Two of President George W. Bush's military advisors said that the US inability to find illegal weapons in Iraq means little.

"I don't think that you can draw any conclusion from the fact that the stockpiles were not found," Pentagon advisor Richard Perle said at the American Enterprise Institute.

Perle said he did not fear that the United States would lose credibility after Bush used Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction as his principal justification for going to war.

"If others are going to take the view that, because these weapons weren't found, nothing that the United States says can be trusted -- there's not much we can do about that," he said. "It would be a foolish conclusion to draw."

[edit]

[Regarding France's opposition to the war]

"Sometimes the right answer, when a person has a grievance against you, is to say: 'You're completely mistaken; that grievance comes out of a completely wrong way of looking at the world and you're just going to have to get over it'," Frum said.

"We're not going to change."

except for a few lucky members of their sex, most women today must choose between males who are whiny, incapable of making decisions, and in general of "acting like men," or those who treat women roughly and are unreliable, unmannerly, and usually stupid.

The young men, for their part, are not a little embarrassed when they hear these charges but can't wholly deny them. Indeed, when asked the simple question, "When have you ever been taught what it means to be a man?" they are typically speechless and somewhat ashamed.

Today's barbarians are not hard to find. Like the barbarians of old, the new ones wander about in great packs. You can recognize them by their dress, their speech, their amusements, their manners, and their treatment of women. You will know them right away by their distinctive headgear. They wear baseball caps everywhere they go and in every situation....

Recognizing other barbarians by their ball caps, one barbarian can enter into a verbal exchange with another anywhere: in a men's room, at an airport, in a movie theater. This exchange, which never quite reaches the level of conversation, might begin with, "Hey, what up?" A traditional response: "Dude!" The enlightening colloquy can go on for hours at increasingly high volumes. "You know, you know!" "What I'm sayin'!" "No way, man!" "What the f---!" "You da man!" "Cool!" "Phat!" "Awesome!" And so on. Barbarians do not use words to express thoughts, convey information, paint pictures in the imagination, or come to a rational understanding. Such speech as they employ serves mainly to elicit in others audible reactions to a few sensual events: football, sex, hard rock, the latest barbarian movie, sex, football.

Barbarians, not surprisingly, listen to barbaric music. Allan Bloom famously identified rock-and-roll as the music of sexual intercourse. It was no accident that the progenitor of the rock-and-roll revolution was nicknamed "the Pelvis." Equally basic, but fundamentally different, are the passions enlisted by modern rock without the roll, that is, heavy metal. It is certainly not the music of intercourse, at least not of the consensual variety, since girls and women generally hate it. And with good reason: It is impossible to dance to.

The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.

The text of the Constitution provides that the President may use his Recess Appointments power to fill any vacancy “that may happen” during a recess of the Senate. One possible construction of the word “happen” is that only those vacancies that “happen to occur” during a recess of the Senate can be filled by recess appointment. Such a limited construction of the phrase, however, was rejected early in the country’s history. A long line of Attorney General and Office of Legal Counsel opinions have held that the word refers to those vacancies that “happen to exist” during a recess of the Senate, whether the vacancies arise before or during the recess.

The FBI and other federal agencies Thursday offered a reward of up to $100,000 for information leading to the arrest of the author or authors of a letter found in a South Carolina post office containing the deadly poison ricin.

The letter included a sealed metal container with a small amount of ricin inside. It was discovered by a processing clerk at a postal facility October 15 in Greenville, South Carolina, but no one was exposed to the poison.

The typewritten letter was addressed to the Department of Transportation and demanded that changes in truckers' sleep/work schedules not be implemented.

"I have easy access to castor pulp," the author of the letter wrote, referring to the waste of castor bean processing which can be used to make ricin.

"If my demand is dismissed I'm capable of making ricin," the letter continued. "My demand is simple, January 4, 2004 starts the new hours of service for trucks which include a ridiculous ten hours in the sleeper berth. Keep it at eight or I will start dumping."

Those federal regulations did go into effect Sunday, allowing long haul drivers to be on the road for 11 hours after 10 hours off-duty.

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill likened President Bush at Cabinet meetings to "a blind man in a room full of deaf people," according to excerpts on Friday from a CBS interview.

Here's, here's the bottom line on this for every American and everybody in the world, nobody knows for sure, all right? We don't know what he has. We think he has 8,500 liters of anthrax. But let's see. But there's a doubt on both sides. And I said on my program, if, if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush Administration again, all right? But I'm giving my government the benefit of the doubt. . . .

[edit]

. . . if he has 8,500 liters of anthrax that he's not going to give up, even though the United Nations demanded that he do that, we are doing the right thing. If he doesn't have any weapons, then we are doing the wrong thing. So, we'll see.

Things might change, but right now it looks like the CIA overestimated the weapons of mass destruction threat in Iraq.

Americans are a forgiving people and we all make mistakes. We are now living in an age of ideological demagoguery where honest mistakes are turned into lies by ruthless, dishonest individuals. It makes me sick.

Gunter Oberdorster of the University of Rochester in New York and colleagues tracked the progress of carbon particles that were only 35 nanometres in diameter and had been inhaled by rats. In the olfactory bulb - an area of the brain that deals with smell - nanoparticles were detected a day after inhalation, and levels continued to rise until the experiment ended after seven days.

"These are the first data to show this," says Ken Donaldson, a toxicologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. "I would never have thought of looking for inhaled nanoparticles in the brain."

[edit]

Little is known about what effect nanoparticles will have when they reach the brain. The toxicity of the nanoparticles that are currently being used to build prototype nanosized electronic circuits - such as carbon nanotubes, which are produced in labs around the world - has not been thoroughly assessed.

But Donaldson says that there is a growing feeling that other nanoparticles, such as those produced by diesel exhausts, may be damaging to some parts of our body. He estimates that people in cities take in about 25 million nanoparticles with every breath. These particles are believed to increase respiratory and cardiac problems, probably by triggering an inflammatory reaction in the lungs.

Oberdorster's unpublished work includes evidence that some nanoparticles may trigger a similar inflammatory reaction in the brains of rats.

From the San Francisco Chronicle: Rep. Doug Ose of Sacramento has seven dirty words very much on his mind...Fed up with recent repeated instances of broadcast TV networks allowing language that many people would deem offensive to be aired live, the Republican House member has introduced a bill that spells out the seven awful words that would be banned from the public air waves in all their forms and all their meanings -- "including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms,'' as the bill says.

[T]he prohibition against 'taking the child around or otherwise exposing the child to his gay lover(s) and/or his gay lifestyle' is not so vague or overly broad as to be unenforceable. However, we find that it did not put Husband on notice that he was restrained from telling his son that he was gay. We do not read the restraining order to prohibit a statement by the father that he is gay. Thus, Husband did not have notice that he was prohibited from telling his son he was gay and therefore cannot be held in contempt for doing so.

[I]f a customary social institution is trashed and trivialized by irresponsible buffoons, we ought to exert more control over it — to tighten access, not loosen it. If it turns out that there has been chicanery in the counting of votes, that is an argument for making supervision of the voting rules stricter, not for opening the voting booths to felons, foreigners, lunatics, and minors.

Speaking as a person who has watched from the sidewalk as the Gay Pride parade made its way down Manhattan's Fifth Avenue one balmy summer's day, I have no confidence at all — not a jot, tittle, nor smidgeon of confidence, sorry — that opening up marriage to homosexuals will raise the general level of seriousness and respect which the institution enjoys in our society. The contrary effect seems to me infinitely more probable.

President Bush will announce plans next week to establish a permanent human settlement on the moon and to set a goal of eventually sending Americans to Mars, administration sources said last night.

[edit]

Officials were unwilling to provide cost figures or details and would say only that Bush will direct the government to immediately begin research and development to establish a human presence or base on the moon, with the goal of having that lead to a manned mission to Mars. That endeavor could be a decade or more away, the officials said.

With its rising budget deficit and ballooning trade imbalance, the United States is running up a foreign debt of such record-breaking proportions that it threatens the financial stability of the global economy, according to a report made public today by the International Monetary Fund.

[edit]

Fund officials warned that the long-term fiscal outlook was far grimmer, predicting that underfinancing of Social Security and Medicare would lead to shortages as high as $47 trillion over the next several decades, or nearly 500 percent of the current gross domestic product in the coming decades.

The excerpts shown on NBC also show Dr. Dean saying in December, 2000, "George Bush is, I believe, in his soul a moderate," and adding about those thinking that Mr. Bush's presidency would be a one-term one, "that is going to be a mistake."

Four years ago, Howard Dean denounced the Iowa caucuses as "dominated by special interests," saying on a Canadian television show that they "don't represent the centrist tendencies of the American people, they represent the extremes."

Democrat Wesley Clark said yesterday he would never appoint a pro-life judge to the federal bench because the judge’s anti-abortion views would render him unable to follow the established judicial precedent of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

The Presidential candidate also told The Union Leader that until the moment of birth, the government has no right to influence a mother’s decision on whether to have an abortion.

“Life,” he said, “begins with the mother’s decision.”

[edit]

Clark was asked if would appoint or reject a prospective judicial nominee who passed all of Clark’s criteria but happened to be known as pro-life.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It would depend. I don’t have litmus tests. I want a guy who will do judicial precedent.”

But following the interview, Clark telephoned a reporter to clarify.

“I’m not going to be appointing judges who are pro-life,” he said.

Asked again how he will know a nominee’s position on abortion without applying a litmus test, Clark said:

“You just work through what the judge has done and if you find guys who follow judicial and established precedent, you’re not going to find a judge who is pro-life.”

Then about a month ago, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released a poll showing that people who regularly attend religious services supported Bush 63 percent to 37 percent, and those who never attend religious services opposed him 62 percent to 38 percent. When you exclude blacks (as they do in Vermont), who are overwhelmingly Baptist and overwhelmingly Democratic, and rerun the numbers, basically any white person who believes in God is a Republican

No Child Left Behind is a powerful, sweeping law. It is the logical step after Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act promised an equitable society. The Ancient Greeks used to say, “Education is freedom.” Yes, it is. And No Child Left Behind is about freedom and equality and justice. It is about the way we learn about life; it is about life itself.

Because of the powerful sweep of this change, this revolution, there are some who resist. That is to be expected. The resistance to Brown was “massive” and sustained over generations. Those who fought against Brown were on the wrong side of history, just as those who fight No Child Left Behind will one day also be labeled. We have come to expect strident resistance to any major changes in education, particularly if they change the status quo and challenge the educational establishment that seeks to protect itself.

It was called the “Texas Miracle,” and you may remember it because President Bush wanted everyone to know about it during his presidential campaign.

It was about an approach to education that was showing amazing results, particularly in Houston, where dropout rates plunged and test scores soared.

Houston School Superintendent Rod Paige was given credit for the school success, by making principals and administrators accountable for how well their students did.

Once he was elected president, Mr. Bush named Paige as secretary of education. And Houston became the model for the president’s “No Child Left Behind” education reform act.

Now, as Correspondent Dan Rather reports, it turns out that some of those miraculous claims which Houston made were wrong. And it all came to light when one assistant principal took a close look at his school’s phenomenally low dropout rates – and found that they were just too good to be true.

Twenty-five years after Vietnamese tanks rolled into this capital, putting an end to the murderous Khmer Rouge regime, a top Cambodian government official said Wednesday that the time had come to put surviving leaders on trial.

"The unfortunate Cambodians who both survived and were killed have to receive justice," the official, Chea Sim, president of the governing Cambodian People's Party, said at somber ceremonies here that recalled the end of a government that in less than four years killed about 1.7 million people, or as many as one-fourth of Cambodia's population.

The Bush administration has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment, according to senior government officials.

The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March.

[edit]

The 400-member team withdrawn from Iraq, known as the Joint Captured Matériel Exploitation Group, was primarily composed of technical experts and was headed by an Australian brigadier, Defense Department officials said. Its work included searching weapons depots and other sites for missile launchers that might have been used with illicit weapons, the officials said, and it was withdrawn "because its work was essentially done."

"They picked up everything that was worth picking up," one official said. The weapons disposal team still in place, known as Task Force D/E, for disablement and elimination, has been used to collect suspicious material, although none has proved to be part of any illicit weapons program.

[The enemies of freedom] wage their war against freedom in the form of terror. They wage it against America, the greatest bastion of freedom, and New York, its greatest symbol.

We know what they are capable of, we know that New York will always be a target of their evil, and we know that nothing is more important than preventing them from striking again.

As New Yorkers we are fortunate to have leaders with the courage to confront this threat with force.

On behalf of the people of New York, I want to thank President Bush for his strong support of our security efforts, and commend him for his determination to take this war to the spider holes of Tikrit and away from our city streets.

Nine months after U.S. forces closed Iraq's state-run television stations and subsequently launched the new channel with promises of a democratic dawn for the country's news media, the Pentagon-sponsored station has not won the trust of many Iraqis. By seeking to cast the U.S. occupation in the most favorable light, al-Iraqiya may actually be losing the war for viewers' hearts and minds.

[edit]

Media critics and many ordinary Iraqis agree that the station has yet to seriously tackle many problems now bedeviling everyday life, such as gas lines, electricity shortages and street crime. Alaa Juburi, a correspondent and producer who recently left al-Iraqiya to work for a U.S. television network in Baghdad, said local reporters should be grilling Iraqi ministers about these problems but are reluctant to challenge them.

Instead, the station provides an open forum for U.S. and Iraqi officials. In a program that aired several times last week, two spokesmen from the U.S. provisional administration and the Governing Council were shown over coffee at a local restaurant, talking for a half-hour about U.S. plans to transfer political control this year. Station officials said this was part of al-Iraqiya's mission to inform the public.

Coupled with a flat, drab presentation that Iraqis say is reminiscent of the grim newscasts of the Hussein era, al-Iraqiya's staid news judgment is costing it viewers. An October survey conducted for the State Department in seven cities found that 63 percent of Iraqis with satellite dishes preferred getting their news from either al-Jazeera or al-Arabiya -- the leading Arabic satellite channels -- while only 12 percent chose al-Iraqiya.

Vote for Bolinas to be a socially acknowledged nature-loving town because to like to drink the water out of the lakes to like to eat the blueberries to like the bears is not hatred to hotels and motor boats. Dakar. Temporary and way to save life, skunks and foxes (airplanes to go over the ocean) and to make it beautiful.

DOES THE FIRST AMENDMENT PROTECT FACT-BASED SPEECH THAT COULD BE MISLEADING?

The Federalist Society's Free Speech and Election Law Practice group will host a panel discussion on the First Amendment protection of fact-based but potentially misleading speech.

"Mr. Dean is from a Congregationalist background, a liberal denomination that does not believe in ministerial authority or church hierarchy. Each Congregationalist believes he is in direct contact with God and is entitled to sort out truth for himself. Mr. Dean's wife is Jewish and his two children are being raised Jewish, which is strange at best, considering the two faiths take a distinctly different view of Jesus."

"What's strange at best is that Cal Thomas even mentions this in the first place.

"I'd like to know what wouldn't be 'strange,' considering the makeup of Howard Dean's family. Are Christians automatically entitled to come out ahead of Jews in religious disputes? Are part-Jewish children supposed to ignore half their heritage? I'll be charitable and assume that's what he's getting at, although that in itself means he has some explaining to do. Christian supremacy isn't the endearing quality that it used to be. The only other explanation is that Mr. Thomas thinks Howard Dean shouldn't have married a Jew in the first place."

As an American, I should hope that the best, most qualified, candidate gets the Democratic nomination on the chance he might become president. In that sense, Joe Lieberman should be my guy.

He says such amazingly crazy things, he's just so much more entertaining than the ever-cautious Gephardt. For example, Dean recently said that he didn't want to "prejudge" Osama bin Laden's guilt or innocence since he'd have to face a "jury trial."

Can you imagine FDR declaring he didn't want to "pre-judge" Hitler? The comment was a parody of conservative complaints about the Democratic Party's approach to the war on terror; they see it as a pesky law-enforcement problem.

"I've resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found," Dean said. "I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials. So I'm sure that is the correct sentiment of most Americans, but I do think if you're running for president, or if you are president, it's best to say that the full range of penalties should be available. But it's not so great to prejudge the judicial system."

The Bush administration’s rhetorical justifications for invading Iraq (after the threat from Iraq’s unconventional weapons was debunked) were to end a brutal regime and set an example to inspire the “democratization” of the Middle East. But continued Bush administration support for equally brutal, but “friendly,” regimes reveals the hypocrisy of those justifications and the emptiness of the administration’s goal of spreading democracy.

[T]here was "no deliberate effort to fabricate" a story, the source said. Instead, the source said, the board believes the White House was so anxious "to grab onto something affirmative" about Hussein's nuclear ambitions that it disregarded warnings from the intelligence community that the claim was questionable.

The CIA and the State Department had doubts about the purported Niger information because they knew that Hussein already had a stockpile of the same type of uranium that he was supposed to be seeking.

We've got to unite our party in the first instance, and you have to send a message of unity, constructive ideas and hope. That's the way to beat George Bush's negativism and extremism and divisiveness.

America suffers when we're not united.

CONAN: You talk about polarizers. Are there polarizers in this room?

LIEBERMAN: I'm afraid Howard Dean has said a number of things that are polarizing. He has represented anger. Anger has fueled his campaign.

I love the enthusiasm of his supporters. He's done an incredible service to our party and our political system by bringing a lot of them in, but we've got to go beyond that.

A senior adviser to Howard Dean accused two rival campaigns on Tuesday of harassing Dr. Dean's supporters here with a relentless flurry of telephone calls intended to disrupt his organizing strategy for the upcoming Iowa caucuses.

The adviser, Joe Trippi, Dr. Dean's campaign manager, said that dozens of Dr. Dean's fervent supporters had each received as many as 20 computerized phone calls over the past weekend from the campaigns of Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri.

All the campaigns are pushing hard to identify and mobilize supporters. Mr. Trippi accused the two rival campaigns of trying to frustrate Dr. Dean's supporters so they would not answer the phone, making it difficult for Dr. Dean to recruit precinct captains on caucus night.

In early October [1983], a young Mondale aide named Joe Trippi shows up in Des Moines to check on Mondale's Iowa field operation. What he finds there horrifies him. Somehow the Iowa team has allowed the rival campaign of California Senator Alan Cranston to nearly corner the market on tickets to the JJ dinner, an annual affair designed to raise money for the Iowa state Democratic Party.

[edit]

When it comes down to it, Trippi is going to have to get his hands on tickets that have already been sold. Cranston tickets. Lots of them. And yet, once he accepts that proposition, the solution is almost elegant in its simplicity: What's to stop him from just marching right up to Cranston's people and asking for them?

"We started really early in the day," Trippi remembers, reflecting on how he and an Iowa colleague named Tom Cosgrove solved their JJ problem. "They stopped about three miles out [from] the staging area--the Mondale buses coming from Minnesota or wherever they were coming from." What follows is one of the most ambitious political makeovers in history. A team of Mondale aides, led by Cosgrove, plasters the bus with Cranston paraphernalia--stickers, posters, buttons, everything. Three miles down the road, the bus pulls up to the Cranston tent, where a Mondale/Cranston supporter gets out and tells a real Cranston aide he has 52 people on the bus. The aide looks up at the bus, surely admiring the military-like discipline that has brought a busload of Cranston supporters from "Los Angeles or wherever" out to the middle of Iowa this early in the day, and quietly congratulates himself. He promptly hands over 52 tickets.

And it continues like this, through bus after bus of Mondale supporters: Stop three miles up the highway, lather the bus in Cranston paraphernalia, drive on to the Cranston tent, claim your tickets. And the Cranston campaign just keeps forking them over. Happily. Hell, the more buses that show up, the more impressed the Cranston people are by their own handiwork. Never does it occur to them that these busloads of supporters aren't the genuine article. At least not until the real Cranston buses start showing up. "Twenty buses pull up, and they're out of tickets," Trippi says, still amused at the spectacle almost 20 years later. "More Cranston buses keep pulling up, and they don't have the tickets anymore."

The nine-month record of arms investigators since the fall of Baghdad includes discoveries of other concealed arms research, most of it less advanced. Iraq's former government engaged in abundant deception about its ambitions and, in some cases, early steps to prepare for development or production. Interviews here -- among Iraqi weaponeers and investigators from the U.S. and British governments -- turned up unreported records, facilities or materials that could have been used in unlawful weapons.

[I]investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen -- combining pox virus and snake venom -- that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a "grave and gathering danger" by President Bush and a "mortal threat" by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.

A review of available evidence, including some not known to coalition investigators and some they have not made public, portrays a nonconventional arms establishment that was far less capable than U.S. analysts judged before the war. Leading figures in Iraqi science and industry, supported by observations on the ground, described factories and institutes that were thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict, arms embargo and strangling economic sanctions. The remnants of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

In every field of special weaponry, Iraqi designers and foreign investigators said, such deceit was endemic. Program managers promised more than they could deliver, or things they could not deliver at all, to advance careers, preserve jobs or conduct intrigues against rivals. Sometimes they did so from ignorance, failing to grasp the challenges they took on.

Lying to an absolute ruler was hazardous, Iraqi weaponeers said, but less so in some cases than the alternatives. "No one will tell Saddam Hussein to his face, 'I can't do this,' " said an Iraqi brigadier general who supervised work on some of the technologies used in the rail gun.

David Kay's survey group has turned up other such cases. Analysts are calling the phenomenon "red-on-red deception," after the U.S. practice of using red to stand for enemy forces and blue to stand for friendly ones. In some cases, they said, "red on red" amounted to "red on blue" -- because Western intelligence collected the same false reports that fooled Hussein.

Of course it is also true that when his nation went to war George H. W. Bush signed up to be one of the youngest combat pilots in American history, while Howard Dean responded to the war of his youth by hitting the slopes of Aspen to endure a grueling therapeutic regimen for his lower back.

We decide only the legality of Plan 1374C, not its wisdom. Whether the Texas Legislature has acted in the best interest of Texas is a judgment that belongs to the people who elected the officials whose act is challenged in this case. Nor does the reality that this is a reprise of the act of the 1991 State Legislature weigh with the court’s decision beyond its marker of the impact of the computer-drawn map. This extraordinary change in the ability to slice thin the lines brings welcome assistance, but comes with a high cost of creating much greater potential for abuse. Congress can assist by banning mid-decade redistricting, which it has the clear constitutional authority to do, as many states have done. In Texas, the phenomenon is new but already old. The larger lesson of 1991 and 2003 is that the only check upon these grasps of power lie with the voter. But, perversely, these seizures entail political moves that too often dance close to avoiding the recall of the disagreeing voter. We know it is rough and tumble politics, and we are ever mindful that the judiciary must call the fouls without participating in the game. We must nonetheless express concern that in the age of technology this is a very different game.

Eight schoolchildren are amongst at least 13 people killed in a bomb blast in the Afghan city of Kandahar.

Nearly 60 others were injured in the explosion, security officials say.

Kandahar is the spiritual home of the ousted Taleban militia which governed Afghanistan until a US-led invasion in 2001.

Supporters and remnants of the Taleban have been blamed for rising violence and instability in the region.

Spokesmen for the Taleban movement have declared a holy war against foreign aid workers and soldiers in Afghanistan.

Tuesday's explosions came minutes before the governor of Kandahar's province, Yusuf Pashtun, was to pass through the area, the AFP agency reports.

[A police official] said at least two of those most badly hurt were taken to the U.S. military base at Kandahar Air Field for treatment.

U.S. troops moving between the air field and a base in the city housing a new joint civilian-military reconstruction team regularly use the road where the bomb was laid.

Southern and eastern Afghanistan have been plagued with a stream of shootings, kidnappings and bomb blasts against civilians as well as soldiers, many of the them claimed by Taliban.

This remark, so bizarre and tasteless that I felt it deserved checking, sent me to the transcript of the show, where, sure enough, it was confirmed. In it Norquist referred to the supposedly specious argument that the estate tax was worth keeping because it really affected only "2 percent of Americans." He went on: "I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust. 'Well, it's only a small percentage,' you know. I mean, it's not you. It's somebody else."

The left-leaning Internet group MoveOn.org sponsored a contest, "Bush in 30 Seconds," inviting people to submit television advertisements about Mr. Bush, with the best to be determined by a vote of visitors to the site.

But two of more than 1,500 submissions have outraged Republicans and leading Jewish groups for comparing Mr. Bush, in profile and policy, to Hitler.

"This is the worst and most vile form of political hate speech," Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said in one of several statements he issued.

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Dad accused of killing girl he mistook for wife's lover

A northeast Houston man has been charged with fatally stabbing his 13-year-old daughter, whom he mistook for the lover he believed his wife had been visiting, police said.

Prudencio Mendez Vasquez, 46, of the 10500 block of Onslow is charged with murder and aggravated assault in the death of his daughter, Michelle, and the wounding of his wife, Micaela, 41. Police said Vasquez slipped into the back of his wife's parked pickup and, evidently believing her boyfriend was in the front passenger seat, stabbed the girl repeatedly about 11:30 p.m. Sunday.

When Vasquez discovered what he had done, investigators said, he stabbed his wife, then himself before a passer-by grabbed the knife and called police. Vasquez remained in fair condition Monday at Ben Taub Hospital. His wife was treated and released.

"While touting the $895 million in increased wages it says [1.3 million] workers would be guaranteed from the changes, the Labor Department is suggesting ways employers can keep their labor costs from going up.

Among the options: cut workers' hourly wages and add the overtime to equal the original salary, or raise salaries to the new $22,100 annual threshold, making them ineligible.

The department says it is merely listing well-known choices available to employers, even under current law.

"We're not saying anybody should do any of this,'' said Labor Department spokesman Ed Frank.

The head of the Army Corps of Engineers quietly exonerated Halliburton Co. of any wrongdoing in a Kuwait fuel-delivery contract that Pentagon auditors asserted has overcharged the U.S. government by more than $100 million.

In a previously undisclosed Dec. 19 ruling, the commander of the Corps, Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers, cleared Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary of the need to provide "any cost and pricing data" pertaining to a no-bid contract to deliver millions of gallons of gasoline from Kuwait to Iraq.

He acted after lower-level Army Corps officials concluded in a memo to him that Kellogg Brown & Root had provided enough data to show it had purchased the fuel and its delivery to Iraq at a "fair and reasonable price."

"Democrats are reaping what they've sown," DeLay said. "Their leaders have lined up behind Howard Dean's brand of angry, intolerant politics. They've made their message clear: 'moderates need not apply' and that's a sad trend for a once-great party."

"I've always said that if being a Democrat hurt my district I would switch or I would resign," Hall said in an interview with The Associated Press. He said GOP leaders had recently refused to place money for his district in a spending bill and "the only reason I was given was I was a Democrat."

"We have at this point not made any decisions on the disposition of the herd as to whether we would depopulate any or part of that herd."

[B]efore Dean ventures too far into territory that's obviously unfamiliar to him, he might pause and realize that those who prefer theocracy to democracy have already anointed their candidate — and he isn't it.

[edit]

Indeed, those who declaim the loudest about their faith have already anointed Bush as their chosen candidate for 2004. On Friday, televangelist Pat Robertson announced that God had told him that "George Bush is going to win in a walk … the Lord has just blessed him."

Among such voters, Dean doesn't have a prayer. So he might as well run at least honestly, as the candidate of Democrats, not theocrats.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- About 7,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan who were planning to retire or otherwise leave the service in the next few months are getting new marching orders: Stay put.

The Army is expanding what it calls a "stop loss" order to keep soldiers in uniform - even those who have met their contractual service obligation or are scheduled to retire - during a rotation of tens of thousands of troops that begins this month and is scheduled to finish in May.

Anatomy exhibit's real bodies prove popular draw

The event, supported by such organizations as the Japanese Medical Association, aims to promote understanding about the human body and general health. It takes the rare approach of displaying real bodies and body parts, even allowing visitors to touch some of them.

The exhibition displays 16 fully dissected bodies and 160 body parts, including hearts, brains and digestive systems. One body is sliced into 2-cm-thick sections from the top of the head all the way down to its toes. Seven embryos are also on show.

"It's so soft. . . . Not meaty at all!" exclaimed Yumi Katagiri, 24, as she inserted her finger in a body's stomach.

"I was really curious (about the exhibit)," said her friend, Chifumi Magoshi, 23. "I didn't want to miss it."

Like these two, who came by themselves because their boyfriends wouldn't dare, women seem to have less of a problem than men in dealing with the exhibit.

Takayuki Yoshida, 19, whose design school took him here to study human anatomy, said, "I don't know what I'm doing here. I feel sick."

[70 percent of those attending the exhibit are women].

Sanno University psychology professor Biten Yasumoto said the exhibit's popularity with women can be explained by the fact that they are more conscious about their bodies, both due to social expectations for them to keep up their looks and for their role as the gender that bears children.

The department says it is merely listing well-known choices available to employers, even under current law.

"We're not saying anybody should do any of this," said Labor Department spokesman Ed Frank.

Employers' options include:

-- Making a "payroll adjustment" that results "in virtually no, or only a minimal increase in labor costs," the department said. Workers' annual pay would be converted to an hourly rate and cut, with overtime added in to equal the former salary.

Essentially, employees would be working more hours for the same pay.

The department does not view the "payroll adjustment" option as a pay cut. Rather, it allows the employer to "maintain the pay at the current level" with the new overtime requirements, said the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division administrator, Tammy McCutchen, an architect of the plan.

He's not only a brutal dictator, but a dictator who runs his country like it's his own private Disney World. That country, Turkmenistan, is a former Soviet republic sitting strategically between Iran and Afghanistan. And the man who runs it is Saparmurat Niyazov.

He’s known by his citizens, and by decree, as "Serdar Turkmenbashi" - which means "Great Leader of all Turkmen."

The government of Turkmenistan is one of the most repressive in the world. Saparmurat Niazov is president for life. The government tolerates no opposition and crushes critical thinking. Since its independence from the Soviet Union, there has not been a single nationwide election that could be considered free or fair. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe declined to send even a scaled-down mission to monitor the 2000 parliamentary elections in Turkmenistan, so certain was it that they were an empty exercise.

Turkmen opposition figures were either driven into exile in the early 1990s or imprisoned. Most were released, and after the awful prison experience and constant surveillance afterward do not dare speak out again. No independent human rights organizations can operate in Turkmenistan. There is no free media: the government subjects all newspaper outlets to prepublication censorship, has banned most Russian-language media, and has introduced measures to limit access to the Internet.

In the name of building the Turkmen nation, the government has also banned opera, ballet, circus, the philharmonic orchestra, and non-Turkmen cultural associations. It has also closed the Academy of Sciences. Russian orthodoxy and government-approved Sunni Islam are the only religions that may operate houses of worship. Followers of other faiths have faced criminal prosecution, police beatings, deportation, and in some cases demolition of their houses of worship.

Back in the ‘90s, an American oil company, Unocal, hired heavy-hitters like Henry Kissinger to tap into Turkmenistan's huge natural gas reserves via a proposed pipeline through Afghanistan. That deal fell through because of the Taliban. But today, Donald Rumsfeld is another heavy-hitter who's lobbying for Turkmenbashi's help. Rumsfeld made a quiet visit here last year to urge the Turkmen dictator to help with the on-going battle against the Taliban next door.

All this augers well for the administration's '04 fortunes. If they can continue economic expansion and begin to bring troops home from Iraq, the 2003-4 cycle may come to resemble the 1971-72 Nixon experience. In 1971, George McGovern, steamrolling his way to the Democratic nomination seemed unstoppable. Impelled by frustration with Vietnam and catalyzed by Nixon's escalation of the conflict, he seemed to have the issue to bring the president down. But, by '72, troops were on their way home and Henry Kissinger was announcing that "Peace is at hand."

[W]e maintain that Mr. Dean's economic agenda is reminiscent of such unforgettable recent Democratic presidential failures as George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. We're willing to admit that this may be a bit unfair. In fact, Messrs. McGovern, Mondale and Dukakis might have reason to complain, because none of them proposed economic policies that would tilt the Democratic Party as far to the left as Mr. Dean has.

"The Lord has just blessed him. I mean, he could make terrible mistakes and come out of it. It doesn't make any difference what [President Bush] does, good or bad, God picks him up because he's a man of prayer and God's blessing him."

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said Friday he believes God has told him President Bush will be re-elected in a "blowout" in November.

"I think George Bush is going to win in a walk," Robertson said on his 700 Club program on the Virginia Beach-based Christian Broadcasting Network, which he founded. "I really believe I'm hearing from the Lord it's going to be like a blowout election in 2004. It's shaping up that way."

Robertson told viewers he spent several days in prayer at the end of 2003.

Mark Knoller of CBS News, scrupulous keeper of records of presidential activity, reports that this visit is Bush's 29th to his Texas ranch as president, so he has stopped at the ranch on all but three of his 32 presidential trips to Texas. Knoller reports that Bush has spent all or part of 214 days at his ranch. Since New Year's Day was Day 1,077 of the Bush presidency, he has been in Crawford for one-fifth of the days in his term. He is scheduled to return to Washington on Saturday.

NORRIS: Senator Kerry, if I have my history right, no Democratic president has carried a majority of white voters since the 1960s. I believe the last to do so was Lyndon Johnson.

Senator, how do you plan to broaden the base and reach out to those voters, particularly Southern white voters who no longer even consider Democratic candidates?

And what can you point to in your political experience to suggest that you will have success in this task?

KERRY: I can point to what is happening in South Carolina right now and in other parts of the South, where people are supporting me because I represent leadership, tested experience that has the ability to make America safer in a very dangerous time.

I am a veteran. I've fought in a war. They particularly respect service to country in the South.

I also have fought as a law enforcement officer. I led the fight to put 100,000 cops on the streets of America.

I'm going to talk mainstream American common sense to our country.

And there are incredible numbers of people in the South who are losing education, losing health care, losing their jobs, because they are being drawn away by slogans, rather than real choices.

And in the end, if I'm the nominee, I could always pick a running mate from the South, and we'll do just fine.

Authorities are conducting a criminal investigation into whether corporate money, including hundreds of thousands of dollars linked to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, improperly financed the Republican Party's takeover of the Texas Capitol.

The probe is focused on several political and fund-raising organizations run by Republican activists, investigators said. One organization, the political-action committee Texans for a Republican Majority, has direct ties to DeLay, a Texas Republican and one of Washington's most powerful politicians.

At issue is whether the organizations improperly used corporate contributions to help finance the campaigns of more than 20 GOP candidates for the Texas House in 2002, according to documents and interviews with prosecutors and government investigators.

[edit]

Texas law bans corporations from contributing money to candidates for office. Corporations are allowed to fund many ancillary costs of a political campaign, such as office rental or telephone lines, and in many cases are allowed to educate voters through advertisements and other programs, provided they do not specifically advocate a candidate's defeat.

Texans for a Republican Majority is an offshoot of DeLay's Americans for a Republican Majority, created in 1994 to elect conservatives to public office. The Texas group was created in 2001, with the 2002 elections in mind, using seed money from Americans for a Republican Majority.

Investigators said they suspect that the Texas group spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on telephone banks and other initiatives during the election — projects, they said, that went beyond the administrative costs that corporations are allowed to fund in Texas elections. The money, in effect, represented a direct contribution to candidates, they argue.

Former Sen. Bill Bradley, who lost the Democratic nomination for president to Al Gore in 2000, is expected to endorse front-runner Howard Dean, party officials said Monday.