"I do believe in the sanctity of marriage, I totally do," Spears told MTV's "Total Request Live" in a telephone interview Wednesday.

At the American embassy the officer rejected their visa applications once more. When Fakhraai asked why, she claims she was yelled at: "Never apply for a US visa again!"

She didn't. The couple returned home, and in November 2002, Fakhraai and Valadkhan were granted study visas from the Canadian government on the day of their application. One year into her studies at Waterloo, Fakhraai is pleased with her move to Canada. "You never feel like a foreigner," she says. "Living and studying here is one of the best experiences I've had."

So will the United States' draconian response to the terrorist threat cause a fundamental shift in the international movement of researchers - and perhaps even alter the global balance of scientific power?

"For the past four decades, Iraqi women have enjoyed some of the most modern legal protections in the Muslim world, under a civil code that prohibits marriage below the age of 18, arbitrary divorce and male favoritism in child custody and property inheritance disputes.

"Saddam Hussein's dictatorship did not touch those rights. But the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council has voted to wipe them out, ordering in late December that family laws shall be "canceled" and such issues placed under the jurisdiction of strict Islamic legal doctrine known as sharia.

"This week, outraged Iraqi women -- from judges to cabinet ministers -- denounced the decision in street protests and at conferences, saying it would set back their legal status by centuries ....

"The order, narrowly approved by the 25-member council in a closed-door session Dec. 29, was reportedly sponsored by conservative Shiite members. The order is now being opposed by several liberal members as well as by senior women in the Iraqi government.

"The council's decisions must be approved by L. Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, and aides said unofficially that his imprimatur for this change was unlikely."

"All of us have an obligation to speak out. We may come from different backgrounds and faiths -- but parents the world over love our children. We respect our mothers, our sisters and daughters. Fighting brutality against women and children is not the expression of a specific culture; it is the acceptance of our common humanity ..."

"(Ronnie) Hill is a Southern Baptist evangelist who unabashedly talks about the need to preach to public school students. Based in Fort Worth, Texas, Hill travels the nation, and in partnership with fundamentalist churches, offers free anti-drug assemblies to public school audiences.

"... For years, fundamentalist groups have been using tactics similar to Hill's to fly under the radar and slip into public schools with sectarian messages designed to promote religious crusades off site.

"The technique is old, but Hill seems to have refined it to an art form. In a recent article in SBC Life, a publication of the Southern Baptist denomination, Hill lays out in detail how he preaches to public school students -- even recommending specific brands of pizza as a come-on.

" 'The key to being creative and reaching students is to remember the goal is to reach 'lost' students, not to go after the 'church' students,' Hill wrote. 'Each night is kicked off with a brand name food being served like Papa John's Pizza, Chick-fil-a, Taco Bell, etc. (This is a must!) The students then attend a lively service geared for them with a great praise band and then a gospel presentation that is entertaining, but centered on the cross, repentance, and being a Christ follower for life.'

"... Hill's ministry has prepared an entire booklet, titled 'Crusade Preparation Manual,' that advises local churches on the best way to bring Hill to town to reach public school students. Every conceivable detail is covered .... 'When Ronnie goes to a school campus, he does not need to drive up with the church name on the van,' advises the manual. 'This might hinder his chance of getting on campus.' "

Rep. Katherine Harris, who as Florida secretary of state oversaw Florida's contested 2000 presidential election, would be the immediate front-runner if she enters the GOP primary for U.S. Senate, polls show. [link]

President Bush will use next week's State of the Union address to try to revive a proposal that would allow younger workers to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in the stock market, aides say.

Homosexuals, homosexuals, homosexuals. Will American society never tire of its strange fascination with homosexuals?

While the rest of the industrialized world, a few New England states and our Canadian neighbors have accepted the fact that, besides being attracted to members of the same sex, homosexuals are basically the same as everyone else, our Puritan strain won't let this issue die. We argue what sorts of rights should be accorded gay men and lesbian women without answering this central question: Why on earth should heterosexuals decide what homosexuals can and cannot do? [ed: italics mine]

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: "Why didn't you give the new city administration time to act?" .... We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation.

.... I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom ...

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

.... I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "And Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry .... The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth."

Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely rational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will.

... Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.

Before opening the borders, seal up the wombs!
By Jane Chastain, WorldNetDaily

What is the dirty little secret that the Bush administration doesn't tell you about its proposed "temporary" guest-worker program?

These workers will come here in the prime of life and, while they are in our country as temporary workers, they will have babies, who immediately become U.S. citizens. These workers may be poor, but they are not stupid!

Can U.S. citizens be deported? Of course not!

The Bush administration says this plan would create a system that is "fairer, more consistent and more compassionate."

What compassionate country would deport the parents of underage U.S. citizens? Let's get real here. That will never happen!

Therefore, the only way to assure the American people that this "temporary" status truly is temporary is to seal up the wombs – sterilize – those who apply for guest-worker status. Or else change the law that grants citizenship to anyone who is born here regardless of the status of his or her parents.

Of course, the latter idea is a lot more humane and practical than the former – and a lot more compassionate to U.S. taxpayers who currently pick up the tab for the children of illegal aliens, as well as many children of those who simply drive or fly across the border on temporary visas to give birth, many at our expense.

I find it ironic that the right wing conservative talk show hosts in this country love to point the finger at the media elites, yet they're not representing the real people out there. These people are flying in Lear jets, drinking the best whiskey and smoking the best cigars - they're not down with America -- they're talking down to America. And so I, I see a real void in the media. And yes, I am bombastic. I am aggressive. I, I just love to tell the conservatives that Democrats died on Omaha Beach. I love to tell 'em that Democrats died in Vietnam. And I love to tell 'em that Democrats are dying in Iraq and that we have a stake in this country too. But if you listen to conservative talk radio in this country, and you're a Democrat, or you think differently from the way they do, it almost makes you feel like you don't belong in the country. And I say that there's more of us out there than them. And I say that half the country, more than half the country voted for Al Gore, and I think that there's a huge market for this.

The picture of a White House teeming with fanatics gets even clearer with O'Neill's depiction of Bush's brain trust's dogged devotion to cutting taxes for the wealthy.

And, before I go any further, one word of advice to the White House attack dogs now unleashed on O'Neill: If you want to belittle his bona fides, you've got to come up with something better than saying, "We didn't listen to him when he was there, why should we now?" Let's get real. Is there anyone more central to developing economic policy than the treasury secretary? One that was picked by, yes, George Bush? To be any more inside, O'Neill would have to have been George Bush's proctologist.

Now, of course, they're painting him out to be a cross between Jerry Garcia and Karl Marx. Yeah, what an antiestablishment wackjob: Former CEO of Alcoa and a friend of Don Rumsfeld's since the '60s.

Anyway, whether or not they listened to him, O'Neill certainly listened to them, and now he's doing what this administration makes a fetish of not doing: telling the American people what their government has been doing.
...
The most alarming thing that emerges from O'Neill's revelations is the total lack of leadership on the president's part. At the very moment that Rove and the Bush reelection team are gearing up to sell us on the image of the president as the macho, heroic cowboy from Crawford who is going to keep us all safe from terrorists, despots and Mad Cow meat, here comes O'Neill with his devastating assessment of Bush as "a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."

By a whopping ratio of 60 percent to 21 percent, Americans say they would prefer to reduce the deficit by "canceling some recent tax cuts" - the course advocated to some degree by all the Democratic presidential contenders - rather than by spending less on programs like health and education.

Among Democrats, an even more lopsided 76 percent majority favors canceling some tax cuts to reduce the deficit. Spending restraint, combined with hoped-for economic growth, is the approach advocated by the White House.

In addition, Americans say by a solid 11-percentage-point margin that they prefer the Democratic Party’s approach to deficit reduction over that of the Republican Party. Indeed, on their handling of taxes and government spending-big Democratic liabilities before President Clinton presided over the return of budget surpluses in the 1990s-Democrats now essentially are tied with Bush’s party in respondents’ eyes.

Taxpayers are not the only ones who make errors. Congress makes mistakes every time it passes a tax bill, the result of tax laws being drafted in secret and often passed without anyone having time to read the actual language. A solution has been instituted to deal with this. Congress regularly passes what it calls technical corrections law, as if to say, “Oops, ignore that law over there because we didn’t mean what we enacted.”

Just such an error turned up in the 1997 tax cut law. This mistake helped only beneficiaries of the 400 or so estates that each year are worth $17 million or more. The error was worth $200,000 in tax savings to each estate, a total of $880 million over a decade. As soon as the text of the law became available, tax lawyers and congressional staffers spotted the error and notified the Department of the Treasury, which recommended a technical correction. The Senate moved to fix the problem before anyone got the unintended tax break. But Representative [Bill] Archer [R-TX], the vehement foe of the earned income tax credit who complained at every opportunity about how much it was costing the government, stopped the corrective process. Archer explained his action in a letter to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, an ally in Archer’s efforts to eliminate the estate tax. “While some might argue that the proposed change is a mere correction of a drafting error made last year, I view it as an increase in federal death rates,” Archer wrote. “Accordingly, I cannot support any change in law that would go in the opposite direction by increasing death tax rates.”

Archer’s spokesman, Ari Fleischer, who later would become the White House press secretary, explained Archer’s stance in political terms which spoke to partisanship and political advantage, rather than any concept of principled conduct. “When the Democrats controlled Congress and drafting errors worked against the taxpayers, the Democrats let them stay in the law,” Fleischer said. “Now, when one works against the Government and for the taxpayers, we’re in no rush to correct it.”

Democrats disputed Fleischer’s two-wrongs-make-a-right statement. “Every time a technical error has been found, either way, we corrected it,” said John Buckley, the chief tax lawyer for the Ways and Means Committee Democrats.

Six years later this error by Congress remained uncorrected at a cost to taxpayers, and a benefit to heirs of the super rich, of more than a half billion dollars and growing.

"if Tennesseans are too weak to demand that such accommodations be made, then a pox on their collective house."

"At Wal-Mart, we respect the individual rights of our associates and encourage them to express their ideas, comments and concerns. Because we believe in maintaining an environment of open communications, we do not believe there is a need for third-party representation.

"The audit of 25,000 employees performed by Wal-Mart in July 2000 detailed 1,371 violations of child-labor laws, including minors working too late, too many hours in a day or during school hours. On more than 60,000 occasions, workers missed breaks and on 16,000 they skipped meal times, in violation of most state labor regulations.

"In a statement Tuesday, Wal-Mart said the audit was not a valid study and should not be taken at face value."

"During the first Gulf War, Paul Wolfowitz was a top advisor to then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, and he disagreed strongly with the decision by the first President Bush to stop the war after driving Saddam out of Kuwait.

"... Wolfowitz's resolve to oust Saddam was unwavering. In 1997, he wrote, 'We will have to confront him sooner or later -- and sooner would be better ...'

"The following year, Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and 16 others -- 10 of whom are now serving in or officially advising the current Bush Administration -- wrote President Clinton, urging him to use military force to remove Saddam. They said, 'The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action ...'

"As soon as the current President Bush took office in 2001, he brought a group of conservatives with him, including Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and others, who had been outspoken advocates for most of the previous decade for the forcible removal of Saddam Hussein.

"At first, President Bush was publicly silent on the issue. But as Paul O'Neill has told us, the debate was alive and well ...

"... But there was resistance to military intervention by those who felt that the existing sanctions on Iraq should be strengthened. Saddam had been contained and his military capabilities had been degraded by the Gulf War and years of U.N. sanctions and inspections. At a press conference a month after the inauguration, Secretary of State Colin Powell said: 'We have kept [Saddam Hussein] contained, kept him in his box.' The next day, Secretary Powell very clearly stated that Saddam 'has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction ...' [elipsis in original]

"Then, on September 11th, 2001, terrorists attacked us and everything changed. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld immediately began to link Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda and the attacks. According to notes taken by an aide to Rumsfeld on September 11th, the very day of the attacks, the Secretary ordered the military to prepare a response to the attacks. The notes quote Rumsfeld as saying that he wanted the best information fast, to judge whether the information was good enough to hit Saddam and not just Osama bin Laden. "Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. 'Sweep it all up. Things related and not.' "

"This is a way for the president to address the concerns of conservatives and to solidify his conservative base," a presidential adviser said.

and

"The president loves to do that sort of thing in the inner city with black churches and he’s very good at it,” a White House aide said.

Me: Have you no decency?

Ann: That's exactly what they asked Joe McCarthy.

Me: Whom you have defended!

Ann: He was railroaded.

Me: You're out of your mind.

Ann: Jerk.

Me: Bitch.

Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.

Alexandria, Va.: Gene, I just finished reading Al Franken's "Lies" book, in which does a rather sound job of berating Ann Coulter. Since you know both of them, (and perhaps have read the book) do you ever bring up these issues to Ann?

She seems nice, yet very opinionated. Do you find you're able to have intellectual debates with her -- or is she as closed for debates as her articles and debates suggest?

washingtonpost.com: NICE?! Are you on crack?

Democrats haven't voted yet, but reporters have got the story: The former Vermont governor is angry, gaffe-prone and unelectable. How do they know? Republicans, and anonymous Democrats, told them so.

Basic English:

plan - noun - a detailed formulation of a program of action

Did the Clinton administration have a plan (filed away somewhere) for toppling Saddam Hussein?

Yes.

Did the Bush administration have a plan for toppling Saddam Hussein?

Yes.

plan - verb - to have as a specific aim or purpose; intend: They plan to buy a house.

Did the Clinton administration plan to topple Saddam Hussein?

No.

Did the Bush administration plan to topple Saddam Hussein?

Yes, as early as the first weeks of Bush's term (according to Paul O'Neill).

"In hiding after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein penned a directive warning his followers not to join forces with Islamic jihadists and other foreign fighters seeking to make Iraq their new battlefield, according to a document found with Hussein when he was captured, U.S. government officials said last night.

"The document, which the CIA believes to be authentic, appears to be written to leaders of the Iraqi resistance and, as such, undercuts the argument of Bush administration officials that Hussein was working closely with al Qaeda and other religious extremists ...

"On the contrary, the directive, which was first reported in today's New York Times, adds to the mounting evidence that the insurgency is largely Iraqi-directed and -controlled and that Hussein's links to al Qaeda before the war were not strong.

"... Al Qaeda members in secret CIA detention centers abroad have told interrogators in the past year that Osama bin Laden had rejected the idea of working with Hussein, who as president of Iraq led one of the most secular governments in the Middle East."

Scalia starts: "It depends on what's meant by discrimination. The handicapped not getting an elevator may not be a constitutional violation." Clement replies that when the handicapped can't vote, that's a fundamental right being burdened, and it should trigger strict judicial scrutiny. Rehnquist says that voting discrimination means "a person is not allowed to vote, as opposed to not being facilitated in being allowed to vote."

Clement sees no difference. Nor do I. When groups are systematically barred from the polls, you have a constitutional problem whether you call it a denial or a refusal to facilitate. But Scalia contends that being "turned away because there is no elevator is not a constitutional violation." He adds, "An inaccessible voting place means nothing at all. It merely means the state didn't go out of its way to accommodate the handicapped."

Dean is the only major Democratic candidate to evade the sissifying barbs of the GOP's shock-jock surrogates...Dean acts like a man who likes his steak blood-rare and his politics cutthroat. These traits are part of his campaign to achieve symbolically what he can't quite carry off ideologically, by competing with Bush for the most potent compliment in American politics today: You the man!
...
Can a Democrat be an alpha male? The question hasn't come up on CNN, but it may be the hidden issue of the campaign. After decades of associating Democrats with failed masculinity, the Republicans are faced with an opponent who knows how to put on a butch display. They are trying to get around Dean's fight-back persona by portraying him as a dyspeptic, impetuous fool. Whether this negative spin will stick remains to be seen, but there's another a-word that pops up regularly in pieces about Dean: anger. The Republicans and their allies are trying to undercut his brashness by calling him reckless. Still, fist-waving hasn't exactly hurt Donald Rumsfeld. Ever since 9/11, nothing seems to be over the top when it comes to macho in a pol. Think Arnold Schwarzenegger. His meteoric rise ? despite a record of groping and degrading women ? is ample proof that in American politics today Liberace's motto applies: "Too much is not enough!"
...
What is progressive masculinity? It has something to do with what the linguist George Lakoff calls "nurturant parenting." All the great liberal Presidents of the past century were nurturers (their weakness for war notwithstanding). But conservative leaders follow another model; Lakoff calls it "the strict father." The appeal of this harsh, punitive style is directly related to anxiety. People kept in a state of constant stress will sacrifice their best instincts and even their real interests for the illusion of safety ? and sheer sexiness ? that a bad dad can provide. That's why the Republicans put such energy into arousing anxiety and displacing it onto Democrats. If Dean is to beat the odds, he will have to counter this strategy in every move he makes.

It won't be easy. It doesn't take much to foment fear in white boys. What's more, as Al Sharpton reminds us, black voters aren't impressed by attitude that doesn't come with a progressive program. Then there's the chance that conquest and a patchwork "recovery" will prop up the illusion that things are getting better. This will be the mother of all long shots for the Democrats. Butching up is no guarantee of victory. Still, for better or worse, it's a necessary step.

We may resent the fact that Americans regard the penis and its symbolic projections as synonymous with strength. But psychic reality cannot be denied. At this moment, most voters are looking for a leader who reassures them with a manly presentation. The trick is to be a man women admire, blacks find credible and white guys bond with. It's a hard job, but someone's got to do it or Bush will ride the backlash to the White House ? with a real mandate this time.

From 1984 to 2002 the government collected $1.7 trillion more in Social Security taxes than the agency paid out in benefits to retired widows and orphans and in disability benefits.

That is enough to double the value of all the 401(k) retirement plans in the country.

That is enough to pay off all the consumer debt in the country at the end of 2001.

It is an average of $16,000 that each family did not have to spend on improving their lifestyle or on investing for the future.

From 1983, when the overtaxing began, through 2002 Social Security benefits rose by half in real dollars while Social Security taxes almost doubled. As a result, three out of four households now pay more in Social Security taxes than in income taxes.

Social Security does not apply to all income so not everyone was affected in the same way by the tax increases. The government takes 6.2 cents out of each dollar of salary, but only up to a ceiling that was $87,000 in 2003. People whose salary is higher than this get a tax break on every additional dollar they earn.

In 2003, President Bush sought to eliminate taxes on dividends paid to shareholders, saying that it was wrong to tax a dollar twice. Since companies pay dividends out of their after-tax profits, and shareholders must then report these dividends as income, the president argued that the same dollar was being taxed twice and that this was fundamentally unfair. "It's a matter of principle," he said.

Social Security also represents a double tax. The Social Security tax applies to wages that have already been subject to the personal income tax. If double taxation is fundamentally unfair, a stronger case can be made for the unfairness of Social Security as a double tax than for the tax on dividends. Among other things, many dollars of corporate profit are not taxed, despite the seeming requirements of the law, and so in a system in which people can collect dividends tax-free they may earn income that is completely untaxed, escaping both the corporate income tax and the personal income tax.

U.S. Sen. Zell Miller, a Georgia Democrat who has frequently broken with his party to support Republican policies, has agreed to campaign for President Bush's reelection, a campaign spokesman said on Tuesday.

"400 Club of the Republican Party of Orange County -- the largest G. O. P. fund raising organization in Orange County ... Additionally, Mr. Probolsky is a member of the California Republican Party and its Initiatives Committee.

"Mr. Probolsky is founding co-chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Orange County Chapter .... Mr. Probolsky lead [sic] the Central Orange County Voter Registration PAC which successfully registered thousands of new Republicans in Orange County."

"We close our column this week with Happy Birthday wishes to some of the prominent Republicans in our midst here in Orange County: political consultant Adam Probolsky (Oct. 10) ..."

I have to ask why the ACLU cares about voters at all. They get their agenda put into place by having activist judges override the will of the people as expressed in ballot propositions, elections and recalls.

It's clear that people in these extreme groups like the ACLU are trying to run the country, but they're not doing so through the legislative process our democracy is built on. No, they're doing it through activist judges who write law from the bench - something that is totally at odds from a judge's function.

The move will let Subaru sell more vehicles with turbochargers, which pep up performance but hurt mileage and increase pollution.

"Do you think homosexual relations between consenting adults should or should not be legal?"

July 2003
Should ................ 54%
Should Not ......... 39%
Don't Know .......... 7%

December 2003
Should ................. 41%
Should Not .......... 49%
Don't Know ......... 10%

HOLLYWOOD stars Nick Nolte, Joaquin Phoenix and Don Cheadle are to film a movie in South Africa.

The three will join London-based Sophie Okonedo, who was so powerful in the recent film "Dirty Pretty Things," and several South African actors in filming "Hotel Rwanda," a movie that is set against the backdrop of the Rwandan genocide.

[edit]

[Director Terry George says]

"I was looking for a story about Liberia or Sierra Leone, but then I found this true story about Paul Rusesabagina, who strove to keep his own family safe during the Rwanda genocide."

He ended up caring for over 2 000 people, some of them members of the Tutsi elite who were prime targets of the Hutu assault. Not one person under his care died in the conflict." ...

"I want to shame audiences by showing them what really happened and how little they understood it.

"Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world don't know that the Hutus and Tutsis were never clearly defined rival tribes until the Belgian colonialists came. They created a separation between the tribes on the 'divide and rule' principle and that lay at the heart of what happened in 1994.

"I also plan to expose how the United Nations simply castrated the UN troops on the ground.

Nick Nolte plays the UN commander whose force could have halted the conflict in the first month, but he was ordered by the UN not to do anything and it escalated into the fastest genocide in modern history. I want the audience to see that and feel the shame of it." George has been working in close collaboration with the real Paul Rusesabagina to ensure the story is accurate. Some preliminary shooting was done in Rwanda in December.

CHANGING THE TONE
I hear Bush's critics saying that President Bush has violated his promise to change the tone in Washington. I agree that the tone hasn't changed too much, and frankly I don't care. But I don't really see how Bush is up for much criticism on this score. Consider his statement yesterday when asked about O'Neill's allegations. He said, "I appreciate former Secretary O'Neill's service to our country. We worked together during some difficult times," Bush said. "We worked together when the country was in recession, and now we're coming out of recession, which is positive news. We worked together when America was attacked on Sept. 11, which changed how I viewed the world." This is hardly the sort of destroy the accuser politics of the previous administration, now is it?

"By misrepresenting the intelligence it received about weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration has severely damaged our nation's credibility. What happens if, down the road, we get good intelligence -- intelligence that is confirmed by multiple sources -- telling us that a regime in some foreign country is about to use weapons of mass destruction against America or enable terrorists to use them against us? Many of our allies will see America as "the boy who cried wolf" and not take us seriously. We need a new president who can rally our allies to help us take appropriate action."

The (Bush) administration previously allowed the release of some sensitive documents. Bob Woodward, author of "Bush at War," writes that his information included "notes taken during more than 50 national security council and other meetings," as well as "other personal notes, memos, calendars, written internal chronologies, transcripts and other documents."

In an interview, the Rev. Dozier, a non-practicing attorney, acknowledged asking some of the questions. But he defended their appropriateness. "I want to know the applicants' spiritual makeup," Dozier said. "It tells me a lot about a person. I think a judge should be God-fearing."

[edit]

In 2001, Bush appointed Dozier, a black Republican, to the Broward JNC for a two-year term, and reappointed him to a four-year term last year. Dozier said he did not particularly want to be on the JNC, but was nominated by a group of black leaders in the community. "I didn't think I'm qualified for the JNC," he said. "I don't practice law. I thought it should be made up of practicing lawyers."

But now that he's on the JNC, he isn't shy about pressing his views on judicial candidates. "This country is founded on the principles of Christianity, not the principles of Buddhism, not the principles of Judaism," the South Florida Sun-Sentinel quoted him as saying Nov. 30, 2003. "I don't believe the developers of the Constitution would want us to compromise our Christian values."

Dozier is vehemently opposed to homosexuality, which he called in the Nov. 27, 2003, issue of New Times Broward Palm Beach "something so nasty and disgusting that it makes God want to vomit," according to the .

Dozier said he has received complaints from "atheists" who heard about his line of religiously oriented questioning during JNC interviews. But he argues that religion belongs on the bench. "There is no such animal as separation of church and state in the Constitution," he said.

[edit]

Dozier does not deny asking Broward General Master Marina Garcia Wood how she felt about the U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down the Texas prohibition against homosexual activity. "I am totally against that ruling," Dozier said. "We cannot have a judge who feels sodomy is OK."

Dozier, however, said he is not opposed to gays or lesbians serving on the bench - "as long as [they] can assure me [they] would not promote sodomy."

Last year, after voting to recommend one candidate for a Broward judicial vacancy, Dozier said he was surprised and disconcerted to get information that the person is gay. "If I had known, I would have taken the opportunity to search further and investigate," he said. "It's up to us to ask questions and investigate."

The governor formerly shared responsibility with the Bar for appointing JNC members. But Bush and Republican legislative leaders complained that the state judiciary was blocking their legislative agenda.

In 2001, in a move widely seen as greatly increasing the governor's power to shape the judiciary, the GOP-dominated Legislature gave the governor the right to appoint all nine members of each JNC; the Bar's role was reduced to merely recommending four candidates to the governor.

Bush repeatedly has said that he wants a judiciary that reflects his philosophy of government, and has appointed many conservatives to the JNCs. "I'm looking for people who share my philosophy: respect the separation of powers and recognize the judiciary has an important role," Bush said at a JNC training seminar in Orlando last September. "They don't need to be legislating."

Mr. O'Neill may like to see himself as a contemporary Cyrus Vance, who in 1980 left as Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State over principled disagreements on foreign policy. But instead he resembles Don Regan, the temperamental White House chief of staff who, after President Reagan fired him, went on to write a tell-all book embarrassing his old boss with revelations about Nancy Reagan's fondness for astrologers. The book made Mr. Regan look small and it didn't do much damage to Mr. Reagan's reputation. The same will be true of Mr. O'Neill's poison-pen recollections.

Back in 1983, as part of a deal to save Social Security from impending demographic doom, Congress enacted legislation to essentially increase payroll taxes and reduce benefits. As a result, the government began to collect more Social Security payroll taxes than it paid out to beneficiaries each year. The theory was that the government would use these surpluses to pay down the national debt. That way, when baby boomers retire—and comparatively more people are collecting benefits while comparatively fewer people are working—the government would be in a better position to borrow the necessary funds to provide the promised benefits.

So much for theory. The reality? For the first 15 years, every penny of the surplus was spent, first by Republican presidents and then by a Democratic president. According to figures provided by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the surpluses were relatively insignificant for much of this period. Between 1983 and 2001 a total of $667 billion in excess Social Security payroll taxes was spent—about $35 billion per year. It was only in fiscal 1999 and 2000, when the government ran so-called on-budget surpluses, that excess Social Security funds were actually used to retire debt.

In the 2000 campaign, Vice President Al Gore said we should sequester the Social Security surpluses in a "lockbox" to prevent appropriators from spending them. Bush agreed in principle. But that commitment went out the window soon after the inauguration. In his first three budgets, Bush (who had the good fortune to take office at a time when the surpluses were growing rapidly) and Congress used $480 billion in excess Social Security payroll taxes to fund basic government operations—about $160 billion per year!

By so doing, Washington spenders have masked the size of the deficit. For Fiscal 2004—which began in October 2003—if you factor out the $164 billion Social Security surplus, the on-budget deficit will be at least $639 billion, rather close to the modern peak of 6 percent of GDP. And according to its own projections (the bottom line of Table 8 represents the Social Security surplus), the administration plans to spend an additional $990 billion in such funds between now and 2008. That year, according to the Office of Management and Budget's projections, the on-budget deficit will be about $464 billion. Only by using that year's $238 billion Social Security surplus does the administration arrive at a total, unified deficit of $226 billion. And the ultimate on-budget deficit will almost certainly be worse. OMB has proven in the past few years that its projections can't be trusted.

The accounting for Social Security surpluses has always been dishonest. But in the past few years, the Bush administration has made this shady accounting a central pillar of its fiscal strategy. The unprecedented reliance on these funds hides the failure of the administration to ensure that there is some reasonable correlation between the resources it has at its disposal and the spending commitments it makes. Bush & Co. have redesigned the tax system so that collections of the progressive taxes that are supposed to fund government operations—like individual income taxes—have plummeted. Instead, with each passing year we rely for our current needs more on the regressive payroll taxes that are supposed to fund our collective retirement.

The persistence of the administration and its credulous allies in eliding these facts is flabbergasting. Of course, for the Bush administration to give an honest accounting of the deficits, and of the role that Social Security surpluses play in keeping them down, would be to admit the fundamental bankruptcy—no pun intended—of its adventuresome fiscal experiment.

"Sonia Cavigelli and Martha McClintock of the Department of Psychology and Institute for Mind and Biology at the University of Chicago found in a recent experiment that individuals who fear novelty—a condition scientists have named "neophobia"—are likelier to die at an earlier age than those who are unafraid of change. It is the first time, says Cavigelli, that a study has demonstrated that an emotional trait that shows up in infancy can shorten life span.
...
Is it possible that neophobia in humans can affect life span in the same way?

Cavigelli thinks so. A number of parallels exist between humans and their rat surrogates. Neophobia shows up in human infants as early as 14 months of age, and like the rats, fearful children have a faster and stronger hormonal response than children who are not afraid of new situations. It's also been shown that if you are neophobic at a young age, you tend to remain that way throughout childhood."

"Larry DiRita, the top Pentagon spokesman, said he had not read the Record study. He added: 'If the conclusion is that we need to be scaling back in the global war on terrorism, it's not likely to be on my reading list anytime soon.' "

Yet George W. Bush tells New Yorker writer Ken Auletta: "No President has ever done more for human rights than I have."

[edit]

The President's eyebrow-raising assertion comes during some Oval Office chitchat after Auletta - writing about the testy relations between the Bush White House and the news media - sits in on an interview with a British newspaper reporter.

"[Gephardt] does not mention his votes to authorize the (Iraq) war and to finance the occupation.

"That silence is not an effort to evade overwhelmingly anti-war sentiment in the pacifist Midwest, charmed by Dean's anti-war rhetoric. Polling data indicate that most Iowans support the war, and that includes many Democrats ..."

An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Typically, this fallacy involves two steps. First, an attack against the character of person making the claim, her circumstances, or her actions is made (or the character, circumstances, or actions of the person reporting the claim). Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim or argument the person in question is making (or presenting).

[edit]

The reason why an Ad Hominem (of any kind) is a fallacy is that the character, circumstances, or actions of a person do not (in most cases) have a bearing on the truth or falsity of the claim being made (or the quality of the argument being made).

So let me just say that I learned nothing from O'Neill that dissuaded me from the view that he was a pompous, self-indulgent prima donna far more concerned with global warming, education policy and worker safety than he was in the robustness of the American economy or the strength of its currency.

The group didn't release information that poll respondents opposed the constitutional amendment, by a split of 49-48 percent. It also didn't mention that poll respondents, by a margin of 48-46, did not want lawmakers to prevent marriage licenses from being issued to homosexual couples in May, when the Supreme Judicial Court decision legalizing gay marriage takes effect.

In view of the performance of these immigration judges and the criticisms of them that we have felt obligated to make, we urge the service to refer the cases to different immigration judges.

When the hearing before the immigration judge was held, Dr. Johnson was in Prague, and the Blagoevs’ lawyer suggested that she be permitted to testify by phone. The immigration judge had already ruled that she could testify by phone from Dartmouth, where she was then teaching, if she didn’t want to come to Chicago. But when he discovered that she was abroad, he forbade her to testify by telephone. This is one of the odder rulings in our experience. Prague does have phone service after all, and in fact the phone service between Prague and Chicago is quite comparable in acoustic quality and other relevant quality dimensions to the phone service between Hanover, New Hampshire and Chicago; nor did the immigration judge or anyone else suggest otherwise. So we’re baffled.

Men and women may have achieved equality in many areas of American life, but they sure aren't treated the same by Republican primary voters.

At least that's the finding of political scientists David C. King of Harvard University and Richard E. Matland of the University of Houston, who found that female candidates don't seem to do as well as similarly qualified men in GOP primaries. On the other hand, the researchers found, political independents and Democrats seem to prefer Republican women running for office over GOP guys.

[edit - the following data was not collected by King and Matland but is cited in their research.]

The telephone survey of 820 randomly selected adults included a novel experiment. Respondents were read a description of a hypothetical congressional candidate, who was identified as a Republican. They were told the congressional wannabe was a successful businessperson who had "never run for public office before" and was running because "Congress just doesn't get it." The prospective lawmaker's top priority was to "reduce government spending and waste," survey participants were informed.

To test for gender bias, the researchers did one other thing: Half the sample was told that the candidate was a woman, the other half was told the candidate was a man. In all other ways, respondents heard the identical description.

The survey revealed that sex matters, at least among Republicans. A majority of GOP men (57 percent) and a slightly smaller proportion of Republican women (53 percent) said they would be "very likely" to vote for the man. But when the candidate was identified as a woman, support plummeted by 14 percentage points among men and 11 percentage points among women.

In this angry, devastating examination of "the House of Bush," Kevin Phillips asks the question that seems to have occurred to no one else: How did these people get so entitled? How is it that a family in no way distinguished by genuine accomplishment, moral and/or political conviction or exceptional intelligence has managed to lay claim as a matter of right to the American presidency, and how is it -- this is the real puzzler -- that the American people seem to have acquiesced in this presumption? How did we manage to put ourselves in the hands of a family that clearly believes it has dynastic stature, with all the privileges and entitlements attendant thereto, and behaves accordingly?

[edit]

Tracing the family lineage through four generations -- beginning with the president's great-grandfathers, George Herbert Walker and Samuel Prescott Bush, moving along to his grandfather, Prescott Bush, then to his father and himself -- Phillips paints a portrait that can only be deeply disturbing to anyone concerned about how power is now gained and maintained in this country.

Apart from the differences already mentioned between the Bushes and the Adamses, Roosevelts and Kennedys, one stands apart from and above all others: The Bushes have nothing to commend them to the public save rank ambition. Other than accumulating a certain amount of money and achieving a measure of what passes for aristocratic social position in this country, the Bushes have achieved nothing of distinction and appear to believe in nothing except their own interests.