Tashi delegs -- auspicious excellent bliss -- to one and all on this first day of Losar, Tibetan New Year, the Year of the Fire Dog.
How do we love thee, Bushist fascist corporate corporations of America?NEW YORK - The U.S. ambassador to theSay, isn't that the society that John Roberts didn't remember he belonged to, and Samuel Alito didn't remember he belonged to? Funny. I can't remember.
United Nations said Saturday that the world body is hobbled "by bad management, by sex and corruption" and a lack of confidence in its ability to carry out missions. . .
"We find an organization that is deeply troubled by bad management, by sex and corruption and by a growing lack of confidence in its ability to carry out missions that are given to them," Bolton told an audience at a Columbia Law School symposium held by the Federalist Society, a conservative law organization.
Larry Flynt of Hustler infamy has recently claimed that John Bolton frequented the famous swinger's club Plato's Retreat in the 1970s and coerced his ex-wife to perform in group sex while he watched.I dunno about that. It could get better if it turns out that Bolton is the leaky source for the Traitorgate Plame name, could it not?
Corroborated allegations that Mr. Bolton’s first wife, Christina Bolton, was forced to engage in group sex have not been refuted by the State Department despite inquires posed by Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt concerning the allegations. Mr. Flynt has obtained information from numerous sources that Mr. Bolton participated in paid visits to Plato’s Retreat, the popular swingers club that operated in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s. . .
If this is true, on the one hand, its another example of a neocon doing some nasty things behind closed doors. On the other hand, well, its just a hilarious story. The soon-to-be ambassador to the UN watched his wife having sex; it does not get any better than this.
If a Youngstown lawmaker's proposal becomes Ohio law, Republicans would be barred from being adoptive parents.
State Sen. Robert Hagan sent out e-mails to fellow lawmakers late Wednesday night, stating that he intends to "introduce legislation in the near future that would ban households with one or more Republican voters from adopting children or acting as foster parents." The e-mail ended with a request for co-sponsorship. . .
Hagan said his legislation was written in response to a bill introduced in the Ohio House this month by Rep. Ron Hood, R-Ashville, that is aimed at prohibiting gay adoption. . .
Hagan wrote . . .that `"credible research" shows that adopted children raised in Republican households are more at risk for developing "emotional problems, social stigmas, inflated egos, and alarming lack of tolerance for others they deem different than themselves and an air of overconfidence to mask their insecurities."
However, Hagan admitted that he has no scientific evidence to support the above claims.
Just as "Hood had no scientific evidence" to back his assertion that having gay parents was detrimental to children, Hagan said.
"It flies in the face of reason when we need to reform our education system, address health care and environmental issues that we put energy and wasted time (into) legislation (Hood's) like this," continued Hagan, who has been in the Ohio Senate nine years. Before the Senate, he served 19 years in the Ohio House.
Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Dick Cheney when he shot Texas lawyer Harry Whittington on a hunting outing two weeks ago say Cheney was "clearly inebriated" at the time of the shooting.
Agents observed several members of the hunting party, including the Vice President, consuming alcohol before and during the hunting expedition, the report notes, and Cheney exhibited "visible signs" of impairment, including slurred speech and erratic actions.
According to those who have talked with the agents and others present at the outing, Cheney was drunk when he gunned down his friend and the day-and-a-half delay in allowing Texas law enforcement officials on the ranch where the shooting occurred gave all members of the hunting party time to sober up.
We talked with a number of administration officials who are privy to inside information on the Vice President's shooting "accident" and all admit Secret Service agents and others say they saw Cheney consume far more than the "one beer' he claimed he drank at lunch earlier that day.
"This was a South Texas hunt," says one White House aide. "Of course there was drinking. There's always drinking. Lots of it."
One agent at the scene has been placed on administrative leave and another requested reassignment this week. A memo reportedly written by one agent has been destroyed, sources said Wednesday afternoon.Cheney has a long history of alcohol abuse, including two convictions of driving under the influence when he was younger. . . .someone like Cheney, who is taking blood thinners because of his history of heart attacks, could get legally drunk now after consuming just one drink.
If Cheney was legally drunk at the time of the shooting, he could be guilty of a felony under Texas law and the shooting, ruled an accident by a compliant Kenedy County Sheriff, would be a prosecutable offense.
Recently disclosed FBI files show that in Seattle in recent years, federal agents and local police looked for signs of civil disobedience among activists preparing to protest Navy ships arriving for Seafair:
# Local anti-war groups such as the Raging Grannies, Not in Our Name and Ground Zero were watched for intent to disrupt Navy ships through civil disobedience such as chaining themselves to ships. It never happened.
# A Navy criminal investigator traveled to Eugene, Ore., to find out if anarchists blamed for violence at Seattle's 1999 World Trade Organization conference might return to protest the fleet. They never did.
# A law enforcement agent conducted surveillance as two small, Peace-Fleet boats were launched in West Seattle. . .
"This is part of a troubling pattern by the government of spying on peaceful groups," said Kathleen Taylor, executive director of the ACLU of Washington.
Keeping watch on "groups like Raging Grannies doesn't make us safer," she said. "And it interferes with people's right to protest government policies. When government believes that advocacy of peace is a threat, we are going in the wrong direction. The government needs to focus on real threats to public safety rather than to presume that anyone who objects to government action is a safety threat. . ."
In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration responded to its failure to detect the attacks by broadening the rules for the FBI to open a national security investigation.
The old guidelines required that a crime had been committed or was being planned. The new guidelines create a category called "threat assessment," and no crime has to be committed or planned to perform a threat assessment.
Under a threat assessment, a federal criminal justice source said, agents can attend public meetings without identifying themselves and conduct such simple surveillance as watching a protest march. . .
It's unclear whether information about local political activists has been collected in the database intended for military installations to use to share intelligence. The Pentagon did not make itself available to answer the question. . .
[A} memo apparently from a police member of the FBI's Washington Joint Analytic Center says: "The Snohomish County Peace Action of Edmonds is a merge between the Lynnwood SNOW and Peace Action of Snohomish County. They support the anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-nuclear, anti-weapons movements."
Tehran, Iran (AP) -- Iranians love Danish pastries, but when they look for the flaky dessert at the bakery they now have to ask for "Roses of the Prophet Mohammed."
Bakeries across the capital were covering up their ads for Danish pastries Thursday after the confectioners' union ordered the name change in retaliation for caricatures of the Muslim prophet published in a Danish newspaper.
"Given the insults by Danish newspapers against the prophet as of now the name of Danish pastries will give way to 'Rose of Mohammed' pastries," the union said in its order. . .
Iran's Danish renaming wasn't the first time a food name has become a symbol of protest.
A Republican congressman from North Carolina helped lead an effort to make sure Capitol Hill cafeterias changed their menus to advertise "freedom fries" instead of french fries after France opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) A Pakistani cleric announced Friday a $1 million bounty for killing a cartoonist who drew Prophet Muhammad, as thousands joined street protests and Denmark temporarily closed its embassy and advised its citizens to leave the country.
Police confined the former leader of an Islamic militant group to his home to prevent him from addressing supporters over the cartoons, amid fears he could incite violence, after riots this week killed five people. . .In the northwestern Pakistan city of Peshawar, prayer leader Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi announced the bounty for killing a cartoonist to about 1,000 people outside the Mohabat Khan mosque.
Qureshi said the mosque and his religious school would give $25,000 and a car, while a local jewelers' association would give another $1 million. . . "This is a unanimous decision by all imams (prayer leaders) of Islam that whoever insults the prophet deserves to be killed and whoever will take this insulting man to his end, will get this prize," Qureshi said. . .
A Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, first printed the prophet pictures by 12 cartoonists in September. . . Denmark has already temporarily closed its embassies in Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Indonesia after anti-Danish protests and threats against staff. . .
Unrest over the cartoons has spiraled in Pakistan, even as it has ebbed in the rest of Asia and in the Middle East. Big riots in Lahore and Peshawar this week caused millions of dollars in damage, as hundreds of vehicles were burned and protesters targeted numerous U.S. and other foreign-brand businesses, including KFC, McDonald's, Citibank, Holiday Inn, and Norwegian cell phone company Telenor.
Intelligence officials have said scores of members of radical and militant Islamic groups, such as Jamaat al-Dawat, joined the unruly protests in Lahore on Tuesday and had incited violence in a bid to undermine President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's government. . .
WASHINGTON--Monday's hunting trip to Pennsylvania by Vice President Dick Cheney in which he reportedly shot more than 70 stocked pheasants and an unknown number of mallard ducks at an exclusive private club places a spotlight on an increasingly popular and deplorable form of hunting, in which birds are pen-reared and released to be shot in large numbers by patrons. The ethics of these hunts are called into question by rank-and-file sportsmen, who hunt animals in their native habitat and do not shoot confined or pen-raised animals that cannot escape.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette [reported]that 500 farm-raised pheasants were released yesterday morning at the Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township for the benefit of Cheney’s 10-person hunting party. The group killed at least 417 of the birds, illustrating the unsporting nature of canned hunts. The party also shot an unknown number of captive mallards in the afternoon. . .
"This wasn’t a hunting ground. It was an open-air abattoir, and the vice president should be ashamed to have patronized this operation and then slaughtered so many animals," states Wayne Pacelle, a senior vice president of The Humane Society of the United States. "If the Vice President and his friends wanted to sharpen their shooting skills, they could have shot skeet or clay, not resorted to the slaughter of more than 400 creatures planted right in front of them as animated targets."
The Humane Society of the United States deplores the shooting of captive birds and animals where traditional “fair chase” hunting ethics are discarded and kills are guaranteed. . . For more information, visit The HSUS’ Web site – www.hsus.org.
In their brochures and advertisements, operators of canned hunting facilities routinely flout the most basic principles of fair chase in hunting. Here's a sample of what they're saying, and how these operations brag about stacking the odds against captive animals:
"No kill no pay."
—Triple R Ranch
"...comfort of a large enclosed blind with sliding window overlooking heavily used corn feeders."
—Barnes-Keith Ranch
"...all weather blind overlooking feeding areas."
—Beaver Creek Ranch
"...hunts are from elevated box blinds overlooking food plots, senderos or feeders."
—Edmund Tom Ranch
"The animals are fed on a feed routing that runs daily."
—Gunn Ranch
"...we have the daytime cover and water...so they MUST come to us to hide and drink."
—Itchy Acres Ranch
"The preferred hunt will be from elevated blinds and enclosed tri-pods overlooking automatic feeders."
—Kinsel Cattle Company
"Our hunters have 90% to 100% success...we put 40 lbs of corn at each stand twice a week so the deer and hogs are used to coming to them. You may put out corn at the stand you are hunting...36 comfortable box stands."
—Lange Ranches in the Texas Hill Country
"Hunting is done from tower blinds overlooking feeders which have been operating continuously since August. Any predators seen may be taken as well."
—Mann Outfitting
"...hunting is usually done from double box blinds overlooking feeders...we're going to do everything legally possible to make your hunt a productive worthwhile experience!"
—Rojo Grande Ranch
"Each stand has mineral licks and timer controlled feeders."
—Solano Ranch
DENIAL
The woman refuses to admit--even to herself--that she has been beaten or that there is a "problem" in her marriage. She may call each incident an "accident". She offers excuses for her husband's violence and each time firmly believes it will never happen again.
The Dalai Lama on Wednesday urged Hamas to renounce violence, but refused to take sides in the increasingly bloody dispute over cartoons of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed. . .
The Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet more than four decades ago during a failed revolt against Chinese rule and now lives across the border in India, brushed aside reports that China is upset with Israel for allowing him to visit . . .
Asked about Mideast strife, [the Dalai Lama] appealed to Hamas to renounce violence, in the wake of its victory in last month's Palestinian parliament election. Hamas is under growing pressure from the West to end attacks, recognize Israel and honor Israeli-Palestinian interim agreements.
The Dalai Lama noted that Hamas won a democratic election.
"I want to take this opportunity, and also my appeal to Hamas, now through violent way it won't solve, it won't achieve what it wants," he said in halting English. He called for "mutual respect" and urged the group to approach the situation "more realistically" . . .
The spiritual leader, who advocates religious tolerance, would not take sides in the dispute over Danish newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed which have sparked protests, some deadly, across the Muslim world. He said it would be unfair to hold all Muslims responsible for the violent acts of a few.
Asked to take a side, he said: "I think tricky question ... so difficult. If you give me permission, I remain silent. No comment."
Australian television has broadcast previously unpublished graphic images of the alleged physical abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
SBS television's Dateline program screened video and still images of the wounds allegedly inflicted on the Iraqis by their American captors.
They included photographs of blood-soaked Iraqi prisoners who had been tortured or shot dead, footage of a prisoner repeatedly slamming his head into a metal door, and a film of naked male prisoners being forced to masturbate in front of the camera.
The Bush administration is reportedly attempting to prevent release of the images in the US, arguing that their publication could provoke antagonism towards the US. . .
George Negus, host of Wednesday's Dateline program, told SBS viewers it was important to televise the images to make the public aware of what taken place at Abu Ghraib prison.
"Despite the currently overheated international climate, we're showing them because they show the extent of the horror that occurred at Abu Ghraib," Negus said. . .
ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh told Dateline the images were evidence of "systemic and widespread abuse" of prisoners by US soldiers.
The CIA’s top counter-terrorism official was fired last week because he opposed detaining Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons abroad, sending them to other countries for interrogation and using forms of torture such as "water boarding", intelligence sources have claimed.Link here to whole story.
Robert Grenier, head of the CIA counter-terrorism centre, was relieved of his post after a year in the job. . . Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counter-terrorism at the agency, said: "It is not that Grenier wasn't aggressive enough, it is that he wasn't 'with the programme'. He expressed misgivings about the secret prisons in Europe and the rendition of terrorists.”
Grenier also opposed "excessive" interrogation, such as strapping suspects to boards and [near-drowning] them in water, according to Cannistraro. . .
AB "Buzzy" Krongard, a former executive director of the CIA who resigned shortly after Goss's arrival, said . . . said it was up to President George Bush to stop the rot. "The agency has only one client: the president of the United States," he said. "The reorganisation is the way this president wanted it. If he is unwilling to reform it, the agency will go on as it is."
"History will judge how good an idea it was to destroy the teams and the programmes that were in place."
VA NURSE INVESTIGATED FOR "SEDITION" FOR CRITICIZING BUSH
Laura Berg is a clinical nurse specialist at the VA Medical Center in Albuquerque, where she has worked for 15 years. Shortly after Katrina, she wrote a letter to the editor of the weekly paper the Alibi criticizing the Bush Administration.
After the paper published the letter in its September 15-21 issue, VA administrators seized her computer, alleged that she had written the letter on that computer, and accused her of "sedition."
Here's what her letter said.
"I am furious with the tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence of this government," it began. "The Katrina tragedy in the U.S. shows that the emperor has no clothes!" She mentioned that she was "a VA nurse" working with returning vets. "The public has no sense of the additional devastating human and financial costs of post-traumatic stress disorder," she wrote, and she worried about the hundreds of thousands of additional cases that might result from Katrina and the Iraq War.
"Bush, Cheney, Chertoff, Brown, and Rice should be tried for criminal negligence," she wrote. "This country needs to get out of Iraq now and return to our original vision and priorities of caring for land and people and resources rather than killing for oil. . . . We need to wake up and get real here, and act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit. Otherwise, many more of us will be facing living hell in these times."
After her computer was seized, Berg wrote a memo to her bosses seeking information and an explanation.
Mel Hooker, chief of the human resources management service at the Albuquerque VA, wrote Berg back on November 9 and acknowledged that "your personal computer files did not contain the editorial letter written to the editor of the weekly Alibi."
But rather than apologize, he leveled the sedition charge: "The Agency is bound by law to investigate and pursue any act which potentially represents sedition," he said. "In your letter . . . you declared yourself "as a VA nurse" and publicly declared the Government which employs you to have 'tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence' and advocated, 'act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.'"
Berg, who is not talking to the press, is "scared for her job" and "pretty emotionally distressed," says Peter Simonson, executive director of the ACLU of New Mexico.
"We were shocked to see the word 'sedition' used," Simonson tells The Progressive. "Sedition? That's like something out of the history books."
In a press release, Simonson also said: "Is this government so jealous of its power, so fearful of dissent, that it needs to threaten people who openly oppose its policies with charges of 'sedition"?"
The ACLU of New Mexico is working in Berg's behalf. It has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents relating to this incident. And it is asking "at the very least" that Berg "receive a pubic apology from Mr. Hooker to remedy the unconstitutional chilling effect on the speech of VA employees that has resulted from these intimidating tactics," according to a letter from the New Mexico ACLU to the VA's Office of Regional Counsel. . .
"While VA does not prohibit employees from exercising their freedom of speech, we do ask that such activity occurs outside government premises and not during their official tour of duty," says Bill Armstrong, a public affairs specialist for New Mexico's VA Health Care System. "When we have reason to believe that this policy is not being adhered to, we have the obligation to review an individual's computer activity."
The VA in Washington also refused to comment on the sedition charge. "We don't discuss internal personnel issues," says Phil Budahn, a VA spokesman in Washington, D.C.
Berg has an additional concern: that the VA may have got the FBI on her case.
A union employee "shared with me that Mel Hooker conveyed to him that my letter had been reported 'up through VA channels' to the FBI in Washington, and that this had been discussed and confirmed" with union officials at the national office, Berg wrote in her November 2 complaint. (The union she belongs to is the American Federation of Government Employees.)
Hooker denied that the VA had contacted the FBI. "The Agency has no knowledge of any report alleged to have been made to the FBI regarding you or your letter," he said in his November 9 memo.
Meanwhile, Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, has taken up the Berg case.
"I am writing to express my deep concern regarding news reports that Ms. Laura Berg . . . was investigated for sedition after writing a letter that was critical of the current Administration," Senator Bingaman wrote to R. James Nicholson, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, on February 7. "In a democracy, expressing disagreement with the government's actions does not amount to sedition or insurrection--it is, and must remain, protected speech."
In recent weeks, the officials said, guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into "restraint chairs," sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward. Detainees who refuse to eat have also been placed in isolation for extended periods in what the officials said was an effort to keep them from being encouraged by other hunger strikers.
Mr. Wilner, who was among the first lawyers to accept clients at Guantanamo and represented them in a case in 2004 before the Supreme Court, said a Kuwaiti detainee, Fawzi al-Odah, told him last week that around Dec. 20, guards began taking away items like shoes, towels and blankets from the hunger strikers.
Mr. Odah also said that lozenges that had been distributed to soothe the hunger strikers' throats had disappeared and that the liquid formula they were given was mixed with other ingredients to cause diarrhea, Mr. Wilner said. . . .
Mr. Odah said he heard "screams of pain" from a hunger striker in the next cell as a thick tube was inserted into his nose. . .
Another lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, said one of his three Bahraini clients, Jum'ah al-Dossari, told him about 10 days ago that more than half of a group of 34 long-term hunger strikers had abandoned their protest after being strapped in restraint chairs and having their feeding tubes inserted and removed so violently that some bled or fainted.
Before marrying Russell Yates, Andrea Kennedy was a successful young woman working as a post-operative nurse. She enjoyed regular swimming and jogging and was apparently from a Catholic family. Their courtship included praying and reading the Bible together--so far so good.
But somewhere in that Bible study, or in the conservative Christian culture that surrounded them, they got the idea that when they married, they would not use birth control. They would lovingly accept as many children as God sent them. This ideal is still being taught by the Roman Catholic Church and by many small independent fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches. The use of contraceptives is considered a sin. There are no allowances for difficult circumstances such as postpartum depression, bipolar disorder, poverty, or rape. By giving family planning the powerful label of sin, these churches entrap women like Andrea Yates, who had five children and one miscarriage during her eight years of marriage.
We in EEWC need to reach as many women as possible with the good news that controlling their fertility is within God's will. Otherwise, more children will face abuse and even death at the hands of overwhelmed parents or caregivers. At a conference in 1986, EWC approved a resolution that stated, "Because we believe that every human being is made in God's image, we deplore violence against women and children and the misuse of power within the family." We need to find more ways to carry out our mission to curb domestic violence.
Now that I've had my daily dose of Abramoff-Indian Trust Fund obsessing, I'll get back to work compiling the next posts. I started Best Post and Most Humorous Post this morning, and will hopefully have one, if not both, up later tonight.
I did a quick estimation yesterday, and it looks as though we had somewhere around 10,000 individual nominations this year (about 1000 nominators, with an average of 10 nominations each.) That's about twice what we had last year. I was wondering why I felt like I was going blind these past few days
I'm passing the hat yet again, to cover the increasing costs of these awards. In addition to regular contributions, if you happen to know anyone who would like to purchase an ad on our sidebar, a la our wonderful Texas Senate candidate, Barbara Ann Radnofsky, please let us know. Over the next few weeks, a large percentage of the eyeballs which frequent the Lefty blogosphere will land on Wampum at one point or another, so it's a pretty good advertising investment , at a fraction of what the Big Dogs charge.
Five talking points about Cesar Vallejo.
1) There's the inexplicable mystery of how and why he realized that he could be Cesar Vallejo. That is, speak with such an unmistakably individual voice. What gave him that courage? (Normally I hate to apply the word courage to writing in a particular style; it seems fake and inappropriate to say that it is courageous for me to write in a particular way. For Vallejo, though, this is entirely approrpriate.)
2) He had a complete poetic language, ranging from the colloquial to the erudite, the Quechua-inflected Spanish that he grew up speaking to the avant-garde cosmopolitan discourse of Europe.
3) He had a unique way of bridging the individual and the collective voice. "Yo no siento este dolor como Cesar Vallejo." Yet it took "Cesar Vallejo" to articulate this insight.
4) He passed through the historical avant-gardes and forged a style of political poetry totally inflected by the freedom given to him by this avant-garde. He never practiced a sort of "generic" avant-garde style. . .
5) His appeal is immediate and direct. You know that it's great before you even understand what it's all about. Further study only deepens our appreciation.
This is not necessarily good news if you're in the business of victim advocacy - and it is a business, perhaps soon to become a career choice if Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) has her way. Slaughter is the sponsor of a 95-page bill that would create a Pentagon Office of Victim Advocacy (OVA). We may never win the war on terror, but we'll by golly win the war on hurt feelings.
RENO, Nev. 1/22/06 -- Carson City Sheriff Ken Furlong says he's amazed by the survival of two emaciated children who say they were locked in an apartment bathroom and starved for the past five years.
When the siblings were found Thursday, the 16-year-old girl weighed about 40 pounds, and her 11-year-old brother weighed about 30 pounds. The pair were in stable condition Sunday at a hospital, while their grandmother, mother and the mother's boyfriend were in jail.
"The little girl appeared to be a Holocaust victim," Furlong told The Associated Press. "There's no meat or muscle whatsoever. We're talking absolute starvation. It was the same thing for the little boy."
Deputies were led to the home after someone reported seeing an 8-year-old girl pushing a shopping cart full of food within a block of the sheriff's office. It turned out to be the 16-year-old girl, who told deputies she was running away because she had been locked in a bathroom . . ."Right now, there doesn't seem to be anything that conflicts with anything the girl has said," Furlong said, adding the bathroom door appeared damaged as if someone had broken out. . .
Their grandmother, Esther Rios, 56; mother, Regina Rios, 33; and the mother's boyfriend, Tomas Granados, 33, were jailed on suspicion of child abuse or neglect and false imprisonment in lieu of $100,000 bail. . . Furlong said it's one of the worst cases he's seen in nearly 30 years of law enforcement.
"I don't know how the girl or her brother survived," he said.
