Shocks Seen in New Math for Pensions - New York Times: "In some cases, particularly at old industrial companies like automakers, the newly disclosed obligations are likely to be so large that they will wipe out the net worth of the company.The traditional way doesn't seem to have worked very well as we are beginning to see and then it will be every man for himself.
The panel, the Financial Accounting Standards Board, said the new method, which it plans to issue today for public comment, would address a widespread complaint about the current pension accounting method: that it exposes shareholders and employees to billions of dollars in risks that they cannot easily see or evaluate. The new accounting rule would also apply to retirees' health plans and other benefits.
A member of the accounting board, George Batavick, said, 'We took on this project because the current accounting standards just don't provide complete information about these obligations.'
The board is moving ahead with the proposed pension changes even as Congress remains bogged down on much broader revisions of the law that governs company pension plans. In fact, Representative John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio and the new House majority leader, who has been a driving force behind pension changes in Congress, said yesterday that he saw little chance of a finished bill before a deadline for corporate pension contributions in mid-April."
Army Bans Use of Privately Bought Armor - Yahoo! News: "Army officials told The Associated Press that the order was prompted by concerns that soldiers or their families were buying inadequate or untested commercial armor from private companies — including the popular Dragon Skin gear made by California-based Pinnacle Armor.I'll bet they did. This way if people come home dead it will reduce future benefits. There is a plan, always a plan and it isn't for the benefit of the little guy.
We're very concerned that people are spending their hard-earned money on something that doesn't provide the level of protection that the Army requires people to wear. So they're, frankly, wasting their money on substandard stuff,' said Col. Thomas Spoehr, director of materiel for the Army.
Murray Neal, chief executive officer of Pinnacle, said he hadn't seen the directive and wants to review it.
'We know of no reason the Army may have to justify this action,' Neal said. 'On the surface this looks to be another of many attempts by the Army to cover up the billions of dollars spent on ineffective body armor systems which they continue to try quick fixes on to no avail.'
The move was a rare one by the Army. Spoehr said he doesn't recall any similar bans on personal armor or devices. The directives are most often issued when there are problems with aircraft or other large equipment.
Veterans groups immediately denounced the decision."
.The Cost Of Errant Justice: "n his last days in office as Virginia's governor, Mark Warner took unprecedented action to deal with the problem. He ordered thousands of decades-old cases involving DNA evidence to be reopened following the discovery of files containing meticulously preserved samples of blood, semen and saliva, ready for retesting using technology that had not been available when the evidence was originally collected. DNA analysis of evidence in a small sample of these cases induced Warner to pardon two inmates wrongfully convicted of rape. This work to expose and correct errors of justice -- and to validate the accuracy of other old cases -- may prove to be Warner's greatest legacy, not only to Virginia but to the nation's criminal justice system.Not enough to run for President, but then lately who has?
Some errors of justice are inevitable, but we could manage them much more effectively than we do. Sophisticated systems are in place to manage mistakes in other fields: scientific research and production processes, for example, or to balance the risk of loss against the yield in financial portfolios. And yet no such systems exist with regard to the vitally important business of determining guilt or innocence in criminal cases.
This can be fixed. The use of modern management methods and more widespread availability of effective forensic technology could go a long way to solve more of these crimes and reduce both types of error. DNA evidence gives us a unique window into errors for those crimes for which the evidence is available and relevant. We can use this window to estimate rates of errors for those crimes. We can do more to assess the social costs of both wrongful convictions and nonconvictions for each major crime category: The costs to the community of failures to convict serial rapists and one-time shoplifters are clearly in different leagues. We can learn more about the relationships between police and prosecution policies and errors of justice. And in old, settled cases with valid DNA evidence, as in Virginia, we may be able to find further errors of justice and correct them. Better late than never."
Mac News: iPod : New Software Lets iPod Users Turn Down Max Volume: "Owners of recent iPods will now be able to set how loud their digital music players can go. Apple Computer (Nasdaq: AAPL) Latest News about Apple, facing complaints and a lawsuit claiming the popular player can cause hearing loss, made the setting available as part of a new software update Wednesday.In this age of lack of personal responsibility and since most of America doesn't understand the Darwin Theory (or awards!) a company must fix it so that stupid children don't hurt their tiny little ears. Bwaaah! This is right up there with a plastic bag is not a toy.
The free download applies to the iPod Nano and the iPod models with video-playback capabilities.
Parents also can use the feature to set a limit on their child's iPod and lock it with a code, the company added."
Women who had frequently consumed French fries at preschool age had an increased risk of breast cancer. The odds ratio (OR) for breast cancer for one additional serving of French fries per week was 1.27. Consumption of whole milk was linked to a slightly decreased breast cancer risk (OR per additional glass of whole milk/day = 0.90). No association was found between intake of any of the nutrients calculated and the risk of breast cancer.
ABC News: Gadgets That Provide Peace of Mind for Pets: "GloLeash — $29.99 (available now)Lasted longer than I thought it would, very useful.
www.petgadgets.com
The Gloleash combines a retractable dog leash and a flashlight into one device. Brilliant!
Doggie Seat-Belt Harness — $24.99 (available now)She always has a harness in the car. It means puppy ride! (5 yrs old!)
www.petgadgets.com
Locking your pet into a seat belt protects your dog and the passengers in the car. If you get into a high-speed accident, the dog could slam into a seat, the window or even other passengers. If your dog has a hard time sitting still in the car, the harness will also prevent them from jumping into the driver's seat."
White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. announced his resignation this morning after nearly 5 1/2 years as President Bush's top aide. Bush said Card will be replaced by Joshua B. Bolten, the director of the Office of Management and Budget.These guys don't have an original name between 100 people that they keep suggesting. Why not Harriet Miers? She gave him the most important PDB that we know of and he hasn't appointed any women lately. Bolton, Bolten. Does he have a stache?
Card will serve until April 14 to provide a transition period. The move could presage broader staff changes as Bolten takes over an operation hobbled by political problems heading into a crucial midterm election season.
On the eve of oral argument in a key Supreme Court case on the rights of alleged terrorists, a group of retired U.S. generals and admirals has asked Justice Antonin Scalia to recuse himself, arguing that his recent public comments on the subject make it impossible for him to appear impartial.And this one is just a thinly disguised deliberate effort to raise a populace unable to think, just follow directions.
In a letter delivered to the court late yesterday, a lawyer for the retired officers cited news reports of Scalia's March 8 remarks to an audience at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland. Scalia reportedly said it was "crazy" to suggest that combatants captured fighting the United States should receive a "full jury trial," and dismissed suggestions that the Geneva Conventions might apply to detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Schools from Vermont to California are increasing — in some cases tripling — the class time that low-proficiency students spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law, signed in 2002, requires annual exams only in those subjects and punishes schools that fall short of rising benchmarks.If you spent more time trying to teach the kids before they got to these
The changes appear to principally affect schools and students who test below grade level.
The intense focus on the two basic skills is a sea change in American instructional practice, with many schools that once offered rich curriculums now systematically trimming courses like social studies, science and art. A nationwide survey by a nonpartisan group that is to be made public on March 28 indicates that the practice, known as narrowing the curriculum, has become standard procedure in many communities.
The survey, by the Center on Education Policy, found that since the passage of the federal law, 71 percent of the nation's 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects to open up more time for reading and math. The center is an independent group that has made a thorough study of the new act and has published a detailed yearly report on the implementation of the law in dozens of districts.
"Narrowing the curriculum has clearly become a nationwide pattern," said Jack Jennings, the president of the center, which is based in Washington.
At Martin Luther King Jr. Junior High School in Sacramento, about 150 of the school's 885 students spend five of their six class periods on math, reading and gym, leaving only one 55-minute period for all other subjects.
About 125 of the school's lowest-performing students are barred from taking anything except math, reading and gym, a measure that Samuel Harris, a former lieutenant colonel in the Army who is the school's principal, said was draconian but necessary. "When you look at a kid and you know he can't read, that's a tough call you've got to make," Mr. Harris said..
CNN.com - Form letters tell 9/11 families�of 911 calls - Mar 26, 2006: "'I had one family member call me today, she was hysterical. She actually fainted,' said Bill Doyle, whose son died after two planes crashed into the WTC towers. 'She opened it up in an elevator and she couldn't believe it, because she never heard from her husband that morning, but apparently he called 911.'Come Sail Away by Styx is now playing.
Doyle called the letters notifying families this week 'totally crass' and shocking to families.
He sent an e-mail to victims' families Saturday.
'We are sending this e-mail to you because we do not want you to be blindsided by the information, and we want you to be able to choose where and when you read the information and with whom,' Doyle's e-mail to families said.
Jonathan Greenspun, commissioner of the Mayor's Community Assistance Unit, in a written statement responding to Doyle's complaint, said his office had intended to send an e-mail to WTC support groups Friday to give them advance notice but a 'miscommunication' delayed the warning until Saturday.
Families of those heard on the 911 calls can request a CD with the unedited recording, Greenspun said.
As part of a court decision last year, it will be left to those next of kin to decide whether the New York Fire Department recordings will be made public.
Letters began arriving by special delivery Friday, sent by New York officials to the families offering them copies of the calls and informing them of their right to keep them private or make them public."
Written by dennis deyoung
Lead vocals by dennis deyoung
I’m sailing away, set an open course for the virgin sea
I’ve got to be free, free to face the life that’s ahead of me
On board, I’m the captain, so climb aboard
We’ll search for tomorrow on every shore
And I’ll try, oh lord, I’ll try to carry on
I look to the sea, reflections in the waves spark my memory
Some happy, some sad
I think of childhood friends and the dreams we had
We live happily forever, so the story goes
But somehow we missed out on that pot of gold
But we’ll try best that we can to carry on
A gathering of angels appeared above my head
They sang to me this song of hope, and this is what they said
They said come sail away, come sail away
Come sail away with me
Come sail away, come sail away
Come sail away with me
I thought that they were angels, but to my surprise
They climbed aboard their starship and headed for the skies
Singing come sail away, come sail away
Come sail away with me
Come sail away, come sail away
Come sail away with me
To end with Playing in Stereo by the Cars
And they say the shuffle selection isn't intuitive.
Happiness Is a Warm Gun - New York Times: "When I was in college, in the Vietnam-Watergate era, sullen mugs trumped smiley faces.that might mean they did their own homework without grade lowering
'Happiness was very uncool,' my friend Michael Kinsley recalls of his Harvard days. 'There was a huge premium on being depressed.'
Leon Wieseltier, who graduated from Columbia about the same time, agrees that 'happiness was considered embarrassing, a mark of shallowness.' He still calls joie de vivre 'a sign that you're not paying attention.'
But in the Ivy League now, students are eager to embrace the group therapy of positive thinking. As Carey Goldberg wrote in The Boston Globe, the most popular Harvard course is one taught by Tal Ben-Shahar about how to shed pathologies.
You'd think just being lucky enough to get that Harvard edge
would cause elation. But Ms. Goldberg reported that more than 800 students left smiling and cheering after hearing Dr. Ben-Shahar offer self-help formulas like these: 'Learn to fail or fail to learn'; don't think, 'It happened for the best,' but rather, 'How can I make the best of what happened?'
He meditated with the students, telling them to 'give yourself permission to just be.' A gut on trusting your gut.
I love when she wraps it up by saying:
Studies show the happiest people are the most resilient. (And probably regard positive-psych classes as demented psychobabble?) Since they didn't have to learn to be resilient in the Depression and World War II, yuppies and their offspring succumbed to narcissism and materialism.Would twice a week make me as happy as Paris Hilton, but smart enough to know the difference?
They say money can't buy happiness, but maybe it can buy some. In 2004, two economists declared that money seemed to buy greater happiness but, surprisingly, not more sex. (Explain Ron Perelman.) David Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England calculated that if you increased your sexual activity from once a month to once a week, you'd be as happy as if you had an extra $50,000 a year."
As Parents Age, Baby Boomers and Business Struggle to Cope - New York Times: "A $20-an-hour aide, on an eight-hour shift, would otherwise cost a Prudential employee $160, rather than $32. Yet the company says it will save $650,000 during a three-year contract with Work Options, Ms. Corcoran said, because 'if our employees needs are taken care of, they can focus on work.'Men have parents that they care about also, that is a very arrogant statement.
Diane Yankencheck, a Prudential employee in Newark, said the service kept her working during a crisis. Her father has a degenerative neurological disease and round-the-clock care. Her mother manages the household, or did until she broke her wrist. Now an aide from Work Options cooks, cleans and helps her bathe and dress.
Kent Burtis, a Verizon technician in Bayville, N.J., uses similar backup care for his father, who is paralyzed and incontinent. For a while, Mr. Burtis spent hours before work feeding, diapering and dressing him. Now an aide does the morning shift. 'It's kept me from slitting my throat,' Mr. Burtis said.
Elder care benefits most often seem a luxury at small companies and nonprofits. So even at AARP, dedicated to the needs of older Americans, Deborah Russell, the director of work force issues, was daunted by coordinating long-distance care for her mother and then missing weeks of work to be at her bedside when death neared.
Ms. Russell and her two sisters, grateful for AARP's excellent referral service, still spent 'an inordinate amount of time on the telephone' during working hours, distracted and unproductive. As their mother's condition deteriorated, and the siblings rotated weeks in Florida, Ms. Russell used paid vacation time rather than the 12 weeks of unpaid leave guaranteed by the federal Family Medical Leave Act or AARP's more generous 16-week program, also unpaid.
Another benefit assumed to be useful is the flexible spending account, governed by the Internal Revenue Service and widely offered by companies. It permits the use of pretax dollars for dependent care, as long as the dependent meets the I.R.S. definition. Virtually all children do, but most aged parents do not. That means tax breaks for baby sitters but not companions for the elderly.
Experts disagree about whether women will push employers for help with their parents, as they did 30 years ago when child care was their pressing issue.
Ellen Galinsky, 63, president of the Family and Work Institute, led the charge for a day care center at Bank Street College when she was a researcher there in 1969. After "huge resistance," the center opened in 1974. Ms. Galinsky predicts a similar awakening to elder care issues because "demographics are destiny."No pensions, for parents or children, no savings once the parent is gone, no realistic plan to deal for an aging population (not a surprise!) What are childless couples going to do? Or the ones who have children who don't care?
"Everyone I know is dealing with this," said Ms. Galinsky, who recently stayed at the bedside of her 98-year-old mother for the last two months of her life. The institute allows unlimited sick leave for such family emergencies. But even with that leeway, Ms. Galinsky said: "I was on another planet. It's like no other experience. I barely have words for how hard it is."
George Bush's Trillion-Dollar War - New York Times: "Now comes a study by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University, and a colleague, Linda Bilmes of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, that estimates the 'true costs' of the war at more than $1 trillion, and possibly more than $2 trillion.Not that most Americans couldn't use that money.
'Even taking a conservative approach and assuming all U.S. troops return by 2010, we believe the true costs exceed a trillion dollars,' the authors say.
The study was released earlier this year but has not gotten much publicity. The analysis by Professors Stiglitz and Bilmes goes beyond the immediate costs of combat operations to include other direct and indirect costs of the war that, in some cases, the government will have to shoulder for many years.
These costs, the study says, 'include disability payments to veterans over the course of their lifetimes, the cost of replacing military equipment and munitions, which are being consumed at a faster-than-normal rate, the cost of medical treatment for returning Iraqi war veterans, particularly the more than 7,000 [service members] with brain, spinal, amputation and other serious injuries, and the cost of transporting returning troops back to their home bases.'
The study also notes that Defense Department expenditures that were not directly appropriated for Iraq have grown by more than 5 percent since the war began. But a portion of that increase has been spent 'on support for the war in Iraq, including significantly higher recruitment costs, such as nearly doubling the number of recruiters, paying recruitment bonuses of up to $40,000 for new enlistees and paying special bonuses and other benefits, up to $150,000 for current Special Forces troops that re-enlist.'
'Another cost to the government,' the study says, 'is the interest on the money that it has borrowed to finance the war.'
Among the things taken into account by the study are some of the difficult-to-quantify but very real costs inflicted by the war on the American economy and society, such as the effect of the war on oil prices, and the economic loss that results from the many thousands of Americans wounded and killed in the war.
The study does not address the substantial costs of the war borne by Iraq or by any other countries besides the United States.
In an interview, Mr. Stiglitz said that about $560 billion, which is a little more than half of the study's conservative estimate of the cost of the war, would have been enough to "fix" Social Security for the next 75 years. If one were thinking in terms of promoting democracy in the Middle East, he said, the money being spent on the war would have been enough to finance a "mega-mega-mega-Marshall Plan," which would have been "so much more" effective than the invasion of Iraq.
It's not easy to explain just how much money $1 trillion really is. Imagine a stack of bills worth $1 million that is roughly six inches high. (Think big denominations — a mix of $100 bills and $1,000 bills, mostly $1,000's.) If the six-inch stack were enlarged to the point where it was worth $1 billion, it would be as tall as the Washington Monument, about 500 feet. If it were worth $1 trillion, the stack would be 95 miles high.
Ms. Bilmes said that the $1 trillion we're spending on Iraq amounts to about $10,000 for every household in the U.S."
Rapture Letters: "The rapture: When all the believers in Jesus Christ, who have been born again, are taken up to heaven.Yup, I think I've found the clue.
After the rapture, there will be a lot of speculation as to why millions of people have just disappeared. Unfortunately, after the rapture, only non believers will be left to come up with answers. You probably have family and friends that you have witnessed to and they just won't listen. After the rapture they probably will, but who will tell them?
We have written a computer program to do just that. It will send an Electronic Message (e-mail) to whomever you want after the rapture has taken place, and you and I have been taken to heaven.
How is this accomplished, you might ask. It's a dead man switch that will automatically send the emails when it is not reset.
If you wish to do something now that will help your unbelieving friends and family after the rapture, you need to add those persons email address to our database. Their names will be stored indefinitely and a letter will be sent out to each of them on the first Friday after the rapture. Then they will receive another letter every friday after that.
This rapture letter service is FREE and will hopefully gain the person you send it to an eternity in heaven.
If you would like to see one of the letters which will be sent after the rapture, click here.
This is a personal ministry, if you have any questions or comments please address them to: info@raptureletters.com
Thank you and God Bless You!"
Bloomberg.com: Asia: "March 21 (Bloomberg) -- Cyclone Larry, the strongest storm to hit Australia in 30 years, smashed into the Queensland coast today with about 40 percent more force than Hurricane Katrina at landfall.Even atheists are starting to pray to some deity to get us out of the mess this overgrown messianic blastocyte has created or there will be nothing left but a some asteroid dust between Venus and Mars.
The highest recorded winds for Cyclone Larry, a category 5 storm, were about 180 miles per hour (290 kilometers per hour), compared with 125 mile per hour winds for the Category 3 Katrina when it struck land, said James Vasilj, a spokesman with the National Weather Service in New Orleans.
``If a Category 5 hurricane like Larry hit any populated area of the United States, the damage would be absolutely catastrophic,'' said Frank Lepore, spokesman for the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
``You're talking major wall failure on high-rise buildings. A Category 5 hurricane could lift a 2000-pound car and deposit it on a 4-foot-high wall,'' Lepore said in an interview. ``A 150-160 pound person wouldn't stand a chance.''
More than half the buildings in Innisfail, Queensland, a town of 8,000 people, were damaged by Larry, and about 30 people suffered minor injuries, according to Queensland's Department of Emergency Services.
``It looks like an atomic bomb hit the place,'' Innisfail Mayor Neil Clarke said on Australian television, the Associated Press reported. ``This is more than a local disaster, this is a national disaster.''
Hurricane Katrina caused the evacuation of 1.5 million people, according to the Hurricane Insurance Information Center. More than 1,300 people died and more than $87 billion so far has been earmarked for the rebuilding and recovery efforts.
Hurricane Andrew, which struck Florida in 1992 and caused 23 deaths and $26.5 billion in damage, is the last Category 5 storm to hit the U.S., according to the National Hurricane Center.
Category 5 storms must have winds of at least 155 miles per hour. The storms are known as typhoons in the Pacific Ocean and hurricanes in the Atlantic."
Media Matters - Coulter called NY Times coverage of ex-Bush aide's arrest "revenge of the queers," falsely named private secretary as "most highly placed black in the Clinton administration": "In the March 15 publication of her nationally syndicated column, right wing pundit Ann Coulter described The New York Times' coverage of the arrest of President Bush's former domestic policy adviser, Claude A. Allen, as the 'revenge of the queers,' a reference to a comment Allen made in 1984 describing Senate Democratic hopeful James B. Hunt Jr.'s links to 'queers.' At that time, Allen was press spokesman for then-Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC), whom Hunt was challenging. Coulter also falsely claimed that 'the most highly placed black in the Clinton administration was his secretary, Betty Currie'; in fact, six former Clinton cabinet officials are African-American"Coulter is a pimple on the ass of a moron, if she was black she would have had a midnight visit to the "tree".
Bush Says Ports Debate Sends Bad Message: "Legislation on the issue has piled up in both the House and the Senate in the weeks since the flap over DP World erupted and divided Bush from the GOP-led Congress.Your approval rating sucks with numbers that rival Nixon for "how low can we go?"
Before the United Arab Emirates-based company's announcement, the House and Senate appeared all but certain to block DP World's U.S. plan despite Bush's veto threats _ a message that GOP congressional leaders delivered personally to the White House.
Facing a disapproving public in an election year, a House committee overwhelmingly voted against the plan Wednesday. And House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., warned the president in a private meeting Thursday that the Senate inevitably would follow suit."
Nearly four out of five Americans, including 70 percent of Republicans, believe civil war will break out in Iraq — the bloody hot spot upon which Bush has staked his presidency. Nearly 70 percent of people say the U.S. is on the wrong track, a 6-point jump since February.People are trying to pretend that they never knew you, even with photo evidence and receipts to the contrary.
"I'm not happy with how things are going," said Margaret Campanelli, a retiree in Norwich, Conn., who said she tends to vote Republican. "I'm particularly not happy with Iraq, not happy with how things worked with Hurricane Katrina."
Republican Party leaders said the survey explains why GOP lawmakers are rushing to distance themselves from Bush on a range of issues — port security, immigration, spending, warrantless eavesdropping and trade, for example.
Documents obtained by investigators for the Senate Indian Affairs Committee show that the second tribe, the Louisiana Coushattas, also paid $25,000 to Mr. Norquist's group shortly before the meeting, although the tribe has been unwilling to say if its chief had the same opportunity as the Kickapoo chief to talk briefly with Mr. Bush and be photographed with him.You have moved from the pink elephant in the room to the albatross sinking the boat.
The May 9 reception attended by Chief Garza was photographed by a White House photographer. One of the photographs became public last month, and showed Mr. Abramoff in the far background as Mr. Bush greeted Chief Garza. It was the first picture showing Mr. Abramoff in the same setting with Mr. Bush, who has said he does not remember meeting the lobbyist.
A former senior tribal official, Isidro Garza, who is not related to Raul Garza, said the $25,000 donation to Americans for Tax Reform was solicited days earlier by Mr. Abramoff, who often encouraged his clients to donate to Mr. Norquist's group. Most of the tribe's money comes from a casino it operates near the Mexican border.
Isidro Garza said Mr. Abramoff did not say directly that the $25,000 was the price of admission to the meeting with Mr. Bush.
Mr. Abramoff, he said, described the donation to Mr. Norquist's group as a "good investment" in the tribe's lobbying efforts in Washington. Mr. Garza said he arranged for the payment although he saw little direct connection between the tribe's interests and those of Americans for Tax Reform.
"He has no political capital," said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster. "Slowly but surely it's been unraveling. There's been a direct correlation between the trajectory of his approval numbers and the -- I don't want to call it disloyalty -- the independence on the part of the Republicans in Congress."Be grateful that you live in the United States of America. Other countries with unpopular leaders have been known to have "fatal medical emergencies" or mysterious mechanical failures when the numbers get that low and the populace is no longer paying attention to "reality" TV.
The port deal has troubled Republicans not just on the substance of the issue but also on the president's handling of it. The White House failed to anticipate the frenzy that would be touched off by the prospect of an Arab company managing U.S. ports, and many Republicans believe that Bush exacerbated the situation with a rash veto threat.
The missteps seem all the more striking for a White House once known for its discipline and political acuity. With Bush's approval rating ranging from 34 percent in a CBS News poll to 41 percent in the latest Washington Post-ABC News survey, some Republican candidates facing the voters in just eight months worry privately that, unlike in 2002 and 2004, he will be more albatross than advantage for GOP candidates in the fall campaign.
acupuncture : Message: Acupuncturists Without Borders barred fromserving the people of New Orleans: "Medical Board Bars Relief Efforts By Volunteer Acupuncturists Citing the 'Absence of a Demonstrated Need' February 20, 2006, New Orleans Diana Fried, Executive Director of Acupuncturists Without Borders, announced that the Louisiana Board of Medical Examiners has forced AWB to immediately terminate all of its humanitarian relief efforts in Louisiana. The Board, in a letter dated February 17, 2006, gave as its reasoning, the 'absence of a demonstrated need' for relief work by out-of-state volunteer acupuncturists. AWB has provides free treatments on a walk-in basis to residents, National Guardsmen, EMT's, workers and officials for FEMA and the Red Cross, policemen, firemen, utility workers, contractors, volunteers at emergency facilities, food kitchens, health clinics, and other locations throughout the city. After Friday's story about AWB in the Times Picayune, and today's on WDSU-TV, AWB has received hundreds of phone calls and emails from residents about where people can get treatments (many are urgent cries for help). At every clinic people desperately ask when the organization will return. AWB volunteer out-of-state licensed acupuncturists have been providing free acupuncture treatments for stress, trauma, and insomnia at numerous locations in New Orleans and surrounding areas, from health clinics to emergency operations centers. To date over 4000 free treatments have been performed. AWB planned to continue providing thousands more over the coming months. Director Fried stated: 'The Board's failure to recognize the continued need for free acupuncture treatments is puzzling, at best. We know of only one Louisiana-licensed individual who is willing to do this work in New Orleans and that person can only commit to one day a month.' AWB's free acupuncture treatment program is the only known acupuncture program offering free stress relief treatments to Hurricane victims in New Orleans and surrounding areas. AWB will be seeking relief from DHH Secretary Cerise and the Louisiana Medical Board. John MacDonald, AWB's Director of Policy and Planning, expressed his doubt whether the Board will address this issue in a timely fashion . 'We wrote the Board in December. They met in mid-January but did not inform us of their decision until their letter dated February 17th, I contacted the Board today and was told that the Board required 72 hours notice and would not look at our response until their meeting in late March. The Board's apparent lack of any sense of urgency is puzzling given the desperate need for health services of all types.' Sign the Petition to bring back Acupuncturists without borders to New Orleans: http://acuwithoutborders.org/govt_rule_change.php "If they were offering to cause pain to inmates awaiting the death penalty there would probably be a red carpet with eunuchs peeling grapes in order to make them happy.
Nipping and Tucking on Both Coasts - New York Times: "In Hollywood terms, we've reached an Indiana Jones crisis moment in our parlous protectorate. The cave is collapsing, the snakes are encroaching, the vehicles are exploding, the crushing ball is rolling down on us. The public has stopped buying the administration's sugary spin. The Washington Post reported yesterday that 80 percent of Americans — cutting across party lines — say sectarian violence makes civil war in Iraq likely. More than a third call it 'very likely.' Half also think the U.S. should begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, the poll found, and two-thirds say the president has no clear plan for Iraq.The problem is anyone who disagrees with the party line. Anyone. And the closer it gets to the end the more maniacal, the more disconnected from reality, the more clinically diagnosable they will become, but nothing will be done because everyone will be so cowed and traumatized that we will have become a nation of sheep ripe for the shearing.
The widespread resistance to the Dubai ports deal, even among newly fractious Republicans, indicates that Americans have lost faith in the president's competence — a faith shredded by the White House's obtuseness and lies on Katrina.
As Hollywood often does, the administration scorns introspection and originality. It sticks with the same worn themes: Stay the course. Victory's around the corner. Anyone who expresses skepticism is a defeatist, a softie on terrorism.
On 'Meet the Press' on Sunday, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Iraq was 'going very, very well, from everything you look at.' And at a Pentagon briefing yesterday, Rummy, who should have resigned in shame long ago, tried to blame the press, echoing Gen. George Casey in saying: 'Much of the reporting in the U.S. and abroad has exaggerated the situation.'
He added, 'The steady stream of errors all seem to be of a nature to inflame the situation and to give heart to the terrorists.'
After all the horrible mistakes in judgment the defense secretary has made — mistakes that have left our troops without proper backup and armor, created an inept and corrupt occupation, and confused soldiers into thinking torture was O.K. — it takes humongous gall to suggest that the problem is really the reporters."
Independent Online Edition > World Politics: "This is your life (if you are a woman)Stats aren't everything, I find that being female is preferable to the alternative.
Published: 08 March 2006
1% of the titled land in the world is owned by women
A baby girl born in the UK is likely to live to 81 - but if she is born in Swaziland, she is likely to die at 39
70% of the 1.2 bn people living in poverty are women and children
21% of the world's managers are female
62% of unpaid family workers are female
9% of judges, 10% of company directors and 10% of top police officers in the UK are women
Women comprise 55% of the world's population aged over 60 years old and 65% of those aged over 80
970,000 pounds (money) is the difference between lifetime earnings of men and women in the UK finance sector
85m girls worldwide are unable to attend school, compared with 45m boys. In Chad, just 4% of girls go to school.
700,000,000 women are without adequate food, water, sanitation, health care or education (compared with 400,000,000 men)
Women in full-time jobs earn an average 17% less than British men
Women in part-time jobs earn an average 42% less than British men
67% of all illiterate adults are women
1,440 women die each day during childbirth (a rate of one death every minute)
1 in 7 women in Ethiopia die in pregnancy or childbirth (it is one in 19,000 in Britain)
In the US, 35% of lawyers are women but just 5% are partners in law firms
In the EU, women comprise 3% of chief execs of major companies
12 is the number of world leaders who are women (out of 191 members of the United Nations)
Men directed 9 out of every 10 films made in 2004"
USATODAY.com - Decades later, Marines hunt Vietnam-era deserters: "However, the Marine official in charge of bringing in deserters said after Conti's arrest that his office was being more aggressive.Deserters, schmerters. Find someone who has inflicted damage on this country not someone who objected to killing people in the first place.
Chief Warrant Officer James Averhart, who has commanded the Marine Corps Absentee Collection Center since September 2004, told the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times that he had ordered cold cases reopened and that his squad had caught 27 deserters in his first 11 months on the job, a rate he suggested was higher than those of his predecessors. The Corps last month updated that number to 33 cases.
'I have a different leadership style than the guys who have had this job. My job is to catch deserters. And that's what I do,' Averhart told the newspaper."
Debsweb: "My interests are varied, but I have a few favorites that occupy a good percentage of my thinking time. Depending on my mood I can focus on politics (the stuff that gets glossed over on the national infotainment that describes itself as news), things that fall into the geek category (science, electronics, etc.), cooking/nutrition (from recipes to the latest health news) and anything else that strikes my fancy.I neglected to mention my interests of astrophysics, anthropology, veteran's affairs, stupid people tricks, most things Mac, Firefox and then discovered computer code that I could understand and write myself.
I am an Acupuncturist by trade, a borderline geek by nature and a home cook by intention. Almost any problem can be solved or defused by food. Whether you are hunting/gathering (shopping), prepping, cooking , presenting, eating or digesting, your mind should be focused on what you are doing. The above activities can be creative and relaxing with the reward being you get to eat the results. Digesting usually makes most people calm and sleepy. Thanksgiving springs to mind. National eating holiday."
Dana Reeve, Widow of Actor Christopher Reeve, Dies at Age 44: "'We are extremely saddened by the death of Dana Reeve, whose grace and courage under the most difficult of circumstances was a source of comfort and inspiration to all of us,' said Kathy Lewis, president and chief executive of the New Jersey-based Christopher Reeve Foundation, in a statement. Reeve died at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Medical Center, the foundation said.May he have experienced all the tragedy he ever will and that from this day forward may light, love and happiness fill his life.
Reeve, who served as chairwoman of the foundation, died just seven months after announcing she had been diagnosed with lung cancer. She said then that she had never smoked. In November, she said the tumor was shrinking.
Dana Reeve lived in Westchester County, near New York City, with the couple's 13-year-old son Will.
Her husband, Christopher Reeve, best known for his role as 'Superman,' died just 17 months ago in Oct. 2004, at age 52 after being completely paralyzed for nine years.
'She was improving,' Kate Michelman, a spokesman for the foundation, told CNN. 'Then just recently, she learned she was failing. She was determined she was going to overcome this.' Reeve died just a little more than a week before her 45th birthday.
Michelman called Reeve's death 'brutal' and 'extraordinarily unfair,' particularly for the couple's teenage son."
CNN.com - Bush wants line-item veto power - Mar 6, 2006: "'Congress gave the president the line-item veto in 1996, but because with problems the way the law was written, the Supreme Court struck it down,' Bush said. 'That should not be the end of the story.'Dude, you used up your "line" items in your misspent youth and you never should have thrown that veto threat over the Dubai port incident. Congress isn't interested in helping you anymore, they aren't going to let you have any more power than you can steal. Party of fiscal responibility, ha!
Bush announced his plan, which he first revealed in his State of the Union address a month ago, at the swearing-in ceremony for Edward Lazear, the new chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
Bush has not vetoed any legislation during five years in office, but he said the line-item veto would help 'reduce wasteful spending, reduce the budget deficit and ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely.'
Earlier version struck down
The earlier version of the line-item veto allowed Clinton to single-handedly strike parochial projects and special interest tax breaks. It was passed by Congress as one of the key planks of the GOP's 'Contract With America.'
Instead, Bush is proposing that he be allowed to send Congress proposals to strike earmarks from spending bills and special interest tax breaks and that Congress be required to bring them to a vote. Constitutional scholars say this version should pass muster with the Supreme Court.
Lawmakers' enthusiasm for the earlier veto power waned sharply in 1997 after Clinton used it gently against a handful of special interest tax provisions and about 80 earmarks from spending bills, leading some lawmakers to change their minds."
No Delivery from Evil: "Federal prosecutors want a reply writ large of the 1997 Oklahoma City bombing trials, in which they wove together seamlessly emotional victim testimony with circumstantial evidence to gain the convictions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. But McVeigh was a real murderer and Nichols did far more to help the bomb plot than Moussaoui came close to doing. And that is a factual difference that no somber litany of the names of the dead and no enormous in-court model of the Twin Towers can change.If P then Q. Depends on how much Kool-Aid the people have drunk. Even after all this time there are diehards who believe in WMD's in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein worked hand in hand with al Qaida. You never know who is going to be on the jury or how independent a thinker they might be.
If Moussaoui ultimately is condemned after this trial it won't be because he pulled a trigger (he didn't) or even knew of the specific 9/11 plot (he didn't). It won't be because he is the 9-11 mastermind (he wasn't) or because he was supposed to be on one of those doomed planes (he wasn't). It will be because federal conspiracy law is a vast expanse that authorizes the government to link together one sub-plot to another until the chain is established. Moussaoui was a terror conspirator. And terror conspirators murdered nearly 3,000 people on 9/11. Ergo, federal law says and the government intends to prove, Moussaoui conspired to murder those people. The case is no more complex than that.
The feds must establish first that Moussaoui's lies to federal agents at the time of his arrest -- e.g., when he denied his latent interest in flying planes into buildings -- "resulted" in at least one of the 9/11 deaths. Indeed, because of the peculiarities of federal criminal law, in addition to trying to pin Moussaoui to the worst crime in American history, the feds also must try to pin on him the rap that he also is responsible for the worst intelligence failure in American history; that had he told the truth to the authorities back in August 2001 they would have foiled the plot one month later.Somebody has been watching a little too much fantasy TV or faux news if they think that is a likely scenario to a government that ignores warnings all the time.
The government, in other words, needs by law to blame Moussaoui for the attacks even though he was reportedly clueless and in custody on 9/11. Moussaoui's lawyers, not surprisingly, therefore want to try to deflect blame from their client by arguing that government was clueless, too. They will try to convince the jury that nothing the defendant could have said in August 2001 would have awakened sleepy intelligence officials to the imminent threat of hijacked planes being piloted into buildings. So a trial about terrorism will also become a trial about foiling terrorism -- and our failure to do so back in 2001. Ugly? You bet.Our government, clueless? Say it isn't so.
Defense attorneys are going to hammer away at the government's pre-attack intelligence as they try to convince jurors that the feds knew way more than Moussaoui about the threat of hijacked planes being used as missiles. For example, they are likely to argue that if the government didn't do enough to beef up airline security after the infamous August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing memo entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S. (by hijacking airplanes)" than why in the world would an honest Moussaoui statement that month have done anything more to convince the machinery of government to get into gear? The idea will be to convince jurors that Moussaoui's silence- his refusal to divulge his terror training-- would not have made a difference."And it wouldn't. We don't listen to warnings about anything, being so superior and arrogant and all. There is no global warming, no rising threat of world terrorism, no economic slowdown, no torture, no healthcare crisis, no worries.
Criminal Probe in Tillman Case Set to Open: "The Army originally reported that Tillman was killed in a firefight with enemy forces in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan near the Pakistani border, and officials heralded his heroism with a tale of how he was charging a hill against the enemy when he was shot. Weeks later, after a nationally televised memorial service, the Army revealed that he had been gunned down by members of his own unit who had rounded a corner in a Humvee and mistook him and a coalition Afghan fighter for the enemy.Ummmm, nothing? These last six years have been a lesson in learning that the truth is mutable. If the administration is at fault then whoever revealed the truth must be punished. If the military is at fault then it has fallen futher into disrepute than anticipated. If the unit is at fault, then our training leaves a lot to be desired. If the populace is at fault, then we must hang our head in shame, because we have failed each other, and that is a crime that no civilization can truly survive.
Mary Tillman said yesterday that she believes evidence of a crime has existed all along, and that the family's repeated calls for a criminal investigation were ignored until now. 'It is completely obvious that this should have been done from the very beginning,' she said. 'The military has had every opportunity to do the right thing, and they haven't. They knew all along that something was seriously wrong, and they just wanted to cover it up.'
Patrick Tillman Sr. expressed skepticism that the new investigation will yield additional answers. 'I think it's another step,' he said. 'But if you send investigators to reinvestigate an investigation that was falsified in the first place, what do you think you're going to get?'"
