In fact, President Bush has consulted senators since the beginning. He refrained from nominating Peter Keisler and Brett Kavanaugh of Maryland and Chris Cox of California, listening to their home-state senators even though all three would have made excellent judges. He renominated Clinton nominee Roger Gregory of Virginia, becoming the first president to do that for an opposite-party president's choice. And he sought to work with Sens. Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow about appointing two other Clinton picks to the district court, although the Michigan senators refused to accept anything less than appeals court nominations.

"Have you been to the Home School Science Fairs? They are great! Some of the best and brightest kids in Minnesota were there. You could have learned how stable the Ark was in strong winds..."
(snip)
The fear of God is the beginning of knowledge. Proverbs 1:7

This is a list of questions kids have asked in our brain storming sessions for science fair topics. These are the raw questions as I have not had time to clean them up or rephrase them in a statement for a hypothesis.
(snip)
1. A virus can mutate (alter) the DNA code of the host cell and reproduce a new species. Does this prove evolution by mutation is true or does it show adaptation (variety) within a species?
2. How many shades of skin color are there? Use a paint scanner to test 100 people. [Seems a bit ambitious. How many different shades do you think they'll find in Minnesota?]
3. Make a computer model of the Flood currents. [Not a flood, the Flood.]
10. What was life like before the Flood?
12. Trilobites prove Noah's flood because they are curled up or not? [Painful logic accompanies painful grammar.]
21. Does a bad mood spread?
29. Why do some foods give you a stomach ache? [Might require a trip to the emergency room.]
33. Why is hair thicker on the head than the rest of the body? [This one seems like an invite to play "doctor."]
35. Why does the Bible say there is one glory of the sun, one glory of the moon, and one glory of the stars?
58. Why did God create the moon to control the tides?
95. Are humans mammals? We thought they were made in God's image and not related to animals.
102.Why do we have pimples? Did God goof?

For decades, terrorists have attacked Americans - and we remember every act of murder, including 17 Americans killed in 1983 by a truck bomb at our embassy in Beirut; and 241 servicemen murdered in their sleep in Beirut; an elderly man in a wheelchair, shot and thrown into the Mediterranean; a sailor executed in a hijacking; two of our soldiers slain in Berlin; a Marine lieutenant colonel kidnapped and murdered in Lebanon; 189 Americans killed on a PanAm flight over Scotland; six people killed at the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; 19 military personnel killed at the Khobar Towers; 12 Americans killed at our embassies in East Africa; 17 sailors murdered on the USS Cole; and an American diplomat shot dead in Jordan last year.

In Iraq, we took another essential step in the war on terror. The United States and our allies rid the Iraqi people of a murderous dictator, and rid the world of a menace to our future peace and security.

Critics of the liberation of Iraq must also answer another question: what would that country look like today if we had failed to act? If we had not acted, Saddam Hussein and his sons would still be in power. If we had not acted, the torture chambers would still be in operation; the prison cells for children would still be filled; the mass graves would still be undiscovered; the terror network would still enjoy the support and protection of the regime; Iraq would still be making payments to the families of suicide bombers attacking Israel; and Saddam Hussein would still control vast wealth to spend on his chemical, biological, and nuclear ambitions.

A conservative group that supports President Bush is using an official Navy photo of the president greeting troops aboard an aircraft carrier to raise money.

Citizens United for the Bush Agenda sent copies of the picture to about 30,000 people last month, along with a request for donations in increments of $25 to $1,000.

The picture was taken by a Navy photographer after Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in May to declare an end to major combat operations in Iraq.

"He is clearly a commander in chief who is proud to be in the company of his troops — a striking contrast to former President Bill Clinton, who openly 'loathed' the military," the group's president, David Bossie, wrote in a fund-raising letter accompanying the photograph. The mailing was first reported in Thursday's editions of The Boston Globe.

Bossie, a former congressional aide and one of Clinton's harshest critics, said the photo was taken from a U.S. Navy Web site and properly credited to the Navy in the mailings.

Citizens United, which is not affiliated with the Republican Party or the president's re-election campaign, will use money generated from the fund-raising pitch to create television ads praising Bush's leadership in the war on terrorism.

Glenn Flood, a Pentagon spokesman, said once the picture is posted on the Internet, it's in the public domain and can be used by anyone as long as the photo is credited.

"We don't know what the end use is when an organization takes the picture down," Flood said. "We can't stipulate how they can use it."

Some Democrats complained that the trip, with the president decked out in Navy flight gear, had political overtones and that landing in a jet was a waste of taxpayer money.

Citizens United has already aired two TV ads supporting Bush's decision to send troops to Iraq and honoring soldiers serving in the war.

"In Liberia if you ask the question, 'What is our strategic, vital interest?' it will be hard to define it that way," he said. "But we do have an interest in making sure that West Africa doesn't simply come apart. We do have an interest in showing the people of Africa that we can support efforts to stabilize a tragic situation as we work with others to bring relief to people — people who are desperately in need."

Essentially, the Doctrine expresses that military action should be used only as a last resort and only if there is a clear risk to national security by the intended target; the force, when used, should be overwhelming and disproportionate to the force used by the enemy; there must be strong support for the campaign by the general public; and there must be a clear exit strategy from the conflict in which the military is engaged.

Two days after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell called for the speedy deployment of troops to Liberia, the top two American military officers warned today of significant dangers facing United States military involvement there and called for a clear mission and a strategy for its successful end before any troops are sent.

The fear, articulated mainly at the Pentagon but felt throughout the bureaucracy, was that what would start as a small engagement by foreign troops would end as a large and costly one by Americans. This was the lesson of Somalia, where U.S. troops had gotten into trouble in an effort to bail out the beleaguered Pakistanis. The logical outgrowth of this fear was an effort to steer clear of Rwanda entirely and be sure others did the same.

Lieutenant General Wesley Clark looked to the White House for leadership. "The Pentagon is always going to be the last to want to intervene," he says. "It is up to the civilians to tell us they want to do something and we'll figure out how to do it."

Ann Coulter, the right wing's dial-900 girl—a rail-thin, chain-smoking, hard-drinking, big-eyed leggy blonde who winkingly serves up X-rated ideological smut on liberals—is at it again. "Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy," Coulter writes—or sneers—in Treason, her follow-up effort to the best-selling Slander. Like its predecessor, Treason sits atop the best-seller charts, riding higher than one of Coulter's signature miniskirts.

Q Scott, has there ever been an attempt or effort on the part of anyone here at the White House to discredit the reputations or reporting of former Ambassador Joe Wilson, his wife, or ABC correspondent Jeffrey Kofman?

MR. McCLELLAN: John, I think I answered that yesterday. That is not the way that this White House operates. That's not the way the President operates. And certainly, I first became aware of those news reports when we were contacted by reporters and the questions were raised. It's the first I had heard of those. No one would be authorized to do that within this White House. That is simply not the way we operate, and that's simply not the way the President operates.

Q Are you trying to do an internal investigation to find out?

MR. McCLELLAN: I have no reason to believe that there is any truth that that has happened. So if I thought that there was any reason to believe that something like that had happened, I would --

Q So you're saying that reporters just made it up?

MR. McCLELLAN: -- try to get to the bottom. Campbell, I just said that anonymous is someone I would like to know who that is, but it's usually a fruitless search.

A vote had been scheduled, but was postponed because too many senators left the meeting to maintain a quorum.

During the discussion of Pipes' nomination to the USIP board, Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) described Pipes variously as a "provocative" and "highly controversial" candidate whose "decidedly one-sided" views would be in "direct contradiction" to USIP goals.

Sen. Harkin, who said he took the time to investigate the nominee, spoke at length about Pipes' statement warning of the "dangers" posed by the enfranchisement of American Muslims and of his web site (http://www.campus-watch.org) that sought to create "dossiers" on academic critics of Israeli policies.

Harkin said the ongoing controversy generated by Pipes' possible confirmation would "overshadow" the work of the institute. He also said Iowa is home to the oldest operating mosque in America in Cedar Rapids and that Muslims are a vibrant segment of that state's population. "(Daniel Pipes is) not the person that ought to be on the United States Institute of Peace board," said Harkin.

Sen. James Jeffords (I-Vt.) said the fact that Pipes would stimulate debate was "hardly a reason" to support his nomination. Only Senator John Ensign (R-Nev.) offered a cautious defense of the nominee, saying he agreed with Pipes' position on peacemaking needing to be backed up by strength.

There is evidence that Democratic opposition to Owen and Charles Pickering hurt Senate Dems in the 2002 election. Polling further suggests that the Estrada filibuster may hurt Dems with the Hispanic vote in 2004.

New rule: No do-overs. Once you elect an official, unless he runs off with public funds or gets caught with kiddie porn, you're stuck with him.

He's the governor, not some dude you married in Las Vegas.

What's going on here in California, if you're lucky enough to not have been following this, is that the economy turned, so we're getting rid of the governor. But what if we drive him out of office and the economy still doesn't get better? I guess we'll have to burn him. And if that doesn't work, we'll kill his dog.

Yes, in baseball when the team stinks, you fire the manager. But you don't fire him because it rains. And you don't let the opposing team choose a new manager for you.

And you don't fire him between innings. And replace him with a Viennese weightlifter.

Here's why the economy turned: The dot-com bubble burst. (Obviously on the orders of Gray Davis.) The airline industry collapsed. (Just as Gray Davis planned.) We fought two wars. (Playing right into Gray Davis' hands.) And Dick Cheney's friends at Enron "gamed" the energy market and ripped off the state for billions.

So you can see the problem: Gray Davis.

And the obvious solution: A Viennese weightlifter. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Finally, a candidate who can explain the Bush administration's positions on civil liberties in the original German.

But there are still a lot of Democrats with sour grapes over the last presidential election, and they're not collecting petitions to replace George Bush with Bernie Mac.

Now, I'm not saying that I like Davis. Being enthusiastic about Davis would be like saying your favorite food is straw. But he fought for his country in Vietnam and won a fair election, and he's entitled to his term.

Maybe he's a lousy governor, but he was the one elected by voters who bothered to show up at the polls. Their efforts shouldn't be undone by disgruntled shoppers signing a petition on their way out of Target.

Anyone who thinks this recall is some great affirmation of democracy should review early American history. This is precisely the kind of direct involvement by the howling masses that the framers wanted to avoid.

But, hey, let's have the recall. And then the people who voted for Davis can have a recall and put him back in. And then we can throw him out again. It works well in Italy.

And it'll really help the state economy, too, when investors realize our political system is on par with Belize.

Oh, and a recall election will cost the state up to $35 million. Money we would otherwise just waste on schools and roads. And we'll still have to have a regular election in March.

But this really isn't about elections at all. This is about a congressman named Darrell Issa, a Republican car alarm magnate who wants to be governor and has spent $1.5 million of his own money to fund the recall effort.

Think about that as the silver lining the next time a car alarm wakes you up in the middle of the night.

Smelling blood, just as they'd been meant to, first the media--and then the Democratic party--dove into the resulting "scandal" head first and fully clothed.

Belatedly, but sometime soon, the divers are going to figure out that they've been lured into a great big ocean--with no way back to shore. Because the more one learns about this Niger brouhaha that White House spokesmen have worked so hard to generate, the less substance there seems to be in it. As we say, George W. Bush is a genius.

[edit]

That muffled sound you hear coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the sound of George W. Bush chuckling at the success of his nefarious scheme. Misunderestimated, once again.

Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 3:53 PM
To: LCR-IW@LCR.ORG
Subject: [lcr-IW] Inclusion Wins! July 23, 2003

INCLUSION WINS!
JULY 23, 2003
*******************
Coleman calls anti-gay marriage amendment premature

U.S. Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota (R) said Monday that he doesn't agree with some GOP colleagues who argue that a constitutional amendment is necessary to prevent gay marriage in the United States. "At this point, it's a little premature," Coleman said in a telephone interview to The Advocate. Shortly after the Supreme Court threw out a Texas law banning gay sex, Senate majority leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said he would support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Frist later backpedaled, however, saying he would take a "wait and see" approach favored by President Bush, who said the amendment is not needed yet.

Coleman noted that Congress has already passed the Defense of Marriage Act, a 1996 law allowing states not to recognize gay marriages performed in other states. Coleman said he supports that law. "You don't need to rile up these waters right now," he said. "That's the law of the land, and at this point it's not necessary to talk about a constitutional amendment. The law is pretty clear."

In theory, pursuing with intent to kill violates a long-standing policy banning political assassination. It was the misfortune of Saddam Hussein's sons, Odai and Qusai, that the Bush administration has not bothered to enforce the prohibition.

[edit]

The ban has been overlooked so often in recent years that some wonder why the administration doesn't simply declare the measure null and void.

[edit]

The ban on assassinations, spelled out in an executive order signed by President Ford in 1976 and reinforced by Presidents Carter and Reagan, made no distinction between wartime and peacetime. There are no loop holes; no matter how awful the leader, he could not be a U.S. target either directly or by a hired hand.

[edit]

Ford's executive order was in response to the general revulsion over disclosures by a Senate committee about a series of overseas U.S. assassination attempts some successful, some not over many years.

The committee found eight attempts on the life of Cuban President Fidel Castro. Other targets included Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, both in 1961; and Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam in 1963. Lumumba and Diem were both assassinated, although the degree of U.S. involvement has never been clear.

[edit]

... the old assassination taboo lives on, at least on paper.

"There's an executive order that prohibits the assassination of foreign leaders, and that remains in place," a White House spokesman said just as the Iraq hostilities were about to begin.

It should come as no surprise that I do not feel compelled to take any fashion or lifestyle tips from the homosexual movement, and I say that as someone who was wearing pink shirts back in the 1960s before the color was seized by homosexual activists and politicized. Nowadays, I still wear a pink shirt every now and then as a sign of rebellion against a movement that expects wearers of that color to be sympathetic to their agenda, which I most certainly am not.

Flowers' Clinton lawsuit revived: Judge rules conspiracy claim against former first lady, aides may proceed

Gennifer Flowers may proceed with a lawsuit that accuses Hillary Rodham Clinton of conspiring with [James Carville and George Stephanopoulos ] to defame her during the 1992 presidential election campaign, a federal judge in Las Vegas has ruled...According to Flowers' lawsuit, Hillary Rodham Clinton organized and directed a conspiracy to defame her.

Three weeks after signaling it might send American troops to Liberia as part of an international peacekeeping operation, the Bush administration today disputed any suggestion that it was deliberately delaying a decision even as the Liberian capital of Monrovia endured another violent day.

"All previous threats in the history of mankind have had one element in common. They were posed by historical groups that had created the weapons -- both physical and cultural -- that they used to threaten their enemies." States achieved their military power through their own labor and sacrifice, developing their own economies, organizing their societies, training their own troops, and building their own arsenals.

But the same cannot be said of the threats emanating from the Muslim world. Al-Qaeda destroys airplanes and buildings that it itself could not possibly build. The Palestinian Authority has failed in every field of endeavor except killing Israelis. Saddam Hussein''s Iraq grew dangerous thanks to money showered on it by the West to purchase petroleum Iraqis themselves had neither located nor extracted.

How, despite their general incompetence, has this trio managed to guide the course of events as if they were Powers in the traditional sense?

The cause of this anomaly, Harris replies, is that the West plays by a strict set of rules while permitting Al-Qaeda, the Palestinians, and Saddam Hussein to play without rules. We restrain ourselves according to the standards of civilized conduct as refined over the centuries; they engage in maximal ruthlessness.

The two notorious sons of Saddam Hussein, Uday and Qusay, were killed today in an extended firefight with American forces in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the United State military said today.

The war in Iraq was fought for several very specific reasons. Indeed, it is rare in American history that an administration has been so careful to spell out the causes for going to war. First, said the Bush administration, only a war fought now will prevent a sworn enemy from threatening us later with weapons of mass destruction. Hussein's use of chemical and biological weapons against his neighbors as well as his own people combined with his efforts to develop a nuclear device conjured up the very real possibility of an attack on the United States that would have made September 11 look like child's play. In the next place, argued the administration, regime change in Iraq was necessary to disrupt the possibility of an emerging Iraq-al-Qaeda alliance — an alliance that would put the vast resources of an oil-producing rogue state at the disposal of fanatical terrorists who had already demonstrated their intent and ability to target American cities.

And, finally: The Bush administration argued in favor of going to war on humanitarian grounds — in order to liberate the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator, one who regularly employed poison gas, torture, ethnic cleansing, and mass rape as his preferred methods of "statecraft." Taken together, our goals were to defend ourselves and to bring a more decent and democratic rule to the Iraqi people.

[edit]

The upshot would be that the Iraq invasion was not in our "national interest," at least narrowly conceived, and that we thus fought the war exclusively for humanitarian reasons. This was Bush's third rationale for the war, and it has proven impregnable.

The identity of an undercover CIA officer whose husband started the Iraq uranium intelligence controversy has been publicly revealed by a conservative Washington columnist citing "two senior administration officials."

Intelligence officials confirmed to Newsday yesterday that Valerie Plame, wife of retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson, works at the agency on weapons of mass destruction issues in an undercover capacity - at least she was undercover until last week when she was named by columnist Robert Novak.

[edit]

Wilson and a retired CIA official said yesterday that the "senior administration officials" who named Plame had, if their description of her employment was accurate, violated the law and may have endangered her career and possibly the lives of her contacts in foreign countries. Plame could not be reached for comment.

"When it gets to the point of an administration official acting to do career damage, and possibly actually endanger someone, that's mean, that's petty, it's irresponsible, and it ought to be sanctioned," said Frank Anderson, former CIA Near East Division chief.

A current intelligence official said that blowing the cover of an undercover officer could affect the officer's future assignments and put them and everyone they dealt with overseas in the past at risk.

"If what the two senior administration officials said is true," Wilson said, "they will have compromised an entire career of networks, relationships and operations." What's more, it would mean that "this White House has taken an asset out of the" weapons of mass destruction fight, "not to mention putting at risk any contacts she might have had where the services are hostile."

When he announced the record $455 billion federal deficit last week, Office of Management and Budget Director Joshua Bolten reassured Americans that the red ink will evaporate as soon as the economy perks up. In the long term, Bolten insisted, rapid economic growth will generate the federal revenues needed to close the gap.

Bolten's faith in history is charming, but worrisome. His implication is that just as the '90s boom erased the deficit President Clinton inherited, so economic growth will eventually wipe out the deficit President Bush created.

But Bush's own policies make that very unlikely. Even if the economy rebounds, the tax revenue the federal government needs to balance the budget won't return.

[edit]

As they did in the '90s, the wealthy will receive a disproportionate share of the reward when the economy and the markets pick up again. But because of these tweaks to the tax code, the government will harvest much less of the windfall than it did during the Clinton years.

[edit]

The Bush administration has been woefully off-base when it comes to projecting federal revenues and expenditures. Even if economic growth meets its expectations, the recovery in federal revenues won't. They have changed the rules too much.

French peacekeepers found the hacked bodies of 22 elderly people, women and children in a village outside the Congolese town of Bunia after trading gunfire with militiamen, a spokesman said on Tuesday.

"Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," President Bush said in Cincinnati on Oct. 7. "Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."

But declassified portions of a still-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released Friday by the White House show that at the time of the president's speech the U.S. intelligence community judged that possibility to be unlikely. In fact, the NIE, which began circulating Oct. 2, shows the intelligence services were much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his government was collapsing after a military attack by the United States.

[Saddam] presumes that British and American journalists, after the obligatory mention that the world is better off with Saddam gone, would — by their investigative and oppositionist nature — sustain the credibility firestorm. By insisting that Bush deliberately lied about his reasons for pre-emption, and gave no thought to the cost of occupation, critics would erode his poll support and encourage political opponents — eager to portray victory as defeat —to put forward a leave-Iraq-to-the-Iraqis candidate.

GUN-CONTROL & AMIN [Dave Kopel]
As the world prepares for Idi Amin's imminent death, let us remember that his genocide was made possible by gun-control laws which Amin's government inherited from the British colonial government. Historically, genocide almost never occurs without the prior imposition of gun laws which disarm the victim population.

...in a culture where scientific thinking is going extinct, people begin to view power over the world in magical terms, because to them the scientific method is indistinguishable from sorcery. Power over the world, over others, continues to preoccupy everyone more than ever, but mastery of scientific knowledge and technique is no longer understood as the means to that end.

State audit in Houston, Tex, finds more than half of 5,500 students who left in 2000-1 school year should have been declared dropouts but were not; that year Houston schools reported only 1.5 percent of its students dropped out; audit recommends lowering ranking of 14 of 16 Houston middle and high schools from best to worst; audit is stunning blow to Houston school system, largest and most celebrated district in state and winner of $1 million prize as best urban district in country; Houston has been pillar of so-called Texas miracle in education, whose emphasis on grading school performance became model for rest of country; some in Texas are now questioning whether miracle may have been smoke and mirrors, at least on high school level; they suggest that Houston is model of how focus on school accountability can sometimes go wrong, driving administrators to alter data or push students likly to mar school's profile out the back door; Pres Bush's Secretary of Education Rod Paige, who ran Houston system from 1994 to 2001, refuses comment on undercounting of dropouts; current Houston school officials are appealing proposed reclassifications of their schools, saying problem is one of sloppy record keeping rather than large-scale fraud.