While the practice of providing news organizations with staged photos of events involving the president goes back decades, veteran shooters at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue say it has become almost a regular occurrence with the Bush Administration. A review of Associated Press archives found that during the entire eight years of the Clinton administration, only 100 handout photos of events were released to the press. During the first five years of Bush's presidency, more than 500 have been distributed.
Evidence that obesity could be contagious was published yesterday by American researchers - and washing your hands could be an elementary step to avoiding the virus and becoming overweight.
A team led by Dr Leah Whigham, of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, found that the human adenovirus Ad-37 causes obesity in chickens, marking the third virus to be linked to being overweight: two related viruses, Ad-36 and Ad-5, also cause obesity in animals.
Moreover, Ad-36 has been associated with human obesity, leading researchers to suspect that Ad-37 also may be implicated.
"We know Ad-36, and now Ad-37, cause obesity in animals," said Dr. Whigham, whose findings are reported in the American Journal of Physiology.
"But we do not have cause-and-effect data in humans - you cannot ethically do the experiments for that kind of data: infect humans and see if they get fat."
The notion that viruses can cause obesity has been a contentious one among scientists, she admitted. And yet, there is evidence that factors other than poor diet or lack of exercise may be at work.
"With the exception of infectious diseases, no other chronic disease in history has spread so rapidly," Dr Whigham said.
"The nearly simultaneous increase in obesity in most countries is difficult to explain by changes in food intake and exercise alone, and suggest that adenoviruses could have contributed."
"When a service has to repeatedly resort to compelling the retention of people who want to leave, you're edging away from the whole notion of volunteerism."
This is what the Bush administration has done to the Army. If things do not dramatically change, and I mean an indefatigable turn from any and all desires to start a war with Iran, we can immediately kiss our all-volunteer military service goodbye. As long as the likes of Rummy can still face a camera and say everything is just hunky dory, and certain segments of Americana lap it up, conscription will become a fact of life in the not-too-distant future.
The U.S. Army has forced about 50,000 soldiers to continue serving after their voluntary stints ended under a policy called "stop-loss," but while some dispute its fairness, court challenges have fallen flat.
Stop-loss. Just another word to desribe indentured.
"The persistent use of stop-loss underscores the fact that the war-fighting burden is being carried by a handful of soldiers while the vast majority of citizens incur no sacrifice at all."
That is it, in a nutshell. This so-called war on terror, which is a misnomer anyway, is only minimally supported, in a physical way, by the Republican party members and electorate. In the blogosphere (hat tip to skippy), we call them keyboard commandos. In the real world, I'd call them cowards. Unfortunately, the term "cowards" has been usurped by the right-wingers and turned around to mean any Democrat, liberal or opponent of the current regime's policies. Double-speak is the norm for this crowd.
Everyone thought the humuhumunukunukuapuaa was Hawaii's state fish. As it turns out, the brightly colored fish with the excessively long name has been
dethroned.The stubby-nosed, brightly striped and slightly aggressive little fish whose name few tourists even try to utter (it's pronounced HOO-moo-HOO-moo-NOO-koo-NOO-koo-AH-poo-AH-ah) is commonly believed to be the state's favorite. The fish figures into tourist trinkets, broadcast commercials and a much-beloved song about a little grass shack.
"It won't be long 'till my ship will be sailing back to Kona, a grand ole place, I always long to see, I'm just a little Hawai'ian and a homesick island boy, I want to go back to my fish and poi, I want to go back to my little grass shack in Kealakekua, Hawai'i, where the humuhumunukunukuapuaa go swimming by."
A tourist favorite, for sure, and probably the first song most haole wahines learn to do the hula.
I don't think John put the part up where Tweety asks him if he likes to speak in Spanish because it's more "up-beat," and Villaraigossa look at him like he's a mental patient and says he was born in the United States and English is his first language.
The study found that if New Orleans' returning population was limited to the neighborhoods undamaged by Katrina, about half the white population would not return and 80 percent of its black population would not.
A California agency voted on Thursday to classify second-hand tobacco smoke as a "toxic air contaminant," a first-in-the-nation move that could ultimately toughen state regulations against smoking.
The designation by California's Air Resources Board starts a process that could lead to further smoking bans in the nation's largest state, which has often pioneered in health and environmental regulation.
Scientific studies in recent years have warned about the health impact from second-hand smoke and linked it to a wide array of ailments including heart disease, lung cancer and other respiratory ailments, and breast cancer.
The group is among organizations urging United Nations experts to recommend that governments adopt tough laws against field testing and selling Terminator technology, which refers to plants that have had their genes altered so that they render sterile seeds at harvest. Because of this trait, some activists call Terminator products ''suicide seeds.''
Developed by multinational agribusinesses and the U.S. government, Terminator has the effect of preventing farmers from saving or replanting seeds from one growing season to the next.
The product is being tested in greenhouses throughout the United States. Opponents fear it is likely to be marketed soon unless governments impose a ban.
Good read over at Informed Comment. Long top ten, so I won't post it here.In fact, the United States invaded a major Muslim country, occupied it militarily, tortured its citizens, killed tens of thousands, tinkered with the economy-- did all those things that Muslim nationalists had feared and warned against, and there hasn't even been much of a reaction from the Muslim world. Only a few thousand volunteers went to fight. Most people just seem worried that the US will destabilize their region and leave a lot of trouble behind them. People are used to seeing Great Powers do as they will. A Syrian official before the war told a journalist friend of mine that people in the Middle East had been seeing these sorts of invasions since Napoleon took Egypt in 1798. "Well," he shrugged, "usually they leave behind a few good things when they finally leave."
Because they exaggerate the scale of the conflict, and because they use it cynically, Bush and Cheney have grossly mismanaged the struggle against al-Qaeda and Muslim radicalism after September 11. Here are their chief errors:
The first official history of the $25 billion American reconstruction effort in Iraq depicts a program hobbled from the outset by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs, according to a preliminary draft.
The document, which begins with the secret prewar planning for reconstruction and touches on nearly every phase of the program through 2005, was assembled by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction and debated last month in a closed forum by roughly two dozen experts from outside the office.
A person at the forum provided a copy of the document, dated December 2005, to The New York Times. The inspector general's office, whose agents and auditors have been examining and reporting on various aspects of the rebuilding since early 2004, declined to comment on the report other than to say it was highly preliminary.
"It's incomplete," said a spokesman for the inspector general's office, Jim Mitchell. "It could change significantly before it is finally published."
In the 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit, the White House received detailed warnings about the storm's likely impact, including eerily prescient predictions of breached levees, massive flooding, and major losses of life and property, documents show.
A 41-page assessment by the Department of Homeland Security's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), was delivered by e-mail to the White House's "situation room," the nerve center where crises are handled, at 1:47 a.m. on Aug. 29, the day the storm hit, according to an e-mail cover sheet accompanying the document.
The NISAC paper warned that a storm of Katrina's size would "likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching" and specifically noted the potential for levee failures along Lake
Pontchartrain. It predicted economic losses in the tens of billions of dollars, including damage to public utilities and industry that would take years to fully repair. Initial response and rescue operations would be hampered by disruption of telecommunications networks and the loss of power to fire, police and emergency workers, it said.
The NISAC analysis accurately predicted the collapse of floodwalls along New Orleans's Lake Pontchartrain shoreline, an event that the report described as "the greatest concern." The breach of two canal floodwalls near the lake was the key failure that left much of central New Orleans underwater and accounted for the bulk of Louisiana's 1,100 Katrina-related deaths.
The documents shed new light on the extent on the administration's foreknowledge about Katrina's potential for unleashing epic destruction on New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities and towns. President Bush, in a televised interview three days after Katrina hit, suggested that the scale of the flooding in New Orleans was unexpected. "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm," Bush said in a Sept. 1 interview on ABC's "Good Morning America."
Ha. You bet your bippy the White House declined to comment.The reports echo warnings given around the same time by Max Mayfield, head of the National Hurricane Center, who began sounding the alarm when forecasters first placed Katrina on a collision with the Gulf Coast on the evening of Aug. 26. But the FEMA and NISAC reports provided much more detail and covered a wider range of possible consequences, from damaged ports and oil terminals to spikes in energy prices.
The White House declined to comment yesterday on the specifics of the reports ...
Are they really that stupid, or is this just the new meme?QUESTION: Jonathan Landay with Knight Ridder. I'd like to stay on the same issue, and that had to do with the standard by which you use to target your wiretaps. I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American's right against unlawful searches and seizures. Do you use --
GEN. HAYDEN: No, actually -- the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure.
QUESTION: But the --
GEN. HAYDEN: That's what it says.
QUESTION: But the measure is probable cause, I believe.
GEN. HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.
QUESTION: But does it not say probable --
GEN. HAYDEN: No. The amendment says --
QUESTION: The court standard, the legal standard --
GEN. HAYDEN: -- unreasonable search and seizure.
QUESTION: The legal standard is probable cause, General. You used the terms just a few minutes ago, "We reasonably believe." And a FISA court, my understanding is, would not give you a warrant if you went before them and say "we reasonably believe"; you have to go to the FISA court, or the attorney general has to go to the FISA court and say, "we have probable cause."
And so what many people believe -- and I'd like you to respond to this -- is that what you've actually done is crafted a detour around the FISA court by creating a new standard of "reasonably believe" in place of probable cause because the FISA court will not give you a warrant based on reasonable belief, you have to show probable cause. Could you respond to that, please?
GEN. HAYDEN: Sure. I didn't craft the authorization. I am responding to a lawful order. All right? The attorney general has averred to the lawfulness of the order.
Just to be very clear -- and believe me, if there's any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it's the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. And so what you've raised to me -- and I'm not a lawyer, and don't want to become one -- what you've raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is "reasonable." And we believe -- I am convinced that we are lawful because what it is we're doing is reasonable.
The ad, sponsored by Campaign for America's Future and Public Campaign Action Fund, touts itself as "the ad Tom DeLay doesn't want you to see." The announcer in the new version says DeLay "received" campaign contributions from Abramoff instead of "pocketed."
DeLay spokeswoman Shannon Flaherty said the modified ad remains "fraudulent."
"Any new decision they make is probably based more on their need for cash than upholding their credibility," Flaherty said of the station's decision to air the spot.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.
Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.
More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.
That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on Sunday ridiculed as "bizarre" a U.S. report that senior al Qaeda leaders were killed in a CIA attack on a home along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
"There is no evidence, as of half an hour ago, that there were any other people there," Aziz said on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer."
"The area does see movement of people from across the border. But we have not found one body or one shred of evidence that these people were there."
U.S. counterterrorism officials have said they believe the January 13 attack killed four to eight al Qaeda-affiliated "foreigners" attending a dinner meeting. Knowledgeable sources have said that their bodies were removed from the scene by comrades and buried elsewhere.
Tens of thousands of Pakistanis have taken to the streets in cities nationwide to express outrage about the attack, which killed more than a dozen civilians, including women and children.
Pakistani officials originally put the death toll at 18 civilians; Aziz cited 13 deaths Sunday.
There's something that doesn't sit right with me when, on the day Osama Bin Laden resurfaced in a disturbing audio tape, cable television ends up in a game of name calling as a war protester is compared to Osama Bin Laden.
That's reason to be outraged - but even more outrageous is the fact that in a flurry of sound bites what was lost was a real discussion of the fact that more than four years after the devastating attacks of 9/11, more than four years after George Bush boasted we wanted Osama "dead or alive," more than a year after Osama Bin Laden showed his hateful face in yet another video, this barbarian is still very much alive and boasting of additional attacks against the United States.
Here's a subject suited for true hard ball, on Hardball: four years of failure - enough is enough - why hasn't Osama Bin Laden been captured or killed, and how will he be destroyed before he next appears on tape to spread his disgusting message?
That discussion -- rather than criticizing American citizens who exercise their right to free speech and express dissenting opinions - is the discussion that America needs. That would be the kind of debate on Hardball to which we should all tune in.
Crawford, Texas -- A tragic flood this morning destroyed the personal library of President George W. Bush. The flood began in the presidential bathroom where the books were kept. Both of his books have been lost. A presidential spokesman said the president was devastated, as he had almost finished coloring the second one. The White House tried to call FEMA but there was no answer.
As exhausted as I am right now, and while hoping to sneak in a few hours of R&R on the road, it's shit like this that reminds me-- all too often -- why it's so important to continue doing what I'm doing here. As much as I'd rather be doing almost anything else.Brad Blog usually covers the Diebold debacle, but this post above was in response to the recent suicide of an Iraq veteran despondent over the closing of a VA facility near him that was the only one that treated veterans for PTSD.
While the rest of the "media" -- the likes of O'Reilly and his despicable ilk -- are out spinning and apologizing for and making a political game out of this abomination of the American ideal...An ideal twisted and tortured and now embodied by the unAmerican Bush Adminstration and their facilitating accomplices of death, destruction and mayhem in Congress and the Rightwing Media Echo Chamber...I'm reminded why it's important to keep at it, no matter how exhausting, and just how very grateful I am to those of you who -- against all odds, and to no end of frustration -- continue to support what we do here, and continue to do everything within your power to make sure the rest of the country takes notice of what is happening in this country during these years of shame.
Thank you all for that.
One day, we will restore the balance of sanity to this great nation. I also pray, however, that once we do, we may "Never Forget" what has gone on here and who it is that must, one day...somehow...be held accountable.
May God Bless America.
Hey Brad:
I just got confirmation from the Police Department that Douglas did indeed commit suicide yesterday. Apparently, it happened with police officers on the spot trying to talk him out of if.
The officer I just spoke to said Douglas took his gun, fired one shot, and killed himself. He said he was the officer in charge of the investigation. I asked him what kind of an investigation was done when someone took their own life. He said they'd like to find out the circumstances surrounding it and perhaps why it happened.
I told him that when Douglas did the interview on my show, he said that he'd been diagnosed with PTSD, and was having trouble getting help from the VA. That seemed to pique his interest and he then asked me if I had that interview on tape. I told him it was archived on my web site. He asked if I could send him a link to the interview, which I just did. Here's the link...
Absolutely, you you have my permission to use this interview along with the email I received in any way it will help get the truth out. I really hate these people, Brad. I really do. Take care.
Doug
The political tactic of playing up the soldiers on the battlefield while tearing down the reputations of veterans who oppose them could eventually cost the Republicans dearly. It may be one reason that a preponderance of the Iraq war veterans who thus far have decided to run for office are doing so as Democrats.
Now the Cybercast News Service, a supposedly independent organization with deep ties to the Republican Party, has dusted off the Swift Boat Veterans playbook, questioning whether Mr. Murtha deserved his two Purple Hearts. The article also implied that Mr. Murtha did not deserve the Bronze Star he received, and that the combat-distinguishing "V" on it was questionable. It then called on Mr. Murtha to open up his military records.
“I had orders from the great Bill Russell,” O’Neal said. “Me and him were talking in Seattle the other day, and he was telling me how rivalries should be. I asked him if he ever disliked anybody he played against, and he told me, ‘No, never,’ and he told that I should shake Kobe Bryant’s hand and let bygones be bygones and bury the hatchet.
“Today is a day of peace. Dr. Martin Luther King was an ambassador of peace."
America was founded on the principles of freedom. The president says the reason we are fighting a war in Iraq is to preserve freedom in America and to spread freedom to the Middle East. And yet, here in America, this president continues to fight for restrictions on those freedoms. Detaining innocent people indefinitely, calling people who question the actions of this government traitors, stifling and controlling what is disseminated in the media, followed by outright lying to the American people about everything short of the cookie jar ... and still millions of Americans find nothing wrong with the double-speak.The soldiers were ordered to leave their privately purchased body armor at home or face the possibility of both losing their life insurance benefit and facing disciplinary action.
Once the $18.6 billion for reconstruction is spent, the nation might have to rely on private investment. 'No pain, no gain,' a U.S. official says.
After more than 2 1/2 years of sputtering reconstruction work, the United States' "Marshall Plan" to rebuild this war-torn country is drawing to a close this year with much of its promise unmet and no plans to extend its funding.
The $18.6 billion approved by Congress in 2003 will be spent by the end of this year, officials here say. Foreign governments have given only a fraction of the billions they pledged two years ago.
With the country still a shambles, U.S. officials are promoting a tough-love vision of reconstruction that puts the burden on the Iraqi people.
"It’s sad to see the religious left and the secular left forge an unholy alliance against people of faith," Johnson said. "We have invited people to pray, to serve and to engage, and candidly, we will not be intimidated or bullied by these folks."
More than 30 local pastors last night officially accused two evangelical megachurches of illegal political activities.Read more, here.
In a rare and potentially explosive action, the moderate ministers signed a complaint asking the Internal Revenue Service to investigate World Harvest Church of Columbus and Fairfield Christian Church of Lancaster and determine if their tax-exempt status should be revoked.
The grievance claims that the Rev. Rod Parsley of World Harvest Church and the Rev. Russell Johnson of Fairfield Christian Church improperly used their churches and affiliated entities — the Center for Moral Clarity, Ohio Restoration Project and Reformation Ohio — for partisan politics, including
supporting the Republican gubernatorial candidacy of Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.
Pakistan on Saturday condemned a purported CIA airstrike on a border village that officials said unsuccessfully targeted al-Qaida's second-in-command, and said it was protesting to the U.S. Embassy over the attack that killed at least 17 people.
Two senior Pakistani officials told The Associated Press that the CIA acted on incorrect information in launching the attack early Friday in the northwestern village of Damadola, near the Afghan border.
"It's a little ironic that Congress and the administration are talking about cutting Medicaid administrative costs, and here we are rolling up our sleeves and doing all we can to make sure a federal program is working," she said.
On the other hand, if the Democrats would just come out and say it - that they are a Party entirely dedicated to federally funded abortion on demand and they daren't retreat from this for fear of angering the abortion industry - this would be at least a bit of refreshing honesty for our Democrats.
So, it turns out that the "bomb" the police "defused" at the San Francisco Starbucks, was only a flashlight casing with corroded batteries inside.
This article is dope! Ha ha, no, seriously, this is a good read. For those that did not know the history of LSD, it was used primarily, after discovery, in the treatment (and understanding of) psychotic disorders.Albert Hofmann remembers very clearly the moment when, on a spring afternoon, riding his bicycle, the whole world - and his life - changed.
"Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror," says the chemist, who celebrates his 100th birthday tomorrow. "I had the feeling that I could not move from the spot. I was cycling, cycling, but the time seemed to stand still." It was 1943, and Hofmann was experiencing the world's first LSD trip.
American troops in Baghdad yesterday blasted their way into the home of an Iraqi journalist working for the London daily, The Guardian, and TV's Channel 4, firing bullets into the bedroom where he was sleeping with his wife and children.
Ali Fadhil, who two months ago won the Foreign Press Association young journalist of the year award, was hooded and taken for questioning, the newspaper reports. He was released hours later.
Fadhil is working with and the newspaper and Guardian Films "on an investigation for Channel 4's Dispatches programme into claims that tens of millions of dollars worth of Iraqi funds held by the Americans and British have been misused or misappropriated," the paper reports.
"The troops told Dr. Fadhil that they were looking for an Iraqi insurgent and seized video tapes he had shot for the programme. These have not yet been returned."
The director of the film, Callum Macrae, said yesterday: "The timing and nature of this raid is extremely disturbing. It is only a few days since we first approached the US authorities and told them Ali was doing this investigation, and asked them then to grant him an interview about our findings.
This is very troubling on all sorts of levels. US troops do not have a Status of Forces agreement with Iraq and do not have a constitutional right to arrest civilians without a warrant. And, the US military should not be harassing journalists reporting on contract fraud.
For a guy who treasures loyalty as a person's most important trait, Bush has no qualms about throwing friends overboard when they face an unspinnable problem. Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay was Bush's close pal, until the president no longer knew he was. Katherine Harris was the nice lady who helped him steal a presidential election, until she ran for the Senate and he stopped taking her calls. Trent Lott was in tight with Bush, right up until he wasn't.
As for Tom DeLay, last month Bush "liked" him and his "remarkable" record. Now, the Bush gang has leaked word that the president never saw DeLay as anything more than "the help."
I started this blog in April of 2005.
Insisting that God "certainly needs to be involved" in the Supreme Court confirmation process, three Christian ministers today blessed the doors of the hearing room where Senate Judiciary Committee members will begin considering the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito on Monday.
Capitol Hill police barred them from entering the room to continue what they called a consecration service. But in a bit of one-upsmanship, the three announced that they had let themselves in a day earlier, touching holy oil to the seats where Judge Alito, the senators, witnesses, Senate staffers and the press will sit, and praying for each of the 13 committee members by name.Wasn't there a time when people like that were burned at the stake?
You know, there was a time when someone told you to do something, you did it. Bam, right on, no questions asked. It was Yes Sir, and Yes Ma'am. You never said no, you know?
AMERICA is to spend £1billion on an embassy in Baghdad "more secure than the Pentagon". . . The US also wants to build four massive military superbases around Iraq's capital.
Asking forgiveness from "the Almighty and from those I have wronged," an ashen Jack Abramoff, once a powerful Republican lobbyist on Capitol Hill, stood before a federal judge Tuesday and pleaded guilty to a scheme of fraud and tax evasion that could send him to prison for 11 years.
