on the price of gas that seems to have gotten out of control in places like indiana....

The Formula-US is 6% of World, using 25% of oil, borrowing 75% of cost

--jmcgowanjm
on DU

like others who have read and commented on this story elsewhere, YUK! i say if they're stupid enough to go through it, by jimminey, let them have the consequences of messin around with the eyeball. as a contact lens wearer, i know all too well what it's like when you mess around with your eyes. from the SFGATE:

Some Illinois lawmakers want to make sure the twinkle in your eye doesn't come from jewelry.

Repulsed by a body modification offered at a Dutch institute — where tiny metal hearts and half-moons are surgically embedded in the whites of the eye — one lawmaker has proposed banning the practice in Illinois.

A House committee Thursday approved legislation that would make it a felony to implant jewelry in someone's eye.

"I don't think anybody should be messing with the eyeball," Democratic Rep. Kevin Joyce said Friday.

Members of Congress have approved seven pay raises for themselves since 1997. The cumulative $28,500 congressional pay increase gives them a total of $162,100 in annual wages.During the same eight years, Congress has not approved any increases in the minimum wage. It is still frozen at $5.15 per hour. No member of Congress should get another pay increase unless they also increase the minimum wage by the same percentage.
-Mark L. Smith,president, Iowa AFL-CIO, Des Moines.
http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050305/OPINION04/503050312/1035/OPINION

someone brings up a good point on the ten commandments issue: never before in the history of the world, and certainly not during the time they were even created, did they ever get placed in such conspicuous places like courthouses, parks and the such. no, in fact.... they were placed inside a container away from view.

so what gives these religious fanatics the right to push them in the ways they're attempting to? do they think they know better than God? obviously, yes. and that alone makes them hypocrites.

this is hilarious. bush is spoutin off with the mouth again, not knowing what the fuck he's talking about ....

One of the myths of Social Security is that your money is going into it and the government is holding it and saving it for you. That's not the way it works. Your money is going into the system and it's getting spent -- some of it on retirement benefits, other parts on just general government. And there's an IOU, a paper IOU accumulating.
... then continues ....
Let me tell you why it makes sense to me that -- first of all, the government can't meet its promises.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/03/20050304-9.html

well, if the government is unable to keep it's promises, then why should japan and every other creditor that's floating this administation's quest to bankrupt the nation, continue to carry our massive historical debt?

'sides, aren't U.S. Treasury notes, ... um, IOUs? and what about all those 'promises' he made about not touching social security. or was that just a figment of my imagination?

ya know what makes fox news different? they're not just conservative. they're bent on making anybody not conservative .... wrong, evil and not worthy of whatever praise their stomachs have leftover from being spent on their fuhrer.

ok, installed the new beta of google's toolbar, and i got blogger back. the fuckn buttons are fixed now. just got done transferring all my dv8 tapes into imagemix. that's a great program for transferring tapes and making video albums. for those that don't like text anyway, cuz everything's iconated. anyway, listenin to faux, and all that's on is martha martha martha, and they are doing this non-stop bashing, all the while trying to be 'normal' about it. it's like sickening.

this could very well be one to watch. nobody else seems to be picking up on it, but i'm sure we haven't heard the last of what really went on in fallujah

Dr Khalid ash-Shaykhli, a representative of the Iraqi Ministry of Health who was authorized to assess health conditions in al-Fallujah after the end of the major battles there, announced that the surveys and studies which a medical team did in al-Fallujah and subsequently reported to the Ministry confirm that US forces used substances that are internationally prohibited -- including mustard gas, nerve gas, and other burning chemicals -- in the course of its attacks on the city.

Ash-Shaykhli held a press conference in the Health Ministry building in Baghdad's Bab al-Mu'azzam section on Tuesday. He began by reporting on the final results of the fact-finding mission's survey of the situation in which the people of al-Fallujah find themselves. He said that the city now is still experiencing the effects of chemical and other types of weapons used by the Americans, which will be causing serious diseases over the long term.

The correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam asked ash-Shaykhli what were the facts regarding use by the occupation forces of limited nuclear weapons. Dr. ash-Shaykhli said,

"What I saw during our researches in al-Fallujah make me believe everything that has been said about that battle. I absolutely do not exclude their use of nuclear and chemical substances, since all forms of nature were wiped out in that city. I can even say that we found dozens, not to say hundreds, of stray dogs, cats, and birds that had perished as a result of those gasses."

i'm enjoying being able to paste from other web pages and the links get embedded. i know when i copy/paste text using notepad, i lose the links. and have always gone through the notepad before pasting here. but now with bloggers gui, which has been around for a while, only in the last couple of days have i decided to use it, these links stay embedded. and as i saw in the last post, font size and all other formatting transferred.

well, well.... the validity of elections has topped my list of things to be concerned about. and now a group has emerged that mirrors my ambitions for making our elections clean.

The Velvet Revolution has begun!

This time, however, it’s not in Ukraine, but right here in the United States.

Led by Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com, the Velvet Revolution (VelvetRevolution.us) is a coalition of 80 progressive groups who say they have united to bring accountability and transparency to American voting procedures. Targeting the nine leading vote machine manufacturers–Diebold, Sequoia Voting Systems, Election Systems and Software, HartInterCivic, MicroVote, Danaher-Guardian, TriadGSI, UniLect, and Advanced Voting Solutions–the Velvet Revolution hopes to open vote-counting procedures in America to greater public scrutiny.

“These companies are behaving terribly,” Friedman said. “They are all Republican companies that insist on keeping their information private.”

Friedman and the Velvet Revolution coalition insist that because such corporations are contracted to serve a public function–to manage vote-counting systems–they should be accountable to the public in the same way government agencies are. The coalition takes issue with the fact that all nine companies refuse to release their software, saying it is proprietary, and will not issue paper ballots or receipts.

The voting machine companies disagree.

“This looks fairly political and not something we’d pay a lot of attention to,” said Alfie Charles, a spokesperson for Sequoia Voting Systems, one of the firms singled out by the campaign.

only, i would call it the freedom revolution. because without clean elections, are we truly free?

oh this is great. china is issuing a report on the human rights record of the bush administration. from the people's daily online:

The Information Office of the State Council will issue on March 3 the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2004, in response to the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices issued by the United States, which irrationally condemns human rights in China.

It will be the sixth Chinese report in response to the annual country reports on human rights by the United States in six consecutive years.

The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2004, based on plenty of facts, is divided into six parts, uncovering the bad records of the United States concerning the invasions into other countries and the mistreatment of foreign inmates, as well as the bad records in the aspects of life, freedom and personal security of the US citizens, their political rights and freedom, economic, social and cultural rights, racial discrimination, conditions of women and children.

bush orders the sun to rise. (from the wires)

ARNOLD, Md. (AP) - President Bush on Wednesday demanded in blunt terms that Syria get out of Lebanon, saying the free world is in agreement that Damascus' authority over the political affairs of its neighbor must end now.

finally, the des moines register seems to be getting it. from today's paper:

It happened routinely in communist and fascist dictatorships. Government agents swept people off the streets, took them into custody for interrogation and kept them confined for years without ever having to charge them with a crime or prove they did anything wrong.

Such things were never supposed to happen in America. That was the difference between us and them.

Except such things have been happening in America since 9/11 - to this country's everlasting shame.

Finally, America's courts are getting around to checking the abuse of power by the executive branch in imprisoning American citizens without trial.

The latest affirmation of the Constitution is a no-nonsense ruling by federal District Judge Henry Floyd in South Carolina in the case of Jose Padilla, an American citizen held without charges since May 2002. The judge gave the government 45 days to either charge Padilla with a crime or set him free.

Padilla was arrested at O'Hare airport in Chicago after returning from Pakistan. The government declared that Padilla was plotting with al-Qaida to set off a "dirty bomb" in the United States, but he was not formally accused of any crime. He was designated an "enemy combatant" and whisked away without trial to a military prison in South Carolina.

The government will appeal the ruling, but the finding is so obvious that it's hard to see how the government could win on appeal. In the United States of America, citizens cannot be deprived of liberty without due process of law. Period.

That is the difference between us and them.

from the Jackson Sun-Herald:

JACKSON, Miss. - Praying for American troops and evoking biblical images of helping the needy, Howard Dean told Mississippi Democrats on Tuesday night that the national party won't give up on socially conservative states.

"We're not going to concede the South," the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee told an overflow crowd of more than 900 people in a dining room that was set up for 800 in the Clarion hotel near downtown Jackson.

"The South will rise again, and when it does, it will have a D under its name," Dean said to applause from the diverse crowd of blacks and whites.

nothing succeeds like failure, especially when you donate to a bush. from the billings gazette:

CHICAGO - Sears, Roebuck and Co. Chief Executive Officer Alan Lacy received about $2.8 million in salary, bonuses and restricted stock in 2004 - about 40 percent more than he received in 2003 despite the retailer's fourth straight year of declining sales.

this is what is so wrong with "today's army" and donald rumsfeld in particular. from the oregonian (via fairuse)

Jeremiah Adler yearned for the type of mettle-testing adventure he never found in his pacifist, vegan upbringing in the Garden Home area of Southwest Portland. snip

He enlisted in the U.S. Army -- not just a two-year stint, but a five-year commitment with a chance to attend the U.S. Army Airborne School.

"I didn't want to be the average infantryman, the average grunt," says Adler, now 18. He wanted to make a difference, he says, not only to the Iraqis he hoped to help liberate, but to the military itself.

But only hours after arriving for basic training at Fort Benning, Ga., he had a change of heart. The Army, he says, wanted to turn him into "a ruthless, coldblooded killer," and he wanted no part of it.

what nobody seems to care about is what these 'kids' are going to be like when they return.

and interesting detail about the taiwanese press in the LAT, caught by slate's Today's Papers:

When one professor offered a course on media ethics, "none of his
journalism students signed up. Asked why, several said they didn't want to
become 'schizophrenic,' constrained by boring niceties that had no place in the
real world."

as we get closer to the day we bomb iran, and we all know it's coming.... little by little, rove has got the media machine churning out lil' bits of the puzzle that he is using to justify the invasion. so that when the time comes, the American people will be so dead against any truth that may lie in the underwash of allegations leading up to the invasion. it worked before, so why not use the gameplan again.

Iran's contact with the network run by Mr. Khan has been known for some time. But the government's failure to turn over documents detailing the nature of those discussions until confronted with evidence is being cited by American and European investigators as another example of the country's continued reluctance to disclose the inner workings of its program, which Iran insists is for commercial energy production, not weaponry. Over the past two years, it has hidden nuclear facilities, including some designed to enrich uranium, until the I.A.E.A. confronted it with evidence and forced it to open those facilities to inspectors.

While Iran is believed to have taken up only parts of the deal offered by the Khan network, its scope appears to resemble the package deal that the network ultimately sold to Libya a decade later. Libya also received the blueprints for a Chinese-designed nuclear weapon; it is unclear whether Iran was offered the same plans.

NYTimes

congrats to my best friend, and about the only one that really knows me, manny parrish, for appearing in the new klaus nomi movie.

and junior DARES to question another country about planting reporters???????

PUTIN GRILLS BUSH ON DAN RATHER
Sun Feb 27 2005 14:51:38 ET

George Bush knew Vladimir Putin would be defensive when Bush brought up the pace of democratic reform in Russia in their private meeting at the end of Bush's four-day, three-city tour of Europe. But when Bush talked about the Kremlin's crackdown on the media and explained that democracies require a free press, the Russian leader gave a rebuttal that left the President nonplussed, TIME magazine will report on Monday.

If the press was so free in the U.S., Putin asked, then why had those reporters at CBS lost their jobs? Bush was openmouthed. "Putin thought we'd fired Dan Rather," says a senior Administration official. "It was like something out of 1984."

TIME's John Dickerson: The Russians did not let the matter drop. Later, during the leaders' joint press conference, one of the questioners Putin called on asked Bush about the very same firings, a coincidence the White House assumed had been orchestrated. The odd episode reinforced the Administration's view that Putin's impressions of America are often based on urban myths fed to him by ill-informed aides.

Developing...
drudge

R.I.P. the First Amendment. and when bushco gets rid of those evil lawyers, who'll protect the people from the fascist state?

A George Rogers Clark High School junior arrested Tuesday for making terrorist threats told LEX 18 News Thursday that the "writings" that got him arrested are being taken out of context.

Winchester police say William Poole, 18, was taken into custody Tuesday morning. Investigators say they discovered materials at Poole's home that outline possible acts of violence aimed at students, teachers, and police.

Poole told LEX 18 that the whole incident is a big misunderstanding. He claims that what his grandparents found in his journal and turned into police was a short story he wrote for English class.

"My story is based on fiction," said Poole, who faces a second-degree felony terrorist threatening charge. "It's a fake story. I made it up. I've been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran by zombies."

Even so, police say the nature of the story makes it a felony. "Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function it's a felony in the state of Kentucky," said Winchester Police detective Steven Caudill.

Poole disputes that he was threatening anyone.

"It didn't mention nobody who lives in Clark County, didn't mention (George Rogers Clark High School), didn't mention no principal or cops, nothing,"
said Poole. "Half the people at high school know me. They know I'm not that stupid, that crazy."

On Thursday, a judge raised Poole's bond from one to five thousand dollars after prosecutors requested it, citing the seriousness of the charge.

and the best comment i've heard yet came from a fellow DU'r

you would think that this would just be "Columbine fallout" but after the initial backlash against "trench coat mafia" type kids it quieted down for a while...this trend is definitely the result of *'s Puritanical whitewashing and fear mongering of the US citizenry, especially some of the most vulnerable: quirky adolescents in the educational system who refuse/cannot toe the status quo line and learn what it takes to be a good little brownshirt repubs

--ForceOfNature

what can you say about a man who took the presidency of the United States as his second civil position? other than he always has to be a star.

and the oscar gooooooooooes tooooooo..... the woman who hates everybody, Ms. Maureen Dowd, MoDo to her friends, for offering up one of the best concise peeks into the soul of george w. boosh.

It was remarkable to see President Bush lecture Vladimir Putin on the importance of checks and balances in a democratic society.

Remarkably brazen, given that the only checks Mr. Bush seems to believe in are those written to the "journalists" Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher and Karen Ryan, the fake TV anchor, to help promote his policies. The administration has given a whole new meaning to checkbook journalism, paying a stupendous $97 million to an outside P.R. firm to buy columnists and produce propaganda, including faux video news releases.

The only balance W. likes is the slavering, Pravda-like "Fair and Balanced" coverage Fox News provides. Mr. Bush pledges to spread democracy while his officials strive to create a Potemkin press village at home. This White House seems to prefer softball questions from a self-advertised male escort with a fake name to hardball questions from journalists with real names; it prefers tossing journalists who protect their sources into the gulag to giving up the officials who broke the law by leaking the name of their own C.I.A. agent.

W., who once looked into Mr. Putin's soul and liked what he saw, did not demand the end of tyranny, as he did in his second Inaugural Address. His upper lip sweating a bit, he did not rise to the level of his hero Ronald Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Instead, he said that "the common ground is a lot more than those areas where we disagree." The Russians were happy to stress the common ground as well.

An irritated Mr. Putin compared the Russian system to the American Electoral College, perhaps reminding the man preaching to him about democracy that he had come in second in 2000 according to the popular vote, the standard most democracies use.

Certainly the autocratic former K.G.B. agent needs to be upbraided by someone - Tony Blair, maybe? - for eviscerating the meager steps toward democracy that Russia had made before Mr. Putin came to power. But Mr. Bush is on shaky ground if he wants to hold up his administration as a paragon of safeguarding liberty - considering it has trampled civil liberties in the name of the war on terror and outsourced the torture of prisoners to bastions of democracy like Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. (The secretary of state canceled a trip to Egypt this week after Egypt's arrest of a leading opposition politician.)

"I live in a transparent country," Mr. Bush protested to a Russian reporter who implicitly criticized the Patriot Act by noting that the private lives of American citizens "are now being monitored by the state."

Dick Cheney's secret meetings with energy lobbyists were certainly a model of transparency. As was the buildup to the Iraq war, when the Bush hawks did their best to cloak the real reasons they wanted to go to war and trumpet the trumped-up reasons.

The Bush administration wields maximum secrecy with minimal opposition. The White House press is timid. The poor, limp Democrats don't have enough power to convene Congressional hearings on any Republican outrages and are reduced to writing whining letters of protest that are tossed in the Oval Office trash.

When nearly $9 billion allotted for Iraqi reconstruction during Paul Bremer's tenure went up in smoke, Democratic lawmakers vainly pleaded with Republicans to open a Congressional investigation.

Even the near absence of checks and balances is not enough for W. Not content with controlling the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and a good chunk of the Fourth Estate, he goes to even more ludicrous lengths to avoid being challenged.

The White House wants its Republican allies in the Senate to stamp out the filibuster, one of the few weapons the handcuffed Democrats have left. They want to invoke the so-called nuclear option and get rid of the 150-year-old tradition in order to ram through more right-wing judges.

Mr. Bush and Condi Rice strut in their speeches - the secretary of state also strutted in Wiesbaden in her foxy "Matrix"-dominatrix black leather stiletto boots - but they shy away from taking questions from the public unless they get to vet the questions and audiences in advance.

Administration officials went so far as to cancel a town hall meeting during Mr. Bush's visit to Germany last week after deciding an unscripted setting would be too risky, opting for a round-table talk in Mainz with preselected Germans and Americans.

The president loves democracy - as long as democracy means he's always right.

WATCHING NIGHTLINE and pat o'brien claims: i dont know if its the war in iraq, or if its the economy, or what, but America has an insatiable appetite for celebrity news.

i can tell you why. they want shit that aint off some wire and sanitized.

one has GOT to wonder just what in God's name gives the NYT any credibility writing at all about iraq. from today's TP over at slate:

Ah, Shiite ... From the NYT's correction page:

The caption on Feb. 14 for a picture by Reuters with the continuation of an article about the Iraqi elections misstated the reason Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a Shiite cleric, was weeping. He was participating in a mourning ritual as part of Ashura, a holy Shiite festival - not reacting to results showing that his political alliance had won a slim majority of seats. A second caption for a Reuters photo misstated the reason a Shiite was shown flagellating himself in a Baghdad procession. He was taking part in the same mourning ritual, not celebrating the election outcome.

i can't name a person more hated and vilified by just their mere presence, let alone when they open their mouths, than judy woodruff. i'll take any bet that she hasn't received money, and i mean a lot of money (it would take a lot of money for me to sell my soul, wouldnt it for you?) from the rnc handlers.

nothing would give me more pleasure than to create a website that had users typing in words, and she barking on the 'right' ones.

she makes me puke every time i hear her.

this fuckn blogger. and fukn google for messin with that damn toolbar blogger. they should have left well enough alone, but no, they had to get their dirty lil' fingers in there and mess everything up.

anyway, what i meant to say before i was so rudely cut off from posting by an obnoxious graphical user interface, was that this was a brainstorming even like none other.

sheeeeeesh.... from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Software scientists at Microsoft Research have teamed up with biomedical researchers in Seattle, Boston and Perth, Australia, to see if computer techniques used to defeat e-mail spam can also be used to help design a vaccine that can defeat AIDS.

Today, members of this unique collaboration will announce a plan to use "machine learning" or "data mining" computational techniques to decipher HIV's wildly creative genetic ability to constantly change and disguise itself from immune system detection and deletion.

"HIV mutates like crazy, but it does show a pattern," said Dr. David Heckerman, a physician and computer scientist at Microsoft Research.

"It isn't completely random," added Heckerman's colleague Nebojsa Jojic. Just as a spammer can add only so much nonsense or other disguising characters without obscuring the message, Jojic said, so can the AIDS virus vary only so much without disabling itself.

what nobody seems to be picking up is that when they (in this case, the post) quote someone, as they did here with grant, they don't connect him to someone of such low expectations. iow, if the guy is impressed because you dressed yourself, would you value his assessment of you?

I was very impressed," said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a London-based research group that favors strong links to North America. "Of course it's only words -- but in diplomacy, words set the tone."

The visit "does imply that Bush 2 is very different than Bush 1," Grant added. "If he can at least go through the motions of taking the European Union seriously, because the expectations are so low I think they will certainly forgive him for being the Big Bad Bush of the first term."

he's on record now. as if that would matter since he said the same thing about iraq months before he bombed baghdad. from yahoo:

Many Europeans also are nervous about a possible U.S. strike against Iran to stop its suspected nuclear weapons program, and Bush gave mixed signals about American intentions.

"This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous," the president said with a slight smile. "Having said that, all options are on the table." He made a similar statement last week, saying a president never says never about military action.

well well welllll...... about time some responsible journalists took this administration head on about the privitizing social security. looks like the administration has been caught in their zeal to sell broker services. from the los angeles times:

WASHINGTON — President Bush believes Americans are so eager to join the "ownership society" that, given a chance, two-thirds of those eligible would divert funds from Social Security into the personal investment accounts he proposes.

But when public employees in seven states were offered the opportunity for similar accounts during the last decade, nowhere near two-thirds signed up for them. In many instances, the figure was closer to 5%.

so there's tapes now of georgie admitting to smoking pot, and i guess other things. i'm tracking down the tapes now. but this could be explosive.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush (news - web sites) has indicated in interviews secretly taped by a friend before he became president that he used marijuana but would not admit it for fear of setting a bad example for children.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050221/od_uk_nm/oukoe_bush_marijuana_1

but what is not being discussed is that he lied about smoking pot. just as he lied about everything else.

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON WITH BLOGGER??? the blogger toolbar item produces errors whenever i try and post something, and now i cant even post it from within blogger.

nope.... YOU FUCKS. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING ??????


HTML ERROR

Required field cannot be left blank

Stop showing errors for this post

whenever i need to know what the ilk like rush limbaugh is screaming and whining about, i can usually just turn to the des moines register and catch a letter to the editor that sounds like it's out of a twilight zone script. and there was one today:

I read with shock and awe of the U.S. plan to have minority Sunnis occupy high-level ministerial positions after the Iraqi "election" - their candidates not having fared well. This is an abomination of the American form of democracy where "winner takes all" is the rule.

Allowing losers to help determine policy is tantamount to treason. The winning party worked hard to obtain the victory and should be able to enjoy the spoils. Why should the U.S. government prop up these losers?

As we have proven here in the United States, a little dynamic tension is good for the country. It builds character. The idea that "Shutting the Sunni Arabs out of power could alienate Sunnis and lead to more internal strife" is more leftist claptrap obviously espoused by a vast liberal press bent on foisting its agenda on this emerging democracy.

Being a uniter, not a divider, is for France, the Dutch and the United Nations. Let the winners rule. Making Iraq more like America is the goal here, is it not?
-R. G. Riley Jr.,
Des Moines.

i could save enough money in education, to fund education.

for the next decade.

how, you say.

stick around, i'll tell you after dinner.
or email me for a quicker answer.

once you hear it, you'll slap yourself on the head wondering why you didn't think of it.

really.

email me and find out for yourself.

oops... here

i could save enough money in education, to fund education.

for the next decade.

how, you say.

stick around, i'll tell you after dinner.
or email me for a quicker answer.

once you hear it, you'll slap yourself on the head wondering why you didn't think of it.

really.

email me and find out for yourself.

oops... here

i just got home from a full day, funeral in the morning, haircut & shopping in the afternoon. caught cbs news about how the fda will now pay more attention to the safety of drugs, AFTER they hit the market.

this right after capping lawsuits in the so-called tort reform..... NOW we see their game. i'm jus pissed that nobody else is catching on to their kon game. they're liars, cheats & thieves. every last one of 'em.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

the head of the AMA is a bigot, and no doubt a bush sympathizer. in fact, i would go so far as attributing his actions as those i'd expect from nazi soldiers.

White Plains, New York) The president of the American Medical Association has come to the defense of New York Medical College under attack for banning a gay students group from campus.

In an interview with the Westchester Journal News AMA President John Nelson said as a private institution the college has the right to set and enforce its own policies.

Nelson then said that the school was acting no differently than Brigham Young University in banning Coca-Cola from campus or its suspending of four athletes accused of raping a 17-year-old girl.

http://www.365gay.com/newscon05/02/021505nyMed.htm

from today's des moines register, a couple of iowans noticed that article i heard about on DU:

No, Gen. Mattis, killing is not fun

Every once in a while, you get a glimpse into the thinking of someone, and it really makes you sick (" 'Fun to Shoot Some People,' " General Says," Feb. 4). Lt. Gen. James Mattis made one of those comments.

He actually said, "It's fun to shoot some people." Anyone who thinks that has no place in our military. When it is necessary to go to war, killing another person should be something that is done out of necessity. It should not produce joy. That is sick.

Mattis is a psychopath who should be given a dishonorable discharge and a lot of time in the care of someone capable of helping him deal with his mental illness.
-Dana Barrer,
Mitchellville.

***

"It's a hell of a hoot . . . It's fun to shoot some people," said Lt. Gen. James Mattis. Not for me, general.

During World War II, I commanded a combat-infantry platoon in the Northern Solomons, New Guinea and the Philippines. My machine-gun platoon killed Japanese soldiers; I killed two with my rifle. We took no pleasure in that; It certainly was not what the general was pleased to call "a hoot."

At one point in the Philippines I led my platoon past what had been a Japanese artillery unit. Uniforms were stripped, bodies were shattered, guts were hanging out.

Mattis may have considered it a hoot. I was sickened by the sight. I led my platoon to our next engagement. I was 22 years old.
-John C. McLaughlin,
Iowa City.

the nytimes has something that took my eyes off what i was doing:

City health officials announced on Friday that they had detected the rare strain of H.I.V. in one man whose case they described as particularly worrisome because it merged two unusual features: resistance to nearly all anti-retroviral drugs used to treat the infection, and stunningly swift progression from infection to full-fledged AIDS. Scientists say that only with more testing will they hope to determine how virulent the strain is and how specific to this one man its effects are.

That combination drug resistance and rapid AIDS onset, the officials said, could signal a new, more menacing kind of infection, and its discovery set in motion an anxious search by city workers to find the man's sexual partners and have them tested.

The infected man, gay and in his 40's, tested negative for H.I.V. in May 2003, then tested positive last December, health officials said. Investigators believe he may have contracted the virus in October when he engaged in unprotected anal sex with multiple partners while using crystal methamphetamine. By last month, it was clear that three of the four classes of anti-retroviral drugs used against H.I.V. were not working in this case, and the man showed signs of AIDS, including rapid weight loss, a high level of the virus in his bloodstream, and a depleted supply of crucial immune system cells.

Even though the anti-retroviral "cocktail" has extended many lives, some infected people still deteriorate and end up with AIDS, but that process usually takes many years. Doctors say that for a patient to reach that stage in a matter of months is extremely troubling.

has nobody even bothered to ask the most important question about iraq today? or has it been asked, only to get the infamous turn off by changing the subject. i dont know, but it seems to me, someone needs to step up to the plate, and my guess is that's why howard dean was successful at getting the reins of the DNC.

here's a message to mr. dean, as i stomped plenty of pavement in north iowa for you during last winter.... HOLD THIS ADMINISTRATION ACCOUNTABLE. accountable to the American people, not just to the American elite. make this administration make public it's plans regarding iraq. all we hear is what is happening, not why. filled with promise after promise about how great things WILL get. only, nobody seems to care when.

the next time someone bashes seymour hersh over at the new yorker, needs to be bitchslapped with some facts, such as this lil' gem, caught by today's papers over at slate:

Unmanned U.S. planes have been monitoring Iranian airspace in search of nukes, reports the WP. The drones complement satellite recon by sampling the air for traces of nuclear activity. The story elaborates on news broken by Seymour Hersh last month. Iranian civilians first spotted the drones in December but thought they were flying saucers. Though the United States believes that Iran's nuclear energy program is a front for developing nuclear weapons, Condoleezza Rice said that an Iranian invasion is not on the menu "at this time."

at this time?? what the hell are they up to, you might ask. well, just make sure you ask someone with a brain to tell you, like a democrat.

it's par for the course. whenever i pick one letter from the register, there's undoubtedly going to be another that deserves the same attention.

Set my television free, Congress

Way back in the history of broadcasting, Congress guaranteed local TV broadcasters that if they had agreements to carry network programming, no other broadcaster in its reception area could carry that same programming. This World War II-era government-controlled monopoly model persists to this day, and is why fans of "American Idol" are stuck with a basketball game (" 'American Idol' loses to Hawkeye Games," Feb. 9).

Ironically, the technology to overcome this is cheap and seamless: Since TV stations upload their signals via satellites, cable or satellite providers could retransmit those signals to their subscribers, so they could watch "Idol" on, say, Chicago's Fox affiliate, WFLD, instead of the basketball game on Des Moines' Fox affiliate, KDSM.

But providers aren't allowed to do that, thanks to the deceptively named Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act (SHVIA). Passed in 1999, the law, which ossifies the restrictions imposed by ancient technology, holds viewers hostage to the whims of local broadcasters and their advertisers.

There are no similar federal regulations restricting other forms of consumer choice: If you don't like a car dealership in Des Moines, you are free to shop for that car in the Quad Cities, or in Minnesota, for that matter. Don't like your bank? Open an account with another. But if your local TV station chooses to pre-empt network programming - such as when WOI's owner, Capital Communications, refused to air the "Nightline" segment involving the reading of the Iraq war dead - the viewer has no recourse.

You could argue that "it's only television." But when TV is such a huge part of our culture, and when it is the overwhelming provider of our news and information, should this massest of media really remain a state-controlled franchise? It is past time for Congress to tear down the walls of broadcaster protectionism and allow viewers to make their own choices.

-Ira Lacher,
Des Moines.

http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050213/OPINION04/502130321/1035/OPINION

can't get the blogger thing on google's toolbar to work. 'error on page' is all that gets expressed.

Besides, Social Security wasn't intended to make anyone rich. It was created to keep people from being poor.

--ANDIE DOMINICK, DSM Register editorial writer

well, this is my 2nd install of XP on this new 250gig 16mb buffer harddrive. but boy does it sing. and worth every penny of the $140 or so i paid for it at staples.

i jus watched cbsnews doing a piece on the predator, showing released dod video of a predator taking out some roadside bomb or something, and just misses the car going past. what really got my blood flowing from this terrorist activity was the announcer joking about how the driver must have gotten the scare of his life.

have we descended into such horrific animals as to joke about terrorizing another human being?

i'm ashamed to be an American after watching cbsnews tonite. God help us.

and the post sums it up rather tiday:

A Breathtaking Budget (washingtonpost.com): "Either way, the fiscal 2006 budget proposed yesterday by President Bush is breathtaking -- in the first approach as farce, in the second as tragedy. "

slate's TP nails this administration's priorities down pat:

Don't Let me Down, Truce By Eric?Umansky: "Among the programs to face the hypothetical scalpel: The EPA would be cut nearly 6 percent, with the biggest chunk coming from a clean-water fund. A program to help people pay their heating bills would be cut by 8 percent. And that good-for-nuthin' bureaucracy known as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be trimmed by about 12 percent.
Of course, not all programs are facing cuts. From the Post: 'Financing for the apprehension of Army deserters would double.' "

kudos to Dr. Bret McFarlin (nice irish name isn't it) for getting Quasar's Quote For The Day:

DesMoinesRegister.com: "Medical care corrupted by market forces and profit motives is what's truly bankrupt."

this letter writer demonstrates the fallen logic used by the reich-wing to denounce gay marriage.

DesMoinesRegister.com: "Rekha Basu thinks the YMCA should be more liberal in its view of 'family' to include gay lovers, but where do we draw the line? Why not also include your live-in boyfriend or girlfriend?"