Musings, Wisdoms and Follies

Yahoo! News - All members of primitive tribe survived tsunami

2005-03-03T23:38:00.000-05:00

Yahoo! News - All members of primitive tribe survived tsunami

Unbelievable

2005-01-18T23:09:00.000-05:00

News: "Las Vegas Weatherman Fired for MLK Slur

LAS VEGAS (AP) - A television weatherman was fired after referring to slain civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. as ``Martin Luther Coon King'' on the air, station officials said.
Rob Blair, of KTNV-TV, was delivering the extended forecast Saturday morning when he said: ``Martin Luther Coon King Jr. Day, gonna see some temperatures in the mid-60s.''
Jim Prather, vice president and general manager of the ABC affiliate, said Blair stumbled when he uttered the remark, but the excuse was not enough to save his job.
``This kind of incident is not acceptable under any circumstances, and I'm truly sorry that this event occurred,'' Prather said.
Blair, who worked at the station for about three months, apologized during the station's 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts Saturday.
``I in no way intended to offend anyone,'' he said in the apology. ``I'm very sorry.'' "

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Land of Penny Pinchers

2005-01-06T13:17:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Land of Penny Pinchers: "By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

o is the U.S. 'stingy' about helping poor countries?
That accusation by a U.N. official, in veiled form, provoked indignation here. After all, we're the most generous people on earth ... aren't we?
No, alas, we're not. And the tsunami illustrates the problem: When grieving victims intrude onto our TV screens, we dig into our pockets and provide the massive, heartwarming response that we're now displaying in Asia; the rest of the time, we're tightwads who turn away as people die in far greater numbers.
The 150,000 or so fatalities from the tsunami are well within the margin of error for estimates of the number of deaths every year from malaria. Probably two million people die annually of malaria, most of them children and most in Africa, or maybe it's three million - we don't even know.
But the bottom line is that this month and every month, more people will die of malaria (165,000 or more) and AIDS (240,000) than died in the tsunamis, and almost as many will die because of diarrhea ( 140,000).
And that's where we're stingy.
Americans give 15 cents per day per person in official development assistance to poor countries. The average American spends four times that on soft drinks daily.
In 2003, the latest year for which figures are available, we increased such assistance by one-fifth, for President Bush has actually been much better about helping poor countries than President Clinton was. But as a share of our economy, our contribution still left us ranked dead last among 22 top donor countries.
We gave 15 cents for every $100 of national income to poor countries. Denmark gave 84 cents, the Netherlands gave 80 cents,"

Elephants Help Clear Debris in Thailand

2005-01-03T21:35:00.000-05:00

Yahoo! News - Elephants Help Clear Debris in Thailand: "A year ago, they were filming battle scenes for the movie 'Alexander.' Now six elephants are pitching in to help with the massive cleanup from the tsunami that devastated many of Thailand's prime tourist destinations"

While heavy machinery works on the tangled wreckage that used to be posh seafront resorts, some areas are too muddy or hilly for anything other than 4 foot drive.
So the Wang Chang elephant farm in the 17th-century Thai capital of Ayuddhaya offered to send in its best pachyderms. They arrived by truck Sunday in Phang Nga and got to work immediately — after a quick shower to cool off in the tropical heat.
"The six were chosen because they are smart and can act on command," said Romthongsai Meephan, one of the elephant farm's owners.
The elephants, all males, were cast with Colin Farrell and Angelina Jolie in "Alexander," recreating their ancient roles as battle tanks. Today, they mostly entertain tourists and give them tours around Ayuddhaya, but they also are experienced at dragging logs through forests.
"They will be assigned to work in towing heavy objects and pulling out debris," said Siriphong Leeprasit, a district official in Phang Nga. "Elephants could work better in pulling out the remains of collapsed buildings and houses, especially in areas flooded with mud or hilly areas."
In Indonesia, another 11 elephants — native to badly hit Sumatra island — have been pressed into similar duty because there were few trucks and other heavy equipment to do the job there. A TV report showed them pulling a sport utility vehicle from a collapsed building.
Cranes and backhoes have been used to open routes to areas cut off in Thailand, but many local residents have complained that assistance has been slow to arrive and some areas have still not been accessed, particularly near Khao Lak beach, another hard-hit tourist zone about 50 miles north of Phuket.

So two of the elephants headed into a rough forested road that was blocked by uprooted palm trees, cement utility poles, cars, motorbikes and TV sets. A gray police patrol boat had washed up on a hill, more than a mile from the beach. The receding waters left behind two murky saltwater lakes.

The beasts were watered down by their trainers, called mahouts, then began using their trunks and tusks to clear the road. One mahout clambered aboard each elephant, with two others on the ground leading them.
The animals made quick work of huge muddy clumps of plant material and didn't need much more time to handle the heavy utility pylons. Then, after a little lunch, they were ready to start the next task.

Dog Rescues 7-Year-Old in India

2005-01-03T21:29:00.000-05:00

Yahoo! News - Dog Rescues 7-Year-Old in India
"Run away!" her husband screamed from a rooftop after he spotted the colossal waves. The command was simple but it presented Sangeeta with a dilemma: She had three sons, and only two arms.
She grabbed the youngest two and ran — figuring the oldest, 7-year-old Dinakaran, had the best chance of outrunning the tsunami churning toward her home.
But Dinakaran didn't follow. He headed for the safest place he knew, the small family hut just 40 yards from the seashore.
Sangeeta thought she would never see him again. The family dog saw to it that she did.
While water lapped at Sangeeta's heels as she rushed up the hill, the scruffy yellow dog named Selvakumar ducked into the hut after Dinakaran.
Nipping and nudging, he did everything in his canine power to get the boy up the hill.
Sangeeta, who like many south Indians only uses one name, had no idea of the drama unfolding below. Once she had crossed the main road to safety she collapsed into tears, screaming over the loss of her eldest son.
"I had heard from others that the wall of my house had collapsed, I felt sure that my child had died," said the 24-year-old mother.

Selvakumar looks pretty much like every other dog in the village. He hardly ever barks and lets the three boys climb all over him and pull his tail without protest. At night, he joins the rest of the family and sleeps among them, no matter how may times they throw him out.
Most days, the dog escorts Dinakaran to and from school, spending the rest of the day playing with the other two boys, or begging for food.

Sangeeta's brother-in-law gave her the puppy, following the birth of her second son. When the brother-in-law died in an accident two years ago, they changed the dog's name to his.
Sangeeta's husband, R. Ramakrishnan, had just returned from his early morning fishing with a boat full of fish.
From their home, the view of the ocean was obstructed by a two-story community center. So when they heard a strange noise coming from the sea, Sangeeta's husband went to investigate.
When Ramakrishnan saw the waves, he ran to the roof of the center and shouted down to Sangeeta to flee. That's when she made her agonizing choice.
"He is somewhat older than the other two. I knew he would be able to run, so I grabbed the other two," Sangeeta explained.

Dinakaran credits the dog with saving his life.
"That dog grabbed me by the collar of my shirt," the boy said from under some trees at Pondicherry University, where the family is waiting for relief. "He dragged me out."
Sangeeta said she wept with joy when she saw her son walking up to her, with Selvakumar by his side.
The Tamils of south India believe that talking about the death of a living person can make it so, so Sangeeta didn't want to mull over her decision or speculate how she would have felt had her son not survived.
She did say that she believes some special spirit, perhaps her brother-in-law's, resides in the young yellow dog.
"That dog is my God," said Sangeeta — with Dinakaran sitting on the ground at her feet and Selvakumar sleeping on the warm asphalt next to him.

Yahoo! News - Tsunami Death Toll Rockets to 114,000

2004-12-30T13:56:00.000-05:00

Yahoo! News - Tsunami Death Toll Rockets to 114,000: "BANDA ACEH, Indonesia - The death toll from last weekend's earthquake-tsunami catastrophe rose to more than 114,000 on Thursday as Indonesia uncovered more and more dead from ravaged Sumatra island, where pilots dropped food to remote villages still unreachable by rescue workers. A false alarm that new killer waves were about to hit sparked panic in India, Sri Lanka and Thailand. "

2004-12-13T18:03:00.000-05:00

Blast Kills 13 Year After Saddam Capture
By PAUL GARWOODAssociated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- An al-Qaida-linked suicide bomber blew up his vehicle Monday near cars waiting to enter the Green Zone, home to the U.S. Embassy and Iraq's interim government, killing 13 Iraqis on the anniversary of Saddam Hussein's capture.
As insurgents continued to step up attacks against U.S. and Iraqi forces ahead of next month's elections, the country's interim president said Washington was wrong for dismantling Iraq's security forces, including its 350,000-strong army, after last year's invasion.
"Definitely dissolving the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Interior was a big mistake," Ghazi al-Yawer told British Broadcasting Corp. radio, saying it would have been more effective to screen out former regime loyalists than to rebuild from scratch.
He added: "As soon as we have efficient security forces that we can depend on we can see the beginning of the withdrawal of forces from our friends and partners and I think it doesn't take years, it will take months."
U.S. military commanders, however, say American forces will be in Iraq for several years and that troop numbers will rise from 138,000 to 150,000 before the Jan. 30 national elections, which many Iraqis fear could be targeted by militants opposed to the occupation and bent on derailing the political process.

2004-12-13T17:52:00.000-05:00

How real is all this? If it wasn't for truthout.com, I wouldn't hear much about Ohio at all. Where's the Today show coverage. Or is it just a lot of wishful thinkers who can't believe the mess we're in?
Protesters Urge Delay for Ohio Electors
Sun Dec 12, 5:49 PM ET
By JOHN McCARTHY, Associated Press Writer
COLUMBUS, Ohio - As it has done for 200 years, Ohio's delegation to the Electoral College (news - web sites) is to meet Monday to cast ballots for president and vice president — but this time, there are demands that the electors wait until after a recount. A demonstration was held Sunday as about 100 people gathered outside the Ohio Statehouse to protest the delegation's vote.
The Electoral College's vote in the Ohio Senate chamber is expected to be accompanied by demonstrations outside the Capitol sponsored by groups who don't accept that President Bush (news - web sites) won the key swing state by 119,000 votes, guaranteeing his victory over Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites).
Led by a coalition representing the Green and Libertarian parties, the dissidents are paying for recounts in each of Ohio's 88 counties that will begin this week. The recount is not expected to be complete until next week.
"John Kerry conceded so early in the process that it's maddening," said Kat L'Estrange of We Do Not Concede, an activist group born after the election that believes Kerry was the real winner in Ohio and nationally.
L'Estrange, Susan Truitt of the Columbus-based Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, and others demanded that the electoral vote be put off until the recount is completed.
"In Ohio, there has not been a final determination. Therefore, any meeting of the Electoral College in Ohio prior to a full recount would in fact be an illegitimate gathering," said John Bonifaz of the National Voting Rights Institute.
The dissidents claim there were disparities in vote totals for Democrats, too few voting machines in Democrat-leaning precincts, organized campaigns directing voters to the wrong polling place and confusion over the counting of provisional ballots by voters whose names did not appear in the books at polling places.
The Kerry campaign does not dispute that Bush won the election, but supports the Ohio recount. Kerry issued a statement Wednesday saying reported voting problems should be investigated to ensure there are no doubts in future elections.

2004-12-09T20:12:00.000-05:00

Defining VictoryAs Chaos MountsIn Iraq, U.S. ArmyRethinks Its Future
Amid Signs Its Plan Fell Short,Service Sees Ben efits Of Big Tanks, Translators
Mock Raids and Reading Lists
By GREG JAFFE Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNALDecember 8, 2004; Page A1
Shortly after the U.S. deposed Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003, the Army kicked off its annual "war game," a mock battle in which U.S. forces set out to topple another Middle Eastern regime.
Set 10 years in the future, the game featured a force built around a light, fast, armored vehicle that the Army planned to start producing in 2010. The Army attacked from seven dizzying directions and, when the game ended, appeared on the verge of shattering the enemy force.
"We walked out and patted ourselves on the back and said 'marvelous job,' " says retired Lt. Gen. William Carter, who commanded U.S. forces in the game. "We didn't understand that what we were seeing in those games wasn't victory."
Today, the exercise stands as a stark example of how senior Army leaders and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the years leading up to the Iraq invasion were guided by a flawed understanding of how future enemies would fight.
Swift Strikes
The Iraq attack was built on the premise that speed and high-tech equipment could radically change the way war was fought. Short, swift attacks against key targets -- such as communications stations and headquarters -- could confuse enemy forces and isolate them from their commanders, according to both Army and Defense Department doctrine. If you chopped off the enemy's head, the theory went, the whole body would die. Getting to the fight faster became the focus of modernization plans for the Army and all other U.S. armed services.
Now, the escalating insurgency in Iraq is showing that lightning assaults can quickly topple a regime -- but also unleash problems for which small, fast, high-tech U.S. forces are ill-equipped.
"We're realizing strategic victory is about a lot more than annihilating the enemy," says one senior defense official in Mr. Rumsfeld's office. Victory also requires winning the support of locals and tracking down insurgents, who can easily elude advanced surveillance technology and precision strikes. In some cases, a slower, more methodical attack, one that allows U.S. troops to stabilize one area and hold it up as an example of what is possible for the rest of the country, could produce better results, according to emerging Army thinking.
Mr. Rumsfeld acknowledges that the military, which is still organized "to fight big armies, navies and air forces on a conventional basis," must change in order to deal with guerrilla fighters and terrorists. "The department simply has to be much more facile and agile," he says in an interview. "We have got to focus more on the post-combat phase."
But he adds that the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate the "critical importance of speed and precision as opposed to mass or sheer numbers."
New Standards
Before the war began, Middle East experts, along with some Army officials, warned that stabilizing and governing a fractious and ethnically divided Iraq would be much harder than toppling Saddam Hussein.
A recent directive, prepared by Mr. Rumsfeld's office and still in draft form, now yields to that view. It mandates that in the future, units' readiness for war should be judged not only by traditional standards, such as how well they fire their tanks, but by the number of foreign speakers in their ranks, their awareness of the local culture where they will fight, and their ability to train and equip local security forces. It orders the military's four-star regional commanders to "develop and maintain" new plans for battle, hoping to prevent the sort of postwar chaos that engulfed Iraq.
The Army is discarding or delaying big parts of its longstanding plans. It recently announced it has pushed back introduction of its new lightweight fighting vehicle for several years, to 2014, freeing up $9 billion. Earlier plans had called for all of the service's combat units to be built around the light, quick, armored vehicle.
The Army now thinks it will need a mix of slower-to-deploy, heavy tanks as well as light fighting vehicles. This will allow commanders to swing quickly between tasks, the Army says, from handing out emergency rations on one block to conducting an all-out battle with insurgents on another. Commanders in Iraq have found that 70-ton tanks, which literally shake the ground as they move, can help ward off guerrilla attacks simply through intimidation.
"The answer to complexity, volatility and uncertainty is always diversity," says Brig. Gen. David Fastabend, a senior officer in the Army's Futures Center, which does long-range planning.
The service recently canceled its $12.9 billion program for Comanche helicopters. Instead of spending the money on 121 stealthy Comanches -- designed to evade high-tech enemy radar -- the Army is spending the money to buy 825 attack and cargo helicopters and planes of the sort being used daily in Iraq.
It's also investing about $1 billion over the next six years in a new computerized system to speed the flow of intelligence, which today must move up and down a rigid hierarchy. Soon the Army says each of its 800-soldier battalions in Iraq will have immediate access to intelligence reports from units scattered across the country. The system will help intelligence analysts sort through data and identify connections between attacks or terror cells in different parts of the country.
"I've said we are a hierarchy trying to fight a network. I still believe that. But I also believe we are getting better," says Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff.
Perhaps the most striking changes are taking place on Army posts such as Fort Carson, Colo., where the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment is getting ready for an Iraq deployment early next year. Since taking command of the 5,000-soldier regiment this summer, Col. H.R. McMaster, an early critic of the Army's vision of fast, high-tech wars, has put his troops through weeks of mock raids. He has staged convoy ambushes and meetings with role players acting as local Iraqi leaders. Such training is becoming common throughout the Army.
In a training exercise last month, Lt. Doug Armstrong sat down with two fellow soldiers -- both Iraq veterans -- who were pretending to be the mayor and police chief of an Iraqi village. Lt. Armstrong, 23 years old, quickly asked where the insurgents in the town were hiding. The mock mayor shrugged and demanded food and water for the people. He chastised the lieutenant for parking his Humvee in the village wheat field.
About five minutes into the meeting, Col. McMaster cut it short. "Be a little more personable," he told the young officer. "Ask about the mayor's family. Build a relationship before you ask him where the bad guys are."
Col. McMaster then asked the lieutenant if he noticed anything unusual in the room where he was meeting with the mayor. The lieutenant shook his head no.
"Who is that dude on the wall?" Col. McMaster asked, pointing to the only poster tacked to the small office's walls. The lieutenant shrugged. A sergeant standing nearby answered that it was Muqtada al Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric.
"You've got to notice those things," Col. McMaster said.
Trying to win the cooperation of locals is a huge change for a service that until recently saw war primarily as the clash of traditional armies. Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, the top U.S. commander in Iraq during the first months of the war, recently told colleagues he recalls watching Iraqis loot chairs, artillery shells and other weapons. Instead of having his troops intervene, he and his commanders were focused on finding senior military and Baath Party leaders. Gen. Wallace now says those leaders had become largely irrelevant to the chaos breaking out around the country.
"There was a point when the regime was no longer relevant, no longer running the country. We were slow to pick up on that," Gen. Wallace says.
As a result, U.S. commanders missed an opportunity to shift forces to other tasks -- such as policing and reconstruction -- that would have helped win the support of a deeply skeptical population. Some senior officers were simply overwhelmed by the number of tasks facing them as the country came apart.
"The complexity was much greater than what we trained and exercised for prior to this campaign," Gen. Wallace says.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110246829907493919-email,00.html

Frustrated soldiers give Rumsfeld earful

2004-12-09T19:50:00.001-05:00

a>:
"CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Defense chief Donald Rumsfeld found himself on the defensive as troops in Kuwait grilled him about equipment problems and extended tours of duty.
BY ROBERT BURNS
Associated Press
CAMP BUEHRING, Kuwait -In a rare public airing of grievances, disgruntled soldiers complained to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Wednesday about long deployments and a lack of armored vehicles and other equipment.
''You go to war with the Army you have,'' Rumsfeld replied, ``not the Army you might want or wish to have.''
Spc. Thomas Wilson had asked the defense secretary, ''Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?'' Shouts of approval and applause arose from the estimated 2,300 soldiers who had assembled to see Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld hesitated and asked Wilson to repeat his question.
''We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north,'' Wilson, 31, of Nashville, Tenn., concluded after asking again.
Wilson, an airplane mechanic whose unit, the 278th Regimental Combat Team of the Tennessee Army National Guard, is about to drive north into Iraq for a one-year tour of duty, put his finger on a problem that has bedeviled the Pentagon for more than a year. Rarely, though, is it put so bluntly in a public forum.
Rumsfeld said the Army was sparing no expense or effort to acquire as many Humvees and other vehicles with extra armor as it can. What's more, he said, armor is not the savior some think it is.
''You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can [still] be blown up,'' he said.
U.S. soldiers and Marines in Iraq are killed or maimed by roadside bombs almost daily. Adding armor protection to Humvees and other vehicles that normally are not used in combat has been a priority for the Army, but manufacturers have not been able to keep up with the demand....
A TOUGH CROWD
In his prepared remarks in Kuwait, Rumsfeld urged the troops -- mostly National Guard and Reserve soldiers -- to discount critics of the war and to help ''win the test of wills'' with the insurgents....
EXTENDED TOURS
Yet another soldier asked how much longer the Army would continue using its ''stop loss'' power to prevent soldiers from leaving the service who are otherwise eligible to retire or return to civilian life at the end of their enlistment.
Rumsfeld said this condition was simply a fact of life for soldiers in times of war. Critics, including some in Congress, say it's proof the Army has been stretched too thin by war.
Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., told Rumsfeld in a letter Wednesday that his response to the question about armored vehicles was ''utterly unacceptable'' and that it was the duty of the government to provide safety equipment.
CONFLICTING ACCOUNTS
The deputy commanding general of U.S. forces in Kuwait, Maj. Gen. Gary Speer, said at Camp Buehring that as far as he knew, every vehicle deploying to Iraq from Kuwait had at least ''Level 3'' armor protection. That means it had locally fabricated armor for its side panels, but not bulletproof windows or reinforced floorboards.
Speer said he was unaware that soldiers were searching landfills for scrap metal and discarded glass.
However, Maj. Gen. Gus L. Hargett, the adjutant general of the Tennessee National Guard, disputed Speer's remarks. ''I know that members of his staff were aware and assisted the 278th in obtaining these materials,'' he said.
At the Pentagon, spokesman Larry Di Rita said production of armored Humvees had increased from 15 to 450 a month since fall 2003, when commanders in Iraq started asking for them because of insurgents' heavy use of roadside explosives.

"

Frustrated soldiers give Rumsfeld earful

2004-12-09T19:50:00.000-05:00

Yahoo! News - AP: Navy Probes New Iraq Prisoner Photos

2004-12-04T19:23:00.000-05:00

Yahoo! News - AP: Navy Probes New Iraq Prisoner Photos: "AP: Navy Probes New Iraq Prisoner Photos

Sat Dec 4, 3:54 PM ET

By SETH HETTENA, Associated Press Writer
CORONADO, Calif. - The U.S. military has launched a criminal investigation into photographs that appear to show Navy SEALs in Iraq (news - web sites) sitting on hooded and handcuffed detainees, and photos of what appear to be bloodied prisoners, one with a gun to his head.

AP Photo

AP Photo
Slideshow: Iraq Prisoner Abuse Investigation

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Some of the photos have date stamps suggesting they were taken in May 2003, which could make them the earliest evidence of possible abuse of prisoners in Iraq. The far more brutal practices photographed in Abu Ghraib prison occurred months later.
An Associated Press reporter found more than 40 of the pictures among hundreds in an album posted on a commercial photo-sharing Web site by a woman who said her husband brought them from Iraq after his tour of duty. It is unclear who took the pictures, which the Navy said it was investigating after the AP furnished copies to get comment for this story.
These and other photos found by the AP appear to show the immediate aftermath of raids on civilian homes. One man is lying on his back with a boot on his chest. A mug shot shows a man with an automatic weapon pointed at his head and a gloved thumb jabbed into his throat. In many photos, faces have been blacked out. What appears to be blood"

Yahoo! News - Marines Find Alleged Iraqi Torture Chamber

2004-12-03T00:34:00.000-05:00

Yahoo! News - Marines Find Alleged Iraqi Torture Chamber: "FALLUJAH, Iraq - Down a steep staircase littered with glass shards and rubble, U.S. Marines descended Thursday to a dark basement believed to have been one of Fallujah's torture chambers. They found bloodstains and a single bloody hand print on the wall � evidence of the horrors once carried out in this former insurgent stronghold.
'We had sensed that there was a pure streak of evil in this town, ever since the first days of engagement here,' said Maj. Wade Weems.
The basement, discovered while Marines fought fierce battles with Fallujah insurgents last month, is part of the Islamic Resistance Center, a three-story building in the heart of this city 40 miles west of Baghdad.
Maj. Alex Ray, an operations officer with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said all evidence indicates the 15-foot-by-20-foot space was used by insurgents to imprison and torture their captives.
'Based on the evidence we have found here, we believe people were held here and possibly tortured � we have found enough blood to surmise that,' Ray told reporters shown the basement Thursday.
On the wall adjacent to the hand print, human fingernails were found dug deep into the porous gravel around a hole in the wall � evidence, the Marines say, of a tunnel-digging attempt. "

Houses of Horror and A New Industry

2004-11-23T07:25:00.000-05:00

CBSNews.com: Print This Story: "Fallujah's Houses Of Horror
FALLUJAH, Iraq,
Nov. 22, 2004
U.S. commanders say their door to door patrols have uncovered nearly two dozen houses of horror in the back streets of Fallujah, reports CBS News Correspondent Lee Cowan.

'The face of Satan was here in Fallujah, and I'm absolutely convinced that that was true,' said Lt. Col. Gareth Brandl, with the U.S. Marines.

The rooms were found by Marines following trails of dried blood, or the smell of death. Some rooms were hidden behind fake walls, or concealed in basements.
Residents told troops they only knew the torture chambers were there because they could hear the screams at night. 'We found numerous houses, also, where people were just chained to a wall for extended periods of time,' said U.S. military intelligence officer Major Jim West.
Marines believe they found the place where British hostage Kenneth Bigley was caged before being beheaded, and others where American hostages could have been held.
Forensics teams are testing blood on the walls and floors to determine who was held there -- and intelligence officials are hoping interviews with those already in U.S. custody can uncover even more.
Between U.S. and Iraqi forces, more than 1400 people have been detained in connection with the Fallujah operation. But already more than 400 have been let go after it was determined they were non-combatants, reports Cowan. Officials concede some of the very people responsible for the abductions could be walking the streets again -- planning to restart what had become Fallujah's most notorious industry. 'We've seen a small business grow out of someone who will do the kidnapping and then sell the person they've kidnapped off to one insurgent group or another, basically give them to the highest bidder, " said West, the U.S. military intelligence officer.

It's a cold reality that will stain this city for generations -- whether the insurgents return here or not.

Dangerous Ignorance Among Bush Voters

2004-11-11T01:14:00.000-05:00

Wonderful essay. Scary data.

NYT. Bob Herbert. 11/10/04
I think a case could be made that ignorance played at least as big a role in the election's outcome as values. A recent survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found that nearly 70 percent of President Bush's supporters believe the U.S. has come up with "clear evidence" that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda. A third of the president's supporters believe weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. And more than a third believe that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion.
This is scary. How do you make a rational political pitch to people who have put that part of their brain on hold? No wonder Bush won.
The survey, and an accompanying report, showed that there's a fair amount of cluelessness in the ranks of the values crowd. The report said, "It is clear that supporters of the president are more likely to have misperceptions than those who oppose him."
I haven't heard any of the postelection commentators talk about ignorance and its effect on the outcome. It's all values, all the time. Traumatized Democrats are wringing their hands and trying to figure out how to appeal to voters who have arrogantly claimed the moral high ground and can't stop babbling about their self-proclaimed superiority. Potential candidates are boning up on new prayers and purchasing time-shares in front-row-center pews.

A more practical approach might be for Democrats to add teach-ins to their outreach efforts. Anything that shrinks the ranks of the clueless would be helpful.
If you don't think this values thing has gotten out of control, consider the lead paragraph of an op-ed article that ran in The LA. Times on Friday. It was written by Frank Pastore, a former major league pitcher who is now a host on the Christian talk-radio station KKLA.
"Christians, in politics as in evangelism," said Mr. Pastore, "are not against people or the world. But we are against false ideas that hold good people captive. On Tuesday, this nation rejected liberalism, primarily because liberalism has been taken captive by the left. Since 1968, the left has taken millions captive, and we must help those Democrats who truly want to be free to actually break free of this evil ideology."
Mr. Pastore goes on to exhort Christian conservatives to reject any and all voices that might urge them "to compromise with the vanquished." How's that for values?
In The New York Times on Thursday, Richard Viguerie, the dean of conservative direct mail, declared, "Now comes the revolution." He said, "Liberals, many in the media and inside the Republican Party, are urging the president to 'unite' the country by discarding the allies that earned him another four years."
Mr. Viguerie, it is clear, will stand four-square against any such dangerous moves toward reconciliation.
You have to be careful when you toss the word values around. All values are not created equal. Some Democrats are casting covetous eyes on voters whose values, in many cases, are frankly repellent. Does it make sense for the progressive elements in our society to undermine their own deeply held beliefs in tolerance, fairness and justice in an effort to embrace those who deliberately seek to divide?
What the Democratic Party needs above all is a clear message and a bold and compelling candidate. The message has to convince Americans that they would be better off following a progressive Democratic vision of the future. The candidate has to be a person of integrity capable of earning the respect and the affection of the American people.
This is doable. Al Gore and John Kerry were less than sparkling candidates, and both came within a hair of defeating Mr. Bush.
What the Democrats don't need is a candidate who is willing to shape his or her values to fit the pundits' probably incorrect analysis of the last election. Values that pivot on a dime were not really values to begin with.

Lame Behavior and Lamer Excuse

2004-11-08T18:56:00.000-05:00

Hypocritical behavior at best. But check out the press secretary's unbelievably lame excuses.
Report Probes Gifts to Schwarzenegger Aides
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Top aides to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have skirted state regulations limiting gifts from special interest groups by spreading them around through their families, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday. California law allows officials to accept up to $340 in gifts in a year from any one special interest, but state officials have sidestepped the cap in several instances, according to a Times review of lobbying reports. Five of Schwarzenegger's senior aides and their families each accepted more than $340 in tickets to a Sacramento Kings basketball game on one night alone, sitting in luxury boxes supplied by phone company SBC and oil giant BP, the newspaper said. And last May, communications director Rob Stutzman, his wife and son were treated to $767 worth of tickets from SBC. Under state law, gifts handed out directly to relatives rather than the state official aren't counted toward the $340 limit, the Times said.
Schwarzenegger has railed against special interests since before becoming governor in last year's recall election.
``I think any of those kind of real powerful special interests, if you take money from them, you owe them something because like (economist) Milton Friedman said a long time ago, there's no such thing as a free lunch,'' he said during the campaign.
The governor's press secretary, Margita Thompson, said accepting gifts from major corporations that lobby state government fits in with the Schwarzenegger administration's plan to modify the state Capital's political environment.
``One of the things the governor came into Sacramento to do is change the culture,'' Thompson said. ``And one of the things that has to happen to change the culture and create a more bipartisan atmosphere is that people have to talk to each other.''
Thompson also argued that family outings provide leisure time for hardworking staff and that bonds between children at such events can help foster political relationships.
``I've certainly heard of instances where two little boys whose parents are in opposing parties end up hanging out and bonding as children can uniquely do. And suddenly, you have an even deeper tie,'' she said.

Depressed

2004-11-03T22:22:00.000-05:00

I am so, so very depressed today.

God, who stole my country?

Impolitic: Redskins' home loss augurs Kerry win

2004-11-01T15:58:00.000-05:00

Here's hoping the pattern holds one more time.
ABC News: Impolitic: Redskins' home loss augurs Kerry win: "John Kerry supporters have a welcome omen for their candidate: The Green Bay Packers defeated the Washington Redskins on Sunday.

Associated Press
Nov. 1, 2004 - LANDOVER, Md. -- John Kerry supporters have a welcome omen for their candidate: The Green Bay Packers defeated the Washington Redskins on Sunday.
If history holds, the 28-14 result portends a victory for Kerry
on Tuesday because the result of the Redskins' final home game
before the presidential election has always accurately predicted
the White House winner. If the Redskins win, the incumbent party
wins. If they lose, the incumbent party is ousted.
'Oh, yeah, he's going to win. It's guaranteed,' said Packers
safety Darren Sharper, a Kerry supporter. 'I don't have to vote
now. Don't even have to go to the polls. Saved me a trip on
Tuesday.'
The streak began in 1933, when the Boston Braves were renamed the Redskins. Since then, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt's
re-election in 1936, the trend has held, including a 2000 Redskins
loss to the Tennessee Titans that predicted George W. Bush's win
over Al Gore."

Votes of the Dead to Count

2004-10-31T18:05:00.000-05:00

Appropriate for Halloween...
News

Musings, Wisdoms and Follies

2004-10-26T13:29:00.000-04:00

Musings, Wisdoms and Follies
U.N. Warns of Explosives Missing in Iraq
Mon Oct 25, 7:26 PM ET
By WILLIAM J. KOLE, Associated Press Writer
VIENNA, Austria - The U.N. nuclear agency warned Monday that insurgents in Iraq (news - web sites) may have obtained nearly 400 tons of missing explosives that can be used in the kind of car bomb attacks that have targeted U.S.-led coalition forces for months.
The disappearance raised questions about why the United States didn't do more to secure the Al-Qaqaa facility 30 miles south of Baghdad and failed to allow full international inspections to resume after the March 2003 invasion.
The White House played down the significance of the missing weapons, but Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry accused President Bush of "incredible incompetence" and his campaign said the administration "must answer for what may be the most grave and catastrophic mistake in a tragic series of blunders in Iraq."
Al-Qaqaa is near Youssifiyah, an area rife with ambush attacks. An Associated Press Television News crew that drove past the compound Monday saw no visible security at the gates of the site, a jumble of low-slung, yellow-colored storage buildings that appeared deserted.
"The most immediate concern here is that these explosives could have fallen into the wrong hands," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.
The agency first placed a seal over Al-Qaqaa storage bunkers holding the explosives in 1991 as part of U.N. sanctions that ordered the dismantlement of Iraq's nuclear program after the Gulf War.
IAEA inspectors last saw the explosives in January 2003 when they took an inventory and placed fresh seals on the bunkers, Fleming said. Inspectors visited the site again in March 2003, but didn't view the explosives because the seals were not broken, she said.
Nuclear agency experts pulled out of Iraq just before the U.S.-led invasion later that month, and have not yet been able to return for general inspections despite ElBaradei's repeated urging that they be allowed to finish their work. Although IAEA inspectors have made two trips to Iraq since the war at U.S. requests, Russia and other Security Council have pressed for their full-time return — so far unsuccessfully.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said U.S.-led forces searched the Al-Qaqaa facility after the invasion.
"Coalition forces were present in the vicinity at various times during and after major combat operations," he said. "The forces searched 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings at the facility, but found no indicators of WMD (weapons of mass destruction)."

Red Sox Nation

2004-10-21T09:00:00.000-04:00

BoSox Top Yanks to Win Historic AL Pennant
Sports: "No curses this time. Johnny Damon clubbed two homers, including a grand slam, and drove in six runs as the Boston Red Sox defeated New York 10-3 to win the AL championship series in seven games and complete baseball's most historic comeback Wednesday night.
David Ortiz and Mark Bellhorn also homered as Boston became the first team in baseball history to win a best-of-seven-series after trailing 3-0. Only twice in North American major professional sports had a club come back to win such a series after dropping the first three games, both times in hockey."

Political Trivia: Hustings

2004-10-20T16:10:00.000-04:00

stump speech (stump speech) noun

A political speech, delivered on a campaign tour.

[Originally, campaigning politicians often stood on tree stumps when
addressing voters. Today, the stump is used metaphorically in expressions
such as "stump speech" (a campaign speech) or "on the stump" (on the
campaign trail).]

Hustings is the British equivalent of the US word stump. Until 1872
Hustings was the raised platform from which candidates were nominated
for the British Parliament, and where they addressed electors.
Courtesy of AWAD

Troops Refuse Mission

2004-10-16T21:56:00.000-04:00

Man, this is a problem. Sounds like they were right - that their equipment is substandard.
But how can you allow this in a war zone?
How can you allow this anywhere in the militar?

Unit Refused Iraq Mission, Military Says
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN
WASHINGTON (AP) - News: "Relatives of soldiers who refused to deliver supplies in Iraq say the troops considered the mission too dangerous, in part because their vehicles were in poor shape. The Army is investigating up to 19 reservist members of a platoon that is part of the 343rd Quartermaster Company, based in Rock Hill, S.C. The unit delivers food, water and fuel on trucks in combat zones. Convoys in Iraq are frequently subject to ambushes and roadside bombings. Some of the troops' safety concerns were being addressed, military officials said. But a coalition spokesman in Baghdad said ``a small number of the soldiers involved chose to express their concerns in an inappropriate manner, causing a temporary breakdown in discipline.'' The coalition said in a statement Saturday that the troops are ``not being guarded or detained. They are being interviewed. They're taking statements.'' But the relatives said they were told the soldiers had been confined. Teresa Hill of Dothan, Ala., who said her daughter, Amber McClenny, was among in the platoon, received a phone message from her early Thursday morning saying they had been detained by U.S. military authorities. ``This is a real, real, big emergency,'' McClenny said in her message. ``I need you to contact someone. I mean, raise pure hell.'' "

Mass Graves of Kurds in Iraq

2004-10-13T20:18:00.000-04:00

News:
"Kehoe said the bodies were apparently bulldozed into the graves.

``Unlike bodies that you've seen in many mass graves - they look like cordwood - all lined up,'' he said. ``That didn't happen here. These bodies were just pushed in.''
He said excavators found the body of a mother still clutching her baby. The infant was shot in the back of the head and the mother in the face.
Kehoe said that most mass graves in Bosnia largely contain men of fighting age. Graves near Hatra included many women and children, he said. "

1st Red Sox World Series since 1986 !

2004-10-11T18:28:00.000-04:00

Even I didn't realize it had been that long since they were even in the World Series!
Good grief.

I would love it if my dad could live to see the Red Sox win a World Series - He's been longing for it most of his 80+ years.

UN: Iraqi Nuclear-Related Materials Have Vanished

2004-10-11T18:24:00.000-04:00

Yahoo! News - UN: Iraqi Nuclear-Related Materials Have Vanished:
" Equipment and materials that could be used to make nuclear weapons are disappearing from Iraq (news - web sites) but neither Baghdad nor Washington appears to have noticed, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency reported on Monday.

Satellite imagery shows that entire buildings in Iraq have been dismantled. They once housed high-precision equipment that could help a government or terror group make nuclear bombs, the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a report to the U.N. Security Council"
equipment -- including high-precision milling and turning machines and electron-beam welders -- and materials -- such as high-strength aluminum -- were tagged by the IAEA years ago, as part of the watchdog agency's shutdown of Iraq's nuclear program. U.N. inspectors then monitored the sites until their evacuation from Iraq just before the war.
The United States barred the inspectors' return after the war, preventing the IAEA from keeping tabs on the equipment and materials up to the present day. ...
The United States also has not publicly commented on earlier U.N. inspectors' reports disclosing the dismantling of a range of key weapons-making sites, raising the question of whether it was unable to monitor the sites.

'WE SIMPLY DON'T KNOW'
"We simply don't know, although we are trying to get the information," said one council diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. ...
President Bush (news - web sites), locked in a tough reelection battle with Senator John Kerry (news - web sites) of Massachusetts, justified the war, in part, by saying that then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein
Both men agreed during a Sept. 30 debate that nuclear proliferation is the most serious threat facing the United States.

Coroner: Markings found on pledge's body

2004-10-10T15:53:00.000-04:00

Our kids are never safe from harm, are they?
Frats hazing are inherently dangerous - and stupid. Its a mob mentality that takes over along with a need to push the envelope further and further and big disincentives for anyone, pledge or rational frat member, to holler stop.CNN.com - Coroner: Markings found on pledge's body - Oct 9, 2004:
"Members of a fraternity scrawled racial and other slurs on the body of an 18-year-old pledge who was passed out and died hours later of alcohol poisoning, the young man's father said.
Lynn Gordon Bailey, father of Gordie Bailey, said Thursday the coroner told him markings were found on his son's arms, legs and trunk. Gordie Bailey was white.

Bailey and the other pledges of the University of Colorado chapter of Chi Psi began the evening September 16 blindfolded and abandoned in the woods. Police said the pledges were told to drink large amounts of whiskey and wine.
Later, when they were driven back to the fraternity house after midnight, Bailey had passed out. Fraternity tradition called for members to write on the body of any pledge who passed out without taking his shoes off, a police search warrant said.
The next morning Bailey was found face down on the floor, and could not be revived. His blood-alcohol level was 0.328 percent, four times the legal limit for driving in Colorado.
The national headquarters of Chi Psi has shut down the Boulder chapter."

Janet Leigh, 77, Shower Taker of 'Psycho,' Is Dead

2004-10-10T04:24:00.000-04:00

The New York Times > Movies > Janet Leigh, 77, Shower Taker of 'Psycho,' Is Dead: "

Janet Leigh, the demure but sexy blond movie star of the 1950's who will always be remembered for the 45-second shower scene in which she was slashed to death in Hitchcock's 'Psycho' in 1960, died on Sunday at her home in Beverly Hills. She was 77.
The cause was vasculitis, an inflammation of the blood vessels, said Heidi Schaeffer, a spokeswoman for the family.
'Psycho' was a landmark in Hollywood moviemaking, both controversial and shocking, partly because of its violence and partly because the director did the unthinkable and killed off his star one-third of the way through the movie.
As Marion Crane, an embezzler on the run with $40,000, Ms. Leigh made the mistake of stopping for the night at the Bates Motel and taking a shower. She was apparently stabbed dozens of times, although the movie never showed the knife touching her flesh. Bernard Herrmann's shrill music underscored the slashes; the scene is beloved of both serious movie scholars and parodists.
'It took us seven days to shoot that scene, and there were 70 camera setups for 45 seconds of footage,' Hitchcock said in 'Hitchcock' by the filmmaker Fran�ois Truffaut.
After 'Psycho,' for which Ms. Leigh received her only Academy Award nomination, was released, Mr. Hitchcock told his star that they could never work together again. In a 1998 interview, Ms. Leigh remembered the director's words: 'Whatever I put you in, the audience would immediately think of 'Psycho.' It wouldn't be fair to the picture or the character.'
In a career with many forgettable films, Ms. Leigh starred in two other classic movies. She was the woman who met Frank Sinatra on a train in John FranFrankenheimer's thriller "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962), and Susan Vargas, the threatened American bride of the Mexican narcotics cop Charlton Heston in Orson Welles's film noir "Touch of Evil" (1958).
She was born Jeanette Helen Morrison on July 6, 1927, in the Central Valley town of Merced, Calif. Her parents moved from apartment to apartment and town to town. At the age of 14, Ms. Leigh escaped from home by eloping. The marriage was later annulled, and Ms. Leigh returned to high school, graduating just before her 16th birthday.

The 19-year-old Jeanette Morrison became a movie actress in classical old-Hollywood fashion. The MGM star Norma Shearer saw her photograph at a ski lodge where her parents were working as desk clerk and maid. A screen test at MGM was followed by a contract at $50 a week.
Ms. Leigh's own reaction to "Psycho" was visceral. After she saw the movie, she said many times, she never wanted to take a shower again.

"

WSJ. Analysis Shows Kerry Building Lead

2004-10-09T14:20:00.000-04:00

WSJ.com: "OCTOBER 6, 2004
The presidential debate has lifted John Kerry back to where he was in our battleground analysis before the Republican convention energized the Bush campaign.
The latest Zogby Interactive poll puts Mr. Kerry ahead of President Bush in 13 of the 16 closely contested states -- two more states than the Massachusetts senator led before the debate and the most since August. The latest survey was conducted between last Thursday, after the debate ended, and Tuesday afternoon, before vice-presidential contenders Dick Cheney and John Edwards debated.
Mr. Kerry moved ahead in two states (Ohio and Nevada) and increased his lead in seven others -- though Mr. Kerry's margin over Mr. Bush in Ohio, Arkansas and Florida was negligible -- less than one percentage point. Mr. Bush's lead narrowed in the three states (Missouri, Tennessee and West Virginia) that he remains ahead of Mr. Kerry. Overall, seven of Mr. Kerry�s leads are within the margins of error, while all of Mr. Bush�s leads are.
If the results on Election Day matched Zobgy's numbers, Mr. Kerry would win. Here's how:
To analyze Zogby's results, we begin by assuming that the District of Columbia and the 34 states that aren't in the battleground poll will vote for the same political party this November as they did in the 2000 election. Thus, Mr. Bush starts with 189 electoral votes and Mr. Kerry with 172. A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win.
To those numbers, we add the electoral votes from the latest poll, regardless of the margins of error or the spread between the candidates. Mr. Kerry's 13 states have 150 electoral votes, while Mr. Bush's three have 27 votes. The bottom line: Mr. Kerry would have 322 electoral votes and the president would have 216.
That 106-vote margin is far wider than the last analysis, on Sept. 20, the presidents was just 56 electoral votes behind Mr. Kerry."

....an electoral-college calculation by The Cook Political Report has the race about even. Adding the states that it finds solidly, likely and leaning for each candidate, it puts Mr. Bush ahead 208-207, with 123 electoral votes in the middle. The newsletter, which says it bases its calculations on information provided by both parties, names Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin among toss up states.
A count by Web site Slate, which relies on a variety of polling sources, puts Mr. Bush ahead 321-217. It includes in Mr. Bush's column states such as Arkansas, Florida and Nevada (in which Zogby shows narrow leads for Mr. Kerry) and Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Mexico (which Zogby says the senator leads firmly).
Of course, the timing of polls can play a big role in disparities between Electoral College calculations. Of the six states in the Slate analysis mentioned above, the leanings of only Florida and Nevada were based on polls that were conducted after the debate.
Nevertheless, the Zogby results gibe closely with those from some other state polls that have come out since the presidential debate.

Tickets....I need Tickets!

2004-10-09T13:48:00.000-04:00

I can't help myself.
I'm a diehard Red Sox fan from a family, generations really, of Red Sox fans.

Think of that for a moment - No world series since 1918 - why is there still such a loyal and intense base?
Red Sox attendance figures are always among the top for any team, despite having a stadium that seats 37,000 or so - and that's after the stadium expansion a few years ago.

I want to be at those games!
NOTE:
It was only the second playoff sweep for the Red Sox. They also beat Oakland in 1975 to reach the World Series; Boston lost in seven games to the Cincinnati Reds. The Red Sox last clinched a playoff series at home in 1986, when they finished off the Angels to advance to the World Series; Boston lost to the New York Mets in seven games. ... The Angels hadn't been swept in a playoff series before, but it was the third time they lost three straight. Milwaukee won three in a row after falling behind 2-0 in the 1982 ALCS, and the Red Sox won three straight after falling behind 3-1 in the '86 ALCS. ... Timlin had not allowed an earned run in the postseason since 2000, a span of 12 1-3 innings.
10/08/04 21:34
© Copyright The Associated Press.

Red Sox Win Series, 3-0: Red Sox Alter the Same Old Story With a Happy Ending

2004-10-09T01:36:00.000-04:00

This article is so right about the tension. It was way too good to be true, being up 2 and 3 to zip...you just new not to trust it.
The resilience the Sox are showing, the ability to hang in there and come from behind is going to keep my hopes kindled.
Course our history will keep my fingers crossed.
The New York Times > Red Sox Win Series, 3-0: Red Sox Alter the Same Old Story With a Happy Ending: " No one came to Fenway Park on Friday to celebrate a victory. They came to ward off a disaster.
There was more tension in attendance than joy. Fans were more pensive than players. For much of the evening, the rickety old stadium sounded as quiet as the Old North Church.
The local anxiety was validated by Vladimir Guerrero's game-tying grand slam and it was broken with David Ortiz's game-winning home run with two outs in the bottom of the 10th. That final blast beat the Angels, 8-6, clinched a sweep of the division series, 3-0, and put the Red Sox in the American League Championship Series, which starts Tuesday in either New York or Minnesota.
'I know everybody wants the Yankees,' said Kevin Millar, the Red Sox first baseman. 'We just want the ring.'
As he spoke, buckets of water were flying around the clubhouse. Ortiz was wearing swimming goggles to keep the Champagne out of his eyes. And Pedro Mart�nez was triumphantly holding a dwarf over his head, Nelson de la Rosa, a friend who has become a good-luck charm.

Only one other time since 1918, the year of Boston's last World Series championship, have the Red Sox clinched a playoff series at home. Fittingly, that year was 1986, when they also beat the Angels, and then lost to the Mets in the World Series. Sensing the significance, many players streamed out of the clubhouse and ran around the field at Fenway Park. 'Tonight we're going to go rock out,' said Johnny Damon, who started the 10th with a single. "

2004-10-09T00:39:00.000-04:00

Helplessly Hoping...Savoring a Sweet Victory

Fatal Spider Bite

2004-10-09T00:10:00.000-04:00

What a scary thing!
News: "A 5-year-old boy's death was the result of a bite by a poisonous brown recluse spider, the state medical examiner ruled.
Nicholas Robinson was bitten while playing outside his home about 70 miles south of Nashville on July 29.
The child was taken to a doctor, who determined he was suffering from a virus rather than a bite. However, that night the child was rushed to a hospital, where his symptoms included hypersalivation, sweating and neurological problems before he died, according to the medical examiner's report, completed Thursday.
``In about the last 30 or 40 years, I was only able to find about six deaths related to bites proving to be from a brown recluse spider,'' said Dr. Bruce Levy, the medical examiner.

The brown recluse is one of two common spiders in the United States - the other is the black widow - that are considered poisonous, the National Institutes of Health said. The bite can cause a rash, swelling and flu-like symptoms and in rare cases, kidney failure, seizures and coma.
The spider is most common in the South and central United States. "

Blogs Abuzz with Gossip in Caustic U.S. Campaign

2004-10-08T19:19:00.000-04:00

BLOGS in the news.
More than 2 million Americans are blogging! Holey Moley; that's a lot.
Yahoo! News - Blogs Abuzz with Gossip in Caustic U.S. Campaign: "The U.S. presidential campaign between George W. Bush and John Kerry (news - web sites) has prompted a frenzy of gossip and conspiracy theories among Internet bloggers, hybrid online sites that blend news, gossip and opinion.
As Bush and the Massachusetts Senator slug it out in a neck-and-neck race ahead of the November 2 election, partisan bloggers have flooded the Internet with alternative views about both candidates, which they hope will help sway voters.
Experts say much of the gossip on the Internet is as loony as supermarket tabloid stories claiming Elvis Presley lives, but that it still has a role to play in the campaign.
'Blogs probably pretty accurately reflect the level of polarization and paranoia and frustration among everyday Americans that the entire campaign reflects,' said Vanity Fair media critic Michael Wolff, characterizing the new form of overtly-biased journalism as 'the voice of the mob.' ...
ahead of Friday's second debate between Bush and Kerry, the Internet was abuzz with gossip that the president wore a listening device during last week's debate allowing an unseen puppet master to whisper cues and tips in his ear.
The Bush campaign said that rumor -- likening the president to Milli Vanilli, the infamous singing duet unveiled as frauds for lip-syncing -- was totally false.
Driving the latest incendiary blogging is a picture posted on the Internet of Bush during the debate in Florida. Shot from behind, the image shows what appears to be a bulge beneath the president's suit jacket below his shoulder blades.
Robert Thompson, pop culture professor at Syracuse University, called the accusation "the biggest conspiracy theory" of the campaign to date. "Until there's a credible source I'm not sure I buy it," he said.

A recent Pew Internet and American Life Project found more than two million Americans have their own blog. Most have few readers but some garner thousands of hits daily as the American public becomes increasingly distrustful of mainstream ore than two million Americans have their own blog. media.

"

2004-10-07T23:35:00.000-04:00

News: "President Bush and his vice president conceded Thursday in the clearest terms yet that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, even as they tried to shift the Iraq war debate to a new issue - whether the invasion was justified because Saddam was abusing a U.N. oil-for-food program.

Ridiculing the Bush administration's evolving rationale for war, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry shot back: ``You don't make up or find reasons to go to war after the fact.'' "

Kerry takes Momentum Lead

2004-10-07T18:24:00.000-04:00

I hope and pray Kerry does well tomorrow. If he is strong and consistent, he keeps Bush playing catch-up.
News: " Sen. John Kerry holds a slim lead over President Bush, according to an Associated Press poll that shows the Democrat gaining ground while Bush lost support on personal qualities, the war in Iraq and national security.
Fewer voters than a month ago believe Bush is the best man to protect the country and fight the war.
The AP-Ipsos Public Affairs poll, completed on the eve of the second presidential debate, charted a reversal from a month ago, when the Republican incumbent had the momentum and a minuscule lead. Since then, bloodshed increased in Iraq, Kerry sharpened his attacks and Bush stumbled in their initial debate.
Nearly three-fourths of likely voters said they had watched or listened to the first presidential debate last week, according to the poll. Only 8 percent came away with a more favorable view of Bush while 39 percent said they felt better about Kerry.

Among 944 likely voters, the Democratic ticket of Kerry and Sen. John Edwards led Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney 50 percent to 46 percent. The Oct. 4-6 survey "

Dead Froma Broken Heart?

2004-10-05T20:20:00.000-04:00

News: " A 45-year-old woman collapsed and died days after learning her son had been killed in Iraq, and just hours after seeing his body. Results of an autopsy were not immediately released, but friends of Karen Unruh-Wahrer said she couldn't stop crying over losing her 25-year-old son, Army Spc. Robert Oliver Unruh, who was killed by enemy fire near Baghdad on Sept. 25.
``Her grief was so intense - it seemed it could have harmed her, could have caused a heart attack. Her husband described it as a broken heart,'' said Cheryl Hamilton, manager of respiratory care services at University Medical Center, where Unruh-Wahrer worked as a respiratory therapist.
Unruh, a combat engineer, had been in Iraq less than a month when he was shot during an attack on his unit.
Several days after learning of his death, his mother had gone to the hospital complaining of chest pains, Hamilton said. She was feeling better the next day but saw her son's body Saturday morning and collapsed that night in her kitchen.
Her husband, Dennis Wahrer - also a respiratory therapist - and other family members performed CPR but Unruh-Wahrer was pronounced dead that night. ....
Robert Unruh will be buried Friday at the Southern Arizona Veterans' Memorial Cemetery. His mother's body will accompany her son's in the procession to the cemetery. "

RE:Martha Stewart

2004-10-05T10:19:00.000-04:00

Couldn't they have said something earlier?
Money & Business: "The head of the guards union at the federal prison where Martha Stewart will serve her time said Monday that staffing shortages will make it difficult to protect her.

Staffing at the minimum-security women's prison at Alderson has fallen from 60 guards four years ago to 35 because of budget cuts, said Kent Gilkerson, local president of the Council of Prison Locals. The prison houses about 1,000 inmates. "

2004-10-05T04:47:00.000-04:00

I don't remember ever hearing this...

ON THIS DAY
On Oct. 5, 1947, in the first televised White House address, President Truman asked Americans to refrain from eating meat on Tuesdays and poultry on Thursdays to help stockpile grain for starving people in Europe.

Fox apologizes for Web site gaffe

2004-10-04T22:39:00.000-04:00

Finally, they have to own up to one of their misstatements and outright lies!
Fox apologizes for Web site gaffe: "NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Fox News, which has been criticized for catering to right-wing political viewpoints, apologized for posting phony quotations from Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry on its Web site.
Carl Cameron, a Fox (FOX: news, chart) reporter who covers the Kerry campaign, wrote an item that resembled a news account with made-up Kerry quotes. The item was written in 'jest' and was not supposed to be posted on the site, the network said.
'Carl made a stupid mistake which he regrets,' spokesman Paul Schur told the Associated Press. 'And he has been reprimanded for his lapse in judgment. It was a poor attempt at humor.' "
The Fox gaffe comes on the heels of a media industry furor that surrounded CBS News and anchor Dan Rather. CBS apologized for airing a flawed report on Bush's National Guard service.
Fox has spent substantial time on the Rather issue, in a seeming attempt to keep the story alive after it began to fade from view in other media organizations. (CBS's parent, Viacom is a significant investor in MarketWatch, the publisher of this report.)
Fox has also been criticized at times for seeming to cater to conservative viewers. The network has consistently denied that it favors any particular group of viewers.
At the same time, Fox has benefited greatly from the loyalty of right-wing viewers. During the Republican Convention in New York a month ago, Fox swamped the competition and had the highest TV ratings by far, thanks largely to the loyalty of its base.

Developers Skeptical about Hartford

2004-10-04T12:47:00.000-04:00

Bad news for Hartford folks. Sounds like their rose-colored glasses just got smacked off.
ctnow.com -: "Many Saw City's Plan As Too Great A Risk

October 4, 2004
By MIKE SWIFT, Courant Staff Writer
One developer was interested in Adriaen's Landing but didn't like the idea of having to compete with other developers when he was being courted by cities across the United States.
Other developers said they were too busy to bid on the massive development project in Hartford, or were concerned that the state's plan for the entertainment, shopping and housing district at Adriaen's would not leave them enough freedom to create their own vision.
And for yet another developer, Hartford was the problem.
He had been to the empty lot between the new Connecticut Convention Center and city hall where the state has plotted out the retail and entertainment district of Adriaen's Landing. He had checked out downtown and visited the city's neighborhoods. He had duly noted the sophisticated and attractive stores in Glastonbury and West Hartford Center.
Weighing a $70 million subsidy against the risks of building a complex project on a tight urban site in a city still in the early March of its promised economic revival, the developer arrived at a clear decision: The risks outweighed the rewards.
'Everybody we talked to who took a look at it said, `This is tough.' The return is not there - mentally, physically, financially. This is just a tough project,' said the developer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for business reasons. 'There are other ways to make money that are a lot easier than this.'"

Debate Assumes New Importance

2004-10-04T12:25:00.000-04:00

This is one debate I may be able to enjoy watching.Yahoo! News - Debate Assumes New Importance: "By Mike Allen and John F. Harris, Washington Post Staff Writers
Tomorrow's vice presidential debate, which both campaigns once presumed would be a sideshow to the presidential race, has assumed critical importance, with Republicans depending on Vice President Cheney to halt the ticket's slide in momentum.

After what Republicans acknowledge was President Bush (news - web sites)'s faltering performance in his televised encounter with Democratic nominee John F. Kerry, GOP strategists said Cheney's aim is to return public attention to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the administration's broader handling of the terrorism threat and away from what they called a 'second-guessing' debate over the decision to invade Iraq (news - web sites).
A Republican official involved in Cheney's preparation for his encounter with Sen. John Edwards (news - web sites) (N.C.) said the vice president will try to bring fresh attention to the themes 'that shoot out of the 9/11 set of memories and issues -- preparedness, safety and homeland security.'
Kerry's aides are hoping that at the debate in Cleveland, Edwards will summon his skills as a trial lawyer to cast Cheney as the architect of the administration's worst policy judgments, as well as a symbol of corporate excess because of his former position as chief executive of Halliburton, which has received huge Iraq contracts but has also faced accusations of improper billing there.

Vice presidential debates historically have not been consequential in presidential contests, but strategists with both parties say the timing and personalities of this one could make it an exception. American politics in recent decades has rarely offered a more vivid stylistic and substantive contrast than Cheney, 63, and Edwards, 51.

On Bush

2004-10-03T22:27:00.000-04:00

Found great quote on blog entitled, 'The Federalist Papers.' ( url below.)

John Stewart's comment on Bush's decisiveness: "He drove us into a wall, but he never blinked."

http://rubley.blogspot.com/

Debate Leads to Shifts in Strategy

2004-10-03T21:21:00.000-04:00

A faint pulse of hope begins to beat gently in my heart. But dare I hope?
I'll still pray.
Yahoo! News - Debate Leads to Shifts in Strategy: "Bush advisers were described as stunned by how negative the reviews were of the president's performance, which many of them regarded as not his best but not so bad. Bush was portrayed as upbeat while acknowledging to supporters that he knew he could have done better. His aides indicated they planned some retooling before Friday's debate, but maintained a sense of outward confidence.
Advisers to both candidates predicted the race would tighten when the debates end on Oct. 13, if not before, but Bush strategists say that will have less to do with the debates than on a natural tightening as the election nears. The first poll since Thursday night to measure the debate's impact, taken by Newsweek, showed Kerry leading Bush 49 to 46 percent -- a reversal from a series of polls over the last month.
On Tuesday, Vice President Cheney and Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards (news - web sites) will meet in Cleveland for a 90-minute debate -- a session some Republicans believe may have more relevance as a result of what happened in Florida. On Friday, Bush and Kerry will attend a town hall meeting with voters in St. Louis. The final presidential debate will take place in Tempe, Ariz., on Oct. 13."

U.S., Afghan Forces Attack Taliban Ahead of Vote

2004-10-03T21:17:00.000-04:00

I'm glad to see we're paying some attention still.
On the whole, we have done too little to follow through in Afghanistan.
Yahoo! News - U.S., Afghan Forces Attack Taliban Ahead of Vote: "KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan guards backed by U.S. helicopter gunships raided a Taliban safe house, killing one man and arresting 15, to prevent attacks during this week's presidential election, officials said on Sunday.
The raid on Saturday night near the town of Spin Boldak came a day after 60 Taliban guerrillas planning to disrupt the election were intercepted nearby as they slipped across the border from Pakistan.
Local Afghan border guard commander Abdul Raziq said his men raided the house after a strafing run by U.S. helicopter gunships. One man was killed and nine were wounded.
In Kabul, the United Nations (news - web sites) said the election campaign had been marred by intimidation and official partiality, but it expected the vote to be relatively free and fair. "

Rice Says She Knew Iraq Tube Claims Questioned

2004-10-03T21:14:00.000-04:00

It's about time her halo slipped in public. She has been a big purveyor of false information on Iraq all along.
The administration is truly a bunch of unrepentant liars, and I don't use the workd lightly. They believe so much in their own righteousness and that of their neo-con cause, that they believe they are justified in using any means necessary to get what they want and to keep the presidency.
They have betrayed our country and all that it stands for.
I hope their reign ends soon and that we can begin to repair our country, begin to abide by the ideals we have longed tried to live by.
Yahoo! News - Rice Says She Knew Iraq Tube Claims Questioned: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Top U.S. officials were aware some pre-war evidence cited to make the case against Iraq (news - web sites)'s Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was questionable but U.S. intelligence officials nonetheless deemed the threat of his developing nuclear weapons credible, top White House aides said on Sunday.
President Bush (news - web sites)'s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites), one top aide who cited the claims about aluminum tubes seized in Jordan in June 2001 in urging that Saddam was attempting to revive a nuclear program, was responding to a report in The New York Times that Bush officials ignored doubts about the potential other uses of thousands of the high-strength tubes to press the case for war.
Rice claimed in September 2002 that the tubes were 'only really suited for nuclear weapons programs.'
On ABC's 'This Week,' Rice said she was aware of debate over the tubes but that they were part of a larger body of evidence pointing to a nuclear threat.
'What you had was a debate in the intelligence community,' Rice said.
'The tubes were alongside a lot of other evidence about experts being kept together, about balancing equipment being brought in, about how these procurement efforts were being funded,' she said.
Rice added on CNN's 'Late Edition' that objections regarding the purpose of the tubes were raised by the Energy and State Departments more than a year before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
'But I did know at the time that the -- the DCI and the intelligence community had said, the intelligence community as a whole believed that these were for centrifuge parts' involved in nuclear weapon production."

Scalia's Remarks

2004-10-03T21:04:00.000-04:00

I react more strongly when someone who self-righteously purports to be the arbiter of morality is out of line like this. The vocal homophobe who turns out to be gay, for example. This is outrageous from any Supreme Court Judge, worse from a prig like Scalia.
News: "Scalia Jokes About Group Sex in Speech
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's recent speeches have ventured into some surprising territory, with the staunch conservative joking about group sex. He raised eyebrows this week, jesting that 'sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.'"

Front Street? Think Small

2004-10-03T15:06:00.000-04:00

I think she's right. Make some part of all this people friendly and more 'indigenous' if you will, more of Hartford. And I should definitely find out more about those book readings.
ctnow.com: Front Street? Think Small: "
http://www.ctnow.com/news/yahoo/hc-ubinas1003.artoct03,0,7171104.column?coll=hc-aol-yahoo-nws-hed
Front Street? Think Small
Helen Ubi�as
October 3 2004
I stopped by a little coffeehouse around the corner from The Courant the other day looking for some inspiration in a cup of Caf� Madre Isla. My head was full of development news that grabbed the headlines for most of the week: the selection of an architect for the science center, the high hopes for a new Front Street plan, and then the dismal results - no one, not even Magic Johnson, came up with enough cash for that part of the city's multimillion dollar revitalization dream.
If you haven't already heard, these big, shiny developments are the city's salvation. When they build it, tourists and conventioneers will come. We will no longer be a doorstop between the cooler, more exciting Boston and New York. Life as we know it will be better for everyone ... or at least the people who count.
So, it's no wonder our leaders are a little freaked about the Front Street glitch.
But before they have their meltdowns, they should meet the two little girls who walked into the coffee shop, clothes still first-month-of-school new. I knew them; I read to their third-grade class at Burns Elementary School last year. And suddenly they remembered me and got chatty.
Miracle Nazario discovered La Paloma Sabanera Coffeehouse first, and then she brought Nikia Rankins along. The girls like coming here, they say, because it's close enough to home that their parents let them visit by themselves. In the summer, they used to head straight upstairs to play in the room reserved for children....
But it's not just kids here; college students sit by the windows, noses buried in thick textbooks. Workers from the nearby insurance and government offices claim the bench for a much-needed break from their cubicles. Local artists and teachers pick up books, and everyone from the guys who hang outside the nearby barbershop to the man who runs one of the local art galleries is grabbing a cup of good, strong Spanish coffee.
And then, it hit me: Leaders in this city put too much stock in buildings and not enough in people, too much hope into yet-to-be-built developments, instead of realizing that right there, on the corner of Capitol and Babcock, is exactly what this city needs.

All this glitzy downtown stuff is for outsiders. It's the neighborhood spots that sustain the people who live here. Places like La Paloma and Great Harvest, a bakery on Maple Avenue where kids stop for a free slice of bread on the way to and from school. Places like McGregor's and Rajun Cajun in the North End, where some of the most creative plans for the neighborhoods have been dreamed up while waiting in line for takeout or sitting in corner booths with heaping plates of food.
Before we bet our future on yet another mammoth redevelopment project - have we learned nothing from the past? - we should realize that there are places like this all over the city, places that could benefit with a fraction of the attention that architectural monuments get around here.
Friday night, La Paloma was packed with people there for a book reading. They just started showing independent films. One of the owners wants to get a van, maybe take kids on a little road trip now and then.
It's no six pillars, but it sounds like my kind of revitalization plan.

2004-10-02T23:36:00.000-04:00

Iraqi Cartoonist mocks the terrorists

Brutal Iraqi Cartoon

2004-10-02T23:33:00.000-04:00

I think the brutal 'humor' of this cartoon says more about the state of affairs in Iraq than many news stories. That this could be considered funny....though mocking and making fun of the terrorists does perhaps lessen their power, de-mystifies them.

Yahoo! News - Lifestyle: "Iraqi cartoonist Muayed Naima, like other artists, intellectuals and writers, worked within tight constraints under Saddam. Naima had to wait 35 years before he could draw what was on his mind. But since Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was toppled, he has faced new pressure from Islamist militants who have threatened him because his work mocks their violence. He is not put off. In this undated cartoon by Naima, a militant measures the neck of his bound captive and chooses a knife with which to behead him. (Reuters - Handout) "

Mount St. Helens

2004-10-01T20:34:00.000-04:00

In 1985, 5 years after the massive eruption of Mt St Helens, I flew over the impacted area by helicopter. It was too foggy to fly into the crater itself, news I met with a mixture of disappointment and relief, but the power of the blast and the massive devastation it wrought was visible for miles. The area was dun colored,with just hints of green here and there, the beginning of the return of life to the area. Trees had blown down and looked like so many toothpicks from the air, blown down in the same direction, blown flat.
I'll never forget it.
I'd love to see a small eruption - it must be spectacular. but I hope we don't experience a massive blast again.

2004-10-01T20:28:00.000-04:00

16,000 feet into the air the plumes shot.
(Don't know what's wrong with Hello tonite. I can't get it to publish the pics in the larger size.)

2004-10-01T20:26:00.000-04:00

Spectacular!

The Winter Hill Gang and the FBI

2004-10-01T12:53:00.000-04:00

You've got to read this whole story. Bizarre story, too bizarre to make up, involving mobsters, the FBI, Jai Alai in CT and FLA, numerous murders and the brother of the former President of the Mass. State Senate and Boston University!

ctnow.com -:
"Flemmi Sentenced In 1981 Murder
October 1, 2004
By EDMUND H. MAHONY, Courant Staff Writer

One of the most unsettling mysteries in Connecticut law enforcement moved closer to a final solution Thursday in an Oklahoma courtroom, when Stephen 'The Rifleman' Flemmi was sentenced to life in prison for the 1981 murder of former World Jai Alai owner Roger Wheeler.
Moments before his sentencing, Flemmi acknowledged in Tulsa District Court that he and other members of Boston's notorious Winter Hill gang, working with corrupt FBI agents in Massachusetts, arranged Wheeler's assassination to protect a gang skimming operation at World Jai Alai frontons in Hartford and south Florida.
Connecticut law enforcement agents, who were investigating the newly legalized state jai alai industry in 1981, concluded within months of Wheeler's death that Boston mobsters and crooked FBI agents were responsible. But the Connecticut investigation met fierce federal resistance: Federal agents leaked confidential information to the killers, and state police detectives even complained of being followed during a trip to Boston.
No one was charged in the Wheeler homicide until nearly two decades later, when a sensational investigation of law enforcement corruption in Boston, ordered by former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, led to the arrests on murder charges of Flemmi, other members of the Winter Hill Gang and retired Boston FBI agent H. Paul Rico.
Hours before Flemmi's guilty plea and sentencing Thursday, one of Wheeler's sons, David Wheeler, telephoned The Courant and said he wanted to express his gratitude to Connecticut law enforcement personnel, whose persistence he said kept the investigation of his father's murder from stalling.

Yahoo! News - Merck Halts Vioxx Sales on Health Threats

2004-09-30T23:21:00.001-04:00

I've taken Vioxx for 2-3 years now and no doctor ever told me of these possible side effects! Never. So my question is-Do the negative effects diminish when you stop taking it?
Yahoo! News - Merck Halts Vioxx Sales on Health Threats: "Merck & Co. is pulling its blockbuster Vioxx from the market after new data found the arthritis drug doubled the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Merck's stock plunged almost 27 percent as the pharmaceutical giant said the recall will hurt its earnings.
Merck said Thursday the clinical trial data showed an increased risk of heart attack and other cardiovascular complications 18 months after patients started taking Vioxx, which also is prescribed for acute pain and disorders such as carpal tunnel syndrome.
The three-year study � aimed at showing that Vioxx could prevent the recurrence of polyps, which can turn cancerous, in the colon and rectum � was stopped after Merck discovered participants had double the risk of a heart attack compared to those taking a placebo. During the study, 10 patients died, five who had been taking Vioxx and five who took dummy pills. "

Yahoo! News - Vioxx high-risk warning no surprise in medical circles

2004-09-30T23:21:00.000-04:00

Yahoo! News - Vioxx high-risk warning no surprise in medical circles

Yahoo! News - Arthritis Drug Vioxx Is Taken Off Market

2004-09-30T23:20:00.000-04:00

Yahoo! News - Arthritis Drug Vioxx Is Taken Off Market

FDA Issues Public Health Advisory on Vioxx as its Manufacturer Voluntarily Recalls the Product

2004-09-30T23:19:00.000-04:00

FDA Issues Public Health Advisory on Vioxx as its Manufacturer Voluntarily Recalls the Product

Iraq = Disaster

2004-09-30T10:45:00.000-04:00

And Kerry shouldn't be afraid to say it either. We are not better off, certainly not safer, now that Saddam has been deposed!

St Louis Post-Dispatch

IRAQ: One word says it all: disaster
By THOMAS F. EAGLETON
09/29/2004
Insurgents run rampant and Rumsfeld grows more stubborn. We're etching a big black mark across American history.
We do not need to recount yet again the history of the war in Iraq. It will go down as one of the most ill-conceived military undertakings in our history.
The recently disclosed July report of the National Intelligence Council to President Bush tells us we are in grave trouble. The Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar of Indiana, and another Republican committee member, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, concur. If the failures of former CIA Director George Tenet justified throwing him overboard, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the godfather of this Iraq disaster, should have been chained to Tenet.
President George W. Bush often asks, rhetorically, "Isn't the world better off with Saddam Hussein out of power?" The answer is no, no, no. Saddam, a brutal dictator, is in jail. That's good. But we have paid a bloody, awful price; a price we will be paying for years to come. The Iraq we created now is an international menace, a citadel for terrorism far more dangerous than the declining Saddam regime we deposed. Sometimes, the cure really is worse than the disease.

Yahoo! News - Bush Lead Narrows in ABC News/Washington Post Poll

2004-09-28T02:16:00.000-04:00

Dare we hope that our country will wake up and refuse to be snowed by the Bush machine? Say it could be so.

Yahoo! News - Bush Lead Narrows in ABC News/Washington Post Poll: " President Bush (news - web sites)'s lead over Democratic nominee John Kerry (news - web sites) narrowed to six points in an ABC News/Washington Post poll of likely voters released on Monday, compared with a nine-point lead in the poll earlier this month.

The survey showed 51 percent support Bush and 45 percent for Kerry. A similar poll released on Sept. 8 showed Bush with 52 percent compared to Kerry at 43 percent.
Among registered voters, the results were nearly identical with 51 percent supporting the president and 44 percent backing Kerry. There was virtually no change from the earlier poll in early September that had 50 percent of registered voters behind Bush and 44 percent in favor of Kerry. "

The New York Times > Campaign 2004 > The Hand-Marked Ballot Wins for Accuracy

2004-09-21T17:02:00.000-04:00

CT still has lever machines, but bias among those in charge of selecting new machines is toward the fanciest - the touch screens - despite evidence that they are not yet ready for prime time.

The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > The Hand-Marked Ballot Wins for Accuracy

Mr. Bush's Glass House

2004-09-20T22:48:00.000-04:00

Even the conservatives have issues with Bush.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Mr. Bush's Glass House
....we shouldn't be distracted by our doubts about the CBS documents. There's no doubt that Mr. Bush benefited from favoritism. The speaker of the Texas House has acknowledged making the call to get Mr. Bush into the National Guard.
Does any of this matter? What troubles me is less Mr. Bush's advantage three decades ago and more his denial today. Mr. Bush's own route to avoid the draft underscores the disparities in America, yet his policies seem based on a kind of social Darwinism in which the successful make their own opportunities. His tax cuts and entire outlook seem rooted in ideas not of noblesse oblige, but of noblesse entitlement.
One fall day in 1973, when Mr. Bush was a new student at Harvard Business School, he was wearing a Guard jacket when he ran into one of his professors. The professor, Yoshi Tsurumi, says he asked Mr. Bush how he wangled a spot in the Guard.
"He said his daddy had good friends who got him in despite the long waiting list," recalls Professor Tsurumi, who is now at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. Professor Tsurumi says he next asked Mr. Bush how he could have already finished his National Guard commitment. "He said he'd gotten an early honorable discharge," Professor Tsurumi recalls. "I said, 'How did you manage that?' "
"He said, oh, his daddy had a good friend," Mr. Tsurumi said. "Then we started talking about the Vietnam War. He was all for fighting it."
Professor Tsurumi says he remembers Mr. Bush so vividly because he was always making outrageous statements: denouncing the New Deal as socialist, calling the S.E.C. an impediment to business, referring to the civil rights movement as "socialist/communist" and declaring that "people are poor because they're lazy." (Dan Bartlett, an aide to Mr. Bush, denies that the president ever made these statements.)
So in this muddle of competing witnesses and suspect documents, what do we actually know about Mr. Bush and the Air National Guard?
It's pretty clear that Mr. Bush got into the Guard because of his name but did a fine job in his first few years. "He was rock-solid as a pilot," Dean Roome, a pilot in the same unit who was briefly Mr. Bush's roommate, told me. Mr. Roome adds that Mr. Bush inquired in 1970 about the possibility of transferring to Vietnam but was turned down - and, if so, that's a credit to him.
Then, in 1972, something went badly wrong. My hunch is that Mr. Bush went through personal difficulties that he's embarrassed to talk about today. In addition, Mr. Roome suggests that changes at the Texas air base were making it more difficult for junior pilots, so sometimes Mr. Bush's only chance to fly was as a target for student pilots - not the most thrilling duty.
For whatever reason, Mr. Bush's performance ratings deteriorated, he skipped his flight physical, he stopped flying military planes forever, he transferred to Alabama, and he did not report to certain drills there as ordered. The pilots I interviewed who were in Alabama then are pretty sure that Mr. Bush was a no-show at required drills.
The next year Mr. Bush skipped off to Harvard Business School. He still had almost another year in the Guard he had promised to serve, but he drifted away, after taxpayers had spent $1 million training him, and he never entirely fulfilled his obligations.
More than three decades later, that shouldn't be a big deal. What worries me more is the lack of honesty today about that past - and the way Mr. Bush is hurling stones without the self-awareness to realize that he's living in a glass house.

No Stars, Just Cuffs

2004-09-20T15:45:00.000-04:00

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 19, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/opinion/19dowd.htmlMrs. Niederer tried to shout while the first lady was delivering her standard ode to her husband's efforts to fight terrorism. She wanted to know why the Bush twins weren't serving in Iraq "if it's such a justified war," as she put it afterward. The Record of Hackensack, N.J., reported that the mother of the dead soldier was boxed in by Bush supporters yelling "Four more years!" and wielding "Bush/Cheney" signs. Though she eventually left voluntarily, she was charged with trespassing while talking to reporters.
The moment was emblematic of how far the Bushies will go to squelch any voice that presents a view of Iraq that's different from the sunny party line, which they continue to dish out despite a torrent of alarming evidence to the contrary.
Aside from moms who are handcuffed at Bush events and the Jersey 9/11 moms who are supporting John Kerry after growing disillusioned with White House attempts to suppress the 9/11 investigation, the president is doing very well with women. The so-called security moms, who have replaced soccer moms as a desirable demographic, are now flocking to Mr. Bush over Mr. Kerry, believing he can better protect their kids from scary terrorists.
In the new Times poll, 48 percent of women supported the president, compared with Mr. Kerry's 43 percent - a reversal from July, when Mr. Kerry had the women's vote 52 to 40 percent. This is an ominous sign for the Democrat, who lost his gender gap advantage after his listless summer and the G.O.P.'s convention swagger.
How did the president who has caused so much insecurity in the world become the hero of security moms? He was, after all, in charge when Al Qaeda struck, and he was the one to send off Mrs. Niederer's son and other kids to die in a war sold on a false premise. And that conflict has, despite what Mr. Bush claims, spurred more acts of terror and been a recruiting bonanza for Osama bin Laden.
In the Times poll, half of all registered voters said they had a lot of confidence in Mr. Bush's ability to protect the nation from another terrorist attack, compared with 26 percent who felt that way about Mr. Kerry.
While Mr. Bush managed to duck service in Vietnam and let Osama get away, he has been relentless in John Wayning the election and turning war hero John Kerry into a sniveling wimp.
Last week, Mr. Kerry finally tried to change the subject from Mr. Bush's mockery of Mr. Kerry's tortuous stances on Iraq to the awful reality of what's happening in Iraq.
He got an assist from the president's own intelligence community, which issued a gloomy report that gave the lie to the administration's continued insistence that Iraq is a desert flower of democracy.
This was followed by a report by Charles A. Duelfer, the top American weapons inspector in Iraq, that found no evidence that Iraq had begun any large-scale program for weapons production by the time of the American invasion last year. To rationalize its idée fixe on Iraq, the administration squandered 15 months, with 1,200 people - at a time when our scarce supply of Arabic experts should have been focused on the Iraqi insurgency and Al Qaeda - just to figure out that Saddam would have loved to have dangerous weapons if he could have, but he couldn't, so he didn't.
Even with the help of his new Clintonistas, Mr. Kerry is nibbling around the edges of the moral case against W(rong) and Dark Cheney. He charged that the president was living in "a fantasy world of spin" on Iraq.
But the Bushies are way beyond spin, which is a staple of politics. These guys are about turning the world upside down, and saying it's right side up. And that should really give security moms the jitters.

Portrait of George Bush in '72: Unanchored in Turbulent Time

2004-09-20T15:16:00.000-04:00

By SARA RIMER
This article was reported by Sara Rimer, Ralph Blumenthal and Raymond Bonner and written by Ms. Rimer.
MONTGOMERY, Ala., Sept. 17 - Nineteen seventy-two was the year George W. Bush dropped off the radar screen. ....
This year of inconsequence has grown increasingly consequential for President Bush because of persistent, unanswered questions about his National Guard service - why he failed to take his pilot's physical and whether he fulfilled his commitment to the Guard. If anything, those issues became still murkier this past week, with the controversy over the authenticity of four documents disclosed by CBS News and its program "60 Minutes" purporting to shed light on that Guard record.
Still, a wider examination of his life in 1972, based on dozens of interviews and other documents released by the White House over the years, yields a portrait of a young man like many other young men of privilege in that turbulent time - entitled, unanchored and safe from combat, bouncing from a National Guard slot made possible by his family's prominence to a political job arranged through his father.
In a speech on Tuesday at a National Guard convention, Mr. Bush said he was "proud to be one of them," and in his autobiography he writes that his service taught him respect for the chain of command. But a review of records shows that not only did he miss months of duty in 1972, but that he also may have been improperly awarded credit for service, making possible an early honorable discharge so he could turn his attention to a new interest: Harvard Business School.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/20/politics/campaign/20bama.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&posit

The New York Times Op-Ed Columnist: Protect the Vote

2004-09-13T19:07:00.000-04:00

So very many things to fight and to fear as Bush Republicans claw tooth and nail to protect their power - at any cost. Any lie, any broken law, any disenfranchised vote.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Protect the Vote: "

More than 80 percent of the population of Detroit is black. This is very well understood by John Pappageorge, who is white and a Republican state legislator in Michigan. 'If we do not suppress the Detroit vote,' said Mr. Pappageorge, 'we're going to have a tough time in this election.'
Oops! Republicans aren't supposed to actually say they want to suppress black votes. That's so retro. It's so Jim Crow. This is the 21st century, and the thing now is to do the dastardly deed, but never ever acknowledge it.
That's where our friend Pappageorge went wrong.
After his startling quote was published several weeks ago in The Detroit Free Press, Mr. Pappageorge, who is 73, apologized and said he certainly never meant to suggest that anything racist or illegal take place. But he reiterated to me in a phone conversation last Friday that he did indeed mean that the vote in Detroit needed to be kept down.
A lot of other Republicans have similar views about the vote in areas with large African-American populations. Most blacks vote Democratic. If those votes can be suppressed, Republicans benefit. And there is increasing evidence that a big effort to suppress the vote among blacks and some other heavily Democratic voting groups is under way, which is why it is important to keep the following phone number handy:
1-866-OUR VOTE."

Terror Threat May Be Mostly a Big Bluff

2004-09-13T18:46:00.000-04:00

Hmmm. What do you all think of this?

Terror Threat May Be Mostly a Big Bluff: "Bart Kosko teaches probability and statistics at USC, where he is a professor of electrical engineering. He is author of 'Heaven in a Chip' (Random House, 2000).

Just what is the evidence for this alleged terrorist threat that now dominates foreign affairs and the presidential election? The third anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon and New York's World Trade Center has come and gone without any terrorist attacks in the U.S. No terrorists attacked the Olympics in Greece, as so many feared. Nor did they attack the Republican convention in New York. And the big statistical picture of terrorism has changed little in years.

Deaths because of terrorism worldwide have increased a bit lately (especially after the school attack in Russia), but the number still remains on the order of about a thousand deaths a year, according to the State Department � a small fraction of the 15,000 or so murders each year in the United States, or the 40,000 who die in car accidents."

Labor Board May Rule on Union Tactic

2004-09-13T18:39:00.000-04:00

So very much at stake in every possible arena in this presidential election....

Labor Board May Rule on Union Tactic: "'The right to organize totally depends on who wins this election,' said Stewart Acuff, organizing director for the AFL-CIO. He said unions were 'breaking our backs to make sure' that Democrat John F. Kerry 'is in the White House next year.'

What's at issue is 'card check recognition,' used in the Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles and to unionize tens of thousands of communication workers, hotel workers, people who make auto parts and others around the country.

In the card check process, an employer agrees to recognize a union if a majority of employees sign pledge cards; they don't cast ballots, as in a federally supervised vote. Often, the agreement comes with a promise by the employer to remain neutral throughout the recognition campaign. Under those conditions, unions rarely lose.

Card check recognition bypasses the traditional NLRB election process, with its highly litigated system of complaints and appeals. Under that process, about half the elections are won by unions, but many campaigns are abandoned before they ever make it to a vote.

Union leaders and labor experts claim that the NLRB elections are routinely manipulated by employers. Workers are often threatened or fired for supporting a union even though such actions by employers are illegal, according to extensive reviews of NLRB cases by Cornell University labor researcher Kate Bronfenbrenner. The penalties for such behavior are slight, the review found, and can be years in coming.

'The representation election looks democratic,' said David Brody, a UC Davis emeritus professor of history and an authority on union organizing. 'The reality is, it's a platform for coercion.'

For their part, card check opponents say the informal and unregulated process opens the door to abuse by unions. Some organizers intimidate or bribe workers into signing cards, critics contend, noting that employers have no redress if they think the process was rigged.

Outgoing Marine General Faults Fallouja Strategy

2004-09-13T18:22:00.000-04:00

If the top brass would get out of the way, the fighting troops might win a few...

Outgoing Marine General Faults Fallouja Strategy

It was unclear how strenuously the Marines had argued their point of view. But the attack on Fallouja, which caused hundreds of Iraqi casualties, only exacerbated the hostility, the general said.

"When we got here, we were told by the 82nd that you can go into Fallouja, spend 45 minutes, no more," Conway said. "After the contractor incident, we were told that we had to attack Fallouja. I think we certainly increased the level of animosity that existed, and we're living with that."

The attack, which began April 4, proceeded well, Conway said. "In three days we had taken a third of the city. We were quite happy with the progress…. We thought we were going to be done in two days."

Reports on Arab-language television of heavy civilian casualties inflamed the Arab world and caused consternation in Western capitals. But Conway said those reports were exaggerated — as were accounts of heavy U.S. casualties.

"Fallouja was not costing us greatly," said Conway, who said six Marines were killed in three days of fighting.

Then came the order to stop advancing. Conway indicated that he was stunned by the move. He suggested that the decision-makers had not quite understood the magnitude of their earlier directive to attack.

"I would simply say that when you order elements of a Marine division to attack a city, that you really need to understand what the consequences are, and not perhaps vacillate in the middle of something like that," Conway said. "Once you commit, you've got to stay committed."

Firefighters Dash Into Towers; Many Do Not Return

2004-09-11T07:01:00.000-04:00

Remembering that for days there were tales of people found improbably alive and wild survival tales, like the firefighter who survived a 75 story fall by 'riding' a piece of the building down to the ground as the building collapsed.
Later we learned they were just urban legends...

Firefighters Dash Into Towers; Many Do Not Return: "THE RESPONSE
Firefighters Dash Into Towers; Many Do Not Return
By EDWARD WONG and JANE FRITSCH

As many as 2,000 rescue workers were trying early this morning to find trapped survivors from the collapse of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, searching through the rubble and listening for signs of life, whether they came from cell phone calls or from buried whispers.
'All night, we'll keep trying to get people through tomorrow,' Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said at a news conference shortly before midnight.
Mayor Giuliani estimated that thousands of people had died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on Tuesday, and that the final body count 'will be very large.'
But mourning was pushed aside early today as workers focused on those who were still alive. There were indications that at least two people had used their cell phones to call from the basement of One World Trade Center, and they had said during their calls that there were others trapped there, Mayor Giuliani said.
Earlier in the night, two Port Authority officers were rescued from beneath rubble near Trinity and Church Streets. They had been trapped there since the morning, said Inspector Gene Ceccarelli of the Port Authority Police Department.
Rescue workers were holding out hope that some people were managing to survive in pockets of air called 'voids.' A group of four or five firefighters had been taken earlier to St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village after being rescued from such a space. They had emerged without realizing the building had collapsed on top of them.

But those working above the rubble early this morning were searching with the knowledge that they were looking for many of their own. More than 300 firefighters were reported missing, and "we believe many of them are gone," a fire official said. The dead included some of the highest-ranking members of the department, including Peter J. Ganci, the chief of department; William M. Feehan, first deputy fire commissioner; and Raymond M. Downey, the chief of rescue operations.

The disaster was the worst in the history of the New York Fire Department, with explosions having collapsed the two main towers of the World Trade Center on to the first wave of rescuers as they snaked through stairwells and hallway.
....

Throughout the night, fire officials went from firehouse to firehouse doing head counts to determine the death toll.

In the tumult of Tuesday morning, the temporary command center set up on a nearby street to deal with the calamity was buried in a rolling wave of concrete chunks.

One of the fire department's Roman Catholic chaplains, Mychal Judge, had rushed to the scene to comfort victims, only to be killed in the collapse.

There was no trace of three of the fire department's most elite units, Rescues 1, 2 and 4, officials said last night.

September 11th

2004-09-11T06:28:00.000-04:00

ON THIS DAY
On Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackers crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center in New York, causing the 110-story twin towers to collapse. Another hijacked airliner hit the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Some 3,000 people were killed in all.

NYT

From 1814, Tales Keep A-Comin'

2004-09-11T06:17:00.000-04:00

Interesting.
Nations and their myths.

The New York Times > Arts > Television > From 1814, Tales Keep A-Comin': "'In Canada, we learn that we successfully resisted your invasion, and that laid the groundwork for what would eventually become our nation,' said Jack Granatstein, the former director of the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. 'We won the War of 1812 by not losing.'
Stephen Clarkson, a professor of political economy at the University of Toronto, remembers being surprised the first time he encountered the American view of the war. 'A student showed me an American book on it about 15 years ago,' he said, 'and it conveyed the idea that it had been this glorious victory when, in fact, it was a defeat in an attempt to conquer Canada.'
While the American failure in the north meant that the United States would never seriously threaten British interests in North America again, it also meant that Washington would direct its expansionist energies more fruitfully westward and southward against the Indians, Spain and Mexico.
'The war confirmed certain American messianic views about the continent, views the U.S. still holds,' Professor Clarkson said. "

Yahoo! News - Russian Boy Survived Seige With Luck

2004-09-10T08:29:00.000-04:00

Yahoo! News - Russian Boy Survived Seige With Luck: "In a terrifying videotape, 10-year-old Georgy Farniyev sat near a bomb, his hands behind his head and his face a mask of misery. He looked certain to die, but survived through luck, self-possession beyond his years and enough grit to pull shrapnel out of his own arm. "

Horribly like Sopie's Choice

2004-09-04T21:00:00.000-04:00

What horror.
I wonder if her child survived. so many didn't. so many died.

Given No Choice
A Mother Is Forced To Save One Child, Leave Another Behind
September 3, 2004 By KIM MURPHY, Los Angeles Times
BESLAN, Russia -- Zalina Dzandarova cradles her son Alan as he sleeps with his small face buried against her stomach. He is the child that Dzandarova was able to save.

It is the other one, little Alana, her 6-year-old daughter, whose image torments her: Alana clutching her hand, Alana crying and calling after her. Alana's sobs disappearing into the distance as Dzandarova walked out of Middle School No. 1 here Thursday clutching Alan in her arms.

Guerrillas armed with automatic rifles and explosive belts who are holding hundreds of hostages at the small provincial school in southern Russia allowed 26 women and children to leave. About a dozen mothers, like Dzandarova, were allowed to take only one child and forced to leave another behind."I didn't want to make this choice," a stunned-looking Dzandarova, 27, said in the reception room of her father-in-law's comfortable house a few miles from the school. "People say they are happy that my son and I are saved. But how can I be happy if my daughter's still inside there?"

Violence often randomly selects its victims, but seldom is a mother forced to choose to save one child at the cost of leaving another behind, possibly to face death. The standoff involving about two dozen guerrillas likely linked to the separatist republic of Chechnya or neighboring Ingushetia has stunned a nation seemingly accustomed to war and its horrors after the many ethnic and territorial conflicts that accompanied the breakup of the former Soviet Union.

A Failed Presidency

2004-08-27T14:59:00.000-04:00

So very well said.

From The Nation
A Failed Presidency: "A Failed Presidency
Editorial

As Republicans gather in New York City, the Bush campaign will undergo a drastic makeover, camouflaging gutter tactics with a veneer of moderation calculated to help the President win another four-year term. But the hard truth of this campaign is that George W. Bush, while attempting to impose an extremist right-wing agenda on this country and the world, has compiled a record of staggering failure.
The debacle in Iraq has already claimed close to 1,000 American and 10,000 Iraqi lives. Far from making America safer or the Middle East more democratic, it has turned out to be what this magazine warned it would be: a reckless abuse of power that has damaged US security, destabilized the region and undercut America's position in the world. The high cost of the war is evident not just in the number of deaths but also in burgeoning federal budget deficits (the war has cost more than $200 billion) and in the record gasoline prices Americans now pay. It is also evident in the reported swelling of the ranks of Al Qaeda-inspired groups and in the rising hatred of America reflected in public opinion polls which show that even among traditional allies like Jordan and Egypt, as much as 95 percent of the population view the United States with disfavor. Meanwhile, the war has diverted resources from urgent international problems ranging from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the widening AIDS pandemic.
And there's no end in sight. The US occupation grinds on with both Bush and his Democratic opponent, John Kerry, ignoring the only intelligent alternative: a phased US withdrawal. Iraqi opposition to the occupation remains fierce-expressed even by Iraqi soccer players at the Olympics-while the country's appointed leaders display authoritarian tendencies that undermine the democracy Bush and his aides claim is being built.
If the war were Bush's only failure, it would be enought o require his departure. But it is not. By withdrawing the United States from international treaties and conventions, mishandling crises in the Middle East and North Korea and diverting resources from the pursuit of Al Qaeda, Bush has left America more isolated and less secure. And the detention camps made infamous by the crimes of Abu Ghraib have stripped America of the pride we once had in our country and the role it played, however imperfectly, as a champion of human rights, economic opportunity and the rule of law."

The Seattle Times: Local News: War exacts high personal toll as Marine suffers double loss

2004-08-27T10:58:00.000-04:00

The Seattle Times: Local News: War exacts high personal toll as Marine suffers double loss: "By Hal Bernton
Seattle Times staff reporter

POWERS FAMILY PHOTO
Siblings and fellow Marines Rosanna and Caleb Powers, photographed in Twentynine Palms, Calif., in 2002. Lance Cpl. Caleb Powers, 21, of Mansfield, Douglas County, was killed in Iraq last week.

The most difficult miles of Rosanna Powers' life are bringing her from Florida to the small Washington state farming community of Mansfield, Douglas County, for her brother's funeral tomorrow. Then she will fly back across the country to help bury her fianc� the next day.
Both were U.S. Marines killed last week � one day apart � in Iraq.
The double dose of tragedy struck a 22-year-old woman keenly aware of the risks of Marine life. She's a Marine corporal herself, now in the United States in her final days of service"

USATODAY.com - Questions about Bush's Guard service unanswered

2004-08-26T14:31:00.000-04:00

Who says people in glass houses can't throw stones? You can, apparently, if you are brazen enough and deceitful enough and powerful enough.

USATODAY.com - Questions about Bush's Guard service unanswered
Questions about Bush's Guard service unanswered
By Dave Moniz and Jim Drinkard, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — At a time when Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has come under fire from a group of retired naval officers who say he lied about his combat record in Vietnam, questions about President Bush's 1968-73 stint in the Texas Air National Guard remain unresolved: (Related item: Bush urges end to TV attack ads by outside groups)

Some of the documents about President Bush's military service documents still have not been made public.
George Bush Presidential Library
•Why did Bush, described by some of his fellow officers as a talented and enthusiastic pilot, stop flying fighter jets in the spring of 1972 and fail to take an annual physical exam required of all pilots?
•What explains the apparent gap in the president's Guard service in 1972-73, a period when commanders in Texas and Alabama say they never saw him report for duty and records show no pay to Bush when he was supposed to be on duty in Alabama?
•Did Bush receive preferential treatment in getting into the Guard and securing a coveted pilot slot despite poor qualifying scores and arrests, but no convictions, for stealing a Christmas wreath and rowdiness at a football game during his college years?

The White House has released hundreds of pages of records, but the files released so far haven't answered those questions. Since the documents were released in February, at least a half-dozen news organizations, including USA TODAY, have filed new requests for Bush's military records under the Freedom of Information Act.

In an e-mail to USA TODAY last week, presidential spokesman Dan Bartlett said: "The president has authorized the release of his records and we are complying with all requests. Some are taking longer than others, but all will be addressed."

Past military service and qualifications to be commander in chief have become a central theme in the 2004 presidential campaign.

Questions about Bush's record predate the current campaign. The apparent gap in his Guard service first surfaced before the 2000 election, when The Boston Globe reported that Texas Guard commanders were unable to account for Bush's whereabouts from May 1972 to April 1973.
Bush has not said what he did in the Guard during that period. Aside from a statement by a former Alabama Air Guard officer who said he saw Bush report for duty there in the fall of 1972, the only evidence he was at Dannelly Air National Guard Base in Alabama was a record of a dental exam on Jan. 6, 1973, at the base.
Bush said in a TV interview in February that he would make all his military records available. That month, the White House released more than 400 pages of Bush military records, including some duplicates, and said the documents were a complete catalog of his personnel files.

But some documents still have not been made public. The White House did not release Bush's medical records from his Guard files but allowed a group of reporters who cover the White House to review them for 20 minutes. They found nothing unusual. Kerry released some of his military records earlier this year. He has also declined to release his complete medical records but showed them to reporters as Bush did.
Since February, the White House has banned all Guard and military commanders outside the Pentagon from commenting on Bush's records or service. Requests for information must go to the Pentagon's Freedom of Information Act office.
The Pentagon last week responded to a 4-month-old request from USA TODAY for additional records from Bush's files by sending another copy of documents that were released by the White House in February. The documents do not address the unexplained year in Bush's Guard service or his decision to stop flying.

The Associated Press filed a lawsuit this summer requesting copies of Bush's military records stored in a Texas archive on microfilm. It sought information that might explain why Bush did not take his flight physical and whether he showed up for duty in Alabama in the fall of 1972, AP spokesman John Stokes said.

These Charges Are False ...

2004-08-26T14:25:00.000-04:00

This just makes me spitting mad....!

These Charges Are False ...: " It's one thing for the presidential campaign to get nasty but quite another for it to engage in fabrication.

The technique President Bush is using against John F. Kerry was perfected by his father against Michael Dukakis in 1988, though its roots go back at least to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. It is: Bring a charge, however bogus. Make the charge simple: Dukakis 'vetoed the Pledge of Allegiance'; Bill Clinton 'raised taxes 128 times'; 'there are [pick a number] Communists in the State Department.' But make sure the supporting details are complicated and blurry enough to prevent easy refutation.

Then sit back and let the media do your work for you. Journalists have to report the charges, usually feel obliged to report the rebuttal, and often even attempt an analysis or assessment. But the canons of the profession prevent most journalists from saying outright: These charges are false. As a result, the voters are left with a general sense that there is some controversy over Dukakis' patriotism or Kerry's service in Vietnam. And they have been distracted from thinking about real issues (like the war going on now) by these laboratory concoctions.

It must be infuriating to the victims of this process to be given conflicting advice about how to deal with it from the same campaign press corps that keeps it going. The press has been telling Kerry: (a) Don't let charges sit around unanswered; and (b) stick to your issues: Don't let the other guy choose the turf.

At the moment, Kerry is being punished by the media for taking advice (b) and failing to take advice (a). There was plenty of talk on TV about what Kerry's failure to strike back said about whether he had the backbone for the job of president — and even when he did strike back, he was accused of not doing it soon enough. But what does Bush's acquiescence in the use of this issue say about whether he has the simple decency for the job of president?"

Vast Force Is Deployed for Security at Convention

2004-08-26T09:50:00.000-04:00

The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > Vast Force Is Deployed for Security at Convention:
.....
"The backbone of security is being provided by the 37,000-member New York Police Department, which has a budget larger than all but 19 of the world's standing armies. To prevent an attack, the department will flood the streets with officers and employ high and low technology, from seven surveillance helicopters to plainclothes detectives traveling the subways and eyeballing other riders.
Up to 10,000 officers, many reassigned from narcotics and other duties, will be part of an enormous show of force around Madison Square Garden. That display will include special heavily armed 'Hercules' antiterror squads, snipers and phalanxes of officers set up around the arena to search buses and trucks before they enter the area. In addition to the helicopters, several of which can feed close-up video surveillance images to mobile command centers on the ground, 26 launches will patrol waterways, and officers will use 181 bomb-sniffing dogs, many of them borrowed from other law enforcement agencies.
'We can cover all the bases with 37,000 police officers,' Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said yesterday. 'As big as the R.N.C. deployment is, we have a reserve on top of that. New York would be a poor choice for the malicious-minded to try anything, especially now.'
Mr. Kelly has said that virtually the entire department will be mobilized next week, when in addition to the convention, the department will police the United States Open tennis tournament, and baseball games at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and Shea Stadium in Queens."
...

Plofsky Suspended

2004-08-25T17:52:00.000-04:00

Rumors swirl as to the nature of the allegations against him...
I told you Michele Jacklin and others were premature in their automatic defense of this guy. He is not the best person for that job at this point in time and should leave. More to follow...

Connecticut News - State%2C National and World News from The Hartford Courant - CONNECTICUT NEWS: "Report%3A Plofsky On Leave%2C Under Investigation%0D%0A8%3A45 AM EDT%2CAugust 25%2C 2004 %0D%0AAssociated Press %0D%0A%0D%0AAlan S. Plofsky%2C the executive director of the State Ethics Commission%2C has been placed on leave while he is under investigation%2C The New York Times reported Wednesday%2C%0D%0A%0D%0APlofsky%2C a harsh critic of former Gov. John G. Rowland%2C was notified by hand-delivered letter on Friday that he was being place on paid leave as a result of complaints.%0D%0A%0D%0ARosemary Giuliano%2C chairwoman of the commission%2C said in the letter that the allegations are of %22serious misconduct which could constitute just cause for dismissal.%22%0D%0A%0D%0AJust last month%2C the commission had resolved a controversy involving Plofsky and public comments he had made about Rowland. On July 23%2C the commission issued a written reprimand to Plofsky%2C rather than a threatened two-week suspension."

Bush's Lawyer edited anti-Kerry Ads

2004-08-25T17:42:00.000-04:00

Only surprise here is that they got caught. Imagine what he was up to in Florida.

New York Post Online Edition%3A Breaking News: "%0D%0A%0D%0AWASHINGTON %28AP%29 -
One of President Bush's top lawyers resigned from his campaign Wednesday, a day after disclosing that he had given legal advice to a veterans group airing TV ads against Democrat John Kerry. The guidance included checking ad scripts, the group said. Benjamin Ginsberg, who also represented Bush in the 2000 Florida recount that made the Republican president told Bush in a letter that he felt his legal work for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had become a distraction for the re-election campaign. "

Cheney on Gay Rights

2004-08-25T17:36:00.000-04:00

Once upon a time, I liked Cheney better than Bush - this was part of the reason why. Now it seems to be one of his few redeeming qualities.
New York Post Online Edition%3A news: "WASHINGTON
Vice President Dick Cheney broke from his boss yesterday and threw his support behind "an issue our family is very familiar with" gay relationships. "Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it's an issue our family is very familiar with," Cheney said of his daughter Mary. When asked at a campaign stop in Iowa where he stood on gay marriage, Cheney said,"With respect to the question of relationships, my general view is freedom means freedom for everyone. People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to," he added. The question that comes up with marriage is what kind of official sanction or approval is going to be granted by the government, Cheney said. Historically%2C that%27s been a relationship that%27s been handled by the states.%22 %0D%0AIn spite of his views%2C Cheney conceded President Bush ultimately sets the policy for the administration. %0D%0ABush has been a vocal opponent of gay marriage %97 blaming %22activist judges%22 for legalizing the unions in Massachusetts %97 and backs a constitutional ban. %0D%0A%0D%0ACheney said Bush seeks the ban because %22the courts were making the judgment for the entire country.%22 "

Some History

2004-08-25T17:30:00.000-04:00

New York Post Online Edition%3A news

HAMPTONS DIARY
August 25, 2004 -- LOOKS like Gardin ers Island co- owner Robert Gar diner, who died Monday at age 93, won't be granted a wish he once had — to be buried on his beloved, pristine isle.
Diary hears the reclusive millionaire always hoped the private paradise in Gardiners Bay would be his final resting place, and he had his eye on a small cemetery there that he would proudly show off to visitors.
But now Gardiner is to be buried in East Hampton's South End cemetery Friday, alongside family members including his parents, and his ancestor Lion Gardiner, who was given the island by King Charles I of England in 1639.
A representative for Gardiner's estranged niece Alexandra Creel Goelet, who now owns the island outright, said the Goelet family had received a request from Gardiner a while ago asking if he could be buried on the island, and they had agreed to it. ...
"Doing it in East Hampton was the logical decision by his wife," the lawyers said.

Goelet family members released a statement yesterday saying they intend to "continue to utilize the island as a family home for generations to come."

2 Planes Crash Near Moscow%3B 88 Feared Lost

2004-08-25T15:11:00.000-04:00

This account adds a detail that wasn't part of the news reports this morning on TV.

The New York Times
2 Planes Crash Near Moscow%3B 88 Feared Lost
Wednesday%2C Aug. 25 - Two Russian passenger jets on domestic flights crashed nearly simultaneously after departing from the same terminal in Moscow on Tuesday night%2C officials said. At least 88 people were presumed dead.%0D%0AWhile precise details surrounding the crashes were unclear%2C the Russian news service Interfax%2C citing an anonymous official source%2C reported that minutes after the first plane went down%2C the second jet issued a distress signal indicating it had been hijacked. Then it%2C too%2C disappeared from radar. %0D%0AAs airport security was tightened throughout Russia%2C President Vladimir V. Putin%2C who has been vacationing and working in the Black Sea resort of Sochi%2C ordered the F.S.B.%2C one of the successor agencies to the K.G.B.%2C to begin immediate investigations into the crashes%2C"

Truth from a Reluctant Witness

2004-08-22T11:44:00.000-04:00

I get so angry at the gall and lack of ethics of Bush and company for attacking Kerry's record. Bush who scammed the military, who has never seen enemy fire!!! He should be ashamed.... I hope to God the American people are not fooled.

From the Chicago Tribune
Fellow Skipper: Kerry Critics Wrong
August 22, 2004 By WILLIAM B. ROOD, Chicago Tribune

There were three swift boats on the river that day in Vietnam more than 35 years ago - three officers and 15 crew members. Only two of those officers remain to talk about what happened on Feb. 28, 1969.One is John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate who won a Silver Star for what happened on that date. I am the other.For years, no one asked about those events. But now they are the focus of skirmishing in a presidential election with a group of swift boat veterans and others contending that Kerry didn't deserve the Silver Star for what he did on that day, or the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts he was awarded for other actions.Many of us wanted to put it all behind us - the rivers, the ambushes, the killing. Ever since that time, I have refused all requests for interviews about Kerry's service - even those from reporters at the Chicago Tribune, where I work as an editor on the metropolitan desk.But Kerry's critics, armed with stories I know to be untrue, have charged that the accounts of what happened were overblown. The critics have taken pains to say they're not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what others did, but their version of events has splashed doubt on all of us. It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there.Even though Kerry's own crew members have backed him, the attacks have continued, and in recent days Kerry has called me and others who were with him in those days, asking that we go public with our accounts.I can't pretend those calls had no effect on me, but that is not why I am writing this. What matters most to me is that this is hurting crewmen who are not public figures and who deserved to be honored for what they did. My intent is to tell the story here and to never again talk publicly about it.I was part of the operation that led to Kerry's Silver Star. I have no firsthand knowledge of the events that resulted in his winning the Purple Hearts or the Bronze Star.But on Feb. 28, 1969, I was officer in charge of PCF-23, one of three swift boats - including Kerry's PCF-94 and Lt. j.g. Donald Droz's PCF-43 - that carried South Vietnamese regional and Popular Force troops and a Navy demolition team up the Dong Cung, a narrow tributary of the Bay Hap River, to conduct a sweep in the area.The approach of the noisy, 50-foot aluminum boats, each driven by two huge 12-cylinder diesels and loaded down with six crew members, troops and gear, was no secret.Ambushes were a virtual certainty, and that day was no exception.The difference was that Kerry, who had tactical command of that particular operation, had talked to Droz and me beforehand about not responding the way the boats usually did to an ambush.We agreed that if we were not crippled by the initial volley and had a clear fix on the location of the ambush, we would turn directly into it, focusing the boats' twin .50-caliber machine guns on the attackers and beaching the boats. We told our crews about the plan.The Viet Cong in the area had come to expect that the heavily loaded boats would lumber on past an ambush, firing at the entrenched attackers, beaching upstream and putting troops ashore to sweep back down on the ambush site. Often, they were long gone by the time the troops got there.The first time we took fire - the usual rockets and automatic weapons - Kerry ordered a "turn 90" and the three boats roared in on the ambush. It worked. We routed the ambush, killing three of the attackers. The troops, led by an Army adviser, jumped off the boats and began a sweep, which killed another half-dozen VC, wounded or captured others and found weapons, blast masks and other supplies used to stage ambushes.Meanwhile, Kerry ordered our boat to head upstream with his, leaving Droz's boat at the first site.It happened again, another ambush. And again, Kerry ordered the turn maneuver, and again it worked. As we headed for the riverbank, I remember seeing a loaded B-40 launcher pointed at the boats. It wasn't fired as two men jumped up from their spider holes. We called Droz's boat up to assist us, and Kerry, followed by one member of his crew, jumped ashore and chased a VC behind a hooch - a thatched hut - maybe 15 yards inland from the ambush site. Some who were there that day recall the man being wounded as he ran. Neither I nor Jerry Leeds, our boat's leading petty officer with whom I've checked my recollection of all these events, recalls that, which is no surprise. Recollections of those who go through experiences like that frequently differ.With our troops involved in the sweep of the first ambush site, Richard Lamberson, a member of my crew, and I also went ashore to search the area. I was checking out the inside of the hooch when I heard gunfire nearby. Not long after that, Kerry returned, reporting that he had killed the man he chased behind the hooch. He also had picked up a loaded B-40 rocket launcher, which we took back to our base in An Thoi after the operation.John O'Neill, author of a highly critical account of Kerry's Vietnam service, describes the man Kerry chased as a "teenager in a loincloth." I have no idea how old the gunner Kerry chased that day was, but both Leeds and I recall that he was a grown man, dressed in the kind of garb the VC usually wore.The man Kerry chased was not the "lone" attacker at that site, as O'Neill suggests. There were others who fled. There was also firing from the tree line well behind the spider holes and, at one point, from the opposite riverbank as well. It was not the work of just one attacker.Our initial reports of the day's action caused an immediate response from our task force headquarters in Cam Ranh Bay.Known over radio circuits by the call sign "Latch," then-Capt. and now retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann, the task force commander, fired off a message congratulating the three swift boats, saying at one point that the tactic of charging the ambushes was a "shining example of completely overwhelming the enemy" and that it "may be the most efficacious method of dealing with small numbers of ambushers."Hoffmann has become a leading critic of Kerry's and now says that what the boats did on that day demonstrated Kerry's inclination to be impulsive to a fault.Our decision to use that tactic under the right circumstances was not impulsive but was the result of discussions well beforehand and a mutual agreement of all three boat officers.It was also well within the aggressive tradition that was embraced by the late Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, then commander of U.S. Naval Forces, Vietnam. Months before that day in February, a fellow boat officer, Michael Bernique, was summoned to Saigon to explain to top Navy commanders why he had made an unauthorized run up the Giang Thanh River, which runs along the Vietnam-Cambodia border. Bernique, who speaks French fluently, had been told by a source in Ha Tien at the mouth of the river that a VC tax collector was operating upstream.Ignoring the prohibition against it, Bernique and his crew went upstream and routed the VC, pursuing and killing several.Instead of facing disciplinary action as he had expected, Bernique was given the Silver Star, and Zumwalt ordered other swifts, which had largely patrolled coastal waters, into the rivers.The decision sent a clear message, underscored repeatedly by Hoffmann's congratulatory messages, that aggressive patrolling was expected and that well-timed, if unconventional, tactics like Bernique's were encouraged.What we did on Feb. 28, 1969, was well in line with the tone set by our top commanders.Zumwalt made that clear when he flew down to our base at An Thoi off the southern tip of Vietnam to pin the Silver Star on Kerry and assorted Bronze Stars and commendation medals on the rest of us.My Bronze Star citation, signed by Zumwalt, praised the charge tactic we used that day, saying the VC were "caught completely off guard." There's at least one mistake in that citation. The name of the river where the main action occurred is wrong, a reminder that such documents were often done in haste, authored for their signers by staffers. It's a cautionary note for those trying to piece it all together. There's no final authority on something that happened so long ago - not the documents and not even the strained recollections of those of us who were there.But I know that what some people are saying now is wrong. While they mean to hurt Kerry, what they're saying impugns others who are not in the public eye.Men like Larry Lee, who was on our bow with an M-60 machine gun as we charged the riverbank; Kenneth Martin, who was in the .50-caliber gun tub atop our boat; and Benjamin Cueva, our engineman, who was at our aft gun mount suppressing the fire from the opposite bank.Wayne Langhoffer and the other crewmen on Droz's boat went through even worse on April 12, 1969, when they saw Droz killed in a brutal ambush that left PCF-43 an abandoned pile of wreckage on the banks of the Duong Keo River. That was just a few months after the birth of his only child, Tracy. The survivors of all these events are scattered across the country now.Jerry Leeds lives in a tiny Kansas town where he built and sold a successful printing business. He owns a beautiful home with a lawn that sweeps to the edge of a small lake, which he also owns. Every year, flights of purple martins return to the stately birdhouses on the tall poles in his backyard.Cueva, recently retired, has raised three daughters and is beloved by his neighbors for all the years he spent keeping their cars running. Lee is a senior computer programmer in Kentucky, and Lamberson finished a second military career in the Army.With the debate over that long-ago day in February, they're all living that war another time.
The Chicago Tribune is a Tribune Co. newspaper.

Cheney Lurking

2004-08-22T11:26:00.000-04:00

Washington Insiders go to Cheney to get things done. He is the power behind the throne.
Cheney Is a Quiet Force Behind Bush Presidency
1 hour, 18 minutes ago
By Randall Mikkelsen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Dick Cheney (news - web sites) is one of the most powerful vice presidents in U.S. history, regarded as a driving force behind the Iraq (news - web sites) war and the Bush administration's industry-friendly energy policy.
A longtime Bush family confidant and defense secretary in the first Gulf War (news - web sites), Cheney is a courtly figure who embodies former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt's maxim: "Speak softly and carry a big stick."
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Cheney worked out of sight for long stretches at an undisclosed location for security reasons.
He remained largely in the background as he helped prepare the Bush administration for the Iraq war, but gave a few high-impact public speeches making the case for invasion. Supporters praise his leadership and dedication, but Cheney has been a lightning rod for criticism of the administration's conduct in the war and its aftermath.
As vice president, Cheney also drew the ire of an environmental organization and a conservative watchdog group, who sued to force the disclosure of Cheney's contacts with industry executives when he headed Bush's energy policy task force. The groups claimed Cheney, a former chief executive of energy and construction company Halliburton Co., secretly drafted a policy favorable to the energy industry.
Cheney said: "You can't run the government if you don't have the ability to talk to people in confidence." He appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) and the justices sent the case back to an appeals court for more hearings.
PINSTRIPES AND COWBOY BOOTS
The 62-year-old former congressman has a reputation for politeness, even with political foes, so it was a surprise to many when he directed a four-letter expletive at a Democratic senator earlier this year.
Cheney usually blends pinstripe elegance with cowboy boots and a voice so quiet a listener often has to lean forward to catch his words, only to find they express a hard line.
In an August 2002 speech, he sounded the call for war in Iraq, saying: "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." ....

Ex-CIA blasts Iraq war

2004-08-20T16:14:00.000-04:00

The full article is worth reading and includes an intelligent defense of some of the decisions to proceed with restraint. His condemnation of the Iraq war is blistering.

We could have stopped him The CIA has taken much of the blame for the security lapses that led to 9/11 and the false intelligence on Iraq's WMDs. But now one spy has broken ranks to point the finger at the politicians - and warn that the war on terror could plunge the US into even greater danger.
By Julian Borger Friday August 20, 2004The Guardian
These are not happy times at the CIA. In the space of a few short months, two official reports have found the agency principally to blame for failing to prevent the September 11 al-Qaida attack and for claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt there is a lot of blame to go round. The twin fiascos rank as the worst intelligence failures since the second world war. But the two reports, by the September 11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee respectively, were also testaments to political expedience. Both panels were made up of Republican and Democratic loyalists who reached a political compromise by going relatively easy on both Clinton and Bush administrations, and focused on institutional culprits. The CIA, without a defender after the resignation in July of its long-serving director, George Tenet, presented the easiest target.
Yet most of the agency's rank and file believe they have done little wrong. They were the first to raise the alarm over the danger posed by Osama bin Laden, long before the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa. In 1996 they set up a unit called the Bin Laden Issue Station, codenamed "Alex", dedicated to tracking him down, only to have one operation after another aborted as too politically dangerous.
There are a lot of angry spies at Langley, and one of the angriest is Mike Scheuer, a senior intelligence officer who led the Bin Laden station for four years. While some of his colleagues have vented their frustrations through leaks, Scheuer has done what no serving American intelligence official has ever done - published a book-length attack on the establishment.

His book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, is a fire-breathing denunciation of US counter-terrorism policy. In it, Scheuer addresses the missed opportunities of the Clinton era, but he reserves his most withering attack for the Bush administration's war in Iraq.
He describes the invasion as "an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat but whose defeat did offer economic advantage". He even goes so far as to call on America's generals to resign rather than execute orders that "they know [...] will produce more, not less, danger to their nation". Bin Laden, he believes, is not a lonely maverick, but draws support from much of the Islamic world, which resents the US not for what it is, but for what it does - supporting Israel almost uncritically, propping up corrupt regimes in the Arab world, garrisoning troops on the Saudi peninsula near Islam's most holy sites to safeguard access to cheap oil.
"America ought to do what's in America's interests, and those interests are not served by being dependent on oil in the Middle East and by giving an open hand to the Israelis," Scheuer argues. "If we're less open-handed to Israel over time we can cut down Bin Laden's ability to grow. Right now he has unlimited potential for growing." What makes these comments the more challenging to the Bush administration is that they come from a self-described conservative and instinctive Republican voter. ....

Say What? Contaminated Brain Surgery

2004-08-20T12:52:00.000-04:00

One shouldn't have to be a brain surgeon....The same tools used in an autopsy were used for a dozen brain surgeries! You must be kidding. And they don't 'super-sterilize' their brain surgery equipment on a regular basis.

August 20, 2004
Woman being treated for brain-wasting condition dies

SEATTLE - A woman who was treated in Seattle for a brain-wasting condition believed to be related to mad cow disease has died.
Authorities say an autopsy may help identify the mysterious ailment.
A Washington state health epidemiologist, Dr. Jo Hofmann, says brain tissue from the woman will be sent to the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center in Cleveland.
Hoffman says the woman was younger than 60 and neither resided nor died in Washington. Her identify has been withheld at the family's request.
Tests so far have indicated the presence of prions, misshapen proteins that are believed to cause a number of fatal diseases by eating holes in the brain.
Human forms include Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease and a variant in people who have eaten beef from cattle with mad cow disease -- but both have been ruled out in this case.
Harborview officials say about a dozen patients had brain surgery after the biopsy and before the instruments used in the surgical procedure were super-sterilized.
They plan to wait for the test results before deciding whether to notify those patients. Research indicates that ordinary sterilization does not always destroy prions -- and, in very rare cases, prion diseases have been transmitted by contaminated medical equipment.
(Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Reminiscent of The Crucible...Hysteria Strikes

2004-08-19T22:14:00.000-04:00

Mass Hysteria Strikes Small Rural U.S. High School
Thu Aug 19, 6:05 PM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Ten healthy female students at a rural, co-ed North Carolina high school had repeated bouts of seizures, swooning and hyperventilation over a four-month period in 2002 -- an outbreak that experts are calling an example of mass hysteria.
The first girl began experiencing seizures in August. Over the next few weeks, more girls began to show the same symptoms. The attacks escalated throughout the fall months, then appeared to taper off by the winter holiday break.
One student experienced at least 30 attacks. All but one of the girls had no history of seizures.
Most of the attacks occurred while students were at school but not in class, such as during breaks or in hallways between classes.
Five of the students were current or former cheerleaders, but only two shared a classroom. None appeared to be experiencing more than their normal share of life's stressors, such as family problems or history of depression.
To investigate why these girls were experiencing seizures, Dr. E. Steve Roach of Wake Forest University in North Carolina and Dr. Ricky L. Langley of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (news - web sites) interviewed the students and their parents, and spoke with teachers and the school nurse. They also reviewed the students' class schedules and medical records, and tested the high school's buildings for environmental contaminants.
Writing in the Archives of Neurology, the authors conclude that the evidence "strongly suggested" that the girls were experiencing an episode of mass hysteria, defined as "the simultaneous occurrence of related signs or symptoms with a psychogenic basis in multiple individuals in a group."
The authors explain that they suspect mass hysteria because the episodes largely occurred at the same place, there was no other obvious explanation for them, and all of the girls' symptoms appeared and disappeared at around the same time.
Moreover, previous research has shown that mass hysteria typically strikes women more often than men, and may also occur more frequently in children and adolescents, they write.
Many episodes of mass hysteria are triggered by harmless odors or when a "prominent" person begins showing symptoms, they add. No environmental trigger was found, and since the first girl to experience seizures was a cheerleader and four others were as well, Roach and Langley suggest that seeing the symptoms in these girls "could have encouraged additional students to develop similar episodes."
Unfortunately, mass hysteria was not seriously considered as a possibility until after some time had passed, the authors note. By then, some girls said they had been teased, were unable to drive, and their mysterious conditions had placed a strain on family and personal life.
Moreover, "had the similarities between these individuals been noted earlier," some of the girls could have avoided some unnecessary diagnostic procedures and treatment, the investigators add.
"Although the underlying dynamics that initiate and perpetuate mass hysteria are poorly understood, its prompt recognition allows physicians to avoid unnecessary tests and treatments and to reassure both the affected individuals and the public," they write.
SOURCE: Archives of Neurology, August 2004.

Truth Stranger than Fiction - Kidnap Plot

2004-08-18T16:26:00.000-04:00

HEIR-STRIKE 'KIDNAPPER' By KATE SHEEHY

August 18, 2004 -- The former whiz-kid financial guru to real-estate tycoon Jim Weichert tried to kidnap the billionaire's son in a bizarre, eerie scheme involving a New Jersey cemetery, authorities said yesterday.
Cash-strapped, drug-addled Robert Harrison - an ex-star Merrill Lynch stockbroker - hatched the plot to lure 21-year-old James Weichert Jr. to a graveyard in Morris County last week and then nab him to extort his parents, officials said.
But Harrison, 38, was foiled after James Jr. became suspicious when the disgraced money manager called his cellphone and lied that he was a detective from the "New Vernon Police Department," authorities said.
Harrison allegedly told the son, whose family is from New Vernon in Harding, that a Mercedes-Benz had been found abandoned at the cemetery, with paperwork inside linking it to him. Harrison suggested that the young man meet him at the site, officials said.
The only problem is, there is no New Vernon Police Department.
Smelling a rat, the quick-thinking heir called his dad, and authorities were immediately alerted.
Cops later found duct tape, a BB gun and a ransom note demanding "a large amount" of money in the trunk of Harrison's black 1994 Mercedes, authorities said.
Harrison — a married dad of two young boys and admitted cocaine and heroin addict — had been fired as Weichert's personal financial adviser in October 2000, officials said.
He was booted by Merrill Lynch a year later, after customers griped he was making unauthorized trades and charging them inflated fees, The Star-Ledger of Newark said.
Harrison, in a jail interview, told The Star-Ledger that he had been raking in up to $1 million a year as a stockbroker, but that drugs were part of his downfall.
"The whole thing is a complete, complete mistake," Harrison said of his bust. "I'm not some crazed person who is going to kidnap someone.
"Did I have some stupid thoughts? Yes," the alleged kidnapper wannabe told the paper. "[But] I did not even come close to acting on it."
In pleading with a judge yesterday to reduce his $200,000 bail, Harrison whimpered, "I really am a good person at heart."
Harrison told The Star-Ledger that financial woes forced him and his family to move from a million-dollar pad in Maplewood to a small rental house in Monmouth Beach seven months ago.
One source who knows Harrison said last night that he wasn't too surprised at the bust.
"He's a bit strange," the source said. "He smoked a lot of cigarettes and definitely had a nervous edge.
"He was always in his car. It was bizarre," the source added. "He liked sitting in the car making phone calls, always with the trunk open. He was always fiddling around talking as the kids were [going] in and out."
But neighbor Joe Jackson called Harrison's alleged plot "very out of character.
"He's never cruel, and there haven't been mean words of any kind," Jackson said. "He's very happy-go-lucky. He seems super-intelligent."
Lt. Jeffrey Paul, spokesman for Morris County Prosecutor Michael Rubbinaccio, praised the Weicherts, saying, "We credit the family with their prompt response in handling the situation."
Additional reporting by Steven Hirsch

Of dis-Belief and God

2004-08-17T10:36:00.000-04:00

"The consolation one receives from imaginery things is not an imaginery thing."

Who said this?

Rowland Papers Released

2004-08-16T16:29:00.000-04:00

Connecticut News - State%2C National and World News from The Hartford Courant - CONNECTICUT NEWS:
The legislature on Monday released more than 85,000 pages of documents that were used in the impeachment investigation of former Gov. John G. Rowland.The documents, which include tax forms, personal letters, and details of Rowland's financial investments were provided to the legislature's Select Committee of Inquiry by Rowland, his wife Patricia and the governor's office.Legislative attorneys continued the task of sifting through another 400,000 pages of documents to determine which of those should be made public under Connecticut's open government laws.
The inquiry committee fought to have much of the documents it collected through subpoenas and other means kept private. Until Monday, the panel had only released the information it used as evidence during Rowland's impeachment hearings - a small portion of the overall cache of documents collected by investigators.

The legislature's lawyers were trained by the Attorney General's Office in freedom of information law. Some of the 510,000 pages gathered by the committee contain personal information that is exempted under the law, including Social Security numbers and health information.

O'Neill estimated that less than five percent of the documents will not be released to the public. That list includes some tax returns, medical documents and security information at the Connecticut Juvenile Training School in Middletown - one of the key state projects scrutinized by the inquiry committee.

Officials planned to release a second batch of documents before Labor Day.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: More Trouble on the Turnpike

2004-08-16T09:38:00.000-04:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: More Trouble on the Turnpike:

" My fictional alter ego, a disgraced political operative, once suggested a motto for the Garden State: 'New Jersey: you got a problem with that?' Maybe you have to be from Jersey (we leave out the 'New') to appreciate the slogan. Jersey is all about confrontation; we dare you to see just how much we'll tolerate before things get ugly.
I watched the resignation and outing of Gov. James E. McGreevey of New Jersey with this motto in mind. I was riveted: as a novelist who has written about a New Jersey governor who tries to cover up a sexual secret; as a crisis management consultant whose day job is making bad news go away; and as a Jersey native with a working knowledge of the rules of local politics.
The novelist in me empathized with Mr. McGreevey's confession because, in literary terms, he executed the denouement of his 'character arc' flawlessly. A writer agonizes to make even his villains human, so one would have to be heartless not to feel the genuine conflict in the soul of this earnest Catholic boy, the son of a Marine drill sergeant, who had devoted his life to public service.
As a crisis manager, however, I saw only a stone-cold exercise in damage control. Mr. McGreevey was a politician in deep stew who shrewdly cut his losses. As I watched his news conference, I thought to myself: somebody's got him dead to rights. In New Jersey, no less, where it's hard enough for a guy to be sensitive, never mind gay."

Some Random Quotes

2004-08-02T10:51:00.000-04:00

Fun post from a blog I stumbled upon- Random Acts of Discombobulation. address below.
I only know one guy who regularly includes taglines. It does add interest to his emails, though one does look slightly askance.
http://darnedtoheck.blogspot.com/2004/07/taglines.html
Taglines
For a very short while, people at work started adding personal quotes to the end of their e-mails. This was a rare glimpse into the minds of those around me who normally drift around like ghosts, appearing to be no more than mere images of real people. Of course, management quickly caught on and put an end to it ("OMG! They're expressing opinions! On company property!"), but before that happened I started a little collection. Here's my tagline collection with a few thoughts:

Whether we bring our enemies to justice or justice to our enemies, justice will be done....Not that I disagree with the sentiment, but does it really mesh with the (lack of) office culture? "Hey, Bob. Here are those TPS reports you asked for. Death to the godless heathens, out."

"An organization's ability to learn and translate that learning into action rapidly is the ultimate competitive business advantage." - Jack Welch, Chairman, General ElectricNow say that five times real fast.

Never give up your dreams...they will always give you a goal to accomplish.I'm cool with this one. Of course, one of my dreams is to find a better job. No wonder the MiCs (Morons in Charge) wanted this notion suppressed.

Be a sport and take a kid fishing this summer!Okay. Does it have to be my kid, or can I just grab one at random?

** Please use the Reply function to send your correspondence **An e-mail telling you how to use the e-mail.

Briefly look over your life, "For what purpose do you live?"Okay, you've convinced me. I'm offing myself.

Find a purpose in life so big it will challenge every capacity to be at your best.Do I get any rest breaks? Ever?

*Backup requests are made to comply with audit requirements*Can't get much more corporate than that.

"Whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe, and enthusiastically act upon, must inevitably come to pass" - Paul J. MeyerI like the fact that Herr Meyer included the fact that you have to WORK to make your dreams come true. A lot of human quote generators tend to forget that part.

"I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he/she has overcome while trying to succeed." - Booker T. WashingtonI like that sentiment - it makes me feel more successful than my banks statements allow.

Have a Nice Day!Fuck you. Don't tell me what kind of day to have.

"To Be, or Not To Be"....is not a question.--UNKNOWN'nuff said.

"I HEAR and I forget. I SEE and I remember. I DO and I understand."I FART and the room clears.

"Forgiveness is the fragrance that the flower leaves on the heel of the one that crushed it."I think this one came from someone experiencing an unhappy breakup.

A cheerful heart is good medicine... (Prov 17:22a)Religionists! Aaaack! Run!

"God created man, because he was disappointed in the monkey" Mark TwainI've heard this is a misquote, but I'm not sure.

"Great opportunities to help others seldom come, but small ones surround us every day." - Sally KochI agree with Sally, whoever she is.

" Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens " .......Jimi HendrixJimi rox!

-- Spend every moment like it's your last --AAAAAAGH! I'M GONNA FREAKIN' DIE RIGHT NOW! NO, NOW! NO...

Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut that held its ground.I can relate.

Music is to the soul and bread is to the body; Except the body can dump the crapHunh?

"The problems we have today cannot be solved with the same level of thinking we were at when we caused them." Albert EinsteinYeah. You go, Al.

If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.Or, preferably, on fire.

A penny saved is a government oversight.I read long ago that the government spends over $200 million a year minting those stupid, useless things. Time for them to go. Lets get rid of the pennies while we're at it.

Attitude - The difference between an ordeal and an adventureI should have remembered that yesterday. Of course, that's probably as useless as telling someone to "Cheer up." Has that ever worked?

"What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?" Jean-Jacques RousseauJimmy Stewart said something similar in Harvey. "In this world, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. And you may quote me."

"Of all the days you have available to choose from, today will give you the earliest start and the best advantage."Ehh. I'll comment tomorrow. Actually, I kind of like this one.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint. (Mark Twain)I don't know if that was really his or not. Mark Twain, like Abraham Lincoln, has the distinction of being one of the most misquoted individuals in history.

"Someday, in the distant future, our grandchildren's grandchildren will develop a new equivalent of our classrooms. They will spend many hours in front of boxes with fires glowing within. May they have the wisdom to know the difference between light and knowledge" - Plato -I don't think our grandchildren are old enough to be having sex.
And my personal favorite (taken from Stephen King's Wizard and Glass) -
Good is bad, bad is good, all the stuff's the same.Evil, out.
Grant bloviated at 2:06 PM

ABCNEWS.com : A Record Year for Shareholder Activism

2004-08-01T15:09:00.000-04:00

Good article on burgeoning interest in and success of shareholder activism. Success of CT Treas. Nappiers initive cited.

ABCNEWS.com : A Record Year for Shareholder Activism:
"Claiming Victory
But in some cases, shareholders are already claiming victories. American Electric Power Co., for instance, apparently heard the voice of investors, led by Connecticut Treasurer Denise Nappier, who demanded in 2003 more disclosure about the company's impact on global warming. This year, under pressure from another pending shareholder resolution, the company agreed to let an independent committee oversee a report. Satisfied shareholders withdrew their proposal.
'Typically the annual meeting has been a 'rah-rah' event for the company and for management,' says Tracey Rembert, advocacy director for the Social Investment Forum. 'Some [firms] don't take shareholders very seriously, but more and more are finding they need to.'"

A Useless Memoir From a Bad General

2004-08-01T12:36:00.000-04:00

From what I hear, tho mostly from special forces troops, this guy is not respected or liked by the troops. He not only doesn't know how to utilize and deploy special forces, he's outright hostile to them, to the point of not giving them critical support at times. Good riddance. I'll have to find out more of what people think of his replacement.

Ex-General Gives His Take on Iraq War
In His Memoir, Franks Also Seems Supportive of the Bush Administration

By Thomas E. RicksWashington Post Staff WriterSunday, August 1, 2004; Page A10
Four days before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, then the commander of the U.S. military in the Middle East, told his intelligence staff that his greatest fear was "a terrorist attack against the World Trade Center in New York," according to his new memoir.
He does not elaborate on what led him to that view.
"American Soldier," which goes on sale Tuesday, does not break much other new ground but does deepen and confirm some earlier accounts of the Bush administration's conduct of the war in Afghanistan in 2001 and the Iraq invasion in the spring of 2003. Coming as the presidential election season gears up, it probably will be seen as supportive of the Bush administration and critical of Democrats, who Franks portrays as lacking the "stomach" to confront al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan during the 1990s.
Franks conveys the sense that President Bush put him at ease, to the point that Franks felt able, because he was busy, to decline an invitation after a meeting in Crawford, Tex., for lunch with Bush.
Even so, two key Bush administration officials come in for harsh treatment in the book: Pentagon policy chief Douglas J. Feith and former White House counterterrorism director Richard A. Clarke.
Franks confirms the account in "Plan of Attack," by Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward, which described friction between Franks and Feith. Franks calls the undersecretary of defense for policy "a master of the off-the-wall question that rarely had relevance to operational problems." He adds, "I generally ignored his contributions."
Franks later quotes himself as saying during the planning for the invasion of Iraq that Feith had achieved the reputation in some military circles as "the dumbest . . . guy on the planet."
Clarke, who has since written his own memoir, "On Terror," which is extremely critical of the Bush administration, is depicted as an impractical blowhard who talked a lot but failed to produce "a single operational recommendation, or a single page of actionable intelligence."
By contrast, Franks portrays Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld as a difficult but effective leader whose demands sometimes seemed to "border on harassment." He depicts their relationship as one that began somewhat rockily when they first worked closely together, during the Afghan campaign. Franks recalls being so stung by Rumsfeld's frustration at getting Special Operations troops into Afghanistan early in October 2001 that, he writes, he told Rumsfeld that he felt the defense secretary lacked confidence in him and offered to step down as chief of the U.S. Central Command.

Stinky Diplomacy

2004-08-01T12:10:00.000-04:00

Smelly Poster Creates Diplomatic Incident

A poster forming part of a new awareness campaign, requesting that passengers don't eat smelly food, is pictured at the Embankment Underground Station in London, July 29, 2004. The poster showing an overweight and Mediterranean-looking man lounging in an underground train carriage surrounded by hams, salamis and strings of garlic triggered a torrent of letters from angry Italians and even the Italian ambassador. (Toby Melville/Reuters)

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/040730/photos_od/mdf642621

Life can be complicated. Some public servants head will roll.

Yahoo! News - Some Republicans Defect to Kerry's Camp

2004-08-01T11:56:00.000-04:00

Dare we hope this trend will develop?
The quotes in this article give 4 great reasons why some R's are switching to Kerry this year..... Deficit, lies, avoidance of the draft, mess in Iraq, no domestic program.

Yahoo! News - Some Republicans Defect to Kerry's Camp: "Ohio resident Bob Stewart says of President Bush (news - web sites): 'He's been a world-class polarizer. I don't know if I can stomach four more years with him as president. He misled us into the war in Iraq (news - web sites) and has mismanaged everything since.' "

The Shovel is Brother to the Gun

2004-08-01T00:51:00.000-04:00

Poems of War:

"Iron"

by Carl Sandburg (1916)

Guns,
Long, steel guns,
Pointed from the war ships
In the name of the war god.
Straight, shining, polished guns,
Clambered over with jackies in white blouses,
Glory of tan faces, tousled hair, white teeth,
Laughing lithe jackies in white blouses,
Sitting on the guns singing war songs, war chanties.

Shovels,
Broad, iron shovels,
Scooping out oblong vaults,
Loosening turf and leveling sod.

I ask you
To witness-
The shovel is brother to the gun."

War Poems: The Light Brigade

2004-08-01T00:31:00.000-04:00

How many of our soldiers feel this way as they leave their bunkers for the scary streets of Baghdad or Fallujah, surrounded by danger, no longer clear on the reason why.

http://poetry.about.com/library/weekly/bltennysonwar.htm

The Charge of the Light Brigade
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1854)

I
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
`Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!’ he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

II
`Forward, the Light Brigade!
’Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

III
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

IV
Flash’d all their sabres bare,
Flash’d as they turn’d in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder’d:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro’ the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel’d from the sabre-stroke
Shatter’d and sunder’d.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

V
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro’ the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

VI
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder’d.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

Background to the Charge of the Light Brigade

2004-08-01T00:15:00.000-04:00

Background to the Charge of the Light Brigade:

What's so special about this charge?
The historian Corelli Barnett said:

It is curious that ... the charge of the Light Brigade should loom so large in British legend. Only 673 men were involved, and they lost 157 men out of 20 000 war dead. Why have the British chosen to make a sentimental legend out of a pointless effort arising from muddled orders? The entirely successful and equally gallant charge of the Heavy Brigade earlier on the same day is generally forgotten ...
Whatever the reasons, the famous charge by the British Light Cavalry Brigade at a strong, but the wrong, Russian force on 25 October 1854 struck a chord in Victorian Britain. Benjamin Disraeli commented in the House of Commons that it was, "A feat of chivalry, fiery with consummate courage, and bright with flashing courage."

What went wrong?
In a nutshell, a commander failing to take account of the fact that he was on a hill and could see what was going on and his troops could not!...
"The situation was exacerbated by upper-class rivalry. George Charles Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan, in overall command of the cavalry and subsequently promoted to Field Marshal, was an imperious and over-bearing aristocrat who was promoted to high position over more proficient professional officers because of his social connections. He let a personal quarrel with his brother-in-law - Lord Cardigan, commander of the Light Brigade - reach such a point that their respective staffs refused to co-operate and an order from Lucan to Cardigan was misconstrued, leading to the charge. Thomas James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan was a 'stupid, overbearing, arrogant, vindictive' general whose ancient title and great wealth overcame his inability to command in the eyes of the military leadership. To make matters worse, the 'galloper' who delivered the message, Captain Nolan, despised both of them. This whole subject is covered in a classic book, The Reason Why, by Cecil Woodham-Smith...."