COLUMBUS - The politically connected chairman of a Cincinnati-based online gambling company had the ears of key decision-makers in Columbus as he lobbied the state to sell lottery tickets through his Internet business.
While Roger Ach II pushed Ohio to offer online lottery ticket sales, the chief executive officer of the financially troubled Games Inc. had power brokers working to give him "20 minutes" with Gov. Bob Taft, according to documents released yesterday by the governor's office.
Even after issuing stock to some of the most influential Ohioans - including Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett and Brian Hicks, Governor Taft's former chief of staff - Mr. Ach was unsuccessful in convincing the state to put its lottery online.
The Blade first reported on Wednesday that Tom Noe, the former Toledo-area coin dealer under investigation, invested at least $150,000 of the state's money with the company.
Yesterday, Governor Taft said he met with representatives from Games Inc., but he rejected their pitch to sell lottery tickets over the Web. ...........................
Games Inc. has recently focused on gaming because online lotteries have yet to be approved by any state, a fact that company executives hoped to change by appealing to the Taft administration.
"The Company has also developed software for Internet Lottery Ticket sales," Games Inc. said in an SEC filing. "As it became evident the Internet Lottery ticket sales were going to be adopted more slowly than the Company had anticipated, the Company has focused more of its attention on the games business in general, never losing sight of its ultimate goal of being an electronic lottery retailer."
Earlier this month, Mr. Ach pitched his firm to Mr. Hayes of the Lottery Commission.
.................. Mr. Ach, a prominent Cincinnati businessman who has contributed thousands of dollars to GOP candidates, convinced a number of Republicans to invest in the company. At least one prominent Democrat, Jerry Springer, a talk show host, also invested.
Jean Schmidt, a former Republican state representative from the Cincinnati area, also appealed to the governor's office on behalf of a Web-based lottery. Ms. Schmidt is currently running for Congress against Paul Hackett, a Democrat who served in the Iraq War.
The race has attracted national attention.
In a November, 2001, e-mail, Jon Allison, a staff member for Governor Taft, complained that Ms. Schmidt "continues to bug me on Internet lottery."
One year later, her state representative re-election campaign garnered a $1,000 donation from Mr. Ach.
Ms. Schmidt said through a spokesman that she does not remember any conversations with the governor's office about an online lottery, although she does remember that this was a significant issue at the time.
"The documents indicate that she is lobbying the governor on behalf of Roger Ach," said her opponent, Mr. Hackett. "After doing their bidding, she takes a $1,000 donation. That is the culture of corruption - documented."
By MIKE WILKINSONand STEVE EDER BLADE STAFF WRITERS
COLUMBUS — Tom Noe used state money to try to pump up an online gambling company in which he and other prominent Republicans were investors, records show.
Mr. Noe invested at least $100,000 of the state’s rare-coin money into financially troubled Games Inc., which has plummeted in value in the last year as its CEO Roger Ach II, a politically connected Cincinnati businessman, sought public contracts.
Mr. Noe is among several prominent Republicans who have invested in Games Inc.
Brian Hicks, former chief of staff to Gov. Bob Taft; Bob Bennett, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party; former Senate President Stanley Aronoff, and Lucas County Republicans Patrick Kriner and Sally Perz all own shares in the company, records filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission show.
Jerry Springer, a Democrat from Cincinnati and a talk show host, is also listed as an investor.
The company operates a Web site that offers multiple gambling games. Mr. Ach has also sought contracts with state lotteries, including Ohio’s, to allow people to buy lottery tickets online using its software.
In addition to being a personal investor, Mr. Noe is quoted in a company press release touting the benefits of online lotteries. Mr. Noe, identified in the release as chairman of the Ohio Board of Regents, said an online lottery could help ease funding woes for education by making the state lottery more accessible
So it is odd how Schmidt and Noe were both lobbying for the same online lottery. But she never heard of Noe. Every prominent Republican Roger Ach could get his hands on was pimping for his lottery, yet Schmidt doesn't know Noe and can't remember calling the governor or a $1000 donation? It is one hell of a coincidence that she and Noe are connected to this lottery, pitched as a way to increase education funding, yet have no knowledge of each other? Very interesting.
Yes, I like Pretty Ricky, and here's a pack of smokes ok. Now, can I get my New York Times?
Arianna strikes again. You know, people have issues with MoDo, but they fucking hate Judy Miller. I mean her husband is swanning around the Med and she's listening to Ciara and comparing hair styles. And now the knives come out.
Ever since I started blogging about Judy Miller's role in Plamegate (and in the selling of the war in Iraq), I've been showered with tips and tidbits about the jailed reporter, whom one e-mailer from Sag Harbor ("her summer hometown") archly referred to as "the amazing Ms. Miller, intrepid girl reporter."
And since I spent the weekend in the vicinity of her summer hometown, some of what I heard was delivered by people who know her well. Together all these pieces of information now comprise my newly labeled -- and ever-expanding -- Judy File.
A recurring theme in many of the conversations and e-mails is how Judy, to the dismay of many of her colleagues, never played by the same rules and standards as other reporters. One source e-mailed to give me some examples of this pattern: "In Feb 2003, Judy was in Salahuddin covering the Iraqi opposition conclave. Iraqi National Congress spokesperson Zaab Sethna told a reporter who was also there that Judy was staying with Chalabi's group in Salahuddin (the rest of the reporters had to stay 30 minutes away in crappy hotels in Irbil), and that the I.N.C. had provided her with a car and a translator (Did the New York Times reimburse them?). The I.N.C. offered another reporter the same, but he turned it down. Judy had just arrived in a bus convoy from Turkey, big footing C.J. Chivers, who was also there covering the story for the Times. While everyone else on the buses had to scramble for accommodations, she was staying in a luxurious villa loaned to the I.N.C. by the Kurdish Democratic Party...
"Two years earlier, she was on assignment in Paris for the Times and conducted her reporting out of the ambassador's personal residence, where she was staying. Felix Rohatyn, the ambassador at the time, was out of town, but it would be interesting to know whether the Times reimbursed U.S. taxpayers for the use of the embassy while she was there on assignment. What is certain is that the Paris bureau was buzzing about this at the time, as getting too close to sources or accepting hospitality -- accommodations, meals -- is a violation of the Times's ethical standards. The feeling was that somehow Judy was able to do whatever she wanted."
For those interested in visiting Judy at the Alexandria Detention Center, one source emailed that Miller's visiting hours "are fully booked until September 15."
Another I ran into told me that the Committee to Protect Journalists is very divided over Miller: "There are those of us who feel that this is not a good case for us to be identified with. There are too many unknowns and too much that's murky here."
The AP reported on Friday that a delegation of the Committee to Protect Journalists (clearly not including those who do not believe that protecting Judy Miller is what they should be doing) visited her last week. During her meeting with the group, which included Tom Brokaw, Miller wore a dark green uniform with "PRISONER" written on the back.
According to the CPJ reps who visited her, Miller told them that while she is allowed to read and write in jail, she's been permitted to go outside only two times in the three weeks she's been locked up. I can't figure this one out. Are prison authorities worried she might get in trouble in the yard? Convince her fellow inmates that Iraq did indeed have (as she wrote in Sept 2002) "12,500 gallons of anthrax, 2,500 gallons of gas gangrene, 1,250 gallons of aflotoxin and 2,000 gallons of botulism throughout the country"?
Besides being able to read and write, she's also able to make long-distance phone calls (collect, I assume). According to a source, she used one of her allowed calls to phone her publisher pal Mort Zuckerman to complain about a Lloyd Grove column that ran in Zuckerman's New York Daily News, in which Grove reported, correctly, that while Miller is in jail her husband, "famed editor Jason Epstein," is cruising around the Mediterranean aboard the Silver Shadow cruise liner. The Grove column included a delicious riff from Chris Buckley. Miller, apparently, was not amused. Grove's piece also featured a priceless quote from Miller's attorney Bob Bennett who, when asked about Epstein's travels, replied, "We all serve our time in our own way."
Speaking of Bennett, we had a brief but memorable e-exchange with him on Friday, when the HuffPost contacted him to ask about a tip I'd gotten that Miller was in the process of negotiating a book deal about her Plamegate/prison experiences. When asked to confirm the story, Bennett e-mailed back a lawyerly: "Where did you get this info?" Was he expecting me to give him the name, address, and blood type of my source? We replied that I had heard it through "publishing sources" -- to which he emailed back: "No Comment".
Thanks, Bob. Should we take "No Comment" to mean "yes" -- since if you'd meant "no" you surely would have said so? Unsolicited advice to Alice Mayhew, Judy Miller's legendary editor at Simon and Schuster (if she's the one negotiating with Bennett): Hold your horses or, if you can't, keep the advance very low. A reporter going to jail to protect her own ass and not a source smells like remainder to me. But what worries my Times sources the most is that it smells like the straw that could break the Gray Lady's back. A lot hinges on how much of what Judy knows Bill Keller and Arthur Sulzberger also know. Keller has been very cagey on the subject. When asked by George Stephanopoulos on Nightline if he knew who Miller's source was, he refused to say yes or no.
And no fewer than four sources have either e-mailed, called, or, in one case, run up to me on the street to tell me that what I termed Miller's "especially close relationship" with Chief Warrant Officer Richard Gonzales, the leader of the WMD-hunting unit Miller was embedded with during the war, might have been, well, very close indeed. According to one insider, Miller had emailed a picture of Gonzales to a colleague at the Times with the message "Lucky Lady".
So thanks to all those who contributed to the Judy File... which is open and ready for more. Keep 'em coming...
Maybe that's why her husband is playing 6th Fleet this summer instead of standing by his wife.
Salad nicoise so beats bologna and cheese with bug juice.
When They Knew Sources indicate that Rove may have learned Valerie Plame's identity from within the Administration rather than from media contacts By MASSIMO CALABRESI
Posted Sunday, Jul. 31, 2005
As the investigation tightens into the leak of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, sources tell TIME some White House officials may have learned she was married to former ambassador Joseph Wilson weeks before his July 6, 2003, Op-Ed piece criticizing the Administration. That prospect increases the chances that White House official Karl Rove and others learned about Plame from within the Administration rather than from media contacts. Rove has told investigators he believes he learned of her directly or indirectly from reporters, according to his lawyer.
..........................
When Pincus' article ran on June 12, the circle of senior officials who knew about the identity of Wilson's wife expanded. "After Pincus," a former intelligence officer says, "there was general discussion with the National Security Council and the White House and State Department and others" about Wilson's trip and its origins. A source familiar with the memo says neither Powell nor Armitage spoke to the White House about it until after July 6. John McLaughlin, then deputy head of the CIA, confirms that the White House asked about the Wilson trip, but can't remember exactly when. One thing he's sure of, says McLaughlin, who has been interviewed by prosecutors, is that "we looked into it and found the facts of it, and passed it on."
You bet he did. But this goes deeper than that. Plame pissed off people in the Office of Special Plans. They made the link and decided to kill two birds with one stone.
Ohio is appalled that Jean doesn't know Schmidt about Noe
Official state documents prove candidate covered-up ties to corruption
Jean Schmidt is well known for never forgetting a face or a name. Conventional wisdom recognizes her renowned memory to the point where the Cincinnati Enquirernoted (July 31, 2005):
Schmidt knows the district very well, having almost a "file-card" memory to recall details about people, places and issues she's had experience with on the local level.
Yet on this morning's CBS 12 "Newsmakers" program, Jean Schmidt lied to the voters on ? only two days before the election. In an effort to cover up Jean Schmidt's involvement in the scandalous culture of corruption, Schmidt said she didn't know Tom Noe. Schmidt said she'd never met Tom Noe. Schmidt said she had never even heard of Tom Noe. The woman with the "file-card memory" lied.
You see, Jean Schmidt was Vice Chair of the Higher Education Subcommittee of the House Finance and Appropriations Committee. During the same period, Tom Noe was a member of the Board of Regents.
There are a number of areas where we are totally lined up with [Jean Schmidt's] thinking. In any event, the conclusion is that we need more contact, more often.
These official State of Ohio documents confirm ties between Jean Schmidt and Tom Noe.
And this isn't an isolated incident, there is a pattern of the woman with the "file-card memory" not recalling her ties to corruption.
When it came to lobbying Bob Taft for online casino gambling, she suddenly forgot everything. The Toledo Bladereported (July 29, 2005):
Jean Schmidt, a former Republican state representative from the Cincinnati area, also appealed to the governor's office on behalf of a Web-based lottery. [...]
In a November, 2001, e-mail, Jon Allison, a staff member for Governor Taft, complained that Ms. Schmidt "continues to bug me on Internet lottery."
One year later, her state representative re-election campaign garnered a $1,000 donation from Mr. Ach.
Ms. Schmidt said through a spokesman that she does not remember any conversations with the governor's office about an online lottery, although she does remember that this was a significant issue at the time.
The next day, the woman with the "file-card memory" was the focus of a Cincinnati Enquirer article headlined, Schmidt can't recall Ach favor.
It is time for Jean Schmidt to come clean about her relationship with Tom Noe, Bob Taft, Roger Ach and online gambling. The culture of corruption will continue until reporters demand that career politicians tell voters the truth.
Voters deserve straight talk, Come Clean Jean.
UPDATE: (Bob) Paul Hackett and former Senator Max Clelland are on the Courthouse Steps doing a press conference right now. The big three stations, channels 5, 9, and 12 are here. More to come.
.. Well, Bob missed one thing: Noe was chair of the Board of Regents, not just a member, making it impossible that Schmidt not only didn't know him, but that she had to have dealings with him. Such a stupid lie, so easy to check.
I'm on the education committee and I don't know the chair of the Board of Regents? What is she, a pathological liar? All she had to say is that she never took his money, that's it. But no. She had to lie that she never knew him. Wow.
Our bodily fluids, George, which is why I onlydrink grain alcohol and branch water. Have to protect those fluids
Senator Batshit becomes unglued again on TV. Some people were pissed at the way Jon Stewart talked to him, but his approach was to get the man to hang himself. People forget that Stephanopoulos is a minister's kid and knows religion real well. His father is a Greek Orthodox priest, so when the Holy Rollers come on, he knows how full of shit they are. So he went for the throat.
The whole segment is filled with crazy, but this is extra special crazy
STEPHANOPOULOS: Let?s talk about something else in the book, radical feminists. A second quote from the book, you say, Respect for stay-at-home mothers has been poisoned by a toxic combination of the village elders? war on the traditional family and radical feminism?s mysogynistic crusade to make working outside the home the only marker of social value and self-respect.
Let?s get specific here. Name one or two of these radical feminists who are on this crusade.
SANTORUM: Well, I mean, you know, you have ? you go back to, what?s her name, well, Gloria Steinem, but I?m trying to remember ? I can?t remember the woman?s name. It?s terrible. Anyway?
STEPHANOPOULOS: But it?s kind of an important point. Because you paint this broad brush: radical feminists, village elders. Name one.
SANTORUM: There?s lots of ? no, there?s lot?s of ? well, Gloria Steinem. There?s one. I mean, there?s lots of writings out there?
STEPHANOPOULOS: She?s been on a crusade against stay-at-home moms?
SANTORUM: There?s lots of writings out there, and there is an opinion by the elite in this country across academia, across the media, that stay-at-home motherhood is not adequately affirmed and respected by our society.
SANTORUM: And if you don?t believe that, get a panel of stay-at- home moms here on your show, and you ask them whether they feel affirmed by society, whether they feel affirmed by the culture.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Listen, I can go home. My wife Wendy both works and stays at home at various times. And sometimes, when she?s not working, you know, she gets upset, but it?s not some message that?s being driven by?
SANTORUM: Isn?t it?
STEPHANOPOULOS: ? specific people.
SANTORUM: Isn?t it a message for us? I mean, where does this come from? Does this come from the ether?
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, I?m asking you. Where are these radical feminists?
SANTORUM: It comes from an elite culture, dictated, again, from academia, dictated, again, from the Hollywood culture and the news media, that says, the only thing that?s affirming, the only thing that really counts is what you do at work.
And that goes for men and women. And it?s wrong. It?s wrong to tell that to fathers. It?s wrong to tell that to mothers. And we need to value mothers and fathers spending time with their children much more than we do in America.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Hillary Clinton wrote much the same in her book, It Takes a Village. Do you believe she?s a radical feminist?
SANTORUM: Yes, I do. I mean, read her work and what she?s done on children?s rights. I mean, that?s radical. I mean, you?re talking about giving children the same ? that children have rights equal to adults. I mean, that is not a nurturing atmosphere of mothers and fathers taking responsibility for shaping the moral vision of their children. She doesn?t agree with that, at least if you look at her earlier writings.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Have you talked to her about your book?
SANTORUM: We?ve had conversations in passing about it.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Tell us about them.
SANTORUM: Oh, just, you know, pass in the hallway, you know, she made a comment to me about that it takes a village, and I responded, no, it really does take a family.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So no serious debate?
SANTORUM: No serious debate. I?d love to have a serious debate.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You may have drawn her out now, calling her a radical feminist.
SANTORUM: I?d love to have a serious debate. If she?d like to have a serious debate about her view of how society should be ordered and structured ? I believe her view is one that says government and top-down. I believe my view is the view that?s held by most Americans, which means we need strong families and strong communities, and we don?t need government really dissembling those institutions, which I think her view of the world does.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Let?s move on to another controversy you stirred up, the question of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church. You made a statement in July 2002 which has drawn a lot of fire.
You said, in a publication called Catholic On-Line, When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While there?s no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.
You?ve reaffirmed that just a couple of weeks ago. Ted Kennedy, John Kerry say you have to apologize. Mitt Romney, Republican governor, says basically you don?t know what you?re talking about.Do you still stand by that statement?
SANTORUM: Look, the statement I made was that the culture influences people?s behavior. I don?t think anyone?
STEPHANOPOULOS: Isn?t that what conservatives used to say about liberals, when they used to say they were trying to excuse criminals?
SANTORUM: I think what I?m saying is that the culture of liberal sexual freedom and the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ?70s had a profound impact on everybody and their sexual mores. It had a profound impact on the church.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But you singled out Boston in?
SANTORUM: I singled out Boston in 2002. In July of 2002, that was the epicenter. We did not know?
STEPHANOPOULOS: That is simply not true. I went back and looked at all of these clips. We had stories in 1994, going back all the way to 1984 in Louisiana, in just about every archdiocese in the country.
I just don?t understand why you stick by this, because we now know it was widespread. It was in every city in the country.
SANTORUM: Well, at the time, we did not know it was in every city of the country.
STEPHANOPOULOS: We knew a lot of that.
SANTORUM: It was ? look at the press reports. It was the epicenter.
STEPHANOPOULOS: I have them right here.
SANTORUM: I think it?s taking it out of context?
STEPHANOPOULOS: Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1994, it cites instances of abuse in Santa Fe and Chicago, as well as Lafayette, Louisiana, and Camden, New Jersey. 1994.
SANTORUM: I understand that it was in other places. All I?m talking about, at the time, what everyone was focused on at the time was Boston.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So you stand by it?
SANTORUM: Look, I will admit that Boston is ? that using Boston at the time was appropriate. Now, I would not say it would be appropriate. I would say that Boston right now would ? we?d say a whole lot of other cities in the country and a whole lot of problems. But if you read the article, that was one of about four or five things that I said?
STEPHANOPOULOS: I did read it.
SANTORUM: ? and I talked about the problems within the church. I wrote the article in 2002. Ted Kennedy and John Kennedy wrote no articles in 2002 criticizing this church. I went out and talked to bishops. I went out and talked to cardinals. I was very concerned. I was offended and hurt by a church that betrayed me by not doing what they should have done, and I was angered by that, and I spoke out about it, and I spoke loudly about it.
The senators from Massachusetts did nothing. They spoke nothing. They sat by and let this happen.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So you?re standing your ground
..................................
Senator Batshit Crazy said other things, but clearly, he's both stupid and a maniac. He didn't mention how he thinks birth control "harms the country" as he did on CNN. Yeah. So what will the former Senator from Falls Church do when he is out of work. I know he makes a nod at living in Pittsburgh, but come on.
And mesage to Hillary: no matter what you do, this is how they think about you.
The Ishtar Sheraton Hotel is reflected in a pool of water at a new park on the banks of the Tigris River in Baghdad in this March 21, 2005 file photo. In the months after the invasion, the Sheraton Baghdad was a veritable hive, buzzing with businessmen, politicians, journalists and the military. Now it is all but dead, a symbol of how Iraq's worsening insurgency is sucking the life out of the city
I haven't written about Iraq in a while, but I wanted to discuss why liberal warhawks are so wrong.
If you are a reader of Bill Lind. Tony Cordesman or any of the professional military experts, not ideologues like Max Boot and Victor Davis Hansen, you have concluded long ago, our war in Iraq is a folly.
Why?
We cannot establish any kind of order in Iraq, and it's not just the streets. Saddam's trial ended in a brawl, the politicians cannot make up their mind on what to call the country and the police forces are completely penetrated by the resistance.
There is nothing current US forces can do to win the war. The Iraqis can contest any ground and control most of the cities. When poligenerals say the Iraqi forces will be ready, that's a lie, a baldface lie. Half the people you need are killing Americans.
First of all, the Iraqis are little better than merceneries. Every time a car bomb blows up in from of a police station, someone gave them the info they needed. Second, the leadership is weak.
Remember, Iraqis withstood eight years of brutal warfare against Iran. There are a lot of good small unit and company and battalion leaders in the country. Just not fighting for us.
The liberals argue that we can't leave Iraq a mess.
Have they seen Iraqi politics lately? A minister wants to ban liquor sales at the airport. You can't even drive to the airport without bodyguards, yet this is his priority. Iranian agent of influence Ahmed Chalabi runs the oil ministry. Badly, but he runs it all the same.
Iraqis are far more interested in their grudges than running a country. The Kurds think they can either get their way or have their country. Sure, under the treads of Turkish tanks. It is as if we found the worst people possible to form a government, then expected them to perform.
But the liberal warhawks foolishly accept Bush's definitions and assessments, when they are highly flawed.
Rumsfeld's transformation is a disaster in the making. The US has exposed how horribly it does basic infantry tasks, as the bodies litter Iraq. They seem to think it's just a matter of adjusting a few things and fixing what is a deeply flawed policy. It isn't. From the day the first Thunder Run took place in Baghdad, the US didn't have the army to win this war.
Bush's America first policy doomed the US in Iraq from the start. Normally, Pakistani and Indian troops would have done the basic security tasks and area patrolling. But since intervention in Iraq would have meant government toppling riots, that didn't happen and the resistance filled right in.
When you hear someone like Joe Biden talk about internationalization, you have to wonder if he's been dipping into Arlen Spector's pain meds. Tony Blair has his job because everyone else is too incompetent to do it. No European government can now join us in Iraq. They would be tossed out of office overnight. Those that did are pulling back. What started out as a way to make friends with the US, has turned into a political disaster.
And then you have Peter "PNAC's Bitch" Beinart signing on to some manifesto they came up with. They failed. Why endorse them?
But what is clear and the warhawks need to realize it and come to understand that we will leave the Iraqis to their fate:
1) No one wants to fight this war. When you ask liberal warhawks to enlist, they act as if you are insane. If they won't fight, no one else will
2) Iraqis talk support, but back the resistance to a frightening degree. The resistance's intelligent net is comprehensive.
3) The current Iraqi government is not only corrupt, but in hock to Iran.
With these conditions, we will only fail in Iraq. It is time to realize that and leave.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Jeff Cunningham scored twice in the final five minutes as the Major League Soccer All-Stars' beat England's Fulham FC 4-1 on Saturday.
Cunningham came on as a substitute in the 68th minute and struck from eight yards out off a header to his foot from D.C. United midfielder Christian Gomez with five minutes left. Four minutes later, New England's Shalrie Joseph sprang Cunningham, who dribbled in and beat goalkeeper Jaroslav Drobny.
The crowd of 23,309 roared at the late goals from Cunningham, a longtime Columbus Crew standout who went to Colorado in the offseason.
The MLS struck 23 minutes in when Landon Donovan wound up with the ball following a Fulham turnover. Donovan slipped a pass into the box past U.S. national team teammate Carlos Bocanegra to New England forward Taylor Twellman, who beat goalkeeper Mark Crossley.
Drobny replaced Crossley when he was injured a few minutes later.
Donovan and Twellman nearly connected again four minutes after the goal, but Twellman's shot from the right side flew wide left.
Fulham leveled in the 36th minute when Chris Albright was whistled for knocking down Luis Boa Morte in the penalty box as Boa Morte dribbled toward goal. Claus Jensen's ensuing penalty kick caught keeper Matt Reis moving the wrong way.
That was Fulham's lone good chance of the first half, however, as the MLS side owned the midfield with Donovan and New England teammates Clint Dempsey and Joseph controlling possession.
MLS took back the lead in the 56th minute when Dallas' Ronnie O'Brien deflected a shot from Dempsey just inside the left post for the score.
Dempsey nearly put the MLS on the board in the 3rd minute, controlling a high ball with his back to the goal, then turning and firing from about eight yards out. Bocanegra stepped into an open goal mouth and cleared it for Fulham.
The MLS All-Stars blew mid-table Fulham away. If they didn't have that penalty kick in the first half, they wouldn't have scored at all.
On any given day, any team can beat any other team, but despite two former MLS players on their side, they never seemed to get their act together. No real pressure on the MLS at all, and by the end of the game, they just collapsed.
But the reason I'm posting this is that it comes a couple of days after a tight DC United-Chelsea match.
This is a good thing for US Soccer. Because I think the National team's experience is finally filtering down to MLS. That Columbus stadium was as packed as Anfield on Derby Day. But the US side, in both games, seem to play with a lot more confidence than in past years. The skill level is still pretty wide between a mid-table team like Fulham and most US sides.
I remember how the US team just collapsed in the 1998 World Cup, then came back and played harder than any American side had ever done internationally in 2002. They stunned Portugal and played the Germans hard.
What is clear from this match is two things: the US has a growing talent pool, both in league play and with the internationals. And there is an audience for soccer in the US.
It you've noticed, soccer's best teams are going to Asia and the US for their summer exhibitions. I saw Barca play Yokahama, Real Madrid play the Taiwanese national team, as well as the US matches. This is no accident. The exhibition matches get good attendence and good press. What is clear is that there is a growing audience for soccer in the US, because they understand the game. A mother who played soccer is far more likely to take her soccer playing children to these matches. The WNBA is far more family friendly than the NBA, with it's insane ticket prices and night games.
This reenforces soccer as a global sport. And appeals to many, many Americans as well. And the media is coming around as well. Soccer is no longer a footnore in SI, and Jim Rome's rantings are increasingly silly and irrelevant. The only single sport cable channel is Fox's Soccer Channel, which means there is an audience for the sport in the US.
After years of rank US soccer incompetence, it's nice to see the US building on their 2002 performance at the World Cup with solid players and a growing fan base.
SAIPAN, Northern Mariana Islands - By jogging at sunset on the white sands of a palm-fringed beach here, 17-year-old Audrey O. Bricia is doing more than toning up for her next try in this island's Miss Philippines contest. She is getting in shape for United States Army boot camp.
Audrey O. Bricia, 17, in the Northern Marianas, sees the Army as a way to nursing school .
To gain an edge on the competition for enlistment, she reserved a seat two days in advance to take Army's aptitude test on a recent Saturday morning here. Safely ensconced in her seat, she watched an Army recruiter turn away 10 latecomers, all new high school graduates.
"I am scared about Iraq, but I am going to have to give something in return for those benefits I want," said Ms. Bricia, a daughter of Filipino immigrants whose ambition is to attend nursing school in California.
From Pago Pago in American Samoa to Yap in Micronesia, 4,000 miles to the west, Army recruiters are scouring the Pacific, looking for high school graduates to enlist at a time when the Iraq war is turning off many candidates in the States.
The Army has found fertile ground in the poverty pockets of the Pacific. The per capita income is $8,000 in American Samoa, $12,500 in the Northern Marianas and $21,000 in Guam, all United States territories. In the Marshalls and Micronesia, former trust territories, per capita incomes are about $2,000.
The Army minimum signing bonus is $5,000. Starting pay for a private first class is $17,472. Education benefits can be as much as $70,000.
"You can't beat recruiting here in the Marianas, in Micronesia," said First Sgt. Olympio Magofna, who grew up on Saipan and oversees Pacific recruiting for the Army from his base in Guam. "In the states, they are really hurting," he said. "But over here, I can afford go play golf every other day."
Here, where "America starts its day," the Army recruiting station in Guam has 4 of the Army's top 12 "producers." While small in real terms, enlistments from Guam, Saipan, and American Samoa are the nation's highest per capita. Saipan, with a population of about 60,000 American citizens and green card holders, has 245 soldiers in Iraq.
[American Samoa, population of 67,000, has lost six soldiers in Iraq, most recently Staff Sgt. Frank F. Tiai of Pago Pago on July 17. Guam has lost three. Saipan has lost one.]
"I see yellow ribbons everywhere," Staff Sgt. Levi Suiaunoa said by telephone from the Army recruiting station in Pago Pago, capital of the territory. " 'Come home safely' signs almost litter the streets."
Despite the casualties, poverty and patriotism fuel enlistments.
"I buried at least one myself, but it hasn't stopped the number of recruits going in," said the Rev. J. Quinn Weitzel, bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Samoa-Pago Pago. "They still feel like they want to do something special for the United States."
In Guam and Saipan, the letters U.S.A. are emblazoned on license plates, as if to educate tourists that these territories are American.
FARMVILLE, Va. - Warren Brown was about to enter first grade in 1959 when officials chained up the public schools in Prince Edward County rather than allow black children to sit beside white children in a classroom.
Leola Bailey, Alda Boothe, Warren Brown, Rita Moseley and Barbara Springwere among those locked out of Virginia schools in the 1950's.
Without the resources to send him away, his mother kept him at home for four years, until she found a local church offering classes to black children.
Mr. Brown graduated from high school in 1972, winning basketball scholarships from three colleges, only to turn them down because he feared the academics would have been too challenging.
"I didn't get a proper foundation," he said. "If you're not prepared, what good is the school going to do for you?"
This fall, however, Mr. Brown, at the age of 51, plans to go to college to study criminal justice.
Five decades after Virginia ignored the actions of Prince Edward County and other locales that shut down their public schools in support of segregation, the state is making a rare effort to confront its racist past, in effect apologizing and offering reparations in the form of scholarships.
With a $1 million donation from the billionaire media investor John Kluge and a matching amount from the state, Virginia is providing up to $5,500 a year for any state resident, like Mr. Brown, who was denied a proper education when public schools shut down. So far, more than 80 people have been approved for the scholarships, and the number is expected to rise. Several thousand are potentially eligible, many of them now well into their 60's.
Rita Moseley, 58, was about to go into the sixth grade when the schools were closed. Her mother sent her more than 120 miles away to Blacksburg, Va., to live with an elderly woman and her daughter - "total strangers," she said - just to attend a public school willing to accept black children.
Currently a secretary in the high school she would have been barred from attending, she plans to use her scholarship to study business management.
"A lot of us still feel hurt, anger and bitterness," Ms. Moseley said. "I've talked with grown people, now 50, 60 years old. Some have been able to move on. Some haven't. Some are still trying to figure it all out."
And many, she said sadly, will never have the chance.
Most of the applicants who have come forward still live here in Prince Edward County, deep in the Bible belt of southern Virginia, where an important chapter of America's struggle with civil rights played out. A 1951 lawsuit challenging segregation was consolidated with four others to become the 1954 landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, which said separate but equal education for blacks and whites was unconstitutional.
Officials here largely ignored the decision, emboldened by state law passed in 1956 known as "massive resistance" that created a voucher program to allow white children to attend private schools. The Farmville Herald, the local newspaper, said in a March 20, 1959, editorial, describing efforts by outsiders to enforce Brown, "It is all part of the diabolical Communist plan to disrupt American life and reduce the white race to impotency."
In June 1959, the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors withdrew all financial support of public schools as a way to close them and skirt the order of the Brown decision. Intended for black children, it was a decision that affected white families as well. Even with the state vouchers, not all of them could afford tuition at the private schools, which makes whites eligible for the scholarships as well.
Enough to close the public schools rathet than have their kids educated with blacks
Posted Jul 28, 2005, 1:40 PM ET by Jason Calacanis
Jerry Michalski broke it down for me years ago. I was hosting a brunch for him at my loft in New York after he had moved out West. Over some H&H bagels we talked about happiness, something he always seemed to have in abundance. He told me that we humans were simple creatures at the end of the day: we just wanted to make a living doing something we loved.
Wow. That stuck with me.
WIN's outward facing business model?the one the public experiences-is as a long tail publisher. We've got a bunch blogs, a bunch of bloggers, and a bunch of advertisers. We surf Chris' long tail to profitability. Case closed, you can file us away in your dotcom history books as the latest evolution of the AOL Greenhouse, GeoCities, and About.com breed.
However, the truth is that what we are creating has nothing to do with publishing. What we're creating is a lifestyle for passionate people that *results* in our outward facing business model.
These days we don't spend time saying asking ourselves how can we make better blogs, we spend our time saying how can we support our bloggers better?
Our bloggers work for a couple of hours a day and magically a check arrives every month (100+ checks last month). Every couple of months the check gets a little bigger and the blogger's love and knowledge of their topic grows deeper. The blogging becomes easier and more rewarding the more bloggers blog. The community gets more involved and their jobs get even easier and more rewarding.
We give them raises when they don't expect it. We send them to trade shows they always wanted to attend, but never had a chance too. We have a total blast when we go to these trade shows-it's a party!
The dream is to have hundreds of people working for a couple of hours a day about a subject they love without having to answer to a boss. Without being filtered. If someone loses their passion for a subject they cn simple glide over to another subject in the network and become inspired all over again. If they have two or three passions in their life they blog about all of them as much-or as little-as they want.
No filters, no politics, no commute, and no office.
And when you go to college, it will be easy to get laid.
Let me tell you a story about the writer of this horseshit, Jason Calacanis.
First, so there is no misunderstanding, I have always thought he was full of shit. He's always had money to fuck around with. He had a magazine, tried to do some shit with VC's and is now trying to set up some kind of blog empire.
Ok, so Jen, the Netslaves guys and I are at a conference of online writers. With us is John Lee. John is an old school hacker and the smartest guy I know. He's also a big fucking guy. He really hates Calacanis because of some shit. So, on stage, John says he basically wants to smack the shit out of him. Calacanis blanched. Because John is old school Brooklyn as well, and he's not into idle threats.
No violence occured, but John just ripped into him.
It was fun to watch.
Now it's my turn.
In yesterday's Salon, there was a long article on snake oil salesman Kevin Trudeau. Calacanis is an online snakeoil salesman.
Everything he wrote is bullshit.
Easier? Maybe with his canned blogs, but in my world, this gets harder every day. Yesterday was libel law day. Like the SEALS say, the only easy day was yesterday
He thinks this is some kind of utopia? Bullshit. If his bloggers are working a few hours a day, their blogs aren't very good. He compares it to those lame ass projects like About.com when it isn't anything like that.
This guy has been on the make for years and this doesn't surprise me.
But his blogs are dull and uniform and the writing didn't stop me in my tracks.
But let me explain something: any asshole calling himself chief happiness officer is going to fuck someone over at some time. Writing is hard work. It isn't easy and it isn't always fun. He likes the hype of being a blog impresario but he isn't so worried about the quality of his content. That's the hard part.
It isn't all parties and fun, trust me on that, and spouting that shit, and how easy it all is, pissed me off, because it's a crock of shit.
He was a dotcom failure and with his pollyanna attitude, blog failure is next.
If you no longer marvel at the Internet's power to connect and transform the world, you need to hear the story of a woman known to many around the globe as, loosely translated, Dog Poop Girl.
Recently, the woman was on the subway in her native South Korea when her dog decided that this was a good place to do its business.The woman made no move to clean up the mess, and several fellow travelers got agitated. The woman allegedly grew belligerent in response.
What happened next was a remarkable show of Internet force, and a peek into an unsettling corner of the future.One of the train riders took pictures of the incident with a camera phone and posted them on a popular Web site. Net dwellers soon began to call her by the unflattering nickname, and issued a call to arms for more information about her.
According to one blog that has covered the story, "within days, her identity and her past were revealed. Requests for information about her parents and relatives started popping up and people started to recognize her by the dog and the bag she was carrying," because her face was partially obscured by her hair.
Online discussion groups crackled with chatter about every shred of the woman's life that could be found, and with debate over whether the Internet mob had gone too far. The incident became national news in South Korea and even was discussed in Sunday sermons in Korean churches in the Washington area.Humiliated in public and indelibly marked, the woman reportedly quit her university.
..................
It was the clarion call of one well-known blogger, for example, that led to answers about the dubious press credentials of Jeff Gannon, who attended White House news conferences and asked questions that favored President Bush and attacked Democrats.
But the mob went further, reporting and speculating on aspects of Gannon's private life.
The problem was that the whole thing exploded because she violated a social norm, which is cleanilness. Which was a major deal
So being a whore with online ads is now private life? I doubt that they can use that argument in Anacostia"It's none of your business who's dick I suck for money."They would laugh as they shoved her in the paddy wagon
What happened to this girl is excessive. There was no need to expose her parents. But Guckert is a horse of a different color.
On the Web you'll find the Infinite Cat Project but no Infinite Dog. My Cat Hates You is big on the Web, but there is no site named My Dog Hates You. (Dogs Hate Bush exists, but then so does Cats Hate Bush.) As any good Web hound can tell you, Rathergood.com is filled with crazy crooning cats. But where, oh where, are the singing dogs? (New Guinea singing dogs, a real breed, do not count.)
Cats are the Web's it-animals. They're everywhere. When you look up Devil Cats, you'll see comics about cat owners who love too much and the cats that cheat on them. Look up Devil Dogs, and you'll be offered apparel for the Marine Corps and information about Drake's cakes. Under the heading "Animal Antics," ifilm.com has four "Viral Videos" of cats, none of dogs. There are tons of badly drawn cats at www.tiddles.co.uk, but there's no such site for dogs.
Sure, there are dog sites aplenty, including fanciers' sites, funny sites and even an occasional hoax site, like thedogisland.com. But most don't have the buzz of Infinite Cat or Rathergood.
Why cats and not dogs?
Perhaps mycathatesyou.com will provide a clue. This site, founded in 2000, offers what it calls "the largest collection of sour-faced, indignant felines on the Internet." There you can see a squinty-eyed, snaggletoothed cat named Guapo, who appears ready to tear someone's head off. If you posted a picture of a dog as scary as that, no one would laugh. They would send for the dogcatcher.
Now take a look at Litterboxcam.com, where a live camera is trained on the litter boxes of two cats, Grey and Black. Every 60 seconds the image is refreshed. Counting down to zero and waiting for the cats to come into the frame is strangely and annoyingly suspenseful.
But if you Google poop and dog, you'll be led to a site called smellypoop.com/photogallery.html, which is more disgusting than funny. Or you may find the story of the "dog poop girl," also known as the "puppy poo girl," or in Korean "gae-ttong-nyue," which, believe it or not, is also not funny.
This is her story. Last month a woman let her dog relieve itself on the subway in Seoul. She was caught, by a cellphone camera, doing nothing about it. Within days, her picture, her identity, her family's identity and her past were revealed to the world on the Web. She quit her university in shame. The Washington Post and The Columbia Journalism Review weighed in. On Wikipedia there's already a "dog poop girl" entry logged, and a movement to delete it.
Because cats are inside animals and it's a lot easier to get a decent cat shot than a dog shot.
SAN FRANCISCO, July 29 - It was with great fanfare that Hewlett-Packard announced in January 2004 that it would begin selling Apple's digital music player, the iPod, in a deal that was cast as a major step forward for both companies.
Earlier this week, however, Hewlett-Packard quietly retreated from that deal when it informed Apple it would stop selling the iPod. A spokeswoman for Apple suggested that the move hardly mattered given how minor a role Hewlett has played in the spreading popularity of the iPod.
In the quarter that ended June 30, Apple sold 6.16 million iPods, said Katie Cotton, a spokeswoman for Apple. Hewlett sold fewer than 500,000 units during that three-month period, Ms. Cotton said, accounting for just under 8 percent of all iPods sold that quarter.
"H.-P.'s iPod sales have counted for on average for 5 percent of all iPods sold since the deal was originally struck," she said.
Ross Camp, a spokesman for Hewlett, did not dispute those numbers, but added that "in general our Apple iPod sales met and exceeded our expectations." Asked why the company had stopped selling the iPod, Mr. Camp said, "basically we determined that reselling the iPod did not fit within our current digital entertainment strategy, but we're not providing any other details on that decision right now."
The decision, four months into the tenure of Mark V. Hurd, the company's chief executive, represents the pulling of the plug on yet another program begun by Carleton S. Fiorina, the former chief executive who was fired by the board in February.
By LARRY ROHTER and JUAN FORERO Published: July 30, 2005
RIO DE JANEIRO, July 29 - As he campaigned for the presidency in 2002, Luiz In�cio Lula da Silva boldly pledged to clean up the sordid politics of Brazil. His, he vowed, would be an ethical, honest and moral government the likes of which Brazil had never seen.
President Luiz In�cio Lula da Silva of Brazil promised an honest government, but a party functionary was caught smuggling $100,000.
That pledge helped him win the votes of more than 50 million Brazilians and a sweeping mandate. But now, in a gloomy echo of what has happened time and again across Latin America, Mr. da Silva's government is mired in the biggest, most audacious corruption scandal in his country's history.
A congressional inquiry has heard testimony that the governing Workers' Party paid dozens of deputies from other parties a $12,500 monthly stipend for their support. This month, a party functionary was detained at an airport with $100,000 - stashed in his underwear - which he claimed to have earned selling vegetables.
Mr. da Silva's chief aide has been forced to resign, as have the president, secretary general and treasurer of the Workers' Party. While Mr. da Silva has not yet been accused in the scheme, speculation that he could face impeachment is widespread, and the first street demonstrations against him, small but indignant, started this week.
Brazil's scandal is just the latest reminder of the unremitting corruption that has marked Latin American politics since colonial times, when absolute rulers regarded newly conquered realms in the New World as their personal property. The important difference today is that popularly elected governments now hold sway, and corruption has emerged as one of the gravest threats to the hard-won democratic gains of the last 20 years.
Across the region, these second-generation democrats have proved a disappointment, and their ineffectiveness and low standing have allowed political instability and economic disparity to grow. Opinion polls routinely cite corruption as a top cause for a dangerous disillusionment sweeping the region. The disaffection has led to violent popular outbursts, including the lynching of public officials in Peru, and has helped force out eight heads of state in five years.
"This is the great problem, and there simply has not been a break from the past," said Edgar Villanueva, a congressman who is leading one of several investigations of the government of President Alejandro Toledo in Peru. "What has happened in Latin America is we have not been able to get good people into power. The person in power always maintains ties to his small power base, and they forget the people, they forget their promises."
Mr. Toledo, too, came to power with similar pledges to clean up past corruption, succeeding a government under Alberto K. Fujimori, whose byzantine networks of bribery and extortion seemed to set a new standard for the region.
Today more than a dozen of Mr. Toledo's relatives, including his wife and brothers, are accused of using their influence for personal gain. Opinion polls give him among the lowest ratings of any Latin American leader, and his government has been bled by nearly constant media sniping over the scandals. Similar accusations in Ecuador contributed to the fall of President Lucio Guti�rrez in April.
Farther north the story is nearly the same. In Mexico, President Vicente Fox came to power in 2000, sweeping out the notoriously corrupt and authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party that governed for more than seven decades. But he has failed on almost every front to reverse corruption's course, from police departments along the increasingly violent border with the United States to scandals in his own administration.
Not only have Mr. Fox's efforts to prosecute former government officials suspected of funneling state oil money into political campaigns come to naught, but it has come to light that his own campaign fund, Friends of Fox, took illegal contributions. His wife, Marta Sahag�n de Fox, is embroiled in a series of scandals over the use of millions of dollars flowing into her charity organization, and her sons have come under congressional scrutiny for contracts they won to build public housing.
Why do Mexicans move to the US, well, this is one reason.
Postage Stamp Honors B-24 Liberator Shot Down Just Short of WWII Victory
Sixty years after the Black Cat bomber was downed over Germany, the B-24 Liberator is commemorated on a postage stamp. Ten of the crew died in the crash just before the end of the war in Europe, including Howard Goodner, kneeling second from right; and pilot Richard Farrington, standing third from right
By Neely Tucker Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, July 30, 2005; Page C01
Howard Goodner plunged out of the Black Cat, the last American bomber shot down over Germany in World War II, early on the morning of April 21, 1945. The B-24 Liberator was hit at 22,000 feet and broke into pieces.
Goodner, just 21, had no parachute. He came down in a free fall alongside bombs and oxygen tanks, spinning toward the Bavarian village of Scharmassing.
He landed in a field outside town, his body striking the earth so hard that it left a crater nearly six inches deep.
Maria Wittig, then 19, saw him there. He was athletic looking, fair-skinned, handsome. Long fingers.
"I can see him before me," she told an interviewer, a half century later, so clear was her memory. Shown a picture of the entire crew, she picked out Goodner immediately. "That's him," she said, her voice breaking.
The story of Goodner, the Black Cat and Maria Wittig is 60 years old. Other wars have come and gone, but the story has never really died, living on in the small shadows of the greatest generation.
Yesterday at a ceremony in Vienna, the Black Cat was immortalized on a U.S. postage stamp, that diminutive marker of historical American moments large and small.
Part of a series of 10 commemorative aviation stamps, this one shows the Black Cat still intact, still in flight, over the pastoral fields where it would crash. Nothing on the stamp denotes the plane's tragic end.
............................
"The plane being shot down at the very end of the war -- it has haunted my family for so many years, and I finally went to Germany and found the crash site," says Thomas Childers, Goodner's nephew, whose 1995 book, "Wings of Morning," chronicled the story of the plane and its crew. "This farmer started scratching around in the dirt, and he pulled out a 50-caliber machine gun bullet. I was speechless. Every year when they plow, parts of the plane come to the surface."
"My family just never got over it," says Robert Layton in a telephone interview from Indianapolis yesterday. He is the cousin of the doomed plane's pilot, Richard "Dickie" Farrington.
"There's still a lot of resentment against the Axis side. I won't drive a German or Japanese car to this day. My aunt, Richard's mother, never could move out of her house until the day she died a few years ago.
"She wasn't mental, but she just couldn't get it out of her head that Dickie might have been in an institution all these years. She thought he'd come home and she would have moved. He'd never be able to find us."
By Robin Wright and Ann Scott Tyson Washington Post Staff Writers Saturday, July 30, 2005; Page A01
Uzbekistan formally evicted the United States yesterday from a military base that has served as a hub for combat and humanitarian missions to Afghanistan since shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Pentagon and State Department officials said yesterday.
In a highly unusual move, the notice of eviction from Karshi-Khanabad air base, known as K2, was delivered by a courier from the Uzbek Foreign Ministry to the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent, said a senior U.S. administration official involved in Central Asia policy. The message did not give a reason. Uzbekistan will give the United States 180 days to move aircraft, personnel and equipment, U.S. officials said.
If Uzbekistan follows through, as Washington expects, the United States will face several logistical problems for its operations in Afghanistan. Scores of flights have used K2 monthly. It has been a landing base to transfer humanitarian goods that then are taken by road into northern Afghanistan, particularly to Mazar-e Sharif -- with no alternative for a region difficult to reach in the winter. K2 is also a refueling base with a runway long enough for large military aircraft. The alternative is much costlier midair refueling.
Ooops. We should haven't said anything about the boiling
Cheese producers strive for perfection - but usually on dry land
Canadian salvage divers are searching for an unusual treasure - a vast hunk of sunken cheddar cheese.
Quebec cheese producer Luc Boivin threw 800kg (1,700lb) of cheese in the Baie des Ha! Ha! in north-east Canada, believing it would improve the taste.
But food hygiene inspectors say Mr Boivin can't sell his cheese without rigorous health testing.
But before cheese can be tested, it must be found, and divers have so far failed in the 40m (130ft) deep lake.
Mr Boivin's divers hope to satisfy the food standards authorities by finding the cheddar and taking samples from the cheese during its ageing process on the lake floor.
He suspects that the increased pressure and low temperatures at extreme depths accelerate the cheese ageing process and while keeping it perfectly cool.
McGruder, stop drawing those subversive cartoons and put your hands up before we come get your black ass.
Fat piece of shit Bernie Goldberg has the new enemies list. If I was on it, Bernie would be sued for defamation of character so quick his ass would spin before his head. Liberals take this shit way too fucking lightly. You want to say I'm ruining America, you better be prepared to do so before a jury.
Why? Because every time someone says this, it gives credence that the only loyal Americans worship dear leader and support conservatives, while we're all commies in waiting.
Win or lose, I don't play that shit. You want to defame my character, you better have some fucking proof or a good lawyer.
There's a new right-wing book out called 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America. Markos makes the list at #52, James Wolcott at #64, and Katha Politt at #74. Go bloggers, but I have to say I am disappointed I failed to make it (maybe someday). By the way, that makes Markos and Wolcott greater threats than David Duke according to the author. I have included the list in the extended entry.
Anyway, its counter-list time. List off as many names of people who you think are "screwing up" America. Remember--they don't just have to be political,a nd they don't have to just be Republicans.
My list: bitter ex-CBS employee, fat piece of shit Bernie Goldberg. Maybe he and Ed Klein should rent an office and think up of ways to attack more liberals. Maybe grab a drink with the whisky-sodden Chris "Kim Philby" Hitchens
Jim, I am not happy with this. I thought you had Frist by the balls.
Master is displeased.
Focus Action founder says Senate majority leader's position a "betrayal" of values voters
Colorado Springs, Colo. -- Focus on the Family Action founder and chairman Dr. James C. Dobson issued the following statement today after learning that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., had come out strongly in favor of increased federal funding for destructive embryonic stem-cell research:
?It is an understatement to say that the pro-life community is disappointed by Sen. Frist's decision to join efforts to void President Bush's policy limiting the funding of embryonic stem-cell research. Most distressing is that, in making his announcement, Sen. Frist calls himself a defender of the sanctity of human life -- even though the research he now advocates results, without exception, in the destruction of human life.
"Sen. Frist argues that under the Bush policy, there are insufficient stem-cell lines to maximize what he calls the 'promise' of embryonic stem-cell research. That statement continues the common misconception that embryonic stem cells hold the greatest potential for human healing and therapy. In reality, recently published studies demonstrate that some adult stem cells can form most, if not all, body tissues, just like embryonic cells may be able to do. Furthermore, there will never be a sufficient number of new stem-cell lines to satisfy the sometimes unquenchable thirst for federal money to fund pet projects of researchers. A morally sound line must be drawn at the beginning of this journey into stem-cell research: that no human life is sacrificed for possible or proven scientific gain ? period.
"The media have already begun speculating that Sen. Frist's announcement today is designed to improve his chances of winning the White House in 2008 should he choose to run. If that is the case, he has gravely miscalculated. To push for the expansion of this suspect and unethical science will be rightly seen by America's values voters as the worst kind of betrayal ? choosing politics over principle.
"We urge Sen. Frist to reconsider his position in light of the values he has espoused during his career in public service."
But the miracle metamorphosis didn't happen. Ayad thought he was going to get a new eye; instead he got a contact lens. And the laser surgery that was promised to erase his facial scars will only lighten them, unless he can receive follow-up treatment in the United States or another modern country, which is highly unlikely once he leaves behind the silky sheets and first-class hotels for his mud hut.
Just the sight of an Iraqi flag yesterday, at the Iraqi mission to the United Nations, jolted his father back to reality.
"Can't I stay here and work?" he asked Ambassador Samir Shakir M. Sumaida'ie, Iraq's permanent representative to the United Nations.
When the ambassador gently shook his head, Ayad's father covered his face and cried.
Ayad arrived in New York on July 13, and soon began skin laser treatment by Dr. Tina Alster, a dermatologist in Washington, who zapped 2,500 ugly blue freckles on his face. His most recent treatment was on Monday, which is why his face is now so sore.
Ayad also saw a number of eye doctors in Baltimore. But he was unable to get the cornea transplant that was needed to restore his full vision because the optic nerve in his right eye was destroyed. Instead, doctors gave him a specially made cosmetic contact lens that turns his milky blue eye back to brown. He quickly lost it, though his sponsors hope to send him a spare.
A tiny piece of shrapnel was found near the retina of his good eye, which at first was thought to require surgery. But a retina specialist determined that the shrapnel was not hurting Ayad's vision and that it would be too risky to remove it.
Then came the V.I.P. treatment. Ayad and his father met Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, who has worked to increase financing for civilian casualties.
Mr. Leahy told Ayad that he is blind in one eye, too.
"If I can be a senator with one eye, you can be prime minister," Mr. Leahy said. Ayad beamed.
They had lunch at the Pentagon with Robert Reilly, a Defense Department adviser who helped smooth the way for the visit. Ayad saluted a picture of the president, saying in English, "Bush, very, very good."
Meanwhile, his father was boiling inside. During an interview with an Arab television network, he went into a tirade about being promised money and gifts.
"I demand to face George W. Bush, and I have some things to say straight to him," he said.
On Wednesday afternoon, the two were more somber. They were scheduled to leave New York on an 11 p.m. flight for the Middle East and the sight of their suitcases stuffed with new clothes, cameras and Herbal Essence shampoo depressed them.
"I thought the Americans could do everything," Ayad's father said.
I can't decide how cruel this is, but God is it cruel.
The more I'm reading about Judy Miller and her actions leading up to and during the early days of the war, and then through the unfolding Plame-Rove-Libby-Gonzalez-Card scandal, the more I'm struck by the special access and relationships she enjoyed with many of the key players in the Iraq debacle (which, at the end of the day, is really what Plamegate is all about).
For starters, of course, we have her still unfolding involvement in the Plame leak. Earlier this month, Howard Kurtz reported that Miller and Libby spoke a few days before Novak outed Plame -- and I'm hearing that the Libby/Miller conversation occurred over breakfast in Washington. Did Valerie Plame come up -- and, if so, who brought her up' There is no question that Miller was angry at Joe Wilson' and continues to be. A social acquaintance of Miller told me that, once, when she spoke of Wilson, it was with 'a passionate and heated disgust that went beyond the political and included an irrelevant bit of deeply personal innuendo about him, her mouth twisting in hatred.'
Miller's special relationships go much further than Scooter Libby, Richard Perle and the rest of the neocon establishment. Take her involvement as an embedded reporter during the war with the Pentagon's Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha -- the unit charged with hunting down Saddam's WMD. As extensively reported by both Kurtz and New York Magazine's Franklin Foer, Miller's time with the unit was highly unusual.
First, there was the fact that she landed the plumb assignment in the first place. It would give her first dibs on the biggest story of the war' the hoped-for reveal of Saddam's much-touted WMD (with much of the touting done by Miller herself and her special sources). Was this the reward for her pro-administration prewar reporting'
Foer cites military and New York Times sources as saying that Miller's assignment was so sensitive that Don Rumsfeld himself signed off on it. Once embedded, Miller acted as much more than a reporter. Kurtz quotes one military officer as saying that the MET Alpha unit became a 'Judith Miller team.' Another officer said that Miller "came in with a plan. She was leading them" She ended up almost hijacking the mission.' A third officer, a senior staffer of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, of which MET Alpha was a part, put it this way: "It's impossible to exaggerate the impact she had on the mission of this unit, and not for the better."
What did Miller do to create such an impression' According to Kurtz, she wasn't afraid to throw her weight around, threatening to write critical stories and complain to her friends in very high places if things didn't go her way. 'Judith,' said an Army officer, 'was always issuing threats of either going to the New York Times or to the secretary of defense. There was nothing veiled about that threat.'
In one specific instance, she used her friendship with Major General David Petraeus to force a lower ranking officer to reverse an order she was unhappy about. (Can we stop for a moment and take the full measure of how unbelievable this whole thing is')
Miller also had a special, ten-year relationship with Ahmed Chalabi, which led to the MET Alpha unit, which had no special training in interrogation or intelligence, being given custody of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Sultan. Miller was even allowed to sit in on the initial questioning of Sultan -- a turn of events that didn't go down well with some Pentagon officials.
Miller apparently ended up developing an especially close relationship with Chief Warrant Officer Richard Gonzalez, the leader of the MET Alpha unit. Along with puffing him up in some of her dispatches -- once describing his 'meeting tonight with Mr. Chalabi to discuss nonproliferation issues' -- Miller took the unusual step of taking part in the ceremony where Gonzalez was promoted, actually pinning his new rank to his uniform (has the bizarreness of all this hit you yet').
Later, when Miller's reporting came under serious fire, Gonzalez was only too happy to return the favor, writing an impassioned response to the Times' Iraq reporting mea culpa. 'We have been deeply disturbed,' Gonzalez wrote in a letter to the Times that was co-signed by a pair of his colleagues, 'by the mischaracterizations of the operation and of [Miller's] reporting' We were particularly disturbed by the recent New York Times editor's note apologizing for having been 'taken in' by WMD 'misinformation' and citing one article she wrote while embedded with our unit' We strongly disagree with that assertion and remain firmly supportive of the accuracy of her accounts of the events she described, as well as other articles she wrote while embedded with our unit.' Wow. I'm kinda surprised he didn't sign it 'JM + MET Alpha, N.A.F (Now and Forever)'.
But Gonzalez and his pals seem to be the only ones standing behind the accuracy of Miller's reporting. Even the administration is no longer barking up that tree, with top weapons hunter Charles Duelfer closing his investigation this spring saying that the search for WMD 'has been exhausted' without finding any -- while at the same time dismissing the Miller-touted claim that WMD had been shipped to Syria just before the U.S. invaded.
So the WMD investigation has ended. But the investigation into Judy Miller's role -- both in the WMD fiasco and the Plame scandal -- is just beginning.
Oh, and in a promotion ceremony, usually the person pinning the new rank on you is VERY close to you, like a wife, parent, you get the hint, right.
Maybe that's one reason her husband is sunning himself in Spain while his wife dances with Negroes.
What prompted the committee's entry into the Schmidt-Hackett race was a comment made by Hackett in a USA Today article published Thursday. Hackett, talking about his service as a marine in Iraq, is quoted as saying, "I've said I don't like the son-of-a-b--- that lives in the White House. But I'd put my life on the line for him."
Because Hackett said that, Forti said, "we decided to bury him."
So remember, the GOP want to bury Hackett, something the Iraqis couldn't quite pull off. Because he spoke badly of dear leader.
Isn't it nice to have the GOP help spur fundraising? :)
Can we sue to get the Republicans to stop using us as their logo? We're not small minded and cruel, are we mom?
After reading Joe Braun's silly letter, I think I can conclude he's a stupid man.
I mean, why would you use the same e-mail for sex and politics? What? Was he too lazy to use another addess? And now to threaten a libel action because his own carelessness was exposed? Come on. Was he asleep in class when they explained the discovery process? Sue, and his entire sex life becomes fair game.
But that letter was sent to scare someone who didn't know better, kids.
We are not kids.
Most of us have had other careers and are adults. We aren't just out of college and we know a little about how the world works.
The image of bloggers is of young, bright guys. Well, there are those who fit that model, Matt Stoller, Big Media Matt, the Pandagon folks, but others of us are old and crusty and know how to gauge threats. And if someone wants to have me debate their sexlife in open court, fine. It's stupid beyond words, but if you want to examine the details, fine.
But it goes beyond silly letters from a troubled campaign.
A lot of Dem campaigns want online money, but they kiss our asses, not listen to us.
We are expert in what we do. We know how the medium works.
Let's be blunt, Paul Hackett would be limping along and his staff unable to do much without that $300K we collectively gave him. We, not his staff, turned the race from a forlorn hope to a winnable race. This isn't to say that I have a problem with them, I don't.I've sent them money and urge you to do the same But, as someone asked me, what are we getting for that money?
In this case, to demonstrate we can lead the way in races, and create buzz. The DCCC, the House funding arm, should take their lead from blogs in the sense that bloggers are betting their money and the money of their readers on these candidates. Not just shuffling other people's money around.
But it isn't an open spring. You just can't ask for money without a sound reason.
Campaign staffs have not really adjusted to the online world well, and Mr. Braun's idiotic letter demonstrates that he doesn't fully get that he's not dealing with A person, but a community. We stick up and help each other. In a few hours, his name, past writings and membership in the bar became known. Not from bloggers, but from readers. People in the street. We are not just a few people working alone. There are many unseen and unackowledge hands helping us.
And I think some Dems better realize that as well. If you burn one of us, a lot of us are going to stand up for that person. If you want our help, you have to realize we're not an open bank. There better be a good reason to give you money and support your candidacy.
We aren't just a spigot to pay your bills. Nor are we gullible kids.
I'm not talking about a movement or anything like that. Just the practical reality that the online world is a useful tool in politics, but to get the most out of it, you have to understand it is moved by ideas and consensus.
And we aren't your lackies. You don't order us around like the staff. We help because we choose to and we can choose to help other people and spend our time in different ways.
We are here to help, if we can. But not for any one and not at any price.
By JAMES W. CRAWLEY Media General News Service Tuesday, July 19, 2005
WASHINGTON - The Army National Guard has fallen 23 percent behind its recruiting goal so far this year and is unlikely to meet its annual quota - largely because of a dramatic drop in recruits from the South.
With tens of thousands of Guardsmen deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan during hurricane and wildfire seasons, some experts worry the Guard is being stretched thin while unable to fill the ranks.
The Pentagon announced last week that the Army National Guard has fallen about 10,500 enlistees behind its goal. So far, nearly 34,600 have enlisted. ?We?ve got a big hole,? said Lt. Col. Mike Jones, deputy recruiting director for the National Guard Bureau.
The largest shortfall this year in Guard enlistees has been in the South - historically the mother lode for recruiters.
So far this year, the National Guard is short 3,343 recruits from the South. Instead of meeting its goal of 17,514 recruits in the region, the Guard enlisted only 14,171, according to statistics reviewed by Media General News Service.
The Southern deficit is nearly a third of the Guard?s overall enlistment problem during the first nine months of the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. In contrast, Southern recruiters in 2003 signed up 105 percent of their quota.
This year, Virginia has signed only 66 percent of the 1,127 recruits the state needed. Alabama garnered 70 percent of its goal, Florida 79 percent and North Carolina 80 percent.
Four Southern states are surpassing goals: Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi and West Virginia. South Carolina enlisted 89 percent of its quota.
Louisiana and the District of Columbia have barely filled half their needs. Virginia recruiting official Lt. Col. Daryl Francis said, ?We?re not doing as well as we want to do.
Man, when Southerners won't join the Army.....A lot of that is driven by black opposition to the war. Even college bound kids often will join the Guard and Reserve because everyone else does. But this says a LOT of parents are saying be a student or Wal Mart employee of one. Be the best that you can be in college. But whatever you do,. don't join the Army.
What's also not being said is that a lot of potential enlistees are being warned off by those already in the service.
If you live in Philadelphia, and you're the kind of person who knows about blogs, you also probably know by now all about the search for 24-year-old LaToyia Figueroa of West Philadelphia, who went missing 10 days ago and was ignored for 9 of those days by the same national media that's obsessed with missing white women, preferably blonde.
Yesterday, largely because of a campaign led by Philly blogger "Richard Cranium" of the popular website allspinzone.com, that started to change. The story got picked up by the big 3 cable news networks, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, it is the lead story on local news radio and upfront in the papers, and a reward fund for LaToyia's whereabouts is growing rapidly.
But something else came out because of the blogospehre's campaign on LaToyia's behalf, and it wasn't pretty.
It was the truth.
MSNBC's bow-tied, right wing pundit, Tucker Carlson of the widely unwatched "The Situation," and local boy turned stock tipster Jim Cramer, managed to "cover" the plight of the missing woman in the most disgusting manner possible -- and without even lowering themselves to mentioning after a fleeting mention of the name of the non-white woman.
But at least they were brutally honest, about the contempt that much (but trust us, not all) of the mainstream media feels toward the idea of covering missing women, let alone crime, from areas outside of the mostly lilly-white suburbs.
But just read it for yourself. (The other talking head is Air America's Rachel Maddow. We think the quote from "CRAWFORD" is probably a typo for Cramer, but we can't be sure.)
CARLSON: People who don?t?people who don?t work in the press who look at this and immediately draw the conclusion that people who work in the press are racist ought to know there?s another dynamic involved here. And it is this. Things that are unusual or perceived to be unusual are the ones that are considered news.
It?s like planes that land safely aren?t news. When someone, not just a black person or a Hispanic person, but someone who lives in a tough neighborhood, is injured in a crime, the feeling, right or not?or wrong?and it?s probably wrong?is, this is a more common occurrence than if it were to happen in a suburban area.
MADDOW: But it?s the per?again, it?s the perception. We?ve got a woman who has been missing for nine days. She?s pregnant. She?s a young mother. It has all the components of the other stories that get covered. But because of the race, because she?s from West Philly, it?s not getting covered.
CARLSON: But...
MADDOW: So, people are trying to drive...
CARLSON: But...
MADDOW: ... the media...
(CROSSTALK)
CARLSON: But the truth is, we are covering it. It was on our air today. And it?s on our air...
MADDOW: Because of an enterprising blogger.
CARLSON: It?s...
CRAWFORD: Where would you rather vacation, Aruba or West Philly?
MADDOW: West Philly has...
(CROSSTALK)
CRAMER: Forty-second and Baltimore is nothing like Aruba.
(LAUGHTER)
Laughter.
A young, pregnant mother is missing, and MSNBC is laughing at the story.
So while you folks were questioning Paul Hackett's military service (publicly verifiable) , your campaign manager is looking for a Sub to pour wax on and look at her coochie with a speculum. What kind of values are those? Pulp Fiction values?
On Tuesday, voters in Ohio's 2nd Congressional District will go to the polls and vote in a special congressional election. One thing that seems very clear to everyone following the race is that Republican Jean Schmidt will do anything to win. Anything.
After Jean Schmidt was embroiled in an ethics scandal, she turned right around and gobbled up the maximum contribution from the poster boy for corruption, Tom DeLay.
Since then, her supporters have been Swift Boating her opponent, smearing his service to try to score cheap political points.
Schmidt has focused her campaign on family values, but now it looks like her Campaign Manager may have used the internet to satisfy his bizarre sexual fetishes. If this is true, it is the ultimate in hypocrisy.
Here's how this whole thing came about. People who emailed the Schmidt campaign had their email's bounce back. The details of the bounce back showed that the email joe@jeanschmidt.com actually went to deanofcorn@aol.com. This is important because it shows that Schmidt Campaign Manager Joe Braun was using his AOL account for campaign purposes.
People googled this AOL account and apparently found that the same email account being used for the Schmidt campaign was also being used for a profile on a BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadomasochism -- think of the pawn shop in Pulp Fiction) website used by freaks to meet other freaks.
The smoking gun appears to be the fact that this profile was removed within a couple of hours after it had been linked to Joe Braun on the blogs (screenshot here).
Jean Schmidt's family values campaign is nothing by crass hypocrisy if her Campaign Manager is a pervert.
But my guess is you'll hear little from Jean Schmidt on this. Because she's too busy smearing Hackett and doing whatever it
Now, I disagree with Bob, there is nothing perverted about BDSM. It's perfectly acceptable, as private behavior. It isn't my taste, but neither is yogurt.
What I agree with is this: Schmidt is running around, talking about the evil gays and family values, while her campaign manager is engaged in bashing people in alternative lifestyle. And no, that isn't just code for gay.
In the past, a lot of people would have been decrying this kind of thing as dirty politics.
My reply to that is: so fucking what? Max Clelland was lied about for political gain. The man lost three of his limbs as an Infantry officer in Vietnam, and he's soft on defense?
Gays are all thoughout the GOP, hidden in a closet.
They disrespect our patritoism, our service, our beliefs, and we're supposed to help them keep their secrets?
No fucking no. No more.
It's time to get scrunchy, get in the dirt and spread it around and play as dirty as they do. They can run on the issues if they choose. But if they don't, we don't have to either.
Update: Oh yeah, there's more to do
RNC Dumping Cash into Race - Considering that this race should be a cakewalk for Schmidt, that's a sign they are truly terrified. Not clear how much, but looks to be in the six figures. Trying to match our ActBlue scratch, no doubt.
NRCC Poll Shows Hackett Down Just FIVE? - This is according to Tim, and is truly stunning news. No Dem has received more than 30% of the vote in this district in the past two decades. If this poll story is true, that's amazing.
I have reviewed the materials posted on your blog site that make outrageous and libelous allegations about me. I emphatically deny these allegations are true and demand that you remove them immediately from your website now that I have placed you on notice of their false nature. As you are aware, I am not a public official and you do not enjoy any type of qualified privilege to place patently untrue and malicious statements about me on your blog. I am an attorney who regularly lectures on libel and slander at a local school and am very aware of the current state of both Ohio and federal law in this area. If you will not remove these outrageous statements and retract them as unfounded I will pursue all legal avenues available, including but not limited to, an injunction in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio seeking to have them removed and holding you libel for damages associated therewith.
Please be guided accordingly.
I would appreciate an immediate response.
Sincerely,
Joe Braun
OK, if that is the case, can he explain how his e-mail address was linked to the aformentioned to both the campaign and the above post, which was immediately removed. While Mr. Braun is free to deny this, it would hardly meet the standard of libel, unless the e-mail address and campaign address were fraudlently created to tarnish him.
How can an AOL screenshot be defamatory? My first question is if he denying being the owner of the AOL address under his name and linked to the campaign website. If this is in error, it will be corrected. And if it was not him, why was the site removed within hours, and who removed it.
Just because he denies it does not mean it is either defamatory or reckless disregard of the truth. If Mr. Braun would provide some evidence, like his AOL records, then there would be every reason to withdraw the above article.
Unfortunately, I think Mr. Braun is rather unfamiliar with libel law, despite his claims. He is the campaign manager of a candidate for federal office. Which means he is NOT a private figure if he has spoken for the campaign. Which he has, and this directly relates to his employment.
However, this poorly worded threat from a "lawyer", especially one "expert" in libel law, should have mentioned how the post defamed him and how it is untrue.
Also, as a lawyer, he should know the first act in any legal action would be discovery, of not only his AOL records, but his health records, his computer records and bank and credit card records to determine if, at ANY time, he has paid for anything related to BDSM activity, including travel records.
Then, he does realize that he would be deposed as would all of his friends, family and employers, as well as former partners and dates. Who would be asked detailed questions about his sex life. Because as a defense, one would have to prove he had engaged in ANY activity, from spanking to bondage, which could be construed as BDSM.
Because, he surely knows truth is an absolute defense for libel. And if he, even once, explored BDSM, any case would be rendered moot.
I think his embarassment is leading to his overreaction. Does he want to be the center of a national case which centers on his sex life? I seriously doubt it. But this is not anyone's fault but his own. As the campaign manager of a federal race, people are going to investigate his background. If both his personal e-mail address and campaign address are linked, and there are independent witnesses that there are, how can this be about anything but embarassment.
Mr. Braun is free to provide some factual evidence to back up his claims. At which time an apology and retraction will occur. Until then, his denials are just that, denials. There is every reason to believe that the statement is both true, factual and accurate.
ALBANY - Gov. Pataki and his inner circle might really believe he could be President one day. But observers outside of Pataki-land, on both the left and the right, aren't buying it.
Pataki faces a particularly tough sell with the red-meat conservatives of the national GOP, whose support will be crucial in the party primaries. The pro-choice, pro-gay rights and pro-gun control positions that made Pataki palatable to liberal New Yorkers won't go down so well in the heartland.
A typical reaction came from Richard Viguerie, the Virginia-based direct-mail guru who helped elect President Ronald Reagan in 1980. He says a Pataki candidacy "makes no sense."
"He's someone who's out of sync with the base of the Republican Party on every issue I can think of," Viguerie said. "It'd be like Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater running for President on the Democratic ticket. He's in the wrong party."
.....................
But Viguerie said it's too late for Pataki to win the hearts of the right wing.
"He has a record of running from the right and governing from the left, so why in the world would any conservative trust him?" he said.
And Pataki has another liability that could be even more significant than his centrist policies or his bland speaking style: Rudy Giuliani, another liberal Republican from New York who has been a GOP superstar since 9/11.
Pataki is "second in line from his own state, and second is the same thing as last in this equation," Wolfson said.
LOL. Pataki, a Republican president? Of what, the Yale Alumni Club?
CHICAGO ? The Cook County Republican Party is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to an indictment and conviction of Mayor Richard Daley, whose administration has been buffeted by scandal.
A: Just $10K? That's not even a good kickback
B: They ran Alan Keyes for Senate
C: Wasn't George Ryan a crook?
D: I think that's Patrick Fitzgerald's job
The Chicago Magazine piece (see below) refers to Fitzgerald as now Deputy AG James Comey's best friend and a colleague from their days in the NY US Attorney's office. See link to Ashcroft's recusal and Comey's appointment of Fitzgerald as Special Prosecutor.
It would also be interesting to get a copy of the speech Fitzgerald gave on 5/6/02 to the Seventh Circuit Bar Association (following John Paul Stevens on stage). The speech was titled "The Role of the Prosecutor in the 21st Century." and covered global terrorism, national security, urban violence, and the Internet (from the Chicago Magazine profile). Interesting, no?
"On Monday Mr Fitzgerald filed criminal complaints against two city officials in Chicago, alleging "pervasive fraud" at city hall and charging them with using political patronage to award jobs and faking tests for employees. The arrests marked the first time an 18-month corruption investigation had reached inside Mayor Richard Daley's office."
"People broke the law," (Fitzgerald) said. "It was not political reform, it was prosecuting a crime. If that leads to political reform, that's a great thing."
"If these 76 days set the pace, Patrick Fitzgerald's ruthless assault on public corruption stands to reshape politics and governance in Illinois. Day by day, often advancing cases initiated by his predecessors, he is building the environment in which gutty whistleblowers and victims of public scams can step forward. And yet Fitzgerald has only begun his work here. His crusade needs to go on and on and on.
For the lawbreakers who have owned too much of government in Illinois, these 76 days have been difficult. Long ago they mastered the art of politics and government in Illinois. What they've never wanted to admit was that many of their bold brush strokes are indictable crimes."
"Fitzgerald takes his job seriously enough that his best friend and former colleague, James Comey, now the U.S. attorney in New York City, suggests that thousands of people on the planet would like to put a bullet in Fitzy?s head. After all, Fitzgerald has prosecuted the most vengeful kinds of criminals: big-time mobsters and terrorists. With Comey, he put a couple of members of the notorious Gambino crime family behind bars. He was chasing associates of Osama bin Laden around the globe well before the Saudi terrorist mastermind became a household name in America. Within 48 hours of the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, Fitzgerald was in Nairobi personally taking the case?s key confession."
General info - Archive on Fitzgerald from ICPR, an IL reform outfit
By Caroline E. Mayer Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, July 28, 2005; A01
Embarrassing calls at work. Threats of jail and even violence. Improper withdrawals from bank accounts. An increasing number of consumers are complaining of abusive techniques from some companies that are part of a new breed of debt collectors.
They are debt buyers, outfits that acquire unpaid bills from credit card firms and other credit providers for pennies on the dollar and then try to collect. Some of these companies go after bills so old that consumers can no longer be sued for them in court or punished for them on their credit reports. ................................... Francis Buselli of Amherst, N.H., told the FTC that a debt collector called him repeatedly about a debt the company said his daughter owed -- even though she had moved out 15 years before. On Nov. 26, 2004, the company called about six times in 15 minutes. On the final call, the debt collector recited Buselli's Social Security number, mentioned his wife by name and threatened to send thugs to get him, according to Buselli's FTC complaint.
"They knew too much about me. That really scared me," he said in an interview.
.............................
Particularly troubling, Smith-Valentine said, are the growing number of cases in which collectors persuade a consumer to pay just a little -- and then use the bank information from that payment to improperly withdraw more funds from the consumer's account.
That was the experience of Sheilah R. Henderson of Lanham, as detailed in a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for Maryland. According to the suit, a collector threatened to sue her for a bill for a home-security system that had been incurred by Henderson's deceased mother. Although Henderson was not responsible for the debt, she agreed to have money automatically debited from her bank account on the 15th of every month. According to the complaint, the next thing she knew, the collector tried to withdraw money five times in three weeks, with Henderson incurring a returned check charge each time.
Henderson ordered a stop to the wire transfers, but then the collector started calling her at work, threatening to garnish her wages if she didn't pay. Henderson asked the collector to stop calling her at work, her right under federal law, but the collector told her he'd continue to call her there "until she lost her job," the lawsuit said. The lawsuit was settled under a confidentiality agreement
.........................
It's not illegal to try to collect this debt -- and collection industry officials say there are a lot of consumers who want to pay, even if they are no longer legally obligated to. However, federal rules make it illegal to sue or even threaten to sue to collect it.
That's one of the chief reasons the Federal Trade Commission sued CAMCO. In its court filing, the agency, which had received more than 2,000 consumer complaints about CAMCO, called the Rockford, Ill., firm "a debt collection company gone wild."
It alleged that CAMCO harassed thousands of consumers to pay old, unenforceable debts or even debts they didn't owe. CAMCO sometimes tried to find people with the same name in the same geographic area and tried to collect the debt from them, the agency alleged. Even if the consumer was not the actual debtor, CAMCO threatened jail, seizure of property or garnishment of wages unless they paid, the FTC said. CAMCO collected millions every year "and perhaps as much as 80 percent of the money" came from consumers who never owed the original debt, the agency said in its complaint.
CAMCO closed last December after the FTC filed suit. Its $1.75 billion portfolio of consumer receivables was auctioned off for $6.8 million -- to another debt buyer.
Does this stuff really work?
The best thing to do is to not engage them at all. Once you do, they have you.
Three years ago I met a wonderful man in his early 30s. I was always disappointed when dating men who kept little black books or lists of women they had slept with. This guy was different. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that he was relatively sexually inexperienced (e.g., he had trouble unhooking my bra). However, the longer we dated the more information I found out about his past. To make it short, my new guy was a date rapist for seven years before we met. His victims were mostly older, unattractive women whom he met in clubs and bars. They were weaker and liked the attention of a younger man. He would manipulate them by telling them lies and by staying sober while buying them drinks. He also had a one-year "relationship" with one woman who was six years older and going through a divorce. She was never interested in sex, but he would pressure her and cause her to feel guilty in order to get what he wanted. At times when he was not able to convince her, he would tell her that she could just lie still while he had his way. According to him, she had obvious mental problems.
He told me that the reason he appeared so sexually inexperienced is because he had never really had sex with anyone except me. He says that the reason he manipulated those women was not for sex, but for control, and he felt the highest level of control by being able to perform the most intimate acts. Physical pleasure was never a factor for him, and he was often confused as to why others would say that sex felt physically good. For him, the feeling of being in control was the best part.
When I put it all together from his stories he did not attempt to deny it. Since admitting to having been a rapist, he has been actively trying to change his attitude toward women and sex. He is a volunteer at a rape crisis center and he came clean about his past to the directors of the organization. They sent him to a psychiatrist to make sure he was fit to be a volunteer and now they support and encourage him. He says that the only reason he was capable of changing anything was because he fell in love with me.
My problem is me. I know that love can change people. I know that he is a different man now. I know that he would do anything to stay with me. I know that I'm not one of his victims. But I still can't seem to get over his terrible past. Sometimes I start asking him questions just to prove to myself how wrong and bad it was and how different it is now. Why am I trying to prove things that I already know when I'm thinking rationally? At other times I think that I should just look for someone else who does not have a criminal past. Wouldn't that make it easier for me?
I love him. I want to stay with him. How can I get over his past?
Cary's response is well, ok, in this case because you really can't scream at someone like this. They stop listening. But you can read it if you want.
Anyway, this guy is a predator.
He picks the weakest from the herd and strikes at them.
He would also manipulate other women into sex,despite their wishes.
He then admits he likes being in control.
Love does not change people. This man is a predator and will use his methods to get what he wants. Maybe it's me, but this guy seems really dangerous. I mean, a pattern of hunting down women and getting them drunk while remaining sober? That's scary to me.
By Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Scott Higham Washington Post Staff Writers Thursday, July 28, 2005; Page A01
Three years ago, Sunnye L. Sims lived in a two-bedroom apartment north of San Diego, paying $1,025 in monthly rent. Then she landed a dream job, with $5.4 million in pay for nine months of work.
Now she owns a $1.9 million stucco mansion with lofty ceilings on a hilltop, featuring sun-splashed palm trees and a circular driveway.
"She really went uphill," said Jerry Collins, a maintenance man at her former apartment complex who recalled Sims talking about her ambitions.
Sims is not a Hollywood starlet. She is a meeting-and-events planner who built her fortune on a U.S. government contract. In 2002, her tiny company secured a no-bid subcontract to manage logistics on an urgent federal project to protect the nation's airports in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Sims, now 42, recruited hundreds of people to help hire a government force of 60,000 airline passenger screeners on a tight deadline. With little experience, her tiny company was asked to help set up and run screener-assessment centers in a hurry at more than 150 hotels and other facilities. Her company eventually billed $24 million.
The company, Eclipse Events Inc., was among the most important of the 168 subcontractors hired by prime contractor NCS Pearson Inc. The cost of the overall contract rose in less than a year to $741 million from $104 million, and federal auditors concluded that $303 million of that spending was unsubstantiated.
Spurred by that audit, federal agents are examining the entire contract and focusing on Eclipse, according to government officials and Pearson. Investigators at the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General are trying to determine how and why Eclipse obtained the work and whether the company overcharged the government or submitted false claims.
The story of how Sims vaulted from relative obscurity into a key role overseeing tens of millions of dollars in government spending is still unfolding. A deeper examination of the Eclipse subcontract illustrates the chaos that accompanied homeland security initiatives after the terrorist attacks and shows how contractors were allowed to operate with little government oversight. ........................
In early 2002, Sims was contacted by Pearson, an educational-testing division of Pearson PLC, a media and publishing company based in England.
Pearson was in a jam. It had just received a contract to test, fingerprint and medically evaluate candidates for jobs as federal airport passenger screeners. Originally, Pearson had planned to use hundreds of its own testing facilities to screen the candidates. But within weeks, TSA officials decided to change the contract and told Pearson to create assessment centers from scratch at hotels and other facilities close to airports, according to Pearson company documents and federal auditors.
Pearson suddenly needed help to carry the huge logistical load.
If this person, had, instead, been a devout follower of Osama Bin Laden, US airports would have had AQ spies and acolytes in key positions across the country.
This kind of recklessness is at the heart of the GOP's national security program.
AC Milan's Clarence Seedorf (L) and Chelsea's Claude Makelele go head to head during a friendly match at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. Chelsea won 1-0(AFP/John Mottern)
The New Tower of London Chelsea Looks to Overtake Arsenal, Manchester United in English Soccer
By Steven Goff Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, July 28, 2005; Page E01
It wasn't enough to win the English Premier League championship, perhaps the most honorable prize in all of professional soccer. Chelsea, the suddenly stylish club from southwest London, had ended 50 years of general hopelessness in May by running away with the title under its young Russian billionaire owner, Roman Abramovich, and his quirky Portuguese coach, Jose Mourinho.
But just because the Blues had won one little ol' trophy and, in the process, smashed the Manchester United-Arsenal empire with a nearly perfect season, it certainly didn't signal the end to their mission.
After all, they didn't win the English FA Cup, the oldest competition in soccer, and were tripped up on their way to the European Champions Cup. Of long-term significance, the club came to the realization that, despite the sudden resurgence, its popularity in England and the rest of the world was dwarfed by that of the sport's eminent clubs.
So Chelsea went out this month and bought a prized young midfielder, English speedster Shaun Wright-Phillips, and began vigorously pursuing one of the best players from Africa, Ghana's Michael Essien.
What's another $76 million when you've already spent a half-billion on player acquisitions the last few years?
"We're a little bit behind in world appeal and we're playing catch-up," said Bruce Buck, Chelsea's New Jersey-born chairman. "Even at the top of English football, we're the new blood on the block. Now we're there and we're upsetting the apple cart, which I think is good for football generally, but of course it doesn't make Manchester United and Arsenal particularly happy.
"From a marketing perspective, we have a way to go. From a footballing perspective, I think we're there and we intend to continue to win trophies year after year after year."
The way to win trophies is by assembling a roster that strikes fear into Real Madrid, Barcelona and AC Milan -- not to mention the English soccer aristocracy. But while on-field success will inevitably attract new fans, Chelsea has also upgraded its marketing campaign the last two years in an attempt to join its European rivals in global appeal.
Buck said the club has targeted four regions where it would like to improve its profile: London, where Chelsea has traditionally been overshadowed by Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur; China, which has rapidly embraced European and South American soccer; Russia, where Abramovich is a well-known figure; and the United States, with its passionate and lucrative sports market.
For the second straight preseason, Chelsea has come to America. Last year it played exhibitions against European teams in Seattle, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and this summer it returned for friendlies against AC Milan in the Boston and New York areas as well as tonight's meeting with defending MLS champion D.C. United at FedEx Field in Landover.
I would argue that Liverpool had the best season in the Premiership, even with Chelsea winning the Premiership.
Why?
Because their win against AC Milan wasn't just spectacular, but has all the potential to turn the franchise's fortunes around. I think Liverpool has the most fanatic and loyal fan base of any Premiership team.
Chelsea bought a championship, but their legacy is a real issue. Legacy as in being the home for yobbos and skinheads. It wasn't Millwall, but it isn't anything to write home about, compared to the Spurs Jewish roots and Man U's Labour allegiances.
The new Chelsea, however, needs great players as well. Shaun Wright-Phillips is a start, but they need more stars. Man U and Arsenal have great players, not just good ones. For Chelsea to compete, they will need more than a great coach, but great players as well. And more importantly, they need to play as a team after those players arrive.
Or you get Real Madrid's galacticos not playing together as a team.
Which is also a possibility. The skill of Arsene Wenger and Alex Ferguson is not just in running the team on the field, but managing egos. Maurihno seems to have his own ego problems and overshadowed his team on the pitch, this year. That will not continue. Only Sven-Goren Erikson can overshadow his team with his antics and only for so long.
Ok, when I read the paper today, I saw an article on The Aristocrats, a movie about a joke. An old joke, and a very dirty one. But the thing is that there is no one standard version of the joke. There are hundreds, with the same setup and punchline.
Which I find incredible. Comics love this joke for some reason.
On the site where I found this, there are many variations of the same joke.
But be warned, it is VERY DIRTY and not work safe. But I figure since the ads have all over the net and TV, you might want to know what the joke is, and why AMC Theaters won't show the film.
Christie Corpus's "The College Try" Aristocrats Joke
A family walks into a talent agency. It's a father, mother, son, daughter and dog. The father says to the talent agent, "We have a really amazing act. You should represent us."
The agent says, "Sorry, I don't represent family acts. They're a little too cute."
The mother says, "Sir, if you just see our act, we know you would want to represent us."
The agent says, "OK. OK. I'll take a look."
So,the dad opens up a large briefcase and takes out an ancient and dusty Emerson record player and an equally dusty album. He cranks up the record player, sets the album on the turntable and drops the needle. The crackling sound of the Notre Dame Victory March fills the room. "Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame!" sings the chorus of collegians.
"Notre Dame is French for Our Mother," says the father into a megaphone. He then takes a shovel out of his briefcase, and smashes it over his wife?s head. Her unconscious body drops to the floor.
"Son, you may begin," the dad says.
The son drops his pants to reveal a massive, throbbing hard on. With glee, he falls to the floor, removes his mother?s pants from her lifeless, unconscious body, and starts fucking her in the ass.
?Wake up the echoes cheering her name!? sings the Notre Dame Men?s Choir from the old victrola.
?Missy, hit it!? says the dad.
?Yes, sir,? says Missy, the buxom, fifteen year old daughter. And with that, she disrobes, drops to the floor, and starts eating her brother?s ass.
?Fido, eat, boy!? the dad shouts. The family dog obediently sits behind the daughter and starts licking her young pussy like a peanut butter sandwich.
As the sounds of the Notre Dame philharmonic begin to reach a crescendo, the dad steps into the action, letting his son suck his cock until he spews all over the young boy?s face, climaxing with such force that he shits all over his knocked out wife?s head. The dog stops licking the daughter?s pussy and runs to the front to eat the dad?s shit off the mom?s head. Seeing an opening, the dad runs to the back, and begins fisting his daughter like he was fixing a clogged drain.
Just then, the son pulls out of his mom?s ass and blows his load all over his dad?s shit on his mom?s head. The dog keeps chomping away on the steaming pile. The dad then stops fisting his daughter and runs to the front join the dog in eating the pile of shit and cum while he jerks off. Beaming with joy, the daughter runs to the front and starts sucking the dog?s dick, while the son runs to the suitcase and grabs a piece of fabric. He then jumps on a chair, and starts pissing all over the rest of the family.
The warm joly of the son?s piss causes the mom to recover from her concussion. Just as the dad blows his load on her face, the dog cums in the daughter?s mouth, and the Notre Dame Men?s Choir sings, ?Onward to Victory!? Finally, the son wipes his dad's cum from his face and unfurls a banner that says 'Notre Dame', and vomits on his mom?s head.
The mom looks up, covered in shit, piss, cum and vomit and smiles at the talent agent, and the whole family says in unison with a smile, ?Our Mother!?
For the longest time, the agent just sits in silence. Finally, he manages, "That's a hell of an act. What do you call it?"
Well, since their other arguments were pretty weak, now we have the Murdoch media empire calling on its stormtroopers to turn the story away from treason and instead play the partisanship card. Courtesy of the foul Deborah Orin and inserted into the bloodstream of spin by Fox "News" comes this:
WASHINGTON ? Outed CIA spy Valerie Plame last fall gave a campaign contribution to go toward an anti-Bush fund-raising concert starring Bruce Springsteen, it was revealed Tuesday night.
It?s the first revelation that Plame participated in anti-Bush political activity while working for the CIA.
The $372 donation to the anti-Bush group America Coming Together, first reported by Time magazine?s Web site, was made in Plame?s married name of Valerie E. Wilson and covered two tickets.
OK, so because Valerie Plame wanted to see Bruce Springsteen in concert she deserves to be outed? Again, the issue is TREASON and REVEALING THE IDENTITY OF AN COVERT OPERATIVE. Like Ulysses, you must lash yourself to the mast and stuff your ears against the sirens? song. But of course, no conspiracy is complete without the presence of a rich, evil Jew:
America Coming Together is one of the anti-Bush activist groups bankrolled by Bush-opposing billionaire George Soros. He gave the group around $10 million.
Yes, this is a major news story. A 40 year old woman goes to see Springsteen with her husband. Wow. Would it have been OK if she had seen Toby Keith instead? Yeehah. Fuck them Dixie Chicks.
Oh yeah, how come other parts of the Fox Empire are suggesting Iraq is all fucked up? Over There is no recruiting tool. Not after the guy's leg blew off. Next week, we visit a military hospital and hijinks do not ensue.
Not everyone in the Times building is on the same page when it comes to Judy Miller. The official story the paper is sticking to is that Miller is a heroic martyr, sacrificing her freedom in the name of journalistic integrity.
But a very different scenario is being floated in the halls. Here it is: It's July 6, 2003, and Joe Wilson's now famous op-ed piece appears in the Times, raising the idea that the Bush administration has "manipulate[d]" and "twisted" intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Miller, who has been pushing this manipulated, twisted, and exaggerated intel in the Times for months, goes ballistic. . . So she calls her friends in the intelligence community and asks, Who is this guy? She finds out he's married to a CIA agent. She then passes on the info about Mrs. Wilson to Scooter Libby (Newsday has identified a meeting Miller had on July 8 in Washington with an "unnamed government official"). Maybe Miller tells Rove too -- or Libby does. The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and Cooper. The story gets out.
This is why Miller doesn't want to reveal her "source" at the White House -- because she was the source. . . [I]n this scenario, Miller certainly wasn't an innocent writer caught up in the whirl of history. She had a starring role in it. This also explains why Miller never wrote a story about Plame, because her goal wasn't to write a story, but to get out the story that cast doubts on Wilson's motives. Which Novak did.
Famed editor Jason Epstein, husband of jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller, has lately been making himself scarce at the federal facility in Virginia where his wife has been incarcerated for the past three weeks.
Miller has been married to Epstein - who was the longtime editorial director at Random House and a founder of the New York Review of Books - since 1993. She chose contempt of court and imprisonment over revealing her sources to the independent counsel in the CIA-Karl Rove-Robert Novak leak brouhaha.
And Epstein's choice?
In a frothy social column yesterday about a celeb-glutted Mediterranean cruise, featuring everyone from Isabella Rossellini to J.K. Rowling aboard the ocean liner Silver Shadow, the New York Sun's A.L. Gordon revealed:
"One passenger with his mind soberly on home is the literary icon Jason Epstein. ... Ms. Miller would have been on the cruise had she not gone to jail."
His wife's in the slammer and he cruises the Med?
"We all serve our time in our own way," quipped Miller's attorney Robert Bennett.
My pal Christopher Buckley, comic novelist and editor of Forbes FYI, imagined what Epstein might have said to Miller prior to his departure.
"Darling, I'm sure it's not going to be a very nice cruise. I hear they don't even have beluga caviar, just a slightly inferior grade of osetra, and I'm sure the Champagne will be, well, not too warm exactly, but probably not as chilled as I normally like it. And I'm sure people will get seasick and there won't be anyone interesting to talk to, nor any beautiful unattached women.
"Darling, I wouldn't be able to enjoy myself even if it were a nice cruise. While I'm dining on foie gras, I will be thinking only of you, sitting behind bars in 110-degree heat, eating baloney and being brutalized by prison matrons."
Epstein, said to be somewhere in Spain, couldn't be reached yesterday.
But for the record, Bennett told me that Epstein "was very reluctant to go, but Judy wanted him to go very much. She insisted he go, because there was nothing he could do for her during that period of time."
I always though Chris Buckley was funny. Well, he is. Despite the mistress, trick baby and angry wife.
Your wife is in jail, with negroes no less, and you go to Spain. True love.
By AYMAR JEAN The Washington Post ....................
A Tysons Corner, Va., dog spa, Happy Tails, is reaching out to officers such as Damko and the war's often overlooked dogs. The spa has been collecting donations for war dogs and their handlers, sending more than 300 pounds of donated items and planning to send about 400 more. They have sent such supplies as dog biscuits and bones, lip balm for handlers and dogs, and magazines for handlers to camps in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Last weekend, it held its first charity dog wash to raise money for more sophisticated war dog equipment, mainly cooling devices and dog goggles--called ``doggles''--for Iraq's sandstorms.
``These dogs love their jobs, but they didn't have a lot of choice in the matter,'' said Amy Nichols, chief executive of Happy to be Here Inc., the Happy Tails franchise company.
Doggles cost about $15 a pair, Nichols said, while cooling vests for dogs cost upwards of $50.
Joanne Tew, Foxwoods brand marketing manager, along with Army National Guard Staff Sgt. David J. Walsh, organized an ongoing donation drive for American soldiers stationed in Iraq.
Background:Tew, an Uncasville resident, has worked at Foxwoods 12 years, 11 of them in the brand marketing department. Tew is responsible for outside promotions of the casino, such as setting up displays at outside venues. Tew said she has always been a volunteer in activities in her community and workplace. Tew has two sons: Richard Weissgarber, 38, who retired from the Air Force two weeks ago; and Michael Weissgarber, 37, who is in the Connecticut National Guard in Hartford.
The drive: Tew rallied some Foxwoods employees for donations and sent school supplies to Iraq after Walsh, 42, a Shelton resident stationed in Iraq with the Army National Guard, e-mailed the casino requesting supplies earlier this year. Tew and Walsh started a collection for books, deodorant, toothpaste and phone cards for soldiers. More than 100 Foxwoods employees have contributed to the ongoing donation drive.
In April 2004, Lt. Col.. Andy Barclay, an Acton resident, e-mailed his wife from his base in Iraq to ask her to send things such as teabags, nuts, red licorice and other candy. Barclay's wife shared the e-mail with friends, one of whom showed the request to Petr.
Petr, who through years of involvement in school issues and local politics has developed an e-mail list of more than 800 people, thought the larger community of Acton and Boxborough might be willing to help out with Barclay's request.
"I talked to his wife, and I said, 'hey, I'd be happy to coordinate this if you thought it would be helpful,'" Petr recalled. Before she knew it, the operation was in gear. People on Petr's e-mail list were dropping supplies on her doorstep and at St. Elizabeth's church. A CCD class of seventh-grade boys that Petr was teaching also got involved in assembling boxes to be shipped to Iraq for the soldiers.
Not long afterward, the project began to take on more and more dimensions.
"As the summer started to wind down and it came to be back-to-school time," I suggested to Andy Barclay that we could also send school supplies over for Iraqi children," Petr said. "He said that it was a great idea, but that it would really only work if we could send over supplies in sufficient quantity, like a couple hundred bags of supplies or so. I said I thought we could do that."
Petr's faith was not unfounded. To date, Acton and Boxborough residents have donated 1,018 bags of school supplies to Iraqi children. Responding to Barclay's assessment that the supplies would be most useful if they came with school bags in which to keep them, Petr solicited donations of new and used tote-bags and backpacks, and stuffed each with pencils, markers, notebooks, rulers, blunt scissors and other useful school materials. She shipped the boxes to Barclay at his military address, and he, along with his unit and his translator, made sure the supplies found their way to the soldiers and village children who needed them.
At present count, Petr said, Acton and Boxborough residents have sent 406 boxes to Iraq, most of them weighing around 30 pounds. The project has spent more than $8,000, 90 percent of which has gone to postage.
In extreme circumstances, often it is the little things that make a difference.
"Socks will make a soldier's day like finding a $20 bill in the Kmart parking lot," said Staff Sgt. Albert Stenzel, a Pennsylvania National Guardsman based in Canonsburg.
About 75 members of Stenzel's unit, Company C, 1st Battalion, 110th Infantry Division, Mechanized, have been sent to the Middle East as part of the state's largest National Guard callup in more than 50 years.
More than 2,000 Pennsylvania National Guardsmen recently arrived in Kuwait as part of a national deployment in support of the war in neighboring Iraq. They soon will be moving north into Iraq itself.
Local soldiers are part of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, which also includes Company B, 876th Engineer Battalion, 28th Infrantry Division, Mechanized, and the brigade's Headquarters and Headquarters Company, both based in Washington. Company C is based in Waynesburg but also keeps an armory in Canonsburg.
It was to the Canonsburg armory that the auxiliary of American Legion Post 793 in Cecil recently donated 13 large boxes of supplies for soldiers serving overseas. The group raised more than $1,300 in donations to buy items ranging from toothpaste
MIDDLEBURY - Through song and dance, amidst an expanse of red, white and blue, second grade students from Long Meadow Elementary School honored U.S. veterans with a patriotic performance to benefit the Wounded Warrior Project.
The WWP was founded to help thousands of wounded soldiers returning home from current conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world.
According to the WWP, the majority of their efforts are concentrated on the wounded who return to Walter Reed Medical Center and other medical facilities.
When our wounded soldiers are sent to hospitals in the United States, the government does not provide them with basic personal supplies.
Through donations, the WWP is able to provide a backpack filled with much needed comfort items such as a military brown t-shirt, sweatpants, socks, an AT&T calling card, C.D. player, deodorant, shave gel, shampoo and other essential toiletries.
Kathryn Kinne and fellow nurses at Harris Methodist H-E-B Hospital gathered supplies such as sun block, toothpaste and deodorant to send to soldiers. Some of these supplies people take for granted, but they are precious to their co-worker Major Deb Stewart, who is on her second tour in Iraq.
An item as simple as a Ziploc bags becomes a treasure of protection for items because of the sand and wind in Iraq.
Stewart is an operating room nurse in a field hospital near Mosul and her friends call her a great person.
It was Stewart's e-mails, from the front lines, that spurred Kinne and others to take action.
"Just got four traumas from an explosion...we do 12 hour shifts, six days a week," wrote Stewart.
Stewart also wrote how shipments of essentials such as powdered milk were sometimes delayed for weeks because of ambushed trucks
Ooops.
So Jen's coworker was seeking attention huh? I guess it must be a new snydrome, Beg for toothpaste by proxy syndrome. It's spreading across the country and is the new fad in the military. Even Majors are in on it. Score as much tolietries as you can, sell it on the black market and win. Even the wounded are in on it.
Here's the deal: if someone in Iraq asks for a tube of toothpaste, they fucking need a tube of toothpaste. If they could get it in Iraq, they would. I know I'd like to wait weeks for toothpaste from my relatives, especially when they have to beg their coworkers for help.
I understand the cynicism, but come on. This is Bush's war. They can't get armor, you expect them to get toothpaste?
There are rumors floating around the internet that you are Karl Rove's concubine. Is it true? I sure hope so.
There's nothing wrong with serving as his concubine. It's a position steeped in ancient biblical tradition. Mr. Rove, the deliverer of elections and master of the Christian base, deserves a stable of mistresses just as David, the slayer of Goliath and king of God's chosen people, had his own harem of concubines.
More importantly, it would put an end to all the talk about Mr. Rove and that harlot, Jeff Gannon. Every time I think about it, I get this mental picture of Mr. Rove on all fours like Ned Beatty in Deliverance, his flabby flesh rippling and his belly and man-breasts bouncing in a rhythm dictated by Gannon's furious pounding and punctuated by Karl's calf-like bellows. I'd rather not have to picture that anymore.
Eric Minameyer, an advisor to Jean Schmidt, was just the beginning of the "swift boating" of Paul Hackett in what appears to be a coordinated effort by her campaign. Upon arriving at Hackett HQ this morning to take some photos and videos, I was shocked to hear that the deplorable tactics have been taken to a new level in the past 24 hours.
1.) A local conservaitve radio host started by questioning Paul Hackett's service to country. Scott Sloan of WLW 700 AM in Cincinnati went off on some insane rant about the real level Paul's patriotism regarding the war in Iraq and claimed Hackett was using his service for "political purposes."
Over the past two days, Republicans have been calling into talk radio across the district saying things like, "Paul wasn't really a Marine Corps Major in Iraq." It's a coordinated effort, as I am hearing from people that similar lines are being repeated and repeated by radio callers in and out of the district.
2.) The "swift boating" is picking up steam, and we have to fight back. I sat no less than five feet away from a reporter from a cable news outlet that asked, "Some say that this was all a plan on your part. To go to Iraq and come back with this great story while running for congress."
Less than 30 minutes ago, a reporter from CBS asked about Eric Minameyer's question, and yes, questioned Paul's service to his country.
3.) A few days ago, an Amry Private First Class was burried in Fairfield, Ohio. Within 24 hours, a number of flags were burned and tossed into a pile infront of his mother and father-in law's home. As you can imagine, this incident has led to a lot of press and sadness for the family.
The same host above, Scott Sloan, attempted to tie Paul Hackett to the flag burning incident. He said that it was people like Paul Hackett that allow things like this to happen.
3.) Last night, a number of people in the district began receiving robo-calls talking shit (for lack of a better word) about Paul Hackett. Of course, they hit on the standard themes, choice, equal rights, and yes, Iraq.
4.) Earlier today, the police had to be called at campaign HQ as a strange individual pulled up to the office, kept the car in park, and started plugging away at a lap-top. When people walked out of HQ to investigate, the car pulled off quickly. The police have been notified.
One local said, "this really reminds me of what was happening last October. It got real ugly down here before the election.
55KRC - Cincy Morning Show with Jerry Thomas and Craig Kopp 5am-9am 513 749 5800
700 AM (We need these flooded Now till Election Day--All Hackett, all the time)
(513)749-7000
Jim Scott - Weekdays, 5 - 9AM Mike Mconnell - Weekdays, 9AM - Noon Bill Cunningham - Weekdays 12:20 - 3PM Gary Burbank - Weekdays 3:00 - 6PM Scott Sloan - Weeknights 9PM-Midnight Talking Points:
1.) How dare Jean Schmidt's campaign and her surrogates question Paul Hackett's service to this country.
2.) Jean Schmidt is using deplorable tactics to change the subject from her close association with Gov. Bob Taft's "culture of corruption." She is, after all, the subject of an ethics investigation for accepting unreported gifts by a pharmaceutical lobbyist. Gifts she failed to report.
3.) As you all know, this area has been deeply affected by the war in Iraq, how can Jean Schmidt and her friends claim to support the troops while attacking them at the same time?
I don't have any polling numbers, but I gotta imagine they do and the race is a lot closer than they had hoped over at Schmidt HQ. Last night at the debate, it was "terrorism, terrorism, terrorism, gay marriage, gay marriage, pro-life, pro-life, pro-life," which I now regard as, "The Alamo," or last line of defense for faltering Republicans.
Let's cut this shit out now. Give to Hackett to make a point. This bullshit has to be punished at some point and now is as good a time as any.
Wednesday July 27, 2005 11:31 AM By KRISTEN GELINEAU
Associated Press Writer
BOWLING GREEN, Va. (AP) - As thousands of Boy Scouts gathered in the woods of northern Virginia on the opening day of their national Jamboree, a group of Scouts from Alaska watched in horror as tragedy struck their campsite.
Four adult Scout leaders who were pitching a huge dining tent were killed Monday when the tent's towering pole hit live power lines, sending electricity coursing through the metal.
Karl Holfeld said his 15-year-old son Taylor witnessed the accident and was on his cell phone to his mother back home in Alaska when the electrocutions occurred.
The boys ``all started screaming,'' Holfeld told the Anchorage Daily News. ``He said, 'Oh my God, oh my God, the tent is on fire, they're being burned!'''
The news spread quickly at the Jamboree, casting a pall over the event which draws more than 40,000 Scouting enthusiasts from around the world. But organizers said the 10-day Jamboree would try to return to normal Wednesday after a memorial service for the four men and an evening speech by President Bush.
But when over 1700 soldiers die on his orders,he can't make time for their funerals. Maybe they should have been scouts. Just another way to appeal to his base, with the conservative leadership of Scouting and their Mormon/Catholic base.
Hi! All, Today I come to you with a heavy heart to tell you that my nephew, Major Peter S. - US Army, is in Iraq and has been there for over two months. I promised to send to him and his buddies the following items that they need and cannot afford to purchase in Iraq.
Anything that you can give to help my nephew and his fellow soldiers will be greatly appreciated. I have a box in front of my cubicle, Location: xxxxx where you can put in any of the above items. Thank you for your support and please keep my nephew Peter and all are armed service men and women in your prayers. Best Regards,
Jen
Now, I interact with this woman a lot, and my first question was why does he not get any of these things either for free or subsidized at the comissary? Her answer shocked me:
"He's apparently in a private unit near someone high-up, and they are near a huge contractor area. The contractors get paid so much money that the local stores have jacked up the prices on everyday items to insane levels. He can't afford stuff that he could get in the dollar store back home--mouthwash, tissue packs, razors, you name it--it's all a fortune now for him."
Remember, during the Gold Rush, fresh eggs sold for a dollar apiece ($23 in 2003).
Letting our military get gouged is just disgraceful. Letting others profiteer off of them WHILE THEY ARE THERE is even more disgusting. The fact that they suffer like this guarding contractors who make ten times what they do is just the fecal icing on the shit cake. He can't get a fucking TOOTHBRUSH? That's insane.
This is a major in the US Army. Who cannot afford soap.
What are his men doing for stuff
At least it's not chickenplate armor and radios. Both of which have been the subject of fuindraising drives.
Next year's recruits may also not be as qualified as this year's, because the Army will be looking for enlistees it can quickly ship to basic training. That means recruits whose options are limited, "are not in school and not in a job," said Cheney, chief operating officer of Business Executives for National Security in Washington, D.C
The Army is offering unprecedented enticements - including enlistment bonuses as high as $20,000 and service stints as short as 15 months - but so far has been unable to persuade enough young men and women to join.
Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey recently proposed increasing the top enlistment bonus to $40,000 and is about to add 800 additional recruiters to the force. Even the new recruiters and higher bonuses "may not be enough for everyone," Rochelle said.
None of the recruiting trends bode well for the Army, said Loren Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.
"If you think of the Army as a watershed, their reservoir is about to run dry," Thompson said. "They have nothing left in reserve."
Yet, the DLC wants to promote national service.
There's something about being killed in Iraq which just isn't appealing. Which is why they're taking bums. No school, no job, probably no diploma either.
The anti-war movement isn't in flashy marches, but in parents refusing the entreaties of recruiters. Even poor parents would rather have their kids work shit jobs than get killed in Iraq. Middle class parents don't want the recruiters near their kids.
Maybe it's also the shitty way soldiers get treated , by having to buy their own armored vests, and the crap they deal with when they come home, divorces, mental illness.....
I was watching MTV one night, well woke up with the TV on one night and there's this cute girl singing. They only play music in the wee hours, so this was weird.
The girl's name was Anna Nalick and the song was Breathe. The video didn't do much for me, but the song was amazing. I mean, she was cute, but no matter how many times she spun around, she wasn't going to turn into Rosario Dawson, ok.
However, the song was something else entirely. And her voice kicked ass. Now, I'd listened to Nellie McKay, and while she can clearly sing, much of her style was affected. But Nalick's songs were different, not just interesting but captivating. And lightyears away from American Idol. Lightyears.
Then the next song was Dave Matthew's American Baby. Ok video, great song. Just a great song.
People have wondered why Coldplay's new album was beat by a tune for a cellphone in the UK. The reason is simple. Mr. Paltrow and mates should join Danny Elfman in making soundtrack music. Their songs sound like they're in search of a Hugh Grant movie. Which isn't bad.
And of course, Madness has returned from the '80's. Maxwell House has people singing Our House, which I always called Bahaus. It amused me, then and now. And now, Levi's is using It must be Love in another commercial. I forget whatHugh Grant movie that was in, no, it was in a movie called The Tall Man with Emma Thompson and Jeff Goldblum, a movie I love, btw. The thing is that even with AC, it's hard to sleep in 80 degree heat at night. And watching a documentary on Edson's Ridge on Guadacanal doesn't help matters. So you just feel sticky, hot and wet, always wet. The sweat coats your body in a nasty, slick, oily sheen.
Which is why I was thinking about music. When it's this hot, TV is a distraction, movies, two hours out of the heat. But music? Music seems to matter more in this weather. Escaping inside your head is sometimes the best vacation possible.
There isn't much to say about Lance Armstrong, except this: he not only survived, but prevailed.
He got as close to death as one can and still lived, his marriage blew apart in an ugly way, and the French kept accusing him of doping.
He prevailed against things most people never face and gave back. He isn't selling cereal or shoes, but fighting cancer.
To win seven Tour De France is remarkable, but to do it with grace is something else. And that is the thing which strikes me about him. An uncommon grace. He seems small everyplace but on a bike, and that is how it should be. Despite peforming feats larger than life, and having superhuman will, he seems ordinary.
There are a lot of heroes around. But they never accept the term. Because they are only doing what they must. While other people wouldn't, they act.
Armstong is not a hero for his athletics. Someone will surpass him and feats of skill are not feats of character. He is a hero because he wants to fight cancer and has put much of his public persona into that fight. He spends much of his time visiting the sick and raising money.
Retiring on the top of his game, he's thinking about his future. Talk of politics fill the pages. Which is a good thing. Public service needs people who are out for more than their ego. By using his public persona to help others, he should set an example in a country where too many are willing to take the mantle of victim and seek to blame others for their fate.
Armstrong didn't do that. He didn't let illness and divorce embitter him. He didn't let his dark moments overshine the light of his character. Which is a far more important victory and a far more heroic act than winning any race, anywhere.
You can't buy the Pensacola News Journal at Wal-Mart anymore.
The store ordered us off their property, told us to come pick up our newspaper racks and clear out.
So we did.
A few people called last week, some even wrote letters to the editor, and wanted to know why they couldn't buy the newspaper at Wal-Mart in the days after Hurricane Dennis.
Some managers at Wal-Mart didn't appreciate a column Mark O'Brien wrote last month about the downside of the cheap prices that Sam Walton's empire has brought to America. We all pay a little less, and sometimes a lot less, at the grocery store and department store because of Mr. Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart
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Mr. Hart, however, said he and his stores couldn't tolerate a newspaper that would print the opinions of someone who was as mean and negative as Mark O'Brien. But, you know, Mark's not nearly as ornery as that left-wing rabble-rouser Molly Ivins, whose column the newspaper also publishes. At any rate, Mr. Hart said he wanted the newspaper to get its racks off his lots. But he also said that if I fired Mark, we could talk about continuing to sell the newspaper at his stores.
Wal-Mart is a company that wraps itself in red, white and blue.
I might understand it if Wal-Mart said I ought to fire Mark because what he said wasn't accurate. But that isn't the case. Mark accurately reported that there are 10,000 children of Wal-Mart employees in a health-care program that is costing Georgia taxpayers nearly $10 million a year.
Shouldn't we talk about that?
When we stop listening to people on the other side of the fence, when we try to silence and even punish people for thinking differently than we do and raising facts and figures we don't like, well, we won't be red, white and blue anymore.
That's why Mark still has a job and you can't buy a Pensacola News Journal at Wal-Mart anymore.
People do that all the time. It's happened to me. Good editors stick by their writers, bad ones don't.
Going to the DLC meeting is crazier than Ricky Williams
Atrios pointed this out.
The interesting part is that Podesta and Jackson, long an enemy of the DLC, are warning her off. Wolfson know he has a problem here.
"If she wanted to give a speech to a centrist organization truly interested in bringing the various factions of the party together, she could've worked with NDN," the blog said in a reference to the New Democrat Network, with which Daily Kos's Markos Moulitsas is associated. "Instead, she plans on working with the DLC to come up with some common party message yadda yadda yadda. Well, that effort is dead on arrival. The DLC is not a credible vehicle for such an effort. Period."
Other blogs noted that the day Clinton was calling for a truce, one DLC-sponsored blog was writing disparagingly of liberals. Marshall Wittman wrote from the DLC meeting in Columbus, "While someone from the daily kosy (misspelling intended) confines of Beserkely might utter ominous McCarthyite warnings about the 'enemy within,' here in Columbus constructive committed crusaders for progressivism are discussing ways to win back the hearts of the heartland."
Roger Hickey, co-director of the liberal Campaign for America's Future, said Clinton had badly miscalculated the current politics inside the Democratic Party and argued that she could pay a price for her DLC association if she runs for president in 2008."There has been an activist resurgence in the Democratic Party in recent years, and Hillary risks ensuring that there's a candidate to her left appealing to those activists who don't much like the DLC," he said.Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson tried to deflect the criticism. "Her point was simply to say that the goals and issues that divide us are less consequential than are the ones we share in common, and that unity is needed in the face of our shared challenge," Wolfson said.
John D. Podesta, who was White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, said he interpreted Clinton's remarks as critical of those on both sides -- centrists as much as liberals -- who would devote more energy to internal party battles than to confronting the right . But he said Clinton may have underestimated the bad feelings within the party. "I think she was trying to push the DLC back a little bit, but she walked into a crossfire maybe she should have realized was out there," he said.
Meanwhile, Jesse L. Jackson reopened his decades-old battle with the DLC by accusing the group of fronting for corporate interests while ignoring labor and civil rights leaders. "The DLC embraces CAFTA and sells admission to its conference to corporate lobbyists," he said in a speech to the AFL-CIO convention in Chicago.
No, I don't think you should run for the chair of the Democratic Party. I think you should get into your car, check into the nearest dingy motel, eat one last cheeseburger and blow your brains out.
Let's start with something small?your nickname. To begin with, it's taken. It belonged to a person that the world has judged to be of genuine historical import, a man with balls, a person who, by all accounts, literally bowled crowds of people over with his personality every time he entered a room.
You, on the other hand, are a nobody, a bureaucrat, a stuffed suit. You don't have a single idea of your own. You have to honk in order to get served at the local drive-thru. You think you're being cute and funny by taking Teddy Roosevelt's nickname, but it's not funny. It's sad. What you are, exactly, is a high school nerd who starts a Van Halen cover band and does David Lee Roth kicks when he rocks out in his garage in front of his only friend's eight-year-old brother. Outside that garage, the whole world concludes that you will never reproduce. That's you in your DLC offices, playing at being Teddy Roosevelt.
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People are slowly coming to understand what the DLC is. You are a tiny gang of needle-nosed cubicle slaves hired to sell out the genuine political aspirations of millions of people. You have been hired to rush from newsroom to newsroom badmouthing almost every principle your constituents have held for decades, and to propagandize at every opportunity the hopelessness of such ideas as peace, tolerance and ideological backbone.
It's bad enough that you are who you are. But that you should have fun doing what you're doing is just flat-out intolerable. I wouldn't get too used to it, if I were you. But that's just one Mooseketeer's opinion.
Whittman should be under no illusions as to the contempt he is held in by most Democrats. He worked for the Hudson Institute, home to various rightwing crackpots. Why not have Joe Trippi consult with Karl Rove on races. So his opinion is as relevant as mine on Jen's choice of lipstick.
A candidate to her left? You mean like most of the people planning to run, like John Kerry, Wes Clark, Mark Warner?
Most serious candidates, as well as Dean, were nowhere to be seen. And the comments from Podesta and Hickey are serious warnings. They're telling her that the party has moved left and there will be a price to pay for associating with the DLC. Podesta is clearly a Clinton friend and someone who they should listen to.
This isn't just me bitching about people I don't like. Podesta had President Clinton and John Lewis speak to a bunch of kids a couple of weeks ago. Not Al From or Bruce Reed. So when he says Hillary made a mistake, I would take it as a clear warning. Why? Because the weight of the party has shifted left. If you want to raise money, Kos can help you more than the DLC and there are no strings attached. The bright young Dems are working with the new think tanks. So you can disagree with the left, but you need them as the GOP needs the fundies.
What Podesta and Hickey are saying, gently, is that times have changed and that her instincts are off. I would bet Wolfson got an earful from them at some point. Because if they say this to the WaPo, there is a lot more anger behind the scenes.
By KEVIN O'HANLON The Associated Press Tuesday, July 26, 2005; 8:14 PM
LINCOLN, Neb. -- A 22-year-old man faces criminal charges in Nebraska for having sex with an underage 13-year-old girl, although he legally married her in Kansas after she became pregnant.
The man's lawyer said the couple, with their families' support, "made a responsible decision to try to cope with the problem."
Matthew Koso, 22, was charged Monday with first-degree sexual assault, punishable by up to 50 years in prison. He was released on $7,500 bail pending an Aug. 17 preliminary hearing.
After the girl became pregnant, her mother gave permission in May for Koso to take the young woman to Kansas, which allows minors to get married with parental consent. The girl is now 14 and seven months pregnant.
"The idea ... is repugnant to me," said Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning. "These people made the decision to send their ... 14-year-old daughter to Kansas to marry a pedophile."
He said the marriage is valid, thanks to the "ridiculous" Kansas law, "but it doesn't matter. I'm not going to stand by while a grown man ... has a relationship with a 13-year-old _ now 14-year-old _ girl."............
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"The families are all united in this effort," Yoesel said. "I don't know who is complaining. ... What benefit is there to anybody in the prosecution of this young man?"
There was no comment from Koso, who does not have a listed telephone number
Atrios pointed this out.
Well,. he did rape a 13 year old girl, marriage doesn't negate the crime.
I mean, he's 22, she's 13, and in most states that's a criminal act.
Why he would want to mess with a 13 year old is beyond me, but he did and a court will decide if he committed a crime.
God, it's been a nasty fucking day and it's even been hotter at night. I should dig up Apocalyspe Now. But each steamy night has a silver lining. And that was a trip to Home Depot to get an extension cord for my AC.
As I sat in the blinds section, thinking, it came to me what irritated me so much about Hillary Clinton and the DLC.
As a New Yorker, I think Clinton is a good senator, as long as Chuck Schumer actually gets the pork for the state. People outside New York don't have any idea as to why Schumer is popular, and it's simple, he delivers. The guy has no further ambition, his kids go to public school, his wife is a city commissioner and he lives in a Brooklyn apartment. He's a mensch.
Now, people disagree with his stands, but I don't really care. When a school needs funding, Chuck Schumer is the go to guy. Which is his job. He may support Israel unquestioningly, but that doesn't affect me as much as transportation money for the state. He may be a TV hog, but he delivers and that's the point.
But as I sat there, I realized something. The DLC couldn't wait until the end of the election to run to the Wall Street Journal and run down Michael Moore and Move On.
The same Michael Moore who spent his own dime in the fall to run around the country and help register voters. Who had supported Nader in 2000. And took no amount of shit from him for coming to his senses in 2004.
Move On, which mobilized millions of voters, raised tens of millions of dollars and helped in key races.
People who didn't only believe in democracy, but embraced it and made it happen for other people. Who cared about the system enough to drop their cynicism, and embrace the process. And even after Kerry lost, buckled down and continued to be involved. They didn't retreat, they regrouped and reformed. I've seen this first hand. Our blogs have far more traffic now than six months ago.
Last year, we raised $75K for Ginny Schrader. This week, we raised $200K for Paul Hackett. The DLC is nowhere to be seen. But we are. Win or lose, every GOP candidate has to worryh about the netroots and their money. None are safe. None.
But does the DLC embrace this? No. They vilify us and minimize our collective efforts. They decided we were the enemy and went after us. We didn't back their guys, we didn't lose with their GOP light positions. But they refuse to own up to it, even after their guys lost decisively to Dean for DNC chair. Instead, they attack Kos and the rest of us.
Understand this: every time they attack the blogs or Move On or Howard Dean, they are attacking us, you, me, all of us. They simply want us to go away. They want us to shut up and give them money and go away. They have only contempt for our collective hard work and effort. They think we're the problem and tell the Republicans so every chance they get.
So, what does Hillary do? Embrace them. You see John Kerry or John Edwards there? Harry Reid? No? Think hard why.
I think she's a good Senator. She could be a great one, but President? Even without her bagagge, her record is real thin. Celebrity can only get you so far. And much of the adolation she gets is celebrity and I see that every day. She has no real record on domestic issues, a middling legal career and one term of moderate success. If that was the criteria for President, Kay Bailey Hutchinson could run and win.
People don't want to hear that of course. They rather accuse you of mysogyny or some other silly shit. Because they like her. Well so do I. I voted for her in 2000 and plan to do so again. But I don't see her as president and here's why: timing.
To be a good coach, or politician, you need to know when to strike with your best play. To be a great coach, you need to create the conditions for that play to be used. Hillary Clinton is neither. Her timing is off. Pols aren't going to Kos because they like him, but because he can help them.
Notice that pols, both state and local, as well as federal, want nothing to do with the DLC. They had to drop a ton of names from their site. So what does Hillary do? Go to them. She wants use them to revive her fortunes when they cannot revive their own. What that says to me is that her tactical sense is flawed.
Every time she takes up something like video games or talks about moderation on abortion, it's a disaster. Her liberal supporters are offended by these stands and conservatives see it as crass opportunism. It doesn't gain any supporters or show her as politically wise. It just alienates people on both sides. And it reenforces a perception on both left and right of untrustworthiness.
Because it plays against perception. And that matters. I know Hillary Clinton is a moderate and always has been, but moderates will not elect her. Liberals will. But not if she keeps running to the right. Because they won't vote for her.
Hillary Clinton thinks she can use the same team with the same basic playbook and win what her husband did. But she is not her husband. She doesn't have his charm, good will or history. And it is not 1992. The rules have changed. The DLC is the past. Even if their penchant for attacking fellow Dems wasn' t there, they can't win with their agenda.
If Hillary Clinton wants to win, she needs to rethink, hard, how she wants to run. Remember, John Kerry has thousands of favors to call in if he runs again, so does John Edwards. If she's going to win, she needs to shed the DLC and define her own vision. They will not be the tool for her success, but may well engineer her failure.
As a string of foes from John McCain to Richard Clarke can attest, Karl Rove has never been shy about using personal attacks for political gain. But as the Valerie Plame scandal rages on, the Bush administration?s in-house bulldog may be forced to endure a taste of his own medicine.
Last Sunday, in a blistering column in the New York Times, Frank Rich charged that around the time the White House was leaking Plame?s undercover CIA status to friendly reporters, Rove?s office was publicly ?outing? Jeffrey Kofman after the gay ABC correspondent reported on the flagging morale of American troops in Iraq. Rich angrily charged the Republican rumor-monger with fostering a ?pervasive culture of revenge? in Washington. Now, in the same spirit, Rove?s critics are forcing the married pol to fend off a politically motivated campaign that focuses on his own personal life.
For years, political insiders in the Lone Star State have whispered about Rove?s close friendship with lobbyist Karen Johnson, a never-married, forty-something GOP loyalist from Austin, Texas. The two first became close when Johnson sat on the board of then-Governor George W. Bush?s Business Council over a decade ago. Their friendship reportedly deepened after Bush appointed Johnson?a little-known spokesperson for the Texas Good Roads Association?to a seat on his Transportation Department transition team in 2000. The plum appointment enabled Johnson?s lobbying firm, Infrastructure Solutions, to snare such high-paying clients as Aetna and the City of Laredo. Sources say Johnson now frequently travels between Washington D.C. and Austin, where she frequently appears at Rove?s side at parties and unofficial functions.
Although there is no evidence that their relationship is anything but professional, the close association between the married White House aide and the comely lobbyist has long raised eyebrows in conservative Texas circles. Asked about the pair, a prominent political journalist who has written extensively about Rove says, ?I?ve heard the stories, but I would never write about Karl and Karen. If you want to keep your job as a reporter in Texas, you make believe you don?t see them together.?
In the post-Lewinsky era, Washington?s press corps has mostly avoided reporting on the private lives of public officials. But as the political climate in the capitol grows more poisonous, Rove?s close friendship with the lobbyist has attracted increased scrutiny from opponents eager to prove that Bush?s dirty trickster is sitting on some dirty laundry of his own.
Asked to comment on Rove?s relationship with Johnson, a White House spokesman firmly declined to discuss the matter, saying that their relationship was ?the business of these two individuals who have personal lives?I don?t think that?s something that the White House should comment on.? A new air of civility in Washington? Don?t count on it.
So, he doesn't fuck guys? Ok then.
Look, if Rove is fucking some woman, Republicans will leak this, if they can nail him.
My, my, my. I wonder if Ms. Johnson has had a little talk with Mr. Fitzgerald. My bet is that she has.
we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender
The special election is one week from today. Paul Hackett (D) raised $30K in the last 24 hours from the netroots. And he landed the endorsement of the Cincinnati Post. He's so competitive, they're now swift-boating him.
* Connect readers with the campaign. This is going to be a super-low turnout election and everyone in Ohio who volunteers for GOTV can make a serious difference. We're talking 10% turnout and remember Jean Schmidt lost her last race by only 22 votes. They'll have lodging for volunteers road-tripping, so plug your reader in Ohio (which should be one out of every 20 or so) in with the campaign: http://www.hackettforcongress.com/
* Blog it. People want to follow the campaign, they want to know what is going on. The more people you can interest now, the more people will be invested if we need last minute action to kill a story or debunk a lie. Tell the story, it is a great one.
The money we've moved killed Schmidt's strategy. A thousand dollars has come in online in the time it took me to pen this email. I think we can be at $200K by the end of the day and $250K by the end of the week. Let's focus everything we've got on this one little district and show all the DC types how the netroots can come together nationalize. Chris Bowers says:
Make no mistake--Hackett continues to be a longshot. This district favors Republicans by around thirty points, and the Post is smaller than the Cincinnati Enquirer, which has yet to endorse. But this is how we become a majority party again. We find good candidates to run in difficult seats. We support those candidates as best we can. We send our message everywhere, and we challenge Republicans everywhere. I don't think anyone expected Hackett would put up this sort of fight against Jean Schmidt, who has now resorted to giving herself money and Swift-boat type smears in order to hang on.
-Bob Brigham
Look, I'm not going to hold out any false hope here, as Bob says, it's a long shot. But you can ask George Steinbrenner about that. He saw two happen to him in less than a year. And if you don't play the long odds, you can't win big. As they know in Boston.
Hackett may be a Congressman, he may not be, but he's running and we need more people who believe in public service to run. People who sacrifice themselves before others. Hackett chose to be a Marine, and unlike a governor's son, didn't try to get a JAG billet, but instead led men in combat. Civil Affairs isn't a rifle company, but what is? But what it isn't is safe. At a time when many Republican look at service as a burden for the poor, Hackett, like so many other Guardsmen and Reservists, left his life, home and family to serve in Iraq,. a war he doesn't support.
He is a real patriot, unlike the morons who say "support the president". His daughters, are they even working? There are 17 grandchildren in the Bush family, not one serves this country in uniform. Not one.
It's not that his Marine service in Iraq makes him better than most people, it doesn't. It does, however, make him a lot better than than blind supporters of a war, fought by people they neither know or care about.
COLUMBUS, Ohio ? The Democratic Leadership Council, an organization of influential party moderates, on Monday named Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) to direct a new initiative to define a party agenda for the 2006 and 2008 elections.
The appointment solidified the identification of Clinton ? once considered a champion of the party's left ? with the centrist movement that helped propel her husband to the White House in 1992. It also continued her effort, which has accelerated in recent months, to present herself as a moderate on issues such as national security, immigration and abortion.
In her speech at the group's annual summer meeting, Clinton signaled a desire to retain her independence from any party faction. She called for a truce between the DLC and liberal elements of the party, which have engaged in a ferocious war of words over the Democrats' direction since President Bush won reelection last year.
"Now, I know the DLC has taken some shots from some within our party, and that it has returned fire too," she told the gathering in Columbus. "Well, I think it's high time for a cease-fire ? time for all Democrats to work together based on the fundamental values we all share."
The DLC has been struggling to maintain the influence in the party it wielded when Bill Clinton held the White House. Leading party centrists formed the DLC after President Reagan's landslide reelection in 1984 over Walter F. Mondale, who was allied with the most liberal Democratic interest groups.
Clinton assumed her role as head of the DLC's "American Dream Initiative" at a meeting that drew three other centrist Democrats considered possible 2008 contenders and highlighted the maneuvering already underway for the next presidential race.
Besides Clinton, about 500 elected officials and DLC supporters heard from Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), the group's outgoing chairman; Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who replaced Bayh this month; and Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner.
The session amounted to one of the first multi-candidate "cattle calls" for potential 2008 contenders. "I thought I was at a New Hampshire J-J dinner," joked Warner, in a reference to the Jefferson-Jackson Day party dinners that are frequent platforms for Democratic presidential contenders.
Each of the potential candidates delivered campaign-style speeches that blended criticism of the Bush administration with calls for Democrats to pursue centrist policies on issues such as national defense, energy and the federal budget.
Clinton's speech was built around an elaborate portrayal of what the country might look like ? on issues from healthcare to domestic security ? to a similar gathering in Ohio 15 years from now. Clinton envisioned a more prosperous and secure future, presumably under Democratic policies. And she charged that President Bush's agenda was leading America away from that day.
Mark my words. She will never make it out of the primaries if she runs.
Hillary Clinton's instincts suck. They are horrible.
Her enemies will ALWAYS paint her as a liberal, regardless of her real stands. Her name is a byword for liberalism and corruption among the right. They will fight her to their last breath. The DLC wants to use the same failed playbook it has always used, run down the middle of the road and lose to the GOP.
At the same time, all this does is alienate liberal supporters who are perplexed by her insane and pointless manuvering. Video games, abortion, all these issues do not help her. They just make her look weak and vaciliating.
John Kerry ran to the left and lost by 110K votes. He didn't hide from being a liberal and he came close enough to winning that Bush was sweating out election day. So what lesson does Clinton take from that: run to the middle. Despite every poll, every focus group that wants a strong, active Democratic party, the Democratic Loser Council wants to stay in the middle.
She keeps this up, she'll be watching John Kerry or John Edwards take the oath of office in 2009.
Why does the DLC not get it? Why does the DLC think that they can recreate 1992 when they can't even hold on to Senate seats. All their bright shining boys like Brad Carson got waxed by hard core GOP nutters. Why does she think Vichy can do anything more than appease and lose?
But what is so amazing is that Clinton doesn't take Clinton hate seriously. She thinks she comes into the room with a clean slate and she doesn't. To many people, she is the modern embodiment of liberal feminism, no matter what she really believes. She can preach moderation all she wants, but Max Clelland, Tom Daschle and many, many others show what happens to those who do. They may hate Howard Dean, but they do not fuck with him.
Atrios points out the uniting ways of the DLC and I added more.
If only we could hear such moral clarity from our own party's left! Instead, we heard from Daily Kos, the ur-liberal ur-blogger, whose blog included a cheer for, among others, outcast Labourite George Galloway, who blamed the attacks on Blair's Iraq policy -- and was roundly denounced by virtually all British politicians. "See, Democrats? That's how it's done," lectured the blogger ignorantly. Likewise, Matt Yglesias, an articulate liberal voice at The American Prospect, who belittled Marshall Wittmann's call for moral clarity as a phrase never used "unironically" anymore. No wonder Democrats are perceived to have a values problem.
My liberal friends are quick to point out that the left's chief grievance is with the war in Iraq, not the war on terror. But what does it do for the image of the Democratic Party -- not to mention the thinking of rank and file Democrats -- when some of our most skilled commentators use a moment of unambiguous terror to first find fault with an American policy (unseating Saddam Hussein) rather than first condemning the terrorists?
As Atrios points out, Kos didn't say that, but people cheered when Galloway spanked the whisky soaked Chris Hitchens and Norm Coleman in one day. Becuase he stood his ground, a concept foreign to the Democratic Loser's Council.
Uh, it's a shame the DLC hasn't noticed what Bill Lind and Tony Cordesman, no liberals, have. Our Iraq policy is a grotesque failure. Defending it only draws the contempt of average Democrats, who don't want their kids to die there. Removing Saddam made things worse, not better, for Iraqis in most aspects of their lives.
Atrios also asks why they hate Kos so much, and the reason is simple: he points out what pathetic losers they are. That doesn't surprise me. What did surprise me is the attack on Big Media Matt. None of us take that asshole Wittman seriously. He was laughed out of the room when he tried to run for DNC chair. And not by a blogger, either, but by Matt Taibbi of the NY Press.
If Hillary Clinton wants to lose with the DLC, that's her business. But lose she will.
Paul Hackett, a Marine reservist, is running in a special election in Ohio's 2nd District. Now, his opponent, faced with a scandal of her own and Hackett raising over $100K in a day from online contributions, is questioning his service as a Civil Affairs officer in Fallujah.
I contributed $25 last week. You can do the same via his Act Blue link.
On her recent appearance on the Speaking Frankly radio show Jean Schmidt stated that Eric Minamyer was advising her campaign. Given Mr. Minamyer?s recent habit of indirectly questioning Paul Hackett?s service in Iraq this site must ask the question does Eric Minamyer speak for the Schmidt campaign?
I understand that Hackett did not participate in combat at all. It is still dangerous over there as I can personally attest. Let?s just not act as though we led marines in combat if we did not, okay?
I have asked the question time and again, what role did he actually play?
Given all the opportunities he has had to say ?I served in combat? one fair conclusion is that he did not.
Did Mr. Minamyer really ask the question to Paul Hackett? Somehow I doubt that he?s talked to anyone on the Hackett campaign on this issue since if he did he would have heard some very interesting things. When I called last night I talked to someone working on the campaign who had actually served with Hackett in Iraq. He told an interesting story of them almost being killed on a trip to Baghdad. To get further clarification I asked Hackett?s campaign manager about Hackett combat ribbons:
I am not a military guy, but from what I understand he is slated to receive at least 2, but has not been sent them yet.
He does not want to tout his military ribbons for the campaign.
CCW on her blog has this to say about Mr. Minamyer?s comments on Mr. Hackett:
Every attack he makes feels like a slap in the face to those who have friends and family in Iraq. I?m sure that was not his intent, but belittling a service members? function, seems an attempt to downplay the seriousness of the events in Iraq. My brother-in-law spent a little more than a year in Iraq. He was part of a public affairs unit. Public affairs is also considered a non-combat role and my brother?s unit was in a ?secure? area. Did this keep them out of danger? Of course not. Did this keep us from worrying day and night about his safety? Absolutely not. I know with 100% certainty that my brother would have been safer sitting in his living room than being anywhere in Iraq.
Let?s get down to brass tacks: Mr. Minamyer?s attacks on Paul Hackett?s service to our country are nothing more than disgusting partisan attempt to score points against someone who risked his life to follow the orders of our President. Emphasis on OUR President Mr. Minamyer. This site for one would advise the Schmidt campaign to tighten the leash of their advisor Eric Minamyer. He?s not doing her campaign any good by peddling this swill.
As for you, Mr. Minamyer: if you have any questions for Paul Hackett about his service, I suggest that you ask him to his face. He?s easy enough to find these days.
9 Responses to ?A Slap In The Face: Schmidt Advisor Questions Hackett?s Service?
1. Eric Minamyer Says: July 25th, 2005 at 6:01 pm
I am asking the questions about Hackett?s duties because his ad on tv implies that he led marines in combat. Civil Affairs Officers attached to marine division do not normally do that. I am not attacking his service, just trying to discover exactly what it was.
Being a Civil Affairs Officer is a noble thing and carried the same dangers we all faced in the Middle East. If one?s role was not command or combat, however, one should not imply that it was.
I would not have mentioned ribbons except it raised by a Hackett supporter. The whole ribbons thing came up because one blogger said that the ribbons proved Hackett had been in combat. This is not accurate, however.
Ribbons are given for participating in a campaign. They are not just for combat. Everyone in the theatre gets one. There are insignia that go on the ribbon depending on the exact details.
I offer this as factual background so non-military folks can understand that ribbons do not equal combat. Two ribbons were authorized for the global war on terror and I am sure that he earned those as did all who were over there. There is also one for service in SW Asia and one for being in an expeditionary force no matter where it is. That?s four, same as everyone over there.
I would not have raised the questions about his exact duties except you guys were congratulating yourselves on what a splendid commercial Hackett put together. This glee included the fact that it did a splendid job of disguising his party affiliation and using the president?s image.
I noted also the vague and unusual words used to describe his military service. I still do not know what ?follow my marines? means. I had never heard a marine officer said it that way and it made me curious.
When I have spoken of my role in the war I have said I was the inspector general and this is what my duties were.
I guess to some asking a direct question they don?t want to answer is an ?attack.? I do not see questions as ?attacks?.
Similarly, it is no ?attack? to say a person was not in combat, unless there have been claims or implications that the person has.
I am not disparaging his service or anyone else?s. I just want to know what it was. Nothing in the above post by the editor answers that question.
The article is another example of the straw man argument. The article sets out a distorted version of what I have said and then shoves it over like a straw man. The only trouble is I never attacked Hackett?s service. I asked questions that the above post still does not answer.
Did Hackett lead marines in combat? Did Hackett command marines at all, if so who? Was he a member of division staff? This all I am asking. Note that the source listed is a marine who served with, not under the command of, Major Hackett.
I reiterate that I speak here for myself alone. I am a voter in OH2. Advising Jean Schmidt and speaking for her are two different things. I do not speak for her.
Ok, this is disgusting.
Civil Affairs officers have to go into Iraqi towns and try to make them work. Which means they risk their lives. Hackett, mistakenly, assumed that people would understand that he risked his life on a daily basis. The scumbags in the other campaign, however, want to claim he's lying about his service.
Aren't you tired of these people questioning real patriotism?
I know I am.
It is very easy to be wounded in Iraq. Five female Marines working at a checkpoint were killed on their way back to base by a suicide bomber. Their officials jobs were not all that dangeorus, but Iraq is a dangerous place.
Australian women drinking hard. It's when they stop that your troubles begin.
It's fucking miserable in New York. The humidity is cloying, I shower every few hours so I don't feel sticky. It just feels tropical.
I bought a new AC, but I had it delivered, so it won't be here until the temp drops. Oh well, fuck it.
First, things have been so goddamn busy that I haven't thanked people for their contributions, much less reposted my PO Box. Oddly enough, no one reminded me of this either. I raised money, they blew up the subway, and all hell broke loose.
But for all site related mail, you can send it to
Stephen Gilliard 217 E. 86th St NMB 112 New York, NY 10028
So while I'm catching my breath figuratively, let us thank you for your contributions to the site and your ongoing support. The praise means a lot and I love the handwritten notes that come with the checks. They make me feel as if I'm making a difference.
The last couple of weeks have been nuts. Sunday conference calls, travel, and the news. Always the news.
My God, as I sit in my sweltering Manhattan apartment, I just think about the general lunacy I've seen lately. I mean, New York just went crazy last week. Not a damn thing to do, until someone gets the balls to sue.
Look, the good news is that we're getting our act together. You're seeing the results of our work on the blogs, and we do want to build structures to ensure we can support bloggers over time. But it's going to take a while. But more of my time is being taken up by talking to people and doing stuff not evident on the blogs you read.
The stakes have just increased so much over the last few weeks. It seems that the blogs are helping decide the news agenda.
I know Jen, my partner, tends towards politcial pessimism, but from where I sit, things are changing.
Bush hasn't won since th e bankruptcy bill passed. Everything else has turned into a defeat in one form or another. The Dems have avoided getting sucked into fights they couldn't win and forced Bush back on Social Security They even eeeked out a win on the filibuster. Remember, the GOP has spent time and money and have lost.
We have a lot of fights coming up, but as long as we're smart, we can pull them out.
One nation, divisible Do evangelicals and secularists want the same America? Legal scholar Noah Feldman says yes, and he has a plan for a more perfect union. Too bad it will never work.
- - - - - - - - - - - - By Michelle Goldberg
In "Divided by God," Feldman frames America's divisions over religion in the public sphere as a struggle between two camps that he calls "legal secularists" and "values evangelicals." He believes -- falsely, I think -- that both groups have essentially compatible visions of national harmony. "Religious division threatens [American] unity, as we can see today more clearly than at any time in a century, yet almost all Americans want to make sure that we do not let our religious diversity pull us apart," he writes. "Values evangelicals think that the solution lies in finding and embracing traditional values we can all share and without which we will never hold together. Legal secularists think that we can maintain our national unity only if we treat religion as a personal, private matter, separate from the concerns of citizenship."
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To remedy this backward situation, Feldman proposes a bargain -- more tolerance for public religious expression in exchange for tighter restrictions on government funding of religion. He distills it down to a slogan: "No coercion and no money." This approach makes a lot of sense, not least because it could address some of the inevitable incidents of secularist overreach -- the elimination of Christmas songs in public schools, for example -- that infuriate local communities and ricochet around the right-wing media, sparking howls about anti-Christian persecution throughout the land.
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The trouble with "Divided by God" is that Feldman seems to accept McConnell's legal argument as the actual political motivation of the Christian right. Values evangelicals, in his telling, just want to be heard along with everybody else. "In its most sophisticated and attractive form, values evangelicism is actually a type of mutliculturalist pluralism, professing respect for faith as faith and for cultural tradition as tradition," Feldman writes. "This inclusive vision of a society in which one can partake in the common American project by the very act of worshipping as one chooses is more than broad enough to accommodate new religious diversity that has come about as a result of Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist immigration."
If this is what "values evangelicism" is, then the term is almost meaningless, since it doesn't apply to any of the leadership of the Christian right, the group that's actually fighting the culture wars that Feldman is trying to mediate. Consider, for example, how the Family Research Council -- the Washington spinoff of James Dobson's enormously powerful Focus on the Family -- reacted in 2000 when Venkatachalapathi Samuldrala became the first Hindu priest to offer an invocation before Congress. "While it is true that the United States of America was founded on the sacred principle of religious freedom for all, that liberty was never intended to exalt other religions to the level that Christianity holds in our country's heritage," the group said in an apoplectic statement. "Our Founders expected that Christianity -- and no other religion -- would receive support from the government as long as that support did not violate peoples' consciences and their right to worship. They would have found utterly incredible the idea that all religions, including paganism, be treated with equal deference."
This was not an isolated outburst -- it wouldn't be hard to find enough similar quotes to fill a volume larger than Feldman's entire book. Sure, the Christian right may invite a token rabbi -- often the South African ultraconservative Daniel Lapin -- to its functions to promote an image of ecumenism, but that cannot hide the motivating belief in Christian supremacy, spiritual and political, at the movement's core.
.......................
As this suggests, many legal secularists are already doing what Feldman says they should -- focusing on coercion and money rather than symbolism. That's where the significant battles are being fought, and unfortunately, Feldman's formula offers little hope of a truce. Values evangelicals, he writes, "ought to reconsider their position in favor of state support for religious institutions and re-embrace the American tradition of institutionally separated church and state. The reason they should be prepared to do so is that such state funding actually undercuts, rather than promotes, the cohesive national identity that evangelicals have wanted to restore or re-create."
Indeed, values evangelicals should do this, but they will not. Millions of individual born-again Christian voters probably sincerely desire an end to America's fierce polarization, but the movement's leaders believe themselves to be fighting a civil war against a hateful enemy, and they are in no mood to compromise
Useful fools like Feldman don't get it. These people want a theocracy. They want to force their idea of religion on us all. You can no more negotiate with them than you can talk a forest fire into putting itself out. A middle ground is a rest stop, not an ending point, for these people. Give them ground, they will take it, smile and take more ground. Because they think there is no compromise. They want power. Hell, they tried to ruin Michael Schiavo and blackmail Congress. Some even wanted Jeb Bush to violate the law to seize her. Does that sounds like people looking for a middle way?
I'm acquainted with a couple in their 50s who are going to adopt a child from China. They have been married for about five years and don't have any children. I'm not their friend but I know their story through a close friend of mine who rents part of their house. My problem is this: These people fight constantly. My friend (who would have no reason to make all this up) tells me that the neighbors have even complained about and to the couple because of all the yelling that comes from their house. The wife is the loud one. She constantly criticizes and belittles the husband in screaming tones. He is apparently quite passive, and puts up with all this verbal aggression from his wife. I don't believe these people have any business adopting an innocent baby. From what I have gathered they are going to adopt an orphan and have told many people. The wife tells everyone that her motive is to rescue a child from its underprivileged situation.
I feel strongly that they shouldn't be allowed to have a child. I know enough about people to feel sure that the woman will emotionally abuse the child the way she does her husband. My friend has talked to the man about this and he says that he will be the "buffer" for the child against his wife's anger. This sounds ludicrous to me but he has no intention of calling off the plan. He never stands up to his wife -- just does what she wants (usually after she screams at him for a while.) The man's sister, neighbors and other acquaintances are all talking about this adoption behind the couple's back. No one wants to talk to them directly because they don't want to be the target of this woman's hostility.
I think the situation is crazy and someone should put a stop to it! I'd love to see a person from their immediate circle confront both of them, not just the husband, and say in no uncertain terms that they will be putting the child in a very bad situation, and should immediately cancel all plans to adopt. By the way, there is no question of the wife or couple going into counseling. She says there's nothing wrong with her and refuses to go to marital counseling with him even though he has told her he wants to.
Cary, what would you do in my place? I know It's not my job to confront these people, yet I hate to see an innocent being moved into a house of abuse and dysfunction. Everything in me cries out that it will be wrong and all these "good" people are sitting around and doing nothing. Is there anything that a reasonable person can do to make a difference here?
S
____
Dear S,
I grow exceedingly cautious whenever anyone asks how to intervene in the lives of other people, especially people they don't know well, especially in matters generally conceded to be private. This caution is compounded by the fact that we don't know for sure what's best for this hypothetical child. If adopted, he or she may grow up with parents who yell at each other. If not adopted, the same child may starve in a remote village, or be sold into sexual slavery, or never get an education, or die of easily treatable disease. We don't know.
First, this woman is batshit crazy. And the man a gutless moron.
She wants to save a little yellow baby, not raise a child.
If you think this is wrong, stand up to this screaming crone and stand your ground, if you know her. If not, it's not your business.
Everything about this is wrong. Everything. But what can you do?
Ooooh, we have to wash. Yes, we need to be extra clean for the DLC after party. Will sucks our balls extra clean. We have to wash them for him. But I thought he liked monkey smells? Not THAT much, wash your balls.
Valuing Patriotism American voters know that 9/11 put national security back at the center of politics. Democrats should unify behind a new progressive patriotism. By Will Marshall
.................
Such antics give Democrats an opportunity to expose what lies beneath the fulsome facade of GOP patriotism -- an atavistic nationalism in which the ruling passion is the will to power, not love of country. The right answer to GOP jingoism, however, cannot be left-wing anti-Americanism. Of course, progressives can criticize their country and still be patriotic. Indeed, one of the highest forms of patriotism is being honest about your country's flaws and taking responsibility for fixing them. But it is what's in your heart that counts. Are your objections rooted in a warm and generous affection for your country, or in a curdled contempt for it? Too many Americans aren't sure if the left is emotionally on America's side. And that's a big problem for Democrats.
The left's unease with patriotism is rooted in a 1960s narrative of American arrogance and abuse of power. For many liberals who came of age during the protests against the Vietnam War, writes leftish commentator Todd Gitlin, "the most powerful public emotion of our lives was rejecting patriotism." As he and other honest liberals have acknowledged, the excesses of protest politics still haunt liberalism today and complicate Democratic efforts to develop a coherent stance toward American power and the use of force.
When Americans ponder such questions today, their frame of reference is not the Vietnam War, but Sept. 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks evoked the most powerful upsurge in patriotic feeling since Pearl Harbor, and thrust national security back into the center of American politics. Democrats have yet to come to grips with this new reality. More than anything else, they need to show the country a party unified behind a new patriotism -- a progressive patriotism determined to succeed in Iraq and win the war on terror, to close a yawning cultural gap between Democrats and the military, and to summon a new spirit of national service and shared sacrifice to counter the politics of polarization.
Winning the war on terror.
Democrats' most important task is to articulate a tough but smart strategy for winning the ideological struggle against Jihadist extremism. Yet many liberals remain fixated instead on Iraq. It's true that Team Bush has badly fumbled the occupation, but an anti-Iraq message alone won't reassure voters that Democrats can take charge of the nation's security. On the contrary, the conflation of partisan animus toward Bush with anti-war sentiment has shoved Democrats in a decidedly dovish direction.
Why the DLC sucks monkey balls.
Larry Johnson, professional spook, lifelong Republican, was just smeared in the Weekly Standard.
Paul Hackett, lawyer, Marine Reservist, Iraq War vet, was just smeared today, accused of lying about his military record.
So what are we supposed to do, imitate that little coward Peter Beinart and be PNAC's bitch?
I think not.
We are talking about the President's closest aide being indicted for harming the security of the United States.
The DLC is a collection of losers and most of what they say should be ignored.
A drunk monkey could make a mockery of the GOP's claims to any sort of stewardship on National Security, if the argument is framed right. From failure in Iraq to underfunding security at home, to Tora Bora, the GOP has failed this country and those who serve her. But the Vichyite Marshall doesn't get it. He thinks we have to continue the GOP's failed policies. Iraq is a tactical nightmare and a strategic sinkhole. We have no reason to further the GOP's misguided policies there or come up with a solution.
We need new, effective policies and to stop playing the GOP's game of letting them define patriotism. They think it's a code word for big dick, and losers like Marshall want to play along. It's time to cut the shit and tell the truth, the GOP's war is a failure and we need new approaches. Not in the dick stuffed mouth mumbling way he advocates, but honestly and forthrightly.
National Service? Does he mean sending the poor to be crippled in Iraq? Does he mean that?
Well, we know that's bullshit. Because the liberal warhawks and Young Republicans agree on one thing: Iraq is for white trash, niggers and Mexkins, not us. They get pissed when you ask them to serve. And the poor also say "I'd rather work in Wal Mart. No one blows up an IED next to the Sam's Clubs sodas"
The shit coming from Marshall could fill a septic tank. Democrats are not "more dovish", we're just against getting Americans and Iraqis killed for no good fucking reason. 1700+ dead and Iraq is sliding into anarchy. We'd also like to see Osama Bin Laden caught. As in on trial. Or shot in the head eight times. Whatever works. But now since's had four years, Al Qaeda is now a franchise like Subway. Be batshit crazy enough and you can join AQ.
You want a coherent statement on force, here it is: let's work with out allies to stop our real enemies, not to feed Bush's ego, and like everything else in his life, have it turn to shit before his eyes.
Pakistan has destroyed al-Qaeda's ability to operate on its soil, President Pervez Musharraf has said.
He said the network could not have orchestrated deadly bombings in London, Egypt or elsewhere from his country.
"Al-Qaeda does not exist in Pakistan any more," he told reporters in Lahore, after unconfirmed reports Pakistanis were being sought over bombs in Egypt.
Police in Egypt are not linking the missing men to Friday's Sharm al-Sheikh bombings, in which more than 60 died.
President Musharraf said al-Qaeda "sanctuaries" in Pakistan had been over-run, and that Pakistani security forces had arrested 700 of the movement's fighters.
'Wrong'
He said small groups of al-Qaeda members may still be operating in the mountainous tribal regions of Waziristan, bordering Afghanistan, but their capacity to act was greatly reduced.
Jen
In other news: Monkeys flew out of Musharraf's ass today at a press conference.
It may also have been used to knap, or split, flints
A sculpted and polished phallus found in a German cave is among the earliest representations of male sexuality ever uncovered, researchers say.
The 20cm-long, 3cm-wide stone object, which is dated to be about 28,000 years old, was buried in the famous Hohle Fels Cave near Ulm in the Swabian Jura.
The prehistoric "tool" was reassembled from 14 fragments of siltstone.
Its life size suggests it may well have been used as a sex aid by its Ice Age makers, scientists report.
"In addition to being a symbolic representation of male genitalia, it was also at times used for knapping flints," explained Professor Nicholas Conard, from the department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology, at T�bingen University.
Jen So much material, so little time...wonder how the US press will sanitize this story if they carry it at all..
Meet Larry Johnson The CIA official turned Democratic spokesman has a pre-9/11 mindset. by Gary Schmitt 07/25/2005 12:11:00 PM
ON SATURDAY, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson gave the Democratic party's weekly radio address and excoriated President Bush for not having fired Karl Rove and others in connection with the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's name to the press. This followed Johnson's appearance before a panel of House and Senate Democrats on Friday, where he made similar criticisms of the president. A self-described Republican, Johnson argued that the failure of the president to fire Rove and anyone else supposedly involved in the leak had severely damaged national security and would certainly hamper future efforts to recruit informants in the war on terror.
Well, it's good to see that the former CIA employee is now worried about the war on terror. But it's a bit late. On July 10, 2001--two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon--Johnson wrote an op-ed for the New York Times ("The Declining Terrorist Threat") in which he argued that Americans were "bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism" and, in truth, had "little to fear" from terrorism. And, in turn, he rebuked his former colleagues in the national security bureaucracy for using the "fiction" of the terrorist threat to pump up their budgets.
Nor was this Johnson's first foray into dismissing bin Laden and al Qaeda. Johnson, who also served as the deputy director for the office of counterterrorism at the State Department in the early 90s, was interviewed by PBS's Frontline for its 1999 program, "Hunting for bin Laden." According to Johnson, Americans had "tended to make Osama bin Laden sort of a superman in Muslim garb," when in reality he is "more of a symptom of a problem" than a looming threat. And while bin Laden "would like to kill Americans . . . wanting to is different from being able to, having the full capabilities in place." By Johnson's lights, "Osama bin Laden . . . has not been a very effective organizer or leader. He talks a great game."
The Democratic party wants to use Larry Johnson as a seemingly safe mouthpiece to attack to the president. But, in doing so, they have adopted someone who fits perfectly the profile of the pre-9/11 CIA: see no evil, hear no evil. As documented in report after report, the CIA's directorate of operations had no assets in al Qaeda and CIA's analysts were asleep at the switch when it came to analyzing the scale of the threat posed by bin Laden. ................... Gary Schmitt is executive director of The Project for the New American Century.
Some PNAC asshole is going after Larry Johnson.
His response should be interesting.
But let me say this: what Johnson said makes sense for 1999. PNAC makes no sense, ever.
PNAC prompted this failed policy in the war on terror.
Also, if you're going to attack the man, note that he worked at the State Department's INR, which is widely regarded as the most respected intelligence agency in Washington.
It should be noted that PNAC was Ahmed Chalabi's bitch for years and had no clue he worked for Iran.
The bombers look like everyone else, and it is improved intelligence rather than bullets that will weed them out
Gary Younge Monday July 25, 2005 The Guardian
In the Addams Family movie, Wednesday Addams heads off to a fancy dress Halloween party in her regular clothes. "I'm a homicidal maniac," she explains when questioned by Morticia about her attire. "They look like everybody else." Just over two weeks ago Jean Charles de Menezes "looked like everybody else" in London. But on Friday morning in the eyes of the travelling public and the police, he was transformed into a potential "homicidal maniac".
In a clear indication of how terrorism not only destroys bodies but contaminates perceptions, fellow travellers say they saw an "Asian man" with "a bomb belt and wires coming out". What they actually saw was a young Brazilian in a Puffa jacket. The police saw a threat. To them De Menezes looked like another "clean skin" (a perpetrator with no history of previous terrorist involvement or affiliation) on the run and possibly about to act. Having cornered him and pinned him to the ground they pumped five bullets into his head at close range.
In a world where every brown skin is little more than a "clean-skin" waiting to happen, stop and search will inevitably become stop and shoot. The dominant mood that we are better safe than sorry is understandable. But after Friday's incident we are left with one man dead, nobody safe and everybody sorry. If there's one thing we've learned over the past two years, it's that a pre-emptive strike with no evidence causes more problems than it solves.
De Menezes's killing came the day after the police presented Tony Blair with a shopping list of new measures they say they need to tackle terrorism. As though the plea not to allow terrorists to change our way of life does not apply to the authorities, they want to increase the amount of time they can detain a suspect without charge from 14 days to three months. Given that they already have the option of shooting unarmed, innocent people dead in the underground, the police clearly have more power than they can responsibly handle. But De Menezes's death does not make the case against giving police extra anti-terrorist powers - it simply illustrates it.
Rick Santorum United States Senator (R-Pa.) Monday, July 25, 2005; 1:00 PM
In his new book, "It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good," Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) argues that it is the family unit, rather than the federal government, that should make up the foundation of a fair society. He says that public policy should reflect this principle through conservative statestmanship as a means of addressing social and economic problems.
Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) was online Monday, July 25, at 1 p.m. ET to discuss his new book, "It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good."
Have questions about Live Online? Find answers in our new interactive FAQ.
Read more about "It Takes a Family."
Submit your questions and comments before or during today's discussion.
____________________
Senator Rick Santorum: Thanks to everybody for coming online. I appreciate the opportunity to answer questions. This book was written to come up a third way of dealing with public policy in America, critical of both the liberal left as well as the libertarian right. I am hopeful that this will spawn a great deal of debate and discussion on a variety of issues.
_______________________
New York, N.Y.: Love the book........how do we get government on the side of promoting stable two parent families without offending those who are offended by moral judgments?
Senator Rick Santorum: That's a great question because what I try to do in the book is point out that lots of different types of families can work but what we know works best is a two-parent, traditional, what I call natural families. That's not to say that single moms or single dads or other types of family arrangements (aunts, uncles etc.) can't work. The story I tell in the book is one related to me by Dr. Wade Horn, where he likens it to taking an airplane trip, one plane gets you there 90% of the time, the other plane gets you there 80% of the time. Both are good planes, but who wouldn't be for the one that gets you there more often. That's what the traditional family is, proven over time to be the ideal and that's what we should strive for.
The Post had NO questions about his getting a free ride for homeschooling his kids, his wife's lawsuit, the Schiavo fundrasing or his gay aide? Much less his rabidly homophobic comments. Why the hell not? They had ONE question about his blaming Boston for priestly pedophilia
Instead, people were treating his idiotic book like Dr. Phil wrote it.
I wonder where the tons of hostile questions went, or did they just :"avoid" them.
BY TAMER EL-GHOBASHY, TONY SCLAFANI, WARREN WOODBERRY JR. and DAVE GOLDINER DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Five tourists kneel in handcuffs on Broadway between 50th and 51st Sts. after being ordered off Gray Line tour bus in Times Square yesterday. They were later released and resumed their trips aboard another Gray Line bus.
New York was fear city yesterday as heavily armed police swarmed a double-decker bus packed with tourists in Times Square and later shut down Penn Station after an irate passenger said he had a bomb.
In a dramatic sign of the city's edginess since the London transit bombings, cops evacuated buildings, shut midtown streets and forced about 60 terrified tourists to march off the double-decker bus, with their hands up, in the heart of Broadway.
Cops in riot gear handcuffed a group of apparently harmless South Asian-looking men with British accents after a jittery tour bus worker reported they seemed suspicious.
The men were forced to kneel on the sidewalk, with their hands bound behind their backs, between 50th and 51st Sts. in front of the Winter Garden theater on a sunny summer Sunday with the city packed with tourists.
"People were really scared," said Jill Sully, 29, of Saskatoon, Canada. "There were sharpshooters with guns pointed toward our bus."
"I was scared out of my mind," said another passenger, Amanda Pesanello, 20, of Coventry, R.I. "We don't have things like this in Rhode Island."
The dramatic faceoff on Broadway came just days after the NYPD ratcheted up security after the July 7 and July 21 London transit bombs and began searching bags in the subway.
.............................
A Gray Line dispatcher called 911 and told cops the men had backpacks and their pockets "stuffed" - a possible warning sign of suicide bombers, said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.
........................... Fear grew when cops ordered everyone to put their hands up and walk off the bus - leaving their bags to be searched.
"You want to talk about real terror?" said Arrigo's husband, Robert. "There were two little girls with their parents who were just terrified. They were crying uncontrollably."
My God. This is just so fucking stupid. They had shit in their pockets? Tourists? All you need is a fucking cellphone tos et off a bomb. Someone is going to get killed behind this shit. When shit like this happens to people who happen to be not white, there's a saying " Well, I guess they now know what it's like to be black"
Osama must be laughing his ass off. I mean, he's got Western governments turning on their citizens, violating their rights, justifying streetside executions, isolating Muslims. This is like his wet dream come true. I mean, he's winning while Western governments look ineffective, weak and frightened.
This only endangers people. The sooner it ends, the safer we will be. The quicker the city is enjoined from this, the lower the risk will be to all of us.
Look George, it's like I said, you don't pardon the help. They get paid, and that's enough.
The reason I posted that wingnut screed on Rove is simple. well beisdes it making me laugh, is this, they don't take this seriously.
I get the feeling that Fitzgerald has a better case than people think and Joe Wilson will get his dream of seeing Karl Rove being frogmarched out of the White House. Unlike the Clinton mess, which was never quite that serious, people are beginning to sweat, as the realization that Rove and Libby and god knows who else may well be indicted.
The problem for Bush is simple: he needs Rove desperately, but he cannot keep an indicted man as his chief aide. The GOP lackies are slowly coming to realize that this mess could land right on the door of the President.
The Bushies have always treated this as a political problem when it was a national security problem. It was not about making Joe Wilson or his wife look bad, but crippling our WMD efforts. As more people realize the scale and sense of the disaster unleashed by Bush and his team, their problem will only grow.
The GOP can defend Bush for only so long before they go down with him.
The fact that Bush had a Supreme Court nomination noted and passed should be a hint of how this is playing out.
If Iraq had gone well and Osama locked up in Gitmo, they might be given a pass, but with disaster everywhere, that is unlikely.
This is one in a series of posts about how to best use the Internet in a way that gets your message heard and doesn't piss off the person you're trying to influence. I usually tick some people off by writing this, but that's okay, because they tick me off when they spam me. If people want to be effective advocates - be it on this site or by writing to other bloggers, journalists, etc., my advice should help. So here goes.
And a quick caveat. About 2/3 of the emails I get are amazing. They're incredibly useful, they include great scoops, great ideas, and more. I love it. And most of the info I post here, at least a lot of it, comes from tips you guys have sent in. The other 1/3 of the emails I get, however, are crap. And those of you who DON'T send me crap, know it already - because you've either seen me post your stuff or send you a nice email back, etc. And when you get hundreds of emails a day, and that number keeps increasing every day, and the percentage of crap emails keeping increasing every day, then that impacts my effectiveness, but more importantly, it impacts the effectiveness of everyone trying to email journalists, bloggers, and more. So, here's my advice (or screed) for those people.
1. I've said this before, write a GOOD subject line.
Preferably something descriptive. For example, someone recently emailed me about changing the way I set up archives on the blog. A good email. The subject line was "archives" - I thought it was spam. Perhaps a better one might have been "suggestion about blog archives." The idea is to be detailed in 4 or 5 words, it helps a LOT to get your email noticed when the guy receiving it gets hundreds of emails a day. Oh, and when you reply to an email, consider changing the subject line rather than having a series of "re:" back and forth.
2. Don't put me, or anyone else, on an email list without our permission, or you will be shot.
It's rude, plain and simple. You put me on a list, I will ban your address and hate you. If you're trying to get sympathy for your cause, or get me to listen to your advice, don't make me hate you. This guy for example, ELMENDORFX@aol.com, has been spamming me for weeks with crap. When I asked him to stop, repeatedly, he got all pissy with me, banned my email address from his aol account, and is continuing to spam me - but because he banned my address I can't ask him to stop again. That's a really good way to get me to not listen to you and to get your own email account shut down (and if anyone works at AOL, please get this guy).
3. Sending me emails about articles you want me to post and not sending me the URL of the article.
Now, I know some people don't totally understand what a URL is or how to email one, and that's cool. But lots of big non-profits, for example, send out mass emails of their press releases, sometimes very interesting press releases (like the other night, there were lots of press releases about reaction to the Roberts nomination), but they don't put a link to the release or statement in the email itself. How do I link to something when I don't have the link? Same goes for articles, how do I know an article is real, or link to it, if you don't send me the link? Again, remember that the guy on the receiving end is getting hundreds of emails a day, there simply is no time to go hunting for the URL of each email that didn't include it. Do you want to have influence or not? You won't believe how many big organizations just don't think of including the URL of some thing they want me to post.
4. Look at my blog, or whoever's blog you're emailing, and see if the article is already on the blog before writing to tell me to post it :-)
Often, it's already there. I don't have this problem too often, but other sites I work on do. People email all the time an article that's already on the site.
5. Conspiracy theories. I don't buy em. Don't send em.
Tony Blair didn't blow up the Tube. A missile did no crash into the Pentagon on 9/11. And Jeff Gannon isn't some kidnapped kid from Iowa or wherever who was forced into a child sex ring. Enough already.
6. Asking me to link to your blog. I don't have a blog roll. I don't want to have a kitchen-sink list of thousands of blogs because then the list is meaningless. I link to sites that I actually like. That means I won't link to your site until it becomes one of my favs. And that takes time, as I don't get to read a lot of other blogs, just too busy. Sorry, but I just don't find the never-ending list of blog links very useful.
7. Having said all of that, I do like to get emails recommending good content for the blogs - articles you've seen, good blog entries on other blogs - and in fact, it's the primary way I get info for this blog. It's just that as the email traffic increases in my in box, and it has, the quality of what I get has gone down a lot recently. And that doesn't help me, or you.
8. Sending people stuff that you know is crap.
Now, I don't mean to be harsh, but I just got an email, and you know who are, about some African king of Buganda, or something, visiting some grade school or something in Boston. Now, why in God's name would the readers of AMERICAblog care about that? If this were just one email, I'd delete it and that would be that. But I get this kind of stuff all the time. And I work on other news Web sites that get even worse bs than this.
Please, please, please. We're getting hundreds - and I mean hundreds upon hundreds - of emails a day. It's hard enough to read them all, and I try to read them all, and generally read each one, because I think it's rude not to. And more importantly, you guys send good stuff. But when more and more of the incoming emails are just crap that you know has nothing to do with AMERICAblog or the kind of stories we post, then please don't send it. All you do is piss me off, or piss off the reporter or blog or other news site that you're writing to. I mean, what's the point of that?
9. Emailing bunches of people at the same time, over and over again.
What I mean here is, not thinking of what AMERICAblog readers might be interested in, but simply emailing whatever you have to a set list of people including me, FOX News, ABC, Jeff Gannon, and President Bush. I got news for you - most of the people on that list don't read a thing you send. And for the rest of us, if Jeff Gannon and George Bush are both cc'd on something you send me, that's a pretty good signal to me that you haven't even given it any thought as to whether the email in question is even appropriate for this blog. Don't do it.
Again, sorry to be bitchy, but some people need to learn how to use the Internet better so that they, and we, can all be more effective. I'm writing this because I KNOW the other bloggers are having the same problem I'm having, so I consider this a service for them all.
And if you get pissed off cuz I wrote this, so be it. I'm pissed off about getting emails about the King of Buganda
Ok, I don't have John's complaints, but they do make sense. I'm lucky in that people usually send me useful, timely stuff, but people should keep this in mind before contacting any site or reporter or blogger.
All the leading Democrats got together the other day to demand the resignation of Karl Rove, one of Bush's key advisors, and certainly his key political advisor. The charge is that Rove broke an important law by intentionally revealing the name of a CIA covert operative. Despite the pomp, ceremony, solemnity and high hopes that Democrats bring to this overtly political effort the charge is really just plain stupid and typically Democratic.
Firstly, the law clearly states that the operative must have been covert within the last 5 years. Mrs. Wilson has had a desk job at the CIA for the last 6 years. Period, end of story. Jonathan Alter, however, of Nut Case Radio (Air America) and Newsweek says it doesn't matter because operatives typically go in and out of cover and Mrs. Wilson may have wanted to go undercover someday. While this does not matter one tiny bit from a legal, technical point of view, it is especially silly when applied to Mrs. Wilson since she recently gave birth to twins and is an unlikely candidate to be playing agent Jane Bond 007 any time soon.
Secondly, based on the actual evidence to date it seems likely that Rove, at worst, merely identified her as Mr. Wilson's wife at the CIA, in the course of explaining how Mr. Wilson had gotten a nepotistic assignment through her, not the Vice President of the United States, to investigate whether Iraq had purchased Uranium from Niger.
This is not enough to be considered "intentionally" outing or exposing an undercover agent with the specific intent to harm national security, according to common sense and Victoria Tensing who helped right the law. Moreover, the most recent evidence is that Rove got his information from the press; not through official gov't sources, in which case any possible guilt is greatly diminished since Rove, then, was not the source of the information. And, there is no evidence that Rove even knew her actual name anyway. This again makes it very hard to charge him with intentional exposure. When pressed, most insiders are saying there is virtually no chance of Rove being charged, let alone convicted despite what Democrats and their allies in the press would have us believe. Expect Democrats and their allies in the press to get no farther here than they did with the so called Tom Delay junket scandal which fell apart the exact instant Republicans directed the press to look at Democratic junkets too.
The Democrats seem motivated to defend Mr. Wilson (the ex-Ambassador to Gabon, of all places) in large part because his report indicated that Bush was lying about Iraq purchasing uranium from Niger. Would anyone believe the Democrats are motivated out of passion for defending the CIA when they (Church and Tomaselli in particular) have for decades hated and stripped the CIA bare to the point where it had no idea to whom Niger was selling its nuclear fuel or who was about to attack the World Trade Center?
So why did Rove want to discredit Wilson's report which said that Iraq did not buy or want to buy uranium from Iraq? Perhaps because the evidence showed it was a silly report. Firstly, it was not a report. Wilson was informally and orally debriefed upon his return from Niger.
The non-partisan Senate Select Committee which then formally investigated the matter concluding that the oral report was silly and led more people, rather than less, at the CIA to think there was uranium sold to Iraq.
Before the Senate investigation Wilson was a Kerry presidential adviser with his own website operated by and linked directly to the main Kerry campaign site.
Immediately after the Senate investigation had discredited Wilson personally, for lying that his wife had not gotten him the Niger assignment, and professionally, for lying and incompetence regarding his conclusions, the Kerry campaign took down the website.
Secondly, Italian Intelligence first concluded and still does that there was an Iraq/Niger connection. Thirdly, British Intelligence also concluded and still does that there was a connection. Fourthly, the Butler Commission, in England, did a separate investigation and concluded that there was a connection. Fifthly, The Financial Times of London and French Intelligence both have concluded independently that there was a connection. Lastly, it is intuitively obvious that there was probably a connection since Niger is a desperately poor country with tons of very valuable uranium to export, and Iraq was certainly among the most likely destinations for such exports.
In short, Karl Rove broke no law in the course of discrediting a fraudulent oral report based on a nepotistic field trip to Niger by Mr. Wilson, the ex-Ambassador to Gabon.
On the plus side for the Democrats is 1) the CIA was angry about the incident, 2) a federal prosecutor was persuaded to pursue the case doggedly, 3) The White House did inexplicably lie saying that Rove had no involvement at all, and 4) judges who have seen secret files pertaining to the case have ruled on various related motions baased on having been persuaded that the case has legitimacy.
The case has an odd quality too in that, amazingly, no one actually knows for sure exactly what charges are being investigated. It might turn out that the difficult "exposure" issue will be secondary to a charge related to revealing classified information, and of course there is always the threat that innocent people will panic when threatened by an investigation and be liable for obstruction of justice charges.
In the end one has to predict it will probably turn out to be a huge waste of national energy that should have been devoted to radiating the Democratic cancer that has so infected our country.
OK, I've sent her some cash and if you're up to it, you should support her as well.
Why?
Because after having drinks with her in DC, I'm convinced she's a freaking genius. The kind of journalist who drinks hard, thinks fast and is usually too good to be chosen to run anything. Very cool person.
But that isn't the only reason to help her out.
She knows things. And people. And when she writes on the things she knows, she's on fucking target. We need to encourage this.
For some reason, the media thinks we're all recent college graduates and not professionals with years of experience in various fields. DC Media Girl has logged much time in Cable News and newspapers. We sat in a bar where I got to watch Senators drink.
So give, give that beer money up for her and her work.
This is our media. We pay for it and we get the news and opinions which make sense to us. Or not and get to live with John Gibson rolling in with an "I love Nathan Bedford Forest" t-shirt one day.
Please don?t forget to donate - the PayPal addy is dcmediagirlmail@gmail.com. Any and all donations are appreciated - and thanks to those who have sent in money already.
The following comments were e-mailed to the BBC AFTER the story came out that the man shot in the Stockwell tube station in London was not related to the July 7 bombings in London.
I have sympathies with the victim's family, but two weeks ago over 50 innocent people died. Let's not forget that. It was very unfortunate that this lad died, but the risk of him being guilty was just too big a risk to take. The press should support the police against terrorism, not it would appear the other way around. This lad who died was another victim in the war against terrorism, unfortunate, but true. My thoughts are with the police officer and his family.
It's sad when an innocent man dies but even sadder when 52 innocent people die. I think the police acted in the right manner and in tough situations the right outcome is uncertain. Jean Charles de Menezes was Brazilian but when you live in a foreign country you need to understand the way things are done. If you are challenged by an armed man in the UK the odds are it is the police. In the circumstances, the police have to shoot to stop. We are defending a way of life.
It is a disgrace that people are criticising the police. They are dealing with a national emergency and preventing the loss of further lives. If anyone carrying a bag on the Tube is running from the police and ignores their orders to stop then they ought to be shot. The lives of hundreds of innocent civilians must be paramount.
He had a choice - he could have stopped. Jumping over barriers to get away is not normal behaviour - sorry. I thank the police for protecting the general public from what could have been a very serious incident. If we don't let the police do their job we may all live to regret it.
Let's recap.
We have:
The guy was a "victim in the war on terrorism" (it's the terrorists' fault that the cops shot him)
"We are defending a way of life." In other words, he was collateral damage in the "war on terror", which involves "defending a way of life" from "evildoers" (Bush's term for terrorists).
If you are running away from police, "[you] ought to be shot." No matter what the cost. Because it's all part of the "war on terror". Collateral damage, and all of that.
"If we don't let the police do their job we may all live to regret it." In other words, if the police use excessive force - in this case, deadly force - we may all be killed by terrorists. The police can shoot to kill, even with no evidence that someone is a threat, because it's all part of the war on terror.
I WILL NOW REPEAT MYSELF: These comments were made AFTER IT CAME OUT THAT THE GUY WAS INNOCENT.
Please keep that in mind as you re-read those comments. Do not forget that. Because if you find yourself agreeing with those comments even though you know the guy was innocent, there is a huge fucking problem in this country; it means that the Bush administration's brainwashing is working, and there is no hope left, unless there is a way to de-condition those who are thinking that way.
I guess terrorist attacks expose the ease with which people believe every bit of bullshit fearmongering spin the government throws at them. Oh, and one of the comments above was sent in by an American.
I am really, really disgusted by this shit. I'm saddened too, but this is sick, sick stuff, and there isn't any hope if people start thinking this way... if you can call it thinking.
First of all, most Americans know better. We live with police shootings, not the convictions of police officers, but their shootings. Little girls, unarmed men, security guards, it's part of American life. But there are always a few which allow their fear to get the better of them and defend them.
What surprises me is that the British trust that the government's version of this. This man was shot, pinned, by a "cop", we don't know who it was, and executed. We have no idea if the police's version will stand up to inquiry, and they are quick to blame the victim for ignoring plainsclothes cop.
Because the British are simply scared shitless. They have home grown threats and in one poll, six percent of Muslims think the bombings are justified, while 16 percent feel no loyalty to Britain.
I think most Britons were shocked that their fellow citizens held such resentment towards them. And despite all of the bullshit about being resolved, that young Brazilian man died because that was a lie. The British are like Dr. Frankenstein finding out that they built a monster and it doesn't much like them. So they are willing to do anything to feel safe. But we've been through this before, with the IRA. The British sent hit teams, played the loyalists off of the IRA to the point where the IRA were shooting their own members. They tossed laws in the garbage, allowed people to be framed, and they still didn't stop the IRA.
If already alienated Muslim teenagers think that they are subject to sshoot to kill orders for wearing a coat or listening to an iPod, that just creates more terrorist candidates. People need to be a lot more skeptical about an execution of an innocent man and stop letting their fear rule them. Because it could happen again.
JIM SINEGAL, the chief executive of Costco Wholesale, the nation's fifth-largest retailer, had all the enthusiasm of an 8-year-old in a candy store as he tore open the container of one of his favorite new products: granola snack mix. "You got to try this; it's delicious," he said. "And just $9.99 for 38 ounces."
Some 60 feet away, inside Costco's cavernous warehouse store here in the company's hometown, Mr. Sinegal became positively exuberant about the 87-inch-long Natuzzi brown leather sofas. "This is just $799.99," he said. "It's terrific quality. Most other places you'd have to pay $1,500, even $2,000."
But the pi�ce de r�sistance, the item he most wanted to crow about, was Costco's private-label pinpoint cotton dress shirts. "Look, these are just $12.99," he said, while lifting a crisp blue button-down. "At Nordstrom or Macy's, this is a $45, $50 shirt."
Combining high quality with stunningly low prices, the shirts appeal to upscale customers - and epitomize why some retail analysts say Mr. Sinegal just might be America's shrewdest merchant since Sam Walton.
But not everyone is happy with Costco's business strategy. Some Wall Street analysts assert that Mr. Sinegal is overly generous not only to Costco's customers but to its workers as well.
Costco's average pay, for example, is $17 an hour, 42 percent higher than its fiercest rival, Sam's Club. And Costco's health plan makes those at many other retailers look Scroogish. One analyst, Bill Dreher of Deutsche Bank, complained last year that at Costco "it's better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder."
Mr. Sinegal begs to differ. He rejects Wall Street's assumption that to succeed in discount retailing, companies must pay poorly and skimp on benefits, or must ratchet up prices to meet Wall Street's profit demands.
Good wages and benefits are why Costco has extremely low rates of turnover and theft by employees, he said. And Costco's customers, who are more affluent than other warehouse store shoppers, stay loyal because they like that low prices do not come at the workers' expense. "This is not altruistic," he said. "This is good business."
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Emme Kozloff, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, faulted Mr. Sinegal as being too generous to employees, noting that when analysts complained that Costco's workers were paying just 4 percent toward their health costs, he raised that percentage only to 8 percent, when the retail average is 25 percent.
"He has been too benevolent," she said. "He's right that a happy employee is a productive long-term employee, but he could force employees to pick up a little more of the burden."
Mr. Sinegal says he pays attention to analysts' advice because it enforces a healthy discipline, but he has largely shunned Wall Street pressure to be less generous to his workers.
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Costco also has not shut out unions, as some of its rivals have. The Teamsters union, for example, represents 14,000 of Costco's 113,000 employees. "They gave us the best agreement of any retailer in the country," said Rome Aloise, the union's chief negotiator with Costco. The contract guarantees employees at least 25 hours of work a week, he said, and requires that at least half of a store's workers be full time.
Workers seem enthusiastic. Beth Wagner, 36, used to manage a Rite Aid drugstore, where she made $24,000 a year and paid nearly $4,000 a year for health coverage. She quit five years ago to work at Costco, taking a cut in pay. She started at $10.50 an hour - $22,000 a year - but now makes $18 an hour as a receiving clerk. With annual bonuses, her income is about $40,000.
"I want to retire here," she said. "I love it here."
Remember, when dotcom CEO's were living like kings, they didn't say shit. Dennis Kozlowski lived like a king and no analyst said a fucking word. But working people need to make less money? Ignore that nonsense.
Loyalty pays its own rewards. There is tremendous internal pressure to keep a Costco job. You show up, on time, sober and don't steal. It pays as well as a factory or civil service job. The health care plan alone can keep their workers loyal. They save millions on training and theft investigations. When you treat the worker as disposable, they treat the job the same way. When you invest in them, they will save you money.
What the street misses is that Costco isn't being dragged through federal court and facing massive judgments, are they. Wally World could be on the hook for $10B because of sex discrimination. No unionization drives either. In short, they have few of Wally World's inherent problems. I wonder how many ex-Wal Mart employees now work for Costco?
According to former FBI agent Mike German, who worked against right-wing terrorist gangs in America and later on an Islamist case, there are many more similarities than differences between the way Muslim suicide bombers and 'ordinary' terrorists operate and, hence, between effective ways of defeating them. Even their structures - loose networks whose command and control may not consist of anything more organised than access to a website and a grapevine for passing on those with technical, bomb-making expertise - are much the same, German says.This lack of hierarchy can be a strength - there is no 'Mr Big' whose interrogation might unravel a whole terrorist army - but also a weakness. 'It means they are open to infiltration,' he says. 'In both cases, the successful agent may well find he gets the best evidence from not saying much about himself, and not asking questions about the others.'
German not only penetrated neo-Nazi groups, he also gathered evidence of sufficient quality to take them to court and send them to prison. Yet after 9/11, he and his colleagues with anti-terrorist experience found themselves derided as mere 'gumshoes', unsuitable for use in the new 'war on terror'. In his view, America made a grave error in rejecting the traditional law-enforcement model in favour of this more abstract concept and its associated methods, such as internment and torture at Bagram and Guantanamo Bay, which has, just about everyone but Bush and Donald Rumsfeld now accept, produced very little hard, 'actionable' intelligence.
........................
The police and intelligence agencies are not going to defeat terrorism,' he said. 'People and communities are.' In a series of meetings with Muslim leaders, the next tomorrow, he hopes to foster a community-based network. In time, this may become a way not only of monitoring extremist preachers, but a source of real intelligence: 'The names of the young men and women who seem to be absorbing such preachers' message, or whose behaviour and character suddenly change; information about people who've started buying suspicious chemicals.'
There's nothing very glamorous or high-tech about this approach, nor about the new regional offices being opened by MI5, much of whose work may well be quite mundane. Much of the time, the Muslim agent recruited to supply information on developments in, say, Beeston may well have nothing to report. But analogous methods, the development of intelligence through a mixture of partnership and infiltration, have 'worked' before, against the IRA.
They are not foolproof. By the early 1980s, the Provos had been so thoroughly penetrated that a young volunteer was as likely to be killed as a supposed informer by his own comrades as he was by the SAS. Yet in October 1984, they managed to bomb the Grand Hotel in Brighton in the middle of the Tory conference, killing five and coming within a hair's breadth of murdering the entire cabinet. 'We are not superhuman,' Blair said yesterday.
But in terms of providing practical defence and prevention, these tried and tested methods look more promising than overseas military adventures and schemes to remould the Middle East. Don't panic. There is a plan.
When you hear Bush and the GOP ridicule law enforcement solutions to dealing with terrorism, they don't want to do what works. Trials work, jail works. Special ops has only a limited success rate. But that's the flashy, fun solution.
If you want to keep a community safe, you need intelligence. Searching bags and executing electricians won't do that. Penetrating cells do. Cameras and police deter, but cannot stop a determined bomber. Only foreknowledge can do that. And you have to be inside these groups to do that. It may not make the news until the arrest, but it saves lives.
Okay, this has been such a gonzo news week that I thought some escapism would do us all a world of good. NO, I'm not saying to go watch Fox News...just contemplate booking a room here.
I had almost forgotten that the Fantasuites Hotels even existed anymore. I first found out about them years and years ago, back in the pre-Web days, when a pal from school who was a Star Trek geek insisted that he had found a hotel with a NASA theme room. I brushed it off, until Playgirl magazine, of all things (someone had gotten me a scrip for my birthday...great bedtime reading as it pretty much put me to sleep...yawn...) ran an article on it.
Now, for whatever reason, my longterm boyfriend at the time seemed intrigued by the idea of rooms transformed into a castle or ancinet Egyptian temple by the miracle of tacky resin and fiberglass appealing, so we ordered a brochure. At the time, there had been a branch by the King of Prussia Mall, which at the time was also allegedly one of the biggest malls in the country.
We never did actually make the trip, but we had a hell of a lot of fun reading the slick, "trying too hard at elegance" descriptions and packages. To be honest, the website and the current offerings of the chain are less fun and artsy than the old original--they apparently got rid of the more "artsy" rooms (they used to have monochrome rooms with special lighting, round furniture, etc), as well as some of the more elaborate ones (King Arthur's Court and the fullblown Egyptian Temple, both of which my then-beau seemed particularly interested in).
I realize that this idea and variations on it are nothing new, but never before had I or have I seen what I'll call the odd distillation of people's fantasies boiled down in one place--if they didn't have a demand for Room Theme X, they wouldn't have kept it. Given the availability of the "space" theme, the "stagecoach" theme, and the "treehouse" them, you really have to wonder.....
Now, there are other places that have a "theme room schtick" going on--Berlin's Propeller Island Hotel comes to mind--but there's something much more edgy, artsy, and less "velvet painting of big eyed puppies" about the whole setup:
Having said that, I guess my ideal fantasy hotel room (other than one that I occupy on a return trip to Berlin so that I can actually stay in one of PI's great rooms) would be a comfy suite that looks just like my apartment--only when they deliver the paper, it talks about President Gore's second terrific term, there actually would be something worth watching on TV, there'd be vacation brochures around for beach trips to the newly-peaceful Red Sea area, and my pay stubs would reflect a few extra digits.
One can dream....which I intend to do now. Have a peaceful night and dream of a better world.
What is also good is the Brit police tactics that we saw at work in the subway Friday morning. The tackle and kill team is incredible, if for no other reason than their bravery. Can you imagine the job of those cops? Tackle the guy wearing a vest bomb and hope your colleague is right behind with the gun to put five bullets in the noggin before he sets off the bomb.
Turns out he didn't have a bomb, and turns out he wasn't one of the four bombers Thursday. And if it turns out ultimately that he had nothing to do with anything, no doubt there will be hell to pay. But the police say he was linked to the terror probe, so let's wait and see.
Meantime, got to admire the cojones of those Brit cops to go after him like that. All of this trumps any of my other complaints that the Brits weren't making the right noises about fighting terror. They like to go about things a bit more quietly than us. Not my style, but okay, fine -- as long as they get the five in the noggin of the right bomber boy. They do that and I'm fine.
So for the moment, alls well. Just catch the four bombers. Five in the noggin is fine. Don't complain that sounds barbaric. We're fighting barbaric
Except this man was innocent. He had no bomb. Was no threat to anyone and may well be judged to have been murdered by the police, if they were the police and not a Special Forces team. We don't know who killed this man or why they thought he was killed.
Remember, the British used the Army in policing in Northern Ireland. In such a crisis situation, this could have happened again. Because shooting someone five times in the head is a bit much to stop them. Something went very, very wrong. And until there is an investigation, we have no idea who did the shooting. During the Troubles, the British Army deployed Detachnment 14 (Det 14), pulled from all branches and arms, paras, SAS,. SBS, RMP, to work with police units. Given the level of fear, another such deployment is not impossible.
No one much cares if an SAS/SBS team or the Met Police shoot a bomber in the act of setting a bomb off, but Gibson, who must beat off to Rambo movies, is an absolute idiot. It's only a matter of time before he slips up and says some horribly stupid racist thing and loses his job. Because he's just a fucking moron. This is life and death, and personally, catching a bomber alive is a good thing. Why? Intelligence, something Gibson is quite unfamiliar with.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 23 - They just keep getting stronger.
Despite months of assurances that their forces were on the wane, the guerrillas and terrorists battling the American-backed enterprise here appear to be growing more violent, more resilient and more sophisticated than ever.
A string of recent attacks, including the execution of moderate Sunni leaders and the kidnapping of foreign diplomats, has brought home for many Iraqis that the democratic process that has been unfolding since the Americans restored Iraqi sovereignty in June 2004 has failed to isolate the insurgents and, indeed, has become the target itself.
After concentrating their efforts for two and a half years on driving out the 138,000-plus American troops, the insurgents appear to be shifting their focus to the political and sectarian polarization of the country - apparently hoping to ignite a civil war - and to the isolation of the Iraqi government abroad.
And the insurgents are choosing their targets with greater precision, and executing and dramatizing their attacks with more sophistication than they have in the past.
American commanders say the number of attacks against American and Iraqi forces has held steady over the last year, averaging about 65 a day.
But the Americans concede the growing sophistication of insurgent attacks and the insurgents' ability to replenish their ranks as fast as they are killed.
"We are capturing or killing a lot of insurgents," said a senior Army intelligence officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to make his assessments public. "But they're being replaced quicker than we can interdict their operations. There is always another insurgent ready to step up and take charge."
At the same time, the Americans acknowledge that they are no closer to understanding the inner workings of the insurgency or stemming the flow of foreign fighters, who are believed to be conducting a vast majority of suicide attacks. The insurgency, believed to be an unlikely mix of Baath Party die-hards and Islamic militants, has largely eluded the understanding of American intelligence officers since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government 27 months ago.
The danger is that the violence could overwhelm the intensive American-backed efforts now under way to draw Iraq's Sunni Arabs into the political mainstream, leaving the community more embittered than ever and setting the stage for even more violence and possibly civil war.
...........................................
Last Sunday, in the Shiite town of Musayyib, about 40 miles south of Baghdad, a suicide bomber dashed beneath a truck full of liquefied gas and blew himself up, igniting a giant fireball that killed more than 70 people and wounded at least 156. The truck, which amounted to a gigantic bomb itself, had been hijacked in western Iraq and parked next to a Shiite mosque.
The greatest success of the resistance is to have kept us clueless about who is in it and how it is set up.Gee, and they have no replecement problem, No kidding, really?
WASHINGTON, July 23 - The Bush administration's rallying call that America is a nation at war is increasingly ringing hollow to men and women in uniform, who argue in frustration that America is not a nation at war, but a nation with only its military at war.
From bases in Iraq and across the United States to the Pentagon and the military's war colleges, officers and enlisted personnel quietly raise a question for political leaders: if America is truly on a war footing, why is so little sacrifice asked of the nation at large?
.......................
"Nobody in America is asked to sacrifice, except us," said one officer just back from a yearlong tour in Iraq, voicing a frustration now drawing the attention of academic specialists in military sociology.
...........................
Senior administration officials say they are aware of the tension and have opened discussions on whether to mobilize brigades of Americans beyond those already signed up for active duty or in the Reserves and National Guard. At the Pentagon and the State Department, officials have held preliminary talks on creating a Civilian Reserve, a sort of Peace Corps for professionals.
In an interview, Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, said that discussions had begun on a program to seek commitments from bankers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, electricians, plumbers and solid-waste disposal experts to deploy to conflict zones for months at a time on reconstruction assignments, to relieve pressure on the military.
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In the speech, at Fort Bragg, N.C., on June 28, Mr. Bush mentioned a Defense Department Web site, Americasupportsyou.mil, where people can learn about private-sector efforts to bolster the morale of the troops. He also urged those considering a career in the military to enlist because "there is no higher calling than service in our armed forces."
While officers and enlisted personnel say they enjoy symbolic signs of support, and the high ratings the military now enjoys in public opinion polls, "that's just not enough," said a one-star officer who served in Iraq. "There has to be more," he added, saying that the absence of a call for broader national sacrifice in a time of war has become a near constant topic of discussion among officers and enlisted personnel.
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David C. Hendrickson, a scholar on foreign policy and the presidency at Colorado College, said, "Bush understands that the support of the public for war - especially the war in Iraq - is conditioned on demanding little of the public.
It's really quite simple. If Bush called for mass enlistments, the quiet anti-war resistance would become vocal overnight. People do not see their personal interest at stake in Iraq, and even those who do want no part of the fighting. And the support for the war is an inch deep. No one gives a shit about Iraqi's having freedom after being told Saddam was behind 9/11. They would be glad as not to carpet bomb the country. Once you vilify Arabs and Muslims as hating America, expecting them to care about the fait of Arab muslims is a bit much. So no one will enlist. Feith's little skills draft will meet the bitterest resistance imaginable. The fact that he's even mentioning it, demonstrates the raw desperation about the war and its course.
The military should realize, calling for greater sacrifice is politically impossible for Bush. In a speech yesterday, Barabara Bush mentioned that she had 17 grandchildren. Number in Iraq? Zero.
That tells you all you need to know about how the Bush family feels about this war. And if they won't fight it, who else should?
Scotland Yard said Mr Menezes, who lived in Brixton, south London, was completely unconnected to the bomb attacks and added: "For somebody to lose their life in such circumstances is a tragedy and one that the Metropolitan Police Service regrets."
The Brazilian government has expressed its shock at the killing and Brazil's foreign minister Celso Amorim is on his way to London to get an explanation from foreign secretary Jack Straw.
In a statement the government said it "looks forward to receiving the necessary explanation from the British authorities on the circumstances which led to this tragedy".
The Brazilian government has expressed its shock at the killing and Brazil's foreign minister Celso Amorim is on his way to London to get an explanation from foreign secretary Jack Straw.
In a statement the government said it "looks forward to receiving the necessary explanation from the British authorities on the circumstances which led to this tragedy".
The shooting is being investigated by officers from Scotland Yard's Directorate of Professional Standards, and will be referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
The family of Mr Menezes told the Brazilian media there was nothing in his past which would give him a reason to run from police.
Mr Menezes' cousin, Alex Alves, told O Globo television: "I asked that the body be released as quickly as possible, we need to bring him to Brazil, which is what the family wants".
"He does not have a past that would make him run from police," he said.
Mr Alves said Mr Menezes, who was from the city of Gonzaga in Minas Gerais state, had lived in London legally for at least three years and was employed as an electrician. Civil rights groups have called for a full inquiry into the shooting.
1988 saw one of the most controversial operations for the Special Air Service Regiment. This incident would lead to endless debates on the use of soldiers abroad in intelligence and even "assassination" roles against acknowledged terrorists. ...................!
The Spanish police were brought into the intelligence net, and were detailed to follow the terrorists, keeping close tabs on them, noting all details of their activities. The Spanish Police lost them immediately, throwing the operation into turmoil. The police were even known to have been showing photos of the dead terrorists at hotels to continue the search for them three days after they were shot and killed! Two days prior to the team arriving, a woman was known to have scouted the band positions on several occasions, alerting the officials to an imminent operation in Gibraltar. The JOC authorized the deployment of a sixteen man troop of SAS, including an explosives expert, to Gibraltar immediately. The SAS arrived the day before the IRA team.
Operation "Favius" was under way. The Gibraltar Police Commissioner Joseph Canepa briefed the SAS and Police involved in the operation. The SAS were told the operation was to arrest the IRA terrorists, disarm them and defuse the bomb, which was assumed to be a car bomb and was to be parked near to the site where the band played. It was stressed to the SAS men that the bomb would be detonated by remote control. These assumptions, as well as the certainty that the terrorists would be armed turned out to be wrong.
In the afternoon of March 6th, surveillance personnel, including two pairs of SAS operatives were deployed around the town. They were dressed casually in jeans and windbreakers and armed with a Browning Hi Power 9mm pistol, tucked into the waistband of their pants. Lapel microphones were utilized to stay in contact. Those responsible for awaiting the terrorists at the ambush site were ready. Sean Savage was observed approaching a small white car parked in the square where the band was to set up. He opened the car door and made some movements like he was adjusting something within the car. This was the end for him. He hung about the car as Farrell and McCann were seen walking into town from the Spanish border post. The SAS explosives expert was tasked with examining the car, and suspected it was booby-trapped. The car was new, but had a rusty radio antennae, indicating that all was not as it appeared. On suspicion that the car contained a bomb, Canepa signed over the operation to the military. The terrorists were observed to walk back toward the Spanish border and they were followed by the four SAS soldiers. Savage unexpectedly separated from the group and walked back towards the town. Their SAS tail split into two pairs and one pair followed Savage while the other stuck with Farrell and McCann. A police siren caused the three IRA to become visibly nervous. McCann turned his head and looked straight into the eyes of one of the soldiers tailing her. The soldier later stated that he was about to shout a challenge when McCann moved his hand across his body, and was thought to be reaching for the detonator. The soldier drew his pistol and fired, striking McCann in the back and observed Farrell reach for her bag, causing him to shoot her once. He then fired again at McCann, and the second soldier fired at both terrorists as well.
Hearing the shots, Savage spun around and one of the soldiers following him shouted "Stop!" As he did, he noticed Savage make a move towards his pocket, and both soldiers opened fire. At 4:06pm the SAS officer in charge turned over control of the operation to the police.
The operation at first appeared to be a complete success, as three notorious IRA had been caught in the act of planting a bomb which could possibly have killed hundreds of innocents, had been eliminated. The mistakes that came to light were that the white car did not contain a bomb and the terrorists were unarmed. The bomb was discovered the next day in a car in a parking lot in Marbella. The SAS came under fire, accused of being Licensed to kill, and the affair turned into propaganda for the IRA. After a two week inquest the SAS were cleared of any wrong doing, however the stigma attached by leftist groups shadowed the Regiment for some time.
Except, of course, this man was an innocent and may not have thought the police were talking to him. So he was gunned down. The question is was it a mistake or an extrajudicial execution. Fear is a dangerous thing. Oddly enough, I predicted this would be the case yesterday. Just a guy running to grab the train or something and gunned down by a scared cop.
Reacting to the NYPD's announcement Thursday afternoon that police would randomly?but routinely?search the bags of commuters, one concerned New Yorker quickly created a way for civil libertarians to make their views black-and-white.
In a few outraged moments, local immigrant rights activist Tony Lu designedt-shirts bearing the text, "i do not consent to being searched." The minimalist protest-wear can be purchased here, in various styles and sizes. (Lu will not get a cut. The shirts' manufacture, sale, and shipment, will be handled by the online retailer. Lu encourages budget-conscious New Yorkers to make their own and wear them everywhere.)
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly had announced the legally obvious?that New Yorkers are free to decline a search and "turn around and leave." But Lu, who is a lawyer at Urban Justice Center, warned that even well-intentioned cops could interpret people's natural nervousness or anger as "reasonable suspicion." The possibility of unjustified interrogation and even arrest is real, Lu said.
Stephanie Klein, author of a much-read, diarylike blog that has spun off a book and publishing deal, gathering material at the bar at Angelo and Maxie's in New York.
Ms. Balossini, 28, an executive secretary from Prospect Park, N.J., wasn't describing a hot summer beach read but a blog about the trysts, triumphs and heartaches of a young New York City woman named Stephanie Klein.
Stephanie Klein's Web site is illustrated with photos of her, her friends, her dog and newspaper mentions of her publication deal.
Since Jan. 20, 2004, Ms. Klein, a 29-year-old art director with freckles and long red curls like Botticelli's Venus, has been blogging about the intimate details of her life, from her affinity for rainy days and grilled cheese sandwiches to her sexual escapades, including one that involved a stranger and a can of Pam cooking spray.
Today the blog has an international readership with fans who recognize Ms. Klein when they see her gallivanting around Manhattan and the Hamptons, and who find parallels to their own lives in her candid, freewheeling stories.
According to Technorati, which ranks blogs based on "net attention," or the number of people who are linking to them, Ms. Klein's blog has a rank of 2,132, meaning that of the world's more than 13 million blogs, there are only 2,000 or so with more inbound links than hers.
"That would put her in the top 1 percent of all bloggers," said David L. Sifry, the founder and chief executive officer of Technorati. (The top 100-ranked blogs tend to offer news and political commentary; single-subject or niche blogs like Ms. Klein's, even the most popular, are generally further down the list.)
Ms. Klein's blog is a voyeur's playground, with many photos of Ms. Klein, her friends and the swanky places they go. But the allure is muted by accounts of Ms. Klein's childhood summers at fat camp, the husband she says cheated on her when she was pregnant, her subsequent abortion and her ongoing quest for love. Nothing, it seems, is too private not to share with readers.
And that is exactly how they like it. While most of the millions of daily-life blogs have only a handful of regular readers, generally the author's friends, Ms. Klein's legions of followers seem as absorbed in her escapades as if she were a television character, the Carrie Bradshaw of New York bloggers.
"I have to read it every day," Ms. Balossini said. "I have to know she's O.K. and that good things are happening for her. I want good things for her."
Ms. Klein's celebrity has lately outgrown the Web, leading to a book and television deal. Her memoir, "Straight Up and Dirty," is to be published by ReganBooks, Judith Regan's HarperCollins imprint, in April 2006, and NBC is developing the book into a half-hour comedy series produced by Ms. Regan. Ms. Klein is also working on a second book about her fat-camp experiences. (Her trademark candor did not extend to the exact advance for her books, but she allowed that Publishers Marketplace, an industry publication, had described it as a "major deal," meaning $501,000 or more.)
Her blog, called Greek Tragedy (www.stephanieklein.blogs.com), takes its name in part from Ms. Klein's heritage (she is a quarter Greek) and from a humiliating experience at Barnard College in which, she said, she was the only woman in her class not invited to join a sorority.
The title is tongue in cheek because while many of the entries are about rejection, an undercurrent of hope runs through them - something fans cling to when licking their own wounds. "I want to be able to not just cry over clich�s but rise above it with triumph just as you've done," one reader wrote in a post on the blog.
I read her blog and well, people watch soap operas, they will read them as well. God, brevity is a such an essential skill for writers and Ms. Klein has not mastered it. But she's engaging enough if you're sympathetic to her. It's not my taste, but it's not bad once you read it.
But she's getting divorced. Which means her husband and his lawyer has access to her inner thoughts. Makes for an interesting negotiation session. I think at some point, Ms Klein will find a demand letter in her mail box, claiming invasion of privacy or defamation of character. Especially after her windfall.
But then, what better way to gain attention to yourself than exposing all your thoughts in a blog, and being cute and girlie about it. And posting lots of pictures. While Jen and I like our privacy to a degree, others clearly don't. So you can see pictures of her dog, read about her dates and her inner thoughts and the creep factor of having her meet her fans.
However, she does something a lot of bloggers would be smart to do, and concentrate on herself, not her job and her pettty grudges. Because only misery lies that way.
If she wasn't cute, or straight and lived in Jersey City, one could bet that this wouldn't be worth a book contract from the doyenne of Ground Zero. It's the hunt for the next Sex and the City. I mean, how many times do you read about women who live in JC and go to Sea Bright instead of the Hamptons?
But while I have some doubts, this is a good thing. Because with some cleverness, people who had no shot at a book contract can now bypass the slush pile and get read. If Klein can keep an audience, then she deserves whatever comes from that,especially the good.
It's really nice to go out on a limb to defend your free speech rights, only to find out that you pretty much lied to everyone and fired no one for sticking in a porno easter egg in the game. You even lied about the hack.
Let me explain something. You have the right to make whatever game you want. But you have enemies and this is like handing them a big assed bat to beat you with.
Is everyone at your company an emotional 14 year old?
First, it was stupid to add more controversy to an already controversal product.
Second, when you were busted, you lied. Instead of firing or supending the people who did this, to save your ass, instead, you just handed the censors a big fat reason to fuck with your industry. Which is amazing.
I don't think you understand something. You want to be treated as an art form, you want the respect that movies and the written word have, act like fucking adults. If you are clueless, that means a wee bit more than just taking the games off the shelf.
You might want to apologize to Senator Clinton, because you're lying shits and if you don't, she will beat you stupid with your idiocy for years to come and we cannot defend you for that.
Then you might want to offer exchanges so people can get a porn free version.
Then, you might want to pledge to either label or incredibly enough, not include sexually explicit material in a game not related to sex.
Why?
Because you need to show contrition because you fucked up.
I have defended your free speech rights more than once and I feel like a mark, now. You lied, and a lot of people stood up for you and your company. We, if no one else, deserve an apology. You violated our trust and I for one, feel used.
The First Amendment isn't a fucking game. Your company needs ro act like adults and not teenagers. You hurt your industry and all those who work using the First Amendment, and for what? A programmers giggle?
Thanks a whole fucking lot for making our jobs harder.
An anxious new era in the life of New York City's subways opened with the morning rush yesterday as the police began widespread searches of bags and packages in a highly visible attempt to protect the busiest transit system in the United States.
At dozens of stations in four of the city's five boroughs, subway riders added a new element to their commuting routines, yielding their belongings to an inspection by a police officer. Some bus and ferry riders were also searched.
Two other transit carriers in the region announced that they, too, would begin random inspections, starting on Monday. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said it would conduct searches at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, on the two AirTrain lines at Kennedy and Newark Liberty International Airports, and on the PATH commuter railroad. "People are willing to endure some level of inconvenience to have a higher level of safety," the authority's chairman, Anthony R. Coscia, said in an interview.
New Jersey Transit, the largest statewide transit agency in the country, said it would begin inspections across its train, bus and light-rail networks. In a statement, Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey said the two bomb attacks this month on subways and buses in London made it "necessary to bring a new level of vigilance to our mass transit system."
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the subways, said its small police force conducted limited searches yesterday along the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad.
Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, said he could not predict how long the nation's mass transit agencies would remain on high alert, signaled by the color orange. "Part of the discussion of coming off orange will be asking how far to come off, how gradually, whether there should be different levels of alertness for different systems, depending on the threat picture," he said in a telephone interview.
The New York Police Department called the first day of searches a success, but it would not disclose the number of stations searched or the number of officers involved. A spokesman, Deputy Chief Michael Collins, said the searches did not turn up illegal weapons or drugs and did not result in any arrests. Officials said that the searches would continue during the weekend, though at a reduced pace, and that at least one person had refused to allow a search and left.
The presence of officers seemed to vary widely among the 468 subway stations. At 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, a sergeant used a bullhorn to tell passengers, "If you do not agree to inspection, you must exit the system." But at West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village, officers stood by as riders brought oversized backpacks, large rolling suitcases and lumpy laundry bags into the subway.
The police focused their efforts on monitoring access to the busiest stations during peak hours. Several commanders said they had directed their officers to stop every fifth rider carrying a large bag or package. The searches were mostly orderly, and officials said very few riders refused to comply or exited the subways.
Summer Fridays are slow in NY.
The real test, Monday, 8 AM. Let's see how well that goes.
By Carol D. Leonnig and Jim VandeHei Washington Post Staff Writers Saturday, July 23, 2005; Page A01
Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has been reviewing over the past several months discrepancies and gaps in witness testimony in his investigation of the unmasking of CIA operative Valerie Plame, according to lawyers in the case and witness statements.
Fitzgerald has spent considerable time since the summer of 2004 looking at possible conflicts between what White House senior adviser Karl Rove and vice presidential staff chief I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby told a grand jury and investigators, and the accounts of reporters who talked with the two men, according to various sources in the case.
Libby has testified that he learned about Plame from NBC correspondent Tim Russert, according to a source who spoke with The Washington Post some months ago. Russert said in a statement last year that he told the prosecutor that "he did not know Ms. Plame's name or that she was a CIA operative" and that he did not provide such information to Libby in July 2003.
Prosecutors have also probed Rove's testimony about his telephone conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in the crucial days before Plame's name was revealed in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak.
Rove has testified thathe and Cooper talked about welfare reform foremost and turned to the topic of Plame only near the end, lawyers involved in the case said. But Cooper, writing about his testimony in the most recent issue of Time, said he "can't find any record of talking about" welfare reform. "I don't recall doing so," Cooper wrote.
Both Libby's attorney and Rove's attorney declined to comment yesterday, as did Fitzgerald's office. The possible conflicts in the accounts given by Russert and Libby were first reported yesterday by Bloomberg News.
Fitzgerald's review of apparent discrepancies are further evidence that his investigation has ranged beyond his original mission to determine if someone broke the law by knowingly revealing the identity of a covert operative.
It's not the crime, it's the coverup.
Oh and he thinks the dauphin will save his ass, he should think again. He's only the help.
SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt - Three car bombs exploded in quick succession in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik early Saturday, ripping through a hotel and a coffeeshop packed with European and Egyptian tourists. The province governor said at least 49 people died in the deadliest attack in Egypt in nearly a decade.
The powerful blasts, beginning at 1:15 a.m., rattled windows miles away and sent panicked vacationers streaming out of hotels and clubs. Smoke and fire rose from Naama Bay, a main strip of beach hotels in the desert city at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, also popular with Israeli tourists, witnesses said.
Dazed tourists milled about the darkened streets as Egyptian rescuers searched for dead and injured. Bodies of the dead lay under white bedsheets or were loaded in plastic bags into ambulances, while other emergency vehicles sped away with the wounded.
"There seemed to be a lot of bodies strewn across the road" near one cafe, British policeman Chris Reynolds, visiting from Birmingham, England, told the BBC by telephone. "It was horrendous."
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which came nine months after simultaneous bombings hit two resort further north in Sinai, killing 34 people.
Aq hunting tourists. Even in a country with no rights and secret police, you can't stop determined killers
No, honey, they'll never see the sodomy pictures from Abu Ghraib
Bush is desperate to hide our crimes in Gitmo and Iraq
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Thursday threatened to veto a massive Senate bill for $442 billion in next year's defense programs if it moves to regulate the Pentagon's treatment of detainees or sets up a commission to investigate operations at Guantanamo Bay prison and elsewhere.
The Bush administration, under fire for the indefinite detention of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and questions over whether its policies led to horrendous abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, put lawmakers on notice it did not want them legislating on the matter. [...]
"If legislation is presented that would restrict the president's authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bring terrorists to justice," the bill could be vetoed, the statement said.
Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, who endured torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, said after meeting at the Capitol with Vice President Dick Cheney that he still intended to offer amendments next week "on the standard of treatment of prisoners."
South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who was working on legislation defining the legal status of enemy combatants being held in Guantanamo, also said he would offer an amendment.
I think the Rove investigation will turn up more dirt than we think.
The GOP has to decide at some point to cut Bush loose. Things will only get worse, and at some point, they will have to choose where their loyalty lies, with their sworn duty or their party.
July 22, 2005 -- Nadine Haobsh became the poster girl for the blogger generation yesterday.
The formerly anonymous wit behind the beauty blog "Jolie in NYC" lost not one, but two enviable publishing jobs ? all because of her online journal.
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"My boss regularly gets Marc Jacobs wallets and coats, plane-ticket vouchers, iPods, overnight stays at the Mandarin Oriental, yearlong gym memberships, and, of course, all the free highlights and haircuts your poor dyed, straightened and styled hair can stand," she once wrote.
The 24-year-old Barnard grad's online journal was a must-read with Vogue and Glamour peons and higher-ups. Other media-centric blogs like Gawker and Media Bistro pondered her identity.
But when news of her true self was unmasked in a mass e-mail this week ? and spread faster than an Est�e Lauder goody bag around a Cond� Nast office ? Haobsh saw the downside of fame.
Her bosses at Ladies' Home Journal "thought it displayed a lack of respect for the industry and a lack of professionalism," a contrite Haobsh said yesterday.
"I understand that," she said.
But all seemed OK for the rapier-keyboarded scribe since she was leaving to work for the bible of teen beauty ? Seventeen magazine.
Or maybe not.
"They took back the offer yesterday. They were very apologetic," she said. "They just simply said in light of the events they felt it was unprofessional."
A spokeswoman for Seventeen said, "Based on new information that was learned today, we have rescinded the offer." ........................
Meredith Publishing, publisher of Ladies' Home Journal and More, e-mailed employees to remind them that blogging was not encouraged, and employees keeping or commenting on blogs were required to tell their bosses.
Once again, I have to explain.
If you write about your job, you may well lose it. In this case, I'd apply to Columbia J School, because she has zero prosepects editing for fashion mags. Blackball is the word I would use. Fashion mags are brutal and this woman is unlikely to be an editor at them any time soon. People forget that when you write about your job on the Internet, it is no different than any form of publishing.
Especially after The Devil Wore Prada, the industry takes a dim view of insider gossip from the inside, without permission. You know, people love gossip, especially inside gossip, but when you get canned, they shake their heads and move on.
People confuse common sense with the First Amendment. Nowhere in the case law does it say you can't be made to pay for your words online. There is no right to not have a reaction to your ideas. And in some cases, that means losing your job.
The idea that one can write about their boss and have it become public AND keep their job boggles my mind.
A lot of people don't seem to understand that blogging is publishing. People mistake the casual nature of the writing for it being personal. It is not. It is a public statement no different than an interview in a magazine. So when you post catty comments about your boss, it is the same as doing so in an interview. And people have been fired after interviews.
Now I know some of you will defend her right to publish what she wants. Which is fine. But she cannot publish nasty things about her boss and expect to keep her job. The world doesn't work like that.
For God's sake, if you have to vent, protect yourself and some of the details of your life if you care about your job. There are a host of legal reasons, not just your boss's anger, which can cause you to lose your job because of a blog, mainly your opinions reflect upon your employer and can be used against them. You know even I have limits as to what I can say and how I can say it. Libel and defamation laws can visit me as well.
Yes, he bought the home with coin money. Why was Ohio investing in coins? He was a Republican, silly.
Petro: Noe stole millions Coin deals described as 'Ponzi' scheme By JAMES DREW and STEVE EDER BLADE STAFF WRITERS
COLUMBUS ? Tom Noe stole millions of dollars from the state and used a ?Ponzi? scheme to fabricate profits within the state?s $50 million rare-coin investment, Ohio?s attorney general said yesterday.
?There was an absolute theft of funds going on,? Attorney General Jim Petro said.
Mr. Petro said there is evidence that Mr. Noe pocketed nearly $4 million in money invested with the coin fund through the Ohio Bureau of Workers? Compensation since 1998.
Mr. Petro asked a judge to further restrict the former Toledo-area coin dealer from selling personal assets because he believes they may have been purchased with state money.
State officials yesterday laid out a complicated scheme of payments between companies Mr. Noe controlled, which they say resulted in the theft of state money.
The attorney general said the theft began on March 31, 1998, the day Mr. Noe received the first of two $25 million payments from the workers? compensation bureau, and continued until late May ? more than eight weeks after The Blade first reported on April 3 that there were problems with the state?s investment.
?On Day One, Tom Noe took $1.375 million and put it in his personal or his business account,? Mr. Petro said. Records show that Mr. Noe immediately began using the state?s money for his personal use, the attorney general said.
A week later, Mr. Noe and his wife, Bernadette, made $4,500 in contributions to then-Secretary of State Bob Taft?s campaign for governor.
In the three months after the $1.375 million transfer of state funds, Mr. Noe made thousands of dollars in political contributions, including an additional $2,500 to Mr. Taft, $2,000 to then-Gov. George Voinovich?s Senate campaign, and $500 to Mr. Petro?s campaign for re-election to the state auditor post he held before becoming attorney general.
When asked if he believed the state?s money had been used for campaign contributions, Mr. Petro said: ?I don?t see that. I mean, clearly, Tom Noe personally contributed to campaigns and the source of his funds could very well be public money.?
Ths story has been kicking around online, but now, it's clear the biggest booster of the Ohio GOP stole millions while his friends in government, including Rastus Blackwell, smiled and took his money.
The state invested in coins of all things and was shocked to find out that not only did they lose money, but now that it was stolen as well, in fact that he was running a freaking ponzi scheme is all too amusing. This guy seems to have thought he could steal state money, live well and no one would notice.
Police today shot a man dead at Stockwell tube station in south London.
Scotland Yard said: "We can confirm that just after 10am armed officers entered Stockwell tube station. A man was challenged by officers and subsequently shot. London ambulance service attended the scene. He was pronounced dead at the scene."
A witness described the man being "shot dead" in front of him as an officer "unloaded five shots" from a pistol. Another witness said he heard three shots.
Passenger Mark Whitby said he was sat on a Northern Line train when three plainclothes officers ran on in "hot pursuit" of an Asian man.
He told BBC News: "I heard lots of shouts of 'get down, get down'. I looked to my right and I saw an Asian man run on the train. As he ran on he half tripped."
He said the man was being pursued by three plainclothes officers who ran on just a few feet behind him.
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Muslim leaders called on the police to explain why an Asian man was shot dead at Stockwell station this morning. The Muslim Council of Britain said Muslims were concerned there was a "shoot to kill" policy in operation.
A spokesman said Muslims he had spoken to this morning were "jumpy and nervous". Inayat Bunglawala said: "I have just had one phone call saying 'What if I was carrying a rucksack?'.
"It's vital the police give a statement about what occurred and explain why the man was shot dead. There may well be reasons why the police felt it necessary to unload five shots into the man and shoot him dead, but they need to make those reasons clear.
"We are getting phone calls from quite a lot of Muslims who are distressed about what may be a shoot to kill policy."
He said in the current atmosphere Muslims were very afraid and other people were looking at them in a very suspicious manner."
When it turns out that he was a loon or recent immigrant and not a bomber and was basically shot for running, what will the Met say then? Shot for being dark and running from the cops? The bombers looked normal, they wouldn't have run. But who knows why they shot.
London was once again a city of migrants yesterday. For the second time in two weeks, the capital's streets were filled not with the usual cars and buses but thick, snaking columns of people on the move.
These refugees from the city did not march with wagons piled high or bundles on their back, but with suitcases on wheels and mobile phones in their hands - just as they had a fortnight ago. Told that the London Underground had been closed, they were setting off on the long march back home.
"Oh no, not again," was the first thought to pass through Isabelle Hans's mind. A charity worker, she found herself barred from her office just around the corner from Warren Street tube, the building hidden behind the blue and white plastic ribbons of a police cordon - just as it had been on July 7.
Initial word suggested a macabre rerun of that fateful day: four explosions, three trains and a bus, one blast for each point of the compass around the centre of London. .............................
Even if the ritual was a repeat, the mood seemed different. Much was made of the stoicism of Londoners on July 7, an unruffled calm exhibited even by those who narrowly escaped the attacks. Yesterday, by all accounts, was not like that.
Witnesses at the Oval station and elsewhere said that once they heard the sound of an explosion, or breathed in the acrid smell of smoke, passengers fell rapidly into a collective panic.
There were reports of desperate stampedes as people rushed to get off trains and out of stations.
One man at Warren Street station showed the television cameras a pile of sandals and flip-flops he had collected - abandoned by their owners as they "ran for their lives"
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Dean Seddon, 23, had made the salesman's journey to London from St Helens - against his wife's wishes. "She was going mad with me for coming," he said. At Charing Cross station he had been faced with a "wave of people, saying 'Run! Run!'" And now he thought his wife was right. Pulling his trolley-suitcase, hoping he could somehow get back to Merseyside, he had resolved not to come back to the capital "for a while" at least.
Heidi Ashton, 20, had her three-year-old son asleep in a pushchair and had made up her mind too. No more buses or tubes for her, and certainly not for her child. Ms Jackson had just got off the phone after speaking to her parents, back in her native Canada. They had told her that enough was enough; it was time to come home.
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Ms Leeven said she had not seen anyone rushed or panicked, but rather "walking around with a question mark on their faces." It seemed to describe London itself: not quaking - yet - nor deluged with fresh grief. But etched with a giant question mark, wondering what tomorrow might bring.
All of the talk about resolve was bullshit, it cracked in two weeks anyway.
But what is the point of this anyway? To make life worse for Muslims in Britain? All it will do is set Special Branch and MI-5 on the community until these folks are rooted out. Terrorism is a failed tactic. They aren't the IRA, they don't have that kind of support. There is no deal to cut,.only jail.
As the New York Police Department begins randomly checking the bags and backpacks of people entering the city's subway system, it is entering largely uncharted legal terrain, where the requirements of protecting the public against terrorism may run into the constitutional right to privacy.
Civil libertarians began expressing their concerns even as the policy was announced yesterday. "We all have an interest in protecting our safety and security as we ride the trains," said Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "However, searches without suspicion of wrongdoing are fundamentally at odds with our constitutional guarantee of privacy, and placing unfettered discretion in the hands of the police invites racial, religious and ethnic profiling."
Lawyers said the new policy is almost certain to be challenged under the Fourth Amendment, which bars "unreasonable searches and seizures." In the past, courts have held that when the police search people for a law enforcement purpose, the amendment requires that there be "individualized suspicion" to warrant the search.
In 2000, for instance, the United States Supreme Court overturned the drug conviction of a bus passenger, ruling that a Border Patrol agent's decision to feel his bag "in an exploratory manner" was a violation of his privacy.
Much is likely to depend on the way the New York program is carried out. Police officials have said that riders who do not wish to have their bags searched will be free to leave the city's trains without further questioning. They have also said that anyone found to be carrying illegal drugs or weapons will be subject to arrest, a provision that lawyers have found troubling.
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In New York, the police began randomly searching bags at protests after the Sept 11. attack. But the New York Civil Liberties Union challenged the practice, and last summer a federal judge in Manhattan declared it unconstitutional.
This is a lawyer's employment act, if nothing else. I want a safe and secure New York, but not at any price, and not stupidly done. There is NO reason for this, as the cops will have to admit in court. The London attacks are home grown and there is NO indication that an attack is being planned. It is a response to the news in an election year, nothing more. They may catch a very stupid bomber. They are likely not to, and cost the city millions in legal settlements.
Bloomberg has shown a rather easy use of state power to limit rights. Not as flashy as Giuliani, but in some ways far more troubling. First, it was critical mass, second, the RNC protestors, now this draconian and rather stupid use of police power.
New York has 41,000 cops and 4.5 million train riders. And of course, those consenting to the search can be arrested for anything found in their bag. Perfect cop logic, but unlikely to make it to court. Lieberman is kind. I would expect any young, brownskinned male with a backpack to have an encounter with the cops upon using public transportation. Anyone even vaguely Indian looking under 30 will get shit when this happens.
I do not believe Bloomberg has a racial animus. Or Kelly. But this idiotic idea is from staff, who can think up any shit and defend it, until bad things happen. And one can bet that cops will use to search any person they want, read young black and Puerto Rican. They may stop a few others to make it look good, but I would bet that you're gonna see some real 4th Amendment issues. Because while cops are not stupid, they will use the law anyway they can. Staff probably said we have to do something and this is the something, an unconstutional, even dangerous idea.
What non-New Yorkers don't understand is the Canute-like task this is. We're talking hundreds of people a minute going into major stations like Jamaica Avenue, 72nd and Broadway, Borough Hall. These are all choke points for commuters. 72nd and Broadway handles thousands of people every few minutes in rush hour. To expect police to pull people out and search them is to ask for a confrontation. People accept the idea, but the reality, them missing a train for work, will be a very different thing.
Even scarier is the weather. Any delay in entering a subway subjects people to brtual heat, as does being on the subway platform.
Real security would involve installing thousands of cameras in the subway, keeping open token booths and hiring more police specifically to deal with the subway, as New York once had. It doesn't involve the impossible, which this is.
At best, they will only check a few bags, but given the NYPD's habits, expect a lot of screaming in the next few days.
And before anyone argues that this is about security, the Transit Union had to hire their own security expert. The MTA is far too busy selling assets for bargain prices. Bloomberg should have been fighting with Washington for more Homeland Security aid, not harassing New Yorkers.
Americans will not accept French or British terrorism laws if it imfringes on their rights. People may toleratre the bag searches at first, but evetually someone will refuse to have their bag search, attempt to enter the train and be arrested. Regardless of the danger, Americans will protect their rights. Even if it means terrorists buying .50 caliber rifles.
The Army told John Conroy on July 8 that it did not want him, despite his master's degree in business and his marathon-proven fitness. Just shy of 41, he is too old.
But by next year, Mr. Conroy could be in a uniform.
With the Army, Army Reserve and Army National Guard all on pace to fall short of their recruitment goals for the year, the military is reconsidering its age limits for recruits.
Allowing older soldiers could be costly in terms of benefits, and there is the thorny issue of whether older men and women can keep up with the young. But many in the military argue that 40-somethings are in better physical shape today and point out that thousands of middle-age soldiers are already rotating through Iraq.
On Monday, the Pentagon filed documents asking Congress to increase the maximum age for military recruits to 42, in all branches of the service. Now, the limit is 39 for people without previous military service who want to enlist in the reserves and the National Guard, and 35 for those seeking active duty.
At a subcommittee hearing in the House on Tuesday, David S. C. Chu, under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said lifting the age limit was one of several tools needed to turn recruitment around.
"There is a segment of the population that is older, that would like to serve," Mr. Chu said at the hearing, "and we'd like to open up that aperture for the military departments to use as they see fit."
When asked how 42 was chosen, Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said Wednesday that it would bring the policy in line with a recent provision that allows the military to commission officers until that age. Even if the age limit is raised, she said, the Marines and Air Force planned to accept new enlistees only through age 35.
Desperation.
I could go on about this, but it's pretty fucking obvious.
This article was reported by David Johnston, Douglas Jehl and Richard W. Stevenson and was written by Mr. Johnston.
WASHINGTON, July 21 - At the same time in July 2003 that a C.I.A. operative's identity was exposed, two key White House officials who talked to journalists about the officer were also working closely together on a related underlying issue: whether President Bush was correct in suggesting earlier that year that Iraq had been trying to acquire nuclear materials from Africa.
The two issues had become inextricably linked because Joseph C. Wilson IV, the husband of the unmasked C.I.A. officer, had questioned Mr. Bush's assertion, prompting a damage-control effort by the White House that included challenging Mr. Wilson's standing and his credentials. A federal grand jury investigation is under way by a special counsel to determine whether someone illegally leaked the officer's identity and possibly into whether perjury or obstruction of justice occurred during the inquiry.
People who have been briefed on the case said the White House officials, Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby, were helping prepare what became the administration's primary response to criticism that a flawed phrase about the nuclear materials in Africa had been in Mr. Bush's State of the Union address six months earlier.
They had exchanged e-mail correspondence and drafts of a proposed statement by George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, to explain how the disputed wording had gotten into the address. Mr. Rove, the president's political strategist, and Mr. Libby, the chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, coordinated their efforts with Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, who was in turn consulting with Mr. Tenet.
At the same time, they were grappling with the fallout from an Op-Ed article on July 6, 2003, in The New York Times by Mr. Wilson, a former diplomat, in which he criticized the way the administration had used intelligence to support the claim in Mr. Bush's speech.
The work done by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby on the Tenet statement during this intense period has not been previously disclosed. People who have been briefed on the case discussed this critical time period and the events surrounding it to demonstrate that Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby were not involved in an orchestrated scheme to discredit Mr. Wilson or disclose the undercover status of his wife, Valerie Wilson, but were intent on clarifying the use of intelligence in the president's address. Those people who have been briefed requested anonymity because prosecutors have asked them not to discuss matters under investigation.
The special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has been examining this period of time to determine whether the officials' work on the Tenet statement led in some way to the disclosure of Ms. Wilson's identity to Robert D. Novak, the syndicated columnist, according to the people who have been briefed.
SALEM, Ore. -- Oregon would become the first state to require a prescription for many types of cold medicines under a bill overwhelmingly passed Wednesday by the House as part of an attack on methamphetamine.
Pseudoephedrine, an ingredient in popular over-the counter medicines such as Sudafed and Sinutab, is used to make meth, an illegal and powerfully addictive drug.
The bill was sent to the Senate on a 55-4 vote. Supporters said they expect the measure to pass in the Senate, and it is supported by Gov. Ted Kulongoski.
"A plague has spread across America," said state Rep. Greg Macpherson, a Democrat. "This is what we must do in this state to get this problem under control."
Oregon, like several other states, already restricts the sale of pseudoephedrine-based cold medicine to pharmacies and requires that the medications be kept behind the counter. Customers must also show identification.
Jen
Gilly--I know it's a big news day, but PLEASE run this story. This is INSANE, and will make it almost impossible for allergy sufferers and borderline-perscription-meds needers to get otherwise very safe treatment that they need to live normally. As noted earlier, all this will do is stop the Home Rocket Scientists and do nothing to stop big producers who use even more dangerous stuff, like fertilizer, to cook speed.
LONDON (Reuters) - The word "fail" should be banned from use in British classrooms and replaced with the phrase "deferred success" to avoid demoralizing pupils, a group of teachers has proposed.
Members of the Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) argue that telling pupils they have failed can put them off learning for life.
Subway passengers should be prepared to open up their bags or packages beginning Friday morning, under a police plan to conduct random searches of those entering the system.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said officers will choose people using a numerical system that will seek to prevent racial profiling.
"Every certain number of people will be checked and it won't be done -- certainly no racial profiling will be allowed - it's against our policies - but it will be a systemized approach to checking bags," Kelly said.
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Kelly said the searches will be done before passengers enter the subways, generally before they swipe their MetroCards.
"Ideally it will be before you go through the turnstyle - you have a right to turn around and leave," Kelly said. "But we also reserve the right to do those types of searches if in fact someone is already inside the system."
So, when this reaches federal court, and the numbers show few whites being searched, what will Kelly say then? I seriously doubt blonde hair/blue eyed Jen will ever be stopped by the security theater players. This is one of the dumbest fucking ideas ever. Cops harassing blacks and puerto ricans, fucking with any brown person, actually. Oh yeah, causing a traffic jam a suicide bomber would love.
So what if the cops see a bag of weed? Does the person get arrested?
This will be in court by the end of next week.
It's the illusion of security, not actual security. People say they'll agree with it atr first, but when the first mom is late to pick up her kid, wigs out and gets arrested, this stupid idea will be exposed for the idiocy it is.
Look, the job of stopping terror is the CIA's and FBI's. Bored cops checking out tits is not security and terrorists know it. They may catch a bomb, but more likley, they're going to catch lawsuits.
After the four suicide bombers in London were identified last week, news accounts focused on life in the old mill town of Leeds, where they grew up: the immigrant enclaves, the high unemployment, the rising anger and alienation of Muslim residents. Some Britons grasping for an explanation pointed at those conditions, however tentative their link to homegrown terrorism.
Mahendra Kumar Patel, the manager of Patel's Cash and Carry in Jersey City, has immigrants of many ethnic groups as customers.
That rough sketch of Leeds had a familiar ring for many residents of the Northeastern United States, where old mill towns in New Jersey and upstate New York have also drawn many immigrants to faded neighborhoods teetering between blight and renewal.
Three of the suspects were raised in immigrant families from Pakistan and one from Jamaica. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are now home to at least 20 percent of the nation's 219,000 Pakistani immigrants, and more than half of the 513,000 immigrants from Jamaica.
But the differences between the suspects' hometown and the depressed cities around New York are actually stronger than the similarities. Social conditions among British immigrants, for example, appear to be considerably worse than they are in the United States.
The 747,000 Pakistanis in Britain, counted among its nonwhite residents, are three times more likely to be out of work than white Britons, according to one of several bleak statistics showcased in the 2001 British census. Forty percent of Pakistani women and 28 percent of Pakistani men are listed as having no job qualifications, and school failure among Caribbean blacks is triple the rate for white Britons, who constitute 92 percent of the population.
In America, where few surveys even break out ethnic origins, a much rosier picture emerges from available figures. Pakistani household incomes in New York are close to the $43,393 median and exceed it in New Jersey - $56,566 compared with $55,145, according to 1999 figures, the most recent available. Jamaicans fare a little less well statewide, but have robust rates of household income and educational success in New York City, where they are concentrated. They have a clear edge: English proficiency in a place where one in four residents cannot speak it well, and where nearly half of the work force is foreign-born.
While South Asian immigrants to Britain began arriving soon after World War II, they were part of a stream of temporary workers to a small, culturally homogenous country where they remained outsiders. In the United States, the pioneer immigrants from predominantly Muslim lands arrived mainly after 1980, many as university students, and like Caribbean blacks, entered a diverse country built on immigration.
But demographics fall short of explaining terrorism. As details emerged about the British suspects' relatively prosperous lives, experts and immigrant parents alike wondered how much collective benchmarks mean in predicting the extremism of a handful of angry people.
Compared with Britain, "We definitely have a different dynamic going on here in the United States," said Peter Skerry, a political scientist at Boston College. "I don't know that that necessarily means we're out of the woods - it doesn't take very much for a set of individuals to adopt attitudes that could lead to a terrorist act."
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In a Jersey City shop where fresh goat meat and comic videos in Urdu compete for shelf space, Zafar Zafar, a Pakistani father of three, echoed such concerns last week. Mr. Zafar, whose oldest child is 13, struggled in imperfect English to convey his horror at the case of Shahzad Tanweer, 22, the suspect described as a pious but fun-loving youth whose father owned a fish-and-chips shop in Leeds.
"It's like a bad dream," Mr. Zafar said. "Someone, crazy guys, make brainwashing." He added, "We need protection. Like, every week, two times a week, all youngsters in community should go together, and someone is teaching them, 'This should no happen again.' "
The difference is simple, and it's one both Americans and Britions need to deal with.
In the US, while racist, South Asians tend to be accepted far more easily and the community far more diverse. It is also far easier for Muslims of all ethnicities to become part of public life. join the Army, the last figure I saw was that 2 percent of the British Army is non-white, become public servants. There is no one way to be an American.
Also, many Americans are likely to see South Asians in positions of authority, like in college or a hospital. It is also much more difficult to isolate yourself in the US. Indian stores sit side by side Filipino stores and bodegas in Jersey City. The kids all play together. Socialization is encouraged to the point that South Asians and Arabs join the US military. Which is no small deal. Europeans have grudgingly created multicultural societies, but refused to create a single social identity. What people who haven't visited America don't get is that there is no one way to define American. Anyone can be an American, keep their culture, their language as long as they follow the law. The Yemeni guys who sell me the paper every morning are as American as the Indian guys in the Deli next door and as their customers.
South Asians are just another group who chose to be Americans. Remember, in Europe, there are anit-immigration parties. Politicians here are usually treated as little better than jokes (Tom Tancredo). We have foiled terrorists attacks here, but what is so frightening about these bombings is the sense of isolation these people feel from the wider society.
LONDON - Explosions struck three London Underground stations and a bus at midday Thursday in a chilling but less deadly replay of the suicide bombings that killed 56 people two weeks ago.
Only one person was reported wounded, but the lunch-hour explosions caused major shock and disruption in the capital and were hauntingly similar to the July 7 bombings by four attackers.
The London police commissioner confirmed Thursday that four explosions took place in what he described as "a very serious incident."
"We've had four explosions ? four attempts at explosions," Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair said outside police headquarters at Scotland Yard.
"At the moment the casualty numbers appear to be very low ... the bombs appear to be smaller" than those detonated July 7.
Police also said an armed police unit had entered University College hospital. Press Association, the British news agency, said they arrived shortly after an injured person was carried in.
Sky News TV reported that police were searching for a man with a blue shirt with wires protruding. In a memo to hospital staff, officers asked employees to look for a black or Asian male, 6 feet 2 inches tall, wearing a blue top with a hole in the back and wires protruding
So how could this happen with MI-5 and Special Branch all over these people like ticks on a dog's ass?
Either sympathy for these folks runs a lot deeper than anyone wants to admit, or the security services know a lot less than they think.
Blair needs to stop pretending Iraq has nothing to do with this. It is the last straw. It is no excuse for random murder, but the isolation and anger of radical British muslims is mutating into something quite malevolent and self-destructive. The support for these people is wide enough that a second bomber team wasn't immediately offered up to Special Branch. And seeing Iraq on the news every night is a constant reminder of what offends them.
So far, these have been people who have not only been born in the UK, but are British in every way as well, from accent to tastes, yet they can do this.
This is not just a failure of British Muslim society, but the wider society as well. To have these people feel so isolated and angry is a failure of an entire society.
By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, July 21, 2005; C01
At 1:27 a.m. yesterday, the Guerilla Women of Tennessee weighed in on President Bush's Supreme Court nominee.
"John Roberts: Married to Anti-Choice Org VP," the group's Web site blared. Another site, A Liberal Dose, asked: "Why does John G. Roberts Hate Our Soldiers?"
And Feministing.com made no attempt at subtlety: "Why John Roberts Sucks."
The lightning-quick attacks came after 50 top liberal bloggers held a 45-minute conference call Tuesday night. "On the left, we've always talked about the need to have an echo chamber," says John Aravosis, a Washington lawyer and gay rights activist who writes at Americablog.com. "We believe the right has a whole media network, from talk radio to Fox News to Matt Drudge. The left doesn't have that because the left doesn't play well with others."
This is the first Supreme Court nomination of the Internet age, meaning that liberal and conservative opinion-mongers are already blanketing cyberspace with arguments, facts, taunts, polemics, gossip and electronic links to raw data, hoping to rally the faithful and influence the mainstream media coverage.
The conference call was arranged by BlogPAC, a political action committee that got some of its members on the phone with Sen. Ted Kennedy on the day that Sandra Day O'Connor announced she was leaving the court. The group has also held calls with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.), Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) and the liberal organizations involved in the nomination battle, including MoveOn, Alliance for Justice, NARAL and People for the American Way.
Kennedy "reached out to them directly to convey the impact that this decision will have on hundreds of millions of Americans, whose last line of defense for their freedoms and liberties is the Supreme Court," says Laura Capps, the senator's spokeswoman.
Such coordination seems to defy the image of bloggers as iconoclastic lone rangers, pounding the keyboards in their bedrooms and basements without regard to interest-group politics. Bloggers, after all, come from all walks of life, building a following on the strength of their words and ability to draw attention from other Web diarists. They have also proven to be a formidable fundraising force, raising $80,000 on Tuesday for a Democratic candidate in a special House e
