The health ministry plans to give preferential treatment to single mothers when hiring part-time workers, officials said Thursday. The move is part of its program to support fatherless families under special legislation enacted in July.

When choosing from applications for part-time clerical work, the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry will favor single mothers if there are no significant differences in qualifications from their competitors, the officials said.

***

The measure is aimed at supporting fatherless families, which are under an additional financial strain due to the continuing economic slump.

***

Many single mothers have part-time jobs, and their average annual income in 1998 was only about 2.3 million yen -- roughly one-third that of an ordinary household. They often face job cuts and tough prospects for re-employment as companies try to trim their payrolls, according to the ministry.

***

In the current fiscal year, the ministry has launched a program to pay 300,000 yen to employers each time they give full-time status to single mothers who were originally hired as part-time workers. ***

Calls to provide employment support for single mothers have been mounting since the government slashed child-rearing allowances for low-income households in April. The government claimed the cuts were aimed at focusing on measures to help single mothers be more self-reliant and find employment.

The monument, which proclaims that Shepard, who was gay, is in hell, will be placed in cities that have Ten Commandments monuments on display in publicly owned facilities. [Emphasis mine.]

"We are going to pock-mark this nation from sea to shining sea with this message on the monument: ... 'Matthew Shepard entered hell October the 12th, 1998, at age 21 in defiance of God's warning, 'Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination' -- Leviticus 18:22,'" Phelps said in a telephone interview. "That is the message this nation needs, whether it knows it or not or whether it wants it or not. And that's the message we are determined the nation is going to receive."

Democratic Senator Zell Miller has endorsed George W. Bush for president.

Life-long left-liberal Roger L. Simon has endorsed George W. Bush for president.

Life-long left-liberal Cara Remal has endorsed George W. Bush for president.

All in the last three days.

[edit]

Democrats: You had better snap out of denial and get your act together fast. You are in so much trouble and you have no idea.

[I'm a liberal, blah, blah, blah]

Still, if the election were held today, like Georgia Democratic Senator Zell Miller, I would vote for George W. Bush without a second’s hesitation. That’s how bad I think the Democrats are on foreign policy, by far the most important issue of our day. I will go further. They are one of the sleaziest collections of low-down opportunists I have ever seen on one stage together short of that crowd of tobacco executives who testified “No, sirree, I didn’t know that nicotine was addictive.” These dudes and one dudette (Mosely-Braun) are downright dangerous. (Okay, Lieberman can be sane, but he doesn’t seem to have a chance in that bizarre atmosphere). And here’s why I think they’re dangerous—they’re acting like we’re still in Vietnam when we’re in a real war of civilizations. We’re on the right side this time. Haven't they seen the videotapes of Baathists chopping their own countrymens' heads off and pushing them off roofs? Haven't they seen the unmarked graves of children? What’s going on with these people? Do they think suicide bombers driving into the Red Cross are pacifist Buddhist monks?

I would go one step further and ask the Democratic Presidential candidates to dare to say with a straight face and a clear conscience that the Iraqi people would be better off now if we had left Saddam Hussein in power, because they are coming way too close (for and to Comfort) to saying that these days. Clark literally said that “this war was unnecessary”.

I have to say that I agree with Roger Simon and the Democratic Senator Zell Miller on this one. Unless the delusions of the far “left” stop infecting these candidates, unless they stop hallucinating that Iraq is Vietnam, unless they get off the opportunists bus they’re riding on, unless they see that the (party) problems of nine little candidates don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, and if the election were held today, even though I disagree with Bush domestically, I would have to vote for George W. Bush. No contest.

The Legal Birth Definition Act was devised to ban specific abortion procedures by re-defining when the moment of birth occurred. Under this legislation, a child would be constitutionally protected under the Constitution once the baby demonstrated a detectable heartbeat, evidence of breathing, spontaneous movement, or umbilical cord pulsation.

The distinguishing feature of modern Washington dishonesty is that it is almost transparent, barely intended to deceive. It uses true-ish factoids to construct an implied assertion about reality that is not just false but preposterous. Modern Washington dishonesty is more like an elaborate, stylized ritual than a realistic Western-style performance. The goal is not to persuade but merely to create an impression that there are two sides to the question without actually having to supply one of them.

Facing criticism for dropping an investigation of an elite U.S. platoon that slaughtered Vietnamese villagers, Army officials have reopened the case to find out why no one was charged despite evidence that the unit violently lost control in 1967.

[edit]

The Army’s review could help determine why key suspects were allowed to resign during the investigation - escaping the reach of military prosecutors, and why three murder suspects were never charged when the inquiry was completed.

Some Republicans denounced the Democrats' efforts.

"It would be inappropriate for Texas Democrats to seek to strong-arm, intimidate or even lobby the Justice Department to protect their seats," said Jonathan Grella, spokesman for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the Sugar Land Republican who urged GOP legislators to redraw the lines imposed two years ago by judges.

“Judge Charles Pickering has been victimized by inaccurate race-baiting, and political trash talk by the news media, members of Congress and Washington's liberal elite.

[edit]

“But the special interest groups don’t care about any of that. They don’t want to hear how qualified Justice Brown and Judge Pickering are or how much the voters like the jobs they have done.

“No, their only mission is to assassinate these good people’s character and to take them down one way or another because they fear they won’t cater to their liberal agenda.

“Folks such as Judge Charles Pickering and Justice Janice Rogers Brown deserve fair treatment, not ruthless, cruel, character assassination.”

"Please don't send me e-mails arguing that pederasty has nothing whatever to do with homosexuality. I don't believe it."

"The point is that open homosexuality is -- not necessarily, but all too often -- an infiltrating, exclusivist, corruptive, and destructive force."

"a sufficient concentration of open homosexuals in the higher levels of an organization ... changes the character of that organization, to the degree that heterosexuals feel unwelcome in it."

"What I want to talk about here is the fact of my disliking homosexuality. ... I am not cruel, or bigoted, or intolerant. Nor am I aware of anyone who knows me that believes be to be any of those things. Like Thomas More: 'I wish none harm, I say none harm, I do none harm.' "

Just seconds before the Capital gun scare story died, CNN's Jonathan Karl was beginning his interview with New York Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy. Why select her from the 435 members of Congress? Why, because her husband was the victim of gun violence, of course!

Fortunately, the story turned out to be a false alarm. Otherwise CNN's viewers would have been subjected to who knows how much fear-inspired, uninformed anti-gun speculation.

This example of liberal media bias is so great, one suspects even Eric Alterman might notice.

15 October 1993
Houston Chronicle

Senate Republican leader Bob Dole of Kansas said the compromise "does give the president flexibility and it does protect American forces. We have an American plan now, and we're going to get out of there, no question about it.''

Somalia critics led by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, pushed for an immediate withdrawal and offered a second amendment that would provide only funding necessary to withdraw the troops.

"Can we justify more funerals of young Americans over the next six months based on a policy none of us can define?'' asked Gramm. Gramm voted against the Byrd amendment.

[edit]

"To me, and I believe the majority of the American people, that (release) removes the last impediment to the total, rapid, prompt and safe withdrawal of American troops in Somalia,'' said McCain, a former Vietnam prisoner-of-war. "There is no reason for the United States of America to remain in Somalia.''

9 October 1993
Chicago Sun-Times

The Clinton administration made "a terrible mistake . . . in underestimating the strength" of Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) said Friday.

Hyde, senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also said he fears President Clinton is making "another mistake" by announcing a March 31 deadline for withdrawing U.S. troops instead of leaving the date "open-ended . . . and getting out earlier."

[edit]

And if "we're going to protect our troops that are left, we're probably going to have to expand our resources" with more troops, he conceded.

"But then we should get out - and I don't see why that should take six months," Hyde said.

6 October 1993
The Seattle Times

Any military presence in Somalia is facing growing opposition on Capitol Hill, where Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., yesterday urged Clinton to "declare victory and get out."

"Remaining in Somalia will only cost more U.S. lives, squander U.S. power and commit the United States to an unending quagmire from which we cannot easily withdraw," Lott said.

6 October 1993
Orlando Sentinel

"If we had a vote today, we'd be out today," Sen. Robert Dole of Kansas, the Republican leader, said. But, he added: "We can't get out with hostages there."

"We went in to save their dying children and now they parade the slain bodies of our youth," said Rep. John Mica, R- Winter Park, one of nearly two dozen House members who took the floor Tuesday to demand that U.S. forces be withdrawn immediately. "I cannot accept any more killing."

5 October 1993
The Washington Post

"As the body bags pile up in Mogadishu, the confusion over U.S. objectives increases," said Senate Minority Leader Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.), who called on President Clinton to send Congress next week a "blueprint for how and when the U.S. leaves Somalia for good."

"The SEIU's action, coming shortly after Dean won pledges from two small unions, the International Union of Painters and the California Teachers Assn., goes a long way toward completing the transformation of the former Vermont governor from a niche candidate backed by limousine liberals, antiwar activists, and tech-savvy young people into a mainstream candidate who can also connect with blue-collar America ..... The SEIU's move would effectively kill AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney's efforts to gather labor behind Dean rival Representative Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.). Until the painters and the teachers acted on Oct. 27, Gephardt, a staunch union ally during his quarter-century in Congress, had a virtual lock on labor leaders."

"Gephardt's problem is even greater among rank-and-file voters, many of whom are responding to Dean's fierce, unapologetic partisanship. An early October poll of likely Democratic caucus voters in Michigan, a must-win state for Gephardt, showed Dean with twice as much support among union members."

We continued along lanes and paths that often took us through the
middle of villages that did not appear on any map. In one village, we stopped to wait for all the vehicles to catch up to us. The path we were on had been one of the exit trails used by people fleeing Kigali. There were remnants of a barrier here, and many people had been killed and thrown in the ditches and on the sides of the road. As I got out to wait, I looked at the bodies, which seem relatively fresh. Just as I glimpsed the body of a child, it moved. I wasn't sure if it was my imagination, but I saw the twitching of the child and wanted to help. I leaned down to pick the child up, and suddenly I was holding a little body that was both tingling and mushy in my hands. In a second I realized that the movement was not the child but the action of maggots. I was frozen, not wanting to fling the child away from me but also not wanting to hold it for a second longer. I managed to set the body down and then stood there, shaky, not wanting to think about what was on my hands.

We saw many faces of death during the genocide, from the innocence of babies to the bewilderment of the elderly, from the defiance of fighters to the resigned stares of nuns. I saw so many faces and try now to remember each one. Early on I seemed to develop a screen between me and the sights and sounds to allow me to stay focused on the work to be done. For a long time I completely wiped the death masks of raped and sexually mutilated girls and women from my mind as if what had been done to them was the last thing that would send me over the edge.

But if you looked, you could see the evidence, even in the whitened skeletons. The legs bent apart; a bottle broken, a rough branch, even a knife between them. Where the bodies were fresh, we saw what must have been semen pooled on and near the dead women and girls. There was always a lot of blood. Some male corpses had their genitals cut off, but many women and young girls had their breasts chopped off and their genitals crudely cut apart. They died in a position of total vulnerability, flat on their backs, with their legs bent and knees wide apart. It was the expressions on their dead faces that assaulted me the most, a frieze of shock, pain and humiliation.

"The world community has largely turned its back on the newly freed Iraqis. The Red Cross, U.N. and Doctors Without Borders cut and ran from Iraq following attacks by the very people they came to assist."

"America shouldered the burden –- together with the rest of the attending baggage -– because nobody else would. Not because it's popular. Or because it will be easy. But because it's the right thing to do. What a country!"

Speaking to reporters this week, Mr. Bush made the bizarre argument that the worse things get in Iraq, the better news it is. "The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," he said. In the Panglossian Potomac, calamities happen for the best.

.... The war began with Bush illogic: false intelligence (from Niger to nuclear) used to bolster a false casus belli (imminent threat to our security) based on a quartet of false premises (that we could easily finish off Saddam and the Baathists, scare the terrorists and democratize Iraq without leeching our economy).

Now Bush illogic continues: The more Americans, Iraqis and aid workers who get killed and wounded, the more it is a sign of American progress. The more dangerous Iraq is, the safer the world is. The more troops we seem to need in Iraq, the less we need to send more troops.

The harder it is to find Saddam, Osama and W.M.D., the less they mattered anyhow. The more coordinated, intense and sophisticated the attacks on our soldiers grow, the more "desperate" the enemy is.

For weeks Washington has been the site of a colossal game of hot potato over who's to "blame" for the Iraq war. Or, more specifically, who's to blame for the "bad intelligence" over Iraq's as-of-yet-undiscovered stockpiles of WMD.

[edit]

Might I suggest another candidate for the blame? What about Saddam Hussein?

[edit]

Whatever we discover in Iraq at the end of the day, one thing has been crystal clear for a decade: Saddam Hussein very much wanted the world to think he had weapons of mass destruction. If our intelligence was uncertain before the war, that made his behavior all the more suspicious and therefore unacceptable.

Maybe he was bluffing; maybe he thought he had WMDs; maybe he really did have them. Who cares? Saddam played games. And we said very clearly that after 9-11 we were in no mood to play games anymore - especially on the issue of WMD because, unlike a gun, by the time you know for sure it's loaded, it's too late to do anything about it.

Look at it this way. Imagine you're a cop. You've chased down a known felon and violent criminal who you have every reason to believe is in possession of a gun. You say, "Put your hands up!" And instead he plays games, keeping his hands behind his back. You say, "Let me see your hands" and he shows you them one at a time, like a little kid playing keep-away. Finally, you say, "Look, if you don't cooperate there are going to be some serious consequences; I'm going to make you cooperate."

Companies awarded $8 billion in contracts to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan have been major campaign donors to President Bush, and their executives have had important political and military connections, according to a study released Thursday.

The study of more than 70 U.S. companies and individual contractors turned up more than $500,000 in donations to the president's 2000 campaign, more than they gave collectively to any other politician over the past dozen years.

The measure would apply to tickets and fines incurred in New York City and Washington, D.C., in the period from April 1, 1997, to Sept. 30, 2003.

Many embassies reside in Washington, and New York is home to the United Nations.

The provision would help New York City recover up to $21 million owed for 186,000 unpaid tickets, according to Schumer's office. The secretary of state can waive the penalties if it is in the national interest.

Schumer's office said that among the major offenders are Egypt, which owes nearly $2 million from 17,825 tickets; Kuwait, which owes $1.2 million from 11,122 violations; and Nigeria, in arrears almost $1 million from 8,520 violations.

He was asked about a news story published during a political campaign between Helms, R-N.C., and then-North Carolina Gov. James Hunt Jr. that quoted Allen as saying Hunt was vulnerable because of his links "with the queers."

Allen testified he used the word "queer" in its dictionary meaning from that time, or "odd, out of the ordinary, unusual. I did not use the word as pejorative; I did not use the word to denigrate any individual or any group."

We know, I know that it is nowhere near what the legislation characterized it to be. We're not naive enough to say that it doesn't exist from time to time. Typically when it does exist, it's a consensual sex act and typically one that's gone bad.

Democratic Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia said Wednesday he will endorse President Bush in the coming presidential election.

"This does not mean I am going to become a Republican," Miller said in a written statement. "It simply means that in the year 2004, this Democrat will vote for George Bush."

" ... when I look at the decimation of our manufacturing base nationally and in Wisconsin, I want clear answers on the World Trade Organization and NAFTA. Kucinich boldly stakes out his position. 'On the first day of my presidency, I will cancel NAFTA and WTO.' "

The following organizations have lent monetary, grassroots or some other type of direct support to anti-gun organizations. In many instances, these organizations lent their name in support of specific campaigns to pass anti-gun legislation such as the March 1995 HCI "Campaign to Protect Sane Gun Laws." Many of these organizations were listed as "Campaign Partners," for having pledged to fight any efforts to repeal the Brady Act and the Clinton "assault weapons" ban. All have officially endorsed anti-gun positions.

REPORTER: "You recently put Condoleezza Rice, your national security adviser, in charge of the management of the administration's Iraq policy. What has effectively changed since she's been in charge?"

PRESIDENT BUSH: "[Condoleezza Rice's] job is to coordinate interagency. She's doing a fine job of coordinating interagency . . . and to help unstick things that may get stuck. That's the best way to put it. She's an unsticker and -- is she listening? Okay, well, she's doing a fine job."

When Napoleon was asked what distinguished a great leader from a regular politician, he explained that it was not innate intelligence, but rather the mental power "de fixer les objets longtemps sans etre fatigue" (to concentrate on objectives for long periods without tiring.) While most other politicians (certainly including most of the Democratic Party presidential aspirants) have long since tired of the mental and emotional strain of staring into the terrorism abyss, the president continues to focus and to act.

Having started the process of rolling back terrorism (however falteringly or imperfectly), we are more secure than if we had not yet started.

The United States and the United Kingdom committed other acts of sabotage on deployment to Rwanda. For instance, I had long been arguing with New York that RTLM [Hutu hate-radio] had to be shut down, as it was a direct instrument in promoting genocide. The UN did not have the means to stop the broadcasts, either through jamming, a direct air strike on the transmitter, or covert operations, but it made a formal request of the United States, which had the means to try all three. The issue was studied by the Pentagon, which in due course recommended against conducting the operation because of the cost - $8,500 an hour for a jamming aircraft over the country - and the legal dilemma. Bandwidth within a nation is owned by the nation, and jamming a national radio station would violate international convention on national sovereignty. The Pentagon judged that the lives of the estimated 8,000-10,000 Rwandans killed each day during the genocide were not worth the cost of fuel or the violation of Rwandan airwaves. The death toll, which was estimated at 200,000 by the end of April, reached 500,000 by the end of May and 800,000 by the end of June.

I had judged that we needed one hundred APCs to be effective on the ground. The DPKO [UN Dept. of Peacekeeping Operations] approached forty-four nations to give, lend or lease APCs to the troop-contributing countries to equip their forces. The United States, with its vast unused Cold War stocks of APCs eventually supplied fifty. As soon as the United States offered anything at all, the DPKO stopped searched for other donors. And then the stalling began: staff with the Pentagon were reluctant to put their vehicles into central Africa and seemed content to let them rust in German depots. They badgered the DPKO with questions, and staff there passed the questions on to me. Then the United States decided that the APCs could not be given to the mission but would have to be leased and that the lease would have to be negotiated. Eventually they came up with the price of $4 million, which they insisted had to be pre-paid. When the issue was raised of transporting the carries to Kampala to link them up with the Ghanaians who needed to be trained to operate them, the United States insisted upon another $6 million to cover the cost of air transport. After the funding was secured - another time consuming exercise - the APCs were airlifted to Entebbe [in Uganda]; after much negotiations with Uganda, they arrived stripped of machine guns, radios, tools, spare part, training manuals and so on. The United States, in effect, delivered tons of rusting metal to Entebbe. We were without trucks to transport the APCs to Kigali and had no drivers trained to operate them.

Now and then one sees the claim that Kausfiles was the first blog. I beg to differ: I happen to feel that my Salon column was the first true blog. My columns had punch and on-rushing velocity. They weren't this dreary meta-commentary, where there's a blizzard of fussy, detached sections nattering on obscurely about other bloggers or media moguls and Washington bureaucrats. I took hits at media excesses, but I directly commented on major issues and personalities in politics and pop culture.

Wilson claimed he shipped 20 tons of plastic explosives out of Houston Intercontinental Airport at the request of the CIA. The federal government denied this, and at the heart of the case against him was a CIA affidavit submitted by prosecutors stating Wilson had not done any work for the CIA since his retirement in February 1971.

But U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes spelled out in his order vacating Wilson's conviction, that the CIA forwarded a memo to the U.S. attorney's office a few days after he was convicted -- but before he was sentenced -- alerting them that they had since discovered at least five projects Wilson had worked on for the CIA after 1971 -- including a planned trip to Iran with the CIA's deputy director.

The CIA forwarded the memo to the U.S. attorney's office, Hughes said, but after debating the issue for months, decided not to inform Wilson's attorneys. Wilson appealed, but the government failed to acknowledge that the affidavit was false.

Is it John Kerry's Beatles-era haircut that doesn't appeal to students sporting today's shorter styles?

A waffle breakfast for the Massachusetts senator and Democratic president hopeful drew only about 10 people at the University of Colorado on Tuesday, even as several thousand rallied for political rival Howard Dean outside.

The waffles were symbolic of what Kerry's supporters say is Dean's waffling on issues.

"He's never been afraid to stand up for what he believes in," said Meininger, a 21-year-old senior majoring in history and political science.

Photographs on the wall showed Kerry with hair combed neatly over his ears. One showed him with John Lennon.

"I think that's just him. He's had long hair for a long time. That's who he is, and that's what's so great about John Kerry - he's not afraid to be himself," said Meininger, who has short hair.

"He does need a haircut," said Eric Morgan, a graduate student in history who was eating a waffle. "I think if he trimmed it back, it would be nice."

Michele Buckley, a leader of the campus Democrats and an organizer of the Dean rally, said the former Vermont governor's short haircut helps on campus.

Buckley doubts the slogan on Dean's signs - "the Dean Generation" - will be the same turnoff to older voters that Kerry's hair is to youth.

"The older generation has been the younger generation," she said.

Republicans will target U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold and Rep. Ron Kind as they try to increase their majorities in Congress and win Wisconsin for President Bush in next year's elections, the national GOP chairman said Tuesday.

The Republican Party has marked Wisconsin as a key battleground state for the 2004 race ever since Bush lost the state to Al Gore in 2000 by fewer than 6,000 votes.

Chairman Ed Gillespie stopped short of calling Wisconsin a must-win for Bush but said the president and Republicans will visit here frequently in an effort to win Wisconsin for the first time since Ronald Reagan did it in 1984.

Congress nixes extra pay for some troops

Oct. 29, 2003 | WASHINGTON (AP) -- House-Senate negotiators considering an $87 billion package for Iraq and Afghanistan have rejected a Democratic proposal to compensate federal employees on active duty with the National Guard and reserves.

The proposal by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., would have made up the differences between the workers' regular salaries and their service incomes, as many states and private employers are already doing. He said 23,000 federal employees would be affected.

The Senate had included the provision in its version of the Iraq spending bill, but senators in the conference agreed to eliminate it Tuesday in a 16-13 vote that was mainly along party lines.

"I wish you could be in the den of our home sometime when Don Rumsfeld is being interviewed by the press, how he can handle it. He makes in most cases, certainly a lot of them, regret that they asked the question the way they did. [Laughter] It's a pleasure and delight to watch some of them in the press to try to twist a question so that they can get the wrong answer to the right question .... There is no spin with this gentleman. He tells the truth. He always calls it as he sees it. And America is lucky to have him serving at such a critical time."

The hospitals remained operational throughout the genocide thanks to the efforts of Phillipe Gaillard and the International Committee of the Red Cross, backed by Medecins Sans Frontieres and the Canadian doctor and Somalia veteran James Orbinski. But at what cost. Fifty-six Rwandans working for the Red Cross would be killed before the conflict was over, a few white doctors and nurses would be injured and hundreds of Rwandan casualties would be pulled out of ambulances and slaughtered on the spot. On one trip to the city centre, I saw a white Red Cross van, angled on the road, riddled with bullet holes. Smoke was coming out of the engine compartment and all the windows were smashed. The passenger door was open and a Rwandan in a Red Cross vest was hanging down, facing us, with blood oozing from his head in a slow, steady stream. The back doors were open and a body on a stretcher was still inside, with another held up on the bumper. There were three other casualties, their white and bloodied gauze dressings spun around them. One body had no head. Five blood-spattered youths sat on the curb, smoking cigarettes beside the ambulance. Their machetes were stained red. At most they may have been fifteen years old.

DOBBS: "When you and I talked at one point during the war, in mid-March of this year, you said you believed that the French and the Germans and other critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policy would fall in line as soon as the war were ended, as soon as it became clear that Saddam was a non-entity. That has not been the case. What is your assessment of the French and the German policy post- Saddam Hussein?"

PERLE: "Well, I think it's appalling, having professed concern about the people of Iraq, when the time came to make a contribution to their reconstruction, they couldn't find the euro to put in the till. And that tells you more than all their words about how much they care about the people of Iraq. It's an appalling failure of responsibility on their part."

Larson Frisby of the ABA was kind enough to provide me with the ABA ratings for the 108th Congress. The ABA has two categories for such nominees, Qualified and Well Qualified. Remember all of the circuit court nominees that liberals claim are extremist? Miguel Estrada, Carolyn Kuhl, Patricia Owen, Charles Pickering, William Pryor, Claude Allen, and Janice Rogers Brown come to mind. Every one of these has been judged "well qualified" either unanimously or by a substantial majority. Not a single nominee was graded simply "qualified."

North Korea's highest-ranking defector, who has been kept under heavy guard by the South Korean government for six years, left for Washington on Monday on a 10-day trip to discuss the North in meetings with Bush administration officials and Senate leaders.

The defector, Hwang Jang Yop, is known as the chief architect of North Korea's official juche, or self-reliance, ideology. He was a confidant of Kim Il Sung, North Korea's late leader, and a mentor to Kim Jong Il, who succeeded his father.

''If I were to go into details, it would take many days,'' he said. ''As a politician or leader who can work for the development of the state and the happiness of the people, he is an F student, a dropout. But as a dictator he has an excellent ability. He can organize people so that they can't move, can't do anything, and he can keep them under his ideology. As far as I know, the present North Korean dictatorial system is the most precise and thorough in history.''

Hwang says that he believes foreign aid has helped Kim by providing the resources he needs to retain the loyalty of his core constituencies -- the military and party elites. Hwang says he does not believe Kim would ever allow foreign aid and investment to benefit the people who need it; Kim has shown no interest in his people's material well-being, and given the choice between regime survival and national prosperity, it's pretty clear which he would prefer. A few years ago, Kim began letting South Koreans visit the north, and this was seen as a relaxation of the isolation of his information-starved subjects. But the tourists, whose visits provide much-needed hard currency to the regime, are shepherded in quarantinelike conditions that make them virtual prisoners; contact with ordinary North Koreans is nil. Hwang says outsiders are naive to believe that Kim is ready to open up his country.

''South Korea is being fooled, and the Chinese, who should know best,'' he said. ''A considerable number of people are being fooled, including the United States.''

In an apparent attempt to prevent Hwang from becoming too talkative in Washington, North Korean authorities have reportedly advised the South Koreans that Hwang's eldest son was recently "injured" in an accident and has been brought to Pyongyang for observation, according to Japan's Sankei newspaper.

It quickly became apparent that members of the mob had attacked a couple who had been visiting the CND, and were now taunting the RPF guards to try to save them.

Brent, realizing how rapidly this situation could escalate, intervened, ordering the RPF to stay inside the compound and not respond to the provocation. Brent and Troute [Phillipe Troute - Belgian para-commando and Dallaire's driver] then plunged into the crowd, certain that they would be backed up by the eight-man Bangladeshi guard unit that was stationed at the entrance to the CND. As they got to the center of the mob, they discovered a man sprawled on the ground with blood splattered everywhere. His face had been sliced almost in two, exposing the blue-white glint of bone. Close by lay a heavily pregnant woman, her arm sliced through the bone and broken. Brent lifted the man onto his shoulder and made directly for the vehicle. As he moved forward with his bloody burden, a man with a machete separated himself from the crowd and stood squarely in Brent's way. Without a second's thought, Brent drove his fist into the man's solar plexus, knocking him to the ground. Troute raised his assault rifle, and the crowd backed off, giving him room to pick up the woman and carry her to safety. It wasn't until Brent and Troute were both back at the vehicle that they realized the Bangladeshi guards were nowhere in sight. They were hiding in the bunker adjacent to the main gate.

President Bush on Monday blamed rising violence in Iraq on U.S. progress being made there, saying coalition successes are making insurgents more desperate.

Bush spoke only hours after bombings in postwar Baghdad killed dozens of people and after conferring at the White House with the top U.S. general and civilian official in Iraq.

"The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity that's available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become," Bush told reporters.

Brent [Beardsley] and a team of MILOBs [military observers] had spent the day conducting rescue missions in one of the APCs. On the first effort, he'd picked up several UN civilian staff and their families and also the Canadian charge d'affiars, Linda Carroll, who was able to provide him with a list of addresses of Canadian expatriates in Kigali.

With Brent that day were Marek Pazik and Stefan Stec, both Polish officers who had briefly been billeted in the Gikondo Polish Church, known as the Polish Mission because it was run by priests from Poland. Pazik and Stefan had not lasted long under the austere regime at the mission, but two of their fellow Polish MILOBs had stayed on. That morning, a faint radio call had come from the men at the mission begging for help. The batteries on the radio were dying and all Brent could make out was that there had been killings at the church.

Not knowing what to expect, Brent, Pazik and Stec armed themselves and, hatches down, set off to Gikondo in the APC with a Bangladeshi officer and three men. Along the route, they passed through fighting between the RGF [Rwandan government forces] and the RPF [rebel Tutsi forces], through Gendarmerie roadblocks and through the ever-increasing and chaotic militia roadblocks. They saw the bodies of men, women and children near these roadblocks. So many civilians were on the move, it looked like the entire population was abandoning Kigali.

At the church, they came to a halt and dismounted. Pazik and a Bangladeshi soldier went to the rectory to find the Polish MILOBs, while Brent and Stec confronted the first evidence of wholesale massacre. Across the street from the mission, an entire alleyway was littered with the bodies of women and children near a hastily abandoned school. As Brent and Stefan were standing there trying to take in the number of bodies, a truck full of armed men roared by. Stefan went inside while Brent stood by the unbelievable horror - the first such scene UNAMIR witnessed - evidence of the genocide, though we didn't yet call it that. In the aisles and on the pews were the bodies of hundreds of men, women and children. At least fifteen of them were still alive but in a terrible state. The priests were applying first aid to the survivors. A baby cried as it tried to feed on the breast of its dead mother, a sight Brent has never forgotten. Pazik found the two Polish MILOBs, who were in a state of grief and shock, hardly able to relate what had happened. They night before, they said, the RGF had cordoned off the area, and the Gendarmerie had gone door to door checking identity cards. All Tutsi men, women and children were rounded up and moved to the church. Their screams had alerted the priests and the MILOBs, who had come running. The priests and officers were seized at the church doors and slammed up against the wall with rifle barrels at their throats. They were forced to watch at gunpoint as the gendarmes collected the adults' identity cars and burned them. Then the gendarmes welcomed a large number of civilian militiamen with machetes and handed over the victims to their killers.

Methodically and with much bravado and laughter, the militia moved from bench to bench, hacking with machetes. Some people died immediately, while others with terrible machete wounds begged for their lives or the lives of their children. No one was spared. A pregnant woman was disemboweled and her fetus severed. Women suffered horrible mutilation. Children begged for their lived and received the same treatment as their parents. Genitalia were a favourite target, the victims left to bleed to death. There was no mercy, no hesitation and no compassion. The priests and the MILOBs, guns at their throats, tears in their eyes, and the screams of the dying in their ears, pleaded with the gendarmes for the victims. The gendarmes' reply was to use the rifle barrels to lift the priests' and MILOB's heads so that they could better witness the horror.

[Brent and the others took the two Polish MILOB's but left the priests and wounded behind, as they could not all fit in the one available vehicle. They promised to launch a rescue mission as soon as they returned to headquarters, but since there were so many other rescue missions underway, one could not be launched until the next day.]

Early the next morning, the priests called on the radio and reported that the militia had returned during the night. Our APC had been spotted at the church, and the killers had returned to destroy the evidence of the massacre. They had killed the wounded and removed and burned the bodies.

OLBERMANN: "How -- what happened here?"

LOFTUS: ".... About a year-and-a-half ago, people in the intelligence community came and said (that) guys like Alamoudi and Sami al-Arian and other terrorists weren’t being touched because they’d been ordered not to investigate the cases, not to prosecute them, because there were being funded by the Saudis and a political decision was being made at the highest levels -- don’t do anything that would embarrass the Saudi government.
.... How could these guys operate for more than a decade immune from prosecution? And the answer is coming out in a very strange place. What Alamoudi and al-Arian have in common is a guy named Grover Norquist. He’s the super lobbyist. Newt Gingrich’s guy, the one the NRA calls on .... He is the guy that was hired by Alamoudi to head up the Islamic Institute ....

... Grover Norquist's best friend is Karl Rove, the White House chief of staff, and apparently Norquist was able to fix things. He got extreme right-wing Muslim people to be the gatekeepers in the White House. That's why moderate Americans couldn't speak out after 9/11. Moderate Muslims couldn't get into the White House because Norquist’s friends were blocking their access."

OLBERMANN: "How does this tie back into the thing that apparently pulled the stopper out of the drain, if you will -- the [developments] at Guantanamo Bay? How rotten is the system of the interpreters and the chaplains -- the Muslim chaplains that Alamoudi was involved in setting up?"

LOFTUS: "It's as rotten as it gets. Think of the Muslim chaplains program that he set up as a spy service for al-Qaeda. The damage that's been done is extreme. It wasn't just sending home mom and dad messages from the prisoners. These guys, this network in Guantanamo, stole the CIA's briefing books. Everything that the CIA knew about al-Qaeda is now back in al-Qaeda hands. That's about as bad an intelligence setback as you can get."

Now, my question to you is, it is pretty clear that any seasoned minority candidate with good credentials who goes before that committee is going to get raked over the coals and is not going to get confirmed.

Perhaps surprisingly, 31 percent of college students identify themselves as Republicans, while 27 percent call themselves Democrats and 38 percent independent or unaffiliated.
...
The general population is significantly more Democratic - about 36 percent of Americans consider themselves Democrats, 27 percent Republicans, 20 percent independents or third party loyalists, and the rest have no preference, according to the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.

The changing politics of college students reflects broader societal change. While older generations grew up in a "culture of voting," more than half of today's young voters grew up in households with parents who have never voted, according to David King, a professor of public policy at Harvard University.
...
Sixty-one percent of students approve of Bush's performance on the job - higher than the president's overall national approval ratings, which have dipped in recent months and now stand at only 50 percent in a poll released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.

Under the contract, Boeing would produce 100 refueling tankers based on its 767-model airliner, a deal Dicks predicts would be expanded and eventually bring the giant weapons manufacturer $100 billion. That would make it one of the most expensive military programs this decade.

Leasing, rather than buying, is the key to the deal: The Air Force, under current budgeting, cannot afford to buy so many aircraft at once. Leasing would permit it to pay less up front, although it would ultimately pay as much as $5.7 billion more overall. And Boeing would be able to keep its 767 production line active despite a decrease in commercial orders for the plane. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and others have denounced the program as corporate welfare born in backroom dealing. Air Force Secretary James G. Roche has said it is a cost-effective way to modernize an aging tanker fleet.

[edit]

Some Pentagon officials remain convinced that the tanker leasing agreement, signed by the Air Force in July, does not meet federal accounting standards, a view shared by the General Accounting Office. Two weeks ago, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said it was actually a purchase disguised as a lease, making it "significantly more costly" than a normal purchase.

[edit]

In December 2001, language authorizing the deal -- but providing no money -- emerged in legislation in what Hill veterans refer to as a "virgin birth," meaning it was inserted into the defense appropriations bill after the bill had passed the House and Senate, during closed negotiations between conferees. It was then approved on the House and Senate floors as part of a compromise bill.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), a longtime supporter of expanding federal leasing, has claimed credit for inserting the language. One month before he did so, he received $21,900 in campaign contributions from 31 Boeing executives at a fundraiser in Seattle, where Boeing has many employees.

Gang rape has been so violent, so systematic, so common in eastern Congo during the country's five years of war that thousands of women are suffering from vaginal fistula, leaving them unable to control bodily functions and enduring ostracism and the threat of debilitating lifelong health problems.

Kakule and his two helpers were surrounded by a squad of eight M.L.C. soldiers. At gunpoint, the rebels ordered two of the loggers to hold the third to the ground. Then the squad's commander took off his red beret. He inverted it, put it back on his head with the black side facing outward and yanked a knife across the throat of Kakule's assistant. He cut the tongue from below and pulled it out through the throat; he cut the belly down the middle and claimed the liver; he stripped off the trousers so he could slice off the testicles and penis. One of his squad hacked up the body. The commander gave Kakule his knife, told him to pare the skin from an arm, a leg. He told Kakule and his other assistant to build a fire. From their satchels, the soldiers brought cassava bread. They sat in a circle. The commander placed the dead man's head at the center. He forced the two loggers to sit with them, to eat with them the pieces of boiled limb. The grilled liver, tongue and genitals had already been parceled out among the commander and his troops.