Flexible Reality: A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community
A Selective Tasting of Articles about Social, Economic, Scientific, Artistic, and Political Thought That Has Successfully Passed Thru Stage I of a Stupidity Filter. ****************We STRONGLY recommend using Firefox to browse this blog.*************
Monday, July 31, 2006
More Than 60 Percent of US in Drought
The Associated Press
Saturday 29 July 2006
Steele, N.D. - More than 60 percent of the United States now has abnormally dry or drought conditions, stretching from Georgia to Arizona and across the north through the Dakotas, Minnesota, Montana and Wisconsin, said Mark Svoboda, a climatologist for the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
The Essential Krugman: "Shock and Awe"
by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Aug 1, 2006
"For Americans who care deeply about Israel, one of the truly nightmarish things about the war in Lebanon has been watching Israel repeat the same mistakes the United States made in Iraq...
Yes, I know that there are big differences in the origins of the two wars. There’s no question of this war having been sold on false pretenses; ... Israel is clearly acting in self-defense. But ... [i]t’s a terrible mistake to start a major military operation, regardless of the moral justification, unless you have very good reason to believe that the action will improve matters.
The most compelling argument against an invasion of Iraq wasn’t the suspicion ... that the ... case for war was fraudulent. It was the fact that the real reason government officials and many pundits wanted a war — their belief that if the United States used its military might to “hit someone” in the Arab world, never mind exactly who, it would shock and awe Islamic radicals into giving up terrorism — was, all too obviously, a childish fantasy.
And the results of going to war on the basis of that fantasy were predictably disastrous: ... Iraq has ended up demonstrating the limits of U.S. power, strengthening radical Islam — especially radical Shiites allied with Iran, a group that includes Hezbollah — and losing America the moral high ground.
What I never expected was that Israel — a nation that has unfortunately had plenty of experience with both war and insurgency — would be susceptible to similar fantasies. ...
There is a case for a full-scale Israeli ground offensive against Hezbollah. It may yet come to that... There is also a case for restraint — limited counterstrikes combined with diplomacy, an effort to get other players to rein Hezbollah in, with the option of that full-scale offensive always in the background.
But the actual course Israel has chosen — a bombing campaign that clearly isn’t crippling Hezbollah, but is destroying Lebanon’s infrastructure and killing lots of civilians — achieves the worst of both worlds. Presumably ... people in the Israeli government ... assured the political leadership that a rain of smart bombs would ... intimidate Hezbollah into submission. Those people should be fired.
Israel’s decision to rely on shock and awe ..., like the U.S. decision ...[in] Iraq ..., is having the opposite of its intended effect. Hezbollah has acquired heroic status, while Israel has both damaged its reputation as a regional superpower and made itself a villain in the eyes of the world. ...
What Israel needs now is a way out of the quagmire. And since Israel doesn’t appear ready to reoccupy southern Lebanon, that means doing what it should have done from the beginning: try restraint and diplomacy. And Israel will negotiate from a far weaker position than seemed possible just three weeks ago. ...
[T]he United States... response has been both hapless and malign. ...U.S. policy seems to be to stall ... a cease-fire as long as possible so as to give Israel a chance to dig its hole even deeper. Also, we aren’t talking to Syria, which might hold the key to resolving the crisis, because President Bush doesn’t believe in talking to bad people, and anyway that’s the kind of thing Bill Clinton did. Did I mention that these people are childish?
Again, Israel has the right to protect itself. If all-out war with Hezbollah becomes impossible to avoid, so be it. But bombing Lebanon isn’t making Israel more secure. ... The hard truth is that Israel needs, for its own sake, to stop a bombing campaign that is making its enemies stronger, not weaker.
Hunker Down with History
Richard Cohen: Washington Post
Tuesday, July 18, 2006; Page A19
The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.
This is why the Israeli-Arab war, now transformed into the Israeli-Muslim war (Iran is not an Arab state), persists and widens. It is why the conflict mutates and festers. It is why Israel is now fighting an organization, Hezbollah, that did not exist 30 years ago and why Hezbollah is being supported by a nation, Iran, that was once a tacit ally of Israel's. The underlying, subterranean hatred of the Jewish state in the Islamic world just keeps bubbling to the surface. The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and some other Arab countries may condemn Hezbollah, but I doubt the proverbial man in their street shares that view.
There is no point in condemning Hezbollah. Zealots are not amenable to reason. And there's not much point, either, in condemning Hamas. It is a fetid, anti-Semitic outfit whose organizing principle is hatred of Israel. There is, though, a point in cautioning Israel to exercise restraint -- not for the sake of its enemies but for itself. Whatever happens, Israel must not use its military might to win back what it has already chosen to lose: the buffer zone in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip itself.
Hard-line critics of Ariel Sharon, the now-comatose Israeli leader who initiated the pullout from Gaza, always said this would happen: Gaza would become a terrorist haven. They said that the moderate Palestinian Authority would not be able to control the militants and that Gaza would be used to fire rockets into Israel and to launch terrorist raids. This is precisely what has happened.
It is also true, as some critics warned, that Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon was seen by its enemies -- and claimed by Hezbollah -- as a defeat for the mighty Jewish state. Hezbollah took credit for this, as well it should. Its persistent attacks bled Israel. In the end, Israel got out and the United Nations promised it a secure border. The Lebanese army would see to that. (And the check is in the mail.)
All that the critics warned has come true. But worse than what is happening now would be a retaking of those territories. That would put Israel smack back to where it was, subjugating a restless, angry population and having the world look on as it committed the inevitable sins of an occupying power. The smart choice is to pull back to defensible -- but hardly impervious -- borders. That includes getting out of most of the West Bank -- and waiting (and hoping) that history will get distracted and move on to something else. This will take some time, and in the meantime terrorism and rocket attacks will continue."
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Doping
Star sprinter Gatlin tests positive for testosterone
By Philip Hersh
Chicago Tribune
(MCT)
CHICAGO - First, the winner of cycling's premier race. Two days later, the winner of track and field's signature event.
Never has the credibility of sport been more undermined by doping, nor has the morality of leading U.S. athletes been more called into question.
Saturday's announcement that 2004 Olympic 100-meter champion Justin Gatlin has tested positive for the same substance, testosterone, as 2006 Tour de France winner Floyd Landis means two of the United States' leading athletes risk having their entire careers tarnished by stunning ethical lapses.
It also means their scandal-battered sports have suffered another damaging blow.
"This truly compromises the integrity of sport and strikes at its very essence," said Merrill Melnick, a sports sociologist at SUNY-Brockport. "We presume the field is level and the most courageous athlete will prevail.
"The bottom line is, this is terrible for sport."
Friday, July 28, 2006
Sex Offenders in Georgia
Note: The Georgia Legislature has spent the better part of the past several years passing laws that mirror the concerns of the Republican National Committee, not the concerns of independents and progressives. But recently they did write a State law that seemed to be somewhat useful. It prohibited convicted sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of a school bus stop. Sounds good so far.
However, this bunch of yahoos, most of whom are lawyers, apparently didn't think about enforcement. What for example is a "school bus stop". A typical school bus picks up and drops off students at dozens of sites on their route. Is every one a "school bus stop" under the law?
According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution article it's not at all clear:
By KRISTINA TORRES ktorres@ajc.com and JILL YOUNG MILLER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 07/27/06
A school board near Augusta became the state's first to act on a new sex offender law green-lighted Tuesday by a federal judge, as sheriff's deputies moved to evict some offenders from their homes.
Attorneys seeking to stop those evictions have a hearing today with U.S. District Court Judge Clarence Cooper and will ask for a temporary restraining order as litigation to block the law continues. Most local school boards have made no immediate move to act on the law, which in part forbids sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of school bus stops.
Most systems are still sorting through what the Tuesday ruling means and its effect on an important if seemingly mundane task they don't usually handle: Choosing a student's bus stop. "Unfortunately, it's not what we like or don't like; it's what we're required to do by law," said Gail Dean, president of metro Atlanta's Fulton County school board, who is surprised the issue appears to require a vote at all.
The new state law means to keep registered sex offenders away from children. Georgia's sex offender registry includes more than 10,000 people who have committed such crimes as sodomy, child molestation and rape. It's not known exactly how many live within 1,000 feet of a school bus stop.
But the law assumes that local school boards already act to formally sign off on the thousands of school bus stops across the state. They don't. Cooper acknowledged that problem Tuesday in his ruling, even as he allowed the law to take effect.
School bus stops by practice are identified by administrative experts and not board members. "The school board delegates that to the superintendent. The superintendent delegates that to the Transportation Department," said Fulton spokeswoman Susan Hale, whose system alone will coordinate 15,000 bus stops next school year for an expected 86,600 students.
But, if the restriction on offenders living near school bus stops is to be enforced, that practice seemingly must change. State Attorney General Thurbert Baker, in a letter to state education officials, said boards may need to "act appropriately" to make the law enforceable.
Cooper said in his ruling that the law would be enforceable only if "the local boards of education, as opposed to their employees or agents, name or point out school bus stops." He did not express an opinion on the constitutionality of the school bus stop provision and said local school boards could, but do not have to, take official action to designate school bus stops. But he added that "local school boards of education will likely immediately designate school bus stops in light of this ruling."
State schools Superintendent Kathy Cox seemed to back that sentiment, saying in a statement released through her spokesman that systems "will continue to do the right thing" and should work with law enforcement agencies to bring offenders "into compliance with this law."
Still, several local school officials said they wanted further clarification: Does the ruling mean boards literally have to agree where to put bus stops or can they vote on a list compiled by system transportation officials?
"We're going to be following this and we'll fall in line with the law when it's clarified," Cobb County spokesman Doug Goodwin said.
In suburban Columbia County, about five miles northwest of Augusta, school board members voted within hours of Cooper's ruling Tuesday to formally designate their posted list of bus stops as official and to forward it to the local Sheriff's Office.
That list, Columbia schools spokeswoman Karen Ribble said, was produced by the system's Transportation Department just as it has been in the past.
However, the board's action coincided with action by deputies from the Columbia County Sheriff's Office who began notifying people on the sex offender registry that they had 72 hours to leave their homes, according to a court document filed by lawyers from the Southern Center for Human Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia.
They are seeking a temporary restraining order to stop sheriffs in Columbia, Richmond and Burke counties from evicting offenders who, according to the law, live too close to school bus stops.
At least 203 people in Richmond County alone would have to move, the document said. It also said Augusta District Attorney Danny Craig has told the Richmond County Sheriff's Office to begin notifying people to move.
The Augusta judicial circuit includes Columbia, Richmond and Burke counties. Craig and sheriffs in Columbia and Richmond counties could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
Deputies in Burke County "are not enforcing the school bus stop portion," Chief Deputy James Hollingsworth said. He said Craig advised the Sheriff's Office on Wednesday to wait until after he meets with the area's three school boards and they establish common guidelines.
On Tuesday, however, Craig told Augusta TV station WRDW that Cooper's ruling cleared the way for sheriffs to enforce the bus stop rule, according to the television station's Web site. Craig said the 72-hour notice that Columbia deputies are giving sex offenders is reasonable, but not necessary.
But Craig misinterpreted Cooper's ruling, according to the Southern Center, which is helping sex offenders sue the state over the bus stop provision in the law, which went into effect July 1.
School boards should "reflect and be rational," Lisa Kung, director of the center, said in a prepared statement Wednesday. "We've already been down the road of 159 sheriffs trying to enforce a counterproductive, unenforceable law. We don't need school boards now rushing in to passing resolutions that will put children in greater danger."
Testimony at a July 11 court hearing indicated that restrictions such as banning sex offenders from living near school bus stops could actually make the public less safe because it may disrupt registered sex offenders' lives and potentially force them underground.
Note: So Georgia legislators busied themselves with creating a law that is: a) un-enforceable on it's face; b) unspecified in the manner of implementation; and c) most likely to be challenged in court since it involves forceably evicting persons from their homes. Was the aim of the law what appeared to be the target that most-people perceived when they heard about the new law, or something else? How can these guys craft such poorly considered laws?
All I can say from this is: just be glad these legislators don't go after something that affects innocents!
Rules for a Sane Vacation
by Robert Reich
July 27th, 2006
"I'm sitting on the beach last week trying to relax into an abbreviated summer vacation when someone I barely know comes up to me with a scowl. "Did you read that dumb-f#&% middle-class agenda Hillary just put out? If that's all the Dems have to offer to deal with widening inequality, we're screwed," he says, and walks off. I feel my spine tingle, my shoulders begin to ache. To distract myself I pick up the paper and skim the headlines -- Hezbollah and Hamas attacking Israel, Israel bombing Lebanon, Iraq tumbling into civil war, more chaos. Bird flu deaths rising in Indonesia, Iran and North Korea closer to having nuclear weapons. Famine in sub-Sahara Africa. Genocide continuing in Darfur.
By now I'm feeling nauseous. My cell phone rings. It's my good friend John, a welcome distraction. "How'dja like to go to a movie tonight?" he asks... Great, I say, eager for any escape. "Fine, he says, I just got tickets to Al Gore's film on global warming."
As a general rule I don't believe in escapism. I think citizens ought to get involved, be engaged in the world. Don't put your head in the sand. But in order to be engaged most of the time, you have to disengage a bit of the time or you'll go nuts. Before instant communications, before we knew everything going on everywhere, all the time, vacations were about taking a break. Even during the Great Depression and World War II my grandparents once a year trundled off to some remote spot to get away from it all for a week or two. At least they looked happy in the photos.
So how is it possible today to have a real vacation, to get away from it all when it all comes to us and when so much of it is so awful? For the last day (the last day I'm here) I've followed three simple rules, and frankly I feel much better. First, don't read anything. Second, don't watch anything. Third, don't talk with anyone.
The Essential Krugman: "Reign of Error"
By Paul Krugman - NY Times Op-Ed
July 28th, 2006
"Amid everything else that’s going wrong in the world, here’s one more piece of depressing news: a few days ago the Harris Poll reported that 50 percent of Americans now believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when we invaded, up from 36 percent in February 2005. Meanwhile, 64 percent still believe that Saddam had strong links with Al Qaeda.
At one level, this shouldn’t be all that surprising. The people now running America never accept inconvenient truths. Long after facts they don’t like have been established, whether it’s the absence of any wrongdoing by the Clintons in the Whitewater affair or the absence of W.M.D. in Iraq, the propaganda machine that supports the current administration is still at work, seeking to flush those facts down the memory hole.
But it’s dismaying to realize that the machine remains so effective.
Here’s how the process works.
First, if the facts fail to support the administration position on an issue — stem cells, global warming, tax cuts, income inequality, Iraq — officials refuse to acknowledge the facts.
Sometimes the officials simply lie. “The tax cuts have made the tax code more progressive and reduced income inequality,” Edward Lazear, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, declared a couple of months ago. More often, however, they bob and weave.
Consider, for example, Condoleezza Rice’s response a few months ago, when pressed to explain why the administration always links the Iraq war to 9/11. She admitted that Saddam, “as far as we know, did not order Sept. 11, may not have even known of Sept. 11.” (Notice how her statement, while literally true, nonetheless seems to imply both that it’s still possible that Saddam ordered 9/11, and that he probably did know about it.) “But,” she went on, “that’s a very narrow definition of what caused Sept. 11.”
Meanwhile, apparatchiks in the media spread disinformation. It’s hard to imagine what the world looks like to the large number of Americans who get their news by watching Fox and listening to Rush Limbaugh, but I get a pretty good sense from my mailbag.
Many of my correspondents are living in a world in which the economy is better than it ever was under Bill Clinton, newly released documents show that Saddam really was in cahoots with Osama, and the discovery of some decayed 1980’s-vintage chemical munitions vindicates everything the administration said about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. (Hyping of the munitions find may partly explain why public belief that Saddam had W.M.D. has made a comeback.)
Some of my correspondents have even picked up on claims, mostly disseminated on right-wing blogs, that the Bush administration actually did a heck of a job after Katrina.
And what about the perceptions of those who get their news from sources that aren’t de facto branches of the Republican National Committee?
The climate of media intimidation that prevailed for several years after 9/11, which made news organizations very cautious about reporting facts that put the administration in a bad light, has abated. But it’s not entirely gone. Just a few months ago major news organizations were under fierce attack from the right over their supposed failure to report the “good news” from Iraq — and my sense is that this attack did lead to a temporary softening of news coverage, until the extent of the carnage became undeniable. And the conventions of he-said-she-said reporting, under which lies and truth get equal billing, continue to work in the administration’s favor.
Whatever the reason, the fact is that the Bush administration continues to be remarkably successful at rewriting history. For example, Mr. Bush has repeatedly suggested that the United States had to invade Iraq because Saddam wouldn’t let U.N. inspectors in. His most recent statement to that effect was only a few weeks ago. And he gets away with it. If there have been reports by major news organizations pointing out that that’s not at all what happened, I’ve missed them.
It’s all very Orwellian, of course. But when Orwell wrote of “a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past,” he was thinking of totalitarian states. Who would have imagined that history would prove so easy to rewrite in a democratic nation with a free press?"
Chicken-Hawks
"What Makes Someone a Chicken Hawk?"
by Glenn Greenwald
"Although there is no formal definition for it, the "chicken hawk" criticism is not typically made against someone who merely (a) advocates a war but (b) will not fight in that war and/or has never fought in any war (although, admittedly, there are those who mis-use the term that way). After all, the vast majority of Americans in both political parties meet that definition. The war in Afghanistan was supported by roughly 90% of Americans, as was the first Persian Gulf War, even though only a tiny fraction of war supporters would actually fight in those wars which they advocated.
Something more than mere support for a war without fighting in it is required to earn the "chicken hawk" label. Chicken-hawkism is the belief that advocating a war from afar is a sign of personal courage and strength, and that opposing a war from afar is a sign of personal cowardice and weakness. A "chicken hawk" is someone who not merely advocates a war, but believes that their advocacy is proof of the courage which those who will actually fight the war in combat require.
This dynamic requires criticism because it is so irrational, false and manipulative. There is nothing courageous or strong about wanting to send other people to war or to keep them in wars that have already been started. And there is nothing weak or cowardly about opposing the commencement of a war in which others will bear the risks. To the extent courage and cowardice play a role in war advocacy at all, one could argue that those who blithely want to send other people off to war in order to protect themselves against every potential risk are driven by fear and weakness. And those who are less fearful will require a much higher level of personal threat before believing that it is desirable and just to send other people off to risk their lives.
A "chicken hawk" is one who strikes the pose of a warrior, who imputes the personal courage of a soldier in combat to themselves by virtue of the fact that they are in favor of sending that soldier off to war, or who parades around with the pretense of personal courage and resolve while assuming none of the risks. And a "chicken hawk" will, conversely, attempt to depict those who oppose such wars as being weak, spineless and cowardly even though the war opponents are not seeking to avoid any personal risk to themselves, but instead, are arguing against subjecting their fellow citizens to what they perceive are unnecessary dangers.
posted by Glenn Greenwald | 1:48 PM
Thursday, July 27, 2006
You Must Remember This !
109th U.S. Congress (2005-2006)
S. J. Res. 1: Marriage Protection Amendment
Same Sex Marriage resolution
Official Title: A joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relating to marriage.
Status: Failed Senate (87% of Republicans supporting, 96% of Democrats opposing.)
By failing to be passed in the Senate, this bill or resolution is now dead.
Introduced: Jan 24, 2005
Last Action: Jun 7, 2006: Cloture on the motion to proceed not invoked in Senate by Yea-Nay Vote. 49 - 48. Record Vote Number: 163.
Full Text of Resolution
Sponsor: Sen. Wayne Allard [R-CO]
Co-Sponsors: (32 Total - Partial List Below)
Sen. Lamar Alexander [R-TN]
Sen. George Allen [R-VA]
Sen. Samuel Brownback [R-KS]
Sen. Saxby Chambliss [R-GA]
Sen. Thomas Coburn [R-OK]
Sen. Thad Cochran [R-MS]
Sen. John Cornyn [R-TX]
Sen. Larry Craig [R-ID]
Sen. Michael Crapo [R-ID]
Sen. Jim DeMint [R-SC]
Sen. Michael DeWine [R-OH]
Sen. Elizabeth Dole [R-NC]
Sen. William Frist [R-TN]
Sen. Orrin Hatch [R-UT]
Sen. Kay Hutchison [R-TX]
Sen. James Inhofe [R-OK]
Sen. John Isakson [R-GA]
Sen. Trent Lott [R-MS]
Sen. Mel Martinez [R-FL]
Sen. Mitch McConnell [R-KY]
Sen. Pat Roberts [R-KS]
Sen. Richard Santorum [R-PA]
Sen. Jefferson Sessions [R-AL]
Sen. Richard Shelby [R-AL]
Sen. Ted Stevens [R-AK]
Sen. James Talent [R-MO]
Sen. John Thune [R-SD]
Sen. David Vitter [R-LA]
This bill is identical to H. J. Res. 88 (Status: Failed House (88% of Republicans supporting, 83% of Democrats opposing.)).
Cartogram of 2004 Presidential Election: (Red=Republican; Blue=Democrat)
North America Night Lights
Colloidal Silver: Risk Without Benefit: as published on Quackwatch Website, by Stephen Barrett, MD
Green Living: House & Home: Flower Power
The Medicinal Properties of Popular Plants
eMagazine: August 2006
by Orna Izakson
Gardening is the world’s most popular and enduring recreational activity, feeding the spirit and the body, reducing dependence on the florist and the supermarket, and, when done organically, curtailing the use of toxic pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Gardening feeds the senses with scent and color, and feeds the body with exercise, fresh air and the freshest—and therefore more vitamin-packed—foods.
But gardens can also feed your health in other ways: By growing your own medicine, you can reduce your trips to the doctor and pharmacist. Garden plants can help with everything from infections or insomnia to healing wounds and broken hearts. Best of all, you can grow these gems in a floriferous landscape that keeps the neighbors happy and boosts your property values.
Here is a small sample of the many flowers that do double duty in a vase and in your medicine cabinet:
Calendula (Calendula officinalis):
These indefatigably cheery bright orange flowers are good for both the garden and the gardener. Like their marigold cousins, the plant deters pest insects.
Calendula’s sticky resin is superlative for healing wounds. Make a flower tea and use as a skin wash, or steep flowers in olive oil for two weeks and apply topically. Used internally, calendula combines well with drying herbs for respiratory infections. The dried flowers make a bright addition to wintertime teas—you can eat the whole flower as it floats around in your cup.
Even two or three plants will give more flowers than you can keep up with, self seeding prolifically to ensure your garden will always have their blooms. This annual plant is hardy to Zone 6, but may over-winter in warmer climates. Easy-going calendula tolerates many soil and sun conditions, but thrives in full sunlight.
Lavender (Lavandula spp.): Best known for its perfume, lavender is also a remarkably versatile medicine.
The chemicals that make lavender so wonderfully aromatic also make it a potent pathogen fighter. The name comes from the French word for washing; the earliest antimicrobial soaps were made with lavender. The flowers fight bacteria, viruses and fungi, and the essential oil helps heal wounds and burns.
Lavender is also deeply cheering in cases of sadness or mild depression. A hot cup of lavender tea, brought to you by a friend, is wonderful for alleviating a broken heart.
Cultivars of this mounding, Mediterranean perennial can grow larger than four feet high and wide. These sun lovers are hardy to Zone 5.
Passionflower (Passiflora incarnata, P. edulis, P. caerulea.):
Courtesy of http://digitalflowerpictures.com
Fast-growing, vining passionflower is one of the best herbal medicines for promoting sleep without making you feel drugged. It also has been used for the pain of shingles. The flowers of these prolific climbers look almost extraterrestrial. Depending on the species, passionflowers can be hardy to Zone 6, evergreen unless knocked back by a cold snap. The sprawling vines require support, growing as much as 18 feet in a year. Warm-climate gardeners may even get some of the delicious tropical fruit.
Roses:
Roses raise the spirits, both for their beauty and their medicine. Possibly the world’s most famous garden flower, roses come in every imaginable form, from groundcovers less than a foot tall to ramblers that clamber up trees or power poles. So many cultivars means there’s a rose for almost every situation, whether you live in chilly Zone 2, have a fully shaded yard, or garden within spitting distance of saltwater.
The most famous rose medicine comes from the fruit, known as hips, which are high in cold-fighting and antioxidant vitamin C. Picked after they soften in the year’s first frost, fresh hips are dried for tea or used fresh in jams.
Rose leaves, flowers and buds also make excellent medicine, calming the nerves, easing indigestion, and acting as a mild astringent for skin wounds or sore throats.
Purple coneflower: Echinacea:
This native of the North American prairies is not only striking, but one of the best known medicinal plants—Echinacea. This sun-loving, hardy perennial grows from Manitoba to Texas, thriving down to Zone 3 and growing grander each year. The medicinal species (Echinacea purpurea, E. angustifolia and E. pallida) are covered with two-inch to three-inch flowers, each with a corona of pink or purple petals surrounding a prominent, spiky seed cone.
From root to flower, all parts of this plant are medicinal. In summer, one way to get coneflower’s medicine is by cutting the central cone in quarters and biting the soft inner part like an orange slice. Be careful at first: The medicinal constituents will zing your tongue like pins and needles. Echinacea is thought to be an immunity booster, best taken as early as possible in the case of infection. Ideally, begin taking the tea or tincture when you think you might get sick.
UN says Israel warned many times before fatal attack
re: Four UN Soldiers Killed at U.N. post in Lebanon
Wed Jul 26, 2006 5:21 PM ET
By Irwin Arieff
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations said on Wednesday it asked Israel a dozen times to stop bombing near a U.N. post in Lebanon in the hours before an Israeli air attack destroyed the position killing four peacekeepers.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan initially referred to Tuesday's deadly Israeli strike as the "apparently deliberate targeting" of the Khiam U.N. observer post.
But he softened his stance after talking with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who said he believed it was a mistake and would order an investigation.
"We await the end of the investigations, and I am grateful for the prime minister for what he has said, and we accept his words," Annan said in Rome, where he was attending a conference on the conflict between Israel and Hizbollah.
Jane Holl Lute, a deputy head of U.N. peacekeeping operations, told the Security Council behind closed doors there were 21 strikes within 300 meters (yards) of the observer post during the six hours before it was completely destroyed.
Twelve of the 21 struck within 100 meters (yards), including four which scored direct hits, Holl Lute said, according to a text of her remarks.
Firing continued during the rescue operation, "despite repeated requests to the Israeli Defense Forces for an abatement," she said. Another U.N. base came under Israeli fire on Wednesday as an artillery round fell 10 meters (yards) from its headquarters compound in Naqoura, she added.
While there was speculation Israel may have been targeting Hizbollah positions near the Khiam post, Holl Lute said there was no Hizbollah firing coming from near the outpost.
An Irish army officer in south Lebanon warned Israeli forces six times that its strikes threatened the lives of the four observers, Ireland's Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday.
Lieutenant Colonel John Molloy, the chief U.N. liaison officer with Israel in south Lebanon, told the Israelis on six separate occasions "that their bombardment was endangering the lives of U.N. staff in south Lebanon," a Department of Foreign Affairs spokesman said.
"He warned: 'You have to address this problem or lives may be lost,'" the spokesman said.
In New York, Holl Lute and U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown telephoned Israeli U.N. Ambassador Dan Gillerman and his deputy half a dozen times to convey the same message, U.N. officials said.
"The base is clearly marked, a well-known. well-established position for a generation," said a U.N, official, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity.
The United Nations still wanted a joint investigation, as Annan requested, despite Olmert's decision to conduct a solely Israeli inquiry, the U.N. official said.
Gillerman wrote the Security Council on Wednesday "to express Israel's deep sorrow" over the four deaths and to "categorically deny" the attack had been deliberate.
Separately, Israeli Brig. Gen. Udi Dekel wrote U.N. commanders that the deaths resulted from "a tragic operational mistake" and said an investigation was already under way.
UN hits impasse on text criticizing Israeli attack
Wed Jul 26, 2006 11:34pm ET
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The U.N. Security Council failed to agree on a statement late on Wednesday condemning a deadly Israeli attack on a U.N. observer post in Lebanon after the United States blocked language that appeared critical of Israel.
Vote Expected on Abortion Bill
The Associated Press
Tuesday 25 July 2006
Washington - Confidants like grandparents or ministers who help pregnant teens should be protected from prosecution under a bill headed for Senate passage that would punish anyone who takes girls across state lines to end their pregnancies, Democrats said Tuesday.
"We should not criminalize the grandparents or clergy members to whom a teen in trouble might turn for help," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who plans to introduce an amendment to protect such confidants from prosecution.
But Republicans, reopening the abortion debate ahead of this fall's midterm elections, say Congress must defend the parents' right to know when their children seek abortions. The bill, sponsored by Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., would exempt parents and the teens from prosecution but punish anyone else who helps them seek an abortion in another state with fines and up to a year in jail.
The measure contains an exception for those who help underage girls get such abortions to avoid life-threatening conditions.
"What opponents of this bill forget is that no parent wants anyone to take their children across state lines or even across the street - without their permission," said Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. "This is a fundamental right, and the Congress is right to uphold it in law."
Polls suggest there is widespread public backing for the bill, with almost three-quarters of respondents saying a parent has the right to give consent before a child under 18 has an abortion.
Opponents of the bill say it would cut off an escape route for pregnant teens with abusive parents who live in the states with parental consent or notification laws. Democrats also will propose additional exceptions for those who help pregnant teens get abortions in other states in cases of rape or incest.
Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill, complained that the bill is the latest on a list of measures Republican leaders are bringing up for votes in an effort to appeal to the GOP's base of social conservatives. No one in his state has raised the practice of interstate abortions as a major source of concern, he said.
Unlike the failed constitutional amendments to ban flag desecration and gay marriage, the abortion bill is expected to pass given the Senate's 55-44-1 Republican majority. The House passed the bill 270-157 in April 2005 after lawmakers there rejected an amendment similar to Feinstein's.
The states without parental notification or consent laws are: Washington, Oregon, New York, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, plus the District of Columbia. The bills are S. 403 and H.R. 748.
Note: it's Stupid:
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
The Passion of the Embryos
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 23 July 2006
Note: Mr. Rich does another nice job of pointing out the mendacity of the Administration regarding stem cell research.
"How time flies when democracy is on the march in the Middle East! Five whole years have passed since ominous Qaeda chatter reached its pre-9/11 fever pitch, culminating in the President's Daily Brief of Aug. 6, 2001: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
History has since condemned President Bush for ignoring that intelligence. But to say that he did nothing that summer is a bum rap. Just three days later, on Aug. 9, he took a break from clearing brush in Crawford to reveal the real priority of his presidency, which had nothing to do with a nuisance like terrorism. His first prime-time address after more than six months in office was devoted to embryonic stem-cell research instead. Placing his profound religious convictions above the pagan narcissism of Americans hoping for cures to diseases like Parkinson's and diabetes, he decreed restrictions to shackle the advance of medical science.
Whatever else is to be said about the Decider, he's consistent. Having dallied again this summer while terrorism upends the world, he has once more roused himself to take action - on stem cells. His first presidential veto may be bad news for the critically ill, but it was a twofer for the White House. It not only flattered the president's base. It also drowned out some awkward news: the prime minister he installed in Baghdad, Nuri al-Maliki, and the fractious Parliament of Iraq's marvelous new democracy had called a brief timeout from their civil war to endorse the sole cause that unites them, the condemnation of Israel.
The news is not all dire, however. While Mr. Bush's Iraq project threatens to deliver the entire region to Iran's ayatollahs, this month may also be remembered as a turning point in America's own religious wars. The president's politically self-destructive stem-cell veto and the simultaneous undoing of the religious right's former golden boy, Ralph Reed, in a Republican primary for lieutenant governor in Georgia are landmark defeats for the faith-based politics enshrined by Mr. Bush's presidency. If we can't beat the ayatollahs over there, maybe we're at least starting to rout them here.
That the administration's stem-cell policy is a political fiasco for its proponents is evident from a single fact: Bill Frist, the most craven politician in Washington, ditched the president. In past pandering to his party's far-right fringe, Mr. Frist, who calls himself a doctor, misdiagnosed the comatose Terri Schiavo's condition after watching her on videotape and, in an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, refused to dispute an abstinence program's canard that tears and sweat could transmit AIDS. If Senator Frist is belatedly standing up for stem-cell research, you can bet he's read some eye-popping polls. His ignorance about H.I.V. notwithstanding, he also knows that the facts about stem cells are not on Mr. Bush's side.
The voting public has learned this, too. Back in 2001, many Americans gave the president the benefit of the doubt when he said that his stem-cell "compromise" could make "more than 60" cell lines available for federally financed study. Those lines turned out to be as illusory as Saddam's weapons of mass destruction: there were only 22, possibly all of them now contaminated or otherwise useless. Fittingly, the only medical authority to endorse the Bush policy at the time, the Houston cancer doctor John Mendelsohn, was a Bush family friend. He would later become notorious for lending his empirical skills to the Enron board's audit committee.
This time around, with the administration's credibility ruined by Iraq, official lies about science didn't fly. When Karl Rove said that embryonic stem cells weren't required because there was "far more promise from adult stem cells," The Chicago Tribune investigated and found that the White House couldn't produce a single stem-cell researcher who agreed. (Ahmad Chalabi, alas, has no medical degree.) In the journal Science, three researchers summed up the consensus of the reality-based scientific community: misleading promises about adult stem cells "cruelly deceive patients."
No less cruelly deceptive was the photo op staged to sell Mr. Bush's veto: television imagery of the president cradling so-called Snowflake babies, born via in vitro fertilization from frozen embryos that had been "adopted." As Senator Arlen Specter has pointed out, only 128 of the 400,000 or so rejected embryos languishing in deep freeze in fertility clinics have been adopted. Many of the rest are destined to be tossed in the garbage.
If you believe, as Mr. Bush says he does, that either discarding or conducting research with I.V.F. embryos is murder, then fertility clinic doctors, like stem-cell researchers, belong on death row. But the president, so proud of drawing a firm "moral" line, will no sooner crack down on I.V.F. than he did on Kim Jong Il: The second-term Bush has been downsized to a paper tiger. His party's base won't be so shy. Sam Brownback, the Kansas Republican who led the Senate anti-stem-cell offensive and sees himself as the religious right's presidential candidate, has praised the idea of limiting the number of eggs fertilized in vitro to "one or two at a time." A Kentucky state legislator offered a preview of coming attractions, writing a bill making the fertilization of multiple eggs in I.V.F. treatments a felony.
Tacticians in both political parties have long theorized that if a conservative Supreme Court actually struck down Roe v. Wade, it would set Republicans back at the polls for years. Mr. Bush's canonization of clumps of frozen cells over potential cancer cures may jump-start that backlash. We'll see this fall. Already one Republican senatorial candidate, Michael Steele of Maryland, has stepped in Mr. Bush's moral morass by egregiously comparing stem-cell research to Nazi experiments on Jews during the Holocaust.
Mr. Reed's primary defeat is as much a blow to religious-right political clout as the White House embrace of stem-cell fanaticism. The man who revolutionized the face of theocratic politics in the 1990's with a telegenic choirboy's star power has now changed his movement's face again, this time to mud.
The humiliating Reed defeat - by 12 points against a lackluster rival in a conservative primary in a conservative state - is being pinned on his association with the felonious lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who also tainted that other exemplar of old-time religion, Tom DeLay. True enough, but it's what Mr. Reed did for Mr. Abramoff's clients that is most damning, far more so than the golf junkets and money-grubbing. The causes Mr. Reed enabled through manufactured grass-roots campaigns (unwittingly, he maintains) were everything he was supposedly against: Indian casinos and legal loopholes that allowed forced abortions and sexual slavery in the work force of an American commonwealth, the Northern Mariana Islands.
Hypocrisy among self-aggrandizing evangelists is as old as Elmer Gantry - older, actually. But Mr. Reed wasn't some campfire charlatan. He was the religious right's most effective poster boy in mainstream America. He had been recruited for precisely that mission by Pat Robertson, who made him the frontman for the Christian Coalition in 1989, knowing full well that Mr. Reed's smarts and youth could do P.R. wonders that Mr. Robertson and the rest of the baggage-laden Falwell generation of Moral Majority demagogues could not. And it worked. In 1995, Mr. Reed was rewarded with the cover of Time, for representing "the most thorough penetration of the secular world of American politics by an essentially religious organization in this century."
Actually, the Christian Coalition was soon to be accused of inflating its membership, Enron-accounting style, and was careening into debt. Only three years after his Time cover, Mr. Reed, having ditched the coalition to set up shop as a political consultant, sent his self-incriminating e-mail to Mr. Abramoff: "I need to start humping in corporate accounts!" He also humped in noncorporate accounts, like the Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004.
By 2005 Mr. Reed had become so toxic that Mr. Bush wouldn't be caught on camera with him in Georgia. But the Bush-Rove machine was nonetheless yoked to Mr. Reed in their crusades: the demonization of gay couples as boogeymen (and women) in election years, the many assaults on health (not just in stem-cell laboratories but in federal agencies dealing with birth control and sex education), the undermining of the science of evolution. The beauty of Mr. Reed's unmasking is the ideological impact: the radical agenda to which he lent an ersatz respectability has lost a big fig leaf, and all the president's men, tied down like Gulliver in Iraq, cannot put it together again to bamboozle suburban voters.
It's possible that even Joe Lieberman, a fellow traveler in the religious right's Schiavo and indecency jeremiads, could be swept out with Rick Santorum in the 2006 wave. Mr. Lieberman is hardly the only Democrat in the Senate who signed on to the war in Iraq, but he's surely the most sanctimonious. He is also the only Democrat whose incessant Bible thumping (while running for vice president in 2000) was deemed "inappropriate and even unsettling in a religiously diverse society such as ours" by the Anti-Defamation League. As Ralph Reed used to say: amen.
Groundbreaking legislation would provide universal coverage by building on Medicare and the employer system
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Representative Pete Stark (D-CA), Ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee, today introduced the “AmeriCare Health Care Act” with the support of U.S. Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and more than 25 of their colleagues. AmeriCare is a simple and practical proposal for universal health coverage that builds on both Medicare and the employer-based system.
“Debates on healthcare tend to occur every ten to fifteen years, when costs rise to a level that attracts national attention. As we edge closer to our next discussion, the fundamental question before us is if medical care is a civic and social right like police and fire services, education, and national defense,” said Stark. “While Republicans are fixated on outlawing gay marriage, stem cell research, and flag burning, I am offering a new direction for health care in America. AmeriCare builds on Medicare, an efficient, popular, and successful program, to provide universal coverage with minimal disruption to our current system.”
Under the “AmeriCare Health Care Act,” people would either receive coverage through their employer or through AmeriCare, a new program modeled on Medicare. AmeriCare would provide preventive, physician, hospital, and mental health services, as well as maternity coverage and an affordable prescription drug benefit. It would also impose a limit on out-of-pocket costs.
AFL-CIO Director of Legislation Bill Samuel said: "Health care ranks among our members’ greatest concerns – paying for it, keeping it, worrying about how to cope with medical bills if it is lost. The dismal trends in health care cost and coverage hit too close to home for working families. We have reached a crisis that demands bold initiatives. AmeriCare takes a thoughtful and sensible approach to provide all Americans with access to affordable, comprehensive, quality health coverage."
AmeriCare would provide additional benefits for children under age 24 and individuals with income less than 300 percent of the poverty level. Supplemental benefits could be offered by employers or purchased through private insurance companies. Sharing risk and responsibility, AmeriCare would be financed through contributions from employers, individuals, and states, all of whom pay into our current health care system.
“AmeriCare is a bold and thoughtful proposal that takes us down the most promising road to universal health insurance,” said Yale University Professor Dr. Jacob Hacker. “Rather than try to reinvent the wheel or upend parts of our present system that work, AmeriCare builds on employment-based insurance and the Medicare model to ensure that every American has access to a secure, affordable, and comprehensive health plan. This valuable legislation – which has the best chance of any proposal for universal coverage – could transform America for the better.”
Unlike the current system, AmeriCare would save billions of dollars by utilizing Medicare’s highly efficient administrative infrastructure. Whereas many private insurers devote more than 30 percent of funds for marketing, administration, and profit, Medicare operates on a two to three percent margin. AmeriCare would also require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate with the pharmaceutical industry for reasonable prescription drug prices and expand the use of health information technology.
A one-page summary of the “AmeriCare Health Care Act” is available here
A section-by-section summary of the bill is available here
Recycling Technology Products: An Overview of E-Waste Policy Issues
U.S. Department of Commerce, Technology Administration
Executive Summary: July 2006
I.R.S. to Cut Tax Auditors
N.Y. Times
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
Published: July 23, 2006
The federal government is moving to eliminate the jobs of nearly half of the lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service who audit tax returns of some of the wealthiest Americans, specifically those who are subject to gift and estate taxes when they transfer parts of their fortunes to their children and others.
The administration plans to cut the jobs of 157 of the agency’s 345 estate tax lawyers, plus 17 support personnel, in less than 70 days. Kevin Brown, an I.R.S. deputy commissioner, confirmed the cuts after The New York Times was given internal documents by people inside the I.R.S. who oppose them.
The Bush administration has passed measures that reduce the number of Americans who are subject to the estate tax — which opponents refer to as the “death tax” — but has failed in its efforts to eliminate the tax entirely. Mr. Brown said in a telephone interview Friday that he had ordered the staff cuts because far fewer people were obliged to pay estate taxes under President Bush’s legislation.
But six I.R.S. estate tax lawyers whose jobs are likely to be eliminated said in interviews that the cuts were just the latest moves behind the scenes at the I.R.S. to shield people with political connections and complex tax-avoidance devices from thorough audits.
Sharyn Phillips, a veteran I.R.S. estate tax lawyer in Manhattan, called the cuts a “back-door way for the Bush administration to achieve what it cannot get from Congress, which is repeal of the estate tax.”
Mr. Brown dismissed as preposterous any suggestion that the I.R.S. was soft on rich tax cheats. He said that the money saved by eliminating the estate tax lawyers would be used to hire revenue agents to audit income tax returns, especially those from people making over $1 million.
Mr. Brown said that civil service rules barred the estate tax lawyers from moving over to audit income taxes. An I.R.S. spokesman said that the agency had asked for permission to allow such transfers twice, but that the Office of Personnel Management had not responded.
Estate tax lawyers are the most productive tax law enforcement personnel at the I.R.S., according to Mr. Brown. For each hour they work, they find an average of $2,200 of taxes that people owe the government.
Mr. Brown said that careful analysis showed that the I.R.S. was auditing enough returns to catch cheats and that 10 percent of the estate audits brought in 80 percent of the additional taxes. He said that auditing a greater percentage of gift and estate tax returns would not be worthwhile because “the next case is not a lucrative case” and likely to be of relatively little value.
That is a change from six years ago, when the I.R.S. said that 85 percent of large taxable gifts it audited shortchanged the government. The I.R.S. said then that it would hire three more lawyers just to audit taxable gifts of $1 million or more.
Over the last five years, officials at both the I.R.S. and the Treasury have told Congress that cheating among the highest-income Americans is a major and growing problem.
The six I.R.S. tax lawyers, some of whom were willing to be named, all said that clear evidence of fraud was pursued vigorously by the agency, but that when audits showed the use of complicated schemes to understate the value of assets, the I.R.S. had become increasingly reluctant to pursue cases.
The lawyers said that the risk analysis system the I.R.S. used to evaluate whether to pursue such cases gave higher-level officials cover to not pursue tax cheats and, in the process, emboldened the most aggressive tax advisers to prepare gift and estate tax returns that shortchanged the government.
“This is not a game the poor will win, but the rich will,” said John Hruska, another I.R.S. estate tax lawyer in New York who, like Ms. Phillips, is active in the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents I.R.S. workers.
Colleen M. Kelley, the national union president, said: “If these lawyers are not there to audit the gift and estate tax returns, then a lot of taxes that should be paid will go uncollected, and that impacts every taxpayer who is paying their fair share.”
Monday, July 24, 2006
Firms saving instead of hiring
Little Trickle-Down Effect from Gun-Shy Tech Companies
By Chris O'Brien
Mercury News
July 24th, 2006
In 2004, Silicon Valley's 150 largest companies made more money than ever -- profits were up 169 percent from the year before.
So why didn't it feel like a boom year? Because for the most part, companies aren't hiring locally. They're simply banking the cash.
During the dot-com bust, companies learned to sell more with fewer people. At the same time, demand for tech products has picked up, along with revenue. The result: The 10 Silicon Valley companies with the most cash on hand increased their stashes from a total of $21 billion in 1997 to $73 billion in 2005.
Many of these companies are building giant nest eggs as insurance against an uncertain future. When they open their checkbooks, it's often to buy back stock or acquire other companies. And if they do hire, it's usually outside Silicon Valley.
Consider Oracle of Redwood Shores. Revenue rose 11 percent last year, and profit 12 percent. The company finished the year by paying $10.6 billion in cash for rival PeopleSoft. Then it started this year by cutting 5,000 jobs from the combined companies. Companies in the Silicon Valley 150 posted $336.3 billion in revenue last year, up 14 percent from 2003. Profits over that year went up 169 percent to $31.4 billion.
However, hiring was mixed. This year's top companies increased their payrolls by 3.6 percent or 29,175 jobs. But that's still 3,040 fewer jobs than last year's top companies had. And much of the hiring simply isn't happening here.
Perhaps no company better epitomizes the priorities of this new era than Cisco Systems.
During the boom, the San Jose company hired trucks to drive around towns with its Web site on billboards, begging: ``Talk to us at Cisco.''
But with the bust, Cisco fired thousands of employees. Chief Executive John Chambers vowed not to hire until revenue per employee reached $700,000 again, a target Cisco missed by a hair last year.
As Cisco cut costs, the cash rolled in. The cash on its balance sheet jumped from $1.2 billion in 1997 to $9.3 billion in 2003. The company spent $16.9 billion buying back its stock between 2001 and 2004. And it spent more than $2.2 billion acquiring 12 companies in three years.
Yet its workforce in Silicon Valley has remained flat the past two years at 13,000, according to a Cisco spokeswoman. And Cisco's once-ambitious plans to build a campus in Coyote Valley and hire tens of thousands of new employees remain on ice.
Edy Unthank, 55, of San Jose, is one of the employees laid off from Cisco in 2002. Unthank, who worked in marketing, has been getting by on savings and contract work.
``For the first couple years, I figured it was slow and it'll turn around,'' Unthank said. ``But I still see companies laying people off.''
But Cisco's investors are smiling.
``We really love what Cisco is doing,'' said Brad Slingerlend, head of technology research for Janus, a mutual fund company.
Companies say they are obliged to do their best for shareholders and use their cash accordingly. And economists say the valley needs high productivity to compete with low-cost places like India and China.
``In the long term, that's the only way we can remain competitive,'' said Doug Henton, president of Collaborative Economics in Mountain View.
It's a different story for workers. Santa Clara County posted its third straight year of job losses in 2004.
``They don't need more people to do the work,'' said John Challenger, CEO of job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. ``Companies have found that they can fill their order flow with the people they have.''
Explosion of cash
Higher revenue and lower expenses have created an explosion of cash on the SV 150's balance sheets. From 1997 to 2005, cash at Hewlett-Packard alone jumped from $2.7 billion to $13.6 billion. Cash at Oracle jumped from $2.2 billion to $9.4 billion.
``Companies have nowhere to put the money,'' said Howard Silverblatt, a market equity analyst with Standard & Poor's.
In some cases, analysts believe companies won't spend because they remain shell-shocked from the downturn.
``A lot of them are taking that money and holding it as a rainy-day fund,'' said Mark Kajita, vice president for investment management at Baker Boyer National Bank in Walla Walla, Wash. ``We have some of the most efficient corporations right now in the history of America.''
Investors have begun urging companies to figure out a way to use their cash.
One favorite strategy is buying back stock. In 2004, 59 valley firms announced buybacks, up from 32 in 2003.
While dividends remain rare in tech, they, too, are increasing. Nine tech companies in the S&P 500 have announced dividends.
``Investors are telling them if you don't have something to do with that money, then give it back to us,'' analyst Silverblatt said.
That sentiment took its most extreme form in recent years at a small Santa Clara semiconductor company called Celeritek.
Celeritek's cash on hand grew from $8 million in 2002 to $28.9 million in 2003.
That year, a group of shareholders seized control of the board through a proxy fight. The new board then issued two cash dividends in 2004 totaling $7.50 a share.
Unfortunately, Silicon Valley workers barely feel the impact of dividends or buybacks.
``Neither one of those really help the local economy,'' said Steve Cochrane of Economy.com.
Mergers on rise
Companies are also using cash to buy other companies. Among the valley's top 24 companies, the number of mergers and acquisitions rose from 38 worth $4.7 billion in 2002 to 57 worth $27.4 billion in 2004, according to The 451 Group, a high-technology research firm. The number of those deals paid for in cash jumped from 64 percent to 81 percent.
Oracle is one company on a shopping spree.
Besides its recent acquisition of PeopleSoft, the company also won a bidding war for Retek by paying $669 million in cash.
But most of Oracle's expansion is overseas, where tech spending is growing faster than in the United States. From May 2003 to May 2004, Oracle added 1,008 jobs in all, according to a securities filing. But it cut 1,309 jobs in the United States and added 2,317 jobs overseas.
``The big companies are increasingly spreading their workforce around the country and around the world,'' Cochrane said. ``They may be growing, but the true impact may be felt in Portland or overseas.''
Google gives PayPal a run for your money
By Gregory M. Lamb | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Tuesday, July 25th, 2006
Shoppers browsing online for new designer sunglasses or that ultrathin cellphone have a new temptation: a speedy-looking blue shopping-cart icon offering to whisk them to a purchase.
Last month, Google, by far the most popular way to find things on the Internet (it processes about 45 percent of all searches), added Google Checkout to its burgeoning list of related products. By signing up, shoppers can quickly and painlessly (at least until the bill arrives!) click to buy anything where they see the Google Checkout shopping-cart symbol without entering their credit-card number or other information. Consumers can also keep track of what they've bought anywhere online in one place.
Google joins PayPal, a more full-service online- payment system owned by eBay, and others such as Bill Me Later, in offering an online "electronic wallet." These companies argue such systems are safer than punching in credit-card numbers all over the Net. Both Google and PayPal act as an intermediary and don't reveal the consumer's full credit-card number to the merchant at the site of the purchase.
But others worry that Google, in particular, is beginning to accumulate a tremendous amount of personal and financial data on consumers.
With Checkout, "Google has more data on you than before," says Philipp Lenssen, a full-time blogger in Stuttgart, Germany, whose Google Blogoscoped ( blog.outer-court.com) tracks developments at Google. "They have your e-mails [if you use Gmail], they have your search queries, they have what you shop for, they know which results you click on. If you have the Google Toolbar installed, they know where you're surfing."
"We take the privacy of our users very, very seriously," says Benjamin Ling, product lead for Google Checkout. For example, buyers using Checkout can set up a special e-mail account to communicate with sellers so that their own e-mail address remains private. "We understand that we're playing a trusted role here," Mr. Ling says. "We seek to protect the privacy of our users while staying in compliance with the law."
Google Checkout's privacy policy states that the company "will not sell or rent your personal information to companies or individuals outside Google," but will share information "[t]o detect, prevent, or otherwise address" fraud, security, or technical issues.
Earlier this year, Google vigorously opposed in court a request from the US Justice Department to provide it with 1 million random Web addresses and records of one week of Google searches. A judge later ruled that Google must provide 50,000 Web addresses from its databank but would not have to reveal any terms users had searched for.
Other than requests from the US government, Google has little reason to disclose the data it's accumulating, Lenssen says. "They don't have any [business] incentive to hand out your credit card [number]," he adds.
Although Google is a widely recognized brand name, it still has some work to do to persuade shoppers that it will handle their money with care, says analyst Edward Kountz, who tracks online payments and financial services at JupiterResearch in Boston. "[Google's] very much a search 'brand.' It's not a trusted brand per se." The ultimate question, he says, is "Would you let them hold your wallet?"
In the short term, Mr. Kountz says, "The credit-card companies still have the predominant share of the market space [online], and I would say of brand recognition as well, with the exception of PayPal."
About three-quarters of those going on the Internet have purchased a product or service online in the past 12 months, according to a JupiterResearch/Ipsos-Insight survey. But among those who have not made a purchase, concerns about security for their credit card or person ranks as the No. 1 reason (37 percent of respondents) for hesitating.
That may be why both Google Checkout and PayPal emphasize the security advantages of making purchases through them rather than entering credit-card information at each website. PayPal, online since 1998, has already staked out a large and growing presence. Last year, its total transactions amounted to $27.5 billion, a 45 percent increase over the previous year. Or, put another way, 10 percent of all the online sales in the United States were processed through PayPal, says Amanda Pires, a spokesperson for the company.
But although PayPal administers 114 million accounts worldwide, there are still "a lot of people who've never bought anything online," especially outside the US, Ms. Pires says, meaning the market is far from saturated.
Currently, Google requires a credit- or debit-account number to buy from participating merchants. At PayPal, consumers can transfer money in and out of bank accounts, too.
While PayPal won't comment directly on Google Checkout, PayPal's parent company, the giant online auction site eBay, has said it will not allow Google Checkout to be used for eBay transactions.
Google Checkout, with fewer features than PayPal, isn't "going to be a PayPal killer," Kountz says. PayPal is aimed at consumers and auction buyers, while Checkout is aimed at attracting merchants.
Google launched Checkout ( www.google.com/checkout) with a relatively modest number of online stores on board, including Jockey, Starbucks Store, Levi's, Dockers, Buy.com, Timberland, and Zales. Google's Checkout icon appears as an option on the checkout page of participating merchants.
But the service may quickly prove attractive to the vast number of online merchants, large and small, who pay to advertise using Google's AdWords program. For them, Google places small ads on behalf of advertisers next to its search results and charges the advertisers based on the number of clicks their ads receive.
Google will also make money, as do the credit-card companies, by charging a small fee to merchants for processing online transactions.
However, for every dollar a merchant spends on buying AdWords, Checkout will waive the processing fee for $10 worth in sales. That's a symbiotic relationship that could drive more use of both services.
In the end, Google simply wants to make money in as many places as it can as it creates more online tools, Lenssen says. "For them, [Checkout] is a very logical next step."
From: Use their tactics to change minds now
Posted on Alternet by: jgahler on Jul 19, 2006 3:08 PM
Proposed Dem campaign motif. Include a short snippet of truth preceded by "Since G W Bush & the GOP took control of the federal government...”. Does the snippet need precision to be exactly true? Require explanation? Who cares? Let the GOP make the arguments and explanations. It will take them pages, which no one will read. Every day, every hour, a new snippet. Change the venue. Really, all that will be needed will be bumper stickers with the words: HAD ENOUGH YET? Keep it short. Keep it simple. Keep it within the boundaries of truth."
AMD Agrees to buy ATI
Reuters: July 24th, 2006
By Franklin Paul
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said on Monday it would buy Canadian graphics chipmaker ATI Technologies Inc. for $5.4 billion, in what analysts called an aggressive but expensive move to compete with Intel Corp.
The deal will give AMD, the No. 2 supplier of computer processors, better high-end graphics products for mobile computing, gaming and media markets putting pressure on its larger rival Intel. Under the terms of the pact, AMD will pay $4.2 billion in cash and 57 million shares of AMD common stock. That is about $20.47 for each ATI share, a 24 percent premium over ATI's closing price on Nasdaq on Friday. AMD will take on $2.5 billion in new debt to complete the deal.
Iraqi PM admits failure to contain growing violence
Ewen MacAskill and Richard Norton-Taylor
Tuesday July 25, 2006
The Guardian
"The Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, conceded yesterday that the country's security situation had worsened in the two months since he took office. Speaking to journalists in London before meeting Tony Blair, Mr Maliki said he was planning a new security initiative for Baghdad. "The security situation has got worse since the government took control because the terrorists realise this is a government that can achieve security," Mr Maliki said. "All the groups involved in terrorism have escalated bombings, kidnappings and other actions."
China: Capitalism Doesn't Require Democracy
by Robert B. Reich:
July 24th, 2006
"You may remember when the world was divided between communism and capitalism, and when the Chinese were communists. The Chinese still call themselves communists, but now they’re also capitalists. In fact, visit China today and you find the most dynamic capitalist nation in the world. In 2005, it had the distinction of being the world’s fastest-growing major economy.
China is the manufacturing hub of the globe. It’s is also moving quickly into the highest of high technologies. It already graduates more computer engineers every year than the United States. Its cities are booming. There are more building cranes in use today in China than in all of the United States. China’s super-highways are filled with modern cars. Its deep-water ports and airports are world class. Its research and development centers are state of the art. At the rate its growing, in three decades China will be the largest economy in the world.
Communist, as in communal? Are you kidding? The gap between China’s rich and poor is turning into a chasm. China’s innovators, investors, and captains of industry are richly rewarded. They live in luxury housing developments whose streets are lined with McMansions. The feed in fancy restaurants, and relax in five-star hotels and resorts. China’s poor live in a different world. Mao Tse Tung would turn in his grave. So where are the Chinese communists? They’re in government. The communist party is the only party there is. China doesn’t have freedom of speech or freedom of the press. It doesn’t tolerate dissent. Authorities can arrest and imprison people who threaten stability, as the party defines it. Any group that dares to protest is treated brutally. There are no civil liberties, no labor unions, no centers of political power outside the communist party.
China shows that when it comes to economics, the dividing line among the world’s nations is no longer between communism and capitalism. Capitalism has won hands down. The real dividing line is no longer economic. It’s political. And that divide is between democracy and authoritarianism. China is a capitalist economy with an authoritarian government.
For years, we’ve assumed that capitalism and democracy fit hand in glove. We took it as an article of faith that you can’t have one without the other. That’s why a key element of American policy toward China has been to encourage free trade, direct investment, and open markets. As China becomes more prosperous and integrated into the global market -- so American policy makers have thought -- China will also become more democratic. Well, maybe we’ve been a bit naive. It’s true that democracy needs capitalism. Try to come up with the name of a single democracy in the world that doesn’t have a capitalist economy. For democracy to function there must be centers of power outside of government. Capitalism decentralizes economic power, and thereby provides the private ground in which democracy can take root. But China shows that the reverse may not be true -- capitalism doesn’t need democracy. Capitalism’s wide diffusion of economic power offers enough incentive for investors to take risks with their money. But, as China shows, capitalism doesn’t necessarily provide enough protection for individuals to take risks with their opinions.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
How Much Is That Laptop? It Depends on the Color of the Case.
by Robert Frank, Economic Scene, NY Times:
"If I order Apple's new MacBook laptop, the company will charge me $1,499 for a machine in black, but only $1,349 for an identically configured one in white.
As economists use the term, price discrimination means charging some buyers more than others for essentially the same product or service. Is it a bad thing? Buyers paying the higher prices understandably resent the practice. They might thus be surprised to learn that it often enables them to enjoy both lower prices and higher quality than would be possible if sellers charged the same price to everyone. Even more surprising, price discrimination often metes out rough justice among buyers, requiring those who are responsible for a greater share of sellers' costs to shoulder a greater share of the burden.
For these claims to hold, sellers' costs per unit must decline with the number of units sold. This test is met in many markets. ..., for example, ... the average cost of laptop computers declines sharply with the number produced — largely because research and development costs are essentially fixed. ... The upshot is that pricing schemes that enable companies to attract more buyers reduce the average cost per buyer served. And that frees resources that can be used to support higher quality — more frequent flights for travelers and more sophisticated laptops for computer buyers.
Among the ingenious tactics that sellers have developed for getting some buyers to pay more than others, many share a common feature: sellers offer discounts, but only to buyers who are first willing to jump a hurdle of some sort, like taking the trouble to mail in a rebate coupon. From the seller's perspective, the perfect hurdle is one that price-sensitive buyers can jump without difficulty but that other buyers find impossible to jump. ...
Although some people care a great deal about cutting-edge hardware and software, others would happily settle for simpler machines if that meant lower prices. Offering discounts to buyers of traditional white machines enables Apple to expand its market. And this reduces its cost per unit sold, freeing resources to develop even more sophisticated machines.
Apple's research program benefits all its buyers, but disproportionately those who care most about the new features it makes possible. In a just world, those buyers would pay a greater share of Apple's research costs. The premium price for new-look black machines is a crude device for identifying those buyers. People who are willing to pay it are largely the same ones who are willing to pay the most for the new machine's cutting-edge features.
Of course, discount hurdles do not apportion costs among buyers with precision. Some ... buyers who do not care much about a computer's technical abilities may have an overriding preference for machines in black, while others for whom those abilities are important may be equally happy with machines in white.
On balance, however, there appears to be at least rough justice in these and other hurdle schemes. The buyers who care most about quality tend also to be those who are least willing to jump over discount hurdles. To the extent these hurdles work, ... buyers of black laptops have little grounds for complaint.
The Essential Krugman: "The Price of Fantasy"
The Price of Fantasy, by Paul Krugman
Commentary, NY Times, July 21st, 2006
"Today we call them neoconservatives, but when the first George Bush was president, those who believed that America could remake the world to its liking with a series of splendid little wars — people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — were known within the administration as “the crazies.” Grown-ups in both parties rejected their vision as a dangerous fantasy.
But in 2000 the Supreme Court delivered the White House to a man who, although he may be 60, doesn’t act like a grown-up. The second President Bush obviously confuses swagger with strength, and prefers tough talkers like the crazies to people who actually think things through. He got the chance to implement the crazies’ vision after 9/11, ... And the result is the bloody mess we’re now in. ...
As I wrote back in January 2003, ... the “Bush doctrine” of preventive war was, in practice, a plan to “talk trash and carry a small stick.” It was obvious ... that the administration was preparing to invade Iraq not because it posed a real threat, but because it looked like a soft target.
The message to North Korea, which really did have an active nuclear program, was clear: “The Bush administration,” I wrote, ... “says you’re evil. It won’t offer you aid, even if you cancel your nuclear program.... But for all its belligerence, the Bush administration seems willing to confront only regimes that are militarily weak.” So “the best self-preservation strategy ... is to be dangerous.”
With a few modifications, the same logic applies to Iran. And it’s easier than ever for Iran to be dangerous, now that U.S. forces are bogged down in Iraq.
Would the current crisis on the Israel-Lebanon border have happened even if the Bush administration had actually concentrated on fighting terrorism, rather than using 9/11 as an excuse to pursue the crazies’ agenda? Nobody knows. But it’s clear that the United States would have more options, more ability to influence the situation, if Mr. Bush hadn’t squandered both the nation’s credibility and its military might on his war of choice.
So what happens next? Few if any of the crazies have the moral courage to admit that they were wrong. Vice President Cheney continues to insist that ... his declaration ... that we would be “greeted as liberators” and his assertion a year ago that the insurgency was in its “last throes” — were “basically accurate.” But if the premise of the Bush doctrine was right, why are things going so badly?
The crazies respond by retreating even further into their fantasies of omnipotence. The only problem, they assert, is a lack of will.
Thus William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, has called for a military strike — an airstrike, since we don’t have any spare ground troops — against Iran. ... Mr. Kristol is, of course, a pundit rather than a policymaker. But there’s every reason to suspect that what Mr. Kristol says in public is what Mr. Cheney says in private.
And what about The Decider himself? For years the self-proclaimed “war president” basked in the adulation of the crazies. Now they’re accusing him of being a wimp. “We have been too weak,” writes Mr. Kristol, “and have allowed ourselves to be perceived as weak.”
Does Mr. Bush have the maturity to stand up to this kind of pressure? I report, you decide.
Friday, July 21, 2006
July 20th, 2006 - US Forces @ 2,560 Killed In Action; Iraqi Civilians @ approx. 40,000 Killed in Action; OIF direct costs of approx. $280M per day, 18,777 US Forces Wounded in Action, Number of Days Osama has evaded capture: 1,773, estimated number of Muslims in America - approx 2 million; number of people arrested in the US for alledgely supporting Islamic terrorism: 262; highest ranking officer killed in Iraq: Lt. Col.; daily Iraqui oil exports @ 1.4M barrels/day vs pre-war of 3.2M barrels/day; global percentage of the population who believe Iraq will become a democracy within two generations @ 13% vs percent of Republicans who believe the war effort "will probably succeed" at 81%.
Bush Administration Poll Numbers by Political Affiliation: July 2006
At least one group is not seeing things correctly.
Stem Cell Research
The Stem Cell Research Situation circa July 2006
ISSCR Guidelines for the Conduct of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research
Full PDF format available here.
The National Research Council and Institute of Medicine formed the Committee on the Biological and Biomedical Applications of Stem Cell Research to address the potential of stem cell research. The committee organized a workshop that was held on June 22, 2001. At the workshop, the committee heard from many leading scientists who are engaged in stem cell research and from philosophers, ethicists, and legal scholars.
Note: Audio files of the speakers’ presentations are available at the workshop Web site, www.nationalacademies.org/stemcells.
NPR Timeline on this topic
Stem Cell - Overview
From: Religious Tolerance.org Website
June 2006
A stem cell is a primitive type of cell that can be coaxed into developing into most of the 220 types of cells found in the human body (e.g. blood cells, heart cells, brain cells, etc). Some researchers regard them as offering the greatest potential for the alleviation of human suffering since the development of antibiotics. Over 100 million Americans and two billion other humans worldwide suffer from diseases that may eventually be treated more effectively with stem cells or even cured. These include heart disease, diabetes, and certain types of cancer.
Stem cells can be extracted from very young human embryos -- typically from surplus frozen embryos left over from in-vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures at fertility clinics. A couple undergoing IVF is faced with four alternatives for their 16 or so surplus embryos:
There are very few parents willing to give their embryos to another couple for a variety of emotional reasons. There are very few couples willing to receive them for emotional reasons and because thawed embryos have such a low chance of starting a pregnancy. Preservation can be expensive. So most ask that they be discarded.
There are currently hundreds of thousands of surplus embryos in storage. One source estimated that there were 400,000 stored embryos by mid-2003. 4 However, a minority of pro-lifers and a majority of pro-life organizations object to the use of embryos in research. They feel that a few-days-old embryo is a human person. Extracting its stem cells kills the embryo -- an act that they consider to be murder. Stem cells can now be grown in the laboratory, so (in a pinch) some research can be done using existing stem cells. No further harvesting needs to be made from embryos. However, existing stem cell lines are gradually degrading and will soon be useless for research.
Stem cells can also be extracted from adult tissue, without harm to the subject. Unfortunately, they are difficult to remove and are severely limited in quantity. There has been a consensus among researchers that adult stem cells are limited in usefulness -- that they can be used to produce only a few of the 220 types of cells in the human body. However, some evidence is emerging that indicates that adult cells may be more flexible than has previously been believed.
Research using embryo stem cells had been authorized in Britain, but was initially halted in the U.S. by President George W. Bush. He decided on 2001-AUG-9 to allow research to resume in government labs, but restricted researchers to use only 72 existing lines of stem cells. By 2003-MAY, most of these lines had become useless. Only 22 remained in mid-2006, and many of them were of limited usefulness because of DNA damage.
Research continues in U.S. private labs and in both government and private labs in the UK, Japan, France, Australia, and other countries. On 2002-SEP, Governor Davis of California signed bill SB 253 into law. It is the first law in the U.S. that permits stem cell research. Davis simultaneously signed a bill that permanently bans all human cloning in the state for reproduction purposes -- i.e. any effort to create a cloned individual.
Following former president Ronald Reagan's death due to Alzheimer's in 2004-JUN -- a slow, lingering disease that took a decade to kill him -- Nancy Reagan and all of her family, except for Michael Reagan, mounted a campaign to encourage President Bush to relax restrictions on embryo stem cell research. Fifty-eight senators, almost all Democrats, sent a letter to President Bush, urging the same action.
A federal bill passed the House on 2005-MAY-24 to allow government funded research on embryonic stem cells extracted from surplus embryos in fertility clinics. It is expected to be voted upon by the Senate in 2006-JUL. President Bush has promised to veto it.
Text of Pres. Bush's Press Conference July 19th, 2006 - re: Stem Cell Research
Earlier Report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science - Fall 1999
PBS Nova Special on Stem Cells: April 2005
The Official National Institutes of Health stem cell research website
UCC General Synod 23 supports federally funded research on embryonic stem cells.
Resolution Summary:
This resolution calls upon the Twenty-third General Synod of the United Church of Christ to support federally funded embryonic stem cell research. Such research may enable the development of new approaches to diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of some of our most devastating diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Juvenile Diabetes and heart disease.
WHEREAS, Jesus set an example, by his ministry of healing and caring for the sick and disabled, challenging us to follow his example by supporting the healing and caring ministry in our own day, and
WHEREAS, human embryonic stem cells can form virtually any type of human cell and thus have the potential to form tissues for any part of the body, and
WHEREAS, many scientists agree that research on embryonic stem cells is more promising than that of adult stem cells that have only a limited capability to form certain cell types, and
WHEREAS, many scientists believe that embryonic stem cell research could relieve suffering and possibly cure patients with a variety of disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, juvenile diabetes, spinal cord injury, Huntington’s disease, and muscular dystrophy, and
WHEREAS, there are currently over 25,000 frozen embryos in IVF (in-vitro fertilization) clinics that probably will eventually be discarded, and
WHEREAS, the NIH developed guidelines regulating federally funded research on stem cells, provided they were taken from frozen human embryos derived from in vitro fertilization and which would be discarded after the treatment of infertile couples, and
WHEREAS, in Spring 2001 the present administration canceled the inaugural meeting of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) committee that was to review the applications for federal grants to study human embryonic stem cells; and
WHEREAS, there is bipartisan support for research using human embryos, including many Democratic and Republican legislators, and
WHEREAS, research on embryonic stem cells is already underway in privately funded laboratories where regulations and guidelines do not apply, and
WHEREAS, the support for federally funded research will impose ethical guidelines and oversight, and
WHEREAS, by banning the research, we foreclose the possibility of doing all we can to improve the lot of the living, and in many cases giving them new life,
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Twenty-third General Synod of the United Church of Christ supports federally-funded embryonic stem cell research within ethically sound guidelines (including concern for justice, privacy, access to the benefits of the research for all) and the limitations set forth by the National Institutes of Health, and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Twenty-third General Synod requests the General Minister and President of UCC to send a letter to the President of the United States urging approval of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research within NIH guidelines, and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Twenty-third General Synod requests Justice and Witness Ministries to advocate for allocation for stem cell research before the appropriate Congressional committees, and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Twenty-third General Synod requests Conferences, Association and Local Churches to work diligently in support of the legislation allowing stem cell research, providing appropriate guidelines for such research, and allocating funds to support the research, and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Twenty-third General Synod of the United Church of Christ calls upon the Covenanted Ministries to provide leadership and study materials for education, discussion and theological reflection about the ethical issues of developments in the field of stem cell research.
Funding for this action will be made in accordance with the overall mandates of the affected agencies and the funds available.
DoNoHarm Website: Opposes federal funding for stem cell research
House fails to override Bush Stem Cell Research veto
By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer Thu Jul 20, 6:48 AM ET
WASHINGTON - After waiting 5 1/2 years to make good on a veto threat, President Bush used his first to underscore his politically risky stand against federal funding for the embryonic stem cell research that most Americans support.
Some political strategists say Bush's high-profile stance on such an intensely emotional issue could hurt the party's congressional candidates in November in heartland places like Missouri.
"This bill would support the taking of innocent human life in the hope of finding medical benefits for others," Bush said after rejecting calls that he change his policy. "It crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect."
The veto puts some Republicans in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between the wishes of their conservative backers who consider embryonic stem cells to be early human life and those in greater numbers who want to use the cells for research that could one day save lives.
"I think history will look very unkindly on this veto," said Rep. Chris Shays, a moderate Connecticut Republican who helped pass the legislation. "I believe the president is very sincere in vetoing this bill, but I think that he's been captured by his own ideology and taking his ideology to an extreme."
"I think it will hurt" the party in November, said Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., who supported the veto. But he said Bush and Republicans who were allied with him were acting on moral principle and not politics. "I'm willing to roll the dice on that."
In vetoing the bill Bush made good on a promise he made in 2001 to limit federally funded embryonic research to the stem cell lines that had been created by the time.
Republicans working to maintain majorities in Congress say stem cells will not be the biggest issue on voters' minds in November and that the economy, war and terrorism will be more important. However, Democrats warned that voters would not forget Bush's veto.
"Everyone knows someone who needs this bill," said Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the chairman of the Democratic senatorial committee. "We don't have to do much work on this bill. It'll speak for itself."
There could be a silver lining for Republicans. The president's opposition to embryonic stem cell research is a popular move among his most conservative supporters — the same bloc that has been angry over Bush's immigration policies.
Richard A. Viguerie, a conservative direct-mail fundraiser, said Bush is in "serious trouble" with his base.
"If he were not to veto this legislation, you could see the administration come unraveled very quickly," Viguerie said. "It would really wreak havoc with his ability to govern with the conservative base there."
The hope among Republican strategists is that the stem cell veto will reinvigorate conservatives to get to the polls in the midterm, when turnout is traditionally lower.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee plans to fund ads on the issue in the fall as Democrats work to take control of the House with the November elections. Leading targets could be Republicans who are running in suburban districts, such as Peter Roskam near Chicago and Mike Fitzpatrick of the Philadelphia area.
Strategists on both sides say the debate could have the biggest impact on the Senate race in Missouri, where a measure protecting embryonic stem cell research is expected to be on the ballot.
Democrats chose their candidate in Missouri, State Auditor Claire McCaskill, to deliver last weekend's national radio address touting the potential lifesaving cures of the research. Incumbent Republican Sen. Jim Talent (news, bio, voting record) struggled over his position for months before announcing in May that he would oppose the ballot measure.
Talent's position put him on the side of anti-abortion and religious groups but against the state's biggest business and medical groups, which have lined up behind the initiative. The state's Republican governor supports it, as does former Sen. John Danforth, an Episcopal priest who lost a brother to Lou Gehrig's disease and has taped ads touting the measure.
"I think a lot of people are going to vote on this issue," Danforth said. He bristled at the suggestion that it could motivate conservatives and help the party.
"I served in elected office as a Republican for 26 years," he said. "Is somebody telling me I don't count? My brother doesn't count? What counts is that religious theory that says what takes place in a lab dish takes precedent over my brother?"
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Youtube's New Terms
YouTube's "new" Terms & Conditions allow them to sell whatever you uploaded however they want:
"…by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business… in any media formats and through any media channels."
Star Wars 2006
Blog Entry on Altercation
by Siva Vaidhyanathan
July 20th, 2006
Permalink
"North Korea tested a long-range ballistic missile that was supposed to be able to be able to deliver a nuclear warhead as far as Alaska. After five years of tense showdowns, sporadic negotiation, and much bluster, the U.S. government had succeeded in providing North Korea with no incentive to refrain from developing and testing nuclear weapons and the systems that would deliver them. Instead, President George W. Bush had elevated tensions, disengaged from Clinton-era talks that had suspended North Korea’s weapons programs, and, by virtue of committing vast military resources to the Middle East, had rendered all potential deterrents against North Korean military actions incredible.
The missile test did not go well for North Korea. The long-range missile fell into the sea just minutes after launch.[i] President Bush’s reaction to the news of the test was to boast that the freshly deployed (albeit limited) U.S. missile defense system would most likely have been able to protect the Western Continental United States from such a missile fired by North Korea. “Yes, I think we had a reasonable chance of shooting [the North Korean missile] down,” Bush said at a news conference in Chicago two days after the failed Korean test. “At least that's what the military commanders told me.”[ii]
Just the day before, Bush had reinforced his commitment to a missile defense system. “Because I think it's in -- I know it's in our interests to make sure that we're never in a position where somebody can blackmail us,” Bush said at a news conference in Washington, D.C., after meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. “And so we'll continue to invest and spend. And since this issue first came up, we've made a lot of progress on how to -- toward having an effective system. And it's in our interest that we continue to work along these lines.”[iii]
Bush expressed a dangerous level of faith in an unproven technology. Since it first emerged as a vision of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the U.S. government has spent from $2 billion to $10 billion dollars per year on various systems that would track intercontinental ballistic missiles through the stratosphere and send small intercepting vehicles up to disable or destroy the incoming warhead. This plan gathered enough enthusiasm among defense experts to justify development and experimentation for more than a decade, despite the ease with which any potential attacker could simply evade even the best system (overwhelming the defense with “dummy” or multiple warheads; shifting warheads to low-flying cruise missiles; relying instead on human carriers to deliver warheads in luggage; etc.). Every test of every part of every prototype of missile defense has failed.[iv] After repeated embarrassing failures and the news accounts of them, the United States merely opted in 2002 to cease testing the system. Despite the ceasing tests, the Bush administration activated elements of a system over Alaska and California in response to tensions with North Korea in June of 2006.[v]
Clearly, it does not matter to Bush that the technology is neither empirically viable nor theoretically effective. He just believes. Such faith in technology in the absence of critical analysis or empirical support is an example of “techno-fundamentalism,” the belief that we can, should, and will invent a machine that will fix the problems the last machine caused. It’s an extreme form of technological optimism or Whiggishness. Techno-fundamentalism assumes not only the means and will to triumph over adversity through gadgets and schemes, but the sense that invention is the best of all possible methods of confronting problems. Any dissent on the matter betrays a suspicious lack of faith, an infidelity of the gravest kind.
In the United States at the beginning of the 21st century we pay a heavy price for techno-fundamentalism. We build new and wider highways under the mistaken belief that they will ease congestion and speed traffic on its way.[vi] We rush to ingest pharmaceuticals that might alleviate our ills with no more effectiveness than a placebo would.[vii] We make investment and policy decisions based on self-fulfilling (and misleading) phenomena such as “Moore’s Law,” which falsely predicts that computer processing power will double every 18 months, as if computer speed had the force of nature above and beyond specific decisions by firms and engineers.[viii] Perhaps most dangerously, we maliciously neglect real problems with the structures and devices we depend on to preserve our lives, as we did for decades with the levees that failed to protect the poorest residents of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.[ix] And now, it seems techno-fundamentalism stands as the operative ideology in national security policy. We need not depend on messy diplomacy or credible military threats to curb the activities of hostile states. We have “Star Wars.”[x]
Note: Siva Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian and media scholar, is the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004).
The Federal Budget circa 2000-2006 - The Worst in Fifty Years
July 20, 2006
EVEN WITH NEW BUDGET PROJECTIONS, BUDGET DETERIORATION FROM 2000-2006 WILL BE THE LARGEST 6-YEAR DETERIORATION IN HALF A CENTURY
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
by Richard Kogan and Matt Fiedler
The White House has trumpeted new projections that show that the budget deficit will be 2.3 percent of the Gross Domestic Product in 2006, down from the 3.2 percent of GDP projected earlier this year. However, a deficit of 2.3 percent of GDP is no cause for celebration, particularly considering that the budget was in surplus as recently as 2001. Indeed, even taking into account this recent improvement, the deterioration in the nation’s fiscal situation over the last six years is the worst six-year deterioration in a half century.
The Press Conference Photo-Op - when Bush 43 exercised his first veto in six years - on stem-cell research.
EPA Improves Standards for Recycling of Cathode Ray Tubes
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Contact: Roxanne Smith, (202) 564-4355 / smith.roxanne@epa.gov
(Washington, D.C. - July 19, 2006) EPA is streamlining the federal hazardous waste management requirements for cathode ray tubes and CRT glass destined for recycling. These safe, yet simplified standards aim to increase the collection and recycling of CRTs. Safely recycling CRTs saves energy and conserves resources, allows the recovered lead to be reused in other ways, and reduces the amount of lead in landfills.
"A discarded CRT represents an opportunity lost," said EPA Assistant Administrator Susan Bodine. "This rule will help encourage the reuse and recycling of CRTs, which puts these resources back to productive use, rather than into the Nation's landfills."
Under these new regulations, used, unbroken CRTs are not regulated as hazardous waste unless they are stored for more than a year. EPA is setting simpler, more manageable standards for unbroken CRTs because the risk of lead releases from them is very low. Limited storage requirements apply only to CRT recyclers and collectors.
CRTs are the video display components of televisions and computer monitors. The glass in CRTs typically contains enough lead to require managing it as hazardous waste under certain circumstances. Under the previous regulations, businesses and other organizations that recycle or dispose of CRTs were sometimes unclear about the proper way to recycle or dispose of this equipment. That uncertainty sometimes prevented CRTs from being recycled and reused. EPA is changing CRT waste management requirements to eliminate this confusion so that more CRTs will be reused and recycled. About 57 million computers and televisions are sold in the United States annually, although many new models may not contain CRTs.
Used, broken CRTs are not regulated as hazardous waste as long as certain good-housekeeping practices are followed. To remain unregulated, CRTs undergoing glass processing must follow the same simplified requirements, except that they must be processed so that lead from the glass is not volatilized. CRT glass that has been processed and sent to a CRT glass manufacturer or a lead smelter also is unregulated, as long as it is kept in storage less than a year.
Exporters shipping broken or unbroken CRTs to another country for recycling must notify EPA and receive written consent from the receiving country through EPA before shipments can be made. This requirement is similar to those applicable to exporters of hazardous waste, which are found at 40 CFR Part 262. In addition, exporters shipping used, unbroken CRTs for reuse as computers to another country must submit a one-time notification to EPA.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
America's Senior Moment
By Paul Krugman
Review of: The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know About America's Economic Future by Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns, MIT Press, 274 pp., $27.95; $16.95 (paper)
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Heat Wave Prevails Across Most of U.S.
N.Y. Times
By JOHN HOLUSHA
Published: July 18, 2006
Most of the nation remained in the grip of a heat wave today, with high temperatures in the 90’s and 100’s prevailing across all but the northernmost states, straining electric power grids and disrupting some transportation links.
Iraqi Death Toll Rises Above 100 Per Day, U.N. Says
N.Y. Times
By KIRK SEMPLE
Published: July 19, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 18 — An average of more than 100 civilians per day were killed in Iraq last month, the United Nations reported Tuesday, registering what appears to be the highest official monthly tally of violent deaths since the fall of Baghdad.
Night Views
From a recent email message: "The Red Planet is about to be spectacular!...
Note: It's a two year old email hoax...ignore it
Federally Funded Pregnancy Resource Centers Mislead Teens about Abortion Risks
Monday, July 17, 2006 --
A new study released by Rep. Henry A. Waxman, (D, California), finds that federally funded pregnancy resource centers often mislead pregnant teens about the medical risks of abortion, telling investigators who posed as pregnant 17-year-olds that abortion leads to breast cancer, infertility, and mental illness.
Recommendations of the Carter-Baker Conference Committee - 2005
Report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform
September 2005
Note: Only specific recommendations which deserve special consideration are included or highlighted below. Ed.)
{Full Report Text Available Here}
Summary:
2.2.1 In order to assure that lists take account of citizens moving from one state to another, voter databases should be made interoperable between states. This would serve to eliminate duplicate registrations, which are a source of potential fraud.
2.4.1 States and local jurisdictions should use Web sites, toll-free numbers, and other means to answer questions from citizens as to whether they are registered and, if so, what is the location of their precinct, and if they are not registered, how they can do so before the deadline.
2.6.1 States need to effectively maintain and update their voter registration lists.The EAC should provide voluntary guidelines to the states for quality audits to test voter registration databases for accuracy (correct and up-to-date information on individuals), completeness (inclusion of all eligible voters), and security (protection of unauthorized access). When an eligible voter moves from one state to another, the state to which the voter is moving should be required to notify the state which the voter is leaving to eliminate that voter from its registration list.
2.6.2 All states should have procedures for maintaining accurate lists such as electronic matching of death records, drivers licenses, local tax rolls, and felon records.
3.1.1 Congress should pass a law requiring that all voting machines be equipped with a voter-verifiable paper audit trail and, consistent with HAVA, be fully accessible to voters with disabilities.
3.3.1 The Independent Testing Authorities, under EAC supervision, should have responsibility for certifying the security of the source codes to protect against accidental or deliberate manipulation of vote results. In addition, a copy of the source codes should be put in escrow for future review by qualified experts. Manufacturers who are unwilling to submit their source codes for EAC-supervised testing and for review by independent experts should be prohibited from selling their voting machines.
4.4.8 The Federal Voting Assistance Program should receive a copy of the report that states are required under HAVA to provide the EAC on the number of absentee ballots sent to and received from military and overseas voters.
5.1.1 In July of even-numbered years, the U.S. Department of Justice should issue a public report on its investigations of election fraud. This report should specify the numbers of allegations made, matters investigated, cases prosecuted, and individuals convicted for various crimes. Each state’s attorney general and each local prosecutor should issue a similar report.
5.2.1 State and local jurisdictions should prohibit a person from handling absentee ballots other than the voter, an acknowledged family member, the U.S. Postal Service or other legitimate shipper, or election officials.The practice in some states of allowing candidates or party workers to pick up and deliver absentee ballots should be eliminated.
6.1.1 To undertake the new responsibilities recommended by this report and to build confidence in the administration of elections, Congress and the states should reconstitute election management institutions on a nonpartisan basis to make them more independent and effective. U.S. Election Assistance Commission members and each state’s chief elections officer should be selected and be expected to act in a nonpartisan manner, and the institutions should have sufficient funding for research and training and to conduct the best elections possible.We believe the time has come to take politics as much as possible out of the institutions of election administration and to make these institutions nonpartisan.
6.1.3 States should prohibit senior election officials from serving or assisting political campaigns in a partisan way, other than their own campaigns in states where they are elected.
6.1.4 States should take additional actions to build confidence in the administration of elections by making existing election bodies as nonpartisan as possible within the constraints of each state’s constitution. Among the ways this might be accomplished would be if the individuals who serve as the state’s chief elections officer were chosen based on their capability, integrity, and nonpartisanship.The state legislatures would need to confirm these individuals by a two-thirds majority of one or both houses. The nominee should receive clear bipartisan support.
7.1.2 The Commission encourages broadcasters to continue to offer candidates short segments of air time to make issue statements, answer questions, or engage in mini-debates.
7.2.1 News organizations should voluntarily refrain from projecting any presidential election results in any state until all of the polls have closed in the 48 contiguous states.
Triumph of the Authoritarians
Triumph of the authoritarians
by John W. Dean, Commentary, Boston Globe:
July 14, 2006
"Contemporary conservatism and its influence on the Republican Party was, until recently, a mystery to me. The practitioners' bludgeoning style of politics, their self-serving manipulation of the political processes, and their policies that focus narrowly on perceived self-interest -- none of this struck me as based on anything related to traditional conservatism. Rather, truth be told, today's so-called conservatives are quite radical.
For more than 40 years I have considered myself a "Goldwater conservative," and am thoroughly familiar with the movement's canon. But I can find nothing conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon "imperial presidency" on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra.
What true conservative calls for packing the courts to politicize the federal judiciary to the degree that it is now possible to determine the outcome of cases by looking at the prior politics of judges? Where is the conservative precedent for the monocratic leadership style that conservative Republicans imposed on the US House when they took control in 1994, a style that seeks primarily to perfect fund-raising skills while outsourcing the writing of legislation to special interests and freezing Democrats out of the legislative process?
How can those who claim themselves conservatives seek to destroy the deliberative nature of the US Senate by eliminating its extended-debate tradition, which has been the institution's distinctive contribution to our democracy? Yet that is precisely what Republican Senate leaders want to do by eliminating the filibuster when dealing with executive business (namely judicial appointments).
Today's Republican policies are antithetical to bedrock conservative fundamentals. There is nothing conservative about preemptive wars or disregarding international law by condoning torture. Abandoning fiscal responsibility is now standard operating procedure. Bible-thumping, finger-pointing, tongue-lashing attacks on homosexuals are not found in Russell Krik's classic conservative canons, nor in James Burham's guides to conservative governing. Conservatives in the tradition of former senator Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan believed in "conserving" this planet, not relaxing environmental laws to make life easier for big business. And neither man would have considered employing Christian evangelical criteria in federal programs, ranging from restricting stem cell research to fighting AIDs through abstinence.
Candid and knowledgeable Republicans on the far right concede -- usually only when not speaking for attribution -- that they are not truly conservative. They do not like to talk about why they behave as they do, or even to reflect on it. Nonetheless, their leaders admit they like being in charge, and their followers grant they find comfort in strong leaders who make them feel safe. This is what I gleaned from discussions with countless conservative leaders and followers, over a decade of questioning.
I started my inquiry in the mid-1990s, after a series of conversations with Goldwater... Goldwater was also mystified (when not miffed) by the direction of today's professed conservatives -- their growing incivility, pugnacious attitudes, and arrogant and antagonistic style, along with a narrow outlook intolerant of those who challenge their thinking. He worried that the Republican Party had sold its soul to Christian fundamentalists, whose divisive social values would polarize the nation. From those conversations, Goldwater and I planned to study why these people behave as they do... Sadly, the senator's declining health soon precluded his continuing...
For almost half a century, social scientists have been exploring authoritarianism. We do not typically associate authoritarianism with our democracy, but as I discovered while examining decades of empirical research, we ignore some findings at our risk. Unfortunately, the social scientists who have studied these issues report their findings in monographs and professional journals written for their peers, not for general readers. With the help of a leading researcher and others, I waded into this massive body of work.
What I found provided a personal epiphany. Authoritarian conservatives are, as a researcher told me, "enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral." And that's not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of thousands over the past several decades.
Authoritarianism's impact on contemporary conservatism is beyond question. Because this impact is still growing and has troubling (if not actually evil) implications, I hope that social scientists will begin to write about this issue for general readers. It is long past time to bring the telling results of their empirical work into the public square and to the attention of American voters. No less than the health of our democracy may depend on this being done. We need to stop thinking we are dealing with traditional conservatives on the modern stage, and instead recognize that they've often been supplanted by authoritarians."
Note: John W. Dean, former Nixon White House counsel, just published his seventh nonfiction book, ``Conservatives Without Conscience." Given his background and role in Watergate, a description of this White House as "a Nixon "imperial presidency" on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra," and other such statements catches your attention.
The Essential Krugman: Left Behind Economics
Left Behind Economics
by Paul Krugman, U.S. Economy Commentary, NY Times:
I’d like to say that there’s a real dialogue taking place about the state of the U.S. economy, but the discussion leaves a lot to be desired. In general, the conversation sounds like this:
Bush supporter: “Why doesn’t President Bush get credit for a great economy? I blame liberal media bias.”
Informed economist: “But it’s not a great economy for most Americans. Many families are actually losing ground, and only a very few affluent people are doing really well.”
Bush supporter: “Why doesn’t President Bush get credit for a great economy? I blame liberal media bias.” ...
Many observers, even if they acknowledge the growing concentration of income..., find it hard to believe that this concentration could be proceeding so rapidly as to deny most Americans any gains from economic growth. Yet newly available data show that that’s exactly what happened in 2004 ...
Here’s what happened... The U.S. economy grew 4.2 percent, a very good number. Yet ... real median family income — the purchasing power of the typical family — actually fell. Meanwhile, poverty increased, as did the number of Americans without health insurance. So where did the growth go?
The answer comes from the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, whose long-term estimates of income equality have become the gold standard for research on this topic... They show that even if you exclude capital gains from a rising stock market, in 2004 the real income of the richest 1 percent of Americans surged by almost 12.5 percent. Meanwhile, the average real income of the bottom 99 percent of the population rose only 1.5 percent. In other words, a relative handful of people received most of the benefits of growth.
There are a couple of additional revelations in the 2004 data. One is that growth didn’t just bypass the poor and the lower middle class, it bypassed the upper middle class too. Even people at the 95th percentile of the income distribution — that is, people richer than 19 out of 20 Americans — gained only modestly. ...
The other revelation is that being highly educated was no guarantee of sharing in the benefits of economic growth. There’s a persistent myth, perpetuated by economists who should know better ... that rising inequality ... is mainly a matter of a rising gap between those with a lot of education and those without. But census data show that the real earnings of the typical college graduate actually fell in 2004.
In short, it’s a great economy if you’re a high-level corporate executive or someone who owns a lot of stock. For most other Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.
Can anything be done to spread the benefits of a growing economy more widely? Of course. A good start would be to increase the minimum wage, which in real terms is at its lowest level in half a century.
But don’t expect this administration or this Congress to do anything to limit the growing concentration of income. Sometimes I even feel sorry for these people and their apologists, who are prevented from acknowledging that inequality is a problem by both their political philosophy and their dependence on financial support from the wealthy. That leaves them no choice but to keep insisting that ordinary Americans — who have, in fact, been bypassed by economic growth — just don’t understand how well they’re doing.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Toying With Terror Alerts?
By Joshua Michah Marshall
TIME Magazine
Friday 07 July 2006
"In these perilous days, we must be ready to think the unthinkable. No, I don't mean the possibility of a catastrophic terrorist attack. After 9/11, that's all too easy to imagine. No, I'm talking about a thought that even now seldom forces its way into respectable conversation: the quite reasonable suspicion that the Bush Administration orchestrates its terror alerts and arrests to goose the GOP's poll numbers.
Now, I'm a respectable columnist. I don't want to draw rolled eyes. But think about it.
The 18 months prior to the 2004 presidential election witnessed a barrage of those ridiculous color-coded terror alerts, quashed-plot headlines and breathless press conferences from Administration officials. Warnings of terror attacks over the Christmas 2003 holidays, warnings over summer terror attacks at the 2004 political conventions, then a whole slew of warnings of terror attacks to disrupt the election itself. Even the timing of the alerts seemed to fall with odd regularity right on the heels of major political events. One of Department of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge's terror warnings came two days after John Kerry picked John Edwards as his running mate; another came three days after the end of the Democratic convention.
So it went right through the 2004 election. And then not long after the champagne corks stopped popping at Bush campaign headquarters, terror alerts seemed to go out of style. The color codes became yesterday's news. With the exception of one warning about mass-transit facilities in response to the London bombing on July 7, 2005, that was pretty much it until this summer. I live in lower Manhattan and my wife works in a building overlooking Ground Zero. So I want to know when something's really up and not worry that I'm getting bamboozled to amp the President's approval rating.
Can I prove any of this was politically motivated? Of course not. But that's the magic of the terror-alert song and dance. There's no way to know. All the key facts are veiled in secrecy, as they must be. So it's impossible to know from the outside whether it's on the level or not. But with another election looming, it seems we're about to get a bunch of new chances to wonder.
On June 23, cable-news channels went gonzo over a raid on a homegrown terror cell in Miami that foiled an alleged plot to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales held a press conference to announce the arrests. Even Vice President Dick Cheney weighed in and called the group a "very real threat." He did so at a political fundraiser.
But as often is the case in these announcements, it turned out to be a lot less than advertised, unless you were a writer for Saturday Night Live. When the FBI raided the abandoned warehouse where the group hung out in Miami's impoverished Liberty City neighborhood, they found no weapons, no money and no evidence of ties to any terrorist group anywhere. Indeed, these would-be jihadis were so early in their planning for jihad that they hadn't yet set aside time to become Muslims. The group, according to a follow-up report from Reuters, "mixes Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Freemasonry, Gnosticism and Taoism." Their covert methods included taking turns guarding the abandoned warehouse (which served as their clubhouse) wearing black uniforms, ski masks and combat boots in the hot Florida summer. Their leader, Narseal Batiste, roamed the streets in a bathrobe with a crooked wooden staff recruiting men to join his group. The oath of allegiance to al-Qaeda they allegedly made to an FBI informant seems as likely as not to have been prompted by the informants' offer of new pairs of boots for the gang. Shoes were apparently in short supply.
You don't need to be a Muslim or even that bright a bulb to create deadly mayhem. Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber, was a klutz, but one who might have downed an airliner en route to the U.S. in the days after 9/11. But the Miami warehouse cult that gave Cheney the willies seemed like they'd have trouble finding a Sears let alone blowing up the Sears Tower.
Two weeks later there was another report of a foiled plot, this one a far more serious-sounding scheme to blow up the Holland Tunnel, which connects New Jersey to Manhattan. Sensing their credibility might be running thin, FBI officials as well as members of media started referring to these plotters as the "real deal" plotters, presumably to distinguish them from whack jobs in Miami. These guys too, it turned out, hadn't done much more than talk in an Internet chat room about blowing something up. And their plan to flood downtown New York City with sea water from a demolished tunnel would have been complicated a bit by the fact that, unlike New Orleans, Manhattan is well above sea level.
The "tell" in this case was the date. The FBI got wind of this plot last summer and arrests were made back in April. So why did we hear about them on July 7, the anniversary of the London bombings? I believe the question answers itself. The story was leaked to pump up the anniversary of the London subway bombings on July 7, 2005, and remind people that if it could happen in London it could happen here. The dozens if not hundreds of law enforcement folks who worked on thwarting this embryonic plot were not part of some political scheme. But whoever chose July 7 to leak the story clearly was. With the mid-term election less than four months away, for some people, that's a helpful message.
The Housing Bubble: Slow Leak or Bust?
The End of the Housing Bubble
I just bought a house in Berkeley, California, that I couldn’t have afforded a year ago. I still can’t afford it, but at least I’m breathing. New data show home construction in May recovering a bit from the 13-month low hit in April, but housing starts are still way behind where they were a year ago. More telling, building permits -- a sign of future construction -- fell 2.1 percent in May, to the lowest level since November, 2003. Home sellers have every reason to worry. There’s a record number of unsold homes on the market:¬ 565,000 new ones and 3.4 million previously owned residences. In other words, a glut.
America’s housing bubble has not exactly burst. It’s just sprung a leak the size of your average mortgage banker. What’s clear is the boom is over. All across America, backlogs of unsold homes are long. Price increases are slowing. In some markets, home prices are actually dropping.
It’s better that bubbles leak than burst. Gradual declines are always easier to manage than explosions. But the housing boom has been so large and important to the American economy over the past five years that even this slow leak will cause severe headaches. Not for me and other home buyers, but for lot of other people.
One big headache will be experienced by millions of households that had turned their growing home values into piggy banks to finance their continued consumption. That easy route to cash is just about gone. The inevitable result will be less consumption, which will mean fewer jobs.
A more immediate problem will arise for all the people making, financing, and selling houses. Here we’re talking about a vast army of carpenters, plasterers, roofers, plumbers, electricians, mortgage bankers, home inspectors, real estate agents, architects, structural engineers and many more. According to Moddy’s Economy.com, housing-related employment has accounted for almost a quarter of the five million jobs that have appeared since 2003.
These jobs pay well even though most of them don’t require a college degree. That’s because they don’t have to compete in global commerce. Workers in Beijing or Calcutta can’t easily build houses in Phoenix or San Diego. Moreover, demand for housing-related work has been rising faster than the supply of people to fill them, at least until recently. But now with the housing boom over, many of these good jobs are over, too.
In other words, without the housing bubble, the American economy will lose a lot of its fizz. I don’t like bubbles, but from a jobs standpoint this recovery has needed all the fizz it can get. Median wages have gone nowhere. The ranks of the long-term unemployed have been unusually high. The percent of the labor force with jobs is lower than in 2000. Housing has been one of the few bright spots in the economy.
All of which brings us to Ben Bernanke and his gang at the Federal Reserve Board Open Market Committee. They just raised short-term interest rates again because they think the economy is too fizzy and still prone to inflation. I hope they listen carefully: The hissing sound they hear is air escaping the housing bubble. There’s less fizz in the economy than they think. They should stop raising rates. Raise interest rates any further, and the Fed raises the likelihood the economy will deflate.
Study Finds Backdating of Options Widespread
NY Times
By STEPHANIE SAUL
Published: July 17, 2006
More than 2,000 companies appear to have used backdated stock options to sweeten their top executives’ pay packages, according to a new study that suggests the practice is far more widespread than previously disclosed.
The new statistical analysis, which comes amid a broadening federal inquiry of the practice of timing options to the stock market, estimates that 29.2 percent of companies have used backdated options and 13.6 percent of options granted to top executives from 1996 to 2005 were backdated or otherwise manipulated.
So far, more than 60 companies have disclosed that they are the targets of government investigations, are the subject of investor lawsuits or have conducted internal audits involving the practice, in which options are backdated to days when the company’s shares trade at low prices.
From Prof. Robert Reich's Blog:
"More than 60 companies have disclosed investigations, including 40 grand jury investigations, into whether they’ve back-dated executive options to coincide with days when their stock prices were low. And a raft of shareholder lawsuits have been filed. At least 17 people have been fired or quit in connection with the unfolding scandal.
One lawsuit, for example, alleges that Apple Computer backdated stock option grants to 14 current and former officers, dating each grant just after a sharp drop and just before a substantial rise in Apple’s stock price.
What’s the big deal? Just this. If Apple or any other company back-date options for when share prices are especially low, executives who exercise the options get a windfall. They can buy shares at that extra-low price and then sell them after their price has risen. Seems unfair, right? Like insider trading, or outright stock manipulation, or worse.
But now comes SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins, who argues that companies who manipulate the timing of their executive options are not guilty of violating securities laws because such maneuvers are actually good for shareholders.
According to Atkins’ logic, back-dating executive stock options, or timing them so they can be exercised just before the company issues a positive quarterly earnings report that raises share values, does create a windfall for executives. But precisely because of this windfall, companies are able to compensate their executives more cheaply. They can issue fewer stock options or provide lower salaries. So by timing stock options this way, companies end up saving money, and investors pocket the savings. Get it?
I’ve heard a lot of arguments over the years to justify almost anything. But let me tell you, this is a doozie. It’s a little like arguing that home insurers benefit if people back-date their home insurance policies to take effect before their houses burn down because then they’ll have the money to renew their policies.
What’s particularly weird about this logic is it completely ignores the purpose of executive stock options in the first place. They’re supposed to better align executive incentives with the interests of investors – inducing executives to work harder to raise share prices.
But stock options have this effect only if executives don’t know what their option will be worth in the future. If they can go back in time and pick a date when the share price was especially low relative to what it is now or will surely be when a positive quarterly earnings report is issued, the incentive disappears because the future is no longer the future. It’s the past.
If the incentive that’s supposed to be in a stock option disappears, shareholders are worse off. More stock has been issued, which dilutes the value of their own shares. And they get nothing in return. Anyone who believes companies will reduce executive compensation by the inflated value of a stock option has not been paying much attention to what’s happened to executive compensation in recent years.
Note: Robert Reich is the nation's 22nd Secretary of Labor and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley
Friday, July 14, 2006
Microsoft Ends Support for Win98
Win98 Train Wreck Is Finally Here @ Thursday, July 13, 2006 11:11 PM
"The business models of Microsoft and IBM (and other business oriented software publishers and service firms)are very different. Microsoft relies on upgrade sales to continue to make money, and thus actually welcome bugs and security holes. IBM (and others leasing software) rely on software app "maturity" because they lease the software and need to guarantee stability and usefulness. Businesses running "legacy" apps are actually doing so because they are "mature" and after many years of actual usage, are now bug-free; and can be relied on to do their work right with little or no worries.
In business, the more mature an app is, the more valuable it is to the business. Mature apps running on Windows 98 and even DOS are worth more to business than new, buggy apps running on new, buggy OS's. The key word in business is software "maturity" and Microsoft would hate to admit it because if they do, they'll fold up in no time. So Microsoft declares their own, old software "obsolete" that need to be upgraded/replaced with their newest (and yet buggy) versions. Makes me wonder where the term "software maturity" went? It used to be the most convincing sales pitch in software leasing business. That said, Windows of any version will never ever be "matured".
Note: by Mark Riordan, Madison, Wisconsin, July 2006
Golf Gadgets: Range Finders
SkyCaddie - MSRP @ $399: Using a powerful microprocessor, GPS technology with satellite based accuracy, the SkyCaddie automatically calculates up to 40 locations per hole insatntly. No more guessing distance! Only the best and most expensive golf courses have GPS enabled golf carts. Well now you can have your very own that will work at ANY golf course! No Aiming, No Missing Because It Works By Satellite! More Time To Focus On Your Game. Avoid Hidden Trouble. Measure The Distance Of The Shot You Just Completed (How Long Was That Drive?)! Use It On Any Golf Course. Totally Portable At Only 4.8 Ounces - About The Size Of A Cell Phone! Up to 10-hour, rechargeable lithium-ion battery. You can have up to 5 courses that you can program yourself. To get the most out of the Skycaddie, there are downloadable golf courses available.
Bushnell PinSeeker® 1500 - MSRP @ $495: Bushnell's Yardage Pro rangefinders use an invisible, eye-safe Class 1 Laser beam (as classified by the FDA) which is "bounced" off distant objects with the press of a button. Then, the rangefinder's high-speed digital clock measures the time it took for a laser beam to reach a target and return to the unit. Next, using advanced digital electronics, the rangefinder instantly calculates the distance within + / – 1 yard and shows the range in either yards or meters on a through-the-lens LCD Display. The entire process is so fast that less than a second elapses between the time you press the button to generate a laser beam to the time the exact range to your target is displayed.
Because rangefinders "bounce" a laser beam off the target in order to take a measurement, their range is partially determined by the reflectivity of the target. In other words, hard or "reflective" targets – like a rock cliff or semi-truck – can be measured at greater distances than soft surface targets – like a deer. Ranges for moderately reflective targets, like trees, fall somewhere in the middle. Most experienced hunters will use their rangefinder to frequently estimate ranges to near and distant landmarks before they actually encounter a game animal. By "pre-measuring" ranges to spots where a trophy is likely to appear, they can concentrate on making an accurate shot when the moment of truth arrives.
SureShot GPS Golf Rangefinder - MSRP @ $400: Select the hole to play and know the distance to the front, center and back of the green from anywhere on the course; know the distance to up to 15 recorded points identifying hazards, etc. for each hole; maintain momentum during play as they no longer have to search for distance markers; know pace of play and elapsed playing time; record individual golf courses quickly and simply and save up to 10 different courses; download from the Tee2Green website pre-recorded courses which can be included in the 10 courses available on the sureshotgps; use sureshotgps on any golf course in the world (subject to local rules); record fairways hit, greens in regulation, putts and provide statistics. Provided with the sureshotgps is the bonus Windows software sureanalysis which further analyses play and keeps statistics for specific or multiple games.Measure their shots and know the exact distance for each club – enabling this feature allows club recommendation depending on the distance to the green.
Nikon Laser 500G LaserCaddy™ Rangefinder MSRP @ $295: Nikon introduces the perfect practice companion — the Laser 500G LaserCaddy™ Rangefinder. Featuring Nikon’s original digital processor and revolutionary Tru-Target™ ranging system technology, LaserCaddy delivers incredibly accurate and consistent distance measurements to the pin and other hard-to-range targets. Whether at sea, in the woods or on the golf course, laser rangefinders can prove to be very handy devices for specific applications. Nikon's Laser 500G is ideally suited to a golfer's needs, with a lightweight design that's a pleasure to carry. They pack incredibly sharp, contrast optics which are the envy of the competition.
Bushnell Trophy 800 Laser Rangefinder - MSRP @ $195: Take the guesswork out of distance measurement and yardage estimation with these advanced, ultra-precise laser rangefinders. Using state of the art technology, they emit an invisible, eye safe infrared energy pulse that is reflected off selected targets and back to the rangefinder. Accurately measures to + or -1 yd. Thru-the-lens, multifunction, in-view liquid crystal display (LCD) shows target quality, low battery indicator, active laser, and distance readout while simultaneously viewing the target. Permits measurements in inclement weather with zip-thru mode that enables measurement readings through foreground clutter like branches and brush. Features a fully coated Perma-Focus monocular magnification sighting system , quite operation, and automatic shut-off for longer battery life. Compact lightweight units are water and shock resistant and housed in a durable rubber-armor coated aluminum body. Includes padded carrying case and neck strap.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Damn it...here we go again !!
Israel Blockades Lebanon; Wide Strikes by Hezbollah
By HASSAN M. FATTAH and STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: July 14, 2006
BEIRUT, Lebanon, Friday, July 14 — Israel imposed a full naval blockade on Lebanon on Thursday and put Beirut’s international airport out of commission, and the militant group Hezbollah loosed a hail of rockets and mortar shells that killed two Israelis and sent thousands into bomb shelters.
Israeli attacks on Lebanon continued on Thursday. Hezbollah in turn has fired rockets and mortars into Israel. Earlier, Israel entered Gaza's Kissufim crossing and cut off the southern third of the territory from the rest of the strip.
A day after cross-border raids by Hezbollah fighters brought Israeli troops into Lebanon in force for the first time in six years, Israel sent punishing airstrikes deeper into the country, hitting all three runways at Rafik Hariri International Airport, two Lebanese Army bases, and, early on Friday, Hezbollah offices in south Beirut and the main highway between the capital and Damascus, Syria.
The Lebanese government said 53 Lebanese civilians had died since Wednesday, including one family of 10 and another of 7 in the southern village of Dweir. More than 103 have been wounded, the Lebanese said.
Lebanese residents hoarded canned goods and batteries as lines at gas stations stretched for blocks. Supermarkets and bakeries were flooded. It felt, many said, as if the civil war that ended 15 years ago was back.
Israel said that the Lebanese government was responsible for the actions of Hezbollah, which is a member of the governing coalition, and that the cross-border raid that captured two Israeli soldiers on Wednesday was an unprovoked act of war by a neighboring state. Senior Israeli officials said that the military had been unleashed to cut off Lebanon, permanently drive Hezbollah forces back from the border and punish the government for not upholding a United Nations directive to disarm and control the group.
Israel’s military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, warned that “nothing is safe” in Lebanon and that Beirut itself, especially Hezbollah offices and strongholds in southern Beirut, would be a target.
Hezbollah fired more than 120 Katyusha rockets and mortar shells into Israel on Thursday, Israeli officials said. The barrage killed a woman on her balcony in Nahariya and a man in Safed, and wounded more than 100 other Israelis in some 20 towns and villages, including Haifa, Safed and Carmiel. Israeli officials said it was the first time Haifa had been hit by rocket fire from Lebanon.
Hezbollah said it was using a new rocket, called Thunder 1, that is more advanced than the standard Katyusha, which does not have enough range to reach the 18 miles between the border and Haifa.
Thousands of Israelis in the north spent the night in bomb shelters as Hezbollah warned that Israeli attacks on southern Beirut would be met by rocket attacks on Haifa, a port city of 250,000 people. Thursday evening, two rockets landed near the city’s Stella Maris Church.
The rapid surge in fighting on a second front, two weeks after Israel entered Gaza to try to secure the release of another captured soldier, alarmed Arab and Western governments and drove up the price of oil.
The European Union on Thursday criticized Israel for “the disproportionate use of force” in Lebanon “in response to attacks by Hezbollah on Israel,” according to a statement issued by the union’s current Finnish presidency. It said that “the imposition of an air and sea blockade on Lebanon cannot be justified.”
The Israeli military said it struck the airport because it is “a central hub for the transfer of weapons and supplies to the Hezbollah terrorist organization.”
President Bush, in remarks in Germany, said that “Israel has the right to defend herself,” but he also called for care, warning Israel not to weaken the government in Lebanon.
“There are a group of terrorists who want to stop the advance of peace,” Mr. Bush said. “The soldiers need to be returned.”
The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, warned that Israel’s Lebanon offensive “is raising our fears of a new regional war” and urged world powers to intervene.
The Lebanese government, which has said that it had nothing to do with the raid by Hezbollah, called for a cease-fire, saying that all means should be used to end “open aggression” against the country.
But Israeli officials said there would be a long campaign to restore the country’s security, both along its southern border with Gaza and its northern one with Lebanon. The Israelis want to restore their military credibility with the Palestinian militants and the Hamas government in Gaza and with Hezbollah, and say they intend to make the current campaign painful for both sets of antagonists.
Neither Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, nor its defense minister, Amir Peretz, has the kind of long military experience previous holders of their positions have had, and the two have been in power for only several months. Some Israeli commentators argued that this made it all the more necessary for an unambiguous military response.
The Israelis say they want the message to get across to Syria and Iran, the countries widely considered to be the main sponsors of Hezbollah and Palestinian militancy.
Mr. Peretz said Israel would no longer allow Hezbollah forces to occupy positions along the border. “If the government of Lebanon fails to deploy its forces, as is expected of a sovereign government, we shall not allow Hezbollah forces to remain any further on the borders of the state of Israel,” he said.
But few Israeli officials expect that the Lebanese government, which is greatly influenced by Syria, has the will or the power to displace Hezbollah in the south.
What happens when there's no Plan B
By Dana L.
The Washington Post
Sunday 04 June 2006
"The conservative politics of the Bush administration forced me to have an abortion I didn't want. Well, not literally, but let me explain.
I am a 42-year-old happily married mother of two elementary-schoolers. My husband and I both work, and like many couples, we're starved for time together. One Thursday evening this past March, we managed to snag some rare couple time and, in a sudden rush of passion, I failed to insert my diaphragm.
The next morning, after getting my kids off to school, I called my ob/gyn to get a prescription for Plan B, the emergency contraceptive pill that can prevent a pregnancy - but only if taken within 72 hours of intercourse. As we're both in our forties, my husband and I had considered our family complete, and we weren't planning to have another child, which is why, as a rule, we use contraception. I wanted to make sure that our momentary lapse didn't result in a pregnancy.
The receptionist, however, informed me that my doctor did not prescribe Plan B. No reason given. Neither did my internist. The midwifery practice I had used could prescribe it, but not over the phone, and there were no more open appointments for the day. The weekend - and the end of the 72-hour window - was approaching.
But I needed to meet my kids' school bus and, as I was pretty much out of options - short of soliciting random Virginia doctors out of the phone book - I figured I'd take my chances and hope for the best. After all, I'm 42. Isn't it likely my eggs are overripe, anyway? I thought so, especially since my best friend from college has been experiencing agonizing infertility problems at this age.
Weeks later, the two drugstore pregnancy tests I took told a different story. Positive. I couldn't believe it.
I'm still in good health, but unlike the last time I was pregnant, nearly a decade ago, I'm now taking three medications. One of them, for high cholesterol, is in the Food and Drug Administration's Pregnancy Category X - meaning it's a drug you shouldn't take if you're expecting or even planning to get pregnant. I worried because the odds of having a high-risk pregnancy or a baby born with serious health issues rise significantly after age 40. And I thought of the emotional upheavals that an unplanned pregnancy would cause our family. My husband and I are involved in all aspects of our children's lives, but even so, we feel we don't get enough time to spend with them as it is.
I felt sick. Although I've always been in favor of abortion rights, this was a choice I had hoped never to have to make myself. When I realized the seriousness of my predicament, I became angry. I knew that Plan B, which could have prevented it, was supposed to have been available over the counter by now. But I also remembered hearing that conservative politics have held up its approval.
My anger propelled me to get to the bottom of the story. It turns out that in December 2003, an FDA advisory committee, whose suggestions the agency usually follows, recommended that the drug be made available over the counter, or without a prescription. Nonetheless, in May 2004, the FDA top brass overruled the advisory panel and gave the thumbs-down to over-the-counter sales of Plan B, requesting more data on how girls younger than 16 could use it safely without a doctor's supervision.
Apparently, one of the concerns is that ready availability of Plan B could lead teenage girls to have premarital sex. Yet this concern - valid or not - wound up penalizing an over-the-hill married woman for having sex with her husband. Talk about the law of unintended consequences.
By late August 2005, the slow action over Plan B led the director of the FDA's Office on Women's Health to resign her post. The agency's delay on the drug, she wrote in an e-mail to her colleagues, "runs contrary to my core commitment to improving and advancing women's health." As recently as April 7, Steven Galson, director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said that the agency still needed time to work on the issue.
Unfortunately, time was the one thing I didn't have.
Meanwhile, I hadn't even been able to get Plan B with a prescription that Friday, because in Virginia, health-care practitioners apparently are allowed to refuse to prescribe any drug that goes against their beliefs. Although I had heard of pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control on religious grounds, I was dumbfounded to find that doctors could do the same thing.
Moreover, they aren't even required to tell the patient why they won't provide the drug. Nor do they have to provide a list of alternative sources. I had asked the ob-gyn's receptionist if politics was the reason the doctor wouldn't prescribe Plan B for me. She refused to answer or offer any reason, no matter how much I pressed her. By the time I got on the phone with my internist's office and found that he would not fill a Plan B prescription either, I figured it was a waste of time to fight with the office staff. To this day, I don't know why my doctors wouldn't prescribe Plan B - whether it was because of moral opposition to contraception or out of fear of political protesters or just because they preferred not to go there.
In any event, they were also partly responsible for why I was stuck that Friday, and why I was ultimately forced to confront the decision to terminate my third pregnancy.
After making the decision with my husband, I was plunged into an even murkier world - that of finding an abortion provider. If information on Plan B was hard to come by, and practitioners were evasive on emergency contraception, trying to get information on how to abort a pregnancy in 2006 is an even more Byzantine experience.
On the Internet, most of what I found was political in nature or otherwise unhelpful: pictures of what your baby looks like in the womb from week one, and so on.
Calling doctors, I felt like a pariah when I asked whether they provided termination services. Finally, I decided to check the Planned Parenthood Web site to see whether its clinics performed abortions. They did, but I learned that if I had the abortion in Virginia, the procedure would take two days because of a mandatory 24-hour waiting period, which requires that you go in first for a day of counseling and then wait a day to think things over before returning to have the abortion. Because of work and the children, I couldn't afford two days off, so I opted to have the procedure done on a Saturday in downtown D.C. while my husband took the kids to the Smithsonian.
The hidden world of abortion services soon became even more subterranean. I called Planned Parenthood two days in advance to confirm the appointment. The receptionist politely informed me that the organization never confirms appointments, for "security reasons," and that I would have to just show up.
I arrived shortly before 10 a.m. in a bleak downpour, trusting that someone had recorded my appointment. I shuffled to the front door through a phalanx of umbrellaed protesters, who chanted loudly about Jesus and chided me not to go into that house of abortion.
All the while, I was thinking that if religion hadn't been allowed to seep into American politics the way it has, I wouldn't even be there. This all could have been stopped way before this baby was conceived if they had just let me have that damn pill.
After passing through the metal detector inside the building, I entered the Planned Parenthood waiting room; it was like the waiting room for a budget airline - crammed full of people, of all races, and getting busier by the moment. I was by far the oldest person there (other than one girl's mom). The wait seemed endless. No one looked happy. We were told that the lone doctor was stuck in Cherry Blossom Parade traffic.
He finally arrived, an hour and a half late.
The procedure itself took about five minutes. I finally walked out of the building at 4:30, 6 1/2 hours after I had arrived.
It was a decision I am sorry I had to make. It was awful, painful, sickening. But I feel that this administration gave me practically no choice but to have an unwanted abortion because the way it has politicized religion made it well-nigh impossible for me to get emergency contraception that would have prevented the pregnancy in the first place.
And to think that, all these years after Roe v. Wade became the law of the land, this is what our children have to look forward to as they approach their reproductive years.
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Georgia Photo ID law suffers 2 setbacks
By SONJI JACOBS , CARLOS CAMPOS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 07/13/06
The federal and state legal blows mean voters will not be required to show one of only six forms of government-issued photo identification when they go to the polls in Tuesday's primaries. And they may not have to abide by the new law in the November general election.
U.S. District Court Judge Harold Murphy, after a hearing in Rome that lasted more than five hours, ruled that Georgia's photo voter ID law appeared to violate the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment guarantee of the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law and due process.
Supporters of the voter photo ID law argue that the measure will help prevent voter fraud and protect the ballot box. Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue, represented by state attorneys, on Monday asked the high court to reverse Westmoreland's ruling. Perdue's office expressed disappointment about Wednesday's state Supreme Court order. "It looks like congratulations are in order for the Georgia Democratic Party," Perdue spokeswoman Heather Hedrick said. "It appears that dead people, felons and illegal aliens will be able to vote in Tuesday's primary."
Note: Yes, it is disgusting. The Georgia Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the ID law. Republicans took the opportunity to politically attach dead people, felons, and illegal aliens to the Democratic party. Opposition to the law came from Common Cause Georgia, the League of Women Voters of Georgia, the ACLU and the NAACP. Left unsaid are the name of organizations supporting the law. Was it a broad based coalition of groups known for their civic and social works?
Who keeps pushing this year after year when the state and federal courts have repeatedly said these kind of laws are unconstitutional? And what about the undeniable fact there have been several orders of magnitutude more reported cases of abuse in absentee voting than in non-photo ID'ed voting? Where are these stalward champions of voter integrity measures when the topic turns to absentee voting and paper trails for voting machines? Could it be politics? Yes...absentee ballots in the 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections favored Republican office seekers.
The Tunnel of Fear
By Tim Dickinson
Rolling Stone
Friday 07 July 2006
"It's hard to know what to make of the FBI's reported disruption of a plot to blow up the Holland Tunnel. But the timing of the leak -- and its intended political impact -- is indisputable.
Maybe this was a credible threat. Maybe it was a lot of hot air seethed in an Internet forum. (By the way, was anyone else disturbed to discover that when the FBI talks about picking up terrorist "chatter," it's literally coming from Jihadi chat rooms?!) Whatever the case, we should applaud the capture of Amir Andalousli in Lebanon. One less Osama wannabe on the streets of Beirut isn't a bad thing.
But let's examine the alleged plot: As reported by the Daily News, Andalousi wanted to drown lower Manhattan by detonating a bomb in the Holland Tunnel. (UPDATE: The specific targeting of the Holland Tunnel is now in dispute.) OK, first: The physics are impossible. Worst case scenario: The tunnel floods. Water in the tube isn't going to magically spout out the mouth and make Wall Street look like the Lower 9th Ward. Even the directors of that Stallone Holland Tunnel epic Daylight would have found that plot device implausible. So shame on the Daily News for fearmongering with its coverline: "Gang sought to flood downtown."
Now let's turn to the timing. Here's the most important line in the piece:
FBI and New York City Police Department officials would not comment about the investigation, which has been kept under wraps for months.
In other words, this is old news . . . of an incipient plot . . . that was defused before it left the chat room. [UPDATE: ABC's The Blotter reports that Andalousi has been in custody for roughly three months, since April.]
So why did someone leak it to a tabloid for publication on today of all days? Consider: Today is the one-year anniversary of the July 7 bombings in London. It also marks four months to the day from November's mid-term elections.
Karl Rove & Co. are, once again, playing the Fear Card in an election year. Anyone who doubts that simply hasn't been paying attention for the last five years.
UPDATE: CBS and an ex-CIA spook question the seriousness of the plot.
Ben Stein, (yes him), has a KYITT Article Here
And the winner is...
Robert Reich: "SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins Wins the Prize"
"I just read the transcript of a recent speech given by a commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and am pleased to announce that the winner of this year's George Bush Prize for Circular Economic Reasoning is Paul Atkins.
Here's the background: More than 60 companies have disclosed investigations, including 40 grand jury investigations, into whether they’ve back-dated executive options to coincide with days when their stock prices were low. And a raft of shareholder lawsuits have been filed. At least 17 people have been fired or quit in connection with the unfolding scandal.
One lawsuit, for example, alleges that Apple Computer backdated stock option grants to 14 current and former officers, dating each grant just after a sharp drop and just before a substantial rise in Apple’s stock price.
What’s the big deal? Just this. If Apple or any other company back-date options for when share prices are especially low, executives who exercise the options get a windfall. They can buy shares at that extra-low price and then sell them after their price has risen. Seems unfair, right? Like insider trading, or outright stock manipulation, or worse.
But now comes SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins, who argues that companies who manipulate the timing of their executive options are not guilty of violating securities laws because such maneuvers are actually good for shareholders.
According to Atkins’ logic, back-dating executive stock options ... does create a windfall for executives. But precisely because of this windfall, companies are able to compensate their executives more cheaply. They can issue fewer stock options or provide lower salaries. So by timing stock options this way, companies end up saving money, and investors pocket the savings. Get it?
I’ve heard a lot of arguments over the years to justify almost anything. But let me tell you, this is a doozie. It’s a little like arguing that home insurers benefit if people back-date their home insurance policies to take effect before their houses burn down because then they’ll have the money to renew their policies.
What’s particularly weird about this logic is it completely ignores the purpose of executive stock options in the first place. They’re supposed better align executive incentives with the interests of investors – inducing executives to work harder to raise share prices.
But stock options have this effect only if executives don’t know what their option will be worth in the future. If they can go back in time and pick a date when the share price was especially low relative to what it is now or will surely be when a positive quarterly earnings report is issued, the incentive disappears because the future is no longer the future. It’s the past. If the incentive that’s supposed to be in a stock option disappears, shareholders are worse off. ..."
Never again gone mad in Israel
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
By Sandy Tolan
Guest Columnist
July 11, 2006
"In the name of forcing the release of a single soldier, Israel has seized members of a democratically elected government; bombed its interior ministry, the prime minister's offices and a school; threatened another sovereign state (Syria) with a menacing overflight; dropped leaflets from the air, warning of harm to the civilian population if it does not "follow all orders" of the Israel Defense Forces; loosed nocturnal "sound bombs" under orders from the Israeli prime minister to "make sure no one sleeps at night in Gaza"; fired missiles into residential areas, killing children; and demolished a power station that was the sole generator of electricity and running water for hundreds of thousands of Gazans.
Besieged Palestinian families, trapped in a locked-down Gaza, are down to one meal a day, eaten in candlelight. Yet their desperate conditions go largely ignored by a world accustomed to extreme Israeli measures in the name of security.
"Wake up!" shouted the young Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer from Gaza on San Francisco's "Arab Talk" radio in late June. "The Gaza people are starving. There is a real humanitarian crisis. Our children are born to live. Don't these people have any heart? No feelings at all? The world is silent!"
For the Palestinians, Omer's cry speaks to a collective understanding: That the world sees the life of an Arab as infinitely less valuable than an Israeli's; that no amount of suffering by innocent Palestinians is too much to justify the return of a single Jewish soldier. This understanding, and the rage and humiliation it fuels, has been driven home endlessly through decades of shellings, wars and uprisings past.
Indeed Omer's plaintive words form a mantra, echoing all the way back to the first war between the Arabs and the Jews.
The Arab-Israeli war of 1948, known in Israel as the War of Independence, is called al-Nakba, or the Catastrophe, by Palestinians. During the 1948 conflict, more than 700,000 Palestinians fled the violence or were driven from their homes. In the middle of July, when temperatures exceeded 100 degrees, more than 30,000 Arabs marched into exile, some for more than 20 miles. Many never made it; those who did were certain they would be coming back in a matter of days or weeks. Fifty-eight years later, they remain in exile.
Some refugees wear the keys to their homes around their neck; others tell stories of golden fields, or of a lemon tree whose fruit grows larger in the memory with each passing year.
Fifty-eight summers after the Nabka, as U.S.-made weapons pound Gaza from Israel, a déjà vu settles on the old men and women of the refugee camps, and in the vast diaspora beyond, reminding them of yet another bitter anniversary.
The latest attacks by Israel in Gaza, ostensibly on behalf of a single soldier, recall the comments by extremist Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, in his eulogy for U.S. Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 massacred 27 Palestinians praying in the Hebron mosque. "One million Arabs," Perrin declared, "are not worth a Jewish fingernail."
Israelis, too, are a traumatized people, and their nation's current actions are driven in part by a hard determination, born of the Holocaust, to "never again go like sheep to the slaughter." But if "never again" drives the politics of reprisal, few seem to notice that the reprisals themselves are obscenely out of scale to the provocation: For every crude Qassam rocket falling harmlessly, far from its target, dozens, sometimes hundreds of shells rain down on the Palestinians. For one missing soldier, a million and a half Gazans are made to suffer. In Israel, today, it is "never again" gone mad.
The irony is that, contrary to making themselves more safe, the Israelis, just like the Americans in Iraq, are only sowing the seeds of more hatred and rage.
Note: Sandy Tolan is author of "The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East" and a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley. He will be reading from his book at 7 p.m. Thursday at University Temple United Methodist Church in Seattle.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Bring back the draft
By Jim Wooten | Monday, July 10, 2006, 06:21 AM
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Thinking Right Blog
"Throughout the Iraqi phase of the War on Terrorism, especially when attention is momentarily focused on some other potential world troublespot — last week it was the seconds-long Taepodong-2 missile launch by North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il —a distant hum arises from the campgrounds of the Left.
Harken! Listen closely. The hum grows louder. Draaaaft. Draaaaft. Draaft. Draft. Ah, yes, the draft. March the 18-year-olds, boys and girls alike, down to the induction station for physicals. The Bush doctrine, which allows for preemptive strikes against regimes that threaten us, surely cannot now survive another day without the military draft. That’s the message behind the hum you hear from the Left.
It’s all so tiresome. Sad thing, really, that this nation can’t have an honest debate on the draft. We can’t. The Left injects it not for an honest, good-faith discussion, but because it’s seen as a way to mobilize another group against the war. That group is, of course, those affected, those the Left would have this administration round up and march off to boot camp. That group and their mammas. The Cindy Sheehan Nation."
Note: Mr. Wooten's opinion piece seems to be saying the nation cannot have an honest debate on a draft...because "The Left" ...what? wouldn't address the issue in good faith? And what's with the pejoritive words: "The Cindy Sheehan Nation", etc. Where are his comments about almost every right-wing "leader" in American politics failure to having served in the US military? He says he supports the idea that every able bodied man serve in the military while belittling the idea of any other kind of national service such as the Peace Corps. Israel has shown that universal national service can be done fairly, and responsibly. Why not in America?
It is a constant theme of the right-wing pundits. First they deny the credentials/honesty/patriotism of anyone who proposes an alternative to their policies. Then they assert something that is not demonstrably correct. Next they assert they understand the ramifications of the issue, and generally support the stated goal of the item under discussion; but beleive those with different ideas fail to understand and accept some principle they hold dear. Finally they close with an appeal to their authority on the matter, and imply that only an idiot would not see things their way.
No, sorry...secularists, democrats, progressives and independents understand, and appreciate the fact that reasoned arguments, rational thought, and consensus are more likely to yield sound decisions rather than depending on edicts from an executive with unchecked power using classic propaganga techniques. Society and governments cannot function effectively using only corporate business practices and procedures.
Mr. Wooten, George Will, and numerous other commentators are skilled writers - just not very skilled thinkers - who can dispense with name-calling, appeals to authority, and other logical faults most of us became aware of in freshman Logic classes.
I'm reminded of the "Unabomber Manifesto" - wherein after reading several columns one nods in agreement, questions the logic of other statements; but then runs smack into a statement like: "...to save them, we had to kill them...". It's not the leftist, the democrats, the independent free-thinkers we need to be cautious of or question their patriotism/civility/honesty; rather it's those who resort to intimidation, appeals to fear or extra-legal remedies, or those who seek to deny others the right to participate in the process.
Monday, July 10, 2006
State appeals blocked voter ID law
Lawyers say decision creates risk of confusion among voters, officials.
By CARLOS CAMPOS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 07/11/06
A Fulton County judge erred when he stopped enforcement of Georgia's new photo voter ID law, and the state Supreme Court should move immediately to reverse the decision before "voter confusion" and "further disruption" of the primary elections, lawyers for the state said in documents filed Monday.
On the first day of early voting for the July 18 primary elections, the state formally asked the Georgia Supreme Court to overturn a Friday decision by Judge Melvin K. Westmoreland of the Fulton County Superior Court.
Westmoreland ruled that the state's new law requiring voters to show one of six forms of government-issued photo identification at the polls "unduly burdens the fundamental right to vote."
In an "emergency motion" on Monday asking the high court to reverse Westmoreland's ruling, lawyers for the state noted the timing of the primary next Tuesday, when voters across Georgia will choose candidates for governor, lieutenant governor, Congress and a host of other state and local races.
A Peach of a Scandal in Georgia
By Garrison Keillor
The Baltimore Sun
Thursday 06 July 2006
If a preacher secretly accepts a bucket of money from a saloonkeeper to organize a temperance rally at a rival saloon and maybe send in a gang of church ladies to chop up the bar with their little hatchets, this would strike you and me as sleazy, but others are willing to make allowances, and so Ralph Reed's political career is still alive and breathing in Georgia. He has bathed himself in tomato juice and hopes to smile his way through the storm.
The facts are fairly simple.
Mr. Reed left the Christian Coalition in 1997 as it was sinking, and he was paid by Jack Abramoff to organize opposition to a gambling bill in the Texas legislature, which would have opened the door to competition for Mr. Abramoff's client casinos in Louisiana.
So Mr. Reed got the good Christians of Texas to bombard the legislature with phone calls and letters denouncing gambling, for which Mr. Reed was paid millions of dollars in gambling money, by way of Mr. Abramoff's bagman, Grover Norquist.
Mr. Reed also helped defeat a state lottery and video poker in Alabama, in behalf of casinos in Mississippi. In Alabama, he told Mr. Abramoff, he had "over 3,000 pastors and 90,000 religious conservative households." He enlisted these Baptists in a fight against one saloon while he was on the payroll of another.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
The Essential Krugman: "The Treason Card",
N.Y. Times
by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times:
"The nature of the right-wing attack on The New York Times — an attack not on the newspaper's judgment, but on its motives — seems to have startled many people in the news media. After an editorial in The Wall Street Journal declared that The Times has what amount to treasonous intentions — that it "has as a major goal not winning the war on terror but obstructing it" — The Journal's own political editor pronounced himself "shocked," saying that "I don't know anybody on the news staff of The Wall Street Journal that believes that."
But anyone who was genuinely shocked by The Journal's willingness to play the treason card must not have been paying attention these past five years. ...[T]he Bush administration and the movement it leads have been engaged in an authoritarian project, an effort to remove all the checks and balances that have heretofore constrained the executive branch.
Much of this project involves the assertion of unprecedented executive authority — the right to imprison people indefinitely without charges (and torture them if the administration feels like it), the right to wiretap American citizens without court authorization, the right to declare, when signing laws passed by Congress, that the laws don't really mean what they say.
But an almost equally important aspect of the project has been the attempt to create a political environment in which nobody dares to criticize the administration or reveal inconvenient facts... As far back as 2002, Rush Limbaugh, in words very close to those used by The Wall Street Journal last week, accused Tom Daschle, then the Senate majority leader, of a partisan "attempt to sabotage the war on terrorism."
Those of us who tried to call attention to this authoritarian project years ago have long marveled over the reluctance of many of our colleagues to acknowledge what was going on. For example, for a long time many people in the mainstream media applied a peculiar double standard to political speech, denouncing perfectly normal if forceful political rhetoric from the left as poisonous "Bush hatred," while chuckling indulgently over venom from the right. (That Ann Coulter, she's such a kidder.)
But now the chuckling has stopped: somehow, nobody seems to find calls to send Bill Keller to the gas chamber funny. ... I think that most Americans still believe ... that the president isn't a king, that he isn't entitled to operate without checks and balances. And President Bush is especially unworthy of our trust, because on every front — from his refusal to protect chemical plants to his officials' exposure of Valerie Plame, from his toleration of war profiteering to his decision to place the C.I.A. in the hands of an incompetent crony — he has consistently played politics with national security.
And he has done so with the approval and encouragement of the same people now attacking The New York Times for its alleged lack of patriotism. ...
Things have changed...: Mr. Bush's ability to wrap his power grab in the flag has diminished now that most Americans no longer consider him either competent or honest. But the administration and its supporters still believe that they can win political battles by impugning the patriotism of those who won't go along.
For the sake of our country, let's hope that they're wrong.
Recent Arrests in Terror Plots Yield Debate on Pre-emptive Action by Government
N.Y. TImes
By ERIC LIPTON
Published: July 9, 2006
WASHINGTON, July 8 — In Miami last month and now in New York, terror cases have unfolded in which suspects have been apprehended before they lined up the intended weapons and the necessary financing or figured out other central details necessary to carry out their plots.
For officials in Washington, it is a demonstration of the much-needed emphasis in this post-9/11 era for pre-emptive arrests.
"We don't wait until someone has lit the fuse to step in," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Friday at a news conference about the New York plot.
But the Miami and New York cases are inspiring a new round of skepticism from some lawyers who are openly questioning whether the government, in its zeal to stop terrorism, is forgetting an element central to any case: the actual intent to commit a crime.
"Talk without any kind of an action means nothing," said Martin R. Stolar, a New York defense lawyer. "You start to criminalize people who are not really criminals."
In the two most recent plots, the authorities have simultaneously warned that the suspects were contemplating horrific attacks — blowing up the Sears Tower in Chicago and setting off a bomb in a tunnel between New York and New Jersey — but then added that as far as they knew, no one was close to actually making such a strike.
In the Miami case, an F.B.I. official said at a recent hearing that the suspects apparently did not have written information on how to make explosives, details on the layout of the Sears Tower or any known link to a terrorist group.
In New York, officials said Friday that none of the eight suspects believed to be planning the tunnel attack were in the United States, and that they apparently did not have bomb materials and had not completed reconnaissance work on their supposed target.
The arrest on April 27 in Beirut of Assem Hammoud, 31, a Lebanese man who is accused of being the mastermind of the tunnel plot, came after the authorities monitored Internet chat rooms used by Islamic extremists who had used coded language to discuss a possible attack. One American official said the members of the group had never met one another.
In announcing the case, federal officials, including Mr. Chertoff, said the government could not waste time trying to determine whether the suspects were smart enough or serious enough to turn their threats into destructive action.
"It is a mistake to assume that the only terrorist that's a serious terrorist is the kind of guy you see on television, that's a kind of James Bond type," Mr. Chertoff said Friday. "The fact of the matter is mixing a bomb in a bathtub does not take rocket science."
Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican and the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said that the cases also demonstrate that the authorities cannot always delay charges until they have built airtight criminal cases.
"It was essential that the F.B.I. get rid of its pre-9/11 mentality of not making an arrest until they have enough evidence to convict," Mr. King said Friday in an interview. "You can't be locking everyone up. But so long as there are reasonable grounds to make the arrest, they should do that."
Mark J. Mershon, an F.B.I. assistant director, said that the apprehensions related to the New York case — so far no one has been arrested in the United States — began after the authorities were convinced that the talk was close to turning into action.
"Plotting for this attack had matured to a point where it appeared that the individuals were about to move forward," Mr. Mershon said Friday in New York.
"They were about to go to a phase where they would attempt to surveil targets, establish a regimen of attack and acquire the resources necessary to effectuate the attacks."
Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at University of Richmond in Virginia who tracks terrorism cases, said the modest evidence disclosed so far in some recent cases in relation to the ability of the suspects to deliver on their threats has caused him to wonder if politics might be a factor.
"There is some kind of public relations gained by making Americans on the one hand feel concerned that the Sears Tower in Chicago or some tunnel in Manhattan is targeted yet on the other hand feel comforted that the government is on top of it," he said.
The questions posed about some of the terror-related arrests echo doubts raised when Tom Ridge was secretary of homeland security and the Bush administration half a dozen times raised the color-coded alert warning to orange, signaling a high risk of a terrorist attack, leading skeptics to suggest the up-and-down warning levels may have been driven in part by politics.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a Justice Department tally, 261 defendants have been convicted or have pleaded guilty in terrorism or terrorism-related cases. But many of those cases have only remote connections to actual terrorism plots, like the case involving six men from Lackawanna, N.Y., who pleaded guilty to attending a terrorist training camp, but never actually took part in a terror plot.
But Pasquale J. D'Amuro, former assistant director in charge of the F.B.I. office in New York, said that law enforcement officials have no choice but to act pre-emptively, even if planning has not yet turned into an active plot.
"When they go operational, they run silent," Mr. D'Amuro said. "It becomes very difficult to follow them and try to trail them."
Mr. Chertoff acknowledged the debate on Friday, saying he had heard criticism by some that "the people you are arresting are not really serious or they don't really have the capacity of actually carrying something out."
But he said that the lesson not only of Sept. 11, but of terrorist attacks since then, including bombings last year in London, is that the government has no other choice. That means, he said, acting sooner rather than later, even if it might result in skeptics suggesting the plots were more imaginary than real.
"We are dangerously putting people at risk if somehow we believe that only criminal masterminds or terrorist masterminds are a threat," he said.
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Friday, July 07, 2006
July 7th, 2005: London, England
"...it is obscene to suggest that you can somehow secure justice for the people of Iraq or Afganistan or Palestine by committing an injustice against the people of New York, Madrid, or London." Note: by Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain in response to the one year anniversary of the London trail bombings.
Looking to Take On Apple's iPod, Microsoft Plans Its Own Hand-Held Player
NY Times
By JEFF LEEDS
Published: July 6, 2006
Microsoft has been developing its own hand-held music and video player to challenge Apple Computer's iPod and expects to have it in stores in time for the holiday season, entertainment industry executives briefed on the company's plans said last night.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Rap Culture: The Dark Side
Hilary Magazine
July 6th, 2006
"... "The worse it gets, the better it sells" wrote one major national newspaper in response to the growing popularity of hip hop and rap. Shock value is what the record industry is selling. The more shocking it is, the more we pay attention, and it's that attention that the entertainment industry thrives on. Publicity (whether good or bad) is publicity nonetheless. It's what sells records and puts the names out there. Press, articles and books are devoted to the phenomenon of hip hop and rap music and its popularity with the masses. Some people like it; others hate it. But then again, some people hated The Rolling Stones. Some people thought Elvis was risqué. What changes our perception of good or bad? That question will always be asked. The controversy lies in the music's content. The danger lies in society's continuous desensitization to it."
Last Stand - The Military's problem with the President's Iran Policy
By Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker
10 July 2006 Issue
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
The Declaration of Independence
Happy Fourth of July
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
--Abraham Lincoln
IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws of Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
He has made judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended legislation:
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from Punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with Power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy of the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free People.
Nor have We been wanting in attention to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
WE, THEREFORE, the REPRESENTATIVES of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in General Congress, Assebled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by Authority of the good Poeple of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally disolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.
John Hancock--Geo. Taylor--Button Gwinnett--James Wilson--Lyman Hall--Geo. Ross--Geo. Walton--Caesar Rodney--Wm. Hooper--Geo. Read--Joseph Hewes--Tho. M. Kean--John Penn--Wm. Floyd--Edward Rutledge--Phil. Livingston--Thos. Heyward, Jr.--Fras. Lewis--Thomas Lynch, Jr.--Lewis Morris--Arthur Middleton--Richd. Stockton--Samuel Chase--Jno. Witherspoon--Thos. Stone--John Hart--Charles Carroll of Carrollton--Abra. Clak--Josiah Bartlett--George Wythe--Wm. Whipple--Richard Henry Lee--Saml. Adams--Th. Jefferson--John Adams--Benj. Harrison--Robt. Treat Paine--Thos. Nelson, Jr.--Elbridge Gerry--Francis Lightfoot Lee--Step. Hopkins--Carter Braxton--William Ellery--Robt. Morris--Roger Sherman--Benjain Rush--Sam. Huntington--Benj. Franklin--Wm.Williams--John Morton--Oliver Wolcott--Geo. Clymer--Matthew Thornton--Jas. Smith
Monday, July 03, 2006
Excommunication Is Sought for Stem Cell Researchers
NY Times
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: July 1, 2006
ROME, June 30 — Scientists who engage in stem cell research using human embryos should be subject to excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church, according to a senior Vatican official.
Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, who heads the group that proposes family-related policy for the church, said in an interview with the Catholic weekly Famiglia Cristiana published Thursday that stem cell researchers should be punished in the same way as women who have abortions and doctors who perform them.
Generics vs Name Brand Meds for Pets
Note: Commonly used pet medications such as Frontline, Heartgard, etc are generally only available for purchase at veternarians; however, there are equivalent generics such as Bio Spot, and Tri-Heart Plus for the two namebrands above respectively. My local vet charged me $46.80 for Frontline (45-88) while Bio Spot was available in the same strength/size/quantity for $11.50 - over four times as much. Comparing Heartgard and Tri-Heart the price differential was in the same range.
I don't usually get all hot-and-bothered over a 5-50% cost difference between products or services; but 400% gets my attention. If you're looking for a reputable online pet med site, I can recommend: American Vet Supply.
Saturday, July 01, 2006
When do we publish a secret?
How the press balances national security with its mission to report the news.
By Dean Baquet and Bill Keller, DEAN BAQUET is editor of the Los Angeles Times. BILL KELLER is executive editor of the New York Times.
July 1, 2006
SINCE SEPT. 11, 2001, newspaper editors have faced excruciating choices in covering the government's efforts to protect the country from terrorist agents. Each of us has, on a number of occasions, withheld information because we were convinced that publishing it could put lives at risk. On other occasions, each of us has decided to publish classified information over strong objections from our government.
Last week, our newspapers disclosed a secret Bush administration program to monitor international banking transactions. We did so after appeals from senior administration officials to hold the story. Our reports — like earlier press disclosures of secret measures to combat terrorism — revived an emotional national debate, featuring angry calls of "treason" and proposals that journalists be jailed, along with much genuine concern and confusion about the role of the press in times like these.
We are rivals. Our newspapers compete on a hundred fronts every day. We apply the principles of journalism individually as editors of independent newspapers. We agree, however, on some basics about the immense responsibility the press has been given by the inventors of the country.
Make no mistake, journalists have a large and personal stake in the country's security. We live and work in cities that have been tragically marked as terrorist targets. Reporters and photographers from both of our papers braved the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center to convey the horror to the world. We have correspondents today alongside troops on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Others risk their lives in a quest to understand the terrorist threat; Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal was murdered on such a mission. We, and the people who work for us, are not neutral in the struggle against terrorism.
But the virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings. It is also aimed at our values, at our freedoms and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. If freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror.
Thirty-five years ago Friday, in the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote: "The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people."
As that sliver of judicial history reminds us, the conflict between the government's passion for secrecy and the press' drive to reveal is not of recent origin. This did not begin with the Bush administration, although the polarization of the electorate and the daunting challenge of terrorism have made the tension between press and government as clamorous as at any time since Justice Black wrote.
Our job, especially in times like these, is to bring our readers information that will enable them to judge how well their elected leaders are fighting on their behalf, and at what price.
In recent years our papers have brought you a great deal of information the White House never intended for you to know — classified secrets about the questionable intelligence that led the country to war in Iraq, about the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, about the transfer of suspects to countries that are not squeamish about using torture, about eavesdropping without warrants.
As Robert G. Kaiser, associate editor of the Washington Post, asked recently in that newspaper: "You may have been shocked by these revelations, or not at all disturbed by them, but would you have preferred not to know them at all? If a war is being waged in America's name, shouldn't Americans understand how it is being waged?"
Government officials, understandably, want it both ways. They want us to protect their secrets, and they want us to trumpet their successes. A few days ago, Treasury Secretary John Snow said he was scandalized by our decision to report on the bank-monitoring program. But in September 2003, the same Secretary Snow invited a group of reporters — from our papers, the Wall Street Journal and others — to travel with him and his aides on a military aircraft for a six-day tour to show off the department's efforts to track terrorist financing. The secretary's team discussed many sensitive details of their monitoring efforts, hoping they would appear in print and demonstrate the administration's relentlessness against the terrorist threat.
How do we, as editors, reconcile the obligation to inform with the instinct to protect?
Sometimes the judgments are easy. Our reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, take great care not to divulge operational intelligence in their news reports, knowing that in this wired age, it could be seen and used by insurgents.
Often the judgments are painfully hard. In those cases, we cool our competitive jets and begin an intensive deliberative process.
The process begins with reporting. Sensitive stories do not fall into our hands. They may begin with a tip from a source who has a grievance or a guilty conscience, but those tips are just the beginning of long, painstaking work. Reporters operate without security clearances, without subpoena powers, without spy technology. They work, rather, with sources who may be scared, who may know only part of the story, who may have their own agendas that need to be discovered and taken into account. We double-check and triple-check. We seek out sources from different points of view. We challenge our sources when contradictory information emerges.
Then, we listen. No article on a classified program gets published until the responsible officials have been given a fair opportunity to comment. And if they want to argue that publication represents a danger to national security, we put things on hold and give them a respectful hearing. Often, we agree to participate in off-the-record conversations with officials so they can make their case without fear of spilling more secrets onto our front pages.
Finally, we weigh the merits of publishing against the risks of publishing. There is no magic formula, no neat metric for either the public's interest or the dangers of publishing sensitive information. We make our best judgment.
When we come down in favor of publishing, of course everyone hears about it. Few people are aware when we decide to hold an article. But each of us, in the last few years, has had the experience of withholding or delaying stories when the administration convinced us that the risk of publication outweighed the benefits. Probably the most discussed instance was the New York Times' decision to hold its article on telephone eavesdropping for more than a year, until editors felt that further reporting had whittled away the administration's case for secrecy.
But there are others. The New York Times has held articles that, if published, might have jeopardized efforts to protect vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear material, and articles about highly sensitive counter-terrorism initiatives that are still in operation. In April, the Los Angeles Times withheld information about American espionage and surveillance activities in Afghanistan, discovered on computer drives purchased by reporters in an Afghan bazaar.
It is not always a matter of publishing an article or killing it.
Sometimes we deal with the security concerns by editing out gratuitous detail that lends little to public understanding but might be useful to the targets of surveillance. The Washington Post, at the administration's request, agreed not to name the specific countries hosting secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons, deeming that information not essential for American readers. The New York Times, in its article on National Security Agency eavesdropping, left out some technical details.
Even the banking articles, which the president and vice president have condemned, did not dwell on the operational or technical aspects of the program but on its sweep, the questions about its legal basis and the issues of oversight.
We understand that honorable people may disagree with any of these choices — to publish or not to publish. But making those decisions is the responsibility that falls to editors, a corollary to the great gift of our independence. It is not a responsibility we take lightly. And it is not one we can surrender to the government.
Three Iraq Myths That Won't Quit
By Scott Ritter, AlterNet. Posted June 26, 2006.
"These three myths -- WMD, Zarqawi and Iraqi sovereignty -- are what members of Congress should be debating in their halls of power, the American media should be discussing either in print or across the airwaves, and that discussion should constitute the foundation of a movement towards accountability, where the citizens of the United States finally point an accusatory finger at those whom they elected to represent them in higher office, and who have failed in almost every regard when it comes to Iraq. But then again, silly me for thinking this way, believing that there was an engaged constituency within America that knows and understands the Constitution of the United States and seeks to live each day as a true citizen empowered by the ideal and values set forth by that document. I had overlooked the Fourth Myth -- that American citizens are engaged in our national debate."
Note: Scott Ritter served as chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 until his resignation in 1998.
Bush vs. New York Times
By Robert Scheer, Truthdig. Posted June 28, 2006.
Attacks on the New York Times aren't about national security, they're about muting criticism.
UPDATE: The GOP will introduce a resolution to condemn the New York Times for its reporting.
The Bush administration's jihad against newspapers that reported on a secret program to monitor the personal banking records of unsuspecting citizens is more important than the original story. For what the president and his spokesmen are once again asserting is that the prosecution of this ill-defined, open-ended "war on terror" inevitably trumps basic democratic rights in general and the constitutionally enshrined freedom of the press in particular.
The stakes are very high here. We've already been told that we must put up with official lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the unprecedented torture of prisoners of war and a massive electronic-eavesdropping program and other invasions of privacy. Now the target is more basic -- the freedom of the press to report on such nefarious government activities. The argument in defense of this assault on freedom is the familiar refrain of dictators, wannabe and real, who grasp for power at the expense of democracy: We are in a war with an enemy so powerful and devious that we cannot afford the safeguard of transparent and accountable governance.
"We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm to the United States of America," President Bush said Monday.
The "bunch of people" Bush says we are fighting was originally believed to be those behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, specifically Osama bin Laden and his decentralized Al Qaida terrorist organization. Yet Bush, prodded by the neoconservative clique, quickly expanded this war beyond what should have been a worldwide manhunt for Al Qaida operatives into an open-ended occupation of Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- which, as we know from the Sept. 11 commission report, had nothing to do with Al Qaida or Sept. 11.
In fact, if the media, or Congress, had aggressively pursued the truth earlier, rather than being overwhelmed by the shock of Sept. 11, anti-U.S. terrorists of every stripe would not now be swarming over Iraq. Nor would the degenerating situation in Afghanistan and the enhanced power of religious fanatics throughout the Mideast, from Tehran to Gaza, pose such threats to peace if a fully informed public had held this president in check. Even today, the Bush administration continues to place the situation in Iraq in the "war on terror" framework, instead of acknowledging the primary role of religious and nationalist passions unleashed by the unwarranted U.S. invasion.
As Bush has continued to stretch it to cover all of his leadership failings, the "war on terror" has become a meaningless phrase, to be exploited for the political convenience of the moment. Terrorism, which should be treated clinically as a dangerous pathology threatening all modern societies, instead has been seized upon as an all-purpose propaganda opportunity for consolidating this administration's political power. In such a situation, the press' role as a conduit of both information and debate is more essential than ever. Freedom of the press, enshrined in our Constitution at a time when our fragile nation was besieged by enemies of the new republic, is not an indulgence to be allowed in safe periods but rather an indispensable tool for keeping ourselves safe. That is just the point that Vice President Dick Cheney, the high priest of excessive secrecy -- even in domestic matters, such as refusing to reveal the content of his negotiation with Enron lobbyists in framing the administration's energy policy -- is bent on obscuring.
"Some in the press, in particular the New York Times, have made the job of defending against further terrorist attacks more difficult," said Cheney, all but calling the newspaper traitorous.
How convenient to leave out the Wall Street Journal, which editorially supports the administration but which also covered this latest example of Bush's abuse of power in its news pages. The administration's attack on the Times, in fact, is not really about national security, but rather follows a domestic political agenda that requires attacking free media that dare offer criticism.
On Monday, following the pattern, Cheney also attacked the Times' earlier disclosure that the National Security Agency had simply ignored the legal requirement of court warrants in monitoring telephone calls. "I think that is a disgrace," he said of the Times' winning a Pulitzer Prize for the stories.
What is truly a disgrace, though, is an administration that has consistently deceived the public about its intentions, and that continues to shamefully exploit post-Sept. 11 fears to ensure its grip on the body politic.
Note: Robert Scheer is the co-author of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq.
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About Me
- Name: Richard
- Location: Waleska, Georgia, United States
A slightly better than average guy.
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