"Republicanism is about surface appearances. Freeper types are taught to never look below the surface. That's why they wear those fake shiny-happy smiles all the time. Hence they'll pass a law titled Something-or-other Environmental Protection Blather and it'll be about cutting down all the forests so the leaves won't get their lawns dirty. They know for damn sure their followers won't read it and their followers will do everything possible to make sure nobody else reads it."--TrogL
The US military plans to detonate a 700 tonne explosive charge in a test called "Divine Strake" that will send a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas, a senior defense official said.--story
"I don't want to sound glib here but it is the first time in Nevada that you'll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons," said James Tegnelia, head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
I was very surprised to learn that Iowa Council for International Understanding declined to endorse the anti-bullying policy adopted by 49 other organizations, and objected to including sexual orientation in diversity training, apparently because these are not international concerns (“Man Quits Board Over 'Snub’ of Gay Issues,” March 31).attribution
I have been a freedom writer for Amnesty International, writing governments about their human rights abuses for 20 years. The first response of any government to international inquiry about a human-rights abuse is that it isn’t an international concern.
The world has come to understand that it is the right of all people on this planet to live without discrimination or abuse including, in the view of Amnesty International, freedom from discrimination or abuse because of sexual orientation.
It should not come as a surprise to an organization promoting international understanding that all of us have a duty as Iowans and as part of the international web of humanity to protect human rights and promote an understanding of human rights everywhere, including Iowa.
That the Iowa Council for International Understanding doesn’t understand that basic human rights are an international concern is not surprising, it is shocking.
— Ivan T. Webber, West Des Moines.
"The reason why we're opposed to military action is because it's an infinitely worse option and there's no justification for it."--source
--British foreign secretary Jack Straw
IRAN had shot down an unmanned surveillance plane in the south amid reports that the United States is planning military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, a press report said today.--story
Another Shiite mosque was bombed Saturday, killing six people and injuring 19. Other attacks killed 14 additional people around Iraq Saturday.
In Afghanistan Saturday, a car bomb exploded outside a NATO base, killing two and wounding seven. The Taliban took credit. The attack was the second in two days on foreign military bases in the country.
This is my opinion to David Hampton (mailbag on lack of outrage on port deal).
We Americans are the dumbest people in the world. All those so-called free trade agreements are a failure. Our government is borrowing $2 billion a day from China and Japan because of our debt. Our America is disappearing and is up for sale.
I do not shop around here because I refuse to buy crap from China. I buy items made in the U.S. People who buy this junk from China are helping them to build up their military, and where do you think they will be pointing those guns at? At us.
The working class in this country has no representation. We aren’t even a democracy; the rich and corporate America run this country.
I am angry and frustrated because of our citizens’ ignorance and apathy.
Shame on all of us.
--LORY SHIPPY, Clear Lakeand
Gov. Tom Vilsack’s firing of the director and deputy director of the Iowa Workforce Development agency on April 5 for not effectively monitoring spending was a refreshing counterpoint to what I find is a sad condition in the nation today — government officials screwing up without any discernible consequences.
The worst examples of this were provided by the 9/11 attacks. Although our country spends tens of billions of dollars each year to provide the FBI, CIA and other agencies with the means to protect us, they were too choked by self-serving bureaucracies to do so. And yet, not a single individual lost his or her job because of their failure to stop the attacks which killed almost 3,000 people.
The same goes for commanders of the New York police and fire departments whose personnel refused to communicate with each other even as they tried to rescue people in the stairwells of the Trade Centers. As they had for decades, these departments were more concerned with protecting turf than sharing critical information that could have saved more lives. Rather than being held accountable, they were treated like heroes.
And then we have the U.S. Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, who have since the departure of the Clinton administration tripled the national debt to almost $9 trillion by never saying no to anyone, especially the well-heeled lobbyists who provide the money for them to get re-elected.
Fortunately, we can fire these people ourselves, and we need to do so the next time they come up for re-election.
--DICK SCHINNOW, Rock Fallsattribution
"I call on the Senate minority leader to end his blocking tactics and allow the Senate to do its work and pass a fair, effective immigration reform bill," Bush said in his weekly radio address.--source
Reid shot back that Bush and Frist "are flat-out wrong about what happened to the immigration bill," saying Democrats proved their commitment to a comprehensive, bipartisan measure by voting twice in favor of it.
"It was President Bush and Republicans in Congress who lacked the backbone to stand up to the extreme right wing of their party, filibustered reform twice in two days, and put partisan politics ahead of border security and immigration reform," Reid said.
New statistics suggest San Francisco has the highest percentage of gay men among major cities in the world, with a quarter of them HIV-positive, a top city health official said on Friday.--story
...
He said it found an estimated 63,577 gay males aged 15 and above in San Francisco, a city with a total population of 764,000. That figure represents nearly one in five of the city's males above the age of 15.
0ne out of every four gay males -- 25.8 percent -- is infected with the HIV virus, giving San Francisco an estimated total of 16,401 HIV-positive men, said McFarland, an epidemiologist who has also worked on studies in Uganda, Zimbabwe and Egypt....
Leander Pickett, a teacher's assistant at Englewood Elementary, said he was manhandled and handcuffed by two plain clothed Homeland Security officers in front of the school Tuesday for no reason at all.--story
"I would like to treat people the way I would want to be treated, and yesterday I wasn't treated that way," Pickett said.
Pickett has been working at Englewood for two years, and his principal and colleagues told Channel 4 they have never met a harder worker or nicer guy.
"He's well loved by everyone because he's willing to do anything to help children," said the Englewood Elementary Principal Gail Brinson.
However, Tuesday afternoon Pickett's niceness turned to anger, disappointment, and betrayal when, as Pickett was directing bus traffic, he said he was handcuffed and roughed up and humiliated by the very people that were supposed to protect him.
"I walked up to him and said, 'Sir, you need to move.' That's when he said 'I'm a police officer. I'm with Homeland Security ... I'll move it when I want to.' That's when he started grabbing me on my arm," Pickett said.
However, Homeland Security tells a different story.
The department said the only reason the officers were at the school was because they pulled over to look at a map.
The department also said it's looking into what happened, and that Pickett's version is wrong. It claims he was antagonizing the officers.
Several people were outside of the school, watching the incident take place, and those witnesses agree with Pickett's story.
"Mr. Pickett asked the guy blocking the bus loading zone to move, and the guy told him he would move his car when he got ready to move it," said Englewood coach Alton Jackson.
"At that point I intervened and I went up to the gentleman and said, 'Mr. Pickett is an employee here,' and they said that didn't matter," said Englewood media specialist, Terri Dreisonstok.
"'We're with Homeland Security,' and on and on they went, and pretty soon, before you know it, he's handcuffed and slammed against a car," Brinson said. "All the children are watching, they're all upset."
--story
2nd Homeland Security official in teen sex scandal - exposed himself to teenage girl in mall, formerly ran sex predator operation at Homeland Security
And the federal agent can’t seem to stop talking to the cops.--story
Michael Burks: My father was a police officer. I was a police officer. I work for the Department of Homeland security. I understand you guys have a job to do and I’m not trying to tell anything else other than that. I swear to God, as God as my witness, I’m wearing a St. Michael’s medal right now, okay? I was not going to do anything with her.
The administration of President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue.--yahoo
Must Raise Voice Against Limitless Presidency,” caught my eye. Though I agree with your point, I do not agree with your wording.attribution
Words like “limitless,” “buzz off” and “cockamamie theory” show a prejudice against President Bush. There is no mention of President Jimmy Carter’s case of United States v. Truong, where Carter’s Justice Department claimed Carter had a “constitutional prerogative” to conduct this warrantless wiretap. So it was OK for Carter in peace time but wrong for Bush now? In my opinion it was wrong both times.
— Jim Davidson, Cedar Rapids.
Just 36 percent of the public approves of Bush's job performance, his lowest-ever rating in AP-Ipsos polling. By contrast, the president's job approval rating was 47 percent among likely voters just before Election Day 2004 and a whopping 64 percent among registered voters in October 2002.--source
Only 40 percent of the public approves of Bush's performance on foreign policy and the war on terror, another low-water mark for his presidency. That's down 9 points from a year ago. Just before the 2002 election, 64 percent of registered voters backed Bush on terror and foreign policy.
Just 35 percent of the public approves of Bush's handling of Iraq, his lowest in AP-Ipsos polling.
The White House on Friday chose not to challenge a prosecutor's disclosure that President George W. Bush authorized top official Lewis "Scooter" Libby to disclose intelligence on Iraq in 2003, as Libby alleges.--source
The US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has said US officials have held talks with some groups linked to the Sunni-led Iraqi insurgency.--story
Everybody fronts the surfacing of the only known copy of what's called the Gospel of Judas; the 1,700-year-old text asserts that Jesus told Judas to sell him out. "You can see how early Christians could say, if Jesus's death was all part of God's plan, then Judas's betrayal was part of God's plan," said one academic. "So what does that make Judas? Is he the betrayer, or the facilitator of salvation, the guy who makes the crucifixion possible?"
Columbus- Weary from a string of scandals and bad economic news, a majority of likely voters want Democrats to retake control of Ohio government, according to a new poll released Wednesday.--story
Republican fatigue is particularly evident among the Democrats surveyed. But 62 percent of the important swing voters said they'd like to end the GOP dominance that began 15 years ago, according to a telephone poll of likely primary voters conducted by the University of Akron's Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics.
"The evidence that we are filing supports our claim that AT&T is diverting Internet traffic into the hands of the NSA wholesale, in violation of federal wiretapping laws and the Fourth Amendment," said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "More than just threatening individuals' privacy, AT&T's apparent choice to give the government secret, direct access to millions of ordinary Americans' Internet communications is a threat to the Constitution itself. We are asking the Court to put a stop to it now."
--source
Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing.--source
The New York Times leads with and others front scientists discovering a 375-million-year-old all-terrain creature that appears to be a missing link between fish and land-based animals. The Tiktaalik roseae—Inuktitut for "large shallow water fish"—had arm-joints, proto-wrists, and could drag itself across land. It's exactly the kind of transitional creature that creationists have long crowed there had never been evidence of.
The problem with Democrats today is they seem to aspire only to be Republican-lite. Corporate interests, the costs of campaigns and the focus on "base issue" polling have given us a landscape of demo-clones who all say mostly the same thing with slightly differing degrees of believability.attribution
Why would Democratic voters feel energized when they feel as if they are voting for what seems like progressive or moderate Republicans rather than real Democrats? We need the Democratic Party to shake down its entrenched leadership and organize its message.
Scream about the environment and the tax cuts, propose radical shifts from fossil fuels to renewable energies and force a real debate on health care rather than the same tired platitudes every time elections roll around.
I'll vote for the first person who stands up and shakes his or her finger at us in believable anger for allowing our current president to wiretap illegally, strand us in Iraq under false pretenses and destroy our budget surplus with staggering debt.
— Chris Gorder, Iowa Falls
"We have to prepare the ground for it so that it can grow and bear fruit - especially because independent and national forces, and also self-reliant forces, in Iran will never accept a foreign country telling them what to do and which way to take."attribution
--Mohammad Ali Dadkhah, co-founder of the Center for Human Rights Defenders
PHOENIX (AP) - Two young men charged with sodomizing 18 boys at a youth camp last year have been offered a plea agreement that may net them little jail time and no record of sexual assault.--story
Clifton Bennett, 18, the son of Arizona Senate President Ken Bennett (R-Prescott), and his co-defendant, Kyle Wheeler, 19, were charged in January with 18 counts of aggravated assault and 18 counts of kidnapping for the incidents, which happened at a youth camp last June.
A new online poll conducted by Scholastic magazine says more than 80% of kids don't want to be the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth.
Amazingly, that's a nearly total flip from 2004, when 75% of the elementary and middle school children did want to rule the roost from the White House.
--source
A piece inside the Post wonders whether giving Zacarias Moussaoui the death penalty would be bad for national security. "There's absolutely no doubt that executing him would turn him into a martyr," said one analyst. "Moussaoui could achieve a fame and notoriety in death that eluded him in life."
The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, notes new Treasury numbers concluding that the richest 1 percent of Americans "held 33.4 percent of the nation's net worth in 2004, up from 32.7 percent in 2001, but still lower than a peak of 34.6 percent in 1995."--source
But of course super-wealthy Americans get super-savings from the investment tax cut: They're the ones who invest the most. The piece also offers hard numbers again and again—for example, those who make more than $10 million in a year saw an average tax savings of $500,000. What the story rarely does is give readers a more balanced picture, namely what proportion of income the super-rich are paying in taxes and how that compares with the not-so-rich. In fairness, the story does achieve one of its goals: deflating the rhetoric from the GOP that the dividend tax cut helps most average Joes; it doesn't.
--source
"The commitment to what the president of the United States will say every single day of the week is his number one priority in Iraq, when it's translated into action, looks very tiny."attribution
--Les Campbell, who runs programs in the Middle East for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, known as NDI.
It was no surprise that George W. Bush has stated that our troops will remain in Iraq through 2008. After all, Bush has spent his life having people in power (his family, wealthy friends, the Supreme Court) give him an enterprise (an oil company, a baseball team, the United States) that he promptly proceeds to run into the ground.attribution
Then he moves on, leaving a mess for someone else to clean up. The quagmire in Iraq, ballooning national debt, etc. have become problems for future presidents and our descendants.
True to form, Bush happily goes about his usual pattern - sowing chaos while others reap the results. But, how could anyone expect anything else from him? It's all he knows.
— Michael Santangelo, Iowa City.
Terry Mattingly’s column in Saturday’s Globe-Gazette about writer Eric Metaxas’ humorous takes on God and the Bible brings to mind an edition of Wiley Miller’s comic strip, “Non Sequitur,” that features as its main caption, “God Does the Talk Show Circuit.”attribution
The strip shows God, in the stereotypical depiction of an old man with a beard, talking to Jay Leno. God says, “I think my best creation was the sense of humor. The irony, of course, is that the people who claim to believe in me the most are the ones least likely to have one.”
--KEVIN YOUNG, Sheffield
A young Iraqi girl has given a shocking first hand account of what witnesses claim amounts to mass murder by US troops in the war-torn country...winning hearts and minds has got to be harder with these kinds of maniacs in our armed forces.
Fifteen people in all were killed, including her parents and grandparents. Her account has been corroborated by other eyewitnesses who say it was a revenge attack after a roadside bomb killed a marine...
--source
In a sleazy hotel room, "Brittany," then aged 16 and drugged into oblivion, waited for the men to arrive. Her pimps sent as many as 17 clients an evening through the door.--SOURCE
A "john" could even pre-book the pretty young blonde for $1,000 a night, sometimes flying in and then flying out from a nearby airport.
None of this happened in Bangkok or Costa Rica, places that have become synonymous with sex tourism and underage sex.
It took place in Atlanta, the buckle of the U.S. Bible Belt, where the world's busiest passenger airport provides a cheaper, more convenient and safer underage sex destination for men seeking girls as young as 10.
U.S. Capitol Police on Monday asked a federal prosecutor to approve an arrest warrant for Rep. Cynthia McKinney after she tangled with a uniformed officer last week.our VP can shoot a man in the face and joke about it, but this woman defended herself and gets arrested. one has said it's apples and oranges .... why?
--source
1. She is a woman.
2. She is black.
3. She is a LIBERAL Democrat who sees through the lies of the neocons.
Different standards must apply if we are to maintain NATIONAL SECURITY. Which in this case means making a scapegoat of this popular Dem to distract from the real stories that are spilling out of the Bushocracy even as we speak. Implying that McKinney is a lunatic criminal will help deflect the true stories about the real lunatic criminals. You know - the ones with the guns.
Everybody leads with Rep. Tom DeLay announcing—via interviews in Time and a
local paper published late last night—that he's not going to run for reelection and will quit Congress, he offered, "probably by the end of May. " DeLay is set to make a formal announcement today.
Last week a second DeLay aide pleaded guilty to conspiracy and corruption charges and has sung to the feds about, as the Washington Post puts it, "a criminal enterprise being run out of DeLay's leadership offices." Not that that had anything to do with the congressman's decision, of course. DeLay explained that he was stepping down only because he was in a tough reelection campaign and was just taking one for the team. "This is a very strong Republican district," he said. "It's obvious to me that anybody but me running here will overwhelmingly win the seat."
Detailing how the feds are creeping ever closer to DeLay, a piece inside the Post points out that not only have two once top aides pleaded guilty, but DeLay's former chief of staff was also named in the latest government docs as a collaborator. In another plus for DeLay pulling out now, he can take all the cash from his campaign war-chest and drop it into his defense fund, which as the Post notes has so far been "financed largely by corporations with business before Congress."
Asked if he'd done anything illegal in office, DeLay told Time, "No." Anything immoral? "We're all sinners," said the Hammer.
Because a Muslim converted to Christianity he faced the death penalty in Afghanistan, and most Muslims there seem to support it. So, why did we get rid of the Taliban? Is this the democracy you envisioned, Mr. President?attribution
— Philip Luksetich, Knoxville.
Regarding Rekha Basu’s March 22 column: Another scenario that will arise from South Dakota’s anti-abortion law will be the forcing of rape victims to give birth to their rapists’ offspring.attribution
By not allowing abortion even in the case of rape or incest, girls raped by their fathers would be forced to give birth to their own father’s children. I can’t comprehend how people who deem themselves “pro-life” and “pro-family” could force something this cruel onto a young girl.
— Randy Steele, Washington.
The Bush administration can't seem to find anyone who is willing to take the job of FEMA director, reports the NYT on Page One. All the top emergency response experts around the country who have been asked have rejected the job, largely because they don't believe the administration is serious about fixing the agency. This problem goes beyond the job of director, as people who were appointed on an "acting basis" are filling 11 of the 30 top jobs at FEMA.
After the bombing of the shrine in February, 30,000 to 36,000 Iraqis have left their homes.
--source