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Going To Hell In A Very Stylish Handbasket.

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

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Older Archives 2003-2006

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

I'm sorry, but exactly when did the Office of the Vice President go from being a spare tire in case the prez got flat, to an autonomous branch of government? And since when did the Office of the President become a monarchy?

Bush won't supply subpoenaed documents

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - President Bush, moving toward a constitutional showdown with Congress, asserted executive privilege Thursday and rejected lawmakers' demands for documents that could shed light on the firings of federal prosecutors.

Bush's attorney told Congress the White House would not turn over subpoenaed documents for former presidential counsel Harriet Miers and former political director Sara Taylor. Congressional panels want the documents for their investigations of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' stewardship of the Justice Department, including complaints of undue political influence.

The Democratic chairmen of the two committees seeking the documents accused Bush of stonewalling and disdain for the law, and said they would press forward with enforcing the subpoenas.

..coz the left sucks as bad as the right. Buncha goddamn bleedingheart busybody ex-hippies...

GAO examines signing statement cases

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The Bush administration sometimes fails to follow all provisions of laws after President Bush attaches "signing statements" meant to interpret or restrict the legislation, congressional examiners say.

Lawmakers who asked the Government Accountability Office to conduct the study said it was further proof that the Bush White House oversteps constitutional bounds in ignoring the will of Congress.

"Too often, the Bush administration does what it wants, no matter the law. It says what it wants, no matter the facts," Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., said Monday. Byrd and House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., requested the report.

Signing statements, in which the president appends bills he is signing into law with statements reserving the right to revise, interpret or disregard provisions on national security and constitutional grounds, have become a major sticking point in the power struggle between Congress and the White House.

PC World - Think that all of the great Web sites have already been invented? Think again. The Internet is evolving in new and inventive ways thanks to mashups that pull data from all over the Web and to AJAX-based interfaces that give sites the same degree of interactivity and responsiveness that desktop apps possess.

To keep you ahead of the curve, we've rounded up 25 innovative Web sites and services that are well worth watching. Some of them help you design your own personalized Web site mashups; others enable you to create video mixes, build wikis, share personal obsessions, and more. But take note: A number of these sites are works in progress, and user-generated sites depend on developing a critical mass of content, which doesn't happen right away. With that in mind, check out the following dot-com destinations. One of them may become the next big Web hit.

Mashups, Maps, and More

Build your own Web feed, poll friends and strangers, and find your way with these tools.

Popfly

Popfly provides a friendly, visual way to build your own mashups.If you haven't already discovered the world of mashups, Microsoft's Popfly is a good place to start. Mashups combine multiple Web-based sites or applications to produce all sorts of useful things, such as an overlay of traffic information over Google Maps. With Popfly, you can create your own mashups--and you don't have to know a lick of code to do it. Just drag prefab building blocks, connect them, and you have an instant mashup that you can add to an existing Web page or turn into its own site. For example, you can easily produce a mashup that grabs pictures from a site like Flickr and then displays them in a rotating cube.

Yahoo Pipes

You need a little patience to learn how to build a mashup using Yahoo Pipes.Like Popfly, Yahoo Pipes lets you create your own mashups or "pipes." As with Popfly, you drag and drop prebuilt modules, and then create connections between them. But Yahoo Pipes is much harder to use than Popfly, and the way to go about building your own mashup isn't always obvious. But if you're willing to do some digging and learning, you can build very useful stuff, such as a mashup that uses Yahoo maps to show the locations of all apartments for rent in a certain neighborhood.

BuzzDash

If you were the type of child who continually asked, "But why?" BuzzDash should satisfy your endless curiosity.Are foreign movies better watched with subtitles or with dubbed dialog? Is it okay to cry at work? Who is the best center fielder of all time--Willy Mays, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Ty Cobb, or Ken Griffey, Jr.?

If these are the kinds of issues that keep you awake at night, we have a Web site for you. BuzzDash lets you participate in, comment on, and see the results of numerous quick opinion polls. The polls are organized by topic, such as movies, football, and politicians; and if you have a burning question you want answered, you can create your own survey.

Wayfaring

Wayfaring.com lets you create personalized maps, such as one that pinpoints shipwrecks in the Great Lakes.If you're obsessed with cartography, wander over to Wayfaring.com. Here you can easily create personalized maps for a walking tour of London, say, or a wine-tasting trip through Napa or a pub crawl through Seattle. The site provides the tools you'll need to build annotated maps--complete with descriptions, Web links, and photos of your favorite stops--and then post them for others to view and discuss. It's fun to check out the maps other users have created. One of my favorites: a map of shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, including links to Web sites that discuss each wreck.

CircleUp

CircleUp makes social planning easier by letting you organize your contacts into different communities.Anyone who has ever tried to organize an event--or to get a group of people to respond to a simple question like "Who can drive the kids to Little League this week?"--knows how tough it is to filter and organize the answers into coherent, usable form. That's where CircleUp comes in handy. Use this site to send an e-mail or instant message to a group of people; then wait for it to return a consolidated summary of responses to you. It's simple, it's free, and it will liberate you from the recurring feeling that you're herding cats whenever you try to coordinate an activity involving more than two people.

Organizers, Searchers and Optimizers

The Web has so much information that it's hard to keep track of everything. These sites will help you pull content together and move around the Internet more efficiently.

Pageflakes

Using Pageflakes, you can customize a Web site with just the news and information you want.The Web is just as chaotic as the world--but Pageflakes can organize both of them for you. This super-customizable version of a home page enables you to pick the news and information feeds you want to read, and to specify the "flakes," or applets, you want to include. Flakes let you add all sorts of cool stuff to your page--movie times, to-do lists, a notepad, e-mail, a horoscope--even sudoku or a personal blog. If you're looking for one-stop browsing, this is it.

Spock

Spock is a search engine dedicated to finding information about people.If you spend more time than you should googling folks, you need to check out Spock.com, a search engine designed to dig up information about people. Start by typing in a name, or a search term that describe a group of people--for example, Motown Singer, or Rastafarians. The site then searches through various social networking sites such as MySpace and Friendster, along with more-general Web sites, and reports on what it finds.

For many searches, you'll get multiple categories of links. For instance, type in Barack Obama, and you'll get groupings like 'Democrat', 'Senator', and '2008 Presidential Candidate'. Click any link, and you'll find pages related to both Obama and the larger category. There are also links to photographs, tags, Obama's

Swivel

Swivel charts everything from crime statistics to American Idol contestant popularity.Data and graph fanatics, you have a home. Swivel, holds a mind-boggling array of charts and graphs--from a line graph illustrating the relationship between wine consumption and crime in the United States over the past 30 years to a pie chart showing the percentage breakdown of bird flu cases in 14 Asian countries. But the site's most outstanding feature is its ability to integrate different charts containing seemingly unrelated data. Want to compare the national murder rate to the cost of a first-class stamp, or to total hours of media use in U.S. households, over the same period of time? Now you can.

Clipmarks

Clip elements of your favorite Web pages, and save them to your Clipmarks profile.The Internet is the best research tool in existence. That's the good news--and the bad news. Though finding information online is easy, keeping track of it all can be tough. Most people end up copying and pasting information from Web sites, printing it out, or bookmarking pages--with no good way to keep it all organized or find what they want fast.

Clipmarks solves the problem neatly by installing a toolbar that hitches on to Internet Explorer or Firefox. As you surf the Web, use the Clipmarks toolbar to clip and save sections of a page--text, graphics, and even YouTube videos. Clipping something automatically archives it under your Clipmarks profile, though you can also save it directly to your blog or send it via e-mail. You can even share your clip collections, or look at archives that other users have assembled.

OpenDNS

One reason the W eb sometimes feels poky, even when you use broadband, is the Internet's Domain Name System. When you type a URL (such as www.pcworld.com) into your browser, DNS servers must translate that alphanumeric information into a numeric IP address (such as 70.42.185.10) that Web servers and your PC can understand. Typically your ISP's DNS servers handle the translation work.

But OpenDNS speeds up the translation (called "name resolution") by handling the process on its own high-speed DNS servers. The service includes other cool time-savers, as well, such as the ability to create keyboard shortcuts. For example, instead of typing www.pcworld.com each time, you might arrange to type in the letter p and jump immediately to your favorite online destination.

Real Estate, Bookmarks, and Blogs

With these services, you can find a house, browse the Web from a single location, and make sure that your online prose never gets lost.

Trulia

Trulia gives you an idea of how much you'll have to spend when shopping for a home in a certain 'hood.There are plenty of real-estate sites on the Web, but this one comes with a twist. By combining social networking with mapping and search technology, Trulia gives you a high-tech way to find the home of your dreams. Use the different sliders and checkboxes to focus your search (price, square footage, and the all-important number of bathrooms), and Trulia will display qualifying homes that are for sale in the specified area, overlaid on a map. The site includes useful, city-specific real estate guides containing additional data on average home sale prices, most popular neighborhoods, crime statistics, and the like.

The Trulia Voices section hooks you up with other people to discuss neighborhoods, housing issues, or real estate in general. Trulia is relatively new, so that section is as yet quite sparse. But if the site gains traction, Trulia Voices may prove to be the most useful tool of all.

Tip: To view some cool time-lapse maps showing how an area (such as Las Vegas) has developed over time, hop to Trulia Hindsight.

PopURLs

Forget site hopping. Head to PopURLs, and scan all your headlines in one place.If you're an information hound, you probably spend lots of time jumping from Digg to Del.icio.us to YouTube to Fark to Google News to anything-dot-com. With PopURLs, you no longer need to waste time hopping around the Internet. An aggregator of all things informative, PopURLs features massive lists of headlines, videos, blogs, and content from all of those sites, as well as plenty of others.

One nice bonus is that you can search some of the sites--Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Wikipedia, among others--straight from PopURLs. It's also easy to tweak the way PopURLs looks and works, too, including customizing the layout of the feeds so you can put the ones you view most regularly on top. The scrapbook is a particularly useful feature; just click the 'Add to Scrapbook' button next to any headline, and PopURLs will save it (and up to 19 other favorite items).

Goowy

Goowy lets you run different applications and widgets, all from the Web.For several years, observers have speculated that the Internet will become, in essence, a vast operating system, with applications built on top of it. To a great extent, that's the premise underlying Goowy. Create an account, and you can start building your own desktop, with applications for e-mail, contacts, instant messaging, file management, and more. You can also add prebuilt widgets, called "minis," to your desktop, for news, stocks, weather, and other tidbits of information.

Don't expect the site to replace your desktop at this point: Goowy lacks full-blown applications and doesn't access your hard drive. Still, it's a glimpse into what may be the future of the Internet.

BlogBackupOnline

If you have a blog and you aren't sure that your blog provider will always have a backup in case of a crash, head over to BlogBackupOnline pronto. The site is straightforward: Log in, enter information about your blog, and the site diligently backs it up every day (provided that you use one of the 11 supported blogging services--Blogger, Friendster, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Multiply, Serendipity, Terapad, TypePad, Vox, Windows Live Space, or WordPress). The site is also a great tool if you ever decide to move your blog from one platform to another. After you've backed up your blog, BlogBackupOnline can bring all of your old entries into the new service.

Ma.gnolia

Ma.gnolia is an online keeper of bookmarks, with plenty of community aspects to boot.If you're a fan of the social bookmarking site Del.i.cio.us but wish that it were a little more social--and a little less geeky--check out Ma.gnolia. As with Del.icio.us, you can save and share bookmarks and tags. But Ma.gnolia presents a far more appealing design, and it has a few nice extra talents, such as the ability to let you save snapshots of your favorite pages.

Ma.gnolia excels on the social networking front. You can join groups, share bookmarks, and browse groups and discussions for more bookmarks on topics that fascinate you. If you're strictly interested in bookmarking and tagging, Del.i.cio.us remains the best place to go. But if you want to share your findings with others, Ma.gnolia is worth a taste.

Five Ways to Create and Share

These services help you put your thoughts together and publish them on the Web, whether you're most comfortable talking, shooting video, or just typing.

Yodio

With Yodio, you can create an audio postcard that makes your picture worth a thousand words.Of course your friends and family want to see all of your pictures from your Venetian vacation--but wouldn't it be better if they could also hear your voice, telling you cool details about what they're looking at, or narrating a story regarding some gondola hijinks?

Yodio lets you combine photos with sound files to create an audio postcard. To make a recording, call a special Yodio phone number and start talking (or you can record your own MP3 file and upload it). Once you've transferred photos to the site, you can add sound and publish your postcard on the Web for others to admire. The site also has a scheme for making money from your productions, though we wouldn't bet the farm on it.

Meebo Rooms

Goal, or no goal? With Meebo's multimedia chat rooms, you can discuss videos and pictures with other fans.You may have heard about Meebo, the Web-based instant messaging program that lets you communicate with people over various IM services, such as AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo. (See our review of Meebo.)

Well equally cool is Meebo's newest launch, Meebo Rooms, which lets you participate in multimedia chats. You'll find chat rooms on everything from sports to SpongeBob Squarepants, and the rooms support videos and photos that you can discuss with fellow fans. If you can't find a topic you're interested in, simply create a new room and post visuals for others to discuss. You can even embed rooms into your site or blog, and use them to lure people to your own Web destination.

Squidoo

Squidoo makes it easy to create (or look for) Web pages that reflect your passions.Got an obsession or special passion you want to convey to the world? Squidoo is your ticket. Using the site's simple tools, you can build a "lens" (aka, a Web page) that includes information on any topic that's close to your heart, whether it's cats or Kafka.

A lens can be quite different from a blog. With lenses, you share links to resources, book recommendations, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, eBay auction items, and other cool Web content related to a single subject. Even if you don't build your own lens, the site is worth visiting to see what others have done. You can learn a lot more about lemonade or laptop bags than you ever thought possible.

SplashCast

Build your own streaming media channel using the tools on SplashCast.For anyone who has ever dreamed of becoming a broadcast mogul, here's a quick (and free) way to get a taste of what it might be like. SplashCast lets you create your own streaming media channel that combines video, music, photos, text, narration, and RSS feeds. A wizard walks you through the steps of building your channel. Start by uploading media files from your hard drive, or point to files on other sites. Add captions, commentary, and RSS feeds, and your channel is ready to go. Once you're done finessing your channel, you can send it to friends and family, or syndicate it to blogs and social networking sites. So far, there's no way for you to make money from your channels, but the site plans to start a revenue-sharing model.

Eyespot

With Eyespot, it's a cinch to create a video mix and share it with others.To create a video all you have to do is point your cell phone, digital camera, or camcorder at something, press a button, and stay focused. The result: an instant movie. What's not so easy, though, is organizing, editing, and combining your video clips to create something aesthetically pleasing. Eyespot simplifies this process. Upload your videos to the site, and then use its tools to crop and mix them either with other clips you supply or with free video from the site. You can even add effects, transitions, and titles before publishing your video mix for the world to see.

Sites for Collaborative Work and Play

Whether you're putting together an important document or an anniversary party, these services will help get everybody involved. Also, check out a snazzy online photo editor and a new way to search.

Approver.com

Approver.com lets you keep tabs on a document while passing it around to different recipients--and track its progress.Anyone who has collaborated with multiple people on a document knows the true meaning of frustration. You have to distribute the file to the entire group, convince every person to review it by a certain date and time, and get them all to sign off on it. Approver.com lowers the pain quotient considerably. Upload the document you want to track, and the site routes it to everyone who needs to see it. It also lets you set deadlines for reviewing the document, and keep track of approvals and comments. Approver.com works with a number of apps, including Microsoft Office, Adobe PDF, and Open Office; alternatively, you can use the site to create documents, and have your colleagues read them online.

Pbwiki

Create a community of opera lovers (or anything else) by building your own wiki.Though the whole world seems to know about Wikipedia these days, many people and organizations don't realize how useful it can be to build their own wiki. In business settings, it's an ideal way to share information within a group. For individuals, it's perfect for planning a get-together, organizing a fan club, or sharing memories with family members. Pbwiki makes creating miniature versions of Wikipedia a breeze. The site's simple, Web-based tools are perfect for building a wiki--you don't need to have any HTML know-how--and getting others in on the editing action.

MyPunchbowl

MyPunchbowl handles online invitations, sets up message boards, and maps your party with Google Maps.Planning a party, but unsure of what date works best for your friends? MyPunchbowl is basically Evite with a little extra kick. Like any self-respecting online invitation site, MyPunchbowl lets you create party invitations and then track who's coming, who's not, and who has yet to respond. But the site also enables you to send pick-a-date e-mail messages to see which day works best for people, set up message boards (useful for organizing things like who's bringing the vino), and produce a map of the shindig's location using Google Maps. You can also create an after-party message board where people can share comments, photos, and videos--if, um, appropriate.

Picnik

From sepia to soften, Picnik's photo editor lets you apply any number of effects. Now all we need is an old gum tree.You probably have hundreds or thousands of digital photos on your PC. And a lot of those photos would probably benefit from a little tweaking. But that doesn't mean that you have to download and install photo editing software. Picnik supplies a nice suite of tools for editing photos online. All you have to do is upload your photos, or have Picnik grab them from a site like Flickr (which doesn't have editing features), and then get to work. Picnik offers tools aplenty for performing simple editing--cleaning up red-eye or resizing photos, say--as well as doing more-extensive work, such as changing the exposure, fixing a color cast, or applying special effects.

Quintura

With Quintura, search and you shall find a standard results list, along with a visual diagram of related terms.Quintura provides a new way for you to search for things on the Internet. When you enter a search term, Quintura returns an ordinary list of results on the right-hand side, while on the left it offers a visual map (or "cloud") of related terms. Click any of these words, and the list of results changes to encompass the new term as well, which can help you narrow your search. The process may sound clunky, but it's surprisingly effective.

Alphabetical Listing

Keep an eye on these sites--you may be looking at Google 2.0. Here they are listed in alphabetical order.

Didn't we just give this asshole an extra 120 billion dollars to fund his little vanity war through the summer? Hasn't he already wasted half a TRILLION taxpayer dollars stomping Iraq back into the stoneage? Oh, yeah, and, "Tax-and-spend" sounds a hell of a lot better than "Spend-and-spend", which is what BushCo has been doing to America for over six years.

Bush warns he'll veto runaway spending

CRAWFORD, Texas, Associated Press - President Bush warned Congress on Saturday that he will use his veto power to stop runaway government spending.

"The American people do not want to return to the days of tax-and-spend policies," Bush said in his radio address.

The House passed a $37 billion budget for the Homeland Security Department on Friday, but Republicans rallied enough votes to uphold a promised veto from Bush.

The measure — one of several annual spending bills that Congress began to consider this week — exceeds Bush's request for the department by $2.1 billion.

Democrats on Friday defended the extra money in the homeland security bill, noting it contains money to hire 3,000 additional border agents, improve explosive detection at airports and provides money to double the amount of cargo screened on passenger aircraft.

The administration, hoping to appease Republicans who demand fiscal restraint, has pledged to keep overall spending to the level in Bush's proposed budget in February.

The president has had uneven success.

Damn, they're good, too - go figure!

Singing seniors redefine rock songs

NORTHAMPTON, Mass., Associated Press - Fred Knittle wears his belt up high. His nose is tethered to an oxygen tank, and on stage he's confined to a folding chair. From this unlikely perch, he's turning rock 'n' roll on its head.

Singing Coldplay's "Fix You," Knittle transforms the song into a powerful ballad about a grandfather's healing wisdom. It means something different coming from an 80-year-old retiree suffering from congestive heart failure.

Knittle is a singer for the Young@Heart Chorus, whose members range from 73 to 92 years old. Singing songs they shouldn't even know, at an age when they're expected to be sitting quietly somewhere, they subvert all accepted notions of old and young.

Songs by bands like the Radiohead, OutKast and Nirvana take on a new dimension when performed by these 23 foot-stomping senior citizens. "Fix You" or the Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go" become about life and death.

Though little known in America, the Northampton-based Young@Heart has performed from Australia to London, serenaded the king and queen of Norway, been discussed on "The Daily Show," and been documented in an acclaimed film for British television. They're now recording an album tentatively titled "Rockin' At Heaven's Door."

It may sound like a gimmick, but Young@Heart is no karaoke act. They're a cover band for the ages.

(WFCR news story audio file on Young@Heart)

...but golly-gosh, there's nothing we can do about the pesky price hikes. No sir, not a thing...

Gas prices expected to rise at pump

NEW YORK, Associated Press - Gasoline futures extended their rally Friday, raising the prospect that prices at the pump will reverse course and again head higher in the coming weeks. Oil futures moved above $68 a barrel.

Retail gasoline prices, which typically lag the futures market, fell again by 1.4 cents overnight to a national average price of $3.029 a gallon, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. Prices peaked at $3.227 a gallon on May 24.

"Unfortunately, I think this is about as good as it gets," said Tom Kloza, publisher and chief oil analyst at the Oil Price Information Service.

19th-century weapon found in whale

BOSTON, Associated Press - A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago. Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale's age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old.

"No other finding has been this precise," said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Calculating a whale's age can be difficult, and is usually gauged by amino acids in the eye lenses. It's rare to find one that has lived more than a century, but experts say the oldest were close to 200 years old.

In too many ways, one is worse than the other, and in so many ways so is the first. I leave it to you to figure out which.

Google complains about Microsoft's Vista

SAN FRANCISCO, Associated Press - Internet search leader Google Inc. is trying to convince federal and state authorities that Microsoft Corp.'s Vista operating system is stifling competition as the high-tech heavyweights wrestle for the allegiance of personal computer users.

In a 49-page document filed April 18 with the U.S. Justice Department and state attorneys general, Google alleged that the latest version of Microsoft's Windows operating system impairs the performance of "desktop search" programs that find data stored on a computer's hard drive.

The Vista operating system, which became widely available in January, includes a desktop search function that competes with a free program Google introduced in 2004. Several other companies also offer desktop search applications.

Besides bogging down competing programs, Google alleged Microsoft had made it too complicated to turn off the desktop search feature built into Vista.

With its allegations, Google hopes to show that Microsoft isn't complying with a 2002 settlement of an antitrust case that concluded the world's largest software maker had leveraged the Windows operating system to throttle competition.

The consent decree requires Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft to ensure its rivals can build products that run smoothly on Windows — something that Google says isn't happening.

"The search boxes built throughout Vista are hard-wired to Microsoft's own desktop search product, with no way for users to choose an alternate provider," Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes said in a statement issued Monday.

Next time my lovely significant other gives me flack about raising my voice, I shall point to this erudite study, which reveals that I am actually very efficiently cutting through the fluff of a weak argument and zeroing in on the real problem. It's either that or sleep on the couch ;)

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Anger Fuels Better Decisions

LiveScience.com - The next time you are plagued with indecision and need a clear way out, it might help to get angry, according to a surprising new study.

Despite its reputation as an impetus to rash behavior, anger actually seems to help people make better choices—even aiding those who are usually very poor at thinking rationally. This could be because angry people base their decisions on the cues that "really matter" rather than things that can be called irrelevant or a distraction.

Gads! And it ends up in our homes, on our floors...

There's a scene in an amazing movie called "The Emerald Forest" in which the tribal elder talks about the outside world, calling them the "termite people", people who chew up the grandfather trees and leave raw devastation in their wake...

Chinese demand drives global deforestation

NGAMBE-TIKAR, Cameroon (Reuters) - From outside, Cameroon's Ngambe-Tikar forest looks like a compact, tangled mass of healthy emerald green foliage.

But tracks between the towering tropical hardwood trees open up into car park-sized clearings littered with logs as long as buses.

Forestry officers say the reserve is under attack from unscrupulous commercial loggers who work outside authorized zones and do not respect size limits in their quest for maximum financial returns.

"I lack words to describe what is going on here," says Richard Greine, head of the local forestry post, 350 km (220 miles) north of Cameroon's capital Yaounde.

"Both illegal and authorized exploiters have staged a hold-up on the forest."

From central Africa to the Amazon basin and Indonesia's islands, the world's great forests are being lost at an annual rate of at least 13 million hectares (32 million acres) -- an area the size of Greece or Nicaragua.

The timber business is worth billions of dollars annually, and experts say few industries that size are as murky as the black market in wood.

Evidence of rampant deforestation around the globe points in one direction: booming demand in China, where economic growth is fuelling a timber feeding frenzy.

In just the past decade, China has grown from importing wood products for domestic use to become the world's leading exporter of furniture, plywood and flooring.

I have no problem with the death penalty. Some crimes are so heinous that no rehabilitation, no revenge, no reparation, no justice can ever be possible. In these cases the best thing to do is permanently neutralize the offending organism and stop wasting taxpayer resources. I do agree with those who complain that the justice system is flawed and unfair. But that's different than putting down, for example, monsters like Dennis Rader or Gary Ridgeway.

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Studies say death penalty deters crime

Associated Press - Anti-death penalty forces have gained momentum in the past few years, with a moratorium in Illinois, court disputes over lethal injection in more than a half-dozen states and progress toward outright abolishment in New Jersey.

The steady drumbeat of DNA exonerations — pointing out flaws in the justice system — has weighed against capital punishment. The moral opposition is loud, too, echoed in Europe and the rest of the industrialized world, where all but a few countries banned executions years ago.

What gets little notice, however, is a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle a once hotly debated argument — whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. The analyses say yes. They count between three and 18 lives that would be saved by the execution of each convicted killer.

Unbelievably, this monumental buffoon is still being taken seriously by a few misguided idiots. I say we use the combined armed might of the United States of America and invade *his* sorry ass. Maybe he can get a hero's welcome from the folks in Fushe Kruje, Albania.

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Lieberman: U.S. should weigh Iran attack

WASHINGTON - Sen. Joseph Lieberman said Sunday the United States should consider a military strike against Iran because of Tehran's involvement in Iraq.

"I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq," Lieberman said. "And to me, that would include a strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers."

Aaaaaaaahahahahaha! Dubya had to go all the way to Albania and threaten the Russkies just to get a decent approval rating! Go Bushie! Go Bushie! w00t! w00t!

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Bush receives hero's welcome in Albania

TIRANA, Albania, Associated Press - President Bush, enthusiastically welcomed as the first U.S. president in this former communist nation, served notice Sunday he is running out of patience with Russia's objections to independence for neighboring Kosovo.

"Sooner rather than later you've got to say `Enough's enough — Kosovo is independent,'" Bush said, telling Albanians what they wanted to hear. He said independence was a certainty.

Nearing the end of an eight-day trip, Bush got a hero's reception in this desperately poor country, still struggling to recover from being cut off from the rest of the world for four decades under the harsh rule of dictator Enver Hoxha. Hoxha died in 1985, and Albania emerged from isolation in 1990 but still is one of Europe's most impoverished lands.

Cannons boomed salutes from mountains overlooking the capital. Huge banners proclaimed "Proud to be Partners," and billboards read "President Bush in Albania Making History."

At home, Bush's job approval rating stands at its all-time low. But here, Prime Minister Sali Berisha said Bush was Albania's "greatest and most distinguished guest we have ever had in all times."

Throngs of people grasped Bush's hands, arms and fingers on the streets of Fushe Kruje, a small town near the airport where he stopped to chat in a cafe with business owners. Unused to such adoring crowds in America, Bush reveled in the attention. He kissed women on the cheek, posed for pictures and signed autographs. Someone reached out and rubbed his gray hair.

"Bushie, Bushie," people shouted. Some of the business people have received small loans under U.S. government programs.

Okay, so I've been playing around with the blog software features, and I got the "more" command to work, meaning that long articles will not be published complete on the front page. I will include several paragraphs and then to read the rest of the news article you just click through where it says "More yaddah". Less boring that way.

In this post, I will play with some other commands, see how they come out.

Apparently, the comments commands are totally FUBARed. That's actually okay, since I'm not overly fond of feedback. If I want your opinion, I'll tell it to you ;)

I'm thinking once I'm ready to take this site to the next level, I'll migrate everything over to Movable Type or something equally robust. This little blog software is great for what it does, but that's all it does.

Great. Teach them to kill, fuck up their heads, and send them home to be "normal". We are already seeing marked increases in suicides, homicides, domestic violence and drug/alcohol abuse among returning vets. It happened in 'Nam, too - we fucked those boys up, and expected them to be fine when they came home. We do not take care of our own, apparently.

Soldiers struggle to find therapists

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Soldiers returning from war are finding it more difficult to get mental health treatment because military insurance is cutting payments to therapists, on top of already low reimbursement rates and a tangle of red tape.

Wait lists now extend for months to see a military doctor and it can takes weeks to find a private therapist willing to take on members of the military. The challenge appears great in rural areas, where many National Guard and Reserve troops and their families live.

Back in the mid-80's, when I was a hotshit yuppie in San Francisco, I had a friend named Aaron. Well, more like a friend of the girl I was dating. Anyways, Aaron did something spectacularly stupid one day. And he did another equally spectacularly stupid thing a few days later.

One day, Aaron was at the SF Museum of Modern Art with his art class or somesuch. For reasons he never clearly explained, Aaron slipped away from the group and hid in a cleaning closet.

After the class left the museum, Aaron walked up to a small Picasso sketch, took it down off the wall, put it in his trenchcoat pocket and calmly walked out of the building.

That was the first stupid thing.

It was all over the news that night. Nobody knew who the mysterious MoMA burglar was. The talking heads speculated that a cabal of high-end art thieves had moved into the City and there would soon be a rash of raconteurs and bon vivants absconding with pricey fine arts works. Everyone did too much coke back then, and we all thought we were hotshit and said junk like that.

So Aaron finds out from watching the teevee that the sketch he nicked was worth over $25,000 dollars. That's twenny-five grand in 1980's dollars, not twenny-five grand in today's dollars. For twenny-five grand you could still buy a little condo back then. Suddenly, Aaron doesn't feel like hotshit anymore.

He freaks. He starts driving all over town with the sketch in his backpack. He's hyperventilating, getting more and more paranoid. His blood pressure spikes every time he sees a city squadcar.

Aaron ends up down at the Stonestown Galleria, a huge upscale mall at the southwest end of San Fran by SFSU. He parks in the lot behind Nordstroms, runs to the dumpster, and flings the sketch in. He tears out of the parking lot like the Duke boys smoking Roscoe P. Coltrane, and then he calls his lawyer.

That was stupid thing number two.

Seriously, the police had no clues, the MoMA was so embarrassed at the appalling lack of security for the sketch (c'mon, the kid just walked out with it in his coat!) that they downplayed the incident, and it was off the radar by the next newsnight.

Aaron could have tucked away the framed napkin scribble (admit it, Picasso is a hack) into a safe deposit box and pulled it out for himself decades later as a juicy retirement gift. But nooooo....

So he listens to his lawyer, contritely turns himself in, tells the MoMA people where they can find the piece, and promises to be a good boy and never do it again. Since Aaron is only 18 and non-ethnic, the judge gives him probation and community service.

Every now and then I wonder what happened to Aaron. I suspect he grew up to be an Enron executive...

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This is the news article that got me to thinking about Aaron after all these years:

Stolen drawing returned to Wis. gallery

MILWAUKEE, Associated Press - A Eugene Delacroix drawing of one of his own paintings that hangs in the Louvre Museum has been returned to a Milwaukee gallery nearly two years after it was stolen.

A man walked into DeLind Gallery of Fine Art on Friday afternoon and said he found the drawing in the trash, gallery director Michael Goforth said.

"I was literally crying when he returned this," Goforth said. "It's irreplaceable. It's a French national treasure."

The sepia drawing is called "Entry of the Crusaders Into Constantinople." Delacroix, a French romantic artist, drew the battle scene around 1840 as a study for a larger painting that hangs in the Louvre in Paris. The drawing was priced at $45,000 and had been owned by a private collector who gave it to the gallery on consignment.

A man who frequented the gallery was the only visitor there when the drawing was taken in July 2005, Goforth said.

Shortly after the man left, Goforth went to photograph the drawing for a prospective customer, he said. But the drawing was gone from the easel sitting on a table in another room.

Goforth was the only person working when the theft occurred. The gallery, which had no cameras at the time, has since upgraded its security, owner Bill DeLind said, declining to elaborate.

Police sent a detective to investigate, but because Goforth didn't see the man steal the drawing, authorities couldn't search his residence, he said.

DeLind said he suspects the thief is someone he knows. He has been leaving him messages and putting on his car fliers that contain a picture of the drawing and the words: "Have you seen this artwork?"

On Friday afternoon, another man walked into the gallery and told Goforth he found the drawing in the trash with the gallery's name on it, described the drawing to Goforth and asked him what he would give him for it.

Goforth knew it was the Delacroix piece and offered $100. The man left and returned with the drawing, asking Goforth not to involve police. Goforth agreed and gave him the money, even though he didn't believe his story.

Milwaukee police Capt. Christopher Domagalski confirmed Friday night that a theft occurred at the gallery on July 21, 2005, and said the case was still open. He said police hadn't heard from the gallery.

At the time of the theft, the gallery's insurance company reimbursed the collector who lent it to the gallery. Goforth said he planned to contact the insurance company Monday and expected it to ask the gallery to sell the drawing for them.

He said he had no doubt the drawing was the original. "I knew it was the real deal right when I laid eyes on it," Goforth said.

___

On the Net:

Reckon there is a god after all. We at TitleGoesHere(tm) heartily support society's right to throw the whiny bitch in jail to do her time just like the little people hafta. When are her 15 minutes finally gonna be up? Is news around the world really THAT slow today?

***** BREAKING NEWS *****

Hilton sent back to jail in hysterics

LOS ANGELES, Associated Press - She was taken handcuffed and crying from her home. She was escorted into court disheveled, without makeup, hair askew and face red with tears.

Crying out for her mother when she was ordered back to jail, Paris Hilton's cool, glamorous image evaporated Friday as she gave the impression of a little girl lost in a merciless legal system.

"It's not right!" shouted the weeping Hilton. "Mom!" she called out to Kathy Hilton, who also was in tears.

The 26-year-old hotel heiress tried to move toward her parents but was steered away by two sheriff's deputies, who held her by each arm and hustled her from the courtroom.

Superior Court Judge Michael T. Sauer was apparently unmoved by the pleas of Hilton's lawyers to send her back to home confinement because of an unspecified medical condition. He ordered Hilton returned to a Los Angeles County jail to serve the rest of her 45-day sentence for violating probation in an alcohol-related reckless driving case.

The judge gave no explanation for his ruling. But his comments showed he was affronted by county Sheriff Lee Baca's decision to set aside his instructions and release Hilton after three days in jail to finish her time in the luxury of her Hollywood Hills home.

Her lawyers said the reason for her release was an unspecified medical condition. The judge suggested that could be taken care of at jail medical facilities.

After the hearing, Hilton was taken to a correctional treatment center at the downtown Twin Towers jail for medical and psychiatric examination to determine which facility she will be held in, said sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore.

"She'll be there for at least a couple of days," he said.

The sheriff defended his decision, citing jail crowding — although Hilton was in a special unit and did not have a cellmate — and what he termed "severe medical problems."

He said he had learned from one of her doctors that she was not taking a certain medication while previously in custody, and that her "inexplicable deterioration" puzzled county psychiatrists.

Baca also charged that Hilton received a more severe sentence than the usual penalty for such a crime, which he said would have been either no jail time or direct placement in home confinement with electronic monitoring.

"The only thing I can detect as special treatment is the amount of her sentence," the sheriff said.

But he said he would not try to overrule the judge's decision again.

Hilton's jailhouse saga began Sept. 7, when she failed a sobriety test after police saw her weaving down a street in her Mercedes-Benz on what she said was a late-night hamburger run.

She pleaded no contest to reckless driving and was sentenced to 36 months' probation, alcohol education and $1,500 in fines. In the months that followed she was stopped twice while driving on a suspended license. The second stop landed her in Sauer's courtroom.

After being taken to court Friday in a black-and-white police car, paparazzi sprinting in pursuit and helicopters broadcasting live from above, Hilton entered the courtroom weeping and continued to cry throughout the hearing, which lasted more than an hour.

Her blond hair was pulled back in a disheveled knot, in contrast to the glamorous side-swept style in her booking photo earlier in the week. She was wrapped in a long, gray fuzzy sweat shirt over slacks.

Several times she turned to her parents, seated behind her in the courtroom, and mouthed, "I love you." At one point, she made the sign of the cross and appeared to be praying.

Her body shook constantly as she cried, clutching a ball of tissue, tears running down her face.

Seconds later, the judge announced his decision: "The defendant is remanded to county jail to serve the remainder of her 45-day sentence. This order is forthwith."

Hilton screamed.

Eight deputies immediately ordered all spectators out of the courtroom. Hilton's mother, Kathy, threw her arms around her husband, Rick, and sobbed uncontrollably.

Deputies escorted Hilton out of the room, holding each of her arms as she looked back.

Despite being reincarcerated, she could still be released early. Inmates are given a day off their terms for every four days of good behavior, and her days in home detention counted as custody days. It appeared that Friday would count as her sixth day. Baca indicated she would serve about 18 more days.

Friday's hearing was delayed by a misunderstanding. Hilton apparently thought she was going to be able to participate from home by telephone. But the judge, who had not authorized that, angrily denounced a media outlet for spreading the rumor, although a court spokesman also gave that information to news media. He ordered sheriff's deputies to go to Hilton's home and take her to court. The process took nearly two hours.

Once the hearing began, Sauer was blunt in his criticism of the sheriff for disobeying his orders, which specifically banned home confinement with electronic monitoring.

"I at no time condoned the actions of the sheriff and at no time told him I approved the actions," he said. "At no time did I approve the defendant being released from custody to her home."

The hearing was requested by the city attorney's office, which had prosecuted Hilton and wanted Baca held in contempt for releasing Hilton despite Sauer's order that she go to jail. The judge didn't act on the contempt request.

Hilton's attorney, Richard Hutton, implored the judge to hear testimony in his chambers about Hilton's medical condition before deciding whether to send her to jail. The judge did not respond.

The last lawyer to speak was a deputy city attorney, David Bozanich, who declared: "This is a simple case. There was a court. The Sheriff's Department chose to violate that order. There is no ambiguity."

Truly, in all my fussing and fretting over global warming, this possibility had not occurred to me. What the fuck is next.

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Adoption Group Says Cats Invading Shelters Due to Global Warming

LiveScience.com - Droves of cats and kittens are swarming into animal shelters nationwide, and global warming is to blame, according to one pet adoption group.

Several shelters operated by a national adoption organization called Pets Across America reported a 30 percent increase in intakes of cats and kittens from 2005 to 2006, and other shelters across the nation have reported similar spikes of stray, owned and feral cats.

The cause of this feline flood is an extended cat breeding season thanks to the world’s warming temperatures, according to the group, which is one of the country’s oldest and largest animal welfare organizations.

“Cats are typically warm-weather, spring-time breeders,” said the group’s president, Kathy Warnick. “However, states that typically experience primarily longer and colder winters are now seeing shorter, warmer winters, leading to year-round breeding.”

“Basically, there is no longer a reproduction lull with cat breeding cycles, and unfortunately, it seems more people are bringing boxes of kittens into our agencies during winter now,” she added.

Studies have shown that global warming is altering the breeding seasons of other animals, such as migratory birds and penguins.

One possible solution to stem the tide of cats is to make sure pets are spayed or neutered.

This goes beyond retarded and into the deliberately evil. No more imperialism! No more blood for oil! No trampling on sovereign nations! GODDAMIT, BUSHCO GET OUTTA IRAQ!

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New White House plan: Keep US troops in Iraq permanently.

Washington, USA Today - President Bush used to be fond of saying that American troops would stay in Iraq as long as needed and not a day longer. He isn't saying that anymore.

The new word from the White House is that American troops would be stationed in Iraq permanently on the "Korean model." The analogy is a little strained. The United States has helped to mend the rift between North and South Korea since 1953. But South Korea has had no internal insurgency to worry about.

The plan for permanent bases in Iraq must have been long in the making. The president ignored a recommendation of the Baker-Hamilton Commission that he state that America seeks no permanent bases in Iraq. At one point last year, the Senate and House passed an amendment to the military-spending bill banning the establishment of permanent bases in Iraq. The bill went to conference and then the ban on bases, adopted by both chambers, mysteriously disappeared.

The building of four bases along with a gigantic new American embassy in the Green Zone on the Tigris River has been moving along rapidly. The bases will have runways two miles long to accommodate the largest American planes. The Balad base north of Baghdad covers 14 square miles. Another base is planned for the area that was ancient Babylon.

The new embassy, which will be the largest American mission in the world, will be complete with swimming pool and commissary. Retired General Anthony Zinni has said that permanent bases are "a stupid idea." He said that they will damage America's image in the whole region.

So, the rainforest is being slashed-and-burnt and the Andes are melting at an obscene rate, and Dubya is wiping his ass with serious science and serious solutions... and so is China and India. WE ARE SO FUCKED.

---------------------------

Global warming melts Andean glaciers toward oblivion

CHACALTAYA, Bolivia (Reuters) - Global warming will melt most Andean glaciers in the next 30 years, scientists say, threatening the livelihood of millions of people who depend on them for drinking water, farming and power generation.

Small glaciers are scattered across the Andes and have for long been a crucial source of fresh water in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, thawing in summer months and replenishing themselves in winter. But global warming has driven them into retreat.

The glacier on Bolivia's Chacaltaya mountain -- which means "cold road" in the local Aymara language -- used to be the world's highest ski resort at 18,000 feet above sea level.

But the glacier is now only 10 feet thick on average, down from 49 feet in 1998, and glaciologist Edson Ramirez says it will disappear this year or next.

"This is a process that unfortunately is now irreversible," he said, adding that industrialized nations are doing too little and too late to slash carbon dioxide emissions.

"Even if they were to take measures now, it will take many, many years to replenish these glaciers, because unfortunately the damage has already been done," he said. "Most of these glaciers are similar to the Chacaltaya and that makes us think that those small glaciers could disappear in 20, 30 years."

Over 2 million people in the La Paz region depend heavily on the thawing of Chacaltaya and neighboring glaciers for tap water and, indirectly, for electricity supplies.

"At least 35 percent of the drinking water comes from melting glaciers, and about 40 percent of the electricity," said Oscar Paz, the head of the Bolivian Climate Change Panel, a government task force.

WATER SHORTAGES

Water is already scarce in El Alto, a sprawling lower-class satellite city north of the country's administrative capital La Paz. Almost 1 million people live in El Alto and most homes lack running water.

Daniel Cuencas, a father of four, walks several blocks every day to fetch water from a stream and is well aware of what will happen when the glaciers disappear.

"This right here is ice melt. That is where the drinking water comes from, from the mountains. So we know that there isn't going to be enough water," he said, fetching water with a rusty tin can from the stream.

Water needs will only increase in coming years with the population in the La Paz region expected to double by 2050.

Ecuador's capital Quito, with 1.5 million people, and the Peruvian capital Lima, with 8 million people, also rely on melting glaciers for water and energy supplies.

About 80 percent of the Andean glaciers are similar in size to Chacaltaya at under 1 square kilometer, and experts say they are similarly doomed.

Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru have started drafting plans with scientists to mitigate the negative effects of melting glaciers and experts say they will need to make large investments to find new water and energy sources.

Paz said rich countries should create a global fund to compensate poor nations for the effects of global warming.

"We're the victims of climate change, the underdeveloped countries like Bolivia, which are suffering the effects of shrinking glaciers," Paz said.

Earlier this year, Bolivia's leftist President Evo Morales also blamed pollution from rich nations for the floods, droughts and hailstorms that pounded the poor South American country for three months.

Okay, I've been getting some static about how I've been basically lazy the last few... okay, years. It's been years, OKAY? Fuck you. Lazy in that I haven't really been blogging like I used to, I've just been writing snarky snippets about news articles that frost my shorts or whatever.

The ultimate right, the right to end one's own life, is firmly in the hands of the government here in the Land of the Free. And we all know how great the government is at handling important things. We here at TitleGoesHere(tm) support the individual's right to die with dignity by their own hand. Fuck the government.

----------------------

'Dr. Death' served us all with time in prison

By Sidney Wanzer, MD

What has Jack Kevorkian, now that he has been released after eight years in prison for murder, actually accomplished?

In 1998, he openly dared Michigan to put him in prison for ending the life of a suffering person, and the state did just that. His detractors say he flouted the laws of our society and forced the state to punish him for his deeds. His supporters say he did all of us a service by pointing out what he thought was the right of a dying, suffering person to have autonomy over the manner and timing of death. In doing so, he brought this matter to the acute attention of the public in a way that no one had done before.

The latter is the important outcome. Kevorkian forced us to examine critically the need for new laws that will allow dying persons to end life in certain circumstances when this is the only truly compassionate treatment.

This need to actively end life is a very infrequent happening. The more common and proper sequence of events is that, as a fatal disease progresses, a point will come at which efforts to cure or restore some semblance of well-being are destined to fail.

The astute physician will help the patient and family recognize and define that critical point, so that a decision may be made properly to switch from curative efforts to comfort care only. This considered decision to redefine goals has the important effect of allowing the patient, family and physicians to stop expending emotional energy in fruitless directions and instead to concentrate on preparing for dying.

Comfort the dying

Comfort care becomes the only goal - to shepherd the patient through the dying process with as much calm and choice as is possible. This approach works because modern comfort care is now sophisticated and effective. It is possible to deliver meticulous attention to all the facets of pain relief and to prescribe symptomatic treatment for all forms of distress - physical and emotional - with a degree of efficiency that allows a reasonably comfortable death.

However - and this is a big however - there are occasional instances in which comfort care is applied with the greatest skill possible, and yet the patient continues to suffer intolerably in spite of all measures. This happens in the practicing lifetime of a physician only rarely, but it does happen. In my experience, these situations are self-evident. They cry out that physician-aid in dying is the only humane and compassionate thing left in the spectrum of treatment at the end of life.

Where to draw line

Modern medicine is miraculous, but when its use extends the dying process inappropriately, it can be a disservice to the patient. When a patient actively invites death, it is not suicide, which most of us regard as an irrational act of a mentally ill person. Rather, it is the patient asking for treatment to end suffering by the use of a fatal dose of medication - an option that is legal only in Oregon.

Our country needs a law in every state, similar to that in Oregon, where almost 10 years of experience have shown that we can allow physicians to prescribe a lethal dose of a barbiturate for terminally ill patients who are suffering intolerably. In that state, there has been no abuse and no slippery slope that was so vociferously predicted.

From 1998 (when the law became operative) through 2006, only 292 patients utilized the law to end their lives in order to end suffering, after careful prerequisites. This number is tiny compared with the 85,755 Oregonians who died from the same diseases but without barbiturates.

Without fearing abuse, we should permit intolerably suffering patients the right to exert this ultimate autonomy in choosing the manner of their dying. Oregon and three countries in Europe allow this, but we all should have that option.

Doctors shouldn't have to go to jail for acting compassionately.

-----

The media has been screaming "terror terror terror!!!" over the capture of these homegrown cockroaches who supposedly were planning on blowing up JFK airport. Turns out the terrorism experts are saying something very different than what the White House is saying:

Experts cast doubt on credibility of JFK terror plot

NEW YORK (AFP) - An alleged plot to blow up fuel tanks and pipelines at New York's JFK airport had little chance of success, according to safety experts, who have questioned whether the plot ever posed a real threat.

US authorities said Saturday they had averted an attack that could have resulted in "unfathomable damage, deaths, and destruction," and charged four alleged Islamic radicals with conspiracy to cause an explosion at the airport.

But according to the experts, it would have been next to impossible to cause an explosion in the jet fuel tanks and pipeline. Furthermore, the plotters seem to have lacked the explosives and financial backing to carry out the attack.

John Goglia, a former member of National Transportation Safety Board, said that if the plot had ever been carried out, it would likely have sparked a fire but little else, and certainly not the mass carnage authorities described.

"You could definitely reach the tank, definitely start the fire, but to get the kind of explosion that they were thinking that they were going to get... this is virtually impossible to do," he told AFP.

The fuel pipelines around the airport would similarly burn, rather than explode, because they are a full of fuel and unable to mix with enough oxygen.

"We had a number of fires in the US. All that happens is a big fire," he said. "It won't blow up, it will only burn."

Even if the attackers had managed to blow up a fuel tank, the impact would be limited, he said, citing the example of North Vietnamese forces attacking US fuel dumps during the Vietnam war.

"They hit the fuel tanks with pretty big rockets. You would get a big fire but not a big explosion other than the rocket."

"There is a difference between just exploding the tank and a huge explosion. The tank may explode and blow up some metal, but that certainly wouldn't go very far," he said.

His comments contrasted with those of US Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf, who insisted at the weekend that "the devastation that would be caused had this plot succeeded is just unthinkable."

Jake Magish, an engineer with Supersafe Tank Systems, also cast doubt on the credibility of the plot, saying: "The fantasy that I've heard about the people saying 'they will blow the tank and destroy the airport,' is nonsense."

"There are people there responding to hysteria, I think. But from an engineering point of view, if someone is successful in blowing a hole into a tank, they will just have a fire from one tank.

"There is no way for the fire to go from tank to tank, that is nonsense. It just won't happen."

Besides the alleged plotters' capability, other questions have focused on the main source in the probe -- a convicted drug dealer who infiltrated the group and whose sentence was pending as part of his cooperation with police.

Neal Sonnett, a former federal prosecutor, told the New York Times there was also a danger in overstating how serious or sophisticated a plot really was.

"There unfortunately has been a tendency to shout too loudly about such cases," he said. "To the extent that you over-hype a case, you create fear and paranoia," he said.

The New York Times on Sunday pointedly avoided giving much coverage to the alleged plot, devoting only a brief on its front page continued on the local section, despite the story breaking in the early afternoon on Saturday.

U.S. cuts back climate checks from space

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The Bush administration is drastically scaling back efforts to measure global warming from space, just as the president tries to convince the world the U.S. is ready to take the lead in reducing greenhouse gases.

A confidential report to the White House, obtained by The Associated Press, warns that U.S. scientists will soon lose much of their ability to monitor warming from space using a costly and problem-plagued satellite initiative begun more than a decade ago.

Because of technology glitches and a near-doubling in the original $6.5 billion cost, the Defense Department has decided to downsize and launch four satellites paired into two orbits, instead of six satellites and three orbits.

The satellites were intended to gather weather and climate data, replacing existing satellites as they come to the end of their useful lifetimes beginning in the next couple of years.

The reduced system of four satellites will now focus on weather forecasting. Most of the climate instruments needed to collect more precise data over long periods are being eliminated.

Instead, the Pentagon and two partners — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA — will rely on European satellites for most of the climate data.

"Unfortunately, the recent loss of climate sensors ... places the overall climate program in serious jeopardy," NOAA and NASA scientists told the White House in the Dec. 11 report obtained by the AP.

They said they will face major gaps in data that can be collected only from satellites about ice caps and sheets, surface levels of seas and lakes, sizes of glaciers, surface radiation, water vapor, snow cover and atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Rick Piltz, director of Climate Science Watch, a watchdog program of the Washington-based Government Accountability Project, called the situation a crisis.

"We're going to start being blinded in our ability to observe the planet," said Piltz, whose group provided the AP with the previously undisclosed report. "It's criminal negligence, and the leaders in the climate science community are ringing the alarm bells on this crisis."

Bush has repeatedly cited his administration's record on researching global warming as a response to criticism of his opposition to forced reductions in the greenhouse gases blamed for it. The administration has been spending about $5 billion a year on global warming: $2 billion on climate research and $3 billion on technologies for combatting it.

Last week, the president proposed the idea of the 15 largest global-warming polluters — the U.S. is the largest, followed closely by China — meeting to set goals for fixing the problem while leaving it up to each nation just how to do it.

The problem will be a major topic at this week's summit of world leaders in Europe.

Bush requested $331 million for work on the scaled-back satellite system next year in his fiscal 2008 budget proposal. Congress has yet to act on it.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences have both cautioned that downsizing the satellite program will result in major gaps in the continuity and quality of the data gathered about the Earth from space.

NASA and NOAA agreed in April to restore sensors that will enable the satellites to map ozone. NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher said that would give scientists a better idea of the content and distribution of atmospheric gases.

But seven other separate climate sensors are still being eliminated or substantially downgraded by lower-quality equipment to save money, according to the report to the White House. Most of the satellites, which were scheduled to launch starting next year, have been delayed to between 2013 and 2026.

White House science adviser Jack Marburger, for whom the report was intended, acknowledged that climate scientists had been depending greatly on the planned satellites.

"We're obviously very concerned about this," he told the AP. "It got in trouble and we couldn't fit all those instruments on it ... leaving us with a number of problems and questions: How do we maintain our momentum in this very important area of science?"

NASA spokeswoman Tabatha Thompson told the AP a final version of the "impacts" report was delivered to Marburger on Jan. 8. It was not made public because it is "a pre-decisional document within the administration," she said.

NASA and NOAA also are looking for guidance from the National Research Council, which is holding a workshop on the satellites this month. Chet Koblinsky, director of NOAA's climate program office, told the council the satellites "represented the cornerstone of the nation's future space-based climate research program," according to PowerPoint slides obtained by AP.

The delays were caused in part because of problems with an infrared sensor that officials either didn't monitor closely enough or didn't bring to the attention of their managers, the Commerce Department's inspector general reported last year. That report also said a contractor on the project was receiving excessive fees.

The National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System, or NPOESS, was first announced in 1994. It was an effort to combine weather-forecasting satellites operated by the Defense Department and NOAA and add climate data-gathering instruments.

The plans also involved the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites and the National Space Development Agency of Japan.

By 2005, however, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, found the costs for the U.S. satellites could run to $9.7 billion and were almost a year and a half behind schedule. The Pentagon last year pegged the cost at $11.5 billion and found that it was further behind schedule.

Jerry Mahlman, a former scientist at NOAA who is now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said he and other colleagues warned of problems as far back as 1995.

Shifty repuglicans still using illegal voter disenfranchisement techniques and nobody cares.

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What the heck is vote caging, and why should we care?

By Dahlia Lithwick, Slate Magazine

Last week, in her testimony before the House judiciary committee, Monica Goodling referred several times to "vote caging" possibly done by Arkansas' soon to be ex-interim, never-confirmed U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin. Yet Goodling was questioned about this almost not at all, nor did the media do much more than report the words of the former liaison between the White House and Alberto Gonzales (why a "liaison" is required between two institutions with no boundaries between them is incomprehensible, but perhaps another story). Meanwhile, liberal talk radio, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the blogosphere went nuts. So, which is it: Is vote caging the most underreported part of this U.S. attorneys scandal or the most over-hyped?

One of the reasons the mainstream news reports (including mine) barely touched the vote-caging story was that nobody had any idea what Goodling was talking about. "Vote caging, what's that?" we e-mailed each other at Slate. The confusion seemed to extend to Goodling herself. The subject came up in her testimony about former Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty. In saying he had not been forthright with the House judiciary committee in his testimony on the firing of the U.S. attorneys, she cited three areas, one of which was McNulty's failure "to disclose that he had some knowledge of allegations that Tim Griffin had been involved in 'vote caging' in the president's 2004 campaign," when he spoke to Congress.

Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., asked Goodling to "explain what caging is," clarifying that she was unfamiliar with the term. Goodling fumbled around, muttered something about, "it's a direct-mail term, that people who do direct mail, when, when they separate addresses that may be good versus addresses that may be bad," then made sure to end with, "I don't … I believe that Mr. Griffin doesn't believe that he, that he did anything wrong there and there, there actually is a very good reason for it, for a very good explanation." Which explanation Goodling did not then provide.

To recap, Goodling told the judiciary committee that: 1) Griffin was possibly involved in caging; 2) he doesn't believe he did anything wrong (she is less certain, it seems); and 3) McNulty lied under oath when he downplayed his knowledge of these allegations to the committee.

That would suggest that vote caging is a big deal. Is it?

Vote caging is an illegal trick to suppress minority voters (who tend to vote Democrat) by getting them knocked off the voter rolls if they fail to answer registered mail sent to homes they aren't living at (because they are, say, at college or at war). The Republican National Committee reportedly stopped the practice following a consent decree in a 1986 case. Google the term and you'll quickly arrive at the Wizard of Oz of caging, Greg Palast, investigative reporter and author of the wickedly funny Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans—Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. Palast started reporting allegations of Republican vote caging for the BBC's Newsnight in 2004. He's been almost alone on the story since then. Palast contends, both in Armed Madhouse and widely through the liberal blogosphere, that vote caging, an illegal voter-suppression scheme, happened in Florida in 2004 this way:

The Bush-Cheney operatives sent hundreds of thousands of letters marked "Do not forward" to voters' homes. Letters returned ("caged") were used as evidence to block these voters' right to cast a ballot on grounds they were registered at phony addresses. Who were the evil fakers? Homeless men, students on vacation and—you got to love this—American soldiers. Oh yeah: most of them are Black voters.

Why weren't these African-American voters home when the Republican letters arrived? The homeless men were on park benches, the students were on vacation—and the soldiers were overseas.

Palast supplies evidence linking Tim Griffin, then-research director for the RNC, to this caging plot; specifically, a series of confidential e-mails to Republican Party muckety-mucks with the suggestive heading "RE: caging." The e-mails were accidentally sent to a George Bush parody site. They also contained suggestively named spreadsheets, headed "caging" as well. The names on the lists are what Palast's researchers deemed to be homeless men and soldiers deployed in Iraq. Here are the e-mails.

As Palast points out—and Griffin himself has observed—the American media barely touched this story, and Griffin has yet to explain the e-mails or the lists. He did tell The New Yorker's Jane Mayer last March that "caging is not a derogatory term. ... [I]t's a direct-mail term. It derives from caging categories of mail in steel shelves and files." Still, that hardly explains why he was allegedly caging only transient African-American voters in those shelves or files, which would likely violate the Voting Rights Act.

Palast is surely not above overstatement. He is one of many who have repeated the claim that, "In an Aug. 24 e-mail, the Justice Department's Monica Goodling wrote to Sampson, that Griffin's nomination would face opposition in Congress because he was involved 'in massive Republican projects in Florida and elsewhere by which Republicans challenged tens of thousand of absentee votes. Coincidentally, many of those challenged votes were in black precincts.' " Goodling wrote no such thing. That quote is from an article circulated by Goodling on Aug. 24. It's an unfair smear of both Griffin and Goodling (both of whom have proven amply capable of smearing themselves).

Still, Palast's vote-caging claims are hardly unbelievable. Republicans have been systematically trying to suppress minority votes for decades, most recently calling it pushback for rampant liberal voter fraud. Our own former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist was alleged to have mastered the art. And while bouncing voters from the rolls on the basis of their race violates federal law, it's not beyond imagining that eager young "loyal Bushies" aren't all that bothered by federal laws, especially if there's a way to bend rather than overtly break them.

From the point of view of the ongoing DoJ scandal, perhaps what's most urgent about the vote-caging claims is that they go a long, long way toward explaining why Karl Rove and Harriet Miers were so determined to get Griffin seated in the Arkansas U.S. Attorney's office, and to do so without a confirmation hearing. If, as the Justice Department has continued to insist, Griffin was eminently qualified for the position, why did he need to be spared the hearing at all costs? And once it became clear that he would undergo a hearing, why did Griffin sideline himself with the colorful observation that undergoing Senate confirmation would be "like volunteering to stand in front of a firing squad in the middle of a three-ring circus?" Griffin—who is now in job talks with the Fred Thompson campaign—sure looks like a guy hiding something, and if vote caging is that something, it becomes even more interesting that the White House was pushing him forward.

Why did Goodling choose to shine a beacon on the vote-caging allegations in her perfectly rehearsed, highly coached testimony last week? Having slaved to secure Griffin's U.S. attorney post, why raise the allegations against him and then subtly distance herself from him, if there is nothing to see here? Professor Rick Hasen of Loyola Law School, who wrote earlier this month about voter fraud, is my personal voting-law guru. (Everyone needs one.) When I asked him whether the mainstream media were making a mistake in blowing off the vote-caging story, he said Goodling's mention of it "makes me suspect that there's something there worth investigating by the MSM, even if you don't buy into the grand conspiracy theories."

If the media have fallen down on this story, how much more so has Congress? Nobody tried to press Goodling about what McNulty allegedly knew and withheld from Congress in regard to Griffin's alleged vote-caging schemes. I'd be interested in the answer. I'd also like to hear what Griffin himself has to say about those lists the BBC has. If the RNC was paying good money to send registered mail to homeless black men in Florida, there must have been a reason for it. Griffin, after all, has left his Arkansas post and is looking for work. (Tim, if Sen. Thompson is a no-go, I need a babysitter next Saturday!) I bet he'd like nothing better than to clear his name and remove the taint of voter suppression from his résumé.

Latest BushCourt horseshit. I just KNEW all those BushieBoys were gonna set the country back 100 years in terms of equal rights, and here they are, true to form, ruling that men and women can be paid differently for the same work.