W Didn't listen to his pappy

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Politics (A Word Transformed): "there was no viable 'exit strategy' we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different --and perhaps barren --outcome. "


...and then there was the admonition, "Whatever you do, son, DON'T PEAK TOO SOON!"

Friedman Can Dream On

Op-Ed Columnist: Awaking to a Dream: "I am so hungry for a positive surprise. I am so hungry to hear a politician, a statesman, a business leader surprise me in a good way. It has been so long. It's been over 10 years since Yitzhak Rabin thrust out his hand to Yasir Arafat on the White House lawn. Yes, yes, I know, Arafat turned out to be a fraud. But for a brief, shining moment, an old warrior, Mr. Rabin, stepped out of himself, his past, and all his scar tissue, and imagined something different. It's been a long time.
I have this routine. I get up every morning around 6 a.m., fire up my computer, call up AOL's news page and then hold my breath to see what outrage has happened in the world overnight. A massive bombing in Iraq or Madrid? More murderous violence in Israel? A hotel going up in flames in Bali or a synagogue in Istanbul? More U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq?
I so hunger to wake up and be surprised with some really good news пїЅ by someone who totally steps out of himself or herself, imagines something different and thrusts out a hand.
I want to wake up and read that President Bush has decided to offer a real alternative to the stalled Kyoto Protocol to reduce global warming. I want to wake up and read that 10,000 Palestinian mothers marched on Hamas headquarters to demand that their sons and daughters never again be recruited for suicide bombings. I want to wake up and read that Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia invited Ariel Sharon to his home in Riyadh to personally hand him the Abdullah peace plan and Mr. Sharon responded by freezing Israeli settlements as a good-will gesture.
I want to wake up and read that General Motors has decided it will no longer make gas-guzzling Hummers and President Bush has decided to replace his limousine with an armor-plated Toyota Prius, a hybrid car that gets over "

911 Whisteblowers that got FIRED

Michael Springman

WHO: Twenty-year State Department veteran, and former head of the visa bureau in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

CLAIM: He was repeatedly overruled by high-level State Department officials to issue visas to bin Laden recruits so they could receive training in the United States. Says this continued at least until the summer of 2001. (Notably, 15 of the 9/11 hijackers first entered the US through Jeddah.) Springman protested.

RESULT: Fired. Springman says he believes that the victims of 9/11 "may have been sacrificed in order to further wider US geopolitical objectives."
www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=104&row=1
sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2002/02/521.shtml
radio.cbc.ca/programs/dispatches/audio/020116_springman.rm


Sibel Edmonds

WHO: FBI translator

CLAIM: That a Turkish "spy ring" operated in the translation department with the apparent protection of FBI brass, falsifying intercepts containing explicit, actionable warnings of 9/11. That members of this ring were involved with the subjects of the intercepts. And that high-ranking officials asked her to falsify her translations and bribed her to keep quiet.

RESULT: Fired. After taking concerns to upper management, was dismissed with only one reason offered: "for the convenience of the government." Escorted from building by agents who said "We will be watching you and listening to you. If you dare to consult an attorney who is not approved by the FBI, or if you take this issue outside the FBI to the Senate, the next time I see you, it will be in jail." Told by John Ashcroft that he was invoking "State Secret Privilege and National Security" to keep what she knows from reaching the public.
www.thememoryhole.org/spy/edmonds.htm
www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=8516
tomflocco.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=50

Robert Wright

WHO: FBI special investigator

CLAIM: That FBI agents assigned to intelligence operations actually protect terrorists from investigation and prosecution. That the FBI shut down his probe into terrorist training camps, and he was removed from a money-laundering case that had a direct link to terrorism. Says the FBI "intentionally and repeatedly thwarted his attempts to launch a more comprehensive investigation to identify and neutralize terrorists."

RESULT: Suspended and ordered to remain silent. Subject of at least three internal FBI investigations. Has written a book that the FBI is not only refusing to allow publication, but is not permitting anyone to even see it.
www.judicialwatch.org/printer_2469.shtml
www.laweekly.com/ink/02/37/news-crogan.php


Lt. Col. Steve Butler

WHO: Vice Chancellor for student affairs, Defense Language Institute in Monterey.

CLAIM: In a letter to the editor of a local paper, Butler wrote "Bush knew of the impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism. What is...contemptible is the President of the United States not telling the American people what he knows for political gain." During Butler’s term as chancellor, 9/11 hijacker Saeed Alghamdi was enrolled at the Defense Language Institute.

RESULT: Disciplined, lost his position and threatened with court martial.
www.mercurynews.com/mld/mcherald/3406502.htm
www.truthout.org/docs_02/06.06E.butler.bush.htm
raleigh.craigslist.org/com/21220698.html

Indira Singh

WHO: "Risk architect" consultant to JP Morgan Chase.

CLAIM: That Ptech, a software company founded by a Saudi financier on the terrorist watch list, had troubling access to sensitive US institutions, which was apparently of no concern to the institutions involved or the FBI. For instance, a "person of interest" from Ptech “had a team in the basement of the FAA for two years” before 9/11. One of Ptech’s projects gained it access to "all information processes and issues that the FAA had with the National Airspace Systems Agency."

RESULT: Warnings went ignored by institutions and the FBI. Told to keep quiet. Subject to surveillance and threats.
www.madcowprod.com/index45.html


Colleen Rowley

WHO: FBI field agent, Minnesota office.

CLAIM: That FBI head office perversely thwarted the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, throwing up unusual roadblocks which prevented exposing the terrorist use of flight schools in the summer of 2001. That Dave Frasca of the Radical Fundamentalism Unit altered her report, rendering it impossible for the FBI to pursue the matter further.

RESULT: After 9/11, Frasca – the senior official who altered Rowley’s report and sat on the Minnesota office's request to investigate flight schools, even though he had received a similar request from the Phoenix office – is promoted and commended.
www.time.com/time/covers/1101020603/memo.html
www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MOO208B.html

John O’Neil

WHO: Former FBI head of antiterrorism.

CLAIM: That his investigations into al Qaeda in general and the Cole bombing in particular were subverted by senior officials, and the situation had become much worse under Bush. Authorisation to re-enter Yemen to investigate the Cole denied by US Ambassador Barbara Bodine. Quit the FBI under a cloud.

RESULT: Killed in the World Trade Center. [OK, he wasn't fired exactly]
www.hereinreality.com/johnoneill.html
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/knew/

Lt. Gen. Donald Kerrick

He worked for Clinton and was carried over into the Bush madministration. Seymour Hersh reported he quit when Smirk and Sneer paid no heed to terrorism. A few months later -- 9-11.

From an interview with Will Pitt of DU and TruthOut.org:

Interview: Sidney Blumenthal with William Rivers Pitt

t r u t h o u t | Interview, Monday 08 December 2003

EXCERPT...

On terrorism, they assigned the matter to Vice President Dick Cheney “for study.” Anyone who has been in government knows that when you do that, you are essentially taking it off the table and not taking it seriously. As I reported in my book, Donald Kerrick, who is a three-star general, was a deputy National Security Advisor in the late Clinton administration. He stayed on into the Bush administration. He was absolutely not political. He was a general. He told me that when the Bush people came in, he wrote a memo about terrorism, al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. The memo said, “We will be struck again.” As a result of writing that memo, he was not invited to any more meetings. No one responded to his memo. He felt that, from what he could see from inside the National Security Council, terrorism was demoted.

Hardball lives up to its name ...

Judging by how he took on Bush campaign advisor Tucker Eskew last nite, apparently Matthews isn't rejecting that vertebrae transplant ...


MATTHEWS: There�s a riff of four or five jokes where he made fun of the fact he couldn�t find weapons of mass destruction.

Now, the reason I raise this is, we were just over at Walter Reed. There is like almost more than 3,000 seriously injured guys, amputees, the people that fought that war thinking they were protecting this country from weapons of mass destruction. They weren�t because the guy didn�t have any weapons of mass destruction.

(CROSSTALK)

ESKEW: They did.

MATTHEWS: They did what? They protected us from weapons of mass destruction?

(CROSSTALK)

ESKEW: They protected us from Saddam Hussein.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: But not weapons of mass destruction, which was the case made to them and their families.

ESKEW: It was a case made.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: A case?

ESKEW: It was a case.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: What was the other case made before the war?

ESKEW: Oh, come on, Chris.

MATTHEWS: Before the war.

ESKEW: Before the war.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: To Europe, to the world.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: When we went to U.N., the case was they, had weapons of mass destruction.

ESKEW: That was a central part of the case. It was at the forefront of the case.

MATTHEWS: Well, it�s not true.

ESKEW: And it remains at the forefront of the case.

MATTHEWS: It does? How?

ESKEW: Of course it does.

MATTHEWS: How does it still become an issue for the war?

ESKEW: Because I think the president has made clear that we disarmed

a dictator, an evil man who had the capacity

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Without the weapons, he was just evil. But he wasn�t a threat to us, was he?

(CROSSTALK)

ESKEW: He was the same sort of threat to George W. Bush that John Kerry acknowledged that he was over and over and over again.

MATTHEWS: You�re shifting here.

ESKEW: No, I�m not. I think the case is that the American—bipartisan—on a bipartisan basis, the American leadership in this country understood the man.

MATTHEWS: Nice try.

ESKEW: Come on, Chris.

MATTHEWS: When you come up with the evidence, you�ll have the case made for the war. The case for the war was, they were dangerous to us because they might use nuclear. They might use nuclear. They might use biological or chemical against us. We have a Department of Defense, not offense or war. It�s called the Department of Defense.

ESKEW: I think there will be a debate in this campaign about whether or not we�ll be on offense.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: If you can�t show that we went to war to defend this country, you got a problem on your hands.

ESKEW: I can say the president will make the case that we went on offense, not only against terrorists in Afghanistan, but against...

MATTHEWS: Oh, offense. So are we going to call it the Department of Offense now or defense?

(CROSSTALK)

ESKEW: Well, we�re going to fight it as a war. John Kerry has said he wants to fight it as a law enforcement action.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: So you hold to the argument as a spokesman for the president that the president of the United States was right last night to make fun of the issue of why he went to war?

ESKEW: Listen, you can put it in that context, Chris.

MATTHEWS: Four jokes.

ESKEW: The president—come on. The president has talked about WMD over and over and over again, since David Kay reported and before.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Would you have him tell those jokes as he tours the hospitals?

(CROSSTALK)

ESKEW: He tours the hospitals an awful lot. He doesn�t need a lesson in compassion toward the American soldiers, Chris.

MATTHEWS: No, it�s just he has a—maybe there�s a question here of taste.

ESKEW: I think the president has very good taste.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: You felt the jokes were right?

ESKEW: That�s self-deprecation, Chris. I think you misinterpret it.

MATTHEWS: So you think the guys who got hurt and killed in this war thought it was funny?

ESKEW: I wouldn�t say that and I don�t think you really mean that.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: I just don�t think it was funny. I was there last night.

I didn�t think it was funny.


http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4605173/

Defining your terms: Terrorist

I haven't been happy with the definitions I've seen. This seems to fill the bill:

Terrorist: one who attacks civilians with the intention of instilling terror in the general population to further a political agenda.


...Got a problem widdat?

The Next Sound You Hear

may be a crash...

"the question is not if we are going to have more attacks on U.S. soil, but when. That may not be news, but it is clear Americans are in denial about this truth, and that denial, unfortunately, will set you up for failure in your personal finance.

As a result of the Afghan and Iraq wars the global political landscape has become more destabilized than before. The Israeli roadmap for peace has collapsed. The Pakistani offensive against al-Qaida now looks like a farce. And the post-Madrid television warnings from bin Ladin's mastermind al-Zawahiri that "death brigades" are 90 percent in place to carry out new terrorists' attacks inside America's borders have an ominous promissory ring to them, as did the warnings of the blind cleric during his trial after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

So the "when" we heard from Buffett and Rumsfeld appears much closer on our radar than a few years ago. Indeed, the current 9/11 hearings reveal an inept government intelligence system that can easily be outwitted by determined terrorists armed with low-tech weapons focusing on new and unsuspecting targets.

...

we are already mired in World War III, a global cultural war that has been accelerating for over a decade, and we must fight enemies who have made it clear in no uncertain terms that they will be trying to kill us and our way of life for generations. "

http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?siteid=mktw&dist=nwtpf&guid=%7BC3CD16F6%2D9FFA%2D4142%2D8F85%2D47A5A20824DD%7D

...I'm sure if I looked hard enough, I could find someone with a more pessimistic outlook but why bother?

They must all be liars

Politics - World - s.f. bayarea forums - craigslist: "They must all be liars < RoughJustice > 03/26 07:57:02

Alterman is replaced by pod pundit: 'Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, Max Cleland, Paul OпїЅNeill, General Zinni, and Dick Clarke are all unpatriotic liars and weenies right? Has to be true; otherwise, this administration is both incompetent and dishonest. And thatпїЅs not possible. I mean, on the one hand we have people who have given their entire careers to serving the American people and in many cases, paid dearly for it. On the other, we have a guy who didnпїЅt bother to show up for his cushy National Guard service during a war he supported, spent most of his first forty years drinking and carousing, and having been made wealthy by his fatherпїЅs associates, fell into the job of president where he (undeniably) misled his country into a war based on falsified evidence. Gee thatпїЅs a hard one. ...

msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/"

Outsourcing is a chicken coming home to roost

And she's a monster...

"The real solution to outsourcing
Equipping all of America's students to compete

Marshall Loeb writes: (CBS.MW) -- Beneath the passionate debate over U.S. companies outsourcing jobs to low-wage foreign workers in far-off countries lies a new and worrisome truth: They're gaining on us.

People in the Third World are rapidly acquiring the skills and knowledge needed to close the gap in the great competitive race against the U.S. It is the race to win -- and hold -- markets around the world.

Robert Hormats, vice chairman (International) of Goldman, Sachs, sums up the issue: "Historically, developing countries have been competing against us on the basis of cheap wages. Now, increasingly, they are competing against us on the basis of high-quality goods. We don't have much alternative to raising the quality of our work force. The answer to the challenge of outsourcing is to address the problems of education and training that we have at home."

In other words, the way to combat outsourcing is not to slap tariffs or import quotas on foreign goods, not to bar U.S. companies from producing their goods and services as efficiently and inexpensively as they can, but to equip American students with the skills and knowledge required to beat the competition in the Darwinian global economy.

That is being done -- but only for part of America's students. U.S. universities are unquestionably the world's best -- not only those of the Ivy League and other elite private schools, but also good old State U. They attract striving students from the world over.

Many suburban and private high schools and primary schools also rank high.

Too many left behind

But not so the public schools in a distressing number of America's big cities and rural communities. The hard truth is that too many of them have produced a generation of semiliterate students.

As our economy grows more competitive and complex, the U.S. is rapidly -- and perhaps dangerously -- becoming two nations.

One America is educated, skilled, confident, secure, equipped to compete in the new global economy. But the other America is undereducated, unskilled, demoralized. Its people, in the urban ghettos and the rural hollows, fall farther and farther behind.

One of our nation's basic challenges is to find the means for the American underclass to lift themselves out of their economic and educational slough. The harsh reality is that many of our public primary and secondary schools are just not educating our young people to get jobs and hold onto them, or even to begin to cope with the increasingly complicated demands of the modern, global economy. Until they do, outsourcing will be a major migraine.

We are not going to end this crisis simply by throwing money at it. But if you think we, the people, can solve it without spending more tax money, think again:

We will have to lengthen the time that the schools are kept open, perhaps from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. every working day and for a full 12 months every year. We will have to give millions of American kids a place to go and something constructive to do while both of their parents work.
We will have to put a higher premium on being a schoolteacher and we'll have to give that job a loftier status, as it now has in Europe, Asia and elsewhere abroad.
We will have to make teachers more accountable for their work. The educational system must be far more willing to weed out ineffective teachers and reward the superior ones.
We will have to adopt national standards for our students to meet and national testing to measure their performance. The key reason is that if and when they get their jobs, they will be competing not so much against workers in the next town or the nearest big city or the next state but against workers from just about any part of the world.
At the elementary school and high school level, we are not winning the education competition. Goldman Sachs's Hormats points out that when essentially the same math and science tests are given to students from many countries, the U.S. typically hovers around the middle. When compared with students from European and Asian countries, the U.S. ranks low.

Business must lead

If this situation is to be rescued, private business must help take the lead in improving public schools. Business has the talent, the treasure and, yes, the political influence to help change our schools in a most dramatic way.

As an opening step, our business leaders -- those who do the hiring -- should speak up. They need to tell local education officials just what sort of training graduates will need in order for companies to hire them. We need graduates who have a firm grounding in four basic subjects: reading, writing, mathematics and computer sciences.

We are entering an era when whole countries and individual companies will be valued and rewarded according to the quality and exercise of their brainpower. The most valuable form of capital will be human capital, the intelligence and ideas, the resourcefulness and industriousness of a nation's people.

Companies and other institutions will climb or fall along with their ability to seize upon new ideas, to carve out and capture new markets, to invest wisely in research, and to turn research into useful, marketable, urgently demanded goods and services and to make steady, incremental, day-to-day improvements in their products and services. Steadily improving education will go far to create all that.

As Hormats says, "Either we rise or we sink. Every time we have faced global competition, we have prevailed. There is no reason why we can't do it this time."

http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?siteid=mktw&dist=nwtpf&guid=%7BFF6419F0%2D482C%2D4F4B%2D9E49%2DF3AFC010A07C%7D

Documentation of warning ignored

"(CBS) Two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, an analysis prepared for U.S. intelligence warned that Osama bin Laden's terrorists could hijack an airliner and fly it into government buildings like the Pentagon.

"Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House," the September 1999 report said.

www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/18/attack/main509488.shtml

The Bush administration has asserted that no one in government had envisioned a suicide hijacking before it happened.

"Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people," Mr. Bush told U.S. Air Force Academy football team members.

"What it shows is that this information that was out there did not raise enough alarm with anybody," Fleischer acknowledged.


Bush, Powell and Rumsfeld have been using carefully crafted "legal" statements this week in which they say that had they known planes were to be hijacked and flown SPECIFICALLY into the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon, they would have taken steps to prevent the incidents.
They knew and did nothing. "

www.buzzflash.com/editorial/04/03/edi04021.html

... I prefer the less confrontational "They should have known and failed to act."

"We decide, you vote accordingly"

FOX gets caught playing fast & loose with quotes ...

Here's former Reagan Navy Secretary John Lehmann ...

I never got Jim Thompson to stand before 50 photographers reading your book. And I certainly never got 60 Minutes to coordinate the showing of its interview with you with 15 network news broadcasts, the selling of the movie rights, and your appearance here today. So I would say, Bravo. (LAUGHTER) Until I started reading those press reports, and I said this can't be the same Dick Clarke that testified before us, because all of the promotional material and all of the spin in the networks was that this is a rounding, devastating attack -- this book -- on President Bush. That's not what I heard in the interviews. And I hope you're going to tell me, as you apologized to the families for all of us who were involved in national security, that this tremendous difference -- and not just in nuance, but in the stories you choose to tell -- is really the result of your editors and your promoters, rather than your studied judgment, because it is so different from the whole thrust of your testimony to us. And similarly, when you add to it the inconsistency between what your promoters are putting out and what you yourself said as late as August '05, you've got a real credibility problem. And because of my real genuine long-term admiration for you, I hope you'll resolve that credibility problem, because I'd hate to see you become totally shoved to one side during a presidential campaign as an active partisan selling a book.

Here's how Fox News described Lehmann's comment ...

"You've got a real credibility problem," John Lehman, former Navy secretary under President Reagan, told Clarke, calling the witness "an active partisan selling a book."

Clarke responded: "I don't think it's a question of morality at all, I think it's a question of politics."



Now, get a load of this Clarke guy! Okay, wait, don't get a load of him yet. Lehmann's broadside was harsh enough. Did Fox accurately portray what Lehmann said? I'll let you decide.

Okay, now ... get a load of this Clarke guy! Lehmann accuses him of all this terrible stuff. And this character Clarke comes back with, "Hey buddy, morality, shmorality. It's all politics to me!"

Hmmm. Actually, that wasn't his response. That was his response to a completely different exchange, which came later ...

THOMPSON: Mr. Clarke, in this background briefing, as Senator Kerrey has now described it, for the press in August of 2002, you intended to mislead the press, did you not?
CLARKE: No. I think there is a very fine line that anyone who's been in the White House, in any administration, can tell you about. And that is when you are special assistant to the president and you're asked to explain something that is potentially embarrassing to the administration, because the administration didn't do enough or didn't do it in a timely manner and is taking political heat for it, as was the case there, you have a choice. Actually, I think you have three choices. You can resign rather than do it. I chose not to do that. Second choice is...


THOMPSON: Why was that, Mr. Clarke? You finally resigned because you were frustrated.

CLARKE: I was, at that time, at the request of the president, preparing a national strategy to defend America's cyberspace, something which I thought then and think now is vitally important. I thought that completing that strategy was a lot more important than whether or not I had to provide emphasis in one place or other while discussing the facts on this particular news story. The second choice one has, Governor, is whether or not to say things that are untruthful. And no one in the Bush White House asked me to say things that were untruthful, and I would not have said them. In any event, the third choice that one has is to put the best face you can for the administration on the facts as they were, and that is what I did. I think that is what most people in the White House in any administration do when they're asked to explain something that is embarrassing to the administration.

THOMPSON: But you will admit that what you said in August of 2002 is inconsistent with what you say in your book?

CLARKE: No, I don't think it's inconsistent at all. I think, as I said in your last round of questioning, Governor, that it's really a matter here of emphasis and tone. I mean, what you're suggesting, perhaps, is that as special assistant to the president of the United States when asked to give a press backgrounder I should spend my time in that press backgrounder criticizing him. I think that's somewhat of an unrealistic thing to expect.

THOMPSON: Well, what it suggests to me is that there is one standard of candor and morality for White House special assistants and another standard of candor and morality for the rest of America. I don't get that.

CLARKE: I don't think it's a question of morality at all. I think it's a question of politics.


http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_03_21.php#002761

When someone says Martha Stewart had it coming, you gotta ask

aren't there bigger crooks out there in dire need of investigation?

CBS News | Bush Sold Stock Despite Promise | July 16, 2002пїЅ15:01:38: "(CBS MarketWatch) Two and a half months before George W. Bush sold his stock in Harken Energy Corp., he signed a 'lockup' letter promising to hold onto the shares for at least six months, according to internal company documents obtained by the Washington Post.

The Post reported late Tuesday that the letter, signed by Bush on April 3, 1990, is now being compared with the account his lawyers gave federal securities regulators who examined the stock sale as a possible insider trade.

According to the Post story, the letter Bush signed promising to hold onto the stock was released by the Securities and Exchange Commission under the Freedom of Information Act. At the time he signed it, Harken was considering a public stock offering to raise money to solve a cash flow problem.

The President's lawyers have said that Bush had a pre-existing plan to sell his stock in Harken and other companies to pay a tax bill and a loan he owed for his stake in the Texas Rangers ball team.

In June 1990, Bush sold about $850,000 in shares of Harken, just weeks before the oil and gas company reported an unexpected loss. Eventually, the SEC forced Harken to restate its financials to show a loss of $12.6 million for 1989, disallowing the accounting it used for the sale of a subsidiary to a group of insiders."

Those Wacky Scots

Ya think maybe they're mad cuz he let 3 of em get away??? Or maybe for performing surgery without a license?...

Scotsman.com News - Latest News - Man Who Killed Armed Intruder Jailed Eight Years: "Man Who Killed Armed Intruder Jailed Eight Years
A man who stabbed to death an armed intruder at his home was jailed for eight years today.

Carl Lindsay, 25, answered a knock at his door in Salford, Greater Manchester, to find four men armed with a gun.

When the gang tried to rob him he grabbed a samurai sword and stabbed one of them, 37-year-old Stephen Swindells, four times.

Mr Swindells, of Salford, was later found collapsed in an alley and died in hospital.

Lindsay, of Walkden, was found guilty of manslaughter following a three-week trial at Manchester Crown Court.

He was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment.

After the case, Detective Chief Inspector Sam Haworth said: “Four men, including the victim, had set out purposefully to rob Carl Lindsay and this intent ultimately led to Stephen Swindells’ death.

“I believe the sentences passed today reflect the severity of the circumstances.”

Three other men were charged with robbery and firearms offences in connection with the incident, which took place in February last year.


http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2687311

... Write Congress! Write Blair! Free Carl Lindsay NOW!

No Drug Company Left Behind

(CBS.MW) -- The Medicare program will be forced to dip into its trust fund this year and will be insolvent by 2019, seven years earlier than previously forecast, if it continues on its current path, government-appointed trustees warned in their annual report Tuesday.

"The financial outlook for the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund that pays hospital benefits has deteriorated significantly from last year, with annual cash flow deficits beginning this year and expected to grow rapidly after 2010 as baby boomers begin to retire," the report said....

The enactment of the Medicare prescription drug bill -- pegged at a cost of $534 billion by the Bush administration over the next decade -- helped push the Medicare insolvency date forward by two years, the trustees found."


...Got a problem widdat?

OttawaCitizen questions Sharon's judgement

and finds it acceptable ...

Ottawa - canada.com network: After reviewing Yassin's particularly nasty habit of encouraging and glorifying mass slaughter, they get down to the Brass Tack: "Could it be that the benefits of eliminating Mr. Yassin are outweighed by the costs, such as renewed terrorism and international criticism?

We don't think so. Killing Mr. Yassin hasn't made Israel more vulnerable to attack. For Hamas, the fact of Israel's existence was always sufficient motive. When Israel elects left-wing governments, Hamas sees it as a sign of weakness and calls for more martyrs. When Israel elects hawkish governments, Hamas sees it as provocation and calls for more martyrs..."

Quotations About Killing of Hamas Leader

Some comments after Israel's killing of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin:

"Israel has been the embodiment of restraint -- How long do you think the US would dick around with Mexico if scores of Mexicans were wandering around blowing up American malls and pizza parlors? " - RoughJustice

"The war against terror has not ended and will continue day after day, everywhere. ... This is a difficult struggle that all the countries of the enlightened world must participate in. It is the natural right of the Jewish people, like that of all nations in the world that love life, to hunt down those who rise to destroy it." - Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

"The operation attests to complete lunacy. The decision came from the gut and not from the head." - Avshalom Vilan, a lawmaker from Israel's dovish Yahad Party.

"This is one of the biggest crimes that the Israeli government has committed." - Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia.

Yasser Arafat "is like a man who was hit on the head because they killed Yassin and now they could kill him. He feels his turn is next and he is sad and worried." - an aide to Arafat, describing the Palestinian leader's reaction.

"Yassin is a man in a nation, and a nation in a man. And the retaliation of this nation will be of the size of this man. ... You will see deeds not words." - Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi.

"The Zionists didn't carry out their operation without getting the consent of the terrorist American administration, and it must take responsibility for this crime." - Hamas statement.

"We are deeply troubled by this morning's incident in Gaza." - White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

"What peace process, when the situation is on fire? Nobody would have imagined that matters would go this far. ... Its repercussions are unknown." - President Hosni Mubarak, on how the assassination would affect the Israel-Palestinian peace process.

"We are annoyed and pained by what happened despite our arduous and persistent efforts with all sides, including the Israeli government, to refrain from its policy of military escalation." - King Abdullah II of Jordan.

Israel has the right to protect itself against terrorist attacks, but "is not, however, entitled to carry out extra-judicial killings." Yassin's assassination "has inflamed the situation ... Violence is no substitute for the political negotiations which are necessary for a just and lasting settlement." - European Union foreign ministers' statement.

Red States: the New Welfare

The Carpetbagger Report: 'Givers and Takers': "Givers, Pink explains, are those states that contribute more to the federal government in taxes than it receives in federal spending. In other words, for every dollar a taxpayer in Minnesota sends to Washington, he or she receives only 77 cents in return. Takers, meanwhile, are the opposite, receiving more in federal spending than it pays in federal taxes. North Dakota, for example, has a return of $2.07 for every dollar paid in taxes.
There are 33 'Taker' states, 16 'Giver' states, and one -- Indiana -- that breaks exactly even with a one-to-one ratio.
But that's not the fun part. The angle Pink emphasized is how Givers and Takers vote. Pink explained:
The Democrats' electability predicament comes into focus when you compare the map of Giver and Taker states with the well-worn electoral map of red (Republican) and blue (Democrat) states. You might expect that in the 2000 presidential election, Republicans, the party of low taxes and limited government, would have carried the Giver states -- while Democrats, the party of wild spending and wooly bureaucracy, would have appealed to the Taker states. But it was the reverse. George W. Bush was the candidate of the Taker states. Al Gore was the candidate of the Giver states.
Consider:
78 percent of Mr. Bush's electoral votes came from Taker states.
76 percent of Mr. Gore's electoral votes came from Giver states.
Of the 33 Taker states, Mr. Bush carried 25.
Of the 16 Giver states, Mr. Gore carried 12.
Juxtaposing these maps provides a new perspective on the political landscape.... Republicans seem to have become the new welfare party -- their constituents live off tax dollars paid by people who vote Democratic. Of course, not all federal spending is wasteful. But Republicans are having their pork and eating it too. Voters in red states like Idaho, Montana and Wyoming are some of the country's fiercest critics of government, yet they're also among the biggest recipients of federal largess. Meanwhile, Democratic voters in the coastal blue states -- the ones who are often portrayed as shiftless moochers -- are left to carry the load...

Is there a way out for Democrats? Maybe not. With Republicans holding the purse strings, it's the Democrats who are being taken.

Wait, does this mean that conservatives and GOP activists who rail against government, taxes, and federal spending are actually shameless hypocrites who enjoy feeding at the public trough? "

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/001167.html

...or is it just a quirk and red states have been sucking on the public teat at the expense of blues year in and year out, in Democrat and GOP administrations? In other words, has the imbalance changed since Dubya took office?

The bottom line on Kerry's "secret friends"

I think Kerry is probably telling the truth but what kind of idiot makes that kind of claim if he's not willing to back it up?

A: yet another Massachussetts liberal idiot destined to be roadkill under the Bush steamroller

He's not burnt toast yet, but the selector knob is already set to "dark"

Kiss that bullet train bye-bye

'America's Risky Rails
Why the government is investing so much in airline security while leaving trains vulnerable
By AMANDA RIPLEY



Monday, Mar. 22, 2004
Anyone who has boarded an Amtrak train since Sept. 11, 2001, must wonder how long the delusion can last. How easy it is to waltz into a teeming station 10 minutes before departure, pull your ticket from a machine and glide onto the train without any inspection of your ID or your bags. Your shoes are of no interest to anyone. It's as if Amtrak has been exempted from modernity, and all the fuzzy charm of taking the train remains untouched by time. '

www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040322-600882,00.html

... if ever there was a technology with a bulls-eye painted on it, it's high speed rail

Don't sell those junk bonds!

Interest rate hikes keep receding beyond the horizon so hold on to those ARMs and hi-yield securities, and you don't need to rush the refi...

March 17, 2004 | WASHINGTON (AP) -- Extra-low borrowing costs are likely to stick around through most of the year as the anemic jobs market restrains the Federal Reserve from raising short-term interest rates.
That was the view expressed by a growing number of private economists after Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and his colleagues said Tuesday they can be 'patient' in ordering rate increases. Fed policy-makers said that 'new hiring has lagged' even though the economy is growing solidly.

'Don't expect the Fed to raise rates anytime before the election unless we get an unexpected multi-month pop in payrolls and a rise in inflation,' said Sherry Cooper, chief economist at BMO Nesbitt Burns. 'Even a rate hike in November or December seems to be a long shot now.'

... bummer about the job search. Pass me the Grey Poupon.

Nader: What Impact?

God, I hope the Zogman is right ...

James J. Zogby
March 9, 2004

"...how national polls would be impacted by his decision to enter the 2004 presidential contest. The early results are now in and it appears that, at least at this point, Nader takes some support from the Democrat, Senator John Kerry. Without Nader in the race, most polls are showing Kerry leading over Republican incumbent President George W. Bush by one to four points. When Nader's name is added, however, the polls show Bush beating Kerry by one or two points.

In many ways, this year's contest may be a replay of 2000's presidential match up.
...But now for a reality check: This year's election will be like 2000's race in only one way; it will be close. Voters are already showing signs of being evenly divided. What is different is the intensity of the division between those who support George W. Bush's reelection and those who support John Kerry. It appears, even at this early point, that both Bush and Kerry are each guaranteed at least 45% of the vote leaving less than 10 percent still to be decided. While early polls show Nader picking up some of that undecided vote, I believe that as we get closer to the November election those voters will make a decision between Bush or Kerry, ultimately leaving Nader with less than one percent of the overall vote. "

http://aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2004%20opinions/March/9%20o/Nader%20What%20Impact%20James%20J.%20Zogby.htm





...Got a problem widdat?

Careful what you say, carefuller whut u write

Headline: "Pot calls fridge black!"

 
http://forums.craigslist.org/?ID=13261076

or just pop over to http://www.myimgs.com/data/jmopics/moran.jpg since Blogspot is putting up an "out of bandwidth" warning

...Got a problem widdat?

Feeling a draft?

Washington -- The government is taking the first steps toward a targeted military draft of Americans with special skills in computers and foreign languages.

The Selective Service System has begun the process of creating the procedures and policies to conduct such a targeted draft in case military officials ask Congress to authorize it and the lawmakers agree to such a request.

Richard Flahavan, a spokesman for the Selective Service System, said planning for a possible draft of linguists and computer experts had begun last fall after Pentagon personnel officials said the military needed more people with skills in those areas.

"Talking to the manpower folks at the Department of Defense and others, what came up was that nobody foresees a need for a large conventional draft such as we had in Vietnam," Flahavan said. "But they thought that if we have any kind of a draft, it will probably be a special skills draft."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said he would not ask Congress to authorize a draft, and officials at the Selective Service System, the independent federal agency that would organize any conscription, stress that the possibility of a so-called "special skills draft" is likely far off.

A targeted registration and draft is "is strictly in the planning stage," said Flahavan, adding that "the whole thing is driven by what appears to be the more pressing and relevant need today" -- the deficit in language and computer experts.


http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/03/13/MNG905K1BC1.DTL

And the Let Them Eat Cake Award goes to ...

Antonin Scalia! ...

from the Washington Times, no liberal rag: Scalia spends so much time stumping for his wack-o views (and duck hunting with Cheney)he can't be bothered to show up to vote in court. But the last line here is simply vintage Antoinette: "The Sixth Amendment gave even indigent defendants the right to an attorney, but the framers never meant to have government pay for the service"

"WASHINGTON, March 10 (UPI) -- Justice Antonin Scalia was giving a speech in New Orleans Tuesday and, unlike the rest of the Supreme Court, did not consider a death stay request from an Oklahoma inmate -- one more sign that his outside activities might be seriously interfering with his duties as a justice.

According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Scalia was giving a speech Tuesday at a conference sponsored by the Louisiana Organization for Judicial Excellence, based in Baton Rouge. Times-Picayune writer Gwen Filosa said the organization "advocates merit selection of judges -- a system that typically involves a governor picking a state district or appeals judge from a list of names winnowed by a blue-ribbon commission -- rather than direct elections."

There was no indication that Scalia was so busy with the speech that he did not have time to properly consider Brown's documents. Justices usually participate in votes on death stays, no matter where they are or what they are doing. Modern communication allows them to cast votes from Europe or Asia, even during the height of the summer recess, while clerks back in Washington handle the paper work.

One tenuous clue as to why Scalia did not participate in the Brown vote may be found in the text of his New Orleans speech. Scalia criticized activist judges across a broad range of issues. Among the targets of his criticisms was how the courts interpret the Sixth Amendment. The Sixth Amendment gave even indigent defendants the right to an attorney, but the framers never meant to have government pay for the service, Scalia told his audience. "

washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040310-111004-6156r.htm

Unasked Question Dept: Secret flights from Konduz

Rummy, you got some 'splainin to do...

"HERSH: Okay, the cream of the crop of Al Qaeda caught in a town called Konduz which is near ... it's one little village and it's a couple hundred kilometers, 150 miles from the border of Pakistan. And I learned this story frankly-- through very, very clandestine operatives we have in the Delta Force and other very...

We were operating very heavily with a small number of men, three, 400 really in the first days of the war. And suddenly one night when they had everybody cornered in Konduz-- the special forces people were told there was a corridor that they could not fly in. There was a corridor sealed off to-- the United States military sealed off a corridor. And it was nobody could shoot anybody in this little lane that went from Konduz into Pakistan. And that's how I learned about it. I learned about it from a military guy who wanted to fly helicopters and kill people and couldn't do it that day.

JANE WALLACE: So, we had the enemy surrounded, the special forces guys are helping surround this enemy.

SY HERSH: They're whacking everybody they can whack that looks like a bad guy.

JANE WALLACE: And suddenly they're told to back off--

SY HERSH: From a certain area--

JANE WALLACE: -- and let planes fly out to Pakistan.

SY HERSH: There was about a three or four nights in which I can tell you maybe six, eight, 10, maybe 12 more-- or more heavily weighted-- Pakistani military planes flew out with an estimated-- no less than 2,500 maybe 3,000, maybe mmore. I've heard as many as four or 5,000. They were not only-- Al Qaeda but they were also-- you see the Pakistani ISI was-- the military advised us to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. There were dozens of senior Pakistani military officers including two generals who flew out.

And I also learned after I wrote this story that maybe even some of Bin Laden's immediate family were flown out on the those evacuations. We allowed them to evacuate. We had an evacuation.

JANE WALLACE: How high up was that evacuation authorized?

SY HERSH: I am here to tell you it was authorized — Donald Rumsfeld who — we'll talk about what he said later — it had to be authorized at the White House. But certainly at the Secretary of Defense level.

JANE WALLACE: The Department of Defense said to us that they were not involved and that they don't have any knowledge of that operation.

SY HERSH: That's what Rumsfeld said when they asked him but it. And he said, "Gee, really?" He said, "News to me." Which is not a denial, it's sort of interesting. You know,

JANE WALLACE: What did we do that? Why we would put our special forces guys on the ground, surround the enemy, and then-- fly him out?

...The initial plan was to take out the Pakistani military. What happened is that they took out al Qaeda with them. And we had no way of stopping it. We lost control. Once there planes began to go, the Pakistanis began-- thousands of al Qaeda got out. And so-- we weren't able to stop it and screen it. The intent wasn't to let al Qaeda out. It was to protect the Pakistani military. "

http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_hersh.html

Social Security books are crooked

Sure, we're putting more in now than is being paid out.

Sure the surplus has to be invested somehow, and certainly US Treasuries are a safe place to park it.

But the gov't is applying accounting standards which would get a CFO a long vacation behind bars. They are double booking the revenue -- it appears as an asset in the 'trust fund' and as general revenue to offset the current deficit. This is how the national debt managed to rise every year of Clinton's administration, 'surplus' or no. But as every embezzler knows, the juggling act can't go on forever.

In about 15 years, a whole lot of chickens will be coming home to roost.

Greenspan recommends the inevitable

i.e. raise taxes, cut benefits:

Greenspan: Job Growth Will Pick Up Before Long | theledger.com: "Greenspan said Thursday that 'employment will begin to increase more quickly before long,' and that erecting protective trade barriers was not the answer to the nation's current worries about the loss of jobs to foreign competition.

During his testimony before the House Education and Workforce Committee, Greenspan said nothing that made analysts waver in their belief that the Fed will keep a key interest rate at a current 45-year low of 1 percent for most of this year. Fed officials will meet on interest rates Tuesday.

But Greenspan did wade into the hot-button political issues of job losses and Social Security. He said erecting protectionist barriers was not the answer to foreign competition and that Congress would at some point have to address the problem of the pending retirement of 77 million baby boomers.

Greenspan repeated his warning that Congress will have to trim future Social Security benefits, but he added that he thought a tax increase would also be needed to close the massive funding gap.

For the good of the economy, he said, Congress needs to get most of the savings by trimming benefits."

The unemployment survey flap

Bottom line is there's not much change in jobs since Jan 2001 but 8 million more adults in the most jobless recovery since they started keepin stats.

"Household numbers not that much stronger than payrolls

Democrats have been hammering Bush for months, saying he has the worst economic record since Herbert Hoover presided over the Great Depression.

Republicans counter that the economy is expanding at the fastest pace in 20 years and that hiring isn't nearly as rare as Democrats say.

Each side points to a government survey to bolster their arguments. Democrats say payrolls are down 2.2 million since Bush took office. Republicans say employment is actually up about 500,000.

The election could turn on which arcane government statistic is most trusted: The payroll survey of 400,000 business establishments or the employment survey of 60,000 households. Read about the payroll data and the household survey.

New research from the government suggests the two alternative views of the U.S. labor market aren't as far apart as they appear.

Both surveys show a weak job market since the recession began in March 2001, just two months after Bush took office, according to a paper written by economists at the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics. Read the paper.

Over the past eight years, the two surveys, when properly compared, show nearly identical job growth, the economists say. During the late 1990s' boom, the payroll survey showed stronger growth, but since the recession hit in 2001, the household survey has caught up.

The two surveys are designed to look at different aspects of the labor market. The payroll survey tracks employment from the employers' point of view, looking at the number of workers in each industry, their hours and their pay.

The household survey looks at jobs from the workers' point of view, measuring the employment rate for various demographic groups and tracking the number of multiple job holders or the number working part-time.

The two surveys have been almost impossible to compare directly, until now. The payroll survey showed businesses employed 130.2 million workers in February, while the household survey showed that 138.3 million Americans said they had a job.

Most of the 8.1 million gap is due to differences in each survey's coverage. The household survey includes agricultural workers, self-employed workers and unpaid household workers. The payroll survey counts multiple jobholders twice.

A second complication is that the household survey is adjusted for new population estimates only infrequently, making direct comparisons with past data unreliable, the government says.

Labor Department economists now have created an adjusted household survey more comparable to the payroll survey.

As of February, the adjusted household survey showed employment of 130.4 million, not significantly different from the 130.2 million reported in the payroll survey.

Since Bush took office in January 2001, the adjusted household survey shows total employment growth of 214,000, an average of less than 6,000 new jobs a month. In the meantime, the adult population grew by 8.5 million.

While 6,000 jobs a month is nothing to get excited over, it's better than the payroll survey's average monthly job loss of 59,000. At least the sign is right: It allows the Bush administration to claim that employment has risen during his term.

Whichever survey you trust, it's been the weakest job market of any recovery since the government began tracking the data in the 1930s.

Most economists, including staunch Republicans such as Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and nonpartisan economists who work for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, say the payroll survey is the more accurate reflection of the job market.

Economist John Irons says the fastest way to lose credibility in his profession is to claim the household survey is better or that economists disagree about which one is superior.

"The payroll survey is better, and it is what everyone uses -- there is as much disagreement on this as there is on the question of whether or not the earth is round," Irons wrote.

Those reassurances haven't stopped some critics from arguing that "something is different" in today's economy that the payroll survey is missing; namely large number of entrepreneurs who are starting their own businesses or consultants who have a strange "neither-here-nor-there" relationship with their "employer."

Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, has held hearings into the "mystery" of the two surveys.

Commentator Larry Kudlow wrote in the National Review that the "softer payroll survey" is not believable.

Economist Tim Kane of the Heritage Foundation said the payroll figures are just "an illusion." Kane argues that the new adjusted and smoothed data prove that the payroll survey should not be trusted.

"There is simply no way that the economy could grow this rapidly and not experience significant job growth," said Brian Wesbury, chief economist for GKST. Wesbury says the payroll survey is missing the "eBay economy" that's driven by entrepreneurs and consultants.

However, Wesbury's thesis is shot down by Robert Barro, a Harvard economics professor writing in the Wall Street Journal, who notes that self-employment as a percentage of employment is no higher today than it was in the mid-1990s. Self-employment can only explain a tiny fraction of the gap between the two surveys.

Other critics of the payroll survey say it misses start-up firms, pointing to the embarrassing revisions after the fact from the early 1990s that showed payrolls were much stronger coming out of the recession than the contemporary data showed.

But the BLS learned from that mistake and it now finds and tracks new firms much faster than it used to. The recent benchmark revision to the payrolls showed the government had actually overestimated the number of new firms being formed.

Acknowledging that the payroll survey has its flaws, Fed Gov. Ben Bernanke said, "the truth probably lies in between the two series," adding that "somewhat greater reliance should probably be placed on the payroll survey."

Barro agreed. "It seems best to weigh both (surveys) when evaluating the recent performance of the labor market." Barro wrote in the Journal.

If Bennett, Kane, Kudlow and Wesbury are right that the household survey is the accurate gauge of jobs, one of the Democrats' major talking points against Bush loses its bite. President Bush would no longer be lumped in with Hoover as the only presidents to have net job losses over a full four-year term.

Ultimately, it won't be economists or statistics that decide the matter. Voters will make a judgment in November based on their own experiences and those of their friends and families.

Call it the voting booth survey."

http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?siteid=mktw&dist=nwtpf&guid=%7BA451F958%2D98CF%2D4845%2D8E44%2D55B7BC1BAB39%7D

Greenspan's cohones grandes

Maestro of Chutzpah
By PAUL KRUGMAN
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The New York Times
March 2, 2004

The traditional definition of chutzpah says it's when you murder your parents, then plead for clemency because you're an orphan. Alan Greenspan has chutzpah.

Last week Mr. Greenspan warned of the dangers posed by budget deficits. But even though the main cause of deficits is plunging revenue - the federal government's tax take is now at its lowest level as a share of the economy since 1950 - he opposes any effort to restore recent revenue losses. Instead, he supports the Bush administration's plan to make its tax cuts permanent, and calls for cuts in Social Security benefits.

Yet three years ago Mr. Greenspan urged Congress to cut taxes, warning that otherwise the federal government would run excessive surpluses. He assured Congress that those tax cuts would not endanger future Social Security benefits. And last year he declined to stand in the way of another round of deficit-creating tax cuts.

But wait - it gets worse.

You see, although the rest of the government is running huge deficits - and never did run much of a surplus - the Social Security system is currently taking in much more money than it spends. Thanks to those surpluses, the program is fully financed at least through 2042. The cost of securing the program's future for many decades after that would be modest - a small fraction of the revenue that will be lost if the Bush tax cuts are made permanent.

And the reason Social Security is in fairly good shape is that during the 1980's the Greenspan commission persuaded Congress to increase the payroll tax, which supports the program.

The payroll tax is regressive: it falls much more heavily on middle- and lower-income families than it does on the rich. In fact, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, families near the middle of the income distribution pay almost twice as much in payroll taxes as in income taxes. Yet people were willing to accept a regressive tax increase to sustain Social Security.

Now the joke's on them. Mr. Greenspan pushed through an increase in taxes on working Americans, generating a Social Security surplus. Then he used that surplus to argue for tax cuts that deliver very little relief to most people, but are worth a lot to those making more than $300,000 a year. And now that those tax cuts have contributed to a soaring deficit, he wants to cut Social Security benefits.

The point, of course, is that if anyone had tried to sell this package honestly - "Let's raise taxes and cut benefits for working families so we can give big tax cuts to the rich!" - voters would have been outraged. So the class warriors of the right engaged in bait-and-switch.

There are three lessons in this tale.

First, "starving the beast" is no longer a hypothetical scenario - it's happening as we speak. For decades, conservatives have sought tax cuts, not because they're affordable, but because they aren't. Tax cuts lead to budget deficits, and deficits offer an excuse to squeeze government spending.

Second, squeezing spending doesn't mean cutting back on wasteful programs nobody wants. Social Security and Medicare are the targets because that's where the money is. We might add that ideologues on the right have never given up on their hope of doing away with Social Security altogether. If Mr. Bush wins in November, we can be sure that they will move forward on privatization - the creation of personal retirement accounts. These will be sold as a way to "save" Social Security (from a nonexistent crisis), but will, in fact, undermine its finances. And that, of course, is the point.

Finally, the right-wing corruption of our government system - the partisan takeover of institutions that are supposed to be nonpolitical - continues, and even extends to the Federal Reserve.

The Bush White House has made it clear that it will destroy the careers of scientists, budget experts, intelligence operatives and even military officers who don't toe the line. But Mr. Greenspan should have been immune to such pressures, and he should have understood that the peculiarity of his position - as an unelected official who wields immense power - carries with it an obligation to stand above the fray. By using his office to promote a partisan agenda, he has betrayed his institution, and the nation.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Waffle Wars

Bush is against campaign finance reform; then he's for it.

Bush is against a Homeland Security Department; then he's for it.

Bush is against a 9/11 commission; then he's for it.

Bush is against an Iraq WMD investigation; then he's for it.

Bush is against nation building; then he's for it.

Bush is against deficits; then he's for them.

Bush is for free trade; then he's for tariffs on steel; then he's against them again.

Bush is against the U.S. taking a role in the Israeli Palestinian conflict; then he pushes for a "road map" and a Palestinian State.

Bush is for states right to decide on gay marriage, then he is for changing the constitution.

Bush first says he'll provide money for first responders (fire, police, emergency), then he doesn't.

Bush first says that 'help is on the way' to the military ... then he cuts benefits

Bush-"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. Bush-"I don't know where he is. I have no idea and I really don't care.

Bush claims to be in favor of the environment and then secretly starts drilling on Padre Island.

Bush talks about helping education and increases mandates while cutting funding.

Bush first says the U.S. won't negotiate with North Korea. Now he will

Bush goes to Bob Jones University. Then say's he shouldn't have.

Bush said he would demand a U.N. Security Council vote on whether to sanction military action against Iraq. Later Bush announced he would not call for a vote

Bush said the "mission accomplished" banner was put up by the sailors. Bush later admits it was his advance team.

Bush was for fingerprinting and photographing Mexicans who enter the US. Bush after meeting with Pres. Fox, he's against it.

"The governor -- who first told voters he did not need any
special-interest money and then redefined special interests as only
Indian tribes and labor unions -- said through a spokesperson Sunday
that he did not intend to accept contributions from any bond
dealers who would directly benefit from the sale.

But what about not accepting dollars from CEOs of investment banks
that employ bond dealers, attorneys for the bond dealers, spouses of
bond traders, investors likely to buy the bonds and others with
less-obvious financial interests? In addition to the investment
community, we should expect Johnson's pharmaceutical industry
colleagues to be on hand Tuesday. An audit by the Bush administration's
Department of Health Services shows that pharmaceutical companies owe
the state of California
$1.3 billion in rebates for prescription drugs purchased by the state
Medi-Cal program -- enough to restore the $900 million in proposed
budget cuts to health-care programs for children and the poor.

Yet Schwarzenegger has not collected on the debt, and his own audit of
state finances made no mention of the money owed. You can be sure the
drug executives want to keep it that way.

Commercial real estate interests that operate nationwide are also
likely to be at dinner. They desperately want California's recovery to
be dependent on the $15-billion bond measure because the alternative
revenue source for Schwarzenegger would be to reassess commercial
property values for tax purposes. That alone would cost commercial real
estate interests about $4 billion per year. That's probably why
mega-developers A.G. Spanos and Castle & Cooke have already given
$500,000 between them."

www.arnoldwatch.org

Record-shattering gas prices seen as inevitable

BOHICA, baby!...

"Gas prices continue to surge as wild rumors of problems with more than half of the refineries supplying California continue to drive up the futures price on gasoline. Prices on the wholesale "rack" continue to exceed the retail prices being charged on the street. This means that as dealers run out of their current inventories of "cheap" $2.13 per gallon gas, they'll be forced to replace it with gasoline that costs ten to twenty cents per gallon more. It looks as though a news record high of more than $2.30 a gallon is inevitable..

It is evident that we are seeing a repeat of the same situation we saw this time last year: problems in Iraq, high oil prices, and the addition of ethanol to our fuel supply have given the California Refining Cartel the plausible cover they need to continue their gouging.

www.fueltracker.com/newmenu/home.html?id=home&title=Home
...Got a problem widdat?

What's goin on with the Solar Tower of Power?

most recent entry I found is 2 years old ....

http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~somalwar/honsem/2002/articles/solar_plant.html

Sun in the Forecast

The first commercial-scale solar power plants are up and
running. The price isn't competitive yet, but that goal is
getting closer all the time. A progress report
By Erika Check
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

April 8 issue - High in the Mojave Desert, 130
miles northeast of Los Angeles, lies a vast field
of mirrors. Crisscrossing rows of glass and
metal, glinting in the sunlight, cover a full
square mile of dirt. It's not some bizarre
fun-house experiment or a grotesque exhibit of
Hollywood vanity. It's a fully operational array
of power plants churning out an average of 180
megawatts of electricity, and offering a glimpse
of a world in which the grid's electricity comes
from the sun.


MOST PEOPLE THINK of solar power as a flat panel on every rooftop. But photovoltaic panels, which convert sunlight to electricity, have limitations. They work fine when the sun is strong, but when the clouds roll in you’d better have batteries to run the TV and dishwasher. And even on the sunniest days the panels aren’t very well suited for cities, where roof space is limited. For decades, engineers have been working on ways to catch the sun over a broad area, concentrating it and using it to produce electricity on the same scale as centralized coal, hydro or nuclear power plants—hundreds of megawatts at a time. Several pilot plants have been operating in California, some for decades, but so far they haven’t had enough volume to force costs down to competitive levels.
That may soon change. Spain is drawing up plans for a pioneering 15-megawatt plant. South Africa, Italy, Australia and India are expected to follow with much larger plants capable of generating more than 100 megawatts each. If at least some of these projects are completed, costs could come down from the current 15 cents a kilowatt-hour for the Mojave plant to 8 cents per kwh in the next eight to 10 years, says Bill Gould, project manager for energy systems at Nexant, a renewable-energy firm. That would go a long way toward closing the gap with gas and oil, which now cost as little as 4 cents per kwh. “The first plants will be expensive,” says Craig Tyner of Sandia National Laboratories. “But as we build them the costs will come down.
The Mojave plant, owned by Kramer Junction Company (KJC), is one of the world’s first commercial solar power plants, with five Solar Electric Generating Systems (SEGS) supplying electricity to southern California. The basic component of a SEGS plant is a row of parabolic mirrors that reflect sunlight onto a pipe filled with oil. The oil heats up and is used to produce steam, which turns an electrical turbine. Assemble a few dozen rows of these trough-mirrors, and you’ve got capacity to generate 30 megawatts of power, enough for half a small town. The 180 megawatts from the five SEGS plants came in handy during California’s energy crisis last summer, when oil and gas prices shot up to 50 cents per kwh. “Suddenly, we were quite the deal,” says Scott Frier, KJC’s general manager. The problem with trough technology, though, is that the oil loses its heat too quickly. When the sun goes down, so does the power. SEGS require supplementary generators that run on natural gas at night and when it gets cloudy.
Within the next two years an international consortium, including the Spanish company Ghersa and Saint-Gobain of France, will break ground on a new plant called Solar Tres. Its design uses molten salt instead of oil. Since salt holds more heat longer than oil, it can drive turbines through the night. The technology has been demonstrated in a 10-megawatt pilot plant in the Mojave Desert. Concentric rings of mirrors direct sunlight up to a tank of molten salt. When the stuff is hot enough, some goes straight to a generator to produce steam, while the rest is stored for use at night. The 15-megawatt Solar Tres plant would be the first long-term commercial power production project that uses the tower design. Since the electricity is expected to be costly—close to 20 cents per kwh—the Spanish government plans to subsidize the plant.
The next big thing—dish systems—is already in the works. The building block of such a plant is a parabolic mirror, shaped like a satellite dish, that reflects sunlight onto a small generator suspended in front. The heat drives a turbine. Demonstration projects for dish systems are slated to go up later this year in both Arizona and South Africa. Theoretically a dish configuration would produce more energy per acre than other solar concentrating plants—that is, if engineers could figure out a good way of linking many dishes together.
Although the United States still sponsors most solar research, the biggest potential market is in dry, equatorial climates. Italy is spending .120 million to study how best to mine the Mediterranean sun. The World Bank has putting up $50 million for hybrid plants that use solar trough technology and natural gas in Egypt, India, Mexico and Morocco. What would really give solar plants a kick in the pants is a rise in oil and gas prices and a shortage of fossil fuels. Should that happen, it’s a safe bet the sun will still be shining.

Economist's Challenge Puzzles Free-Trade Believers

Outsourcing got you down?...

" if China ships cheap brassieres to the United States and 20,000 workers in U.S. bra factories lose their jobs, the lower prices for 100 million American women mean that "the gains to the multitude are greater than the loss to the displaced workers," he wrote in one of his Internet pieces. That is because the savings enable people to spend more money on other things, creating demand for other jobs, he said.

But the U.S. economy as a whole will suffer if bra manufacturers and other industries move overseas, according to Roberts, because so many workers would lose their jobs that "the loss of incomes outweighs the lower prices."

Mainstream trade experts contend that such a scenario is no more grounded in reality than past scares about mass job losses, which centered on "automation" in the 1950s and 1960s, "de-industrialization" in the 1980s, and the "giant sucking sound" of jobs moving to Mexico conjured up by Ross Perot during the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement in the early 1990s. In each case, the limited job losses that occurred drove down costs and generated efficiencies that fueled increases in U.S. productivity -- the ultimate source of higher American living standards. Now that the big worry is outsourcing, the basic lesson of those episodes is being overlooked, said Brink Lindsey, director of trade policy studies at the Cato Institute.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7312-2004Feb25_2.html

... I agree with Cato boys but my concern here is not the change but the apparently accelerating rate of change and America's weakening resilience. My thesis is our culture is churning out hordes of what can charitably be described as second raters into an environment that increasingly needs (and rewards) the best & brightest.

It's a rotten deal compared to the relatively cushy prospects I had, but the long & short of it is you can't expect to keep getting $60K for doing something Habib & Lo Ping are willing to do for much less.

UN accounting shananigans even worse than ours

"I speak simply about the U.N.-supplied numbers on Oil-for-Food's operations. Over the past 18 months, I have periodically tried to get these figures to add up. I am starting to believe the words of an unusually forthright U.N. spokesman, who at one point told me, "They won't."

Basic integrity in bookkeeping seems little enough to ask of the U.N., where officials defending Oil-for-Food have been insisting that it wasn't their fault if Saddam was corrupt. They just did the job of meticulously recording the deals now beset by graft allegations, approving the contracts, and making sure the necessary funds went in and out of the U.N.-held escrow accounts. I'm sure there was some sort of logic to it. Though I have begun to wonder if maybe the same way the U.N. has its own arrangements for postal services and tax-exempt salaries, U.N. accounting has its own special system of arithmetic.

It all added up fairly neatly, of course, in the summary offered by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, when the U.N. turned over the remnants of Oil-for-Food to the Coalition Provisional Authority in November. Oil-for-Food, said Mr. Annan, had presided over $65 billion worth of Saddam's oil sales and in buying relief supplies had used "some $46 billion of Iraqi export earnings on behalf of the Iraqi people." (Keep your eye on those numbers.) In doing so, the U.N. secretariat had collected a 2.2% commission on the oil, which, even after a portion was refunded for relief operations, netted out to more than $1 billion for U.N. administrative overhead. The U.N. also collected a 0.8% commission to pay for weapons inspections in Iraq--including when Saddam shut them out between 1998 and 2002--which comes to another $520 million or so.

The keen observer will see that this adds up to payouts of just under $48 billion from Saddam's Oil-for-Food proceeds, which is about $17 billion less than what he took in. The difference is explained--near enough--by the $17.5 billion paid out of the same Oil-for-Food stream of Saddam's oil revenues but dispensed, under another part of the U.N. Iraq program, by the U.N. Compensation Commission to victims of Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. That gives us a grand total of $65 billion earned, and about $65 billion allocated for payments, all very tidy.

Except the U.N. Compensation Commission states on its Web site that oil sales under Oil-for-Food totaled not Mr. Annan's $65 billion, but "more than US$70 billion"--a $5 billion discrepancy in U.N. figures. A phone call to the UNCC, based in Geneva, doesn't clear up much. A spokesman there says the oil total comes from the U.N. in New York, and adds, helpfully, "Maybe it was an approximate figure, just rounded up."

OK, but in some quarters, if not at the U.N., $5 billion here or there is big money. Halliburton has been pilloried, and rightly so, over questions involving less than 1% of such amounts. One turns for explanation to the U.N. headquarters in New York, where a spokesman confirms that though the U.N. program ended last November, the former executive director of Oil-for-Food, Benon Sevan, is still on contract, still drawing a salary, but Mr. Sevan's secretary explains he is "not giving interviews anymore." The spokesman, also still on salary, answers all requests for clarification with "I don't know," and "You have the Web site."

All right. The Web site brings us a U.N. update issued Nov. 21, 2003, when the U.N. turned over the program to the CPA, which tells us that $31 billion worth of supplies and equipment had been delivered to Iraq, with another $8.2 billion in the pipeline. That comes to $39.2 billion. Again, even if you add in, say, $2 billion for U.N. commissions, that's still about $5 billion short of the $46 billion Mr. Annan says was used for supplies--which might make sense if the program at the end had been swimming in loose cash, except that Mr. Sevan was lamenting toward the end that there was not enough money to fund all the supply contracts he'd already approved.

Returning to the U.N. Web site, nothing there discloses the amount of interest paid during the course of the program on the Oil-for-Food escrow accounts. That should have been substantial, because these U.N.-managed Iraq accounts in the final phases of the program held balances of about $12 billion. Or so we've been told. I first got that number by phoning the U.N. back in September 2002. That was well before Mr. Sevan stopped giving interviews, and I spoke with Mr. Sevan himself. He told me the Oil-for-Food accounts at that point contained balances of about $20 billion. The next day, someone in his office revised that down to about $15 billion. Later that afternoon, someone in the U.N. controller's office revised that down to $9 billion. When I protested that these discrepancies were getting large, we ended up haggling over the phone for a while, and finally settled on an official total of about $12 billion in the Oil-for-Food accounts.

I'm still not sure what to believe, however, given that the U.N. treasurer, Suzanne Bishopric, assured me at the same time, in September 2002, and again in early 2003, that the accounts had been diversified among "five or six" banks, and to date we have still heard mention of only one--a French bank, BNP Paribas. So, in some fit of arithmetic absent-mindedness, did Ms. Bishopric lose track of the number of banks, confusing one with five or six?

It's a little hard to know whether oil sales were actually $65 billion or $70 billion, whether there were five or six banks or just one, whether at least that one bank, BNP, ever paid significant interest on balances that toward the end of the program totaled $20 billion or $15 billion or $9 billion or $12 billion, and whether humanitarian import contracts were funded to the tune of $39.2 billion or $46 billion. Mr. Annan assures us the program has been audited many times, even if it was done in confidence, in-house, backed up by member nations that may have had their own interests to consider, such as one of Saddam's favorite trading partners, France.


http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/cRosett/?id=110004734
...Got a problem widdat?

Common Cause should get some sort of internet prize

if only for providing the best way to write your arguably elected federal officials (including your Rep, both Senators, and WH all at once):

http://www.commoncause.org/about/

enter your ZIP under Action Alert, pick "Compose Your Own Letter" and blast away

SCOTUS backs state's right to withhold funds for divinity schooling

but here's a foretaste of things to come: Note who the 2 dissenters are -- they will be joined by 3 like-minded induhviduals during W's next administration. (Thanks again, Dimmocrats & Nadirites, for the repeat demo of the Law of Unintended Consequences...)

WASHINGTON, Feb. 25 — The Supreme Court ruled today, in a case watched by public officials and educators across the country, that the states can withhold public scholarship money from students pursuing religious studies.

The justices decided, 7 to 2, that Washington State had the right to deny scholarship aid to a college student who was studying to be a minister.

The majority rejected arguments that the exclusion of divinity students from the state's Promise Scholarship Program was an unconstitutional burden on the free exercise of religion.

The program "imposes neither criminal nor civil sanctions on any type of religious service or rite," Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote for the majority. "It does not deny to ministers the right to participate in the political affairs of the community. And it does not require students to choose between their religious beliefs and receiving a government benefit."

Rather, the chief justice wrote, "The state has merely chosen not to fund a distinct category of instruction."

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the dissenters, found that reasoning unpersuasive. "The indignity of being singled out for special burdens on the basis of one's religious calling is so profound that the concrete harm produced can never be dismissed as insubstantial," Justice Scalia wrote.

"Let there be no doubt," Justice Scalia wrote at another point. "This case is about discrimination against a religious minority."

The Washington State program awards scholarships on the basis of academic merit and financial need to students who attended accredited colleges in the state, including those with religious affiliations. But it excludes students pursuing degrees in devotional theology.

The case was Locke v. Davey, No. 02-1315, after Gov. Gary Locke and Joshua Davey, who studied religion at Northwest College, which is affiliated with the Assemblies of God. He did not become a minister, deciding instead to attend Harvard Law School.

www.nytimes.com/2004/02/25/national/25CND-SCOT.html?hp

Nader redux -- why that dude has zero chance

Nader won't win, regardless of his articulate stand on issues and not because he isn't better qualified. It really CAN'T be done. Every 3rd party effort in history has quickly withered away, and not by accident (although not by some conspiracy either) ...

PoliSci 101: as my son explained it, we have a two-party system not because it was INTENDED that way but because it IS that way, inherently. This style of political system will NEVER be other than that, as every single third party effort in our history attests. The most success a 3rd party can claim is a spoiler role in an attempt to blackmail one side or the other into paying more attention to their agenda.

That said, I support experiments with voting reform that would give third parties a bigger voice (but I would NOT pick presidential contests as the place to start such experiments). Cumulative and preference voting schemes look particularly interesting.

... update: I should have mentioned IRV --Instant Runoff Voting. This one is so simple I don't understand why 3rd party wannabes haven't conspired to at least get it put as an initiative on the CA ballot (Lord knows, we plenty more wacko initiatives than this).

http://www.fairvote.org/irv/whatis2.htm

Pentagon says climate change will destroy civilization < in_20_years!?>

Stick this in your Union of Concerned Scientists pipe and inhale ...

www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1153530,00.html

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

NYT: Nader Does It Again

I joined the Nader group on yahoo http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RalphNader2004/
so I could post this there.

Ralph Nader Does It Again

Published: February 23, 2004

Four years ago, when people told Ralph Nader that his Green Party candidacy might split the Democratic vote and elect George W. Bush president, Mr. Nader said Al Gore and Mr. Bush were so much alike that it didn't really matter who won. The worst that could happen, he sometimes added, was that Mr. Bush would turn out to be far more conservative than expected. That would then mobilize Democrats and create a healthy new sense of urgency about progressive issues.
Well, four years later the Democrats are nothing if not mobilized. Yet Mr. Nader isn't satisfied. He's running again, this time as an independent, to the horror of both friends and critics. It was Mr. Nader, they say, who drained votes away from Mr. Gore in critical states like Florida and New Hampshire, throwing the White House to Mr. Bush. The idea that he's prepared to do it again has made them both terrified and furious.

Their concern seems overblown. If Mr. Nader didn't learn anything from the 2000 election, the voters certainly did. People might have voted for him once under the impression that sending a message was more important than picking the next president. We doubt very much that they will make the same mistake twice.
So much has happened in the last four years that it's hard to remember how low the stakes seemed when Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush were running. The country was at peace and prosperous. The big issue in Washington was what to do with the budget surplus. Mr. Gore kept changing his message and Mr. Bush was promising to be a uniter, not a divider. Both men knew from their polling that victory would belong to the one who captured the affections of a small number of wavering voters in a few states, and both tried desperately to come up with the fuzzy, centrist message to win them over.

It's not surprising that in 2000 many people thought they could afford to express their irritation with a vote for Mr. Nader. If they did that again this November, it would be a repudiation of the Democratic nominee so thorough that the party would certainly have bigger problems than third-party candidates to worry about.

The most regrettable thing about Mr. Nader's new candidacy is not how it is likely to affect the election, but how it will affect Mr. Nader's own legacy. Ralph Nader has been one of the giants of the American reform movement. His crusades for consumer rights and product safety alone should earn him a place in history. But he has always been an outsider, and his candidacy in 2000 seemed fueled by bitterness at the way he had been marginalized in Democratic politics. His anger is understandable, but it would be a tragedy if Mr. Nader allowed it to give the story of his career a sad and bitter ending.

Which is a bigger threat to the institution of marriage?

(a) a hundred thousand gay weddings by 2014

(b) twelve million more hetero divorces with 20 million more children to be raised in single-parent households?


I guess gays are just gonna make bad things worse ...
http://waxy.org/random/images/opus/opus_2004-02-01.jpg

Can Nader Tap the Anger of the Dean Machine?

Can he tap in? Of course he can, at least to the tune of a couple of
percentage points, which is all Dubya needs. The problem is that by
giving another term to Dubya, Nader guarantees 3 more far right seats
on the Supreme Court and the continued favorable treatment of oil by
a one-party government of the kleptocrats, by the kleptocrats, and
for the kleptocrats.

The upshot of Nader's quixotic repeat of his self-defeating 2000
effort will be to ensure that the looting of our natural resources
will accelerate beyond anything we've seen in living memory. This is
going to the Mother of All Self-Inflicted Wounds.

Having seen the catastrophic results of his last run, how could
anyone in their right mind turn around and do it again? Do Greens
really see no difference between Dubya and the Dems?

I guess I'm not surprised, simply appalled.

BOHICA, baby. Here comes Ralphieboy's Self-Inflicted Wound Train II

Unbef***inglievable. Not only did Ralphieboy cripple the country
with his EgoTrip 2000 campaign, after SEEING the results with his own
eyes he's gonna give the country to Dubya again! He's either on the
payroll or the biggest damn fool in American political history.
Better strap in, it's gonna be a long year.

Qs for Dr L :

Dr. Laura Schlessinger is a US radio personality who dispenses advice to
people who call in to her radio show. Recently she said that
homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22,
and cannot be condoned under any circumstances. The
following is an open letter to Dr. Laura penned by a US resident, which
was posted on the Internet. It's funny, as well as informative.
Dear Dr. Laura:
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have
learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with
as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual
lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly
states it to be an abomination. End of debate.
I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other
specific laws and how to follow them.
1. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a
pleasing odor for the Lord -- Lev. 1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They
claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus
21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for
her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her
period of menstrual uncleanliness -- Lev. 15:19-24. The problem is, how do
I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offence.
4. Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and
female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of
mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you
clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2
clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill
him myself?
6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an
abomination -- Lev. 11:10-- it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality.
I don't agree. Can you settle this?
7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a
defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my
vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair
around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.
19:27. How should they die?
9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me
unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different
crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two
different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse
and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble
of getting the whole town together to stone them? -- Lev.24:10-16.
Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do
with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)
I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you
can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and
unchanging.
Your devoted disciple and adoring fan.