For many wine aficionados, the most important case in years is about to be opened.

Justices to Hear Arguments on Interstate Wine Sales
By BOB TEDESCHI
NY Times
Nov. 29th, 2004

On Dec. 7, the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments from small wineries and state regulators to decide whether those wineries can sell directly to out-of-state consumers, or whether they must use a state-mandated distribution system that, the winemakers argue, is far too costly.

The issue has implications for the 24 states, including Georgia, Florida and New Jersey, that do not allow direct shipments to their residents, but none more than New York, the nation's second-largest wine-consuming state, after California.

With the Internet fast becoming the marketing method of choice for smaller wineries to reach faraway customers, the court's decision could shape how the industry will market itself in the future.

At the heart of the matter are regulations enacted after the approval of the 21st Amendment in 1933, which ended Prohibition and allowed states to regulate the sale of alcoholic beverages. At that time, New York and other states passed laws requiring out-of-state sellers of alcoholic beverages to sell only to licensed wholesalers in the state, who would then market the wine and other drinks to retailers.

Since this "three tier" distribution system bars the import of out-of-state wines by retail customers, small operators like David Lucas, of the Lucas Winery in Lodi, Calif., cannot ship wine to consumers like Robin Brooks-Rigolosi, a commercial real estate broker and a fan of red wines in Manhattan.

In 2000, Ms. Brooks-Rigolosi tried to order a zinfandel from Mr. Lucas's Web site but found that such a sale was illegal. Shortly thereafter, she and Mr. Lucas, along with a libertarian public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, among others, brought suit in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contending that New York's law violated the commerce clause of the Constitution, which, among other things, bars states from enacting laws that unduly interfere with interstate commerce.

"This is about liberty," Ms. Brooks said. "One of the most far-reaching aspects of the Internet is that I can access art, culture and products that are well beyond my backyard. But all of these parochial state laws are preventing me from enjoying a perfectly legal commodity."

Similar cases have been brought in Florida and Michigan. The states have argued that since the 21st Amendment explicitly gave them the right to regulate alcohol, their laws were essentially free from commerce clause restrictions.

While the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, upheld the state's restrictions, the Sixth Circuit last year struck down Michigan's ban on direct interstate shipment to consumers, saying that the law did not serve the core interests of the 21st Amendment enough to justify discrimination against out-of-state businesses.

Into that judicial breach now steps the Supreme Court, which has offered relatively little guidance in past cases on how exactly to balance the commerce clause and the 21st Amendment.

"I think it's up for grabs," said Jesse Choper, who teaches law at Boalt Hall, the law school of the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Choper, who has advised wineries challenging the state laws, said that three members of the court, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O'Connor, had indicated in past cases that the 21st Amendment trumped the commerce clause, while two others, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, suggested opposing views.

Lawyers for the states and the wine wholesalers argue that the restrictive laws help limit under-age drinking, since, they said, children could more easily obtain wine online than at a store. They also say that the laws establish "orderly market conditions" and the collection of taxes, because wholesalers are licensed and aware of the state's tax requirements.

Randy Mastro, a lawyer at the firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and a former New York City deputy mayor, who is representing New York State wine distributors in the case, said that to comply with New York's laws, out-of-state wineries would have to open an office in the state and obtain a license, "so they could be present and accountable to the state, just like any in-state New York winery."

But David Lucas, who runs the Lucas Winery with his wife and three children, said such a move would be economically foolish for a business like his that would ship, at most, 50 cases of wine into the state.

In addition, Mr. Lucas and many other small wineries in the country either do not produce enough wine to get the attention of large distributors, or cannot afford to sell their wines at the discounts up to 50 percent that wholesalers require.

As a result, many visitors to their tasting rooms during vacations cannot buy the wines after returning home.

The states' arguments that their laws prevent minors from ordering wine online also do not impress vineyard owners. " FedEx and U.P.S. require an adult signature whenever they drop off our wine to a customer," Mr. Lucas said. "Besides, if kids want to drink, they're not going to go online and order a $25 bottle of chardonnay."

The teenage temperance argument, critics say, is further undermined by the fact that many states, including New York, typically allow in-state wineries to ship directly to consumers.

Even New York wineries are lobbying to adopt a reciprocal approach, where the state would strike agreements with other states to allow the direct shipment of limited quantities of wine. Thirteen states, notably California, have such laws. New York's governor, George E. Pataki, proposed a reciprocity law this year, but it did not clear the Legislature.

Chuck Tauck, managing partner of Sheldrake Point Vineyard in the Finger Lakes region of New York, said that his wines had received awards and good reviews in recent years but that consumers elsewhere could not get them at local stores. "Ideally, we'd have customers go to our site or give us a call, but we have to say we can't do that," he said.

Mr. Tauck said he and other New York winemakers had run into stiff opposition from wholesalers in their effort to adopt a more open stance on interstate direct wine sales.

"The last thing they want is to have anyone chipping away at the foundation of their business," he said. "So here we are, the winemakers of New York, walking around the halls of Albany with mud in our Vibram soles, and our enemy is the wholesalers."

"And the dilemma we have is, those same wholesalers control our distribution in New York," Mr. Tauck added. "So we're sort of dancing on eggshells."

Wordy Thoughts Of The Day

1. Two antennas meet on a roof, fall in love and get married. The ceremony wasn't much, but the reception was excellent.

2. Two hydrogen atoms walk into a bar. One says, "I've lost my electron." The other says, "Are you sure?" The first replies, "Yes, I'm positive..."

3. A jumper cable walks into a bar. The bartender says, "I'll serve you, but don't start anything."

4. Two peanuts walk into a bar, and one was a salted.

5. A sandwich walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Sorry we don't serve food in here."

6. A dyslexic man walks into a bra.

7. A man walks into a bar with a slab of asphalt under his arm and says: "A beer please, and one for the road."

8. Two cannibals are eating a clown. One says to the other: "Does this taste funny to you?"

9. "Doc, I can't stop singing 'The Green, Green Grass of Home.'" "That sounds like Tom Jones Syndrome." "Is it common?" Doc says, "It's Not Unusual."

10. Two cows standing next to each other in a field, Daisy says to Dolly, "I was artificially inseminated this morning." "I don't believe you," said Dolly. "It's true, no bull!" exclaimed Daisy.

11. An invisible man marries an invisible woman. The kids were nothing to look at either.

12. A man takes his Rottweiler to the vet and says, "My dog's cross-eyed. Is there anything you can do for him?" "Well," says the vet, "let's have a look at him." So he picks the dog up and examines his eyes, then checks his teeth. Finally, he says, "I'm going to have to put him down." "What? Because he's cross-eyed?" "No, because he's really heavy."

13. I went to buy some camouflage trousers the other day but I couldn't find any.

14. I went to the butcher's the other day and I bet him 50 bucks that he couldn't reach the meat off the top shelf. He said, "No, the steaks are too high."

15. I went to a seafood disco last week... and pulled a mussel.

16. What do you call a fish with no eyes? A fsh.

17. A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at him and says, "I'm sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger."

18. Two fish swim into a concrete wall. The one turns to the other and says, "Dam!".

19. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that; you can't have your kayak and heat it too.

20. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? His goal: transcend dental medication.

21. A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse. "But why?" they asked, as they moved off. "Because", he said, "I can't stand chess-nuts boasting in an open foyer."

22. A woman has twins and gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a family in Egypt and is named "Ahmal." The other goes to a family in Spain; they name him "Juan." Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his birth mother. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband that she wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal. Her husband responds, "They're twins! If you've seen Juan, you've seen Ahmal."

23. These friars were behind on their belfry payments, so they opened up a small florist shop to raise funds. Since everyone liked to buy flowers from the men of God, a rival florist across town thought the competition was unfair. He asked the good fathers to close down, but they would not. He went back and begged the friars to close. They ignored him. So, the rival florist hired Hugh MacTaggart, the roughest and most vicious thug in town to "persuade" them to close. Hugh beat up the friars and trashed their store, saying he'd be back if they didn't close up shop. Terrified, they did so, thereby proving that only Hugh can prevent florist friars.

24. Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him ... (Oh, man, this is so bad, it's good)...A super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

States Rights vs Federal Law: Supreme Court to Decide

Court to Hear Marijuana Case
Legality of Cultivating Plant for Medical Use Is at Issue
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 29, 2004; Page A02

Local sheriff's deputies and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents disagreed when they converged on Diane Monson's house in Oroville, Calif., two years ago.

The county cops accepted Monson's explanation for growing six marijuana plants: She had a doctor's permission to smoke it for back pain, so the pot was legal under the state's 1996 "medical marijuana" law.

But the DEA agents insisted that growing marijuana is still against federal law. They seized the plants and destroyed them.

Today that federal-state clash continues at the Supreme Court, where the justices will hear oral arguments on whether the Constitution permits the federal government to take action against those who use homegrown marijuana for medicinal reasons within states where it is legal to do so.

The case is the third medical pot case to reach the Supreme Court since voters overwhelmingly approved California's Compassionate Use Act. But the legal issues this time give the case importance well beyond the 11 states, mostly in the West, that since 1996 have eased or eliminated penalties for medical use of marijuana.

Among these states is Maryland, which last year set a maximum fine of $100 for medical users of less than an ounce of pot.

It has wider implications because Monson claims that federal drug busts of people such as her exceed Washington's authority under the commerce clause of the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to regulate trade "among the several states."

Last year, the San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled 2 to 1 that Monson was right. If the Supreme Court agrees, it could limit the federal government's power over not just the cultivation and use of marijuana, but also other activities.

Much modern government regulation exists because the Supreme Court articulated a broad definition of interstate commerce during the 20th century. This permitted the court to uphold, as exercises of Congress's commerce clause power, a wide range of national laws -- from the economic policies of the New Deal to the civil rights era ban on racial segregation in hotels and restaurants.

Perhaps the key ruling came in 1942, when the court held that the Roosevelt administration could enforce acreage controls against an Ohio wheat farmer who claimed his crop was entirely for his own use.

The court said that even subsistence farming could change the overall supply and price of grain; this "substantial effect on interstate commerce" triggered Congress's authority.

But in more recent years, the court has tightened its definition of interstate commerce.

In 1995, the court struck down a federal ban on gun possession within 1,000 feet of a school, ruling that Congress's claims that school gun violence had a "substantial effect" on the economy were implausible.

And in 2000, the court struck down a federal law giving women a right to sue rapists in federal court, ruling that such violence was not, "in any sense of the phrase, economic activity."

Monson and her co-plaintiffs -- Angel McClary Raich, an Oakland woman who suffers from a variety of painful chronic disorders, and two people identified as John Doe One and John Doe Two, who give Raich pot free of charge -- argue that these recent cases favor them, because using small amounts of marijuana they grow for themselves, or passing it along for "compassionate" reasons, cannot affect the broader market for the drug.

"This case is and always has been about federalism and state sovereignty," Monson's lawyers argue in their brief.

But the Bush administration counters that even small-scale use of a fungible commodity such as marijuana can affect price and quantity in the black market.

"[E]xcepting drug activity for personal use or free distribution from the sweep of [federal drug laws] would discourage the consumption of lawful controlled substances and would undermine Congress's intent to regulate the drug market comprehensively to protect public health and safety," the administration argues in its brief.

The federalism issue in the case has created unusual alliances. Three conservative Deep South states, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, have filed a friend of the court brief supporting the marijuana users on states' rights grounds. "California is entitled to make for itself the tough policy choices that affect its citizens," the states' brief argues.

Legal analysts say the likeliest supporter on the court for the marijuana users may also be its most conservative member: Justice Clarence Thomas, who, though a harsh critic of drug abuse, has also written that the court must narrowly define Congress's commerce clause powers.

Meanwhile, a liberal environmentalist group, the Community Rights Council, filed a brief in support of the Bush administration, noting the group's interest in "ensuring . . . legislative flexibility to address national concerns."

In two previous cases at the Supreme Court, medical marijuana advocates have a split record.

In 2001, the court ruled 8 to 0 that there is no "medical necessity" exception to federal drug laws against producing and distributing marijuana, so California's "cannabis clubs" cannot escape prosecution by saying they save lives.

But in 2003, the court refused to hear the Bush administration's appeal of a 9th Circuit ruling that said doctors have a right to discuss marijuana as a treatment option with their patients. That left the 9th Circuit ruling on the books.

Thus, today's case is critical to the medical marijuana movement. With cannabis clubs unable to distribute pot legally, a doctor's right to recommend it would be meaningless unless users or their friends can grow it themselves.

The case is Ashcroft v. Raich, No. 03-1454. A decision is expected by July.

Happy Holidays !! 

Wireless Networks & Wardriving

Most home users go out and buy a wireless router, hook it up to their DSL or Cable modem, set a few default parameters, and forget about any security concerns with their equipment. In effect they have set up an open system, which can be accessed by "wardrivers" who want unrestricted, unpaid, and unnoticed access to the Internet or other network equipment.

We have tested several locations in a nearby city for open systems, and can report that AP's are open on almost every block. Going into many apartment complex public areas with nothing more than an ORiNOCO Gold card, even with the built-in antenna, and with Netstumbler on a laptop, can put you on the Web within five minutes, guaranteed.

Usually it's not a problem for anyone, unless there is malicious intent, and then, there can be real problems. For an introductory primer on promiscuous access to wireless networks read the information here.

Reuters: Nov. 24, 2004: A Ukrainian woman places carnations into the shields of anti-riot policemen standing outside the presidential office in Kiev, November 24, 2004. Ukraine's authorities raised the stakes in a face-off with their liberal opposition on Wednesday as they prepared to announce results of a disputed election that are likely to infuriate thousands of protesters in the streets.
 

Citing Terror Issues, Britain Plans National ID Cards
By ALAN COWELL
NY Times International
Published: November 24, 2004

LONDON, Nov. 23 - Invoking a global threat of terrorism, the British government announced plans on Tuesday to introduce national identity cards for the first time since the World War II era. An opposition legislator said the government wanted to create a "climate of fear" in advance of elections expected next year.

New Car Jacking Scheme

DeKalb County Sheriffs Office
Nov. 23rd, 2004

You walk across the parking lot, unlock your car and get inside. Then you lock all your doors, start the engine and shift into reverse, and you look into the rear view mirror to back out of your parking space and you notice a piece of paper stuck to the middle of the rear window.

So you shift into park, unlock your doors and jump out of your car to remove that paper (or whatever it is) that is obstructing your view. When you reach the back of your car, that is when the car-jackers appear out of nowhere, jump into your car and take off!

Your engine was running (ladies would have their purse in the car) and they practically mow you down as they speed off in your car.

Just drive away and remove the paper later and be thankful you read this info herel. I hope you will forward this to friends and family, especially women! A purse contains all identification and you certainly do not want someone getting your home address, they already HAVE your keys!

Deficit Disorder

American Progress Action
Fund

Nov. 23, 2004

President Bush's reckless fiscal policies, combined with a dollar edging towards a dangerous "free fall," are imperiling America's economy. The weak dollar would be little cause for alarm had President Bush's first term tax cuts not "driven the government's budget deficit to record levels." But if foreign bankers, who finance most of America's debt, continue to lose confidence in the Bush administration's ability to pay down that deficit, they could stop investing in our economy. Once that happens, the market for U.S. dollars would dry up, causing the dollar's value to fall further and faster. At that point, to attract investment, America would be forced to raise interest rates, slowing America's economy and making it even harder to pay down the debt. (Put the dollar's decline in perspective with this new column from American Progress's Christian Weller.)

FOREIGN LEADERS SKEPTICAL OF BUSH: To minimize the risk of an abrupt crash in the dollar, President Bush needs to convince the world he is serious about reducing the debt. But the world is skeptical. Last week, as Congress finalized plans to raise America's debt ceiling for the third time in three years, Bush told a summit of CEO's in Chile that he was committed to reducing the deficit. The remarks were not well-received. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder "openly criticized the U.S." for its inability to trim its "twin deficit…the current account deficit and the budget deficit." London currency specialist Monica Fan said Bush's pledge didn't "amount to anything more than political posturing." Another European economist said the dollar's accelerated decline since the Nov. 2 election reflected concern that Bush's "emphasis on tax cuts" would prevent him from reining in deficits.

GREENSPAN WARNS DEFICIT COULD DESTABILIZE ECONOMY: The complaints haven't all come from foreign economists. The administration's own Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, warned this week that "The persistence of bloated U.S. trade deficits over time can pose a risk to the U.S. economy." So far, Greenspan said, foreigners have been willing to lend the U.S. money to finance the current account imbalances, but "at some point foreigners might suddenly lose interest in holding dollar-denominated investments. That could cause foreigners to unload investments in U.S. stocks and bonds, sending their prices plunging and interest rates soaring."

MADE IN CHINA: The Bush administration's inability to pay down the deficit is subjecting America's economy to the whims of foreign leaders. "Right now, our whole country's on life-support from Beijing and Tokyo," said Euro Pacific Capital CEO Peter
Schiff. As the dollar continues to weaken, Schiff said, "China might decide it's best to cut us off this welfare scheme and start spending the money on their own citizens." Morgan Stanley economist Stephen Roach adds, "The day will come when foreign investors simply say 'no' to this arrangement. That's when the dollar collapses, US interest rates soar, and the stock market plunges. Under such a crisis scenario, a US recession would be all but inevitable." The Guardian reports the Chinese – the number one financer of American debt – are already "losing their appetite for US holdings."

BACK TO THE FUTURE: Some experts insist the current decline of the dollar is "eerily similar to a decline in the 1970s that touched off the worst period of growth the United States experienced since World War II." Then, as now, the dollar declined at a time of "high budget and trade deficits, low interest rates, high oil prices and ever-increasing military spending." By the end of that decade, "the nation was suffering double-digit rates in inflation, mortgages and unemployment."

Sports Thuggery

NBA takes hard stance, other need to follow suit
Monday, November 22, 2004
Muskegon Chronicle

The most shocking thing about the NBA melee that occurred last weekend is that it didn't happen sooner. Or that it wasn't worse. As bad as it was when Indiana Pacers' Ron Artest sparked a brawl between players and fans that saw punches thrown, a chair tossed, beer poured and a frightened 8-year-old kid bawling on the fringe of the activity, the incident was confined to a relatively small area among a relatively few people and there were no serious injuries.

David Stern knows that. That's why the NBA commissioner moved quickly in handing down the most severe suspension in major sports history to Artest, the instigator and primary aggressor in the incident. Artest, who has a history of violent behavior, has been suspended for the season.

Maybe it takes that kind of financial penalty to get through to spoiled athletes like Artest that people have to learn to act civilly in a civilized society. Maybe enacting long-term suspensions is the only way Stern knows to make a point that thuggery will not be tolerated in the NBA. But taking a stand isn't always easy. Suspensions don't just affect players. They affect teams. They affect the quality of games. And they raise the hackles of union representatives and attorneys, who generally believe the player is always right, no matter what the customer thinks.

Yes, there will be an appeal. And, yes, there will be lawyers lining up at the doors to cash in on another major sports debacle. Suspensions aren't popular period. But they're necessary. That's why Stern also went after Indiana's Stephen Jackson and Jermaine O'Neal for joining Artest in the stands with fists clinched. Stern suspended Jackson for 30 games and O'Neal for 25 while levying a bunch of smaller game suspensions to several other players involved in the incident, including Detroit's Ben Wallace who went after Artest on the court after an unnecessarily hard foul with about 5 minutes remaining.

The way Artest and his teammates barreled into the stands to attack heckling fans was downright scary. In sports where so many top officials look the other way, Stern's stand is practically unheard of. When a reporter asked Stern if it was a close vote on the hefty suspensions, he said it was a unanimous decision -- 1-0. In other words, he didn't need weeks to conduct an investigation. He didn't need a police report. He didn't need to seek opinions from a bunch of outside sources.

He just needed his own eyes to see what happened and his own good sense to make a decision. Because what he saw on film made him sick to his stomach.

In handing down the historic suspensions, Stern talked about his concern for the declining standards of respect involving both players and fans in the NBA, but he could have been talking about sports in general.

Remember, a day after the NBA brawl, South Carolina disgraced its outgoing football coach Lou Holtz by mixing it up with Clemson players during a college game. That particular altercation spread to dozens of players with one afterward having the audacity to excuse the incident by saying it wasn't nearly as bad as the NBA fight because their melee didn't involve fans.

Even Clemson coach Tommy Bowden tried to blame the brawl on his players' reaction to watching the NBA melee on TV the night before.

Shame on you Coach Bowden. You had the opportunity to chastise your players royally for their behavior, to teach them the importance of taking responsibility, but instead decided to pass the buck.

Stern isn't interested in excuses. What he is interested in is cleaning up the image of his sport and holding both players and fans accountable for their actions. Yes, the fans who got caught up in the frenzy by dumping beer and popcorn on the heads of Artest and Jackson as they were shoved toward the locker rooms acted no better than the players themselves.

Fans, who often get extra stupid from guzzling beer throughout pro games, also need to be held accountable and it's about time they, too, receive penalties for disruptive or violent behavior.

The bigger question is whether it will make a difference in the long run. The decline of sportsmanship standards and the advent of thuggery at all levels of professional sport have been going on for years. And the trickle down effect to the collegiate and even high school levels has been of concern to many folks for longer than that.

As long as professional, collegiate and even prep teams continue to bolster their rosters with players of troubled pasts and poor character, incidents like what happened at The Palace and in South Carolina a day later will continue.

Stern made a statement with his actions. But, it will take a no tolerance policy from every leader at every level of the sporting community to make a real difference.

Note: And it's not like there was no prelude to this. Remember Iverson, or Spreewell? Nor is it just the NBA. Ask the Canucks, or do a Google search and see where there are at least a dozen websites devoted to fights at hockey games between players.

"The will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this as against any other abuse of power." John Stuart Mills, (1806–1873), "On Liberty". 

“I am a loyal party man, but I believe very firmly that I can best render aid to my party by doing all that in me lies to make that party responsive to the needs of the state, responsive to the needs of the people, and just so far as I work along those lines I have the right to challenge the support of every decent man, no matter what his party may be. I despise a man who surrenders his conscience to a multitude as much as I do the one who surrenders it to one man.

"If we wish to do good work for our country we must be unselfish, disinterested, sincerely desirous of the well-being of the commonwealth, and capable of devoted adherence to a lofty ideal; but in addition we must be vigorous in mind and body, able to hold our own in rough conflict with our fellows, able to suffer punishment without flinching, and, at need, to repay it in kind with full interest. by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt 

Business Done the Trump Way

Trump's Casinos File for Bankruptcy
By REUTERS
Published: November 22, 2004
Filed at 7:52 a.m. ET

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Donald Trump's casino operations filed for bankruptcy Sunday in a long-expected move that would allow the real estate maverick to restructure the company's debt and overhaul its aging casinos."

Under the voluntary bankruptcy filing, Trump Atlantic City Associates, which is 99 percent owned by Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts Inc., listed $1.3 billion in debt and $1.5 million in assets. It marks the second bankruptcy for Trump's casino empire. In 1992, Trump's Atlantic City casinos filed for Chapter 11 after buckling under the weight of $1 billion in debt. He later regained control of those properties.

The restructuring plan forged last month calls for the bondholders to own about two-thirds of the company. Trump's stake would shrink to about 27 percent from 56 percent.

With Krugman off writing a book, Mr. Rich is doing just fine as a replacment!!

NY Times Op-Ed
Frank Rich
Nov. 21, 2004
Bono's New Casualty: 'Private Ryan'

As American soldiers were dying in Falluja, some Americans back home spent Veteran's Day mocking the very ideal our armed forces are fighting for ­ freedom. Ludicrous as it sounds, 66 ABC affiliates revolted against their own network and refused to broadcast "Saving Private Ryan." The reason: fear. Not fear of terrorism or fear of low ratings but fear that their own government would punish them for exercising freedom of speech.

If the Federal Communications Commission could slap NBC after Bono used an expletive to celebrate winning a Golden Globe, then not even Steven Spielberg's celebration of World War II heroism could be immune from censorship. The American Family Association, which mobilized the mob against "Ryan," was in full blaster-fax and e-mail rage. Its scrupulous investigation had found that the movie's soldiers not only invoked the Bono word 21 times but also, perhaps even more indecently, re-enacted "graphic violence" in the battle scenes. How dare those servicemen impose their filthy mouths and spilled innards on decent American families! In our new politically correct American culture, war is always heck.

The stations that refused to show the movie were not just in Baton Rouge and Biloxi but in cities like Boston, Detroit, Cleveland and Baltimore. For some reason, a number of them replaced "Ryan" with the 1986 movie "Hoosiers," the heartwarming tale of high school basketball players who claw their way to the championship in 1950's Indiana. But even Indiana and jocks have no immunity from the indecency cops in 2004. Less than 48 hours after "Hoosiers" supplanted the censored "Ryan," the Pittsburgh Panthers quarterback Tyler Palko used the Bono word in a live interview with NBC Sports's Tom Hammond after his team's upset of Notre Dame. Unless the F.C.C. wants to open a legal Pandora's box, it now has no choice but to apply the same principles to a victorious football player's spontaneous expletive that it did to a victorious rock star's.

For anyone who doubts that we are entering a new era, let's flash back just a few years. "Saving Private Ryan," with its "CSI"-style disembowelments and expletives undeleted, was nationally broadcast by ABC on Veteran's Day in both 2001 and 2002 without incident, and despite the protests of family-values groups. What has changed between then and now? A government with the zeal to control both information and culture has received what it calls a mandate. Media owners who once might have thought that complaints by the American Family Association about a movie like "Saving Private Ryan" would go nowhere are keenly aware that the administration wants to reward its base. Merely the threat that the F.C.C. might punish a TV station or a network is all that's needed to push them onto the slippery slope of self-censorship before anyone in Washington even bothers to act. This is McCarthyism, "moral values" style.

What makes the "Ryan" case both chilling and a harbinger of what's to come is that it isn't about Janet Jackson and sex but about the presentation of war at a time when we are fighting one. That some of the companies whose stations refused to broadcast "Saving Private Ryan" also own major American newspapers in cities as various as Providence and Atlanta leaves you wondering what other kind of self-censorship will be practiced next. If these media outlets are afraid to show a graphic Hollywood treatment of a 60-year-old war starring the beloved Tom Hanks because the feds might fine them, toy with their licenses or deny them permission to expand their empires, might they defensively soften their news divisions' efforts to present the graphic truth of an ongoing war? The pressure groups that are exercised by Bono and "Saving Private Ryan" are often the same ones who are campaigning to derail any news organization that's not towing the administration line in lockstep with Fox.

Even without being threatened, American news media at first sanitized the current war, whether through carelessness or jingoism, proving too credulous about everything from weapons of mass destruction to "Saving Private Lynch" to "Mission Accomplished." During the early weeks of the invasion, carnage of any kind was kept off TV screens, as if war could be cost-free. Once the press did get its act together and exercised skepticism, it came under siege. News organizations that report facts challenging the administration's version of events risk being called traitors. As with "Saving Private Ryan," the aim of the news censors is to bleach out any ugliness or violence. But because the war in Iraq, unlike World War II, is increasingly unpopular and doesn't have an assured triumphant ending, it must also be scrubbed of any bad news that might undermine its support among the administration's base. Thus the censors argue that Abu Ghraib, and now a marine's shooting of a wounded Iraqi prisoner in a Falluja mosque, are vastly "overplayed" by the so-called elite media.

President Bush tried to turn the campaign, in part, into a referendum on Hollywood's lack of a "heart and soul." Now that he's won, administration apparatchiks have declared his victory a repudiation not just of Hollywood's dream factory but of the news industry's reality factory. "The biggest loser was the mainstream media," wrote Peggy Noonan in an online analysis for The Wall Street Journal after Election Day. She predicted that institutions like the networks, The New York Times and, presumably, the print edition of her own newspaper (editorial page excepted) were on their way to being rendered extinct by "the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet" ­ in other words, by opinion writers like herself.

In this diet of "news" championed by the right, there's no need for actual reporters who gather facts firsthand by leaving their laptops and broadcast booths behind and risking their lives to bear witness to what is actually happening on the ground in places like Falluja and Baghdad. The facts of current events can become as ideologically fungible as the scientific evidence supporting evolution. Whatever comforting version of events supports your politics is the "news."

The reductio ad absurdum of such a restricted news diet is Jim Bunning, the newly re-elected senator from Kentucky. During the campaign he drew a blank when asked to react to the then widely circulated story of an Army Reserve unit in Iraq, including one soldier from his own state, that refused to follow orders to carry out what it deemed a suicide fuel-delivery mission. "I don't read the paper" is how he explained his cluelessness. "I haven't done that for the last six weeks. I watch Fox News to get my information." That's his right as a private citizen, though even Fox had some coverage of that story. But as a senator, he has the power to affect decisions on the conduct of the war and to demand an accounting of the circumstances under which one of his own constituents was driven to revolt against his officers. Instead Mr. Bunning was missing in action.

He is, however, a role model of the compliant citizen the Bush administration wants, both in officialdom and out. In a memorable passage in Ron Suskind's pre-election article on the president in The New York Times Magazine, a senior White House adviser tells Mr. Suskind that there's no longer any need for the "reality-based community" epitomized by journalists. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," the adviser says. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." A test run of this approach dates at least as far back as May 2003, a week after the president declared the end of major combat operations. When a reporter told Donald Rumsfeld in a Pentagon press briefing that "journalists in Iraq report that a sense of public order is still lacking," the secretary of defense ridiculed journalists for showing only "slices of truth." The reconstruction effort, couldn't anyone see, was right on track.

The creation of this alternative reality has been perfected into an art form in Falluja. Almost everything the administration has said about this battle is at odds with the known facts. "There are over 3,000 Iraqi soldiers who are leading the activities," said the now outgoing deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, as the operation began and those Iraqi troops were paraded before the cameras. But as Edward Wong of The Times later reported, the Iraqis actually turned up in battle only after the hard work was done, their uniforms "spotless from not having done a lick of fighting." Meanwhile, another group of crack Iraqi trainees fled their posts in Mosul, allowing the insurgents, and possibly our current No. .1 evildoer, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to wreak havoc there while Americans were chasing their ghosts in Falluja.

Casualties are also now being whipped into an empire's idea of reality. "We don't do body counts," said Tommy Franks as we fought in Afghanistan in 2002 ­ an edict upheld in a press briefing in Iraq as recently as Nov. 9 by the American commander Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz. But only five days later, as the "reality-based" news spread that many of the insurgents had melted away before we got to them, that policy was sacrificed to the cause of manufacturing some good news to drive out the bad. Suddenly there was a body count of 1,200 to 1,600 insurgents in Falluja, even though reporters on the scene found, as The Times reported, "little evidence of dead insurgents in the streets and warrens where some of the most intense combat took place." By possibly inflating both body counts and the fighting prowess of the local army against guerrillas, the Bush administration is constructing a "Mission Accomplished II" that depends on a quiescent press (as well as on a public memory so short that it won't notice the similarity between the Falluja narrative and Tet).

As the crunch comes, we'll learn whether media companies will continue to test such Iraq war stories against "reality-based" reportage, or whether they'll kowtow to an emboldened administration, spurred on by its self-proclaimed mandate and its hard-right auxiliary groups, that can reward or punish them at will. For now the most dominant Falluja image has been that of the "Marlboro Man" ­ the Los Angeles Times photo of the brave American marine James Blake Miller, his face bloodied and soiled by combat, his expression resolute. It is, as Mr. Rumsfeld might say, a slice of truth. But other slices ­ like the airlifting of hundreds of American troops to Germany to be treated for the traumatic fallout of Falluja's graphic violence ­ are, like "Saving Private Ryan" on Veteran's Day, missing from too many Americans' screens.

...because it drives em nuts !! 

FDA Researcher Says Five Drugs Need to Be Critically Reviewed for Safety Reasons

FDA Reviewer Says 5 Drugs Need Closer Scrutiny
Thu Nov 18, 2004 05:34 PM ET
By Lisa Richwine and Ransdell Pierson

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. Food and Drug Administration reviewer who has accused the agency of being lax in monitoring drug safety on Thursday said five medicines on the market need closer scrutiny.

Shares of several makers of the drugs, including British rivals GlaxoSmithKline Plc and AstraZeneca Plc, fell sharply after the testimony.

Dr. David Graham, speaking at a Senate hearing, singled out Abbott Laboratories Inc.'s weight-loss drug Meridia, AstraZeneca's cholesterol fighter Crestor, Pfizer Inc.'s arthritis treatment Bextra, Roche's acne drug Accutane and GlaxoSmithKline's asthma drug Serevent.

"There are at least five drugs on the market today that I think need to be looked at quite seriously to see if they belong there," said Graham, associate director for science in the FDA's Office of Drug Safety.

Graham in August presented his FDA-sponsored study suggesting Merck & Co's arthritis drug Vioxx caused heart attacks and stroke, the month before Merck recalled its $2.5 billion-a-year drug. Graham has alleged senior FDA officials tried to suppress his findings.

Scientific Enquiry Works Best When It's Not Ideologically Constrained

NAS Committee on Ensuring the Best Science and Technology Presidential and Federal Advisory Committee Appointments

November 2004—The National Academy of Sciences has released a report that speaks out against the use of political litmus tests when selecting scientists for scientific advisory committees. The report also recommends that the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) be restored to the level of assistant to the president, as the position was under previous administrations.

UCS has documented numerous cases in which the Bush administration, during its first term, imposed political litmus tests on candidates for advisory committees. Also, in a departure from previous administrations, the director of the OSTP does not report directly to the president. UCS Board Chair Kurt Gottfried released a statement praising the recommendations, urging Congress to enforce and strenghthen legislation that forbids inappropriate questioning and urging the administration to restore the stature of the OSTP director.

The report comes from the NAS Committee on Ensuring the Best Science and Technology Presidential and Federal Advisory Committee Appointments, which was charged with addressing barriers to appointing the most qualified candidates for science and technology presidential appointments. The committee also examined the appointment process and the principles that should be observed in selecting qualified individuals to serve on federal advisory committees.

Many prominent scientists provided written comments to the committee. In addition, on July 21, at a full-day meeting at the National Academies in Washington, DC, the committee heard testimony from a wide variety of scientists and public-interest groups.

Many charged that the ideological and political litmus tests applied to potential federal advisory committee members by the Bush administration have had a chilling effect on the composition and quality of such committees.

"Scientists understand that public policy decisions must, in most cases, incorporate considerations other than science," said Alden Meyer, UCS director of strategy and policy. "Nevertheless, top-flight scientists can only be expected to accept senior government positions and advisory committee appointments if they have good reason to believe that objective science-based input will actually be heard by decision makers, and not be distorted, suppressed or ignored...It’s clear that if this pattern of abuse continues, there will be an exodus of scientific talent from the federal government."

The committee released the report on November 17, shortly after the presidential election. The executive summary details several points, including:

• "When a federal advisory committee requires scientific or technical proficiency, persons nominated to provide that expertise should be selected on the basis of their scientific and technical knowledge and credentials and their professional and personal integrity. It is inappropriate to ask them to provide nonrelevant information, such as voting record, political-party affiliation, or position on particular policies."

• "Shortly after the election, the President or President-elect should identify a candidate for the position of Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (APST) to provide advice, including suggesting and recruiting other science and technology presidential appointees. After inauguration, the President should promptly both appoint this person as APST and indicate the intent to nominate him or her as the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy."

Separated at Birth? Newsweek provided a photo of Karl Rove and Jerry Faldwell. Priceless !! 

U.S. Economy losing steam, Conference Board says

Leading indicators fall 5th straight month
By Rex Nutting, CBS.MarketWatch.com
Last Update: 10:19 AM ET Nov. 18, 2004

WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) - The U.S. economy is losing steam, the Conference Board said Thursday, reporting that the index of U.S. leading economic indicators fell 0.3 percent in October, the fifth straight decrease. The string of declines "is a clear signal that the economy is losing steam, and may start off 2005 with a relatively weak pace of economic activity," said Ken Goldstein, economist for the board.

A separate business confidence survey "suggests that worries about where the economy is heading may cause some strategic plans to be put on hold," Goldstein said. "And the signal will be much stronger if consumers turn more cautious, just as the holiday season approaches."

The September leading index was revised lower to a 0.3 percent decline, from a 0.1 percent drop previously.

Seven of the 10 leading indicators fell in October, led by consumer expectations, money supply and interest rate spreads. Vendor performance, factory workweek, building permits and new orders for capital goods also contributed to the decline in the leading index.

Three indicators gained ground in October: initial claims for jobless benefits, orders for consumer goods and stock prices.

In the past six months, the leading index has dropped 0.7 percent, with three of the 10 indicators strengthening.

The coincident index rose 0.3 percent in October, with all four indicators rising. The lagging index increased 0.2 percent in October.

Tom Delay: A Pattern Continues...

House Republicans Consider Rule Change to Aid DeLay
NPR.ORG

Morning Edition, November 17, 2004   House Republicans vote in a closed session Wednesday on whether to make rules changes that could shield Majority Leader Tom DeLay. A Texas grand jury has indicted several members of DeLay's staff on criminal charges related to campaign finances. A rule change could keep DeLay in his post if he were indicted.

Note: Recall the last several House Speakers or Majority Leaders: Delay, Hastert, Armey, Gingrich, Gephardt, Foley, Wright, O'Neil, Boggs, Albert, McCormack, Halleck, Rayburn. Which ones were accused of criminal wrongdoing? Which were censured by the House? Which were from Texas? Which could plausibly be considered a political moderate? Yeah...

Drug Law and Mandatory Sentence Idiocy Redux

Judge Questions Long Sentence in Drug Case
NY Times
By NICK MADIGAN
Published: November 17, 2004

SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 16 - In a case that has spurred intense soul-searching in legal circles, a 25-year-old convicted drug dealer, who was arrested two years ago for selling small bags of marijuana to a police informant, was sentenced on Tuesday to 55 years in prison."

Judge Cassell said that sentencing Mr. Angelos to prison until he is 70 years old was "unjust, cruel and even irrational," but that the law that forced him to do so had not proved to be unconstitutional and thus had to stand. The sentence was all the more ironic, he said, because only two hours earlier he had been legally able to impose a sentence of 22 years on a man convicted of aggravated second-degree murder for beating an elderly woman to death with a log. That crime, he argued, was far more serious.

The question of Mr. Angelos's sentence was at the center of a debate as to whether it was fair to send a minor drug dealer to prison for 55 years when a murderer, rapist or terrorist, according to the same sentencing directives, would ordinarily receive no more than about 25 years.

During a court hearing in September, Judge Cassell posed a question to the opposing legal teams in the case: "Is there a rational basis," he asked, "for giving Mr. Angelos more time than the hijacker, the murderer, the rapist?"

But in court on Tuesday, Robert Lund, an assistant United States attorney who prosecuted the case, called Mr. Angelos a "purveyor of poison," and said he had been dealing drugs for more than four years before his arrest. Carrying a gun in the commission of such crimes, he said, meant that Mr. Angelos was prepared "to kill other human beings".

Note: ...this is idiocy!...as is paying the going street rate of $400/ounce for pot! "War on Drugs" my ass !! State's Rights mean nothing to WOD fanatics who are deathly afraid people would smoke some pot and at least temporarily excape the hegemonic claptrap of American popular culture.

Megaphones and Muffled Voices

The Code of Fair Practices

From A Conference sponsored by:
North American Regional Association of the World Association of Christian Communication

"The primary mission of journalists is to offer readers, viewers and listeners a rough first draft of history as it is being made. By definition, this draft is not always complete, often presenting facts without adequate context, filing reports in a hurry and sending pictures that emphasize immediate action and consequences. Still, there is more to informing the public than merely relaying raw data quickly. To prepare coherent accounts of events, reporters and editors routinely filter and condense the vast amount of available information into a coherent package. They attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff. Information gatherers and gatekeepers fulfill their responsibilities best when they observe the following guidelines:

1. The best of journalists do not only report what they see, hear or are told by official sources. They dig beneath the surface. They strive to get the other side or sides of the story and rely on diverse sources.
2. Balance of coverage is not achieved only in providing equal space or time to each side. There is no balance when an articulate, moderate and charismatic person is asked to represent one side and an uncompromising, militant, fiery and inarticulate ideologist is offered as a representative of the other side.
3. Headlines should reflect the content of the story. Photographs should give a fair and accurate image of an event and not exaggerate an incident simply because the photograph is exceptionally dramatic.
4. As much as possible, journalists should understand the language, the history and the culture of the people they cover. They should not totally rely on interpreters provided by particular causes or governments.
5. Covering such a sensitive, nuance-ridden subject as the Arab-Israeli conflict, journalists should be careful in using such loaded words and cliches as "terrorists" "gunmen," "Islamic bombers" and "fatalistic" Muslims.
6. In presenting stories, there should be a clear distinction between news reports and expressions of opinion. News should be free of bias. Columnists should stake their positions by verifiable facts rather than secondary sources or reports. Op-ed articles by advocacy groups should be clearly labeled as such.
7. As a marketplace for ideas, the news media, particularly newspapers, magazines and periodicals, have a responsibility to publish all sides of controversial issues by inviting "op-ed" contributions and letters to the editor.
8. Journalists should have the courage of well-founded convictions and a healthy sense of fair play. They should never write anything that goes against their conscience.
9. Although pledges of confidentiality should be honored, they should be made sparingly - and only when the journalist deems it to serve the public's need for information.
10. Journalists are more self-critical about their work than their readers or viewers frequently give them credit. Journalists should also encourage thoughtful public input about their work.
11. Journalists should expect access from governments at all levels, especially from those that profess to honor democracy. So-called closed military zones and blanket orders prohibiting coverage in combat zones ill serve democracy.
12. Editorial criticism of a government's policy should not be equated as criticism or derision of an entire nation or class of people.

Let's be clear about this...

Two nations under God
New York Times
Nov. 5th, 2004
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Well, as Grandma used to say, at least I still have my health.

I often begin writing columns by interviewing myself. I did that Wednesday, asking myself this: Why didn’t I feel totally depressed after George H.W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis, or even when George W. Bush defeated Al Gore? Why did I wake up feeling deeply troubled ?

Answer: Whatever differences I felt with the elder Bush were over what was the right policy. There was much he ultimately did that I ended up admiring. And when George W. Bush was elected four years ago on a platform of compassionate conservatism, after running from the middle, I assumed the same would be true with him. (Wrong.) But what troubled me Wednesday was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don’t just favor different policies from me — they favor a whole different kind of America from me. We don’t just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is.

Is it a country that does not intrude into people’s sexual preferences and the marriage unions they want to make? Is it a country that allows a woman to have control over her body? Is it a country where the line between church and state bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers should be inviolate? Is it a country where religion doesn’t trump science? And, most important, is it a country whose president mobilizes its deep moral energies to unite us — instead of dividing us from one another and from the world?

At one level this election was about nothing. None of the real problems facing the nation were really discussed. But at another level, without warning, it actually became about everything. Partly it was because so many Supreme Court seats are at stake, and partly it was because Bush’s base is pushing so hard to legislate social issues and extend the boundaries of religion that it felt as if we were rewriting the Constitution, not electing a president. I felt as if I registered to vote, but when I showed up the Constitutional Convention broke out.

The election results reaffirmed that. Despite an utterly incompetent war performance in Iraq and a stagnant economy, Bush held onto the same basic core of states that he won four years ago — as if nothing had happened. It seemed as if people were not voting on his performance. It seemed as if they were voting for what team they were on.

This was not an election. This was station identification. I’d bet anything that if the election ballots hadn’t had the names Bush and Kerry on them but simply asked instead, “Do you watch Fox TV or read The New York Times?” the Electoral College would have broken the exact same way.

My problem with the Christian fundamentalists supporting Bush is not their spiritual energy or the fact that I am of a different faith. It is the way in which he and they have used that religious energy to promote divisions and intolerance at home and abroad. I respect that moral energy, but wish that Democrats could find a way to tap it for different ends.

“The Democrats have ceded to Republicans a monopoly on the moral and spiritual sources of American politics,” noted the Harvard University political theorist Michael J. Sandel. “They will not recover as a party until they again have candidates who can speak to those moral and spiritual yearnings — but turn them to progressive purposes in domestic policy and foreign affairs.”

I’ve always had a simple motto when it comes to politics: Never put yourself in a position where your party wins only if your country fails. This column will absolutely not be rooting for George Bush to fail so Democrats can make a comeback. If the Democrats make a comeback, it must not be by default, because the country has lapsed into a total mess, but because they have nominated a candidate who can win with a positive message that connects with America’s heartland.

Meanwhile, there is a lot of talk that Bush has a mandate for his far-right policies. Yes, he does have a mandate, but he also has a date — a date with history. If Bush can salvage the war in Iraq, forge a solution for dealing with our entitlements crisis — which can be done only with a bipartisan approach and a more sane fiscal policy — upgrade America’s competitiveness, prevent Iran from going nuclear and produce a solution for our energy crunch, history will say that he used his mandate to lead to great effect. If he pushes for still more tax cuts and fails to solve our real problems, his date with history will be a very unpleasant one — no matter what mandate he has.

Army Sends Out Callup Notices to Former Soldiers

Former G.I.'s, Ordered to War, Fight Not to Go
NY Times
By MONICA DAVEY
Published: November 16, 2004
ued the Army after his call-up.

The Army has encountered resistance from more than 2,000 former soldiers it has ordered back to military work, complicating its efforts to fill gaps in the regular troops.

Many of these former soldiers - some of whom say they have not trained, held a gun, worn a uniform or even gone for a jog in years - object to being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan now, after they thought they were through with life on active duty.

They are seeking exemptions, filing court cases or simply failing to report for duty, moves that will be watched closely by approximately 110,000 other members of the Individual Ready Reserve, a corps of soldiers who are no longer on active duty but still are eligible for call-up.

In the last few months, the Army has sent notices to more than 4,000 former soldiers informing them that they must return to active duty, but more than 1,800 of them have already requested exemptions or delays, many of which are still being considered."

CIA plans to purge its agency

Sources say White House has ordered new chief to eliminate officers who were disloyal to Bush
Newsday
BY KNUT ROYCE
WASHINGTON BUREAU
November 14, 2004

WASHINGTON -- The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.

"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

One of the first casualties appears to be Stephen R. Kappes, deputy director of clandestine services, the CIA's most powerful division. The Washington Post reported yesterday that Kappes had tendered his resignation after a confrontation with Goss' chief of staff, Patrick Murray, but at the behest of the White House had agreed to delay his decision till tomorrow.

But the former senior CIA official said that the White House "doesn't want Steve Kappes to reconsider his resignation. That might be the spin they put on it, but they want him out." He said the job had already been offered to the former chief of the European Division who retired after a spat with then-CIA Director George Tenet.

Another recently retired top CIA official said he was unsure Kappes had "officially resigned, but I do know he was unhappy."

Without confirming or denying that the job offer had been made, a CIA spokesman asked Newsday to withhold naming the former officer because of his undercover role over the years. He said he had no comment about Goss' personnel plans, but he added that changes at the top are not unusual when new directors come in.

On Friday John E. McLaughlin, a 32-year veteran of the intelligence division who served as acting CIA director before Goss took over, announced that he was retiring. The spokesman said that the retirement had been planned and was unrelated to the Kappes resignation or to other morale problems inside the CIA.

It could not be learned yesterday if the White House had identified Kappes, a respected operations officer, as one of the officials "disloyal" to Bush.

"The president understands and appreciates the sacrifices made by the members of the intelligence community in the war against terrorism," said a White House official of the report that he was purging the CIA of "disloyal" officials. " . . . The suggestion [that he ordered a purge] is inaccurate."

But another former CIA official who retains good contacts within the agency said that Goss and his top aides, who served on his staff when Goss was chairman of the House intelligence committee, believe the agency had relied too much over the years on liaison work with foreign intelligence agencies and had not done enough to develop its own intelligence collection system.

"Goss is not a believer in liaison work," said this retired official. But, he said, the CIA's "best intelligence really comes from liaison work. The CIA is simply not going to develop the assets [agents and case officers] that would meet the intelligence requirements."

Tensions between the White House and the CIA have been the talk of the town for at least a year, especially as leaks about the mishandling of the Iraq war have dominated front pages.

Some of the most damaging leaks came from Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, who wrote a book anonymously called "Imperial Hubris" that criticized what he said was the administration's lack of resolve in tracking down the al-Qaida chieftain and the reallocation of intelligence and military manpower from the war on terrorism to the war in Iraq. Scheuer announced Thursday that he was resigning from the agency.

A Pastor in the United Church of Canada Responds to Clerical Abuse

Essays on Clergy Abuse in
The United Church of Canada

The following are a collection of essays first posted by Rev. Morrison on United Online. They represent his reflections on the current issues facing ministry personnel in The United Church of Canada. He also offer some discussion starters on how we can respond as a denomination to clergy stress and isolation.

Clergy Union: Solution or Double Bind

The consensus seems to be that a clergy union will not work, but at least it forces the issue to be addressed. My observation is that when people get frustrated in a relationship, they cook up a plan aimed not at finding a solution, but at creating an effectively paralyzing double bind in the system. The double bind is meant to force the system to stop ignoring the problem.

You can tell a lot about where the primary obstacles are in a system by how the constructed double bind is directed. I would argue that in the case of the current union drive in the United Church, the double bind is directed at clergy in their episcopal, collegial, presbytery role. The union drive begs the wonderful, paradoxical, double-bind question: how do we clergy protect ourselves from ourselves?

And like any good double bind, in theory the only ones not paralyzed (any more than they already are) are the folk who first cooked up the double bind. But eventually the double bind can back fire on the creator because it is, at root, not intended as a solution. Nor is it functionally a solution.

Rather, it prompts someone to come along with a real solution, which threatens to leave the double-binders behind as the system moves forward to real second-order change. Anyone choosing to hold onto their bitterness rather than move ahead with a workable solution exposes themselves for who they really are: part of the problem to begin with.

What We Call Clergy Abuse

I believe the issue of clergy abuse is three pronged: 1) difficult parishioners, 2) unsupportive colleagues, and 3) personal maturity.

Difficult Parishioners - Congregational Governance

In my opinion, much of the difficulty with parishioners is related to congregational governance. Governance is, simply put, about funding and permissions. Ministry initiatives need money or other congregational resources. Ministry initiatives need stakeholder permission.

A typical scenario is the congregation that calls a minister to help achieve growth. The minister envisions a ministry initiative, attempts to implement it, and runs into resistance. Someone in the congregation uses their veto power to halt the ministry initiative, despite the minister's preparatory work.

In United Churches, this is typically played out in the Session vs. Stewards dynamic. Although the Session is responsible for giving permission for "people" ministries, the Stewards can veto access to funding or building use. The dynamic plays out wherever the governance structure has afforded "veto power" to a select group or individual over an area of funding or building space. The power to withhold permission for a ministry initiative can frustrate clergy.

The frustration for the minister comes from a disconnect between calling and cooperation in ministry. The governance structure says publicly that it wants the minister to lead, but the governance structure has not addressed veto powerbrokers in the governance structure.

Unsupportive Colleagues - Presbytery Governance

Almost all stories about clergy abuse in the United Church include disappointment with colleagues. Our ministry studies warn us about problem parishioners, dysfunctional congregations, and burnout due to overwork. But we are not adequately prepared for collegial abuse or abandonment.

If matters get out of hand in the congregation, someone often appeals to a higher court, namely presbytery. The minister looks to presbytery with a set of expectations. Mostly, the minister expects that he or she will be backed up on governance. When problems arise within the pastoral relationship, we have an institutionalized expectation that fellow ministers at presbytery will engage an objective and corrective process to protect us and to expose the troublemakers.

The minister has tried to play by the common, public set of governance rules in the congregation, but "problem parishioners" won't play by the rules. Surely someone in presbytery will see this and call the problem parishioners to account. But the anecdotes about clergy abuse are clear that this expectation of collegial support and protection is too often disappointed.

Why? In recent decades the presbytery landscape has become more problematic. Too often presbyteries divide themselves along conservative-liberal lines. When someone of a different theological stripe runs into trouble, we may blame his or her toxic theology and praxis for the mess. When someone of the same theological stripe runs into trouble, we may take it as more evidence that parishioners are toxic and unfaithful to our cause.

Moreover, protecting and supporting a colleague through pastoral problems takes a lot of time and energy. And clergy are already spread too thinly in presbyteries with JNACs, JSCs, PCO visits, inquirer committees, supervising students and pastoral charges, etc. Too often, and quite unfortunately, the path that leads most quickly to some semblance of pseudo-resolution (clergy exiting the pastoral charge) puts the matter to rest for colleagues at presbytery.

The problems with presbytery and collegiality are themselves set against a backdrop of congregational stress. Burnout happens not only when we are overworked, but also when we feel our work is meaningless. Despite the stats from Bibby showing some membership growth, too many clergy know that, despite their best efforts, their congregations are slowly declining, eventually doomed to close. When you go to work knowing that no amount of excellence will turn things around, that older parishioners will die soon without being replaced by new, young families-work can seem hopeless.

It is hard to find collegial support from a group already treading water.

Demographics also come into play at presbytery. I don't have numbers to support this, but my sense is that clergy are aging. Once upon a time, we had clergy of all ages, from young twenties through to retirees, in a presbytery. Over the past 10 or 15 years, new clergy were increasingly second-career baby-boomers adding to the ranks of existing baby-boomers and their elders. Fewer new clergy are young 20- or 30-somethings.

As we age, I think we naturally become worried, and even hopeless, about the state of any organization to which we belong. Older clergy have taken their lumps over the years, and they wonder if the organization will survive into the next generations. Older clergy know from experience that doing pastoral relations work can be deadly. Having young clergy around can bring new hope, vitality, succession planning, and that wonderful thing called idealism. But how many presbytery members, clergy or lay, are under 40? Under 30?1

For whatever reason, clergy are at risk when collegial support is absent or slow in coming, or fellow presbyters take sides depending on theological differences, or presbytery, not knowing its own rules, intervenes improperly. Most common, however, is the tendency for interveners to play mediator: to try to resolve the issue by equalizing blame. The favourite method is to determine that the minister has failed to manage his or her own personality, failed to keep the peace, deserving equal blame for the congregational distress.

The congregation accepts blame for not following proper process, but no structural changes are made to address congregational governance. At most, the problem parishioners are cast as poor governors. But the minister has been cast as a poor person-ality. In the eyes of presbytery, the parishioners are guilty, but the minister is shamed.

Personal Maturity - Self-Governance

The minister's personal process is a significant factor in congregational drama. Congregations are like families, and the minister's identity and self-esteem are intimately tied to perceived success or failure in ministry. Ministers can take things too personally. Ministers can fan the flames.

The biggest dynamic, however, comes from the governance-related nature of the conflict. When a minister's bids to influence the governance structure repeatedly fail, it is easy to turn to passive-aggressive or hyper-aggressive methods of influencing. Without an adequate support system to allow the minister emotional ventilation and feedback, the minister wrongly assumes that the great silent majority in the congregation and presybery will act as the ideal audience, seeing things exactly as the minister imagines. And responding and rescuing exactly as the minister imagines.

There is no substitute for dealing with one's own baggage and buttons. Without adequate attention to our own "stuff," ministers are prone to being anxiously reactive to the roadblocks and failed bids to influence congregational ministry.

Some hear in this analysis a "blaming of the victim." For me, any model or theory of clergy abuse that does not account for clergy agency is itself an abuse of me as a minister. I am an agent. To draw a parallel: I understand from clients who are rape victims or adult victims of childhood sexual/physical abuse that blaming the victim is unacceptable. But these same clients will not tolerate a treatment paradigm that cannot account for their agency and power.

Nonetheless, I always think it is appropriate to raise the warning about blaming the victim, lest the abusers run with that interpretation and ignore issues of difficult parishioners and unsupportive colleagues.

Where To From Here?

My first answer to the question is, "I don't know." I think that is the faithful answer. I do not know; and I hope we can invite the Holy Spirit to move among us. I hope we can trust the Holy Spirit's leading. I hope we can discern what is good and proper spiritual direction on this question.

Having said that, I will put forward some thoughts that I believe have some value in operationalizing the Spirit's leading. I don't believe for a moment that these are necessarily comprehensive or even good and faithful. But I put them forward according to my understanding of spiritual discernment: trust the Body to chew on it and affirm or not affirm God's calling in them.

Pastoral Triage

When I come into the office each Tuesday morning, a number of pastoral needs await me, usually piled up from the weekend and Monday. I do pastoral triage. What is truly a crisis, needing immediate response? What is important, but can wait? And what is dead or irrelevant to pastoral response?

Is the news about a union drive with clergy truly a crisis? Is it important, but nothing new, and not needing an immediate response? Or is it already too late, either because the moment has passed for our denomination to act, or because once the union genie is out of the bottle there is no turning back.

I'm leaning somewhere toward the middle ground between "crisis" and "can wait," with the momentum on the crisis side. Not because the media has jumped on the issue, but because I think the call for a union drive has started the clock ticking. And, most importantly, people are hurting, with everyone knowing a casualty story.2

Pastoral Principles

Given the three-pronged model I have presented above (Congregational Governance - Presbytery Governance - Self-Governance), I approach the issue, first and foremost, as an educational issue. Educate, educate, educate. Educate congregations. Educate presbyteries. Educate clergy. The principles that will determine the didactic content include the following.

Forgiveness. Here is how I conceptualize and operationalize this broad but powerful principle. I find in marital therapy that couples place too much emphasis on avoiding conflict. Conflict is inevitable. The more important relational skill is Repair. We lack repair mechanisms.

The analogy I use is spilled milk. You can educate your child all you want about how not to spill milk--to the point of making the child hypersensitive about spilling milk, which usually leads to a child frequently spilling milk. The more important skill is teaching the child how to clean up the milk after it has been spilled. The child is free for more spontaneity, the parent is free from hypervigilance, and the child learns a valuable skill: how to repair a mistake.

Educating for repair mechanisms in pastoral relationships is not spilled milk; it is more difficult, but it need not be more complex. Repair mechanisms in relationships involve moving past shaming to appropriate confessions of guilt, sometimes punishment, listening toward restitution, rehabilitation and openness to reconciliation. The same applies to pastoral relationships.

Graciousness. We are not in the habit of being gracious with one another. Anyone doing a content analysis of United Online posts over the past years could readily identify this truth. And that's just clergy talking to clergy. We can all name the parishioners who cause our heart rate to accelerate the moment we see them coming--we know they will have nothing gracious to say to us, and their cruel and demoralizing habits are slow but constant abuse.

Education for graciousness in pastoral relationships, both congregational and collegial, involves making people aware of what content and style of communication is toxic.

Discipleship. No one wants to follow anymore in this culture. The pastor's leadership in a congregation is accidental to the governance structure and mission. We get to preach, but when is the last time you heard a Session or Council meeting ask the pastor, "Where do you want to lead us on this issue…What direction do you discern to be God's leading?"

The irony is that the Presbytery-as-congregation is least likely to operationalize pastoral leadership. As past chairperson of Lambton Presbytery, I am in the middle of a restructuring proposal. But in addition to structural change, I wonder if we need a pastor. Now when I say pastor and presbytery in the same sentence, most automatically think I mean something like a pastoral care or counselling role, or a bishop. I do not. I think presbyteries should have a preacher. We know our congregations need and value having a regular preacher; but why not the presbytery--if it is actually a congregation of clergy? Sure, having a different preacher each meeting is nice variety, but would we recommend this to our pastoral charges?

My idea is crazy, and perhaps over the top. But I say: let's give every member of presbytery a ballot, have them write down the name of the one fellow presbyter they would most like to have preach at them for every presbytery meeting for the next 2-3 years. The name that gets the most votes is set apart for that role in presbytery. No nominations, no campaigning, hopefully as little popularity contest as possible. Whoever that person is, they are freed up from whatever presbytery (and even Conference) responsibilities they have, and they do nothing but preach. Not theological reflection at close of meeting. Preach and preside. I don't care if they don't want to. They do it anyway. If they believe in the concept of the congregation setting someone apart for the ministry of the Word, and respect the congregation's discernment, they will do it. And if they resist, trust that God will provide the belly of a fish.

Make presbytery a congregation for clergy, employing the very same strategies of Word and Sacrament we advocate in our parishioners' congregations.

Pastoral Oversight. Here is another dimension of discipleship and discipline sorely lacking within presbytery. The pastoral oversight visit is too often an exercise in futility. The national church needs to immediately draft standardized, relevant assessment tools for the presbytery's pastoral oversight visit to congregations. How do you really assess if the Ministry & Personnel Committee is functioning properly? How do you really assess if the clergyperson is making proper use of the gift of continuing education rather than fraudulently adding three weeks vacation? Because I believe corporate worship is central to congregational life and mission, how do you really assess the health of a congregation's worship? How many pastoral oversight representatives actually attend the worship service of the congregation they are overseeing? How do you really assess if a Session or Council is regularly asking the pastor, "Where do you want to lead us on this issue…What direction do you !
discern to be God's leading?"

Pastoral Relations. Here is another dimension of discipleship and discipline sorely lacking within presbytery. Even angels fear to tread here. Let's resource the brave souls who sacrifice themselves to this necessary presbytery task. The national church needs to immediately direct substantial amounts of financial resources to the training, support and succession planning of pastoral relations convenors and committees. How much money? Let me be so bold as to compare the amount to what the annual cost of a union would be.

The Rev. M.J. Perry makes a compelling argument that union reps are an affordable alternative to hiring a lawyer when trouble hits in the pastoral relationship. Our presbytery system, in this risk-management era, has evolved into a sterile monster that provides no advocate for the beleaguered pastor.

Hope. Growth in the Body of Christ has atrophied in our back yards. The front line of evangelism is not longer overseas. It is in Sarnia, Ontario. And Montreal. And Truro, N.S. And Swift Current, SK. And Banff, AB. And Smithers, B.C. We are not building for tomorrow. We are not operationalizing any hope for future worshipping congregations. This hopelessness infects the whole Body and its servants.

The congregation is the engine driving the future of The United Church of Canada. And the pastor is strapped to the front of the locomotive. The stewardship of the Mission and Service Fund will be forced, one way or the other, into a radical paradigm shift. Better sooner than later.

End Notes
1. The flip side, however, is that this concentration of older, baby-boomer clergy have the demographic clout needed to raise up issues of concern. And right now older, middle aged clergy are able to assert their need for something real and concrete to change.

2. There is debate about levels of stress and stress leave in the denomination. Cited in this debate is a misunderstood statistic about our Employee Assistance Program (EAP). The claim is that United Church ministers access the EAP plan more than other professions, evidence that our profession faces greater stress, perhaps from clergy abuse. It should be noted that our EAP is unique in that we can also access for supervision of our pastoral care and counselling. WarrenShepell, the denomination's EAP provider, fails to adequately differentiate this reason for accessing EAP, sometimes lumping requests for supervision under work stress, etc. Until WarrenShepell can adequately differentiate this variable, it is premature to assert that United Church ministers access EAP more often than other professionals. Maybe we do, maybe we don't...but I don't think we know yet.

Rev. Dr. Bradley T. Morrison
Grace United Church
Sarnia, ON
November 12, 2004
<------------------------------------->

Saving Private Ryan from Everyman

Where Aired, 'Private Ryan' Draws a Crowd
Washington Post
By Lisa de Moraes
Saturday, November 13, 2004; Page C01

An average of 7.7 million people watched ABC's unedited broadcast of "Saving Private Ryan" on Veterans Day -- a remarkable number given that viewers in nearly one-third of the country did not have the opportunity to decide for themselves whether the graphic Academy Award-winning, Steven Spielberg-directed, World War II epic was appropriate viewing in their homes.

That's because 65 of ABC's more than 220 affiliate stations appear to have refused to air the movie, including such large markets as Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, Orlando and Detroit, from among the 56 that are metered by Nielsen Media Research and tend to be among the country's biggest markets.

"Saving Private Ryan" includes many instances of an expletive for which TV stations may receive fines. Most of the stations that refused to broadcast the movie are owned by a handful of media companies, including Hearst-Argyle Television, Cox Broadcasting, Scripps Howard Broadcasting, Sinclair Broadcast Group, Young Broadcasting, Citadel Communications, Pappas Telecasting and Belo Corp.

Officials from some of these companies said they felt it was their civic duty to preempt the flick:

Ahh...Chocolate...

Libido linked to love of chocolate
November 15, 2004

Women have compared chocolate to sex for decades. Now doctors have discovered a scientific link between the two. Desirable ... female chocolate lovers have a higher sex drive.

According to Italian researchers, women who eat chocolate regularly had the highest levels of desire, arousal and satisfaction from sex. But for men, the findings of a British study were not so good.

Research has found men who are sexually promiscuous when they are young could be increasing their risk of contracting prostate cancer later in life.

The study suggests sex with lots of partners increases the risk of exposure to the human papilloma virus (HPV) and that such infections may kick-start the chain of genetic mutations that lead to cancer, often decades later.

HPV is already linked to cervical cancer in women, but the suggestion it might also cause prostate cancer in men is new. If confirmed, it could explain why rates of the disease have surged in the Western world.

"HPV infects many women in their late teens and early 20s," said Tim Oliver, professor of medical oncology at the London School of Medicine and Dentistry. "We know this is linked to cervical cancer later in life and now we're seeing that in men it also lays the seeds for prostate cancer."

Dr Oliver's study follows research from Sweden that found men with high levels of antibodies against the HPV 33 strain of the virus - the same one involved in cervical cancer - were more likely to develop prostate cancer.

In the chocolate/sex study, urologists from Milan's San Raffaele hospital questioned 163 women about their consumption of chocolate and their sexual fulfilment.

"Women who have a daily intake of chocolate showed higher levels of desire than women who did not have this habit," the study found. "Chocolate can have a positive physiological impact on a woman's sexuality."

Dr Andrea Salonia, author of the study - funded by a university, not by the confectionery industry - said women who had a low libido could become more amorous after eating chocolate.

She believes chocolate could be particularly medicinal for women who shun sex because they are suffering from premenstrual tension.

"Chocolate is not like a food, it's like a drug," Dr Salonia said. "Women who suffer mood swings as a result of their menstrual cycle may also suffer a dip in their sexual function. I strongly believe eating chocolate may improve their sexual function."

The research also looked at smoking and coffee consumption, but found no links with sexual enjoyment.
From The Sunday Times of London

Can You Say: Hypocrisy?

November 14, 2004
NY Times Op-Ed
FRANK RICH
On 'Moral Values,' It's Blue in a Landslide

Farewell to Swift boats and "Shove it!," to Osama's tape and Saddam's missing weapons, to "security moms" and outsourced dads. They've all been sent to history's dustbin faster than Ralph Nader memorabilia was dumped on eBay. In their stead stands a single ambiguous phrase coined by an anonymous exit pollster: "Moral values." By near universal agreement the morning after, these two words tell the entire story of the election: it's the culture, stupid.

"It really is Michael Moore versus Mel Gibson," said Newt Gingrich. To Jon Stewart, Nov. 2 was the red states' revenge on "Will & Grace." William Safire, speaking on "Meet the Press," called the Janet Jackson fracas "the social-political event of the past year." Karl Rove was of the same mind: "I think it's people who are concerned about the coarseness of our culture, about what they see on the television sets, what they see in the movies ..."

And let's not even get started on the two most dreaded words in American comedy, regardless of your party affiliation: Whoopi Goldberg.

There's only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media's conventional wisdom, it is fiction. Everything about the election results - and about American culture itself - confirms an inescapable reality: John Kerry's defeat notwithstanding, it's blue America, not red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide. Kerry voters who have been flagellating themselves since Election Day with a vengeance worthy of "The Passion of the Christ" should wake up and smell the Chardonnay.

The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is among Democrats. Those whose "moral values" are invested in cultural heroes like the accused loofah fetishist Bill O'Reilly and the self-gratifying drug consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when they turn apoplectic over MTV. William Bennett's name is now as synonymous with Las Vegas as silicone. The Democrats' Ashton Kutcher is trumped by the Republicans' Britney Spears. Excess and vulgarity, as always, enjoy a vast, bipartisan constituency, and in a democracy no political party will ever stamp them out.

If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it must be the undisputed king of the red cultural elite, Rupert Murdoch. Fox News is a rising profit center within his News Corporation, and each red-state dollar that it makes can be plowed back into the rest of Fox's very blue entertainment portfolio. The Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" and the Vivid Girls' "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox News by willing hosts like Rita Cosby and, needless to say, Mr. O'Reilly. There are "real fun parts and exciting parts," said Ms. Cosby to Ms. Jameson on Fox News's "Big Story Weekend," an encounter broadcast on Saturday at 9 p.m., assuring its maximum exposure to unsupervised kids.

Almost unnoticed in the final weeks of the campaign was the record government indecency fine levied against another prime-time Fox television product, "Married by America." The $1.2 million bill, a mere bagatelle to Murdoch stockholders, was more than twice the punishment inflicted on Viacom for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction." According to the F.C.C. complaint, one episode in this heterosexual marriage-promoting reality show included scenes in which "partygoers lick whipped cream from strippers' bodies," and two female strippers "playfully spank" a man on all fours in his underwear. "Married by America" is gone now, but Fox remains the go-to network for Paris Hilton ("The Simple Life") and wife-swapping ("Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy").

None of this has prompted an uprising from the red-state Fox News loyalists supposedly so preoccupied with "moral values." They all gladly contribute fungible dollars to Fox culture by boosting their fair-and-balanced channel's rise in the ratings. Some of these red staters may want to make love like porn stars besides. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) An ABC News poll two weeks before the election found that more Republicans than Democrats enjoy sex "a great deal." The Democrats' new hero, Illinois Senator-elect Barack Obama, was assured victory once his original, ostentatiously pious Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race rather than defend his taste for "avant-garde" sex clubs.

The 22 percent of voters who told pollsters that "moral values" were their top election issue - 79 percent of whom voted for Bush-Cheney - corresponds almost exactly to the number of voters (23 percent) who describe themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians. They are entitled to their culture, too, and their own entertainment industry. And their own show-biz scandals. The Los Angeles Times reported this summer that Paul Crouch, the evangelist who founded the largest Christian network, Trinity Broadcasting Network, vehemently denied a former employee's accusation that the two had had a homosexual encounter - though not before paying the employee a $425,000 settlement. Not so incidentally, Trinity joined Gary Bauer and Fox News as prime movers in "Redeem the Vote," the Christian-rock alternative to MTV's "Rock the Vote."

But the distance between this hard-core red culture and the majority blue culture is perhaps best captured by Tom Coburn, the newly elected Republican senator from Oklahoma, lately famous for discovering "rampant" lesbianism in that state's schools. As a congressman in 1997, Mr. Coburn attacked NBC for encouraging "irresponsible sexual behavior" and taking "network TV to an all-time low with full frontal nudity, violence and profanity being shown in our homes." The broadcast that prompted his outrage on behalf of "parents and decent-minded individuals everywhere" was the network's prime-time showing of Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."

It's in the G.O.P.'s interest to pander to this far-right constituency - votes are votes - but you can be certain that a party joined at the hip to much of corporate America, Mr. Murdoch included, will take no action to curtail the blue culture these voters deplore. As Marshall Wittman, an independent-minded former associate of both Ralph Reed and John McCain, wrote before the election, "The only things the religious conservatives get are largely symbolic votes on proposals guaranteed to fail, such as the gay marriage constitutional amendment." That amendment has never had a prayer of rounding up the two-thirds majority needed for passage and still doesn't.

Mr. Wittman echoes Thomas Frank, the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?," by common consent the year's most prescient political book. "Values," Mr. Frank writes, "always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won." Under this perennial "trick," as he calls it, Republican politicians promise to stop abortion and force the culture industry "to clean up its act" - until the votes are counted. Then they return to their higher priorities, like cutting capital gains and estate taxes. Mr. Murdoch and his fellow cultural barons - from Sumner Redstone, the Bush-endorsing C.E.O. of Viacom, to Richard Parsons, the Republican C.E.O. of Time Warner, to Jeffrey Immelt, the Bush-contributing C.E.O. of G.E. (NBC Universal) - are about to be rewarded not just with more tax breaks but also with deregulatory goodies increasing their power to market salacious entertainment. It's they, not Susan Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen, who actually set the cultural agenda Gary Bauer and company say they despise.

But it's not only the G.O.P.'s fealty to its financial backers that is predictive of how little cultural bang the "values" voters will get for their Bush-Cheney votes. At 78 percent, the nonvalues voters have far more votes than they do, and both parties will cater to that overwhelming majority's blue tastes first and last. Their mandate is clear: The same poll that clocked "moral values" partisans at 22 percent of the electorate found that nearly three times as many Americans approve of some form of legal status for gay couples, whether civil unions (35 percent) or marriage (27 percent). Do the math and you'll find that the poll also shows that for all the G.O.P.'s efforts to court Jews, the total number of Jewish Republican voters in 2004, while up from 2000, was still some 200,000 less than the number of gay Republican voters.

When Robert Novak writes after the election that "the anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, socially conservative agenda is ascendant, and the G.O.P. will not abandon it anytime soon," you have to wonder what drug he is on. The abandonment began at the convention. Sam Brownback, the Kansas senator who champions the religious right, was locked away in an off-camera rally across town from Madison Square Garden. Prime time was bestowed upon the three biggest stars in post-Bush Republican politics: Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger. All are supporters of gay rights and opponents of the same-sex marriage constitutional amendment. Only Mr. McCain calls himself pro-life, and he's never made abortion a cause. None of the three support the Bush administration position on stem-cell research. When the No. 1 "moral values" movie star, Mel Gibson, condemned the Schwarzenegger-endorsed California ballot initiative expanding and financing stem-cell research, the governor and voters crushed him like a girlie-man. The measure carried by 59 percent, which is consistent with national polling on the issue.

If the Republican party's next round of leaders are all cool with blue culture, why should Democrats run after the red? Received Washington wisdom has it that the only Democrat who will ever be able to win a national election must be a cross between Gomer Pyle and Billy Sunday - a Scripture-quoting Sun Belt exurbanite whose loyalty to Nascar does not extend to Dale Earnhardt Jr., who was fined last month for saying a four-letter word on television.

According to this argument, the values voters the Democrats must pander to are people like Cary and Tara Leslie, archetypal Ohio evangelical "Bush votes come to life" apotheosized by The Washington Post right after Election Day. The Leslies swear by "moral absolutes," support a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and mostly watch Fox News. Mr. Leslie has also watched his income drop from $55,000 to $35,000 since 2001, forcing himself, his wife and his three young children into the ranks of what he calls the "working poor." Maybe by 2008 some Democrat will figure out how to persuade him that it might be a higher moral value to worry about the future of his own family than some gay family he hasn't even met.

"FDA Bans Vioxx And Bextra Critic From Advisory Panel Meeting

Plus le change, plus le meme chose avec les Bushies...:
November 13, 2004

A drug safety expert says his invitation to participate in a meeting on the risks of arthritis drugs like Vioxx and Bextra has been rescinded by government officials because he publicly expressed concerns about the medications.

Curt Furberg, a member of the FDA's drug safety advisory committee presented study data during a meeting of the American Heart Association last week. During the meeting, Furberg said a study showed people who took Bexta, a drug similar to Vioxx, had twice the risk of having a heart attack or stroke compared to those who didn't take it.

Bextra, a Pfizer drug, is a COX-2 inhibitor like Vioxx, which Merck pulled off the market on September 30, because a study showed that it doubled the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Furberg expressed concerns that 'higher-ups' in the FDA wanted to silence him. 'I think they're trying to control criticism at the committee meeting,' the Washington Post quoted Furberg as saying.

The day after Furberg presented his findings he was informed by the FDA that his invitation to sit on the panel discussion on Vioxx was rescinded because he spoke out publicly about his concerns over the drugs.

Officials at the FDA indicated Furberg was removed from the panel because of his potential conflict of interests. The advisory panel meets in February to discuss the risk of Vioxx and other arthritis drugs."

The Problem of Divorce, Marriage definitions, terminations, and The Christian Right

George Barna, president and founder of Barna Research Group, commented: "While it may be alarming to discover that born again Christians are more likely than others to experience a divorce, that pattern has been in place for quite some time. Even more disturbing, perhaps, is that when those individuals experience a divorce many of them feel their community of faith provides rejection rather than support and healing. But the research also raises questions regarding the effectiveness of how churches minister to families. The ultimate responsibility for a marriage belongs to the husband and wife, but the high incidence of divorce within the Christian community challenges the idea that churches provide truly practical and life-changing support for marriages."

Donald Hughes, author of The Divorce Reality, said: "In the churches, people have a superstitious view that Christianity will keep them from divorce, but they are subject to the same problems as everyone else, and they include a lack of relationship skills. ...Just being born again is not a rabbit's foot." Hughes claim that 90% of divorces among born-again couples occur after they have been "saved."

Ron Barrier, Spokespersonn for American Atheists remarked on these findings with some rather caustic comments against organized religion. He said: "These findings confirm what I have been saying these last five years. Since Atheist ethics are of a higher calibre than religious morals, it stands to reason that our families would be dedicated more to each other than to some invisible monitor in the sky. With Atheism, women and men are equally responsible for a healthy marriage. There is no room in Atheist ethics for the type of 'submissive' nonsense preached by Baptists and other Christian and/or Jewish groups. Atheists reject, and rightly so, the primitive patriarchal attitudes so prevalent in many religions with respect to marriage.

The Associated Press computed divorce statistics from data supplied by the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Health. They found that Nevada had the highest divorce rate, at 8.5 divorces per 1,000 people in 1998. Nevada has had a reputation as a quickie divorce location for decades. People from other states visited Nevada, fulfilled their residency requirements, got divorced and returned home single.

The data showed that the highest divorce rates were found in the Bible Belt. "Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama and Oklahoma round out the Top Five in frequency of divorce...the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average" of 4.2/1000 people.
-11 southern states (AL, AR, AZ, FL, GA, MS, NC, NM, OK, SC and TX averaged 5.1/1000 people. (LA data is not available; TX data is for 1997).
-Nine states in the Northeast (CT, MA, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VT) averaged only 3.5/1000 people.

Some of the factors that contribute to a high divorce rate in the Bible Belt, relative to Northeastern states are:
-More couples enter their first marriage at a younger age.
-Average household incomes are lower (OK and AR rate 46th and 47th in the U.S.)
-They have a lower percentage of Roman Catholics, a denomination that does not recognize divorce. Anthony Jordan, executive director of the Southern Baptist Convention in Oklahoma commented: "I applaud the Catholics," says Jordan. "I don't think we as Protestant evangelists have done nearly as well preparing people for marriage. And in the name of being loving and accepting, we have not placed the stigma on divorce that we should have."
-Some factor in conservative Protestantism -- which is prevalent in the Bible Belt -- may causes a higher level of divorce.

Baptists and nondenominational Protestant churches (which dominate the Bible Belt) included more adults who had been divorced (29 percent and 35 percent respectively) than any other Christian denomination, mainline or otherwise. Lutherans and Catholics had the lowest divorce rates at 21 percent. By contrast, the rate among atheists and agnostics was just 21 percent.

The same week the bishops released the statement on criminal justice (along with statements on Sudan, immigration, art and worship, abortion, and the Middle East), the chair of the bishops’ committee on marriage and family life joined the heads of the Southern Baptist Convention, the National Association of Evangelicals, and the National Council of Churches in issuing a call for the churches to "strengthen, support, and restore" marriages, which they called "God’s first institution." (The NCC general secretary, Bob Edgar, later withdrew his signature, warning that the declaration on marriage might be used by some in "inappropriate ways." He said, "it would be unconscionable if support for married couples...were to be twisted into a weapon that can be used to attack gays and lesbians.")

"The U.S. has more churchgoing than any other major democracy and it reports much higher rates of murder, rape, robbery, shootings, stabbings, drug use, unwed pregnancy, and the like, as well as occasional tragedies such as those at Waco and Jonestown. . . . There may be no link between the two conditions, but the saturation of religion has failed to prevent the severe crime level. . . . Societies rife with fundamentalism and religious tribalism are prone to sectarian violence. In contrast, England, Scandinavia, Canada, Japan, and such lands have scant churchgoing, yet their people are more inclined to live peaceably, in accord with the social contract. The evidence seems clear: To find living conditions that are safe, decent, orderly, and 'civilized,' avoid places with intense religion." James Haught

"As a result of losing a parent through divorce, children suffer two- to threefold increases in depression, suicide, school dropout, gang involvement, substance and alcohol abuse, teenage pregnancy, physical and sexual abuse, and other serious problems," said Dr. Michael Lamb, head of the section of Social and Emotional Development at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development."

The dissolution of the marriage tie was regulated by the Mosaic law (Deut. 24:1-4). The Jews, after the Captivity, were reguired to dismiss the foreign women they had married contrary to the law (Ezra 10:11-19). Christ limited the permission of divorce to the single case of adultery. It seems that it was not uncommon for the Jews at that time to dissolve the union on very slight pretences (Matt. 5:31, 32; 19:1-9; Mark 10:2-12; Luke 16:18). These precepts given by Christ regulate the law of divorce in the Christian Church.

Attention IE 6.0 Users: Another Worm Variant

New Version of MyDoom Worm in Zero-Day Attack
By Larry Seltzer, eWEEK
November 9, 2004

Anti-virus companies are reporting a worm that spreads via a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer. The vulnerability is not present in Windows XP Service Pack 2, but in all earlier versions of Internet Explorer 6, and no patch is available. It involves a buffer overflow triggered by an IFRAME or EMBED tag, which has an oversized SRC or NAME attribute.

The worm, known as MyDoom.ag in McAfee's naming, does not have a file attachment, as is typical of mail worms. Instead, it installs a Web server on Port 1639 of the infected system. The e-mails it sends out to spread itself contains a link to the server on the infected computer.

The page served when a user clicks the link, which takes the form http://aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd:1639/webcam.htm (where aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd is the IP address of the infected user), invokes the Internet Explorer vulnerability. The worm then takes over, downloading more files and spreading itself.

The use of an IP address means that users behind an NAT server cannot effectively spread the worm. Indeed, Ken Dunham, director of malicious code at iDefense Inc., said, "Home and SOHO users without sufficient perimeter defenses are most likely to be victimized."

A proportional Political Map reflecting the "Red/Blue" voting results in the 2004 election based on population size, rather than geography, or electoral votes. 

Red State - Blue State Morality and Murder Rates

Talkingpointsmemo.com
by Josh Marshall

A few years ago, before the 2000 election, I did a lot of research for what I thought might be a long article or a book on the cultural and social distinctiveness of what we now call Blue and Red America. One motivating interest of mine at the time was a widespread perception in at least a segment of elite public opinion that the Red States were the source of the country’s moral ballast.

‘Elite’ has many meanings. But here I was thinking of the talking heads on the Sunday shows, the best-read newspaper columnists, authors of well-read books and so forth. It was certainly the self-perception of the political voices of Red State America (Remember Newt Gingrich’s claim that Susan Smith, who murdered her two young sons in South Carolina and then tried to pin the blame on a black man, was a product of the Great Society.) But what struck me even more was that it was a perception shared by many --- at least many of the elite opinion-makers of the sort I discussed above --- in Blue America.

It was a window into an odd sort of self-loathing or self-critique that interested me greatly.

The oddity of this Red State moralism argument emerges most clearly when you look at statistics for virtually every form of quantifiable social dysfunction. Divorce, out-of-wedlock birth, poverty, murder, incidence of preventable disease --- go down the list and you’ll see that they are all highest in the reddest states and lowest in the bluest.

There are exceptions certainly --- the Prairie states being the key examples. But the pattern is striking and consistent.

The issue that interested me most were the statistics on murder, in part because they seemed to have the most interesting historical roots. Murder rates are also least affected by cultural bias. For instance, non-reporting of rape varies widely from country to country and region to region. The same can be true of assault. Murder, on the other hand, tends to get reported, regardless of the cultural context.


Thankfully, murder rates in the United States have dropped rapidly over the last decade. But the regional patterns remain. Broadly speaking, New England and the parts of the country originally settled by New Englanders have low murder rates --- some only a fraction of the national averages. The South on the other hand, and the parts of the country originally settled by Southerners, have higher murder rates. (The highest homicide rates are in the Old Southwest --- Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.)

The regional patterns get even more interesting when you drill down deeper into them.

Commonsense would probably tell most of us that big cities have higher murder rates than suburbs and small towns. And that’s true. But not everywhere. In the North and in much of Blue State America, for instance, big cities have higher rates of homicide. But in the South the pattern is turned on its head. The murder rate is highest in the small towns and rural areas.

Digging deeper still we find another difference --- though here the evidence becomes a bit murkier and less definitive. In the North, where murder rates are higher in urban centers, they tend to track with the commission of felonies.

In other words, people get killed by people who are in the process of committing felonies --- whether those be drug sales, muggings, robberies gone bad, organized crime, or something else. But in the Southern states, where murder rates are higher in small towns and rural areas, this isn’t the case. Rather than happening in the process of committing other crimes, these murders tend to be rooted in what are best described as violations of honor, personal slights that escalate into violence or in the simplest sense, rage.

The role of honor, or rather status and respect, caught my attention because it dovetailed with issues I’d dealt with in my academic research in graduate school --- comparisons between how the early northern and southern colonies were organized in the 17th and 18th centuries, really obscure stuff like how violence was used to organize society and discipline labor.

In any case, with the regional political cleavages so marked now and apparently even more entrenched than before, it got me to thinking over these issues again, about the historical roots of the cultural cleavages we now see before us.

I want to return to that point. But let me finish this post on a slightly different, but related, note.

Coming out of this election we hear again and again that folks in the Blue states have to give up their attitude of condescension toward those in the Red. The story comes in different flavors and intensities, ranging from admonitions to ‘reach out’ to folks in the Red states to more acidy claims that folks in the Blue states need to get over their alleged hatred of religion and Red state culture.

At some level, something like this is certainly necessary. I can do the math as well as anyone. And what these last two elections have shown (particularly this last one) is that if the country is divided more or less evenly, that ‘more or less’ isn’t working in our (i.e., the Blue states) favor. We’re in the minority for the moment, even if it’s a close run thing. And Democrats can’t keep going into elections in which so many states are simply out of play. As I wrote a couple days ago, Democrats need to find a way to put a good half dozen more states into play in every election.

Yet, the immediate political question isn’t the only one to discuss.

The talking point about Red State ‘culture’ is often bandied about as though the Red States were the only ones which had one --- as though the Blue States were living in some deracinated post-cultural secular-dom. But at the risk of stating the obvious the Blue states --- to the extent we can talk in such broad brush strokes --- have one too.

You can define it in a variety of ways. I’d say it’s based in modernity and tolerance. But once you see it in that light, is it simply a matter of the Blue States having an attitude of condescension toward the Red ones? The country has become sufficiently divided that there is a good deal of mistrust and animosity on both sides. And I think it is fair to say that that ill-will on the part of the Blue state America does sometimes express itself as condescension.

But the bad feeling of Red State America toward the Blue is just as often expressed as contempt, moral denunciation or simple rage. To the extent that one hears Blue Staters dissing Red Staters as holy-rolling trailer park denizens, the Red staters routinely portray their fellow countrymen as corrupt, deviant, rootless perverts who express their flipflopper-dom by oscillating between being limp-wristed whiners on the one hand and signing up to work for Osama bin Laden as terrorist fifth-columnists on the other.

All joking aside, I don't think either side in the Blue-State/Red-State face off has a monopoly on unkind views of the other, though given the 51%-48% it is a more pressing concern for those on the Blue parts of the map.

Foreign Student Enrollment Decline Indicate Serious Problem for U.S. Universities

Foreign Enrollment Declines at Universities, Surveys Say
By SAM DILLON
NY Times
Published: November 10, 2004

Many of America's top research universities suffered steep declines in foreign student enrollment this fall, according to two new surveys, and alarmed educators blamed delays in processing American visas as well as increased competition from universities overseas.

Educating international students is a $13 billion industry for the nation's 4,000 colleges and universities, and in many science and engineering departments a majority of graduate students are foreign.

The number of Chinese students who applied to attend American graduate schools this fall dropped 45 percent compared with fall 2003, according to a survey of its 450 member institutions by the Council of Graduate Schools. Applications from India fell 28 percent, the survey found. The decline in actual enrollments of students from those countries was less severe, however: 8 percent for Chinese and 4 percent for Indian students, the survey found.

The declines represent a troubling turnaround after three decades in which American colleges and universities experienced a boom in the enrollment of foreign students. The uninterrupted growth ended in the fall of 2003, when the country registered its first decline in foreign enrollment since 1971, 2.4 percent, according to the Institute of International Education.

"This is a serious problem for our country," said Peter D. Spear, the provost at the University of Wisconsin, where foreign enrollment declined by 3.8 percent, to 3,435 this year from 3,571 last year. "We depend on international students to provide a good portion of our science and engineering work force," Dr. Spear said.

At Arizona State University, which has about 60,000 students, the number from foreign countries fell 7 percent this fall over last. "It's a major issue for us, and it's going to get worse," said Michael M. Crow, the university's president. "We need workers in our scientific and engineering laboratories, and Americans tend to go into business, economics and law, while international students go into science and engineering. So our pool of talent is going down."

The countries contributing the most students to Arizona State's total enrollment are China, Taiwan, India, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, Dr. Crow said, and for students from all those countries, obtaining an American visa has become frustrating.

"For students from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, it's extremely difficult," he said.

Other causes of the decline in foreign enrollment include increasing competition from universities in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, as well as a large expansion of university capacities in the countries that send the most students to the United States, India and China.

"Both countries are dramatically increasing their capacity to train their own graduate students at home," by expanding existing universities and building new ones, said Peggy Blumenthal, a vice president at the Institute for International Education.

The institute released its annual report on student mobility, financed by the State Department, which surveyed enrollment data for the 2003-4 term. It found that total foreign student enrollment at 2,700 accredited institutions fell by 2.4 percent in the fall 2003 term, the first such drop since 1971.

At the same time, Nafsa: Association of International Educators released a survey, conducted with four other groups, of foreign enrollment this fall at more than 400 institutions. It found that some universities experienced impressive growth, like the University of Southern California, which has the most foreign students in the United States, 6,647, an enrollment that represents a 6 percent jump over fall 2003. But about two-thirds of the 25 universities with the most international students reported declines.

Similarly, in a survey released last week, the Council of Graduate Schools said 7 out of 10 graduate schools reported declines in first-time international graduate student enrollment.

Many universities that responded to all three surveys attributed the declines, at least in part, to visa denials and delays. Since Sept. 11, foreign students applying for visas have faced stringent review at American embassies. But science and technical students must also now be cleared by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. Educators have been warning that the process keeps thousands of students away, and officials in the Bush administration are trying to fine-tune it, said Vic Johnson, a spokesman for the Association of International Educators.

"But there's a perception in the world now that students can't get a visa to study in the U.S. anymore, and that may take a long time to fix," Mr. Johnson said.

Visa problems are keeping away not only students, but eminent visitors, too, said Larry Faulkner, president of the University of Texas. J. M. Coetzee, a South African author and the 2003 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who was once a doctoral student at Austin, cited the headaches of applying for a visa in declining to attend a ceremony to honor him there this fall, Dr. Faulkner said. And also citing potential immigration problems, the International Astronomical Union decided to hold its 2009 general assembly in Brazil, rather than Hawaii, said Ken Marvel, a spokesman for the union.

HEALTH CARE

The Merck-y Case for Tort Reform

American Progress Report: November 10th, 2004

Mounting evidence suggests that, for at least five years, pharmaceutical company Merck aggressively concealed evidence that its painkiller Vioxx was associated with an increased risk of heart attack and stroke – recklessly endangering tens of millions of people. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is working actively to ensure that drug companies like Merck don't have to pay one red cent to the patients they harm. In December 2003, FDA Chief Counsel Daniel Troy promised a group of drug industry lobbyists that "the FDA would exercise its intervention powers to protect [drug industry] defendants" from lawsuits. The FDA's actions back up Troy's words. Since Bush took office, the FDA or Department of Justice has intervened repeatedly in cases on behalf of pharmaceutical company defendants, each time claiming the FDA's own judgment to approve the drug means that drug companies can't be held responsible. The administration's broader tort reform agenda – including caps on how much a patient can recover – would provide further protection for companies like Merck. If the Bush administration gets its way, drug companies like Merck will be able to push products they know are dangerous to the public with impunity.

MERCK KNEW ABOUT THE DANGERS OF VIOXX FOR YEARS: An e-mail written on 3/9/00 by Merck's research chief, Edward Scolnick, acknowledges that results of a study conducted by a company showed cardiovascular events "are clearly there" among those who take the drug. The data showed "a fivefold increase in heart attacks in patients taking Vioxx compared with those taking an older painkiller, naproxen." Scolinick's e-mail, obtained by the Wall Street Journal, called the results "a shame," especially since the risk of heart attack or stroke was "mechanism based," meaning it was a risk inherent in Vioxx.

MERCK WILLFULLY COVERED UP THE DATA: The following month, Merck released a press statement saying the data from the trial showed "NO DIFFERENCE in the incidence of cardiovascular events" between Vioxx and older painkillers like aspirin. The WSJ also obtained a 16-page internal training document entitled "Dodge Ball Vioxx." Each of the first 12 pages lists one question that may be raised by doctors, including, "I am concerned about the cardiovascular effects of Vioxx" and "The competition has been in my office telling me that the incidence of heart attacks is greater with Vioxx than Celebrex." The last four pages contain a single word written in capital letters: "DODGE!"

MERCK THREATENED ACADEMICS WHO RAISED QUESTIONS: Merck attacked medical researchers who raised questions about Vioxx's safety. A Merck official called the Stanford Medical School to complain that a professor there, Gurkipal Singh, was giving lectures that were "irresponsibly anti-Merck and specifically anti-Vioxx." On the call, the Merck official, Louis Sherwood, said if Singh's conduct continued "Dr. Singh would 'flame out' and there would be consequences...for Stanford." Other academics (and their superiors) received similar calls.

MERCK UNDER CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION: The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission have launched criminal investigations into Merck's conduct. The Justice Department probe is investigating allegations that "Merck misled regulators or perhaps caused federal health programs to pay for the prescription drug when its use was not warranted."

VIOXX SHOULD HAVE BEEN PULLED BY THE FDA MORE THAN THREE YEARS AGO: There is another reason why FDA approval should not insulate pharmaceutical companies like Merck for liability: the FDA hasn't been doing its job. Jerry Avorn, a Harvard University drug safety expert, described the probes by the Justice Department and the SEC as "doing the FDA's work at a time when the FDA has been asleep at the switch in its regulatory function." Avorn's view is bolstered by a recent study in the prestigious medical journal Lancet that found Vioxx's "heart risk was evident in studies four years before the drug was recalled." By the end of 2000, "the evidence was strong enough to initiate discussion of whether the drug should be recalled." The Lancet study concluded that "too often the FDA saw and continues to see the pharmaceutical industry as its customer – a vital source of funding for its activities – and not as a sector of society in need of strong regulation." Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) said, "It looks like the FDA saw a lot of red flags from the beginning. The agency must address what looks like systemic problems when it comes to putting safety first and public relations second."

MERCK'S IRRESPONSIBLE ADVERTISING BLITZ: Why did 20 million people take Vioxx when, for most, it was no more effective at pain relief than aspirin? Marketing. In 2003, Merck spent half a billion dollars marketing Vioxx to health care professionals. In 2000, Merck spent more money advertising Vioxx to the public ($160 billion) than was spent marketing Budweiser ($146 billion) or Pepsi ($125 billion).

Ashcroft Resigns: Bush Seeks to Elevate Former Texas Supreme Court Judge to Become Next AG

Bush Taps Gonzales for Attorney General
November 10, 2004
Richard Tomkins, UPI White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON -- President George W. Bush announced Wednesday his selection of White House General Counsel and former Texas Supreme Court Justice Alberto Gonzales to replace John Ashcroft as U.S. attorney general. "

Gonzales, who embraced Bush as he stepped to the podium Wednesday, promised to fulfill his new duties and to be an attorney general for all Americans.

"As a former judge, I know well that some government positions require a special level of trust and integrity," he said. "The American people expect and deserve a Department of Justice guided by the rule of law, and there should be no question about the department's commitment to justice for every American. On this principle there can be no compromise."

Bush, in heralding Gonzales, his background and his commitment to enforcing all laws, noted the road to achievement wasn't always easy. Gonzales, he pointed out, grew up with seven siblings in a two-bedroom home in Texas built by his migrant-worker parents.

Gonzales' confirmation may not be without rancor. The American Civil Liberties Union Wednesday fired an opening shot in what could be a contentious confirmation process.

The organization called for Senate questioning of Gonzales' positions on key civil liberty and human rights issues.

"Particular attention should be devoted to exploring Mr. Gonzales' proposed policies on the constitutionality of the Patriot Act, the Guantanamo Bay detentions (of foreign terror suspects) the designation of United States citizens as enemy combatants and reproductive rights (abortion), the ACLU wrote.

The organization wants particular attention paid to a May 16 memo in which Gonzales allegedly denigrated certain legal protections in the Geneva Convention for people captured during military hostilities.

U.S. Judge Halts War-Crime Trial at Guantanamo

Federal Judge Brings Halt to Military Commission Trials

NY Times
By NEIL A. LEWIS

Published: November 9, 2004

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, Nov. 8 - A federal judge ruled Monday that President Bush had both overstepped his constitutional bounds and improperly brushed aside the Geneva Conventions in establishing military commissions to try detainees at the United States naval base here as war criminals.

The ruling by Judge James Robertson of United States District Court in Washington brought an abrupt halt to the trial here of one detainee, one of hundreds being held at Guant�namo as enemy combatants. It threw into doubt the future of the first set of United States military commission trials since the end of World War II as well as other legal proceedings devised by the administration to deal with suspected terrorists.

The New York Times > Reuters > Business > Microsoft to Pay Novell $536 Million

Microsoft to Pay Novell $536 Million

By REUTERS
Published: November 8, 2004

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Novell Inc. (NOVL.O) on Monday said it had reached a settlement with software maker Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O) over antitrust issues in which Microsoft will pay it $536 million in cash, sending Novell shares 11 percent higher in pre-market trading."

Linux News: Open Source: A9.com Launches Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox

Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) Latest News about Amazon.com subsidiary A9.com today released its new A9 toolbar for the Mozilla Firefox Web browser. The toolbar enables Firefox users to search the Web using A9.com bookmarks, site history, A9 lists and A9 diary features.

Users can download the A9 toolbar in less than two minutes from the A9.com home page.

Global Warming Materials for Educators

Link above is to a list of Global Warming materials for educators produced by the Union of Concerned Scientists' (UCS) Global Environment Program. All of these materials are based on published, peer-reviewed science, and have themselves been peer-reviewed by scientific experts in the relevant fields. "

File-Sharing Network Thrives Beneath the Radar
Sat Nov 6, 2004 11:16 AM ET

By Adam Pasick
LONDON (Reuters) - A file-sharing program called BitTorrent has become a behemoth, devouring more than a third of the Internet's bandwidth, and Hollywood's copyright cops are taking notice.

For those who know where to look, there's a wealth of content, both legal -- such as hip-hop from the Beastie Boys and video game promos -- and illicit, including a wide range of TV shows, computer games and movies.

Average users are taking advantage of the software's ability to cheaply spread files around the Internet. For example, when comedian Jon Stewart made an incendiary appearance on CNN's political talk show "Crossfire," thousands used BitTorrent to share the much-discussed video segment.

Even as lawsuits from music companies have driven people away from peer-to-peer programs like KaZaa, BitTorrent has thus far avoided the ire of groups such as the Motion Picture Association of America. But as BitTorrent's popularity grows, the service could become a target for copyright lawsuits.

According to British Web analysis firm CacheLogic, BitTorrent accounts for an astounding 35 percent of all the traffic on the Internet -- more than all other peer-to-peer programs combined -- and dwarfs mainstream traffic like Web pages.

"I don't think Hollywood is willing to let it slide, but whether they're able to (stop it) is another matter," Bram Cohen, the programer who created BitTorrent, told Reuters.

Want an easy way to get over it?...go shopping !! 

Summary of Bush/Kerry Ads 2004

The Whoppers of 2004
from Factcheck.org
Oct. 31st, 2004

Bush and Kerry repeat discredited claims in their final flurry of ads. Here's our pre-election summary of the misinformation we found during the Bush-Kerry presidential campaign.

Final Request

Dear Friends,

As you know, tomorrow will significantly affect the future course of our beloved country. As a product of one of America's previous war's of choice aka: Vietnam, I take an special interest in this election. In 1964 our Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson committed America to War in Vietnam, under a idealistic but flawed plan of bringing democracy and self-government to Vietnam, and preventing the "Domino Theory" of Communist propagation.

Almost forty years later our Republican president, George W. Bush, bypassed the United Nations, and unilaterally invaded Iraq based on a similar idealistic but flawed plan of preventing another 9/11. In both cases, the Secretaries of Defense asserted we were winning the War, in spite of all evidence pointing to the opposite observation.

In both cases America went in essentially alone, lost thousands of our fellow citizens to bullets, mortars, anti-personnel explosives, mines, and wartime accidents; and sapped our strength as a Nation at home. As history has shown, America make a mistake going into Vietnam; and as current news reports demonstrate, we have created several quagmires that will take years to ameliorate.

I refer to the illegal detention of several hundred detainees at Gitmo, the undocumented detention of numerous foreign nationals at our military facilities, the 'snoop and peek' segments of the Patriot Act, the poorly planned and executed operation of the Iraqi occupation, and the failure to progressively assist in the de-radicalization of the Worlds inhabitants, combined with the obscene mismanagement of our national resources, and pushed over the top with a jingoistic social and national "face" to our friends and enemies.

it is for these reasons that I urge you to go to the polls tomorrow and vote to elect the Kerry-Edwards ticket. In my almost sixty years of life, I have developed an awareness of the limitations, and powers of our Government; and that politicians are not Gods, but rather are generally decent people trying to do what they think is right. Unfortunately, our current CEO has failed in his job as the Chief Executive. With the stupendous complexity of our World we must have a Chief Executive who can guide our "company" with wisdom, foresight, compassion, honor, ability, professional grade tactical and strategic planning, and a touch of humility. Mr. Bush does not satisfy this need.

While some partisans have questioned Mr. Kerry's qualifications, his historical record shows he has more characteristics required for the job of CEO than Mr. Bush, if for no other reason than his military service, his service as a county prosecutor, and as a respected member of the Senate. Kerry is smarter, "quicker on his feet", more knowledgeable about facts, has a law degree, and is more open to the give and take of politics than Mr. Bush.

Thus, while Mr. Bush may be a decent fellow, he has shown he is incapable of leading this country. If given another term it is fairly likely he will follow the precedent of other Presidents in pushing his core agenda which runs contrary to the overall well-being of the average American.

It is my well researched, honest, and considered opinion that John Kerry will do a much better job of leading this country in our hour of need than Mr. Bush is capable of doing. I therefore beseech you to do everything in your power to assist in the election of the Kerry-Edwards ticket tomorrow.

Thank You,
=rwp=
For An Additional Last Minute Overview of Why Kerry is a Better Choice, Click Here:

Tomorrow Americans will face a choice...

One of the final videos of the campaign from Kerry-Edwards.

Under which administration would gasoline prices be less in 2005?

Kerry Presidency Could Mean Cheaper Oil--Analysts
Mon Nov 1, 2004 03:56 PM ET
By Richard Valdmanis

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil may cost as much as 10 percent less next year if U.S. Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry defeats President Bush in Tuesday's election, some energy analysts said on Monday.

Kerry is seen as more likely to use the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to cool prices and is expected to have a less aggressive policy in the Middle East, lowering the risk of supply disruptions from the energy-rich region.

"Under a Kerry administration we'd likely have a much more interventionist SPR policy," said Jamal Qureshi, market analyst at PFC Energy in Washington. "And when you look out a bit further, Bush is more likely to be aggressive in the Middle East, particularly in Iran," he added.

Oil prices have jumped to record highs of more than $55 a barrel on concerns over tight supplies, unreliable shipments from war-torn Iraq and growing demand from countries like China and India.

The high energy costs have sparked some concerns about their impact on the global economy, with a U.S. Federal Reserve Board governor last week calling the oil price increase a shock to the U.S. economic system.

On Monday, a day ahead of the election, oil prices recoiled more than 3 percent to $50.13 a barrel. PFC predicts an average oil price of $43 a barrel in 2005 if Kerry wins, compared with $48 if Bush is reelected.

EMERGENCY STOCKPILE

Despite surging energy costs this year, the Bush administration has been reluctant to release oil from the nation's stockpile, which was created by Congress in the mid-1970s after the Arab oil embargo.

"This administration doesn't want to be accused of playing politics with the crude reserve," said Aaron Brady, analyst at Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

Kerry has criticized Bush's tight-fisted policy and said Bush should at least stop filling the SPR to allow for more oil on the open market. The reserve currently holds about 670 million barrels, with a target of 700 million.

"A Bush status quo results in somewhat higher oil prices both in the short and the longer term, in my view," said Tim Evans, senior analyst at IFR Energy Services. "In the short run, it means more oil drained from the market."

Oil supplies in the United States, the world's largest energy market, are lagging well-below last year, according to government figures -- a key reason behind record high heating oil prices and gasoline over $2 a gallon.

Some analysts have added that oil prices in the longer term could trend higher if Bush is reelected because of tensions with Iran, an OPEC-member nation that Bush has named part of a global "axis of evil."

"There's an increased likelihood of some material confrontation in Iran with a Bush presidency," said PFC's Qureshi. Kerry is seen as more likely to work through conventional diplomatic channels, he said.

Iran, which sits on the world's second largest reserves of oil and gas, is facing international pressure due to concerns over its nuclear ambitions.

Both Bush and Kerry have said they hope to reduce U.S. dependence on imports from the Middle East, but they differ on how, with Bush focusing on increasing domestic production and Kerry focusing on cutting demand.

Many experts have said neither approach is likely to significantly reduce the need for foreign oil, which costs less to produce than U.S. oil, but they add that curbing domestic oil consumption is key to keeping a lid on prices.

"Conservation, in my opinion, is the only way to get us out of this hole which we put ourselves in," said Fadel Gheit, senior energy analyst at Oppenheimer & Co.

The U.S. consumes roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day, accounting for about a quarter of world demand.

One More Day to Make A Difference

Note: If you don't do anything to affect the outcome, you'd better not bitch and moan if the undesired occurs.

National Press Club Luncheon, Oct. 28th, 2004: George Soros

A Final Appeal from George Soros
Why We Must Not Re-elect President Bush

Speech delivered at the National Press Club by George Soros
Thursday, October 28, 2004, Washington, D.C.

"I have been crisscrossing the country for the last three weeks arguing against the reelection of President Bush. I feel strongly that he has led us in the wrong direction. The invasion of Iraq was a colossal blunder and only by rejecting the President at the polls can we hope to escape from the quagmire in which we find ourselves.

I embarked on the tour because I was worried that the dramatic deterioration in Iraq did not produce the decisive lead for John Kerry I had confidently expected. Now that I am at the end of my tour, I am not reassured. Kerry and Bush are neck and neck in the polls, and although I believe that voter turnout is likely to give Kerry the victory, the race is too close for comfort.

The nation is deeply divided and the two camps seem to be talking past each other. John Kerry won all three debates but President Bush invokes his faith and that inspires his followers. In the end, it boils down to a philosophical difference over how to deal with an often confusing and threatening reality.

Let me inflict on you a brief lecture in philosophy.

An open society such as ours is based on the recognition that our understanding of reality is inherently imperfect. Nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth. As the philosopher Karl Popper has shown, the ultimate truth is not attainable even in science. All theories are subject to testing and the process of replacing old theories with better ones never ends.

Faith plays an important role in an open society. Exactly because our understanding is imperfect, we cannot base our decisions on knowledge alone. We need to rely on beliefs, religious or otherwise, to help us make decisions. But we must remain open to the possibility that we may be wrong so that we can correct our mistakes. Otherwise, we are bound to be wrong.

End of lecture.

President Bush has shown that he is incapable of recognizing his mistakes. He insists on making reality conform to his beliefs even at the cost of deceiving himself and deliberately deceiving the public. There is something appealing in the strength of his faith, especially in our troubled time. But the cost is too high. By putting our faith in a President who cannot admit his mistakes we commit ourselves to the wrong policies. We are the most powerful nation on earth. No external power, no terrorist organization, can defeat us. But we can defeat ourselves by getting caught in a quagmire.

Open Societies suffer from an innate weakness: uncertainty. Leaders who claim to be in possession of the ultimate truth offer an escape from uncertainty. But that is a snare, because those leaders are bound to be wrong.

Under the influence of globalization we have been exposed to more than a normal dose of uncertainty. That is why the kind of faith that guides President Bush is so appealing. The traumatic events of 9/11 have reinforced that appeal. President Bush rose to the occasion and he carried the nation behind him. But he has led us in the wrong direction. He used the war on terror as an excuse for invading Iraq. If we reelect President Bush we are endorsing his policies and we shall have to live with the consequences. We are facing a vicious circle of escalating violence with no end in sight. If we reject him at the polls we shall have a better chance to regain the respect and support of the world and break the vicious circle. Our future depends on it.

That is why I consider this the most important election of my lifetime and that is why I have taken such an active role in it. I have devoted half my fortune and most of my energies in the last 15 years to promoting the values of democracy and open society all over the world, especially in the former Soviet Empire. After 9/11 I came to feel that those principles need to be defended at home.

For 18 months after 9/11 President Bush suppressed all dissent by calling it unpatriotic. That is how he could lead the nation so far in the wrong direction.

The invasion of Afghanistan was justified: that was where Osama bin Laden lived and al Qaeda had its training camps. The invasion of Iraq was not similarly justified.

The war in Iraq was misconceived from start to finish -- if it has a finish. It is a war of choice, not of necessity, as President Bush claims. It goes without saying that Saddam was a tyrant, and it is good to be rid of him. But in invading Iraq as we did, without a second UN resolution, we violated international law. By mistreating and even torturing prisoners, we violated the Geneva conventions. President Bush has boasted that we do not need a permission slip from the international community, but our disregard for international law has endangered our security, particularly the security of our troops.

The arms inspections and sanctions were working. In response to American pressure, the United Nations had finally agreed on a strong stand. As long as the inspectors were on the ground, Saddam Hussein could not possibly pose a threat to our security. We could have persisted with the inspections but President Bush insisted on going to war.

By now we know that we went to war on false pretenses. The weapons of mass destruction could not be found, and the connection with al Qaeda could not be established. What has not yet sunk in is that President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Condoleezza Rice knew that Saddam had no nuclear capacity long before we invaded Iraq. The intelligence experts of the Energy Department told them in 2002 that the famous aluminum tubes, which were presented as the most concrete evidence that Saddam had a nuclear program, could not possibly be used for enriching uranium. Yet they used them as evidence. They deliberately deceived the public, the Congress and the United Nations.

The aluminum tubes were not the only instance of deliberate deception. There was the yellowcake contract with Niger mentioned in the President's State of the Union message. That document was forged and a CBS expose of how it came to be forged was recently suppressed or more exactly postponed until after the elections. Then there were the mobile labs that Colin Powell falsely claimed were for biological warfare. President Bush went much further than Colin Powell. He spoke of incontrovertible evidence and said that the smoking gun may take the shape of a mushroom cloud.

More recently, President Bush claimed that we went to war to liberate the people of Iraq. I find that claim preposterous. If we had cared about the people of Iraq we should have had more troops available to protect them. We should not have used methods that alienated and humiliated them.

All my experience in fostering democracy and open society has taught me that democracy cannot be imposed by military means. And the way we went about it in Iraq will make it more difficult to promote democracy in the future. Through my foundation network devoted to promoting democracy and open society worldwide, I feel this personally. Under President Bush, America has lost its credibility as a champion of open society.

Instead of admitting his mistakes, President Bush now tells us that offense is the best defense and we are safer at home because we are fighting the terrorists abroad. The argument resonates strongly with an electorate fearful of terrorism - but it is a Siren's song.

Let me explain why.

The war on terror is an abstraction. But the terrorists are real people and they are not all alike. Most of the people attacking our soldiers in Iraq originally had nothing to do with al Qaeda. They have been generated by the policies of the Bush administration. We have been spared a terrorist attack at home but it is quite a stretch to attribute that to the invasion of Iraq. The insurrection in Iraq, however, is a somber reality and it doesn't make us safer at home. Our security, far from improving as President Bush claims, is deteriorating.

Bush's war in Iraq has done untold damage to the United States. It has impaired our military power and undermined the morale of our armed forces. Our troops were trained to project overwhelming power. They were not trained for occupation duties. Having to fight an insurgency saps their morale. After Iraq, it has become more difficult to recruit people for the armed forces and we may have to resort to conscription.

Before the invasion of Iraq, we could project overwhelming power in any part of the world. We cannot do so any more because we are bogged down in Iraq. Iran and North Korea are moving ahead with their nuclear programs at full speed and our hand in dealing with them has been greatly weakened.

There are many other policies for which the Bush administration can be criticized but none are as important as Iraq. Iraq is the proof that we cannot put our faith in the President.

It is hard to believe that all the accusations I have leveled against President Bush are actually true. I wish they weren't because then we wouldn't be in the predicament in which we find ourselves. There is only one way out. To change leadership and direction. Fortunately we have a credible - and attractive - alternative. I have known John Kerry personally for many years. He will make an excellent president.

I have been crisscrossing the country for the last three weeks arguing against the reelection of President Bush. On my travels I have heard many doubts about John Kerry. Why can't he project the same certainty as President Bush? Admittedly, he won the debates, but does that qualify him to be our Commander in Chief? Will he be as single- minded in pursuing the war on terror as George W. Bush?

Let me address these concerns. John Kerry has presented a cogent and coherent case but the Bush campaign managed to define him before he could define himself. They made fun of his explanation of the various votes he cast on the $87 billion appropriation for Iraq, although it made perfect sense. He was practically not heard, except in snippets, until the debates.

But the trouble goes deeper. The war on terror as defined by President Bush is a one-dimensional presentation of reality. We cannot fight terrorism by military means alone. We can use military force only when we have a known target; but it is the habit of terrorists to keep their whereabouts hidden. To track them down we need the support of the populations amongst whom they hide. Offense is not necessarily the best defense if it offends those whose allegiance we need.

John Kerry is aware of this other dimension. That is why he cannot be as single-minded as George W. Bush. He is nuanced because reality is complicated. This has been turned into a character flaw by the Bush campaign. Yet, that is exactly the character we need in our commander in chief. John Kerry is prepared to defend the country as he showed in Viet Nam; but he has learned first hand the devastation that war can bring and will use military force only as a last resort.

By contrast George W. Bush revels in being a war president. His campaign is shamelessly exploiting the fears generated by 9/11. Vice President Cheney is conjuring mushroom clouds into our cities. But fear is a bad counselor; we must resist it wherever it comes from. President Roosevelt had the right idea when he said, "We have nothing to fear but Fear itself." If we re-elect President Bush the war on terror will never end. The terrorists are invisible, therefore they can never disappear. It is our civil liberties that may disappear instead.

An open society is always in danger. It must constantly reaffirm its principles in order to survive. We are being sorely tested, first by 9/11 and then by President Bush's response. To pass the test we must face reality instead of finding solace in false certainties. This election transcends party loyalties. Our future as an open society depends on resisting the Siren's song.

Voting Manipulation Reports

Charges of Dirty Tricks, Fraud and Voter Suppression Already Flying in Several States
By KATE ZERNIKE and WILLIAM YARDLEY
NY Times
Published: November 1, 2004

With lawyers and poll watchers descending on battleground states and the presidential race tight enough that every vote could count, elections officials say that charges of voter intimidation and voter fraud, on the street or in courtrooms, are flying more furiously than any one can remember in recent elections.

In Lake County, Ohio, officials say at least a handful of voters have reported receiving a notice on phony board of elections letterhead saying that anyone who had registered through a variety of Democratic-leaning groups would not be allowed to vote this year.

In Pennsylvania, an official of the state Republican Party said it sent out 130,000 letters congratulating newly registered voters but that 10,000 were returned, indicating that the people had died or that the address was nonexistent. Mark Pfeifle, the Republican spokesman, said the numbers showed that in their zeal to register new voters, Democratic-aligned groups had committed fraud.

And in Michigan, Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land said she had to put out a statement in mid-October about where to send absentee ballots after voters in the Ann Arbor area received calls telling them to mail the ballots to the wrong address.

<------------------------------------->
NAACP, election officials caution voters of bogus letter
by JENNIFER HOLLAND
Associated Press
Nov 1, 2004

COLUMBIA, S.C. - Charleston County election officials cautioned South Carolinians on Friday to steer clear of a fake letter that threatens the arrest of voters who have outstanding parking tickets or have failed to pay child support.

"I'm outraged," said Jill Miller, director of the Charleston County Board of Election and Voter Registration. "This is so bogus." The one-page letter poses as a message from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The Rev. Joe Darby, vice president of the state NAACP chapter, said he received the letter at his home in Charleston. It had Columbia postmark with no return address. He said the letter was an attempt to scare minorities from voting Tuesday because the author of the message assumes black people are in trouble with the law.

"This is old South Carolina politics," said Darby. "I don't think anybody will fall for this." Darby said he wants the State Law Enforcement Division to investigate.

The letter says voters must have a credit check, provide two forms of photo identification, a Social Security card, a voter registration card as well as a handwriting sample. "None of that is true," said Miller. "I certainly hope no voter would be taken in by this."

All voters need is one of the following: a voter registration card, a South Carolina driver's license, or a South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles-issued photo identification card.
<------------------------------------->
GOP demands IDs of 37,000 in city
City attorney calls new list of bad addresses 'purely political'
Milwaukee Journal Sentinal
By GREG J. BOROWSKI
gborowski@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Oct. 30, 2004

Citing a new list of more than 37,000 questionable addresses, the state Republican Party demanded Saturday that Milwaukee city officials require identification from all of those voters Tuesday.

If the city doesn't, the party says it is prepared to have volunteers challenge each individual - including thousands who might be missing an apartment number on their registration - at the polls.

The move, which dramatically escalates the party's claims of bad addresses and potential fraud, was condemned by Democrats as a last-minute effort to suppress turnout in the city by creating long delays at the polls.

City officials, who already were trying to establish safeguards in response to the party's claim of 5,619 bad addresses, were surprised by the 37,180 number, nearly seven times larger.

"It's not a leap at all to say the potential for voter fraud is high in the city, and the integrity of the entire election, frankly, is at stake," said Rick Graber, state GOP chairman. "The city's records are in horrible shape."

Any inaccurate address, he said, is an opening for someone to cast a fraudulent vote. However, many of the new addresses now cited might be eligible voters who have voted for years without problems.

City Attorney Grant Langley labeled the GOP request "outrageous."

"We have already uncovered hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of addresses on their (original list) that do exist," said Langley, who holds a non-partisan office. "Why should I take their word for the fact this new list is good? I'm out of the politics on this, but this is purely political."

The initial GOP challenge, which was dismissed 3-0 by the city Election Commission last week, cited thousands of cases where no voter address exists, such as vacant lots and, in one case, a gyros stand.

It was the result of using a computer to compare the city's list of 386,526 registered voters to a U.S. Postal Service list of known addresses.

The same list generated about 13,300 cases where incorrect apartment numbers were listed, and some 18,200 more cases where no apartment number was listed for an existing building. However, the party didn't include any of those in its original challenge, filed three minutes before the 5 p.m. Wednesday deadline.

Legally, neither the city nor the state Elections Board is required to consider any of the newly identified addresses by Tuesday.

In an interview with the Journal Sentinel, Graber acknowledged the party is asking local officials, including the Milwaukee County district attorney's office, to voluntarily take the step as the right thing to do.

Asked why the party was not asking other communities to take the same voluntary precautions and computer check their lists before Tuesday, Graber said the Milwaukee voter list is a "mess" and cause for great alarm.

"You mean why aren't we doing this in Wausau?" he said. "We certainly could." After a pause, he added: "And perhaps should."

Democrats say the effort is designed to give the impression it will be difficult to vote in Milwaukee, in hopes of giving an advantage to President Bush over Democratic Sen. John Kerry.

"There's a real disturbing pattern of them making these charges in Wisconsin and in Ohio," said George Twigg, state spokesman for the Kerry campaign. "It's disappointing that they're continuing to beat this dead horse when they've already been proven wrong."

Democrats intend to have a full force of lawyers at polling places to protect the rights of voters, not just in the city but throughout the state, he said.

The new addresses offered Saturday by Republicans muddied an already complicated matter and could slow down attempts under way to institute safeguards on the initial list.

In conjunction with the Milwaukee County district attorney's office, the city attorney's office began reviewing the 5,619 names Friday. It found many cases where an address does not exist but also hundreds where it believes an address does exist.

The Journal Sentinel reviewed 74 of the addresses on the original list and found 68 of those do not exist. Others, though, were likely to be clerical errors.

Citing its expanded list, the GOP argues any address deficiency, such as no apartment number listed, constitutes an invalid registration.

Langley said he is not prepared to try to review more than 37,000 addresses by Monday, which would be necessary in order to be confident any "watch" lists given to poll workers do not include any valid addresses.

"Here we are Saturday night at 5 p.m., and they're going to drop 37,000 names on me?" Langley said. "There has got to be a deadline for a reason."

Graber said the city or district attorney's office could use the same method and generate its own list in about three hours. However, the same process would yield the same names. Langley is questioning the quality of approach, based on problems already found in the GOP's original list.

Lisa Artison, head of the city Election Commission, said she takes any challenge or claim of fraud seriously.

"We're all very concerned about the timing of this newest development," she said, declining further comment.

Critics said the late maneuver is a transparent effort to generate publicity and cast an unwarranted shadow over city voters, a majority of whom are expected to vote Democratic.

"People certainly can come to their own conclusions," said Martha Love, chair of the Milwaukee County Democratic Party, noting a similar review was not done for Republican areas such as Bayside. "But if it's not voter intimidation or suppression, then what's the point?"

Kevin Kennedy, executive director of the state Elections Board, has been working with the city on the 5,619 addresses to put safeguards in place that would flag questionable addresses.

"The concern the board has is the pall it casts over the process," he said Saturday.

Langley indicated Friday the district attorney's office was reviewing about 500 new voter registrations that appear to be from non-existent addresses.

Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower Quote

"America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment."

Gitmo Detainees Still in Limbo

Disagreement Over Detainees' Legal Rights Simmers
NY Times
By NEIL A. LEWIS
Published: November 1, 2004

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba, Oct. 31 - From the moment the Bush administration decided to use the naval base here as a prison colony for accused terrorists, policy makers were determined to keep everything that went on here beyond the reach of United States courts.

But a decision by the Supreme Court in June seemed to upset those plans as the justices ruled that prisoners at Guantánamo were entitled to some rights, notably the ability to have their claims that they were wrongfully imprisoned heard by a federal judge. But what the justices meant as to how far the government must go to accommodate the Guantánamo prisoners has produced a sharp debate now being played out in lower courts.

Lawyers for many of the detainees, including the ones named in the Supreme Court ruling, say the Bush administration is purposely ignoring the justices' mandate and stalling.

They cite the government's refusal to acknowledge that detainees are entitled to free access to lawyers to make their cases before federal judges. More broadly, they argue that the government is still trying to argue issues it has already lost in the Supreme Court, especially that the detainees have full rights to challenge their detentions in lower federal courts.

The Justice Department responded to demands by the detainees' lawyers with language remarkably similar to that it used almost two years ago in the case it has already lost.

"The notion that the U.S. Constitution affords due process and other rights to enemy aliens captured abroad and confined outside the sovereign territory of the United States is contrary to law and history," a recent government brief asserts, in an echo of the briefs submitted in the original Supreme Court case.

Thomas Wilner, a lawyer for several detainees who were involved in the original lawsuit, said in his brief that the government's motion was "simply outrageous.''

"It is filed in direct violation of the federal rules and it simply rehashes the same arguments that were made before, and rejected by the Supreme Court," Mr. Wilner said.

He compared the government's behavior to the "massive resistance" urged by some Southerners in response to the court's landmark desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

A senior Justice Department official said in response, "It's easy for our adversaries to say, 'My gosh, when the Supreme Court said that there is habeas jurisdiction, that must mean there are real rights at stake, that the detainees are protected by the Constitution.' " But the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the litigation was continuing, said the court's ruling that prisoners may challenge their detentions in lawsuits called habeas corpus actions left open that question for lower courts.

The court, by a 6 to 3 margin, ruled in June that the people held at Guantánamo as unlawful enemy combatants "no less than American citizens are entitled to federal courts' authority" to challenge their detentions.

The Justice Department said in its brief that "the court expressly declined to address 'whether and what further proceedings' would be appropriate after remand," as proof the justices left open the issue of whether the government was required to afford the prisoners more rights. But the full sentence at the end of the principal opinion reads, "Whether and what further proceedings may become necessary after respondents make their response to the merits of petitioners' claims are matters that we need not address now."

Prof. Anthony G. Amsterdam of the New York University School of Law said he believed that the government's resistance to recognizing the detainees' rights, including the right to a lawyer, to make their cases bordered on the unethical.

"It's simply amazing that they are proceeding as if those cases had not been heard before the Supreme Court and that those arguments had not been heard and rejected by the court," Professor Amsterdam said. "I would not expect a reputable lawyer to split nonexistent hairs that way and treat what was plainly a decision that these people had a right to be in court as if it were nothing."

He said the government was apparently hoping to delay the day it would have to explain for each detainee the reasons of imprisonment.

Prof. Douglas W. Kmiec of the Pepperdine University School of Law said he believed that the Supreme Court ruling in June was "written in a deliberately incomplete manner so that it found a right to habeas review but left the nature of that review to some district court." Professor Kmiec said he believed the government was acting "well within its bounds and is not obliged to do anything beyond what they have done."

The senior Justice Department official who asked not to be named said the administration understood that while "we don't think there is a constitutional right to counsel, we understand there is a sort of a functional right" under the federal law that covers habeas corpus challenges.

The administration has agreed to let lawyers visit with detainees to help them bring habeas challenges but under strict security conditions that prohibit them from discussing some aspects of the cases with the client. Defense lawyers have challenged those restrictions.

The administration has also argued that a new legal proceeding it put in place here at Guantánamo after the Supreme Court ruling, combatant status review tribunals, should satisfy the justices' demand that the detainees get individualized fair hearings. Under that procedure, detainees are allowed to contest their imprisonment but do not have a lawyer and are not entitled to see the evidence against them. So far, about half of the base's 580 detainees have been through such hearings, and one detainee has been sent home after having been deemed not to be an unlawful enemy combatant.

Another set of legal proceedings involving the Guantánamo detainees, war crimes trials before military commissions, is set to resume here on Monday.

Note: And as already occurred with selected detainees, once these detainees are released, does anyone in their right mind think for a second that they will "go and sin no more"? Even for those who only fought for the Taliban, and not Al Qaeda, once released they will overwhelmingly favor jihad against America with vengence for their unlawful imprisonment. The chickens will come home to roost. You can bet on that!

Wal-Mart Tells Employees to Go Elsewhere for Health Coverage

States Are Battling Against Wal-Mart Over Health Care
NY Times
By REED ABELSON
Published: November 1, 2004

In the national debate over what to do about the growing number of working people with little or no health insurance, no other company may be taking more heat than the country's largest employer, Wal-Mart Stores.

The company, despite its popularity with consumers, has grown accustomed to being accused of crushing Main Street merchants with its sprawling stores and low prices and of driving down wages for workers across the retail industry. And more than a million former and current female Wal-Mart employees are part of a sex discrimination lawsuit that the company is fighting.

Now, Wal-Mart finds itself under attack for what critics see as its miserly approach to employee health care, which they say is forcing too many of its workers and their families into state insurance programs or making them rely on charity care by hospitals.

Wal-Mart vigorously defends its health care policies, saying it offers affordable coverage for all employees.

The company says it has no way of knowing how many of its employees, whom it calls associates, or their families are insured under state programs. The larger issue of whether companies can and should absorb the soaring cost of health care is a national issue, said Susan Chambers, the executive vice president who oversees benefits at Wal-Mart. "You can't solve it for the 1.2 million associates if you can't solve it for the country.''

A survey by Georgia officials found that more than 10,000 children of Wal-Mart employees were in the state's health program for children at an annual cost of nearly $10 million to taxpayers. A North Carolina hospital found that 31 percent of 1,900 patients who described themselves as Wal-Mart employees were on Medicaid, while an additional 16 percent had no insurance at all.

And backers of a measure that will be on California's ballot tomorrow, which would force big employers like Wal-Mart to either provide affordable health insurance to their workers or pay into a state insurance pool, say Wal-Mart employees without company insurance are costing California's state health care programs an estimated $32 million a year.

Meanwhile, in Washington State, where the insurance commissioner is pushing the legislature to adopt a law similar to the one on the California ballot, companies that struggle to compete with Wal-Mart while insuring most of their own workers have become openly critical.

"Socially, we're engaged in a race to the bottom," said Craig Cole, the chief executive of Brown & Cole Stores, a supermarket chain that employs about 2,000 workers in Washington and adjoining states and pays for insurance coverage for about 95 percent of its employees. "Do we want to allow competition based on exploitation of the work force?" he asked.

Wal-Mart, which disputes the California figures and says it cannot verify the Georgia and North Carolina data, says its employees are largely insured. It cites internal surveys indicating that 90 percent of its employees have insurance - many through means other than Wal-Mart's coverage because they are senior citizens on Medicare, students covered by their parents' policies or employees with second jobs or working spouses.

"We are doing everything we can to take care of our associates and not shift costs," Ms. Chambers said.

The company has gone on its own offensive, saying last week that it was spending $500,000 to defeat the California measure, Proposition 72. The measure is opposed by many other businesses, particularly restaurants and retailers, and by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who asserts that it would impede the state's economic recovery and lead to a loss of jobs.

Wal-Mart has also been running a television ad nationally that features a Wal-Mart worker whose company health insurance covered his toddler son's treatments for life-threatening liver disease. "Without Wal-Mart,'' the father says, "I don't know that he would have made it."

But critics say the reality for too many Wal-Mart workers and their families is no insurance - either because they are unable to meet the company's eligibility requirements or because they cannot afford monthly premiums as high as $264 a month for family coverage on an $8-an-hour cashier's wage. Wal-Mart says its employees make $10 an hour on average.