The departing chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq said yesterday that he now believes Saddam Hussein did not stockpile forbidden weapons after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and the incoming chief inspector indicated that he will shift the focus of the hunt from finding weapons to learning what became of Hussein's weapons programs.

The CIA announced officially yesterday that Charles A. Duelfer, a former senior U.N. weapons inspector, will succeed David Kay, who is resigning after nine months of unsuccessful searches for banned weapons in Iraq. Duelfer, who as a private academic said the Bush administration's prewar allegations on Iraq's weapons were "far off the mark," said yesterday that his goal is to reconstruct Iraq's "game plan" for its weapons and weapons programs.

Also yesterday, Kay said in an interview with the Reuters news agency that most of what will be found in the Iraq weapons search has already been found. Of the stockpiles alleged by the administration, "I don't think they existed," he said. "I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s." Kay could not be reached for further comment.

Those who learn that they have been lied to in an important matter - say, the identity of their parents, the affection of their spouse, or the integrity of their government - are resentful, disappointed, and suspicious. They feel wronged; they are wary of new overtures. And they look back on their past beliefs and actions in the new light of the discovered lies. They see that they were manipulated, that the deceit made them unable to make choices for themselves according to the most adequate information available, unable to act as they would have wanted to act had they known all along.

[edit]

Most of us would resist loss of control over which choices we want to delegate to others and which ones we want to make ourselves, aided by the best information we can obtain. We resist because experience has taught us the consequences when other choose to deceive us, even "for our own good." Of course, we know that many lies are trivial. Be since we, when lied to, have no way to judge which lies are the trivial ones, and since we have no confidence that liars will restrict themselves to just such trivial lies, the perspective of the deceived leads us to be wary of all deception.

[edit]

Deception, then, can be coercive. When it succeeds, it can give power to the deceiver - power that all who suffer the consequences of lies would not wish to abdicate. From this perspective, it is clearly unreasonable to assert that people should be able to lie with impunity whenever they want to do so. It would be unreasonable, as well, to assert such a right even in the more restricted circumstances where the liars claim a good reason for lying. This is especially true because lying so often accompanies every other form of wrongdoing, from murder and bribery to tax fraud and theft. In refusing to condone such a right to decide when to lie and when not to, we are therefore trying to protect ourselves against lies which help to execute or cover up all other wrongful acts.

Likewise, the grief that Vice President Al Gore took over his alleged boasts to have discovered pollution problems at Love Canal, invented the Internet or inspired a character in "Love Story" was the product of his reputation for self-serving puffery.

The most recent example of this was all the attention devoted in December to Gore's alleged claim to have first exposed Love Canal, the infamous toxic subdivision in upstate New York. It all started with a speech the vice president gave to a group of Concord, New Hampshire high school students on November 30. Ceci Connolly of the Washington Post reported on it this way: "Gore boasted about his efforts in Congress 20 years ago to publicize the dangers of toxic waste. 'I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal,' he said. ... 'I was the one who started it all.' " The New York Times printed the same quote.

The Republican National Committee quickly jumped on the story and issued a press release. "It's a pattern of phoniness," RNC Chairman Jim Nicholson said. "It would be funny if it weren't also a little scary." The pundits then chimed in. On CNBC's Hardball, Chris Matthews sneered: "He's now the guy who created the Love Canal. ... I mean, isn't this getting ridiculous? ... Isn't it getting to be delusionary?" ABC's Cokie Roberts, George Stephanopoulos and Bill Kristol followed suit, as did the editorial writers at the New York Post, the Buffalo News and the Washington Times.

There's just one problem: Gore never said it. Instead, he told the story of a girl from Toone, Tennessee, who alerted him in the late '70s to the problems of a local toxic waste dump. "I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing," Gore told the students. "I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue, and Toone, Tennessee--that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all."

SIR – Contrary to your claims of the Americanisation of armed robbery in Britain, one could only hope that robbery in England and Wales was truly becoming Americanised (“You're history”, January 3rd). The International Crime Victimisation Survey shows that for 2000, the latest year available, the robbery rate in England and Wales was twice America's rate.

Equally tellingly, your figure shows that armed robberies stopped falling in England and Wales in 1997 and started rising dramatically almost immediately afterwards. Was not the 1997 handgun ban in Britain supposed to reduce armed robberies? By contrast, American robbery rates have fallen during the 1990s just as more and more Americans have been able to carry concealed handguns for protection.

John Lott
American Enterprise Institute
Washington, DC

"...the NBER committee that determines recession dates is considering whether to make the date as early as November 2000, when Bill Clinton was president.

Such a change would be a stroke of good fortune for the Bush administration, which has long argued that the financial bubble of the late 1990s burst on President Clinton's watch ..."

The House Ethics Committee chairman said Wednesday he has "little to go on" in investigating a Republican congressman's since-retracted claim that he was offered a bribe in exchange for his vote on the Medicare reform bill late last year.

[edit]

Ethics Committee Chairman Joel Hefley of Colorado said in December he thought it would be "appropriate" for the panel to look into the matter.

But Wednesday he issued a statement saying, "At this point a complaint has not been filed before the committee. So the committee has little to go on."

[edit]

House rules don't require a complaint to be filed for the ethics panel to investigate allegations of wrongdoing; the committee can pursue a matter on its own.

While President Bush has enjoyed strong support for his handling of the war on terror, his recent push to provide legal status to millions of illegal aliens is sparking a sudden surge in negative emotions among many Americans.

[edit]

"They're taking it as a personal slap in the face from the president," says Sally St. John, a Las Vegas-based counselor and relationship and self-help personality for Fox television affiliate KVVU.

"They see it as a selfish, self-serving move on the president's part and a personal betrayal, and it's triggering all kinds of family-of-origin issues. My clients feel betrayed, angry and scared. It's like having a father that you trusted turn on you, and you don't know what he's going to do next."

St. John says her clients are independently bringing up the immigration proposal during sessions.

"One is having anxiety symptoms like knifing pains in the heart and sweaty palms. The other one, a guy in his mid-forties, is so anxious, he told his mother that he's considering leaving the country. He wants to move to Australia because he's afraid that we're going to be invaded, that the borders are going to be non-existent, and that we're going to have no safety in this country.

"[Another] is having nightmares that the president is in fact the Antichrist and that before you know it, we're gonna be in a full-fledged New World Order. ...

"One guy wants to send President Bush his bill for therapy because he feels that maybe this will wake him up. ... These were very loyal Republicans, they would never have voted against him, and they're feeling very betrayed."

Agent Stoothoff's testimony was fatally flawed for very basic reasons. It was not a summary of testimony admitted in evidence. Further, there is no indication that Agent Stoothoff's conclusions that the defendants were members of the drug organization were even based on testimony that was eventually presented at trial and could be evaluated by the jury. Agent Stoothoff merely said that his conclusions were based on the "investigation." In fact, Agent Stoothoff's testimony was likely, at least in part, based on the statements of a witness that the government chose not to call at trial; the record shows that the purported leader of the conspiracy, Israel Perez-Delgado, cooperated with the government and provided information. But Israel Perez-Delgado did not testify. The defendants had no chance to cross-examine him, did not know what he had said to the government, and had no basis to challenge a conclusion drawn from what he had said. * * *

Stoothoff * * * was presented as a preliminary overview witness. At least one other court, the Fifth Circuit, has condemned such "overview" testimony by a government agent presented at the outset of a trial. United States v. Griffin, 324 F.3d 330, 349 (5th Cir. 2003). The prosecution in that case called as its second witness an FBI agent, who testified broadly about the defendant's role in a tax-fraud conspiracy. The testimony was based on the accounts of several witnesses that the government presented later in the trial. In holding it was error to admit this preliminary overview testimony, the Fifth Circuit said that "[w]e unequivocally condemn this practice as a tool used by the government to paint a picture of guilt before the evidence has been introduced." Id.

We agree with the Fifth Circuit that this initial witness "overview testimony" is inherently problematic: such testimony raises the very real specter that the jury verdict could be influenced by statements of fact or credibility assessments in the overview but not in evidence. See id. There is also the possibility that later testimony might be different than what the overview witness assumed; objections could be sustained or the witness could change his or her story. Overview testimony by government agents is especially problematic because juries may place greater weight on evidence perceived to have the imprimatur of the government. Cf. U.S. v. Perez-Ruiz, No. 02-1466, 2003 U.S. App. LEXIS 25889, at *23 (1st Cir. Dec. 19, 2003) ("It follows inexorably" from the prohibition on vouching "that the prosecution cannot prop up a dubious witness by having a government agent place the stature of his office behind the witness."). The fact that we and the Fifth Circuit have now had to address the government's use of such preliminary overview government agent witnesses is a troubling development. The government should not knowingly introduce inadmissible evidence; it risks losing convictions obtained by doing so.

There is much talk these days about our income tax as a socialist redistribution scheme. That is indeed what it has become. But the scheme is not to take from the rich and give to the poor, deserving or not, as the courtesans of wealth in Washington would have us believe when they pontificate on the Sunday morning talk shows.

Rather, as Orwell taught us, ours is like all systems in which some animals are more equal that others - it is the pigs who grow economically fat off the tax system.

We have systematically taken away the ability of most Americans to save by taxing them too heavily, and we have expanded the capacity of those with the most to save even more by lowering their taxes.

The tax system today is not promoting prosperity based on individual enterprise and thriftiness. It is instead working, as all socialist redistribution schemes do, to enrich and benefit those who have access to the levers of power. In America that is the political donor class.

Two senators have written Chief Justice William Rehnquist to raise concerns about Justice Antonin Scalia's impartiality in a case that involves the White House's energy task force.

Scalia went on a hunting trip to Louisiana with Dick Cheney, a longtime friend, shortly after the court agreed to review a lower court's decision that required White House to identify members of the vice president's task force.

Scalia has said there is no reason to question his ability to judge the case fairly.

King County prosecutors say Roland Augustin Pitre Jr. acknowledged that he hired someone to kill [his ex-wife] in 1988, but he insisted that he was planning to stop the attack.

Yet when the time came to save her, Pitre recently told police, he forgot.

* * *

[Detectives] say he eventually admitted offering McKee $5,000 or $10,000 to kill his ex-wife, giving him keys to her house and even driving him to a hardware store for duct tape and rope.

But Pitre insisted he never intended for the woman to die, prosecutors said.

"His story was that he was going to intervene in the attempt to kill her, and thereby win her back, " Deputy Prosecutor Barbara Flemming said.

Pitre told detectives it was supposed to happen at midnight. He claimed he was going to tell his new girlfriend that he was heading out for some popcorn, then rush over to his ex-wife's house to stop the attack, Flemming said.

He said he never made it because he suffered some sort of blackout, woke up in the morning, went about his day and "suddenly realized he forgot to go rescue her," Flemming said.

Pitre is [already] behind bars until at least 2018 for a Kitsap County plot to kidnap a teenage boy -- the son of a different ex-wife -- in a clumsy 1993 attempt to get ransom money.

Years earlier, he pleaded guilty in the 1980 murder of an Oak Harbor naval officer after having an affair with the man's wife. The sordid case drew so much publicity that the trial of two co-defendants was moved from Island County to Seattle.

Fort Lauderdale Detective Mike Nahum's handsome appearance lost him a criminal case, but there is a consolation prize. He may be the only guy in the world with a court order declaring he is a "very attractive man."

* * *

Dismissing the case, Judge Lebow certified Nahum as cute.

"I make that a finding. He's a very attractive man," she said, according to a transcript.

Minority members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are prepared to "express their concerns" Thursday about President Bush's decision to recess appoint Charles Pickering to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, Democratic sources on the committee told Fox News.

Senate Judiciary Dems to Make Stink on Pickering

Senate Dems are Pathetic Little Crybabies

My colleagues liked it when I offended people. They called my reporting "hard-hitting," "a public service." I won 18 Emmys, and lots of other journalism awards .... Then I did a terrible thing. Instead of just applying my skepticism to business, I applied it to government and "public interest" groups. This apparently violated a religious tenet of journalism. Suddenly I was no longer "objective."

... These days, I rarely get awards from my peers. Some of my ABC colleagues look away when they see me in the halls. Web sites call my reporting "hurtful, biased, absurd." ... People now e-mail me, calling me "a corporate whore" and a "sellout."

"Greed is peppered with Stosselisms like this one: 'Greed is bad, right? Yet we like the scientist who's greedy for new knowledge, or the artist who's greedy to start something new." One doubts that would score points in a junior high debate tournament.

At another point, we see a psychology experiment where a group of people sit around a bowl of money. The people can take all the money they want -- but the bowl will be periodically refilled only if it isn't emptied. At the beginning of the experiment, all the cash is quickly and greedily grabbed, ending the game. But then the players learn to cooperate, each taking a limited amount at any one time so the bowl gets refilled ... Stossel's conclusion from this: "They're just as greedy, but now they're cooperating and making more. That's just how business works." People voluntarily cooperating for the common good is "how business works"? Actually, it sounds more like socialism.

The Senate gave President Bush and his Republican allies a victory today by approving an $820 billion spending bill covering more than a dozen federal departments and agencies in the fiscal year that began almost four months ago.

The vote was 65 to 28. But that vote was anticlimactic, in a sense, because minutes earlier the chamber had voted, 61-32, to end a delay, or filibuster, that had blocked the measure. The 61 votes were one more than needed to defeat the filibuster

[edit]

Our desire isn't to kill this bill," Senator Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota, the minority leader, told reporters after the Tuesday vote. "Our desire is to give them a chance to fix it."

Republicans said, in effect, that there was nothing to fix. "We are not changing this bill, period," said Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate.

“Clearly the Department of Justice is stonewalling [note: interesting use of Nixonian terminology considering the juxtaposition between the supposed urgent need to keep the DOJ opinion secret and the revelation of the bigger-than-Watergate Republican theft of confidential internal Democratic strategy memos] this request to avoid the embarrassment that will surely ensue when the memorandum is made public,” [Texas Democrats’ lawyer Gary] Hebert wrote in his appeal, which was filed with the department’s Office of Information and Privacy. “Unfortunately, the political appointees of the Justice Department appear committed to dismantling the Voting Rights Act. They are hiding this report, because it will make their intentions clear.”

Hebert and other lawyers said the length of the memo provides a strong indication that career lawyers were building a case against the map, but faced opposition from higher-level Bush administration appointees. Hebert wrote in his appeal letter that “sources inside the Department of Justice” have told him that was the case.

Month by month, Iraqis are assuming more responsibility for their own security and their own future. And tonight we are honored to welcome one of Iraq's most respected leaders: the current President of the Iraqi Governing Council, Adnan Pachachi. Sir, America stands with you and the Iraqi people as you build a free and peaceful nation.

CIA officers in Iraq are warning that [Iraq] may be on a path to civil war, current and former U.S. officials said yesterday, starkly contradicting the upbeat assessment that President Bush gave in his State of the Union address.

The CIA officers' bleak assessment was delivered orally to Washington this week, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the classified information involved.

The warning echoed growing fears that Iraq's Shiite majority, which has until now grudgingly accepted the U.S. occupation, could turn to violence if its demands for direct elections are spurned. Meanwhile, Iraq's Kurdish minority is pressing its demand for autonomy and shares of oil revenue.

These dire scenarios were discussed at meetings this week by Bush, his top national security aides and the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity.

Another senior official said the concerns over a possible civil war were not confined to the CIA but are "broadly held within the government," including by regional experts at the State Department and National Security Council.

According to David Reutens at the University of Melbourne, Australia, a person's sex drive may be proportional to the size of their amygdala, a small 'emotion' centre nestled at the base of the brain.

The almond-sized nugget has been implicated in sex drive before; it is tickled by erotic movies and is vital for mating behaviour in many animals.

A high school student dismissed from his school broadcast program for signing off with "God bless" is rallying community members to his side.

James Lord, a senior at Dupo High School in Dupo, Ill., was suspended for one month from his daily news broadcast on the school's closed circuit television after signing off his Dec. 17 broadcast, the Belleville News-Democrat reported.

Lord told his student audience: "Have a safe and happy holiday, and God bless."

School Principal Jonathan Heerboth has said Lord's comment was inappropriate for public school, the paper reported.

Lord's prayer ran afoul of administrators he acknowledged had warned him not to say it regularly, though he said he thought it would be OK occasionally. As leader of the school's Christian Youth Organization, he is protesting his suspension.

[edit]

Principal Jonathan Heerboth said the school is not against religion but that the message is not appropriate at school.

"We can't allow one person to use school time to express any personal religious beliefs," Heerboth told the newspaper. "We're not going to turn loose our school forum."

"... Why the decline in marriage? It's not because couples are any more lacking today in interpersonal skills for healthy marriages than a generation ago. The big difference today is that a lot of men no longer represent particularly good economic deals, and women no longer have to marry to have economic security. Thirty years ago most men had stable jobs in a mass-production economy that earned them paychecks big enough to support families. And most women didn't have paid jobs, so they had to get married to have food on their tables and a roof over their heads.

"Since then, stable mass-production jobs for men have dwindled, and their paychecks have shrunk. Meanwhile, women have streamed into the workforce. They're making more money than ever (but, sadly, still not as much as men doing the same job).

"I'm not suggesting most unmarried women think about men and marriage in such a mercenary way. My point is only that in the new economy, such a calculation is entirely rational, and, consciously or unconsciously, a growing number of women seem to be making it.

"It's not being single that causes women to be poor. It's being poor that makes it less likely they'll marry. Poor women generally don't have a bumper crop of marriage-worthy men to choose from. Most men available to them are either unemployed or employed part time, and they earn little when they do work. It's entirely rational for a poor woman to hedge her bets and tell a male companion he's welcome to stay only so long as he pulls in enough money and behaves well."

We regard the decisions of the courts in the gay marriage cases as a clear abuse of judicial power. They climax a trend in the judiciary undertaking to legislate, in derogation of the authority of the legislatures, and to encroach upon the reserved rights of the States and the people.

This interpretation [that marriage is between a man and a woman], restated time and again, became a part of the life of the people and confirmed their habits, traditions, and way of life. It is founded on elemental humanity and commonsense.

Though there has been no constitutional amendment or act of Congress changing this established legal principle, the courts, with no legal basis for such action, undertook to exercise their naked judicial power and substituted their personal political and social ideas for the established law of the land.

This unwarranted exercise of power by the courts, contrary to the Constitution, is creating chaos and confusion in the States principally affected.

Without regard to the consent of the governed, unelected judges are threatening immediate and revolutionary changes in our social institutions. If done, this is certain to destroy the institution of marriage.

Few companies can match the long-term success of Stanley Works. So prized are its tools that it has paid a dividend every 90 days since 1899. In July 1999 the company's new chief executive, John M. Trani, was invited to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange to mark a century of unbroken quarterly payments to investors. Four hours later Trani laid of 4,500 workers.

Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.

With the ease of a talk-show host, President Bush interviewed a student and a recent graduate of a Toledo-area community college Wednesday and praised them for going back to school after losing their factory jobs.

Some 2.3 million Americans have lost jobs since Bush took office. Ohio alone has lost about 200,000 jobs, many in manufacturing.

After all the hoopla about Howard Dean's new mass movement of "Deaniacs," it appears that blanketing Iowa with self-righteous 20-year-olds in orange wool caps may not have been the ideal campaign strategy. Dean's distant third-place finish makes you want to ask him the question Jack Nicholson put to his down-and-out gay neighbor in "As Good As It Gets": "What happened to your queer party-friends?"

God Hates Unmarried Losers
It's BushCo's $1.5 bil plan to let the homophobic Christian Right dictate love. Whee!

Man, those inner-city poor people sure are dumb.

Just look at 'em, popping out babies like crazy and draining the welfare system like there's no tomorrow, all while remaining completely unable to either get or stay married in their sad, un-Christian, gangsta-rap lives. Pathetic.

And oh my God, those damnable gays. Would you just look at them, fighting for basic human rights, whining about wanting to get married, as if they knew anything about God's manly, flag-waving, 100 percent heterosexual love?
...
I mean, what the hell is the world coming to? And what, pray tell, is a self-righteous, homophobic, God-thumping, conservative administration that constantly kowtows to the preening Christian Right to do about all this?
...
This, then, is the plan: $1.5 billion to promote "healthy marriages," especially among the lower-income plebes, with the ulterior motive of bashing gays yet again, all newly spawned from the bowels of BushCo to assuage the ever-irritated Christian Right.

You remember them? The masses that are, apparently, incessantly nagging BushCo to get in there and do something to protect the sanctity of marriage before it all falls apart and their straight white gay-hating God up and abandons them entirely and we become a nation of body-pierced single-parent sodomites who read The New York Times and drive Volvos.

Look. This is not a completely hideous idea. You want to help people learn to love more deeply and stay together and deal with their personal issues? You want to educate folks about the value of honest communication and of raising healthy happy kids? Wonderful. I'm all for it.
...
Here's a hard flick of the finger into the forehead of GOP sanctimony: Marriage has nothing to do with God. Marriage has nothing to do with Christian "interpersonal skills." Marriage has nothing to do with how one colon-clenched segment of the power elite decides it must restrict matrimony lest it lose more control and become increasingly insignificant and tumble further down the slope into hot pools of rage and intolerance and bad sex once a year with the lights off.

And, finally, marriage has nothing to do with political attitudes or party affiliation or how big your right-wing campaign contribution was during the last election, and therefore how much you get to shove your personal pseudo-pious homophobic missionary-position ethos down the nation's throat.

Because marriage is, of course, about connection. It is about social ritual and new, wide-open definitions of family and the ability of two people to commit to going deep and peeling each other back and agreeing to deal with each other's crap for the next 50 years.

Marriage is, in truth, just one weird messy culturally endorsed facet of the massive, overarching, impossibly powerful love impulse that fuels, engorges and enrages the entire species at all times and in all places across the entire known and unknown universe. Simple, really.

And guess what? You cannot legislate that force. You cannot stop its various mutations and progressions in our culture, and its absolute insistence on forcing our bewildered species to evolve, despite itself.

Such a force laughs in the face of $1.5 billion attempts to slap some sort of hissy little right-wing agenda on it. Such a force laughs in the face of anything that tries to limit its delicious, kaleidoscopic progress.

And, really, shouldn't the rest of us do the same?

"... a freeze in Medicaid payments to doctors and hospitals. Bush also wants to shift $738 million from special accounts known as trust funds to pay for general needs, a controversial practice that sparked a political furor last year.

"Florida's tax-cutting governor wants one more small cut in the intangibles tax on stocks and bonds owned by about 233,000 investors.

"The Florida Association of Counties called it 'astonishing' that Bush wants to cut taxes while trying to shift a bigger tax burden to local taxpayers ....

" 'It's outrageous," said Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach. "He's giving millionaires tax breaks while leaving 80,000 children of working families without health insurance."

"As a leader, I draw quiet comfort from my relationship with the Lord. My faith teaches benevolence and compassion and I try to apply these teachings for the people that I serve."

"In the Christian view, our treatment of children becomes a measure of our fidelity to the Lord himself ..." -- Pope John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio

Consumers and businesses need reliable supplies of energy to make our economy run -- so I urge you to pass legislation to modernize our electricity system, promote conservation, and make America less dependent on foreign sources of energy.

"A government-run health care system is the wrong prescription."

(APPLAUSE)

"By keeping costs under control, expanding access and helping more Americans afford coverage, we will preserve the system of private medicine that makes America's health care the best in the world."

(APPLAUSE)

"How long do you think national health-care reform would take if ... we rescinded all health-care coverage for members of Congress until they forged a realistic solution for fellow citizens?"

According to a timeline issued by the Cotati-Rohnert Park City School District, the controversy started Dec. 3 when the Conservative Club, which Bueler organized last fall, posted an inflammatory flier at the high school announcing the creation of a "Conservative Hotline," where students could report examples of "un-American" comments by their teachers.

"Let's take a stand against the liberal traitors who call themselves teachers," proclaimed the flier, which had not been approved by the club's faculty advisor as required under school rules.

[edit]

On Dec. 12 Bueler inflamed matters by distributing a Conservative Club newsletter in which he wrote that "Liberals welcome every Muhammad, Jamul and Jose who wishes to leave his Third World state and come to America — mostly illegally — to rip off our health-care system, balkanize our language and destroy our political system."

The statement was borrowed directly from the sayings and writings of nationally syndicated San Francisco radio host Michael Savage, whom Bueler credits for inspiration.

The club's motto, "Protecting our Borders, Language and Culture," is also a Savage slogan.

[edit]

One of the few downsides, said Bueler, whose upstairs room/office is a typical teenage boy's collection of sports posters and "Star Wars" memorabilia, is that the celebrity has cut into his three-hour evening ritual of listening to the Savage show "Savage Nation." He said he keeps the AM radio in his room permanently tuned to the local Savage station.

"I'm missing it right now. I'm getting depressed," Bueler said, breaking into a broad smile. "It's almost like a drug to me. I have to listen to him." Bueler does not agree with everything Savage says. He does not condone, for example, Savage calling a gay caller a "sodomite" and telling him to "get AIDS and die" — a statement that caused the cancellation of his short-lived Saturday afternoon talk show on MSNBC. It's just that for Bueler, a news junkie who reads the online versions of the Washington Times and New York Times every morning as well as several conservative-view websites, Savage is "the voice of reason. He's my hero."

Learning that a reporter had met Savage, a former homeopathic medicine and folk-remedy expert whose real name is Michael A. Weiner, Bueler asked excitedly: "Is he the most intelligent man you've ever met?"

Expanding Support for Teen Abstinence Promotion: Each year, three million American teenagers contract sexually transmitted diseases, causing emotional harm and serious health consequences, even death. President Bush announced a new initiative to educate teens and parents about the health risks associated with early sexual activity and provide the tools needed to help teens make responsible choices. The President’s Fiscal Year 2005 budget would increase the funding for abstinence education programs to more than $270 million. President Bush also directed the Department of Health and Human Services to develop research-based standards for model abstinence education curricula, and he called for a review of all Federal programming for youth addressing teen pregnancy prevention, family planning, and STD and HIV/AIDS prevention to ensure that the Federal government is sending the right messages to teens. He also announced a public education campaign designed to help parents communicate with their children about the health risks associated with early sexual activity.

Activist judges, however, have begun redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives. On an issue of such great consequence, the people's voice must be heard. If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process.

The head of the Army Reserve said yesterday that the 205,000-soldier force must guard against a potential crisis in its ability to retain troops, saying serious problems are being "masked" temporarily because reservists are barred from leaving the military while their units are mobilized in Iraq.

Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly said his staff is working on an overhaul of the reserve aimed in part at treating soldiers better and being more honest with them about how long they're likely to be deployed. Helmly said the reserve force bureaucracy bungled the mobilization of soldiers for the war in Iraq, and gave them a "pipe dream" instead of honest information about how long they might have to remain there.

[edit]

Helmly said his staff is engaged in an overhaul of the reserve aimed at turning the Army's part-time soldiers into a top-flight fighting force that can handle the strains of the global war on terrorism. In a Pentagon briefing for defense reporters, Helmly outlined an array of planned changes and bluntly described the force he took over in May 2002 as being dominated by bureaucrats who often ignored soldiers' needs.

In a recent memo, Helmly said, he told his subordinates that he was "really tired of going to see our reserve soldiers [and finding] they're short such simple things as goggles. It's about damn time you listen to your lawyers less and your conscience more. That will probably get me in trouble. But I told them, I want this stuff fixed."

Reservists in Iraq have long complained about having to spend a year there with inadequate equipment, including a lack of body armor.

Most reservists went to Iraq last year on year-long mobilizations, with a belief that they would be required to spend only six months in the country. But they were abruptly informed in September that they would have to spend 12 months in Iraq, pushing the total length of many reservists' mobilizations to 16 months or longer.

[edit]

Helmly said he has not been surprised by such criticism. "The [Iraq] mobilization was so fraught with friction that it really put a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths," he said. "We had about 10,000 who had less than five days' notice that they were going to be mobilized. Then we had about 8,000 who were mobilized, got trained up, and never deployed."

"No sooner do the statues of Saddam Hussein start tumbling down, then the guidance was, start planning to demobilize everybody," Helmly said, only to find in July that a growing insurgency required remobilizing 4,000 to 5,000 of the 8,000 that were initially mobilized but never deployed.

"We're seeking all the facts. Already, the Kay report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations.

"Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day."

"(U.N. arms inspector) Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We've had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven't found any, we will have a credibility problem."

After seven years of debate in the Statehouse, lawmakers are close to passing a law that would keep Ohio from recognizing same-sex marriages and keep some state employees from getting benefits for their domestic partners.

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Republican Rep. Bill Seitz sponsored the current bill and told the committee that a ruling in Massachusetts that declared the state's gay marriage ban unconstitutional could affect Ohio.

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His bill states that same-sex marriages would be "against the strong public policy of the state," and would prohibit unmarried partners of state employees from receiving benefits received by married partners.

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Seitz denied charges that the bill targets gays and lesbians.

"All unmarried people — gay or straight — are treated the same under this bill," Seitz said.

SCRIPT: CLARK: "Those who've gotten us into the mess in Iraq refuse to admit they were wrong. But now we need to succeed. This means putting Iraqis back in charge, international authority to help and NATO to keep the peace until Iraqis can protect themselves. I'm Wes Clark, and I approved this message. I've led soldiers into battle and I know that you never use force except as a last resort. I'll get us out of this mess and I won't get us into another one."

We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit, "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.

The Campaign Desk attempts to get inside the news cycle and enrich campaign journalism in real time. Our goal is to straighten and deepen campaign coverage almost as it is being written and produced.

The Desk is politically nonpartisan; its only biases are toward accuracy, fairness, and thoroughness. Its focus is not on what politicians say and do, but on how the press is presenting (or not presenting) the political story to the public. It will monitor not just news reporting, but also political analysis and commentary, assessing the accuracy of the facts behind the argument and the fairness of the framing. It will be a resource not only for conscientious journalists, but also for all citizens who want the best possible version of a free press at a time when it matters most.

* In my budget, I have proposed new funding to continue our aggressive, community-based strategy to reduce demand for illegal drugs.

* We will double federal funding for abstinence programs.

* By executive order, I have opened billions of dollars in grant money to competition that includes faith-based charities. Tonight I ask you to codify this into law, so people of faith can know that the law will never discriminate against them again.

* So tonight, I propose a four-year, 300 million dollar Prisoner Re-Entry Initiative to expand job training and placement services, to provide transitional housing, and to help newly released prisoners get mentoring, including from faith-based groups.

"Kenneth Adelman said these [WMDs] are likeliest to be found near Tikrit and Baghdad, 'because they're the most protected places with the best troops. I have no doubt we're going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction.' "

"... a range of foreign policy experts, including supporters of the war, said the long-term consequences of the administration's rhetoric could be severe overseas -- especially because the war was waged without the backing of the United Nations and was opposed by large majorities, even in countries run by leaders that supported the invasion.

" 'The foreign policy blow-back is pretty serious,' said Kenneth Adelman, a member of the Pentagon's Defense Advisory Board and a supporter of the war. He said the gaps between the administration's rhetoric and the postwar findings threaten Bush's doctrine of 'preemption,' which envisions attacking a nation because it is an imminent threat.

"The doctrine 'rests not just on solid intelligence,' Adelman said, but 'also on the credibility that the intelligence is solid.' "

My caucus happened to be close to representative of the state as a whole. After the attendees broke into their presidential preference groups, the numbers looked like this: 40 people for Kerry, 44 for Edwards, 26 for Dean, and 9 for Gephardt. When the caucus chair announced that the forlorn Gephardt supporters standing against a wall were no longer viable, the Kerry and Edwards precinct captains descended upon them like wild dogs on road-kill carcasses.... By the time the Dean captain figured out he was supposed to be strengthening his numbers by picking off the undecideds and the Gephardt people, the Edwards and Kerry teams had already divvied them up between themselves. Final score: Kerry 53, Edwards 51, Dean 26. Lisa Mullin, over in the Dean group was surprised. "I thought we would have more," she said. "We had a ton of undecideds in our door-knocking."
Later, at the Kerry victory party, giddy aides were stunned at how over-hyped and amateurish the Dean ground game was. "The Dean people were on the corner of the street in downtown Des Moines waving signs," one woman laughed into her cell phone. "They had no sense of organization." The Dean campaign called it the "perfect storm," which produced chuckles from Holly Armstrong, a Kerry organizer. "I kept telling everybody," she said, "in The Perfect Storm everybody dies at the end." Vindication.

KING: Bob, do you have a question for the General?

DOLE: No, I think, you know, it's a tough -- you indicated it's a tough business you're in. Looking at it from my perspective, it seemed to me that John Kerry is a big winner tonight, not just in Iowa but also New Hampshire. I know you can't worry about Kerry's campaign but just as an observer I think he's going to benefit a great deal in New Hampshire. Somebody has to lose. Now, of course, you don't want it to be you but I think it may be you.

CLARK: Senator, let's be honest about this thing. The American people want a change in leadership. They're looking for a candidate that can lead on all of the issues. I'm the only person in this race who has ever done foreign policy and I know all of the domestic issues, too. It's one thing to talk about it, but if you think of foreign policy it's like major league baseball. I'm the only person who has ever played it and I pitch a 95 mile an hour fastball. I've negotiated peace agreements, I've won a war. I'm prepared to help the country that's why I'm running. I'm not worried about John Kerry or anybody else.

DOLE: We're not -- we're discussing here as friends but I think just politically you just became a colonel instead of a general...

CLARK: Well, I don't think that's at all -- Senator, with all due respect, he's a lieutenant and I'm a general. You got to get your facts on this. He was a lieutenant in Vietnam. I've done all of the big leadership. I respect John Kerry and I like him but what I'm going to say it's up to the voters of New Hampshire, South Carolina, New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma, all across this country, and that's what democracy is about. It's your job to handicap the race. It's my job to go out here and do the best thing I can do for the United States of America and that's what I'm going to do.

DOLE: And I certainly wish you luck. I'm not being critical. I'm just being realistic. I've been there and I lost, of course, which is a lot more fun winning but...

CLARK: Well, I'll tell you what, I've been in a lot of tough positions in my life, one of them was leading the operation in Kosovo where I not only had to hold alliance but I had to worry about the Pentagon behind me. I'm looking forward to New Hampshire.

The IRS has not undertaken a serious study of tax evasion for years. But if the figures from the last study are simply adjusted for the increased size of the economy, then tax evaders cheat the government out of more than $300 billion each year.

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If the government could collect that conservative estimate of $300 billion lost to evasion, then Congress could exempt from taxes the half of Americans who earn less than $532 a week and give tax cuts averaging $4,000 to the rest of the taxpayers.

The Senate will take up the FY 2004 Omnibus Appropriations bill next week with gloomy federal budget clouds on the horizon. And yet, despite a record federal budget deficit of $500 billion predicted for FY04, lawmakers are still suffering from an irrational case of "budget surplus fever."

If the seven spending bills rolled into this year's $328.1 billion Omnibus are any indication, FY2004 will be an historic year for congressional earmarking. There are 7,931 earmarks in the Omnibus bill at a cost of $10.7 billion. This does not even include the already-passed Energy & Water and Defense appropriations bills that are traditionally loaded with congressional earmarks.

"While I personally do not condone the promulgation of homosexual and bisexual activities, I have sworn an oath of office to represent my constituents and thereby to respect the broad diversity of Americans regardless of race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation and other distinguishing characteristics."

"Given that the governor's position on gay rights issues is clearly articulated in the two-page response and with the pending legislative session, an interview is not possible at this time."

We all like to embrace those facts that confirm what we believe. But character can often be inferred from how we handle those facts that don't.

"You know something? Not only are we going to New Hampshire, we're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico! We're going to California and Texas and New York! And we're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan! And then we're going to Washington, D.C.. To take back the White House!

"We will not give up. We will not give up in New Hampshire. We will not give up in South Carolina. We will not give up in Arizona or New Mexico, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan! We will not quit now or ever! We want our country back for ordinary Americans. And we're going to win in Massachusetts! And North Carolina! And Missouri! And Arkansas! And Connecticut! And New York! And Ohio!

"Most of all, let me thank you from all over America, coming here to change this country. We haven't seen this in 30 years.

"This is the changing of the generations, the passing of the torch to the new generation. It is your generation. And it's your generation that's fueling this campaign because you know that the half trillion-dollar deficit this president is piling up are going to be billed to you and your children, because of the terrible damage this president is doing to the environment are going to be things that you're going to have to live with.

"And we're going to change that. And you have the power to change that. And we are starting right tonight."

President Bush will call on Congress to make his tax cuts permanent in tonight's State of the Union address, a move that Democrats charge actually amounts to a brand-new, $1 trillion tax cut.

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The Congressional Budget Office estimates that making the president's tax cuts permanent would cost $1 trillion in the next decade. That would be in addition to the $1.7 trillion in tax cuts that the president already has enacted.

But the White House insists the extra $1 trillion does not constitute a new tax cut. In fact, Bush aides portray the initiative as a way to prevent a tax increase.

"The president does not think we should raise taxes on the American people," said White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan. "The proposal that the president originally put forward did call for these tax cuts to be made permanent."

Mr. Pickering's "recess appointment" by Mr. Bush on 01/16/04 was clearly unconstitutional; it was not a bona fide recess appointment within the limits of the U. S. Constitution, Art. II, § 2, cl. 3. Surely Mr. Pickering knew that his appointment was not constitutional, yet he assumed that post by taking an oath in which he promised to support the Constitution. What does this say about Mr. Pickering's respect for the Constitution? his attitude toward judicial restraint? his fitness for judicial office?

The Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Miller said, changed him. "Everybody should be in the protection business now," he said. "I can't imagine anybody not saying that. Well, I guess on the farthest end of the left they'd say, `That's our fault.' And on the middle end they'd say, `Well, there's another way to deal with it other than flat-out protecting ourselves.' I just don't believe that. People say we're the ones who make them hate us because of what we do. That's garbage to me. I think they're nuts. And you've got to protect yourself from nuts."

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9-11 Commission), an independent, bipartisan commission created by congressional legislation and the signature of President George W. Bush in late 2002, is chartered to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, including preparedness for and the immediate response to the attacks. The Commission is also mandated to provide recommendations designed to guard against future attacks.

President Bush and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) have decided to oppose granting more time to an independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, virtually guaranteeing that the panel will have to complete its work by the end of May, officials said last week.

A growing number of commission members had concluded that the panel needs more time to prepare a thorough and credible accounting of missteps leading to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the White House and leading Republicans have informed the panel that they oppose any delay, which raises the possibility that Sept. 11-related controversies could emerge during the heat of the presidential campaign, sources said.

The top surviving leader of the Khmer Rouge admitted he made "mistakes" during the feared regime's rule but denied being guilty of genocide and rejected the idea that millions of people died.

Nuon Chea, second in command under Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, told The Associated Press in an interview he would gladly appear before a U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal pursuing top Khmer Rouge leaders. His comments appeared to be the latest in regime leaders' efforts to get their versions on the record before being called to trial.

"I admit that there was a mistake. But I had my ideology. I wanted to free my country. I wanted people to have well-being," Nuon Chea, 77, told AP from his modest bungalow in Pailin, the movement's former stronghold.

"I didn't use wisdom to find the truth of what was going on, to check who was doing wrong and who was doing right. I accept that error," he said in the interview Saturday.

The Khmer Rouge, which ruled from 1975-79, is implicated in the deaths of at least 1.7 million Cambodians, nearly a quarter of the population, according to the Documentation Center of the Cambodia Genocide Program, administered by Yale University. They died from disease, overwork, starvation and execution.