The WP does front a big story on U.S. air strikes in Iraq killing many civilians in the Anbar province. And inside, the WP reports that U.S. air strikes have overall increased five-fold in the past few months-which might be evidence that Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article was on target.
from today's papers
Gay and lesbian couples are asking for equal rights granted by state-recognized marriage. Certain heterosexuals oppose granting gay couples the privilege of marriage partly because they think it would unravel their revered institution of marriage.attribution
The reluctance to change is usually driven by the unknown. Maybe the heterosexual couples are afraid a homosexual marriage institution would have a lower divorce rate, a higher marriage percentage, less spousal-abuse cases, less child neglect and, heaven forbid, the children of homosexual marriage would grow up to be well adjusted, successful adults and possibly heterosexual.
Change is never easy, even in Iowa.
-Craig Seymour, Ames.
The WP fronts its latest poll that shows a jump in President Bush's approval ratings to 47 percent, an increase in 8 percentage points since November. USAT, on the other hand, goes inside with its own poll, taken in almost the exact same days, that says Bush's approval rating is 41 percent. The polls agree that 52 percent of the population does not believe the Iraq war is worth fighting or that troops should have been sent in the first place. The USAT poll also reveals that 55 percent of the population sees the war in Iraq as separate from the war on terrorism.
Two Des Moines children were sexually abused over the weekend by a man wanted by police since October for violation of the Iowa Sex Offender Registry law, authorities reported.--source
A parent contacted police Saturday accusing James Alex Conway, 35, of molesting two boys ages 7 and 10.
"He was baby-sitting at the time," Sgt. Todd Dykstra said of Conway, who had been living at the house where the alleged incident occurred.
...
Critics of the sex offender residency restriction say it does nothing to restrict where child molesters can go, and point out that most abuse occurs when an offender lives in the same home as a child.
The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (U.S.A. Patriot Act)is set to expire on Dec. 31.
This cleverly crafted acronym implies that anyone opposed to the provisions of the act is unpatriotic. While one may argue that they have not personally noticed any loss of freedoms during the past four years from this hastily drafted legislation, that does not make it good legislation. Many of the provisions go too far and give government too much authority, authority that is not necessary for domestic security.
Let's hope Congress, in its haste to get home by Christmas, does not simply continue the provisions in the first legislation. There is nothing patriotic about the Patriot Act.
-Rod Braun, Pella.
More than 500,000 bankruptcy cases were filed in the two weeks before the law took effect, compared with a normal weekly volume of 30,000 to 35,000. So far this year more than 2 million cases have been filed, 49% more than the same period last year and eclipsing all previous records.
The NYT reports that the wealthiest Americans are not the most generous in terms of the proportion of their investment assets they give to charity. A "pioneering study of federal tax data" shows that working-age people earning $50,000 to $100,000 are two to six times more generous than those earning more than $10 million.
--FROM TODAY'S PAPERS
and there was a segment on morgan freeman.
now he's an actor who would draw me to the movies, and i don't think i've seen 3 movies in the last 20 years.
he had a line toward the very end of the piece: how do you be good to life.
you live it. i said that very same thing years ago on christopher street when i was doing my junga jim psycho babbles under the headphones walking the streets of new york city.
you live it. as true then as it is now.
Even I could write a better column about health care than David Yepsen offered us on Dec 11.
Yepsen erected a straw man called "socialized medicine," then began stabbing it with his ink pen. The result was merely confusing because no one is proposing socialized medicine — where all doctors work for the government — as a solution to runaway health-care expenses.
I would begin my column by typing "Google.com" into my computer. There I could quickly find the 2004 Harvard study that found we could all save money by booting the thousands of tangled health-insurance plans we now endure and adopting a single plan that covers us all. That takes government action, to be sure, but it is not socialized medicine. And it has nothing to do with Italy or FEMA or any of the other inkblots that bled from Yepsen's straw man.
—Jerry Depew, Laurens.
attribution
