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“Not for the politically correct.”

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DrudgeReport.com

• POW’s Return Home

• Controversy Over Athletes Endorsing Medicines

• Morris County NJ NOW Chapter Objects to Murder Charge for Foetus

• Newsweek’s Account of Saddam Regime Crimes

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POWs Reunite With Families...

Questions over athletes who pitch pills...

The athletes’ pay for these promotions might also drive up the cost of the medicines.

Hollon says there are risks to selling prescription medicines like pump sneakers, though. Unwittingly or not, he says, athletes are contributing to inflated health costs. They are promoting brand names that are often 10 or 20 times more expensive than generic drugs or over-the-counter remedies, which may be just as effective for some conditions. The largest single health-care expense for General Motors a year ago was $55 million for a heartburn pill, Prilosec, but the company believes it often was unnecessarily prescribed.

NOW objects to murder charge against Laci's baby; case tied to Roe debate...

The head of the National Organization for Women's Morris County chapter is opposing a double-murder charge in the Laci Peterson case, saying it could provide ammunition to the pro-life lobby.

"If this is murder, well, then any time a late-term fetus is aborted, they could call it murder," Morris County NOW President Mavra Stark said on Saturday.

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More than two dozen states, including California, have adopted "fetal homicide" statutes, and prosecutors often will seek a double-murder charge when a pregnant woman is killed.

MAG: SADDAM'S SECRET FILES HOW HE RULED: SPYING, BUNGLING AND BRUTALITY; TAPES, VIDEOS AND DOCUMENTS...

Like the Nazis and all good totalitarians, Saddam’s Baathist henchmen kept records. …

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… One former prisoner he talked to, Anwar Abdul Razak, remembers when a surgeon kissed him on each cheek, said he was sorry and cut his ears off. …

America wants to bring liberty and democracy to Iraq. But first the Iraqis will have to come to terms with the legacy of fear Saddam created, and regain the humanity that was frightened and beaten out of them by three decades of grotesque misrule. No wonder Iraqi looters torched and sacked the National Library and stole their nation’s antiquities from the National Museum. They had lived all or most of their lives in a world where neighbors informed on each other for cash; where torturers multiplied their salaries each time they extracted a confession; where police made only $4 a month for catching crooks but could earn lavish bonuses by imprisoning people for their thoughts and words.

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 OpinionJournal.com

• Reagan’s Treasury Secretary Backs Margin Tax Rate Cuts

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One of the advantages of age and experience is being able to remember things that others never knew or have forgotten, such as stagflation--the combination of stagnation and inflation. In 1980, the year before President Reagan took office, the "misery index"--obtained by adding inflation (13.5%) to unemployment (7.1%)--reached 20.6%. Newsweek said President Reagan had inherited "the most dangerous economic crisis since Franklin Roosevelt took office 48 years ago." Economic pessimists saw this as a permanent new reality and preached about the limits of growth.

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Jewish World Review.com

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 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
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• Airline’s Union Rescinds Contract After Executive Bonuses Belatedly Disclosed

• Congress Approves Changing Nickel Coin to Commemorate Louisiana Purchase

• Washington Post Says War Crimes Trials of Iraqis May Be Problematic

• Dim Middle Easterners Wonder Why US May Go After Syria

• Detail of Iraq Combat

• Saddam Regime Leaves Record of Crimes

• Reasons for Failure of General Assembly

• Meth Labs Moving From Country to Cities

• Arkansans Celebrate Confederate Flag Day

• Burglar Sues Victim in Bentonville

• Weeds Becoming Resistant to Roundup

• Promiscuity, STD’s Increasing in Elderly

• DVD’s Can Have ‘Easter Eggs’ Like Software

• New History of Civil War and Reconstruction Arkansas

• Review of Book on How Societies Handle Defeat in War

• Meredith Oakley on Failure of General Assembly

• Bradley Gitz on America as an ‘Empire’

• Michael Jordan Repudiates Stereotype of Urban Blacks?

• David Duke Popular With ‘Anti-Zionists’

• Letters – “Demonstrators Are Wrong”

The union called for a new election after American belatedly disclosed bonuses for seven top executives and partial funding of extra pension benefits for 45 executives.

The perks were approved last year but not disclosed until the end of regular voting by employees on the concessions, which include deep wage and benefit cuts.

And some wonder why people no longer trust business executives. This is why.

But the legislation allows the replacement of the familiar pony-tailed profile of Jefferson with a likeness that recognizes his role in the Louisiana Purchase and the exploration of that territory by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. The purchase and expedition occurred during Jefferson’s presidency.

The nickel’s reverse side now features a likeness of Monticello, Jefferson’s home outside Charlottesville, Va. It would be replaced with a design celebrating the Louisiana Purchase and the expedition.

The senior U.S. government official acknowledged the United States is entering uncertain legal territory in Iraq. "We’ve never had a war-crimes trial in a regular U.S. civil court, or in a court-martial setting, in our 200-plus years of history," he said. Instead, people who committed war crimes against Americans have all been tried before special U.S. military tribunals, the official said.

Huh? The American military court-martialed and executed the Germans in American uniforms who infiltrated American lines in the Battle of the Bulge. I believe that the perpetrators of the Malmedy Massacre were court-martialed as well.

The Geneva Convention doesn’t protect combatants unless they are in uniform.

French officials said more than 400 Arab fighters went to Iraq through Syria, but the Syrians might have stopped another 100 who were still waiting last week. Syria also has chemical weapons and protects Hezbollah, a terror group with a bloody history of attacks against American targets in the 1980s.

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Sudden U.S. pressure on Syria, and even talk of military action, have sent nervous ripples throughout the Middle East. In a move to outflank hawks in the Bush administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell said last week that he would include Damascus on a Middle East tour later this spring.

Why are the Middle-Easterners surprised? Syria has weapons of mass destruction, sponsors terrorism, and has assisted the Saddam Regime while we were at war with it. Unless it gets rid of the poison gases, drops Hezbollah, and coughs up any Saddam regime officials it might be harboring it is a legitimate target.

Attack Company and the rest of the force rolled on, arriving late that day near the city of Karbala. In just two-and-a-half days, the 2nd Brigade had covered 228 miles — penetrating faster and farther than any invading army in history.

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The division commander, Maj. Gen. Buford Blount III, intended to pour through the Karbala Gap, a mile-wide passage between the Euphrates River and a reservoir — and a good place for Iraqi troops to try to stop the advance. Blount wanted to fool them into thinking the division would cross the river at Hindiyah, a town just to the east.

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As Attack Company rolled through Suwaryah, hundreds of men of military age lined the roads. They wore jeans or robes, but they had military haircuts. Many were barefoot, their military boots discarded in nearby ditches.

In the book, a sort of ledger of doom, are the names of every person who was arrested or vanished after the Persian Gulf War of 1991, when Saddam, a Sunni Muslim, struck back viciously against the Shiites of southern Iraq.

It is divided into chapters: insurgents, deserters, exiles, Kurds and so on. The book is a record of the local people hostile to the regime, their family members, political sympathies, party affiliations, religion and arrest records. There are about 15 names on each page, about 3,000 people in all. Of them, residents of the town now say, at least 100 disappeared.

Rep. Mary Beth Green, R-Van Buren, one of those who voted against extending the session, said she resented the legislative leadership, which she described as "that little group of white Democrat men," for not giving her and others in the Republican minority more details about the budget.

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Taxes. Huckabee called for a five-eighths percent sales tax increase to raise about $250 million, mostly to keep state government services at the present level. The House has 36 new members, many of whom pledged during their campaigns to vote against tax increases. But even most of the senior lawmakers initially rejected the idea of a tax increase for anything other than education.

If we wanted a governor who wanted to raise taxes we would have elected a Democrat. It’s hard for Arkansas Republicans to

Meth is spreading into urban areas across the country, but mainly in the South and Midwest, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The agency estimates that 8.8 million people nationwide have at least tried the drug, a dangerous and addictive stimulant.

Meth production is dangerous. Driving the meth labs into cities will increase the exposure of innocent parties to these dangers, which might be considered an unintended consequence of the war on drugs.

Saturday’s event celebrated Confederate Flag Day, Confederate Memorial Day, which is next month, and Confederate History and Heritage Month in April. Confederate Flag Day was designated in 1957 by Arkansas Code 1-5-107.

BENTONVILLE — A convicted criminal, behind bars after fleeing from police and trying to break into two Springdale businesses, is suing a woman who apparently shot him in the arm.

Kenneth John Lewis, 24, filed a civil lawsuit against Nina Baugh in Benton County Circuit Court. Baugh is the sole defendant in the case filed on Lewis’ behalf by Fayetteville attorney Michael Lea.

Outrageous. Persons shot while committing a crime shouldn’t be able to use the courts to victimize again.

Cropping up in patches the size of a pickup in a couple of fields along the Poinsett County-Mississippi County line, horseweed had beat the best science has to offer, a herbicide called glyphosate. More commonly known by the brand name Roundup, it is row-crop agriculture’s weed killer of choice.

The plants appeared to be immune, a development that, if confirmed, could help undo a revolution in agriculture, according to University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service weed scientist Ken Smith.

This could explain why it’s not working in my yard.

I have just returned from a vacation where all at once the newspapers and television were full of stories of sexually active and even promiscuous retirees, widows and widowers. Bumper stickers in a retirement community in Arizona blared "Get a Room" as more and more people were arrested for lewd behavior on park benches, in parked cars and elsewhere. At the same time, a news program talked about older men dating a different woman every night of the week. The only requirement was being able to drive at night and having some resources.

Most digital video discs offer more than just movies today. Many contain special features such as movie trailers, behindthe-scenes features, deleted scenes and even bloopers. But some offer a little more — hidden items not listed on the DVD’s menus. These hidden items are called DVD Easter eggs.

With Fire and Sword: Arkansas, 1861-1874, by Thomas A. DeBlack, The University of Arkansas Press, 256 pages, $34.95.

…

DeBlack begins with a concise sketch of the economic and political situation in Arkansas as the secession crisis loomed. The 1860 Census identified Arkansas as part of the most rapidly developing region of the country. The Civil War changed that. More than 140 years later the state has still not recovered the relative economic position it enjoyed before the war began. …

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One of DeBlack’s more salient points is that Confederate leaders in Arkansas were unwilling to abandon the unrealistic goal of winning Missouri for the Confederacy. The failure to grasp this military reality caused them to launch large raids into Missouri that were doomed to fail. Even Gen. Jo Shelby’s raid in 1863, which was a tactical success, achieved nothing strategic. The rest were disasters that only wasted precious manpower. DeBlack quotes a Confederate soldier: "In those days it was easy to get into Missouri, but it was sometimes extremely difficult to get out."

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It was a notable fact of war and Reconstruction in Arkansas, and the Trans-Mississippi in general, that there was relatively little contrast between war and peace — for many people in Arkansas there was no difference. For some, Reconstruction was worse: The southwestern part of the state, a region that had been reasonably peaceful and prosperous before the war, became a haven for criminals and unreconstructed Rebels.

One wonders if the war had a similar effect on the other Confederate states, as well as how much high Yankee tariffs contributed.

The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and Recovery, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Translated by Jefferson Chase, Metropolitan Books, 403 pages, $27.50.

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German social historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch writes about how nations respond to defeat, using as case studies the American South after the Civil War, France after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and Germany after World War I.

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The phrase "im Felde unbesiegt" — undefeated in the field of battle — consoled the Germans after 1918. In certain respects they were right. When the German High Command sued for an armistice, that country’s armies remained implanted on French soil. A year after the war, this consoling fact melded with the canard that spineless politicians in Berlin had "stabbed the army in the back" by agreeing to an ignominious peace.

Another commentary on the failure of the General Assembly.

Consistent with Thomas Jefferson’s prediction of an "empire of liberty," and contrary to present appearances, American ideals like democracy and freedom probably have played a greater part in the spread of our influence than have nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and smart bombs.

Martin apparently didn’t see the report of Jordan fathering a child out of wedlock.

White supremacist David Duke visited the tiny Persian Gulf kingdom of Bahrain in November at the invitation of Discover Islam, a local organization whose mission is, ironically, building cross-cultural understanding between Westerners and Muslims.

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The international arena is rife with hostility toward both the United States and Israel, and that offers plenty of platforms for Duke’s views, which are harshly critical of both countries. In Duke’s universe, the Jews and Israel are the roots of all evil, and the United States bears the ultimate blame for Sept. 11 because of its support for Israel. U.S. foreign policy—including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—is the result of Israeli manipulation. For Duke, supporting it amounts to treason.

• “Protesters are wrong.”
  Larry W. Mullen of Prattsville criticizes “anti-war” protestors.

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