More Adventures In Pest Control
The mini-rainy season appears to be over. The cold, rainy and windy weather of the last several days ended this morning around ten, and almost like someone flipped a switch, the rain quit, the sun came out and the wind died down. By noon, the temperature, which never exceeded 74 all morning, was up to 80, where it stayed all afternoon. Overnight lows were 71 both days.
Yesterday, I was feeling a bit ambitious, so I got out the grinding disk I bought at the ferreteria the other day, and finally cut off the padlock on my tool box, so I can use my tools. Everything inside appeared to be in good order, just as I had packed it three years ago, and of course, nothing was missing. So I am out one padlock, but at least my tools are accessible now.
That left me inspired to go ahead and hang the two pictures that were sitting on the floor, the last items remaining from moving in all the stuff that had been in storage. I got out the drill and chucked up the little 3/16 masonry bit I bought at the ferreteria, too, and went to work. In minutes, I had drilled a two-inch deep hole in the wall and screwed in a drywall screw and hung up the picture. Looks nice hanging over the couch. I repeated the process in the bedroom for the last remaining picture, and now I am completely, totally, finally, moved in. Feels good to have all that behind me now.
Well, yesterday morning, I sat down at the computer bright and early, and noticed that my computer desk was crawling with those pesky little tiny ants that I have battled so endlessly around here. There were so many, I knew they had to be coming in from outside, and so I checked around the window frame and sure enough, that was the source. They were coming in from a gap between the somewhat warped window frame and the cinderblock wall in which the frame is set, and it appeared that they had built a colony in there. So with my trusty spray can of Baygon "Death Power" (it says in Spanish) insect spray, I sprayed into the gap as best I could, all along the gap, to kill the colony in there. After the spray had dried somewhat, I got out the calking gun and laid down a bead of silicone rubber along that gap, so the ants won't be able to get back in.
That spray is potent stuff. It'll knock down insects in seconds, just like it claims on the label. The concern I have is what it is doing to me. Every time I use much of it, I end up with a mild headache and slight nausea for a couple of days. So I am just hoping that the "death power" appellation doesn't refer to me. The ants are gone now, but I just hope I don't end up gone with them.
More Reasons Why I Am Glad I Am Out Of The States: The George W Bush administration failed to enter into negotiations with Iran on its nuclear program in May 2003 because neo-conservatives who advocated destabilization and regime change were able to block any serious diplomatic engagement with Tehran, according to former administration officials. The same neo-conservative veto power also prevented the administration from adopting any official policy statement on Iran, those same officials said. Lawrence Wilkerson, then chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell, said the failure to adopt a formal Iran policy in 2002-03 was the result of obstruction by a "secret cabal" of neo-conservatives in the administration, led by Vice President Dick Cheney. "The secret cabal got what it wanted: no negotiations with Tehran," Wilkerson wrote in an e-mail to Inter Press Service (IPS). The Iranian negotiating offer, transmitted to the State Department in early May 2003 by the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, acknowledged that Iran would have to address US concerns about its nuclear program, although it made no specific concession in advance of the talks, according to Flynt Leverett, then the National Security Council's senior director for Middle East Affairs. Iran's offer also raised the possibility of cutting off Iran's support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad and converting Hezbollah into a purely socio-political organization, according to Leverett. That was an explicit response to Powell's demand in late March that Iran "end its support for terrorism". Realists, led by Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, were inclined to respond positively to the Iranian offer. Nevertheless, within a few days of its receipt, the State Department had rebuked the Swiss ambassador for having passed on the offer. Exactly how the decision was made is not known. "As with many of these issues of national security decision-making, there are no fingerprints," Wilkerson told IPS. "But I would guess Dick Cheney with the blessing of George W Bush."
During Dick Cheney's infamous secretive Energy Policy Task Force meeting with oil executives early in the administration, apparently he turned over maps of Iraq's oil reserves and facilities to the oil company executives. Remember, this was well before there was public discussion of a war in Iraq, and even before the events of 9/11. Judicial Watch has obtained the documents from the Commerce Department, under a March 5, 2002 court order as a result of Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force. The documents contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts." The documents are dated March 2001.
With the US trade deficit at a record high and global interest rates rising, East Asian economies need to be prepared for a possible sharp slump in the value of the dollar, the Asian Development Bank warned here. 'Any shock hitting the US economy or the global market may change investors' perceptions given the existing global current account imbalance,' Masahiro Kawai, the ADB's head of regional economic integration, told reporters on a trip here. The ADB's headquarters are in Manila. 'Our suggestion to Asian countries is: don't take this continuous financing of the US current account deficit as given. If something happens then East Asian economies have to be prepared,' he said. Because of the highly inter-dependent nature of the East Asian economies, if countries worked together to allow their currencies to collectively appreciate against a tumbling dollar then the cost of adjustment would be spread, he said.
The FBI is under attack in Puerto Rico for operations that critics say unfairly target pro-independence activists. Students masqueraded as rifle-toting federal agents, while others donned T-shirts with the face of a man they called Puerto Rico's "liberator." Near the angry shouts and political placards stood Elma Beatriz Rosado with a calm explanation for it all: "I want the FBI out of Puerto Rico. The time has come for them to leave, now." Rosado's husband - convicted bank robber, fugitive and pro-independence activist Filiberto Ojeda Ríos - was killed in an FBI shootout in September. In the months since, the FBI has catapulted onto the front pages here, accused of deliberately letting the founder of the radical Macheteros group bleed to death as well as stonewalling follow-up investigations. Last month, federal agents executing search warrants on the homes of independentistas were captured on video pepper-spraying journalists covering the story, with seemingly little or no provocation, further fueling anti-FBI sentiment. The Puerto Rico Department of Justice sued the FBI last week in federal court, saying the agency is obstructing local law enforcement investigations into the two incidents. Puerto Rico's Justice Secretary recently traveled to Washington to lobby Congress to pressure the FBI into releasing information about them.
Five federal judges gave a boost Tuesday to legislation that would bring court scrutiny to the Bush administration's domestic spying program. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing chaired by Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record), R-Pa., the judges reacted favorably to his proposal that would require the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to conduct regular reviews of the four-year-old program. The existence of the warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency was revealed by The New York Times three months ago. The judges stressed that they were not offering their views on the NSA operation, which they said they knew nothing about. But they said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has operated capably for 28 years and is fully able to protect civil liberties and give the administration all the speed and flexibility it needs to execute the war on terror. The administration contends the president has inherent war powers under the Constitution to order eavesdropping without warrants. "I am very wary of inherent authority" claimed by presidents, testified U.S. Magistrate Judge Allan Kornblum. "It sounds very much like King George."
The Pentagon has stalled efforts for years to clean water supplies contaminated by a carcinogenic chemical despite evidence that it posed a significant health risk to millions of people, it was reported yesterday. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) investigated the solvent, trichloroethylene, extensively used on military bases, after significant quantities were found in water supplies. In its report, published in 2001, the EPA found it to be 40 times more likely to cause cancer than had been previously thought, and recommended tough safety standards to limit public exposure. There was also evidence the chemical played a role in birth defects. But the Los Angeles Times reported that the defence department, which owns 1,400 bases and other sites contaminated by trichloroethylene (TCE), fought the findings, challenging their scientific basis. Under pressure from the Pentagon, political appointees at the EPA overruled their own scientists, took them off the case and postponed action pending a further study by the National Academy of Sciences, which is due to report this summer. "The evidence is that there was some monkey business going on between the EPA and the Pentagon," said Gina Solomon, an expert on environmental medicine at the University of California, who was on the scientific board that reviewed the EPA report. "The 2001 report was an excellent piece of scientific work," Dr Solomon told the Guardian.
Unmanned aerial vehicles have soared the skies of Afghanistan and Iraq for years, spotting enemy encampments, protecting military bases, and even launching missile attacks against suspected terrorists. Now UAVs may be landing in the United States. A House of Representatives panel on Wednesday heard testimony from police agencies that envision using UAVs for everything from border security to domestic surveillance high above American cities. Private companies also hope to use UAVs for tasks such as aerial photography and pipeline monitoring."We need additional technology to supplement manned aircraft surveillance and current ground assets to ensure more effective monitoring of United States territory," Michael Kostelnik, assistant commissioner at Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection Bureau, told the House Transportation subcommittee.
Former White House counsel John Dean, who helped push President Richard Nixon from office during the Watergate scandal three decades ago, heads to Capitol Hill on Friday to back an uphill attempt to censure President George W. Bush. "I think that there's absolutely no merit in it, and that the hearing will expose it because of the president's broad (constitutional) authority," Specter said. Republicans have dismissed the resolution as a political stunt, while many Democrats have distanced themselves from it as they jockey for position for the November congressional elections.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accepted on Friday the United States had probably made thousands of errors in Iraq but defended the overall strategy of removing Saddam Hussein. Local Muslims and anti-war activists told Rice to "Go Home" when British counterpart Jack Straw earlier led her on a tour of his home town of Blackburn in the industrial northwest, an area which rarely plays host to overseas politicians. "Yes, I know we have made tactical errors, thousands of them," she said in answer to a question over whether lessons had been learned since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
A new Arkansas small-business health-insurance plan has healthcare advocates concerned that its limited scale and scanty benefits are not worth its cost to the state's low-income residents. The plan is the latest implementation of a federal initiative allowing states to shift Medicaid money into new, public insurance programs. Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee rolled out the program as an innovative way to help small businesses provide employee health insurance. Some healthcare advocates, on the other hand, wonder if the initiative is more about political bragging rights in Huckabee's possible bid for president in 2008 than about providing meaningful coverage to the state’s working poor. With enrollment expected to begin by January 2007, the Arkansas Safety Net Benefit Program will offer a bare bones insurance package to businesses that have 50 or fewer workers and have not provided employee health insurance for one year.
U.S. President George W. Bush warned at the end of a North American summit on Friday that an immigration plan being debated by the U.S. Congress must include a guest worker program for illegal immigrants. The so-called three amigos - Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and new Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper - wrapped up their talks by vowing to work together on border security, avian flu and energy issues. But deep differences remained. A U.S. plan that will require Canadians and Mexicans to carry a passport or passport-type document to cross the U.S. border was a cause of concern for Harper, a newly elected conservative whose appearance at this sun-soaked beach resort was one of his first forays on the international stage. "We're obviously concerned that if we don't move quickly and properly on this, that this could have effects on trade and movement of people, conventions, you name it, that is not helpful to our economy or to our relationship," Harper said.
Joshua Bolten, the incoming White House chief of staff, wants Treasury Secretary John Snow replaced with someone who can present the administration's message more forcefully, The New York Times reported Thursday. Bolten, who takes over the top staff job next month, wants President Bush to shake up his economic team and overhaul White House management, the Times said, quoting a prominent Republican who consults with the White House. Among the names being mentioned to replace Snow were Henry Paulson, chief executive of Goldman Sachs; John Mack, chief executive of Morgan Stanley, and Richard Parsons, chairman of Time Warner, the newspaper said.
In communities across the United States, times are tough for many, but the financial status of black Americans looks especially dire and continues to lag far behind that of whites, according to a new report released Wednesday. Themed "Opportunity Compact," the 2006 edition of an annual report by the liberal think tank National Urban League (NUL), relays mostly negative trends in disparity between blacks and whites. "The state of black America is in trouble," said NUL’s president, Marc Morial, in a statement accompanying the report. Published annually since 1976, "The State of Black America" assesses progress made in education, health, housing, jobs, social justice and discrimination. The 2006 report, released yesterday, found that in terms of equality there has been little improvement over the last few years, and even slippage in some areas.
An American civilian group will soon be on the lookout again for illegal migrants entering the United States from Canada along stretches of the border. Starting April 1, volunteers with the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, angered with the ongoing entry of illegal migrants to the United States, will be watching from New York to New Hampshire at locations yet to be disclosed. Washington state volunteers are also to be on guard. "There's no real border security, and we feel there's a good chance terrorists could get in," said Peter Lanteri, a Long Island resident and head of the initiative in New York state. "What we're doing is a neighbourhood watch on our own border. We are another set of eyes, just as the government asked Americans to be after 9-11." Lanteri expects 36 volunteers to take part in New York state - most of them former military and law-enforcement officers concerned about both economic migrants, criminals and potential terrorists. The group claims 6,500 volunteers throughout the United States.
Americans polled by TIME magazine show strong support for a guest-worker program and a process for undocumented workers to become citizens, but they take a tough stance on securing the borders. And most do not want illegal immigrants to have access to health care, public education or driver's licenses. In the telephone survey of 1004 adults, conducted Wednesday and Thursday, 79% say they favor a guest worker program that would allow illegal immigrants to remain in the U.S. for a fixed period of time - the main provision of the bill proposed by Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy that is now under fierce debate in Congress. Only 47% of those polled say they support the tougher measure backed by some House conservatives, deporting all illegal immigrants back to their home countries. Although Americans want to give illegal immigrants the chance to work in the U.S. temporarily and even earn citizenship - 78% say illegal immigrants who learn English, have a job and pay taxes ought to have a chance at it - they also want better enforcement both at the border and inside the country. A large majority, 71%, favor major penalties for people who hire illegal immigrants; 62% want the U.S. to take "whatever steps are necessary" to secure the border with Mexico, including posting military forces; and 56% favor a 2,000-mile-long fence. That two-pronged approach to illegal immigration is the same one favored by President Bush, who wants both a guest worker program and tighter border security.
Washington, like about a dozen other states, does not permit people with felony convictions like DuBois to vote until they have completed their entire sentences, including paying all financial penalties. But on Tuesday, voting rights activists made a small dent in a system of state laws that disenfranchise citizens as a consequence of felony conviction. A state court struck down a requirement that felons pay all financial penalties before regaining their voting rights.
Supreme Court hearings could be shown on TV under a bill approved by a Senate committee Thursday but opposed by some high court justices. Two bills that, if they became law, would allow more federal court proceedings to be televised moved a step forward in the Judiciary Committee. One, which passed 12-6, would require the Supreme Court to permit television coverage of all open sessions unless a majority of the justices decide that coverage in a particular case would violate the due process rights of a party before the court. Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter said the Supreme Court becomes a "super-legislature" when it decides far-reaching public policy questions, and should make its proceedings more accessible. "The public has a right to know what the Supreme Court is doing," Specter, R-Pa., said. "The day you see a camera come into our courtroom it's going to roll over my dead body," Justice David Souter told a congressional panel in 1996. Two sitting justices, Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen Breyer, and former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, left no doubt about their opposition to cameras in the high court during an American Bar Association event in November.
Republican pollster Jan van Lohuizen, in a memo written for RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, warns that if members of Congress try to drive a wedge between themselves and Pres. Bush, it'd be akin to adding weight to an anchor. GOpers are "W Brand Republicans" whether they like it or not. And van Louhizen, who has polled (often secretly) for the Bush White House under the RNC aegis for years, is worried about low turnout. Time Magazine first reported on the memo this weekend.
Easy to say when you have two DUIs on your record: U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney scored points as a stand-up comedian, telling a radio and television correspondents' gathering: "I'm a real party animal." Filling in for President George Bush, who was en route to a summit in Mexico, Cheney poked fun at himself and others at the 62nd annual Radio & Television Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington Wednesday night. Referring to the accidental shooting of a lawyer while quail hunting in Texas earlier this year, Cheney squinted into the bright lights. "The lighting could be better but I can still see the whites of your eyes," he said. He accompanied his routine with a slide show, and one picture showed him in a room crowded with revelers and Cheney in the center, sitting and poring over a stack of documents. "I know how to have fun," he said. "I'm a real party animal."
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Thursday reinstated a permit needed for the construction of a gold mine north of Juneau, but environmentalists plan to fight the decision to allow waste to flow into a natural alpine lake. In November, the Corps suspended a permit to allow Coeur d'Alene Mines Corp. to dump ore waste from the Kensington gold mine into the lake after environmentalists said the discharge would kill fish in the remote wetland. The Kensington project is the first metal mine to take advantage of a federal rule loosening restrictions on mountaintop coal extraction. The rule now classifies discharge milled ore waste - known as tailings - as benign fill and not a pollutant. The Idaho-based mining company said it will resume full construction of the gold mine, expected to produce 100,000 ounces of gold annually starting in 2007. "We will now focus on moving forward with the full-scale construction of the mine," Couer d'Alene Mines Chief Executive Dennis Wheeler said in a statement.
Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor: House conservatives criticized President Bush, accused the Senate of fouling the air, said prisoners rather than illegal farm workers should pick America's crops and denounced the use of Mexican flags by protesters Thursday in a vehement attack on legislation to liberalize U.S. immigration laws. "I say let the prisoners pick the fruits," said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, one of more than a dozen Republicans who took turns condemning a Senate bill that offers an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants an opportunity for citizenship. "Anybody that votes for an amnesty bill deserves to be branded with a scarlet letter A," said Rep. Steve King of Iowa, referring to a guest worker provision in the Senate measure. Their news conference took place across the Capitol from the Senate, where supporters and critics of the legislation seemed determined to heed admonitions from both Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to conduct a dignified, civilized debate.
Halliburton Watch: Frustrated government auditors pleaded, cajoled and finally threatened Halliburton Co. executives who repeatedly failed to comply with government reporting requirements under a key Iraq contract with a $1.2-billion potential price tag, newly released documents show. The documents, along with a report, were issued Tuesday by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Government Reform. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) had requested the report on the contract, considered crucial to the restoration of oil production capacity in southern Iraq. The 15-page report cites findings by auditors that Halliburton overcharged - "apparently intentionally" - on the contract by using hidden calculations, and attempted in one instance to bill the government for $26 million in costs it did not incur. Auditors also challenged $45 million in other costs, labeling them as "unreasonable or unsupported," the report said. The report blamed the Department of Defense for awarding the contract despite warnings from auditors that Halliburton's cost estimating system had "significant deficiencies." Although federal officials have criticized the company and threatened to cancel its contracts, Halliburton remains the largest private contractor in Iraq.
Your Tax Dollars At Work: This is the Alaskan bush at its most remote. Here, tundra meets sea, and sea turns to ice for half the year. Scattered, almost hidden, in the terrain are some of the most isolated communities on American soil. People choose to live in outposts like Dillingham (pop. 2,400) for that reason: to be left alone. So eyebrows were raised in January when the first surveillance cameras went up on Main Street. Each camera is a shiny white metallic box with two lenses like eyes. The camera's shape and design resemble a robot's head. Workers on motorized lifts installed seven cameras in a 360-degree cluster on top of City Hall. They put up groups of six atop two light poles at the loading dock, and more at the fire hall and boat harbor. By mid-February, more than 60 cameras watched over the town, and the Dillingham Police Department plans to install 20 more - all purchased through a $202,000 Homeland Security grant meant primarily to defend against a terrorist attack. Now the residents of this far-flung village have become, in one sense, among the most watched people in the land, with - as former Mayor Freeman Roberts puts it - "one camera for every 30 residents." Some don't mind, but many others are furious and have banded together to force the city to take the cameras down. "You better smile. You're on camera," says Roberts, 64, a barge captain. Roberts himself isn't smiling as he points out a single camera on the side of a building. The camera is aimed toward an alley.
Republicans Believe In Honest, Transparent Government: Through an apparent loophole in agency rules the Food and Drug Administration has allowed its employees to receive more than $1.3 million in sponsored travel since 1999 from groups closely tied to pharmaceutical and medical device companies. FDA policy bars employees from taking trips paid for by the drug, medical device and other companies the agency regulates or by their trade groups. But the Center for Public Integrity has found nonprofit associations that draw their members, their boards and even some of their funding from medical and pharmaceutical-related companies paying for the travel of hundreds of FDA employees. The sponsor of the most trips was the Drug Information Association, which footed the bill for more than 600 trips taken by FDA employees. The nonprofit group made up of pharmaceutical and medical device employees, academics and government regulators boasts 13 members on its board of directors who work or have worked for the industry or its consulting groups. The FDA has come under heavy criticism since Vioxx and other widely prescribed drugs were recalled for safety reasons. Members of Congress and government watchdog groups have charged that the regulatory agency is too close to the industry it oversees to impartially and effectively police the roughly 10,000 drugs on the market.
Conservatives Believe In A Fair And Impartial Judiciary: A freelance photographer has been fired by the Archdiocese of Boston’s newspaper for releasing a picture of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia making a controversial gesture in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Sunday. Peter Smith, who had freelanced for The Pilot newspaper for a decade, lost the job yesterday after the Herald ran his photo on its front page. Smith said he has no regrets about releasing it. "I did the right thing. I did the ethical thing," said Smith, 51, an assistant photojournalism professor at Boston University. Smith snapped the photo of Scalia flicking his hand under his chin after a Herald reporter asked the conservative jurist his response to people who question his impartiality on matters of church and state.
Free Markets And Privatization Solve All Problems: The infamous Blackwater USA security firm has offered to provide forces for any counter-insurgency mission around the world. J. Cofer Black, vice chairman of Blackwater USA told the Special Operations Forces Exhibition (Sofex-2006), that his company could supply private soldiers to any country. Black, a former U.S. State Department counter-terrorism coordinator, said Blackwater has been marketing the concept of private armies for low-intensity conflicts. "About a year ago, we realized we could do it," Black said. Blackwater has been a leading private security firm in Iraq. The company provides thousands of foreign and Iraqi personnel for government and private security missions. In his presentation in Amman, Jordan, on March 27, Black said Blackwater could supply peace-keeping forces. He said the company was capable of providing a brigade-sized force on alert. One option, Black said, was for Blackwater to provide forces for Sudan's Darfour province. He said the company could bolster existing peace-keeping forces from the African Union.
Trickle-Down Economics Trickling On You: U.S. corporate profits have increased 21.3% in the past year and now account for the largest share of national income in 40 years, the Commerce Department said Thursday. Strong productivity gains and subdued wage growth boosted before-tax profits to 11.6% of national income in the fourth quarter of 2005, the biggest share since the summer of 1966. For all of 2005, before-tax profits totaled $1.35 trillion, up from $1.16 trillion in 2004 and just $767 billion in 2001. Meanwhile, the share of national income going to wage and salary workers has fallen to 56.9%. Except for a brief period in 1997, that's the lowest share for labor income since 1966. "It's a big puzzle," said Josh Bivens, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute. "If this is a knowledge economy, how come the brains aren't being compensated? Instead, the owners of physical capital are getting the rewards." Meanwhile, hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, continue to fall significantly, as announced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
If We Ignore Global Warming Long Enough, Maybe It Will Go Away: Air temperatures above the entire frozen continent of Antarctica have risen three times faster than the rest of the world during the past 30 years. While it is well established that temperatures are increasing rapidly in the Antarctic Peninsula, the land tongue that protrudes towards South America, the trend has been harder to confirm over the continent as a whole. Now analysis of weather balloon data by scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has shown that not only are the lower reaches of the Antarctic atmosphere warming, but that they are doing so at the fastest rate observed anywhere on Earth. Temperatures in the troposphere - the lowest 8km (5 miles) of the atmosphere - have increased by between 0.5C and 0.7 C (0.9F and 1.3F) per decade over the past 30 years. This signature of climate change is three times stronger than the average observed around the world, suggesting that global warming is having an uneven impact and that it could be greater for Antarctica.
A one-two punch of bleaching from record hot water followed by disease has killed ancient and delicate coral in the biggest loss of reefs scientists have ever seen in Caribbean waters. Researchers from around the globe are scrambling to figure out the extent of the loss. Early conservative estimates from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands find that about one-third of the coral in official monitoring sites has recently died. "It's an unprecedented die-off," said National Park Service fisheries biologist Jeff Miller, who last week checked 40 stations in the Virgin Islands. "The mortality that we're seeing now is of the extremely slow-growing reef-building corals. These are corals that are the foundation of the reef ... We're talking colonies that were here when Columbus came by have died in the past three to four months." Some of the devastated coral can never be replaced because it only grows the width of one dime a year, Miller said.
New England could be in for a big one. Meteorologists say conditions - including warmer temperatures in the Atlantic Basin and cooler temperatures in the Pacific Ocean - are ripe for the Northeast coast to be hit by a whopper of a hurricane this season. Ken Reeves, a senior meteorologist at the AccuWeather Center in State College, Pa., said that when the Pacific is cooler, it "essentially drives the storm track further to the east in the Atlantic Ocean basin." He predicts the East Coast north of the Mid-Atlantic states could see a Category 3 hurricane, a storm that could resemble the devastating systems that hit New England between the 1930s and 1950s. "There are some eerie similarities to the pattern of the 1938 hurricane," he said. A 1938 storm known as the "The Long Island Express" remains the region's worst hurricane. Its 121 mph winds gusted to 183 mph and caused massive flooding, power outages and wind damage throughout the region, leaving 600 people dead. During recent decades, New Englanders mostly have experienced only the remnants of storms that hit other parts of the country, such as Hurricane Gloria in 1985 and Hurricane Bob in 1991, which brought heavy rains, localized flooding and power outages.
News From Smirkey's Wars Call it desperation, but the United States has started to take measures in Iraq that would wreck its most cherished goal there: democracy. US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is reportedly campaigning to either dump the United Iraqi Alliance's (UIA) candidate for prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, or force him to withdraw. Khalilzad has taken the drastic measure of appealing to the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to that effect.
Parliament's largest bloc nominates the prime minister under Iraq's constitution, and last month Jaafari captured the nomination by one vote with the help of Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. However, the 275-member parliament is now at an impasse in talks over forming a new government as the main Kurdish, Sunni Arab and secular blocs staunchly oppose a Jaafari premiership.
The steadily worsening situation in southern Afghanistan is not the work of some ineffable Al Qaeda nebula. It is the result of the real depredations of the corrupt and predatory government officials whom the United States ushered into power in 2001, supposedly to help fight Al Qaeda, and has assiduously maintained in power since, along with an "insurgency" manufactured whole cloth across the border in Pakistan--a U.S. ally. The evidence of this connection is abundant: Taliban leaders strut openly around Quetta, Pakistan, where they are provided with offices and government-issued weapons authorization cards; Pakistani army officers are detailed to Taliban training camps; and Pakistani border guards constantly wave self-proclaimed Taliban through checkpoints into Afghanistan. This state of affairs is so bewildering that Kandaharis have reached an astonishing conclusion: The United States must be in league with the Taliban. They reason that America, with its power and riches, could bring an end to the "insurgency" in a month, if it so chose. They figure that America remains a close and munificent ally of Pakistan, the country that is sponsoring the "insurgency," and so the continuing violence must be a deliberate element of U.S. policy. The point is not whether there is any factual basis for this notion, it's that everyone here believes it. In other words, in a stunning irony, much of this city, the Taliban's former stronghold, is disgusted with the Americans not because of their Western culture, but because of their apparent complicity with Islamist extremists.
Soldiers will no longer be allowed to wear body armor other than the protective gear issued by the military, Army officials said Thursday, the latest twist in a running battle over the equipment the Pentagon gives its troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Army officials told The Associated Press that the order was prompted by concerns that soldiers or their families were buying inadequate or untested commercial armor from private companies - including the popular Dragon Skin gear made by California-based Pinnacle Armor. "We're very concerned that people are spending their hard-earned money on something that doesn't provide the level of protection that the Army requires people to wear. So they're, frankly, wasting their money on substandard stuff," said Col. Thomas Spoehr, director of materiel for the Army. Murray Neal, chief executive officer of Pinnacle, said he hadn't seen the directive and wants to review it. Veterans groups immediately denounced the decision. Nathaniel R. Helms, editor of the Soldiers for the Truth online magazine Defense Watch, said he has already received a number of e-mails from soldiers complaining about the policy. "Outrageously we've seen that (soldiers) haven't been getting what they need in terms of equipment and body armor," said Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., who wrote legislation to have troops reimbursed for equipment purchases. "That's totally unacceptable, and why this directive by the Pentagon needs to be scrutinized in much greater detail."
Forgetting that Saddam is behind bars, Smirkey said Wednesday that Saddam Hussein, not continued U.S. involvement in Iraq and the U.S. ambassador's meddling, is responsible for ongoing sectarian violence that is threatening the formation of a democratic government. In his third speech this month to bolster public support for the war, Smirkey worked to counter critics who say the U.S. presence in the wartorn nation is fueling the insurgency. Smirkey said that Saddam was a tyrant and used violence to exacerbate sectarian divisions to keep himself in power, and that as a result, deep tensions persist to this day.
News From The Talibaptist Jihad: Consider the following scenario: It's Saturday, and you feel like going to the movies. You see the latest installment of The Chronicles of Narnia advertised in your local Examiner newspaper (part of a chain whose name has been trademarked in more than seventy cities). You decide to go to your local theater -- a Regal, Edwards, or United Artists. You sit through twenty minutes of advertising, followed by the film itself, which has been delivered from studio to theater by a fiber-optic line. The underlying theme? Every stage of your movie-going experience - from production to promotion to distribution to exhibition - was controlled by one man: sixty-six-year-old religious conservative Philip Anschutz. Named Fortune's "greediest executive" in 1999, the Denver resident is a generous supporter of anti-gay-rights legislation, intelligent design, the Bush administration and efforts to sanitize television. With a net worth of $5 billion, he is Forbes ' thirty-fourth richest American. Anschutz heads a vast media empire whose assets include the Examiner chain, twenty percent of the country's movie screens, and a sizeable stake in Qwest Communications, the scandal-ridden telecom giant he formerly directed. (Anschutz was accused of helping falsely inflate Qwest profit reports, then making millions by selling his own shares in the company -- a claim he ultimately settled by paying millions to charity.) A heavy contributor to the Republican Party for decades, Anschutz helped fund Amendment 2, a ballot initiative to overturn a state law protecting gay rights, and helped stop another initiative promoting medical marijuana. More recently, he helped fund the Discovery Institute, a conservative Christian think tank that mounted a public relations campaign and financed "research" into intelligent design. He has also supported the Media Research Council, the group that generated nearly all the indecency complaints with the FCC in 2003. To some, redirection might be an appropriate metaphor for Anschutz's entire enterprise, which they fear is all about bringing God and conservatism to Hollywood under a more secular and apolitical guise. Anschutz may better resemble another openly conservative Presbyterian, one who acquired his own vertically integrated empire of newspapers, film studios, and television stations years before anyone realized he would turn those media outlets into his personal political mouthpiece. That man was Rupert Murdoch.
Ohio Sen. Mike DeWine said yesterday that he will take a lead role in pushing for a U.S. constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, at least in part to regain support from unhappy conservatives in his state. The Republican said he would co-sponsor the amendment that Senate GOP leaders have scheduled for a vote in June. Although the measure has more than 20 co-sponsors, supporters concede it is unlikely the Senate will approve it by the required two-thirds majority. But the amendment is symbolically important to social conservatives across Ohio, many of whom were disappointed in 2004 when DeWine did not support an Ohio constitutional amendment to define marriage as solely a union of one man and one woman. That issue sparked a huge turnout of conservative voters who helped President Bush win re-election. Although DeWine is expected to easily win the May Republican primary, he faces a stern challenge in November from Rep. Sherrod Brown, of Avon, the likely Democratic nominee for the Senate race. To prevail, DeWine will need a heavy turnout from conservatives, many of whom are unhappy with him on issues of same-sex marriage and curbing immigration.
Republican Rep. Tom DeLay said Tuesday that former and current Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg "don't get it" when they complain about conservative criticism of judges. "All wisdom doesn't reside in... people in black robes," DeLay said. In recent weeks, O'Connor has said the criticism has threatened judicial independence to deal with difficult issues such as gay marriage. Ginsburg said in a speech that a Web threat against her and O'Connor was apparently prompted by Republican proposals in Congress that tell judges to stop relying on foreign laws or court decisions. Ginsburg said such actions by Congress "fuel the irrational fringe." "Didn't you see the comments of Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Ginsburg over the last couple of weeks?" DeLay, R-Texas, asked reporters after a speech to a group of Christian conservatives. "There's still a problem, they don't get it. There are three branches of government. All wisdom doesn't reside in ... people in black robes." Earlier, the former House majority leader told activists he agreed with their premise that there is a "war on Christianity." "Our faith has always been in direct conflict with the values of the world," DeLay said. "We are, after all, a society that provides abortion on demand, has killed millions of innocent children, degrades the institution of marriage, and all but treats Christianity like some second-rate superstition."
Scandals Du Jour: A former top aide to Texas Republican Rep. Tom DeLay pleaded guilty in the widening Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal on Friday, the second former assistant to the powerful congressman to do so. Tony Rudy, the former deputy chief of staff to DeLay, entered the guilty plea to one count of conspiracy in federal court as part of a deal with Justice Department prosecutors. The indictment charged that Rudy accepted $86,000 from Abramoff while working as a staffer for DeLay, then the Republican leader in the U.S. House of Representatives. In return, the indictment said Rudy asked lawmakers to vote against an Internet-gambling bill that would have harmed one of Abramoff's clients. Abramoff, the lobbyist at the heart of a scandal that has rattled top Republicans, has been cooperating in the federal investigation into whether Washington politicians gave his clients favorable treatment in exchange for campaign contributions, Super Bowl tickets and other illegal gifts. Rudy faced a maximum penalty of five years but under the agreement he was expected to serve between 2 and 2 1/2 years. He agreed to cooperate and provide "complete and truthful information" in the Justice Department investigation. Rudy's guilty plea spells more trouble for Ohio Republican Rep. Bob Ney, who took a golf trip to Scotland with Abramoff and Rudy in August 2002. According to the indictment, a congressman named Representative No. 1 "agreed to take favorable official action and render other assistance on behalf of the clients of Abramoff and defendant Rudy." The congressman was not named but according to records made public Ney fits that description.
We Conservatives Are More Moral Than You: What's wrong with this picture? First, it was Republican Duke Cunningham, who was caught taking millions of dollars in bribes, and was forced to resign. So a special election was called. And who are the Republicans running to replace Cunningham? A man who has been caught in a bald-faced lie, not just once, but twice, in his sycophantic support for Smirkey's war in Iraq. Howard Kaloogian placed on his web site this photo, with the caption: "We took this photo of downtown Baghdad while we were in Iraq. Iraq (including Baghdad) is much more calm and stable than what many people believe it to be. But, each day the news media finds any violence occurring in the country and screams and shouts about it - in part because many journalists are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism." The problem? Well, it seems that some Internet sleuths have tracked down the intersection in the photo. It isn't in Baghdad. It isn't even in Iraq. Turns out it is in a suitably quiet and peaceful suburb of Istanbul, in Turkey. It was obvious something was wrong when none of the signs in the image were in Arabic. Update: Since the word got out, and started garnering national attention, Howie quickly changed the photo on his web site. Here's the new one. See for yourself how well it makes his point. It was taken from the window of an upper floor of the Rashid hotel safely tucked away in the Green Zone. And from the metadata extracted from the image file, we know that it was taken by a Minolta camera, cropped/edited with Photoshop Elements, and, most importantly, that the picture was taken on July 13, 2005. It's an old picture. Guess he was just too busy partying among those happy, contented Baghdadis to take legitimate pictures showing how peaceful the place is.
This time, claiming she doesn't even live here - as GOP hatemonger Ann Coulter has been doing on this spring's college speaking tour when she's questioned about her February election meltdown on Palm Beach - isn't going to cut it. Palm Beach County's elections supervisor has given the right wing's unofficial mouthpiece 30 days to explain why she voted in the wrong precinct. "We have to send the registered letter to her address in our records," explained Charmaine Kelly, elections chief deputy. "If it comes back unsigned, we'll deal with that." Or else? He could refer the case to State Attorney Barry Krischer for criminal charges, Anderson said. The letter, however, may be headed to the wrong house. The bestselling author, whose The New Ann Coulter comes out in June, owns a homestead on Seabreeze Avenue, near Worth Ave. Yet, the missive is being sent to the Indian Road home of Realtor Suzanne Frisbie. Coulter claimed in official elections documents to be living there, which Frisbie denied last month. In his official incident report released last week, poll worker Jim Whited wrote that Coulter tried to vote in the Feb. 7 town council election at Bethesda-by-the-Sea, the right place for a Seabreeze resident. Coulter left in a hurry when, Whited said, he asked her to correct the record. Later she cast her ballot at the St. Edward's precinct, where real Indian Road residents go. Coulter, a constitutional lawyer who relentlessly made fun of Palm Beach County voters after the botched 2000 presidential election, couldn't be reached for comment.
After the House ethics committee took limited action at the conclusion of a six-hour meeting Thursday, ranking member Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) issued a statement highly critical of the panel. Ethics members announced only the continuation of an investigative subcommittee probing Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), initially established in 2004, ROLL CALL reported late Thursday. McDermott has been ordered to pay $700,000 in damages and legal fees to now Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) after accepting a tape from a Florida couple that contained a recording of a phone conversation among GOP leaders in 1996 that discussed how to deal with ethics charges chasing then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA).
Nixon White House counselor John Dean, testifying in favor of a Democratic resolution to censure President Bush, asserted Friday that Bush's conduct in connection with domestic spying exceeds the wrongdoing that toppled his former boss from power. Sen. Orrin Hatch (news, bio, voting record), R-Utah, fired back by telling Democrats: "Quit trying to score political points." The Senate, Dean said, should censure or officially scold Bush as proposed by Sen. Russell Feingold's resolution. But if that action carries too much political baggage, some senatorial warning is in order, Dean said. "The resolution should be amended, not defeated, because the president needs to be reminded that separation of powers does not mean an isolation of powers," Dean said in prepared remarks. "He needs to be told he cannot simply ignore a law with no consequences." Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said Feingold's resolution has no merit.
The weather has been hugely miserable the last couple of days. Yesterday morning, I woke up to a steady rain that lasted all day, along with chilly temperatures that were more reminiscent of December than of March. Temperatures dropped to 67 yesterday morning, and only 74 in the afternoon, and today wasn't much better - 71 overnight, and only 75 this afternoon, with a hard, driving rain and blustery winds during much of the day. Weird weather for the dry season. My mango trees are in bloom, and this wet, chilly weather during the blooming season ensures I will not have a crop this year.
Yesterday, I had a couple of potential buyers drop by the house, one from each of two different real estate agencies. Well, that convinced me that I would do well to get the windows cleaned, which were horribly dirty, having not been washed since last year. So I got busy and got them all cleaned up, sparkling clear now, and offering delightful views out into the garden. I had to trim back the gardenia by my office window rather severely to get to the outside of that window. Hated to do it - the bush is just coming into bloom, with all the blossom buds at the tips of the branches, and I love the fragrant rose-like blossoms with their sweet perfume. They're all on the yard waste pile now.
But as it turns out, I need not have bothered. The first buyer that one of the realtors had brought by about a week ago, called the agent and told him of his intent to buy, so I am on pins and needles waiting for the actual offer to materialize. The agent said he will need to have me stay in the house for some time, but that is not a problem, as I need to stay here for awhile while I prepare to move anyway, so that will not be an issue. This is apparently the buyer that spent some time here, and looked the place over a second time about a week ago. I am waiting for the official offer to come through, with the deposit check. Since the buyer is back in the States at the moment, that may be a day or two, but we'll see.
More Reasons Why I Am Glad I Am Out Of The States: Iraq's ruling parties demanded U.S. forces cede control of security on Monday as the government launched an inquiry into a raid on a Shi'ite mosque complex that ministers said saw "cold blooded" killings by U.S.-led troops. U.S. commanders rejected the charges and said their accusers faked evidence by moving bodies of gunmen killed fighting Iraqi troops in an office compound. It was not a mosque, they said. As Shi'ite militiamen fulminated over Sunday's deaths of at least 16 people in Baghdad, an al Qaeda-led group said it staged one of the bloodiest Sunni insurgent attacks in months. A suicide bomber killed 40 Iraqi army recruits in northern Iraq. The Iraqi Defense Ministry said a suicide bomber wearing an explosive belt also wounded 30 at a base near Mosul. After 24 hours of limited communication, U.S. commanders mounted a media offensive to deny Shi'ite accounts of a mosque massacre and portray instead a bold and disciplined operation by U.S.-trained Iraqi special forces that killed 16 fighters and freed a hapless Iraqi hostage being held to ransom for $20,000. Three gunmen were wounded and 18 people detained, he added. "After the fact, someone went in and made the scene look different from what it was," Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli said of footage aired extensively on state television showing the bodies of apparently unarmed civilians in a mosque. "American forces and Iraqi Special Forces committed an odious crime when they attacked the Al-Mustapha Mosque in the Ur neighborhood," the Shiite bloc asserts in a communiqué. "It's an organized crime with serious political and security implications. It aims to incite a civil war," the Shiites insist. "To kill such a great number of the faithful of the family of the Prophet after handcuffing and torturing them is indefensible. It's an attack on the dignity of Iraqis that strips away any credibility from the slogans of freedom, democracy and pluralism flaunted by the American administration," the communiqué concludes.
Leading Democrats in Vermont plan to decide in April whether to urge state lawmakers to petition for Smirkey's impeachment using a little-known provision in the rules of the U.S. House. Democratic committees in at least half of the state's 14 counties have passed resolutions calling for impeachment, citing a rule in "Jefferson's Manual," a book of parliamentary guidelines written by Thomas Jefferson that supplements U.S. House rules. The anti-Bush movement is "genuinely bubbling up from the grass roots," said Jon Copans, the state party's executive director. The state Democratic committee is scheduled to decide the issue in a special meeting April 8. The resolutions accuse the Bush administration of lying about the case for war in Iraq and illegally engaging in electronic surveillance of Americans. They rely on "Jefferson's Manual," which says impeachment proceedings can begin "by charges transmitted from the legislature of a state." A message seeking comment from the White House press office was not immediately returned.
A national security expert "has a valid point" when he says that turning over large portions of battle space to Iraqi forces is meaningless if most of that land is desert, a top U.S. commander in Iraq said Friday. But Army Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the U.S. commander in charge of training Iraq forces, told Pentagon reporters he "stands by" the March 17 assessment of his colleague, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Baghdad. Chiarelli, who is commanding general of Multi-National Corps-Iraq, said March 17 that the coalition’s goal is to turn over control of 75 percent of the country’s territory to the Iraqi security forces by summer’s end. But Anthony Cordesman, a national security analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, believes the hand-over emphasis is "nonsense." With almost the entire western half of Iraq virtually empty desert, "the figures vastly overestimate the actual area of influence and are at least as meaningless as the worst reporting on pacification in Vietnam," Cordesman wrote in a March 22 paper for CSIS. "The Iraqi forces don’t control anything like these areas, ignoring what ‘control’ of empty desert means." Dempsey said Cordesman "has a valid point." "The battle space that has been handed over [to Iraqi forces thus far] is, to some degree, in those parts of the country that have achieved a level of security - both because of the capability of the security forces and also because there’s less threat," Dempsey said.
Tens of thousands of people demonstrated across the United States against a proposed crackdown on illegal migrants, as Smirkey pushed for immigration reform at odds with tougher measures backed by some in his Republican Party. About 50,000 people marched through Detroit and tens of thousands of students walked out of high school classes in the Los Angeles region, where more than 500,000 people staged a rally at the weekend. In Washington, a key Senate panel endorsed a bill Monday that would allow illegal workers to obtain visas, sending the legislation to the full Senate for a likely heated debate in an election year. Earlier, Bush said there had to be a "civil" debate about planned changes to immigration laws, which have caused new divisions between the White House and the Republican Party. The struggling president renewed his call for a guest worker program that would allow some undocumented workers to reside legally in the United States, putting him at odds with some Republicans who want to punish employers hiring illegal entrants.
The port of Long Beach, Calif. - among the busiest in the nation - is a key line of homeland defense. Some 4.5 million shipping containers pass through each year. Big radiation portal monitors scan some - but not all - containers for traces of nuclear or radiological material as they leave the port. But, four-and-a-half years after 9/11, Senate investigators say only 39 percent of all containers entering the U.S. are screened for nuclear material. Many ports, including the third-largest, Miami, still have only handheld detection devices of little value. "We still have massive blind spots in our ability to prevent nuclear material from being smuggled into this country," says Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn. Coleman says the Department of Homeland Security still is not moving nearly fast enough. A report by the Government Accountability Office concludes DHS is two years behind schedule in installing radiation monitors in ports and not likely to have them all done, even by 2009. DHS has made more progress installing detection equipment at the borders, but there investigators found another hole in the system. Coleman tells NBC News that undercover GAO investigators were able to bring enough radioactive material into the U.S. to make two dirty bombs - penetrating both the northern and southern borders. Monitors detected the radiological material, but undercover agents produced fake papers and got the material in. "They were able to use counterfeit documents they got off a basic program on a computer," Coleman says. DHS officials say they are now looking at how to plug that hole. But they insist significant progress has been made toward securing ports.
Glitches in new voting machines in Illinois' primary elections last week may foreshadow snafus in several states this year, as more than 30.6 million voters are expected to encounter new equipment when they go to the polls. "History show that it's the first election with new equipment when jurisdictions are most likely to experience problems," said Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services (EDS), a political consulting firm that specializes in election administration and redistricting. By November, nearly 45 percent of all counties expect to have changed their voting equipment to meet new federal guidelines sparked by the disputes in the 2000 presidential election, according to EDS. But 20 percent of counties are still in the midst of preparing for this year's elections, the company found. Despite some states' initial rush to buy all-digital voting machines, more than half of the nation's counties still will be voting with something that requires paper, EDS found. While at least 29 states will use some form of touch-screen voting machine in the 2006 election, laws in 26 states require either a paper receipt from a digital voting device or a paper balloting system, according to Electionline.org, a nonprofit group that tracks state voting reforms. Another 13 states are considering bills to require a paper receipt or ballot, according to VerifiedVoting.org, a nonprofit advocacy group working to expand such laws. Plans to switch to paperless electronic machines were thrown into tumult after thousands of ATM-like touch-screen voting machines malfunctioned during California's March 2004 primary. Computer scientists and election officials questioned whether digital machines were vulnerable to tampering, and they complained of no paper trail to doublecheck results.
The U.S. Senate defeated today, by a vote of 67-30, an amendment by Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) to create an independent Office of Public Integrity to oversee lobbying disclosure. Leading the opposition were Senators George Voinovich (R-Ohio), chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee, and Tim Johnson (D-S.D.), Vice Chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee. "Overall the Senate [Ethics] Committee has been doing what they were supposed to do," said Voinovich from the floor of the Senate. "The truth is, the Senate Ethics Committee operates effectively and in a bipartisan fashion," Johnson added. Unfortunately, such statements are not rooted in either facts or reality. According to Center for Public Integrity research, while under the oversight of the Senate Ethics Committee, lobbying disclosure has been glaringly un-enforced. * Nearly 14,000 lobbying documents that should have been filed periodically with the Senate Office of Public Records are missing; * Nearly 300 individuals and entities lobbied without registering; * 49 of the top 50 lobbying firms failed to file required forms; * Almost one in five companies have missing lobbying forms; and, * Almost 20 percent of all forms are filed late.
The lure of money is shaping the nation's 155 national forests: more advertising, more fees, more roads to draw timber sales and lumber mill jobs. The Bush administration also wants to sell more than 300,000 acres of national forests and other public land to help pay for rural schools in 41 states. The land sales, ranging from less than an acre to more than 1,000 acres, are expected to generate $800 million and would be the largest sale of forest land in decades. The Forest Service also hopes to raise money by allowing corporate advertisers to put up logos and banners at ski resorts, marinas or other buildings as well at events such as races, competitions and festivals held in national forests. The agency, part of the Agriculture Department, is also planning to conduct more frequent appraisals of 14,500 private cabins allowed in national forests the past 90 years, mainly in California, Oregon and Washington. Environmentalists are alarmed. "Vistas of our national forests may soon include giant inflatable beer bottles, banners for chewing tobacco and snack food kiosks," said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Smirkey's proposed budget for next year would trim Forest Service spending from nearly $4.3 billion to just under $4.1 billion. The Forest Service says it has no estimates of how much money the increased commercial activity will provide but is intent on making government forests a bigger producer of jobs.
Last month, the Bush administration confirmed that it expected the government to waive about $7 billion in royalties over the next five years for oil drilling in deep waters in the Gulf of Mexico, even though the industry incentive was expressly conceived of for times when energy prices were low. But that number could quadruple to more than $28 billion if a lawsuit filed last week challenging one of the program's remaining restrictions proves successful. "The big lie about this whole program is that it doesn't cost anything," said Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who tried to block its expansion last July. "Taxpayers are being asked to provide huge subsidies to oil companies to produce oil - it's like subsidizing a fish to swim." How did a supposedly cost-free incentive become a multibillion-dollar break to an industry making record profits? The answer is a familiar Washington story of special-interest politics at work: the people who pay the closest attention and make the fewest mistakes are those with the most profit at stake. Until last month, hardy anyone noticed - or even knew - the real costs. They were obscured in part by the long gap between the time incentives are offered and when new offshore wells start producing. But lawmakers shrouded the costs with rosy projections. And administration officials consistently declined to tally up the money they were forfeiting. "Failure to invest in the Gulf of Mexico is a lost opportunity for the U.S.," Mr. Johnston pleaded in a letter to other lawmakers when the subsidy was under consideration. "Those dollars will not move into other domestic development, they will move to Asia, South America, the Middle East or the former Soviet Union." Working closely with industry executives, he wrote legislation that would allow a company drilling in deep water to escape the standard 12 percent royalty on up to 87.5 million barrels of oil or its equivalent in natural gas. The coastal waters are mostly owned by the federal government, which leases tens of millions of acres in exchange for upfront fees and a share of sales, or royalties.
No safety concerns have arisen from tests for the cancer-causing chemical benzene in soft drinks, the Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday. Still, the agency is not ready to disclose its findings. The FDA started sampling soft drinks after a private study in November found small amounts of benzene in some beverages. In the vast majority of drinks sampled, benzene either was not found or was present at levels below the federal limit for drinking water. "Although the results to date are preliminary, they do not suggest a safety concern," Robert E. Brackett, director of the agency's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, wrote in a letter released Tuesday. The letter was a pointed retort to an environmental group that is calling for benzene warnings on soft drinks. The Environmental Working Group asked the FDA to warn the public about popular soft drinks containing two ingredients that can form benzene. The ingredients are ascorbic acid and benzoate preservatives, also known as Vitamin C and sodium or potassium benzoate. "Notably, they don't give us the data," said Richard Wiles, the group's senior vice president.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Monday after visiting the Pennsylvania site where a hijacked airliner crashed on September 11, 2001 that the United States deserves poor marks in how it has waged a "battle of ideas" with groups like al Qaeda. Rumsfeld addressed students at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, many of them officers who have commanded troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The speech followed Rumsfeld's first visit to rural Shanksville where a hijacked airliner heading toward Washington crashed on September 11, 2001, after passengers confronted the al Qaeda hijackers. "If I were grading, I would say we probably deserve a D or a D-plus as a country as to how well we're doing in the battle of ideas that's taking place in the world today. And I'm not going to suggest that it's easy, but we have not found the formula as a country," Rumsfeld said at the war college. Allegations that American Red Cross volunteers engaged in theft and fraud after Hurricane Katrina are being probed by Louisiana's attorney general.
Never satisfied with current ways to snoop on the American people, Fairfax County, VA, is taking part in an unusual White House drug study. Wastewater from communities throughout the Potomac River Basin is being tested for the urinary byproducts of cocaine. "Apparently, they're able to ascertain how many people may be using illicit drugs, in this case cocaine, with such studies," Board of Supervisors Chairman Gerry Connolly tells WTOP. Earlier this month, county workers collected five days worth of water samples at the pollution control plant in Lorton. The samples were sent to a lab in Rockville, Md., to be analyzed for the traces of the main urinary byproduct of cocaine. "It does not indicate that we have an unusual drug problem in Fairfax County," Connolly says. "I'll be interested, obviously, in the results. It's kind of an unusual study and an unusual request. Obviously, we're prepared to cooperate with any endeavor to try to make sure the use of illicit drugs is discouraged in our community." White House officials believe the wastewater testing will lead to a more accurate index of how many people use drugs than traditional survey research. Now, would someone please take some samples of the White House sewer effluent?
Allegations that American Red Cross volunteers engaged in theft and fraud after Hurricane Katrina are being probed by Louisiana's attorney general. The inquiry comes as the ARC, the largest recipient of donations after last year's hurricane, unveiled its own probe into claims of impropriety. Concerns include the improper diversion of relief supplies and the failure to follow Red Cross procedures. The ARC's charter could be revoked if it does not overhaul its operations. Attorney General Charles Foti has asked for the names and telephone numbers of those who participated in Louisiana relief efforts as well as copies of any other internal reports or investigations conducted by the American Red Cross. "This is not the first time we have heard reports of abuse involving some charitable agencies and unfortunately it may not be the last," he said in a statement. "I think the American Red Cross is a superb organization but if I find that some individuals committed crimes in our state and took advantage of our tragic situation, I will take the appropriate action."
On the March 23 broadcast of the CBS Evening News, in a segment examining a recent Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regulations proposal that would allow tax return preparers to sell information from returns to third parties, Washington correspondent Bob Orr characterized the proposal as spelling out a "loophole of sorts" that has "been around for more than 30 years." Orr described the proposal as an effort "to improve taxpayer protections" -- a description taken from the IRS' own characterization of it -- that he implied would be addressed by requiring taxpayers to sign a consent form. In fact, in permitting sales to third parties, the new proposal would allow tax preparers to do something they are not currently permitted to do; under current law, they can pass on such information only to affiliates.
Oh, no, not at all - the Lincoln Group does not do propaganda. Sure, the firm's been tarred by some in Congress, the media and the defense establishment for paying Iraqi newspapers to publish hundreds of "news" stories secretly written by U.S. troops. But Paige Craig, the West Point dropout and former Marine intelligence specialist who is the Lincoln Group's president, says the practice is not propaganda. The word carries such baggage, such suggestions of mind control. So in an industry in which euphemism thrives, a more elegant word is deployed. "We call it 'influence,' " says Craig, whose business has 12 U.S. government contracts totaling more than $130 million.
Smirkey expressed support on Monday for U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns, who is under pressure over his links with Jack Abramoff, a Republican lobbyist at the heart of an enormous influence-peddling scandal. Speaking at a fund-raising event for Burns' re-election campaign at a Washington hotel, Bush praised the Montana lawmaker as a strong supporter on national security and tax relief. Burns, who faces a tough fight for re-election in November, became ensnared in the corruption investigation involving Abramoff, who pleaded guilty to fraud in January and is cooperating with prosecutors. In December, Burns said he would return $150,000 he had received from Abramoff-related sources over the past several years. Insisting they were "legal and fully disclosed," he said they had undermined public confidence in the government. In Vanity Fair magazine's April edition, Abramoff said he worked closely with many top Republicans, despite their claims to the contrary. According to the article, Abramoff said Burns was especially cooperative.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has accused staffers at The Boston Herald of watching "too many episodes of the Sopranos." A reporter for the paper on Monday interpreted a hand gesture he made at a cathedral as "obscene." In a strongly-worded letter to the editor of the paper, Scalia said the gesture was merely "dismissive." The Herald reported the justice made "an obscene gesture, flicking his hand under his chin" in response to a question about whether lawyers might question his impartiality in matters of church and state. The incident occurred after he attended Mass at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. It said Scalia had also asked a photographer not to publish a picture. The account was cited by many publications and Web sites, including E&P. A Reuters account initially described the justice as giving the "finger." Scalia said he had explained the gesture's meaning to no avail to the reporter, whom he referred to as "an up-and-coming 'gotcha' star." In his letter he quoted from Luigi Barzini's book, "The Italians," in which he observed: "The extended fingers of one hand moving slowly back and forth under the raised chin means 'I couldn't care less. It's no business of mine. Count me out."'
Why I Am Embarrassed To Present My Passport: Mexican President Vicente Fox paused for a long moment before answering a question on how long it would take Mexico to reach a stage where citizens no longer want to cross the U.S. border to seek work. "Generations," he finally said. "It's a long way to narrow the gap... between incomes in Mexico and on the other side of the border," he said in a recent interview with Reuters. That income gap is the principal reason why hundreds of thousands of Mexicans cross the border with the U.S. illegally to seek work -- yet it rarely figures in the heated and increasingly emotional debate over immigration now raging in the United States. Roughly half of Mexico's population lives on less than $5 a day, according to government figures. The U.S. minimum wage is $5.15 an hour. Annual Mexican Gross Domestic Product per capita is just under $7,000. It is almost $44,000 in the United States. The gap is now wider than it was when Mexico, the United States and Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1992. The treaty took effect two years later and was supposed to generate more jobs in Mexico, raise incomes and, as a consequence, reduce the number of Mexicans crossing the 2,000-mile border with their superpower neighbor, legally or illegally. That has not happened and the number of Mexicans making the increasingly dangerous and expensive trek north has risen steadily over the past few years.
Rats Deserting The U.S.S. Bush: While President Bush appears serenely confident about Iraq, the same cannot be said of the War Party propagandists who were plotting this conflict when Dubya was still a rookie governor of Texas. William Kristol of The Weekly Standard now demands the firing of Donald Rumsfeld. William F. Buckley, whose National Review branded the antiwar Right "unpatriotic conservatives" who "hate" America, now calls upon Bush for an "acknowledgement of defeat." Richard Perle says the administration "got the war right and the aftermath wrong." Self-described "humiliated pundit" Andrew Sullivan confesses to "a sense of shame and sorrow." Michael Ledeen says of Bush's war, "Wrong war, wrong time, wrong way, wrong place." Frank ("The End of History") Fukuyama concedes that "Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at." But it is a March 20 essay in The Wall Street Journal that suggests the neocons may be coming unhinged. Written by Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes, the piece urges Bush to begin the "rejuvenation of his presidency by shocking the media and political community with a sweeping overhaul of his administration." The purge Barnes recommends would have caused Stalin to recoil. Barnes calls on Bush to fire press secretary Scott McClellan, chief of staff Andy Card, political adviser Karl Rove, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Treasury Secretary John Snow -- and Vice President Richard Cheney.
In a (perhaps) historic shift, more Americans now consider themselves Democrats than Republicans, the Gallup organization revealed today. Republicans had gained the upper hand in recent years, but 33% of Americans, in the latest Gallup poll, now call themselves Democrats, with those favoring the GOP one point behind. But Gallup says this widens a bit more "once the leanings of Independents are taken into account." Independents now make up 34% of the population. When asked if they lean in a certain direction, their answers pushed the Democrat numbers to 49% with Republicans at 42%. One year ago, the parties were dead even at 46% each. This shift indicates, Gallup says, why its polls show Democrats leading in this year's congressional races. The latest poll was taken from January to March 2006, with a national sample of about 1,000 adults.
Bill Of Rights Death Watch: Today the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments in the most significant case to date on the limits of George W. Bush's authority in his "war on terror." In the first two cases it heard, the high court reined in Bush for his unprecedented assertion of executive power. It held in Rasul v. Bush that the Guantánamo prisoners could challenge their confinement in US federal courts. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the Court said that "a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to rights of the Nation's citizens." Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's chauffeur, is facing trial in one of the military commissions that Bush created on November 13, 2001. The case pending in the high court will determine the legality of those military commissions, and will decide whether Hamdan and other Guantanamo detainees can challenge their detention in US federal courts. The importance of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld is evident from the sheer number of amicus briefs it has garnered. Of the 42 amici in this case, 37 - including one filed by 280 law professors, this writer among them - support Hamdan's position.
"It was 9:30 on a recent Friday night when Denise Grier saw blue lights in her rearview mirror," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution begins in Thursday editions. She pulled over on Chamblee-Tucker Road, unaware of her infraction. "The officer asked if I knew I had a lewd decal on my car and I thought, 'Oh gosh, what did my kids put on my car?' " As it turns out, the decal was an anti-Bush bumper sticker Grier slapped on her 2001 Chrysler Sebring last summer. The bumper sticker - "I'm Tired Of All The BUSHIT" - contains an expletive. The officer "said DeKalb had an ordinance about lewd decals and wrote me a ticket" for $100, said Grier, an oncology nurse at Emory University Hospital who lives in Athens. "This is all about free speech," Grier said in a telephone interview Monday. "The officer pulled me over because he didn't agree with my politics. That's what this is about, not whether I support Bush, not because of the war in Iraq, but about my right to free speech." Officer Herschel Grangent Jr., a spokesman for the DeKalb County Police Department, confirmed the incident Monday but said he couldn't "speculate on or discuss another officer's decision to write a citation."
A Virginia training manual used to help state employees recognize terrorists lists anti-government and property rights activists as terrorists and includes binoculars, video cameras, pads and notebooks in a compendium of terrorist tools. The manual, discovered by the Virginia News Source, is keen to emphasize that terrorists are not only Middle Eastern in scope and the main focus is afforded to domestic terrorism. Included with Hamas, Al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad, the following groups are identified as terrorist organizations: In any anti-government and militia movements; Are property-rights activists; Are in any racist, separatist and hate groups; Are an environmental and animal rights activist; Are a religious extremist; Are in a street gang. Reading further into the manual, associations between domestic terrorists and the supporting the American Revolution are subtly made. In Alex Jones' 2001 documentary 9/11: The Road To Tyranny, FEMA officials give a seminar in which they identify George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers as terrorists. The manual encourages people to report any suspicious activity to an authority figure. Presumably, if property rights activism is deemed suspicious then anyone protesting or communicating about the recent eminent domain issue will be reported and investigated on grounds of terrorism.
The Bush administration agreed Tuesday to release dozens of disputed photographs and videos of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib, two weeks after Salon published an official Army criminal archive that included many, if not all, of the same images. The government's decision ends a nearly two-year legal battle with civil liberties advocates over whether the publication of the material would harm national security. In a filing to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, government lawyers cited Salon's recent publication of the disputed images as the reason for dropping their legal fight. (A judge still has to accept the government's proposal to drop the case.) A Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday that the military would now review Salon's Web site to see if there were any images or videos that were part of the court case that were not published. "Under the terms of the agreement, within seven days, we will identify the images recently published on a media website that were of issue in this appeal," said the spokesman, Lt. Col. John Skinner. "If any images at issue were not published on the website we will release those images with portions redacted."
The trial of two Austin, TX police officers accused of mistreating a suspect already in handcuffs got underway Monday. Christopher Gray has been suspended from the police department. William Heilman quit the police force. Both men are charged with official oppression. Prosecutors say the officers hit and tased suspect Ramón Hernandez once they already had him in cuffs. Video from a police patrol car shown in court shows the officers hitting and tasing Hernandez while he's face down in handcuffs. Defense attorneys say Hernandez continued to pose a threat and continued to struggle with officers, which is why the additional force was necessary. Austin Police Department policy prohibits tasing a suspect in handcuffs. Prosecutors say Hernandez was wrong to fight police, but they APD officers still had no right to punch and tase him once he was in handcuffs. A third officer, Joel Follmer, has also been charged but he will be tried separately.
Free Markets And Privatization Solve All Problems: More than half of New Orleans still doesn't have phone or Internet access. But that isn't stopping BellSouth from campaigning to shut down a free Wi-Fi service that has become a lifeline for thousands of residents, the city's top technology officer says. State laws ban municipalities from giving away broadband services. The city got around the ban because the governor declared a state of emergency after Hurricane Katrina. The state of emergency is expected to be lifted this year. When that happens, the broadband network would have to shut down. BellSouth has opposed proposed legislation that would allow New Orleans to keep its Wi-Fi network running. The carrier, which provides phone service in Louisiana, stands to lose phone and wireless customers if other cities follow New Orleans' lead. A BellSouth executive says his company hasn't tried to shut down the city's network. "We haven't challenged it. They are here (in New Orleans), and we are co-existing," says Bill Oliver, president of BellSouth's Louisiana operations. Greg Meffert, the city's chief information officer, says that's news to him. "That's not the way I interpreted what BellSouth told the city," he says. Meffert says he has no intention of pulling the plug on the city's Wi-Fi network. "A lot of businesses don't even have basic communications services right now," he says. "This is the only option we have." Within weeks, "BellSouth was in here asking us when we were going to wind it down," Meffert recalls. "We told them we couldn't do that."
News Of The 9/11 Coverup: Award winning actor, director, producer, and pioneering anti-Iraq war activist Ed Asner is scheduled to appear live on the CNN Headline News program Showbiz Tonight (6pm CST). Asner is reportedly going on to support Charlie Sheen's bold and brave stance calling for a real investigation of the events on September 11th, 2001 as well as to raise his own questions. Also on Showbiz Tonight on March 27, actress Sharon Stone defended Sheen and his First Amendment right to speak out saying that he is brave and that it is important to confront authority. Asner and Sheen are just two more of many celebrities who have already come forward to question the official story of what happened on 9/11. Actor James Woods began questioning the official fable in the first weeks right after 9/11. X-Files and Lone Gunmen star Dean Haglund has already gone public on the Alex Jones Show (December 18, 2004) questioning the official story. Ed Bagley, Jr. months ago hosted a 9/11 Truth Symposium in New York City. And we have recently confirmed that one of the world's most popular and beloved musicians is awake to the truth about 9/11 and in the very near future may be going public. Many more major stars who are considering going public have contacted us in recent days. The dam is literally breaking. Former Delta Force Commander Eric Hanney has spoken out in the press about the "War on Terrorism" being bogus and how there is no real threat to the United States. The 9/11 Truth Movement has reached critical mass and is now exploding. The perpetrators of 9/11 have got to be concerned as more and more people worldwide wake up to the 9/11 hoax.
Liberal Biased Media Watch: Fox News continued their efforts to make jackbooted tyranny seem as normal as drinking a cup of coffee yesterday when it aired a segment asking if Zacarias Moussaoui should have been tortured in order to prevent 9/11. Cavuto stand-in David Asman acted as devil's advocate while convicted criminal Oliver North played the 'good cop' in a completely framed debate. North argued that we shouldn't torture but should use 'harsh interrogation methods'. "For example, you say, "If you don't answer me, I'm going to take you out and shoot you." Click here to listen to the audio. Watch the video on Fox's website. It is important to clarify the context of even having a debate on this issue. Just asking the question itself gives the argument a legitimacy and normalizes it. It's like asking yourself, should I put my head into this meat grinder? The pretense is so bizarre that the debate is not necessary.
News From Smirkey's Wars: Hundreds of deserters from the US armed forces have crossed into Canada and are now seeking political refugee status there, arguing that violations of the rules of war in Iraq by the US entitle them to asylum. A decision on a test case involving two US servicemen is due shortly and is being watched with interest by fellow servicemen on both sides of the border. At least 20 others have already applied for asylum and there are an estimated 400 in Canada out of more than 9,000 who have deserted since the conflict started in 2003. Ryan Johnson, 22, from near Fresno in California, was due to be deployed with his unit to Iraq in January last year but crossed the Canadian border in June and is seeking asylum. "I had spoken to many soldiers who had been in Iraq and who told me about innocent civilians being killed and about bombing civilian neighborhoods," he told the UK Guardian newspaper. "It's been really great since I've been here. Generally, people have been really hospitable and understanding, although there have been a few who have been for the war." He is now unable to return to the US. "I don't have a problem with that. I'm in Canada and that's that." Mr Johnson said it was unclear exactly how many US soldiers were in Canada but he thought 400 was a "realistic figure". He had been on speaking tours across the country as part of a war resisters' movement and had come across other servicemen living underground.
Today Rep. Waxman released the first analysis of Halliburton's RIO 2 contract to restore Iraq's southern oil fields. The examination of previously undisclosed correspondence, evaluations, and audits reveals that government officials and investigators have harshly criticized Halliburton's performance under RIO 2. The documents disclose an "overwhelmingly negative" performance, including: * Intentional Overcharging; * Exorbitant Costs; * Inadequate Cost Reporting; * Schedule Delays; * Refusal to Cooperate.
On the eve of oral argument in a key Supreme Court case on the rights of alleged terrorists, a group of retired U.S. generals and admirals has asked Justice Antonin Scalia to recuse himself, arguing that his recent public comments on the subject make it impossible for him to appear impartial. In a letter delivered to the court late yesterday, a lawyer for the retired officers cited news reports of Scalia's March 8 remarks to an audience at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland. Scalia reportedly said it was "crazy" to suggest that combatants captured fighting the United States should receive a "full jury trial," and dismissed suggestions that the Geneva Conventions might apply to detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Scalia's remarks "give rise to the unfortunate appearance that, even before briefing was complete, he had already made up his mind" about issues in the case, the lawyer, David H. Remes, wrote. Noting that Scalia reportedly had discussed the rights of accused terrorists in the context of his son Matthew's recent tour as an Army officer in Iraq, Remes wrote that this creates an appearance of "personal bias arising from his son's military service."
News From The Talibaptist Jihad: When South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds signed HB 1215 into law it effectively banned all abortions in the state with the exception that it did allow saving the mother’s life. There were, however, no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. His actions, and the comments of State Senators like Bill Napoli of Rapid City, SD, set of a maelstrom of protests within the state. Napoli suggested that if it was a case of "simple rape," there should be no thoughts of ending a pregnancy. Letters by the hundreds appeared in local newspapers, mostly written by women, challenging Napoli’s description of rape as "simple." He has yet to explain satisfactorily what he meant by "simple rape." The President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecilia Fire Thunder, was incensed. A former nurse and healthcare giver, she was very angry that a state body made up mostly of white males, would make such a stupid law against women. "To me, it is now a question of sovereignty," she said to me last week. "I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction." A means of contributing to the project has been established.
State Rep. Debra Maggart, R-Hendersonville, said she believes homosexual couples should not be allowed to adopt children. In fact, in addition to e-mail correspondence with a master's student at Vanderbilt publicized recently, in which she said as much, she has also said homosexual couples may molest the children they adopt. "We also have seen evidence that homosexual couples prey on young males and have, in some instances, adopted them in order to have unfretted access to subject them to a life of molestation and sexual abuse," she said. "In all cases to paint with a broad brush strokes is unfortunate," said adoptive parent Dr. Christopher Harris. Harris is a pediatrician by day and a single gay adoptive parent by night. "She brings such joy into my life," he said. "It's always said pediatrician doesn't finished his training till he or she has a kid." Harris fits every requirement for the state's definition of a good adoptive parent: loving, healthy and financially stable. He is also gay, and for Maggert, that means he's unqualified. "I have strong convictions. I just feel kids in our foster have been through enough. They need the optimum family unit, and that is a mother and a father," she said.
We Conservatives Are More Moral Than You: A top adviser to former House Whip Tom DeLay received more than a third of all the money collected by the U.S. Family Network, a nonprofit organization the adviser created to promote a pro-family political agenda in Congress, according to the group's accounting records. DeLay's former chief of staff, Edwin A. Buckham, who helped create the group while still in DeLay's employ, and his wife, Wendy, were the principal beneficiaries of the group's $3.02 million in revenue, collecting payments totaling $1,022,729 during a five-year period ending in 2001, public and private records show. The group's revenue was mostly drawn from clients of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to its records. From an FBI subpoena for the records, it can be inferred that the bureau is exploring whether there were links between the payments and favorable legislative treatment of Abramoff's clients by DeLay's office.
Scandals Du Jour: It's OK for public officials not to disclose the value of checks given to them as gifts, the Texas state panel charged with enforcing good government practices has ruled in a private meeting. The ruling by the Texas Ethics Commission during a closed-door executive session and confirmed Friday by several observers close to the case involves a check for an undisclosed amount made last year to Bill Ceverha, a figure in the fundraising scandal surrounding U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay. Houston home builder Bob Perry, the state's No. 1 individual campaign donor, gave Ceverha the check. Ceverha disclosed it in a personal finance report he filed in his capacity as a board member of the Employees Retirement System of Texas. He listed it as a gift, described only as "check," and did not disclose its amount.
There are intriguing signs of George Bush trying to distance himself from Dick Cheney as the investigation into who leaked the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame homes in on members of the vice-president's close circle. Leaking the name of a covert CIA officer is illegal under US law and an investigation has been going on for some time under Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into who was responsible. Karl Rove, the president's special adviser, reportedly "tipped off" Fitzgerald on the location of 250 emails that had mysteriously gone missing from the vice-president's office. Rove was initially thought to be one of those in the frame but according to the New York Times he is now "increasingly certain" that he will not be indicted, although that may not save his skin as Republican congressmen, desperate to improve the party's declining standing ahead of this year's mid-term elections, are equally desperate to give the administration an extreme makeover (their pressure has now led to the resignation of Bush's other close aide Andrew Card, his chief of staff). Now the US internet newspaper Raw Story is reporting that it was Rove who told Fitzgerald where to find the emails Cheney's office didn't want the special investigator to see.
It may seem as though it's been moving along at a snail's pace, but the second part of the federal investigation into the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson is nearly complete, with attorneys and government officials who have remained close to the probe saying that a grand jury will likely return an indictment against one or two senior Bush administration officials. These sources work or worked at the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council. Some of these sources are attorneys close to the case. They requested anonymity because they were not permitted to speak publicly about the details of the investigation. In lengthy interviews over the weekend and on Monday, they said that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has started to prepare the paperwork to present to the grand jury seeking an indictment against White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove or National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Although the situation remains fluid, it's possible, these sources said, that Fitzgerald may seek to indict both Rove and Hadley, charging them with perjury, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy related to their roles in the leak of Plame Wilson's identity and their effort to cover up their involvement following a Justice Department investigation. The sources said late Monday that it may take more than a month before Fitzgerald presents the paperwork outlining the government's case against one or both of the officials and asks the grand jury to return an indictment, because he is currently juggling quite a few high-profile criminal cases and will need to carve out time to write up the indictment and prepare the evidence.
Disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff and a business partner were sentenced Wednesday to five years and 10 months in federal prison, the minimum they faced for fraud related to their 2000 purchase of the SunCruz Casinos gambling fleet. Abramoff and Adam Kidan both pleaded guilty to conspiracy and wire fraud, but they won't have to report to prison immediately. The judge postponed their reporting date for at least 90 days so the two can continue cooperating in a Washington corruption investigation and a Florida probe into the killing of former SunCruz owner Konstantinos Boulis. Both deny roles in the killing. Abramoff pleaded guilty in connection with the corruption probe but has yet to be sentenced. In court Wednesday, Abramoff said the fraud case was "incredibly painful" for himself, his family and his friends.
According to a biography of Jack Abramoff crafted by his lawyers in an appeal for leniency, "Hollywood politics" triumphed over his pious attempts to keep offensive language out of an action film he produced in the late eighties. But left unmentioned in the appeal is any hint that the film was shot in South African-occupied Namibia during apartheid, and may have even been partly funded by the South African military. In an article written in February for RAW STORY, Danny Schechter wrote that the "idea was to make anti-communist films that could denigrate the anti-apartheid movement." Schechter also wrote that while "for years, Abramoff publicly denied South African financing...the Mail & Guardian quoted one-time apartheid spy Craig Williamson as now admitting that the money came directly from the South African military."
More Adventures In Pest Control - Part Gazillion
The weather turned today. The first tropical wave of the new dry season has come through, and Costa Rica is having some slightly cooler weather and nearly constant drizzle all day long. Yesterday was lovely, but quite windy - often a prelude to a change in the weather, and so I was not surprised to wake up this morning to light rain and much cooler temperatures. Overnight's low was 68, coldest in some time, and this afternoon, it only got up to 75, what with the heavy overcast all day keeping the sun from warming the ground.
This morning I heard something I hadn't heard in quite a while. It is a species of tropical cicada, which emits a constant, almost whistle-like tone, only slightly buzzy. The Ticos have a name for it, and I can't recall what it is, but they say that their appearance means that the rainy season is only three weeks away. Geez, and we just got rid of the rains! I sure hope that doesn't apply, but since this is a La Nina year, rains are supposed to be heavier than usual, so it wouldn't surprise me if the rainy season started early. I sure hope not. I was just getting into this dry-season thing.
At breakfast this morning, I discovered another trail of those pesky little tiny ants, the ones that are similar to Argentine ants, but much smaller and much faster. It was a busy trail, so I was able to readily follow it back to the nest - the trail disappeared at the top of the wall where a ceiling tile met the wall.
I wondered when I moved to this country why ceiling tiles are always calked around the edge of the ceiling, even when big gaps remain in the rest of the ceiling tiles. Well, now I know. The tiny little ants like to nest in the attic, and walk down the walls into the room. They're reluctant to walk very far upside down on a ceiling tile to get to the wall, so they look for gaps at the edge of the ceiling to come down through. This makes control rather simple - just calk around the edge of the ceiling. The ceilings in my house were calked when it was built, but that was 30 years ago, and the cracking caused by age and countless earthquakes since then has caused the calking to crack into gaps just barely big enough for the little blighters to make it down through. So I got out my calking gun, and with a tube of silicon rubber I bought some time back, I went to work. The ceiling around the dining area and the kitchen is now calked up, and hopefully, that will be the end of that. We'll see.
More Reasons Why I Am Glad I Am Out Of The States: The Associated Press reported last week that Hutchison Whampoa Ltd was given a no-bid contract by the US government to take over radiation detecting security just 65 miles away from Freeport in the Bahamas with no oversight. Hutchinson Whampoa is admittedly a holding of the Chinese navy and the People's Liberation Army. The US government has handed a no-bid contract directly to the Chinese military machine to handle key security infrastructure right as that country gears up for a future confrontation with America. From Newsmax, "According to a 1999 investigative report by the American Foreign Policy Council, "Hutchison Whampoa, through its Hutchison International Terminals [HIT] subsidiary or Panama Ports Company, has substantial links to the Chinese communist government and the People's Liberation Army. The Panama Ports Company is 10 percent owned by China Resources Enterprise [CRE], which is the commercial arm of China's Ministry of Trade and Economic Co-operation. In its investigation into China's attempts to influence the 1996 U.S. presidential campaign, the U.S. Senate Government Affairs Committee identified CRE as a conduit for ‘espionage - economic, political and military - for China. "Committee Chairman Senator Fred Thompson said that CRE has ‘geopolitical purposes. Kind of like a smiling tiger; it might look friendly, but it's very dangerous." Sen. Trent Lott has described the Hong Kong firm as "an arm of the People's Liberation Army." "The company is headed by a Li Ka-Shing, the chairman of Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. Intelligence sources say he has deep connections with the Chinese Communist government."
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia dismissed the idea that Guantanamo detainees have constitutional rights and called European concerns over the issue hypocritical, Newsweek magazine reported on Sunday. The comments, which Newsweek said were recorded at a private appearance by Scalia in Switzerland on March 8, emerge before a Supreme Court hearing this week on a legal challenge by a Guantanamo prisoner against U.S. military tribunals. "War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts," Scalia said in the talk at the University of Freiburg, according to Newsweek. "Give me a break." Court officials were not immediately available for comment. Ethics experts said the impression that Scalia had already made up his mind before the hearing should mean that he will voluntarily drop out of the proceedings. However, Newsweek said he did not refer specifically to this week's case. "He should remove himself when there is a reasonable doubt of his impartiality," said Father Robert Drinan, a professor of law at Georgetown University and long-standing human rights campaigner, who teaches judicial ethics. "It should logically be a reason for his recusal but I don't think he'll do it ... he's so stubborn" said Drinan. Challenged by one audience member about whether the Gitmo detainees don't have protections under the Geneva or human-rights conventions, Scalia shot back: "If he was captured by my army on a battlefield, that is where he belongs. I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son and I'm not about to give this man who was captured in a war a full jury trial. I mean it's crazy." Scalia was apparently referring to his son Matthew, who served with the U.S. Army in Iraq. Scalia did say, though, that he was concerned "there may be no end to this war."
More evidence that the U.S. government is justifying surveillance of political dissidence under the guise of monitoring "terrorism" has recently come to light. Early this March an FBI agent's presentation at the University of Texas law school listed Indymedia, Food Not Bombs, the Communist Party of Texas and "Anarchists" as groups on the FBI's "Terrorist Watch List" for central Texas. On March 8, 2006, FBI Supervisory Senior Resident Agent G. Charles Rasner, delivered a guest lecture before Professor Ronald Sievert's U.S. Law and National Security class of approximately 100 students. Accompanying his lecture was an "unclassified" Power Point presentation titled "Counter-Terrorism Efforts in Texas." According to UT law student Elizabeth Wagoner's account of Rasner's lecture on Austin Indymedia: "On a list of approximately ten groups, Food Not Bombs was listed seventh. Indymedia was listed tenth, with a reference specifically to IndyConference 2005. The Communist Party of Texas also made the list. Rasner explained that these groups could have links to terrorist activity. He noted that peaceful-sounding group names could cover more violent extremist tactics." Wagoner has made a Freedom of Information Act request for Rasner's Power Point presentation. A self-described libertarian law student who also attended the class wrote on his blog that this list "got many in class riled up." Food Not Bombs is a moniker for volunteer-run groups that distribute unused vegetarian food from grocery stores and restaurants for free to the general population. Its name stems from a belief that excessive military spending could be redirected to provide food for the hungry. Indymedia is a decentralized grassroots online media outlet, which provides an alternative to the mainstream media coverage.
The New York Times reports that a secret memo from January 2003 reveals that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair agreed to invade Iraq even without U.N. backing. The article, written by Don Van Natta Jr., addresses the Jan. 31, 2003 memorandum which was leaked to a British author and referenced in February of this year. The New York Times was able to obtain a copy of the secret memo, and confirms most of the reports. "Two senior British officials confirmed the authenticity of the memo, but declined to talk further about it, citing Britain's Official Secrets Act, which makes it illegal to divulge classified information," the Times reports. Van Natta's article contains many quotations from the memo that haven't been previously disclosed, and refers to it as "striking in its characterization of frank, almost casual, conversation by Bush and Blair about the most serious subjects."
Total Information Awareness Meets Old McDonald Had A Farm: The U.S. Department of Agriculture is promoting a system that would have farm animal owners and livestock handlers attach microchips or other ID tags to their furry and feathered charges so they could be monitored throughout their lifetimes by a centralized computer network. The National Animal Identification System, as it's known, has been in development by the department since 2002, with help from an agribusiness industry group that represents bigwigs like Cargill and Monsanto. Sounds like Animal Farm meets Big Brother. Yet, while some small-scale farmers are outspoken in their criticism of the scheme, many in the agriculture community say it's high time the U.S. more carefully tracked livestock. The question is how best to do it -- and the devil, as always, is in the details. The vision, says Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, is to create a comprehensive high-tech tracking system that would eventually know the whereabouts of every cow, llama, hog, catfish, ostrich, and other farm critter in the nation so that animal-borne diseases such as avian flu, mad cow, and foot-and-mouth disease could be easily and systematically kept in check. If an animal were discovered to be a carrier of a disease, this system could supposedly track every location it had been in through the course of its life and the other animals it may have come in contact with; those exposed could then be killed before the disease spread out of control.
Military strikes against Iran's nuclear sites would not destroy the Islamic republic's uranium enrichment activities, which could be easily moved and restarted, a senior Iranian official said on Monday. "You know very well... we can enrich uranium anywhere in the country, with a vast country of more than 1 million 600 square kilometers," said Aliasghar Soltaniyeh, Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. "Enrichment can be done anywhere in Iran," he told a panel discussion on the possible use of military force to destroy what the West fears is Iran's atomic bomb program. Soltaniyeh said that after Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear power plant at Osirak in 1981, then Iraqi-leader Saddam Hussein bombed Iran's Bushehr plant. The Security Council then passed a resolution condemning the attacks and making it illegal for countries to strike nuclear facilities. But Soltaniyeh said those U.N. documents were "just pieces of paper" today to the United States and Israel.
Two-thirds of Americans (66%) say Smirkey's policies did little or nothing to help the environment in the past year. More than half (54%) feel American businesses did little or nothing to help. Three-quarters want to see Bush and others - Congress, American businesses and the American public - take action to help the environment in the year ahead. About one-third (35%) of Americans say that in the past year they have personally given a lot of thought to the impact they were having on the environment.
A federal judge in Oregon has refused to hand over for safekeeping to the FBI a classified document that may show that the NSA conducted warrantless electronic surveillance on an Ashland, Ore., charity that the government alleges had ties to Osama bin Laden. U.S. District Judge Garr King sided with charity attorney Steven Goldberg, who argued that the FBI is a defendant in the case and therefore not a neutral party that can be entrusted with the document. The judge instead has temporarily placed the document with federal prosecutors in Seattle until he can make a decision as to how the material should be handled. Thomas Nelson, who also represents the charity, al-Haramain Islamic Foundation Inc., gave the document to the judge in February as part of a lawsuit he has filed against the Bush administration alleging that the NSA conducted illegal eavesdropping on conversations between charity codirector Suliman al-Buthe and his American attorneys, Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor. The intelligence was later used to target the charity, Nelson's complaint alleges.
Every child left behind: Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush's signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it. Schools from Vermont to California are increasing - in some cases tripling - the class time that low-proficiency students spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law, signed in 2002, requires annual exams only in those subjects and punishes schools that fall short of rising benchmarks. The changes appear to principally affect schools and students who test below grade level. The intense focus on the two basic skills is a sea change in American instructional practice, with many schools that once offered rich curriculums now systematically trimming courses like social studies, science and art. A nationwide survey by a nonpartisan group that is to be made public on March 28 indicates that the practice, known as narrowing the curriculum, has become standard procedure in many communities.
Finally! Proof of Saddam's WMD's - Saddam Hussein planned to use "camels of mass destruction" as weapons to defend Iraq, loading them with bombs and directing them towards invading forces. Earlier this month, the Pentagon released copies in the original Arabic onto the internet in the hope that others would interpret them into English. Handwritten on official paper, one of the reports appears to be a road map for the insurgency, with detailed instructions for training what it calls suicide bombers. The papers have been translated by Arabic-speaking members of Free Republic, a conservative internet discussion forum that believes the documents will justify British and American claims that Saddam had made Iraq a haven for terrorists. That's right. People who can barely speak english have translated a Arabic document! I'm serious, this is real and it isn't The Onion. What do these documents prove? The Free Republic writes on its web site: "If the translation is correct, it suggests that many of the foreign fighters now attacking coalition forces and bombing Iraqi civilians were directly trained by the Saddam regime, although there are no known reports of camels being used in suicide attacks." Now, isn't that about the lamest excuse for war you could ever conceive of?
With thousands of superstores dotting the country, Wal-Mart has become the dominant name in American consumerism. Now, the retail giant is workin