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Going To Hell In A Very Stylish Handbasket.

we've had this many folks visit so far:

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

archives:

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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.

links:
Tom Paine
The Nation
Think Progress
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
Buck Fush

Global warming could devastate economy

LONDON, Associated Press - Unchecked global warming will devastate the world economy on the scale of the world wars and the Great Depression, a British government report said Monday, as the country launched a bid to convince doubters that environmentalism and economic growth can coincide.

Prime Minister Tony Blair said unabated climate change would eventually cost the world the equivalent of between 5 percent and 20 percent of global gross domestic product each year. He called for "bold and decisive action" to cut carbon emissions and stem the worst of the temperature rise.

"It is not in doubt that, if the science is right, the consequences for our planet are literally disastrous," he said. "This disaster is not set to happen in some science fiction future many years ahead, but in our lifetime."

The report emphasized that global warming can only be fought with the cooperation of major countries such as the United States and China, and represents a huge contrast to the Bush administration's wait-and-see global warming policies.

Sir Nicholas Stern, the senior government economist who wrote the report, said that acting now to cut greenhouse gas emissions would cost about 1 percent of global GDP each year. He recommended a "low-carbon global economy" through measures including taxation, regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and carbon trading.

"That is manageable," he said. "We can grow and be green."

President Bush kept America — by far the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming — out of the Kyoto international treaty to reduce greenhouse gases, saying the pact would harm the U.S. economy. The international agreement was reached in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 and expires in 2012.

Blair, Bush's top ally in the Iraq war, has indicated that Bush's policies on climate change are unacceptable.

The prime minister made that clear when he signed an agreement this year with California Gov.

Arnold Schwarzenegger to develop new technologies to combat the problem. The measure imposed the first emissions cap in the United States on utilities, refineries and manufacturing plants in a bid to curb the gases that scientists blame for warming the Earth.

Treasury Chief Gordon Brown, who is expected to replace Blair as prime minister next year, announced Monday that former Vice President Al Gore, who has emerged as a powerful environmental spokesman, would advise the British government on climate change.

Blair and the report also said that no matter what Britain, the United States and Japan do, the battle against global warming cannot succeed without deciding when and how to control the greenhouse gas emissions by such fast-industrializing giants as China and India.

Stern's 700-page report said evidence showed "that ignoring climate change will eventually damage economic growth."

"Our actions over the coming decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century," he said.

The report said at current trends average global temperatures will rise by 3.6 to 5.4 degrees within the next 50 years or so, and the earth will experience several degrees more of warming if emissions continue to grow.

It said such warming could have effects such as melting glaciers, rising sea levels, declining crop yields, drinking water shortages, higher death tolls from malnutrition and heat stress, and widespread outbreaks of malaria and dengue fever. Developing countries often would be the hardest hit.

The report acknowledged that its predictions regarding GDP relied on sparse data about high temperatures and developing countries, and placed monetary values on human health and the environment, "which is conceptually, ethically and empirically very difficult."

Brown said Britain would lead the international effort against climate change, establishing "an economy that is both pro-growth and pro-green." He called for Europe to cut its carbon emissions by 30 percent by 2020 and 60 percent by 2050.

Under the 1997 Kyoto accord, 35 industrialized nations committed to reducing emissions by an average 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

But Britain is one of only a handful of industrialized nations whose greenhouse gas emissions have fallen in the last decade and a half, the

United Nations said Monday.

The U.N. said Germany's emissions dropped 17 percent between 1990 and 2004, Britain's by 14 percent and France's by almost 1 percent.

Overall, there was a 2.4 percent rise in emissions by 41 industrialized nations from 2000 to 2004, mostly because former Soviet-bloc countries, whose emissions declined in their economic downturn of the 1990s, increased emissions during the recent four-year period by 4.1 percent.

I'll get that sweet piece of property in the hills of my hometown yet... :)

Home price drop is largest in 35 years

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The median price of a new home plunged in September by the largest amount in more than 35 years, even as the pace of sales rebounded for a second month.

The Commerce Department reported that the median price for a new home sold in September was $217,100, a drop of 9.7 percent from September 2005. It was the lowest median price for a new home since September 2004 and the sharpest year-over-year decline since December 1970. The weakness in new home prices was even sharper than a 2.5 percent fall in the price of existing homes last month, which had been the biggest drop on record.

The price decline for new homes came while the sales pace picked up, rising by 5.3 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate 1.075 million homes. It marked the second consecutive increase in sales following three months of declines.

The declines in prices served to underscore the severity of the correction in the once-booming housing market, which had seen sales of both new and existing homes soar to record levels for five consecutive years, propelled by the lowest mortgage rates in more than four decades.

This year, with mortgage rates rising through midsummer, sales have cooled considerably, with housing expected to trim more than a percentage point from overall growth in the last half of the year.

The debate is whether the slowdown will be enough to push the country into an outright recession. The

Federal Reserve, recognizing the weakness in housing, halted a two-year string of interest rate increases in August and left rates unchanged for a third straight meeting on Wednesday.

The Fed, however, gave no indication that it planned to start cutting rates because of the weakness in housing, saying it was still concerned that inflation remained too high.

The 5.3 percent rise in new home sales in September followed a 3.8 percent rise in August and was the biggest one-month gain since an 8 percent increase in March. However, sales had fallen for three straight months from May through July.

Humans living far beyond planet's means: WWF

BEIJING (Reuters) - Humans are stripping nature at an unprecedented rate and will need two planets' worth of natural resources every year by 2050 on current trends, the WWF conservation group said on Tuesday.

Populations of many species, from fish to mammals, had fallen by about a third from 1970 to 2003 largely because of human threats such as pollution, clearing of forests and overfishing, the group also said in a two-yearly report.

"For more than 20 years we have exceeded the earth's ability to support a consumptive lifestyle that is unsustainable and we cannot afford to continue down this path," WWF Director-General James Leape said, launching the WWF's 2006 Living Planet Report.

"If everyone around the world lived as those in America, we would need five planets to support us," Leape, an American, said in Beijing.

People in the United Arab Emirates were placing most stress per capita on the planet ahead of those in the United States, Finland and Canada, the report said.

Australia was also living well beyond its means.

The average Australian used 6.6 "global" hectares to support their developed lifestyle, ranking behind the United States and Canada, but ahead of the United Kingdom, Russia, China and Japan.

"If the rest of the world led the kind of lifestyles we do here in Australia, we would require three-and-a-half planets to provide the resources we use and to absorb the waste," said Greg Bourne, WWF-Australia chief executive officer.

Everyone would have to change lifestyles -- cutting use of fossil fuels and improving management of everything from farming to fisheries.

"As countries work to improve the well-being of their people, they risk bypassing the goal of sustainability," said Leape, speaking in an energy-efficient building at Beijing's prestigous Tsinghua University.

"It is inevitable that this disconnect will eventually limit the abilities of poor countries to develop and rich countries to maintain their prosperity," he added.

The report said humans' "ecological footprint" -- the demand people place on the natural world -- was 25 percent greater than the planet's annual ability to provide everything from food to energy and recycle all human waste in 2003.

In the previous report, the 2001 overshoot was 21 percent.

"On current projections humanity, will be using two planets' worth of natural resources by 2050 -- if those resources have not run out by then," the latest report said.

"People are turning resources into waste faster than nature can turn waste back into resources."

RISING POPULATION

"Humanity's footprint has more than tripled between 1961 and 2003," it said. Consumption has outpaced a surge in the world's population, to 6.5 billion from 3 billion in 1960. U.N. projections show a surge to 9 billion people around 2050.

It said that the footprint from use of fossil fuels, whose heat-trapping emissions are widely blamed for pushing up world temperatures, was the fastest-growing cause of strain.

Leape said China, home to a fifth of the world's population and whose economy is booming, was making the right move in pledging to reduce its energy consumption by 20 percent over the next five years.

"Much will depend on the decisions made by China, India and other rapidly developing countries," he added.

The WWF report also said that an index tracking 1,300 vetebrate species -- birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals -- showed that populations had fallen for most by about 30 percent because of factors including a loss of habitats to farms.

Among species most under pressure included the swordfish and the South African Cape vulture. Those bucking the trend included rising populations of the Javan rhinoceros and the northern hairy-nosed wombat in Australia.

This image of the Antarctic ozone hole, taken September 24, 2006, uses blue and purple colors to show where there is the least ozone, and greens, yellows, and reds to highlight where there is more ozone. Image released by NASA on October 19, 2006. (NASA/Handout/Reuters)

Global warming study predicts wild ride

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The world — especially the Western United States, the Mediterranean region and Brazil — will likely suffer more extended droughts, heavy rainfalls and longer heat waves over the next century because of global warming, a new study forecasts.

But the prediction of a future of nasty extreme weather also includes fewer freezes and a longer growing season.

In a preview of a major international multiyear report on climate change that comes out next year, a study out of the National Center for Atmospheric Research details what nine of the world's top computer models predict for the lurching of climate at its most extreme.

"It's going to be a wild ride, especially for specific regions," said study lead author Claudia Tebaldi, a scientist at the federally funded academic research center.

Tebaldi pointed to the Western U.S., Mediterranean nations and Brazil as "hot spots" that will get extremes at their worst, according to the computer models.

And some places, such as the Pacific Northwest, are predicted to get a strange double whammy of longer dry spells punctuated by heavier rainfall.

As the world warms, there will be more rain likely in the tropical Pacific Ocean, and that will change the air flow for certain areas, much like El Nino weather oscillations now do, said study co-author Gerald Meehl, a top computer modeler at the research center. Those changes will affect the U.S. West, Australia and Brazil, even though it's on South America's eastern coast.

For the Mediterranean, the issue has more to do with rainfall in the tropical Atlantic Ocean changing air currents, he said.

"Extreme events are the kinds of things that have the biggest impacts, not only on humans, but on mammals and ecosystems," Meehl said. The study, to be published in the December issue of the peer-reviewed journal Climatic Change, "gives us stronger and more compelling evidence that these changes in extremes are more likely."

The researchers took 10 international agreed-upon indices that measure climate extremes — five that deal with temperature and five with precipitation — and ran computer models for the world through the year 2099. What Tebaldi called the scariest results had to do with heat waves and warm nights. Everything about heat waves — their intensity, length and occurrence — worsens.

"The changes are very significant there," Tebaldi said. "It's enough to say we're in for a bad future."

The measurement of warm nights saw the biggest forecast changes. Every part of the globe is predicted to experience a tremendous increase in the number of nights during which the low temperature is extremely high. Those warm night temperatures that should happen only once every decade will likely occur at least every other year by the time we reach 2099, if not more frequently, Tebaldi said.

Warm nights are crucial because Chicago's 1995 heat wave demonstrated that after three straight hot nights, people start dying, Meehl said. However, heat wave deaths are decreasing in the United States because society has learned to adapt better, using air conditioning, noted University of Alabama at Huntsville atmospheric sciences professor John Christy. He is one of a minority of climate scientists who downplay the seriousness of global warming.

Similarly, the days when the temperature drops below freezing will plummet worldwide. That's not necessarily a good thing, because fewer frost days will likely bring dramatic change in wildlife, especially bug infestation, Tebaldi said.

"It's a disruption of the equilibrium that's been going for many centuries," Tebaldi said. But he noted that a lengthier growing season in general is good.

"This notion of the greening of the planet ... generally is a positive benefit," Christy said.

Christy, who did not participate in the study but acknowledges that global warming is real and man-made, said an increase in nighttime low temperatures makes much more sense than the rain-and-drought forecasts of the paper.

One of the larger changes in precipitation predicted is in the intensity of rain and snowfall. That means, Tebaldi said, "when it rains, it rains more" even if it doesn't rain as often.

Tebaldi's assessment jibes with the National Climatic Data Center's tracking of extreme events in the United States, said David Easterling, chief of the center's scientific services. Easterling's group has created a massive climate extreme index that measures the weather in America. Last year, the United States experienced the second most extreme year in 95 years; the worst year was in 1998.

___

On the Net

"Going to the Extremes" study:

http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/publications/klu_multimodel_extremes_revised.pdf

U.S. government's climate extreme index:

This is what happens when you get so fucking greedy that you don't use common sense...

Estuaries of China's greatest rivers declared "dead zones"

BEIJING (AFP) - The estuaries of China's two greatest rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow, have been declared dead zones by the United Nations due to high amounts of pollutants, state press has said.

"Experts warn that these areas are fast becoming major threats to fish stocks and to people who depend upon fisheries for food and livelihoods," the China Daily reported, citing a recent study by the UN Environmental Program.

Dead zones are areas in oceans and lakes choked of oxygen by algae blooms that feed off high concentrations of pollutants such as raw sewage and fertilizer, the report said.

The algae blooms sap the water of its oxygen, which in turn endangers marine life, it added.

According to a separate report by China's State Environmental Protection Administration, the nation's coastal regions suffered from 82 "red tides", a form of algae bloom, in 2005, the paper said.

Large-scale red tides have become an annual occurrence in waters off eastern China's Zhejiang province, where the Yangtze River flows into the sea, and farther north in the Bohai Sea near the Yellow River estuary, the paper added.

Last year, land-based activities in China led to the dumping of 500,000 tons of ammonia-nitrogen and 30,000 tons of phosphate into the sea, it said. The two chemicals are key ingredients in fertilizer.

In June this year, a red tide that spread out in a 1,000-square-kilometre (620-square-mile) area in the Yangtze River estuary killed more than 12 million fish.

The spread of the tide led to safety warnings in Shanghai about eating seafood from the area, the paper said.

More than 20 years of robust economic growth in China have come at the expense of the environment, with local governments and industries shunning ecological protection in the pursuit of short-term profits.

The central government often cites this as a major problem and says it is taking action, but the nation's environmental woes continue to worsen.

Meanwhile, the leading People's Daily reported Friday that it would take at least 200 years to clean up the Bohai Sea, even if no more sewage was poured into it.

The body, located some 150 kilometers (90 miles) east of the capital Beijing, was named the "worst polluted" sea area in China after an investigation by the State Oceanic Administration, the paper said.

US turns space into its colony

Asia Times Online - President George W Bush signed an executive order creating a new National Space Policy on Wednesday. The most crucial feature of this policy is that it "rejects future arms-control agreements that might limit US flexibility in space and asserts a right to deny access to space to anyone 'hostile to US interests'." It adds: "The United States will preserve its rights, capabilities and freedom of action in space ... and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to US national

As much as the United States is hesitant to admit it, the arms race is very much on in space. However, the United States is not the only country pursuing its own military dominance of space. The Bush administration soon will be known for issuing a slew of "strategies." The upside of that pattern is that it enables those in charge of any strategy to think comprehensively and systematically, and to remain focused on all its aspects.

However, the downside of having a strategy is that it unduly raises hopes for the solution of a problem that any strategy is aimed at resolving. What dashes the hopes of those affected is the realization that having a strategy holds no promise that the issue of its focus will be resolved in the short term. That is what is happening to US strategies to fight global terrorism, and for homeland security, infrastructure protection and cyber terrorism.

The National Space Policy also suffers from the fact that it is issued in the post-September 11, 2001, era when militarism is such a dominant characteristic of almost all American approaches to national security. So, the policy sends unmistakable signals to Russia, China and India - the first a veteran space power; the latter fledgling actors in that realm - that the United States intends to monopolize its long-standing space presence by militarizing it.

The Bush administration continues to deny that it has any intention of militarizing space. However, there is ample evidence to conclude otherwise.

What concerns international observers and America's potential competitors in space is that the US refuses to negotiate a space arms-control accord. Its rationale is that no such agreements are needed, because there is no space arms race. However, the US Air Force has published a Counterspace Operations Doctrine, which "calls for a more active military posture in space", and says that protecting US satellites and spacecraft may require "deception, disruption, denial, degradation and destruction".

America's space competitors also vividly recall that the current Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld chaired a commission which recommended to Congress that it develop space weapons to protect military and civilian satellites.

The Bush administration also made its space-related objectives quite clear at the outset. They comprise strengthening "the nation's space leadership", ensuring "that space capabilities are available in time to further US national security, homeland security and foreign policy objectives" and ensuring "unhindered US operations in and through space to defend our interests there".

For China, the chief problem related to space competition stems from America's overwhelming dominance in satellite technology. Consequently, the US military can study, on a detailed basis, the movement of forces, movement of vehicles and missile platforms, and other highly sensitive military activities of its potential competitors and adversaries pretty much at will and develop appropriate countermeasures.

Considering the fact that satellite technology expertise cannot be developed quickly, and in view of the fact that it is a highly controlled Western technology, a country like China does not expect to close the gap with the US in the foreseeable future. However, despite the wide technology gap in the realm of satellite development, China is not without countermeasures of its own.

Early this month, the Pentagon confirmed that Beijing had "tested its anti-satellite laser and jammed a US satellite". Even though China was not able to damage the capabilities of the American satellite to collect intelligence, it underscored the issue of vulnerability of satellites in future warfare. In a conflict, say, with Iran, Chinese anti-satellite technology could be quite effective in blinding American spy satellites.

In all likelihood, Congress may revisit its previous opposition to its own anti-satellite laser program, Starfire, whose funding was blocked by the House of Representatives. What also bothers America's competitors is that, during the Bill Clinton administration, the US was willing to abide by treaty obligations regarding freedom of action in space. The Bush administration is willing to do the same. However, it has declared that it "will oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit US access to or use of space".

America's overwhelming space-based military superiority is also driving its opposition to any negotiations banning space weapons. A number of its "key weapons systems are now dependent on information and communications from orbiting satellites ... The US military has developed and deployed far more space-based technology than any other nation, giving it great strategic advantages. But with the superior technology has come a perceived vulnerability to attacks on essential satellites."

Bush keeps revising war justification

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - President Bush keeps revising his explanation for why the U.S. is in Iraq, moving from narrow military objectives at first to history-of-civilization stakes now.

Initially, the rationale was specific: to stop Saddam Hussein from using what Bush claimed were the Iraqi leader's weapons of mass destruction or from selling them to al-Qaida or other terrorist groups.

But 3 1/2 years later, with no weapons found, still no end in sight and the war a liability for nearly all Republicans on the ballot Nov. 7, the justification has become far broader and now includes the expansive "struggle between good and evil."

Republicans seized on North Korea's reported nuclear test last week as further evidence that the need for strong U.S. leadership extends beyond Iraq.

Bush's changing rhetoric reflects increasing administration efforts to tie the war, increasingly unpopular at home, with the global fight against terrorism, still the president's strongest suit politically.

"We can't tolerate a new terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East, with large oil reserves that could be used to fund its radical ambitions, or used to inflict economic damage on the West," Bush said in a news conference last week in the Rose Garden.

When no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, Bush shifted his war justification to one of liberating Iraqis from a brutal ruler.

After Saddam's capture in December 2003, the rationale became helping to spread democracy through the Middle East. Then it was confronting terrorists in Iraq "so we do not have to face them here at home," and "making America safer," themes Bush pounds today.

"We're in the ideological struggle of the 21st century," he told a California audience this month. "It's a struggle between good and evil."

Vice President Dick Cheney takes it even further: "The hopes of the civilized world ride with us," Cheney tells audiences.

Except for the weapons of mass destruction argument, there is some validity in each of Bush's shifting rationales, said Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign policy scholar at the Brookings Institution who initially supported the war effort.

"And I don't have any big problems with any of them, analytically. The problem is they can't change the realities on the ground in Iraq, which is that we're in the process of beginning to lose," O'Hanlon said. "It is taking us a long time to realize that, but the war is not headed the way it should be."

Andrew Card, Bush's first chief of staff, said Bush's evolving rhetoric, including his insistence that Iraq is a crucial part of the fight against terrorism, is part of an attempt to put the war in better perspective for Americans.

The administration recently has been "doing a much better job" in explaining the stakes, Card said in an interview. "We never said it was going to be easy. The president always told us it would be long and tough."

"I'm trying to do everything I can to remind people that the war on terror has the war in Iraq as a subset. It's critical we succeed in Iraq as part of the war on terror," said Card, who left the White House in March.

Bush at first sought to explain increasing insurgent and sectarian violence as a lead-up to Iraqi elections. But elections came and went, and a democratically elected government took over, and the sectarian violence increased.

Bush has insisted U.S. soldiers will stand down as Iraqis stand up. He has likened the war to the 20th century struggles against fascism, Nazism and communism. He has called Iraq the "central front" in a global fight against radical jihadists.

Having jettisoned most of the earlier, upbeat claims of progress, Bush these days emphasizes consequences of setting even a limited withdrawal timetable: abandonment of the Iraqi people, destabilizing the Middle East and emboldening terrorists around the world.

The more ominous and determined his words, the more skeptical the American public appears, polls show, both on the war itself and over whether it is part of the larger fight against terrorism, as the administration insists.

Bush's approval rating, reflected by AP-Ipsos polls, has slid from the mid 60s at the outset of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 to the high 30s now. There were light jumps upward after the December 2003 capture of Saddam, Bush's re-election in November 2004 and each of three series of aggressive speeches over the past year. Those gains tended to vanish quickly.

With the war intruding on the fall elections, both parties have stepped up their rhetoric.

Republicans, who are also reeling from the congressional page scandal, are casting Democrats as seeking to "cut and run" and appease terrorists.

Democrats accuse Bush of failed leadership with his "stay the course" strategy. They cite a government intelligence assessment suggesting the Iraq war has helped recruit more terrorists, and a book by journalist Bob Woodward that portrays Bush as intransigent in his defense of the Iraq war and his advisers as bitterly divided.

Democrats say Iraq has become a distraction from the war against terrorism — not a central front. But they are divided among themselves on what strategy to pursue.

Republicans, too, increasingly are growing divided as U.S. casualties rise.

"I struggle with the fact that President Bush said, `As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.' But the fact is, this has not happened," said Rep. Christopher Shays (news, bio, voting record), R-Conn., a war supporter turned war skeptic.

The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record) of Virginia, said after a recent visit to Iraq that Iraq was "drifting sideways." He urged consideration of a "change of course" if the Iraq government fails to restore order over the next two or three months.

More than 2,750 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the war, most of them since Bush's May 2003 "mission accomplished" aircraft carrier speech. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died.

Recent events have been dispiriting.

The United States now has about 141,000 troops in Iraq, up from about 127,000 in July. Some military experts have suggested at least one additional U.S. division, or around 20,000 troops, is needed in western Iraq alone.

Dan Benjamin, a former Middle East specialist with the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, said the administration is overemphasizing the nature of the threat in an effort to bolster support.

"I think the administration has oversold the case that Iraq could become a jihadist state," said Benjamin, now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "If the U.S. were to leave Iraq tomorrow, the result would be a bloodbath in which Sunnis and Shiites fight it out. But the jihadists would not be able to seek power."

Not all of Bush's rhetorical flourishes have had the intended consequences.

When the history of Iraq is finally written, the recent surge in sectarian violence is "going to be a comma," Bush said in several recent appearances.

Critics immediately complained that the remark appeared unsympathetic and dismissive of U.S. and Iraqi casualties, an assertion the White House disputed.

For a while last summer, Bush depicted the war as one against "Islamic fascism," borrowing a phrase from conservative commentators. The strategy backfired, further fanning anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world.

The "fascism" phrase abruptly disappeared from Bush's speeches, reportedly after he was talked out of it by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes, a longtime Bush confidant now with the State Department.

If economics is what it will take to clean up the mess, then fine. Whatever motivates the stupid greedy monkeys.

Climate change inaction will cost trillions: study

LONDON (Reuters) - Failing to fight global warming now will cost trillions of dollars by the end of the century even without counting biodiversity loss or unpredictable events like the Gulf Stream shutting down, a study said on Friday.

But acting now will avoid some of the massive damage and cost relatively little, said the study commissioned by Friends of the Earth from the Global Development and Environment Institute of Tufts University in the United States.

"The climate system has enormous momentum, as does the economic system," said co-author Frank Ackerman. "We have to start turning off greenhouse gas emissions now in order to avoid catastrophe in decades to come."

The study said the cost of inaction by governments and individuals could hit 11 trillion pounds a year by 2100, or six to eight percent of global economic output then.

Most scientists now agree average temperatures will rise by between two and six degrees Celsius by the end of the century, driven by so-called greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels for power and transport.

Already at two degrees they predict a massive upsurge in species loss and extreme weather events like storms, droughts and floods, threatening millions of lives. Polar icecaps will melt, raising sea levels by several meters.

Beyond that, the world enters into the unknown with the possible shutdown of the life-giving Gulf Stream and possibly catastrophic runaway change due to so-called climate feedback.

By contrast, spending just 1.6 trillion pounds a year now to limit temperature rises to two degrees could avoid annual economic damage of around 6.4 trillion pounds, the Tufts report said.

CHALLENGE

The report came the day after oil major Shell said business should see the challenge of climate change as a chance to make billions of pounds due to the demand for new technologies and products to slash carbon emissions.

"For business, tackling climate change is both a necessity and a huge opportunity. We have to step up to the challenge," Shell UK chairman James Smith said.

The British government is in the closing stages of a ground-breaking global study of the economic costs of climate change which is expected to be published within the next two weeks stressing the massive costs of inaction.

During a debate in parliament on Thursday Environment Minister David Miliband said the problem was worse than previously thought and the sternest challenge faced by mankind.

"Preventing the transformation of the earth's atmosphere from greenhouse to unconstrained hothouse represents arguably the most imposing scientific and technical challenge that humanity has ever faced," he said.

"It is local, national and international. It will affect all of us as well as all our children," he added.

Birds and bees may be gay: museum exhibition

OSLO (Reuters) - The birds and the bees may be gay, according to the world's first museum exhibition about homosexuality among animals.

With documentation of gay or lesbian behavior among giraffes, penguins, parrots, beetles, whales and dozens of other creatures, the Oslo Natural History Museum concludes human homosexuality cannot be viewed as "unnatural."

"We may have opinions on a lot of things, but one thing is clear -- homosexuality is found throughout the animal kingdom, it is not against nature," an exhibit statement said.

Geir Soeli, the project leader of the exhibition entitled "Against Nature," told Reuters: "Homosexuality has been observed for more than 1,500 animal species, and is well documented for 500 of them."

The museum said the exhibition, opening on Thursday despite condemnation from some Christians, was the first in the world on the subject. Soeli said a Dutch zoo had once organised tours to view homosexual couples among the animals.

"The sexual urge is strong in all animals. ... It's a part of life, it's fun to have sex," Soeli said of the reasons for homosexuality or bisexuality among animals.

One exhibit shows two stuffed female swans on a nest -- birds sometimes raise young in homosexual couples, either after a female has forsaken a male mate or donated an egg to a pair of males.

One photograph shows two giant erect penises flailing above the water as two male right whales rub together. Another shows a male giraffe mounting another for sex, another describes homosexuality among beetles.

BURN IN HELL

One radical Christian said organizers of the exhibition -- partly funded by the Norwegian government -- should "burn in hell," Soeli said. Laws describing homosexuality as a "crime against nature" are still on the statutes in some countries.

Greek philosopher Aristotle noted apparent homosexual behavior among hyenas 2,300 years ago but evidence of animal homosexuality has often been ignored by researchers, perhaps because of distaste, lack of interest or fear or ridicule.

Bonobos, a type of chimpanzee, are among extremes in having sex with either males or females, apparently as part of social bonding. "Bonobos are bisexuals, all of them," Soeli said.

Still, it is unclear why homosexuality survives since it seems a genetic dead-end.

Among theories, males can sometimes win greater acceptance in a pack by having homosexual contact. That in turn can help their chances of later mating with females, he said.

Voters begin to revolt as capital ethics sink

USA Today - Politicians are often accused of being out of touch with their constituents. They get elected, settle into the rarefied world of Washington, then forget the people who sent them there.

It's a cliché, uttered more often than it's true. But at this point it's hard to see it as anything but a dead-on description of the state of affairs in the capital.

The scandal involving former representative Mark Foley (news, bio, voting record), R-Fla., who quit Sept. 29 when lurid instant messages to a former page were exposed, is the latest manifestation. House leaders reacted more as politicians trying to shift blame than as parents concerned about protecting kids from sexual predators.

But the Foley episode is hardly the only embarrassment. For more than a year, Congress has been wallowing in a variety of bribery scandals, most notably one involving former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who ran a vast influence-buying network. These scandals have exposed members of Congress and the Bush administration accepting gifts, including meals, tickets and even vacations. Yet a Congress too attached to its perks has done virtually nothing to clean up the mess.

Legislatively, the past few years have been marked by a distinct inactivity on vital issues, and a frenzy of action for the benefit of favored interests. Congress has handed out freebies to energy companies, ceiling-fan importers, Oldsmobile dealers and many others. It has come down hard on debtors whom credit companies shouldn't have lent money to in the first place. And it has let American corporations avoid taxes on tens of billions of dollars they had stashed overseas. It has not, however, done anything to make health insurance more affordable or available, or taken on illegal immigration in a meaningful way.

The public is catching on to this disconnect. A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll this weekend showed that 86% of the respondents considered corruption an important issue. That's the same number who said

Iraq is important and more than those who said terrorism is.

Some 68% had a negative view on the Republican-controlled Congress, but lest the Democrats think the bad news pertains only to the GOP, a Washington Post-ABC News Poll found that 75% believed the Democrats would have botched the Foley matter had he been one of theirs.

Lost in all of the attention to the Foley case was the abrupt resignation of Susan Ralston, a former Abramoff aide who worked in the White House for adviser Karl Rove. According to a

House Government Reform Committee report, Ralston was one of several White House staffers who accepted, and even solicited, Abramoff freebies.

These aides took expensive tickets 19 times to see professional sports events and concerts by the likes of U2 and Bruce Springsteen. In return, they helped Abramoff get his clients' agenda heard in the White House.

White House officials shrugged off the ethical issues and announced Ralston's resignation on a Friday afternoon, when news tends to get lost. They said her departure was voluntary, brought on by her not wanting to be a "distraction." Apparently she wasn't a distraction when, at Abramoff's behest, she helped focus her boss's attention on the vital issue of a presidential endorsement in a Mariana Islands gubernatorial race just weeks after the 9/11 attacks. But she is now.

The list goes on.

Two members of the 109th Congress have pleaded guilty to corruption charges. A third, former majority leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, is under indictment in his home state. And a fourth, Rep. William Jefferson (news, bio, voting record), D-La., has not been charged but, according to the

FBI, has been videotaped accepting $100,000 in cash from an informant.

People like Foley are gays' worst nightmare

Steve Kluger, USA Today - Thirty years ago, singer, former beauty queen and human being Anita Bryant sat before Florida's Dade County Metro Commission and demanded the repeal of the recently passed ordinance that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

"Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit (our children)," she warned. With those few words, we lost our brand new civil rights - and it took us 20 years to get them back. What we really needed was somebody in the Sunshine State who was on our side.

Enter Mark Foley instead. Theoretically, it's easy to spot the politician whose mailing address is the closet. He's usually the one who's gleefully foaming over the most Draconian of anti-gay measures at the same time he's supporting, say, a jockstrap fetish, an itch to hang around truck stops, or a Calvin Klein model he's got stashed in a secret Brazilian love nest.

Foley was no different. From the day he was sworn in as the representative from Florida's 16th District, all he was missing was Bryant's hair. There was the matter of his very public Christianity, his endorsement of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (which, incidentally, puts adult same-sex couples who wish to pledge lifelong fidelity into a category with national security threats), his authorship of numerous Internet restrictions to protect children from homosexuals and others online, and his repeated use of the word "revolting" to describe rumors that he's gay.

Then he became Bryant's worst nightmare. And ours, too.

Foley appears to be a sexual predator who exploited the adolescent thrall he engendered in House pages by pursuing teenage boys through explicit e-mails. He's also an unwitting poster boy for all gay men and lesbians who envision a career in politics: If you're ready to run for office, you'd better be ready to come out. And act like a responsible grown-up while you're at it. Spot Barney Frank in a gay bar onP Street and nobody's going to bat an eyelash. But if you're a married governor of New Jersey like Jim McGreevey who's discovered to have his clandestine male lover on the payroll, or gay-bashing Spokane Mayor James West who secretly prefers his male interns young and cute, you'd better start checking out Craigslist under "Employment Opportunities."

And yet, what else do you do when your entire career hinges on pretending you're something you're not? The religious fundamentalists and their political pod people might not always see eye-to-eye, but they seem to agree that the decline of Western civilization is due exclusively to gays and Bill Clinton. Indeed, if Foley's e-mails had been sent by a straight congressman to a 16-year-old girl - 16 being the age of consent in Washington, D.C., and in many states, by the way - the TV anchors would have been sure to remind viewers that "the young lady was legally of age," and the word "pedophile" never would have flashed across cable news.

Yet Foley can't be let off that easily. When cornered with his fingers on the keyboard, he thinks it's enough to come clean. "OK, you caught me. I'm gay." But that's not what being gay is about. In fact, not only is Foley's behavior the excuse that has been used over and over again to deprive accountable gay adults of their human rights, his glib defense soils even his own community. "I'm also an alcoholic." "And a priest abused me." "The devil made me do it." Shame comes in many disguises. Foley has worn all of them.

"Being right-handed or left-handed doesn't dictate whether you punch or steal," says Jennifer Pizer, senior counsel at Lambda Legal, the nation's oldest gay-rights law firm. "Your behavior is your choice. There's nothing shameful about being gay. But abusing power to seduce teenagers is wrong whether they're male or female, and whether you're a lefty or a righty."

So who's really responsible for the Mark Foley mess? Foley himself? The Republicans? The religious right? The closets in capitol buildings across the country? All of the above? Ah, hell. Let's blame Florida. Again.

When I was 5, I told the nuns I thought limbo was bullshit and made no sense in light of the doctrine of an all knowing, all merciful god. I got sent to the mother superior's office and given a nasty whupping for mouthing off. That was the day I realized that organized religion was garbage, and learned how to play the game.

So for centuries, the church has had this limbo doctrine. Suddenly, the doctrine is "no longer necessary". What a bunch of horseshit. What a bunch of hypocrites. Lunatic cult, is what it is.

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October 06, 2006

Pope decision on 'limbo' delayed for a year

London Times, Rome - The medieval Roman Catholic concept of “limbo” will remain in place for at least a year after Pope Benedict XVI failed to mention it in his homily at Mass today.

A draft document drawn up for the Pope’s approval declaring that limbo was “no longer essential or even necessary” and could be “abandoned without causing problems of faith” has not been finalised. It will not be presented to the pontiff until 2007.

The Pope was expected to embrace the findings when marking the end of a Vatican conference of international theologians on the subject, but he let the occasion pass.

Catholics regard limbo as the home in the afterlife of the souls of unbaptised children.

The Pope has himself long argued that limbo was only a “theological hypothesis” and should be dropped. There was no explanation of the need for further discussion.

Monsignor Forte said the Vatican wanted to “eliminate the use of images and metaphors which fail to take account of the richness of the message of hope brought by Jesus Christ”. He said the doctrine that baptism was required to remove the stain of original sin remained valid.

But limbo was an outdated concept which had never been part of Catholic dogma, and the Church now believed that in the case of unbaptised children “the salvific power of Christ prevails over the power of sin”.

There's an old saying on Capitol Hill: the only thing worse than being caught with an underage girl is being caught with an underage boy.

Hope this shit takes out the repuglicans in November. It's a sad commentary that this nation finds raunchy emails between an old fart and a horny teen more shocking than the obscenities of the BushCo regime, but hey, at this point, whatever works.

Lawmaker knew in 2000 of sex-tinged emails: Washington Post

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A Republican legislator learned of salacious Internet exchanges by a now-disgraced congressional colleague as far back as 2000, the Washington Post reported, in the latest revelation from an unfolding sex scandal.

An aide to Republican lawmaker Jim Kolbe told the daily that her boss confronted representative Mark Foley (news, bio, voting record) about sending sexually explicit Internet messages to a former high school aide some six years ago.

The revelation appears to contradict House leaders, who said last week that that ruling Republicans first learned of Foley's inappropriate advances toward former pages less than a year ago.

Leaders of Congress have been accused of not taking appropriate action or even hiding what they knew of the scandal, which has dominated US politics since it broke in late September.

According to the Post, the former page had approached Kolbe, an openly gay Arizona Republican due to retire after this session, after being troubled by the sexually-charged content of email messages sent to him by Foley.

The daily described Kolbe as a mentor and confidante to numerous pages, and one only few members of Congress to take an interest in them.

Foley, 52, who resigned when the emails came to light in late September, only last week announced publicly that he is gay.

The scandal broke open after US media published sexually suggestive messages Foley sent young men who had worked as pages in Congress, some of them when they were teenagers.

The widening scandal has increased pressure on the Republicans as they risk losing control of the House for the first time since 1994 heading into mid-term elections on November 7.

Marijuana's Key Ingredient Might Fight Alzheimer's

LiveScience.com - The active ingredient of marijuana could be considerably better at suppressing the abnormal clumping of malformed proteins that is a hallmark of Alzheimer's than any currently approved drugs prescribed for the treatment of the disease.

Scientists report the finding in the Oct. 2 issue of the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics.

About 4.5 million Americans suffer from

Alzheimer's disease, which gradually destroys memory. As more people survive into old age, cases of Alzheimer’s disease are expected to triple over the next 50 years. There is no known cure.

The researchers looked at THC, the compound inside marijuana responsible for its action on the brain. Computer models suggested THC might inhibit an enzyme with the tongue-twisting name of acetylcholinesterase (also called AChE) that is linked with Alzheimer's.

AChE is known to help accelerate the formation of abnormal protein clumps in the brain known as amyloid plaques during Alzheimer's. This enzyme also helps break down the brain chemical acetylcholine, which is linked to memory and learning. Acetylcholine levels are reduced during Alzheimer's.

In lab experiments, the scientists found THC was significantly better at disrupting the abnormal clumping of malformed proteins. THC could completely prevent AChE from forming amyloid plaques, while two drugs approved for use against Alzheimer's, donepezil and tacrine, reduced clumping by only 22 and 7 percent, respectively, at twice the concentration of THC used in the tests.

"We're not advocating smoking dope, but if we can make analogues of THC, it could play a role in treating Alzheimer's," researcher Kim Janda, a chemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., told LiveScience. "It would be nice to do more animal studies along these lines."

Past research on human brain tissues and experiments with rats have suggested that synthetic analogues of THC can reduce the inflammation and prevent the mental decline associated with Alzheimer's disease.

This is why guys who hate girls should never EVER be allowed to design clothing for them. Behold! The feverish mind of Jean-Paul Gaultier, from his 2007 "ready to wear collection":

Yeah, when I'm making ten bucks a day but it costs me fifteen a day to support my family, I'm gonna be a little "irascibly pessimistic" too.

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Joyless indicators

USA Today - Conservative commentators often ask why the American public is not giving President Bush more credit for the economy.

After all, the nation's gross domestic product grew 28% in the past five years, from $9.8 trillion in 2000 to $12.5 trillion last year. The unemployment rate is an impressively low 4.7%. Gasoline prices have been tumbling, and the stock market has been rebounding. On Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a record high.

So why, in an August USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, did only 39% approve of Bush's handling of the economy and 57% disapprove?

Perhaps Americans have traded in their irrational exuberance for an irascible pessimism. Perhaps troubling global events are influencing their views on the economy. Perhaps the news media are spreading overly gloomy sentiment.

Or perhaps not. Looking at new reports from the Census Bureau and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, it is not hard to see why many people are unhappy. They are too busy being squeezed by rising costs for such essentials as housing and health care.

What these numbers show is that for many middle- and working-class families, the money is flowing in, but it's flowing out even faster. If not corrected, this trend will breed more demagogic politics on trade, regulation and other business matters.

On Monday, the Census Bureau reported that the percentage of Americans' income going into housing costs rose in every state except Alaska from 2000-05. Even more telling is the percentage who have to spend 30% or more on housing, a threshold considered to be a reasonable limit. That figure rose from 27% to 35% for homeowners. For renters, it rose from 37% to 46%.

These numbers come a week after the Kaiser Foundation reported that health premiums, for those lucky enough to have insurance, have risen 87% since 2000, while hourly wages increased 20%. They come a month after the Census reported that poverty rolls had grown by 4 million since 2001 while the ranks of those without health insurance continue to grow.

Quantum information teleported from light to matter

LONDON (Reuters) - Beaming people in Star Trek fashion is still in the realms of science fiction but physicists in Denmark have teleported information from light to matter bringing quantum communication and computing closer to reality.

Until now scientists have teleported similar objects such as light or single atoms over short distances from one spot to another in a split second.

But Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have made a breakthrough by using both light and matter.

"It is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects. One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium," Polzik explained in an interview on Wednesday.

The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further.

"Teleportation between two single atoms had been done two years ago by two teams but this was done at a distance of a fraction of a millimeter," Polzik, of the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Quantum Optics, explained.

"Our method allows teleportation to be taken over longer distances because it involves light as the carrier of entanglement," he added.

Quantum entanglement involves entwining two or more particles without physical contact.

Although teleportation is associated with the science-fiction series Star Trek, no one is likely to be beamed anywhere soon.

But the achievement of Polzik's team, in collaboration with the theorist Ignacio Cirac of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, marks an advancement in the field of quantum information and computers, which could transmit and process information in a way that was impossible before.

"It is really about teleporting information from one site to another site. Quantum information is different from classical information in the sense that it cannot be measured. It has much higher information capacity and it cannot be eavesdropped on. The transmission of quantum information can be made unconditionally secure," said Polzik whose research is reported in the journal Nature.

Quantum computing requires manipulation of information contained in the quantum states, which include physical properties such as energy, motion and magnetic field, of the atoms.

My hometown is so overpriced that middle-class homies like me have not been able to afford to buy here for over a decade. But I knew this was coming, and I've been saving my pennies and learning about what factors made the local real estate bubble so outrageous, so I can pounce when the greed that fueled it turns on itself. I *will* have my ranch in the hills...

hehehehehe*chortle*......

Forecast sees housing prices falling

WASHINGTON, Associated Press- Housing prices, slumping after a five-year boom, are projected to decline in more than 100 of the nation's metropolitan areas, with the Northeast, Florida and California among the areas hardest hit.

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The forecast by Moody's Economy.com, a private research firm, presents one of the starkest views yet of the housing slowdown that has been gathering force in recent months.

The West Chester, Pa., forecasting firm projects that the median sales price for an existing home will decline in 2007 by 3.6 percent, which would be the first decline for an entire year in home prices since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The forecast is included in a 195-page report, "Housing at the Tipping Point," which The Associated Press obtained before its general release on Wednesday.

The report projected that 133 of the nation's 379 metropolitan areas would suffer price declines. Those metropolitan areas with declining prices account for nearly one-half of the value of the nation's stock of single-family homes.

The price declines represent quite a contrast from the past five years when low mortgage rates pushed sales to five consecutive annual records and prices in the hottest sales areas skyrocketed.

But this year, the once red-hot housing market has cooled significantly. Some analysts are worried that the slowdown could become so severe that it could drag the entire country into a recession, much as the bursting of the stock market bubble in 2000 led to the 2001 slump.

The housing report said the biggest percentage price decline will be in Danville, Ill., where prices have already fallen by 18.7 percent from the peak in the second quarter of 2005 to a low-point in the first three months of this year. That setback occurred because of layoffs in autos and other manufacturing industries, which depressed the local economy.

The second biggest decline is projected to occur in the Fort Myers, Fla., area, a fall of 18.6 percent from the peak in the final three months of last year to a low-point for prices that is projected to occur in the second quarter of 2007.

The 133 areas with slumping prices are concentrated in the states of California and Florida and the Northeast corridor from southern Maine to just south of Washington, D.C., as well as boom areas of Nevada and Arizona and some depressed sections of the Midwest such as Detroit.

Of the areas with falling prices, 73 were forecast to hit their low point by the end of this year with the rest seeing a trough for prices in 2007 or later.

But even in areas which have already hit a low point, the rebound in prices is not expected to occur quickly.

"Prices are going to go down and stay down for awhile. It will take at least a couple of years to work off the excesses of the last decade," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com and the principal author of the report.

Not all parts of the country will experience price declines. The report said Texas, the Southeastern states other than Florida and much of the Midwest Farm Belt should be immune from price declines.

It projected that annual price gains over the next two years would average 4.2 percent in the Dallas area, 3.3 percent in the Charlotte, N.C., area and 3 percent in the Columbus, Ohio, area.

The report said the most vulnerable areas for price declines were those regions where red-hot markets attracted speculators known as "flippers" who purchased homes in hopes of selling them fast for a quick profit.

"Housing's downturn has turned even more dramatic with the rapid flight of the flipper from the market," the report said. "These investors have gone from sending home sales and prices shooting higher to driving sales and prices lower."

The report described the current environment as a "correction" and not a "crash," but it cautioned that there were downside risks that could make the slowdown more serious.

A big threat is that the fall in home prices could have a significant impact on consumer spending patterns. The so-called wealth effect pushed consumer spending higher during the housing boom as soaring home prices made homeowners feel more wealthy and thus more inclined to spend money. But falling home prices could have the reverse effect and depress consumer spending.

"We believe the housing downturn will weigh on the economic expansion but will not break it. But there are risks," Zandi said.

The slowdown in housing occurred as a result of a two-year campaign by the

Federal Reserve to push interest rates higher as a way of slowing the economy enough to keep inflation under control.

The Fed has kept rates unchanged for the past two months and many economists believe the central bank has finished its rate hikes as long as inflation pressures keep falling.

The belief that the current economic slowdown is restraining inflation has helped push mortgage rates lower with the 30-year mortgage now at a six-month low of 6.31 percent, an improvement that is expected to help put a floor on housing's fall.

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On the Net:

...I was really drunk at the time, y'know? Totally slipped my mind...

Rice doesn't recall Tenet's warning about 9/11

SHANNON, Ireland, ASSOCIATED PRESS -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she cannot recall then-CIA chief George Tenet warning her of an impending al-Qaida attack two months before the Sept. 11 attacks, but according to news reports a review of White House records has determined that Tenet did brief her and other top officials, a State Department spokesman said yesterday.

The account by Sean McCormack came hours after Rice, speaking to reporters en route to Saudi Arabia and other stops in the Middle East, said she met with Tenet daily but had no memory of the July 10, 2001, meeting.

"It kind of doesn't ring true that you have to shock me into something I was very involved in," Rice said, adding that there was near constant discussion of possible attacks overseas, and high alarm.

Rice was President George W. Bush's national security adviser in 2001, when Bob Woodward's book "State of Denial" outlines a July 10 meeting among Rice, Tenet and Cofer Black, the CIA's top counterterror officer.

"What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible," Rice said.

McCormack said records show the Sept. 11 Commission was told of the meeting, which former intelligence officials and members of the commission confirmed yesterday.

Though all parties were questioned, the meeting between Tenet, Rice and Black was not mentioned in the reports from several investigations of the Sept. 11 attacks. However, Woodward wrote that it stood out in the minds of Tenet and Black as the "starkest warning they had given the White House" on bin Laden and his network.

Tenet asked for the meeting after receiving a disturbing briefing from Black, according to the book. Black reportedly laid out secret intercepts and other data "showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaida would soon attack the United States." Tenet was so worried that he called Rice from his car and asked to see her right away, the book said.

But though Tenet and Black warned Rice in the starkest terms of the prospects for attack, she brushed them off, Woodward reiterated yesterday.

Rice referred to the session as "the supposed meeting" and noted that it is not part of the commission's report.

"I remember that George was very worried and he expressed that," Rice told reporters. "We were all very worried because the threat reporting was quite intense. The problem was that it was also quite nebulous."

A former intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the commission kept a transcript of a closed, classified session at CIA headquarters on Jan. 28, 2004, in which Tenet told commission staff about Rice's meeting with Tenet and Black.

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State Dept. confirms Rice-Tenet meeting

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia, Associated Press - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did receive a CIA briefing about terror threats just about two months before the Sept. 11 attacks, but the information was not new, her chief spokesman said.

In doing so, Sean McCormack confirmed a meeting — on July 10, 2001 — that his boss had said repeatedly she could not specifically recall. She had said earlier that there were virtually daily meetings at the time.

A new book by reporter Bob Woodward of Watergate fame describes the White House meeting as an emergency wakeup call that Rice had brushed off. Rice was President Bush's national security adviser at the time and was promoted to the top diplomatic job last year.

Although spokesmen for the State Department and the National Security Council indicated Sunday that such a meeting had taken place, Rice was still saying Monday that she was not sure about it. She said she would have remembered the sort of forceful warning the book claims was conveyed there.

"We can confirm that a meeting took place on or around July 10, 2001," McCormack said late Monday.

"The information presented in this meeting was not new, rather it was a good summary from the threat reporting from the previous several weeks," he added.

Woodward's book "State of Denial" recounts the meeting among then-CIA Director George Tenet, Rice and the CIA's top counterterror officer. The book said the session stood out in the minds of the CIA officials as the "starkest warning they had given the White House" on al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his network.

McCormack said that after the meting, Rice had asked that the same material be given to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Materials from this meeting were made available to the independent Sept. 11 Commission, and Tenet was asked about the session when interviewed by the commission, McCormack said.

The meeting is not part of the commission report, but was referred to obliquely in a report by the commission's predecessor, a joint congressional panel that investigated the 9/11 attacks. That report said that "senior U.S. government officials were advised by the intelligence community on June 28 and July 10, 2001, that the attacks were expected, among other things, to 'have dramatic consequences on governments or cause major casualties' and that 'attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.'"

Meanwhile, Ashcroft said Monday that he should have been notified of any such report dealing with a pending attack on the United States. "It just occurred to me how disappointing it was that they didn't come to me with this type of information," he said in an interview with The Associated Press.

"The FBI is responsible for domestic terrorism," Ashcroft said. He said both Tenet and Black should have been aware that he had pressed for a more aggressive policy in going after bin Laden and his followers in the United States and should have briefed him as well. Rice knew of this advocacy, he suggested.

It's pretty good most of the time, but when the database chokes, baby, it chokes....