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Operations stepped up in Samarra to find Zarqawi
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-Short Attention Span Theater-
Why Do Cats Hate Us Pt 3-Wisc. Hunter Wants Open Season for Cats
Wisc. Hunter Wants Open Season for Cats

MADISON, Wis. Mar 7, 2005 — Hunter Mark Smith welcomes wild birds on to his property, but if he sees a cat, he thinks the "invasive" animal should be considered fair game.

Me 'n the boyz. Wez goot pay this fella a visit tonight. He dunt have sucha good at-e-tude!


The 48-year-old firefighter from La Crosse has proposed that hunters in Wisconsin make free-roaming domestic cats an "unprotected species" that could be shot at will by anyone with a small-game license.

Da shhootin' can go bo't wayz

His proposal will be placed before hunters on April 11 at the Wisconsin Conservation Congress spring hearings in each of the state's 72 counties. "I get up in the morning and if there's new snow, there's cat tracks under my bird feeder 
 I look at them as an invasive species, plain and simple," Smith said.

Wez got to make him an offa he cant refooz

Smith's proposal has horrified cat lovers, but is seen by others as a way to stop cats from killing wild birds.

Da man don' undastand the flavor of sparrow sushi.

University of Wisconsin-Madison wildlife ecology professor Stanley Temple, who trapped more than 100 cats and analyzed their stomach contents during a four-year study, has estimated that between 7.8 million and 219 million birds are killed by rural cats in Wisconsin each year.

Wez cats. we killz boydz.

"It's obviously a very controversial proposal," Temple said, but added, "I think there really is a basis for having a debate about it."

Derez anodda one. He needz a visit too.

The Conservation Congress is a five-member elected body whose duty is to advise the Department of Natural Resources and the Legislature on natural resources issues. DNR attorney Tim Andryk said the vote would simply be "an advisory recommendation" to state lawmakers.

My clients are concerned about "advisory votes" taken by humans on issues concerning cats.

"We (the DNR) don't have authority to regulate domestic animals. Legislation would have to be passed to accomplish this," Andryk said. "You might also have to amend laws relating to abuse of domestic animals."

Amend at your owen risk. There are claws on the prowl.

But Temple said he thinks legislation is not needed. He said the department does have the authority to declare rural cats an unprotected species because unclaimed cats can be considered nonnative wildlife species like house mice, Norway rats, pigeons and starlings.

Da man jus' dun't get it!!

"If they are not a pet, if somebody doesn't claim ownership, they become a nonnative wildlife species and not entitled to protection by the state," he said.

Wez got our own meanz of da protection too!

Posted by: Don Furleone and Consigliere Mr. Tinkles || 03/07/2005 4:36:38 PM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Here in Western Australia we poison them. Much more effective.
Posted by: phil_b || 03/07/2005 17:23 Comments || Top||

#2  "University of Wisconsin-Madison wildlife ecology professor Stanley Temple, who trapped more than 100 cats and analyzed their stomach contents during a four-year study, has estimated that between 7.8 million and 219 million birds are killed by rural cats in Wisconsin each year."

Roman soothsayers also read entrails, but they could produce more precise figures.
Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy || 03/07/2005 17:26 Comments || Top||

#3  Atomic Conspiracy :
Figures lie & Liars figure (A. Lincoln?)
Posted by: BigEd || 03/07/2005 17:36 Comments || Top||


Earthquakes and Volcanos under North Pole
Rantburg Exclusive: There have been 2 large earthquakes in the last 24 hours near the North Pole in area called the Gekkel Ridge known to have undersea volcanos. Close together relatively shallow earthquakes are indicative of an imminent volcanic eruption.

A volcano melting the artic ice will get the global warming crowd excited, even though volcanic eruptions cause climate cooling.
Posted by: phil_b || 03/07/2005 2:22:35 AM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  A volcano melting the artic ice will get the global warming crowd excited, even though volcanic eruptions cause climate cooling.

That's because the idiots have no sense of time beyond the personal, and no understanding of the difference between science and black magic. I take that back: they believe that black magic works... they think science is a matter of individual opinion.
Posted by: trailing wife || 03/07/2005 4:34 Comments || Top||

#2  TW, black magic works, but not the way they presume it does (or for that matter most of the people), what people associate with black magic is just a jumbled recollection of something different. Or, rather "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

they think science is a matter of individual opinion.

Well, looking at the academic culture for the last couple of hundred years, one may, indeed, think that is the case. :-)

However, it shouldn't.
Posted by: Sobiesky || 03/07/2005 4:52 Comments || Top||

#3  Sobiesky, can you elaborate? I read your post several times and still don't get it. The subject interests me.
Posted by: phil_b || 03/07/2005 5:15 Comments || Top||

#4  Phil, which part?
Posted by: Sobiesky || 03/07/2005 5:16 Comments || Top||

#5  How about black magic works and science being a matter of individual opinion.
Posted by: phil_b || 03/07/2005 6:04 Comments || Top||

#6  Let me skip the black magic (or magic in general) part for now. I don't think I can summarize it in few coherent sentences due to the fact that it is a long past my bedtime and it would require quite a deep dip into history and other topics.

The part about "science being a matter of individual opinion" is a jab at the academe. I would call it a culture of scientism, as opposed to science. A religion of sorts, where the main tenured priests make decision about what is scientific and what is not. After they are replaced by another tenured priest, the scientific "truth" may change accordingly, after the tastes of the new priest. Yes, it is rather consensual church, a Nicean council of priests of scientism without a pontifex maximus, so somewhat less autocratorian. But plethora of lower-rank priests (journal editors) that uphold the current prevalent paradigm. Of course, it is an enterprise of sorts and depends on money (funding). The council decides who is the adherent and gets funding and who is a heretic and doesn't. Often the council does not have to trumpet their judgement, the lower-rank priests simply know which side is the bread buttered on.
Posted by: Sobiesky || 03/07/2005 6:38 Comments || Top||

#7  Let e take a stab at the Black Magic thing.Think about primative people who for the first time see an airplane flying overhead,see/hear thier first firearm fired or thier photo taken for the first time.airplanes must be from the gods,fire arms are thunder and lightning,and cameras steal your soul.
Posted by: Raptor || 03/07/2005 7:07 Comments || Top||

#8  "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," wrote author and rumored pederast Arthur C. Clarke.

You have to remember Alchemy morphed into science.
Alchemy = Magic.
Posted by: Sock Puppet of Doom || 03/07/2005 7:34 Comments || Top||

#9  Not necessarily Phil. Apparently, the Gakkel ridge is unusual for a mid-ocean ridge: large parts are unaccompanied by volcanism. Also, the volcanism associated with mid-ocean ridges is submarine and not explosive - not likely to melt the arctic ice cap. The explosive volcanoes of the "ring of fire" around the Pacific are due to subduction-related volcanism.
Posted by: Spot || 03/07/2005 8:22 Comments || Top||

#10  I thought the alien space Nazis lived under the North Pole in their secret base at the center of the planet. I read this on the Internet. It must be true!
Posted by: Chuck Simmins || 03/07/2005 9:30 Comments || Top||

#11  Just clearing a "little" ice to make oil shipping from ANWR easier. Nothing to see here, go about your business
Posted by: Halliburton Arctic Transit Development Division || 03/07/2005 9:56 Comments || Top||

#12  How'd we do by the way? You need more? Less? Drop us a line on the company email.
Yours in world domination.
ETD
Posted by: Halliburton: Earthquake/ Tsunami Division || 03/07/2005 10:24 Comments || Top||

#13  N Pole Earthquakes - USGS
Posted by: BigEd || 03/07/2005 11:34 Comments || Top||

#14  Chuck --

I thought the Nazis lived under the South Pole?
Posted by: nada || 03/07/2005 12:33 Comments || Top||

#15  Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.
Posted by: Chris W. || 03/07/2005 12:36 Comments || Top||

#16  Good link Spot, but it says the Gekkel Ridge has an unexpectedly high level of volcanism. Mid-ocean ridges are formed by volcanic processes. So the existence of a ridge means large scale volcanism in the past.

I know that mid-ocean volcanos do not erupt explosively and they tend to erupt for a long time at a moreorless steady rate. I was just having a bit of fun with the ice melting speculation.

Otherwise a second Kamchatka volcano continues a major eruption.
Posted by: phil_b || 03/07/2005 15:59 Comments || Top||

#17  Don't you people get it? That's the site of all those USNAVY submarine reactor cores that have been dumped. Why do you think all those subs still go up to the North Pole? We don't have have to worry about no stinking Russkie subs, they're all tied up in port. Yeah, makes ya think don't it?

They're polluting the world man! Those bears and penguins ain't got nobody but us to worry for them. {/smirk off}
Posted by: AlmostAnonymous6392 || 03/07/2005 17:35 Comments || Top||

#18  hmmmm - penguins at the north pole now? - I blame W
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 17:42 Comments || Top||

#19  #18 Frank: "I blame W."

It does save time, doesn't it? ;-p
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut || 03/07/2005 19:56 Comments || Top||

#20  it was gonna get there someway, I just saved the university grants, protests, faked data, etc...
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 20:11 Comments || Top||


-Signs, Portents, and the Weather-
Lawyers Victims Sue Thailand, U.S., Accor Over Tsunami
You knew it was only a matter of time...
Posted by: tu3031 || 03/07/2005 11:26:34 AM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  We can't sue God...

I know! We can sue BUSH!

Outstandingly brilliant idea!
Posted by: BigEd || 03/07/2005 11:55 Comments || Top||

#2  the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which operates a Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, failed to issue the requisite warnings Err, thats becuase the system only covers the Pacific.
Posted by: phil_b || 03/07/2005 18:31 Comments || Top||

#3  U.S. and Austrian lawyers have filed a lawsuit demanding Thailand, U.S. forecasters and the French Accor group answer accusations they failed in a duty to warn populations hit by December's Tsunami disaster, a lawyer said Monday.

Think there'd be enough support for kneecapping every single one of these parasites?
Posted by: Bomb-a-rama || 03/07/2005 21:34 Comments || Top||

#4  Why couldn't they have been there 3 months ago?
Posted by: jackal || 03/07/2005 22:17 Comments || Top||


Discovery of more bodies makes Sri Lankan tsunami-hit train worst rail accident ever
Police have discovered another 28 bodies at the site in southern Sri Lanka of what is believed to be the world's worst train disaster. More than 800 bodies have now been identified but it is feared twice that number may have died when the Indian Ocean tsunami hit the train. Hundreds of villagers had clambered on to the Queen of the Sea to try to flee the tsunami when fresh waves struck. Nearly 31,000 Sri Lankans died in the tsunami with one million displaced.

Work at the train disaster site at Telwatta, 75 miles (110km) south of the capital, Colombo, continues to yield victims. "We found the decomposed bodies of 28 people over the weekend," the southern region police chief, DW Prathapasinghe, told AFP news agency. More than 1,500 people had crammed into the train as it travelled to the southern city of Galle. The force of the tsunami threw the train's eight cars into a bog and left the coastal railroad a twisted mess of metal.

In the Indian state of Bihar in June 1981, 800 people were killed when a train was blown into a river during a cyclone.
Posted by: Bulldog || 03/07/2005 6:35:34 AM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  How they got those folks into one engine and two coaches, I'll never know.
Posted by: Chuck Simmins || 03/07/2005 10:14 Comments || Top||


Arabia
Oil prices "unrealistically high" - Saudi adviser
Current crude oil prices are "unrealistically high" and do not reflect any physical shortages in world markets, Adel al-Jubeir, a foreign affairs adviser to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, said on Monday.

Al-Jubeir told a news briefing on Saudi security measures that "we don't see shortage in the physical supply of crude oil." He added that global markets are "fairly stretched out" due to shipping pressures to meet rising demand in China, India and the United States.

"We will make our oil available" to customers, said Al-Jubeir. Current prices are "unrealistically high," he added [again].

Soo... what he is up to? Trying to do some Chavez-control (Chavez $80 greedy eyes) so he does not screw the golden-egg goose for Soddies? What is your reading?
Posted by: Sobiesky || 03/07/2005 4:22:24 PM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  They want to keep the price just below the level at which it becomes economically rational to look at unconventional sources of petroleum, shale, tar sands, renewed domestic drilling, increased conservation. They also want to keep demand alive. Precipitating a recession in China, which has not allowed its currency to appreciate against the dollar, is also not in the Saudi's interest. Finally, they want to stay out of the American people's cross hairs as tyrannic price gougers. In fact, they want as little U. S. publicity as possible.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis || 03/07/2005 16:57 Comments || Top||

#2  The Saudis say this on a regular basis and Mrs D has probably nailed the reason. The perception of future price instability is a major disincentive to investing in unconventional sources. See my comments of 2 days ago.
Posted by: phil_b || 03/07/2005 17:07 Comments || Top||

#3  Ima call SA bluff, even ifn they'd like to lower the price... they can't, they lost control of the cartel oil pricing mechanizem, bad for the US in the short term, but good in the long term.
Posted by: Francis || 03/07/2005 17:19 Comments || Top||

#4  It's too fricking late. Oil won't last forever. We need to move forward sooner or later. Why not now?
Posted by: 2b || 03/07/2005 21:24 Comments || Top||


Yemen Denies Running for Arab League Post
Yemen yesterday denied reports that the country was considering naming a candidate for the post of the Arab League's secretary-general. "The Yemeni government have not decided yet on the candidacy for the post," Foreign Minister Abu Bakr Al-Qarubi, told Arab News. "No date has been set so far for the candidacy, and no decision has been taken (by Yemen) on this matter," he added. He was commenting on press reports Saturday that Sanaa will put forward the candidacy of a prominent politician to succeed Amr Moussa as secretary-general of the Arab League next year. The reports quoted unnamed political sources in Sanaa as saying that the former Yemeni speaker of Parliament, Yassin Saeed Noman, will run for the post in May 2006. Noman said he was not asked by the Yemeni government to run for the post.
Posted by: Fred || 03/07/2005 00:00:00 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve.
Posted by: Chuck Simmins || 03/07/2005 9:29 Comments || Top||

#2  And stop looking at me like that.
Posted by: Seafarious || 03/07/2005 11:26 Comments || Top||

#3  I'll be washing my hair....
Posted by: Steve || 03/07/2005 11:40 Comments || Top||

#4  Gee, fellas, I got a date that night, but I appreciate the offer...

Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski || 03/07/2005 21:31 Comments || Top||

#5  maybe Shimon Peres?.....
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 21:32 Comments || Top||


Caribbean-Latin America
Bolivian President Quits During New Protest Wave
Bolivian President Carlos Mesa said on Sunday he is resigning after 17 months in office as a new wave of protests spread throughout the Andean nation of 8 million. Mesa announced his decision on radio and television on Sunday night and said he will tender his resignation to Congress on Monday. It was not immediately clear who would take over from Mesa, perhaps as an interim leader, or if elections would be called before the presidential term ends in 2007.

Mesa, a political independent, was vice-president when he took over in October 2003 after President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada fled the country during a bloody popular revolt that left about 80 people dead. Polls showed the former TV journalists was popular, but his hands were tied by a Congress controlled by traditional parties and an increasingly organized indigenous majority whose leaders are prone to protests. In January, Mesa was hit by protests on two fronts, sparked by a rise in fuel prices but extended to other issues. Poor Indians protested against a French-owned water utility, while the wealthiest province, Santa Cruz, called for autonomy. Mesa defused both protests by making important concessions.
The French exploiting people? I thought the US had a monopoly on that subject. (sac/off)
But in the last week, protests flared again on several fronts and many of the main roads had been cut, hurting economic activity.
Posted by: TMH || 03/07/2005 00:00:00 AM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:


China-Japan-Koreas
Suspect ID'd in Taiwan Leader's Shooting
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) - Investigators said Monday they've identified the ``most likely suspect'' who fired a shot that slightly injured Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian one day before he was narrowly re-elected last March. But the suspect, Chen Yi-hsiung, drowned shortly after the March 19 shooting and police thought it was a suicide because the man prepared a will just before his death, said Hou You-yi, head of the Criminal Investigation.
How convenient.
Convenient for President Chen, it's suspected he had the shooting staged to get the sympathy vote.
Hou said that the suspect was unhappy about the economy and the president's governance and left notes on a desk calendar describing his feelings. The investigator read one that said, ``I felt depressed. After Chen Shui-bian became the president, the economy turned bad and we could not sell our house.'' Another note said, ``If Chen is reelected, I am old and cannot change anything.'' Hou added, ``We looked for his motive, and we found he was displeased with the social reality.''
Most assassins are. Either they're so disturbed that they run out and pop someone important, or they're so disturbed that they meet up with sinister, dark forces who induce them to pop someone important. Question is, which was Chen?
The pre-election shooting grazed the president's stomach as he was riding in an open-top Jeep in a campaign parade in the southern city of Tainan. Hou said video footage shot before the shooting put Chen Yi-hsiung at the scene and an extensive investigation of the weapon used traced it back to the suspect, who purchased his handgun shortly before the shooting. Hou said that the suspect's wife confessed to her that he shot the president. Hou told reporters the women said her husband was quiet for several days after the shooting. After she saw the TV footage of her husband at the scene, she asked him if he did it, Hou said. ``He said, 'I did it and I will handle it myself,''' Hou said quoting the suspect's wife. The wife said the suspect asked her to trim his hair and sideburns to change his looks.
Bastion of support, she was.
Posted by: Steve White || 03/07/2005 12:04:52 AM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:


Europe
Hitler had atomic bomb first
Interesting.
Adolf Hitler had the atom bomb first but it was too primitive and ungainly for aerial deployment, according to a new book that indicates the race to split the atom was much closer than previously believed.
Nazi scientists carried out tests of what would now be called a "dirty" nuclear device in the waning days of World War II, writes German historian Rainer Karlsch in the book, entitled Hitler's Bomb, which hits booksellers across Germany later this month.
Concentration camp inmates were used as human guinea pigs and "several hundred" died horribly in the tests, which were conducted on the Baltic Sea island of Ruegen and at an inland test in wooded hill country about 100 km south of Berlin in 1944 and early 1945.
Karlsch, 47, author of a number of books on Cold War espionage and the nuclear arms race, supports his findings on what his publishers call hitherto unpublished documents, scientific reports and blueprints. American historian Mark Walker, an internationally recognised expert on the Third Reich's atomic weapons program, lent his support to Karlsch's claims today. "I consider the arguments very convincing," Walker told Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
However, Hitler's atomic weapon did not approach the devastating potential of the US bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, said Walker, a history professor at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Walker said the weapon secretly developed and tested by Nazi scientists was more comparable to a "dirty bomb" - nuclear material encased in explosives. Such a weapon, which causes little actual destruction but which disperses large amounts of deadly radiation, could only have been used on the front to throw back enemy troops, he added. Walker is the author of the 1990 book Nazi Science: Myth, Truth, and the German Atomic Bomb. The US historian praised Karlsch for writing "a whole new chapter" on Hitler's search for the "wonder weapon".
In the final days of the war, Hitler insisted that his scientists were developing a "wonder weapon" that would allow him to wrest last- minute victory from the jaws of impending defeat. Hitler's claims have been dismissed as the rantings of a desperate and deranged man. But Karlsch's book lends credence to the possibility that Hitler may have been closer to getting his hands on his coveted "wonder weapon" than anyone has previously believed.
Hitherto, it was known that German scientists had carried out heavy-water experiments in an attempt to split the atom, using research facilities in Norway and elsewhere. But it was widely believed that Nazi scientists had been hampered by a lack of pure-grade uranium, which was almost non-existent outside North America and Africa. It was also surmised that Hitler had favoured conventional weapons over nuclear arms because his limited grasp of strategic warfare prevented him from seeing the ramifications of nuclear capability. It was believed that Hitler had discouraged development of the atom bomb.
But Karlsch claims to have been able to find documented proof of the existence of a nuclear reactor and nuclear weapons testing sites. His publishers, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt (DVA), say his work is based on four years of painstaking research and interviews with independent historians.
Among the most compelling pieces of evidence is a 1941 patent draft for a plutonium bomb, according to DVA spokesman Markus Desaga. "He also based his research on contemporary research reports, construction blueprints, aerial surveillance photos, notebooks of some of the scientists involved as well as espionage reports by US and Soviet agents," Desaga said. "He also based his findings on radiation measurements and soil analysis," the spokesman added.
Karlsch, born in 1957, is a trained economics historian with a degree from Berlin's Humboldt University, where he holds a chair in economic history. He is also a member of the Berlin Historical Commission and teaches at Berlin's Free University.
He has written numerous articles, essays and books, including Uranian Secrets in 2002 and The Oil Factor in 2003 about the history of German oil production.
Posted by: tu3031 || 03/07/2005 11:38:00 AM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Is this new?

I have heard about this since I was small.

There was talk about this after Hiroshima and Nagasaki that my folks heard at the time (late 1940s) and told me about (1960s & 1970s)...
Posted by: BigEd || 03/07/2005 12:05 Comments || Top||

#2  Among the most compelling pieces of evidence is a 1941 patent draft for a plutonium bomb, according to DVA spokesman Markus Desaga.

This article is so loaded with inaccuracies that I don't know if I'm critiquing the book or the news reporter.

A patent draft of a plutonium bomb is meaningless. Anyone familiar with nuclear physics can draw you a design for a plutonium bomb. However, before you go adding them to the Axis of Evil, they're probably a little short on plutonium, high explosives, metallurgy skills, neutron trigger, etc.

I also notice in the write up that his proof is based on conversations with other historians vice discussions with nuclear physicists.

Color me very skeptical. Perhaps he found all his material next to Hitler's secret diary.
Posted by: Dreadnought || 03/07/2005 12:28 Comments || Top||

#3  I won't believe this story until I see it on the Discovery Channel.

Scary nevertheless.
Posted by: Chris W. || 03/07/2005 12:33 Comments || Top||

#4  find documented proof of the existence of a nuclear reactor

It right by the Krupp built Essen Mark IV digital computer.
Posted by: Shipman || 03/07/2005 13:06 Comments || Top||

#5  However, Hitler’s atomic weapon did not approach the devastating potential of the US bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, said Walker, a history professor at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Walker said the weapon secretly developed and tested by Nazi scientists was more comparable to a "dirty bomb" - nuclear material encased in explosives. Such a weapon, which causes little actual destruction but which disperses large amounts of deadly radiation

Heinlein had a short story about the use of radiation weapons. I believe it was published in 1941. So this isn't that far-fetched of an idea.
Posted by: Robert Crawford || 03/07/2005 13:49 Comments || Top||

#6  Here's the website of the Atomkeller Museum in Haigerloch, Germany, where the Germans were performing their experiments. There are photos and drawings of the reactor here, an account of what the Alsos group found here, and a 1967 interview with Heisenberg here.

Heisenberg apparently gave different people different accounts of why he worked on the bomb, and why he failed to make one. Here he says (of the latter issue) that the German government stopped development on projects that were estimated to take longer than a couple of years to develop, so the scientists didn't really put a lot of effort into a bomb.

He also says that they didn't want to make bombs, and that they "knew" that the war would be lost by the time they got built, anyway. But supposedly, Heisenberg told Niels Bohr a different story.

I can't see how a dirty bomb could be the "wonder weapon" Hitler spoke of. One of the main components of a wonder weapon, surely, is wonder -- or, as we'd say today, "shock and awe". I don't see how a dirty bomb would fit the bill in those days before people saw what an A-bomb could do. The randomness of exposure, and the time lag between exposure and onset of symptoms, would tend to decrease the shock and awe value of a dirty bomb (again, at the time).
Posted by: Angie Schultz || 03/07/2005 14:35 Comments || Top||

#7  Angie,

Great post.

Note a couple things:

1. If that reactor had been critical, there wouldn't be any soldiers crawling around in that vessel.

2. Without the reactor going critical, and the article points out that it did not go critical, there are no fission products, which means...

3. There is no material to make a dirty bomb.

QED This article is a subcritical pile of crap.
Posted by: Dreadnought || 03/07/2005 14:48 Comments || Top||

#8  No way. The problem is getting enough enriched uranium/plutonium (plutonium doesn't exist in natural state it is a by product of uranium's nuclear reaction). Be it through centrifugation or through gasseous diffusion, it was very difficult, time-costly and immensely expensive (expensive as in tying a lot of resources who would have been no longer available for making planes, tanks and subs). For instance the centrifugation plant set by the US had two large power plants just for providing it with electricity and still needed to tap on the civilian grid causing brown outs. And the US were free of ennemy bombings. The Germans weren't and would have had to build a subterranean plant making still more expensive and creating an engineering challenge for cooling it.

My info is that the blowing of Germany's heavy water plant by the Norvegian resistance was unecessary since the Germamns had already dropped from the nuclear race: it was that or having the Russians take Berlin in 1943.
Posted by: JFM || 03/07/2005 14:52 Comments || Top||

#9  Wow--if they'd had both that bomb *and* the Ark of the Convenant, we'd all be toast. Thank you, Indy!
Posted by: Dar || 03/07/2005 14:59 Comments || Top||

#10  Ima wait for USSR! How the Soviets kicked our ass and built the triple_larry transistor multiplexer.
Posted by: Francis || 03/07/2005 17:30 Comments || Top||

#11  Here he says (of the latter issue) that the German government stopped development on projects that were estimated to take longer than a couple of years to develop, so the scientists didn't really put a lot of effort into a bomb.

And this was because either Heisenberg got the math wrong on how much uranium was needed, or he told them some story to stop the funding, thereby intentionally delaying the project.
Posted by: Rafael || 03/07/2005 18:13 Comments || Top||

#12  The story I heard was that German Scientists were ahead of everybody else before WW2 but it lost key Jewish scientists (like the guy who just died) and Hitler didn't believe an atomic bomb would work. He thought it was a Jewish conspiracy.
Posted by: phil_b || 03/07/2005 18:47 Comments || Top||

#13  So what? The media tries to always play a "dirty bomb" ohhhh thats a joke I beieve they had a dirty bomb all that is a regular explosive surrounded by Radiated material say old X-Ray machine guts and whala you have a OHHH dirty bomb. The catch radiation is a lot of hype and scare tactic after all Hiroshema and Nagasaki right after and still to this day are thriving cities full of people and no they dont have 4arms maybe a little higher cancer rate but no serious show stopper problems. And a Real Fission blast Nuclear reaction puts out a world of more radiation than any dirty bomb since it actually radiates everything and blows it all around were one just spreads some low level radiation around. Dirty bomb yeah maybe but full Nuclear city killer like the US version No they had a couple of years to go. Although I did see a article the other day about a guy who said that we did capture a small amount of enriched uranium from the Nazis at the end of the war on one submarine bound for Japan that went awol and that helped us feel confident enough to drop a Nuke on Japan twice with some reserve in the rear. Nukes need enriched uranium a slow long expensive technical process. Once the fuel is thier the hard part the rest is just technical work.
Posted by: C-Low || 03/07/2005 20:48 Comments || Top||


Germany, France Have Euro Deficit Plan
Germany and France have drafted a joint proposal to give countries using the euro more flexibility in running up budget deficits, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said Monday. Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac said they were confident that Luxembourg, which currently heads the European Union, would succeed in brokering a compromise within the EU. "The idea is to put more emphasis on the growth orientation," Schroeder told a news conference after talks with Chirac.

"We want to make the whole thing a bit more flexible," Chirac said, adding that the pact had been "interpreted too strictly" in the past. Germany and France have broken the deficit limits of the so-called Stability Pact in each of the last three years.

Neither leader gave details. Schroeder said he would present the joint proposal to Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, whose country chairs the European Union in the first of half of 2005. Slow economic growth in Germany and France has made them chafe for some time at the stability pact, designed to limit euro countries' budget deficits to 3 percent of gross domestic product to help keep the currency stable.

Schroeder also reaffirmed that Germany and France oppose EU draft rules on the free movement of services, which have raised concerns of an influx of cheap labor, especially from new members in eastern Europe that joined last year.

He called for a complete redrafting of the plan by the EU's executive Commission. "We will make that clear in talks with the Commission," Schroeder said, adding that his people's fears in western Europe needed to be taken seriously.
Posted by: tipper || 03/07/2005 11:02:35 AM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  So, when do we start calling them the "Holy European Union"? ("Holy European Empire" sounds too formal.)
Posted by: Anonymoose || 03/07/2005 11:29 Comments || Top||

#2  *snicker*
Posted by: trailing wife || 03/07/2005 11:31 Comments || Top||

#3  "flexible" i.e. we are running our deficit to hight and want to make it legaly ok...
Posted by: mmurray821 || 03/07/2005 11:49 Comments || Top||

#4 
Posted by: BigEd || 03/07/2005 11:49 Comments || Top||

#5  Ima say go long... long long... on wheel barrows.
Posted by: Francis || 03/07/2005 17:31 Comments || Top||


The face that launched 1,000 Eurosceptic quips
Totally OT, but it made me laugh. There are some familiar names amongst the 'hijackers'.
It was meant to bring the European Union closer to its citizens, putting an appealing face on what often appears to be a distant bureaucracy. But the personal blog, or internet diary, of a European Commissioner has been hijacked by British eurosceptics. They are using it, instead, to attack the EU and to pour scorn on those who lead it.
'Hijacked' is somewhat OTT - she's just getting a lot of critical comments...

Margot Wallström, the Vice- President of the European Commission, was handed the job of boosting support before the wave of referendums on the EU constitution and she started her blog on the Commission website after the new year, mixing the personal and political to emphasise the benefits of Europe. Her efforts have been engulfed in a cyber-war, however, with British Eurosceptics leaving hundreds of messages attacking the Commission for destroying British industry and Britain's democratic traditions.

The row has got so bitter that Ms Wallström replied recently: "The EU-negative crowd in the UK or elsewhere seem very happy to have found in me another object of hatred — help yourselves!" In the very first entry in her blog, Ms Wallström emphasises her concern about the Asian tsunami, before turning to the problem of the long lunches that she has to have for her job. Worrying about the weight that she has put on over Christmas, the Swedish commissioner wrote: "The official meetings don't last that long, but the lunches are three or four or even more hours from now on." A man named Sean replied: "At least you are making an attempt to communicate with the great European public. But I'm afraid there is no getting around the fact that you represent an elitist, corrupt, and unelected politburo, which for some reason exercises enormous power over the lives of millions. Why? Why do you have this power? Who voted for you?"

An entry on the benefits of recycling, in which the commissioner mentioned that she had been sent a bag from India made from used newspapers, prompted a round of derisive comments. She replied: "The one I liked the most was the guy who wanted my recycled bag to throw up in! Funny!" Detailing the benefits of new EU legislation on hazardous chemicals, she recounted that a doctor once found 28 "chemicals" in her blood and said that she was worried about passing them on to her children through breastfeeding. "This is not the stuff that I want my boys to inherit first thing!" she wrote. Richard North, a prominent Eurosceptic, replied: "That, I am afraid, is the classic cry of the charlatan and the snake oil salesman throughout the ages. Tugging on the heartstrings may be all right for the tabloid newspapers, but it is not something that politicians should indulge in."

A reader called John Coles suggested: "She should be locked in a room and told to read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations before being allowed out." The arguments are so onesided that one reader asked for someone to agree with Ms Wallström to add balance. "It's a bit like shooting fish in a barrel otherwise." Sometimes the comments descend into English nationalism. A contributor called Kissingengland listed triumphs from the Magna Carta to the defeat of Fascism, adding: "This free, unconquered nation of mine, which has nourished, defended and preserved its institutions and liberties through eight centuries of continental despotism and warmongering, has nothing to gain from suborning itself to the inferior political structures of the EU."
That constitutes 'English nationalism'? Looks like a rational observation to me.

The 10 Downing Street website quickly closed down its public message board because it was exploited as a platform to attack government policy, but Ms Wallström's spokesman said that she had no plans to follow suit. He added: "It's true a lot of it comes from the UK. It's a pity we get so many comments from people who seem to be very eurosceptic. It proves those in favour are the silent majority."
Uh. Yeah. Of course. Sounds as though someone else needs to be locked in a room with a copy of A Child's Guide to Venn Diagrams.
Posted by: Bulldog || 03/07/2005 5:49:22 AM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  So much! Where to start? Only a few percentage points of the population participates in online forums. This is just the begining. Anglophones are disproportionately represented but thats a combination of culture and being the first movers. I Just don't believe somehow the French and Germans are different to the Brits, They just haven't caught up with the online everyone can choose who they listen to dynamic. They will, just wait.

Otherwise, the Magna Carta was the seminal event in world history. For the first time enforceable rights were written down. The written word became more important than any person, no matter how powerful. Our entire modern society stems from that single event in a small field that still exists.
Posted by: phil_b || 03/07/2005 6:31 Comments || Top||

#2  Despite what she's reported to have said about not censoring her blog, it does seem she's removed at least some, if not most or all, of the non-complimentary comments, including the one about the recycled bag she though amusing. The only two remaining contributions at that post are non-English, one of which being this from a French-speaker (translated courtesy of Babelfish):

dear madam, all my congratulations to integrate in your responsibility and working method interactivity. I hope that you will make school. Concerning recycling... It has all gained circulation and data processing. First of all because the traceability, the follow-up of the responsibility are largely facilitated by data-processing progress. Then, because the speed of the communication, the possibility of binding the individuals according to their interest, their profession represent a fantastic advisability of changing the relation between the producer, his missions and the consumer. Of course like any change, it encounters many resistances, from where the need for courage political like yours for example, but so inevitable because one cannot stop technological progress


Shame on those barbaric British eurosceptics for lowering the tone!
Posted by: Bulldog || 03/07/2005 6:43 Comments || Top||

#3  Heh. Reading a few other entries, it seems there are still plenty of angry comments. The censorship isn't complete. I don't think I've ever read so many vapidly fawning contributions to a blog before though.
Posted by: Bulldog || 03/07/2005 6:51 Comments || Top||

#4  Why I have a feeling that Babelfish did not help to improve the French speaker's post in any way?
Posted by: Sobiesky || 03/07/2005 6:51 Comments || Top||

#5  Improved it for me - someone whose French has lapsed considerably in the twelve years or so since I stopped studying it ;) .

It's an English language blog, which they read in English, so why are some of the commentators responding in strange tongues? All a bit rude, I say, especially considering that English is the lingua franca of Europe...
Posted by: Bulldog || 03/07/2005 7:07 Comments || Top||

#6  Man,I had a tough time following that,Bulldog.Must be cause I'm just a simplimse cowboy.
Posted by: Raptor || 03/07/2005 7:35 Comments || Top||

#7  I didn't say I understand it, Raptor ;) .
Posted by: Bulldog || 03/07/2005 8:23 Comments || Top||

#8  That is exactly what I had on mind in #4. :-)

It resds like someone just built a French version of Chimpskybot.
Posted by: Sobiesky || 03/07/2005 19:26 Comments || Top||

#9  there's still time to reject this agreement of lies and subjugation, BD. Remember, once in, only one seat for the EU on the UN Security Council....Britain, France should lose theirs. Would you really want some unelected pussified belgian (i.e.: french puppet) creating economic hurdles for the UK, while letting the French and Germans skirt debt ceilings and letting Greece lie about their economy? As an American mutt with a considerable dash of English in me, I would hope not! Civil disobedience is not out of the order (and a damn good moment of confusion to take care of bothersome sheikhs, mullahs, and miscreants - wink wink)!
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 19:36 Comments || Top||

#10  Remember, once in, only one seat for the EU on the UN Security Council

Really? Since when?

It's amusing that Frank G's among the chief persons who keep on insisting I'm utterly ignorant about the United States and thus should not comment on it, ever. Somehow I fail to remember ever speaking anything nearly as ignorant as what you just said, Frank.
Posted by: Aris Katsaris || 03/07/2005 20:20 Comments || Top||

#11  Lent. Have a nice day :-)
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 20:27 Comments || Top||

#12  If you intentionally just fed misinformation into the forum, just to troll me into correcting it, then admit yourself a liar and be done with it, Frank. No cryptic "Lent" remarks.
Posted by: Aris Katsaris || 03/07/2005 20:30 Comments || Top||

#13  Surely the members of the EU cannot expect to retain multiple Security Council seats or even multiple General Assembly seats when they unify their foreign policy! For that matter, they can close quite a few embassies and consulates too.

And Giscard d'Estang, chief Euro-bureaucrat, shall bravely lead the European Union's masses into the Chirac multi-polar world, to one day be united with Turkey and the Middle East under the banner of Islam...
Posted by: Tom || 03/07/2005 20:49 Comments || Top||

#14  'zactly. Nuff said, thx Tom
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 20:52 Comments || Top||

#15  Y'all are *welcome*, brother Frank. Pshaw, dude, twern't nothin'.
Posted by: Tom || 03/07/2005 21:03 Comments || Top||

#16  :-) does "should" mean something new?
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 21:05 Comments || Top||

#17  Surely the members of the EU cannot expect to retain multiple Security Council seats or even multiple General Assembly seats when they unify their foreign policy! For that matter, they can close quite a few embassies and consulates too.

But they will still be allowed to field separate Olympic teams? Y'know - like Puerto Rico?
Posted by: Pappy || 03/07/2005 21:13 Comments || Top||

#18  Not only is that perplexing, but how could your "Lent" reference be so cryptic? Perhaps the Murat-imposter has surfaced again under a new name.
Posted by: Tom || 03/07/2005 21:14 Comments || Top||

#19  Pappy: good question; Tom: don't know either...
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 21:17 Comments || Top||

#20  when they unify their foreign policy!

Which is what, 20 or 50 years away, if ever? Frank G. seemed to be referring to a specific "agreement of lies and subjudgation", not one yet in the distant future.
Posted by: Aris Katsaris || 03/07/2005 21:32 Comments || Top||

#21  how could your "Lent" reference be so cryptic?

Well, the exlicit question was "Since when?" and the implicit question was "Have you no shame being such a hypocrite?"

The answer was "Lent." I with my limited knowledge of English don't quite understand the meaning thereof.
Posted by: Aris Katsaris || 03/07/2005 21:36 Comments || Top||

#22  Lent is the answer. Subjudgation and exlicit? I don't know about. Nite
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 21:41 Comments || Top||

#23  Goodnight, lying coward.
Posted by: Aris Katsaris || 03/07/2005 21:42 Comments || Top||


EU flexes muscles against ... Croatia
The crimes of Croatia's past are holding the country's future hostage, a decade after the wars that destroyed Yugoslavia. Croatia's most wanted war crimes suspect, a 49-year-old general, has been on the run for almost four years. Unless he is located and arrested within 10 days, the EU, in a policy shaped mainly by Britain, will refuse to open membership negotiations with Croatia.
Ah, the Brits, of course, the only big country within the EU with a spine. Now I understand.
The government in Zagreb is in a panic as it watches its dream of EU talks, scheduled to open on March 17, dissolve before its eyes. EU governments, amid bitter divisions, are struggling to maintain a consensus on Croatia's bid.

The US is pressing the EU to stay tough with the Croats. The British government is leading the EU hard line and, if need be, will block any moves to open talks. The referee in the dispute, Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor in The Hague, looks certain to declare that Croatia is not cooperating properly with the tribunal, meaning Zagreb cannot open talks.
Accck! Not Carla Del Ponte again! Doesn't that woman have enough to do in botching Slobo's trial and slowing down all the Rwandan tribunals?
"This is going to be a catastrophe for the government and for the country," says Zarko Puhovski, a Croatian political scientist and human rights activist. European diplomats in Zagreb contest that, but many do say that both Croatia and the EU have managed to contrive an impasse in which everyone is a loser.

According to the spies and diplomats trying to find him, General Ante Gotovina is a thug on the run with friends in high places in Croatia. He has a $5m bounty on his head and has been convicted in France of bank robbery, extortion, and kidnapping. But to four out of five Croats, the 49-year-old fugitive military officer and ex-foreign legionnaire is a war hero, the officer who commanded a 72-hour blitz campaign 10 years ago that won Croatia's four-year war against the Serbs.

According to prosecutors at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Gotovina followed that military triumph by overseeing the murder of dozens of elderly civilians, the torching of their properties, and the "ethnic cleansing" of some 150,000 Serbs: crimes against humanity that make him the third most wanted suspect on the tribunal's list.

Gotovina is nowhere to be found. Just before he was indicted in July 2001, Croatian government insiders tipped him off, and he vanished. The story of the subsequent battle of wits between Croatia and Europe entails murky espionage activities, a vicious media war, misinformation, and deep laid plots chronic miscalculation.

Croatian counter-intelligence has been tapping the phones of British and American intelligence agents working for Ms Del Ponte in Croatia, exposing their identities, and then claiming that MI6, the CIA and the tribunal have concocted a plot to discredit Croatia.
Why do we have anyone working for Ms. Del Ponte?
Gordan Malic, a prominent Zagreb journalist clandestinely recorded repeatedly speaking to a named British agent, has effectively been accused of treason, though no action has been taken against him. "You can hide Gotovina from the Croatian government but not from the MI6; it's a serious service," he says. "But I will not help Gotovina. It's the duty of our society, our government, and our media to get the fugitives.

"Croatia does not yet deserve to be a European country. It's a question of the rule of law."

That is pretty much the British position. "You can't dine a la carte on the rule of law," says one British source. "Gotovina crystallises a lot of issues about the rule of law which need to be addressed."

If Britain has taken the lead role in shaping EU policy on Croatia, the position is controversial. At a closed meeting of EU ambassadors in Zagreb last week, the envoy from Austria - strongly pro-Croatia - rounded fiercely on the British, European diplomats say. "The British invented pragmatism, but now they're behaving like the Spanish Inquisition, squeezing the last drop of blood from us," says a senior Croatian official.
Yes, quite.
On a private last-ditch mission to London last week, the Croatian foreign minister, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, handed over documents seeking to prove that Zagreb was doing its utmost to get Gotovina. Denis MacShane, the Europe minister, was not impressed. "It's unlikely to shift the judgments being made," said the British source.

European diplomats and Croatian officials also claim Britain is doing Washington's bidding. Croatia got a green light for EU talks just under a year ago, a decision that the US opposed. Late last year the US administration told all EU governments that it "strongly believes" there should be no EU entry talks with Croatia until Gotovina is in the dock in The Hague. "The Americans have certainly made it clear that cooperation with the tribunal is very important to them," say British sources.

The reason for the US insistence, say European diplomats, is that Washington has strong intelligence incriminating the Croatian government, which for years has been half-hearted at best and duplicitous at worst on the Gotovina case. It was only last week that the Croatian authorities put the general on the wanted list. The defence ministry continues to pay him his military pension. For months the government has been resisting EU pressure to freeze Gotovina's assets.

The government argues vehemently it is doing everything to track down Gotovina except cutting his pension, of course; too little, too late, say the Europeans.
Posted by: Steve White || 03/07/2005 12:19:39 AM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  "The Americans have certainly made it clear that cooperation with the tribunal is very important to them"

After all America has *always* supported international criminal courts, hasn't it?
Posted by: Aris Katsaris || 03/07/2005 11:10 Comments || Top||

#2  Aris, America has no dog in this fight. We don't recognize the authority of the ICC and aren't particularly fond of most of the commanders of ethnic forces in the Balkans.

That said, the ICC is a terribly flawed idea and should be left to wither away. The concept of crimes against humanity is just something that winners use to justify executing losers. That an international body can arbitrarily bring charges without any enforcement capability is an exercise in rhetoric and futility. I don't see the ICC bringing any actions against the UN peacekeepers who aided and abetted the slaughter in Rwanda. Nor for that matter, do I see any actions forthcoming against the heroic Belgians who abandoned the Tutsis to their fate and beat feet back to Belgium when danger threatened.
Posted by: RWV || 03/07/2005 15:43 Comments || Top||

#3  What Aris and his ink don't recognize is the willingness of our governement and military to investigate incidents and charges of wrong doing by our own people. I doubt there is a comparative record of any other government doing as much to insure justice occurs effectively inhouse. We are already seeing reliefs [firings] and convictions of American personnel for actions which occurred less than two years ago. Where's the progress on crimes in the Balkans? Still mired in politics and pseudo-due process. We act, you talk.
Posted by: Cleamp Ebbereling9442 || 03/07/2005 15:49 Comments || Top||

#4  Currently, USA is urging that EU membership be used as a means to pressure Croatia to cooperate with an international courts tribunal.

If people who loathe both the EU and international courts tribunals (claiming them both useless or worse-than-useless) don't see the irony in that, I have nothing to say.
Posted by: Aris Katsaris || 03/07/2005 15:59 Comments || Top||

#5  This could just be Al-Guardian trying to draw a US connection in case anything goes wrong.
Posted by: Charles || 03/07/2005 16:30 Comments || Top||


Fifth Column
Colorado University president resigns
BOULDER, Colo. — University of Colorado President Elizabeth Hoffman announced Monday that she is resigning amid a football recruiting scandal and a national controversy over an activist professor who had compared victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to a Nazi. Hoffman, who has been president for five years, told the Board of Regents in a letter that her resignation is effective June 30 or whenever the board names a successor. "It appears to me it is in the university's best interest that I remove the issue of my future from the debate so that nothing inhibits CU's ability to successfully create the bright future it so deserves," Hoffman wrote.
This is too big a mess for me to clean up. Cya later!
An independent commission reported last year that Colorado players used sex, alcohol and marijuana as recruiting tools without the football staff encouraging or sanctioning the practice.
Rest at link
Posted by: mmurray821 || 03/07/2005 12:46:39 PM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  You mean there are football programs which don't use sex, booze, and drugs?
Posted by: CrazyFool || 03/07/2005 14:35 Comments || Top||

#2  Right church, wrong pew.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis || 03/07/2005 14:53 Comments || Top||

#3  Mrs. Davis: "Right church, wrong pew."

As in "pee-you"? ;-p
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut || 03/07/2005 15:05 Comments || Top||

#4  a good start, but only a start
Posted by: RWV || 03/07/2005 15:06 Comments || Top||

#5  You wanna know the real story behind the resignation?

The Buffs finished next to last in the Big 12 in mens college basketball. Pitiful.

At least, thats my opinion.
Posted by: badanov || 03/07/2005 15:20 Comments || Top||

#6  Having a lying left-wing piece of crap professor is one thing, but a possible NCAA death sentance on the football team, that's going too far.
Posted by: Steve || 03/07/2005 15:26 Comments || Top||

#7  Now have paleface squaw scalp to add to collection. Me show white man.
Bring my limo around.
Posted by: W. Churchill, Alleged Injun || 03/07/2005 17:26 Comments || Top||

#8  F**k ut Ima tired pushing a reverser Crow Farm pic for funny. Ward is a misunderstander der blood indiana! It's too late! Buy lawysers!
Posted by: Francis || 03/07/2005 17:37 Comments || Top||

#9  Isn't there also a "slush fund" scandal brewing at Colorado? I heard something about that, but didn't catch any details.
Posted by: Anonymoose || 03/07/2005 18:12 Comments || Top||

#10  SH&T! She looks just like that Ward Churchill! Scary!
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 18:16 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Politix
McCain Group Got Large Cable Donation
Sen. John McCain (search for hypocrite) pressed a cable company's case for pricing changes with regulators at the same time a tax-exempt group that he has worked with since its founding solicited $200,000 in contributions from the company.
Jesse Jackson without the race angle
Help from McCain, who argues for ridding politics of big money, included giving the CEO of Cablevision Systems Corp. the opportunity to testify before his Senate committee, writing a letter of support to the Federal Communication Commission and asking other cable companies to support so-called a la carte pricing.

McCain had expressed interest in exploring the a la carte option for years before Cablevision advocated it, but did not take a formal position with regulators until after the company's first donation came in. Cablevision is the eighth-largest cable provider, serving about 3 million customers in the New York area.

The pricing plan is opposed by most of the cable industry. It would let customers pick the channels they want rather than buy fixed-price packages. Supporters, like McCain and Cablevision, say it would lower prices for consumers, but recent congressional and private studies concluded it could make cable more expensive.

McCain's assistance in 2003 and 2004 was sandwiched around two donations of $100,000 each from Cablevision to The Reform Institute, the tax-exempt group that touts McCain's views and has showcased him at events since his unsuccessful 2000 presidential campaign.

Arizona? Time to retire "Mr. Political Speech restrictions for those who don't pay up"
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 9:38:48 PM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  even more here - via Drudge
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 21:59 Comments || Top||

#2  I'm all for the a-la-carte option. I hate all the stupid sports and MTV crap. More discovery and History channels!!!
I am also for smacking the hypocrite, anti-free speech butthole back south of the fooken boarder or shipping his ass to France.
Posted by: mmurray821 || 03/07/2005 22:43 Comments || Top||


Los Angeles Mayoral Candidates Make Final Push
In a frenetic last day of campaigning before the mayoral primary, major candidates on Monday plunged into coffee shops, pumped hands at senior centers and hit talk radio hoping to connect with the city's famously distracted voters.

Backed by television attack ads, the candidates packed in a retail campaigning spree.

Hertzberg started on the mayor's home turf, meeting residents to discuss port issues in Hahn's neighborhood of San Pedro. Villaraigosa greeted early commuters in his neighborhood, heavily Hispanic Boyle Heights, before stopping at a downtown diner. The mayor planned to close his campaign with a Hollywood rally after a day of stops around the city.

Turnout will be a key factor in determining who wins two spots for an expected May 17 runoff. Because of the crowded field -- there are 12 contenders -- no candidate is likely to claim a majority of the vote, the threshold needed to win outright.

{SNIP}

Note :
Most recent poll (March 1), LA Times (which may be dubious as most things LA Times are...but if the Times can't show Villaregosa with a substantial lead, then....)

Results :

Villaregosa 24
Herzburg 21
Hahn (inc) 20
Parks 11
Alarcon 5
undecided 19

One-fifth undecided - week to go - ODD!
{Understatement} People are split...

However, if tradition holds, if the incumbent don't got them now, ne never will. BigEd predicts Herzburg-Villaregosa runoff.
Posted by: BigEd || 03/07/2005 7:19:00 PM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:


My Felon Americans: Why Hillary and JFnK Want To Let Criminals Vote
EFL - RTWT - Clarifies the previous posts of which states allow felons to vote

The Constitution grants states the authority to determine "the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections," but Hillary Clinton and John Kerry are pushing a Count Every Vote Act that would, among other things, force states to allow voters to register at the polls and declaring Election Day a federal holiday. And then they want to force every state to let felons vote--even though the 14th Amendment specifically permits states to disfranchise citizens convicted of "participation in rebellion, or other crime."

Forty-eight states deny the vote to at least some felons; only Vermont and Maine let jailbirds vote. Thirty-three states withhold the right to vote from those on parole. Eight deny felons the vote for life, unless they petition to have their rights restored, and the Clinton-Kerry proposal would force them to enfranchise felons (or "ex-felons," as Mrs. Clinton misleadingly calls them) once they've completed parole.

Mrs. Clinton says she is pushing her bill because she is opposed to "disenfranchisement of legitimate American voters." But it's hard not to suspect partisan motives. In a 2003 study, sociologists Chistopher Uggen and Jeff Manza found that roughly 4.2 million had been disfranchised nationwide, a third of whom had completed their prison time or parole. Taking into account the lower voter turnout of felons, they concluded that about one-third of them would vote in presidential races, and that would have overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidates. Participation by felons, Messrs. Uggen and Manza estimated, also would have allowed Democrats to win a series of key U.S. Senate elections, thus allowing the party to control the Senate continuously from 1986 until at least this January.

The DNC - Welcome Home Felons!
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 6:11:48 PM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  It worked so well in Washington state where illegal Felons, the Dead, and imaginary (democratic) friends voted and were counted.
Posted by: CrazyFool || 03/07/2005 19:27 Comments || Top||

#2  Dnc...sinking further and further into irrelevance
Posted by: Pheretle Cravigum4997 || 03/07/2005 19:30 Comments || Top||


Fiery Arms Control Expert Bolton to Be U.S. Ambassador to United Nations
John R. Bolton, a tough-talking arms control official who rarely muffles his views in diplomatic niceties, was chosen Monday by President Bush to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Senate Democrats immediately assailed the nomination, arguing that it didn't make sense for the president to pick a diplomat who has sometimes been critical of the world body at a time when mending fences with the international community was imperative. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Bolton's selection sent "all the wrong signals."
Anticipating a possible fight over confirmation - in 2001, Bolton was approved for his current post over the opposition of 43 Democratic senators - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "Through our history some of our best ambassadors have been those with strong voices." She mentioned former U.N. ambassadors Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Daniel Patrick Moynihan...
Bush and the republican senators are planning a major punishment of the democrat senators, to convince them that they are the minority party, and must behave as the minority. They have been too arrogant for too long, and must get a lot of the fight knocked out of them. Once they adopt a humbler countenance, then they can sit at the grown-ups table again.
Posted by: Anonymoose || 03/07/2005 5:37:26 PM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Bush and the republican senators are planning a major punishment of the democrat senators
Sounds like they are planning a major punishment of the UN too if this guy is un-PC. hehehehehe...
Posted by: mmurray821 || 03/07/2005 17:53 Comments || Top||


Top Democratic Donor Now In The Jail House
Charles Kushner, a multimillionaire real estate executive, philanthropist and one of the top Democratic donors in the country, was sentenced on Friday to two years in federal prison after pleading guilty to 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering and making illegal campaign donations...
NYT.
Posted by: Anonymoose || 03/07/2005 9:13:02 AM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Two years - for that litany?

I won't play the NYT game, even with Bugmenot, but $5 gets you $10 this ruling came from a Donk appointee. Prolly in a country-club prison, too.
Posted by: .com || 03/07/2005 9:58 Comments || Top||

#2  Able to access without the usual sign-in garbage:

Mr. Kushner, who will continue to be free on $5 million bail, was ordered to surrender on May 9 to begin serving his sentence at a federal prison at a military base in Montgomery, Ala
Posted by: Pappy || 03/07/2005 11:10 Comments || Top||

#3  Why isn't this all over the news instead of Martha Stewart? Equal time, baby.
Posted by: Chris W. || 03/07/2005 12:35 Comments || Top||

#4  The federal prison at Maxwell AFB truly is a Club Fed. In a previous life, I used to run by the facility twice a day and didn't realize that it was a prison for the first few weeks. The "inmates" were always playing volleyball or, so help me God, sitting a table dictating to secretaries. Time there is just an inconvenience. Send the guy to San Quentin for some real hard time.
Posted by: RWV || 03/07/2005 15:48 Comments || Top||

#5  Prisoners
Posted by: BigEd || 03/07/2005 15:51 Comments || Top||


International-UN-NGOs
Bono's next No 1 may be at World Bank
He is world famous, and there is no doubt he cares passionately about development. Bono, the Irish rock singer, has many qualifications to be the next president of the World Bank -overseeing global development efforts, a job that becomes vacant in June when James Wolfensohn resigns.

The Bush administration is not ruling Bono out. In fact, the US treasury secretary, John Snow, went out of his way to say nice things about him in a discussion about the forthcoming vacancy yesterday. "He's somebody I admire. He does a lot of good in this world of economic development," Associated Press quoted him saying. Asked about the shortlist for the post, he replied: "I am not going to review here all the candidates that are on the list."

It sounded like a maybe, at least. By tradition, it is up to the US to appoint the World Bank president.

Other names mentioned include Carly Fiorina, a businesswoman a shrew hated by Maureen Dowd for being too successful who was recently sacked as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, the office and consumer electronics company. Bono can claim experience working with the Bush administration. He went on an "odd-couple" tour of Africa in 2002 with Mr Snow's predecessor at the treasury department, Paul O'Neill, and seemed to have gone some way to convincing him of the need for more development aid.
Posted by: Steve White || 03/07/2005 12:26:26 AM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Amazing.

Sting's most memorable musical line, to me, was about politicians, "They all look like game-show hosts to me." My reaction is always, and you don't, Gordon? Asshat.

Talk about idiotic. The closest Bono should get regards being at the top of the World Bank is to jump off of it, IMHO.
Posted by: .com || 03/07/2005 0:43 Comments || Top||

#2  Amoungst entertainers Bono does stand out as someone who seems to grasp how the world really works as opposed to the fictional version most other entertainers confuse with reality. Please not Carly Fiorina she was a disaster at HP.
Posted by: phil_b || 03/07/2005 0:44 Comments || Top||

#3  Lol! Sheesh - I know you're wankin' us. Nothing else explains it, lol! Even as the Einstein of Rock Stars, the friggin' Bertrand Russell of the entertainment world, the Bucky Fuller of the diversion arts -- that makes him about half as qualified as your average bank teller... and wildly inferior to a run of the mill loan officer. Carly was a corporate PC / social experiment - there was almost nothing to suggest she was going to be a success beforehand - and she did not fail to disappoint. The Board of Directors should have followed her out the door, the twits. Regards, Bono, out of 6+ Billion people on the planet, at least 1+ Billion must be a better choice.

I'd take Jack Welch, for instance, in a heartbeat. A no-shit non-idiotarian who has the big picture and knows how to run a global enterprise.
Posted by: .com || 03/07/2005 1:05 Comments || Top||

#4  As I recall The head of the World Bank is a political position and qualifications for it are mostly political with a knowledge of development aid, which is what the WB exists for. As a political choice Bono is really not that bad. He seems familiar with real problems and prepared to push for real solutions. The Left will see him as one of their own but he appears free of (some/most) of the Loony Left Claptrap. The Bush administartion can appear even handed at minimal cost. And Bono does have a track record as a persuader, an important qualification. My reaction was similar to yours when I first heard about this, but on reflection it could be an astute political move.
Posted by: phil_b || 03/07/2005 1:30 Comments || Top||

#5  Sure, okay. *snicker*

Y'know, the Prez of TWB doesn't have to be a total wanker jackoff twitter. It could be someone who actually knows something. I don't give two shits about impressing anyone or any gestures to the Moonbats.

phil, I guess I'm just in No Wankers mode, lol!

Phug'em.
Posted by: .com || 03/07/2005 1:53 Comments || Top||

#6  I'm with phil, or maybe more so.
I think what phil has left out is "The Education of Bono". Based on what I know of Bono and WB activities, I can see him banging heads with Oxfam and other NGOs. Bono's background might make him uniquely qualified to win that one - by putting more on the table than they care to wager.
Posted by: Dishman || 03/07/2005 2:03 Comments || Top||

#7  Oh, like wow, I like get it now. Brilliant (UK definition).
Posted by: .com || 03/07/2005 3:20 Comments || Top||

#8  What about the Wolfowitz idea? He'd be great for the job, though IMO the job's too small for him.
Posted by: someone || 03/07/2005 5:15 Comments || Top||

#9  ...As much as I hate to say this, Bono's interest in global aid matters has gotten him a real-world education far better than anything he would have gotten in 4 years at any college followed by several years at some NGO. On top of that, he does seem to have a grasp of the obvious far exceeding most politicians. I say give him a shot at it.

Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski || 03/07/2005 7:25 Comments || Top||

#10  Tell you what: let Bono start with a smaller project like, say, getting his fellow Irishmen to stop killing each other. If he does a good job on that, then maybe we'll hear what he has to say about global issues.
Posted by: BH || 03/07/2005 10:10 Comments || Top||

#11  BH - right. In the words of his good friend Sunny, best to start on the bunny slopes.
Posted by: 2b || 03/07/2005 10:17 Comments || Top||

#12  This is a good thing. Can you imagine Alan Greenspan launching into "Vertigo" at a congressional hearing?
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 10:19 Comments || Top||

#13  Speaking of Sunny, remember the joke that came after Sunny ran into the tree while skiing:

Tree: Respect the environment and the forest or we will take out one Hollywood star a week.
Posted by: Alaska Paul || 03/07/2005 10:31 Comments || Top||

#14  Why would anyone support the "World Bank"? seems like a very bad institution if one values free markets and economic development.
Posted by: Kalle (kafir forever) || 03/07/2005 10:41 Comments || Top||

#15  .com... my usual answer to that question is "Railroad Crossing". My ex no longer finds it quite so humorous, now that she understands.
Posted by: Dishman || 03/07/2005 13:12 Comments || Top||

#16  I'm available for the position, unless Russel Crowe returns my phone call, of course.
Posted by: Kevin Costner || 03/07/2005 13:26 Comments || Top||

#17  Kalle.. I don't support the World Bank...
Ragnar Danneskjold isn't available for the job, but I'm thinking maybe Bono will end up channeling him.
Posted by: Dishman || 03/07/2005 13:31 Comments || Top||

#18  I vote for Carly Fiorina. She destroyed HP, she can destroy the World Bank next.
Posted by: gromky || 03/07/2005 14:25 Comments || Top||

#19  I'm with Gromky. Run the sucker up onto the rocks.
Posted by: Classical_Liberal || 03/08/2005 0:00 Comments || Top||


Israel-Palestine
IDF says D&D players are detached from reality and automatically given a low security clearance
Ynetnews has learned that 18-year-olds who tell recruiters they play the popular fantasy game are automatically given low security clearance.
"They're detached from reality and suscepitble to influence," the army says.
Fans of the popular role-playing game had spoken of rumors of this strange policy by the IDF, but now the army has confirmed that it has a negative image of teens who play the game and labels them as problematic in regard to their draft status.
So if you like fantasy games, go see the military psychologist...
In a more "active" version of the game, players leave the table and go out, dressed as the characters they assume for the game, along with the requisite equipment of swords (not real) to play outside, usually in the forest or woods.
Thousands of youth and teens in Israel play "D and D", fighting dragons and demons using their rich imaginations. The game has also increased in popularity due to the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy...
Game enthusiasts are aware of their problematic image in the army and prefer to maintain their anonymity. Many of them are from the former Soviet Union where the game is very popular.
In Israel there are thousands of players, between the ages 16 to 35, and include lawyers, high-tech workers and businessmen. Matan, 22, and Igor, a 21-year-old IDF soldier, organize activities for groups of players. Soon hundreds of fans are expected to meet in a forest in the southern part of Israel for a two-day game of pure fantasy.
"It's not a game of winners and losers," Matan says,
"but rather entry into another world with stories and plot changes."
He is aware of the game's problematic reputation, especially in the IDF. The Army is not indifferent to the unique hobby and is trying to locate soldiers who in their free time dress up as witches and play in forests...
Posted by: Anonymoose || 03/07/2005 9:19:44 PM || Comments || Link || [1 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Gads, we used to play D&D aboard ship. In fact, our dungeonmaster had been in the original group that later became TSR (I know - I'm dating myself....).

Then again, we didn't dress up and use the passageways as dungeons.
Posted by: Pappy || 03/07/2005 21:47 Comments || Top||

#2  Obviously they haven't heard of the Sword of Infidels which is +4 vs Mooselimbs and gives protection +2 vs Seething or they would change their mind in a damn hurry!

We used to play D&D back when I was a teenager. We didn't get dressed up or use figurines or anything 'detached' like that. And it was always fun when the starving party ("I thought you had the rations!") would come across a conviently placed Circle K down about the fifth level.....

In other words we played it for fun.
Posted by: CrazyFool || 03/07/2005 21:59 Comments || Top||

#3  D&D players may suffer from low Charisma, but as long as their Strength and Dexterity are high enough, I don't see what the IDF's problem is.
Posted by: Paul Moloney || 03/07/2005 22:04 Comments || Top||

#4  Article is a fake! The pictures were taken outside! Real D&D nerds never see the light of day.

This isn't D&D. Dungeons and Dragons is played with paper, pencil, and dice.

The pictures are from the Society for Creative Anachronism or similar, which has stuff like people running outside and hitting each other with sticks wrapped in foam. There are also people who pretend that they're vampires and run around university campuses at night.

That being said, both groups of people are totally gay and I would never want one backing me up in a firefight. Flakes. Yeah I know there's creative and positive people, but those don't make good soldiers.
Posted by: gromky || 03/07/2005 22:06 Comments || Top||

#5  Oooooookay. Considering I had 3 people from My old group were in the 82nd, and the other was a Marine who fought in GWI. Nope. Can't make good soldiers out of D&D players.
Posted by: jackal || 03/07/2005 22:28 Comments || Top||

#6  Hmmmm. I wonder what they think of "furries"...
Posted by: jackal || 03/07/2005 22:30 Comments || Top||

#7  Don't ask, don't tell (for the love of God!)
Posted by: Paul Moloney || 03/07/2005 22:35 Comments || Top||

#8  ookay. Stupid and dumb. I play D&D, was in the 101st, had a security clearance and was well grounded in the reality that I could go and shoot people as well as get shot myself. I think it is time to introduce the egghead shrinks that thought that crap up to a wall-to-wall counseling session.
Posted by: mmurray821 || 03/07/2005 22:40 Comments || Top||

#9  But, but at NWN I have a +5 Astral sword and I am a level 21 enchantress and level 20 warrior. The game uses Wizzards of the Coast D&D rules. I thought Quake3Arena was a time sink until I started playing NWN.

I think their shrinks have too much time on their hands. The whole thing is about playing as a goal oriented team or party. Wonder what they think about Wolfenstein 3-D and it's ilk.
Posted by: Sock Puppet of Doom || 03/07/2005 23:11 Comments || Top||

#10  I submit that the best D&D dungeonmasters went on to design the architecture of the Internet.
Posted by: Seafarious || 03/07/2005 23:18 Comments || Top||

#11  I think some of our civil affairs troops in Iraq need a special edition of SimCity for practice. They can practice renovating Bagdad or Fallujah while dealing with IEDs and terrorists.

They'd have to remove the SimCity "bulldoze a church--get a nasty disaster' rule, though.
Posted by: Eric Jablow || 03/07/2005 23:29 Comments || Top||

#12  All I have to say is, you people have never met any of the D&D or SCA "people" that I have.
Posted by: gromky || 03/07/2005 23:42 Comments || Top||

#13  Pray tell.
Posted by: Sobiesky || 03/07/2005 23:44 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Culture Wars
Gun ban utopia creates violent crime increase
In a pattern that's repeated itself in Canada and Australia, violent crime has continued to go up in Great Britain despite a complete ban on handguns, most rifles and many shotguns. The broad ban that went into effect in 1997 was trumpeted by the British government as a cure for violent crime. The cure has proven to be much worse than the disease.
Crime rates in England have skyrocketed since the ban was enacted. According to economist John Lott of the American Enterprise Institute, the violent crime rate has risen 69 percent since 1996, with robbery rising 45 percent and murders rising 54 percent. This is even more alarming when you consider that from 1993 to 1997 armed robberies had fallen by 50 percent. Recent information released by the British Home Office shows that trend is continuing.
Reports released in October 2004 indicate that during the second quarter of 2004, violent crime rose 11 percent; violence against persons rose 14 percent.
The British experience is further proof that gun bans don't reduce crime and, in fact, may increase it. The gun ban creates ready victims for criminals, denying law-abiding people the opportunity to defend themselves.
contrast, the number of privately owned guns in the United States rises by about 5 million a year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The number of guns owned by Americans is at an all-time high, fast approaching 300 million.
Meanwhile the FBI reports that in 2003 the nation's violent crime rate declined for the 12th straight year to a 27-year low. The FBI's figures are based on crimes reported to police. By comparison, the U.S. Department of Justice reported in September that, according to its annual national crime victim survey, violent crime reached a 30-year low in 2003.
Right-to-Carry states fared better than the rest of the country in 2003. On the whole, their total violent crime, murder and robbery rates were 6 percent, 2 percent and 23 percent lower respectively than the states and the District of Columbia where carrying a firearm for protection against criminals is prohibited or severely restricted. On average in Right-to-Carry states the total violent crime, murder, robbery and aggravated assault rates were lower by 27 percent, 32 percent, 45 percent and 20 percent respectively.
As usual, most of the states with the lowest violent crime rates are those with the least gun control, including those in the Rocky Mountain region, and Maine, New Hampshire and Ver-mont in the Northeast. The District of Columbia and Maryland, which have gun bans and other severe restrictions on gun purchase and ownership, retained their regrettable distinctions as having the highest murder and robbery rates.
Posted by: Anonymoose || 03/07/2005 8:40:47 PM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  In a pattern that’s repeated itself in Canada and Australia,

It's unfortunate that cause and effect is continually lost on people. You'd think they'd consider, I don't know, repealing the ban, right?
Posted by: Raj || 03/07/2005 20:58 Comments || Top||

#2  that's for "zee leetle peepuls" (apologies to Cracker Barrel Philosopher). The rich have their own armed security (right, Rosie???). You're on your own so the elite have "clear consciences" undisturbed by lack of self-defense methods for the rest of us. I, for one, don't accept that :-)
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 21:04 Comments || Top||

#3  I think much of Europe and Britain's post-America colonies were based on the utter incapability to recognize patterns. "Gee, the last time we used trench warfare, it was a bloody disaster!" "Well, then, we had better do it again! Tradition, and all!"
Posted by: Anonymoose || 03/07/2005 21:23 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Tech
Nobel Winner Hans Bethe, a Giant of 20th Century Physics, Dies at 98
Hans Bethe, a giant of 20th-century physics who played a central role in the building of the atomic bomb and won a Nobel Prize for discovering the process that powers the sun and the stars, has died at 98.
Bethe, who died Sunday, stood alongside such figures as Enrico Fermi, Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller as a member of the corps of scientists who ushered in the atomic age.
During the World War II race to build the bomb, Bethe was head of the Manhattan Project's theoretical physics division at Los Alamos, N.M.
"Bethe was the last of the giants of Los Alamos," said Gerald Brown, a physics professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Bethe, who fled Nazi Germany and joined the Cornell University faculty in 1935, also made major discoveries about how atoms are built up from smaller particles, about what makes dying stars blow up, and how the heavier elements are produced from the ashes of these supernovas.
He averaged a scientific breakthrough every decade or so, beginning during the golden age of physics between the world wars.
Bethe also played key roles in the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty and the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty.
Even though the A-bomb designers knew its calamitous potential, the weapon's reality "was worse than we expected," Bethe reflected in an interview with The Associated Press in 1996. "After Hiroshima, many of us said: 'Let's see that it doesn't happen again.'"
"One of the things that was very special about Hans was his strong moral motivation," said astrophysicist John Bahcall of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. "He did things because he believed they were right and not because they were convenient or helpful to him or promoted his career. His work on the bomb was motivated by a desire to preserve freedom and open society in the face of a spreading Nazi tyranny, which he knew about firsthand."
Born in Strasbourg in 1906, Bethe (pronounced BAY-tuh) fled Germany in 1933 after losing a university post because his mother was Jewish.
Bethe emerged in an era bursting with discoveries about the fundamental building blocks of matter. In the infancy of modern atomic theory, he spelled out what was known and unknown in nuclear physics in a classic series of papers dubbed Bethe's Bible.
He also investigated the structure of atoms, molecules and solids, devised techniques for calculating the properties of nuclear matter and laid the groundwork for the development of quantum electrodynamics.
In 1938, leading nuclear physicists were invited to solve a mystery that had long stumped the best scientific minds: the source of the sun's energy. Just six weeks later, Bethe came up with his "carbon cycle" formula: He showed that virtually all the energy produced by the most brilliant stars stems from a fusion reaction in which hydrogen serves as the fuel and carbon as the catalyst.
His work eventually won him the Nobel in physics in 1967.
At Los Alamos, Bethe earned the nickname "The Battleship."
"He worked like a bulldozer," Brown said. "If he ran into a temporary wall, he would just go around it. With his immense confidence and his knowledge, he was arguably the most powerful scientist of the century."
After retiring from teaching in 1975, Bethe turned to astrophysics, a field he previously had only dipped into. With his grasp of so many areas of theoretical physics, Bethe was persuaded by Brown, an astrophysicist, to delve into the mysteries of mighty star explosions, or supernovae. They collaborated on a 1979 that upended long-held assumptions about the density of a collapsing star's core.
Bethe worked into his 90s at Cornell University's Newman Laboratory of Nuclear Studies, devoting many solitary afternoons to his passion: numbers.
"I think it's very useful for keeping me young," he said in a 1996 interview.
At Bethe's zenith, his mind was a wonder to behold. He could not program the simplest computer, but had no trouble digesting reams of supercomputer readouts. For help, he reached into his briefcase for a slide rule he had carried around for 70 years.
He also had a habit of taking a 30-minute bath each morning.
"You sleep and things get somewhat unscrambled in your mind," he said in 1996. "Then in the bath, I can become conscious of that."
Science had fascinated Bethe since boyhood.
"You see, most philosophical questions were quite well answered by the old Greeks, and even better by people from 1500 to 1800," he said. As for deciphering human character, "I don't think Shakespeare has ever been surpassed."
"Science is always more unsolved questions, and its great advantage is you can prove something is true or something is false. You can't do that about human affairs - most human things can be right from one point of view and wrong from another.
"It is the most wonderful feeling when you come to a real answer. This is it, and this is correct! In science, you know you know."
Bethe's survivors include his wife, Rose; a son, Henry; and a daughter, Monica.
Posted by: Anonymoose || 03/07/2005 6:08:45 PM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Bethe has died; Gamow died in the 1968. Is Alpher still alive?

Yes, that's a joke, but a real one. Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow wrote a famous paper together.
Posted by: Eric Jablow || 03/07/2005 23:23 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Culture Wars
Minority Sports Execs Described As 'Fed Up' With Jesse Jackson
(CNSNews.com) - The man who headed the sports division of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition for more than a decade before being released in January is now organizing former Jackson affiliates into his own minority motor sports division. Charles Farrell told Cybercast News Service that many of his new business recruits admit they were wary about their association with ackson.

"A lot of people were fed up with Reverend Jackson so I think this is a clean start," Farrell said of his newly formed group, One Umbrella Motorsports Association. "We have people coming from as far away as California and Missouri." He called his new venture the "start of something big." In what could be another sign of financial woes at Rainbow/PUSH, Jackson's organization has indicated it is scaling back its national minority sports initiatives, according to Farrell.
Jackson's Rainbow Sports organization has previously conducted minority sports outreach efforts with such groups as NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing), the National Football League, Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association.
The NBA needs help attracting minorities? Who knew?
Posted by: Steve || 03/07/2005 9:10:55 AM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Oh great. I thought this was going to be about minorities getting fed up with Jackson's scam games. Instead, it's some opportunist who used to work with Jackson now starting up a competing scam. Crooks & Cons of Color.
Posted by: .com || 03/07/2005 10:04 Comments || Top||

#2  "It's not a quota. It's a goal"
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 10:17 Comments || Top||

#3  What took him so long?

I've been fed up with Hustler Jackson for 30 years.

Guess he had to hang around long enough to learn the hustler trade....
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut || 03/07/2005 12:03 Comments || Top||

#4  Ackson Jackson ? I thought it was Action Jackson.
Posted by: Johnnie Bartlette || 03/07/2005 13:59 Comments || Top||

#5  "outreach efforts"? I suppose one could call pickpocketing an "outreach effort" too.
Posted by: Xbalanke || 03/07/2005 17:04 Comments || Top||


Africa: North
Legal debate on establishing rule of law in Morocco
RABAT — The fourth session of the Discussion Boards, organised by the Justice and Reconciliation Authority, is discussing necessary reforms in the educational and cultural fields to establish the rule of law, informed sources said.
Rule of law? In an islamic state? Can't have none of that, now!
Discussion Boards are attended by prominent experts and professionals, and are transmitted through the Moroccan second TV channel. Discussions have highlighted serious human rights violations experienced in Morocco since independence and their impact on society and the composition of values.

Discussion Boards — along with public sessions of the victims of serious human rights violations — held every Tuesday, are aimed at involving public opinion in a frank and open way on the historical background that led to such violations, crystallising scientific projects and programmes that enhance the state of law and institutions, protect freedoms, and contribute to ending such violations.
After which the participants are rounded up and beaten.
Posted by: Steve White || 03/07/2005 12:42:53 AM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:


Egypt upper house okays multi-party elections
CAIRO — Egypt's upper parliamentary house gave the green light on Saturday to the constitutional amendment allowing the country to hold its first multi-candidate presidential elections. The 264-member Shura Council voted unanimously for the move, a week after President Hosni Mubarak surprised the nation by ordering the change.
A unanimous decision. There's democracy in action, by Gawd!
It will be the first time in Egypt's modern history that the country will be able to vote for more than one presidential candidate. Previously people had to vote "yes" or "no" for a single candidate approved by both houses of parliament.

Safwat Al Sherif, the speaker of the Shura Council, made the announcement that the amendment to article 76 — the law in question — would go ahead, Egypt's Middle East official news agency said. Al Sherif also called upon all political parties to participate in the presidential vote, the agency said.
So long as they all lose.
The Shura Council is half elected by popular vote, half appointed by Mubarak, and is correctly seen more as a rubber stamping body than an effective legislature.
Posted by: Steve White || 03/07/2005 12:39:16 AM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  This could be a good thing,but who gets to select the slate of candidates? A panel of Mullahs, ala Iran?
Posted by: GK || 03/07/2005 1:32 Comments || Top||

#2  Mubarek, probably. Whether Hosni or Gamel remains to be seen.
Posted by: trailing wife || 03/07/2005 11:16 Comments || Top||

#3  Be careful in your choice of words, tw. 'Specially when you use "remains" and the names of Arab autocrats in the same sentence...
Posted by: Seafarious || 03/07/2005 11:25 Comments || Top||

#4 
Posted by: BigEd || 03/07/2005 12:36 Comments || Top||

#5  Hosni Mubarak - selected, not elected!
Posted by: Chris W. || 03/07/2005 12:38 Comments || Top||

#6  Very good point, Seafarious, thanks. I'll try to be more careful in the future.
Posted by: trailing wife || 03/07/2005 17:27 Comments || Top||


Egyptian Students Protest Bawdy Videos
Hundreds of Egyptian university students in Alexandria, north of Cairo, held a protest yesterday against what they called "bawdy music videos". The protesters in Alexandria University, lead by the Muslim Brotherhood students, said that videos are too seductive to be aired in an Islamic country that has customs and tradition that must be respected. "The Egyptian TV and other satellite channels have to stop immediately the ongoing invasion too raunchy for local consumption," said Muhammad Abdel Fattah, a spokesperson and organizer for the demonstration, which is the first of its kind in the country. "We are not against art, but we are also very concerned about the indecency of the videos that will affect the young Egyptians and the coming generation," he told Arab News.

Following the demonstration, Egypt's state-owned television announced that it will implement a ban on a number of music videos deemed inappropriate by the TV's censorship committee. The list of the would-be banned clips — most of which are Lebanese with a number of Egyptian clips — includes songs by very famous singers such as Haifa's "Nifsi Aaish", Rubi's "Leih Bidari", Najla's "Bahh" Bosi' Samir's song "Bahibo Howa". Other acclaimed singers on the blacklist include Elissa, Maria, Amr Diab, Nawal Al Zoghbi and Nancy Ajram. The censorship committee claimed that these songs have models who dance seductively, disrespecting Egyptian social norms. "Many singers have crossed the limits in their videos and therefore we have to stop them," said an official at the TV's committee who asked not to be identified. "The ban would apply to all video clips that include hot scenes, but some of the songs will be only edited."
Posted by: Fred || 03/07/2005 00:00:00 AM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  I say we beam this in from space nonstop plus give them free MTV. That will know their turbans for them.
Posted by: FlameBait || 03/07/2005 0:41 Comments || Top||

#2  Music videos got their panties in a bunch? Lol. Just extrapolate a bit. Total meltdown, methinks.
Posted by: .com || 03/07/2005 0:46 Comments || Top||

#3  Music videos, no. But belly dancers, yes. Sound logic, there.
Posted by: trailing wife || 03/07/2005 4:42 Comments || Top||

#4  Allan approved of belly dancers (with some stipulations and whole rule set going into minute details), but did not mention videos at all. That means videos are verbotten. Isn't Islamologic wunderbar?
Posted by: Sobiesky || 03/07/2005 4:57 Comments || Top||

#5  I'm sure any bans would be preceded by careful and repeated study of the offending articles.
Posted by: Xbalanke || 03/07/2005 17:07 Comments || Top||


Afghanistan/South Asia
Turbans can be used if not helmets
LAHORE: PML President Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain told reporters on Sunday that the helmet restriction imposed on motorcyclists was for their own safety. However, Chaudhry Shujaat said he would ask Punjab Chief Minister Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi to allow motorcyclists to wear turbans if they did not want to wear helmets.
Posted by: Fred || 03/07/2005 00:00:00 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Please, wear a turban if you think that will please Allan.

(There's a serious scuff mark on the chin of my bucket. That would have been my lips.)
Posted by: Dishman || 03/07/2005 0:32 Comments || Top||

#2  The new Turban Helmet comming soon to a Punjabi near you.
Posted by: ed || 03/07/2005 0:40 Comments || Top||

#3  Please don't wear a helmet and ride at high speed in congested traffic. When you die from head trauma you will leave more for the rest of us. Thank you for your beturbaned cooperation.
Posted by: Sock Puppet of Doom || 03/07/2005 0:47 Comments || Top||

#4  Arizona has tried to pass a Helmet law several times,keeps getting shot down.My personal opinion"If they can make me wear a seat belt,they can make a Biker wear a helmet"it's one of the inconsistantcies of the law that just chaps my hide.
Posted by: Raptor || 03/07/2005 7:11 Comments || Top||

#5  I don't care whether they wear a helmet as long as they have a No helmet, No healthcare policy.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis || 03/07/2005 7:18 Comments || Top||

#6  That's the problem Mrs. D. the public foots the bill if they don't have the insurance. Lose-lose. Unless you just abandon them at the accident site... which is a possibility.
Posted by: Shipman || 03/07/2005 7:30 Comments || Top||

#7  Arizona also has the Barrow Neurological Institute, one of the premier brain trauma research facilities in the world. Pure coincidence, I am sure.
Posted by: Anonymoose || 03/07/2005 8:03 Comments || Top||

#8  In reality, the Paki Govt. could care less whether you wear a helmet or not. My eyes really tear up when I hear about Mooselimbs dying from accidents. Oh, the humanity.

BTW, there is no high speed traffic in Pakiland.
Posted by: Poison Reverse || 03/07/2005 8:51 Comments || Top||

#9  HELMET-NOT

MRS. DAVIS, Where do you think were gonna get all the nice healthy young donor-organs from then?????
Posted by: secondliver || 03/07/2005 10:31 Comments || Top||

#10  Abandon them or make them pay. They're just like the wackos that go off in National Parks/Forests when they're told not to and then need to be resuced. They should pay. I don't mind paying to help people recover from disasters outside their control, but when it's in their control...I smoked for 30 years and I don't plan to ask insurance to pay if I get the big C. It's called personal responsibility and we all need to take some.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis || 03/07/2005 10:37 Comments || Top||

#11  Now, I'm not taking sides on the helmet law issue, but I always thought Rhode Island's was insane: it's optional for the driver but mandatory for the passenger.

I know the arguments against the law (peripheral vision, hearing), but half-dome helmets address both of these.
Posted by: Xbalanke || 03/07/2005 15:57 Comments || Top||

#12  Seems to me the turbans may be used to wrap up the body parts thereby saving an expensive body bag.
Posted by: Deacon Blues || 03/07/2005 16:29 Comments || Top||

#13  :) DB, yes, a credit should be given to the undertaker.
Posted by: Francis || 03/07/2005 17:27 Comments || Top||


Police arrest four gangsters after shoot out
Police have arrested a four-member gang allegedly involved in crimes including murder, theft and car snatching. A staff member at the presidency was also among those arrested, sources told Daily Times. Senior police officials formed a raiding party headed by the sub-divisional police officer of the Secretariat circle to control crime. The police raided a deserted house at Ali pur Farash. Upon seeing the police, the accused opened fire and in retaliation police officials returned fire, sources said.
In Bangla, this'd be the part where the mastermind tries to escape, is gunned down in the crossfire, everyone else escapes, and a zip gun and a bullet are recovered...
After overpowering the gang, the police seized illegal weapons and stolen money. During preliminary investigations, the suspects confessed to being involved in more than 25 crimes of murder, theft and robbery in Rawalpindi and Islamabad, sources said. Naseer Ahmed, a President House messenger, was among those arrested while the other three accused were from Kurk. Arif Hussain Shah, investigation officer, refused to provide details about the gang.
Posted by: Fred || 03/07/2005 11:07:49 PM || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:


Clerics seeking decree to declare Aga Khanis infidels
"Let's get this straight: Nobody's a Muslim but us! Got that?"
Difa-e-Islam Mahaz (Front for the Defence of Islam), an alliance of 22 Sunni religious organisations, is trying to get a fatwa (decree) from scholars of all sects including Shia and Ahle Hadith in Pakistan to declare Aga Khanis kafir (infidels), Dr Mufti Sarfaraz Naeemi, principal of Jamia Naemia, told Daily Times on Sunday. He said, "We have first called for a decree from local Sunni scholars and then the consensus will be made on a national basis to declare Aga Khanis, like the Ahmadis, non-Muslim. After that, no school considering them non-Muslim will join the Aga Khan Board (AKB)."

He said this when asked to comment on the AKB issue, which was part of the main agenda of the Difa-e-Islam Mahaz meeting held at Jamia Naemia on Sunday afternoon. The other agenda included the recent amendment in Section 295-C (Blasphemy Law) of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) and the abolition of the religion column in the new passport. He said Sunnis already considered Aga Kahnis non-Muslim. Asked what the problem was with having an Aga Khani educational board in Pakistan as thousands of students were already taking exams under the British (Christian) system, he said it was already clear that the British system was Christian. About discussions on Section 295-C (Blasphemy Law) of the PPC, Dr Naeemi said the meeting opposed the recent amendment in the aforesaid section, empowering only a superintendent of police level official to inquire into a blasphemy incident before lodging a First Information Report (FIR). He warned that the situation could also instigate common Muslims to react or attack such an accused if he were not arrested immediately. He feared that though this would be against the law, the government would be responsible for such a situation.
Posted by: Fred || 03/07/2005 10:57:49 PM || Comments || Link || [1 views] Top|| File under:

#1  First they came for the Ahmadis
Then they came for the Ismailis
Then they came for the Shias
Then they came for me
Posted by: Paul Moloney || 03/07/2005 22:14 Comments || Top||

#2  right after the Shias?
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 22:26 Comments || Top||

#3  I was more thinking of the ordinary Pakistanis who don't follow a pure enough Islam for the Salafis.

They've been coming for infidels like us from the very beginning.
Posted by: Paul Moloney || 03/07/2005 22:34 Comments || Top||

#4  gotcha - just teasing.... good posts as always Paul, thx
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 22:44 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Culture Wars
Dowd: Taming of the Shrews
Maureen Dowd
Arabs put their women in veils. We put ours in the stocks.
Or send them to work for the New York Times...
Every culture has its own way of tamping down female power, be it sexual, political or financial. Americans like to see women who wear the pants be beaten up and humiliated. Afterward, in a gratifying redemption ritual, people like to see the battered women be rewarded.
That's all Americans, right? No exceptions. To include Maureen? Kinky, isn't she?
That's how Hilary Swank won two Oscars. That's how Hillary Clinton won a Senate seat and a presidential front-runner spot. And that's how Martha Stewart won her own reality TV show and became a half-billion dollars richer while she was in prison.
It is? I'm not sure who Hilary Swank is, but Hillary Clinton won her Senate seat and a presidential front-runner spot by being pretty much a consummate politician. She used the tools that were available and she's getting what she wants. Martha Stewart has my sympathy, because she was railroaded, but it had little to do with her sex, much more to do with the fact that there were crooks crawling out from under every rock in sight and she'd done something vaguely similar — without being a consummate politician.
We've come a long way, baby, from the era of witch trials, when women with special power who knew how to curse were burned at the stake. Now, after a public comeuppance, they are staked to a lucrative new career. In this century, the scarlet letter morphs into a dollar sign.
There are millions of women in this country for whom a scarlet letter morphs into nothing but a welfare check.
Maybe temperamental, power-mad divas always needed to be brought down a peg. They used to do it to themselves. Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe were gorgeous monsters, but were so self-destructive there was no need to punish them further. But Hillary and Martha - the domestic diva with the new ankle bracelet echoed Judy Garland on her Web site yesterday that "there is no place like home" - are not self-destructive. They are brass-knuckled survivors who elicit both admiration and an enmity that Alessandra Stanley memorably dubbed "blondenfreude."
Martha's part of the cultural background noise. A year from now she'll be mentioned in the same context as Lizzie Grubner. Or was it Libby Grubner?
From pornography to "Desperate Housewives," women being degraded has an entertainment value far greater than men being degraded. People liked Hillary and Martha a lot more once they were "broken," like one of Martha's saddle horses, ice queens melted into puddles of vulnerability.
Feeling sorry for yourself, Maureen? No dates recently? Feeling degraded?
Maybe it's because both women sometimes overreached, treated the help badly and displayed an unseemly greedy streak. Maybe it's because a dichotomy about their roles made them seem disingenuous: they gained renown for traditional feminine roles, and apron-and-hearth books, assuming guises to achieve male power and taking a route to the mahogany epicenter through the kitchen. Hillary was America's first lady, photographed smiling in her designer dress as she oversaw table settings and placement for state dinners, even though we knew she did not care about such domestic piffle and was instead maneuvering to take over huge chunks of domestic policy. Martha was America's first lady of gold-leaf designer lifestyle nesting, even though we knew that her ÃŒber-nest was so scary that her husband had flown the coop. Though she was the ultimate professional homemaker and nurturer, she left her daughter out of the litany of things - cats, canaries, horses, chickens and dogs - she would miss in jail.
I'm at a disadvantage here, because I have no idea why Mr. Stewart flew the coop. But one wonders what Maureen's opinion of either Mrs. Clinton or Ms. Stewart would be had they been executives in a different line of work — perhaps vice presidents at Lockheed or Raytheon. Perhaps it was merely their visibility — one in politix, the other in the entertainment industry — that brought them to Maureen's attention. I'd bet my next paycheck she doesn't know the name of the head of Lockheed's information technology division (hint: it's a woman. And she's black.)
Obviously, many men are uncomfortable with successful women, so when these women are brushed back, alpha men can take comfort in knowing that alphettes are not threateningly all-powerful and that they had better soften those sharp edges.
Again, Maureen ignores the real world of actual business and concentrates on the straw world of politix and entertainment. We really have come a long way, baby, in the real world, where men actually do work for women and women for men and the other two logical combinations as well, and without the bugaboo of "sexuality" or gender entering into it any more than shoe size does.
I learned covering Geraldine Ferraro's vice presidential bid that the reaction of women to extraordinarily successful women is also ambivalent, with as much hostility as sisterly pride. An Icarus crash can mitigate the jealousy, while intensifying the feminist attachment. After her husband's philandering with Monica, Hillary played the victim card all the way to the Senate. After her own bad judgment about her stocks, Martha metamorphosed from jailbird to phoenix.
Knock off with the Martha, fergawdsake. The woman was sentenced on a shaky charge. She took her lumps like a grownup, now she's out, and a year from now it'll be mostly forgotten. The small-souled will gloat at her misfortune, never admitting to themselves that they don't have what it takes to do what she's done.
Why don't we need to see Oprah, another titan known by her first name, slapped back? Probably because Oprah never had an icy or phony side to her public persona and because her struggles in her childhood and with her weight take the edge off any animus that might be leveled at her for a net worth of $1.3 billion.
Either that or because nobody particularly cares. If Oprah decides to do a Zsa Zsa imitation and slap a cop, or she proceeds to gut her business enterprises, then that'll change. I suspect she won't do either, because she sells her personality. If the product she's selling isn't the one people are buying, then she'll go out of style. Otherwise she'll keep making money. She realizes that when you're in the personality game, it's not hard to tag yourself out. Maybe she knows Stacey Keach.
And what about Condi, who's now being touted for the Republican ticket in 2008? Perhaps she does not need to play the victim to make people feel better about her power because she was never seen as a termagant, pushing people around and bending them to her will. She always seemed subservient to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, a willing handmaiden and spokesman for their bellicose bidding.
Only in Maureen's special world of straw. I've always seen Condi as a decision maker, giving advice and laying out alternatives for the president. And I'm convinced that if she was in fact a Knickerbocker male that people like Maureen would see her as an eminence grise, exerting sinister influence in the corridors of power in the furtherance of some Bilderberger plot to dominate the world.
One Democratic image maker admiringly predicts that, having survived their virago and victim phases, our two most relentless blondes will outlast everyone: "When the world ends, there will be left only a few cockroaches, Cher, Hillary and Martha."
But at least we'll be rid of Maureen. That's something to look forward to.
Posted by: Fred || 03/07/2005 00:00:00 AM || Comments || Link || [1 views] Top|| File under:

#1  I nominate this column as MoDo's worst. I know, I know, it's so hard to choose, but the self-loathing in this one makes me want to find her sometime on Fifth Avenue, walk up, point at her, and just start laughing. She wouldn't feel any worse.
Posted by: Steve White || 03/07/2005 0:09 Comments || Top||

#2  women being degraded has an entertainment value far greater than men being degraded. She musn't have watched an American sitcom in a very long time.
Posted by: phil_b || 03/07/2005 0:14 Comments || Top||

#3  Without your pithy comments I would never have made it to the end of the article...and for that she gets paid? This passes for what, exactly? Journalism? Opine? Could you imagine being stuck alone somewhere with her? Quick, pass the bottle!
Posted by: Mike Villierme || 03/07/2005 0:31 Comments || Top||

#4  Smart strong wymyn are skeery? Shit, they're the coolest friends, the sexiest, most intriguing, most desirable femalians on the planet.

Dowd's suffering from Femalian Neural Envy - females terminally jealous of the other females who have more than one neuron.

Wotta jackass.

One has to wonder if Dowdy ever emerges from the deep pit that is her personal brand of insanity. Nothing she has written in the last 3 years bears any resemblance to reality - you know, that world the rest of us live in.

She should be, if she's not now, the All-Time Mega-Meds Poster Child.
Posted by: .com || 03/07/2005 0:34 Comments || Top||

#5  She is off her Zoloft again I see.
Posted by: FlameBait || 03/07/2005 0:42 Comments || Top||

#6  Its interesting that many subcultures need to promote a 'we are victims' line. Its by no means restricted to feminists. You see it in religions (not just Islam) all the time. It seems especially prevalent in groups that have a weak rational for existing.
Posted by: phil_b || 03/07/2005 0:54 Comments || Top||

#7  I had to look up the word "termagent"

It means, a quarrelsome, scolding woman; a shrew; which is apparently how Dowd sees Hillary and Martha.

Oddly enough, the etymology of the word is that it is based on an imaginary Muslim deity that appeared in old French religious propaganda dramas and was imported to England with the Normans. The character Tervagant appears in the dramas as a shewish but powerful character.
Posted by: mhw || 03/07/2005 1:11 Comments || Top||

#8  Fred, Hilary Swank won an Oscar for Best Actress for her role in the film "Million Dollar Baby," in which she played a female boxer.

Rather than try to summarize the movie I think I'll just say that I don't think she understood it.
Posted by: Phil Fraering || 03/07/2005 1:21 Comments || Top||

#9  The Times editor messed up. It should have been "When the world ends, there will be left only a few cockroaches: Cher, Hillary and Martha."
Posted by: Pappy || 03/07/2005 1:30 Comments || Top||

#10  I learned covering Geraldine Ferraro's vice presidential bid that the reaction of women to extraordinarily successful women is also ambivalent, with as much hostility as sisterly pride.

And for a perfect example of this, let's look at MoDo's own writing a few sentences later:

And what about Condi, who's now being touted for the Republican ticket in 2008? Perhaps she does not need to play the victim to make people feel better about her power because she was never seen as a termagant, pushing people around and bending them to her will. She always seemed subservient to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, a willing handmaiden and spokesman for their bellicose bidding.

Me-ow. What a poison pen. Of course, just last week the world saw Condi 'bending Hosni Mumbarak to her will.' And the consequences could be historic. That's what is called exercising power. Condi does it because she's qualified and cares about substance. MoDo is so shallow that she cannot get beyond image. That's why she can see an ostensible connection between Clinton and Stewart where none really exists and it's why the article ignores any details about what Martha actually did.
Posted by: John in Tokyo || 03/07/2005 2:05 Comments || Top||

#11  Love the poster! It's an incredible movie, too, particularly the MST3K version.
Posted by: Robert Crawford || 03/07/2005 8:11 Comments || Top||

#12  Gee, Condi was subservient to Bush. Isn't that a reasonable summation of the Boss - employee relationship?

I know I damn well better be subservient to my Boss or I won't have one! (Other than my wife but that's another story of a strong, but, non-termagant womant)
Posted by: AlanC || 03/07/2005 8:32 Comments || Top||

#13  Mike V #3- ditto

Condi was subservient to Bush That was the sole purpose of her yawning screed.

Condi - the talking points are out. It's been decided that you will be portrayed as the house mammy, Sally Hemmings, to be exact. Expect more of those kissing photos with her and Bush - to further the impression of her being not just a beautiful, intelligent, n*^^er, but available after dinner for her masters. It never ceases to amaze how low the current left will stoop.
Posted by: 2b || 03/07/2005 9:01 Comments || Top||

#14  Oh, please! I didn't think that it was possible to write a unconciously politically correct satire of political correctness. But she did it.
Posted by: Highlander || 03/07/2005 9:21 Comments || Top||

#15  I love smart, confident, beautiful women. That's why MoDo turns me off. A neurotic little bitch still wishing for her high school girl's clique days. The NYT should be embarrassed for paying her, much less printing her whines
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 9:45 Comments || Top||

#16  BTW - I've gone thru the "really liked, disliked/liked" Michael Douglas phases as his career has gone up/down/up.
The fact he dumped MoDo for Catherine Zeta Jones, however, makes him look like the smartest (and luckiest) man in the world! Now I'm just jealous :-)
Posted by: Frank G || 03/07/2005 9:51 Comments || Top||

#17  I think Maureen needs a hug.
Posted by: eLarson || 03/07/2005 10:21 Comments || Top||

#18  Mmmmmmmmmmmm...mushrooms!
Posted by: MoDo || 03/07/2005 10:25 Comments || Top||

#19  Well, if anyone knows anything about shrews, it's gotta be MoDo.
Posted by: Desert Blondie || 03/07/2005 11:27 Comments || Top||

#20  She's trapped in the "Bozone", an area of impermeability surrounding a completelty clueless person that prohibits the transfer of intelligence. No intelligence going in or out. In this case, however, the indications are there is no level of intelligence within this person's Bozone.
Posted by: Deacon Blues || 03/07/2005 12:42 Comments || Top||

#21  #2 phil_b:
"women being degraded has an entertainment value far greater than men being degraded." She musn't have watched an American sitcom in a very long time.
Or an American commercial.
Posted by: Chinese Unomoger1553 || 03/07/2005 13:39 Comments || Top||

#22  Oh, ferchrissakes - I'm Chinese again today.

I thought sure I put my name in this computer too. :-(
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut || 03/07/2005 13:44 Comments || Top||

#23  Oh, ferchrissakes - I'm Chinese again today.
Be careful how loud you say that, Barbara. There might be FBI agents around, next thing you know they'll be sending flowers and asking you out.
Posted by: Steve || 03/07/2005 15:30 Comments || Top||



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Two weeks of WOT
Mon 2005-03-07
  Operations stepped up in Samarra to find Zarqawi
Sun 2005-03-06
  Hizbollah Throws Weight Behind Syria in Lebanon
Sat 2005-03-05
  Syria loyalists shoot up Beirut Christian sector
Fri 2005-03-04
  Pro-Syria Groups in Lebanon Press for Unity Govt
Thu 2005-03-03
  Lebanon Opposition Demands Total Syrian Withdrawal
Wed 2005-03-02
  France moving commando support ship to Med
Tue 2005-03-01
  Protesters Back on Beirut Streets; U.S. Offers Support
Mon 2005-02-28
  Lebanese Government Resigns
Sun 2005-02-27
  Sabawi Ibrahim Hasan busted!
Sat 2005-02-26
  Rice demands Palestinians find those behind attack
Fri 2005-02-25
  Tel Aviv Blast Reportedly Kills 4
Thu 2005-02-24
  Bangla cracks down on Islamists
Wed 2005-02-23
  500 illegal Iranian pilgrims arrested in Basra
Tue 2005-02-22
  Syria to withdraw from Lebanon. No, they're not.
Mon 2005-02-21
  Zarq propagandist is toes up

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