Gore to Bush on Iraq: It's Not About You - ""I would urge the President to try to separate out the personal issues of being blamed in history for his mistake and instead recognizing that it is not about him. It’s about our country," Gore said in an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer."
Letter from James Abourezk, former US Senator from South Dakota to Jeff Blankfort on the Israel Lobby - " I can tell you from personal experience that, at least in the Congress, the support Israel has in that body is based completely on political fear--fear of defeat by anyone who does not do what Israel wants done. I can also tell you that very few members of Congress--at least when I served there--have any affection for Israel or for its Lobby. What they have is contempt, but it is silenced by fear of being found out exactly how they feel. I've heard too many cloakroom conversations in which members of the Senate will voice their bitter feelings about how they're pushed around by the Lobby to think otherwise. In private one hears the dislike of Israel and the tactics of the Lobby, but not one of them is willing to risk the Lobby's animosity by making their feelings public."
US Seeks Near-Total Isolation for Gitmo - "As the new Democratic majority in the U.S. Congress considers whether to revisit the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA), the administration of President George W. Bush is proposing still more restrictions on detainees in U.S. custody. The government has proposed limiting contact between defense lawyers and detainees at Guantanamo Bay because it says detainees' communications, such as news of world events, could incite the prisoners to violence."
Iraq Study Group: Situation 'grave and deteriorating' - "The Iraq Study Group's report given to President Bush on Wednesday says the United States needs to change its strategy to tackle the "grave and deteriorating" situation in Iraq. Failure to halt the crisis could bring severe consequences to Iraq, the broader region and the United States, the bipartisan panel warned in a report handed to Bush at the White House."
Gates Says U.S. Is Not Winning Iraq War - "Robert Gates, the White House choice to be the next defense secretary, conceded Tuesday that the United States is not winning the war in Iraq and warned that if that country is not stabilized in the next year or two it could lead to a "regional conflagration.""
Tony Snow: President Disagrees With Gates, Says We Are 'Winning' in Iraq - "Snow said that, as far as he knows, the president has not backed away from his recent statement that the U.S. is actually "winning" in Iraq. He also suggested that Gates, elsewhere in his testimony, seemed to say that maybe we weren't losing and we weren't winning. And he charged that the press was being too negative about all this: "What I think is demoralizing is a constant effort to try to portray this as a losing mission," he said." -- Try this is a "lost" mission, Tony.
Blair agrees war 'not being won' - "Tony Blair has agreed with the incoming US defence secretary's assessment that the war in Iraq is not being won."
Congress must insist Bush isn't above law - "Should President Bush be impeached? The very idea seems extreme, if not loony. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has explicitly ruled impeachment off the Democratic majority's agenda. But activists and legal scholars are organizing to pressure Democrats to begin impeachment hearings. And the incoming chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyers, has issued two remarkable studies on abuses of presidential authority, raising the question of impeachable offenses."
Gingrich Lies To Assault Free Speech Again - "Not content with last week's brazen attack on the First Amendment during a speaking engagement in New Hampshire, Newt Gingrich has swung another right hook in the direction of freedom of speech, by exploiting non-existent statements and Neo-Con propaganda as a reason for shutting down websites and gagging political dissent in America. ... Gingrich's latest attempt to chill dissent in America relies on fraudulent claims and biased sources to present an argument that terrorists are hiding behind the First Amendment in order to recruit for jihad. It echoes similar rhetoric contained in the White House's own strategy document for "winning the war on terror," which identifies conspiracy theorists as terrorist wellsprings. ... The problem with this superficially reasonable statement is that Gingrich and his Neo-Fascist sympathizers classify any dissent against the Bush administration as "aiding the enemy," "hating America," and thus in effect calling for "the destruction of Western civilization," and won't hesitate to tar everyone with the same brush as we have seen all too may times on Fox News in the past. ... Secondly, the claim that Ahmadinejad "threatens to kill Americans in large numbers if we don't submit to his demands," is to be found nowhere in the Iranian leader's letter. Gingrich has carte blanche invented this supposition out of thin air as an excuse to craft his warped argument that the First Amendment should not be a "suicide pact." ... Freedom to dissent is the lifeblood of any society with a modicum of liberty. Wrapping his argument in a camouflage of fighting the phony war on terror, Gingrich's real targets are those who are wise enough to ignore all the chilling attempts on freedom of speech and exercise their inalienable rights without recourse. Under the terms of reference defined by the Founding Fathers, it is people like Gingrich himself, not ghost terrorists in far-flung caves, that are the real threat to the American way of life, and their creed of tyrants rhetoric should be countered at every turn."
U.S. alienates Muslim citizens at its peril - "When the 110th Congress is sworn in next month, Rep.-elect Keith Ellison intends to recite his oath of office with one hand on the Quran. That's right - Ellison's a Muslim, the first ever elected to the House of Representatives. Sadly, that makes him a controversial guy. In Ellison's home state of Minnesota and across the country, the religious right is up in arms over his decision not to use a Christian Bible during the induction ceremony. The American Family Association has even lobbied Congress to prohibit the use of the Quran, the Torah and other non-Christian books for swearing in new representatives."
God. Who knows? - "But there is one voice that is squeezed out, partly because it can equivocate, partly because it tires of the tit-for-tat that the debate is so often reduced to. That is the agnostic. It is a position that interests me because I used to be a priest in the Church of England. Then, to cut a long story short, I left - and I left a confirmed atheist. After a while, I found unbelief as dissatisfying as full-blown Christianity. It seems to entail a kind of puritanism, as if certain areas of human experience must be put off-limits, for fear that they smack of religion. So I became an agnostic. Now, many atheists and believers alike think agnosticism weak. Atheists would bundle us in with them; liberal believers likewise. But this does us a disservice. In fact, I have become really quite evangelical about the need for a passionate, committed agnosticism. Why? How else to deal with something that lies at the heart of the human condition: uncertainty."
Atheists are the new outcast minority - "History reveals that, in whatever society we are talking about, minorities are frequently the scapegoats for whatever are the prevailing ills of the day. Depending upon the society, the minority blame-game may be related to skin color, religious affiliation, ethnicity, sexual preferences, etc. Take your pick: Chinese, Irish, Germans, Hungarians, Asians, Catholics, Jews or Africans. All of them at one time or another were regarded as second-class citizens. African-Americans continued to bear the brunt of the minority label until segregation gasped its last breaths in the 1960s. Another minority, homosexuals, were for years regarded as the scum of the Earth, as witnessed by the brutal ways in which they were routinely harassed. Today, many homosexuals have come "out of the closet" even though they have not yet been allowed to enter the rest of the house to enjoy their so-called guaranteed civil liberties. The most recent bogeyman is the atheist. You know who he is -- the secularist who wants a wall of separation between church and state, the elitist scientist who believes in evolution and not creationism, and the pagan who not only promotes pornography and abortion but also has created a social climate reprehensible to all Christian values. And if you're a born-again atheist all those labels may apply to you. Christians in this country believe that unless God is at the center of national life we will be forever exposed to crime, poverty, warfare and disease. Although science cannot prove the existence or absence of God, it has been able to provide some interesting statistics that make one think twice about the existence and importance of God in a society. Countries regarded as secular or whose populations have by choice abandoned religion have been compared with those who are considered religious. Studies have demonstrated that when one measures life expectancy, literacy, income and education, nations whose populations are religious do poorly as compared to the more nonreligious ones. In addition, studies of non-African countries reveal that nations with the highest rate of homicide are religious." -- Now that is interesting.
Richest 2% hold half the world’s assets - "Personal wealth is distributed so unevenly across the world that the richest two per cent of adults own more than 50 per cent of the world’s assets while the poorest half hold only 1 per cent of wealth. ... To belong to the top 1 per cent of the world’s wealthiest adults you would need more than $500,000, something that 37m adults have achieved. So much of the world’s wealth is concentrated in few hands that if all the world’s wealth was distributed evenly, each person would have $20,500 of assets to use."
Culture Shock on Capitol Hill: House to Work 5 Days a Week - "Forget the minimum wage. Or outsourcing jobs overseas. The labor issue most on the minds of members of Congress yesterday was their own: They will have to work five days a week starting in January. The horror." -- They are so out of touch with the average American.
What Is A Communitarian? - "Communitarians believe that all neighborhoods should be governed like Chinese collectives. They teach that mandatory volunteerism in the community is a moral obligation of all citizens, and that intervening and reporting on your neighbors is required to maintain their individual freedom. It may sound like two conflicting ideologies, but it's not. Communitarianism balances all political conflicts into one master, ideological solution."
Mary Cheney and Partner Are About to Be Moms - "Mary Cheney, the vice president's openly gay daughter, is pregnant. She and her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, are "ecstatic" about the baby, due in late spring, said a source close to the couple."
Study disputes cell phone-cancer link - "A huge study from Denmark offers the latest reassurance that cell phones don't trigger cancer. Scientists tracked 420,000 Danish cell phone users, including 52,000 who had gabbed on the gadgets for 10 years or more, and some who started using them 21 years ago."
Alps experiencing warmest period in 1,300 years, climatologist says - "Boehm said the current warm period in the alpine region began in the noting that a similar warming occurred in the 10th and 12th centuries. However, the temperatures during those phases were "slightly under the temperatures we've experienced over the past 20 years.""
Study: Moms at risk for mental problems - "New moms face increased risks for a variety of mental problems, not just postpartum depression, according to one of the largest studies of psychiatric illness after childbirth."
South Carolina mother has son arrested for playing with Christmas present - "A fed-up mother had her 12-year-old son arrested for allegedly rummaging through his great-grandmother's things and playing with his Christmas present early."
Man Accused Of Faking Retardation -- For 20 Years - "For nearly 20 years -- ever since Pete Costello was 8 -- his mother has collected disability benefits on his behalf. In meetings with Social Security officials and psychologists, he appeared mentally retarded and unable to communicate. His mother insisted he couldn't read or write, shower, take care of himself or drive a car. But now prosecutors said it was all a huge fraud, and they have video of Costello contesting a traffic ticket to prove it."
NASA Schedules Briefing to Announce Significant Find on Mars - "NASA hosts a news briefing at 1 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Dec. 6, to present new science results from the Mars Global Surveyor."
Does water STILL flow on Mars? - "Dramatic new photographs of Mars have revealed the possible existence of water on its surface."
NASA telescope sees black hole gulping remote star - "A giant black hole displaying horrifying table manners has been caught in the act of guzzling a star in a galaxy 4 billion light-years away, scientists using an orbiting NASA telescope said on Tuesday. For the past two years, scientists have monitored the dramatic events as the star, residing in a galaxy in the Bootes constellation, was ripped apart by the black hole."
The Sound of Silence - "The emerging science of infrasound may help track – or even predict – earthquakes and other disasters."
Quote of the Day
"And the wars go on with brainwashed pride for the love of God and our human rights."
~ Guns n' Roses
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