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Larry Flynt finds the dirt on John Bolton

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Mr. Flynt has obtained information from numerous sources that Mr. Bolton participated in paid visits to Plato’s Retreat, the popular swingers club that operated in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

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Dow drops 111 on Wal-Mart profit warning

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Dow drops 111 on Wal-Mart profit warning: “The Associated Press/NEW YORK

By MICHAEL J. MARTINEZ

AP Business Writer

The Associated Press/NEW YORK

By MICHAEL J. MARTINEZ

AP Business Writer

Dow drops 111 on Wal-Mart profit warning

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TODAY’S HEADLINES

Culture Wars Hit Corporate America

How Microsoft Changed Its Mind

A Digital Warrior for Kodak

More Knots in Paul Allen’s Cable Tangle

Don’t Spoil Disney’s Ride

The High Cost of Easing Off Tobacco

Meet Your Organ Match Online

Bring Your CDs Into the iPod Age

Yahoo’s Music Rivals Sing the Blues

A Surprise Dip in the Trade Deficit

Playing Defense, Scoring Big

High Prices, Unhappy Returns

Nobody Likes a Backseat Striver

Scaring Up Paranormal Profits

How Girl on the Go! Got Moving

The Big Concerns of Small Business

Europe’s Small-Cap Fever

Madrid’s Latin Play Is Paying Off

Stan Shih on Taiwan and China

A Tech Boom This Time?

? More Headlines

MAY. 12 4:39 P.M. ET Stocks tumbled sharply Thursday as a second-quarter profit warning from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. overshadowed strong economic news and a sharp drop in oil prices. The Dow fell more than 100 points for the second time this week.

Investors’ fears of an economic slowdown were heightened after Wal-Mart missed Wall Street’s profit expectations for the quarter and, more importantly, said high gasoline prices have hurt customer spending and will affect the company’s second-quarter results.

That put a damper on a very positive Commerce Department report, which showed a 1.4 percent increase in retail sales, the best gain in six months. Analysts had been expecting a rise of 0.8 percent.

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Combined with oil falling below $49 per barrel, the balance of news could be swinging in the market’s favor, but investors’ pessimism instead sent stocks falling.

“Wal-Mart is overshadowing it, but the fact remains the economic news is good. It indicates that the mild slowdown in economic activity we’ve seen is probably going to be short lived,” said Peter Cardillo, chief strategist and senior vice president at S.W. Bach & Co. “We’ll probably have a belated positive reaction over the next day or two once the effects of Wal-Mart begin to dissipate.”

According to preliminary calculations, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 110.77, or 1.08 percent, to 10,189.48.

Broader stock indicators also lost considerable ground. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index was down 11.75, or 1 percent, at 1,159.36, and the Nasdaq composite index fell 7.67, or 0.39 percent, to 1,963.88.

The price of oil price dropped sharply for a second straight session. But it remains high enough going into the summer driving season to exacerbate worries of an economic slowdown as consumers spend more on gasoline and less on everything else. A barrel of light crude settled at $48.54, down $1.91, on the New York Mercantile Exchange — near an 11-week low. The fall in oil prices prompted a selloff in energy stocks, however.

The bond market edged higher as stocks fell, with the yield on the 10-year Treasury note falling to 4.17 percent from 4.18 percent late Wednesday. The dollar rose to a 2005 high against the euro and made gains against other major currencies. Gold prices fell.

Investors continued to focus on the Federal Reserve and interest rates, despite the good economic news. Many on Wall Street are concerned that higher rates could choke off economic growth, but also that inflation may take hold if rates are too low.

“It’s clear that the economy is growing, and it’s growing in a way you’d hope it would be in this point in the cycle,” said Hans Olsen, managing director and chief investment officer at Bingham Legg Advisers in Boston. “The economy is throwing a party and the stock market’s not attending.”

While profits at Wal-Mart rose 14 percent from the first quarter last year, the company’s warning on its second-quarter earnings unnerved investors who have grown accustomed to strong gains at the nation’s largest retailer. Wal-Mart skidded 95 cents to $47.65 after missing analysts’ expectations by a penny per share and saying that its 2005 profit forecasts could be difficult to achieve.

Target Corp. climbed 60 cents to $48.80 after the retailer posted robust sales for the quarter and saw earnings rise 15 percent. The company beat Wall Street’s profit forecasts by 2 cents per share.

Embattled Wall Street firm Morgan Stanley dropped 45 cents to $49.40 after a group of dissident shareholders publicized their plan to spin off the company’s investment banking business from the rest of the firm, essentially reversing its 1997 merger with Dean Witter & Co. The dissidents claim their plan was developed with the help of institutional shareholders.

3M Co. has agreed to purchase filtration products maker Cuno Inc. for $1.35 billion in cash and assumed debt, a deal that would expand 3M’s reach in the liquid- and gas-filtration market. 3M lost $1.21 to $75.78, while Cuno surged 29.2 percent, or $16.03, to $70.85.

Ameritrade Holding Corp. added 4 cents to $13.80 after the company said it is not for sale, rebuffing a takeover offer from E-Trade Financial Corp. E-Trade was down 34 cents at $12.04 on the news.

Declining issues outnumbered advancers by more than 5 to 2 on the New York Stock Exchange, where volume came to 1.58 billion shares, compared with 1.41 billion on Wednesday.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies was down 8.68, or 1.5 percent, at 586.89.

Overseas, Japan’s Nikkei stock average fell 0.38 percent. In Europe, Britain’s FTSE 100 was up 0.37 percent, Germany’s DAX index rose 0.54 percent, and France’s CAC-40 gained 0.91 percent for the session.

Dow drops 111 on Wal-Mart profit warning

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TODAY’S HEADLINES

Culture Wars Hit Corporate America

How Microsoft Changed Its Mind

A Digital Warrior for Kodak

More Knots in Paul Allen’s Cable Tangle

Don’t Spoil Disney’s Ride

The High Cost of Easing Off Tobacco

Meet Your Organ Match Online

Bring Your CDs Into the iPod Age

Yahoo’s Music Rivals Sing the Blues

A Surprise Dip in the Trade Deficit

Playing Defense, Scoring Big

High Prices, Unhappy Returns

Nobody Likes a Backseat Striver

Scaring Up Paranormal Profits

How Girl on the Go! Got Moving

The Big Concerns of Small Business

Europe’s Small-Cap Fever

Madrid’s Latin Play Is Paying Off

Stan Shih on Taiwan and China

A Tech Boom This Time?

? More Headlines

MAY. 12 4:39 P.M. ET Stocks tumbled sharply Thursday as a second-quarter profit warning from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. overshadowed strong economic news and a sharp drop in oil prices. The Dow fell more than 100 points for the second time this week.

Investors’ fears of an economic slowdown were heightened after Wal-Mart missed Wall Street’s profit expectations for the quarter and, more importantly, said high gasoline prices have hurt customer spending and will affect the company’s second-quarter results.

That put a damper on a very positive Commerce Department report, which showed a 1.4 percent increase in retail sales, the best gain in six months. Analysts had been expecting a rise of 0.8 percent.

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Newsday.com: GOP Senator Breaks Ranks, Attacks Bolton

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Newsday.com: GOP Senator Breaks Ranks, Attacks Bolton

WASHINGTON — For a grindingly tense moment, John R. Bolton’s U.N. prospects dangled in the balance. Republican George Voinovich of Ohio was laying out a case against Bolton for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, calling President Bush’s nominee to be the next United Nations ambassador “the poster child of what someone in the diplomatic corps should not be.”

After weeks of deliberation by the committee, interviews with 29 past and present U.S. officials and examination of thousands of pages of documents, “I have come to the conclusion that the United States can do better than John Bolton,” he said in a low voice.

Democrats, yearning for Republican support, leaned forward. It seemed the 10-8 Republican majority might disintegrate and be replaced by a 9-9 tie that would stop the nomination. Perhaps Voinovich would touch off an avalanche that would bury the blunt-speaking undersecretary of state.

But Voinovich suddenly hesitated, put his prepared statement aside and changed the course he had seemed to be on — enough to keep the nomination alive and possibly ensure its approval by the full Senate.

“Mr. Chairman,” Voinovich said, “I am not so arrogant to think that I should impose my judgment and perspective of the U.S. position in the world community on the rest of my colleagues. We owe it to the president to give Mr. Bolton an up-or-down vote on the floor of the U.S. Senate.”

The committee, he said, should move the nomination along — but without a recommendation to approve Bolton. “Let the Senate work its will,” he said.

At day’s end, Voinovich prevailed. By a 10-8 vote the committee followed his recommendation, and now it will be up to the Senate itself to decide.

Afterward, Voinovich said he would vote against Bolton on the floor. But three other Republicans who had indicated they were having a tough time making up their minds, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, registered their support for confirmation.

The Republicans control the Senate 55 to 44, with one independent.

The Ohio senator declined to predict the outcome. But he was certain of one thing: “My feeling was this should not be decided by the committee.”

“I intend to do the best to share my concerns about him with my colleagues in the Senate, hopefully to convince them to not just rubber-stamp this, but rather give this thoughtful consideration.”

Voinovich declined to say whether he had tipped off the White House to his unusual move. But he hinted there was no reason for surprise. “I think they probably knew where I was coming from,” he said.

The White House responded with care. Spokesman Scott McClellan said, “We respect Senator Voinovich’s decision, but there are many people who agree with the president that John Bolton is the right person at the right time for this important position.”

The Democrats still hoped this was a break in their direction.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden of Delaware, who led the drive against Bolton, called on Bush to withdraw the nomination.

Sen. Barbara Boxer of California said of Bush, “I guess he wants a fight and we are going to have a fight.”

===========SNIP=================

Hey, her name ain’t BOXER for nothing. Kick Ass Babs!

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Good Riddamce to Bad Rubbish- Dennis Miller leaves CNBC before they boot his ass

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Broadcasting & Cable: The Business of Television
===SNIP=======
Dennis Miller is leaving his sorry television show on CNBC before they fire him. I say good riddance to bad rubbish. Hey kiddo, your Neo-con rap needs more than a rim shot to make it hip…you ain’t cool, you just chilly, and chilly never been cool Skeezicks!

Look, no two ways about it, Miller has talent for standup. Even as much as I hate his ass, through his arrogant hubris, he has quick wits, but when you marry those quick wits with a tired, stiff shirted conservative riff, it gets old REAL quick. In his old show on cable, he at least had that schtick where he would stand in front of that big tv and make fun of still photos, putting his (or his writer’s) captions. It was hilarious. But, it’s just wrong for such a wrongheaded asshole to have quick wits, because he misuses them.

It’s like giving the improvisionational skills of Robin Williams, or biting satire of George Carlin, to a buffoon like Cheney or King George the Coward. It would be like giving a body like that of Anna Nicole, to a nun…whatta waste!

So, speaking of waste, good riddance to bad rubbish.

Adieu Miller, we hardly knew you..but didn’t want to anyway.
~Code

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Dark days at Wal-Mart; bright times for Target

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Dark days at Wal-Mart; bright times for Target

Dark days at Wal-Mart; bright times for Target

May 13, 2005

BY ANNE D’INNOCENZIO Advertisement

NEW YORK — Wal-Mart, struggling with higher gasoline prices and slippage in its leadership in the retail industry, reported lower-than-expected first-quarter earnings Thursday, and offered a disappointing profit outlook.

Discount rival Target, which keeps sharpening its appeal to higher-income consumers, enjoyed first-quarter results that exceeded expectations. It offered an upbeat outlook.

Shares of Wal-Mart fell 95 cents, or 2 percent, to $47.65. Before Thursday, they had dropped 11 percent in the past year compared with an 8.8 percent gain for Target. Shares of Target rose 60 cents, or 1.2 percent, to $48.80.

”There’s no question that higher gasoline prices have hurt Wal-Mart’s consumer, but Wal-Mart is struggling with store-level execution,” said Bob Buchanan, a retail analyst with St. Louis-based A.G. Edwards. ”They’re slow at checkout, and they’re missing a lot of fashion on the selling floor. Target continues to do a better job in merchandising and executions. And its checkout is lightening fast.”

Although Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart has made some moves to expand into trendier and better quality merchandise, analysts say it has a way to go.

Moreover, Buchanan believes that controversial issues, from gender discrimination to wage-and-hour violations, that continue to dog the retailer have started to take a toll on its performance.

Wal-Mart reported a 14 percent increase in first-quarter earnings, missing Wall Street forecasts by 2 cents a share. It also warned that second-quarter results will be lower than analysts expected, and said its annual profit goal could be difficult to achieve.

Target, which has expanded its merchandise with designer names like Isaac Mizrahi, enjoyed a 15 percent profit increase that was slightly ahead of Wall Street projections. Chairman and CEO Bob Ulrich said he remains confident the company will ”continue to enjoy profitable market share growth throughout 2005 and beyond.”

The news came as the Commerce Department reported retail sales for April jumped 1.4 percent in April, the strongest performance in six months. It was far better than the 0.8 percent gain many analysts expected.

Wal-Mart said quarterly net income grew to $2.5 billion, or 58 cents per share, in the three months ended April 30 from $2.2 billion, or 50 cents per share, a year earlier. The company said first-quarter earnings were boosted by $145 million, or 3 cents per share, from tax and legal resolutions. Excluding the items, earnings per share totaled 55 cents per share, a penny below Wall Street expectations.

Sales rose 10 percent to $70.9 billion from $64.76 billion a year ago, while total revenue including sales and other income grew to $71.7 billion from $65.4 billion a year ago.

A consensus of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial expected the company to earn 56 cents per share on sales of $72 billion.

Wal-Mart expects sales below expectations for the second quarter, and projected per-share earnings for the period of between 63 cents and 67 cents.

Analysts polled by Thomson Financial had expected 70 cents in the second quarter.

Meanwhile, Target earned $494 million, or 55 cents per share, in the three months ended April 30, up from $432 million, or 47 cents per share, a year earlier. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial expected 53 cents per share on sales of $11.53 billion.

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People’s Daily Online — Students hold anti-US protests in Kabul

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People’s Daily Online — Students hold anti-US protests in KabulSeveral hundreds of students from Kabul University hold anti-US protests on the street in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan, May 12, 2005. The university students, angered by a report in Newsweek magazine that US interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba had desecrated the Quran to intimidate prisoners, started demonstrations in eastern city of Jalalabad on Tuesday and the protests spread in some other cities on Wednesday.

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Dr. Hager’s Family Values

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Dr. Hager’s Family ValuesDr. Hager’s Family Values

by AYELISH MCGARVEY

[from the May 30, 2005 issue]

Late last October Dr. W. David Hager, a prominent obstetrician-gynecologist and Bush Administration appointee to the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), took to the pulpit as the featured speaker at a morning service. He stood in the campus chapel at Asbury College, a small evangelical Christian school nestled among picturesque horse farms in the small town of Wilmore in Kentucky’s bluegrass region. Hager is an Asburian nabob; his elderly father is a past president of the college, and Hager himself currently sits on his alma mater’s board of trustees. Even the school’s administrative building, Hager Hall, bears the family name.

That day, a mostly friendly audience of 1,500 students and faculty packed into the seats in front of him. With the autumn sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows, Hager opened his Bible to the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel and looked out into the audience. “I want to share with you some information about how…God has called me to stand in the gap,” he declared. “Not only for others, but regarding ethical and moral issues in our country.”

For Hager, those moral and ethical issues all appear to revolve around sex: In both his medical practice and his advisory role at the FDA, his ardent evangelical piety anchors his staunch opposition to emergency contraception, abortion and premarital sex. Through his six books–which include such titles as Stress and the Woman’s Body and As Jesus Cared for Women, self-help tomes that interweave syrupy Christian spirituality with paternalistic advice on women’s health and relationships–he has established himself as a leading conservative Christian voice on women’s health and sexuality.

And because of his warm relationship with the Bush Administration, Hager has had the opportunity to see his ideas influence federal policy. In December 2003 the FDA advisory committee of which he is a member was asked to consider whether emergency contraception, known as Plan B, should be made available over the counter. Over Hager’s dissent, the committee voted overwhelmingly to approve the change. But the FDA rejected its recommendation, a highly unusual and controversial decision in which Hager, The Nation has learned, played a key role. Hager’s reappointment to the committee, which does not require Congressional approval, is expected this June, but Bush’s nomination of Dr. Lester Crawford as FDA director has been bogged down in controversy over the issue of emergency contraception. Crawford was acting director throughout the Plan B debacle, and Senate Democrats, led by Hillary Clinton and Patty Murray, are holding up his nomination until the agency revisits its decision about going over the counter with the pill.

When Hager’s nomination to the FDA was announced in the fall of 2002, his conservative Christian beliefs drew sharp criticism from Democrats and prochoice groups. David Limbaugh, the lesser light in the Limbaugh family and author of Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging Political War Against Christianity, said the left had subjected Hager to an “anti-Christian litmus test.” Hager’s valor in the face of this “religious profiling” earned him the praise and lasting support of evangelical Christians, including such luminaries as Charles Colson, Dr. James Dobson and Franklin Graham, son of the Rev. Billy Graham.

Back at Asbury, Hager cast himself as a victim of religious persecution in his sermon. “You see…there is a war going on in this country,” he said gravely. “And I’m not speaking about the war in Iraq. It’s a war being waged against Christians, particularly evangelical Christians. It wasn’t my scientific record that came under scrutiny [at the FDA]. It was my faith…. By making myself available, God has used me to stand in the breach…. Just as he has used me, he can use you.”

Up on the dais, several men seated behind Hager nodded solemnly in agreement. But out in the audience, Linda Carruth Davis–co-author with Hager of Stress and the Woman’s Body, and, more saliently, his former wife of thirty-two years–was enraged. “It was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard,” she recalled months later, through clenched teeth.

According to Davis, Hager’s public moralizing on sexual matters clashed with his deplorable treatment of her during their marriage. Davis alleges that between 1995 and their divorce in 2002, Hager repeatedly sodomized her without her consent. Several sources on and off the record confirmed that she had told them it was the sexual and emotional abuse within their marriage that eventually forced her out. “I probably wouldn’t have objected so much, or felt it was so abusive if he had just wanted normal [vaginal] sex all the time,” she explained to me. “But it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the [anal] sex that was so horrible.”

Not once during the uproar over Hager’s FDA appointment did any reporter solicit the opinion of the woman now known as Linda Davis–she remarried in November 2002 to James Davis, a Methodist minister, and relocated to southern Georgia–on her husband’s record, even though she contributed to much of his self-help work in the Christian arena (she remains a religious and political conservative). She intermittently thought of telling her story but refrained, she says, out of respect for her adult children. It was Hager’s sermon at Asbury last October that finally changed her mind. Davis was there to hear her middle son give a vocal performance; she was prepared to hear her ex-husband inveigh against secular liberals, but she was shocked to hear him speak about their divorce when he took to the pulpit.

“In early 2002,” Hager told the churchgoers that day, “my world fell apart…. After thirty-two years of marriage, I was suddenly alone in a new home that we had built as our dream home. Time spent ‘doing God’s will’ had kept me from spending the time I needed to nourish my marriage.” Hager noted with pride that in his darkest hour, Focus on the Family estimated that 50 million people worldwide were praying for him.

Linda Davis quietly fumed in her chair. “He had the gall to stand under the banner of holiness of the Lord and lie, by the sin of omission,” she told me. “It’s what he didn’t say–it’s the impression he left.”

David Hager is not the fringe character and fundamentalist faith healer that some of his critics have made him out to be. In fact, he is a well-credentialed doctor. In Kentucky Hager has long been recognized as a leading Ob-Gyn at Lexington’s Central Baptist Hospital and a faculty member at the University of Kentucky’s medical school. And in the 1990s several magazines, including Modern Healthcare and Good Housekeeping, counted him among the best doctors for women in the nation.

Yet while Hager doesn’t advocate the substitution of conservative Christianity for medicine, his religious ideology underlies an all-encompassing paternalism in his approach to his women patients. “Even though I was trained as a medical specialist,” Hager explained in the preface to As Jesus Cared for Women, “it wasn’t until I began to see how Jesus treated women that I understood how I, as a doctor, should treat them.” To underscore this revelation, Hager recounted case after case in which he acted as confidant, spiritual adviser and even father figure to his grateful patients. As laid out in his writings, Hager’s worldview is not informed by a sense of inherent equality between men and women. Instead, men are expected to act as benevolent authority figures for the women in their lives. (In one of his books, he refers to a man who raped his wife as “selfish” and “sinful.”) But to model gender relations on the one Jesus had with his followers is to leave women dangerously exposed in the event that the men in their lives don’t meet the high standard set by God Himself–trapped in a permanent state of dependence hoping to be treated well.

In tandem with his medical career, Hager has been an aggressive advocate for the political agenda of the Christian right. A member of Focus on the Family’s Physician Resource Council and the Christian Medical and Dental Society, Hager assisted the Concerned Women for America in submitting a “Citizen’s Petition” to the FDA in August 2002 to halt distribution and marketing of the abortion pill, RU-486. It was this record of conservative activism that ignited a firestorm when the Bush Administration first floated his name for chairman of the FDA’s advisory committee in the fall of 2002. In the end, the FDA found a way to dodge the controversy: It issued a stealth announcement of Hager’s appointment to the panel (to be one of eleven members, not chairman) on Christmas Eve. Liberals were furious that they weren’t able to block his appointment. For many months afterward, an outraged chain letter alerting women to the appointment of a man with religious views “far outside the mainstream” snaked its way around the Internet, lending the whole episode the air of urban legend.

Back in Lexington, where the couple continued to live, Linda Hager, as she was still known at the time, was sinking into a deep depression, she says. Though her marriage had been dead for nearly a decade, she could not see her way clear to divorce; she had no money of her own and few marketable skills. But life with David Hager had grown unbearable. As his public profile increased, so did the tension in their home, which she says periodically triggered episodes of abuse. “I would be asleep,” she recalls, “and since [the sodomy] was painful and threatening, I woke up. Sometimes I acquiesced once he had started, just to make it go faster, and sometimes I tried to push him off…. I would [confront] David later, and he would say, ‘You asked me to do that,’ and I would say, ‘No, I never asked for it.'”

I first heard of Davis’s experience in 2004 through a friend of hers. After a few telephone conversations, she agreed to have me fly down to see her in her modest parsonage in Georgia, to tell me her story on the record. With her mod reading glasses, stylish bob and clever outfits, Davis, 55, is a handsome woman with a sharp wit. She spoke with me over two days in January.

Linda Davis (n?e Carruth) first met David Hager on the campus of Asbury College in 1967. “On the very first date he sat me down and told me he was going to marry me,” Davis remembers. “I was so overwhelmed by this aggressive approach of ‘I see you and I want you’ that I was completely seduced by it.”

Davis, a former beauty queen, was a disengaged student eager to get married and start a family. A Hager-Carruth marriage promised prestige and wealth for the couple; her father was a famous Methodist evangelist, and his father was then president of Asbury. “On the surface, it just looked so good,” she remembers. The couple married in 1970, while Hager completed medical school at the University of Kentucky.

“I don’t think I was married even a full year before I realized that I had made a horrible mistake,” Davis says. By her account, Hager was demanding and controlling, and the couple shared little emotional intimacy. “But,” she says, “the people around me said, ‘Well, you’ve made your bed, and now you have to lie in it.'” So Davis commenced with family making and bore three sons: Philip, in 1973; Neal, in 1977; and Jonathan, in 1979.

Sometime between the births of Neal and Jonathan, Hager embarked on an affair with a Bible-study classmate who was a friend of Davis’s. A close friend of Davis’s remembers her calling long distance when she found out: “She was angry and distraught, like any woman with two children would be. But she was committed to working it out.”

Sex was always a source of conflict in the marriage. Though it wasn’t emotionally satisfying for her, Davis says she soon learned that sex could “buy” peace with Hager after a long day of arguing, or insure his forgiveness after she spent too much money. “Sex was coinage; it was a commodity,” she said. Sometimes Hager would blithely shift from vaginal to anal sex. Davis protested. “He would say, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to have anal sex with you; I can’t feel the difference,'” Davis recalls incredulously. “And I would say, ‘Well then, you’re in the wrong business.'”

By the 1980s, according to Davis, Hager was pressuring her to let him videotape and photograph them having sex. She consented, and eventually she even let Hager pay her for sex that she wouldn’t have otherwise engaged in–for example, $2,000 for oral sex, “though that didn’t happen very often because I hated doing it so much. So though it was more painful, I would let him sodomize me, and he would leave a check on the dresser,” Davis admitted to me with some embarrassment. This exchange took place almost weekly for several years.

Money was an explosive issue in their household. Hager kept an iron grip on the family purse strings. Initially the couple’s single checking account was in Hager’s name only, which meant that Davis had to appeal to her husband for cash, she says. Eventually he relented and opened a dual account. Davis recalls that Hager would return home every evening and make a beeline for his office to balance the checkbook, often angrily summoning her to account for the money she’d spent that day. Brenda Bartella Peterson, Davis’s friend of twenty-five years and her neighbor at the time, witnessed Hager berate his wife in their kitchen after one such episode. For her part, Davis set out to subvert Hager’s financial dominance with profligate spending on credit cards opened in her own name. “I was not willing to face reality about money,” she admits. “I thought, ‘Well, money can’t buy happiness, but it buys the kind of misery you can learn to live with.'”

These financial atmospherics undoubtedly figured into Linda’s willingness to accept payment for sex. But eventually her conscience caught up with her. “Finally…I said, ‘You know, David, this is like being a prostitute. I just can’t do this anymore; I don’t think it’s healthy for our relationship,'” she recalls.

By 1995, according to Davis’s account, Hager’s treatment of his wife had moved beyond morally reprehensible to potentially felonious. It was a uniquely stressful year for Davis. Her mother, dying of cancer, had moved in with the family and was in need of constant care. At the same time, Davis was suffering from a seemingly inexplicable exhaustion during the day. She began exhibiting a series of strange behaviors, like falling asleep in such curious places as the mall and her closet. Occasionally she would–as she describes it–“zone out” in midsentence in a conversation, and her legs would buckle. Eventually, Davis was diagnosed as having narcolepsy, a neurological disorder that affects the brain’s ability to regulate normal sleep-wake cycles.

For Davis, the diagnosis spelled relief, and a physician placed her on several medications to attain “sleep hygiene,” or a consistent sleep pattern. But Davis says it was after the diagnosis that the period of the most severe abuse began. For the next seven years Hager sodomized Davis without her consent while she slept roughly once a month until their divorce in 2002, she claims. “My sense is that he saw [my narcolepsy] as an opportunity,” Davis surmises. Sometimes she fought Hager off and he would quit for a while, only to circle back later that same night; at other times, “the most expedient thing was to try and somehow get it [over with]. In order to keep any peace, I had to maintain the illusion of being available to him.” At still other moments, she says, she attempted to avoid Hager’s predatory advances in various ways–for example, by sleeping in other rooms in the house, or by struggling to stay awake until Hager was in a deep sleep himself. But, she says, nothing worked. One of Davis’s lifelong confidantes remembers when Davis first told her about the abuse. “[Linda] was very angry and shaken,” she recalled.

As Hager began fielding calls from the White House personnel office in 2001, the stress in the household–and, with it, the abuse–hit an all-time high, according to Davis. She says she confronted her husband on numerous occasions: “[I said to him,] ‘Every time you do this, I hate your guts. And it blows a bridge out between us that takes weeks, if not months, to heal.'” She says that Hager would, in rare instances, admit what he had done and apologize, but typically would deny it altogether.

For a while, fears of poverty, isolation and damnation were enough to keep Davis from seeking a divorce. She says that she had never cheated on Hager, but after reuniting with a high school sweetheart (not her current husband) in the chaotic aftermath of September 11, she had a brief affair. En route to their first, and only, rendezvous, she prayed aloud. “I said to the Lord, ‘All right. I do not want to die without having sex with someone I love,'” she remembers. “‘I want to know what that’s like, Lord. I know that it’s a sin, and I know this is adultery. But I have to know what it’s like.'”

Davis was sure that God would strike her dead on her way home that weekend. But when nothing happened, she took it as a good sign. Back in Lexington, she walked through her front door and made a decision right there on the spot. “I said, ‘David, I want a divorce.'”

Marital rape is a foreign concept to many women with stories like this one. Indeed, Linda Davis had never heard the term until midway through her divorce. In Kentucky a person is guilty of rape in the first degree when he engages in sexual intercourse with another person by “forcible compulsion”; or when the victim is incapable of consent because she is physically helpless. The same standards apply to the crime of sodomy in the first degree (equivalent to rape, and distinct from consensual sodomy). Both are felonies.

In sexual assault cases, the outcome hinges on the issue of consent. A high-level domestic violence prosecutor in Kentucky confirmed that a scenario such as this one, in which Davis was in a deep sleep from the narcolepsy, could meet the “physically helpless” standard required for a first-degree offense. A prosecutor could also argue that Hager engaged in sodomy with Davis by means of forcible compulsion, even though the alleged encounters did not involve violence. According to the Kentucky Supreme Court’s decision in 1992 in Yarnell v. Commonwealth, a climate of abuse involving “constant emotional, verbal, and physical duress” is tantamount to forcible compulsion. In that case, the victims submitted to the sex acts to avoid a loss of financial security, as well as to maintain peace in the household.

Historically, the legal system has long been indifferent to the crime of marital sexual assault; as recently as twelve years ago in some states, it was legal for a man to force his wife physically into sex, or commence having sex without her consent–actions that could land a stranger in jail. Until 2000 the Kentucky Penal Code still contained archaic procedural obstacles for prosecuting marital rape, including a requirement that it be reported within one year of the offense. (No other felony–including “stranger rape”–contains a statute of limitations.) Even today, marital sexual assault is a notoriously difficult crime to prosecute. Women like Davis often have strong financial incentives to stay with their spouses; those who speak out frequently face an uphill battle to convince people that their husbands, who may be well liked and respected, are capable of something this ugly at home. Also, because marriages play out over many years, some sex is consensual, while other sex is not–a fact that may complicate matters for a jury in a criminal proceeding.

Linda Davis chose not to bring allegations of marital rape into her divorce proceedings; her foremost desires at the time were a fair settlement and minimal disruption for her sons. Nonetheless, she informed her lawyer of the abuse. Natalie Wilson, a divorce attorney in Lexington, asked Linda to draw up a working chronology of her marriage to Hager. “[It] included references to what I would call the sexual abuse,” Wilson explained. “I had no reason not to believe her…. It was an explanation for some of the things that went on in the marriage, and it explained her reluctance to share that information with her sons–which had resulted in her sons’ being very angry about the fact that she was insisting on the divorce.”

As it turned out, when the dust settled after their divorce, nearly everyone in the Hagers’ Christian and medical circles in Lexington had sided with Hager, who told people that his wife was mentally unstable and had moved in with another man (she moved in with friends).

Davis had only told a handful of people about the abuse throughout her marriage, but several of her longtime confidantes confirmed for this article that she had told them of the abuse at the time it was occurring. Wilson, the attorney, spoke to me on the record, as did Brenda Bartella Peterson, Davis’s close friend of twenty-five years. Several others close to Davis spoke to me off the record. Two refused to speak to me and denounced Davis for going public, but they did not contest her claims. Many attempts to interview nearly a dozen of Hager’s friends and supporters in Lexington and around the country were unsuccessful.

As for David Hager, after repeated attempts to interview him for this story, we finally spoke for nearly half an hour in early April. That conversation was off the record. “My official comment is that I decline to comment,” he said.

As disturbing as they are on their own, Linda Davis’s allegations take on even more gravity in light of Hager’s public role as a custodian of women’s health. Some may argue that this is just a personal matter between a man and his former wife–a simple case of “he said, she said” with no public implications. That might be so–if there were no allegations of criminal conduct, if the alleged conduct did not bear any relevance to the public responsibilities of the person in question, and if the allegations themselves were not credible and independently corroborated. But given that this case fails all of those tests, the public has a right to call on Dr. David Hager to answer Linda Davis’s charges before he is entrusted with another term. After all, few women would knowingly choose a sexual abuser as their gynecologist, and fewer still would likely be comfortable with the idea of letting one serve as a federal adviser on women’s health issues.

(Lest inappropriate analogies be drawn between the Hager accusations and the politics of personal destruction that nearly brought down the presidency of Bill Clinton, it ought to be remembered that President Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky was never alleged to be criminal and did not affect his ability to fulfill his obligations to the nation. This, of course, did not stop the religious right from calling for his head. “The topic of private vs. public behavior has emerged as perhaps the central moral issue raised by Bill Clinton’s ‘improper relationship,'” wrote evangelist and Hager ally Franklin Graham at the time. “But the God of the Bible says that what one does in private does matter. There needs to be no clash between personal conduct and public appearance.”)

Hager’s FDA assignment is an object lesson in the potential influence of a single appointment to a federal advisory committee that in turn affects thousands, even millions, of lives. Witness the behind-the-scenes machinations that set the stage for the FDA’s ruling against Plan B, a decision that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists called a “dark stain on the reputation of an evidence-based agency like the FDA.”

On December 16, 2003, twenty-seven of the FDA’s advisers on women’s health and nonprescription drugs gathered in Gaithersburg, Maryland, to evaluate the safety and efficacy of emergency contraception for over-the-counter use. (The Plan B pill, which drastically reduces the risk of pregnancy when used within seventy-two hours after intercourse, has long been available by prescription only; its advocates say its greater availability could significantly reduce the nation’s abortion rate.) After a long day of highly technical deliberation, the advisers voted 23 to 4 to drop the prescription-only status of emergency contraception. “I’ve been on this committee…for almost four years, and I would take this to be the safest product that we have seen brought before us,” announced Dr. Julie Johnson, a professor at the University of Florida’s Colleges of Pharmacy and Medicine.

But on May 6, 2004, the FDA rejected the advice of its own experts and refused to approve the sale of Plan B over the counter. In his letter to Barr Laboratories, Steven Galson, acting director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, claimed that Barr had not provided adequate data showing just how young adolescent women would actually use the drug.

That issue was never voted on by the committee. It was, however, broached by Hager at the meeting; he mentioned his concern for these “younger adolescents” several times.

In his private practice back in Kentucky, Hager doesn’t prescribe emergency contraception, because he believes it is an abortifacient, and, not surprisingly, his was one of the four votes against widening its availability. But rather than voice his ethical opposition to the product, Hager emphasized his concern about adolescents, which other committee members have since called a “political fig leaf.” According to Dr. James Trussell, who voted in favor of Plan B, the FDA had at hand six studies examining whether teens as young as 15 would increase their “risky” behavior if they knew they had a backup emergency contraceptive–and none of the studies showed any evidence for that contention.

In his sermon at Asbury College last fall, Hager proudly recounted his role in the Plan B decision. “After two days of hearings,” he said, “the committees voted to approve this over-the-counter sale by 23 to 4. I was asked to write a minority opinion that was sent to the commissioner of the FDA…. Now the opinion I wrote was not from an evangelical Christian perspective…. But I argued it from a scientific perspective, and God took that information, and He used it through this minority report to influence the decision.” [Emphasis added.]

None of the four panel members I spoke with for this article were aware of Hager’s “minority opinion.” An FDA spokeswoman told me that “the FDA did not ask for a minority opinion from this advisory committee,” though she was unable to say whether any individual within the agency had requested such a document from Hager. This past January the FDA missed a deadline to respond to a new application from Barr Laboratories, and any forward motion on making Plan B more widely available has completely stalled.

Meanwhile, David Hager’s stock has been rising among conservatives. Though his term on the FDA panel is set to expire on June 30, observers on both sides of the political divide anticipate his reappointment. In March I spoke with Janice Shaw Crouse, executive director and senior fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute, the research arm of Concerned Women for America. She is one of Hager’s staunchest advocates in Washington (some credit her with engineering his FDA appointment); Crouse sits alongside Hager on Asbury College’s board of trustees. In May, when informed of the allegations against him, she declined to revise her earlier statement. “I would not be at all surprised to see Dr. Hager elevated to a higher position or to another very influential position when it comes to women’s care,” she told me. “Because he has shown that he does care about women regardless of…the [religious] issues that people want to try to raise…. When people try to discredit him, he continues on. He hasn’t caved in, and he hasn’t waffled. He has been a gentleman. He is a person of character and integrity, and I think people admire that.”

This post originally appeared on an external website

QUOTES FROM THE BOOK 1984

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

From http://www.bookrags.com/notes/1984/QUO.htm
Eric Arthur Blair used the pen name of GEORGE ORWELL.
He penned the classic, 1984, a dystopic tale of a future society in which there was constant surveillance and micromanagement of the lives of each man and woman.
Here are some assorted quotes from that great work.
” Quote 1: “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” Part 1, Chapter 1, pg. 3
Quote 2: “WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” Part 1, Chapter 1, pg. 6
Quote 3: “A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.” Part 1, Chapter 1, pg. 16
Quote 4: “one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended.” Part 1, Chapter 2, pg. 23
Quote 5: “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.” Part 1, Chapter 2, pg. 27
Quote 6: “The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.” Part 1, Chapter 2, pg. 28
Quote 7: “With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm.” Part 1, Chapter 3, pg. 33
Quote 8: “‘Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'” Part 1, Chapter 3, pg. 37
Quote 9: “Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.” Part 1, Chapter 4, pg. 50
Quote 10: “Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.” Part 1, Chapter 6, pg. 64
Quote 11: “She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none, that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her.” Part 1, Chapter 6, pg. 67
Quote 12: “Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema.” Part 1, Chapter 6, pg. 69
Quote 13: “They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds.” Part 1, Chapter 7, pg. 71
Quote 14: “If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.” Part 1, Chapter 7, pg. 72
Quote 15: “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” Part 1, Chapter 7, pg. 74
Quote 16: “a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting – three hundred million people all with the same face.” Part 1, Chapter 7, pg. 77
Quote 17: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Part 1, Chapter 7, pg. 84
Quote 18: “It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, in an armchair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob: utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.” Part 1, Chapter 8, pg. 100
Quote 19: “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement’s, You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin’s.” Part 1, Chapter 8, pg. 103
Quote 20: “At the sight of the words I love you the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid.” Part 2, Chapter 1, pg. 110-11
Quote 21: “by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves.” Part 2, Chapter 2, pg. 125
Quote 22: “Not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces.” Part 2, Chapter 2, pg. 127
Quote 23: “to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.” Part 2, Chapter 3, pg. 132
Quote 24: “What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship.” Part 2, Chapter 3, pg. 134
Quote 25: “She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse. ‘We are the dead,’ he said.” Part 2, Chapter 3, pg. 137
Quote 26: “The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all around him. She had become a physical necessity.” Part 2, Chapter 4, pg. 140
Quote 27: “The proles, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism.” Part 2, Chapter 5, pg. 150
Quote 28: “So long as they were actually in this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them.” Part 2, Chapter 5, pg. 152
Quote 29: “Even the one plan that was practicable, suicide, they had no intention of carrying out. To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.” Part 2, Chapter 5, pg. 153
Quote 30: “she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her.” Part 2, Chapter 5, pg. 154
Quote 31: “He had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.” Part 2, Chapter 6, pg. 160
Quote 32: “He knew that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he even felt that he had a right to do it. The clamorous hunger in his belly seemed to justify him.” Part 2, Chapter 7, pg. 163
Quote 33: “The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world.” Part 2, Chapter 7, pg. 165
Quote 34: “It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything – anything – but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you.” Part 2, Chapter 7, pg. 167
Quote 35: “You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die… There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead.” Part 2, Chapter 8, pg. 177
Quote 36: “The primary aim of modern warfare Part 1n accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.” Part 2, Chapter 9, pg. 189
Quote 37: “If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations.” Part 2, Chapter 9, pg. 190
Quote 38: “the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.” Part 2, Chapter 9, pg. 192
Quote 39: “a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with extraordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture.” Part 2, Chapter 9, pg. 194
Quote 40: “It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.” Part 2, Chapter 9, pg. 201
Quote 41: “Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.” Part 2, Chapter 9, pg. 206-7
Quote 42: “the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty.” Part 2, Chapter 9, pg. 215
Quote 43: “everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing.” Part 2, Chapter 10, pg. 222
Quote 44: “It was more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes’ life even with the certainty that there was torture at the end of it.” Part 3, Chapter 1, pg. 232
Quote 45: “There were times when it went on and on until the cruel, wicked, unforgivable thing seemed to him not that the guards continued to beat him but that he could not force himself into losing consciousness.” Part 3, Chapter 2, pg. 244
Quote 46: “The old feeling, that at bottom it did not matter whether O’Brien was a friend or an enemy, had come back. O’Brien was a person who could be talked to… O’Brien had tortured him to the edge of lunacy, and in a little while, it was certain, he would send him to his death. It made no difference.” Part 3, Chapter 2, pg.255-6
Quote 47: “There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they could die while their minds were still clean.” Part 3, Chapter 2, pg. 259
Quote 48: “We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.” Part 3, Chapter 3, pg. 268
Quote 49: “‘Do you remember writing in your diary,’ he said, ‘that it did not matter whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least a person who understood you and could be talked to? You were right. I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.'” Part 3, Chapter 2, pg. 271
Quote 50: “It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude; the predestined thing happened in any case.” Part 3, Chapter 4, pg. 280
Quote 51: “For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.” Part 3, Chapter 4, pg. 283
Quote 52: “Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!” Part 3, Chapter 5, pg. 289
Quote 53: “There were things, your own acts, from which you could not recover. Something was killed in your breast; burnt out, cauterized out.” Part 3, Chapter 6, pg. 293
Quote 54: “But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” Part 3, Chapter 6, pg. 300
Quote 55: “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” Appendix, pg. 303″

This post originally appeared on an external website

South Texas Healthcare Blog – ENewsBlog

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

South Texas Healthcare Blog – ENewsBlog: “What?s a Doctor?s Time Worth? — Wednesday, May 18, 20052005-05-18 16:46:39

On May 17, a doctor?s blog called ?medrants? (actually known as ‘DB’s Medical Rants’) offers the following:

?In our economy, productivity is often measured in units of time. Time is then converted to money. We hire architects, lawyers, plumbers and piano teachers, and we pay them by the hour.

The current medical reimbursement system pays by the job performed, not by the time spent.

Your appendectomy is charged on a flat rate, like a brake job. The surgeon who performs your appendectomy gets paid the same if he takes one hour or two, as long as he takes out only one appendix.

Your family doctor receives the same reimbursement for diagnosing a sinus infection in 6 minutes as he does if he takes 30 minutes.

In our current system, there is no way to buy an hour of your doctor?s time just to talk.

The doctor can give you that time free, but under most health plans he cannot bill you for it.

With the current rate of exchange, as dictated by the health insurance companies, an hour spent talking with your physician has no value.

The more I consider our reimbursement system, the more I understand how perverse and illogical it really is. ?”

This post originally appeared on an external website

The Sun News | 05/19/2005 | Grenade was threat to Bush, FBI says

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

The Sun News | 05/19/2005 | Grenade was threat to Bush, FBI saysGrenade was threat to Bush, FBI says

Device found at Georgia event

By Ken Herman

Cox News Service

WASHINGTON – The FBI said Wednesday that the hand grenade found within 100 feet of where President Bush spoke on May 10 in the former Soviet republic of Georgia was a live weapon that was a “threat to the health and welfare” of the president and others in the crowd packed into Tbilisi’s Freedom Square.

The report contradicted previous claims by Georgian officials that the grenade, which Bush never saw, was a dud posing no threat and left at the scene only as a scare tactic.

The White House declined to say whether the new information would lead to changes in Bush events held overseas. Today, first lady Laura Bush heads to the Middle East for a five-day trip that includes stops in Jordan, Israel and Egypt.

Bryan Paarmann, an FBI legal attache in Georgia, a country Bush cites as a successfully emerging democracy, said Wednesday that the grenade “appears to be a live device that simply failed to function due to a light strike on the blasting cap induced by slow deployment of the spoon activation device.”

“We consider this act to be a threat against the health and welfare of both the president of the United States and the president of Georgia as well as the multitude of Georgian people that had turned out at this event,” Paarmann said.

At the White House, spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush was told about the grenade’s live nature Tuesday night. Nobody in the presidential party was aware of the incident until notified by Georgia officials as Bush returned to the United States after the recent European trip.

“I think we need to let the investigation proceed, and let them look at all these facts and gather those facts. And then we’ll be able to talk more about it at that point,” McClellan said when asked if the report could spark changes in Bush travel plans and appearances.

This post originally appeared on an external website

Can you say RIGHT WING NUT JOB? I thought that you could–Janice Rogers Brown

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Janice Rogers Brown has some bizarre, and yes, I believe, dangerous views on the world. That’s fine if she was just a greeter at Wal*Mart, but it is NOT fine if she were to become Appeals Court Judge. Her kind of bizarre thinking has NO legitimate place on the judiciary at ANY level.

Think she is just a nice black lady who deserves any judicial position Bushy wants to slide her into?

If you think that, examine her positions…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/19/AR2005051900956_2.html

In many ways, Brown’s court rulings and speeches mirror the thinking of Bush and conservatives coast to coast.

An outspoken Christian conservative from the segregated South, she supports limits on abortion rights and corporate liability, routinely upholds the death penalty and opposes affirmative action.

“A lot of judges get to the point they think they were anointed and not appointed,” Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said Tuesday during floor debate. “I don’t think anyone can contend she has performed other than admirably on the bench. She has written beautifully and thoughtfully.”

Brown’s views are also why Democrats have used a filibuster since 2003 to block her confirmation for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Senate’s 55 Republicans have a clear majority to confirm but not the 60 votes need to break the filibuster.

“She has criticized the New Deal, which gave us Social Security, the minimum wage, and fair labor laws. She’s questioned whether age discrimination laws benefit the public interest,” said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. “No one with these views should be confirmed to a federal court and certainly not to the federal court most responsible for cases affecting government action.”

and farther down…
“She defended her faith-based approach to the law again last month, telling a gathering of Roman Catholic legal professionals in Darien, Conn., that “these are perilous times for people of faith, not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud.”

Janice Rogers Brown apparently is one of the right wing nut jobs who is part of the “Constitution in Exile”.

http://www.acsblog.org/economic-regulation-employment-1217-jeffrey-rosen-on-athe-constitution-in-exilea.html

” Other potential Bush Supreme Court nominees Rosen discusses as potential adherents of the Constitution in Exile include Janice Rogers Brown (who called 1937, the year in which the Supreme Court stopped striking down New Deal legislation on constitutional grounds ?the triumph of our socialist revolution.?), J. Michael Luttig and John Roberts.”

More on teh “Constitution in Exile” insane ideas here

http://www.acsblog.org/judicial-nominations-700-the-return-of-constitution-in-exile.html

But, Janice Rogers Brown has her little fingers all gooey from ALL KINDS of nut job pies! She’s a big one for the “FEDERALIST SOCIETY”.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/5/1/225323/5346
“The Big Lie: Right Wing Plays the Race Card on Judicial Nominations
by Armando
Sun May 1st, 2005 at 19:53:23 PDT

You knew it was coming because the Right Wing is shameless. And here it is – the shameless playing of the race card by the GOP, right from the bottom of the deck:

Why are Senate Democrats so afraid of conservative judicial nominees who are African Americans, Hispanics, Catholics, and women? Because these Clarence Thomas nominees threaten to split the Democratic base by aligning conservative Republicans with conservative voices in the minority community and appealing to suburban women. The Democrats need Bush to nominate conservatives to the Supreme Court whom they can caricature and vilify, and it is much harder for them to do that if Bush nominates the judicial equivalent of a Condi Rice rather than a John Ashcroft.
What shameless liars. Indeed, the opposite is true. The GOP chooses African-Americans and women to be the most extreme, out of the mainstream nominees imaginable. And yes Clarence Thomas is Exhibit A of that theory. Why do they do this? To try and cow legitmate opposition to the unbelievably extreme positions they want their nominees to hold, and they believe the only way to get these extreme views confirmed by the Senate is to cynically play the race card – to wit, nominate African-Americans and women who hold these extreme, out of the mainstream views.

The truth is no bar to the GOP’s offensive use of the race card. Take this description:

Take Janice Rogers Brown, who won reelection to her state supreme court seat with a stunning 76 percent of the vote in one of the bluest of the blue states, California.
First of all, Rogers Brown was not reelected, rather she was facing the voters for the FIRST time in 1998 on a vote of retention after being named to the California Supreme Court in 1996. Brown would not be up for re-election for another 12 years, in 2008. More importantly, a 76% vote for a California Supreme Court Justice is NOT stunning, particularly one with only 2 years on the Court. For example, from California Appellate Counselor:

Four current members of the California Supreme Court were up for retention in the November 1998 election — Chief Justice Ronald George, Justice Stanley Mosk, Justice Ming Chin and Justice Janice Rogers Brown. Most of the attention centered on Chief Justice George and Justice Chin, who had incurred the wrath of certain abortion foes by voting to strike down a statute that required unmarried teenagers to obtain the consent of a parent or judge for an abortion. Justices Mosk and Brown dissented from that decision[,] … American Academy of Pediatrics v. Lungren, 16 Cal. 4th 307 (1997).
As it turned out, the elections were no contest. All four were retained by substantial margins. Here are the final results, as reported in the Los Angeles Times:

Chief Justice Ronald M. George
Confirm 4,131,213 (75 percent)
Reject 1,354,994 (25 percent)

Associate Justice Stanley Mosk
Confirm 3,695,777 (70 percent)
Reject 1,557,390 (30 percent)

Associate Justice Ming W. Chin
Confirm 3,723,584 (69 percent)
Reject 1,669,841 (25 percent)

Associate Justice Janice R. Brown
Confirm 3,884,203 (76 percent)
Reject 1,255,502 (24 percent)

As you can see, distorting the facts is no impediment for the Right Wing. In an election where the Religious Right targetted liberal Justices, Rogers Brown, an afterthought in this election, “stunned” with the same result as the targetted Chief Justice.

More importantly, the Right Wing simply lies about the basis of Democratic opposition to Rogers Brown:

Justice Brown’s disdain for government runs so deep that she urges “conservative” judges to invalidate legislation that expands the role of government, saying that it “inevitably transform[s]… a democracy … into a kleptocracy.” Following her own “pro-activist” advice, Justice Brown – always in dissent – uses constitutional provisions or defies the legislature’s intent to restrict or invalidate laws she doesn’t like, such as California’s anti-discrimination statute (which she condemns as protecting only “narrow” personal interests), hotel development fees intended to preserve San Francisco’s affordable housing supply, rent control ordinances, statutory fees for manufacturers that put lead-based products into the stream of commerce, and a false advertising law applied to companies making false claims about their workplace practices to boost sales. Justice Brown’s colleagues on the court have repeatedly remarked on her disrespect for such legislative policy judgments, criticizing her, in different cases, for “imposing … [a] personal theory of political economy on the people of a democratic state”; asserting “such an activist role for the courts”; “quarrel[ing]… not with our holding in this case, but with this court’s previous decision … and, even more fundamentally, with the Legislature itself”; and “permit[ting] a court … to reweigh the policy choices that underlay a legislative or quasi-legislative classification or to reevaluate the efficacy of the legislative measure.”
Need more? Here’s a review of the substance of the Roger Brown record, matters the Right Wing liars and cynical players of the race card will NOT discuss:

The report, “Loose Cannon,” notes that when Brown was nominated to the state supreme court in 1996, she was found unqualified by the state bar evaluation committee, based not only on her relative inexperience but also because she was “prone to inserting conservative political views into her appellate opinions” and based on complaints that she was “insensitive to established precedent.”
The report carefully examines Brown’s record since she joined the court, especially her numerous dissenting opinions concerning civil and constitutional rights. Brown’s many disturbing dissents, often not joined by a single other justice, make it clear that she would use the power of an appeals court seat to try to erect significant barriers for victims of discrimination to seek justice in the courts, and to push an agenda that would undermine privacy, equal protection under the law, environmental protection, and much more.

In speeches, Brown has embraced the extreme states’ rights and anti-federal-government positions of the Federalist Society, the organization of lawyers and judges working to push the law far to the right. She has said that what she has called the “Revolution of 1937,” when the Supreme Court began to consistently sustain New Deal legislation against legal attack, was a “disaster” that marked “the triumph of our socialist revolution.”

More in extended.

Republicans :: :: Trackback ::

More of the Rogers Brown judicial record.

Civil Rights, Equal Opportunity, and Discrimination
According to the report, “Justice Brown’s opinions on civil rights law are perhaps the most troubling area of a very troubling body of work. These opinions reveal significant skepticism about the existence and impact of discrimination and demonstrate repeated efforts to limit the avenues available to victims of discrimination to obtain justice. Brown’s opinions in this area reveal a troubling disregard for precedent and stare decisis – even in the context of case law that has been settled by the U.S. Supreme Court.”

The report examines Brown opinions in cases involving racial discrimination, discrimination against people with disabilities and older Americans, and affirmative action. California’s Chief Justice criticized one of her opinions as arguing that “numerous decisions of the United States Supreme Court and this court” were “wrongly decided” and as representing a “serious distortion of history.”

Free Speech and Association

Brown’s free speech opinions illustrate her tendency to rule in favor of corporations and seek to provide broad protections for corporate speech, while sometimes giving short shrift to the First Amendment rights of average citizens.

In one dissent she listed as one of her ten most significant decisions, Brown sought to expand the contexts in which corporations could make false or misleading statements without any effective legal mechanism for holding them accountable. In another case discussed in the report, Brown argued that a corporation should be granted an injunction against a former employee sending emails critical of the company’s employment practices to some of his former colleagues. …

Privacy, Family Rights, and Reproductive Freedom

As a state supreme court justice, Brown has issued only one opinion dealing with abortion, but it raises serious concerns about her judicial philosophy concerning women’s constitutional right to privacy and reproductive freedom. In her dissent, Brown argued that the federal Constitution somehow restricts the privacy protections that may be provided by the state constitution, a position far outside the mainstream of judicial thought. She argued that the court majority’s decision ruling unconstitutional a restrictive parental consent law for minors seeking abortions would allow courts to “topple every cultural icon, to dismiss all societal values, and to become final arbiters of traditional morality.” …

Worker Rights, Consumer Protection and Private Property Rights

Several cases raise serious questions about Brown’s willingness to enforce provisions intended to protect the average person against the power of the government or large corporations. Brown has signaled her approval of broad drug-testing provisions even in situations in which a majority of the California Supreme Court found the tests to be clearly unconstitutional, and even where it would have required explicitly rejecting U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

…In several speeches and one of her opinions, Brown has attacked the long-established principle that governmental action infringing on fundamental rights is subject to strict judicial scrutiny while general social and economic legislation is upheld if it has a rational basis. According to Brown, that fundamental principle is “highly suspect, incoherent, and constitutionally invalid.”

The one thing you will not see discussed by the Right Wing racial hucksters is Rogers Brown’s judicial record. Just watch. “

Here’s an example of L’il Ole Janice Rogers Brown “speechifying” and using here “cogimitation bone”…
http://www.constitution.org/col/jrb/00420_jrb_fedsoc.htm
“”A Whiter Shade of Pale”: Sense and Nonsense ?
The Pursuit of Perfection in Law and Politics

Speech of Janice Rogers Brown,
Associate Justice, California Supreme Court

The Federalist Society
University of Chicago Law School
April 20, 2000, Thursday
12:15 p.m.

Thank you. I want to thank Mr. Schlangen (fondly known as Charlie to my secretary) for extending the invitation and the Federalist Society both for giving me my first opportunity to visit the City of Chicago and for being, as Mr. Schlangen assured me in his letter of invitation, “a rare bastion (nay beacon) of conservative and libertarian thought.” That latter notion made your invitation well-nigh irresistible. There are so few true conservatives left in America that we probably should be included on the endangered species list. That would serve two purposes: Demonstrating the great compassion of our government and relegating us to some remote wetlands habitat where ? out of sight and out of mind ? we will cease being a dissonance in collectivist concerto of the liberal body politic.

In truth, they need not banish us to the gulag. We are not much of a threat, lacking even a coherent language in which to state our premise. [I should pause here to explain the source of the title to this discussion. Unless you are a very old law student, you probably never heard of “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”] “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is an old (circa 1967) Procol Harum song, full of nonsensical lyrics, but powerfully evocative nonetheless. Here’s a sample:

“We skipped the light fandango
turned cartwheels cross the floor
I was feeling kinda seasick
but the crowd called out for more.

The room was humming harder
as the ceiling flew away.
When we called out for another drink
the waiter brought a tray.”

There is something about this that forcibly reminds me of our current political circus. The last verse is even better.

“If music be the food of love
then laughter is its queen
and likewise if behind is in front
then dirt in truth is clean….”

Sound familiar? Of course Procol Harum had an excuse. These were the 60’s after all, and the lyrics were probably drug induced. What’s our excuse?

One response might be that we are living in a world where words have lost their meaning. This is certainly not a new phenomenon. It seems to be an inevitable artifact of cultural disintegration. Thucydides lamented the great changes in language and life that succeeded the Pelopennesian War; Clarendon and Burke expressed similar concerns about the political transformations of their own time. It is always a disorienting experience for a member of the old guard when the entire understanding of the old world is uprooted. As James Boyd White expresses it: “[I]n this world no one would see what he sees, respond as he responds, speak as he speaks,”1 and living in that world means surrender to the near certainty of central and fundamental changes within the self. “One cannot maintain forever one’s language and judgment against the pressures of a world that works in different ways,” for we are shaped by the world in which we live.2

This is a fascinating subject which we do not have time to explore more thoroughly. Suffice it to say that this phenomenon accounts for much of the near hysterical tone of current political discourse. Our problems, however, seem to go even deeper. It is not simply that the same words don’t have the same meanings; in our lifetime, words are ceasing to have any meaning. The culture of the word is being extinguished by the culture of the camera. Politicians no longer have positions they have photo-ops. To be or not to be is no longer the question. The question is: how do you feel.

Writing 50 years ago, F.A. Hayek warned us that a centrally planned economy is “The Road to Serfdom.”3 He was right, of course; but the intervening years have shown us that there are many other roads to serfdom. In fact, it now appears that human nature is so constituted that, as in the days of empire all roads led to Rome; in the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery. And we no longer find slavery abhorrent. We embrace it. We demand more. Big government is not just the opiate of the masses. It is the opiate. The drug of choice for multinational corporations and single moms; for regulated industries and rugged Midwestern farmers and militant senior citizens.

It is my thesis today that the sheer tenacity of the collectivist impulse ? whether you call it socialism or communism or altruism ? has changed not only the meaning of our words, but the meaning of the Constitution, and the character of our people.

Government is the only enterprise in the world which expands in size when its failures increase. Aaron Wildavsky gives a credible account of this dynamic. Wildavsky notes that the Madisonian world has gone “topsy turvy” as factions, defined as groups “activated by some common interest adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community,”4 have been transformed into sectors of public policy. “Indeed,” says Wildavsky, “government now pays citizens to organize, lawyers to sue, and politicians to run for office. Soon enough, if current trends continue, government will become self-contained, generating (apparently spontaneously) the forces to which it responds.”5 That explains how, but not why. And certainly not why we are so comfortable with that result.

America’s Constitution provided an 18th Century answer to the question of what to do about the status of the individual and the mode of government. Though the founders set out to establish good government “from reflection and choice,”6 they also acknowledged the “limits of reason as applied to constitutional design,”7 and wisely did not seek to invent the world anew on the basis of abstract principle; instead, they chose to rely on habits, customs, and principles derived from human experience and authenticated by tradition.

“The Framers understood that the self-interest which in the private sphere contributes to welfare of society ? both in the sense of material well-being and in the social unity engendered by commerce ? makes man a knave in the public sphere, the sphere of politics and group action. It is self-interest that leads individuals to form factions to try to expropriate the wealth of others through government and that constantly threatens social harmony.”8

Collectivism sought to answer a different question: how to achieve cosmic justice ? sometimes referred to as social justice ? a world of social and economic equality. Such an ambitious proposal sees no limit to man’s capacity to reason. It presupposes a community can consciously design not only improved political, economic, and social systems but new and improved human beings as well.

The great innovation of this millennium was equality before the law. The greatest fiasco ? the attempt to guarantee equal outcomes for all people. Tom Bethell notes that the security of property ? a security our Constitution sought to ensure ? had to be devalued in order for collectivism to come of age. The founders viewed private property as “the guardian of every other right.”9 But, “by 1890 we find Alfred Marshall, the teacher of John Maynard Keynes making the astounding claim that the need for private property reaches no deeper than the qualities of human nature.”10 A hundred years later came Milton Friedman’s laconic reply: ” ‘I would say that goes pretty deep.'”11 In between, came the reign of socialism. “Starting with the formation of the Fabian Society and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall, its ambitious project was the reformation of human nature. Intellectuals visualized a planned life without private property, mediated by the New Man.”12 He never arrived. As John McGinnis persuasively argues: “There is simply a mismatch between collectivism on any large and enduring scale and our evolved nature. As Edward O. Wilson, the world’s foremost expert on ants, remarked about Marxism, ‘Wonderful theory. Wrong species.'”13

Ayn Rand similarly attributes the collectivist impulse to what she calls the “tribal view of man.”14 She notes, “[t]he American philosophy of the Rights of Man was never fully grasped by European intellectuals. Europe’s predominant idea of emancipation consisted of changing the concept of man as a slave to the absolute state embodied by the king, to the concept of man as the slave of the absolute state as embodied by ‘the people’ ? i.e., switching from slavery to a tribal chieftain into slavery to the tribe.”15

Democracy and capitalism seem to have triumphed. But, appearances can be deceiving. Instead of celebrating capitalism’s virtues, we offer it grudging acceptance, contemptuous tolerance but only for its capacity to feed the insatiable maw of socialism. We do not conclude that socialism suffers from a fundamental and profound flaw. We conclude instead that its ends are worthy of any sacrifice ? including our freedom. Revel notes that Marxism has been “shamed and ridiculed everywhere except American universities” but only after totalitarian systems “reached the limits of their wickedness.”16

“Socialism concentrated all the wealth in the hands of an oligarchy in the name of social justice, reduced peoples to misery in the name of shar[ed] resources, to ignorance in the name of science. It created the modern world’s most inegalitarian societies in the name of equality, the most vast network of concentration camps ever built [for] the defense of liberty.”17

Revel warns: “The totalitarian mind can reappear in some new and unexpected and seemingly innocuous and indeed virtuous form. [?]… [I]t … will [probably] put itself forward under the cover of a generous doctrine, humanitarian, inspired by a concern for giving the disadvantaged their fair share, against corruption, and pollution, and ‘exclusion.'”18

Of course, given the vision of the American Revolution just outlined, you might think none of that can happen here. I have news for you. It already has. The revolution is over. What started in the 1920’s; became manifest in 1937; was consolidated in the 1960’s; is now either building to a crescendo or getting ready to end with a whimper.

At this moment, it seems likely leviathan will continue to lumber along, picking up ballast and momentum, crushing everything in its path. Some things are apparent. Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates, and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible.

But what if anything does this have to do with law? Quite a lot, I think. In America, the national conversation will probably always include rhetoric about the rule of law. I have argued that collectivism was (and is) fundamentally incompatible with the vision that undergirded this country’s founding. The New Deal, however, inoculated the federal Constitution with a kind of underground collectivist mentality. The Constitution itself was transmuted into a significantly different document. In his famous, all too famous, dissent in Lochner, Justice Holmes wrote that the “constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire.”19 Yes, one of the greatest (certainly one of the most quotable) jurists this nation has ever produced; but in this case, he was simply wrong. That Lochner dissent has troubled me ? has annoyed me ? for a long time and finally I understand why. It’s because the framers did draft the Constitution with a surrounding sense of a particular polity in mind, one based on a definite conception of humanity. In fact as Professor Richard Epstein has said, Holmes’s contention is “not true of our [ ] [Constitution], which was organized upon very explicit principles of political theory.”20 It could be characterized as a plan for humanity “after the fall.”

There is nothing new, of course, in the idea that the framers did not buy into the notion of human perfectibility. And the document they drafted and the nation adopted in 1789 is shot through with provisions that can only be understood against the supposition that humanity’s capacity for evil and tyranny is quite as real and quite as great as its capacity for reason and altruism. Indeed, as noted earlier, in politics, the framers may have envisioned the former tendency as the stronger, especially in the wake of the country’s experience under the Articles of Confederation. The fear of “factions,” of an “encroaching tyranny”; the need for ambition to counter ambition”; all of these concerns identified in the Federalist Papers have stratagems designed to defend against them in the Constitution itself. We needed them, the framers were convinced, because “angels do not govern”; men do.

It was a quite opposite notion of humanity, of its fundamental nature and capacities, that animated the great concurrent event in the West in 1789 ? the revolution in France. Out of that revolutionary holocaust ? intellectually an improbable melding of Rousseau with Descartes ? the powerful notion of abstract human rights was born. At the risk of being skewered by historians of ideas, I want to suggest that the belief in and the impulse toward human perfection, at least in the political life of a nation, is an idea whose arc can be traced from the Enlightenment, through the Terror, to Marx and Engels, to the Revolutions of 1917 and 1937. The latter date marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution. All of these events were manifestations of a particularly skewed view of human nature and the nature of human reason. To the extent the Enlightenment sought to substitute the paradigm of reason for faith, custom or tradition, it failed to provide rational explanation of the significance of human life. It thus led, in a sort of ultimate irony, to the repudiation of reason and to a full-fledged flight from truth ? what Revel describes as “an almost pathological indifference to the truth.”21

There were obviously urgent economic and social reasons driving not only the political culture but the constitutional culture in the mid-1930’s ? though it was actually the mistakes of governments (closed borders, high tariffs, and other protectionist measures) that transformed a “momentary breakdown into an international cataclysm.”22 The climate of opinion favoring collectivist social and political solutions had a worldwide dimension.

Politically, the belief in human perfectibility is another way of asserting that differences between the few and the many can, over time, be erased. That creed is a critical philosophical proposition underlying the New Deal. What is extraordinary is the way that thesis infiltrated and effected American constitutionalism over the next three-quarters of a century. Its effect was not simply to repudiate, both philosophically and in legal doctrine, the framers’ conception of humanity, but to cut away the very ground on which the Constitution rests. Because the only way to come to terms with an enduring Constitution is to believe that the human condition is itself enduring.

For complex reasons, attempts to impose a collectivist political solution in the United States failed. But, the political failure was of little practical concern, in a way that is oddly unappreciated, that same impulse succeeded within the judiciary, especially in the federal high court. The idea of abstract rights, government entitlements as the most significant form of property, is well suited to conditions of economic distress and the emergence of a propertyless class. But the economic convulsions of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s passed away; the doctrinal underpinnings of West Coast Hotel and the “switch in time” did not. Indeed, over the next half century it consumed much of the classical conception of the Constitution.

So secure were the intellectual underpinnings of the constitutional revolution, so self-evident the ambient cultural values of the policy elite who administered it, that the object of the high court’s jurisprudence was largely devoted to the construction of a system for ranking the constitutional weight to be given contending social interests.

In the New Deal/Great Society era, a rule that was the polar opposite of the classical era of American law reigned. A judicial subjectivity whose very purpose was to do away with objective gauges of constitutionality, with universal principles, the better to give the judicial priesthood a free hand to remake the Constitution. After a handful of gross divisions reflecting the hierarchy of the elite’s political values had been drawn (personal vs. economic rights, for example), the task was to construct a theoretical system, not of social or cultural norms, but of abstract constitutional weight a given interest merits ? strict or rational basis scrutiny. The rest, the identification of underlying, extraconstitutional values, consisted of judicial tropes and a fortified rhetoric.

Protection of property was a major casualty of the Revolution of 1937. The paradigmatic case, written by that premiere constitutional operative, William O. Douglas, is Williamson v. Lee Optical.23 The court drew a line between personal rights and property rights or economic interests, and applied two different constitutional tests. Rights were reordered and property acquired a second class status.24 If the right asserted was economic, the court held the Legislature could do anything it pleased. Judicial review for alleged constitutional infirmities under the due process clause was virtually nonexistent. On the other hand, if the right was personal and “fundamental,” review was intolerably strict. “From the Progressive era to the New Deal, [ ] property was by degrees ostracized from the company of rights.25 Something new, called economic rights, began to supplant the old property rights. This change, which occurred with remarkably little fanfare, was staggeringly significant. With the advent of “economic rights,” the original meaning of rights was effectively destroyed. These new “rights” imposed obligations, not limits, on the state.

It thus became government’s job not to protect property but, rather, to regulate and redistribute it. And, the epic proportions of the disaster which has befallen millions of people during the ensuing decades has not altered our fervent commitment to statism. The words of Judge Alex Kozinski, written in 1991, are not very encouraging.” ‘What we have learned from the experience of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union … is that you need capitalism to make socialism work.’ In other words, capitalism must produce what socialism is to distribute.”26 Are the signs and portents any better at the beginning of a new century?

Has the constitutional Zeitgeist that has reigned in the United States since the beginning of the Progressive Era come to its conclusion? And if it has, what will replace it? I wish I knew the answer to these questions. It is true ? in the words of another old song: “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.”27

The oracles point in all directions at once. Political polls suggest voters no longer desire tax cuts. But, taxpayers who pay the largest proportion of taxes are now a minority of all voters. On the other hand, until last term the Supreme Court held out the promising possibility of a revival of what might be called Lochnerism-lite in a trio of cases ? Nollan, Dolan, and Lucas, Those cases offered a principled but pragmatic means-end standard of scrutiny under the takings clause.

But there are even deeper movements afoot. Tectonic plates are shifting and the resulting cataclysm may make 1937 look tame.

Lionel Tiger, in a provocative new book called The Decline of Males, posits a brilliant and disturbing new paradigm. He notes we used to think of a family as a man, a woman, and a child. Now, a remarkable new family pattern has emerged which he labels “bureaugamy.” A new trinity: a woman, a child, and a bureaucrat.”28 Professor Tiger contends that most, if not all, of the gender gap that elected Bill Clinton to a second term in 1996 is explained by this phenomenon. According to Tiger, women moved in overwhelming numbers to the Democratic party as the party most likely to implement policies and programs which will support these new reproductive strategies.

Professor Tiger is not critical of these strategies. He views this trend as the triumph of reproduction over production; the triumph of Darwinism over Marxism; and he advocates broad political changes to accommodate it.

Others do not see these changes as quite so benign or culturally neutral. Jacques Barzan finds the Central Western notion of emancipation has been devalued. It has now come to mean that “nothing stands in the way of every wish.”29 The result is a decadent age ? an era in which “there are no clear lines of advance”; “when people accept futility and the absurd as normal[,] the culture is decadent.”30

Stanley Rosen defines “our present crisis as a fatigue induced by … accumulated decisions of so many revolutions.”31 He finds us, in the spirit of Pascal, knowing “too much to be ignorant and too little to be wise.”32

I will close with a story I like a lot. It’s a true story. It happened on June 10, 1990. A British Airways jet bound for Malaga, Spain, took off from Birmingham, England. It was expected to be a routine flight. As the jet climbed through the 23,000-foot level, there was a loud bang; the cockpit windshield directly in front of the captain blew out. The sudden decompression sucked Captain Lancaster out of his seatbelt and into the hole left by the windscreen. A steward who happened to be in the cockpit managed to snag the captain’s feet as he hurtled past. Another steward rushed onto the flight deck, strapped himself into the captain’s chair and, helped by other members of the crew, clung with all his strength to the captain. The slipstream was so fierce, they were unable to drag the pilot back into the plane. His clothing was ripped from his body. With Lancaster plastered against the nose of the jet, the co-pilot donned an oxygen mask and flew the plane to Southampton ?approximately 15 minutes away ? and landed safely. The captain had a fractured elbow, wrist and thumb; a mild case of frostbite, but was otherwise unharmed.

We find ourselves, like the captain, in a situation that is hopeless but not yet desperate. The arcs of history, culture, philosophy, and science all seem to be converging on this temporal instant. Familiar arrangements are coming apart; valuable things are torn from our hands, snatched away by the decompression of our fragile ark of culture. But, it is too soon to despair. The collapse of the old system may be the crucible of a new vision. We must get a grip on what we can and hold on. Hold on with all the energy and imagination and ferocity we possess. Hold on even while we accept the darkness. We know not what miracles may happen; what heroic possibilities exist. We may be only moments away from a new dawn.

——————————————————————————–

1 James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning (Univ. of Chicago Press 1984) p. 4.

2 Ibid.

3 F. A, Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Univ. of Chicago Press 1994).

4 Golembiewski & Wildavsky, The Cost of Federalism (1984) Bare Bones: Putting Flesh on the Skeleton of American Federalism 67, 73.

5 Ibid.

6 Hamilton, The Federalist Papers No. 1 (Rossiter ed. 1961) p. 33.

7 Michael W. Spicer, Public Administration and the Constitution: A Conflict in World Views (March 1, 1994) 24 American R. of Public Admin. 85 [1994 WL 2806423 at *10].

8 John O. McGinnis, The Original Constitution and Our Origins (1996) 19 Harv. J.L.& Pub. Policy 251, 253.

9 Tom Bethell, Property Rights, Prosperity and 1,000 Years of Lessons, The Wall Street J. (Dec. 27, 1999) p. A19.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 John O. McGinnis, The Original Constitution and Our Origins, supra, 19 Harv. J. L.& Pub. Policy at p. 258.

14 Ayn Rand, Capitalism the Unknown Ideal (New American Lib. 1966) pp. 4-5.

15 Ibid

16 Jean Francois Revel, Democracy Against Itself (The Free Press 1993) pp. 250-251.

17 Id. at p. 251.

18 Id. at pp. 250-251.

19 (198 U.S. at p. 75.)

20 Clint Bolick, Unfinished Business (1990) p. 25, quoting Crisis in the Courts (1982) The Manhattan Report on Economic Policy, Vol. V, No. 2, p. 4.

21 Jean Francois Revel, The Flight From Truth (Random House N.Y. 1991) p. xvi.

22 Id. at p. xxxvii.

23 348 U.S. 483.

24 Tom Bethell, The Noblest Triumph (St. Martin’s Griffin, N.Y. 1998) p. 175.

25 Id. at p. 176.

26 Alex Kozinski, The Dark Lesson of Utopia (1991) 58 U.Chi. L.R. 575, 576.

27 Buffalo Springfield, For What It’s Worth (1966).

28 Lionel Tiger, The Decline of Males (Golden Books, N.Y. 1999) pp. 21, 27.

29 Edward Rothstein, N.Y. Times (April 15, 2000) p. A l7.

30 Ibid.

31 Stanley Rosen, Rethinking the Enlightenment (1997) 7 Common Knowledge, p. 104.

32 Ibid.”
===============SNIP==============
She’s a FUCKIN’ NUT!

But, don’t just take MY words…

Check out this page
http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=12751

“Janice Rogers Brown On American Government
Some things are apparent. Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible. [?A Whiter Shade of Pale,? Speech to Federalist Society (April 20. 2000)(?Federalist speech? at 8]

Where government advances ? and it advances relentlessly ? freedom is imperiled; community impoverished; religion marginalized and civilization itself jeopardized….When did government cease to be a necessary evil and become a goody bag to solve our private problems? [?Hyphenasia: the Mercy Killing of the American Dream,? Speech at Claremont-McKenna College (Sept. 16, 1999) at 3,4]

In the last 100 years ? and particularly in the last 30 ? …[g]overnment has been transformed from a necessary evil to a nanny ? benign, compassionate, and wise. Sometimes transformation is a good thing. Sometimes, though, it heralds not higher ground but rather, to put a different gloss on Pat Moynihan?s memorable phrase, defining democracy down. [?Fifty Ways to Lose Your Freedom,? Speech to Institute of Justice (Aug. 12, 2000)(?IFJ speech?) at 2]

[W]e no longer find slavery abhorrent. We embrace it. We demand more. Big government is not just the opiate of the masses. It is the opiate. The drug of choice for multinational corporations and single moms; for regulated industries and rugged Midwestern farmers and militant senior citizens. [IFJ speech at 3-4]

Government acts as a giant siphon, extracting wealth, creating privilege and power, and redistributing it. [Speech at McGeorge School of Law (Nov. 21, 1997) at 18][See also Landgate, Inc. v. California Coastal Commission, 953 P.2d 1188, 1212 (Cal. 1998)(Brown, J., dissenting)(referring to government as ?relentless siphon.?)]
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Janice Rogers Brown on senior citizens and age discrimination
My grandparents? generation thought being on the government dole was disgraceful, a blight on the family?s honor. Today?s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much ?free? stuff as the political system will permit them to extract…Big government is…[t]he drug of choice for multinational corporations and single moms, for regulated industries and rugged Midwestern farmers, and militant senior citizens. [IFJ speech at 2,3]

I would deny [the senior citizen] plaintiff relief because she has failed to establish the public policy against age discrimination ?inures to the benefit of the public? or is ?fundamental and substantial?…Discrimination based on age…does not mark its victim with a ?stigma of inferiority and second class citizenship?….; it is the unavoidable consequence of that universal leveler: time [Dissenting opinion in Stevenson v. Superior Court, 941 P.2d 1157,1177, 1187 (Cal. 1997)]

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Janice Rogers Brown on the New Deal, the Great Society, and the ?transmutation? of the Constitution
I have argued that collectivism was (and is) fundamentally incompatible with the vision that undergirded this country?s founding. The New Deal, however, inoculated the federal Constitution with a kind of underground collectivist mentality. The Constitution itself was transmuted into a significantly different document…1937…marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution…Politically, the belief in human perfectibility is another way of asserting that differences between the few and the many can, over time, be erased. That creed is a critical philosophical proposition underlying the New Deal. What is extraordinary is the way that thesis infiltrated and effected American constitutionalism over the next three-quarters of a century. Its effect was not simply to repudiate, both philosophically and in legal doctrine, the framers? conception of humanity, but to cut away the very ground on which the Constitution rests… In the New Deal/Great Society era, a rule that was the polar opposite of the classical era of American law reigned [Federalist speech at 8, 10, 11, 12]

In the last 100 years ? and particularly the last 30 ? the Constitution, once the fixed chart of our aspirations, has been demoted to the status of a bad chain novel. [IFJ speech at2]
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Janice Rogers Brown on the proper ?protection? of property
In the New Deal/Great Society era, a rule that was the polar opposite of the classical era of American law reigned…Protection of property was a major casualty of the Revolution of 1937?Rights were reordered and property acquired a second class status…It thus became government?s job not to protect property but, rather, to regulate and redistribute it. And, the epic proportions of the disaster which has befallen millions of people during the ensuing decades has not altered our fervent commitment to statism. [Federalist speech at 12, 13]

At its founding and throughout its early history, this regime revered private property. The American philosophy of the Rights of Man relied heavily on the indissoluble connection between rationality, property, freedom and justice. The Founders viewed the right of property as ?the guardian of every other right??.[IFJ speech at 5]

[P]rivate property, already an endangered species in California, is now entirely extinct in San Francisco?I would find the HCO [San Francisco Residential Hotel Unit Conversion and Demolition Ordinance] preempted by the Ellis Act and facially unconstitutional. ?Theft is theft even when the government approves of the thievery. Turning a democracy into a kleptocracy does not enhance the stature of the thieves; it only diminishes the legitimacy of the government. ?The right to express one?s individuality and essential human dignity through the free use of property is just as important as the right to do so through speech, the press, or the free exercise of religion. [Dissenting opinion in San Remo Hotel L.P. v. City and County of San Francisco, 41 P.3d 87, 120, 128-9 (Cal. 2002)(upholding San Francisco ordinance calling on hotel owners seeking permission to eliminate residential units and convert to tourist hotels help replace lost rental units for low income, elderly, and disabled persons)][See also IFJ speech at 4 (warning that without effective limits on government, ?a democracy is inevitably transformed into a Kleptocracy.?)]
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Janice Rogers Brown on the courts, law and the judiciary
We are heirs to a mind-numbing bureaucracy; subject to a level of legalization that cannot avoid being arbitrary, capricious, and discriminatory. What other outcome is possible in a society in which no adult can wake up, go about their business, and return to their homes without breaking several laws? There are of course many reasons for our present difficulties, but some of our troubles can be laid at the feet of that most innocuous branch ? the judiciary?From the 1960?s onward, we have witnessed the rise of the judge militant. [Speech to California Lincoln Club Libertarian Law Council (Dec. 11, 1997)(?Libertarian speech?) at 5-6, 9]

But, alas, the decisions of such [supreme] courts, including my own, seem ever more ad hoc and expedient, perilously adrift on the roiling seas of feckless photo-op compassion and political correctness. [IFJ speech at 15]

Thus, lawyers have secured the right of topless dancers to perform, but have banished prayer from public life. They have won the right for indigents to take over public spaces, even our children?s libraries, and for the mentally ill to live on streets and shout obscenities at passersby. Legal advocates have guaranteed the right of students to be ignorant by opposing competency tests, and ignored their brazen possession and use of weapons in school. [?Politics: A Vision for Change,? Docket (Dec. 1993) at 15]

Politicians in their eagerness to please and to provide something of value to their constituencies that does not have a price tag are handing out new rights like lollipops in the dentist?s office. [Speech to Sacramento County bar Ass?n (May 1, 1996) at 6-7]
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Janice Rogers Brown on strict judicial scrutiny for violations of fundamental constitutional rights and the incorporation doctrine
[Beginning in 1937, t]he court drew a line between personal rights and property rights or economic interests, and applied two different constitutional tests?[I]f the right was personal and ?fundamental,? review was intolerably strict. [Federalist speech at 12]

The dichotomy between the United States Supreme Court?s laissez-faire treatment of social and economic rights and its hypervigilance with respect to an expanding array of judicially proclaimed fundamental rights is highly suspect, incoherent, and constitutionally invalid. [Concurring opinion in Kasler v. Lockyer, 2 P.3d 581, 601 (Cal. 2000), cert. denied, 69 U.S.L.W. 3549 (2001)]

[T]he courts overcame these alleged limitations on their powers with ridiculous ease. How? By constitutionalizing everything possible, finding constitutional rights which are nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. By taking a few words which are in the Constitution like ?due process? and ?equal protection? and imbuing them with elaborate and highly implausible etymologies; and by enunciating standards of constitutional review which are not standards at all but rather policy vetoes, i.e., strict scrutiny and the compelling state interest standard. [Libertarian speech at 7-8]

The United States Supreme Court, however, began in the 1940s to incorporate the Bill of Rights into the 14th Amendment?The historical evidence supporting what the Supreme Court did here is pretty sketchy?The argument on the other side is pretty overwhelming that it?s probably not incorporated. [?Beyond the Abyss: Restoring Religion on the Public Square,? Speech to Pepperdine Bible Lectureship in 1999]
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Janice Rogers Brown on democracy, capitalism, socialism, and ?liberalism?:
Democracy and capitalism seem to have triumphed. But, appearances can be deceiving. Instead of celebrating capitalism?s virtues, we offer it grudging acceptance, contemptuous tolerance, but only for its capacity to feed the insatiable maw of socialism. We do not conclude that socialism suffers from a fundamental flaw. We conclude instead that its ends are worthy of any sacrifice ? including our freedom?.1937?marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution. [Federalist speech at 6-7, 10]

In truth, liberalism?s vaunted tolerance and openness is a lie. In America, at least, liberalism is tolerant only of those concerns to which it is indifferent. To those trivialized forms of religious observance which amount to no more than a consumer preference, the culture maintains a posture of tolerance. [Speech to St. Thomas More Society (Oct. 15, 1998) at 8]

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Janice Rogers Brown on the Supreme Court?s discredited decision in Lochner v. New York
In his famous, all too famous, dissent in Lochner, Justice Holmes wrote that the ?constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire.? Yes, one of the greatest (certainly one of the most quotable) jurists this nation has ever produced; but in this case, he was simply wrong. [Federalist speech at 8]
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Janice Rogers Brown on the right of privacy vs. the ?right to keep and bear arms?
Curiously, in the current dialectic, the right to keep and bear arms ? a right expressly guaranteed by the Bill of Rights ? is deemed less fundamental than implicit protections the court purports to find in the penumbras of other express provisions. (citations omitted) But surely, the right to preserve one?s life is at least as fundamental as the right to preserve one?s privacy. [Concurring opinion in Kasler, 2 P.3d at 602]
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Janice Rogers Brown on government employers requiring employees to forfeit constitutional rights
In this case and others like it involving the interests of government solely as an employer and the surrender of a constitutional right as a condition of obtaining a mere benefit or ?privilege? [i.e. employment], I would argue for a return to an earlier view, pungently expressed by Justice Holmes while a member of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts: ?The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.? (citations omitted) I realize, of course, that for many years Holmes?s view has been out of fashion. ?However, to the extent the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions purports to hold that government may not grant a benefit on the condition that the beneficiary surrender a constitutional right, even if the government may withhold the benefit altogether, it seems more a figment of academic imagination than reality. [Concurring and dissenting opinion in Loder v. City of Glendale, 927 P.2d 1200, 1257, 1258 (1997)(striking down city across-the-board testing program for promoted employees while approving requirement for new employees)].
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Janice Rogers Brown on natural law
We continue to chip away at the foundations of our success. We dismissed natural law and morality because its unverifiable judgments were deemed inferior to reason. But, then, we drove reason itself from the camp because the most significant of life?s questions defy empiricism. ?Only natural law offers an alternative to might makes right and accounts for man?s ?unrelenting quest to rise above the ?letter of the law? to the realm of the spirit.? [IFJ speech at 15, 17] “

Many black civil rights groups and worker’s unions such as the AFL/CIO strongly oppose this asshole!
http://www.aflcio.org/issuespolitics/rogers_brown.cfm
“Oppose the Nomination of Janice Rogers Brown to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit

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Janice Rogers Brown is an associate justice on the California Supreme Court, a position she has held since 1996. On July 25, 2003, President Bush nominated Justice Brown to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Brown?s nomination should be defeated. She is an extreme conservative who is incapable of keeping her personal and political ideology out of her decision making. Brown?s views are extreme, and if adopted, would seriously undermine civil rights, women?s rights, worker and consumer protections and the environment.

Brown?s speeches and opinions show that she takes an extremely narrow view of the role of government in improving people?s lives and an extremely protective view of private property rights. In one speech, Brown described the Supreme Court?s decisions upholding New Deal legislation such as minimum wage laws as ?the triumph of our own socialist revolution.? She compares ?big government? to ?slavery? and an ?opiate.? She goes so far as to say that ?[t]oday?s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much ?free? stuff as the political system will permit them to extract.?[1]

In another speech, she states her view of government as follows:

Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit.[2]

The American Bar Association has given Justice Brown its lowest possible passing grade?a ?qualified/not qualified? rating. When Brown was nominated to the California Supreme Court, three-fourths of the California State Bar?s Commission on Judicial Nominees rated her ?unqualified? for the position because of her lack of experience and her tendency to inject her own personal views into her judicial opinions.[3] In her seven years on the California Supreme Court, Brown has demonstrated that her critics were right.

Examples of how Janice Rogers Brown?s troubling and extreme views have made their way into her decisions on the California Supreme Court include:

Banning Affirmative Action. Brown authored an opinion that effectively ended meaningful affirmative action in California. Hi-Voltage Wire Works, Inc. v. City of Jan Jose, 12 P.3d 1068 (2000). Brown?s opinion was severely criticized, both on and off the court, for its harsh rhetoric and its suggestion that affirmative action resembled racist and segregationist laws that predated landmark civil rights laws.
Denying Effective Remedies to Victims of Unlawful Discrimination. Brown would have barred administrative agencies from awarding compensatory damages for emotional distress in race discrimination cases. Konig v. Fair Employment and Housing Comm?n, 50 P.3d 718 (2002). While couching her decision in separations of powers language, Brown disparaged administrative agencies and implicitly questioned their ability to fairly assess damages, saying that ?administrative agencies [are] not immune to political influences, [and] they are subject to capture by a specialized constituency.? 50 P.3d at 732. Brown was the only justice to take this position. And in Aguilar v. Avis Rent-a-Car, 980 P.2d 846 (1999), Brown authored a dissenting opinion that would have struck down, on First Amendment grounds, an injunction that instructed a supervisor not to use racial epithets against Latino employees. The injunction was issued by a trial court judge after the employer was found liable by a jury for maintaining a discriminatory hostile work environment for Latino employees.
Barring Civil Rights Claims. Brown dissented in a civil rights case and said the plaintiff?s race and age bias claims should have been thrown out as preempted by federal banking law. Peatros v. Bank of America, 990 P.2d 539 (2000).
Allowing Mandatory Arbitration Agreements Even If Employees Must Pay for the Cost of Arbitration. Brown authored an opinion saying that she would allow employers to require employees to agree to compulsory arbitration of employment claims (such as discrimination claims or unpaid overtime claims) even if those agreements allowed arbitrators to impose some or all of the cost of the arbitration on the employee. Armendariz v. Foundation Health Psychcare Servs., 6 P.3d 669 (2000). The majority of the court ruled that a mandatory arbitration agreement containing such a provision would be invalid, because it would discourage employees from exercising their right to bring claims against their employers.
Protecting Private Property Rights at the Expense of Affordable Housing Measures. Brown dissented from a decision that upheld the City of San Francisco?s determination that the owner of a residence hotel needed to retain affordable housing or contribute to an affordable housing fund as a condition of converting its property to a tourist hotel. Brown wrote a sarcastic and blistering dissent, calling the city?s decision ?theft,? ?extortion? and an unconstitutional ?taking? of the hotel owner?s private property. San Remo Hotel v. City and County of San Francisco, 41 P.3d 87 (2002). Brown?s opinion shows that she is skeptical of government action when it impacts private property rights?a view which, if adopted, would put at risk many consumer, environmental and worker protection measures.
Protecting Private Property Owners from Expressive Activity on their Property. Brown authored an opinion that took a narrow view of the California Constitution?s free speech protections, imposing a ?state action? requirement as a condition of those protections, even though such a requirement does not appear in the language of the California Constitution. As a result, tenants in a huge residential apartment complex were barred from distributing a tenant newsletter to their neighbors. Golden Gateway Center v. Golden Gateway Tenants Ass?n, 29 P.3d 797 (2001). Employers are now using the decision to try to keep union organizers away from their workplaces.
Chilling E-mail Communication with Employees. Brown dissented from a ruling that a company could not sue an ex-employee under the tort of trespass after the ex-employee sent e-mails critical of the company to his former co-workers. The court majority said the company could not sue because there had been no actual damage or disruption to the company?s e-mail system. Brown would have allowed the lawsuit even in the absence of such damage. Intel Corp. v. Hamidi, 71 P.3d 296 (2003). Had Brown?s view been adopted, companies throughout California could have used trespass laws to shut down group e-mail contact from outside individuals or organizations.
Denying Schoolteachers Timely Information About Their Employment Status. In Kavanaugh v. West Sonoma County Union High School, 62 P.3d 54 (2003), Brown authored a dissent that would have allowed school districts to notify teachers of their status well after they began work, meaning that new hires could be subjected to ?bait-and-switch? tactics by school employers. The court majority ruled that applicable statutes require school districts to notify teachers of their status (e.g., temporary, probationary, etc.) on their first day of work. Knowledge of this status is important because different categories of teachers have different levels of job security.
Undermining Health and Safety Protections. Prior to joining the California Supreme Court, Brown served on the California Court of Appeal. There, she authored an opinion that would have invalidated a state law that required paint companies to help pay for screening and treatment of children exposed to lead paint. Brown?s opinion was later overturned by the California Supreme Court. Sinclair Paint Co. v. Board of Equalization, 49 Cal. App. 4th 127 (1996), rev?d, 937 P.2d 1350 (1997).
The D.C. Circuit Needs Balance, Not Extremist Judges Like Janice Rogers Brown

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is widely regarded as the second most important court in America, second only to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court is a stepping-stone to the U.S. Supreme Court?the D.C. Circuit has produced more justices to the U.S. Supreme Court than any other circuit court.

The D.C. Circuit is the administrative law court. It is the court that most closely oversees the actions of federal agencies that are responsible for worker protections, environmental protections, consumer safeguards, civil rights protections and much more. And because the Supreme Court grants review of so few lower court decisions, the D.C. Circuit is often the final word on the legality of federal agency actions.

In 1999, Senate Republicans prevented Democratic appointees from gaining a majority on the D.C. Circuit when they blocked two highly-qualified nominees, including a nominee who is now the Dean of Harvard Law School, on grounds that the D.C. Circuit?s workload did not justify any additional judges. Since that time, the D.C. Circuit?s caseload has dropped by 28 percent.

When the Bush administration took office, there were four Republican appointees, four Democratic appointees and four vacancies on the D.C. Circuit. Rather th

MAKES YOU PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN….OR DOES IT?

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html?hp&ex=1116561600&en=8701738ac057aebe&ei=5094&partner=homepage

In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates’ Deaths

By TIM GOLDEN
Published: May 20, 2005
Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.

Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar’s face.

“Come on, drink!” the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. “Drink!”

At the interrogators’ behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

“Leave him up,” one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

The story of Mr. Dilawar’s brutal death at the Bagram Collection Point – and that of another detainee, Habibullah, who died there six days earlier in December 2002 – emerge from a nearly 2,000-page confidential file of the Army’s criminal investigation into the case, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.

Like a narrative counterpart to the digital images from Abu Ghraib, the Bagram file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse. The harsh treatment, which has resulted in criminal charges against seven soldiers, went well beyond the two deaths.

In some instances, testimony shows, it was directed or carried out by interrogators to extract information. In others, it was punishment meted out by military police guards. Sometimes, the torment seems to have been driven by little more than boredom or cruelty, or both.

In sworn statements to Army investigators, soldiers describe one female interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They tell of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner is made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning.

The Times obtained a copy of the file from a person involved in the investigation who was critical of the methods used at Bagram and the military’s response to the deaths.

Although incidents of prisoner abuse at Bagram in 2002, including some details of the two men’s deaths, have been previously reported, American officials have characterized them as isolated problems that were thoroughly investigated. And many of the officers and soldiers interviewed in the Dilawar investigation said the large majority of detainees at Bagram were compliant and reasonably well treated.

“What we have learned through the course of all these investigations is that there were people who clearly violated anyone’s standard for humane treatment,” said the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Larry Di Rita. “We’re finding some cases that were not close calls.”

(Page 2 of 8)

Yet the Bagram file includes ample testimony that harsh treatment by some interrogators was routine and that guards could strike shackled detainees with virtual impunity. Prisoners considered important or troublesome were also handcuffed and chained to the ceilings and doors of their cells, sometimes for long periods, an action Army prosecutors recently classified as criminal assault.

Some of the mistreatment was quite obvious, the file suggests. Senior officers frequently toured the detention center, and several of them acknowledged seeing prisoners chained up for punishment or to deprive them of sleep. Shortly before the two deaths, observers from the International Committee of the Red Cross specifically complained to the military authorities at Bagram about the shackling of prisoners in “fixed positions,” documents show.

Even though military investigators learned soon after Mr. Dilawar’s death that he had been abused by at least two interrogators, the Army’s criminal inquiry moved slowly. Meanwhile, many of the Bagram interrogators, led by the same operations officer, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, were redeployed to Iraq and in July 2003 took charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to a high-level Army inquiry last year, Captain Wood applied techniques there that were “remarkably similar” to those used at Bagram.

Last October, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command concluded that there was probable cause to charge 27 officers and enlisted personnel with criminal offenses in the Dilawar case ranging from dereliction of duty to maiming and involuntary manslaughter. Fifteen of the same soldiers were also cited for probable criminal responsibility in the Habibullah case.

So far, only the seven soldiers have been charged, including four last week. No one has been convicted in either death. Two Army interrogators were also reprimanded, a military spokesman said. Most of those who could still face legal action have denied wrongdoing, either in statements to investigators or in comments to a reporter.

“The whole situation is unfair,” Sgt. Selena M. Salcedo, a former Bagram interrogator who was charged with assaulting Mr. Dilawar, dereliction of duty and lying to investigators, said in a telephone interview. “It’s all going to come out when everything is said and done.”

With most of the legal action pending, the story of abuses at Bagram remains incomplete. But documents and interviews reveal a striking disparity between the findings of Army investigators and what military officials said in the aftermath of the deaths.

Military spokesmen maintained that both men had died of natural causes, even after military coroners had ruled the deaths homicides. Two months after those autopsies, the American commander in Afghanistan, then-Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, said he had no indication that abuse by soldiers had contributed to the two deaths. The methods used at Bagram, he said, were “in accordance with what is generally accepted as interrogation techniques.”

The Interrogators

In the summer of 2002, the military detention center at Bagram, about 40 miles north of Kabul, stood as a hulking reminder of the Americans’ improvised hold over Afghanistan.

Built by the Soviets as an aircraft machine shop for the operations base they established after their intervention in the country in 1979, the building had survived the ensuing wars as a battered relic – a long, squat, concrete block with rusted metal sheets where the windows had once been.

Retrofitted with five large wire pens and a half dozen plywood isolation cells, the building became the Bagram Collection Point, a clearinghouse for prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The B.C.P., as soldiers called it, typically held between 40 and 80 detainees while they were interrogated and screened for possible shipment to the Pentagon’s longer-term detention center at Guant?namo Bay, Cuba.

The new interrogation unit that arrived in July 2002 had been improvised as well. Captain Wood, then a 32-year-old lieutenant, came with 13 soldiers from the 525th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Bragg, N.C.; six Arabic-speaking reservists were added from the Utah National Guard.

(Page 3 of 8)

Part of the new group, which was consolidated under Company A of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, was made up of counterintelligence specialists with no background in interrogation. Only two of the soldiers had ever questioned actual prisoners.

What specialized training the unit received came on the job, in sessions with two interrogators who had worked in the prison for a few months. “There was nothing that prepared us for running an interrogation operation” like the one at Bagram, the noncommissioned officer in charge of the interrogators, Staff Sgt. Steven W. Loring, later told investigators.

Nor were the rules of engagement very clear. The platoon had the standard interrogations guide, Army Field Manual 34-52, and an order from the secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, to treat prisoners “humanely,” and when possible, in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. But with President Bush’s final determination in February 2002 that the Conventions did not apply to the conflict with Al Qaeda and that Taliban fighters would not be accorded the rights of prisoners of war, the interrogators believed they “could deviate slightly from the rules,” said one of the Utah reservists, Sgt. James A. Leahy.

“There was the Geneva Conventions for enemy prisoners of war, but nothing for terrorists,” Sergeant Leahy told Army investigators. And the detainees, senior intelligence officers said, were to be considered terrorists until proved otherwise.

The deviations included the use of “safety positions” or “stress positions” that would make the detainees uncomfortable but not necessarily hurt them – kneeling on the ground, for instance, or sitting in a “chair” position against the wall. The new platoon was also trained in sleep deprivation, which the previous unit had generally limited to 24 hours or less, insisting that the interrogator remain awake with the prisoner to avoid pushing the limits of humane treatment.

But as the 519th interrogators settled into their jobs, they set their own procedures for sleep deprivation. They decided on 32 to 36 hours as the optimal time to keep prisoners awake and eliminated the practice of staying up themselves, one former interrogator, Eric LaHammer, said in an interview.

The interrogators worked from a menu of basic tactics to gain a prisoner’s cooperation, from the “friendly” approach, to good cop-bad cop routines, to the threat of long-term imprisonment. But some less-experienced interrogators came to rely on the method known in the military as “Fear Up Harsh,” or what one soldier referred to as “the screaming technique.”

Sergeant Loring, then 27, tried with limited success to wean those interrogators off that approach, which typically involved yelling and throwing chairs. Mr. Leahy said the sergeant “put the brakes on when certain approaches got out of hand.” But he could also be dismissive of tactics he considered too soft, several soldiers told investigators, and gave some of the most aggressive interrogators wide latitude. (Efforts to locate Mr. Loring, who has left the military, were unsuccessful.)

“We sometimes developed a rapport with detainees, and Sergeant Loring would sit us down and remind us that these were evil people and talk about 9/11 and they weren’t our friends and could not be trusted,” Mr. Leahy said.

Specialist Damien M. Corsetti, a tall, bearded interrogator sometimes called “Monster” -he had the nickname tattooed in Italian across his stomach, other soldiers said – was often chosen to intimidate new detainees. Specialist Corsetti, they said, would glower and yell at the arrivals as they stood chained to an overhead pole or lay face down on the floor of a holding room. (A military police K-9 unit often brought growling dogs to walk among the new prisoners for similar effect, documents show.)

“The other interrogators would use his reputation,” said one interrogator, Specialist Eric H. Barclais. “They would tell the detainee, ‘If you don’t cooperate, we’ll have to get Monster, and he won’t be as nice.’ ” Another soldier told investigators that Sergeant Loring lightheartedly referred to Specialist Corsetti, then 23, as “the King of Torture.”

(Page 4 of 8)

A Saudi detainee who was interviewed by Army investigators last June at Guant?namo said Specialist Corsetti had pulled out his penis during an interrogation at Bagram, held it against the prisoner’s face and threatened to rape him, excerpts from the man’s statement show.

Last fall, the investigators cited probable cause to charge Specialist Corsetti with assault, maltreatment of a prisoner and indecent acts in the incident; he has not been charged. At Abu Ghraib, he was also one of three members of the 519th who were fined and demoted for forcing an Iraqi woman to strip during questioning, another interrogator said. A spokesman at Fort Bragg said Specialist Corsetti would not comment.

In late August of 2002, the Bagram interrogators were joined by a new military police unit that was assigned to guard the detainees. The soldiers, mostly reservists from the 377th Military Police Company based in Cincinnati and Bloomington, Ind., were similarly unprepared for their mission, members of the unit said.

The company received basic lessons in handling prisoners at Fort Dix, N.J., and some police and corrections officers in its ranks provided further training. That instruction included an overview of “pressure-point control tactics” and notably the “common peroneal strike” – a potentially disabling blow to the side of the leg, just above the knee.

The M.P.’s said they were never told that peroneal strikes were not part of Army doctrine. Nor did most of them hear one of the former police officers tell a fellow soldier during the training that he would never use such strikes because they would “tear up” a prisoner’s legs.

But once in Afghanistan, members of the 377th found that the usual rules did not seem to apply. The peroneal strike quickly became a basic weapon of the M.P. arsenal. “That was kind of like an accepted thing; you could knee somebody in the leg,” former Sgt. Thomas V. Curtis told the investigators.

A few weeks into the company’s tour, Specialist Jeremy M. Callaway overheard another guard boasting about having beaten a detainee who had spit on him. Specialist Callaway also told investigators that other soldiers had congratulated the guard “for not taking any” from a detainee.

One captain nicknamed members of the Third Platoon “the Testosterone Gang.” Several were devout bodybuilders. Upon arriving in Afghanistan, a group of the soldiers decorated their tent with a Confederate flag, one soldier said.

Some of the same M.P.’s took a particular interest in an emotionally disturbed Afghan detainee who was known to eat his feces and mutilate himself with concertina wire. The soldiers kneed the man repeatedly in the legs and, at one point, chained him with his arms straight up in the air, Specialist Callaway told investigators. They also nicknamed him “Timmy,” after a disabled child in the animated television series “South Park.” One of the guards who beat the prisoner also taught him to screech like the cartoon character, Specialist Callaway said.

Eventually, the man was sent home.

The Defiant Detainee

The detainee known as Person Under Control No. 412 was a portly, well-groomed Afghan named Habibullah. Some American officials identified him as “Mullah” Habibullah, a brother of a former Taliban commander from the southern Afghan province of Oruzgan.

He stood out from the scraggly guerrillas and villagers whom the Bagram interrogators typically saw. “He had a piercing gaze and was very confident,” the provost marshal in charge of the M.P.’s, Maj. Bobby R. Atwell, recalled.

Documents from the investigation suggest that Mr. Habibullah was captured by an Afghan warlord on Nov. 28, 2002, and delivered to Bagram by C.I.A. operatives two days later. His well-being at that point is a matter of dispute. The doctor who examined him on arrival at Bagram reported him in good health. But the intelligence operations chief, Lt. Col. John W. Loffert Jr., later told Army investigators, “He was already in bad condition when he arrived.”

What is clear is that Mr. Habibullah was identified at Bagram as an important prisoner and an unusually sharp-tongued and insubordinate one.

Page 5 of 8)

One of the 377th’s Third Platoon sergeants, Alan J. Driver Jr., told investigators that Mr. Habibullah rose up after a rectal examination and kneed him in the groin. The guard said he grabbed the prisoner by the head and yelled in his face. Mr. Habibullah then “became combative,” Sergeant Driver said, and had to be subdued by three guards and led away in an armlock.

He was then confined in one of the 9-foot by 7-foot isolation cells, which the M.P. commander, Capt. Christopher M. Beiring, later described as a standard procedure. “There was a policy that detainees were hooded, shackled and isolated for at least the first 24 hours, sometimes 72 hours of captivity,” he told investigators.

While the guards kept some prisoners awake by yelling or poking at them or banging on their cell doors, Mr. Habibullah was shackled by the wrists to the wire ceiling over his cell, soldiers said.

On his second day, Dec. 1, the prisoner was “uncooperative” again, this time with Specialist Willie V. Brand. The guard, who has since been charged with assault and other crimes, told investigators he had delivered three peroneal strikes in response. The next day, Specialist Brand said, he had to knee the prisoner again. Other blows followed.

A lawyer for Specialist Brand, John P. Galligan, said there was no criminal intent by his client to hurt any detainee. “At the time, my client was acting consistently with the standard operating procedure that was in place at the Bagram facility.”

The communication between Mr. Habibullah and his jailers appears to have been almost exclusively physical. Despite repeated requests, the M.P.’s were assigned no interpreters of their own. Instead, they borrowed from the interrogators when they could and relied on prisoners who spoke even a little English to translate for them.

When the detainees were beaten or kicked for “noncompliance,” one of the interpreters, Ali M. Baryalai said, it was often “because they have no idea what the M.P. is saying.”

By the morning of Dec. 2, witnesses told the investigators, Mr. Habibullah was coughing and complaining of chest pains. He limped into the interrogation room in shackles, his right leg stiff and his right foot swollen. The lead interrogator, Sergeant Leahy, let him sit on the floor because he could not bend his knees and sit in a chair.

The interpreter who was on hand, Ebrahim Baerde, said the interrogators had kept their distance that day “because he was spitting up a lot of phlegm.”

“They were laughing and making fun of him, saying it was ‘gross’ or ‘nasty,’ ” Mr. Baerde said.

Though battered, Mr. Habibullah was unbowed.

“Once they asked him if he wanted to spend the rest of his life in handcuffs,” Mr. Baerde said. “His response was, ‘Yes, don’t they look good on me?’ “

By Dec. 3, Mr. Habibullah’s reputation for defiance seemed to make him an open target. One M.P. said he had given him five peroneal strikes for being “noncompliant and combative.” Another gave him three or four more for being “combative and noncompliant.” Some guards later asserted that he had been hurt trying to escape.

When Sgt. James P. Boland saw Mr. Habibullah on Dec. 3, he was in one of the isolation cells, tethered to the ceiling by two sets of handcuffs and a chain around his waist. His body was slumped forward, held up by the chains.

Sergeant Boland told the investigators he had entered the cell with two other guards, Specialists Anthony M. Morden and Brian E. Cammack. (All three have been charged with assault and other crimes.) One of them pulled off the prisoner’s black hood. His head was slumped to one side, his tongue sticking out. Specialist Cammack said he had put some bread on Mr. Habibullah’s tongue. Another soldier put an apple in the prisoner’s hand; it fell to the floor.

When Specialist Cammack turned back toward the prisoner, he said in one statement, Mr. Habibullah’s spit hit his chest. Later, Specialist Cammack acknowledged, “I’m not sure if he spit at me.” But at the time, he exploded, yelling, “Don’t ever spit on me again!” and kneeing the prisoner sharply in the thigh, “maybe a couple” of times. Mr. Habibullah’s limp body swayed back and forth in the chains.

When Sergeant Boland returned to the cell some 20 minutes later, he said, Mr. Habibullah was not moving and had no pulse. Finally, the prisoner was unchained and laid out on the floor of his cell.

The guard who Specialist Cammack said had counseled him back in New Jersey about the dangers of peroneal strikes found him in the room where Mr. Habibullah lay, his body already cold.

“Specialist Cammack appeared very distraught,” Specialist William Bohl told an investigator. The soldier “was running about the room hysterically.”

An M.P. was sent to wake one of the medics.

“What are you getting me for?” the medic, Specialist Robert S. Melone, responded, telling him to call an ambulance instead.

When another medic finally arrived, he found Mr. Habibullah on the floor, his arms outstretched, his eyes and mouth open.

“It looked like he had been dead for a while, and it looked like nobody cared,” the medic, Staff Sgt. Rodney D. Glass, recalled.

Not all of the guards were indifferent, their statements show. But if Mr. Habibullah’s death shocked some of them, it did not lead to major changes in the detention center’s operation.

(Page 6 of 8)

Military police guards were assigned to be present during interrogations to help prevent mistreatment. The provost marshal, Major Atwell, told investigators he had already instructed the commander of the M.P. company, Captain Beiring, to stop chaining prisoners to the ceiling. Others said they never received such an order.

Senior officers later told investigators that they had been unaware of any serious abuses at the B.C.P. But the first sergeant of the 377th, Betty J. Jones, told investigators that the use of standing restraints, sleep deprivation and peroneal strikes was readily apparent.

“Everyone that is anyone went through the facility at one time or another,” she said.

Major Atwell said the death “did not cause an enormous amount of concern ’cause it appeared natural.”

In fact, Mr. Habibullah’s autopsy, completed on Dec. 8, showed bruises or abrasions on his chest, arms and head. There were deep contusions on his calves, knees and thighs. His left calf was marked by what appeared to have been the sole of a boot.

His death was attributed to a blood clot, probably caused by the severe injuries to his legs, which traveled to his heart and blocked the blood flow to his lungs.

The Shy Detainee

On Dec. 5, one day after Mr. Habibullah died, Mr. Dilawar arrived at Bagram.

Four days before, on the eve of the Muslim holiday of Id al-Fitr, Mr. Dilawar set out from his tiny village of Yakubi in a prized new possession, a used Toyota sedan that his family bought for him a few weeks earlier to drive as a taxi.

Mr. Dilawar was not an adventurous man. He rarely went far from the stone farmhouse he shared with his wife, young daughter and extended family. He never attended school, relatives said, and had only one friend, Bacha Khel, with whom he would sit in the wheat fields surrounding the village and talk.

“He was a shy man, a very simple man,” his eldest brother, Shahpoor, said in an interview.

On the day he disappeared, Mr. Dilawar’s mother had asked him to gather his three sisters from their nearby villages and bring them home for the holiday. But he needed gas money and decided instead to drive to the provincial capital, Khost, about 45 minutes away, to look for fares.

At a taxi stand there, he found three men headed back toward Yakubi. On the way, they passed a base used by American troops, Camp Salerno, which had been the target of a rocket attack that morning.

Militiamen loyal to the guerrilla commander guarding the base, Jan Baz Khan, stopped the Toyota at a checkpoint. They confiscated a broken walkie-talkie from one of Mr. Dilawar’s passengers. In the trunk, they found an electric stabilizer used to regulate current from a generator. (Mr. Dilawar’s family said the stabilizer was not theirs; at the time, they said, they had no electricity at all.)

The four men were detained and turned over to American soldiers at the base as suspects in the attack. Mr. Dilawar and his passengers spent their first night there handcuffed to a fence, so they would be unable to sleep. When a doctor examined them the next morning, he said later, he found Mr. Dilawar tired and suffering from headaches but otherwise fine.

Mr. Dilawar’s three passengers were eventually flown to Guant?namo and held for more than a year before being sent home without charge. In interviews after their release, the men described their treatment at Bagram as far worse than at Guant?namo. While all of them said they had been beaten, they complained most bitterly of being stripped naked in front of female soldiers for showers and medical examinations, which they said included the first of several painful and humiliating rectal exams.

“They did lots and lots of bad things to me,” said Abdur Rahim, a 26-year-old baker from Khost. “I was shouting and crying, and no one was listening. When I was shouting, the soldiers were slamming my head against the desk.”

For Mr. Dilawar, his fellow prisoners said, the most difficult thing seemed to be the black cloth hood that was pulled over his head. “He could not breathe,” said a man called Parkhudin, who had been one of Mr. Dilawar’s passengers.

Mr. Dilawar was a frail man, standing only 5 feet 9 inches and weighing 122 pounds. But at Bagram, he was quickly labeled one of the “noncompliant” ones.

(Page 7 of 8)

When one of the First Platoon M.P.’s, Specialist Corey E. Jones, was sent to Mr. Dilawar’s cell to give him some water, he said the prisoner spit in his face and started kicking him. Specialist Jones responded, he said, with a couple of knee strikes to the leg of the shackled man.

“He screamed out, ‘Allah! Allah! Allah!’ and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his god,” Specialist Jones said to investigators. “Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny.”

Other Third Platoon M.P.’s later came by the detention center and stopped at the isolation cells to see for themselves, Specialist Jones said.

It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out ‘Allah,’ ” he said. “It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes.”

In a subsequent statement, Specialist Jones was vague about which M.P.’s had delivered the blows. His estimate was never confirmed, but other guards eventually admitted striking Mr. Dilawar repeatedly.

Many M.P.’s would eventually deny that they had any idea of Mr. Dilawar’s injuries, explaining that they never saw his legs beneath his jumpsuit. But Specialist Jones recalled that the drawstring pants of Mr. Dilawar’s orange prison suit fell down again and again while he was shackled.

“I saw the bruise because his pants kept falling down while he was in standing restraints,” the soldier told investigators. “Over a certain time period, I noticed it was the size of a fist.”

As Mr. Dilawar grew desperate, he began crying out more loudly to be released. But even the interpreters had trouble understanding his Pashto dialect; the annoyed guards heard only noise.

“He had constantly been screaming, ‘Release me; I don’t want to be here,’ and things like that,” said the one linguist who could decipher his distress, Abdul Ahad Wardak.

The Interrogation

On Dec. 8, Mr. Dilawar was taken for his fourth interrogation. It quickly turned hostile.

The 21-year-old lead interrogator, Specialist Glendale C. Walls II, later contended that Mr. Dilawar was evasive. “Some holes came up, and we wanted him to answer us truthfully,” he said. The other interrogator, Sergeant Salcedo, complained that the prisoner was smiling, not answering questions, and refusing to stay kneeling on the ground or sitting against the wall.

The interpreter who was present, Ahmad Ahmadzai, recalled the encounter differently to investigators.

The interrogators, Mr. Ahmadzai said, accused Mr. Dilawar of launching the rockets that had hit the American base. He denied that. While kneeling on the ground, he was unable to hold his cuffed hands above his head as instructed, prompting Sergeant Salcedo to slap them back up whenever they began to drop.

“Selena berated him for being weak and questioned him about being a man, which was very insulting because of his heritage,” Mr. Ahmadzai said.

When Mr. Dilawar was unable to sit in the chair position against the wall because of his battered legs, the two interrogators grabbed him by the shirt and repeatedly shoved him back against the wall.

“This went on for 10 or 15 minutes,” the interpreter said. “He was so tired he couldn’t get up.”

“They stood him up, and at one point Selena stepped on his bare foot with her boot and grabbed him by his beard and pulled him towards her,” he went on. “Once Selena kicked Dilawar in the groin, private areas, with her right foot. She was standing some distance from him, and she stepped back and kicked him.

“About the first 10 minutes, I think, they were actually questioning him, after that it was pushing, shoving, kicking and shouting at him,” Mr. Ahmadzai said. “There was no interrogation going on.”

The session ended, he said, with Sergeant Salcedo instructing the M.P.’s to keep Mr. Dilawar chained to the ceiling until the next shift came on.

The next morning, Mr. Dilawar began yelling again. At around noon, the M.P.’s called over another of the interpreters, Mr. Baerde, to try to quiet Mr. Dilawar down.

“I told him, ‘Look, please, if you want to be able to sit down and be released from shackles, you just need to be quiet for one more hour.”

“He told me that if he was in shackles another hour, he would die,” Mr. Baerde said.

Half an hour later, Mr. Baerde returned to the cell. Mr. Dilawar’s hands hung limply from the cuffs, and his head, covered by the black hood, slumped forward.

“He wanted me to get a doctor, and said that he needed ‘a shot,’ ” Mr. Baerde recalled. “He said that he didn’t feel good. He said that his legs were hurting.”

Mr. Baerde translated Mr. Dilawar’s plea to one of the guards. The soldier took the prisoner’s hand and pressed down on his fingernails to check his circulation.

“He’s O.K.,” Mr. Baerde quoted the M.P. as saying. “He’s just trying to get out of his restraints.”

Page 8 of 8)

By the time Mr. Dilawar was brought in for his final interrogation in the first hours of the next day, Dec. 10, he appeared exhausted and was babbling that his wife had died. He also told the interrogators that he had been beaten by the guards.

“But we didn’t pursue that,” said Mr. Baryalai, the interpreter.

Specialist Walls was again the lead interrogator. But his more aggressive partner, Specialist Claus, quickly took over, Mr. Baryalai said.

“Josh had a rule that the detainee had to look at him, not me,” the interpreter told investigators. “He gave him three chances, and then he grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him towards him, across the table, slamming his chest into the table front.”

When Mr. Dilawar was unable to kneel, the interpreter said, the interrogators pulled him to his feet and pushed him against the wall. Told to assume a stress position, the prisoner leaned his head against the wall and began to fall asleep.

“It looked to me like Dilawar was trying to cooperate, but he couldn’t physically perform the tasks,” Mr. Baryalai said.

Finally, Specialist Walls grabbed the prisoner and “shook him harshly,” the interpreter said, telling him that if he failed to cooperate, he would be shipped to a prison in the United States, where he would be “treated like a woman, by the other men” and face the wrath of criminals who “would be very angry with anyone involved in the 9/11 attacks.” (Specialist Walls was charged last week with assault, maltreatment and failure to obey a lawful order; Specialist Claus was charged with assault, maltreatment and lying to investigators. Each man declined to comment.)

A third military intelligence specialist who spoke some Pashto, Staff Sgt. W. Christopher Yonushonis, had questioned Mr. Dilawar earlier and had arranged with Specialist Claus to take over when he was done. Instead, the sergeant arrived at the interrogation room to find a large puddle of water on the floor, a wet spot on Mr. Dilawar’s shirt and Specialist Claus standing behind the detainee, twisting up the back of the hood that covered the prisoner’s head.

“I had the impression that Josh was actually holding the detainee upright by pulling on the hood,” he said. “I was furious at this point because I had seen Josh tighten the hood of another detainee the week before. This behavior seemed completely gratuitous and unrelated to intelligence collection.”

“What the hell happened with that water?” Sergeant Yonushonis said he had demanded.

“We had to make sure he stayed hydrated,” he said Specialist Claus had responded.

The next morning, Sergeant Yonushonis went to the noncommissioned officer in charge of the interrogators, Sergeant Loring, to report the incident. Mr. Dilawar, however, was already dead.

The Post-Mortem

The findings of Mr. Dilawar’s autopsy were succinct. He had had some coronary artery disease, the medical examiner reported, but what caused his heart to fail was “blunt force injuries to the lower extremities.” Similar injuries contributed to Mr. Habibullah’s death.

One of the coroners later translated the assessment at a pre-trial hearing for Specialist Brand, saying the tissue in the young man’s legs “had basically been pulpified.”

“I’ve seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus,” added Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the coroner, and a major at that time.

After the second death, several of the 519th Battalion’s interrogators were temporarily removed from their posts. A medic was assigned to the detention center to work night shifts. On orders from the Bagram intelligence chief, interrogators were prohibited from any physical contact with the detainees. Chaining prisoners to any fixed object was also banned, and the use of stress positions was curtailed.

In February, an American military official disclosed that the Afghan guerrilla commander whose men had arrested Mr. Dilawar and his passengers had himself been detained. The commander, Jan Baz Khan, was suspected of attacking Camp Salerno himself and then turning over innocent “suspects” to the Americans in a ploy to win their trust, the military official said.

The three passengers in Mr. Dilawar’s taxi were sent home from Guant?namo in March 2004, 15 months after their capture, with letters saying they posed “no threat” to American forces.

They were later visited by Mr. Dilawar’s parents, who begged them to explain what had happened to their son. But the men said they could not bring themselves to recount the details.

“I told them he had a bed,” said Mr. Parkhudin. “I said the Americans were very nice because he had a heart problem.”

In late August of last year, shortly before the Army completed its inquiry into the deaths, Sergeant Yonushonis, who was stationed in Germany, went at his own initiative to see an agent of the Criminal Investigation Command. Until then, he had never been interviewed.

“I expected to be contacted at some point by investigators in this case,” he said. “I was living a few doors down from the interrogation room, and I had been one of the last to see this detainee alive.”

Sergeant Yonushonis described what he had witnessed of the detainee’s last interrogation. “I remember being so mad that I had trouble speaking,” he said.

He also added a detail that had been overlooked in the investigative file. By the time Mr. Dilawar was taken into his final interrogations, he said, “most of us were convinced that the detainee was innocent.”

###

This post originally appeared on an external website

KRT Wire | 05/20/2005 | Bush says he’ll veto stem cell measure

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

KRT Wire | 05/20/2005 | Bush says he’ll veto stem cell measureBush says he’ll veto stem cell measure

BY WILLIAM DOUGLAS

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON – (KRT) – President Bush vowed Friday to veto bipartisan legislation that would ease restrictions on embryonic stem cell research and expressed deep concern about human cloning research in South Korea.

The veto threat sets up a potential showdown between the president and the House of Representatives, which could vote as early as next week on a stem cell bill. The bill would permit federal funding for research on stem cells taken from days-old embryos stored in freezers at fertility clinics.

The issue pits those like Bush, who believe stem cell research verges on scientists immorally taking embryonic life, against people who say such stem cells come from abandoned embryos and can, through research, save lives by advancing medical science.

Human embryonic stem cells can develop into many different cell types in the body, according to the National Institutes of Health. They are isolated from human embryos that are a few days old and can be used to create stem cell lines – cell cultures that can be grown indefinitely in a laboratory. Scientists can use the stem cell lines in transplantation or for treatment of diseases.

Bush, after lengthy deliberation, placed limits in 2001 on federal funding for research on lines of embryonic stem cells that already had been collected.

“I made it very clear to the Congress that the use of federal money, taxpayers’ money, to promote science which destroys life in order to save life – I’m against that,” Bush said Friday during a White House photo session with Danish Prime Minister Fogh Rasmussen. “And therefore, if that bill does that, I will veto it.”

In his fifth year in office, Bush has yet to veto any bill. This one, authored by Reps. Michael N. Castle, R-Del., and Diana DeGette, D-Colo., has nearly 200 House members as co-sponsors. Supporters have launched ads using the words of former first lady Nancy Reagan, who favors expanded research.

Stem cell research proponents believe that it holds the potential to help find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, which killed President Reagan; paralysis, which led to actor Christopher Reeve’s death; and juvenile diabetes.

Even some abortion foes, such as Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, have spoken strongly in favor of the House bill and are pressing for a similar measure in the Senate.

“I think we can get it to the floor one way or another,” Hatch said.

The House measure faces opposition from some conservatives, such as House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and religious groups, who say the research is immoral because the embryo is destroyed in the process.

“This is a big deal,” said Dr. Dennis Steindler, executive director of the Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida. “If this gets vetoed and no additional (embryonic stem cell) lines are easily and readily available, that could impact discoveries made in the United States. If the federal government can’t produce the additional funding, that could impact progress in the field.”

Bush and others worry that such potential advances would come at the expense of morality. The president fretted Friday over news that South Korean scientists have developed a way of producing human embryos through cloning.

“I’m very worried about cloning,” he said. “I worry about a world in which cloning becomes acceptable.”

Bush used the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington to reaffirm his positions on these questions. Praising the late Pope John Paul II, Bush said: “The best way to honor this champion of human freedom is to continue to build a culture of life where the strong protect the weak.”

This post originally appeared on an external website

Yahoo causing RIAA to downsize? – The Peer-to-Peer Weblog – p2p.weblogsinc.com _

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Yahoo causing RIAA to downsize? – The Peer-to-Peer Weblog – p2p.weblogsinc.com _Yahoo causing RIAA to downsize?

Posted May 20, 2005, 11:28 AM ET by Alberto Escarlate

Our favorite billionaire (that happens to blog with us here at Weblogs Inc) wrote an interesting piece about how Yahoo (and other digital music services) should force the RIAA cutback their staff?and stop suing file-sharers.

Why? Because with a service like Yahoo?s Music Unlimited Service the new market value for all-you-can-eat music download has been set at $5/month. How can the RIAA claim legally that downloaders cost them thousands of dollars? In Cuban?s own words: ?In essence, Yahoo just turned possession of a controlled music substance into a misdemeanor. Payable by a $5 per month fine.?

This post originally appeared on an external website

AlterNet: MediaCulture: Moyers Addresses PBS Coup

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

AlterNet: MediaCulture: Moyers Addresses PBS Coup: “Moyers Addresses PBS Coup

By Bill Moyers, AlterNet. Posted May 17, 2005.

Moyers Addresses PBS Coup

By Bill Moyers, AlterNet. Posted May 17, 2005.

In this highly anticipated speech the veteran public broadcaster takes on the PBS coup and its right-wing engineers who are ‘squealing like a stuck pig.’

I can’t imagine better company on this beautiful Sunday morning in St. Louis. You’re church for me today, and there’s no congregation in the country where I would be more likely to find more kindred souls than are gathered here.

There are so many different vocations and callings in this room — so many different interests and aspirations of people who want to reform the media — that only a presiding bishop like Bob McChesney with his great ecumenical heart could bring us together for a weekend like this.

What joins us all under Bob’s embracing welcome is our commitment to public media. Pat Aufderheide got it right, I think, in the recent issue of In These Times when she wrote: “This is a moment when public media outlets can make a powerful case for themselves. Public radio, public TV, cable access, public DBS channels, media arts centers, youth media projects, nonprofit Internet news services … low-power radio and webcasting are all part of a nearly invisible feature of today’s media map: the public media sector. They exist not to make a profit, not to push an ideology, not to serve customers, but to create a public — a group of people who can talk productively with those who don’t share their views, and defend the interests of the people who have to live with the consequences of corporate and governmental power.”

She gives examples of the possibilities. “Look at what happened,” she said, “when thousands of people who watched Stanley Nelson’s The Murder of Emmett Till on their public television channels joined a postcard campaign that re-opened the murder case after more than half a century. Look at NPR’s courageous coverage of the Iraq war, an expensive endeavor that wins no points from this administration. Look at Chicago Access Network’s Community Forum, where nonprofits throughout the region can showcase their issues and find volunteers.”

The public media, she argues, for all our flaws, are a very important resource in a noisy and polluted information environment.

You can also take wings reading Jason Miller’s May 4 article on Z Net about the mainstream media. While it is true that much of the mainstream media is corrupted by the influence of government and corporate interests, Miller writes, there are still men and women in the mainstream who practice a high degree of journalistic integrity and who do challenge us with their stories and analysis.

But the real hope “lies within the internet with its 2 billion or more Web sites providing a wealth of information drawn from almost unlimited resources that span the globe. … If knowledge is power, one’s capacity to increase that power increases exponentially through navigation of the Internet for news and information.”

Surely this is one issue that unites us as we leave here today. The fight to preserve the web from corporate gatekeepers joins media, reformers, producers and educators — and it’s a fight that has only just begun.

I want to tell you about another fight we’re in today. The story I’ve come to share with you goes to the core of our belief that the quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined. I can tell this story because I’ve been living it. It’s been in the news this week, including reports of more attacks on a single journalist — yours truly — by the right-wing media and their allies at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

As some of you know, CPB was established almost 40 years ago to set broad policy for public broadcasting and to be a firewall between political influence and program content. What some on this board are now doing today — led by its chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson — is too important, too disturbing and yes, even too dangerous for a gathering like this not to address.

We’re seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age-old ambition of power and ideology to squelch and punish journalists who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable.

Let me assure you that I take in stride attacks by the radical right-wingers who have not given up demonizing me although I retired over six months ago. They’ve been after me for years now, and I suspect they will be stomping on my grave to make sure I don’t come back from the dead.

I should remind them, however, that one of our boys pulled it off some 2,000 years ago — after the Pharisees, Sadducees and Caesar’s surrogates thought they had shut him up for good. Of course I won’t be expecting that kind of miracle, but I should put my detractors on notice: They might just compel me out of the rocking chair and back into the anchor chair.

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate. I mean the people who are hollowing out middle-class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmed Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’s oil. I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets. I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.

That’s who I mean. And if that’s editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it’s OK to state the conclusion you’re led to by the evidence.

One reason I’m in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn’t play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

Jonathan Mermin writes about this in a recent essay in World Policy Journal. (You’ll also want to read his book Debating War and Peace, Media Coverage of U.S. Intervention in the Post-Vietnam Era.)

Mermin quotes David Ignatius of The Washington Post on why the deep interests of the American public are so poorly served by Beltway journalism. The “rules of our game,” says Ignatius, “make it hard for us to tee up an issue … without a news peg.” He offers a case in point: the debacle of America’s occupation of Iraq. “If senator so and so hasn’t criticized postwar planning for Iraq,” says Ignatius, “then it’s hard for a reporter to write a story about that.”

Mermin also quotes public television’s Jim Lehrer acknowledging that unless an official says something is so, it isn’t news. Why were journalists not discussing the occupation of Iraq? Because, says Lehrer, “the word occupation … was never mentioned in the run-up to the war.” Washington talked about the invasion as “a war of liberation, not a war of occupation, so as a consequence, “those of us in journalism never even looked at the issue of occupation.”

“In other words,” says Jonathan Mermin, “if the government isn’t talking about it, we don’t report it.” He concludes: “[Lehrer’s] somewhat jarring declaration, one of many recent admissions by journalists that their reporting failed to prepare the public for the calamitous occupation that has followed the ‘liberation’ of Iraq, reveals just how far the actual practice of American journalism has deviated from the First Amendment ideal of a press that is independent of the government.”

Take the example (also cited by Mermin) of Charles J. Hanley. Hanley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Associated Press, whose fall 2003 story on the torture of Iraqis in American prisons — before a U.S. Army report and photographs documenting the abuse surfaced — was ignored by major American newspapers. Hanley attributes this lack of interest to the fact that “it was not an officially sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source.”

Furthermore, Iraqis recounting their own personal experience of Abu Ghraib simply did not have the credibility with Beltway journalists of American officials denying that such things happened. Judith Miller of The New York Times, among others, relied on the credibility of official but unnamed sources when she served essentially as the government stenographer for claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

These “rules of the game” permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too often simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers, sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading.

I decided long ago that this wasn’t healthy for democracy. I came to see that “news is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity.” In my documentaries — whether on the Watergate scandals 30 years ago or the Iran-Contra conspiracy 20 years ago or Bill Clinton’s fundraising scandals 10 years ago or, five years ago, the chemical industry’s long and despicable cover-up of its cynical and unspeakable withholding of critical data about its toxic products from its workers, I realized that investigative journalism could not be a collaboration between the journalist and the subject. Objectivity is not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference.

I came to believe that objective journalism means describing the object being reported on, including the little fibs and fantasies as well as the Big Lie of the people in power. In no way does this permit journalists to make accusations and allegations. It means, instead, making sure that your reporting and your conclusions can be nailed to the post with confirming evidence.

This is always hard to do, but it has never been harder than today. Without a trace of irony, the powers-that-be have appropriated the newspeak vernacular of George Orwell’s 1984. They give us a program vowing “No Child Left Behind,” while cutting funds for educating disadvantaged kids. They give us legislation cheerily calling for “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” that give us neither. And that’s just for starters.

In Orwell’s 1984, the character Syme, one of the writers of that totalitarian society’s dictionary, explains to the protagonist Winston, “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only on partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, to ask questions and be skeptical. That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy — or worse.

I learned about this the hard way. I grew up in the South, where the truth about slavery, race, and segregation had been driven from the pulpits, driven from the classrooms and driven from the newsrooms. It took a bloody Civil War to bring the truth home, and then it took another hundred years for the truth to make us free.

Then I served in the Johnson administration. Imbued with Cold War orthodoxy and confident that “might makes right,” we circled the wagons, listened only to each other, and pursued policies the evidence couldn’t carry. The results were devastating for Vietnamese and Americans.

I brought all of this to the task when PBS asked me after 9/11 to start a new weekly broadcast. They wanted us to make it different from anything else on the air — commercial or public broadcasting. They asked us to tell stories no one else was reporting and to offer a venue to people who might not otherwise be heard.

That wasn’t a hard sell. I had been deeply impressed by studies published in leading peer-reviewed scholarly journals by a team of researchers led by Vassar College sociologist William Hoynes. Extensive research on the content of public television over a decade found that political discussions on our public affairs programs generally included a limited set of voices that offer a narrow range of perspectives on current issues and events.

Instead of far-ranging discussions and debates, the kind that might engage viewers as citizens, not simply as audiences, this research found that public affairs programs on PBS stations were populated by the standard set of elite news sources. Whether government officials and Washington journalists (talking about political strategy) or corporate sources (talking about stock prices or the economy from the investor’s viewpoint), public television, unfortunately, all too often was offering the same kind of discussions, and a similar brand of insider discourse, that is featured regularly on commercial television.

Who didn’t appear was also revealing. Hoynes and his team found that in contrast to the conservative mantra that public television routinely featured the voices of anti-establishment critics, “alternative perspectives were rare on public television and were effectively drowned out by the stream of government and corporate views that represented the vast majority of sources on our broadcasts.”

The so-called experts who got most of the face time came primarily from mainstream news organizations and Washington think tanks rather than diverse interests. Economic news, for example, was almost entirely refracted through the views of business people, investors and business journalists. Voices outside the corporate/Wall Street universe — nonprofessional workers, labor representatives, consumer advocates and the general public were rarely heard. In sum, these two studies concluded, the economic coverage was so narrow that the views and the activities of most citizens became irrelevant.

All this went against the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 that created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I know. I was there. As a young policy assistant to President Johnson, I attended my first meeting to discuss the future of public broadcasting in 1964 in the office of the Commissioner of Education. I know firsthand that the Public Broadcasting Act was meant to provide an alternative to commercial television and to reflect the diversity of the American people.

This, too, was on my mind when we assembled the team for NOW. It was just after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. We agreed on two priorities. First, we wanted to do our part to keep the conversation of democracy going. That meant talking to a wide range of people across the spectrum — left, right and center.

It meant poets, philosophers, politicians, scientists, sages and scribblers. It meant Isabel Allende, the novelist, and Amity Shlaes, the columnist for the Financial Times. It meant the former nun and best-selling author Karen Armstrong, and it meant the right-wing evangelical columnist Cal Thomas. It meant Arundhati Roy from India, Doris Lessing from London, David Suzuki from Canada, and Bernard Henry-Levi from Paris. It also meant two successive editors of the Wall Street Journal, Robert Bartley and Paul Gigot, the editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel and the L.A. Weekly’s John Powers.

It means liberals like Frank Wu, Ossie Davis and Gregory Nava, and conservatives like Frank Gaffney, Grover Norquist, and Richard Viguerie. It meant Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Bishop Wilton Gregory of the Catholic Bishops conference in this country. It meant the conservative Christian activist and lobbyist, Ralph Reed, and the dissident Catholic Sister Joan Chittister. We threw the conversation of democracy open to all comers.

Most of those who came responded the same way that Ron Paul, the Republican and Libertarian congressman from Texas, did when he wrote me after his appearance, “I have received hundreds of positive e-mails from your viewers. I appreciate the format of your program, which allows time for a full discussion of ideas. … I’m tired of political shows featuring two guests shouting over each other and offering the same arguments. … NOW was truly refreshing.”

Hold your applause because that’s not the point of the story. We had a second priority. We intended to do strong, honest and accurate reporting, telling stories we knew people in high places wouldn’t like.

I told our producers and correspondents that in our field reporting our job was to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth. This was all the more imperative in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. America could be entering a long war against an elusive and stateless enemy with no definable measure of victory and no limit to its duration, cost or foreboding fear. The rise of a homeland security state meant government could justify extraordinary measures in exchange for protecting citizens against unnamed, even unproven, threats.

Furthermore, increased spending during a national emergency can produce a spectacle of corruption behind a smokescreen of secrecy. I reminded our team of the words of the news photographer in Tom Stoppard’s play who said, “People do terrible things to each other, but it’s worse when everyone is kept in the dark.”

I also reminded them of how the correspondent and historian Richard Reeves answered a student who asked him to define real news. “Real news,” Reeves responded, “is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms.”

For these reasons and in that spirit, we went about reporting on Washington as no one else in broadcasting — except occasionally 60 Minutes — was doing. We reported on the expansion of the Justice Department’s power of surveillance. We reported on the escalating Pentagon budget and expensive weapons that didn’t work. We reported on how campaign contributions influenced legislation and policy to skew resources to the comfortable and well-connected while our troops were fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq with inadequate training and armor. We reported on how the Bush administration was shredding the Freedom of Information Act. We went around the country to report on how closed-door, backroom deals in Washington were costing ordinary workers and tax payers their livelihood and security. We reported on offshore tax havens that enable wealthy and powerful Americans to avoid their fair share of national security and the social contract.

And always — because what people know depends on who owns the press — we kept coming back to the media business itself, to how mega media corporations were pushing journalism further and further down the hierarchy of values, how giant radio cartels were silencing critics while shutting communities off from essential information, and how the mega media companies were lobbying the FCC for the right to grow ever more powerful.

The broadcast caught on. Our ratings grew every year. There was even a spell when we were the only public affairs broadcast on PBS whose audience was going up instead of down.

Our journalistic peers took notice. The Los Angeles Times said, “NOW’s team of reporters has regularly put the rest of the media to shame, pursuing stories few others bother to touch.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer said our segments on the sciences, the arts, politics and the economy were “provocative public television at its best.”

The Austin American-Statesman called NOW, “the perfect antidote to today’s high pitched decibel level, a smart, calm, timely news program.”

Frazier Moore of the Associated Press said we were hard-edged when appropriate but never “Hardball.” “Don’t expect combat. Civility reigns.”

And the Baton Rouge Advocate said, “NOW invites viewers to consider the deeper implication of the daily headlines,” drawing on “a wide range of viewpoints which transcend the typical labels of the political left or right.”

Let me repeat that: NOW draws on “a wide range of viewpoints which transcend the typical labels of the political left or right.”

The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 had been prophetic. Open public television to the American people — offer diverse interests, ideas and voices … be fearless in your belief in democracy — and they will come.

Hold your applause — that’s not the point of the story.

The point of the story is something only a handful of our team, including my wife and partner Judith Davidson Moyers, and I knew at the time — that the success of NOW’s journalism was creating a backlash in Washington.

The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party became. That’s because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth.

This is the point of my story: Ideologues don’t want you to go beyond the typical labels of left and right. They embrace a world view that can’t be proven wrong because they will admit no evidence to the contrary. They want your reporting to validate their belief system and when it doesn’t, God forbid.

Never mind that their own stars were getting a fair shake on NOW: Gigot, Viguerie, David Keene of the American Conservative Union, Stephen Moore, then with the Club for Growth, and others. No, our reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn’t the party line. It wasn’t that we were getting it wrong. Only three times in three years did we err factually, and in each case we corrected those errors as soon as we confirmed their inaccuracy. The problem was that we were telling stories that partisans in power didn’t want told … we were getting it right, not right-wing.

I’ve always thought the American eagle needed a left wing and a right wing. The right wing would see to it that economic interests had their legitimate concerns addressed. The left wing would see to it that ordinary people were included in the bargain. Both would keep the great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it’s no longer an eagle and it’s going to crash.

My occasional commentaries got to them as well. Although apparently he never watched the broadcast (I guess he couldn’t take the diversity), Sen. Trent Lott came out squealing like a stuck pig when after the midterm elections in 2002 I described what was likely to happen now that all three branches of government were about to be controlled by one party dominated by the religious, corporate and political right.

Instead of congratulating the winners for their election victory as some network broadcasters had done — or celebrating their victory as Fox, the Washington Times, The Weekly Standard, talk radio and other partisan Republican journalists had done — I provided a little independent analysis of what the victory meant. And I did it the old-fashioned way: I looked at the record, took the winners at their word, and drew the logical conclusion that they would use power as they always said they would. And I set forth this conclusion in my usual modest Texas way.

Events since then have confirmed the accuracy of what I said, but, to repeat, being right is exactly what the right doesn’t want journalists to be.

Strange things began to happen. Friends in Washington called to say that they had heard of muttered threats that the PBS reauthorization would be held off “unless Moyers is dealt with.” The chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, was said to be quite agitated. Apparently there was apoplexy in the right-wing aerie when I closed the broadcast one Friday night by putting an American flag in my lapel and said – well, here’s exactly what I said:

“I wore my flag tonight. First time. Until now I haven’t thought it necessary to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for everyone to see. It was enough to vote, pay my taxes, perform my civic duties, speak my mind, and do my best to raise our kids to be good Americans.

“Sometimes I would offer a small prayer of gratitude that I had been born in a country whose institutions sustained me, whose armed forces protected me, and whose ideals inspired me; I offered my heart’s affections in return. It no more occurred to me to flaunt the flag on my chest than it did to pin my mother’s picture on my lapel to prove her son’s love. Mother knew where I stood; so does my country. I even tuck a valentine in my tax returns on April 15.

“So what’s this doing here? Well, I put it on to take it back. The flag’s been hijacked and turned into a logo — the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the good housekeeping seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration’s patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao’s little red book on every official’s desk, omnipresent and unread.

“But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They’re in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks even as they call for more spending on war.

“So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don’t have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the coalition of the willing (after they first stash the cash). I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what Bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the government. And it reminds me that it’s not un-American to think that war — except in self-defense — is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomacy. Come to think of it, standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.”

That did it. That — and our continuing reporting on overpricing at Haliburton, chicanery on K Street, and the heavy, if divinely guided hand, of Tom DeLay.

When Sen. Lott protested that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “has not seemed willing to deal with Bill Moyers,” a new member of the board, a Republican fundraiser named Cheryl Halperin, who had been appointed by President Bush, agreed that CPB needed more power to do just that sort of thing. She left no doubt about the kind of penalty she would like to see imposed on malefactors like Moyers.

As rumors circulated about all this, I asked to meet with the CPB board to hear for myself what was being said. I thought it would be helpful for someone like me, who had been present at the creation and part of the system for almost 40 years, to talk about how CPB had been intended to be a heat shield to protect public broadcasters from exactly this kind of intimidation.

After all, I’d been there at the time of Richard Nixon’s attempted coup. In those days, public television had been really feisty and independent, and often targeted for attacks. A Woody Allen special that poked fun at Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration had actually been cancelled. The White House had been so outraged over a documentary called the “Banks and the Poor” that PBS was driven to adopt new guidelines. That didn’t satisfy Nixon, and when public television hired two NBC reporters — Robert McNeil and Sander Vanoucur to co-anchor some new broadcasts, it was, for Nixon, the last straw. According to White House memos at the time, he was determined to “get the left-wing commentators who are cutting us up off public television at once — indeed, yesterday if possible.”

Sound familiar?

Nixon vetoed the authorization for CPB with a message written in part by his sidekick Pat Buchanan, who in a private memo had castigated Vanocur, MacNeil, Washington Week in Review, Black Journal and Bill Moyers as “unbalanced against the administration.”

It does sound familiar.

I always knew Nixon would be back. I just didn’t know this time he would be the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Buchanan and Nixon succeeded in cutting CPB funding for all public affairs programming except for Black Journal. They knocked out multiyear funding for the National Public Affairs Center for Television, otherwise known as NPACT. And they voted to take away from the PBS staff the ultimate responsibility for the production of programming.

But in those days — and this is what I wanted to share with Kenneth Tomlinson and his colleagues on the CPB board — there were still Republicans in America who did not march in ideological lockstep and who stood on principle against politicizing public television. The chairman of the public station in Dallas was an industrialist named Ralph Rogers, a Republican but no party hack, who saw the White House intimidation as an assault on freedom of the press and led a nationwide effort to stop it.

The chairman of CPB was former Republican Congressman Thomas Curtis, who was also a principled man. He resigned, claiming White House interference. Within a few months, the crisis was over. CPB maintained its independence, PBS grew in strength, and Richard Nixon would soon face impeachment and resign for violating the public trust, not just public broadcasting.

Paradoxically, the very National Public Affairs Center for Television that Nixon had tried to kill — NPACT — put PBS on the map by rebroadcasting in primetime each day’s Watergate hearings, drawing huge ratings night after night and establishing PBS as an ally of democracy. We should still be doing that sort of thing.

That was 33 years ago. I thought the current CPB board would like to hear and talk about the importance of standing up to political interference. I was wrong. They wouldn’t meet with me. I tried three times. And it was all downhill after that.

I was na’ve, I guess. I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House. But that’s what Kenneth Tomlinson has done.

On Fox News this week he denied that he’s carrying out a White House mandate or that he’s ever had any conversations with any Bush administration official about PBS. But the New York Times reported that he enlisted Karl Rove to help kill a proposal that would have put on the CPB board people with experience in local radio and television. The Times also reported that “on the recommendation of administration officials” Tomlinson hired a White House flack (I know the genre) named Mary Catherine Andrews as a senior CPB staff member. While she was still reporting to Karl Rove at the White House, Andrews set up CPB’s new ombudsman’s office and had a hand in hiring the two people who will fill it, one of whom once worked for … you guessed it … Kenneth Tomlinson.

I would like to give Mr. Tomlinson the benefit of the doubt, but I can’t. According to a book written about the Reader’s Digest when he was its editor-in-chief, he surrounded himself with other right-wingers — a pattern he’s now following at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

There is Ms. Andrews from the White House. For acting president, he hired Ken Ferree from the FCC, who was Michael Powell’s enforcer when Powell was deciding how to go about allowing the big media companies to get even bigger. According to a forthcoming book, one of Ferree’s jobs was to engage in tactics designed to dismiss any serious objection to media monopolies. And, according to Eric Alterman, Ferree was even more contemptuous than Michael Powell of public participation in the process of determining media ownership. Alterman identifies Ferree as the FCC staffer who decided to issue a “protective order” designed to keep secret the market research on which the Republican majority on the commission based their vote to permit greater media consolidation.

It’s not likely that with guys like this running the CPB some public television producer is going to say, “Hey, let’s do something on how big media is affecting democracy.”

Call it preventive capitulation.

As everyone knows, Mr. Tomlinson also put up a considerable sum of money, reportedly over $5 million, for a new weekly broadcast featuring Paul Gigot and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. Gigot is a smart journalist, a sharp editor, and a fine fellow. I had him on NOW several times and even proposed that he become a regular contributor. The conversation of democracy — remember? All stripes.

But I confess to some puzzlement that the Wall Street Journal, which in the past editorialized to cut PBS off the public tap, is now being subsidized by American taxpayers although its parent company, Dow Jones, had revenues in just the first quarter of this year of $400 million. I thought public television was supposed to be an alternative to commercial media, not a funder of it.

But in this weird deal, you get a glimpse of the kind of programming Mr. Tomlinson apparently seems to prefer. Alone of the big major newspapers, the Wall Street Journal has no op-ed page where different opinions can compete with its right-wing editorials. The Journal’s PBS broadcast is just as homogenous — right-wingers talking to each other. Why not $5 million to put the editors of The Nation on PBS? Or Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! You balance right-wing talk with left-wing talk.

There’s more. Only two weeks ago did we learn that Mr. Tomlinson had spent $10,000 last year to hire a contractor who would watch my show and report on political bias. That’s right. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson spent $10,000 of your money to hire a guy to watch NOW to find out who my guests were and what my stories were. Ten thousand dollars.

Gee, Ken, for $2.50 a week, you could pick up a copy of TV Guide on the newsstand. A subscription is even cheaper, and I would have sent you a coupon that can save you up to 62 percent.

For that matter, Ken, all you had to do was watch the show yourself. You could have made it easier with a double Jim Beam, your favorite. Or you could have gone online where the listings are posted. Hell, you could have called me — collect — and I would have told you.

Ten thousand dollars. That would have bought five tables at Thursday night’s “Conservative Salute for Tom DeLay.” Better yet, that ten grand would pay for the books in an elementary school classroom or an upgrade of its computer lab.

But having sent that cash, what did he find? Only Mr. Tomlinson knows. He’s apparently decided not to share the results with his staff, or his board or leak it to Robert Novak. The public paid for it — but Ken Tomlinson acts as if he owns it.

In a May 10 op-ed piece, in Rev. Moon’s conservative Washington Times, Tomlinson maintained he had not released the findings because public broadcasting is such a delicate institution that he did not want to “damage public broadcasting’s image with controversy.” Where I come from in Texas, we shovel that kind of stuff every day.

As we learned only this week, that’s not the only news Mr. Tomlinson tried to keep to himself. As reported by Jeff Chester’s Center for Digital Democracy (of which I am a supporter), there were two public opinion surveys commissioned by CPB but not released to the media — not even to PBS and NPR. According to a source who talked to Salon.com, “The first results were too good and [Tomlinson] didn’t believe them. After the Iraq War, the board commissioned another round of polling, and they thought they’d get worse results.”

But they didn’t. The data revealed that, in reality, public broadcasting has an 80 percent favorable rating and that “the majority of the U.S. adult population does not believe that the news and information programming on public broadcasting is biased.” In fact, more than half believed PBS provided more in-depth and trustworthy news and information than the networks and 55 percent said PBS was “fair and balanced.”

Tomlinson is the man, by the way, who was running Voice of America back in 1984 when a partisan named Charlie Wick was politicizing the United States Information Agency of which Voice of America was a part. It turned out there was a blacklist of people who had been removed from the list of prominent Americans sent abroad to lecture on behalf of America and the USIA. What’s more, it was discovered that evidence as to how those people were chosen to be on the blacklist, more than 700 documents had been shredded. Among those on the blacklists of journalists, writers, scholars and politicians were dangerous left-wing subversives like Walter Cronkite, James Baldwin, Gary Hart, Ralph Nader, Ben Bradlee, Coretta Scott King and David Brinkley.

The person who took the fall for the blacklist was another right-winger. He resigned. Shortly thereafter, so did Kenneth Tomlinson, who had been one of the people in the agency with the authority to see the lists of potential speakers and allowed to strike people’s names. Let me be clear about this: There is no record, apparently, of what Ken Tomlinson did. We don’t know whether he supported or protested the blacklisting of so many American liberals. Or what he thinks of it now.

But I had hoped Bill O’Reilly would have asked him about it when he appeared on The O’Reilly Factor this week. He didn’t. Instead, Tomlinson went on attacking me with O’Reilly egging him on, and he went on denying he was carrying out a partisan mandate despite published reports to the contrary. The only time you could be sure he was telling the truth was at the end of the broadcast when he said to O’Reilly, “We love your show.”

We love your show.

I wrote Kenneth Tomlinson on Friday and asked him to sit down with me for one hour on PBS and talk about all this. I suggested that he choose the moderator and the guidelines.

There is one other thing in particular I would like to ask him about. In his op-ed essay this week in Washington Times, Ken Tomlinson tells of a phone call from an old friend complaining about my bias. Wrote Mr. Tomlinson: “The friend explained that the foundation he heads made a six-figure contribution to his local television station for digital conversion. But he declared there would be no more contributions until something was done about the network’s bias.”

Apparently that’s Kenneth Tomlinson’s method of governance. Money talks and buys the influence it wants.

I would like to ask him to listen to a different voice.

This letter came to me last year from a woman in New York, five pages of handwriting. She said, among other things, that “after the worst sneak attack in our history, there’s not been a moment to reflect, a moment to let the horror resonate, a moment to feel the pain and regroup as humans. No, since I lost my husband on 9/11, not only our family’s world, but the whole world seems to have gotten even worse than that tragic day.”

She wanted me to know that on 9/11 her husband was not on duty. “He was home with me having coffee. My daughter and grandson, living only five blocks from the Towers, had to be evacuated with masks — terror all around. … My other daughter, near the Brooklyn Bridge … my son in high school. But my Charlie took off like a lightning bolt to be with his men from the Special Operations Command. ‘Bring my gear to the plaza,’ he told his aide immediately after the first plane struck the North Tower. … He took action based on the responsibility he felt for his job and his men and for those Towers that he loved.”

In the FDNY, she said, chain-of- command rules extend to every captain of every fire house in the city. If anything happens in the firehouse — at any time — even if the captain isn’t on duty or on vacation — that captain is responsible for everything that goes on there 24/7.”

So she asked: “Why is this administration responsible for nothing? All that they do is pass the blame. This is not leadership. … Watch everyone pass the blame again in this recent torture case [Abu Ghraib] of Iraqi prisons …”

And then she wrote: “We need more programs like yours to wake America up. … Such programs must continue amidst the sea of false images and name-calling that divide America now. … Such programs give us hope that search will continue to get this imperfect human condition on to a higher plane. So thank you and all of those who work with you. Without public broadcasting, all we would call news would be merely carefully controlled propaganda.”

Enclosed with the letter was a check made out to “Channel 13 — NOW” for $500. I keep a copy of that check above my desk to remind me of what journalism is about. Kenneth Tomlinson has his demanding donors. I’ll take the widow’s mite any day.

Someone has said recently that the great raucous mob that is democracy is rarely heard and that it’s not just the fault of the current residents of the White House and the capital. There’s too great a chasm between those of us in this business and those who depend on TV and radio as their window to the world. We treat them too much as an audience and not enough as citizens. They’re invited to look through the window but too infrequently to come through the door and to participate, to make public broadcasting truly public.”

To that end, five public interest groups including Common Cause and Consumers Union will be holding informational sessions around the country to “take public broadcasting back” — to take it back from threats, from interference, from those who would tell us we can only think what they command us to think.

It’s a worthy goal.

We’re big kids; we can handle controversy and diversity, whether it’s political or religious points of view or two loving lesbian moms and their kids, visited by a cartoon rabbit. We are not too fragile or insecure to see America and the world entire for all their magnificent and sometimes violent confusion. There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by,” John Steinbeck wrote. “It was called the people.”

This post originally appeared on an external website

Lemme Get this Straight- Scientists say the South Korean stem cell research will help folks and Bush condemns it?

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

OK..JUST WANTED TO BE CLEAR ON THAT…SCIENCE IS “BAD…BAD”…ACCORDING TO THAT ASS CLOWN BUSHY….AND IF IT HELPS PEOPLE…HE MUST CONDEMN IT. OK…I JUST WANTED TO GET ALL THIS STRAIGHT FOR THE RECORD.

This post originally appeared on an external website

Bush Condemns S. Korea Stem Cell Research Advances,

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Bush Condemns S. Korea Stem Cell Research Advances, Says He Would Veto Loosening of U.S. Limits

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=778442

WASHINGTON May 21, 2005 ? President Bush has condemned stem cell research advances in South Korea and said he worried about living in a world in which human cloning was condoned. He said he would veto any legislation aimed at loosening limits on federal support in the United States.

“I’m very concerned about cloning,” Bush told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday. “I worry about a world in which cloning becomes acceptable.”

“I made it very clear to the Congress that the use of federal money, taxpayers’ money to promote science which destroys life in order to save life is I’m against that. And therefore, if the bill does that, I will veto it.”

Republicans in Congress are sharply divided over the stem cell issue, which could lead to the first veto of Bush’s presidency. The president’s comments were aimed at putting the brakes on a bill gaining momentum on Capitol Hill.

That bill would lift Bush’s ban on using federal dollars to do research on embryonic stem cell lines developed after August 2001. The president’s veto threat drew immediate reaction from sponsors of the bipartisan bill, Reps. Mike Castle, R-Del., and Diana DeGette, D-Colo.

Castle said the legislation would not allow the cloning of embryos or embryo destruction. Instead, it would let government-funded researchers work with stem cells culled from embryos left over from fertility treatments.

“The bottom line is when a couple has decided to discard their excess embryos, they are either going to be discarded as medical waste or they can be donated for research,” Castle said.

DeGette protested too. “It’s disappointing that the president would threaten to use his first veto on a bill that holds promise for cures to diseases that affect millions of Americans,” DeGette said. “Support for expanding federal stem cell research in an ethical manner remains strong in Congress.”

Stem cells are building blocks that give rise to every tissue in the body. Supporters of embryo stem cell research, including former first lady Nancy Reagan, say it could lead to cures for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other degenerative brain and nerve diseases.

This post originally appeared on an external website

CBC Arts: Recording industry loses file-swapping appeal

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

CBC Arts: Recording industry loses file-swapping appeal

Recording industry loses file-swapping appeal

Last Updated Thu, 19 May 2005 21:12:02 EDT

CBC Arts

TORONTO – The recording industry has failed again in its attempt to force internet service providers to reveal the names of file-sharers but it may be able to try again.

In a unanimous decision Thursday, the Federal Court of Appeal dismissed the Canadian Recording Industry Association’s appeal of a March 2004 ruling that said ISPs like Shaw, Rogers and Bell did not have to reveal the names of 29 users accused of sharing thousands of music files.

In his 2004 ruling, Justice Konrad von Finckenstein had said that sharing music files does not breach Canada’s copyright laws.

He turned down the industry’s request to force ISPs to reveal contact information of the users in question, saying that the group had failed to come up with sufficient evidence matching the online pseudonyms of file-sharers to the specific IP addresses of the various service providers’ customers.

The recording industry association is seeking the users’ real identities in order to follow its U.S. counterpart in suing file-swappers for sharing copyrighted songs online.

IN DEPTH: Downloading music

RELATED STORY: Online music swapping legal: court

In Thursday’s decision, the three judge-panel turned down the appeal request but wrote that the earlier ruling should not have made conclusions about whether downloading or uploading music should be illegal.

“Conclusions … should not have been made in the very preliminary stage of this action,” Justice Edgar Sexton wrote in Thursday’s written decision. “They would require a consideration of the evidence as well as the law applicable to such evidence after it has been properly adduced.”

The court also suggested that the recording industry group could return with stronger and more current evidence against file-swappers.

“The appeal will be dismissed without prejudice to the plaintiffs’ right to commence a further application for disclosure of the identity of the ‘users’ taking into account these reasons,” Sexton wrote.

RELATED STORY: Ottawa moves to quash file swapping

At the end of March, the Canadian government announced several proposed changes to the Copyright Act aimed at ending the unauthorized sharing of music, movies and TV files online.

Audio & Video

Ron Charles reports for CBC-TV (Runs 1:46)

Requires RealPlayer

More Arts on CBC.ca

Film: Homage to a Canadian indie film pioneer

Film: Star Wars Makes Me Sleepy

Books: Novelist Jonathan Coe explores Blair’s England

Music: Trent Reznor and pop music’s love of misery

Books: The new world of teen fiction

Force-friendly quiz: Star Wars

Film: Monster-in-Law review

Film: Todd Solondz’s Palindromes

Film: Interview with documentary legend Albert Maysles

TV: Everybody Loves Raymond bows out

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CNN.com – Karzai demands?’justice’ over?abuse charge – May 22, 2005

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

CNN.com – Karzai demands?’justice’ over?abuse charge – May 22, 2005

Karzai demands ‘justice’ over abuse charge.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The president of Afghanistan has demanded justice from the United States over the alleged abuse of two Afghan detainees who reportedly died in U.S. custody.

But Hamid Karzai told CNN’s “Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer” on Sunday that the incident “must not reflect on the United States.”

Karzai, who arrived in Washington on Sunday, is scheduled to meet with President George W. Bush on Monday in the White House.

His comments came on the same day that the United Nations condemned the alleged abuse as “utterly unacceptable.” It also called on the U.S. military to allow a probe by Afghan investigators. (Full story)

Karzai spoke with Blitzer about the abuse reported Friday in the New York Times, citing a 2,000-page confidential file on the Army’s criminal investigation into the deaths, which took place at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul in December 2002.

“This is simply not acceptable,” Karzai said. “We are angry about this. We want justice. We want the people responsible for this sort of brutal behavior punished and tried and made public.

“At the same time, I must say that while we condemn this, we show Afghans, we show the rest of the world that the behavior of two soldiers or interrogators must not reflect on the United States or on the U.S. people,” he said.

“There are bad people everywhere.”

Karzai, a former U.S. oil company executive seen by many in his own country as a U.S. puppet, came to the United States 10 days after at least 15 people were killed in anti-U.S. protests in his country. (Full story)

Those protests were sparked when a Newsweek report fueled simmering angry at the United States by quoting a U.S. official who said a U.S. investigation had found that interrogators at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had defiled the Quran.

Newsweek retracted the story when its source later said he wasn’t sure his information was correct. (Full story)

The Afghan president said the allegations of defilement of the Quran were “a serious matter about people’s beliefs and feelings,” but added that the violent protests were “directed at the peace process” and the “elections in Afghanistan.”

Karzai also angrily defended his presidency against a charge published in Sunday’s New York Times that a poppy eradication program in Afghanistan is failing because “has been unwilling to assert strong leadership.”

The charge came from a memo sent from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Times said, and was leaked to the paper by “an American official alarmed at the slow pace of poppy eradication.”

“We have done our job,” Karzai told CNN.

“The Afghan people have done their job. Now the international community must come and provide alternative revenue to the Afghan people which they have not done so far. Let us stop this blame game. Instead of blaming Afghanistan, the international community must come and fulfill its own objective to the Afghan people.”

Meanwhile, Karzai told CNN that fugitive terror leader Osama bin Laden is not in Afghanistan.

“If he were, we would catch him,” he said.

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GEORGE W. VADER….

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

IOL: North America

Star Wars sparks talk of ‘George W Vader’

May 22 2005 at 10:56AM

By Tangi Quemener

Los Angeles – A powerful leader moves to suspend civil liberties to defend the republic during a time of war. The subject of political debate in Washington? No, it’s the new Star Wars movie.

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge Of The Sith has barely hit screens, but political activists are already drawing heated comparisons between Darth Vader’s battle in a galaxy far, far away and President George Bush’s war on terror.

George Lucas’s sixth and final offering in the classic film series is stirring up a hornet’s nest of controversy in the United States, whether or not the director intended to bring modern politics into his sci-fi allegory.

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Silver Ring Thing- –“Faith Based” IDIOTS

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Silver Ring Thing

On 22 May 2005, this organization was profiled. My reaction after watching this is that these people are dangerous religious nuts being funded by THIS ADMINISTRATION….Run by King George the Cowardly.

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Silver Ring Thing- another view like mine on this crap~!

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Silver Ring Thing

Silver Ring Thing

If you aren’t at all familiar with this Silver Ring Thing bullshit, it’s this Christian supremacist teenage abstinence program where kids get these silver rings (hence the name) that say inside them, no lie, “God wants you to be holy, so you should keep clear of all sexual sin. Then each of you will control your body and live in holiness and honor.” I remember first hearing about this shit waaay back when I was a teenager and I’m pretty sure some of the kids that I went to college with out in Deliverance, MO were rocking the silver rings.

Of course, it’s been proven time and time again that abstinence programs, Jesus-endorsed or otherwise, don’t do jack shit to help prevent STDs and unwanted pregnancies, which I consider a form of STD. In fact, I’ve seen studies that state that kids who take part in these programs are even more likely to get certain STDs than kids who have the common sense to just strap it up and go for it. So in that sense, I really can’t think of any good reason that abstinence should be taught in schools one way or the other, let alone Jesus-based abstinence, which, in addition to being Fucking Retarded, would of course be a huge violation of the separation of church and state.

And yet, this Monday, The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, claiming they illegally funneled over $1 million of tax payers’ money into just such a ridonkulous program. You know, I’m usually too wasted to get involved with issues like these one way or the other, but lately, having this job that requires me to deal with poor people day in and day out, I’m beginning to realize that this whole issue of the public veneration and perpetuation of childbirth through various means really is the defining issue of our time.

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davblog: Silver Ring Thing

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

davblog: Silver Ring Thing

This post originally appeared on an external website

MORE “FROM THE TASER FILES”—-Amnesty Int’l Seeks Military’s Taser Files

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Amnesty Int’l Seeks Military’s Taser Files

Amnesty Int’l Seeks Military’s Taser Files

SAM HANANEL

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Amnesty International is asking the Defense Department whether the military used Taser electric stun guns on prisoners in Iraq or Afghanistan, saying it is uneasy about reports of mistreatment and abuse.

The human rights group said it made the request under the Freedom of Information Act after interviewing dozens of prisoners formerly held by U.S. forces.

“We do have credible evidence that certainly raises the question that Tasers might have been used,” Gerald Le Melee, Amnesty International USA’s deputy executive director, said Monday.

Amnesty has long expressed misgivings about the safety of Tasers and whether they are open to abuse because they can inflict severe pain without leaving marks. The group has urged law enforcement agencies to suspend the use of all electroshock weapons pending the outcome of a vigorous independent inquiry into whether the weapons pose health risks.

Taser International contends its products reduce injuries and save lives by giving police an alternative to lethal force.

Amnesty’s request concerning prisoners seeks information on computer chips stored inside Taser guns that record the date, time and duration of each electric shock administered.

The group also is requesting information about deaths that might have occurred after a Taser was used, as well as training materials and guidelines for how soldiers are to use the weapons.

Pentagon officials did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

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Taser files to delay its quarterly report – Latest Earnings – MSNBC.com

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Taser files to delay its quarterly report – Latest Earnings – MSNBC.com

WASHINGTON – Stun gun maker Taser International Inc. filed with regulators Tuesday to delay its quarterly filing, saying it was not able to complete its quarterly financial statements in time because it is busy restating its financials for the year ended Dec. 31, 2004.

Taser said the error in its yearly results comes from its calculation of the future tax benefit from employees’ sale of stock they had received by exercising options.

The SEC is investigating the company over statements about the safety of its stun guns and a distribution deal struck in December 2004.

The deal increased suspicions because it happened late in the fourth quarter and raised doubts about when Taser planned to book revenue from the agreement.

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The Korea Herald : The Nation’s No.1 English Newspaper

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The Korea Herald : The Nation’s No.1 English Newspaper

Government to establish globalconsortium for cloning research

The government said yesterday that it plans to form a global consortium comprised of experts in support of further advancing therapeutic cloning research by Seoul National University professor Hwang Woo-suk.

Park Ki-young, an aide of the presidential office’s Information, Science and Technology Division, said that steps are being taken to form an international research team to further develop Hwang’s breakthrough in producing stem cells that are identical to the patient with a serious medical condition.

Last week, Hwang’s research team revealed that it successfully created the world’s first patient-specific stem cells, giving scientists greater hopes of one day being able to treat conditions like diabetes and Parkinson’s disease and physical injuries by transplanting healthy cells with damaged cells. The results were published by the U.S. journal “Science.”

The aide of the presidential office said relevant officials from the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Health and Welfare will meet this week to discuss the envisaged international research team and funding issues.

The government hopes a team will be made by the latter half of the year and be ready to start research right away.

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Atheists say it’s time to ‘push back’ fundamentalism

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

AP Wire | 05/22/2005 | Atheists say it’s time to ‘push back’ fundamentalism

Atheists say it’s time to ‘push back’ fundamentalism

GREG SANDOVAL

Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO – To the uninformed, this weekend gathering here may have seemed like a church revival, full of zeal and fervor. But worshipping God was most decidedly not part of the agenda.

The attendees of the “All Atheists Weekend” gathered to discuss what they call the rise of fundamentalism in the U.S. and the blurring of lines between church and state.

Attendees also took time to view documentaries that question the historical accuracy of the Bible – and to hear lectures about the dangers of religious icons on public property and problems with President Bush’s so-called “faith-based initiative,” which seeks to give religious groups equal footing in seeking federal grants to provide social services.

Organizers said they expected more than 250 people to take part in the event, which featured a lecture by Ellen Johnson, the president of American Atheists. The gathering began Friday and continued through Sunday at various spots throughout the city.

The religious right’s increasing involvement in U.S. politics has triggered an angry backlash among the godless, say Bay area atheist groups, five of which organized the weekend event.

“It’s time for us to push back,” said psychologist Jaime Arcila, 52, of San Francisco, who was accompanied by his two children, Javier, 15, and Amanda, 12, in a tiny theater Saturday night just south of downtown.

Arcila, who is not an official member of any atheist group, said he was prompted to attend Saturday’s showing of “The God Who Wasn’t There,” along with about 100 other people, because of what he sees as a growing intolerance in the U.S. for people with alternative views and lifestyles.

Arcila, who was raised by Catholic parents, said the nation needs more dialogue about “peace, tolerance, justice, and love,” not exclusion based on a difference of ideas.

Ali, a 36-year-old native Iranian, agreed. He declined to give his last name because he said he wants to return to his Muslim-dominated homeland someday and fears that he could be persecuted should he be identified as an atheist.

Ali said he knows all too well the effects of religious fundamentalism on a society from his own experiences in his native country.

Nations that accept only one set of values or beliefs are “restrictive and stifling,” Ali said.

“I was a Muslim but stopped believing after a lot of pain and after a lot of thought,” he said. “Being here at this event is encouraging me not to be afraid. It strengthens me and helps me stand up for what I believe.”

But just how tolerant of Christianity and other religions are the atheists?

“We don’t hate Christians,” said David Fitzgerald, 40, an insurance broker and member of San Francisco Atheists. “People in this country are free to believe in whatever they want.”

Nonetheless, during the Saturday night movie, the crowd booed and hissed when a photo of Pat Robertson was displayed on the screen.

Robertson, the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and a former U.S. presidential candidate, is a leader in the efforts by some religious groups to return America and its government to Christian values.

Fitzgerald offered no apologies.

“Robertson and other Theocrats scare the hell out of us,” Fitzgerald said. “They want to turn a democracy into a theocracy. Even Christians are afraid of that.”

================DSAtheists say it’s time to ‘push back’ fundamentalism

GREG SANDOVAL

Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO – To the uninformed, this weekend gathering here may have seemed like a church revival, full of zeal and fervor. But worshipping God was most decidedly not part of the agenda.

The attendees of the “All Atheists Weekend” gathered to discuss what they call the rise of fundamentalism in the U.S. and the blurring of lines between church and state.

Attendees also took time to view documentaries that question the historical accuracy of the Bible – and to hear lectures about the dangers of religious icons on public property and problems with President Bush’s so-called “faith-based initiative,” which seeks to give religious groups equal footing in seeking federal grants to provide social services.

Organizers said they expected more than 250 people to take part in the event, which featured a lecture by Ellen Johnson, the president of American Atheists. The gathering began Friday and continued through Sunday at various spots throughout the city.

The religious right’s increasing involvement in U.S. politics has triggered an angry backlash among the godless, say Bay area atheist groups, five of which organized the weekend event.

“It’s time for us to push back,” said psychologist Jaime Arcila, 52, of San Francisco, who was accompanied by his two children, Javier, 15, and Amanda, 12, in a tiny theater Saturday night just south of downtown.

Arcila, who is not an official member of any atheist group, said he was prompted to attend Saturday’s showing of “The God Who Wasn’t There,” along with about 100 other people, because of what he sees as a growing intolerance in the U.S. for people with alternative views and lifestyles.

Arcila, who was raised by Catholic parents, said the nation needs more dialogue about “peace, tolerance, justice, and love,” not exclusion based on a difference of ideas.

Ali, a 36-year-old native Iranian, agreed. He declined to give his last name because he said he wants to return to his Muslim-dominated homeland someday and fears that he could be persecuted should he be identified as an atheist.

Ali said he knows all too well the effects of religious fundamentalism on a society from his own experiences in his native country.

Nations that accept only one set of values or beliefs are “restrictive and stifling,” Ali said.

“I was a Muslim but stopped believing after a lot of pain and after a lot of thought,” he said. “Being here at this event is encouraging me not to be afraid. It strengthens me and helps me stand up for what I believe.”

But just how tolerant of Christianity and other religions are the atheists?

“We don’t hate Christians,” said David Fitzgerald, 40, an insurance broker and member of San Francisco Atheists. “People in this country are free to believe in whatever they want.”

Nonetheless, during the Saturday night movie, the crowd booed and hissed when a photo of Pat Robertson was displayed on the screen.

Robertson, the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and a former U.S. presidential candidate, is a leader in the efforts by some religious groups to return America and its government to Christian values.

Fitzgerald offered no apologies.

“Robertson and other Theocrats scare the hell out of us,” Fitzgerald said. “They want to turn a democracy into a theocracy. Even Christians are afraid of that.”

====SNIP====

AMEN!

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USATODAY.com – ‘Star Wars’ can’t rescue box office

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

USATODAY.com – ‘Star Wars’ can’t rescue box office

‘Star Wars’ can’t rescue box office

By Scott Bowles, USA TODAY

Looks as if Darth Vader was right: The dark side is pretty powerful. It just wasn’t strong enough to bring balance to the box office galaxy ? yet.

Despite breaking several box office records, Sith wasn’t able to stop the box office slump ? but repeat viewings could change that.

Lucasfilm

Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, George Lucas’ gloomy final installment of his space saga, shattered several box-office records on its way to a whopping $108.5 million weekend, according to estimates from Nielsen EDI. (Related chart: See the weekend’s top 10 movies)

Though Sith did not break the record for biggest opening three-day weekend ?Spider-Man opened at $114.8 million in 2002 ? the film claimed other milestones. Boosted by midnight screenings Wednesday, Sith had the largest single-day opening with $50 million, eclipsing Shrek 2’s $44.8 million. Its $158.5 million not only set the four-day record; it’s also the most money over five days, nudging Spider-Man 2’s $152.4 million five-day haul.

More important, the film satisfied most fans and critics, giving distributor 20th Century Fox hope for a long run. About 83% of the nation’s critics gave the film a positive review, according to the survey site rottentomatoes.com.

“We’re getting great response in every corner,” Fox distribution chief Bruce Snyder says. “Fans are coming out and getting right back in line.”

Strong word of mouth, analysts say, probably will propel the film past $400 million and could make it one of the five highest-grossing films ever.

“This was the movie we’d been waiting for,” Ronnie McDaniels, 22, said Saturday night after seeing the film for a third time at Arclight Cinemas in Los Angeles. McDaniels says he will see Sith “at least twice more. This is the last Star Wars. I want to say a long goodbye.”

That won’t be enough, however, to end the industry’s three-month drought. Despite Sith’s performance, overall ticket sales dropped 6% from the same weekend last year, the 13th straight weekend sales have lagged behind last year’s pace.

“The slump continues,” says Paul Dergarabedian of box office tracker Exhibitor

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CNN.com – Karzai demands?’justice’ over?abuse charge – May 22, 2005

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

CNN.com – Karzai demands?’justice’ over?abuse charge – May 22, 2005

Karzai demands ‘justice’ over abuse charge.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The president of Afghanistan has demanded justice from the United States over the alleged abuse of two Afghan detainees who reportedly died in U.S. custody.

But Hamid Karzai told CNN’s “Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer” on Sunday that the incident “must not reflect on the United States.”

Karzai, who arrived in Washington on Sunday, is scheduled to meet with President George W. Bush on Monday in the White House.

His comments came on the same day that the United Nations condemned the alleged abuse as “utterly unacceptable.” It also called on the U.S. military to allow a probe by Afghan investigators. (Full story)

Karzai spoke with Blitzer about the abuse reported Friday in the New York Times, citing a 2,000-page confidential file on the Army’s criminal investigation into the deaths, which took place at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul in December 2002.

“This is simply not acceptable,” Karzai said. “We are angry about this. We want justice. We want the people responsible for this sort of brutal behavior punished and tried and made public.

“At the same time, I must say that while we condemn this, we show Afghans, we show the rest of the world that the behavior of two soldiers or interrogators must not reflect on the United States or on the U.S. people,” he said.

“There are bad people everywhere.”

Karzai, a former U.S. oil company executive seen by many in his own country as a U.S. puppet, came to the United States 10 days after at least 15 people were killed in anti-U.S. protests in his country. (Full story)

Those protests were sparked when a Newsweek report fueled simmering angry at the United States by quoting a U.S. official who said a U.S. investigation had found that interrogators at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had defiled the Quran.

Newsweek retracted the story when its source later said he wasn’t sure his information was correct. (Full story)

The Afghan president said the allegations of defilement of the Quran were “a serious matter about people’s beliefs and feelings,” but added that the violent protests were “directed at the peace process” and the “elections in Afghanistan.”

Karzai also angrily defended his presidency against a charge published in Sunday’s New York Times that a poppy eradication program in Afghanistan is failing because “has been unwilling to assert strong leadership.”

The charge came from a memo sent from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Times said, and was leaked to the paper by “an American official alarmed at the slow pace of poppy eradication.”

“We have done our job,” Karzai told CNN.

“The Afghan people have done their job. Now the international community must come and provide alternative revenue to the Afghan people which they have not done so far. Let us stop this blame game. Instead of blaming Afghanistan, the international community must come and fulfill its own objective to the Afghan people.”

Meanwhile, Karzai told CNN that fugitive terror leader Osama bin Laden is not in Afghanistan.

“If he were, we would catch him,” he said.

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Laura Bush heckled in Jerusalem

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Laura Bush heckled in JerusalemLaura Bush heckled in Jerusalem

9.09AM, Mon May 23 2005

America’s first lady Laura Bush has been heckled by protesters at two of Jerusalem’s most sacred shrines.

As Mrs Bush visited the Wailing Wall, Israeli police locked arms and Secret Service agents packed tightly around her in a bid to restrain an increasingly angry crowd.

Dozens of protesters shouted, “Free Pollard now” in reference to Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew who is serving a life sentence in a US prison for spying for Israel.

She then went to the Dome of the Rock, a mosque on a hilltop compound known to Muslims as Haram as-Sharif and to Jews as Temple Mount, and was heckled as she left.

Mrs Bush is on a tour of the Middle East in a bid to defuse anti-American sentiment in the area following the announcement of US plans to hand back Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip.

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BBC staff on 24-hour strike over job cuts

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Xinhua – English

LONDON, May 23 (Xinhuanet) – Journalists, broadcasting workers and other employees at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) started a 24-hour strike Monday over plans to cut 3,780 jobs to make savings of 355 million pounds (663.37 million US dollars).

Members with the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and two other unions representing technical workers participated in the strike on Sunday at midnight 2300 GMT to protest the plans announced in March by BBC Director General Mark Thompson.

The walkout, expected to be participated in by about 11,000 of BBC’s 27,000 staff, is the first of four planned strikes.

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DEFINITION OF EMBRYO

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Embryo definition
Embryo definition
In the news, we keep hearing this term “embryo”. I have always been a great supporter of using proper terminology, appropriate to the area of study in which we were using the term (i.e. legal definitions when we are talking about law, medical definitions when we are talking about medicine).

So, when you hear the term “embryo”…do you KNOW what that means?

Here’s a definition from
http://www.biochem.northwestern.edu/holmgren/Glossary/Definitions/Def-E/embryo.html .
” “General: an organism in early stages of development, before hatching from an egg.

Human: A fertilized egg that has begun cell division, often called a pre-embryo (for pre-implantation embryo). An embryo is now defined as a later stage, i.e. at the completion of” the pre-embryonic stage, which is considered to end at about day 14. The term, embryo, is used to describe the early stages of fetal growth, from conception to the eighth week of pregnancy. “

So, under this definition, it is the product of conception AFTER day 14, or two weeks. It is the early stage of gestation, from conception to the eigth week…or about two months. But, is there a better term we can use?

A better word for the intrauterine entity from fertilization to birth, is “conceptus”.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/conceptus
“con?cep?tus (kn-spts)
n.
The product of conception at any point between fertilization and birth. It includes the embryo or the fetus as well as the extraembryonic membranes.”

There indeed may well be individuals who oppose destruction of human life, however; I happen to think that most are just partisan idiots who are entralled in the pseudo-Christian theocratic agenda of imposing a fundamentalist mentality on the population in general, by implementing bizarre, fundamentalist, Neo-Con beliefs on the body politic by fiat.

IDIOTS!

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VOA News – US Lawmakers Hand President Bush Defeat on Stem Cell Research

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VOA News – US Lawmakers Hand President Bush Defeat on Stem Cell Research
US Lawmakers Hand President Bush Defeat on Stem Cell Research
By Dan Robinson
Washington
24 May 2005

In a challenge to President Bush, the House of Representatives has approved legislation by a vote 238 to 194 to expand federal government funding for research using embryonic stem cells. House action came just

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Senate Republicans may bar stem cell bill

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Senate Republicans may bar stem cell bill full story

“We’re positive that we have a majority in the Senate” that favors the bill, Adam Elggren, a spokesman for Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a co-sponsor of the legislation, told UPI. “Senator Hatch is confident we’ve got close to 60, if not 60 already.”

Hatch’s bill, the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005, has 32 co-sponsors, but a

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Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation Supports Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act

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Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation Supports Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act
Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation Supports Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act

24 May 2005

The Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation (CRPF), the non-profit organization founded by the late actor Christopher Reeve and his wife Dana Reeve to fund research for cures and treatments for spinal

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Reform Jewish Leader Applauds House Passage of Embryonic Stem Cell Legislation : ArriveNet Press Releases : Politics

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Reform Jewish Leader Applauds House Passage of Embryonic Stem Cell Legislation : ArriveNet Press Releases : Politics
Distribution Source : U.S. Newswire

Date : Tuesday – May 24, 2005

To: National Desk, Political and Health reporters

Contact: Alexis Rice or Eric Gold, 202-387-2800, 202-841-2360 (cell), both of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism

WASHINGTON, May 24

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Capitol Hill Blue: Police State

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Capitol Hill Blue: Police State

Police State
By DAN K. THOMASSON
May 24, 2005, 07:12
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Some really scary things are happening around here these days.
Congress has become a place of great incivility and rancor, which threaten to undermine any hope of legislative remedy to a myriad of problems, from Social Security to soaring health-care costs to

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Ofcom says OK to sex with animals

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Ofcom says OK to sex with animals

John Plunkett
Wednesday May 25, 2005

Clean-up TV campaigners seeking succour in Ofcom’s new broadcasting rules suffered an immediate blow today when the regulator gave the all-clear to programmes about “sex with animals”.
The comments by Richard Hooper, the Ofcom deputy chairman, came at the unveiling of its long-awaited new broadcasting code and will have had the regulator’s spin doctors holding their heads in their hands.

Although Mr Hooper was at pains to point out that the new regulations will not give carte blanche to broadcasters, he said certain offensive material would be OK as long as it was shown at the right time and with suitable warnings.

“[What about] a programme about sex with animals? Yes, it’s potentially possible. It all comes down to context,” he said.

The new code, which will apply across all TV and radio networks, allows broadcasters to “transmit challenging material, even that which may be considered offensive by some, provided it is editorially justified and the audience given appropriate information”.

Mr Hooper’s comments recalled Channel 4 bestiality documentary, Animal Passions, which featured a man who admitted have sex with his pony and a woman who had sex with her dog.

Although it was cleared by Ofcom last year, it generated 75 complaints from viewers who said it “normalised bestiality” and could encourage copycat behaviour.

The broadcasting code is intended to give broadcasters more “creative freedom” and allow audiences more responsibility in deciding what they watch.

“Freedom of expression does not necessarily mean swearing and offensive language,” said Mr Hooper.

“A lot of things have to be taken into account if something is to be seen as generally acceptable. In certain circumstances the c-word is acceptable, and in certain circumstances it is not. What we have done is codify that. That is nothing new.”

Ofcom has drawn up a 117-word definition of “context” that broadcasters can use to justify the depiction of sex or violence and the use of bad language, including the time the programme was shown, the channel on which it was broadcast, the size of the audience and whether viewers were warned about the content.

“It’s about telling the punter what they are going to get before they get it,” said Mr Hooper. He said The Thick of It, Armando Ianucci’s acclaimed political satire which began on BBC4, last week “had a quite clear statement before it about the sort of language viewers were going to hear. We are very keen that broadcasters do that.”

Tim Suter, the senior partner for content and standards at Ofcom, said previous broadcast regulation had been “about stopping things. The new regime is about what [broadcasters] need in place in order to allow material to be broadcast.”

“We are moving into a world which recognises the different responsibilities of the different players. Broadcasters are responsible for what they broadcast, and audiences are responsible for what they consume.”

Mr Suter said the new rules leaned towards the “lighter touch” regulation previously seen in the radio industry. “Freedom of expression with editorial justification – that is the central idea.”

The new code will also allow companies to sponsor an entire channel, although the proposals still need to go to consultation.

This post originally appeared on an external website

SouthPark vs. Wall-Mart

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Cartman bets Kyle $5 that you crap your pants when you die. The town is abuzz; the new Wall-Mart store is having its grand opening. The building is built on the space where Stark’s Pond used to be. The doors open and inside we find Grandpa Marsh employed as the greeter and Jimmy help with the carts. There are bargains galore everywhere; Cartman is delighted that he can get 3 copies of “Timecop” for $18. Stan asks his dad why Wall-Mart is able to sell stuff so cheap, his dad says he doesn’t know, but he knows he loves it. Later that night Randy Marsh has become obsessed with the store, he goes there late at night hoping to get him some bargains, but finds there are many other people there with the same idea. Kyle doesn’t want to go to Wall-Mart but finds out that that Jim’s Drug Story has to close down because it can’t compete. Cartman, of course is on the side of Wall-Mart. The boys go to the town’s Main Street, but find that it is all boarded up and looking much like a ghost town. Stan wants to tell his parents about what is happening to their town. When he returns home he finds his dad is wiped out after a marathon shopping at Wall-Mart. The citizens gather together to confront the manager and tell him they want him to close their store. The manager tells them that it is out of his hands, the store has taken over his life. He gives them a message to meet him out back in 5 minutes, but before that happens the manager commits suicide by hanging himself and as his last act, craps his pants, much to Cartman’s delight, Kyle now owes him $5.

The whole town has agreed to not shop at Wall-Mart anymore; but the Marsh family goes to the store and find that everyone is still there doing their shopping. They try to come up with a plan to stop the evil that is the Wall-Mart store and Kyle tells them that it only takes self-control to stop shopping there. The town instead decides to burn the store down; but that doesn’t stop the store from getting itself rebuilt. Kyle gets Stan and Kenny to accompany him to Arkansas so they can put a stop to the store. The store reaches out to Cartman, who accompanies the boys on their journey. Kyle knows that Cartman is only coming with them to try stopping their effort to get the store closed. They can’t find help at corporate headquarters, but they find one of the founding executives at nearby bar. He tells them the corporation’s history and tells them about the store’s heart, which is located near the television section. The boys leave and the executive kills himself, and to Cartman’s delight he craps his pants; Kyle now owes him $10.

The boys return to town, with the intention of destroying the stores heart and Cartman tries to stop them, much as Kyle knew he would. They battle the store’s ever lowering bargains on their way to the television department. They finally make it there and they meet the store in one its many forms. Kyle and Stan look in a mirror at the back of the television department and see their own reflection. It is just possible that we (the consumer’s desire) are responsible for making Wall-Mart such a success. The boys decide to break the mirror anyway and the store begins to implode. They all escape as the store craps itself as a last act. The townspeople decide to begin supporting Jim’s Drug in earnest, until they make it too much of a success and the cycle repeats itself.

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gwinnettdailypost.com

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

gwinnettdailypost.com

LAWRENCEVILLE ? The county prosecutor is considering whether to bring the case of a jailed man who died after he was stunned with a Taser to a special grand jury.

Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter said the proposal came out of a Tuesday meeting with officials from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Porter could not say when he would decide whether to recommend that a special grand jury should hear the case.

Frederick Williams died in May 2004 after deputies used a Taser on him while in jail. On April 27, Porter brought the case before a grand jury, which did not hand down any indictments. But the 31-year-old Lawrenceville man?s family members say those involved in the incident should be brought to court.

If Porter decides that such a panel should rehear the case, a petition and a vote by Gwinnett County Superior Court judges would be needed to approve it. Or Porter could wait for the county?s next regular grand jury panel to hear the case in September.

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Warrant issued for runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Warrant issued for runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks; may surrender next week
09:10 PM EDT May 27
LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. (AP) – A warrant has been issued for runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks, but officials don’t expect her to report to police while undergoing psychiatric treatment.

The warrant was issued Thursday, the day after a grand jury indicted her on a felony charge of making a false statement and a misdemeanour count of making a false police report.

Since her return to Georgia from New Mexico, she has entered into psychiatric treatment. District Attorney Danny Porter of Gwinnett County said he will wait until she completes treatment before asking her to turn herself in.

“The earliest I would expect anything to happen would be the first of next week,” Porter said. He has not ruled out a plea agreement in the case.

The charges arise from her claim she had been kidnapped when she disappeared April 26, four days before her planned wedding. She quickly recanted the story and instead said she abruptly left town because of unspecified personal reasons.

The disappearance prompted a large police and civilian search, as well as attention in the international news media.

She could face up to six years in prison if convicted of both charges, as well as $11,000 US in fines. She could also be ordered to reimburse authorities for the cost of the search, which has been tallied at more than $50,000.

=====SNIP=======
Good! What a wimpy, bugeyed loser of a bitch she is !

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IRS to close 68 help centers nationwideIRS to close 68 help centers nationwide

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

IRS to close 68 help centers nationwide

by Freddie Mooche

Internal Revenue Service help centers in 68 communities are slated to close to help the IRS reduce costs and modernize its operations, the agency said.

If you would like to receive late breaking business news covered by AXcess News then you need to subscribe. Membership is free.

May 28, 2005 (AXcess News) Washington – Internal Revenue Service help centers in 68 communities are slated to close to help the IRS reduce costs and modernize its operations, the agency said.

The Internal Revenue Service is closing the help centers in communities where geographic and demographic factors, employee costs, and expenses were considered in factoring in which IRS help centers would be closed.

The IRS is also moving to coax more tax preparers to use electronic filing services in an effort to manage federal income tax filings in a more efficient and cost-effective manner.

Critics say streamlining operations by eliminating IRS help centers forces many income tax filers to seek professional help in preparing their federal income tax forms, putting undue financial burdens on the elderly and low-income wage earners.

The Internal Revenue Service said the closures are necessary though the federal tax agency said that employees there would be offered early retirement, where qualified, and that those remaining would be offered positions in other IRS locations. That no layoffs were expected from the IRS help center closures.

Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, told reporters that the IRS is forcing consumers to use the Internet by closing the centers.

Kelly said that many of the tax payers who use the IRS help centers do not have access to the Internet.

The IRS said that over the last two years tax payer use of its 400 help centers across the nation had dropped by 19 percent. Use of toll-free phone lines to seek help climbed 7 percent in the same period, while visits to IRS Web sites saw triple-digit increases, the agency says.

The IRS has given no schedule to its 68 help center closings, though some are slated to be closed this fall, the tax agency said.

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ONN. Ohio News Now: Voinovich Gives Impassioned Speech

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

ONN. Ohio News Now: Voinovich Gives Impassioned SpeechVoinovich Gives Impassioned Speech

May 26, 2005, 08:36 AM Email to a Friend Printer Friendly Version

John Bolton

Ohio Republican George Voinovich came close to tears as he implored fellow senators Wednesday to think hard before voting to approve John Bolton as UN ambassador.

Voinovich has been the subject of an intense White House lobbying campaign since he broke ranks on Bolton. He has also been roughed up in television advertisements and by conservative commentators. The strain was evident in Voinovich’s voice as his Senate speech drew to a close Wednesday.

Voinovich said Bolton would set back the United States’ goal of reforming the United Nations and he would go into the job hobbled by his own reputation as a bully.

Voinovich said the issue will become the messenger, not the message.

Nevertheless, Senate Republicans believe they have the votes to confirm Bolton, possibly Thursday

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Stop the Tape: I Made Voinovich Cry Over Bolton

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Stop the Tape: I Made Voinovich Cry Over BoltonBEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I tell you what, I made George Voinovich cry yesterday. This is not ego speaking. I’m simply reading to you from an AP dispatch by the lovely and gracious Anne Gearan. “Voinovich has been the subject of an intense White House lobbying campaign since he broke ranks on Bolton. He has also been roughed up in television advertisements and by conservative commentators. The strain was evident in Voinovich’s voice as his Senate speech drew to a close Wednesday.” Conservative commentators are making a senator cry. Boy, that’s going to really look good.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: All right, let’s go to the audio sound bites. We have three sound bites here. This is Senator Voinovich from Ohio weighing in on the nomination and the ultimate vote of John Bolton to be the US Ambassador to the United Nations.

VOINOVICH: (shaky voice) Too many of my colleagues are not going to understand (trembling) that this appointment is very, very important to our country. At a strategic time (blubber) when we need friends all over the world, (whimper) we need somebody up there that’s going to be able to get the job done.

RUSH: (Making crying sounds.) Can you believe this? I’m embarrassed. I’ll tell you. (interruption) Well, I can’t take total credit, Mr. Snerdley, for making him cry. The story says conservative commentators. “He’s also been roughed up in television advertisements and by conservative commentators. The strain was evident in Voinovich’s voice as his speech drew to a close on Wednesday.” You know, I am just stunned. Here you’ve got a US senator on the brink, on the verge of tears, and rather than people be embarrassed by this, you’ve got a media sympathetic, because he’s been criticized by conservative commentators. Meanwhile, Tom DeLay’s reputation and all these judges routinely trashed and destroyed every day and the media licks its chops and asks for more and begins to pile on. For crying out loud, what are we running here, folks? Here’s more from what Voinovich said yesterday, weighing in on the Bolton nomination.

VOINOVICH: I ask myself, “Mr. President, what message are we sending to the world community?”

RUSH: Stop the tape. With you crying on the floor of the US Senate, what do you think the message is? We’re a bunch of wimps! Good grief almighty!

VOINOVICH: In the same breath we are considering a nominee for ambassador to the United Nations who’s been accused of being arrogant, of not listening to his friends, of acting unilaterally, and of bullying those who do not have ability to properly defend themselves. These are the very characteristics that we’re trying to dispel in the court of world opinion.

RUSH: And there you have what’s exactly wrong with this. This is not a time, folks, where we’re going to go out and make the world safer and make ourselves safer by asking yourselves, “Why don’t they like us?” and then trying to make them like us. What’s going on? How old is this man? What has he not learned in his life? I may make him cry again by asking these questions. For crying out loud, how many people tried to be nice to Hitler? What was the guy’s name, Chamberlain? How many people tried to be nice to Hitler? “Hey, Adolf? Take Poland. Just stop there. Just take Poland.” Fine. “Hey, Al-Qaeda, what are we doing to make you dislike us? What is it?” So he’s upset here that we’re going to send a nominee whose accused of being arrogant, of not listening to his friends. Can I define that for you, “arrogant, not listening to his friends”? He knows what he wants! He doesn’t need to go out and ask the opinions of others, Senator Voinovich, to make up his mind. We’re getting a little insight here into how things work in the Senate. “So if I say this, will you like me?” and, “If I do this, will you like me?” We’re looking at the feminization here of the male population of the US Senate, for crying out loud. What in the world is this? I told you, one of the problems these guys have with Bolton is he’s a man. He’s a throwback. He’s a man. He makes up his own mind. He knows what’s right. He knows what’s wrong. He knows what he needs to do, and they think that’s arrogant. He’s too sure of himself. “Nobody should be that sure of themselves. This is going to rub people the wrong way.” This is a bully? Somebody that knows what he knows, somebody that believes what he believes, somebody who’s not afraid to say what he thinks, this is the new definition of a bully? Bullying those who do not have ability to properly defend themselves. We’re back to that, and now we’re back to the fact that Voinovich did not accept incompetence among his staff. Yes, we’re supposed to do that, folks. We’re supposed to accept incompetence because that’s being nice and considerate and we’re supposed to be fair. Want to hear one more bite? Even if you don’t, here it comes.

VOINOVICH: Frankly, I’m concerned that Mr. Bolton would make it more difficult for us to achieve the badly needed reforms to this outdated institution. I believe there could be even more obstacles to reform if Mr. Bolton is sent to the UN than if it were another candidate. Those in the international community who do not want to see the UN reformed will act as a roadblock and I fear that Mr. Bolton’s reputation will make it easier —

RUSH: Stop this! Stop this. Stop this. So the way I understand this is, the UN needs to be reformed. Voinovich admits it’s in bad shape. So we’re going to send somebody up there who — the international community doesn’t want to see the UN reformed anyway, right? So we’re going to send somebody up there, if Voinovich gets his way, we want to send somebody up there who says, “Okay, now, we know you don’t want the UN reformed but we do, and we really need the UN reformed, and I think if I’m just nice to you and I provide no threat, and I present no bullying personality to you, that you will go along with my idea of reform.” This is not how the world works, and the UN is in such a mess, to go up and run it here like a sandbox and just to continue running it the way it always has been — you know, Madeleine Albright’s had her turn at this. The Madeleine Albright, Clinton people had their way. They had their turn with this, and they didn’t fix it at all. We don’t need more people like that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Can I give you an idea just how off his game Voinovich has to be? Here he’s worried about Bolton being a bully at the UN. By the way, these are just accusations and that’s another thing. Some of these Democrats say, “We can’t send somebody up there with these kinds of allegations,” because to them the allegations will be perceived as true by the bad guys. It’s amazing how they want to pander to bullies themselves. What is the UN but a bunch of dumb bullies? It’s a bunch of thugs and tyrants and anti-Semites. I mean, the UN is the Star Wars bar scene, folks, it’s nothing but a bunch of aliens up there — and most of them are dictators and thugs and tyrants who exist for one reason, that’s to oppress their own people and to steal money from our back pocket under any premise they can come up with, such as Kyoto. Yet here’s Voinovich all worried about the bullies at the UN. What about the bully that is Barbara Boxer? What about the bully that is Harry Reid? What about the bullies in the Democratic Party and what they’re saying about our president, and what about the impact that’s having with our enemies and so-called friends at the UN around the world? I think Senator Voinovich ought to turn his fear of bullies to his own chamber and start asking himself and the Democrats just what their words and actions are doing to the US image around the world and how that’s not helping at all, particularly when the Senate minority leader refers to the president as a loser to a bunch of school kids while the president is over in the former Soviet Bloc. “Oh, no we can’t talk about that!” We must have comity in the Senate but we don’t have to have comity with John Bolton. We can set out to destroy him and we can go to the Senate floor and we can cry about it. What about the message that sends to these people who are our enemies, Senator Voinovich? Talk about useful? The term useful idiot apply here? I mean, who’s doing more damage to our foreign relations, Voinovich or the nomination of Bolton? Who’s doing more damage to our foreign policy than the Democrats in the Senate constantly ripping this country, ripping this president in the midst of demonstrable foreign policy successes? I think these guys are looking at the wrong place. They’re always looking at our enemies as our friends, except the Democrats — there we must have comity, comity in the Senate. Tom in Dayton, Ohio. Hi, we’ll go to the phones early today. Welcome to the program, sir.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. My point on the fine senator that represents us is that he’s not crying because he’s getting a couple of comments made or getting a couple of shots thrown at him. He’s crying because there are people like myself that have sent e-mails to the senator telling him, “Hey, thanks for what you’ve done, but you know what? You just crossed the line here and you don’t understand what conservatives are looking for out of Bolton, and we are no longer going to tolerate it out of our senators here in Ohio,” and I pretty much sent him an e-mail telling him, “Thanks but I cannot vote for you no more.” And my other concern with the senator is that he thinks we’re going to send Bolton there, and the UN is going to resist him and not work with him. Well, what are the Democrats doing right now in the Senate? Is he afraid they’re going to act like Democratic senators to him —

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: — and resist everything —

RUSH: Exactly. Exactly.

CALLER: — that we are trying to accomplish?

RUSH: And what’s happening with the UN now? We don’t have anybody up there right now and supposedly they’re not working with us then, either.

CALLER: I would like to know what was being done that was so good by previous people we sent to the UN that worked, because we’ve got —

RUSH: There’s nothing — you can’t say under previous, you know, Madeleine Albright, there goes the oil-for-food scandal right under her nose. Those people have had their chance. Sir, I take exception with you on only one thing, and I realize everybody wants to get in on the act here. You think you made Voinovich cry, but I got the AP story here, doesn’t say anything about you and your e-mail, only says conservative commentators. I made Voinovich cry. If you want to take partial credit, make you feel better, go ahead, but your e-mail is not mentioned in this story.

CALLER: You know what? I’m going to send whoever wrote that article a little e-mail myself because, you know what? As much as I appreciate you, Rush, what it is, it comes down to the people in the states, like myself, who do vote the conservative way, not because… Well, I guess I’ll say this, because of one reason: We want to better our country; we want to have the chance to make sure that our children and our grandchildren have the right to vote and have the right —

RUSH: You know something? It’s interesting you say that because that’s part of the reason Voinovich said he opposes Bolton. He’s worried about his children and grandchildren getting nuked if we send somebody that’s too tough up there. He didn’t say nuked but he’s worried about war breaking out, terrible times and we don’t need a bully up there that’s just going to make it worse, that’s what he thinks.

CALLER: I don’t understand.

RUSH: I guess he’s never seen a John Wayne movie he liked. He probably hates Dirty Harry, the Clinton Eastwood character. He hates people that get it down in law-and-order situations. Just despises them.

CALLER: To be honest with you, I look back and I see how important the state of Ohio was to getting President Bush reelected and then I see what my two senators doing now, acting more as… I can’t even call them moderates. I have to actually say that they are becoming more of a Democratic way of voting, and I’m kind of ashamed and embarrassed that I voted for two conservatives that represent the state of the fine state of Ohio.

RUSH: Ah look, nobody is going to hold it against you, sir. You’re not the total reason here. You were bamboozled like a lot of people. I mean, nobody before all this started thought that Voinovich or DeWine were going to be problems. They just got plucked from obscurity here to be made famous by joining the McCain 14 or what have you. We got more stories on that, by the way, too, as the program unfolds but, Tom, I gotta move on. Thanks much. (interruption) What? Can I make McCain cry? I don’t know. No, McCain’s not going to cry.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: On this Bolton business, the Democrats said that they will try to filibuster John Bolton if the Bush administration doesn’t turn over two final sets of documents. This is Christopher Dodd from Connecticut. “‘If the administration doesn’t give us this information then I want a sixty vote requirement here so that senators can express their views on this issue of the documentation that we need.’ Mr. Dodd said he actually supports an up-or-down vote on Bolton, but is being forced into a filibuster as a protest against the administration. Biden said, ‘Did Bolton attempt to badger or change the views of intelligence officers relating to whether or not Syria had weapons of mass destruction at a critical juncture when you were all writing and we were asking, is Syria next?'” So filibustering Bolton.

Meanwhile, Bill Frist has made it plain what his strategery is. He said, “‘We cannot stop with this single step of Priscilla Owen. We must give fair up-or-down votes to other previously blocked nominees.’ The Senate’s top Republican said that he would press for votes on the nominations of William Myers and Henry Saad, two of the president’s selections who were not guaranteed final votes in the centrist deal.” And about this, Lindsey Graham said no, no, no, no, I can’t say that I would vote for the nuclear option, and those two, they weren’t part of our original deal. Republican officials also said they expected Frist to push for votes on Brett Kavanaugh and William Haynes, so appears that Frist is going to bring everybody up, even those outside the so-called deal.

END TRANSCRIPT

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MercuryNews.com | 05/27/2005 | Bush suffers setback on Bolton

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

MercuryNews.com | 05/27/2005 | Bush suffers setback on Bolton

Bush suffers setback on Bolton

SENATE MOVE DELAYS DECISION ABOUT U.N. NOMINEE UNTIL JUNE

By Jonathan S. Landay and James Kuhnhenn

Knight Ridder

WASHINGTON – Senate Democrats on Thursday blocked a confirmation vote on John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, souring the bipartisan atmosphere set by an agreement earlier this week on judicial nominees.

The vote to advance Bolton’s nomination to an immediate confirmation vote was 56-42 — four short of the 60 votes that Bolton’s Republican backers needed.

Democratic aides said that despite the vote, Bolton’s nomination did not appear to be in jeopardy.

Democrats insisted they are trying to compel the administration to release additional documents about Bolton, an outspoken critic of the world body and a past proponent of go-it-alone U.S. foreign policy.

“I implore the administration to provide the information,” said Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “We are willing to vote 10 minutes after we get back in session if in fact they provided the information.”

A final vote on Bolton will not take place until at least June, after the Senate returns from a Memorial Day recess.

The vote came a day after the Senate overcame four years of Democratic delaying tactics to confirm Priscilla Owen of Texas as an appellate court judge. Owen was the first beneficiary of a new bipartisan agreement designed to limit the number of times Democrats used extended debate, or filibusters, to block judicial nominees.

The Bolton nomination was not part of that deal, but its timing made it a symbolic test of the week’s bipartisan good will.

“The very first issue we turned to, we got what to me looks like a filibuster,” said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. “It certainly sounds like a filibuster. . . . It quacks like a filibuster. . . . What America has just seen is an engagement of another period of obstruction by the other side.”

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the administration was pleased that Republicans would revisit the vote after the recess and criticized Democrats for the newest delay.

Overall, 57 senators voted to end the debate. But the official vote was 56-42 because Frist switched sides at the end so he could move to have it reconsidered when the Senate returns June 7.

“I think it was a very important day for the Senate because we need information on this nominee that we’ve been asking for for a very long time. We haven’t gotten it yet,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.

The material Democrats have sought for weeks involves Bolton’s use of government intelligence on Syria, and instances in which he asked for names of fellow U.S. officials whose communications were secretly picked up by a spy agency.

A deal to turn over part of the information fell through earlier Thursday. Biden rejected an offer to see edited versions of the classified communications picked up by the National Security Agency that would not reveal the names of the U.S. officials.

Also at issue are Bolton’s temper and management style, charges that he wanted intelligence analysts punished for disputing his views, his disparagement of the United Nations and his close identification with the Bush administration on a go-it-alone foreign policy.

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said the charges against Bolton amounted to “character assassination” and a “smoke screen” by critics seeking an excuse to attack Bush’s foreign policy.

He said Bolton’s achievements, experience and blunt manner made him the right person to represent the United States and champion reforms at the scandal-scarred United Nations.

Bolton is the only Bush choice for a senior position whose name has been sent by a Senate committee to a floor vote without recommendation, the result of surprisingly strong objections to Bolton voiced not only by Democrats during Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings but also by Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio.

Opposition to Bolton stemmed in part from statements he made in 1994 that the United Nations functioned only when there was U.S. leadership and that it would not matter if the top 10 floors of its 39-story headquarters in New York were cut off.

But Bolton’s biggest hurdles were charges that he tried to have a State Department intelligence analyst and a member of the National Intelligence Council, which produces intelligence assessments for the president, punished in 2002 for disputing his views on Cuba’s biological warfare capabilities.

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I SAY LET BOLTON HAVE IT..WHY?

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Bushy wants Bolton. Condi wants Bolton. They say he is the right man for the job. I say, OK…

let’s let them have their choice, and sit back and watch the fun begin.

Bolton has a reputation as a bully, a hothead, and once said that the United Nations did not exist, as well as saying that elimination of the top ten floors of the UN would have no effect.

Bolton is a giant embarassment ready to happen, and when it happens, it will be an embarassment for the administration. It will point out that they are nominating people for political cronyism reasons, and NOT

because they are the right person for the job…

So…I say…give ’em enough rope….let ’em have John Bolton for the UN…and let the humiliation begin~!

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CNN.com – Bush?nominates Bolton as U.N. ambassador – Mar 7, 2005

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

CNN.com – Bush?nominates Bolton as U.N. ambassador – Mar 7, 2005

BOLTON SAID THINGS LIKE…

“If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” he said.

AND

Bolton drew fire from Democrats in 1994 when he said at a Federalist Society forum that “there is no such thing as the United Nations.”

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AlterNet: The Armageddon Man

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

AlterNet: The Armageddon Man: “no such thing”

Enemy of the U.N.

Bolton has long dismissed the legitimacy of the United Nations, a multilateral organization dedicated to “collective security that the United States played a key role in creating. A longtime activist with the Federalist Society, Bolton has used this right-wing association of lawyers, judges, and legal experts as a forum to lash out against the United Nations. In a 1994 speech at the liberal World Federalist Association, Bolton declared that “there is no such thing as the United Nations.” To underscore his point, Bolton said. “If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”

Bolton has also made his stand with those who believe the U.S. government should stop its payments to the United Nations. “Many Republicans in Congress ? and perhaps a majority not only do not care about losing the General Assembly vote but actually see it as a ‘make-my-day’ outcome,” Bolton said before joining the George W. Bush administration, “Indeed once the vote is lost … this will simply provide further evidence to many why nothing should be paid to the U.N. system.”

In a 1999 article in the Weekly Standard article titled “Kofi Annan’s Power Grab,” Bolton laid out the neoconservative position on U.S. military supremacy with respect to what the neocons regarded as the outdated U.N. Charter. Bolton took issue with Annan’s description of the United Nations as “the sole source of legitimacy on the use of force.” According to Bolton, “If the United States allows that claim to go unchallenged, its discretion in using force to advance its national interests is likely to be inhibited in the future.” In mounting the challenge to Annan and the United Nations, Bolton also criticized President Clinton for “his implicit endorsement of the Annan doctrine” during his speech opening the General Assembly session that year.

In Bolton’s view, Annan had put his own legitimacy at risk by expressing his concerns about the NATO bombing campaign over the former Yugoslavia. When visiting the war zone, Annan said: “Unless the Security Council is restored to its preeminent position as the sole source of legitimacy on the use of force, we are on a dangerous path to anarchy.” Subsequently, in the secretary general’s annual report to the UN membership, Annan wrote that “enforcement actions without Security Council authorization threaten the very core of the international security system. … Only the [UN] Charter provides a universally legal basis for the use of force.” Bolton wrote that these were “sweeping ? indeed, breathtaking ?assertions,” although from a post-Iraq invasion perspective Annan’s statements could be described as prophetic.

According to Bolton, “The implicit premise of the Annan doctrine ? that force is unimportant while ‘international law’ is practically everything ? is widely held in Europe, but is also popular here, particularly in the Clinton administration.” Bolton warned that “if the Annan doctrine is left unanswered, we will soon hear about ’emerging new international norms’ that will make it harder and harder for the United States to act independently in its own legitimate national interest. And we will wait in vain for our adversaries to follow those ‘norms.'”

After the UN voted not to authorize the administration’s planned invasion of Iraq, Bolton said the decision was “further evidence to many why nothing should be paid to the UN system.” In the run up to the war, he ordered an intelligence probe of U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix, who headed the UNMOVIC inspection mission in Iraq, and Mohamed El Baradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Not pleased with El Baradei’s lack of a strong stance against Iran, Bolton led a unsuccessful campaign to remove him from his post at the conclusion of his second term.

Bolton described his theory about the legitimacy of U.S. military actions in his 2003 speech to the Federalist Society. According to Bolton, if the U.S. follows its own constitutional procedures then there is no question about the legitimacy of any resulting U.S. actions abroad. In Bolton’s view, “There’s a fundamental problem of democratic theory for those who contend, implicitly or otherwise, that the proper operation of America’s institutions of representative government are not able to confer legitimacy for the use of force.”

“Make no mistake,” said Bolton, “Not asserting that our constitutional procedures themselves confer legitimacy will result over time in the atrophying of our ability to act independently.”

This post originally appeared on an external website

BOLTON AND ROGERS SPOKE BEORFE THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY, WHAT IS IT?

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Fed-Soc.org – The Federalist Society

http://www.fed-soc.org/ourpurpose.htm

This post originally appeared on an external website

WEBSITE OF THEY DAY…A MUST SEE

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

George W. Bush: The Officious Website: http://www.GeorgeWBush.org

This post originally appeared on an external website

George W. Bush or Chimpanzee?

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

George W. Bush or Chimpanzee?

This post originally appeared on an external website

Scotsman.com News – Latest News – Bush ‘Groucho’ Posters Spark School Uproar

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Fri 27 May 2005

printer friendly

1:37pm (UK)

Bush ‘Groucho’ Posters Spark School Uproar

“PA”

Posters that depicted President George Bush with a Groucho Marx-style moustache and cigar were ordered to be taken down at a high school in Los Angeles after a student complained.

Theatre students, who had created the posters to advertise a satirical play, countered with new posters with a First Amendment message.

Principal Kenny Lee ordered 100 posters removed from the campus of El Camino Real High School in the Woodland Hills area of the city last week on grounds they promoted smoking and ?endorsing one ideology over another.?

?That?s our take on the student speech and conduct,? Lee said.

The school-funded posters advertised the students? play, The Complete History of America (Abridged), which satirises US history.

A senior student who supports the president wrote a complaint letter to the administration, teachers and students said.

?We had one student who was very upset,? Lee said. ?If something is bothering a student on campus, we?re going to address it.?

The poster ban infuriated some students.

?It taught us that the First Amendment certainly does not guarantee the right of free speech,? said Jes Shah, 16, a junior in the school drama programme.

The principal asked the drama students to come up with new posters. The new designs all feature a silhouette of Bush and a burning cigar, along with inscriptions such as ?Free Expression for All (unless you are in high school)? and ?What First Amendment??.

?They?re good,? Lee said. ?I like the follow-ups.?

This post originally appeared on an external website

CNN.com – Bush?nominates Bolton as U.N. ambassador – Mar 7, 2005

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

CNN.com – Bush?nominates Bolton as U.N. ambassador – Mar 7, 2005

BOLTON SAID THINGS LIKE…

“If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” he said.

AND

Bolton drew fire from Democrats in 1994 when he said at a Federalist Society forum that “there is no such thing as the United Nations.”

This post originally appeared on an external website

CNN.com – Bush?nominates Bolton as U.N. ambassador – Mar 7, 2005

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

CNN.com – Bush?nominates Bolton as U.N. ambassador – Mar 7, 2005

BOLTON SAID THINGS LIKE…

“If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” he said.

AND

Bolton drew fire from Democrats in 1994 when he said at a Federalist Society forum that “there is no such thing as the United Nations.”

This post originally appeared on an external website

CNN.com – Bush?nominates Bolton as U.N. ambassador – Mar 7, 2005

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

CNN.com – Bush?nominates Bolton as U.N. ambassador – Mar 7, 2005

BOLTON SAID THINGS LIKE…

“If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” he said.

AND

Bolton drew fire from Democrats in 1994 when he said at a Federalist Society forum that “there is no such thing as the United Nations.”

This post originally appeared on an external website

CNN.com – Bush?nominates Bolton as U.N. ambassador – Mar 7, 2005

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

CNN.com – Bush?nominates Bolton as U.N. ambassador – Mar 7, 2005

BOLTON SAID THINGS LIKE…

“If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” he said.

AND

Bolton drew fire from Democrats in 1994 when he said at a Federalist Society forum that “there is no such thing as the United Nations.”

This post originally appeared on an external website

CNN.com – Bush?nominates Bolton as U.N. ambassador – Mar 7, 2005

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

CNN.com – Bush?nominates Bolton as U.N. ambassador – Mar 7, 2005

BOLTON SAID THINGS LIKE…

“If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” he said.

AND

Bolton drew fire from Democrats in 1994 when he said at a Federalist Society forum that “there is no such thing as the United Nations.”

This post originally appeared on an external website

CNN.com – Bush?nominates Bolton as U.N. ambassador – Mar 7, 2005

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

CNN.com – Bush?nominates Bolton as U.N. ambassador – Mar 7, 2005

BOLTON SAID THINGS LIKE…

“If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” he said.

AND

Bolton drew fire from Democrats in 1994 when he said at a Federalist Society forum that “there is no such thing as the United Nations.”

This post originally appeared on an external website

DeLay’s really pathetic lie

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

By: KOS

Sat May 28th, 2005 at 09:38:59 AM ET

MACON,GA.-Kos- Judge rules that TRMPAC violated state election laws. A state judge ruled Thursday that the treasurer of a political fundraising committee organized by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) violated the state’s election law by failing to report $684,507 in contributions from corporations and other donors in 2002.The civil court decision is the first to uphold a complaint by Democrats about the way DeLay and his advisers financed a 2002 political victory in Texas, which ultimately helped cement Republican control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

DeLay claims innocense.

DeLay, asked by a reporter for CNN if the ruling had implications for him, responded: “Not for me. I’m not part of it.”

Right…

? DeLay served as a creator, advisor, and fundraiser for TRMPAC. Who said this? None other than Tom DeLay. In fact, according to a report, which ran in the Austin American Statesman on March 10, 2005 – DeLay said that it was his idea to create TRMPAC. Laylan Copelin wrote that report.

? When TRMPAC announced its existence it prominently publicized Tom DeLay as one its key leaders. It’s own FAQ clearly indicated Tom DeLay was leading this PAC.

? DeLay’s name appeared all over on TRMPAC stationary and promotional materials. Here is a copy of that TRMPAC luncheon flyer prominently featuring the name of Tom DeLay. Here is another sample. Click on the image to see the entire PDF doc:

? TRMPAC records show DeLay was on a conference call of the group’s finance committee. Here is a copy of a memo scheduling a conference call connecting DeLay with the TRMPAC finance committee.

? DeLay did fundraising for TRMPAC. Here is a memo from Warren RoBold, a fundraiser for TRMPAC, discussing DeLays role in calling large donors.

The noose is closing around DeLay.

===============================

The Unauthorized Biography of Dick Cheney

(Kos)

by Direwolf

Fri May 27th, 2005 at 08:46:02 PDT

A buddy of mine is currently vacationing in Canada and came across a TV show that was quite critical of Cheney. He sent me a link this website that provides a blow by blow.

It appears this show first aired just prior to the 2004 election and was re-run this week. It also appears this show aired on CBC, which I believe is a major and legimate national news network.

As an aside, I beleive CBC is the quarterback of Newsworld Intl, an excellent network for intl news on channel 366 of DirecTV.

As my buddy noted, you would never see anything like this on any US television network. Furthermore, if they will show something like this in Canada, an ally, imagine how Cheney et al must be viewed in the rest of the world.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/5/27/11462/0203

=============================

Bush outsources VOA to Hong Kong

Fri May 27th, 2005 at 08:35:59 PDT

Hard to believe, isn’t it? Bush outsources the ‘overnight’ operation of Voice of America to Hong Kong.

Naturally, there will be a few changes. It seems the Hong Kong Administrator thinks that the VOA has a ‘USA bias’, so he’s requiring equal time for the Chinese POV. You know, on little things like garment tariffs, Taiwan independence, dual-use technology shipped to countries on Bush’s ‘enemies list’, etc.

Just think: finally, a balanced view of the world from the VOA.

Perhaps we could rename it to the ‘Voice of the UN’, and John Bolton would be able to give his us his take on the world in his own, unique style, and he could do so where the FCC won’t be fining the company millions of dollars for his rude and crude language.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/5/27/113559/312

This post originally appeared on an external website

CNN.com – Bush?nominates Bolton as U.N. ambassador – Mar 7, 2005

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

CNN.com – Bush?nominates Bolton as U.N. ambassador – Mar 7, 2005

BOLTON SAID THINGS LIKE…

“If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” he said.

AND

Bolton drew fire from Democrats in 1994 when he said at a Federalist Society forum that “there is no such thing as the United Nations.”

This post originally appeared on an external website

China Threatens U.S. Over Textile Import Restrictions

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

China Threatens U.S. Over Textile Import Restrictions
China Threatens U.S. Over Textile Import RestrictionsSHANGHAI, May 30 — China on Monday threatened to take the United States to a formal dispute proceeding at the World Trade Organization if the Bush administration persists in restricting imports of Chinese-made textiles.

China also rescinded tariffs on its own textile exports, asserting that it will not limit its shipments as it offered to do last week so long as the United States and Europe impose their own restrictions.

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At a press conference in Beijing, China’s Commerce Minister, Bo Xilai, unleashed the latest rhetorical volley in an intensifying trade conflict, warning that his government might formally accuse the United States of foul play if the Bush administration does not lift quotas on its textiles.

“This is a legitimate right that China is entitled to and we will resort to this mechanism when it is time to do so,” Bo told reporters, according to Bloomberg News.

That threat came only days before Bo is scheduled to receive his American counterpart, U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, who is due in Beijing on Thursday to hold talks on the textile conflict and the larger issue of how to lessen China’s $160 billion trade surplus with the United States.

The growing intensity of the dispute underscores the degree to which domestic pressures now appear to be leading both sides to push hard, lest they face accusations of appeasement. Analysts emphasized that Beijing and Washington both appear to be engaged in a show of their toughness aimed at assuaging their domestic industries and not in a genuine escalation.

“This is entirely about domestic politics in both countries,” said Andrew Rothman, China strategist at CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets in Shanghai. “They’re doing the dance that they always do. I don’t see this turning into a trade war.”

The textile dispute stems from the expiration of an old system of global quotas that for four decades limited how much clothing any single country could ship to the United States and Europe. Since the lifting of those limits at the beginning of the year, shipments of Chinese-made clothes into the United States have leapt by more than half, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. Volumes of some goods such as cotton pants and shirts have jumped by more than 1,000 percent.

That surge has increased pressure on the Bush administration to choke the flow. Domestic textile manufacturers and a vocal contingent in Congress have accused the administration of being soft on China, allowing a renegade trade power to inundate the market with cheap goods at the expense of American workers.

The Bush administration earlier this month slapped new quotas on several categories of Chinese clothes and textiles to limit growth to 7.5 percent this year. The administration has the express right to impose these safeguard quotas, as they are known, under the agreement that brought China into the World Trade Organization three years ago.

China reacted with hostility, accusing the United States of violating the spirit of free trade. Officials in Beijing maintain that China is simply using its advantages — an abundance of cheap labor and natural resources — to produce high-quality goods at an economical price. China asserts that it is being made a scapegoat for the inevitable decline of American manufacturing.

In a bid to persuade the Bush administration to eschew safeguard quotas, China last week said it would quadruple tariffs it imposes on its textile exports. But on Monday, China said it would withdraw those tariffs altogether so long as the safeguard limits remain

This post originally appeared on an external website

In Memorial – Thank you to our troops.

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

In Memorial – Thank you to our troops.
Posted by CodeWarrior on May 30, 2005 at 9:08 AM (printer friendly)

My father was a WW II vet and died in 1986 in a VA hospital. I have made it a point to thank every person I meet that served our country in the military. I’ve done this in person, over the phone, and over the computer. I’ve been surprised by the reactions.

I can remember one particular tough looking marine who, when I thanked him for his service in ‘Nam, started crying because no one had EVER thanked him since he got out of the Corps. Two weeks ago, I was talking to a black gentleman who was in the Army, and was injured during his tour of duty. I said to him “I just want to thank you for your service to our country.”. He got a stunned look on his face and it took him a few seconds to respond. He said “You know, in 24 years, I’ve NEVER had anyone thank me.”

During the Vietnam war, returning soldiers coming into the states in California, were advised to change out of their uniforms and into civilian clothes, to avoid walking through the airport in their uniforms, because so many people would accost them and call them “baby killers”.

I just wanted , since this IS Memorial Day, to take this space to send a heartfelt “Thank you” to each service man, service woman, and to the families of veterans of all wars, living and dead.

I think our country owes a giant debt of gratitude to our Vets, and that sometimes, our government falls down on the level of support our Vets deserve.

So, on this Memorial Day, regardless of political sentiments, a hearty thank you, and feelings of respect and honor for you guys and gals.

God Bless You All !

This post originally appeared on an external website

CNN.com – Bush?nominates Bolton as U.N. ambassador – Mar 7, 2005

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

CNN.com – Bush?nominates Bolton as U.N. ambassador – Mar 7, 2005

BOLTON SAID THINGS LIKE…

“If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” he said.

AND

Bolton drew fire from Democrats in 1994 when he said at a Federalist Society forum that “there is no such thing as the United Nations.”

This post originally appeared on an external website

Physician Arrested on Terrorism Charges to Be Arraigned

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Physician Arrested on Terrorism Charges to Be ArraignedPhysician Arrested on Terrorism Charges to Be Arraigned

By John-Thor Dahlburg and Walter F. Roche Jr., Times Staff Writers

MIAMI — The doctor kept mostly to himself, neighbors remembered Monday. He lived in a gated South Florida community west of the exclusive town of Boca Raton with a woman and two children. The couple drove a black SUV and white two-door sedan, and fixed up the garage of their rented villa to serve as the youngsters’ rumpus room.

Dan Kozan, an advertising consultant, had one encounter with his neighbor across the street when he moved into Villa San Remo three years ago, but it was enough. Kozan, 51, said he asked the doctor to move the cars of people visiting so Kozan could back out of his driveway more easily. The doctor, he said, ignored him.

“I’m friendly with most of the neighbors around here,” Kozan said. “Not him.”

Early Saturday, the FBI moved in and arrested the physician, Rafiq Abdus Sabir, 50, as an alleged participant in a terrorist plot. Along with Tarik Shah, 42, a self-described martial arts expert who had been arrested the day before in New York, Sabir was accused of conspiring to provide material support to al-Qaida.

According to federal prosecutors, Shah agreed to train Islamic holy warriors in hand-to-hand combat techniques, while Sabir agreed to treat their wounds at a military base in Saudi Arabia.

Both men were scheduled to be arraigned in separate federal court appearances Tuesday, according to a statement from U.S. Attorney David N. Kelley in New York. Judy Orihuela, spokeswoman for the FBI’s Miami office, said Monday that Sabir was being held in the Palm Beach County jail pending his transport to the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce.

According to the federal complaint, the result of a two-year sting operation, Shah and Sabir, both U.S. citizens, took an oath of loyalty to al-Qaida, the shadowy Islamic terror network blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and some of the violence targeting the U.S. occupation in Iraq.

Federal prosecutors said Shah had searched for locations suitable for secret weapons training, at one point inspecting a warehouse on Long Island, and agreed to provide a curriculum for hand-to-hand combat training.

The two men might have known each other for more than a decade. Records show they shared a common address on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. in Harlem in New York City, where in 1993, Shah set up a business called the Expansion of Knowledge Center. Sabir listed the same address as his residence in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

If found guilty of conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization, each defendant faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison and a fine of as much as $250,000.

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101\

3/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101\

3/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

The Globe and Mail: Red Cross pleads guilty, offers apology in blood scandal

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

The Globe and Mail: Red Cross pleads guilty, offers apology in blood scandal

HAMILTON and TORONTO — The Canadian Red Cross pleaded guilty yesterday to a single charge arising from the tainted-blood scandal and publicly accepted responsibility for the disaster that left thousands of people infected with HIV and hepatitis C, saying it “is deeply sorry for the injury and death caused to those who were infected by blood or blood products it distributed” in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Many HIV and hepatitis C sufferers from across Canada said they had waited decades to hear those words, aired in a Hamilton court through a videotaped statement by the current Red Cross chief executive officer, Dr. Pierre Duplessis.

Mike McCarthy, spokesman for the Canadian Hemophilia Society and a tireless activist for victims, welcomed the admission of wrongdoing but with little satisfaction.

“How can anyone be satisfied? Thousands of people lost their lives. Hundreds and hundreds of people are living with these fatal viruses today,” he said. “There’s no great outcome here for anybody that’s gone through the tainted-blood scandal.”

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Other survivors of the tainted-blood tragedy were not impressed, noting that thousands of people never lived to hear the Red Cross apology.

“They slither between every legal loophole and hide behind every lawyer they can,” said Bruce Devenne, a 59-year-old Nova Scotian suffering from hepatitis C. He said he is upset that “the Red Cross is walking free from now on.”

As part of the plea arrangement, which has yet to be approved by a judge, the Red Cross will be fined up to the maximum $5,000 penalty for admitting to violating the Food and Drugs Act. The charity has also agreed to pay an additional $1.5-million, splitting the money between scholarships for victims’ families and funding medical research.

In 2002, after a five year-investigation, the RCMP laid six criminal charges against the Red Cross of endangering the public, but all criminal charges were dropped in the plea agreement.

Thousands of Canadians were infected with HIV and hepatitis C because of tainted blood. A judicial inquiry found that the infections could have been prevented by better screening, but that attempts to deal with the problem were “ineffective and half-hearted.” The federal and provincial governments have compensated victims, but many complain the existing packages do not go far enough.

The tragedy caused the Canadian Red Cross to restructure under bankruptcy protection, transfer its blood operations to the new Canadian Blood Services agency in 1998, and concentrate exclusively on its humanitarian work — as well as face allegations of criminality.

At the John Sopinka Courthouse yesterday, two huge screens were positioned on either side of the courtroom so reporters and the public gallery could see the Red Cross apology. “We profoundly regret that the Canadian Red Cross Society did not develop and adopt more quickly measures to reduce the risks of infection, and we accept responsibility through our plea,” Dr. Duplessis told the Ontario Superior Court.

“We accept responsibility through our plea for having distributed harmful products to those that rely on us for their health.”

The Red Cross said it would donate $750,000 to establish a “national medical error project” at the University of Ottawa. The project would alert doctors to the pitfalls of overlooking medical risks.

The other $750,000 would create scholarships for people who can prove their lives have been adversely affected by the tainted-blood tragedy.

Mr. Justice James Kent accepted the plea but asked to hear from victims before sentencing on June 30. Victims can do that at: http://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/vw/blood.

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

SignOnSanDiego.com > News > Nation — Bush says Amnesty’s criticism is ‘absurd’

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

SignOnSanDiego.com > News > Nation — Bush says Amnesty’s criticism is ‘absurd’

June 1, 2005

Associated Press

President Bush has pledged to hold at least one major news conference a month during his second term.

WASHINGTON ? President Bush said yesterday that it is “absurd” to compare the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay to the gulags run by the former Soviet Union.

The president’s brusque dismissal of last week’s critical report by Amnesty International came during a Rose Garden news conference in which Bush sought to counter speculation that he is losing his political clout.

Referring to Amnesty International’s comparison of Guantanamo to a Soviet concentration camp, Bush declared, “It’s just an absurd allegation.” He said the government has investigated every complaint of abuse stemming from the arrest of thousands of detainees captured since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

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With his approval rating at the lowest level of his presidency, Bush defended his policies on issues ranging from Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programs to his embattled nomination of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Bush stood by his stem cell research policy, promoted his long-stalled energy program and insisted that Congress approve a Central American trade deal. He also indicated he would “consult” with the Senate on future judgeship nominations, but didn’t give details or a timetable.

The president also suggested he wouldn’t yield to Democratic objections to several of his judicial appointments by insisting he would seek candidates “of a certain temperament.”

Bush struck his most unyielding stance in response to repeated questions about his proposal for revamping Social Security by giving workers the option of diverting a portion of their payroll taxes into private retirement accounts.

Democrats and interest groups have mobilized to scuttle the private accounts, and some Republicans appear to be skittish about embracing them even though Bush has spent months campaigning for his plan across the country.

Bush has indicated no inclination to drop the idea and seek a compromise.

“It’s like water cutting through a rock,” Bush said. “It’s just a matter of time. And we’re just going to keep working and working and working, reminding the American people that we have a serious problem and a great opportunity to act not as politicians, but as statesmen and women to solve a problem.”

In addition, the Republican leadership in the Senate has been unable to bring the Bolton nomination to a vote, and the Republican-led House has passed a stem cell research bill that Bush has vowed to veto.

In the face of all those difficulties, Bush sounded combative.

“One thing is for certain. It takes a president willing to push people to do hard things,” he said. “I feel . . . comfortable in my role as the president, and my role in the president is to push for reform. The American people appreciate a president who sees a problem and is willing to put it on the table.”

With the war in Iraq, Bush said, “I think the Iraqi government will be up to the task of defeating the insurgents.”

The Amnesty International report accused the U.S. government of thumbing its nose “at the rule of law and human rights” by its treatment of detainees. It spotlighted what many foreign policy experts say is a major problem in the administration’s efforts to repair America’s tattered image in Muslim countries.

In addition to castigating the administration for its treatment of Guantanamo Bay prisoners, the report also focused on conditions at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison and the “renditions” of suspects to countries that routinely use torture.

Referring to the report, Bush said, “It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on . . . allegations by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to . . . not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report.”

Reminded of an assertion that U.S. military action in Iraq would deter other nations ? notably Iran and North Korea ? from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, Bush sidestepped the suggestion that his promises had fallen short. He noted that Iran and North Korea had ongoing nuclear programs before the U.S. invasion of Iraq and contended that North Korea had resumed its effort by abrogating a deal with the Clinton administration.

In both cases, he reiterated his determination to use diplomacy to curb nuclear threats, with Germany, France and Britain taking the lead on Iran.

While acknowledging tensions with Beijing over Taiwan, Bush emphasized China’s role in six-way talks aimed at persuading North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions. The United States, Russia, Japan and South Korea are the other parties to the talks, which have been suspended for almost a year.

With the Bolton nomination and his choice of several federal judges entangled in Democratic delaying tactics in the Senate, Bush took a conciliatory approach toward the bipartisan deal that shelves the use of filibusters against some of his judicial nominees without ruling it out in all cases.

Bush praised the Senate for confirming Priscilla Owen as a federal appeals judge, but added that he is puzzled by language reserving the right to filibuster judicial nominees in “extraordinary circumstances.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Bush said. “I guess we’re about to find out when it comes to other appellate judges.”

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

Daily Times – Site Edition

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Friday, June 03, 2005

Amnesty International throws down the guantlet: Let the world see American ?gulag?

TOKYO: The head of Amnesty International on Thursday hit back at US outrage over the group labelling Guantanamo Bay a ?gulag? and challenged Washington to open the military detention centre to outside inspections.

US President George W Bush and other government figures have said they were shocked when the human rights group accused the United States of running ?a new gulag of prisons around the world beyond the reach of the law and decency?.

The secretary general of London-based Amnesty International, Irene Khan, on Thursday defended the comment and said the US response lacked substance and was ?defensive and dismissive?. ?We have not seen from them a more detailed response to the concerns we have expressed in our report,? she told a news conference on a visit to Tokyo.

?Our answer is simple: if that is so (that the allegations are unfounded), open up these detention centres. Allow us and others to visit them.

?What is interesting is that we are actually getting response from the US government? for the first time in more than three years, Khan said. ?We welcome an opportunity to sit down and have a debate with them on the issue.?

Because the US military base in Guantanamo Bay for prisoners from the ?war on terror? is located in Cuba, the Bush administration argues its inmates do not enjoy the same legal protections as those held inside the United States.

?We are concerned about allegations of torture that frequently emerge and are not independently and fully investigated,? Khan said.

She said the human rights watchdog had used the gulag reference in its annual report to ?send a strong message?, not to set off debate in itself about the analogy to the infamous Soviet prison camps.

?Our concern is about the detention of individuals outside of the limit of laws,? she said. The United States should take a number of steps at the Guantanamo Bay and other detention centres, she said:

?End all secret and incommunicado detentions; grant the International Red Cross fully access; ensure recourse to the law for all detainees; bring to justice anyone responsible for authorizing or committing human rights violations.?

The Amnesty report came after allegations that interrogators at Guantanamo had desecrated the Muslim holy book the Koran to pressure prisoners.

Newsweek magazine retracted the report after it set off deadly riots in Afghanistan and stirred outrage in the Muslim world, saying its source had backed away from the allegation. Bush told a news conference Tuesday what he thought of Amnesty?s findings: ?It is an absurd report. It just is.? ?When there?s accusations made about certain actions by our people, they?re fully investigated in a transparent way,? Bush said.

?It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of and the allegations by people that were held in detention, people who hate America, people that have been trained in some instances to dissemble, that means not tell the truth,? he said. Khan said the report was compiled mostly by American staff. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Wednesday also called the gulag reference ?reprehensible?.

?No force in the world has done more to liberate people that they have never met than the men and women of the United States military,? Rumsfeld said.

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

BUSH ALTERS THE LINE OF SUCCESSION

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Bush alters Pentagon line of succession
Friday, June 3, 2005 Posted: 12:46 PM EDT (1646 GMT)

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld left Thursday for Singapore to attend an annual Asian security conference.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Who would act as President Bush’s defense secretary if Pentagon chief Donald H. Rumsfeld were to resign, become disabled, die or be temporarily absent due to an overseas trip, such as on the one he began Thursday?

For years the answer was, quite naturally, the deputy defense secretary.

But the answer had to change Thursday because of a simple, inconvenient fact: There is no deputy defense secretary.

There is, however, a Navy secretary.

That post is held by Gordon England, who also happens to be Bush’s nominee to replace Paul Wolfowitz as deputy defense secretary. But England’s nomination has been stalled for weeks due to a dispute over whether England must buy insurance on the pension he earned before joining the government.

On May 13, the day Wolfowitz left his defense job, Bush designated England to be the acting deputy secretary. England also retained his Navy job.

The presidential executive order spelling out the line of succession to act as defense secretary says no one in that line can become the acting secretary if he holds his own position in an “acting” capacity.

So, with Rumsfeld having left Thursday on an extended trip to Asia and Europe, the only way he could have England fill in for him legally was to have Bush issue a directive that altered the line of succession.

That is just what the president did.

He directed that Navy secretary would “act for and perform the duties of” the secretary of defense in the event of the secretary’s death, disability, resignation or temporary absence.

In practice, Rumsfeld retains the authority to perform his duties as secretary while he is traveling abroad. But if he cannot for some reason, England would be in line to fill in.

This post originally appeared on an external website

Slyck News – MPAA Launches New Round of Lawsuits

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Slyck News – MPAA Launches New Round of Lawsuits: “MPAA Launches New Round of Lawsuits

June 3, 2005

Thomas Mennecke

The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) has been less active against individual file-traders, at least compared to the RIAA, choosing instead to concentrate more of its efforts against large indexing sites. Since November 2004, when the MPAA announced it would sue individuals and indexing sites, the file-sharing community has seen a number of large BitTorrent and eDonkey2000 sites disappear. Most obvious is the loss of LokiTorrent, EliteTorrents, SuprNova and ShareReactor.

Today, it appears the MPAA is renewing is campaign against individuals. In a press release titled ‘MOVIE STUDIOS VS. INTERNET MOVIE THIEVES, ROUND FIVE!’ the MPAA reiterated its ‘You can click, but you can’t hide’ propaganda.

?These lawsuits are helping us raise awareness about the consequences of stealing movies using the Internet,? said Senior Vice President and Director of Worldwide Anti-Piracy John G. Malcolm. ?There is something very disturbing about the fact that major blockbuster hits such as Star Wars III are available illegally on the Internet before they are even released in movie theaters. People swapping movies illegally online need to understand that this is theft and they will be held accountable.?

According to the copyright law, the MPAA can seek anywhere from $30,000 to $150,000 for each movie distributed; depending on the intent of the individual. The MPAA did not state how many people were sued, or which networks they were participating on.

You can read the MPAA’s press release here.”

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

CNN.com – Pentagon: U.S. soldier kicked a Quran – Jun 3, 2005

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

CNN.com – Pentagon: U.S. soldier kicked a Quran – Jun 3, 2005

Pentagon: U.S. soldier kicked a Quran

Investigation found detainees also mishandled Qurans

Friday, June 3, 2005 Posted: 9:11 PM EDT (0111 GMT)

A detainee sits in his cell at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in a 2004 file photo.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon on Friday released new details about mishandling of the Quran at the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects, confirming that a soldier deliberately kicked the Muslim holy book, and that an interrogator stepped on a Quran and was later fired for “a pattern of unacceptable behavior.”

In other confirmed incidents, a guard’s urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Quran; water balloons thrown by prison guards caused an unspecified number of Qurans to get wet; and in a confirmed but ambiguous case, a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Quran.

The findings, released after normal business hours Friday evening, are among the results of an investigation last month by Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, the commander of the detention center in Cuba. The probe was triggered by a Newsweek magazine report — later retracted — that a U.S. soldier had flushed one Guantanamo Bay detainee’s Quran down a toilet.

The story stirred worldwide controversy and the Bush administration blamed it for deadly demonstrations in Afghanistan. (Full story)

Hood said in a written statement released Friday evening, along with the new details, that his investigation “revealed a consistent, documented policy of respectful handling of the Quran dating back almost 21/2 years.”

Hood said that of nine mishandling cases that were studied in detail by reviewing thousands of pages of written records, five were confirmed to have happened. He could not determine conclusively whether the four others took place.

In one of those four unconfirmed cases a detainee in April 2003 complained to FBI and other interrogators that guards “constantly defile the Quran.” The detainee alleged that in one instance a female military guard threw a Quran into a bag of wet towels to anger another detainee. He also alleged that another guard said the Quran belonged in the toilet, and that guards were ordered to do these things.

Hood said he found no other record of this detainee mentioning any Quran mishandling. The detainee has since been released.

In the most recent confirmed case Hood said a detainee complained on March 25, 2005, of urine splashing on him and his Quran. An unidentified guard admitted at the time that “he was at fault,” the Hood report said, although it did not say whether the act was deliberate. The guard’s supervisor reprimanded him and assigned him to gate guard duty, where he had no contact with detainees for the remainder of his assignment at Guantanamo Bay.

As described in the Hood report, the guard had left his observation post and went outside to urinate. He urinated near an air vent and the wind blew his urine through the vent into the cell block. The incident was not further explained.

In another of the confirmed cases, a contract interrogator stepped on a detainee’s Quran in July 2003 and then apologized. “The interrogator was later terminated for a pattern of unacceptable behavior, an inability to follow direct guidance and poor leadership,” the Hood report said.

Probe: Detainees also defiled Qurans

Hood also said his investigation found 15 cases of detainees mishandling their own Qurans. “These included using a Quran as a pillow, ripping pages out of the Quran, attempting to flush a Quran down the toilet and urinating on the Quran,” Hood’s report said. It offered no possible explanation for those alleged abuses.

In the most recent of those 15 cases, a detainee on February 18, 2005, allegedly ripped up his Quran and handed it to a guard, stating that he had given up on being a Muslim. Several of the guards witnessed this, Hood reported.

Last week Hood disclosed that he had confirmed five cases of mishandling of the Quran, but he refused to provide details. Allegations of Quran desecration at Guantanamo Bay have led to anti-American passions in many Muslim nations, although Pentagon officials have insisted that the problems were relatively minor, and that U.S. commanders have gone to great lengths to enable detainees to practice their religion in captivity.

Hood said last week that he found no credible evidence that a Quran was ever flushed down a toilet. He said a prisoner who was reported to have complained to an FBI agent in 2002 that a military guard threw a Quran in the toilet has since told Hood’s investigators that he never witnessed any form of Quran desecration.

Other prisoners who were returned to their home countries after serving time at Guantanamo Bay as terror suspects have alleged Quran desecration by U.S. guards, and some have said a Quran was placed in a toilet.

There are about 540 detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Some have been there more than three years without being charged with a crime. Most were captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 and were sent to Guantanamo Bay in hope of extracting useful intelligence about the al Qaeda terrorist network.

Both President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have denounced an Amnesty International report that called the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay “the gulag of our time.”

The president told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday that the report by the human-rights group was “absurd.”

On Wednesday, Rumsfeld called the characterization “reprehensible” and said the U.S. military had taken care to ensure that detainees were free to practice their religion. However, he also acknowledged that some detainees had been mistreated, even “grievously” at times. (Full story)

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

MOST RETARDED SITE OF THE DAY – http://www.humaneventsonline.com

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE – Conservative News, Views & Books
RETARDED PEOPLE GET TOGETHER AND DROOL AT THIS SITE!

This post originally appeared on an external website

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

A Cognizant Discourse ? Rick Warren on Narcissism 1013/11/2005

Rick Warren on Narcissism 101

After reading Tim?s post on Rick Warren, I?m sick to my stomach. How is it possible that Rick Warren can publish such insipid and grievous lies: Accept Yourself, Love Yourself, Be True To Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Believe in Yourself? Yeah, I get the picture: myself. The only thing myself ever got me was a whole lot of trouble.

By the way, it is fitting to cite Eugene Peterson once more:

When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world?s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.

and?

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we?re just exacerbating the self problem. ?With Christ, you?re better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy.? But it?s just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.

Looking at Jesus. Isn?t that what the Gospel is all about, and not about me, me, and me?

This post originally appeared on an external website

CBS News | Ivy League Prof Sifts Through BS | May 16, 2005?02:24:33

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

CBS News | Ivy League Prof Sifts Through BS | May 16, 2005?02:24:33Ivy League Prof Sifts Through BS

(Page 1 of 9)

May 15, 2005

Professor Studies BS

The success of philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s book on BS suggests that he’s touched a nerve in the American psyche. (Photo: CBS)

“There?s a certain titillation in the fact that an Ivy League professor is writing about a topic which is designated by this barnyard term. … And I think people are fed up with being fed bull—-.”

Harry Frankfurt

Frankfurt joined the great American BS celebrity parade for his first live TV interview about the subject, on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.” (Photo: CBS)

Laura Penny has written a book titled, “Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth About BS.” (Photo: CBS)

“On Bullshit”

by Harry Frankfurt

(CBS) Prudishness prevents us from using the word, but it is one that is familiar to almost everyone, and almost everyone engages in spreading it around at one time or another.

For propriety?s sake, we?ll call it BS. It could be defined as hyped-up, boastful, insincere or pretentious talk. And it?s so prevalent in American life that it?s caught the attention of our deepest thinkers.

There is a bestseller on the stands, a phenomenon of sorts, by a leading American academic. It is called ?On Bull—-,? and it’s a serious work by a serious man about a subject that seems to inundate us at every turn. Correspondent Morley Safer reports.

——————————————————————————–

The success of philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s 67-page book about truth, lies and that vast putrid wasteland in between suggests that he?s touched a nerve, the BS nerve, in the American psyche.

“I think there is, in the population at large, a yearning for living in an environment in which you can really believe what people tell you, and in which people who hold responsible positions or who are aspiring to responsible positions can be trusted to tell you the truth, and not try to fool you and not to try to pull the wool over your eyes and not to try to manipulate your beliefs,” says Frankfurt.

Was he surprised or shocked by the success of this book?

“I am surprised by the response, and I attribute it to a couple of things,” says Frankfurt. “First of all, there?s a certain titillation in the fact that an Ivy League professor is writing about a topic which is designated by this barnyard term. But I think also people are starved for the truth. And I think people are fed up with being fed bull—-.”

With hundreds of TV channels running 24 hours a day, with thousands of new products to be advertised each year, with political rhetoric, lobbyists, PR, spin, and phony news reports put out by the government, and with the trivialities of a celebrity-obsessed culture, BS rules the world.

This post originally appeared on an external website

CBS News | Ivy League Prof Sifts Through BS | May 16, 2005?02:24:33

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

CBS News | Ivy League Prof Sifts Through BS | May 16, 2005?02:24:33Ivy League Prof Sifts Through BS

(Page 1 of 9)

May 15, 2005

Professor Studies BS

The success of philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s book on BS suggests that he’s touched a nerve in the American psyche. (Photo: CBS)

“There?s a certain titillation in the fact that an Ivy League professor is writing about a topic which is designated by this barnyard term. … And I think people are fed up with being fed bull—-.”

Harry Frankfurt

Frankfurt joined the great American BS celebrity parade for his first live TV interview about the subject, on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.” (Photo: CBS)

Laura Penny has written a book titled, “Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth About BS.” (Photo: CBS)

“On Bullshit”

by Harry Frankfurt

(CBS) Prudishness prevents us from using the word, but it is one that is familiar to almost everyone, and almost everyone engages in spreading it around at one time or another.

For propriety?s sake, we?ll call it BS. It could be defined as hyped-up, boastful, insincere or pretentious talk. And it?s so prevalent in American life that it?s caught the attention of our deepest thinkers.

There is a bestseller on the stands, a phenomenon of sorts, by a leading American academic. It is called ?On Bull—-,? and it’s a serious work by a serious man about a subject that seems to inundate us at every turn. Correspondent Morley Safer reports.

——————————————————————————–

The success of philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s 67-page book about truth, lies and that vast putrid wasteland in between suggests that he?s touched a nerve, the BS nerve, in the American psyche.

“I think there is, in the population at large, a yearning for living in an environment in which you can really believe what people tell you, and in which people who hold responsible positions or who are aspiring to responsible positions can be trusted to tell you the truth, and not try to fool you and not to try to pull the wool over your eyes and not to try to manipulate your beliefs,” says Frankfurt.

Was he surprised or shocked by the success of this book?

“I am surprised by the response, and I attribute it to a couple of things,” says Frankfurt. “First of all, there?s a certain titillation in the fact that an Ivy League professor is writing about a topic which is designated by this barnyard term. But I think also people are starved for the truth. And I think people are fed up with being fed bull—-.”

With hundreds of TV channels running 24 hours a day, with thousands of new products to be advertised each year, with political rhetoric, lobbyists, PR, spin, and phony news reports put out by the government, and with the trivialities of a celebrity-obsessed culture, BS rules the world.

This post originally appeared on an external website

May’s job gains weakest in 2 years

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

May’s job gains weakest in 2 yearsMay’s job gains weakest in 2 years

The Associated Press

The Associated Press

A landscaping company advertises for help along a busy roadway in Chesterland, Ohio.

advertisement

WASHINGTON – For job seekers, bosses and investors, monthly ups and downs of the nation’s employment figures are like riding a jerky roller coaster.

The latest report, released by the Labor Department yesterday, showed job growth slowed nearly to a crawl in May. But the unemployment rate dipped to 5.1 percent.

Employers boosted payrolls by 78,000 after a hiring spurt of 274,000 in April.

May’s job gains were the weakest in almost two years.

Economists offered several reasons for May’s moderation: the toll of high energy prices squeezing bottom lines, companies reducing production to work off excess goods on shelves and back lots, cool weather and a statistical payback after the strong job figures in April.

Job cuts last month were reported in categories including manufacturing, leisure and hospitality, accounting and bookkeeping and temporary help. Those losses tempered gains in retail, construction, education, health care and elsewhere.

Lackluster job growth performance raises the odds the Federal Reserve may slow – or soon end – its yearlong campaign to tighten credit, many economists agreed.

Despite slow growth in payrolls, the civilian unemployment rate declined fractionally last month – to 5.1 percent.

That was down a notch from April’s 5.2 percent jobless rate.

“You have both a bit of sweet and a bit of sour in the report,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com.

This post originally appeared on an external website

FPI 2005: A ‘no’ to the new world order

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

FPI 2005: A ‘no’ to the new world order

I think this is an excellent article / blogpost by GREG ERICSON and makes a serious point!

This post originally appeared on an external website

United States Economy at a Glance

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

United States Economy at a GlanceData Series Back

Data Dec

2004 Jan

2005 Feb

2005 Mar

2005 Apr

2005 May

2005

Unemployment Rate (1) 5.4 5.2 5.4 5.2 5.2 5.1

Change in Payroll Employment (2) 155 124 300 122 274 (P) 78 (P)

Average Hourly Earnings (3) 15.85 15.90 15.91 15.95 16.00 (P) 16.03 (P)

Consumer Price Index (4) 0.0 0.1 0.4 0.6 0.5

Producer Price Index (5) -0.3 0.1 (P) 0.4 (P) 0.7 (P) 0.6 (P)

U.S. Import Price Index (6) -1.4 0.6 0.9 2.0 0.8

Employment Cost Index (7) 0.8 0.7

Productivity (8) 2.3 2.9

Footnotes:

(P) Preliminary

(1) In percent, seasonally adjusted. Annual averages are available for Not Seasonally Adjusted data.

(2) Number of jobs, in thousands, seasonally adjusted

(3) For production and nonsupervisory workers on private nonfarm payrolls, seasonally adjusted

(4) All items, U.S. city average, all urban consumers, 1982-84=100, 1-month percent change, seasonally adjusted

(5) Finished goods, 1982=100, 1-month percent change, seasonally adjusted

(6) All imports, 1-month percent change, not seasonally adjusted

(7) Compensation, all civilian workers, quarterly data, 3-month percent change, seasonally adjusted

(8) Output per hour, nonfarm business, quarterly data, percent change from previous quarter at annual rate, seasonally adjusted

Data extracted on: June 3, 2005

Source: U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Note: More data series, including additional geographic areas, are available through the “Get Detailed Statistics” link at the top of this page

This post originally appeared on an external website

AMERICAblog: Because a great nation deserves the truth

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

AMERICAblog: Because a great nation deserves the truth: “http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/02/man-called-jeff.html”

This post originally appeared on an external website

CodeWarriorz Thoughts – ENewsBlog

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

CodeWarriorz Thoughts – ENewsBlog

This post originally appeared on an external website

BetaNews | News.com Says Apple Switching to Intel

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

BetaNews | News.com Says Apple Switching to IntelNews.com Says Apple Switching to Intel

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

June 4, 2005, 10:13 AM

CNET News.com claims that Apple will announce a switch to Intel x86 processors on Monday at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference – a move that has been rumored for years yet never materialized. According to the report, the switch would start with Apple’s low-end computers by the middle of next year, with higher end systems following in 2007.

The report has not been without questions to its validity and most analysts remain skeptical due to numerous unanswered problems that would arise from such a major architecture change. News.com did not address several issues, including the lack of emulation for easing the transition and necessary support from major third-party developers such as Adobe and Microsoft.

This post originally appeared on an external website

Lexington Herald-Leader | 06/03/2005 | CDC detectives study obesity outbreak in West Virginia

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Lexington Herald-Leader | 06/03/2005 | CDC detectives study obesity outbreak in West VirginiaCDC detectives study obesity outbreak in West Virginia

AGENCY’S INQUIRY OF 2 AREAS IN STATE WILL BE PIONEERING

By Gina Kolata

NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

For the first time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has sent a team of specialists into a state, West Virginia, to study an outbreak of obesity in the same way it studies an outbreak of an infectious disease.

Kerri Kennedy, the program manager at the West Virginia Physical Activity and Nutrition Program, said the state had requested the investigation by the centers.

“We were looking at our data,” Kennedy said, and saw that “we are facing a severe health crisis.”

The state ranked third in the nation for obesity — 27.6 percent of its adults were obese as compared with 20.4 percent in the rest of the country. And, Kennedy said, “our rate of obesity appears to be increasing faster than the rest of the nation.”

So the state asked the agency’s disease detectives to tackle its obesity problem, and a three-week investigation began on April 25. It focused, Kennedy said, on two places that represented towns and cities in the state — Gilmer County, with 7,160 residents, and Clarksburg, a city with 16,743 residents.

The investigative teams spent a week and a half in each place, going to schools and asking about physical education programs and what sort of food was provided. They went to workplaces, asking whether there were policies to encourage physical activity. They went to randomly selected grocery stores and restaurants, asking whether they offered fruits and vegetables and skim or 1 percent milk.

The director of the centers, Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, said in a news conference yesterday that this type of investigation was a first for the agency.

“This has never happened in the history of the CDC,” she said.

This post originally appeared on an external website

Dominick Dunne vs. Robert Kennedy

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Dominick Dunne vs. Robert Kennedy

This post originally appeared on an external website

CBS News | Ivy League Prof Sifts Through BS | May 16, 2005?02:24:33

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

CBS News | Ivy League Prof Sifts Through BS | May 16, 2005?02:24:33Ivy League Prof Sifts Through BS

(Page 1 of 9)

May 15, 2005

Professor Studies BS

The success of philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s book on BS suggests that he’s touched a nerve in the American psyche. (Photo: CBS)

“There?s a certain titillation in the fact that an Ivy League professor is writing about a topic which is designated by this barnyard term. … And I think people are fed up with being fed bull—-.”

Harry Frankfurt

Frankfurt joined the great American BS celebrity parade for his first live TV interview about the subject, on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.” (Photo: CBS)

Laura Penny has written a book titled, “Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth About BS.” (Photo: CBS)

“On Bullshit”

by Harry Frankfurt

(CBS) Prudishness prevents us from using the word, but it is one that is familiar to almost everyone, and almost everyone engages in spreading it around at one time or another.

For propriety?s sake, we?ll call it BS. It could be defined as hyped-up, boastful, insincere or pretentious talk. And it?s so prevalent in American life that it?s caught the attention of our deepest thinkers.

There is a bestseller on the stands, a phenomenon of sorts, by a leading American academic. It is called ?On Bull—-,? and it’s a serious work by a serious man about a subject that seems to inundate us at every turn. Correspondent Morley Safer reports.

——————————————————————————–

The success of philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s 67-page book about truth, lies and that vast putrid wasteland in between suggests that he?s touched a nerve, the BS nerve, in the American psyche.

“I think there is, in the population at large, a yearning for living in an environment in which you can really believe what people tell you, and in which people who hold responsible positions or who are aspiring to responsible positions can be trusted to tell you the truth, and not try to fool you and not to try to pull the wool over your eyes and not to try to manipulate your beliefs,” says Frankfurt.

Was he surprised or shocked by the success of this book?

“I am surprised by the response, and I attribute it to a couple of things,” says Frankfurt. “First of all, there?s a certain titillation in the fact that an Ivy League professor is writing about a topic which is designated by this barnyard term. But I think also people are starved for the truth. And I think people are fed up with being fed bull—-.”

With hundreds of TV channels running 24 hours a day, with thousands of new products to be advertised each year, with political rhetoric, lobbyists, PR, spin, and phony news reports put out by the government, and with the trivialities of a celebrity-obsessed culture, BS rules the world.

This post originally appeared on an external website

CBS News | Ivy League Prof Sifts Through BS | May 16, 2005?02:24:33

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

CBS News | Ivy League Prof Sifts Through BS | May 16, 2005?02:24:33Ivy League Prof Sifts Through BS

(Page 1 of 9)

May 15, 2005

Professor Studies BS

The success of philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s book on BS suggests that he’s touched a nerve in the American psyche. (Photo: CBS)

“There?s a certain titillation in the fact that an Ivy League professor is writing about a topic which is designated by this barnyard term. … And I think people are fed up with being fed bull—-.”

Harry Frankfurt

Frankfurt joined the great American BS celebrity parade for his first live TV interview about the subject, on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.” (Photo: CBS)

Laura Penny has written a book titled, “Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth About BS.” (Photo: CBS)

“On Bullshit”

by Harry Frankfurt

(CBS) Prudishness prevents us from using the word, but it is one that is familiar to almost everyone, and almost everyone engages in spreading it around at one time or another.

For propriety?s sake, we?ll call it BS. It could be defined as hyped-up, boastful, insincere or pretentious talk. And it?s so prevalent in American life that it?s caught the attention of our deepest thinkers.

There is a bestseller on the stands, a phenomenon of sorts, by a leading American academic. It is called ?On Bull—-,? and it’s a serious work by a serious man about a subject that seems to inundate us at every turn. Correspondent Morley Safer reports.

——————————————————————————–

The success of philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s 67-page book about truth, lies and that vast putrid wasteland in between suggests that he?s touched a nerve, the BS nerve, in the American psyche.

“I think there is, in the population at large, a yearning for living in an environment in which you can really believe what people tell you, and in which people who hold responsible positions or who are aspiring to responsible positions can be trusted to tell you the truth, and not try to fool you and not to try to pull the wool over your eyes and not to try to manipulate your beliefs,” says Frankfurt.

Was he surprised or shocked by the success of this book?

“I am surprised by the response, and I attribute it to a couple of things,” says Frankfurt. “First of all, there?s a certain titillation in the fact that an Ivy League professor is writing about a topic which is designated by this barnyard term. But I think also people are starved for the truth. And I think people are fed up with being fed bull—-.”

With hundreds of TV channels running 24 hours a day, with thousands of new products to be advertised each year, with political rhetoric, lobbyists, PR, spin, and phony news reports put out by the government, and with the trivialities of a celebrity-obsessed culture, BS rules the world.

This post originally appeared on an external website

JANICE ROGERS BROWN – A BUSH NOMINEE STRAIGHT FROM HELL

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

“Bush?s judicial nominees represent extreme and divisive views about law and society. Bush nominee William J. Haynes IV, Pentagon general counsel, has defended torture and was responsible for the legal guidelines for the highly criticized military tribunals planned for Guantanamo Bay. Alabama Attorney General William Pryor, another Bush nominee, considers Roe v. Wade to be “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our nation’s history,? and has defended restrictions on abortion even when they are designed to protect the health of pregnant women. Bush nominee Justice Janice Rodgers Brown has attacked Social Security and stated, “Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much ?free? stuff as the political system will permit them to extract.”

http://newswriter.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_newswriter_archive.html

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The Downing Street Memo :: What is it?

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The Downing Street Memo :: What is it?

Today is June 5, 2005

31 days since congressional request for investigation.

——————————————————————————–

Congressman John Conyers is calling on American citizens to sign on to a letter to the President that demands a response to questions originally posed by Conyers and 88 other members of Congress in a similar letter dated May 5, 2005. Conyers has committed to personally delivering the letter to the White House when it garners 100,000 citizen signatures.

Let’s help him get there. Follow this link to sign.

*The congressman’s website is having trouble keeping up with the traffic, and they may also be changing the address of the specific page. The links above will go to the Home page. Please then go to the links on the left of the page and click on Downing Street Minutes.

The Downing Street “Memo” is actually a document containing meeting minutes transcribed during the British Prime Minister’s meeting on July 23, 2002?a full eight months PRIOR to the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. The Times of London printed the text of this document on Sunday, May 1, 2005, but to date US media coverage has been limited. This site is intended to act as a resource for anyone who wants to understand the facts revealed in this document.

The contents of the memo are shocking. The minutes detail how our government did not believe Iraq was a greater threat than other nations; how intelligence was “fixed” to sell the case for war to the American public; and how the Bush Administration?s public assurances of “war as a last resort” were at odds with their privately stated intentions.

When asked, British officials “did not dispute the document’s authenticity.” and a senior American official has described it as “absolutely accurate.” Yet the Bush administration continues to simultaneously sidestep the issue while attempting to cast doubt on the memo?s authenticity.

Nobody wants to go to war. We trust our leaders to shed blood in our name only when absolutely necessary. But the facts revealed by the Downing Street Memo force us to ask ourselves: Was I misled? Did President Bush tell me the truth when he said he would not take us to war unless absolutely necessary?

More than two years after the start of the Iraq War, Americans are just learning that our government was dead set on invasion, even while it claimed to be pursuing diplomacy. Please join us in demanding that we get to the bottom of this issue.

TEXT OF THE DOWNING STREET MEMO FROM TIMESONLINE

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html

May 01, 2005

The secret Downing Street memo

SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL – UK EYES ONLY

DAVID MANNING

From: Matthew Rycroft

Date: 23 July 2002

S 195 /02

cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER’S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam’s regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.

The two broad US options were:

(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).

(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.

The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:

(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.

(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.

(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun “spikes of activity” to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.

John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.

The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.

Conclusions:

(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options.

(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.

(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.

(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.

He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.

(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.

(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.

(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)

MATTHEW RYCROFT

(Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide)

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Veterans For Peace | Homepage

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Veterans For Peace | Homepage

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The Raw Story | Coalition of citizen groups seek formal inquiry into whether Bush acted illegally in push for Iraq war

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The Raw Story | Coalition of citizen groups seek formal inquiry into whether Bush acted illegally in push for Iraq warRESOLUTION OF INQUIRY

Coalition of citizen groups seek formal inquiry into whether Bush acted illegally in push for Iraq war

By Larisa Alexandrovna | RAW STORY

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A coalition of activist groups running the gamut of social and political issues will ask Congress to file a Resolution of Inquiry, the first necessary legal step to determine whether President Bush has committed impeachable offenses in misleading the country about his decision to go to war in Iraq, RAW STORY has learned.

The formal Resolution of Inquiry request, written by Boston constitutional attorney John C. Bonifaz, cites the Downing Street Memo and issues surrounding the planning and execution of the Iraq war. A resolution of inquiry would force relevant House committees to vote on the record as to whether to support an investigation.

The Downing Street Memo, official minutes of a 2002 meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair, members of British intelligence MI-6 and various members of the Bush administration, notes that MI-6 director Richard Dearlove said, ?Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.?

Bonifaz says the minutes were the impetus for his request.

?The recent release of the Downing Street Memo provides new and compelling evidence that the President of the United States has been actively engaged in a conspiracy to deceive and mislead the United States Congress and the American people,? Bonifaz wrote in a memo to the ranking House Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers (D-MI), outlining the case (read his memo here).

Blair and other British officials have not questioned the minutes? veracity.

In response to the revelations in the Downing Street memo, Conyers and eighty-eight other members of Congress issued a letter to the White House on May 5 requesting an explanation and answers to questions about whether the President misled Congress into voting for the Iraq war.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan waived off the letter, saying he had ?no need to respond,? according to the New York Times.

Frustrated by the media?s silence, save a few articles buried in major American newspapers and pieces in the alternative media such as Air America Radio, the Ed Schultz Show, Salon and RAW STORY, a grassroots progressive movement has pushed the story forward, culminating in a formal request for a Resolution of Inquiry.

Bonifaz wrote the request and outlined the case on behalf of a joint effort by several groups, including: Veterans for Peace, Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), 911Citizens Watch, Democracy Rising, Code Pink, Global Exchange, Democrats.com, Velvet Revolution, and Gold Star Families for Peace.

?The president, among other alleged crimes, may have also violated federal criminal law if the evidence from the Downing Street memo is proven to be true, including the False Statements Accountability Act of 1996,? Bonifaz wrote.

Some have criticized the media?s coverage of the memo.

“To me it’s kind of the smoking gun, or maybe the latest in a number of smoking guns,? Editor and Publisher senior editor Dave Astor told RAW RADIO Saturday. ?And the fact that the media either didn’t cover it or buried the coverage or poo-pooed it is appalling.?

?It goes back to the fact of who owns the media and the media being intimidated by this administration,? he added. ?I think that memo indicates an impeachable offense, personally. If we had a Congress that had some spine, and was maybe Democratic-controlled, it could be an impeachable offense.?

Coalition member Medea Benjamin, founding director of Global Exchange, said she supports legal proceedings.

?When a president so callously distorts the facts, manipulates the public and is responsible for so much needless death and destruction, he must be held accountable,? Benjamin told RAW STORY.

Other members of the coalition, loosely titled ?After Downing Street,? concur.

?We will be organizing the grassroots to demand Congress move forward with a Resolution of Inquiry,? PDA director Tim Carpenter stated.

As part of Congressional approval for H.R.Res. 114; Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, the administration was required to report to Congress that diplomatic options had been exhausted before or within 48 hours after military action had started.

In a conversation with RAW STORY, Bonifaz expressed the disappointment of many who put their faith in the President.

?Within 48 hours after the attack on Iraq, the president wrote a letter to Congress indicating that Iraq posed a serious and imminent threat to national security and if he knew that was not true at the time he submitted that letter it is a clear violation of the False Statements Accountability Act of 1996,? Bonifaz said.

Under this Act, amending 18 U.S.C. ? 1001, it is a crime knowingly and willfully (1) to falsify, conceal or cover up a material fact by trick, scheme or device; (2) to make any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or (3) to make or use any false writing or document knowing it to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry; with respect to matters within the jurisdiction of the legislative, executive, or judicial branch.

He goes on to discuss the other statutes and laws that may have been violated, including but not limited to the Federal Anti-Conspiracy Statute (more per above link).

When asked if the Resolution of Inquiry would apply to others involved in the alleged effort to mislead the public into war, Bonifaz explained that the procedure requires that a full investigation begin from the top of the chain of command.

?Provisions in U.S. Constitution guarantee that when a President abuses power, engages in excesses, and subverts the constitution, the people have a recourse through their elected officials in congress,? he said.

Other member groups behind this coalition want that recourse.

We are “behind this resolution of inquiry because our loved ones were killed for deception and betrayal from George Bush and the rest of the administration,” said Gold Star Families for Peace founder Cindy Sheehan. “We would like to see George Bush, Dick Cheney, et al, be held accountable for their lies and arrogance for sending our children off to die in a war that is illegal and immoral.”

?We support this resolution of inquiry because we stand for truth and accountability,? said co-founder of 911CitizensWatch Kyle Hence. ?It’s more important than ever as whistleblowers stand up and documents emerge that point to potential crimes in high places all too often of late veiled by government secrecy.?

Brad Friedman, co-founder of Velvet Revolution, agrees with the need for transparency.

“We believe that a proper inquiry into the facts underlying the Downing Street memo are vital to our constitutional democracy because only Congress can declare war, and a President and his appointed officials cannot be allowed to run the country if indeed they have misled and lied about the basis for the Iraq war,? said Friedman.

Bonifaz hopes the groups, which boast a total membership of several million, are just the beginning of the grassroots groundswell.

The others agree.

?It is time for Congress to do its duty and ask: ?Did the administration mislead us into war by manipulating and misstating intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction, suppressing contrary intelligence ?and exaggerated the danger Iraq posed to the United States and its neighbors?? said Kevin Zeese, founder of Democracy Rising.

Bonifaz and others ask that citizens of all party affiliations and backgrounds help support his request by writing to their Congressional leaders. They are also seeking other groups to sign on.

More information will be up shortly at: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org.

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Bristol-Myers Seen Settling Case by U.S. – New York Times

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Bristol-Myers Seen Settling Case by U.S.- criminal case

The drug maker Bristol-Myers Squibb is expected to agree to pay nearly $300 million to end a Justice Department criminal investigation of its accounting practices, according to people briefed on the prospective settlement.

If a deal is reached, the penalties paid by Bristol-Myers will total about $800 million. That would include civil settlements of $389 million reached with investors in the last year and fines by the Securities and Exchange Commission of $150 million.

The company is expected to take a large charge to pay the Justice Department settlement, probably this quarter, which would affect its operating profit. But a penalty of the size anticipated in this week’s settlement is not likely to jeopardize Bristol-Myers’s annual dividend, analysts have said.

The agreement, which could be formally announced as early as tomorrow, would help close a bleak chapter in the company’s 118-year history. During the investigation, which began in 2002, federal agents paid early-morning visits to the homes of retired executives, interviewed more than 100 current and former employees, and pored over boxes of Bristol-Myers documents.

In addition to the payments, the agreement with prosecutors is said to require that the company – a producer of drugs, medical devices and over-the-counter health products – establish government-supervised compliance and disclosure and ethics programs to prevent the type of accounting manipulations that prompted the investigation.

The accusations against the company involved a practice known as “channel stuffing.” Under the practice, Bristol-Myers paid incentives to its wholesalers to stockpile inventory, making it appear as if the company’s sales were higher than they actually were. Then, Bristol-Myers reported the inflated revenue figures to investors.

The company’s chief executive, Peter R. Dolan, acknowledged in 2002 that it had engaged in the practice, and Bristol-Myers said later that the practice had resulted in overstated revenue of about $2.5 billion from 1999 to 2002. The bulk of the problems occurred before Mr. Dolan became chief executive.

Bristol-Myers stock, which had traded in the 50’s before the acknowledgement, slumped afterward. Since then, the shares have been stuck in the middle 20’s, slightly underperforming a battered pharmaceutical industry. The shares closed on Friday at $25.22, down 28 cents.

The agreement between Bristol-Myers and the United States attorney in Newark, Christopher J. Christie, is known as a “deferred prosecution.” This is an increasingly common arrangement in corporate criminal cases in which charges are delayed – with the promise that they will ultimately be dropped – if the subjects comply with terms required by the prosecutors.

While sometimes criticized as slaps on the wrist, deferred prosecution agreements are intended to ensure continued corporate viability and preserve jobs, while at the same time sending a message that the government will not tolerate criminal conduct.

Bristol-Myers Squibb, which is based in New York, employs about 43,000 people, 6,000 of them in New Jersey. Mr. Christie is said to have been concerned about the impact of his office’s investigation on the company, fearing that more severe action would have resulted in layoffs. The company had been cooperating with the government.

Mary Jo White, a private lawyer who formerly served as United States attorney in Manhattan, was hired by Bristol-Myers Squibb to handle negotiations with Mr. Christie’s office.

While a prosecutor, Ms. White was involved in several deferred prosecutions, including a 1994 case in which Prudential Securities acknowledged that it committed crimes in the sale of limited partnerships and agreed to pay $330 million in fines. Prudential was placed on probation for three years, after which charges were dropped. During that period, the company’s operations were under government supervision.

A Bristol-Myers agreement is expected to work in a similar way. If the agreement is announced this week, Mr. Christie’s office is likely to describe the case it could have brought against Bristol-Myers Squibb. A person who has been briefed on the agreement said it would also contain some “special provisions” involving executives of the company.

In previous deferred prosecutions, corporate executives have agreed to disgorgement, or repayment of bonuses received as a result of criminal activities. It was not clear whether there would be any such provisions in a Bristol-Myers settlement.

A spokesman for the company, Tony Plohoros, declined to comment yesterday on the expected announcement, and a spokesman for Mr. Christie’s office, Michael Drewniak, also said he would have no statement.

Bristol-Myers’s payment of $300 million to investors was in class-action litigation partly related to the channel stuffing accusations.

Last week, the company announced that it had settled a related case for $89 million. That was paid to four investors who opted out of the class-action settlement.

Bristol-Myers has recently warned investors of impending civil and criminal penalties. In the first quarter, it added $110 million to its litigation-related reserves. The charge resulted in revised first-quarter earnings of $533 million, or 27 cents a share, reflecting a decline of about 45 percent from the quarter a year earlier.

The $110 million brought the company’s litigation reserve to $140 million, but much of that was depleted by the $89 million. Apparently in anticipation of an announcement this week, Bristol-Myers said that it expected to take another litigation-related charge this quarter, but it did not disclose how much that would be.

Among Bristol-Myers’s major products are Plavix, which helps prevent blood clots, and Pravachol, a cholesterol-lowering drug.

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CNN.com – Rights group leader says U.S. has secret jails – Jun 5, 2005

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CNN.com – Rights group leader says U.S. has secret jails – Jun 5, 2005

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The chief of Amnesty International USA alleged Sunday that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp is part of a worldwide network of U.S. jails, some of them secret, where prisoners are mistreated and even killed.

William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty’s Washington-based branch, speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” defended the human rights group’s recent criticism of U.S. treatment of detainees at the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“The U.S. is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons, into which people are being literally disappeared, held in indefinite, incommunicado detention without access to lawyers or a judicial system or to their families,” Schulz said.

“And in some cases, at least, we know they are being mistreated, abused, tortured and even killed.”

Schulz’s comments were the latest in a volley of incriminations and denials between Amnesty and the White House.

London, England-based Amnesty International’s report, released May 25, cited “growing evidence of U.S. war crimes” and labeled the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay as “the gulag of our times.” (Full story)

U.S. officials responded with outrage. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rebuffed such a comparison, saying a gulag was where the Soviets “kept millions in forced labor concentration camps.” (Full story)

President Bush said the comparison was “absurd” and Vice President Dick Cheney said he was offended by Amnesty’s assertions. (Full story)

Schulz also answered questions about previous remarks in which he labeled Rumsfeld and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as “alleged high-level architects of torture.”

“Any nation that is party to the Geneva Conventions … is obligated under international law to investigate those who are alleged to be involved with the formulation of a policy of torture or with its carrying out,” Schulz said.

He went on: “The United States should be the one that should investigate those who are alleged at least to be architects of torture, not just the foot solders who may have inflicted the torture directly, but those who authorized it or encouraged it or provided rationales for it.”

Senators weigh in

A high-ranking Republican senator said Sunday that hearings on abuse allegations at Guantanamo Bay might be appropriate, and a top Democratic senator suggested closing down the prison.

“Look, it’s very difficult to run a perfect prison,” Majority Whip Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said on CNN’s “Late Edition.”

“But we have an open country. We have hearings on a whole lot of different subjects. We might well have hearings on this.”

Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he thinks the Guantanamo Bay prison imperils the nation and should cease operating.

“This has become the greatest propaganda tool that exists for recruiting of terrorists around the world, and it is unnecessary to be in that position,” Biden said on ABC’s “This Week.”

He called for an independent commission to review operations at Guantanamo and other U.S. military-run prisons and make recommendations to Congress.

“But the end result is, I think we should end up shutting it down,” Biden said.

McConnell, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, objected to some of the language used by critics of the prison — particularly Amnesty’s gulag comparison.

“There is no country in the world that has stood for human rights more than the United States,” McConnell said.

“Does that mean that a given soldier in a given situation may have made mistakes? I think some were made at Abu Ghraib, maybe some were made in Guantanamo. Our people are not perfect.”

Other human rights groups have criticized activities at Guantanamo Bay, a station the United States has leased from Cuba since 1903.

In a 2004 report, the Red Cross called the psychological and physical coercion used at Guantanamo Bay “tantamount to torture.”

Human Rights Watch said U.S. interrogators had inflicted religious humiliation on Muslim detainees, a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The U.S. military issued a report Friday that detailed four incidents where camp personnel mishandled the Quran at Guantanamo Bay, which holds about 540 detainees. (Full story)

The report concluded that inmates — not U.S. military personnel as previous reports claimed — tried to flush the book down a toilet. The report was issued by Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, commander of the detention center.

The incidents included guards kicking a detainee’s Quran; a guard stepping on a detainee’s Quran; a guard’s urine going through an air vent and splashing a detainee and his holy book; and a guard water balloon fight causing two detainees’ Qurans to get wet.

In a fifth confirmed incident, it could not be determined whether a guard or a detainee wrote a two-word obscenity in a detainee’s Quran.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan insisted Saturday the incidents were “isolated” and did not reflect the behavior of the majority of soldiers.

The investigation was prompted by a Newsweek article citing unnamed sources who claimed U.S. personnel had flushed a Quran down a toilet in an attempt at intimidation. Newsweek later retracted the story. (Full story)

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Texas Governor Signs Abortion Bill

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Texas Governor Signs Abortion Bill: “Texas Governor Signs Abortion Bill”Texas Governor Signs Abortion Bill

By JAMIE STENGLE

The Associated Press

Monday, June 6, 2005; 4:59 AM

FORT WORTH, Texas — Using an evangelical school gymnasium as a backdrop, Gov. Rick Perry put his signature to legislation restricting abortions and added his backing to a measure barring same-sex marriage.

Perry signed a bill Sunday requiring girls under the age of 18 to get their parents’ consent before having an abortion and also imposes more limits on late-term abortions.

“For too long, a blind eye has been turned to the rights of our most vulnerable human beings _ that’s the unborn in our society,” Perry told a crowd of about 1,000 people gathered at the Calvary Christian Academy.

Texas already had a parental notification bill, approved in 1999. The new measure requires a parent to provide written consent for unmarried girls under 18. The bill also restricts doctors from performing abortions on women who have carried a child for more than 26 weeks unless having the baby would jeopardize the woman’s life or the baby has serious brain damage,

During the 1 1/2 hour program, Perry also signed a resolution to amend the Texas Constitution by banning same-sex marriages. However, that signature was only ceremonial since voters must approve the ban in November.

“A nurturing home with a loving mother and loving father is the best way to guide our children down the proper path,” said Perry, who was joined by several legislators. He also thanked the “pro-life” and “pro-family” organizations.

The ceremony brought out about 350 protesters, many carrying signs. They included opponents of the ban on same-sex marriage, including two with posters reading “Hate is not a family value” and “God values all families.”

Others were there to protest the use of church property for a bill signing.

“It hurts that he can cheapen politics and religion by this kind of maneuver and people can think it’s OK,” said Karin Cagle, a 45-year-old from Fort Worth who carried a sign saying “Separate church and state _ Keep America great.”

“The critics are generally those who object to people of faith participating in government or the electoral process,” said Perry spokeswoman Kathy Walt. “There are a number of critics who would object to this bill-signing if it were in a public school, a library, a Wal-Mart parking lot or any other venue, because they oppose pro-life and pro-family issues.”

Pastor Larry White, of Our Savior Lutheran Church in Houston, said the gathering there was about life, family and marriage. “There are those that would drive people of faith from the public square if they could,” White said.

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China will not be a scapegoat for US domestic problems

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China will not be a scapegoat for US domestic problemsChina will not be a scapegoat for US domestic problems

(Agencies)

Updated: 2005-06-06 15:05

China will never accept being a scapegoat for US domestic problems, the China Daily said after Washington urged Beijing to understand the pressure it is under over booming exports of Chinese textiles.

A tailor’s in the southwestern city of Chongqing. China will never accept being a scapegoat for US domestic problems, the China Daily said after Washington urged Beijing to understand the pressure it is under over booming exports of Chinese textiles.[AFP]

During talks in Beijing on Saturday, US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez explained that the US side was under mounting pressure at home to do something about a surge in Chinese textiles that are threatening jobs.

But in an editorial the China Daily, said this could never be a valid excuse for violating international trade agreements.

“US Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez called on the Chinese side to understand the political pressure the US government bears over the textile issue. He is honest but his point is weak,” it said.

“Domestic politics is no excuse for violating international agreements. Domestic problems should be resolved domestically.

“Letting trading partners and free trade as a whole pay for one’s internal woes does not look good and is not acceptable.

“The Chinese can be co-operative but they refuse to be a scapegoat for US domestic problems.”

Gutierrez and US Trade Representative Rob Portman held talks here over the weekend with Vice Premier Wu Yi. Gutierrez had earlier had negotiations with his counterpart Bo Xilai but all the discussions ended inconclusively.

Since the end of a global quota system on January 1, the United States has slapped import quotas on seven categories of Chinese textile goods. The EU is also close to imposing limits on two types of textile products.

China has said it remains confident a trade war can be avoided but has also blamed the United States and EU for failing to adequately prepare for the surge in textile exports that came with the end of the quota system.

“When the real impact arrived, they blamed China and quickly moved to breach the (trade liberalization) agreement and attempted to shift the pressure to Chinese textile workers,” said the China Daily.

“This is sheer protectionism.”

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NOTE TO PRO-LIFERS..PROTECT CANCER CELLS..THEY HAVE ALL THE DNA AND THEY ARE HUMAN LIFE

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

For all the pro-lifer nuts out there…read about something called CANCER in humans. You think “human life” is so sacred, and that a cell with all the complement of DNA to make a person is so important?

READ ABOUT HYDATIFORM MOLES -Hydatidiform mole
http://adam.about.com/encyclopedia/000909.htm
Overview Symptoms Treatment Prevention
Definition:
A hydatiform mole is a rare mass or growth that may form inside the uterus at the beginning of a pregnancy. See also choriocarcinoma.
Alternative Names:
Hydatid mole; Molar pregnancy
Causes, incidence, and risk factors:
A hydatiform mole occurs in very rare cases when an egg is fertilized (i.e., the beginning of pregnancy). A hydatiform mole results from over-production of the tissue that would normally develop into the placenta. (The placenta nourishes a fetus during pregnancy).

These tissues instead develop into a mass. The mass is usually made up of placental material that grows uncontrolled. Often, there is no fetus at all.

The cause is not completely understood. Potential causes may include defects in the egg, abnormalities within the uterus, or nutritional deficiencies. Women under 20 or over 40 years of age have a higher risk. Other risk factors include low socioeconomic status and diets low in protein, folic acid, and carotene.

Read about the HELA strain of cancer cells…
http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://discount.vip.sina.com/cancer/breast-cancer-poem/breast-cancer-poem.html&e=7385
So, for those nuts…FIGHT AGAINST ONCOLOGISTS KILLING HUMAN CANCER CELLS..THEY DESERVE LIFE TOO…RIGHT?

🙂

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infojunkies: Bush Ad Uses Doctored Image

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infojunkies: Bush Ad Uses Doctored Image

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ABC News: Man With Chain Saw Allowed to Enter U.S.

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ABC News: Man With Chain Saw Allowed to Enter U.S.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=828025&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

Man With Chain Saw Allowed to Enter U.S.U.S. Border Patrol Comes Under Scrutiny After Man Carrying Chain Saw Is Allowed Into Country

Gregory Despres is shown in this image from television. On April 25, 2005, Despres arrived at the U.S.-Canadian border crossing at Calais, Maine, carrying chain saw stained with what appeared to be blood, a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, and brass knuckles. U.S. customs agents confiscated the weapons, fingerprinted Despres, and then let him into the United States. Despres, the suspect in a grisly double murder in New Brunswick, Canada, was arrested in Mattapoisett, Mass., on April 27, 2005 and is being held in a jail there, charged with two counts of first-degree murder. (CP PHOTO/HO/WHDH-TV)

By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN Associated Press Writer

The Associated Press

BOSTON Jun 7, 2005 ? On April 25, Gregory Despres arrived at the U.S.-Canadian border crossing at Calais, Maine, carrying a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, brass knuckles and a chain saw stained with what appeared to be blood. U.S. customs agents confiscated the weapons and fingerprinted Despres. Then they let him into the United States.

The following day, a gruesome scene was discovered in Despres’ hometown of Minto, New Brunswick: The decapitated body of a 74-year-old country musician named Frederick Fulton was found on Fulton’s kitchen floor. His head was in a pillowcase under a kitchen table. His common-law wife was discovered stabbed to death in a bedroom.

Despres, 22, immediately became a suspect because of a history of violence between him and his neighbors, and he was arrested April 27 after police in Massachusetts saw him wandering down a highway in a sweat shirt with red and brown stains. He is now in jail in Massachusetts on murder charges, awaiting an extradition hearing next month.

U.S. to N.Y.: Return $44M in Sept. 11 Aid

Man With Chain Saw Allowed to Enter U.S.

Poll: Bush Performance Ratings Plummet

At a time when the United States is tightening its borders, how could a man toting what appeared to be a bloody chain saw be allowed into the country?

Bill Anthony, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said the Canada-born Despres could not be detained because he is a naturalized U.S. citizen and was not wanted on any criminal charges on the day in question.

Anthony said Despres was questioned for two hours before he was released. During that time, he said, customs agents employed “every conceivable method” to check for warrants or see if Despres had broken any laws in trying to re-enter the country.

“Nobody asked us to detain him,” Anthony said. “Being bizarre is not a reason to keep somebody out of this country or lock them up. ? We are governed by laws and regulations, and he did not violate any regulations.”

Anthony conceded it “sounds stupid” that a man wielding what appeared to be a bloody chain saw could not be detained. But he added: “Our people don’t have a crime lab up there. They can’t look at a chain saw and decide if it’s blood or rust or red paint.”

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Most Will Be Mentally Ill at Some Point, Study Says – New York Times

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Most Will Be Mentally Ill at Some Point, Study Says – New York Times: “More than half of Americans will develop a mental illness at some point in their lives, often ”

Most Will Be Mentally Ill at Some Point, Study Says

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By BENEDICT CAREY

Published: June 7, 2005

More than half of Americans will develop a mental illness at some point in their lives, often beginning in childhood or adolescence, researchers have found in a survey that experts say will have wide-ranging implications for the practice of psychiatry.

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Mental Health Census

Forum: Mental Health and Treatment

The survey is the most comprehensive in a series of censuslike mental health studies undertaken by the government. The findings of those studies are frequently cited by researchers, advocacy groups, policy makers and drug manufacturers to emphasize the importance of diagnosing and treating mental illness.

The earlier, less comprehensive surveys, which were published in 1984 and 1994 and which also found a high prevalence of mental illness, came under attack on the ground that they defined mental illness too broadly. Now, experts say, the new findings are sure to renew debate about whether mental illness can be reliably distinguished from garden-variety emotional struggles that are part of any life.

Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, the primary sponsor of the study, said in a conference call with reporters, “The key point to remember is that mental disorders are highly prevalent and chronic.”

The study, Dr. Insel added, “demonstrates clearly that these really are the chronic disorders of young people in this country.”

On the other side are psychiatrists who say they believe that the estimates are inflated. “Fifty percent of Americans mentally impaired – are you kidding me?” said Dr. Paul McHugh, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University.

While the new survey was carefully done, Dr. McHugh said, “the problem is that the diagnostic manual we are using in psychiatry is like a field guide and it just keeps expanding and expanding.”

“Pretty soon,” he said, “we’ll have a syndrome for short, fat Irish guys with a Boston accent, and I’ll be mentally ill.”

The report comes amid debate about whether adults and children should be screened for mental disorders, and where the line between illness and health should be drawn. The answers will have an enormous effect on who receives treatment and which disorders are covered by insurance.

The $20 million survey, which in addition to the government financing received some support from health research foundations and pharmaceutical companies, appears in a series of four papers in the June issue of The Archives of General Psychiatry. The investigators arranged face-to-face interviews with a broad cross section of 9,282 Americans ages 18 and over, and the interviewers asked the participants whether they had experienced periods of extended sadness, alcohol or drug abuse, irrational fears or a host of other symptoms. If so, the interviewers probed more pointedly about the episodes, asking how long they lasted and how they affected the participants’ behavior.

People who described symptoms that met criteria outlined in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual were classified as having had a mental disorder.

As expected, the researchers found that the most common problems were depression, affecting about 17 percent of the people at some point in their lives, and alcohol abuse, affecting 13 percent. Phobias were also common, including social phobia, a form of extreme anxiety that affected 12 percent. More than a quarter of those interviewed had had a mental disorder in the last year.

Of those people who had suffered from a mental illness at some point in their lives, most developed the problem at a young age. Mood disorders like depression typically first struck people in early adulthood, in their 20’s or early 30’s. But impulse-control problems like attention deficit hyperactivity, and anxiety problems like phobias, usually started far earlier, often by age 11.

Dr. Ronald C. Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, was the lead author of the survey, and was joined by a team of researchers from other universities and from the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Kessler said the rates of illness found should not be surprising.

“If I told you that 99 percent of Americans have had a physical illness, you wouldn’t blink an eye,” he said in an interview. “The fact is that there is a very wide range included here, with the equivalent of many psychiatric hangnails. We don’t want to demonize those, but we don’t want to trivialize them, either, because we know in many cases they lead to serious problems later on.”

The investigators also asked the study participants about treatments, and found mixed results. Although people were more likely to find care than they were 10 years ago, only a third of the treatments met even minimal standards for effectiveness, said one co-author, Dr. Philip S. Wang, an assistant professor in the department of health care policy at Harvard.

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GEORGE BUSH IS A FRIGGIN’ THEO-CON IDIOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

“I strongly believe that the world needs to share technologies on nuclear power. I don’t see how you can be diversified away from hydrocarbons unless you use clean nuke.

And so we need to work together on developing technologies that will not only ensure people that nuclear power will be safe, but that we can dispose of it in a safe way.

I tell you, an interesting opportunity, for not only here but for the rest of the world, is biodiesel.

That is a fuel developed from soybeans. I’d kind of in jest like to travel our country saying, Wouldn’t it be wonderful if some day the president sat down and looked at the crop report? He’d say, ‘Man, we got a lot of soybeans. Means we’re less dependent on foreign sources of energy.’

We’re spending money to figure out how best to refine soy into diesel.”

==============SNIP[============

Next, he has a plan to plant magic beans, grow a talk stalk into the clouds, steal the magic goose that lays golden eggs from the Giant, and run back down the stalk to the White House….

He’s a retard we know….but a crazy one as well!

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Mathaba.Net News

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Mathaba.Net News

Bad, Bad Janice Brown is Back

Posted: 05/10

From: Black Commentator

The GOP Judicial Theater of the Absurd is on the road, this time with a biblical theme, starring Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla R. Owen, Supreme Court Justices in their home states of California and Texas, respectively. The two were among ten Republican nominees given the hook in George Bush?s first term, through threats of Democratic filibusters.

Now armed with an invisible mandate, Republicans vow to exercise their ?nuclear option? by changing the 200-year-old rules of the Senate to end filibusters of judicial nominees if Brown and Owen are not allowed seats on the federal appellate bench ? a heartbeat away from the U.S. Supreme Court. Democrats say that if Republicans pull the nuclear trigger, they will respond by shutting down the Senate.

Commentators have compared the standoff to the brinkmanship of the Cold War, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union faced Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD.

?Mad? is exactly the right word to describe Janice Rogers Brown ? in every sense of the term. She is a rightwing nut case, the end product of the litmus test that Republicans give to potential Black high bench nominees: they must be even crazier than their white GOP counterparts

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American Civil Liberties Union : ACLU Disappointed with Patriot Act Expansion Bill Approved in Secret; Says “Administrative Subpoenas” Create End-Run Round Constitution

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American Civil Liberties Union : ACLU Disappointed with Patriot Act Expansion Bill Approved in Secret; Says “Administrative Subpoenas” Create End-Run Round Constitution

ACLU Disappointed with Patriot Act Expansion Bill Approved in Secret; Says “Administrative Subpoenas” Create End-Run Round Constitution

June 7, 2005

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Media@dcaclu.org

WASHINGTON – Following reports that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence today approved – behind closed doors – legislation designed to reauthorize and expand the Patriot Act, the American Civil Liberties Union expressed its disappointment with the secretive process and the end result that tramples on the Constitution.

The following can be attributed to Lisa Graves, ACLU Senior Counsel for Legislative Strategy.

“Today?s secret vote was a failure for the Fourth Amendment, the American people, and the very freedoms we hold dear. At a time when Americans from all walks of life are calling for the Patriot Act to be brought in line with the Constitution, the Senate Intelligence Committee went ahead with an unwarranted expansion of the Patriot Act?s already intrusive powers.”

“In a move antithetical to our Constitution, the new ?administrative subpoena? authority would let the FBI write and approve its own search orders for intelligence investigations, without prior judicial approval. Flying in the face of the Fourth Amendment, this power would let agents seize personal records from medical facilities, libraries, hotels, gun dealers, banks and any other businesses without any specific facts connecting those records to any criminal activity or a foreign agent. The panel rejected attempts to limit this extraordinary power to emergencies – creating the likelihood that it will be used in fishing expeditions and in investigations unrelated to terrorism.”

“Americans have a reasonable expectation that their federal government will not gather records about their health, their wealth and the transactions of their daily life without probable cause of a crime and without a court order. We hope that Congress will protect America by giving law enforcement the tools they need without sidestepping our Constitution?s fundamental checks and balances.”

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Pictorial Gazette – News – 06/07/2005 – Lyme voters take aim at Patriot Act

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LYME – It’s been nearly one hundred years since the voters in this town have been asked to take sides in a national issue.

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Last time, the voters opted to send a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt in opposition to enlarging the Supreme Court.

Nearly 200 years ago, in 1808, the little maritime town of Lyme voted to dig their heels in against the Embargo Act of 1807, which prohibited American ships from trading internationally, for fear they’d be sunk by the English or French. As seamen and shipbuilders saw their jobs dry up, the town stood up and voiced their opinion in writing to Thomas Jefferson. The act was repealed a year later.

It was with this knowledge, shared by First Selectman Bill Koch at the outset of the annual town meeting, that some 100 townspeople overwhelmingly accepted a resolution to renew their pledge to the Bill of Rights and to oppose aspects of the Patriot Act they deemed unconstitutional.

The Patriot Act was passed by Congress a little over a month after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The act provides more powers to law enforcement in investigating potential terrorists.

Former 36th District State Rep. Claire Sauer, a six-term Democrat and Lyme resident, said the act violates rights set out in the Bill of Rights and amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Sauer particularly targeted the “sneak and peek” powers given to the government to hold people for questioning without legal charges, denying detained people the right to counsel, limiting access to public documents and unregulated ethnic profiling.

“This resolution is to help educate people about their rights and how we need to work to protect them,” Sauer said.

Sauer and two other members of the Democratic Town Committee brought the resolution to Koch after watching a DVD called “Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties.”

Currently, five other Connecticut towns and over 385 towns and counties across the country have endorsed similar resolutions against the Patriot Act. Representatives from Old Lyme and Essex attended the meeting and are going to present the results to their own town officials. Sauer said East Haddam residents have also voiced interest.

“We were hoping that it would get amended, but the new administration wants to make it stronger instead of weaker,” Sauer said.

Residents had concerns about the wording of the resolution, which “urged” town officials not to participate in actions they deem in violation to residents’ civil rights.

Some voters didn’t feel they knew enough about the act to vote and others were worried that it could cost the town in legal fees.

Koch, an attorney, said each situation would have to be assessed separately as to how far to push against the legislation.

Sauer said the resolution allows town officials to voice their opinion, but allows them to use their discretion. She called the resolution “an expression of support.”

Also at the meeting, voters unanimously approved the $7.3 million budget, over a 10 percent rise over last year’s budget. Voters also approved funds for a new $325,000 fire truck. Minutes after the meeting, the Board of Finance convened and set the tax rate at 13 mills, a 0.6-mill increase.

Last time, the voters opted to send a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt in opposition to enlarging the Supreme Court.

Nearly 200 years ago, in 1808, the little maritime town of Lyme voted to dig their heels in against the Embargo Act of 1807, which prohibited American ships from trading internationally, for fear they’d be sunk by the English or French. As seamen and shipbuilders saw their jobs dry up, the town stood up and voiced their opinion in writing to Thomas Jefferson. The act was repealed a year later.

It was with this knowledge, shared by First Selectman Bill Koch at the outset of the annual town meeting, that some 100 townspeople overwhelmingly accepted a resolution to renew their pledge to the Bill of Rights and to oppose aspects of the Patriot Act they deemed unconstitutional.

The Patriot Act was passed by Congress a little over a month after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The act provides more powers to law enforcement in investigating potential terrorists.

Former 36th District State Rep. Claire Sauer, a six-term Democrat and Lyme resident, said the act violates rights set out in the Bill of Rights and amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Sauer particularly targeted the ‘sneak and peek’ powers given to the government to hold people for questioning without legal charges, denying detained people the right to counsel, limiting access to public documents and unregulated ethnic profiling.

‘This resolution is to help educate people about their rights and how we need to work to protect them,’ Sauer said.

Sauer and two other”

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Eugene Mirman

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Eugene MirmanHate Speech On the Other Line

BY JOHN P. AVLON

May 10, 2005

“Faith, Family and Freedom” – I’m in favor of them. And I’d sure be steamed if these American values were hijacked by some special interest in a crass attempt to profit from politics and people’s fears. But, lo and behold, little is sacred in an era where the culture wars have graduated from grassroots skirmishes to organized armies. Not even your long-distance calling plan is safe in the ideological crossfire.

For example, a San Francisco-based company called “Working Assets” offers long-distance carrier service that donates a percentage of each customer’s bill to groups such as Human Rights Watch, Planned Parenthood, and the ACLU. The company claims to have raised $47 million for these organizations over the past two decades. With so much activist cash available via unorthodox political outreach, it was only a matter of time until conservative organizations used the same strategy. That time has apparently arrived.

It was in late December 2004 when New York-based comedian Eugene Mirman first received a phone-call from a nonprofit organization called “Faith, Family and Freedom,” asking if he opposed gay marriage and then offering to switch his long-distance service to a “Christian-based telephone carrier” identified as United American Technologies out of Oklahoma.

It turns out that Mr. Mirman had donated $50 to the presidential campaign of Alan Keyes in 2000. His name was consequently added to a conservative database. Amused and a bit disturbed, he recorded the subsequent solicitations, and added the tapes to his stand-up act. Excerpts of the transcripts speak for themselves.

After the call reaches a person they are prompted to press “1” if they oppose gay marriage. A holding message says “Please do not hang up … This information will describe how the ACLU and gays are getting gay marriage in every state.” The operator then enters the conversation:

Operator: Did you press 1 to oppose same sex marriages?

Mr. Mirman: Oh, I pressed it, yes.

Operator: Okay, that’s great to hear. And are you against same sex marriages?

Mr. Mirman: Well, I want to destroy it, yes.

Operator: Okay. That’s great to hear… –

Mr. Mirman: Like the fist of God we will smash them!

Operator: Exactly.

In another recorded conversation, the operator describes United American Technologies as “the only carrier that is taking an active stand against same sex marriages and hardcore child pornography.”

Mr. Mirman sensibly interjects, “I think all child pornography is hardcore. I don’t think there’s non-hardcore child pornography.” He then asks “AT&T sponsors child pornography?” The operator clarifies by saying “No. No, that’s MCI.”

Mr. Mirman: MCI has hardcore child pornography?

Operator: Yes, they are. They have a pedophile Web site for men who love boys. It’s a Montr?al based Web site….

Mr. Mirman: And so MCI basically has a child pornography ring?

Operator: That’s correct.

Mr.Mirman: What about the others? What does Verizon do?

Operator: Okay. Verizon, what they do is they train their employees to accept the gay and lesbian lifestyle.

Mr. Mirman: They try to turn their employees gay?

Operator: No, no. They train their employees to accept it.

Mr. Mirman coaxes out the absurdity of the script, but he’s no left-wing activist with an axe to grind. Born in Russia, he explains, “My problem isn’t with people of faith having certain convictions and wanting their money to support those convictions; it’s with a phone company surreptitiously exploiting people’s beliefs and fears for revenue. To have a nonprofit call people on your behalf and imply that MCI makes money from the rape of children and that God hates your competitors, I think, is inappropriate.”

That’s certainly one word for it. A call to United American Technologies shed further light on the fund-raising scheme. I spoke to Carl Thomspon, a senior consultant whose son-in-law Tom Anderson is CEO of the year-old company. He told me that 2,000 people a month were switching as a result of the calls and was forthright in admitting that “our main thing is calling against the gay and lesbian lifestyle.” “We’re not concerned about offending people who don’t agree with us on these issues,” he said.

More complicated was the arrangement he described with the “Faith Family and Freedom” 527 organization that had been placing the calls. The fund was created and maintained by the 33-year-old Republican floor leader of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, Lance Cargill. The funding arrangement, as both men described it, was that a percentage of the profits from each caller who switched would be directed back into the 527’s coffers to pay for conservative political campaigns. This is a hate-speech-fueled food chain between a company professing faith and a political action fund.

Mr. Thompson said that both parties agreed to the script, a charge that Mr. Cargill denies. Mr. Cargill stated that the calls had been recently stopped because of complaints from folks who “didn’t appreciate the phone calls,” but other organizations continue to place calls on United American Technologies’ behalf. This is a rare glimpse into the divide-to-conquer world of grassroots political activists in an age of poisonous partisanship. Some argue that left-wing groups like Working Assets created the environment that right-wing groups are now exploiting. But whatever the genesis, the result is the absurd and ugly state of our domestic politics, where an eye-for-an-eye threatens to leave everyone blind.

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GOP Chairman Walks Out of Meeting

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

GOP Chairman Walks Out of Meeting

By JIM ABRAMS, Associated Press Writer

Friday, June 10, 2005

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(06-10) 16:33 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) —

The Republican chairman walked off with the gavel, leaving Democrats shouting into turned-off microphones at a raucous hearing Friday on the Patriot Act.

The House Judiciary Committee hearing, with the two sides accusing each other of being irresponsible and undemocratic, came as President Bush was urging Congress to renew those sections of the post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism law set to expire in September.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., chairman of the panel, abruptly gaveled the meeting to an end and walked out, followed by other Republicans. Sensenbrenner declared that much of the testimony, which veered into debate over the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, was irrelevant.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., protested, raising his voice as his microphone went off, came back on, and went off again.

“We are not besmirching the honor of the United States, we are trying to uphold it,” he said.

Democrats asked for the hearing, the 11th the committee has held on the act since April, saying past hearings had been too slanted toward witnesses who supported the law. The four witnesses were from groups, including Amnesty International USA and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, that have questioned the constitutionality of some aspects of the act, which allows law enforcement greater authority to investigate suspected terrorists.

Nadler said Sensenbrenner, one of the authors of the Patriot Act, was “rather rude, cutting everybody off in mid-sentence with an attitude of total hostility.”

Tempers flared when Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., accused Amnesty International of endangering the lives of Americans in uniform by referring to the prison at Guantanamo Bay as a “gulag.” Sensenbrenner didn’t allow the Amnesty representative, Chip Pitts, to respond until Nadler raised a “point of decency.”

Sensenbrenner’s spokesman, Jeff Lungren, said the hearing had lasted two hours and “the chairman was very accommodating, giving members extra time.”

James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, speaking immediately after Sensenbrenner left, voiced dismay over the proceedings. “I’m troubled about what kind of lesson this gives” to the rest of the world, he told the Democrats remaining in the room.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, in a statement, said the hearing was an example of Republican abuse of power and she would ask House Speaker Dennis Hastert to order an apology from Sensenbrenner.

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Tempers Flare in Judiciary Committee Dust-up

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Tempers Flare in Judiciary Committee Dust-up

June 10, 2005

Tempers Flare in Judiciary Committee Dust-up

By Josephine Hearn and Jonathan Kaplan

A House Judiciary Committee hearing on the renewal of the Patriot Act turned ugly this morning after Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) gaveled the proceedings to a close over the objections of Democrats.

Democrats continued to make statements and witnesses continued to offer testimony even after Sensenbrenner had left the room. C-SPAN cameras were still rolling as the committee’s majority staff rushed to turn off microphones and lights on the Democrats, prompting the television crews to break out boom mikes.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said this afternoon that she wanted an apology from Sensenbrenner. “I will ask Speaker Hastert to order Mr. Sensenbrenner to apologize for his behavior to the witnesses at the hearing today, and to promise that this will never again happen,” she said in a statement. Pelosi used the dust-up to highlight the Democrats broader message that Republicans are abusing their power. “The Republicans’ abuse of power reached a new low this morning when they tried to silence Democrats at a hearing on the Patriot Act by cutting the microphones,” she said. “I commend Judiciary Committee Democrats for continuing to question witnesses after the Republicans’ shameful behavior, and for standing up for the institution of the House.” Jeff Lungren, a spokesman for Sensenbrenner defended the chairman’s actions.

“We operated according to committee and House customs and rules,” he said. Every member got a full round of questioning. The hearing lasted roughly two hours so I don’t know how [Pelosi] would say it was cut off.” “We have a number of members on our committee for whom 5 minutes is never enough. Five hours is closer. You’re trying to be respectful of everyone’s time and [Sensenbrenner] was very, very generous?Democrats wanted to turn a thoughtful review of the Patriot Act into open mic night at the Improv,” he said.

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), one of the Democrats who kept the hearing going after Sensenbrenner left, said, “At the end, I wanted to make a statement. I sought recognition, but the chairman declared the hearing adjourned. I said, ‘point of order,’ and he just got up and walked out.” Proper parliamentary practice in the House generally requires that committee chairman adjourn on motion or without objection, neither of which was the case this morning. “Despite the fact that [Sensenbrenner had left], I went ahead and made the statement, at which point, someone turned off my mike and I had to comment loudly,” he said. The hearing was one of a dozen the Judiciary committee has held on the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act, but it was the only one to feature solely witnesses put forth by the panel’s Democrats.

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Parents could do 10 years for selling a joint under proposed drug law – Blogging Baby – www.bloggingbaby.com _

In reply to CodeWarriorz Thoughts

Parents could do 10 years for selling a joint under proposed drug law – Blogging Baby – http://www.bloggingbaby.com _Parents could do 10 years for selling a joint under proposed drug law

Posted Jun 9, 2005, 10:05 AM ET by Jim McQuiggin

Related entries: Health & Safety, Lifestyle

Remember the scene in Poltergeist where, after the kids are in bed, mom and dad settle down with a glass of wine and a few tokes? According to Wisconsin Congressman James Sensenbrenner, those parents are deserving of ten years in prison.

With Sensebrenner?s proposed House Bill H.R. 1528, `Defending America?s Most Vulnerable: Safe Access to Drug Treatment and Child Protection Act of 2005?, a mother who sells her neighbor a joint would get a 10-year minimum sentence, even if her kids were at school at the time. However, there is much, much more to the bill. The bill virtually eliminates the ability of federal judges to give sentences below the minimum sentence recommended by federal sentencing guidelines, essentially creating a mandatory minimum sentence for every federal offense (including both drug and non-drug offenses).

The bill also stipulates a 10-year minimum sentence for anyone 21 or older who gives marijuana or others drugs to someone under 18 (i.e. a 21 year old college students gives a joint to his 17-year old brother). A second offense would be life in prison. ?Drug-free? school zones would be expanded to include almost any place in an urban area including hospitals, drug rehabs, video arcades, public libraries, or day-care centers. It would increase penalties for selling or distributing drugs in that area (enhancing penalties for people in inner cities, while people in rural and suburban areas get less time for the same offense).

Worse than that, the bill mandates that you inform on loved ones and friends. If you have knowledge of any kind of drug offense and don?t pass that knowledge onto the police within 24 hours, you would face an automatic five years in prison.

As a therapist who deals primarily with substance abuse clients, I think this bill is nuts. If I were aware of a meth lab in my neighborhood, I?d inform the cops in a New York minute. But threatening me with a mandatory 5 years of prison for not reporting someone smoking weed is absolute insanity.

Fortunately, I?m also a citizen and I can make sure this bill dies a quick and certain death.

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Capitol Hill Blue: Civil Liberties Be Damned: Dubya Wants a Permanent Patriot Act

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Civil Liberties Be Damned: Dubya Wants a Permanent Patriot Act

By Staff and Wire Reports

Jun 10, 2005, 08:23

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President Bush urged the U.S. Congress on Thursday to renew major provisions of the USA Patriot Act and rejected critics who have complained the post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorism law erodes civil liberties.

Sixteen sections of the Patriot Act are scheduled to expire at the end of the year, and the Bush administration fears their expiration will weaken law-enforcement tools needed to search for potential terrorists on American soil.

“My message to Congress is clear: The terrorist threats against us will not expire at the end of the year, and neither should the protections of the Patriot Act,” Bush said during a visit to the Ohio State Highway Patrol Academy.

The Patriot Act was approved by overwhelming margins in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in the tense weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but civil liberties groups and some members of Congress say the law has gone too far, putting American freedoms in danger.

Bush dismissed that view, and quoted a frequent administration critic, California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, as saying she had found no reported abuses.

“Remember that the next time you hear someone make an unfair criticism of this important good law. The Patriot Act has not diminished American liberties. The Patriot Act has helped defend American liberties,” Bush said.

Sen. Russell Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, accused Bush of presenting a “false choice” by focusing his speech on parts of the Patriot Act that are not controversial and glossing over areas where lawmakers say it could be improved.

“He once again ignored bipartisan concerns about the Patriot Act, and presented a false choice to the American people — that we have to reauthorize the Patriot Act without any changes or leave our country vulnerable to terrorist attacks,” he said.

An ABC-Washington Post poll showed 59 percent of Americans favor extending the Patriot Act but some were growing more concerned about government intrusion on civil liberties.

Half of those polled said the government was doing enough to protect the rights of Americans during the war on terror, down from six in 10 or more during 2002 and 2003.

The American Civil Liberties Union said on its Web site that the Patriot Act needs to be changed “if Americans are to preserve our basic freedoms and protect ourselves from broad government searches of our personal records and information.”

Among the provisions opposed by civil-liberties advocates is one allowing authorities to seize library and bookstore records, which the Bush administration has defended.

Bush paid particular attention to sections of the law that permit law-enforcement and intelligence officials to work together; that permit roving wiretaps to keep up with suspects who change mobile phones to elude surveillance; and that allow Internet providers to give information to law enforcement without fear of being sued.

Bush said breaking down the barrier between law enforcement and the intelligence community enabled a joint effort that led to the FBI’s arrest two years ago of a Pakistani-born Ohio truck driver, Iyman Faris, in what was described as an al Qaeda plot to blow up New York’s Brooklyn Bridge.

Faris was sentenced to 20 years in prison for providing al Qaeda with material support, resources and information about possible targets for attack.

Lisa Graves, the ACLU’s senior counsel for legislative strategy, disputed Bush’s contention that there had been no abuses under the law. “The most offensive portion of the President’s remarks was his claim that the Patriot Act is constitutional,” she said.

A move is under way on Capitol Hill to approve the provisions in the Patriot Act that are set to expire.

Just this week the U.S. Senate intelligence committee sided with the White House, by proposing broad new subpoena powers for the FBI to use in counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations.

After hours of secret deliberations, the oversight panel voted 11-4 to send to the full Senate a proposal that would give the FBI the power to subpoena without judicial approval a wide range of personal documents ranging from health and library records to tax statements.

The legislation approved by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence also would make permanent intelligence-related sections of the Patriot Act.

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the Wounded Healer – ENewsBlog

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the Wounded Healer – ENewsBlog

Supreme Court Allows Prosecution of Medical Marijuana

By Bill Mears

CNN

Monday 06 June 2005

Washington – The U.S. Supreme Court Monday ruled doctors can be blocked from prescribing marijuana for patients suffering from pain caused by cancer or other serious illnesses.

In a 6-3 vote, the justices ruled the Bush administration can block the backyard cultivation of pot for personal use, because such use has broader social and financial implications.

“Congress’ power to regulate purely activities that are part of an economic ‘class of activities’ that have a substantial effect on interstate commerce is firmly established,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens for the majority.

Justices O’Connor, Rehnquist and Thomas dissented. The case took an unusually long time to be resolved, with oral arguments held in November.

The decision means that federal anti-drug laws trump state laws that allow the use of medical marijuana, said CNN Senior Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin. Ten states have such laws.

“If medical marijuana advocates want to get their views successfully presented, they have to go to Congress; they can’t go to the states, because it’s really the federal government that’s in charge here,” Toobin said.

At issue was the power of federal government to override state laws on use of “patient pot.”

The Controlled Substances Act prevents the cultivation and possession of marijuana, even by people who claim personal “medicinal” use. The government argues its overall anti-drug campaign would be undermined by even limited patient exceptions.

The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) began raids in 2001 against patients using the drug and their caregivers in California, one of 11 states that legalized the use of marijuana for patients under a doctor’s care. Among those arrested was Angel Raich, who has brain cancer, and Diane Monson, who grew cannabis in her garden to help alleviate chronic back pain.

A federal appeals court concluded use of medical marijuana was non-commercial, and therefore not subject to congressional oversight of “economic enterprise.”

But lawyers for the U.S. Justice Department argued to the Supreme Court that homegrown marijuana represented interstate commerce, because the garden patch weed would affect “overall production” of the weed, much of it imported across American borders by well-financed, often violent drug gangs.

Lawyers for the patient countered with the claim that the marijuana was neither bought nor sold. After California’s referendum passed in 1996, “cannabis clubs” sprung up across the state to provide marijuana to patients. They were eventually shut down by the state’s attorney general.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that anyone distributing medical marijuana could be prosecuted, despite claims their activity was a “medical activity.”

The current case considered by the justices dealt with the broader issue of whether marijuana users could be subject to prosecution.

Along with California, nine states have passed laws permitting marijuana use by patients with a doctor’s approval: Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. Arizona also has a similar law, but no formal program in place to administer prescription pot.

California’s Compassionate Use Act permits patients with a doctor’s approval to grow, smoke or acquire the drug for “medical needs.”

Users include television host Montel Williams, who uses it to ease pain from multiple sclerosis.

Anti-drug activists say Monday’s ruling could encourage abuse of drugs deemed by the government to be narcotics.

“It’s a handful of people who want to see not just marijuana, but all drugs legalized,” said Calvina Fay of the Drug Free America Foundation.

In its hard-line stance in opposition to medical marijuana, the federal government invoked a larger issue. “The trafficking of drugs finances the work of terror, sustaining terrorists,” said President Bush in December 2001. Tough enforcement, the government told the justices, “is central to combating illegal drug possession.”

Marijuana users, in their defense, argued, “Since September 11, 2001, Defendants [DEA] have terrorized more than 35 Californians because of medical cannabis.” In that state, the issue has become a hot political issue this election

The case is Gonzales v. Raich, case no. 03-1454.

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Sword, hatchet taken at border

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Sword, hatchet taken at borderSword, hatchet taken at border

But slaying suspect allowed in U.S.

June 8, 2005

BY MICHAEL KUNZELMAN

ASSOCIATED PRESS

BOSTON — On April 25, Gregory Despres arrived at the U.S.-Canadian border crossing at Calais, Maine, carrying a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, brass knuckles and a chain saw stained with what appeared to be blood.

U.S. customs agents confiscated the weapons and fingerprinted Despres.

Then they let him into the United States.

The following day, a gruesome scene was discovered in Despres’ hometown of Minto, New Brunswick: The decapitated body of a 74-year-old country musician named Frederick Fulton was found on Fulton’s kitchen floor. His head was in a pillowcase under a kitchen table. His common-law wife, 70-year-old Veronica Decarie, was discovered stabbed to death in a bedroom.

Despres, 22, immediately became a suspect because of a history of violence between him and his neighbors. He was arrested April 27 after police in Massachusetts saw him wandering down a highway in a sweatshirt with red and brown stains.

He is now in jail in Massachusetts on murder charges, awaiting an extradition hearing next month.

At a time when the United States is tightening its borders, how could a man toting what appeared to be a bloody chain saw be allowed into the country?

Bill Anthony, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said the Canadian-born Despres could not be detained because he is a naturalized U.S. citizen and was not wanted on any criminal charges on the day in question.

Anthony said Despres was questioned for two hours before he was released. During that time, he said, customs agents employed “every conceivable method” to check for warrants or see whether Despres had broken any laws in trying to re-enter the country.

Anthony conceded it “sounds stupid” that a man wielding what appeared to be a bloody chain saw could not be detained.

But he added: “Our people don’t have a crime lab up there. They can’t look at a chain saw and decide if it’s blood or rust or red paint.”

Sgt. Gary Cameron of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would not comment on whether it was, in fact, blood on the chain saw.

On the same day Despres crossed the border, he was due in a Canadian court to be sentenced on charges he assaulted and threatened to kill Fulton’s son-in-law, Frederick Mowat, last August.

Mowat told police Despres had been bothering his father-in-law for a month.

When Mowat confronted him, Despres allegedly pulled a knife, pointed it at Mowat’s chest and said he was “going to get you all.”

Police say they believe the dispute between the neighbors boiled over in the early-morning hours of April 24, when Despres allegedly broke into Fulton’s home and stabbed the couple.

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Scotsman.com Sport – Latest News – Tyson Loses the Will

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Scotsman.com Sport – Latest News – Tyson Loses the WillTyson Loses the Will

By Mark Staniforth, PA Sport

Mike Tyson did not lose his fighting heart some time after the sixth round in Washington last night when the former world heavyweight champion conceded defeat against a club fighter called Kevin McBride.

The last vestiges of his once-ferocious armoury were not stripped from him by Brixton?s Danny Williams through three-and-a-half unexpectedly explosive rounds in Louisville last year.

Neither Lennox Lewis nor Evander Holyfield can truly claim the credit for stealing Tyson?s status as one of the most irresistible forces in world heavyweight history.

James Buster Douglas might have shattered the myth on that unforgettable night in Tokyo in 1990. But the question must be asked whether Mike Tyson ever possessed much of a true fighting heart at all.

Tyson?s fighting style was based on his ability to bully his opponents in much the same way he had scraped a living terrorising easy targets on the streets of Brooklyn as a child.

He established a persona which struck fear into the hearts of decent opponents like Trevor Berbick, Michael Spinks and Pinklon Thomas, and had them beaten long before the avalanche of punches which left them reeling drunkenly across the canvas.

It was a wonder Frank Bruno made it into the ring at all for his 1996 rematch, while Bruce Seldon crumbled under a first round assault in which replays concluded that Tyson?s so-called knockout punch had actually missed its target.

The sneering teenage ogre seemed to be heading directly for the Hall of Fame ? but it only took one man?s refusal to buy into his fearsome reputation to strip Tyson of his aura of invincibility for good.

Douglas, who had suffered the death of his mother Lula in the build-up to the fight, found strength in that adversity and simply decided he had nothing to be scared of.

When he punched Tyson back, that lack of fighting heart in the heavyweight division?s resident terrorist was brutally exposed for the first time.

On that February night in Tokyo, Tyson did not know how to respond when one man dared challenge his superiority. He suffered the ignominy of scrabbling around on the canvas for his gumshield, devoid of his senses.

Tyson was not going to let that happen again. Whether it be through intentional head-butts, arm-breaking clinches or cannibalism, Tyson tried every other escape route going whenever his opponent had the audacity to attempt to hit him back.

It culminated in Washington last night, when McBride shrugged off Tyson?s best shots and the former world champion resorted to his latest choice of ready-made escape plan: he shrugged his shoulders and stayed on his stool.

This was only the latest of Tyson?s ?No Mas? moments, but it was perhaps the most telling. It gave him a notoriety which surpassed that of his own favourite bully, Sonny Liston, who refused to continue past the sixth round against Cassius Clay in 1964.

It paled into insignificance compared to Jess Willard?s 1919 retirement against Jack Dempsey. Willard is too often derided as one of the worst world heavyweight champions, a lumbering 6ft 6in giant who got lucky when Jack Johnson had an off-night.

But having had his jaw broken by one of Dempsey?s first punches, Willard fought through four more rounds also suffering a broken nose, broken ribs, the removal of four teeth and both his eyes being closed.

Last night it took another unfancied 6ft 6in colossus to make Mike Tyson surrender on his stool with nothing more than a bruised ego.

Willard was an unlikely champion, a Kansas cowhand who was reluctantly persuaded into the boxing ring because he possessed the correct physical attributes for a Great White Hope.

As Dempsey proved, he was slow, one-dimensional and terribly easy to hit. But unlike Tyson, one thing Jess Willard can never be accused of is lacking the will to keep fighting.

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DUNCAN HUNTER MUST BE AN EGYPTIAN PRINCESS, BECAUSE “HE’S DA QUEEN OF DENIAL”

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NewsMax.com: Inside Cover Story
“After Rep. Duncan Hunter’s eye-opening description of how terrorist suspects are living high on the hog at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, prisoners from around the world will no doubt be clamoring for a ‘gulag’ cell of their own.

Appearing on Fox News Sunday, the House Armed Services Committee chairman began by detailing tonight’s dinner menu at Gitmo – which all detainees, including one suspected of being involved in the 9/11 plot, will enjoy. “

DUNCAN HUNTER IS AN IDIOT! HE MUST BE AN EGYPTIAN PRINCESS ‘CUZ HE IS DA QUEEN OF DENIAL !

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TYSON QUITS BOXING

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Angry Tyson reaffirms he’s quitting

By MICHAEL HIRSLEY

Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON – The morning after the most submissive defeat of his career, in which he quit on his stool although he had suffered no knockdowns, Mike Tyson shouted out once more in rage.

“No! No! No! No!” he cried out, trying to silence supporters who loudly applauded his 20-year boxing career at a postfight news conference Sunday.

Urged on by Rock Newman, an adviser to the promoters who brought Tyson to the MCI Center for a much-anticipated comeback fight that turned into an embarrassment against Kevin McBride on Saturday night, Tyson’s fans chose to cheer his early career.

The reason 15,274 fans_about 2,500 short of capacity_showed up for the bout, Newman said, was because “Mike Tyson, at his best, was the most exciting heavyweight on the planet.”

But Tyson, who turns 39 on June 30, was barely a shadow of his best against the virtually unknown McBride. And the applause stirred by Newman genuinely irritated him.

“That’s bull, man!” he shouted. “I don’t want anybody to applaud me.”

He went on to say he has “never in my life asked anybody for anything. … I’m a man. … I’ve been abused any way a man can be abused. I’m as hard-core as it gets. Please don’t embarrass me by doing this.”

In truth, Tyson has asked for plenty from those who would pay to see him fight, including $44.95 for Saturday night’s pay-per-view telecast and a $5 million purse for the unsatisfying fight.

Conceding at least that he has “had enough applause in my life,” he reiterated what he said in the ring after the fight: He will quit boxing rather than disgrace the sport with more poor performances. His record fell to 50-6 with his third knockout loss in his last four fights. He said he felt like a very old man when the 6-foot-6-inch, 271-pound McBride leaned on him and pressed him to the canvas at the end of the sixth round. He said he was tired and “just didn’t want to get up.”

Referee Joe Cortez, who earlier in the round penalized Tyson two points for deliberately head-butting McBride, opening a cut near his left eye, ruled that Tyson’s slump to the canvas was a push and not a knockdown.

Nevertheless, Tyson’s friend and trainer Jeff Fenech said, “It took him an eternity to get up.” After Tyson finally did, and walked dejectedly to his corner, Fenech decided he had had enough.

“I could see in his eyes that he didn’t want to be there,” Fenech said. “I never saw him really get hurt by McBride’s punches, but he was exhausted.”

Before the bout, McBride, the Irish-born underdog who lives in Brockton, Mass., told reporters that his training team included a hypnotist who would help him maximize his energy. Whether that woke him to the task is a matter of conjecture. But after looking into McBride’s eyes for six rounds, Tyson certainly became very, very tired.

McBride did not sustain an offense against an opponent six inches shorter, but he tied him up effectively in clinches and leaned on him often, wearing him down.

Where the victor goes from his team’s ecstatic celebration in the ring remains to be seen. McBride, who improved to 33-4 against his most meaningful opponent to date, repeatedly expressed his desire to become “the first Irish-born heavyweight champion of the world.”

If that goal seemed distant at the opening bell Saturday night, it was far more visible after Tyson, still ahead on two of the three judges’ scorecards after the sixth round, did not come out for the seventh of the scheduled 10 rounds.

Among the possibilities, McBride said, is a much desired challenge to World Boxing Association champion and fellow Boston-area boxer John Ruiz, fighting in their hometown Fleet Center. Regardless of what the outside world thinks, that should spark local interest.

Tyson, who has squandered $300 million and whose prime task of paying off debt is still some $15 million short, talked about his future far more abstractly.

Suggesting that he might do missionary work, except “I don’t want to get killed,” and that he is “too stigmatized” to become a boxing analyst, he declared, “The only time I’m happy is if I’m contributing. If I can’t contribute, I’m emotionally dead.”

Without specifying the $300 million he once could have shared with worthy causes, he said, “I thought I was contributing, but I was contributing to the wrong sort.”

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Rumsfeld Calls Guantanamo Detention Facility Best Option Available

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In recent weeks, news reports about abuses and mistreatment of prisoners at the U.S. military’s detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has put the Bush administration on the defensive. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has made a case for continued operation of the facility.

Donald Rumsfeld
Mr. Rumsfeld says no other military detention facility has been as transparent as Guantanamo Bay. According to the defense secretary, there have been nearly 400 separate media visits to Guantanamo as well as some 180 congressional delegations. Additionally, the U.S. military provides continuous access to members of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Mr. Rumsfeld used his opening statement at a Pentagon news conference Tuesday to defend the U.S. military detention facility, where he said detainees are sent only after they are determined to pose a threat to the United States.

“The kind of people held at Guantanamo include terrorist trainers, bomb makers, extremist recruiters and financiers, bodyguards of Osama bin Laden, and would-be suicide bombers,” he said. “They are not common car thieves. They are believed to be determined killers.”

Mr. Rumsfeld said the U.S. government has spent over $100 million in the detention facility at Guantanamo. In addition, he said procedures have been set up to ensure the detainees are treated in a humane manner.

“The U.S. military has also gone to unprecedented lengths to respect the religious sensibilities of these enemies of civil society, including the issuance of detailed regulations governing the handling of the Koran and arranging schedules for detainees around the five daily calls for prayer required by the Muslim faith,” he said.

Despite the guidelines, abuses have occurred. Earlier this month the Pentagon confirmed five incidents in which it says soldiers or interrogators at Guantanamo mishandled copies of the Koran. This followed a report in late May by the human rights group Amnesty International, that called the detention center at Guantanamo Bay a “gulag.” The Bush administration has said the comparison is “absurd” and “reprehensible”.

More recently, this week’s Time magazine has a cover story that details the harsh interrogation tactics used on Mohamed al-Kahtani, who is being held at Guantanamo, suspected of involvement in the 9/11 plane highjacking in the U.S.

Mr. Rumsfeld defended the interrogation methods used because of the high value of the suspect and the information he provided.

“While at Guantanamo [Mohamed al-] Kahtani and other detainees have provided valuable information, including insights into al-Qaida planning for September 11, including recruiting and logistics, the identities and detailed information of 20 of Osama bin-Laden’s bodyguards, information leading to capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the architect of the September 11 attacks, and information allowing foreign police to detain 22 suspected terrorists plotting attacks earlier this year,” the defense secretary said.

Mr. Rumsfeld said the United States would continue to detain suspected terrorists at Guantanamo until they are determined to no longer be a threat to the United States and its allies, or until their countries of origin are able to safely and securely house the prisoners.

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MORE “FROM THE TASER FILES” CODEWARRIORZ THOUGHTS ONGOING COVERAGE

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PLEASE VISIT THIS LINK TO SEE ACTUAL VIDEOShttp://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/news/video/taser_video3a.html

How One Tasing Unfolded in Boynton Beach
The Aug. 6, 2004 incident began as a normal traffic stop but took an ominous turn when the driver refused to get out of her SUV. It ended with a Boynton Beach Police officer hitting the 22-year-old woman twice with his Taser during her arrest.

The arrest (original)
Video: Boynton Beach Police Department
QuickTime Player required to view video

The speeding SUV ? Original footage (with introduction by Sgt. Aiken) The traffic stop
? Original footage

Footage with Aiken’s commentary The arrest
? Original footage

Footage with Aiken’s commentary McNevin on radio
? Original footage

Special Report: Are officers too quick to fire Tasers?

Credits
Multimedia Producer: Anita Stoner
Reporter: Dani Davies
Flash/HTML Producer: Darrell Spence

——————————————————————————–
Copyright ? 2005, The Palm Beach Post. All rights reserved.

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Latest Business News and Financial Information | Reuters.com

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Latest Business News and Financial Information | Reuters.com

“KPMG apologizes for illegal tax shelters

Thu Jun 16, 2005 05:40 PM ET

By Arindam Nag

NEW YORK (Reuters) – KPMG LLP (KPMG.UL: Quote, Profile, Research) , one of the Big Four accounting firms, on Thursday apologized for helping set up illegal tax shelters, in a move that could help it avoid a criminal indictment like the one that destroyed Arthur Andersen three years ago.

U.S. federal prosecutors have been probing certain tax services that were offered by KPMG to some of its wealthy clients between 1996 and 2002.

“KPMG takes full responsibility for the unlawful conduct by former KPMG partners during that period, and we deeply regret that it occurred,” the audit firm said in a statement.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, but the Wall Street Journal reported that prosecutors have built a criminal case against KPMG for obstruction of justice and the sale of abusive tax shelters. The paper, citing unnamed lawyers briefed on the case, said top department officials are debating now whether to seek an indictment of KPMG.”

=====SNIP======

What is this bullshit…”we’re sorry we broke the law and won’t do it again”? Is that ok for other crimes too?

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village voice > news > What’s the Deal With the Downing Street Memo? by Patrick Mulvaney

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village voice > news > What’s the Deal With the Downing Street Memo? by Patrick MulvaneyToday on Capitol Hill, Democratic representatives Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas and John Conyers of Michigan will lead a hearing on the so-called Downing Street Memo?minutes from a British leadership meeting that suggest the Bush administration first decided to go to war in Iraq and then built a case for it later.

In a conference call with reporters yesterday, Jackson Lee said the public needs to understand what happened. “This is just the beginning. I look to 2002 and the names many of us were called for opposing the war in Iraq, and then I look at where we are today,” she said. “If this is to meet the test of history, we have to have a comprehensive answer to what happened.”

The Memo has been big, big news in Britain, but has received little attention in the U.S. What follows is a primer on the Memo and its implications.

——————————————————————————–

On July 23, 2002, British prime minister Tony Blair met with several of his top advisers to discuss plans for the future concerning the United States, Iraq, and the United Nations. The minutes from that meeting were marked “secret and strictly confidential.” But on May 1, in the heat of Blair’s campaign for re-election, those minutes?which have come to be known as the Downing Street Memo?surfaced in The Times of London.

The Memo confirmed what many progressives had long suspected: that the Bush administration planned to launch a war in Iraq and then rigged a case to justify it. According to the Memo, Britain’s intelligence chief reported the following assessment with regard to his then recent trip to Washington: “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

The British media, from the Guardian to the BBC News, quickly explored the Memo and its implications and subsequently unearthed more documents that cast further doubt on the official Bush-Blair version of the run-up to the Iraq war (as well as the preparations for its aftermath). In the meantime, however, the titans of the U.S. press largely dodged the Downing Street bullet. As Media Matters for America noted in a study released June 15, the editorial pages of four of the nation’s five largest newspapers?USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times?remained “conspicuously silent about the controversy surrounding the document” in the first six weeks after its publication.

Nonetheless, reactions to the Memo have slowly and quietly gathered steam across the United States. Progressive media outlets including The Village Voice (The Bush Beat, Power Plays), TomPaine.com, Democracy Now!, and The Nation have covered the story on a regular basis, and smaller newspapers from Tennessee to Wisconsin have also taken up the issue. Daily Kos began a campaign to “lift the virtual news blackout” on the story.

On the advocacy front, more than 500,000 people signed a letter to President Bush earlier this month demanding an explanation for the latest revelations, and groups of veterans and peace activists have formed a coalition to push for a formal congressional investigation. Moreover, Ralph Nader and Kevin Zeese, among others, have actually raised the prospect of impeachment for President Bush.

With the issue clearly gaining momentum, the key question now is whether the Memo has the muscle to sway not only those who opposed the war in the first place, but also those who at some point supported it.

Neither testimony from Joseph Wilson and Richard Clarke nor the enduring absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has unsettled the American public enough to reopen the debate over the war. Controversy over the Downing Street Memo may also wither away.

But there is a real possibility the issue could gain serious traction in the days and weeks ahead. The Memo is strikingly concrete; beyond the commentary on intelligence-fiddling and fact-tweaking, it notes quite plainly that “the case was thin” for military action in Iraq. And perhaps even more importantly, the people of the United States have become increasingly frustrated with the Iraq war; in fact, a recent Washington Post poll found that for the first time since major combat operations began in March 2003, more than half of all Americans feel the war has not made the nation safer.go to next article in news ->

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The secret Downing Street memo – Sunday Times – Times Online

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The secret Downing Street memo – Sunday Times – Times OnlineThe secret Downing Street memo

SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL – UK EYES ONLY

DAVID MANNING

From: Matthew Rycroft

Date: 23 July 2002

S 195 /02

cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER’S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam’s regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.

The two broad US options were:

(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).

(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.

The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:

(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.

Page 1 || Page 2 || Page 3

(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.

(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun “spikes of activity” to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.

John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.

The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.

Conclusions:

(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options.

(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.

(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.

(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.

He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.

(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.

(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.

(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)

MATTHEW RYCROFT

(Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide)

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GODWIN’S LAW BE DAMNED..A GOOD COMPARISON IS A GOOD COMPARISON

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GODWIN’S LAW BE DAMNED..A GOOD COMPARISON IS A GOOD COMPARISON

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Doing the “Gavel Walk”- by Sensen Baby

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Big F’ing BABY Sensenbrenner takes his toy gavel and runs home to cry to Mommy that the big bad Democrats asked to many “hard questions”.

BIG F’ING BABY

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Latest CodeWarriorz Thoughts Blogs

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We have two new blogs in the CodeWarriorz Thoughts News and Views Portal System :

http://sensenbrenner-is-nuts.blogspot.com
(The Big, Fat, Bald F’ing BABY of Congress)

and

http://without-delay.blogspot.com
(The Story of a Bug Exterminator from Texas)

Please check them out.

~CodeWarriorz Thoughts

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BBC NEWS | Americas | US senators debate Guantanamo Bay

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BBC NEWS | Americas | US senators debate Guantanamo Bay

US senators debate Guantanamo Bay

More than 500 prisoners are being held at Guantanamo Bay

US senators have been debating the legal status of foreign terror suspects, particularly those held by the military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Senate Judiciary Committee heard that US treatment of those held at the prison was harming its image abroad.

It was also told by a government official that the US had the legal right to keep terror suspects in custody forever.

The issue of terror suspects has become deeply divisive in the US.

The BBC’s Adam Brookes reports that the atmosphere at the Senate hearing was uncomfortable.

Like much of the US, he says, the committee seems to be increasingly uneasy at the treatment of prisoners caught during the “war on terror”.

Several senators and former President Jimmy Carter have called for the military prison at Guantanamo Bay to be closed down.

More than 500 men are being held at the facility. Many have been there for more than three years without trial.

‘Held in perpetuity’

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy told the committee that Guantanamo Bay “is causing immeasurable damage to our reputation as a defender of democracy and a beacon of human rights around the world”.

But William Barr, a former US Attorney General, defended the Bush administration’s decision to exempt terror suspects from the Geneva Convention.

“The Geneva Convention applies to signatory powers,” he said. “Al-Qaeda hasn’t signed it. They’re not covered by the Geneva Convention.”

Democratic Senator Joseph Biden asked the Deputy Associate Attorney General, J Michael Wiggins, if suspects could be held forever at Guantanamo Bay because “there is no definition as to when the conflict ends”.

Mr Wiggins replied: “It’s our position that, legally, they can be held in perpetuity.”

Our correspondent says this suggests the Bush administration believes that people who pose a threat to the US may never be released from custody.

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Sen. Specter: End ‘Crazy Quilt’ Detention System – by William Fisher

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Sen. Specter: End ‘Crazy Quilt’ Detention System – by William Fisher

A more extreme view was expressed by former Attorney general William Barr, who served in the first Bush administration from 1991-1993. He told the panel that prisoners detained as enemy combatants at Guantanamo and elsewhere “have no rights and are not entitled to due process,” as enjoyed by U.S. citizens.

Noting that hearings before military tribunals were currently being delayed because of litigation pending in federal courts, Pentagon and law enforcement officials defended current practices at the U.S. military prison camp.

Rear Admiral James M. McGarrah, who monitors the “enemy combatant” detention program for the U.S. Navy, told the Committee that of the 558 detainees given hearings at Guantanamo, 520 were “properly classified” as enemy combatants and of the remaining 38, 23 have been released so far.

Michael Wiggins, a deputy associate attorney general, told the committee that each Guantanamo detainee was given a formal hearing before a review panel to ensure they were all properly classified as enemy combatants.

The hearing took place against the backdrop of increasing calls to shut down the Guantanamo facility because of the image problems created for Washington by growing reports of U.S. abuse of terror war prisoners at the camp.

Committee member Sen. Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat who has called for the shutdown of Guantanamo Bay, said, “We are doing real badly” in the eyes of the world. “Guantanamo is a disaster.”

“If we can hold people until the end of hostilities, when does the conflict end?” Biden asked. “Can we hold people forever?”

The Justice Department representative responded, “Enemy combatants can be held until the war is over.”

Biden has introduced legislation to create a nonpartisan independent committee to investigate the treatment of prisoners captured in the war on terror.

But Sen. Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, told the committee the solution “is not closing Gitmo,” the military shorthand for the Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

He questioned the legal basis for holding detainees as enemy combatants for years when the Justice Department’s definition of an “enemy combatant” did not exist before the summer of 2004.

He also questioned whether the government would consider evidence obtained as a result of torture. Justice Department representative Wiggins responded, “We do not torture prisoners.”

The Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that Guantanamo detainees are entitled to due process and proper judicial hearings. Following that ruling, the Defense Department established the current system of military commissions to review each case and military tribunals to adjudicate them. But to date, only four cases have been referred