News -- September 28, 2006

Senate OKs Detainee Interrogation Bill - "The bill would create military commissions to prosecute terrorism suspects. It also would prohibit some of the worst abuses of detainees like mutilation and rape, but grant the president leeway to decide which other interrogation techniques are permissible." -- Because one person should have that much power.

House approves warrantless wiretap law - "The House approved a bill Thursday that would grant legal status to President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program with new restrictions. Republicans called it a test before the election of whether Democrats want to fight or coddle terrorists."

Cost of Iraq war nearly $2b a week - "A new congressional analysis shows the Iraq war is now costing taxpayers almost $2 billion a week -- nearly twice as much as in the first year of the conflict three years ago and 20 percent more than last year -- as the Pentagon spends more on establishing regional bases to support the extended deployment and scrambles to fix or replace equipment damaged in combat."

House OKs $70B for Iraq, Afghanistan - "With final passage of the bill, Congress will have approved $507 billion for Iraq, Afghanistan and heightened security at overseas military bases since the Sept. 11 attacks five years ago, according to the Congressional Research Service." -- Remember, at $1 a second (that's $3600 an hour) it would take about 32 years to obtain $1,000,000,000. Now imgaine $507 billion.

New Poll Says Majority of Iraqis Approve of Attacks on U.S. Forces - "Nearly eight in 10 say the U.S. presence in Iraq is provoking more conflict than it's preventing (as opposed to being "a stabilizing force.") ... Thirty-seven percent want U.S. troops to withdraw within six months; an additional 34 percent want them to withdraw within the next year."

Torture Tactics Refined In US Prisons, ACLU Says - "The director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prisoner Project Wednesday accused U.S. governments past and present of honing torture tactics in American prisons before they were allegedly implemented in terrorist detention centers in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

Rogue State - " “The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture,” George W. Bush explained in a June 2003 speech, “and we are leading this fight by example.” Oh, the irony!"

Suicide bombers follow Quran, concludes Pentagon briefing - "But internal Pentagon briefings show intelligence analysts have reached a wholly different conclusion after studying Islamic scripture and the backgrounds of suicide terrorists. They've found that most Muslim suicide bombers are in fact students of the Quran who are motivated by its violent commands – making them, as strange as it sounds to the West, "rational actors" on the Islamic stage."

Carter: U.S. in more danger of terrorism - "Former President Jimmy Carter said Wednesday major policy changes are needed because the Iraq war has divided the nation "almost as much as Vietnam.""

A War on Intelligence - "You would think that a consensus report from all 16 U.S. intelligence services concluding that he has blown the war on terror would be a really big deal to the president. But that assumes that George W. Bush values intelligence. Clearly, he does not."

Rumsfeld Comments on Intelligence Report - "But he added that, "the implication that if you stop killing or capturing people who are trying to kill you, then therefore the world would be a better place, is obviously nonsensical."" -- Why does this man have still have a job?

Tony Snow: Previous presidency hurt terrorism fight - "The White House took a swipe at former President Clinton on Wednesday, just days after he accused President Bush of doing “nothing” to catch Osama bin Laden before Sept. 11."

Keith Olbermann Terrorized and Gov Tries to Hide it - "We have serious reason to worry about Olbermann's safety. Last night, he reported that he'd been threatened, apparently with some anthrax-like substance that required him to be subjected to 10 hours of detention in a hospital. He was discharged with a prescription for Cipro." -- Which means he's been hitting a little too close to the truth. Keep up the good work Keith.

A TIMELINE OF OIL AND VIOLENCE - "AFGHANISTAN"

A TIMELINE OF OIL AND VIOLENCE - II - "IRAQ"

Gas Is Down - Go Back to Sleep - "We are used to gas prices going up and down in the short term, but in the last six weeks, we've seen a dip of fifty cents or more in the price of a gallon. We haven't seen anything this precipitous in a long time and it has excited a lot of comment."

Dream world a strange, scary place for liberals - "Among his findings, Kelly Bulkeley discovered that liberals are more restless sleepers and have a higher number of bizarre, surreal dreams -- including fantasy settings and a wide variety of sexual encounters. Conservatives' dreams were, on average, far more mundane and focused on realistic people, situations and settings."

Vatican: Extremists Undermining Religion - "The Vatican's foreign minister said Wednesday that misunderstanding between cultures is breeding a "new barbarism" and expressed hope that reason and dialogue would stop those who use their faith as a pretext for attacks."

Why did Pope Benedict utter these words in public? And why now? - "There is no escape from viewing them against the background of the new Crusade of Bush and his evangelist supporters, with his slogans of "Islamofascism" and the "Global War on Terrorism" - when "terrorism" has become a synonym for Muslims. For Bush's handlers, this is a cynical attempt to justify the domination of the world's oil resources. Not for the first time in history, a religious robe is spread to cover the nakedness of economic interests; not for the first time, a robbers' expedition becomes a Crusade. The speech of the Pope blends into this effort. Who can foretell the dire consequences?"

FOX ON POPE'S ISLAM ATTACKS - "I believe the speaker is correct in his assessment of Cardinal Ratzinger who does indeed represent the dark ages of Christian history and following are the reasons why."

VERMONTERS PROCEED WITH SECESSION TALKS - " Vermont wants to secede from the Union – or at least some are embracing this movement."

Scientists uncover why Spanish Flu was so deadly - "By infecting mice with a reconstructed version of the 1918 virus and monitoring their response, a team of scientists believe they have found some clues to solve the puzzle as well as a possible new way to fight pandemic flu." -- Will a new weapon soon follow?

Morgellons is real, doctor is convinced - "He said his fiber research should also silence critics who say Morgellons is a form of delusions in which patients believe parasites or bugs are attacking their skin."

The Thin Pill - "75 million Americans may have something called metabolic syndrome. How Big Pharma turned obesity into a disease – then invented the drugs to cure it."

World without pain is hell, parent says - "It is only when he rams his head violently into walls or plays a little too roughly with a schoolmate, all the while smiling, that you are reminded that he suffers from an incredibly rare genetic disorder. Roberto is one of 17 people in the United States with "congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis," referred to as CIPA by the few people who know about it."

Boys told no standing to urinate - "The trigger for the explosion of opinion? A decision in the local district that schoolboys must sit on toilet seats when urinating, not stand."

Sickening 'Animal Olympics' forces kangaroos to box humans - "An Australian kangaroo receives a fierce blow to the head by a man dressed in a clown suit (pictured below) in a shameful contest that will further fuel fears over China's barbaric attitude to animals." -- Disgusting.

U.S. homework outsourced as 'e-tutoring' grows - "The outsourcing trend that fueled a boom in Asian call centers staffed by educated, low-paid workers manning phones around the clock for U.S. banks and other industries is moving fast into an area at the heart of U.S. culture: education. It comes at a difficult time for the U.S. education system: only two-thirds of teenagers graduate from high school, a proportion that slides to 50 percent for black Americans and Hispanics, according to government statistics. China and India, meanwhile, are producing the world's largest number of science and engineering graduates -- at least five times as many as in the United States, where the number has fallen since the early 1980s. Parents using schools like Taylor's say they are doing whatever they can to give children an edge that can lead to better grades, better colleges and a better future, even if it comes with an Indian accent about 9,000 miles away."




Quote of the Day
"I am free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally."
~ W.C. Fields