The Pelosi Years
The Democrats will be running the House. But this is not a majority made from cookie-cutter liberals.
ELEANOR CLIFT
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Madam President: Shattering the Last Glass Ceiling
by Eleanor Clift
A Web-exclusive column
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Updated: 11:59 p.m. CT Nov 7, 2006
Nov. 8, 2006 - Democrats have won the House, ending a 12-year drought. And Nancy Pelosi is on her way to becoming Speaker, becoming the first woman ever to hold the job. It’s a time for the long-suffering party to celebrate. But keeping the party's new majority will be a test, and the tone Democrats set over the next days and weeks will create a first impression for the voters that will be hard to change if they don’t get it right.
This is not a majority made from cookie-cutter liberals. These are men and women winning in districts that were drawn for Republicans. Some are pro-life, some pro-gun, some sound so Republican they might be in the other party if it weren’t for President Bush and the Iraq war. It will take all of Pelosi’s skills as a manager and disciplinarian to forge a coalition out of these philosophical disparities.
The voters, tired of Washington's divisive ways, want to see the two parties cooperate; it will be Pelosi's challenge to make that a reality. Pelosi might have looked across the aisle and found some soulmates among Republican moderates, but the early returns suggest they won’t be back. GOP stalwarts like Nancy Johnson in Connecticut were defeated. Johnson regularly crossed party lines to work with Democrats.
Voters cited corruption and ethics along with Iraq as issues that mattered most to them. Asked whether they were voting on local issues or national concerns, 62 percent said they were casting a national vote.
Democrats will be on probation for the next two years to show they can govern. If the Democrats want to retain the majority they just won, they’ll have to behave better than the GOP.
The impetus for a change of course in Iraq will almost certainly come from the Republicans, who will not want to endure another bloodletting in two years if the war is not resolved. Why should Democrats shoulder the burden of solving Bush’s war when they’ve been left out of everything else? Republicans have run the Congress with an iron fist, excluding Democrats and bringing legislation to the floor only when it can command a “majority of the majority,” meaning Republicans only. It will be tempting for Democrats to exact revenge for a decade of mistreatment, but that would just trade one set of bullies for another.
The way both parties act in the coming Congress will set the stage for the ’08 presidential race. Republicans will wake up Wednesday with casualties among moderate Republicans in the Northeast. Those country-club Republicans, who once dominated the party, are a vanishing breed, along with their moderate views on social issues, their activism on the environment, and their support for Planned Parenthood. What's left is a party that's more conservative but not necessarily happy with the conservatism practiced by the Bush White House. The GOP will have to woo back fiscal hawks unhappy with Bush's big-government spending, and foreign policy realists weary of the neocons who cheered Bush's invasion of Iraq.
CONTINUED1 | 2 | Next >
The Fix
Faith Hill's live TV faux pas. Judge tosses Britney sex-tape suit. Plus: Snoop Dogg arrested.
By Scott Lamb
Morning Briefing:
CMA AwardsFaith Hill's CMA gaffe: Brooks & Dunn were the big winners at Monday night's 40th annual Country Music Awards, picking up the prizes for best single, best duo and best video, and an absent Keith Urban won for best male vocalist. But one of the most interesting moments of the night came from a nonwinner: As presenters announced Carrie Underwood's award for female vocalist of the year, the cameras showed fellow nominee Faith Hill prematurely raise her arms in celebration, then yell "What?!" when she realizes she just lost to an "American Idol" winner -- see the video here. (Associated Press, YouTube via Perez Hilton)
Britney loses sex-tape suit: A judge in Los Angeles has dismissed Britney Spears' defamation lawsuit against Us Weekly, saying Spears has no basis to claim the magazine's story about her making a sex tape with husband Kevin Federline hurt her reputation. Us has stood by the piece, titled, "Brit & Kev: Secret Sex Tape? New parents have a new worry: racy footage from 2004." The judge claimed the article didn't qualify as defamatory because Spears has "put her modern sexuality squarely, and profitably, before the public eye." (TMZ, Reuters)
Most Indian men want virgin brides: poll
Mon Nov 6, 8:17 AM ET
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Nearly two-thirds of young Indian men expect the woman they marry to be a virgin, but nearly half have had sex with prostitutes, according to a poll.
The survey of more than 2,500 men aged between 16 and 25 conducted by India Today magazine across 11 cities found that 49 percent claimed to have had sex with a sex worker while 37 percent said they had had a homosexual experience.
But 63 percent of young men in conservative India said they expected the women they married to be a virgin.
The average age of their first sexual encounter appears to be falling -- to 18 years from 23 in a similar survey two years ago, but condom use is on the rise, the report said. More than half of the men surveyed said they always used a condom.
Fourteen percent of those surveyed said they had had sex with a member of their own family.
Pelosi set to become first woman to lead House
By Thomas Ferraro 2 hours, 9 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nancy Pelosi spearheaded the Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives on Tuesday, positioning herself to become the first woman to lead the chamber -- and
President George W. Bush's worst political nightmare.
House Democratic leader since 2003, the California liberal framed the elections as a referendum on Bush, his unpopular
Iraq war and the scandal-rocked, Republican-led House.
"Democrats support change," Pelosi told a victory party in Washington. "Democrats propose a new direction for all Americans, not just the privileged few."
Pelosi, 66, appears certain to be elected House speaker by fellow Democrats when the new 110th Congress convenes in January, replacing
Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican.
Under U.S. law, the speaker is second in the line of succession to the presidency, behind only the vice president.
Pelosi has said she will not try to end U.S. funding of the Iraq war, will pressure Bush to shift course, begin a phased redeployment of U.S. troops and require Iraqis to take greater responsibility for their own nation.
Pelosi was often ignored or even mocked by Bush during his first six years in office but the Republican president would have to work with her once she takes the gavel if he expects to get much done in his final two years.
Pelosi has promised to challenge Bush on a host of fronts, from the Iraq war and his tax cuts to education and health care.
"The only way to deal with Bush is as a co-equal branch of government," Pelosi told Reuters last month. "He's in denial."
Pelosi has rejected calls to attempt to impeach Bush and drive him from office. But she has said Democrats would hold congressional oversight hearings, which could include such matters as whether he manipulated the facts to build early support for the Iraq war.
With a majority in the House, Democrats would chair all House committees, set the legislative agenda and have subpoena power in their investigations.
Pelosi has vowed to clean up how Congress does business in wake of influence-peddling scandals and an Internet sex scandal involving a former Republican congressman.
"Maybe it will take a woman to clean up the House and a new speaker to restore civility," Pelosi said.
Pelosi learned politics as a child a half-century ago from her father, who was mayor of Baltimore. She first ran for Congress in 1987 from her adopted hometown of San Francisco, where she raised five children with her businessman husband and served as state party chairwoman.
Republicans made Pelosi a top target in the congressional campaign, airing TV ads that attacked her in a number of states. They portrayed her as an out-of-control liberal who would increase taxes, roll back the war on terror and oppose conservative efforts to ban gay marriage and abortion.
Ethan Siegal of the Washington Exchange, a private firm that tracks Congress for institutional investors, said, "Nobody really knows how she would fare as House speaker."
As minority leader, Pelosi effectively kept House Democrats united against a number of Republican initiatives in the past year or so, Siegal said.
"But she'd have her hands full as speaker," Siegal said.
Bush took a swipe at Pelosi at a recent White House news conference. He quoted her as saying, "I love tax cuts" while nonetheless voting against many of them.
Pelosi fired back: "Democrats have long fought for middle-income tax cuts. This is in stark contrast to the Republican tax breaks for the super rich that have led to a budget that is grossly out of balance and a national debt that is morally indefensible."
Democrats have dubbed their agenda "A new direction for America." It includes raising the federal minimum wage for the first time in a decade, ending tax giveaways to big oil companies and implementing proposals by the 9/11 commission to secure ports and borders.
Red vs white: battle of poppies erupts in Canada
Tue Nov 7, 7:35 PM ET
CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - Canada's war veterans are girding for a new battle, this time against peace activists they say have hijacked their long-standing floral symbol.
A store in Edmonton, Alberta is distributing white poppy replicas that the Royal Canadian Legion said are a "disturbing" and "illegal" infringement of the red poppies worn on lapels since just after World War One to commemorate those killed in battle.
A Legion official said that Remembrance Day on November 11 is the only time of year they ask citizens to wear the poppies to pay tribute to the 117,000 military personnel who have died in conflict.
"It's something symbolic, which encroaches on a registered trademark, for one thing," Legion spokesman Rod Stewart said of the "white poppies for peace."
"But it puts a political slant on the meaning of Remembrance Day and that's unacceptable in our eyes."
White poppy distributor Michael Kalmanovitch, owner of Earth's General Store, said the version he's distributing was first produced in Britain in the 1930s to symbolize hope that humanity would move beyond armed conflict to solve disputes.
Kalmanovitch said he ordered 200 white poppies from the activist Peace Pledge Union in London. It was his third year of distributing them.
Legion officials have told him that poppies of any color are their registered trademark and the alternative ones are illegal.
But Kalmanovitch said he has no intention to stop distributing the white symbols. He said he wears both versions, and does not consider the white ones to be discourteous to the Legion.
"We're not saying 'or', we're saying 'and'," Kalmanovitch said. "I do respect those people who went off and got hurt or killed in those wars ... but I hope we live in a society where everything can withstand criticism or examination."
The tradition of wearing commemorative red poppies in Canada, Britain and other counties comes from the World War One poem "In Flanders Fields," a tribute to the fallen written by Canadian Lt-Col John McCrae, which begins: "In Flanders fields the poppies blow, Between the crosses row on row..."
Clever, clever Flight Attendant...
Politically incorrect
An encounter with a big-mouthed senator
Tripso.com
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• Text of editorial calling for Rumsfeld to go
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• Olbermann: Where are the checks, balances?
• FBI looking into possible Va. voter intimidation
• Rains ease in Wash.
James Wysong
Travel columnist
• Profile
• E-mail
The senator was the last to board the flight. I was a passenger in the first class seat next to him. We had been waiting on him to close the doors and get on our way. The plane took off, and he and I had a couple of cocktails together and engaged in polite conversation.
Before the meal service, a man from the economy section brought his 6-year-old son up to meet the great man.
“Hey, sonny, what do you want to be when you grow up?” asked the slightly inebriated lawmaker as he patted the boy on his head.
Story continues below ↓ advertisement
“I want to be a pilot or a senator just like you.”
“Well, you’d better stay in school or else you may end up being a flight attendant instead,” he said.
I almost choked on an ice cube.
This is clearly a guy who needs to watch what he says. Besides, he hadn’t eaten yet, and a flight attendant working the flight overheard the comment. I pondered the path his entree would take before it got to him.
We continued chatting through another cocktail. The pilot came out of the cockpit to use the lavatory. She was pretty, black and fairly young. I looked at the senator’s face and saw the scowl appear.
“You see that pilot?” he asked me, leaning closer. “The only reason she is up there is because of affirmative action.”
I could not believe that a man who is supposed to be a people person was talking like this. I don’t care how much alcohol he had had — there was no excuse for that kind of behavior. He was speaking to a complete stranger. I could have been a reporter.
The confidential chat came to a halt when he asked the question I had been waiting for.
“So what do you do for a living?”
“Actually, I am a flight attendant,” I replied.
He began to stir in his seat and I could tell he was getting uncomfortable.
“And the pilot,” I added, “is my wife.”
She wasn’t, but that ended the conversation. It was the first time I had seen a politician at a loss for words.
James Wysong has worked as a flight attendant with two major international carriers during the past fifteen years. He is the author of the "The Plane Truth: Shift Happens at 35,000 Feet" and "The Air Traveler's Survival Guide." For more information about James or his books, please visit his Web site or e-mail him.
What will Democrats do in a Vacuum of sudden power?
Policy made plain.
Pelosi's PlatformHow the Democrats could govern if they win the House.
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Monday, Nov. 6, 2006, at 9:16 PM ET
What will a Democratic House of Representatives under Speaker Nancy Pelosi be like? The Republicans have been painting an unattractive portrait of Democrats roasting young children on a spit in the Capitol rotunda and whatnot. Hoping for a more encouraging view, I picked up "A New Direction for America," a 31-page manifesto released to little acclaim by House Democrats in June. By all means, read it. But do me a favor and vote first.
The document is full of bromides, of course, and like all good bromides, they come in threes. The Democrats promise "security, prosperity, and opportunity" in "diverse, safe, and vibrant communities." Not to mention "integrity, civility and fiscal discipline." They will "protect Americans, secure our borders, and restore our country's position of international leadership" through "homeland, energy, and diplomatic strategies." And we're just up to Page 3.
The two favorite words of Democrats on the cusp of power seem to be "tax credit." They promise to "modernize" the tax credit for research and development; to "expand and improve" the already ludicrously complex system of tax-deductible retirement accounts like IRAs and 401(k)s (and "match dollar-for-dollar" the first $1,000 a person puts in); a "100% tax credit for tuition up to $3000." They want a "broadband tax credit" for Internet access in "rural and underserved areas."
They call for a 50 percent tax credit for employee health insurance paid for by small businesses, as their solution to the health-care crisis. Needless to say, they love the tax credit for ethanol production, and want to expand it for "local" ethanol producers. And—my favorite—they want a tax credit to cover the administrative costs of "encourag[ing] employers to offer their employees the option to convert their retirement plan into an annuity when they retire." I don't know what that last one is about, but I smell an interested party. It's just not the kind of thing that anyone thinks up who doesn't have some skin in the game.
Democrats call for ending the "Disabled Veterans Tax" and the "Military Families Tax." The what? There cannot be any such thing as a Disabled Veterans Tax. It is a label dreamed up by people wanting special treatment, like the Republicans' brilliant "Death Tax" for the estate tax. Maybe they deserve it, maybe they don't. But why can't we leave this bullying by terminology to Newt Gingrich?
The problem with tax credits in general is that they never appear in the budget, so they never get the same scrutiny as direct spending, although their impact on the deficit is exactly the same. By definition, they cost more than whatever benefit they are intended to achieve, since no one is going to be induced to spend an extra dollar on, say, dance lessons (because some member of Congress has decided that it would be good for the country if more people knew how to dance) unless the subsidy is worth more than a dollar.
Tax subsidies often go to Person X to help Person Y (e.g. to a corporation to help its employees), and Person X gets a slice of the benefit—often a big slice. And the distributional consequences are rarely examined. For example, tax credits are just one of several new subsidies the Democrats propose for college education. Why should a young person who is out working and paying taxes subsidize someone in college who will soon be better off, if he or she isn't already?
Fairness is one of the three qualities that need to be restored to American public life after six years of George W. Bush and 12 years of French-Revolution-turned-French-farce on Capitol Hill. The other two are honesty and competence.
Honesty is not just therapeutic. Fiscal honesty is a practical necessity. "New Direction" quite rightly denounces the staggering fiscal irresponsibility of Republican leaders, and duly promises "pay as you go" spending. But in the entire document there is not one explicit revenue raiser to balance the many specific and enormous new spending programs and tax credits.
Competence, of course, brings us back to Iraq. Apparently and unfortunately, President Bush is right that the Democrats have no "plan for victory." (Neither does he, of course. Nor, for that matter, do I. But I don't claim to have one. And I didn't start it.) For national security in general, the Democrats' plan is so according-to-type that you cringe with embarrassment: It's mostly about new cash benefits for veterans. Regarding Iraq specifically, the Democrats' plan has two parts. First, they want Iraqis to "assum[e] primary responsibility for securing and governing their country." Then they want "responsible redeployment" (great euphemism) of American forces.
Older readers may recognize this formula. It's Vietnamization—the Nixon-Kissinger plan for extracting us from a previous mistake. But Vietnamization was not a plan for victory. It was a plan for what was called "peace with honor" and is now known as "defeat."
Maybe "A New Direction for America" is just a campaign document—although it seems to have had no effect at all on the campaign. My fear is that the House Democrats may try to use it as a basis for governing.
back to top
Why do we give idiots authority over things about which they know little or nothing?
Approval sought for human/animal embryo research
By Patricia Reaney Mon Nov 6, 1:07 PM ET
LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists in Britain have applied for a license to create hybrid embryos using human cells and animal eggs for stem cell research to develop new treatments for diseases such as Parkinson's, stroke and Alzheimer's.
The researchers from Kings College London and the North East England Stem Cell Institute (NESCI) submitted the application to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), a regulatory body that oversees embryo research and fertility treatment.
If the application is approved, the hybrid embryo will be 99.9 percent human and 0.1 percent animal. By using animal eggs, the scientists hope to overcome the shortage of human eggs left over from IVF treatments, which have been used for stem cell research.
"Our research team at King's College London is optimistic that the HFEA will rule favorably on our license application," said Dr Stephen Minger, director of the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory at Kings College.
"We feel that the development of disease-specific human embryonic stem cell lines from individuals suffering from genetic forms of neurodegenerative disorders will stimulate both basic research and the development of new treatments for these devastating brain diseases."
The HFEA said on Monday it had not received the application yet. It will be peer-reviewed by a panel of experts. A decision could take several months.
"The government's consultation on fertility laws shows there is a strong current of public concern on this," a spokesman for the HFEA told Reuters.
STEP FORWARD
Other scientists welcomed the application, saying it was a rational next step in stem cell research.
"To achieve this kind of reprogramming will be a key step for regenerative medicine. Using animal eggs instead of human ones is a sensible and practical approach which will accelerate progress," said Dr Wolf Reik of the Babraham Institute in England.
The scientists said they intend to initially use cow eggs in the research, which will attempt to grow new tissue genetically matched to patients from stem cells.
They will use nuclear transfer, the technique used to create Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal. The nucleus of the animal egg will be removed and fused with the nucleus from a human cell. The egg will develop until it is a cluster of cells, or blastocyst.
After six days, the scientists will remove the stem cells, which can develop into any cell type or tissue. The early embryo will be destroyed before it is 14 days old in accordance with the license.
"We are very hopeful that the HFEA will grant us permission for this work, which will help us to understand more about how cells behave after the nuclear transfer process," said Dr Lyle Armstrong of NESCI.
Apparently a "Terrorist" is only a terrorist if he is attacking US interests...
U.S. citizens to go on trial November 10 in Vietnam
2 hours, 43 minutes ago
HANOI (Reuters) - Three Vietnamese-born U.S. citizens charged with plotting against the communist government will go on trial on Friday, days before Hanoi hosts its biggest international event and
President Bush.
The official Vietnam News Agency said on Monday night that the trial in Ho Chi Minh City People's Court would include an Orlando, Florida resident whose detention has complicated the U.S. Congress passing a bill to grant Vietnam permanent normal trade relations status.
A total of seven people -- three U.S. citizens, one U.S. resident and three Vietnamese living in Vietnam -- were charged last week with "terrorist activities" against the one-party Vietnam government.
An official statement linked the seven to a Vietnamese-born resident of the United States, Nguyen Huu Chanh, who has been suspected in recent years of plotting to bomb Vietnamese embassies. He is detained in
South Korea while Hanoi pursues his extradition.
Vietnam hosts the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum leaders' week November 12-19, including presidents and prime ministers from
APEC's 21 members. Separately, Bush and the leaders of China, Japan, Russia and Chile are scheduled to make state visits.
One of the defendants, Nguyen Thuong Cuc, 58, who goes by the name of Thuong Nguyen Foshee in the United States, has close ties with Bush's Republican Party in Florida.
U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, a Florida Republican, has linked her release to passage of a bill granting Vietnam permanent normal trade relations status. Foshee's daughter Liz McCausland said that while her mother was a pro-democracy activist, Foshee was not plotting against the government.
A State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Washington was working closely with Hanoi on the case. The U.S. Embassy in Hanoi said consular officials had visited all three U.S. citizens, who are detained in Ho Chi Minh City.
Washington and Hanoi signed a trade deal on May 31 that helped Vietnam toward accession to the
World Trade Organization, expected later on Tuesday in Geneva.
Vietnam is the fastest-growing market for U.S. goods in Asia and the two countries have built a friendship mainly through business ties since restoring diplomatic relations in 1995, 20 years after the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam.
A "gift" that keeps on Giving!
Cluster bombs at a glance
By The Associated Press Mon Nov 6, 4:14 PM ET
WHAT IS A CLUSTER BOMB?: Fired by artillery or dropped by aircraft, cluster bombs are canisters that open in flight and eject dozens or hundreds of "bomblets" across a wide area, typically the size of one or two football fields. Bomblets are small metallic spheres or cylinders that can be as small as a flashlight battery, with about the same force as a hand grenade. The weapon is designed to slow or halt an enemy army by destroying or disabling troops and vehicles over a wide area in a single attack.
__
DANGERS: An exploding bomblet sends jagged shrapnel through the air much like grenades and mines. It can kill or maim someone within 10 to 50 yards. Bomblets can be set to explode above ground or on the ground with a time delay. Usually they are set to detonate on impact, but 5 percent to 25 percent typically fail to explode, essentially creating minefields wherever they land. The unexploded "duds" are volatile and can detonate if disturbed.
__
LEGALITY: No treaties specifically forbid cluster bombs. But the Geneva Conventions outline laws protecting civilians during conflict, and because bomblets often cause civilian casualties after fighting ends their use has been heavily criticized by human rights groups.
___
Sources: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch,
United Nations, Cluster Munition Coalition.
Monday, 6 November 2006
Politically incorrect
An encounter with a big-mouthed senator
Tripso.com
• Election workers seeing voting problems
• FBI looking into possible Va. voter intimidation
• Back-in-shape Britney visits Letterman
• Stocks rally as Americans go to the polls
• Most viewed on MSNBC.com
• Contractors rarely penalized for misdeeds
• Red Planet rovers are back in contact
• 1999 war games predicted problems in Iraq
• Text of editorial calling for Rumsfeld to go
• Most viewed on MSNBC.com
• Britney Spears divorcing Kevin Federline
• Olbermann: Where are the checks, balances?
• FBI looking into possible Va. voter intimidation
• Rains ease in Wash.
James Wysong
Travel columnist
• Profile
The senator was the last to board the flight. I was a passenger in the first class seat next to him. We had been waiting on him to close the doors and get on our way. The plane took off, and he and I had a couple of cocktails together and engaged in polite conversation.
Before the meal service, a man from the economy section brought his 6-year-old son up to meet the great man.
“Hey, sonny, what do you want to be when you grow up?” asked the slightly inebriated lawmaker as he patted the boy on his head.
Story continues below ↓ advertisement
“I want to be a pilot or a senator just like you.”
“Well, you’d better stay in school or else you may end up being a flight attendant instead,” he said.
I almost choked on an ice cube.
This is clearly a guy who needs to watch what he says. Besides, he hadn’t eaten yet, and a flight attendant working the flight overheard the comment. I pondered the path his entree would take before it got to him.
We continued chatting through another cocktail. The pilot came out of the cockpit to use the lavatory. She was pretty, black and fairly young. I looked at the senator’s face and saw the scowl appear.
“You see that pilot?” he asked me, leaning closer. “The only reason she is up there is because of affirmative action.”
I could not believe that a man who is supposed to be a people person was talking like this. I don’t care how much alcohol he had had — there was no excuse for that kind of behavior. He was speaking to a complete stranger. I could have been a reporter.
The confidential chat came to a halt when he asked the question I had been waiting for.
“So what do you do for a living?”
“Actually, I am a flight attendant,” I replied.
He began to stir in his seat and I could tell he was getting uncomfortable.
“And the pilot,” I added, “is my wife.”
She wasn’t, but that ended the conversation. It was the first time I had seen a politician at a loss for words.
James Wysong has worked as a flight attendant with two major international carriers during the past fifteen years. He is the author of the "The Plane Truth: Shift Happens at 35,000 Feet" and "The Air Traveler's Survival Guide." For more information about James or his books, please visit his Web site or e-mail him.
Policy made plain.
Pelosi's PlatformHow the Democrats could govern if they win the House.
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Monday, Nov. 6, 2006, at 9:16 PM ET
What will a Democratic House of Representatives under Speaker Nancy Pelosi be like? The Republicans have been painting an unattractive portrait of Democrats roasting young children on a spit in the Capitol rotunda and whatnot. Hoping for a more encouraging view, I picked up "A New Direction for America," a 31-page manifesto released to little acclaim by House Democrats in June. By all means, read it. But do me a favor and vote first.
The document is full of bromides, of course, and like all good bromides, they come in threes. The Democrats promise "security, prosperity, and opportunity" in "diverse, safe, and vibrant communities." Not to mention "integrity, civility and fiscal discipline." They will "protect Americans, secure our borders, and restore our country's position of international leadership" through "homeland, energy, and diplomatic strategies." And we're just up to Page 3.
The two favorite words of Democrats on the cusp of power seem to be "tax credit." They promise to "modernize" the tax credit for research and development; to "expand and improve" the already ludicrously complex system of tax-deductible retirement accounts like IRAs and 401(k)s (and "match dollar-for-dollar" the first $1,000 a person puts in); a "100% tax credit for tuition up to $3000." They want a "broadband tax credit" for Internet access in "rural and underserved areas."
They call for a 50 percent tax credit for employee health insurance paid for by small businesses, as their solution to the health-care crisis. Needless to say, they love the tax credit for ethanol production, and want to expand it for "local" ethanol producers. And—my favorite—they want a tax credit to cover the administrative costs of "encourag[ing] employers to offer their employees the option to convert their retirement plan into an annuity when they retire." I don't know what that last one is about, but I smell an interested party. It's just not the kind of thing that anyone thinks up who doesn't have some skin in the game.
Democrats call for ending the "Disabled Veterans Tax" and the "Military Families Tax." The what? There cannot be any such thing as a Disabled Veterans Tax. It is a label dreamed up by people wanting special treatment, like the Republicans' brilliant "Death Tax" for the estate tax. Maybe they deserve it, maybe they don't. But why can't we leave this bullying by terminology to Newt Gingrich?
The problem with tax credits in general is that they never appear in the budget, so they never get the same scrutiny as direct spending, although their impact on the deficit is exactly the same. By definition, they cost more than whatever benefit they are intended to achieve, since no one is going to be induced to spend an extra dollar on, say, dance lessons (because some member of Congress has decided that it would be good for the country if more people knew how to dance) unless the subsidy is worth more than a dollar.
Tax subsidies often go to Person X to help Person Y (e.g. to a corporation to help its employees), and Person X gets a slice of the benefit—often a big slice. And the distributional consequences are rarely examined. For example, tax credits are just one of several new subsidies the Democrats propose for college education. Why should a young person who is out working and paying taxes subsidize someone in college who will soon be better off, if he or she isn't already?
Fairness is one of the three qualities that need to be restored to American public life after six years of George W. Bush and 12 years of French-Revolution-turned-French-farce on Capitol Hill. The other two are honesty and competence.
Honesty is not just therapeutic. Fiscal honesty is a practical necessity. "New Direction" quite rightly denounces the staggering fiscal irresponsibility of Republican leaders, and duly promises "pay as you go" spending. But in the entire document there is not one explicit revenue raiser to balance the many specific and enormous new spending programs and tax credits.
Competence, of course, brings us back to Iraq. Apparently and unfortunately, President Bush is right that the Democrats have no "plan for victory." (Neither does he, of course. Nor, for that matter, do I. But I don't claim to have one. And I didn't start it.) For national security in general, the Democrats' plan is so according-to-type that you cringe with embarrassment: It's mostly about new cash benefits for veterans. Regarding Iraq specifically, the Democrats' plan has two parts. First, they want Iraqis to "assum[e] primary responsibility for securing and governing their country." Then they want "responsible redeployment" (great euphemism) of American forces.
Older readers may recognize this formula. It's Vietnamization—the Nixon-Kissinger plan for extracting us from a previous mistake. But Vietnamization was not a plan for victory. It was a plan for what was called "peace with honor" and is now known as "defeat."
Maybe "A New Direction for America" is just a campaign document—although it seems to have had no effect at all on the campaign. My fear is that the House Democrats may try to use it as a basis for governing.
back to top
Approval sought for human/animal embryo research
By Patricia Reaney Mon Nov 6, 1:07 PM ET
LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists in Britain have applied for a license to create hybrid embryos using human cells and animal eggs for stem cell research to develop new treatments for diseases such as Parkinson's, stroke and Alzheimer's.
The researchers from Kings College London and the North East England Stem Cell Institute (NESCI) submitted the application to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), a regulatory body that oversees embryo research and fertility treatment.
If the application is approved, the hybrid embryo will be 99.9 percent human and 0.1 percent animal. By using animal eggs, the scientists hope to overcome the shortage of human eggs left over from IVF treatments, which have been used for stem cell research.
"Our research team at King's College London is optimistic that the HFEA will rule favorably on our license application," said Dr Stephen Minger, director of the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory at Kings College.
"We feel that the development of disease-specific human embryonic stem cell lines from individuals suffering from genetic forms of neurodegenerative disorders will stimulate both basic research and the development of new treatments for these devastating brain diseases."
The HFEA said on Monday it had not received the application yet. It will be peer-reviewed by a panel of experts. A decision could take several months.
"The government's consultation on fertility laws shows there is a strong current of public concern on this," a spokesman for the HFEA told Reuters.
STEP FORWARD
Other scientists welcomed the application, saying it was a rational next step in stem cell research.
"To achieve this kind of reprogramming will be a key step for regenerative medicine. Using animal eggs instead of human ones is a sensible and practical approach which will accelerate progress," said Dr Wolf Reik of the Babraham Institute in England.
The scientists said they intend to initially use cow eggs in the research, which will attempt to grow new tissue genetically matched to patients from stem cells.
They will use nuclear transfer, the technique used to create Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal. The nucleus of the animal egg will be removed and fused with the nucleus from a human cell. The egg will develop until it is a cluster of cells, or blastocyst.
After six days, the scientists will remove the stem cells, which can develop into any cell type or tissue. The early embryo will be destroyed before it is 14 days old in accordance with the license.
"We are very hopeful that the HFEA will grant us permission for this work, which will help us to understand more about how cells behave after the nuclear transfer process," said Dr Lyle Armstrong of NESCI.
U.S. citizens to go on trial November 10 in Vietnam
2 hours, 43 minutes ago
HANOI (Reuters) - Three Vietnamese-born U.S. citizens charged with plotting against the communist government will go on trial on Friday, days before Hanoi hosts its biggest international event and
President Bush.
The official Vietnam News Agency said on Monday night that the trial in Ho Chi Minh City People's Court would include an Orlando, Florida resident whose detention has complicated the U.S. Congress passing a bill to grant Vietnam permanent normal trade relations status.
A total of seven people -- three U.S. citizens, one U.S. resident and three Vietnamese living in Vietnam -- were charged last week with "terrorist activities" against the one-party Vietnam government.
An official statement linked the seven to a Vietnamese-born resident of the United States, Nguyen Huu Chanh, who has been suspected in recent years of plotting to bomb Vietnamese embassies. He is detained in
South Korea while Hanoi pursues his extradition.
Vietnam hosts the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum leaders' week November 12-19, including presidents and prime ministers from
APEC's 21 members. Separately, Bush and the leaders of China, Japan, Russia and Chile are scheduled to make state visits.
One of the defendants, Nguyen Thuong Cuc, 58, who goes by the name of Thuong Nguyen Foshee in the United States, has close ties with Bush's Republican Party in Florida.
U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, a Florida Republican, has linked her release to passage of a bill granting Vietnam permanent normal trade relations status. Foshee's daughter Liz McCausland said that while her mother was a pro-democracy activist, Foshee was not plotting against the government.
A State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Washington was working closely with Hanoi on the case. The U.S. Embassy in Hanoi said consular officials had visited all three U.S. citizens, who are detained in Ho Chi Minh City.
Washington and Hanoi signed a trade deal on May 31 that helped Vietnam toward accession to the
World Trade Organization, expected later on Tuesday in Geneva.
Vietnam is the fastest-growing market for U.S. goods in Asia and the two countries have built a friendship mainly through business ties since restoring diplomatic relations in 1995, 20 years after the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam.
Cluster bombs at a glance
By The Associated Press Mon Nov 6, 4:14 PM ET
WHAT IS A CLUSTER BOMB?: Fired by artillery or dropped by aircraft, cluster bombs are canisters that open in flight and eject dozens or hundreds of "bomblets" across a wide area, typically the size of one or two football fields. Bomblets are small metallic spheres or cylinders that can be as small as a flashlight battery, with about the same force as a hand grenade. The weapon is designed to slow or halt an enemy army by destroying or disabling troops and vehicles over a wide area in a single attack.
__
DANGERS: An exploding bomblet sends jagged shrapnel through the air much like grenades and mines. It can kill or maim someone within 10 to 50 yards. Bomblets can be set to explode above ground or on the ground with a time delay. Usually they are set to detonate on impact, but 5 percent to 25 percent typically fail to explode, essentially creating minefields wherever they land. The unexploded "duds" are volatile and can detonate if disturbed.
__
LEGALITY: No treaties specifically forbid cluster bombs. But the Geneva Conventions outline laws protecting civilians during conflict, and because bomblets often cause civilian casualties after fighting ends their use has been heavily criticized by human rights groups.
___
Sources: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch,
United Nations, Cluster Munition Coalition.
Be glad you're not trying to prove Bacteria theory to the Paris Achadamy of Sciences, Jeff!
Professor's Bigfoot research criticized
By JESSE HARLAN ALDERMAN, Associated Press Writer Fri Nov 3, 8:26 PM ET
POCATELLO, Idaho - Jeffrey Meldrum holds a Ph.D. in anatomical sciences and is a tenured professor of anatomy at Idaho State University. He is also one of the world's foremost authorities on Bigfoot, the mythical smelly ape-man of the Northwest woods. And Meldrum firmly believes the lumbering, shaggy brute exists.
That makes him an outcast — a solitary, Sasquatch-like figure himself — on the 12,700-student campus, where many scientists are embarrassed by what they call Meldrum's "pseudo-academic" pursuits and have called on the university to review his work with an eye toward revoking his tenure. One physics professor, D.P. Wells, wonders whether Meldrum plans to research Santa Claus, too.
Meldrum, 48, spends most of his days in his laboratory in the Life Sciences Building, analyzing more than 200 jumbo plaster casts of what he contends are Bigfoot footprints.
For the past 10 years, he has added his scholarly sounding research to a field full of sham videos and supermarket tabloid exposes. And he is convinced he has produced a body of evidence that proves there is a Bigfoot.
"It used to be you went to a bookstore and asked for a book on Bigfoot and you'd be directed to the occult section, right between the Bermuda Triangle and UFOs," Meldrum said. "Now you can find some in the natural science section."
Martin Hackworth, a senior lecturer in the physics department, called Meldrum's research a "joke."
"Do I cringe when I see the Discovery Channel and I see Idaho State University, Jeff Meldrum? Yes, I do," Hackworth said. "He believes he's taken up the cause of people who have been shut out by the scientific community. He's lionized there. He's worshipped. He walks on water. It's embarrassing."
John Kijinski, dean of arts and sciences, said there have been "grumblings" about Meldrum's tenure, but no formal request for a review.
"He's a bona fide scientist," Kijinski said. "I think he helps this university. He provides a form of open discussion and dissenting viewpoints that may not be popular with the scientific community, but that's what academics all about."
On campus, Meldrum — himself a hulking figure, with a mop of brown hair, a bristly silver mustache, and a black T-shirt with a silhouette of a hunchbacked, lurking Bigfoot — gets funny looks and the silent treatment from other scientists, and is not invited to share coffee with the other science professors.
Over the summer, more than 30 professors signed a petition criticizing the university for hosting a Bigfoot symposium where Meldrum was the keynote speaker.
He pays for his research with a $30,000 donation from a Bigfoot believer.
Still, Meldrum has a distinguished supporter in Jane Goodall, the world-famous authority on African chimpanzees. Her blurb on the jacket of Meldrum's new book, "Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science," lauds him for bringing "a much-needed level of scientific analysis" to the Bigfoot debate.
"As a scientist, she's very curious and she keeps an open mind," said Goodall spokeswoman Nona Gandelman. "She's fascinated by it."
Bigfoot is sort of the Loch Ness Monster of the Pacific Northwest. The legend dates back centuries. Indian folklore includes murmurs of a man-ape that roams the hidden hollows. Sasquatch is a Salish Indian word meaning woodland wildman.
Newspapers began recording sightings of Bigfoot in the backwoods during the 1920s. But skeptics have challenged the accounts, and practical jokers have staged elaborate hoaxes, including grainy film footage of someone in a monkey suit and phony footprints stamped into the ground with giant molded feet.
Meldrum said it was a decade ago in Walla Walla, Wash., that he first discovered flat 15-inch footprints in the woods. He said he thought initially that they were a hoax, but noticed locked joints and a narrow arch — traits he came to believe could only belong to Bigfoot.
"That's what set the hook," Meldrum said. "I resolved at this point, this was a question I'd get to the bottom of."
When not in the lab, he loads his Chevy Suburban with tents and forensic gear and heads for the woods of Washington state and Northern California, where he has collected what he says are footprints, hair and feces from the ape-man. He tests hair samples and uses physics to produce charts that purport to show how Bigfoot would walk.
Meldrum wonders aloud how much longer he will be on the faculty. But he said he also dreams of one day bringing back a bone or a tooth or some skin, and silencing the "stuffy academics."
"Is the theory of exploration dead?" he asked. "I'm not out to proselytize that Bigfoot exists. I place legend under scrutiny and my conclusion is, absolutely, Bigfoot exists."
___
On the Net:
Idaho State University: http://www.isu.edu
Sunday, 5 November 2006
Professor's Bigfoot research criticized
By JESSE HARLAN ALDERMAN, Associated Press Writer Fri Nov 3, 8:26 PM ET
POCATELLO, Idaho - Jeffrey Meldrum holds a Ph.D. in anatomical sciences and is a tenured professor of anatomy at Idaho State University. He is also one of the world's foremost authorities on Bigfoot, the mythical smelly ape-man of the Northwest woods. And Meldrum firmly believes the lumbering, shaggy brute exists.
That makes him an outcast — a solitary, Sasquatch-like figure himself — on the 12,700-student campus, where many scientists are embarrassed by what they call Meldrum's "pseudo-academic" pursuits and have called on the university to review his work with an eye toward revoking his tenure. One physics professor, D.P. Wells, wonders whether Meldrum plans to research Santa Claus, too.
Meldrum, 48, spends most of his days in his laboratory in the Life Sciences Building, analyzing more than 200 jumbo plaster casts of what he contends are Bigfoot footprints.
For the past 10 years, he has added his scholarly sounding research to a field full of sham videos and supermarket tabloid exposes. And he is convinced he has produced a body of evidence that proves there is a Bigfoot.
"It used to be you went to a bookstore and asked for a book on Bigfoot and you'd be directed to the occult section, right between the Bermuda Triangle and UFOs," Meldrum said. "Now you can find some in the natural science section."
Martin Hackworth, a senior lecturer in the physics department, called Meldrum's research a "joke."
"Do I cringe when I see the Discovery Channel and I see Idaho State University, Jeff Meldrum? Yes, I do," Hackworth said. "He believes he's taken up the cause of people who have been shut out by the scientific community. He's lionized there. He's worshipped. He walks on water. It's embarrassing."
John Kijinski, dean of arts and sciences, said there have been "grumblings" about Meldrum's tenure, but no formal request for a review.
"He's a bona fide scientist," Kijinski said. "I think he helps this university. He provides a form of open discussion and dissenting viewpoints that may not be popular with the scientific community, but that's what academics all about."
On campus, Meldrum — himself a hulking figure, with a mop of brown hair, a bristly silver mustache, and a black T-shirt with a silhouette of a hunchbacked, lurking Bigfoot — gets funny looks and the silent treatment from other scientists, and is not invited to share coffee with the other science professors.
Over the summer, more than 30 professors signed a petition criticizing the university for hosting a Bigfoot symposium where Meldrum was the keynote speaker.
He pays for his research with a $30,000 donation from a Bigfoot believer.
Still, Meldrum has a distinguished supporter in Jane Goodall, the world-famous authority on African chimpanzees. Her blurb on the jacket of Meldrum's new book, "Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science," lauds him for bringing "a much-needed level of scientific analysis" to the Bigfoot debate.
"As a scientist, she's very curious and she keeps an open mind," said Goodall spokeswoman Nona Gandelman. "She's fascinated by it."
Bigfoot is sort of the Loch Ness Monster of the Pacific Northwest. The legend dates back centuries. Indian folklore includes murmurs of a man-ape that roams the hidden hollows. Sasquatch is a Salish Indian word meaning woodland wildman.
Newspapers began recording sightings of Bigfoot in the backwoods during the 1920s. But skeptics have challenged the accounts, and practical jokers have staged elaborate hoaxes, including grainy film footage of someone in a monkey suit and phony footprints stamped into the ground with giant molded feet.
Meldrum said it was a decade ago in Walla Walla, Wash., that he first discovered flat 15-inch footprints in the woods. He said he thought initially that they were a hoax, but noticed locked joints and a narrow arch — traits he came to believe could only belong to Bigfoot.
"That's what set the hook," Meldrum said. "I resolved at this point, this was a question I'd get to the bottom of."
When not in the lab, he loads his Chevy Suburban with tents and forensic gear and heads for the woods of Washington state and Northern California, where he has collected what he says are footprints, hair and feces from the ape-man. He tests hair samples and uses physics to produce charts that purport to show how Bigfoot would walk.
Meldrum wonders aloud how much longer he will be on the faculty. But he said he also dreams of one day bringing back a bone or a tooth or some skin, and silencing the "stuffy academics."
"Is the theory of exploration dead?" he asked. "I'm not out to proselytize that Bigfoot exists. I place legend under scrutiny and my conclusion is, absolutely, Bigfoot exists."
___
On the Net:
Idaho State University: http://www.isu.edu
What do you get when you cross a system that worked with one that is totally inefective and designed to weed out dissenters...?
Report: Feds refusing FBI terror cases
By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press Writer Sun Nov 5, 7:02 PM ET
WASHINGTON - The Justice Department increasingly has refused to prosecute
FBI cases targeting suspected terrorists over the past five years, according to private researchers who reviewed department records.
The government says the findings are inaccurate and "intellectually dishonest."
The report being released Monday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University raises questions about the quality of the FBI's investigations.
Prosecutors declined to bring charges in 131 of 150, or 87 percent, of international terrorist case referrals from the FBI between October 2005 and June 2006, according to the report. The study was based on the most recent data available from the Justice Department's executive office for U.S. attorneys.
That number marks the peak of generally steady increases from the 2001 budget year, when prosecutors rejected 33 percent of such cases from the FBI, according to the report.
The data "raise troubling questions about the bureau's investigation of criminal matters involving individuals the government has identified as international terrorists," the report said.
It noted that prosecutions in traditional FBI investigations since 2001 — including drug cases, white collar crimes and organized crimes — have decreased while the number of agents and other employees has risen.
"So with more special agents, many more intelligence analysts, and many fewer prosecutions the question must be asked: What is the FBI doing?" the report said.
A Justice Department spokesman disputed the data highlighted by the Syracuse researchers, noting that terrorist hoax cases that were quickly dismissed may have been included in the government data.
Additionally, some cases are referred to prosecutors to obtain subpoenas or other legal orders in investigations that ultimately never result in criminal charges, spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said. He said prosecutors rejected 67 percent of FBI international terrorist cases in the nine-month period — not 87 percent.
The FBI's assistant director, John Miller, said the low number of cases prosecuted reflects changes in how investigations have been conducted since the Sept. 11 attacks. He said about half of the FBI's resources go to detection and information gathering of terrorist networks in cases that do not always result in arrests.
"It's not about the numbers and for TRAC to suggest as much is to be intellectually dishonest," Miller said.
He added: "The FBI has been very clear about how we have changed the way we do business since 9/11."
TRAC co-director Susan Long said researchers merely relied on the Justice Department's own numbers to come up with the conclusions.
___
On the Net:
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse: http://www.trac.syr.edu/
Justice Department: http://www.usdoj.gov/
Federal Bureau of Investigation: http://www.fbi.gov/
The original "No Child Left Behind" program!
Germans tell of secret Nazi program
By MELISSA EDDY, Associated Press Writer Sat Nov 4, 8:15 PM ET
WERNIGERODE, Germany - Folker Heinicke always had the feeling that something about his upbringing just wasn't right.
Being raised in a German home full of wealth and privilege did not dull his notions that something was missing, but it would be decades before he would learn the full truth: he was the child of a Nazi program to strengthen the German race with Aryan blood.
He and other children — known as "Lebensborn Kinder" or "source of life" kids — were the product of parents chosen for their traits to breed Hitler's idealized blue-eyed, blonde-haired Aryan race.
For the last four years, Heinicke and about 40 other children raised in the Nazi program have met to support each other. On Saturday for the first time, they told their stories in public, swapping tales of aunts who turned out to be mothers, ice-cold adoptive parents who slid into alcoholism and the joy at finding a blood relative who embraced them as a member of their family.
"There was always the feeling that something wasn't quite right," said Heinicke, who was stolen from present-day Ukraine by the Nazis. "It happens when you have no mother, no father, no roots."
Heinicke's parents told him when he was a teenager that he was adopted but did not reveal the full truth about his background. Later in life, he started exploring irregularities in his birth certificate that led him to other questions, eventually uncovering that he had passed through a Lebensborn home. He discovered his true identity but has yet to find any of his relatives.
Others like Heinicke were born outside the program and taken as toddlers from parents in lands the Germans overran during World War II, then given to a German family to raise.
The Lebensborn program was the mirror opposite of the Nazi's other, more hideous racial experiments.
While millions of Jews and others deemed "undesirable," were slaughtered, these children were carefully selected for their Aryan qualities and brought into the world in comfortable surroundings, well away from the Allied bombing raids.
Of the estimated 5,000 to 8,000 born into Lebensborn homes in Germany, some were raised by their birth mothers, but many were given over to families of high-ranking SS officers to be raised according to Nazi doctrine.
The group is seeking to correct what they say are historical misconceptions that the Lebensborn program was nothing more than a high-class bordello offering up blue-eyed blondes to SS officers as a means to breed a "perfect" race.
"We need to find the courage to speak out in public, to tell our stories as long, as long as we are still alive," urged Violette Wallenborn, whose mother was a Norwegian singer and father a Nazi choir director.
Previous meetings have focused on support and swapping tips on how to track down still-living relatives. But telling their stories is increasingly becoming an aim of members of the association called Lebenssupren, or "Tracing Life."
Because 60 percent of the women who gave birth in Lebensborn homes were not married — a stigma in those conservative times — the births were kept secret. In the final days of the war, the Nazis destroyed many documents detailing the births in hopes of covering their tracks.
In many cases, the kids in the program were housed outside of Germany.
After the Nazis overran Germany's neighbor states in 1940, German occupation soldiers were encouraged to find suitable local mates. Ten Lebensborn homes were set up in foreign lands, where some 8,000 children were eventually born.
Two years later, the Nazis began seeking out blue-eyed, blonde-haired children in neighboring, mostly Slavic, countries and sending them back home to be "Germanized" as Heinicke was.
Hans-Ullrich Wesch, 64, was born in a Lebensborn home in a leafy residential area of Wernigerode in former East Germany.
He always knew he was adopted and when he was a teenager, he began to question who he really was. As a young teen, he went to city officials to obtain his birth certificate for his personal ID card and was told that it did not exist because he was born in a Lebensborn home.
At the time, there was no public information about the program and he did not think much of it.
Later in life though, Wesch's wife suggested his birth parents could still be alive, prompting his first attempt at finding them. But the East German secret police halted his inquiry, insisting that even if his parents were alive, they would have remarried and would want nothing to do with him.
"That was it for me, until the Berlin Wall fell," Wesch said. "Then I thought, 'now you start searching again,'" he said.
His search eventually bore fruit when he was reunited with his mother in the years after the wall fell.
"I am one heart and one soul with my mother," said Wesch, who found her several years ago. "She was very, very pleased when she found me. She suffered a lot as well."
from TruthOut.Org: Bush admits Oil is reason to STAY IN IRAQ! Now What do we do?
Bush Cites Oil As Reason to Stay in Iraq
By Peter Baker
The Washington Post
Sunday 05 November 2006
Greeley, Colo.- During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, President Bush and his aides sternly dismissed suggestions that the war was all about oil. "Nonsense," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld declared. "This is not about that," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.
Now, more than 3 1/2 years later, someone else is asserting that the war is about oil - President Bush.
As he barnstorms across the country campaigning for Republican candidates in Tuesday's elections, Bush has been citing oil as a reason to stay in Iraq. If the United States pulled its troops out prematurely and surrendered the country to insurgents, he warns audiences, it would effectively hand over Iraq's considerable petroleum reserves to terrorists who would use it as a weapon against other countries.
"You can imagine a world in which these extremists and radicals got control of energy resources," he said at a rally here Saturday for Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.). "And then you can imagine them saying, 'We're going to pull a bunch of oil off the market to run your price of oil up unless you do the following. And the following would be along the lines of, well, 'Retreat and let us continue to expand our dark vision.' "
Bush said extremists controlling Iraq "would use energy as economic blackmail" and try to pressure the United States to abandon its alliance with Israel. At a stop in Missouri on Friday, he suggested that such radicals would be "able to pull millions of barrels of oil off the market, driving the price up to $300 or $400 a barrel."
Oil is not the only reason Bush offers for staying in Iraq, but his comments on the stump represent another striking evolution of his argument on behalf of the war. The slogan of "no blood for oil" became a rallying cry for antiwar activists prior to the March 2003 invasion and angered administration officials. "There are certain things like that, myths, that are floating around," Rumsfeld told Steve Kroft of CBS Radio in November 2002. "It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil."
White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Saturday that Bush's latest argument does not reflect a real shift. "We're still not saying we went into Iraq for oil. That's not true," he said. "But there is the realistic strategic concern that if a country with such enormous oil reserves and the corresponding revenues you can derive from that is controlled by essentially a terrorist organization, it could be destabilizing for the region."
Some analysts, however, said that Bush is exaggerating the impact of Iraq's oil production on world markets. Iraq has more than 112 billion barrels of oil, the second-largest proven reserves in the world. But it currently pumps just 2.3 million barrels per day and exports 1.6 million of that, according to the State Department's tracking report on the country, still short of what it produced before the invasion.
That represents a fraction of the 85 million barrels produced around the world each day and less than the surplus capacity of Saudi Arabia and other Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, meaning in a crisis they could ramp up their wells to make up for the shortfall, analysts said. The United States also has 688 million barrels of oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, enough to counter a disruption of Iraqi oil for 14 months.
Even if Iraq did not sell oil to the United States, it would not matter as long as it sold it to someone because the international market is fungible and what counts is the overall supply and overall demand, according to analysts. If Iraq cut off exports altogether, it still would not have the dire effect on the world market that Bush predicts, they said. The price of oil began rising dramatically in 2002 as the confrontation with Iraq loomed, but many factors contributed, including increasing demand by China and problems in Nigeria, Venezuela and elsewhere.
The world, in fact, has already seen what would happen if Iraqi oil were cut off entirely, as Bush suggests radicals might do. Iraq effectively stopped pumping oil altogether in the months immediately after the invasion. And yet the price of oil has never topped $80, much less come anywhere near the $300 or $400 a barrel Bush cited as a possible consequence of a radical Iraqi regime withholding the country's oil.
"They're a minor exporter," said Edward Morse, managing director and chief energy economist at Lehman Brothers. "They have potential to be a greater exporter. But it's ludicrous to suggest someone could hold the world hostage by withholding oil from the market, especially a regime that needs money."
Disruptions of oil supplies certainly affect the markets, but not as drastically as Bush suggested, Morse said. He noted that Venezuela's capacity has fallen by 1 million barrels a day since President Hugo Chavez came to power there and yet it has not given him any geopolitical leverage over the United States even though he is an avowed Bush foe. But Morse agreed that Iran, for example, could "play mischief" because it already effectively controls much of Iraqi oil in the southern part of the country.
Fratto, the White House spokesman, argued that even if radicals could not move the markets dramatically with Iraqi oil, they would use the country as a base to topple other governments in the Middle East such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which would give them "a lot more oil to blackmail with."
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...sought the records to review for evidence of possible crimes...
Ed. Kansas Attorney General Phil Kline has said he sought the records to review them for evidence of possible crimes including rape and illegal abortions.
O'Reilly abortion report riles Kansas MD
By JOHN HANNA, Associated Press Writer 48 minutes ago
TOPEKA, Kan. - An abortion doctor plans to ask for an investigation of the state attorney general and Bill O'Reilly over comments by the Fox television host that he got information from Kansas abortion records, the doctor's attorneys said Saturday.
Dr. George Tiller said he will ask the Kansas Supreme Court on Monday to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and take possession of the records of 90 patients from two clinics.
Attorney General Phill Kline obtained the records recently after a two-year battle that prompted privacy concerns. He has said he sought the records to review them for evidence of possible crimes including rape and illegal abortions.
During a Friday night broadcast of "The O'Reilly Factor," the conservative host said a "source inside" told the show that Tiller performs late-term abortions when a patient is depressed, which O'Reilly deemed "executing babies."
O'Reilly also said his show has evidence that Tiller's clinic and another unnamed clinic have broken Kansas law by failing to report potential rapes with victims ages 10 to 15.
A spokeswoman for Kline, who received redacted copies of the records Oct. 24, said Saturday he doesn't know how O'Reilly obtained the information.
"We don't know anything about Mr. O'Reilly's inside source," spokeswoman Sherriene Jones said. "I assumed he was talking about somebody on the inside of the abortion clinics."
Kline, an abortion opponent and Republican in a tight race with Democrat Paul Morrison, was interviewed by O'Reilly during the segment.
"Our information says that on almost every medical sheet — and obviously we have a source inside here — it says, 'depression,'" O'Reilly told Kline during the broadcast. "I don't know whether you have that information or not — I don't know — but that's what it says."
Pedro Irigonegaray, who represents Tiller and the clinics, said it was "preposterous" that the information would come from an insider at one of the clinics.
"This has been our concern from the beginning, that if he ended up with these records, that just this type of event would occur. Our worst nightmare has happened," Irigonegaray said. "Women in America deserve better than this."
It wasn't clear Saturday whether O'Reilly's source had broken state or federal laws by divulging patient information or whether O'Reilly or his staff had viewed any records themselves. A request to Fox in Washington to interview O'Reilly or someone associated with his show wasn't answered Saturday.
Kline, one of the nation's foremost abortion opponents, has said the targets of his investigation are rapists, sex offenders with child victims, and doctors involved in illegal abortions. Those could include doctors performing illegal late-term abortions or those failing to report abuse of a child.
The clinics had argued that giving the attorney general access to the records would invade patients' privacy.
Shawnee County District Judge Richard Anderson subpoenaed the records at Kline's request in September 2004, concluding there was probable cause to believe they contained evidence of crimes. The documents Kline received were edited so that individual patients could not be identified.
...sought the records to review for evidence of possible crimes...
Ed. Kansas Attorney General Phil Kline has said he sought the records to review them for evidence of possible crimes including rape and illegal abortions.
O'Reilly abortion report riles Kansas MD
By JOHN HANNA, Associated Press Writer 48 minutes ago
TOPEKA, Kan. - An abortion doctor plans to ask for an investigation of the state attorney general and Bill O'Reilly over comments by the Fox television host that he got information from Kansas abortion records, the doctor's attorneys said Saturday.
Dr. George Tiller said he will ask the Kansas Supreme Court on Monday to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and take possession of the records of 90 patients from two clinics.
Attorney General Phill Kline obtained the records recently after a two-year battle that prompted privacy concerns. He has said he sought the records to review them for evidence of possible crimes including rape and illegal abortions.
During a Friday night broadcast of "The O'Reilly Factor," the conservative host said a "source inside" told the show that Tiller performs late-term abortions when a patient is depressed, which O'Reilly deemed "executing babies."
O'Reilly also said his show has evidence that Tiller's clinic and another unnamed clinic have broken Kansas law by failing to report potential rapes with victims ages 10 to 15.
A spokeswoman for Kline, who received redacted copies of the records Oct. 24, said Saturday he doesn't know how O'Reilly obtained the information.
"We don't know anything about Mr. O'Reilly's inside source," spokeswoman Sherriene Jones said. "I assumed he was talking about somebody on the inside of the abortion clinics."
Kline, an abortion opponent and Republican in a tight race with Democrat Paul Morrison, was interviewed by O'Reilly during the segment.
"Our information says that on almost every medical sheet — and obviously we have a source inside here — it says, 'depression,'" O'Reilly told Kline during the broadcast. "I don't know whether you have that information or not — I don't know — but that's what it says."
Pedro Irigonegaray, who represents Tiller and the clinics, said it was "preposterous" that the information would come from an insider at one of the clinics.
"This has been our concern from the beginning, that if he ended up with these records, that just this type of event would occur. Our worst nightmare has happened," Irigonegaray said. "Women in America deserve better than this."
It wasn't clear Saturday whether O'Reilly's source had broken state or federal laws by divulging patient information or whether O'Reilly or his staff had viewed any records themselves. A request to Fox in Washington to interview O'Reilly or someone associated with his show wasn't answered Saturday.
Kline, one of the nation's foremost abortion opponents, has said the targets of his investigation are rapists, sex offenders with child victims, and doctors involved in illegal abortions. Those could include doctors performing illegal late-term abortions or those failing to report abuse of a child.
The clinics had argued that giving the attorney general access to the records would invade patients' privacy.
Shawnee County District Judge Richard Anderson subpoenaed the records at Kline's request in September 2004, concluding there was probable cause to believe they contained evidence of crimes. The documents Kline received were edited so that individual patients could not be identified.
Put the parochial nazis in prison instead!
Calif. 'pot docs' put selves at risk
By LISA LEFF, Associated Press Writer Sat Nov 4, 10:35 PM ET
COOL, Calif. - Dr. Mollie Fry never thought telling her patients where to get the medicine she recommended for pain, depression and nausea would be a problem.
Federal drug agents who raided her home and office thought otherwise, and she was indicted last year on felony charges of conspiring to distribute marijuana.
"I assumed the fact that I had 'M.D.' at the end of my name gave me the right to make judgments about people's health," said Fry, who estimates she has issued thousands of cannabis recommendations since setting up her thriving practice northeast of Sacramento in 1999.
Since California passed the nation's first medical marijuana law a decade ago, a provision requiring written doctor approval to grow and buy pot has created conflict between the state mandate and federal drug laws, and strained the doctor-patient relationship.
Until the stalemate is resolved, doctors recommending marijuana do it with trepidation and a good deal of risk.
Medical marijuana advocates estimate that 1,500 doctors, mostly oncologists and
AIDS specialists, have authorized pot for at least one patient. But most recommendations have come from about 15 self-appointed specialists, the so-called "pot docs," who charge $150 and up to walk what the California Medical Association calls "a gray area between the clearly permissible and clearly impermissible categories of action."
Following complaints by local law enforcement, nearly all have been investigated by the state board that licenses and disciplines physicians. Four had devoted their practices to acting as medical marijuana consultants and ultimately were sanctioned, ranging from the public rebuke that Fry got to having their licenses suspended.
California's medical marijuana law, also known as Proposition 215, named a host of ailments for which marijuana might prove helpful in easing symptoms: cancer, anorexia, AIDS, glaucoma, arthritis, migraine.
Unlike medical marijuana laws enacted in 10 other states, California's also gave doctors discretion to certify patients with "any other illness for which marijuana provides relief," leaving open the possibility that recommendations could be made to people who did not need them.
David Thornton, executive director of the California Medical Board, said that until the board issued guidelines two years ago outlining what constituted "accepted medical standards," physicians pretty much had to figure it out on their own. Most concluded it was not worth the risk.
Although a federal appeals court ruled four years ago that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration cannot go after doctors merely because they recommend marijuana to patients, the state medical board's guidelines make it clear the ruling did not amount to immunity either from prosecution or disciplinary proceedings.
The board advises doctors that relying on a patient's word instead of prior medical records to determine whether a marijuana recommendation is appropriate could constitute medical negligence. Failing to conduct an independent exam or to consider whether another drug would be as effective could lead to charges of unprofessional conduct.
The California Medical Association is even more explicit, warning doctors never to tell patients where to get pot and urging them to remind patients of possible side effects. Discussing dosages with patients, opining on whether they should smoke or eat marijuana, and signing a form that enables patients to obtain a state-issued medical marijuana ID card also are steps the medical association cautions could lead to them being sanctioned.
Frank Lucido, a Berkeley physician who devotes about 30 percent of his practice to working with medical marijuana patients, said he abides by those recommendations, but thinks pot docs are being held to higher standards than doctors who prescribe lots of Viagra, prescription painkillers and other abused medications. Doctors who prescribe sleeping pills for patients who complain of insomnia, Lucido noted, are not at risk of being called quacks if they don't do a hands-on exam or develop a long-term treatment plan.
Fry, 50, who is awaiting trial, continues signing recommendation forms for patients who come to see her from throughout the state. She no longer sells her patients starter plants, but freely tells them about what she sees as the spiritual, emotional and economic benefits of growing their own pot.
"What did I take an oath to do? To do no harm and to alleviate pain and suffering," Fry said. "I'm going to be true to my oath, and I'm even willing to go to prison for it."
Theorys of Exploitation vrs the Ideal of Reverence...!
Kings criticize civil rights museum site
Sat Nov 4, 3:16 PM ET
ATLANTA - Two of Martin Luther King Jr.'s children say a proposed civil rights museum should be near their father's grave instead of in the city's tourism hub.
The 2.5-acre site that Coca-Cola Co. offered two weeks ago for the museum is near the Georgia Aquarium, the CNN Center and the future World of Coca-Cola Museum. Some city leaders say the civil rights museum should be less than two miles away near Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King preached, and the King Center, where he and his wife, Coretta Scott King, are buried.
"I would hope that we as a community and a city, if we were going to erect a civil rights museum, it would be in the King historic district," Martin Luther King III said told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
His sister, Bernice King, noted that the district already contains her father's birth home and other significant civil rights landmarks.
"It just seems appropriate to place something of this magnitude, a civil and human rights museum, in a place where it has more of a historical context," she said.
A King family spokesman and the King Center spokesman didn't immediately return calls to their offices seeking additional comment Saturday. The King Center's spokesman cell phone was temporarily out of service.
Xernona Clayton, who worked closely with King and traveled with Coretta Scott King on concert tours to raise money for the movement, said the Coke site is ideal.
"What better place to have the accessibility than a place where you have high traffic and is convenient for all to see the research," Clayton said. "I would share with others the sentimentality attached to Auburn Avenue, but I have not heard where anyone has offered anything on Auburn Avenue."
Coke spokesman Ben Deutsch said Saturday that the company had no comment. When Coca-Cola chairman and CEO Neville Isdell announced the land donation, he said the idea for a museum came from Mayor Shirley Franklin.
Mayor Shirley Franklin and the city council will decide where the museum will be built.
Franklin said Saturday that she disagreed with the two King children.
"I personally believe the Coke site is the perfect site," she added, because it would boost Atlanta's tourism appeal and promote access to the surrounding attractions.
...only divisions brought about by ever present Pigs who are EVERYWHERE!
AP
Episcopalians install female leader
By RACHEL ZOLL, AP Religion Writer 2 hours, 13 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Katharine Jefferts Schori took office Saturday as the first female leader of The Episcopal Church and the first woman priest to head an Anglican province, two landmarks that could quickly be overshadowed by divisions over the Bible and sexuality throughout world Anglicanism.
Jefferts Schori, who supports ordaining gays, acknowledged the rift in an elaborate ceremony at the Washington National Cathedral, urging parishioners to "make peace" with those who oppose the direction of the U.S. church. In 2003, the denomination consecrated its first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.
"If some in this church feel wounded by recent decisions, then our salvation, our health as a body, is at some hazard, and it becomes the duty of all of us to seek healing and wholeness," Jefferts Schori said during her ceremony.
Jefferts Schori, 52, was bishop of Nevada when she was the surprise winner of the election for presiding bishop at the Episcopal General Convention in June. A former oceanographer who was ordained in 1994, she had served only about five years as a bishop.
Her election was celebrated as a victory for woman clergy and for Episcopalians who support full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the 2.3 million-member denomination. It was decried by U.S. traditionalists and many Anglicans overseas who do not want to recognize Jefferts Schori's leadership.
More than 3,000 people filled the church to welcome the new presiding bishop.
Worshippers stood and faced the doors of the cathedral as Jefferts Schori knocked and entered, wearing a multicolored robe and miter. She walked in a procession toward the front of the church, led by people waving streamers and flags, as applause and music filled the sanctuary.
Outgoing Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, who just completed his nine-year term, turned over the symbol of authority, the primatial staff, and Jefferts Schori stood beaming at the altar as onlookers cheered. She received blessings in Hebrew from a rabbi, in Arabic from a Muslim scholar, along with receiving prayers in several other languages.
Jefferts Schori hopes to revitalize Episcopal parishes after years of declining membership, and to advance the church's fight against poverty and other social ills at home and abroad. She urged Episcopalians on Saturday to work for "shalom" — the Hebrew word for peace — by working to heal the world's suffering.
But internal conflicts are likely to consume much of her time.
She will now represent the American denomination to the Anglican world. Her job is complicated by her personal support for Robinson's election and for blessing same-sex couples, though she insists she won't impose her views on others. She said the U.S. church should be willing to compromise "for a season" to stay in the 77 million-member Anglican Communion.
That may not be enough to appease other branches of the Anglican family, which take a traditional view that gay relationships are prohibited by Scripture. Some Anglican leaders also reject the idea of women's ordination: Jefferts Schori has said they'll have to "get over it."
The majority of Anglicans worldwide have conservative views on sexuality, but they are a minority in The Episcopal Church. Still, by withholding money and building alliances with like-minded Anglicans overseas, they have chipped away at the authority of the denomination.
Seven U.S. conservative dioceses have already rejected Jefferts Schori and have asked Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Anglican spiritual leader, to assign them another national leader. Three of the dioceses do not support ordaining women.
Jefferts Schori has spent her life tackling challenges.
Along with her past career as a scientist, she is a rock climber and a pilot who flew her plane to visit parishes around the sprawling Nevada Diocese.
Her husband of more than 25 years, Richard Schori, is a retired mathematician. Their daughter, 25-year-old Katharine Johanna, is a pilot in the U.S. Air Force.
Jefferts Schori decided to pursue full-time ministry after federal funding for her scientific research dried up.
___
On the Net:
The Episcopal Church: http://www.episcopalchurch.org
___
Associated Press writer Lubna Takruri contributed to this report.
Saturday, 4 November 2006
Report: Feds refusing FBI terror cases
By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press Writer Sun Nov 5, 7:02 PM ET
WASHINGTON - The Justice Department increasingly has refused to prosecute
FBI cases targeting suspected terrorists over the past five years, according to private researchers who reviewed department records.
The government says the findings are inaccurate and "intellectually dishonest."
The report being released Monday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University raises questions about the quality of the FBI's investigations.
Prosecutors declined to bring charges in 131 of 150, or 87 percent, of international terrorist case referrals from the FBI between October 2005 and June 2006, according to the report. The study was based on the most recent data available from the Justice Department's executive office for U.S. attorneys.
That number marks the peak of generally steady increases from the 2001 budget year, when prosecutors rejected 33 percent of such cases from the FBI, according to the report.
The data "raise troubling questions about the bureau's investigation of criminal matters involving individuals the government has identified as international terrorists," the report said.
It noted that prosecutions in traditional FBI investigations since 2001 — including drug cases, white collar crimes and organized crimes — have decreased while the number of agents and other employees has risen.
"So with more special agents, many more intelligence analysts, and many fewer prosecutions the question must be asked: What is the FBI doing?" the report said.
A Justice Department spokesman disputed the data highlighted by the Syracuse researchers, noting that terrorist hoax cases that were quickly dismissed may have been included in the government data.
Additionally, some cases are referred to prosecutors to obtain subpoenas or other legal orders in investigations that ultimately never result in criminal charges, spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said. He said prosecutors rejected 67 percent of FBI international terrorist cases in the nine-month period — not 87 percent.
The FBI's assistant director, John Miller, said the low number of cases prosecuted reflects changes in how investigations have been conducted since the Sept. 11 attacks. He said about half of the FBI's resources go to detection and information gathering of terrorist networks in cases that do not always result in arrests.
"It's not about the numbers and for TRAC to suggest as much is to be intellectually dishonest," Miller said.
He added: "The FBI has been very clear about how we have changed the way we do business since 9/11."
TRAC co-director Susan Long said researchers merely relied on the Justice Department's own numbers to come up with the conclusions.
___
On the Net:
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse: http://www.trac.syr.edu/
Justice Department: http://www.usdoj.gov/
Federal Bureau of Investigation: http://www.fbi.gov/
Germans tell of secret Nazi program
By MELISSA EDDY, Associated Press Writer Sat Nov 4, 8:15 PM ET
WERNIGERODE, Germany - Folker Heinicke always had the feeling that something about his upbringing just wasn't right.
Being raised in a German home full of wealth and privilege did not dull his notions that something was missing, but it would be decades before he would learn the full truth: he was the child of a Nazi program to strengthen the German race with Aryan blood.
He and other children — known as "Lebensborn Kinder" or "source of life" kids — were the product of parents chosen for their traits to breed Hitler's idealized blue-eyed, blonde-haired Aryan race.
For the last four years, Heinicke and about 40 other children raised in the Nazi program have met to support each other. On Saturday for the first time, they told their stories in public, swapping tales of aunts who turned out to be mothers, ice-cold adoptive parents who slid into alcoholism and the joy at finding a blood relative who embraced them as a member of their family.
"There was always the feeling that something wasn't quite right," said Heinicke, who was stolen from present-day Ukraine by the Nazis. "It happens when you have no mother, no father, no roots."
Heinicke's parents told him when he was a teenager that he was adopted but did not reveal the full truth about his background. Later in life, he started exploring irregularities in his birth certificate that led him to other questions, eventually uncovering that he had passed through a Lebensborn home. He discovered his true identity but has yet to find any of his relatives.
Others like Heinicke were born outside the program and taken as toddlers from parents in lands the Germans overran during World War II, then given to a German family to raise.
The Lebensborn program was the mirror opposite of the Nazi's other, more hideous racial experiments.
While millions of Jews and others deemed "undesirable," were slaughtered, these children were carefully selected for their Aryan qualities and brought into the world in comfortable surroundings, well away from the Allied bombing raids.
Of the estimated 5,000 to 8,000 born into Lebensborn homes in Germany, some were raised by their birth mothers, but many were given over to families of high-ranking SS officers to be raised according to Nazi doctrine.
The group is seeking to correct what they say are historical misconceptions that the Lebensborn program was nothing more than a high-class bordello offering up blue-eyed blondes to SS officers as a means to breed a "perfect" race.
"We need to find the courage to speak out in public, to tell our stories as long, as long as we are still alive," urged Violette Wallenborn, whose mother was a Norwegian singer and father a Nazi choir director.
Previous meetings have focused on support and swapping tips on how to track down still-living relatives. But telling their stories is increasingly becoming an aim of members of the association called Lebenssupren, or "Tracing Life."
Because 60 percent of the women who gave birth in Lebensborn homes were not married — a stigma in those conservative times — the births were kept secret. In the final days of the war, the Nazis destroyed many documents detailing the births in hopes of covering their tracks.
In many cases, the kids in the program were housed outside of Germany.
After the Nazis overran Germany's neighbor states in 1940, German occupation soldiers were encouraged to find suitable local mates. Ten Lebensborn homes were set up in foreign lands, where some 8,000 children were eventually born.
Two years later, the Nazis began seeking out blue-eyed, blonde-haired children in neighboring, mostly Slavic, countries and sending them back home to be "Germanized" as Heinicke was.
Hans-Ullrich Wesch, 64, was born in a Lebensborn home in a leafy residential area of Wernigerode in former East Germany.
He always knew he was adopted and when he was a teenager, he began to question who he really was. As a young teen, he went to city officials to obtain his birth certificate for his personal ID card and was told that it did not exist because he was born in a Lebensborn home.
At the time, there was no public information about the program and he did not think much of it.
Later in life though, Wesch's wife suggested his birth parents could still be alive, prompting his first attempt at finding them. But the East German secret police halted his inquiry, insisting that even if his parents were alive, they would have remarried and would want nothing to do with him.
"That was it for me, until the Berlin Wall fell," Wesch said. "Then I thought, 'now you start searching again,'" he said.
His search eventually bore fruit when he was reunited with his mother in the years after the wall fell.
"I am one heart and one soul with my mother," said Wesch, who found her several years ago. "She was very, very pleased when she found me. She suffered a lot as well."
Bush Cites Oil As Reason to Stay in Iraq
By Peter Baker
The Washington Post
Sunday 05 November 2006
Greeley, Colo.- During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, President Bush and his aides sternly dismissed suggestions that the war was all about oil. "Nonsense," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld declared. "This is not about that," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.
Now, more than 3 1/2 years later, someone else is asserting that the war is about oil - President Bush.
As he barnstorms across the country campaigning for Republican candidates in Tuesday's elections, Bush has been citing oil as a reason to stay in Iraq. If the United States pulled its troops out prematurely and surrendered the country to insurgents, he warns audiences, it would effectively hand over Iraq's considerable petroleum reserves to terrorists who would use it as a weapon against other countries.
"You can imagine a world in which these extremists and radicals got control of energy resources," he said at a rally here Saturday for Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.). "And then you can imagine them saying, 'We're going to pull a bunch of oil off the market to run your price of oil up unless you do the following. And the following would be along the lines of, well, 'Retreat and let us continue to expand our dark vision.' "
Bush said extremists controlling Iraq "would use energy as economic blackmail" and try to pressure the United States to abandon its alliance with Israel. At a stop in Missouri on Friday, he suggested that such radicals would be "able to pull millions of barrels of oil off the market, driving the price up to $300 or $400 a barrel."
Oil is not the only reason Bush offers for staying in Iraq, but his comments on the stump represent another striking evolution of his argument on behalf of the war. The slogan of "no blood for oil" became a rallying cry for antiwar activists prior to the March 2003 invasion and angered administration officials. "There are certain things like that, myths, that are floating around," Rumsfeld told Steve Kroft of CBS Radio in November 2002. "It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil."
White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Saturday that Bush's latest argument does not reflect a real shift. "We're still not saying we went into Iraq for oil. That's not true," he said. "But there is the realistic strategic concern that if a country with such enormous oil reserves and the corresponding revenues you can derive from that is controlled by essentially a terrorist organization, it could be destabilizing for the region."
Some analysts, however, said that Bush is exaggerating the impact of Iraq's oil production on world markets. Iraq has more than 112 billion barrels of oil, the second-largest proven reserves in the world. But it currently pumps just 2.3 million barrels per day and exports 1.6 million of that, according to the State Department's tracking report on the country, still short of what it produced before the invasion.
That represents a fraction of the 85 million barrels produced around the world each day and less than the surplus capacity of Saudi Arabia and other Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, meaning in a crisis they could ramp up their wells to make up for the shortfall, analysts said. The United States also has 688 million barrels of oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, enough to counter a disruption of Iraqi oil for 14 months.
Even if Iraq did not sell oil to the United States, it would not matter as long as it sold it to someone because the international market is fungible and what counts is the overall supply and overall demand, according to analysts. If Iraq cut off exports altogether, it still would not have the dire effect on the world market that Bush predicts, they said. The price of oil began rising dramatically in 2002 as the confrontation with Iraq loomed, but many factors contributed, including increasing demand by China and problems in Nigeria, Venezuela and elsewhere.
The world, in fact, has already seen what would happen if Iraqi oil were cut off entirely, as Bush suggests radicals might do. Iraq effectively stopped pumping oil altogether in the months immediately after the invasion. And yet the price of oil has never topped $80, much less come anywhere near the $300 or $400 a barrel Bush cited as a possible consequence of a radical Iraqi regime withholding the country's oil.
"They're a minor exporter," said Edward Morse, managing director and chief energy economist at Lehman Brothers. "They have potential to be a greater exporter. But it's ludicrous to suggest someone could hold the world hostage by withholding oil from the market, especially a regime that needs money."
Disruptions of oil supplies certainly affect the markets, but not as drastically as Bush suggested, Morse said. He noted that Venezuela's capacity has fallen by 1 million barrels a day since President Hugo Chavez came to power there and yet it has not given him any geopolitical leverage over the United States even though he is an avowed Bush foe. But Morse agreed that Iran, for example, could "play mischief" because it already effectively controls much of Iraqi oil in the southern part of the country.
Fratto, the White House spokesman, argued that even if radicals could not move the markets dramatically with Iraqi oil, they would use the country as a base to topple other governments in the Middle East such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which would give them "a lot more oil to blackmail with."
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Updated: Sunday, 5 November 2006 9:19 AM CST
Updated: Sunday, 5 November 2006 9:19 AM CST
Ed. Kansas Attorney General Phil Kline has said he sought the records to review them for evidence of possible crimes including rape and illegal abortions.
O'Reilly abortion report riles Kansas MD
By JOHN HANNA, Associated Press Writer 48 minutes ago
TOPEKA, Kan. - An abortion doctor plans to ask for an investigation of the state attorney general and Bill O'Reilly over comments by the Fox television host that he got information from Kansas abortion records, the doctor's attorneys said Saturday.
Dr. George Tiller said he will ask the Kansas Supreme Court on Monday to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and take possession of the records of 90 patients from two clinics.
Attorney General Phill Kline obtained the records recently after a two-year battle that prompted privacy concerns. He has said he sought the records to review them for evidence of possible crimes including rape and illegal abortions.
During a Friday night broadcast of "The O'Reilly Factor," the conservative host said a "source inside" told the show that Tiller performs late-term abortions when a patient is depressed, which O'Reilly deemed "executing babies."
O'Reilly also said his show has evidence that Tiller's clinic and another unnamed clinic have broken Kansas law by failing to report potential rapes with victims ages 10 to 15.
A spokeswoman for Kline, who received redacted copies of the records Oct. 24, said Saturday he doesn't know how O'Reilly obtained the information.
"We don't know anything about Mr. O'Reilly's inside source," spokeswoman Sherriene Jones said. "I assumed he was talking about somebody on the inside of the abortion clinics."
Kline, an abortion opponent and Republican in a tight race with Democrat Paul Morrison, was interviewed by O'Reilly during the segment.
"Our information says that on almost every medical sheet — and obviously we have a source inside here — it says, 'depression,'" O'Reilly told Kline during the broadcast. "I don't know whether you have that information or not — I don't know — but that's what it says."
Pedro Irigonegaray, who represents Tiller and the clinics, said it was "preposterous" that the information would come from an insider at one of the clinics.
"This has been our concern from the beginning, that if he ended up with these records, that just this type of event would occur. Our worst nightmare has happened," Irigonegaray said. "Women in America deserve better than this."
It wasn't clear Saturday whether O'Reilly's source had broken state or federal laws by divulging patient information or whether O'Reilly or his staff had viewed any records themselves. A request to Fox in Washington to interview O'Reilly or someone associated with his show wasn't answered Saturday.
Kline, one of the nation's foremost abortion opponents, has said the targets of his investigation are rapists, sex offenders with child victims, and doctors involved in illegal abortions. Those could include doctors performing illegal late-term abortions or those failing to report abuse of a child.
The clinics had argued that giving the attorney general access to the records would invade patients' privacy.
Shawnee County District Judge Richard Anderson subpoenaed the records at Kline's request in September 2004, concluding there was probable cause to believe they contained evidence of crimes. The documents Kline received were edited so that individual patients could not be identified.
Ed. Kansas Attorney General Phil Kline has said he sought the records to review them for evidence of possible crimes including rape and illegal abortions.
O'Reilly abortion report riles Kansas MD
By JOHN HANNA, Associated Press Writer 48 minutes ago
TOPEKA, Kan. - An abortion doctor plans to ask for an investigation of the state attorney general and Bill O'Reilly over comments by the Fox television host that he got information from Kansas abortion records, the doctor's attorneys said Saturday.
Dr. George Tiller said he will ask the Kansas Supreme Court on Monday to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and take possession of the records of 90 patients from two clinics.
Attorney General Phill Kline obtained the records recently after a two-year battle that prompted privacy concerns. He has said he sought the records to review them for evidence of possible crimes including rape and illegal abortions.
During a Friday night broadcast of "The O'Reilly Factor," the conservative host said a "source inside" told the show that Tiller performs late-term abortions when a patient is depressed, which O'Reilly deemed "executing babies."
O'Reilly also said his show has evidence that Tiller's clinic and another unnamed clinic have broken Kansas law by failing to report potential rapes with victims ages 10 to 15.
A spokeswoman for Kline, who received redacted copies of the records Oct. 24, said Saturday he doesn't know how O'Reilly obtained the information.
"We don't know anything about Mr. O'Reilly's inside source," spokeswoman Sherriene Jones said. "I assumed he was talking about somebody on the inside of the abortion clinics."
Kline, an abortion opponent and Republican in a tight race with Democrat Paul Morrison, was interviewed by O'Reilly during the segment.
"Our information says that on almost every medical sheet — and obviously we have a source inside here — it says, 'depression,'" O'Reilly told Kline during the broadcast. "I don't know whether you have that information or not — I don't know — but that's what it says."
Pedro Irigonegaray, who represents Tiller and the clinics, said it was "preposterous" that the information would come from an insider at one of the clinics.
"This has been our concern from the beginning, that if he ended up with these records, that just this type of event would occur. Our worst nightmare has happened," Irigonegaray said. "Women in America deserve better than this."
It wasn't clear Saturday whether O'Reilly's source had broken state or federal laws by divulging patient information or whether O'Reilly or his staff had viewed any records themselves. A request to Fox in Washington to interview O'Reilly or someone associated with his show wasn't answered Saturday.
Kline, one of the nation's foremost abortion opponents, has said the targets of his investigation are rapists, sex offenders with child victims, and doctors involved in illegal abortions. Those could include doctors performing illegal late-term abortions or those failing to report abuse of a child.
The clinics had argued that giving the attorney general access to the records would invade patients' privacy.
Shawnee County District Judge Richard Anderson subpoenaed the records at Kline's request in September 2004, concluding there was probable cause to believe they contained evidence of crimes. The documents Kline received were edited so that individual patients could not be identified.
Calif. 'pot docs' put selves at risk
By LISA LEFF, Associated Press Writer Sat Nov 4, 10:35 PM ET
COOL, Calif. - Dr. Mollie Fry never thought telling her patients where to get the medicine she recommended for pain, depression and nausea would be a problem.
Federal drug agents who raided her home and office thought otherwise, and she was indicted last year on felony charges of conspiring to distribute marijuana.
"I assumed the fact that I had 'M.D.' at the end of my name gave me the right to make judgments about people's health," said Fry, who estimates she has issued thousands of cannabis recommendations since setting up her thriving practice northeast of Sacramento in 1999.
Since California passed the nation's first medical marijuana law a decade ago, a provision requiring written doctor approval to grow and buy pot has created conflict between the state mandate and federal drug laws, and strained the doctor-patient relationship.
Until the stalemate is resolved, doctors recommending marijuana do it with trepidation and a good deal of risk.
Medical marijuana advocates estimate that 1,500 doctors, mostly oncologists and
AIDS specialists, have authorized pot for at least one patient. But most recommendations have come from about 15 self-appointed specialists, the so-called "pot docs," who charge $150 and up to walk what the California Medical Association calls "a gray area between the clearly permissible and clearly impermissible categories of action."
Following complaints by local law enforcement, nearly all have been investigated by the state board that licenses and disciplines physicians. Four had devoted their practices to acting as medical marijuana consultants and ultimately were sanctioned, ranging from the public rebuke that Fry got to having their licenses suspended.
California's medical marijuana law, also known as Proposition 215, named a host of ailments for which marijuana might prove helpful in easing symptoms: cancer, anorexia, AIDS, glaucoma, arthritis, migraine.
Unlike medical marijuana laws enacted in 10 other states, California's also gave doctors discretion to certify patients with "any other illness for which marijuana provides relief," leaving open the possibility that recommendations could be made to people who did not need them.
David Thornton, executive director of the California Medical Board, said that until the board issued guidelines two years ago outlining what constituted "accepted medical standards," physicians pretty much had to figure it out on their own. Most concluded it was not worth the risk.
Although a federal appeals court ruled four years ago that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration cannot go after doctors merely because they recommend marijuana to patients, the state medical board's guidelines make it clear the ruling did not amount to immunity either from prosecution or disciplinary proceedings.
The board advises doctors that relying on a patient's word instead of prior medical records to determine whether a marijuana recommendation is appropriate could constitute medical negligence. Failing to conduct an independent exam or to consider whether another drug would be as effective could lead to charges of unprofessional conduct.
The California Medical Association is even more explicit, warning doctors never to tell patients where to get pot and urging them to remind patients of possible side effects. Discussing dosages with patients, opining on whether they should smoke or eat marijuana, and signing a form that enables patients to obtain a state-issued medical marijuana ID card also are steps the medical association cautions could lead to them being sanctioned.
Frank Lucido, a Berkeley physician who devotes about 30 percent of his practice to working with medical marijuana patients, said he abides by those recommendations, but thinks pot docs are being held to higher standards than doctors who prescribe lots of Viagra, prescription painkillers and other abused medications. Doctors who prescribe sleeping pills for patients who complain of insomnia, Lucido noted, are not at risk of being called quacks if they don't do a hands-on exam or develop a long-term treatment plan.
Fry, 50, who is awaiting trial, continues signing recommendation forms for patients who come to see her from throughout the state. She no longer sells her patients starter plants, but freely tells them about what she sees as the spiritual, emotional and economic benefits of growing their own pot.
"What did I take an oath to do? To do no harm and to alleviate pain and suffering," Fry said. "I'm going to be true to my oath, and I'm even willing to go to prison for it."
Kings criticize civil rights museum site
Sat Nov 4, 3:16 PM ET
ATLANTA - Two of Martin Luther King Jr.'s children say a proposed civil rights museum should be near their father's grave instead of in the city's tourism hub.
The 2.5-acre site that Coca-Cola Co. offered two weeks ago for the museum is near the Georgia Aquarium, the CNN Center and the future World of Coca-Cola Museum. Some city leaders say the civil rights museum should be less than two miles away near Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King preached, and the King Center, where he and his wife, Coretta Scott King, are buried.
"I would hope that we as a community and a city, if we were going to erect a civil rights museum, it would be in the King historic district," Martin Luther King III said told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
His sister, Bernice King, noted that the district already contains her father's birth home and other significant civil rights landmarks.
"It just seems appropriate to place something of this magnitude, a civil and human rights museum, in a place where it has more of a historical context," she said.
A King family spokesman and the King Center spokesman didn't immediately return calls to their offices seeking additional comment Saturday. The King Center's spokesman cell phone was temporarily out of service.
Xernona Clayton, who worked closely with King and traveled with Coretta Scott King on concert tours to raise money for the movement, said the Coke site is ideal.
"What better place to have the accessibility than a place where you have high traffic and is convenient for all to see the research," Clayton said. "I would share with others the sentimentality attached to Auburn Avenue, but I have not heard where anyone has offered anything on Auburn Avenue."
Coke spokesman Ben Deutsch said Saturday that the company had no comment. When Coca-Cola chairman and CEO Neville Isdell announced the land donation, he said the idea for a museum came from Mayor Shirley Franklin.
Mayor Shirley Franklin and the city council will decide where the museum will be built.
Franklin said Saturday that she disagreed with the two King children.
"I personally believe the Coke site is the perfect site," she added, because it would boost Atlanta's tourism appeal and promote access to the surrounding attractions.
AP
Episcopalians install female leader
By RACHEL ZOLL, AP Religion Writer 2 hours, 13 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Katharine Jefferts Schori took office Saturday as the first female leader of The Episcopal Church and the first woman priest to head an Anglican province, two landmarks that could quickly be overshadowed by divisions over the Bible and sexuality throughout world Anglicanism.
Jefferts Schori, who supports ordaining gays, acknowledged the rift in an elaborate ceremony at the Washington National Cathedral, urging parishioners to "make peace" with those who oppose the direction of the U.S. church. In 2003, the denomination consecrated its first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.
"If some in this church feel wounded by recent decisions, then our salvation, our health as a body, is at some hazard, and it becomes the duty of all of us to seek healing and wholeness," Jefferts Schori said during her ceremony.
Jefferts Schori, 52, was bishop of Nevada when she was the surprise winner of the election for presiding bishop at the Episcopal General Convention in June. A former oceanographer who was ordained in 1994, she had served only about five years as a bishop.
Her election was celebrated as a victory for woman clergy and for Episcopalians who support full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the 2.3 million-member denomination. It was decried by U.S. traditionalists and many Anglicans overseas who do not want to recognize Jefferts Schori's leadership.
More than 3,000 people filled the church to welcome the new presiding bishop.
Worshippers stood and faced the doors of the cathedral as Jefferts Schori knocked and entered, wearing a multicolored robe and miter. She walked in a procession toward the front of the church, led by people waving streamers and flags, as applause and music filled the sanctuary.
Outgoing Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, who just completed his nine-year term, turned over the symbol of authority, the primatial staff, and Jefferts Schori stood beaming at the altar as onlookers cheered. She received blessings in Hebrew from a rabbi, in Arabic from a Muslim scholar, along with receiving prayers in several other languages.
Jefferts Schori hopes to revitalize Episcopal parishes after years of declining membership, and to advance the church's fight against poverty and other social ills at home and abroad. She urged Episcopalians on Saturday to work for "shalom" — the Hebrew word for peace — by working to heal the world's suffering.
But internal conflicts are likely to consume much of her time.
She will now represent the American denomination to the Anglican world. Her job is complicated by her personal support for Robinson's election and for blessing same-sex couples, though she insists she won't impose her views on others. She said the U.S. church should be willing to compromise "for a season" to stay in the 77 million-member Anglican Communion.
That may not be enough to appease other branches of the Anglican family, which take a traditional view that gay relationships are prohibited by Scripture. Some Anglican leaders also reject the idea of women's ordination: Jefferts Schori has said they'll have to "get over it."
The majority of Anglicans worldwide have conservative views on sexuality, but they are a minority in The Episcopal Church. Still, by withholding money and building alliances with like-minded Anglicans overseas, they have chipped away at the authority of the denomination.
Seven U.S. conservative dioceses have already rejected Jefferts Schori and have asked Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Anglican spiritual leader, to assign them another national leader. Three of the dioceses do not support ordaining women.
Jefferts Schori has spent her life tackling challenges.
Along with her past career as a scientist, she is a rock climber and a pilot who flew her plane to visit parishes around the sprawling Nevada Diocese.
Her husband of more than 25 years, Richard Schori, is a retired mathematician. Their daughter, 25-year-old Katharine Johanna, is a pilot in the U.S. Air Force.
Jefferts Schori decided to pursue full-time ministry after federal funding for her scientific research dried up.
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On the Net:
The Episcopal Church: http://www.episcopalchurch.org
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Associated Press writer Lubna Takruri contributed to this report.
Ellen Burstyn sounds off on her Emmy nod
Fri Nov 3, 8:43 PM ET
WASHINGTON -
Ellen Burstyn was just as flabbergasted as everyone else when she heard she'd been nominated for an Emmy this year for her blink-and-you-miss-it role in the TV movie "Mrs. Harris."
In an interview with AP Radio, the 73-year-old Academy Award winner spoke publicly for the first time about her Emmy nod: "When they told me I was nominated for that I went, `What, are you kidding?'"
Burstyn's cameo in "Mrs. Harris" lasted 14 seconds, with her speaking a total of 38 words.
"I thought it was fabulous," she said. "My next ambition is to get nominated for seven seconds, and, ultimately, I want to be nominated for a picture in which I don't even appear."
Her nomination drew the ire of those who felt she hadn't logged enough screen time to deserve it. Last August, Burstyn wound up losing the Emmy to her "Mrs Harris" co-star,
Cloris Leachman.
"The brouhaha around it, you know, they tried to reach me for a statement," she recalled. "I said, `This doesn't have anything to do with me. I don't even want to know about this. You people work it out yourself.'"
Burstyn, who has starred in such as movies "The Exorcist" and "The Last Picture Show," won a best actress Oscar for her role in 1974's "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.
Fri Nov 3, 8:43 PM ET
WASHINGTON -
Ellen Burstyn was just as flabbergasted as everyone else when she heard she'd been nominated for an Emmy this year for her blink-and-you-miss-it role in the TV movie "Mrs. Harris."
In an interview with AP Radio, the 73-year-old Academy Award winner spoke publicly for the first time about her Emmy nod: "When they told me I was nominated for that I went, `What, are you kidding?'"
Burstyn's cameo in "Mrs. Harris" lasted 14 seconds, with her speaking a total of 38 words.
"I thought it was fabulous," she said. "My next ambition is to get nominated for seven seconds, and, ultimately, I want to be nominated for a picture in which I don't even appear."
Her nomination drew the ire of those who felt she hadn't logged enough screen time to deserve it. Last August, Burstyn wound up losing the Emmy to her "Mrs Harris" co-star,
Cloris Leachman.
"The brouhaha around it, you know, they tried to reach me for a statement," she recalled. "I said, `This doesn't have anything to do with me. I don't even want to know about this. You people work it out yourself.'"
Burstyn, who has starred in such as movies "The Exorcist" and "The Last Picture Show," won a best actress Oscar for her role in 1974's "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.