Its chief executive officer is a convicted rapist, and a former teacher said colleagues drank alcohol and smoked marijuana on the job.

The school has been in the choice program for four years and had 145 students enrolled in kindergarten through eighth grade in January, according to the state Department of Public Instruction.

The school has been in the news before: Chief Executive Officer James A. Mitchell is a convicted rapist, and a school employee was arrested on suspicion of first degree sexual assault of a child in March. Charges were not filed in that case.

According to a DPI spokesman, the school had been delinquent in its payments to the state. The state provides schools $6,020 per student or the amount it spends per pupil - whichever is less. A school would owe the state money if an audit found it spent less than $6,020 or if its enrollment was lower than reported.

In January, the school owed the state $111,338 for the 2001-'02 school year, according to Department of Public Instruction records. A check sent in February from the school bounced. After phone calls and letters from state officials, the school paid the bill June 2.

"They are a school that has recurring and continued financial problems that go beyond their relationship to the state," said DPI spokesman John Kraus. "But the way the Legislature has written the choice law does not provide the DPI with the authority to close down a school because the gentleman running it has a past criminal record, teachers may have records, or because they are not paying teachers."

When Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961 of the ''military-industrial complex,'' he never imagined the regimental descendants of Monty's boys at El Alamein tenting in the desert to baby-sit corporadoes earning $10,000 tax-free a month. This, however, is modern might. The military has become the industrial, and vice versa.

[edit]

The Army says KBR got the Iraqi oil-field contract without having to compete for it because, according to the Army's classified contingency plan for repairing Iraq's infrastructure, KBR was the only company with the skills, resources and security clearances to do the job on short notice. Who wrote the Army's contingency plan? KBR. It was in a position to do so because it holds another contract that is poorly understood yet in many ways more important, and potentially bigger, than the one to repair the oil fields: the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or Logcap, which essentially turns KBR into a kind of for-profit Ministry of Public Works for the Army.

Writing the oil-field contingency plan was only one of a thousand things KBR did for the Army last year under Logcap. (KBR has a similarly broad contract with the Navy, under which it built, among other things, the cages for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.) The technical term for Logcap is ''cost-reimbursement, indefinite-delivery/indefinite quantity,'' or ''cost-plus,'' meaning KBR spends whatever it believes necessary to get a job done, then adds from 1 to 9 percent as profit. There's practically no limit on how lucrative Logcap can be, and as the awarding of the Iraqi oil-field contract -- by KBR, to KBR -- demonstrates, Logcap can become a generator of yet more contracts. Nothing like it exists elsewhere in government. That KBR wrote the oil-field plan wasn't considered by the Army a disqualifying conflict of interest -- in fact, just the opposite. ''They were the company best positioned to execute the oil-field work because of their involvement in the planning,'' said Lt. Col. Gene Pawlik, an Army spokesman.

[edit]

Downsizing the military not only meant doing more with less; it also meant that a lot of former soldiers, sailors, airmen and officers were suddenly on the street looking for the kind of work for which their particular skills would be valuable. The Pentagon still needed those skills. So the downsized warriors joined a constellation of corporations that sold those skills -- everything from data processing to interrogation to bomb disposal -- back to the military at private-sector prices.

In 1992 the Defense Department, under Dick Cheney, hired Brown & Root to write a classified report detailing how private companies could help the military logistically in the world's hot spots. Not long after, the Pentagon awarded the first five-year Logcap -- to Brown & Root. Then Bill Clinton won the election, and Cheney, in 1995, became C.E.O. of Halliburton, Brown & Root's parent company. A lot of Halliburton's business depends on foreign customers getting loans from U.S. banks, which are in turn guaranteed by the government's trade-promoting Export-Import Bank. In the five years before Cheney took the helm, the Ex-Im Bank guaranteed $100 million in loans so foreign customers could buy Halliburton's services; during Cheney's five years as C.E.O., that figure jumped to $1.5 billion.

By July 2000, Cheney claimed on ABC's ''This Week'' that neither Halliburton nor its subsidiaries dealt with Iraq at all. ''Iraq's different,'' Cheney said at the time. ''I had a firm policy that we wouldn't do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal.'' But in fact from 1997 to 2000, when Cheney was running Halliburton, two of its subsidiaries sold Saddam Hussein's government a total of $73 million in oil-field supplies. The deal didn't violate U.S. sanctions because the subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Company, were foreign.

KBR/Halliburton, then, has rounded the bases when it comes to Iraq. It got rich doing business with Iraq, it got rich preparing to destroy Iraq and it's now getting rich rebuilding Iraq.

You knew the minute you heard the report that the chief had resigned that it was because of the unrelenting heat he endured from primarily one news agency.

And that's the value of WorldNetDaily. That's the power of the New Media. That's the positive side of a truly free press.

The snipers were homosexual lovers with ties to the al-Qaida terror network

The shootings were the work of an al Qaeda terrorist cell and part of a wider campaign that was going to spread to other cities.

Or the fact that, at one point, it had been "more than 72 hours since the Beltway sniper last struck, the longest stretch so far. To date, he's killed nine out of the 11 people he's shot.

He's 9 for 11, or 9-11.

Is it a sick Sept. 11 message from Islamic terrorists?

California voters were deceived by Davis last November, they did not have a chance to learn how bad things were. Davis understated the deficit, understated state spending, and misled the public about the state of our economy. Now the facts are in, and Davis deserves to be recalled for misleading the public.

Well, that's a somewhat dishonest quote [emphasis Demagogue's]. I was referring to the people in the previous sentence of that column, cheering and dancing in the streets right now, and, in fact, this -- the way that was so widely misquoted is an example of what I described in my book, which is the constant mischaracterizations, which is a small word, picking out the word of parents. It makes a big difference. And these subtle differences that are then glossed over as if there's absolutely no difference. To try to portray conservatives as crazy people, as Nazis, slave owners, (unintelligible), homophobic, how about dealing with our ideas? I mean I've written two books now, I've written hundreds of columns, I've been on TV hundreds of times. The idea that someone can go out and find one quote that will suddenly, you know, portray me just dismiss her ideas, read no more, read no further, this person is crazy --

Also according to the report, guards at a Brooklyn detention facility – weeks after the attack and within sight of ground zero – subjected illegal immigrant Muslim detainees to "physical and verbal abuse." As the Times described it, "Detainees reported being slammed against the wall, or being subjected to such verbal taunts as 'You're going to die here.'" To quote Tony Soprano: You don't say.

Does anyone at the Times even know any normal people?

The detainees are in this country illegally, their co-religionists had just slaughtered thousands of Americans, and the Times is dismayed, perplexed, angry and shocked that some of them may have been subjected to the sort of manhandling that occurs in the hallways of middle schools throughout the nation. Why, I'm subjected to physical and verbal abuse every time I go through an airport security check, and I'm a citizen.

The report also found that immigrants arrested in New York and housed at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn faced "a pattern of physical and verbal abuse" from some guards as well as "unduly harsh" detention policies.
A total of 84 inmates who were held in Brooklyn in terrorism investigations were subjected to highly restrictive, 23-hour "lockdown," the report found. They were limited to one phone call a week, and they were put in handcuffs, leg irons and heavy chains any time they moved outside their cells, according to the report.

Democrats aren't suffering politically among Hispanic voters for blocking the nomination of Miguel Estrada to an appeals court seat, according to a new poll out this week.

"The Hispanic electorate doesn't care. They don't know about it, they are not well informed and they don't consider it to be an important issue," said Sergio Bendixen, a Miami-based Democratic pollster who conducted a survey of 800 Hispanic voters for the New Democrat Network.

Democrats are filibustering Mr. Estrada's nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and Republicans are hoping political pressure from Hispanics will cause Democrats to relent.

Mr. Bendixen's poll found that 28 percent of Hispanics support the nomination, while 11 percent opposed it and 61 percent weren't aware of the nomination or didn't have an opinion.

He said that, based on listening to some of the poll interviews, it was clear many of those who supported Mr. Estrada were also confusing him with actor Erik Estrada, who was on the 1977-1983 television police drama "CHiPS" and is now a popular Spanish-language soap-opera star.

"Many of them think President Bush nominated Erik Estrada — I'd say a good third think that way," Mr. Bendixen said, adding that he heard one person say Mr. Estrada should be confirmed because he did such a good job playing a policeman on "CHiPS."

Retired officers such as Colonel Lattin, who are familiar with military law, are struggling to decide whether they want to participate in cases that promise to be historic but use rules they view as heavily skewed toward the government.

Detainees tried before military commissions will receive fewer legal protections than American service members tried before courts martial. Even though prosecutors can use a broader array of evidence than permitted in a civilian court or a military court martial, civilian defense lawyers will not be allowed to see some classified evidence. They may also not be allowed to confer with colleagues not assigned to the case or have private conversations with their clients.

Appeals will go to a Pentagon-appointed review panel, the secretary of Defense, and the president, but will not be reviewed by civilian courts.

What's more, the defendants, many of whom are unlikely to trust American lawyers, are barred from hiring non-US citizens. They can select their own military or civilian counsel - but they have to pay for it themselves.

Those drawbacks leave many of the former officers most familiar with military justice unwilling to get involved. "I wouldn't touch this with a 10-foot pole," says one retired senior military lawyer, who asked to remain anonymous. "Why would a civilian defense counsel want to get involved, knowing that he or she would be operating with one hand tied?"

[edit]

If he decides to represent any detainees, Lattin says he can't afford to do it free of charge. And since the government isn't paying those who sign up, any defendant will still have to pay Lattin's hourly $150 fee or a flat rate.

The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to publish a draft report next week on the state of the environment, but after editing by the White House, a long section describing risks from rising global temperatures has been whittled to a few noncommittal paragraphs.

[edit]

Among the deletions were conclusions about the likely human contribution to warming from a 2001 report on climate by the National Research Council that the White House had commissioned and that President Bush had endorsed in speeches that year. White House officials also deleted a reference to a 1999 study showing that global temperatures had risen sharply in the previous decade compared with the last 1,000 years. In its place, administration officials added a reference to a new study, partly financed by the American Petroleum Institute, questioning that conclusion.

[edit]

Administration officials defended the report and said there was nothing untoward about the process that produced it. Mrs. Whitman said that she was "perfectly comfortable" with the edited version and that the differences over climate change should not hold up the broader assessment of the nation's air, land and water.

[edit]

"As it went through the review, there was less consensus on the science and conclusions on climate change," Ms. Whitman said. "So rather than go out with something half-baked or not put out the whole report, we felt it was important for us to get this out because there is a lot of really good information that people can use to measure our successes."

James L. Connaughton, chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, a White House advisory group, said, "It would be utterly inaccurate to suggest that this administration has not provided quite an extensive discussion about the state of the climate. Ultimately, E.P.A. made the decision not to include the section on climate change because we had these ample discussions of the subject already."

"If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," Hatch said. "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the seriousness of their actions, he said.

"There's no excuse for anyone violating copyright laws," Hatch said.

It is not necessary to have a divisive fight over a Supreme Court appointment. If there are vacancies, we would like to see them filled by nominees who unite all Americans.

On behalf of the entire Senate Democratic Caucus, I want to emphasize that we remain hopeful that we would have meaningful, bipartisan consultation in advance of any Supreme Court nomination.

The President ... shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for ...

One's a Southern Democrat, the other a Western Republican, but North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley and Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne are in full agreement in rejecting some harsh conservative rhetoric accusing states of poor fiscal management and criticizing their pleas for federal money.

"I resent that and I reject that," Kempthorne said in a recent speech at Harvard University. He was referring to a National Review article called "Governors Go Home," by Stephen Moore and Grover Norquist who argued that the nation's governors had no place lobbying for federal funds in Washington, D.C.

A group representing some of the biggest U.S. industrial companies is expected to call Wednesday for more federal research and spending to prepare for what it says is a likely U.S. cap on carbon-dioxide emissions.

Although the Bush administration has rejected the idea of mandatory carbon-emission caps in favor of voluntary moves by U.S. companies, the Energy Future Coalition -- a Washington-based group that includes representatives of the Big Three auto makers, the coal industry and oil companies -- is expected to release a report calling for the U.S. to cut its oil consumption and carbon emissions by one-third over the next 25 years.

Despite the administration's current position, a U.S. mandate curbing so-called greenhouse gases is likely, the group's report suggests.

In preparation, the group calls for increased federal spending on programs including tax incentives for fuel-efficient cars and research on how to safely store carbon dioxide emitted by coal-fired power plants.

"The earth's climate cannot be protected unless all countries take on binding commitments to limit their emissions and control carbon," the report says. Developing countries need to choose clean energy sources, it says, but "they are likely to do so only if the U.S. leads with innovation, investment and example."

For family members of those who died on Sept. 11, last week brought a rare chance to meet face-to-face with a man who has become a symbol of their dissatisfaction -- FBI director Robert Mueller. The bureau had quietly invited several dozen family members to Washington to hear a presentation on the war on terrorism, but for the small band of husbands, wives and parents who successfully lobbied Congress last year for an independent 9/11 commission to investigate the attacks, it was a chance to ask some of the troubling questions they have about that day.

They weren't simply queries about the national security collapse that occurred on 9/11, and how a hijacked plane, flying hundreds of miles off course, was able to dive-bomb untouched into the Pentagon a full hour after the World Trade Center had already been attacked twice. Or how more than a dozen terrorists were able to enter America illegally and then live here undetected for weeks and months, and why U.S. intelligence sources failed to piece together significant clues that emerged in advance of the attack.

Family advocates also wanted to know why the government -- and specifically the Bush administration -- has been so reluctant to find answers to any of the obvious questions about what went wrong that day, why so little has been fixed, and why virtually nobody has accepted any responsibility for the glaring failures.

While the administration of President George W. Bush is aggressively positioning itself as the world leader in the war on terrorism, some families of the Sept. 11 victims say that the facts increasingly contradict that script. The White House long opposed the formation of a blue-ribbon Sept. 11 commission, some say, and even now that panel is underfunded and struggling to build momentum. And, they say, the administration is suppressing a 900-page congressional study, possibly out of fear that the findings will be politically damaging to Bush.

"We've been fighting for nearly 21 months -- fighting the administration, the White House," says Monica Gabrielle. Her husband, Richard, an insurance broker who worked for Aon Corp. on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center's Tower 2, died during the attacks. "As soon as we started looking for answers we were blocked, put off and ignored at every stop of the way. We were shocked. The White House is just blocking everything."

Another 9/11 family advocate -- a former Bush supporter who requested anonymity -- was more blunt: "Bush has done everything in his power to squelch this [9/11] commission and prevent it from happening."

FEINGOLD: Then will you provide to the committee a comprehensive list of RAGA's contributors and the amounts and dates of their contributions?

PRYOR: I don't have such a list, Senator.

FEINGOLD: Who does?

PRYOR: The Republican National Committee.

FEINGOLD: Will you urge them to provide that list?

PRYOR: I would ask you that if you need that kind of list, that you really need to seek it from them.

FEINGOLD: I'm asking whether you will help us as a former treasurer of RAGA, an officer of RAGA, to receive this information, since you just stated that you were in favor of full disclosure.

PRYOR: I'm in favor of the full disclosure according to the letter of the law.

FEINGOLD: You oppose the disclosure of this information?

PRYOR: I'm not saying that I oppose it or I favor it. I support the Republican National Committee making its decision to what it has to do follow the law.

FEINGOLD: I'm taking this as a refusal to urge the release of this information.

FEINGOLD: Well, I certainly respect going to Disney World with two daughters. I've done the same thing.

But are you saying that you actually made that decision on purpose to be away at the time of that...

PRYOR: We made a value judgment and changed our plan and went on another weekend.

FEINGOLD: I appreciate your candor on that.

The last thing Andrea Fernandez recalls before being drugged is holding her newborn baby on a Bogota city bus.

Police found her three days later, muttering to herself and wandering topless along the median strip of a busy highway. Her face was badly beaten and her son was gone.

Fernandez is just one of hundreds of victims every month who, according to Colombian hospitals, are temporarily turned into zombies by a home-grown drug called scopolamine which has been embraced by thieves and rapists.

"When I woke up in the hospital, I asked for my baby and nobody said anything. They just looked at me," Fernandez said, weeping. Police believe her son Diego was taken by a gang which traffics in infants.

Colorless, odorless and tasteless, scopolamine is slipped into drinks and sprinkled onto food. Victims become so docile that they have been known to help thieves rob their homes and empty their bank accounts. Women have been drugged repeatedly over days and gang-raped or rented out as prostitutes.

Children in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have suffered systematic torture and cruelty during Congo's five-year war, according to a new report by the Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict. Both foreign and domestic governments and armed groups have committed gross violations against children, including assault, rape, abduction, sexual torture, forced displacement, underage recruitment into armed forces and forced participation in the illegal exploitation of natural resources.

Many children who survive are traumatized by acts of vandalism and barbarity perpetuated by armed groups. They witness horrendous scenes in which their own families and friends are killed, sometimes hacked to death in front of them. Many young people have lost years of schooling. They are raised in communities with eroded family and societal structures, in camps for displaced people, on the streets, in active duty with armed groups and in other dangerous situations. A variety of natural disasters, such as the eruption of Mount Nyiragongo in Goma in 2002, exacerbate the humanitarian crisis and its impact on children.

Despite the availability of information about the humanitarian emergency and the egregious human rights abuses, there is an enormous gap between the scale of this tragedy and the weakness of the international response, according to Refugees International and other analysts. Since the outbreak of the war in 1998, few comprehensive national studies addressing human security issues have been conducted, in large part due to insecurity and poor infrastructure. Humanitarian agencies operating in DRC, however, repeatedly argue that enough data is available to elicit a stronger response by the international community to the enormous human rights and humanitarian catastrophes.

The UN Security Council has taken several decisions regarding conflict in DRC, including the adoption of 18 resolutions and the establishment of a peacekeeping operation that contains a number of child protection advisers (CPAs). At the same time, the UN Security Council has contributed to the lack of protection of civilians in DRC by failing to vigorously hold accountable those parties that violate relevant resolutions.

ARE YOU AWARE THAT MORE THAN TWO YEARS AGO, PRESIDENT BUSH WAS
THE FIRST PRESIDENT, FROM EITHER PARTY, TO NOMINATE A LATINO,
MIGUEL ESTRADA, TO BE THE FIRST LATINO ON THE WASHINGTON, D.C.,
CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS, WHICH IS CONSIDERED TO BE THE SECOND
MOST IMPORTANT COURT IN THE COUNTRY, AND THAT MIGUEL ESTRADA
HAS STILL NOT BEEN CONFIRMED BY THE U.S. SENATE?

YES 32.7
NO 64.6
DK/REFUSED 2.6

"Miguel Estrada is an immigrant from Honduras."

"Miguel Estrada came to this country as a teenager, learned English, and graduated from Harvard University with the highest honors."

"Miguel Estrada has been rated 'Unanimously Well Qualified' by the American Bar Association. This is the best possible ranking a person can receive."

"Miguel Estrada has argued 15 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and won the majority of them."

"Miguel Estrada would be the first Hispanic to serve on the Washington, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals."

"Miguel Estrada was nominated by the President and has been waiting to be confirmed for more than two years."

KNOWING ALL THIS, DO YOU BELIEVE THAT MIGUEL ESTRADA DESERVES
TO BE APPROVED BY THE U.S. SENATE TO SERVE ON THE WASHINGTON D.C.
CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS?

YES 86.9
NO 5.4
DK/REFUSED 7.8

This nation acted to a threat from the dictator of Iraq. Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history -- revisionist historians is what I like to call them. Saddam Hussein was a threat to America and the free world in '91, in '98, in 2003. He continually ignored the demands of the free world, so the United States and friends and allies acted. And one thing is for certain -- (applause) -- and this is for certain: Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat to the United States and our friends and allies. (Applause.)

A British inquiry into two truck-trailers found in northern Iraq has found they are not mobile germ warfare labs, the Observer reported yesterday. Instead, they were for the production of hydrogen to fill weather balloons.