management may be jeopardizing the future of our eyes in orbit — America's fleet of environmental satellites, vital tools for forecasting hurricanes, protecting water supplies and predicting global warming.

"The system of environmental satellites is at risk of collapse," said Richard A. Anthes, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. "Every year that goes by without the system being addressed is a problem."

Anthes chairs a National Academy of Sciences committee that advises the federal government on developing and operating environmental satellites. In a report issued last year, the committee warned that "the vitality of Earth science and application programs has been placed at substantial risk by a rapidly shrinking budget."

Since that report came out, NASA has chosen to cancel or mothball at least three planned satellites in an effort to save money. Cost overruns have delayed a new generation of weather satellites until at least 2010 and probably 2012, leading a Government Accountability Office official to label the enterprise "a program in crisis."

Scientists warn that the consequences of neglecting Earth-observing satellites could have more than academic consequences. It is possible that when a big volcano starts rumbling in the Pacific Northwest, a swarm of tornadoes sweeps through Oklahoma or a massive hurricane bears down on New Orleans, the people in harm's way — and those responsible for their safety — will have a lot less information than they'd like about the impending threat.

"We may be losing something here, something that is good for all of us," said Francisco P.J. Valero, an atmospheric scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.

NASA officials say that tight budgets tie their hands, forcing them to cut all but the most vital programs. The agency's proposed 2007 budget request contains $2.2 billion for satellites that observe the Earth and sun, compared to $6.2 billion for operating the space shuttle and International Space Station and $4 billion for developing future missions to the moon and Mars.

"We simply cannot afford all of the missions that our scientific constituencies would like us to sponsor," NASA administrator Michael Griffin told members of Congress when he testified before the House Science Committee Feb. 16.

Griffin is faced with the difficult task of balancing the space agency's science and aeronautics programs against the cost of operating the space station and shuttle, while simultaneously planning the future of human space flight.

"I truly wish that it could be otherwise, but there is only so much money," Griffin said in his congressional testimony. "We must set priorities."

The space agency has said that many science programs that have had their budgets slashed or eliminated will be revived if the budgetary situation improves.

Meanwhile, the list of delayed, downsized and canceled satellites is a long one:

_NASA's Earth Observing System was conceived in the 1980s as a 15-year program that would collect comprehensive data about the planet's oceans, atmosphere and land surface. It was originally intended to send three generations of spacecraft into orbit at five-year intervals, but budget shortfalls limited the project to only one round of launches.

_Landsat, a series of satellites that have provided detailed images of the ground surface for more than 30 years, is in danger of experiencing a gap in service. Landsat 7, launched in April 1999, is scheduled to be replaced by a next-generation satellite in 2011. But if the existing satellite fails before that date and NASA has not developed a contingency plan, scientists, land managers and others who depend on Landsat images could be out of luck.

_The launch of a satellite designed to measure rainfall over the entire Earth, the Global Precipitation Measurement mission, has been pushed back to 2012. But the satellite it is designed to replace, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, can't possibly last that long. That means there will be a period of several years when scientists have no access to the accurate global precipitation measurements that help them improve hurricane forecasts and predict the severity of droughts and flooding.

_In December, scientists working on the Hydros mission received a letter canceling their program. They were developing a satellite that would measure soil moisture and differentiate between frozen and unfrozen ground, an increasingly important distinction since melting of the Arctic permafrost has accelerated over the past several decades. The satellite also would have improved drought and flood forecasting.

_Last month Scripps' Valero was notified that the Deep Space Climate Observatory, a project he has led for more than seven years, would be canceled. The spacecraft has already been built, but NASA is reluctant to spend the $60 million to $100 million it would cost to launch and operate it.

"It would be a tremendous return in science on the dollar," Valero said.

The observatory would have provided valuable information about how clouds, snow cover, airborne dust and other phenomena affect the balance between the amount of sunlight Earth absorbs and the amount of heat energy it emits. And because it would have hovered between Earth and the sun at a distance of roughly a million miles, it would have been able to observe the entire sunlit surface of the planet constantly. Such observations could greatly enhance scientists' understanding how much the planet has warmed in recent years and help them predict how much warmer it will get in the future.

_A new generation of weather satellites being developed jointly by NASA, the Department of Defense and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has gone so far over budget that federal law requires a review of whether it is worth continuing. Even if the program does survive, the first spacecraft in the National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System can't be launched until at least 2010, and probably 2012.

The current generation of polar-orbiting weather satellites is critical to weather forecasting because it offers a complete picture of the planet every six-hours. That detailed coverage is especially important for developing four- to seven-day forecasts, because it gives meteorologists the ability to track weather systems as they evolve in both time and space.

They plan to make $800 million off the sale of our forest lands to big business. They just agreed to overpay Halliburton by $280 million because gosh golly, the Halliburton fatcats really are 'doing their best'. WTF?! You want money for schools, assholes? STOP MAKING THE VANITY WAR PROFITEERS RICHER!

Land Sale Plan Tilted in Northwest's Favor

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - More than a quarter of the $800 million the Bush administration plans to raise by selling national forest would benefit rural schools in Oregon and Washington, though just 6 percent of the sales would occur in those forest-rich states.

Only about 10 percent of the proceeds would go toward rural schools in the South and Midwest, the two regions where more than a third of the sales of 300,000-plus acres would occur, according to an analysis by the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Oregon alone would get $162 million, in exchange for 10,581 acres, under the administration's plan for reauthorizing a law set to expire Sept. 30.

Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who directs U.S. forest policy, said the law was devised to help those rural counties hurt by logging cutbacks on federal lands. Parcels proposed for sale are isolated, difficult or expensive to manage, or no longer meet Forest Service needs, he said.

"They are not evenly distributed" throughout the country, Rey said, although Congress could adjust the funding formula as it sees fit. The plan also calls for a phased reduction in funding to zero by 2011.

David Carr, public lands director for the nonprofit law center, called the regional disparity unfair and said the land sales would set a dangerous precedent. The center's analysis is based on how states fared under the Forest Service land sales program this year.

"Selling off America's natural heritage is not the way to fund government services," Carr said. "We need to be adding to the public-land base in the South, not holding a bake sale on bits and pieces of our limited national forests for short-term budget needs."

Even prominent Republican leaders question the plan.

"Why sell most of the lands in those states that don't get much money from these payments and very little land in the states that get the most money?" asked Sen. Pete Domenici (news, bio, voting record), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

The New Mexico Republican said he wanted to "keep an open mind" about the idea. His state would get $2.3 million, just one-fifth of 1 percent of the overall proceeds, in exchange for selling 8,000 acres, or 2 percent of the sales.

Sen. Jim Talent (news, bio, voting record), R-Mo., also questioned the proposal, saying there was no guarantee that money generated by the sales would stay within Missouri.

"We need to see more of the benefit of this proposal than we are now seeing," Talent told Bush administration officials at a Senate hearing last week.

Under the Bush plan, 21,566 acres in Missouri's Mark Twain National Forest would be sold, with proceeds going to a general fund. The sell-off would be one of the biggest in the country, while Missouri's share of the school-funding is among the lowest at $2.7 million.

Sales would be more even in California, where $69 million would be received for selling about 80,000 acres.

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden (news, bio, voting record), one of the chief architects of the rural schools law, called questions raised by Talent and Domenici legitimate and said they were a key reason he opposes the plan.

"I don't want to pit your beautiful forest against school stability in Missouri," Wyden, a Democrat, told Talent at a committee meeting last week.

Wyden and other Oregon lawmakers say the state receives so much money under the rural schools law because it was hurt the most by federal policies that restricted logging in the 1990s.

Other states "aren't half-owned by the federal government, and they didn't see a 95 percent harvest reduction on federal lands," as happened in Oregon and Washington, said Rep. Peter DeFazio (news, bio, voting record), D-Ore.

Money from the six-year-old "county payments" law has helped offset sharp declines in timber sales in Oregon and other Western states in the wake of federal forest policy that restricts logging to protect endangered species such as the spotted owl.

Andy Stahl, of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, said the land-sale plan puts the inherent inequality of the county payments law in stark relief. "Special places in other states are proposed to be sold so Oregon can get its pork," he said.

Carr, of the Southern environmental group, said he would oppose the plan even if formulas were adjusted to give more money to Southern states.

"We don't think they should be selling land in Oregon or Virginia or Alabama," he said. "The need is to fill in the gaps, not get rid of what they've acquired."

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On the Net:

Forest Service: http://www.fs.fed.us

AP: Many Defendants' Cases Kept Secret

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Despite the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of public trials, nearly all records are being kept secret for more than 5,000 defendants who completed their journey through the federal courts over the last three years.

Instances of such secrecy more than doubled from 2003 to 2005.

An Associated Press investigation found, and court observers agree, that most of these defendants are cooperating government witnesses, but the secrecy surrounding their records prevents the public from knowing details of their plea bargains with the government.

Most of these defendants are involved in drug gangs, though lately a very small number come from terrorism cases. Some of these cooperating witnesses are among the most unsavory characters in America's courts — multiple murderers and drug dealers — but the public cannot learn whether their testimony against confederates won them drastically reduced prison sentences or even freedom.

In the nation's capital, which has had a serious problem with drug gangs murdering government witnesses, the secrecy has reached another level — the use of secret dockets. For hundreds of such defendants over the past few years in this city, should someone acquire the actual case number for them and enter it in the U.S. District Court's computerized record system, the computer will falsely reply, "no such case" — rather than acknowledging that it is a sealed case.

At the request of the AP, the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts conducted its first tally of secrecy in federal criminal cases. The nationwide data it provided the AP showed 5,116 defendants whose cases were completed in 2003, 2004 and 2005, but the bulk of their records remain secret.

"The constitutional presumption is for openness in the courts, but we have to ask whether we are really honoring that," said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor and now law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "What are the reasons for so many cases remaining under seal?"

"What makes the American criminal justice system different from so many others in the world is our willingness to cast some sunshine on the process, but if you can't see it, you can't really criticize it," Levenson said.

The courts' administrative office and the Justice Department declined to comment on the numbers.

The data show a sharp increase in secret case files over time as the Bush administration's well-documented reliance on secrecy in the executive branch has crept into the federal courts through the war on drugs, anti-terrorism efforts and other criminal matters.

"This follows the pattern of this administration," said John Wesley Hall, an Arkansas defense attorney and second vice president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "I am astonished and shocked that this many criminal proceedings in federal court escape public scrutiny or become buried."

The percentage of defendants who have reached verdicts and been sentenced but still have most of their records sealed has more than doubled in the last three years, the court office's tally shows.

Of nearly 85,000 defendants whose cases were closed in 2003, the records of 952 or 1.1 percent remain mostly sealed. Of more than 82,000 defendants with cases closed in 2004, records for 1,774 or 2.2 percent remain mostly secret. And of more than 87,000 defendants closed out in 2005, court records for 2,390 or 2.7 percent remain mostly closed to the public.

The court office also found a sharp increase in defendants whose case records were partly sealed for a limited time. Among newly charged defendants, the numbers in this category grew from 9,999 or 10.9 percent of all defendants charged in 2003 to 11,508 or 12.6 percent of those charged in 2005.

But the AP investigation found, and court observers agree, that the overwhelming number of these cases sealed for a limited time involve a use of secrecy that draws no criticism: the sealing of an indictment only until the defendant is arrested.

AP's investigation found a large concentration of both kinds of secrecy at the U.S. District Court here: limited sealing of records and extensive sealing that continues even after the courts are done with a defendant.

"When the sentences are sealed, that's a con on the community," said Lexi Christ, a Washington defense lawyer for a man acquitted in a crack cocaine case.

In that case, all the defendants' names became public when the indictment was unsealed. But all other records for six defendants who pleaded guilty remained sealed more than two years after the public trial in which two of the drug dealers were convicted.

One of the cooperating witnesses admitted to seven murders and testified in open court against co-defendants who had committed fewer, Christ said. But like the others who pleaded guilty and cooperated, that witness' plea deal and sentence were sealed.

"Cooperating witnesses are pleading guilty to six or seven murders, and the jury doesn't know they'll be sitting on the Metro (subway) next to them a year later. It's a really, really ugly system," Christ said.

Prosecutors argue that plea agreements must be sealed to protect witnesses and their families from violent retaliation. But Christ said that makes no sense after the trial when the defendants know who testified.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press found the U.S. District Court here has 469 criminal cases, from 2001-2005, that are listed by this court's electronic docket as "no such case." An AP survey over a shorter period found similar numbers here and got oral acknowledgment from the clerk's office that the missing electronic docket numbers corresponded to sealed cases. However, these figures include an unknown number of sealed indictments that will be made public if arrests are made.

"That's horrifying," said Loyola's Levenson. "When I was a prosecutor from 1981 to 1989, I never heard of secret dockets."

No matter how few turn out to be almost totally sealed after the defendant's case was completed, "it's still significant," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee and a pioneer in campaigning against court secrecy.

"The Supreme Court has said that criminal proceedings are public," Dalglish added. "In this country, we don't prosecute and lock up convicts and have no public track record of how we got there. That violates the defendants' rights not to mention the public's right to know what it's court system is doing."

Although Justice Department does not keep comprehensive nationwide statistics on secrecy in federal prosecutions, it does track how often prosecutors ask permission from headquarters to hold a secret court proceeding, like an arraignment, hearing, trial or sentencing.

The department estimates it got 100 such requests from October 2000 though October 2004, Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra said. Another 100 arrived during the 12 months that ended October 2005, he said.

Sierra said the large recent increase occurred because the department sent a memo to all federal prosecutors in 2004 reminding them they need Washington's approval before requesting or agreeing to secret courtroom proceedings. Filing of secret papers in cases doesn't require such permission.

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Antarctic ice sheet in 'significant decline': study

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Antarctica's mammoth ice sheet, which holds 90 percent of the Earth's ice, is showing "significant decline" as world temperatures heat up, according to a new study released.

As Earth's fifth largest continent, Antarctica is twice the size of Australia and contains 70 percent of Earth's fresh water resources. British research suggests the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet alone would raise global sea levels by over 20 feet (six meters).

And now a team of US researchers at the University of Boulder in Colorado say they have discovered that the Antarctic ice sheet is losing up to 36 cubic miles (152 cubic kilometers) of ice annually.

The estimated ice mass in Antarctica is the same as 0.4 millimeters of global sea rise annually, with a margin of error of 0.2 millimeters, according to the study. There are about 25 millimeters to one inch.

The study, however, appears to contradict the 2001 assessment by the UN-mandated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which forecast that the Antarctic ice shelf would actually gain mass in the 21st Century due to higher precipitation in a warming climate.

Using specialized data from two NASA satellites orbiting Earth in tandem, the Boulder researchers determined the Antarctic ice sheet has lost significant mass in recent years.

"This is the first study to indicate the total mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet is in significant decline," said Isabella Velicogna, of the university's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

The bulk of the loss is occurring in the West Antarctic ice sheet, according to Velicogna.

"The changes we are seeing are probably a good indicator of the changing climatic conditions there," she said.

The continent's ice sheet has an average thickness of about 6,500 feet (1,981 meters).

Patriot Act 'compromise' trades liberty for safety

USA Today - Robert Byrd, the longest-serving member of the Senate, counts only a few regrets in his 47-year career: filibustering the 1964 Civil Rights Act, voting to expand the Vietnam War and backing airline deregulation.

This week he added a new one: having joined the stampede in 2001 that passed the dubiously named USA Patriot Act weeks after the 9/11 attacks.

Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat, is an authority on the Constitution and an ardent defender of Congress' prerogatives. On Wednesday, he was one of a handful of senators with the courage to oppose a "compromise" to extend the Patriot Act. The compromise is, in fact, little more than a political fig leaf to cover extension of provisions that still give the government far too much power to snoop on and harass innocent citizens.

Byrd's Republican colleague, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, admitted as much during the debate. Specter, chairman of Senate Judiciary Committee, halfheartedly urged colleagues to pass the bill, which he said is so flawed that he plans new legislation to fix it.

No matter. In an election year in which no politician wants to be perceived as soft on terrorism, the Patriot Act is on a fast track to renewal, warts and all.

More than 90% of the original Patriot Act was not controversial. Much of it was reasonable correction of shortcomings in existing law. But some provisions sought by federal law enforcement were so open to potential abuse that, even in the frightening days after 9/11, Congress refused to make them permanent. Those are set to expire March 10.

Backers claim that extended negotiations with the White House over the expiring portions have produced significant improvements in terms of civil liberties:

• Recipients of subpoenas in vaguely defined terrorist investigations would now be given the right to challenge a gag order barring them from telling anyone about the subpoena.

• When the government demands people's personal records from a third party, the holder of the records would no longer have to name any lawyer consulted about the matter.

• "Clarifying" language narrows the scope of potential demands on libraries for information on their customers.

Big deal. By any standard of respect for the Bill of Rights, those provisions never should have been in the law in the first place. What is it about the Fourth Amendment ("The right of the people to be secure ... against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated") that Congress doesn't get?

In a typical bit of legislative hocus-pocus, though the new version would belatedly provide for judicial review of certain gag orders, that right could be exercised only after a year has gone by - and the recipient has to prove that the government acted in bad faith. Thus this "right" is nearly meaningless.

Further, the government would still be allowed to engage in fishing expeditions, spying on citizens without having to show that its actions have any connection with alleged terrorism. To believe that law enforcement would not stretch the rules and use its power for other purposes defies logic and history.

Byrd, who has been in Congress since the Eisenhower administration, is fond of quoting Ben Franklin: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Govt. Eyes Error That Cost U.S. Billions

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - How it happened or who's responsible is a mystery eight years after the fact. But what may have been a simple error — or perhaps something more ominous — has given a multimillion-dollar windfall to a group of oil and gas companies and could cost the government billions of dollars more in the years to come.

The Interior Department disclosed Wednesday that a provision was mysteriously deleted from hundreds of federal drilling leases in the late 1990s that would have required producers to pay royalties, once prices reached a certain level, on oil or gas taken from deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

In 1995, Congress exempted deep-water oil from royalty payments to spur development. But a price threshold was included in leases issued in 1996 and 1997 and again in leases sold in each year since 2000 that reinstates the royalties if market prices reach a certain level.

For some reason the language "was inadvertently dropped" from an addendum attached to more than 1,100 leases the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service issued for 1998 and 1999, Walter Cruickshank, the agency's deputy director, told a House Government Reform subcommittee Wednesday.

He said officials have not been able to determine who made the change, although he said it had to have been a human act, not a computer glitch.

"It is clear that there is no record telling people to take the language out," he said, and it was widely known that the department wanted the price threshold restriction in any oil and gas leases as a matter of policy.

In the late 1990s, when oil prices were well below the threshold, the issue may not have attracted attention.

Rep. Darrell Issa (news, bio, voting record), R-Calif., the subcommittee chairman, called the whole matter "suspicious."

"This is a $7 billion word processing error," Issa told reporters. He said some of the leases issued during those two years could remain in effect for as long as 85 years, so the government will be unable to collect royalty payments from oil and gas taken from those leases for decades to come.

While providing no specific number, Cruickshank said the government already has lost "several hundred million" dollars in royalty payments from the 1998-99 leases because they lacked the threshold language. If prices remain high, lost royalties "will be in the billions of dollars," he acknowledged.

The price threshold where royalties must be paid changes yearly. Most recently it was set at about $34 a barrel for oil and $4.34 per thousand cubic feet for natural gas, according to Interior officials. The price of oil Wednesday on the New York Mercantile Exchange was nearly $62 a barrel and the government estimates it will remain in the $50-a-barrel range for years to come. Natural gas prices have been in the $9-per-thousand-cubic-feet range.

Issa said he planned to seek more documents from the Minerals Management Service, and said the issue may need to be investigated by the Justice Department to determine whether there was any deliberate wrongdoing.

When Congress enacted the royalty relief program for deep-water exploration and development, it was embraced by the Clinton administration as a way to spur more energy production in areas where the technology and prospects of success were still somewhat uncertain.

Cruickshank said he had no explanation for why the threshold requirement was taken out of the lease language when an addendum was changed for the 1998-99 leases to reflect other regulatory changes.

"Everyone knew the (price) threshold applied" but people didn't focus on it because of low market prices at the time, said Cruickshank, who joined the agency in 1988 but was not involved in writing leases.

The mystery surrounding the 1998-99 leases is part of a broader question over whether any royalty relief should be given to the industry, given high oil and gas prices and huge industry profits.

The Interior Department estimates that as much as $66 billion worth of oil and natural gas that will be taken from the Gulf of Mexico between now and 2011 falls under the royalty relief law enacted by Congress in 1995. Much of that oil and gas will be subject to royalties under the price threshold provision, which is included in leases other than those issued in 1998-99.

Several oil and gas companies have challenged the legality of the threshold requirement in leases issued before 2001. Kerr McGee, a major natural gas producer, has given notice to the Interior Department that it will soon file a lawsuit arguing that the threshold provisions are illegal.

The Interior Department will "vigorously defend" the ability to impose royalties under a price threshold provision, said Cruickshank. "There's a lot of money at stake."

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U.S. Plan to Eliminate Survey of Needy Families Draws Fire

WASHINGTON, D.C., Mar 1 (OneWorld) - Researchers and legislators are rallying to block a Bush administration plan to scupper a U.S. survey widely used to improve federal and state programs for millions of low-income and retired Americans.

President George W. Bush's proposed budget for fiscal 2007, which begins this October, includes a Commerce Department plan to eliminate the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP).

The proposal marks at least the third White House attempt in as many years to do away with federal data collection on politically prickly economic issues ranging from mass layoffs to employment discrimination.

Social scientists, public policy makers, and legislators helped thwart the previous administration plans, which had targeted the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Opponents of the plan to axe SIPP said they hoped for a similar success.

By mid-day Wednesday, some 415 liberal and conservative economists and social scientists had signed a letter to be sent to Congress Thursday urging that the survey be fully funded because it ''is the only large-scale survey explicitly designed to analyze the impact of a wide variety of government programs on the well being of American families.''

A group of Republicans and Democrats in the House of Representatives reportedly are leading a drive to get lawmakers to sign a similar letter defending the survey to be sent to the White House.

Founded in 1984 after six years of development, the Census Bureau survey follows American families for a number of years and monitors their use of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, child care, and other health, social service, and education programs.

''We need to know what the effects of these programs are on American families,'' said Heather Boushey, an economist at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, which is spearheading the counter-offensive.

''SIPP is designed to do just that,'' Boushey told OneWorld, adding that the survey had proved invaluable in tracking the effects of changes in government programs. So much so that the 1996 welfare reform law specifically mentioned the survey as the best means to evaluate the law's effectiveness, she said.

Supporters of elimination say the program costs too much at $40 million per year. Rather, they would kill it in September and eventually replace it with a scaled-down version that would run to $9.2 million in development costs during the coming fiscal year. Actual data collection would begin in 2009.

Defenders of the survey countered in their letter that the cost was justified as SIPP ''provides a constant stream of in-depth data that enables government, academic, and independent researchers to evaluate the effectiveness and improve the efficiency of several hundred billion dollars in spending on social programs.''

For example, Boushey said, the survey revealed that school lunch programs were missing many children whose parents were unemployed for a couple of months or longer, pointing the way to improvements in those programs.

The fight over SIPP evokes at least two similar campaigns of recent years.

In 2004 and 2005, the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Women's Policy Research led a successful campaign to reverse a Bush administration plan to drop questions on the hiring and firing of women from employment data collected by the BLS. Pressure from researchers, policy designers, and lawmakers proved essential to that success, the group said.

In 2003, similar advocacy prompted a budget shuffle and saved the monthly BLS Mass Layoff Statistics report.

The Labor Department, citing a shortage of funding, had said it would do away with the research, which detailed where workplaces with more than 50 employees closed and what kinds of workers were affected. Federal and state social service agencies used the data widely.

The cost of the monthly reports--about $6.6 million per year--had come from a $30 million discretionary budget used by the Labor Department's Employment and Training Administration to finance pilot projects designed to demonstrate ways to help displaced workers find new jobs.

Senate Considers Independent Ethics Office

WASHINGTON Associated Press - An independent ethics office is included in a lobbying reform package a Senate committee is taking up, putting on the table the sensitive issue of whether lawmakers are capable of policing themselves.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee votes Thursday on legislation, an outgrowth of recent lobbying and ethics scandals, that would require greater disclosure of lobbyist activities and take steps to end the sometimes too-cozy relations between lawmakers and those representing special interests.

There's little controversy over many aspects of the bill — based on a measure sponsored by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn. — such as banning gifts and travel provided by lobbyists.

But there will be a fight over a provision, to be introduced by the committee chairman, Sen. Susan Collins (news, bio, voting record), R-Maine and Lieberman, the top Democrat, that would establish an office of public integrity to back up the work of the House and Senate ethics committees.

The office, Collins said, "would help to promote public confidence in the enforcement process by increasing the transparency and independence of the process."

It "would provide an independent, nonpartisan and professional office to work with the congressional ethics committees in a strengthened oversight and enforcement process," clean government groups, including Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, wrote senators Wednesday in urging support of the office.

The committee's action on ethics reform would be the second this week, leading up to debate on the Senate floor as early as next week on a comprehensive bill to limit privately funded travel, make retiring lawmakers wait longer before taking jobs as lobbyists and require greater disclosure of lobbyist contacts with lawmakers.

On Tuesday the Senate Rules Committee approved a lobbying bill that also sets up a procedure to eliminate pet projects, or earmarks, that lawmakers insert into larger bills, often at the urging of special interests.

The idea of an independent ethics office is being pushed by lawmakers, led by Democrats, who say the current system isn't capable of handling ethics issues in a fair and timely fashion. The House ethics committee has been inactive for more than a year, crippled by partisan differences over investigations and staffing.

House and Senate Democrats have a bill that would create an office with auditing and investigative authority. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has proposed an ethics enforcement commission to receive complaints from the public on alleged ethics violations by lawmakers. Reps. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Marty Meehan, D-Mass., partners on campaign finance reform, have a similar proposal.

These proposals all would leave final decisions on whether ethics rules or lobbying laws have been violated to the ethics committees or the Justice Department.

But there's also resistance from lawmakers who say an outside group to monitor ethics in Congress is both unneeded and unwise. Sen. George Voinovich (news, bio, voting record), R-Ohio, who chairs the Senate ethics committee, plans to offer an amendment to remove the new office from the Collins proposal.

The House also is working on legislation in response to the fallout from the scandal over Jack Abramoff, the former lobbyist who pleaded guilty as part of a federal corruption investigation case involving the spending of millions of dollars to buy political influence.

House Republicans, however, are still divided over some key issues, such as whether to ban all privately funded travel. Abramoff hosted several prominent lawmakers on trips to Scotland and elsewhere marked more by rounds of golf than by fact-finding events.

Democrats on the House Rules Committee, meanwhile, on Wednesday introduced a package they said would help end unethical abuses in Congress by making the legislative process more open and assuring that the minority party was not shut out of decisions on the final contents of legislation.

"At the same time that we are piously talking about expanding democracy to the rest of the world, we better take care of it here," said Rep. Louise M. Slaughter of New York, top Democrat on the committee.

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The Keys to Happiness, and Why We Don't Use Them

LiveScience.com - "It requires some effort to achieve a happy outlook on life, and most people don't make it." —Author and researcher Gregg Easterbrook

Psychologists have recently handed the keys to happiness to the public, but many people cling to gloomy ways out of habit, experts say.

Polls show Americans are no happier today than they were 50 years ago despite significant increases in prosperity, decreases in crime, cleaner air, larger living quarters and a better overall quality of life.

So what gives?

Happiness is 50 percent genetic, says University of Minnesota researcher David Lykken. What you do with the other half of the challenge depends largely on determination, psychologists agree. As Abraham Lincoln once said, "Most people are as happy as they make up their minds to be."

What works, and what doesn't

Happiness does not come via prescription drugs, although 10 percent of women 18 and older and 4 percent of men take antidepressants, according to the

Department of Health and Human Services. Anti-depressants benefit those with mental illness but are no happiness guarantee, researchers say.

Nor will money or prosperity buy happiness for many of us. Money that lifts people out of poverty increases happiness, but after that, the better paychecks stop paying off sense-of-well-being dividends, research shows.

One route to more happiness is called "flow," an engrossing state that comes during creative or playful activity, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has found. Athletes, musicians, writers, gamers, and religious adherents know the feeling. It comes less from what you're doing than from how you do it.

Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California at Riverside has discovered that the road toward a more satisfying and meaningful life involves a recipe repeated in schools, churches and synagogues. Make lists of things for which you're grateful in your life, practice random acts of kindness, forgive your enemies, notice life's small pleasures, take care of your health, practice positive thinking, and invest time and energy into friendships and family.

The happiest people have strong friendships, says Ed Diener, a psychologist University of Illinois. Interestingly his research finds that most people are slightly to moderately happy, not unhappy.

On your own

Some Americans are reluctant to make these changes and remain unmotivated even though our freedom to pursue happiness is written into the preamble of the Declaration of Independence.

Don't count on the government, for now, Easterbrook says.

Our economy lacks the robustness to sustain policy changes that would bring about more happiness, like reorienting cities to minimize commute times.

The onus is on us.

"There are selfish reasons to behave in altruistic ways," says Gregg Easterbrook, author of "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse" (Random House, 2004).

"Research shows that people who are grateful, optimistic and forgiving have better experiences with their lives, more happiness, fewer strokes, and higher incomes," according to Easterbrook. "If it makes world a better place at same time, this is a real bonus."

Diener has collected specific details on this. People who positively evaluate their well-being on average have stronger immune systems, are better citizens at work, earn more income, have better marriages, are more sociable, and cope better with difficulties.

Unhappy by default

Lethargy holds many people back from doing the things that lead to happiness.

Easterbrook, also a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institute, goes back to Freud, who theorized that unhappiness is a default condition because it takes less effort to be unhappy than to be happy.

Tape: Bush, Chertoff Warned Before Katrina

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned

President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

Bush didn't ask a single question during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: "We are fully prepared."

The footage — along with seven days of transcripts of briefings obtained by The Associated Press — show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster.

Linked by secure video, Bush expressed a confidence on Aug. 28 that starkly contrasted with the dire warnings his disaster chief and numerous federal, state and local officials provided during the four days before the storm.

A top hurricane expert voiced "grave concerns" about the levees and then-Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown told the president and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that he feared there weren't enough disaster teams to help evacuees at the Superdome.

"I'm concerned about ... their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe," Brown told his bosses the afternoon before Katrina made landfall.

The White House and Homeland Security Department urged the public Wednesday not to read too much into the video footage.

"I hope people don't draw conclusions from the president getting a single briefing," presidential spokesman Trent Duffy said, citing a variety of orders and disaster declarations Bush signed before the storm made landfall. "He received multiple briefings from multiple officials, and he was completely engaged at all times."

Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said his department would not release the full set of videotaped briefings, saying most transcripts from the sessions were provided to congressional investigators months ago.

"There's nothing new or insightful on these tapes," Knocke said. "We actively participated in the lessons-learned review and we continue to participate in the Senate's review and are working with them on their recommendation."

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, a critic of the administration's Katrina response, had a different take after watching the footage Wednesday afternoon from an AP reporter's camera.

"I have kind a sinking feeling in my gut right now," Nagin said. "I was listening to what people were saying — they didn't know, so therefore it was an issue of a learning curve. You know, from this tape it looks like everybody was fully aware."

Some of the footage and transcripts from briefings Aug. 25-31 conflicts with the defenses that federal, state and local officials have made in trying to deflect blame and minimize the political fallout from the failed Katrina response:

• Homeland Security officials have said the "fog of war" blinded them early on to the magnitude of the disaster. But the video and transcripts show federal and local officials discussed threats clearly, reviewed long-made plans and understood Katrina would wreak devastation of historic proportions. "I'm sure it will be the top 10 or 15 when all is said and done,"

National Hurricane Center's Max Mayfield warned the day Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast.

"I don't buy the `fog of war' defense," Brown told the AP in an interview Wednesday. "It was a fog of bureaucracy."

• Bush declared four days after the storm, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees" that gushed deadly flood waters into New Orleans. He later clarified, saying officials believed, wrongly, after the storm passed that the levees had survived. But the transcripts and video show there was plenty of talk about that possibility even before the storm — and Bush was worried too.

White House deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Brown discussed fears of a levee breach the day the storm hit.

"I talked to the president twice today, once in Crawford and then again on Air Force One," Brown said. "He's obviously watching the television a lot, and he had some questions about the Dome, he's asking questions about reports of breaches."

• Louisiana officials angrily blamed the federal government for not being prepared but the transcripts shows they were still praising FEMA as the storm roared toward the Gulf Coast and even two days afterward. "I think a lot of the planning FEMA has done with us the past year has really paid off," Col. Jeff Smith, Louisiana's emergency preparedness deputy director, said during the Aug. 28 briefing.

It wasn't long before Smith and other state officials sounded overwhelmed.

"We appreciate everything that you all are doing for us, and all I would ask is that you realize that what's going on and the sense of urgency needs to be ratcheted up," Smith said Aug. 30.

Mississippi begged for more attention in that same briefing.

"We know that there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana that need to be rescued, but we would just ask you, we desperately need to get our share of assets because we'll have people dying — not because of water coming up, but because we can't get them medical treatment in our affected counties," said a Mississippi state official whose name was not mentioned on the tape.

Video footage of the Aug. 28 briefing, the final one before Katrina struck, showed an intense Brown voicing concerns from the government's disaster operation center and imploring colleagues to do whatever was necessary to help victims.

"We're going to need everything that we can possibly muster, not only in this state and in the region, but the nation, to respond to this event," Brown warned. He called the storm "a bad one, a big one" and implored federal agencies to cut through red tape to help people, bending rules if necessary.

"Go ahead and do it," Brown said. "I'll figure out some way to justify it. ... Just let them yell at me."

Bush appeared from a narrow, windowless room at his vacation ranch in Texas, with his elbows on a table. Hagin was sitting alongside him. Neither asked questions in the Aug. 28 briefing.

"I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm," the president said.

A relaxed Chertoff, sporting a polo shirt, weighed in from Washington at Homeland Security's operations center. He would later fly to Atlanta, outside of Katrina's reach, for a bird flu event.

One snippet captures a missed opportunity on Aug. 28 for the government to have dispatched active-duty military troops to the region to augment the National Guard.

Chertoff: "Are there any DOD assets that might be available? Have we reached out to them?"

Brown: "We have DOD assets over here at EOC (emergency operations center). They are fully engaged. And we are having those discussions with them now."

Chertoff: "Good job."

In fact, active duty troops weren't dispatched until days after the storm. And many states' National Guards had yet to be deployed to the region despite offers of assistance, and it took days before the

Pentagon deployed active-duty personnel to help overwhelmed Guardsmen.

The National Hurricane Center's Mayfield told the final briefing before Katrina struck that storm models predicted minimal flooding inside New Orleans during the hurricane but he expressed concerns that counterclockwise winds and storm surges afterward could cause the levees at Lake Pontchartrain to be overrun.

"I don't think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not but that is obviously a very, very grave concern," Mayfield told the briefing.

Other officials expressed concerns about the large number of New Orleans residents who had not evacuated.

"They're not taking patients out of hospitals, taking prisoners out of prisons and they're leaving hotels open in downtown New Orleans. So I'm very concerned about that," Brown said.

Despite the concerns, it ultimately took days for search and rescue teams to reach some hospitals and nursing homes.

Brown also told colleagues one of his top concerns was whether evacuees who went to the New Orleans Superdome — which became a symbol of the failed Katrina response — would be safe and have adequate medical care.

"The Superdome is about 12 feet below sea level.... I don't know whether the roof is designed to stand, withstand a Category Five hurricane," he said.

Brown also wanted to know whether there were enough federal medical teams in place to treat evacuees and the dead in the Superdome.

"Not to be (missing) kind of gross here," Brown interjected, "but I'm concerned" about the medical and mortuary resources "and their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe."

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On the Net:

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

U.S. Troops in Iraq: 72% Say End War in 2006

Zogby Poll, 02/28/06 Zogby.com

* Le Moyne College/Zogby Poll shows just one in five troops want to heed Bush call to stay “as long as they are needed”

* While 58% say mission is clear, 42% say U.S. role is hazy

* Plurality believes Iraqi insurgents are mostly homegrown

* Almost 90% think war is retaliation for Saddam’s role in 9/11, most don’t blame Iraqi public for insurgent attacks

* Majority of troops oppose use of harsh prisoner interrogation

* Plurality of troops pleased with their armor and equipment

An overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and nearly one in four say the troops should leave immediately, a new Le Moyne College/Zogby International survey shows.

The poll, conducted in conjunction with Le Moyne College’s Center for Peace and Global Studies, showed that 29% of the respondents, serving in various branches of the armed forces, said the U.S. should leave Iraq “immediately,” while another 22% said they should leave in the next six months. Another 21% said troops should be out between six and 12 months, while 23% said they should stay “as long as they are needed.”

Different branches had quite different sentiments on the question, the poll shows. While 89% of reserves and 82% of those in the National Guard said the U.S. should leave Iraq within a year, 58% of Marines think so. Seven in ten of those in the regular Army thought the U.S. should leave Iraq in the next year. Moreover, about three-quarters of those in National Guard and Reserve units favor withdrawal within six months, just 15% of Marines felt that way. About half of those in the regular Army favored withdrawal from Iraq in the next six months.

The troops have drawn different conclusions about fellow citizens back home. Asked why they think some Americans favor rapid U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, 37% of troops serving there said those Americans are unpatriotic, while 20% believe people back home don’t believe a continued occupation will work. Another 16% said they believe those favoring a quick withdrawal do so because they oppose the use of the military in a pre-emptive war, while 15% said they do not believe those Americans understand the need for the U.S. troops in Iraq.

The wide-ranging poll also shows that 58% of those serving in country say the U.S. mission in Iraq is clear in their minds, while 42% said it is either somewhat or very unclear to them, that they have no understanding of it at all, or are unsure. While 85% said the U.S. mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks,” 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.”

“Ninety-three percent said that removing weapons of mass destruction is not a reason for U.S. troops being there,” said Pollster John Zogby, President and CEO of Zogby International. “Instead, that initial rationale went by the wayside and, in the minds of 68% of the troops, the real mission became to remove Saddam Hussein.” Just 24% said that “establishing a democracy that can be a model for the Arab World" was the main or a major reason for the war. Only small percentages see the mission there as securing oil supplies (11%) or to provide long-term bases for US troops in the region (6%).

The continuing insurgent attacks have not turned U.S. troops against the Iraqi population, the survey shows. More than 80% said they did not hold a negative view of Iraqis because of those attacks. About two in five see the insurgency as being comprised of discontented Sunnis with very few non-Iraqi helpers. “There appears to be confusion on this,” Zogby said. But, he noted, less than a third think that if non-Iraqi terrorists could be prevented from crossing the border into Iraq, the insurgency would end. A majority of troops (53%) said the U.S. should double both the number of troops and bombing missions in order to control the insurgency.

The survey shows that most U.S. military personnel in-country have a clear sense of right and wrong when it comes to using banned weapons against the enemy, and in interrogation of prisoners. Four in five said they oppose the use of such internationally banned weapons as napalm and white phosphorous. And, even as more photos of prisoner abuse in Iraq surface around the world, 55% said it is not appropriate or standard military conduct to use harsh and threatening methods against insurgent prisoners in order to gain information of military value.

Three quarters of the troops had served multiple tours and had a longer exposure to the conflict: 26% were on their first tour of duty, 45% were on their second tour, and 29% were in Iraq for a third time or more.

A majority of the troops serving in Iraq said they were satisfied with the war provisions from Washington. Just 30% of troops said they think the Department of Defense has failed to provide adequate troop protections, such as body armor, munitions, and armor plating for vehicles like HumVees. Only 35% said basic civil infrastructure in Iraq, including roads, electricity, water service, and health care, has not improved over the past year. Three of every four were male respondents, with 63% under the age of 30.

The survey included 944 military respondents interviewed at several undisclosed locations throughout Iraq. The names of the specific locations and specific personnel who conducted the survey are being withheld for security purposes. Surveys were conducted face-to-face using random sampling techniques. The margin of error for the survey, conducted Jan. 18 through Feb. 14, 2006, is +/- 3.3 percentage points.

Study: Few Americans Know 1st Amendment

CHICAGO, Associated Press - Americans apparently know more about "The Simpsons" than they do about the First Amendment.

Only one in four Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances.) But more than half can name at least two members of the cartoon family, according to a survey.

The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just one in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms.

Joe Madeira, director of exhibitions at the museum, said he was surprised by the results.

"Part of the survey really shows there are misconceptions, and part of our mission is to clear up these misconceptions," said Madeira, whose museum will be dedicated to helping visitors understand the First Amendment when it opens in April. "It means we have our job cut out for us."

The survey found more people could name the three "American Idol" judges than identify three First Amendment rights. They were also more likely to remember popular advertising slogans.

It also showed that people misidentified First Amendment rights. About one in five people thought the right to own a pet was protected, and 38 percent said they believed the right against self-incrimination contained in the Fifth Amendment was a First Amendment right, the survey found.

The telephone survey of 1,000 adults was conducted Jan. 20-22 by the research firm Synovate and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

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On the Net:

http://www.freedommuseum.us